Bleeding in Black and White

by Colin Cotterill

  But, despite working for an exciting new organization, the boys did a lot of sitting. When you spend too long on your backside, you tend to get sloppy. Bodge was no exception to that rule. He’d had it in his mind for some time that he’d be a good husband. He wasn’t enamored with living by himself and he could picture one of the new Levittown Homes with his pretty wife standing at the door with a freshly baked tuna casserole in her oven mitts. His only problem was recruiting someone he cared enough about to fill the role. It was his mid-twenties crisis. He was starting to abandon all hope of passion.

  Shelly LeTissier was a secretary at Curtis and Simon across the street. She and her buddies from the typing pool ate at Max’s. That’s where Bodge and Lou spent most of their long lunch hours. Bodge couldn’t help but notice the pale girl with good teeth. But he was fascinated more by her tall blond beehive hairdo than her face. He could never understand what kept it up. He liked to watch the flies circle around her hairspray. She noticed this not-so-bad-looking guy staring at her and started to stare back. When he found out her name he figured it was an omen; the French connection. Six months later and before Bodge really knew what hit him, they were engaged. Another three months and they were married.

  Bodge had followed all the rules when it came to women. He’d had girlfriends, plenty of them. He got on to all the bases he was recommended to be on and never (in his mother’s words) messed around in diners when he had his own roast in the oven at home. But it was all so ordinary. He’d heard about love, seen it in movies, read about it. But despite all the affairs, not one ever had him singing in the rain, dancing on the street or hiring mariachi musicians to serenade at his table. He arrived at the firm belief that it was an advertising ploy conjured up to sell chocolates.

  His marriage wasn’t a passionate thing, but by then, Bodge was so dulled by his job, it was colorful by comparison. He’d come to believe women weren’t supposed to be stimulating. Those weren’t the days when girls were encouraged to have ambition. He’d never hung out with any he honestly believed weren’t in training for house-wifing and motherhood. Thankfully he and Shelly had held off having children. Thankfully for Shelly because she needed all the spare time she could find to be spending her new husband’s salary. Thankfully for Bodge because he kind of knew, even before the church bells had stopped ringing in his eardrums, that they wouldn’t be together long enough to watch kids grow up.

  He didn’t actually classify the marriage as a failure. They gave it two years to see if it would turn into a love match all by itself, but neither of them was sad to see the other leave. He probably didn’t give her a thought after it was over. It was an experience, negative perhaps but an experience never the less.

  His job certainly wasn’t adding to his collection of experiences. In July of 1947, President Truman had signed a brand new National Security Act which entered into force on September 19, and the Central Intelligence Agency came into being as a statutory body the next day. This was what they’d all been waiting for, a slick, humanitarian agency with the mandate to rescue the world from tyranny and oppression. Bodge and Lou knew in their hearts that this would be the turning point in their careers. They were given very specific training in infiltration and antiterrorism techniques, had several large volumes of information to take home and memorize, and before the year was out, lined up to receive a certificate, a multi-use penknife, and a very smart personalized CIA identification badge and card. This was the real thing.

  Bodge and Lou had been shown their newly renovated office on the fourth floor, their nicely veneered desks, and the stationery sets with CIA stamped on each pen. And here they still were, four years later, processing files, and discussing the shape of paper.

  “Brother,” Lou decided, “You and I are going to head out at lunch time and have ourselves a good old fashioned rectangular meal at Max’s,”.

  “Eating’s all we seem to do.”

  “Get out of here. What about booze?”

  “You boys having a good time?”

  They looked up to see Supervisor Mooney in the doorway, the perennial cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “I hope those reports aren’t doing too much damage to your theoretical discussions.”

  “Mooney how long have you been standing there spying?” Lou asked. “Go annoy someone else, why don’t you?”

  Supervisor Mooney had been with these two since the beginning. They’d sunk beers together, been on fishing trips. Then, for reasons none of them could work out, especially Stanley Mooney himself, they’d called him into the top office and told him he was going to be promoted to supervisor at another fifty dollars a month. They didn’t ask him if he wanted the job or give him any choice.

  “A little respect if you don’t mind, gentlemen.”

  “Go screw yourself.”

  “Lou!” Mooney looked back into the hallway. “What if anyone had heard that?”

  “They’d be impressed at the warm and caring relationship you have with your underlings.”

  “Screw yourself is warm and caring?”

  “I got worse than that.”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Hey, Bodge.”

  Bodge dragged himself away from the Danish royal family. “Yes, Stan?”

  “There’s some guy here from Washington. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Yeah sure, Stan.” He looked back down.

  “No I’m serious.”

  Lou hooted. “Come on, Mooney. How many times you gonna pull that one, and how many times is it gonna not be funny?”

  “I’m not kidding, guys.” Mooney did see the ironic side of it and smiled.

  “OK, Mooney.”