We had come to something that I had never understood, and could never get a good answer for. “Bob, these ‘unpleasant resources’ are your collaborators, on the one hand, and on the other, you’re trying to stick them in stir.”
“We made them no promises otherwise.” His eyes glittered and his bucktooth grin turned feral. “In addition to Hoffa, we’ve got Carlos Marcello in the crosshairs. We have him in a federal courtroom in New Orleans, right now. Finally, we will deport that slippery bastard.”
“That slippery bastard is part of Mongoose, too, Bob-through Trafficante.”
He was shaking his head. “We don’t need him. Doing something for his country doesn’t buy him a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. You don’t buy your way out of wholesale murder and dope-trafficking.”
Bobby had tried to deport Marcello before-notably when he had the FBI kidnap the don of New Orleans and dump his ass unceremoniously in a Guatemalan jungle.
“What I want from you, Nate, is to work with the Secret Service on tracking down these four suspects. Obviously, you have Saturday morning as a deadline-Jack arrives at O’Hare at eleven A.M.”
“That’s less than four days, Bob.”
“If I’m able to squeeze more information from Edgar on their identities, and the source of this intel, I will. And you’ll hear from me.”
“How will the Secret Service feel about taking on a slightly overage recruit?”
He reached into his suit-coat pocket and withdrew a small black wallet, skimming it over to me across the tabletop.
“These are your credentials. You’re a special investigator attached to the Justice Department on loan to the Treasury Department. I have spoken to Chief Martineau personally, and he’s been instructed to give you every courtesy.”
“Am I working for myself or Martineau?” I knew the guy a little, and wasn’t wild about the prospect of being under his thumb.
“You’re working for me,” Bobby said, “but give the chief his due respect. Work within the unit. Your job is to help find these four…” He pointed to the photos. “… but also to look after our interests.”
That “our” was vague as hell, but I understood it: his interests, his brother’s interests, and my interests … as collaborators in Operation Mongoose.
“We have made a lot of people unhappy, Nate, Jack and I. Sam Giancana, assorted Cubans, right-wing fanatics, certain elements within the CIA, and it’s possible-just possible-two or more of these groups are coming together on this … and taking some of the very tactics we developed to, ah, eliminate Castro, and turning them around on us.”
“Well, then tell Jack to stay away from cigars and seashells.”
Bobby was not amused. In fact, his expression turned grave.
He said, “There is a plan that includes taking Fidel out via high-power rifle with a scope from a high building while he rides in an open vehicle, a Jeep. That plan has never been attempted, never carried out, obviously … but it’s, ah, a scenario the various players in this little comedy did in fact develop.”
“Do you think the Cubans, if they’re captured, will spill about Mongoose? Will they use that knowledge to barter themselves out of captivity?”
The disaster that implied-not just politically but internationally-was staggering to contemplate.
“They might,” Bobby said. His tone seemed casual but expression remained grave. “That’s why I would recommend, if given the opportunity, considering your options.”
That was also vague, but I got it.
Kill the bastards, if you get the chance.
“How about the white guys?” I asked.
“That’s up to you, Nate. This kind of individual, young soldier or ex-soldier, doesn’t usually know much. They tend to have CIA handlers who manipulate them, control them. But if you, ah, don’t deal with them?”
“Yeah?”
“Their handlers likely will.”
Bobby rose, leaving the photos with me. “Martineau has copies of those. He’ll be handing them out to his agents. They have the names, too, Gonzales, Rodriguez. The only thing you know that Martineau doesn’t is the possible Mongoose tie-in.”
Should I tell him about Tom Ellison? His murder, and the strip club payoff that proceeded it? There was a Hoffa tie, and therefore an Outfit tie. But what the hell could a nobody like Jack Ruby have to do with something like this? He was a shirttail Mongoose connection himself, sure, but …
I kept it to myself-Bobby was already halfway out the door.
“I haven’t said I’d do this,” I said.
“Sure you have,” he said.
He went on out.
Me, I just sat there not drinking the cup of Coke, listening to the muffled roar of planes taking off without me, till Eben Boldt collected me. To drive me back to Chicago, where the mental patients stared at blank walls on sunny days.
And to my new job with the Secret Service.
CHAPTER 11
Just catercorner from the Monadnock Building on Dearborn, between Adams and Jackson, the Federal Building was one of those massive, magnificent classical buildings designed to outlive the pyramids.
But this was Chicago, and the wrecking ball would be coming before long, to make room for another glass-and-steel Mies van der Rohe slab like the nearly completed federal courthouse across the street, already casting its thirty-story shadow on the Federal Building’s meager sixteen (counting the dome, anyway).
Eben Boldt and I clip-clopped across the three-hundred-foot-high octagonal rotunda, surrounded by polished granite, white and Siena marble, elaborate mosaics, gilded bronze, and government drones. An elevator with a uniformed attendant (you were seeing less and less of that now) took us up to the ninth floor, where the various federal offices were as utilitarian as the lower area was imposing.
On the ride back from Glenview, Boldt and I had not discussed my confab with the attorney general-in fact, the meeting wasn’t mentioned at all, Bobby Kennedy’s presence unacknowledged. We knew each other well enough to rustle up some small talk about his wife and their two grade-school-age children, and about my boy Sam, and how I was looking forward to spending time with him over Thanksgiving vacation.
The only reference to the little trip we’d just taken came when we were already in the Loop, with Eben saying, “It will be good having you work with us on this.”
And I said, “Yeah. How will Martineau feel about that? We mildly butted heads a while back.”
I had worked for an attorney defending a guy who had passed some counterfeit money, innocently as it turned out (at least according to the jury), and Martineau-who had not appreciated my testimony-asked me after, “How do you sleep at night?”
“With my eyes closed,” I’d said.
“SAIC Martineau and I,” Eben said, pulling into the Federal Building parking ramp, “maintain an uneasy truce.”
I didn’t pursue that.
Moving through an area half the size of the A-1’s waiting room, past a stern-looking but not unattractive brunette receptionist with mannish eyeglass frames, we entered at the midpoint of a rectangular bullpen of perhaps a dozen gray-metal desks. The layout-courtesy of substantial squared-off pillars and wall-like arrangements of filing cabinets-divided itself into numerous sub-areas, giving each desk some work space and even privacy. Down to my right, one end had a glassed-in area of telex machines with a door on either side marked INTERVIEW ONE and INTERVIEW TWO, and down at my left, that end was home to two glass-and-wood-faced offices, the glass blotted out by venetian blinds.
Eben walked me through and I nodded to a couple of agents I recognized, though most were as anonymous as monks hunkered over calligraphy. These servants of a higher power wore not shaved skulls and robes but crew cuts, dark-rimmed glasses, and white shirts with dark ties (suit coats slung over chairs). They seemed to either be on the phone or at their typewriters, the latter on stands that extended from the right of metal desks arrayed with gooseneck lamps, blotters, multiple-line phones, and disturbingl
y neat piles of paperwork. Clipboards hung on pillars with high-mounted black-bladed fans and the occasional clocks. This was an institutional world of gray-green plaster trimmed in dark wood, accented by bulletin boards bearing circulars, existing under fluorescent lighting that gave everything and everyone a ghostly pallor.
At the end with the two offices, Eben ushered me to the door at right, which was stenciled in gold:
SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE
Maurice G. Martineau
the implication being that the position was more important than the mere man who held it.
Eben knocked, waited for the “Yes,” and said, “Mr. Heller is here, sir.”
“Send him in, Ebe.”
This was apparently Eben’s nickname around the office, sounding vaguely like “Abe,” and news to me.
The Negro agent opened the door for me, I stepped in, and he shut it behind me, not joining us.
This was a good-size office, also rectangular but in the opposite direction as the outer area, putting Martineau at his glass-topped mahogany desk at right with a blinds-shrouded window behind him, facing a small conference table all the way across the office, by a wall bearing a big map of the United States. The furnishings were not the gray metal of the bullpen, but dark woods, Mediterranean style. A framed picture of Kennedy overlooked a bookcase of law books opposite as you entered, with the wall adjacent to Martineau’s work area dominated by a bronze Department of the Treasury seal.
Martineau did not rise. He was in fact on the phone-had two multiple-line jobs on the desk, which held many stacks of papers and files, nearly as neat as those of his minions. The desk itself wasn’t any bigger than a Buick, and instead of a gooseneck lamp, he had a green-shaded banker’s number, the shade the same color as his blotter. No ashtray.
Maurice G. Martineau was a sturdy-looking fifty or so, not in his shirtsleeves-his charcoal suit tailored, his tie striped blue and black. His oval mug was well-grooved but otherwise as anonymous as those faces in the crowd out in the bullpen. No crew cut for Martineau, though-his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly parted and combed and a Little-Dab’ll-Do-Ya’ed, and the only thing unruly about him were wiggle-worm eyebrows over deceptively bland blue eyes.
He raised a hand while he finished his phone call. I took in a few other details-the American flag behind him and to his right, the framed family photos (wife, boy, girl) arrayed on another smaller bookcase under the Treasury seal. Also a pitcher of ice water and several glasses.
Call finished, Martineau leaned back in his dimpled-brown-leather swivel chair and extended his hand. It was an odd example of gamesmanship, because this required me to rise from the visitor’s chair to accept the handshake, which proved firm and perspiration-free.
Sitting back down, I said, “I’ll try not to get in anybody’s way, Mr. Martineau. I’m just here to help.”
His smile might have seemed genuine to somebody who couldn’t read eyes.
“Make it ‘Marty,’” he said. “We don’t stand on ceremony around here. I know the Service has a reputation for stuffiness, but when your job is to lay your life on the line, the people you work with become your friends.”
“Fine. So then make it ‘Nate,’ and just let me know how I can lend a hand.”
“Let’s start with why you’re here.” He was rocking a little. “All I’ve been told is that you’re on loan from Justice, as…” He checked a paper on his desk. “… an investigative assistant courtesy of the Attorney General. But to my knowledge…” He gestured in the vague direction of the Monadnock Building. “… you work across the street. For yourself.”
I wasn’t crazy about justifying my presence to this bureaucrat, but I could see I needed to.
“I was an investigator on the rackets committee,” I said. “Worked for Bob Kennedy, and became an occasional asset to him, ever since. About an hour ago, he asked me to help you out for the next few days. Because of this situation with these potential assassins. And I said yes.”
His smile couldn’t have been more stuck on if he’d used Scotch tape. He put a lightness in his tone that didn’t quite do the trick when he said: “Then you’re not a spy?”
“What, for Bobby Kennedy? No. He just knows you’re shorthanded. And meaning no disrespect to that young crew of yours out there, most of whom were not raised in this town, I do know my way around Chicago.”
He thought about that for two seconds. “All right. Then I’ll treat you as just another agent.”
“Fine by me.”
“With one exception. You’ll take the office next door. For one thing, I don’t have a free desk. For another, I want the men to understand that you have a certain standing in this investigation. That you represent the AG.”
“Oh, that’s not really a card I want to play.…”
“Then don’t play it. But it’s how I’ll present you, and…” He gestured toward the wall dividing this office from its neighbor. “… that’s the available space I have for you. Used to be my office, when I was deputy SAIC. But when I got moved up, I didn’t get assigned a second-in-command.”
So I had a private office. I didn’t think any further argument was necessary.
He drummed the fingers of one hand lightly on mahogany. “How well do you know Mr. Boldt?”
Interesting. He had called the agent “Ebe,” and made a point of how informal the guys around the office were. But now it was “Mr. Boldt.”
“He worked for me at the A-1 for a year. Before he got that investigative post with the Illinois troopers.”
He was nodding. “Yes, yes, that’s right, isn’t it? How did you find him as an employee?”
“A good agent. With a stick up his ass.”
That made Martineau smile. Whatever artifices were hanging between us had just been broken through.
“He is a very good investigator,” Martineau said. “But he’s not popular here. About half my staff comes from the South, you know.”
“Not surprising,” I said. “Washington, D.C., is damn near Dixieland.”
“Right. Well, Mr. Boldt is … racially sensitive. I would say oversensitive. If he hears his co-workers telling some innocent jigaboo joke, he files a complaint. We had a kind of unfortunate incident when he came back to work here, after his sojourn on the White House detail. He came in that first morning back, and somebody had hung a little noose from the nail where his clipboard hangs. By his desk?”
“That doesn’t sound so innocent.”
“Nate, do I have to tell you that when men do this kind of work, they develop a dark sense of humor?”
“No, but I don’t think a darkie sense of humor is called for.”
He raised his palms and patted the air. “I quite agree. But where you or I might shrug it off, and maybe even throw a punch after working hours, Mr. Boldt makes formal complaints-he did the same thing on the White House detail, which is why he didn’t make it there. So he’s never really been accepted. Never been … one of the guys.”
“That’s a shame,” I said, sort of meaning it, “but what does it have to do with me?”
“When I break this down into two-man teams, I’ll be assigning Mr. Boldt to you. I wanted you to know that in advance, in case you might take offense.”
“Why would I take offense? Anyway, of the guys out there, Eben’s the only one I really know at all.”
“Good. Good. Then there’s no problem.”
“Not as far as I’m concerned.”
“Good,” he said again. Then he sighed in a that’s-that manner. “Well, go check your office out, and be back here in fifteen minutes, for the briefing. Only a handful in the branch are aware of what’s in store for us, and it’s time to clue in the rest.”
I rose, and this time Martineau did as well, and we shook again. I was glad that bullshit was over.
My new home-away-from-home was half the size of Martineau’s office, but it had the same pricey dark Mediterranean furnishings, the desk only slightly smaller. No American flag, but another br
onze Treasury seal reigned over an empty bookcase. The walls were otherwise pretty bare, though there was one interesting thing: a framed presidential portrait of Eisenhower, not Kennedy. And it had a bumper sticker plastered across the bottom: I STILL LIKE IKE. A comment on Kennedy, dating back to when this was Martineau’s office? I never asked.
Soon, around the conference table in the SAIC’s office, six agents joined Eben Boldt, Martineau, and me. They were an assortment of crew cuts, about half in dark-rimmed glasses, and I would be lying if I said I ever got their names straight. The water pitcher had moved to the table and two ashtrays were present, and three of the agents smoked during the meeting, but not Martineau. Or Eben or myself, for that matter. At each of the seats a manila folder waited. On the wall behind Martineau as he sat at the head of the table was a big framed city of Chicago map.
All of us were in shirtsleeves. A couple had theirs rolled up, apparently the office rebels. And every eye was on Martineau.
“We have a serious threat to the President on Saturday,” he said, solemn yet matter-of-fact. “Some of you know Nathan Heller here. He has a distinguished record as an investigator with work on some of the most famous cases in this city’s history-actually, in American history.”
All eyes were on me now.
“We’ll agree not to mention his bodyguard assignments for Mayor Cermak or Huey Long,” Martineau said joshingly.
That got smiles and laughs, from me as well.
“We’ll hope for a better outcome this time,” I said.
Martineau continued: “Nate worked with the AG back in rackets committee days, and the AG asked him to trot across the street over here to pitch in. We couldn’t be more short-staffed, so we’re happy for the help. Welcome, Nate.”
I actually got a polite little hand out of the boys.
“Glad to be here,” I said, rising. “I’m in the office next door, but I have no special status. If anything, I’m low man on the totem pole. Just want to do my bit.”
I sat.
“We appreciate that,” Martineau said. “We’ll start with Ebe here…”
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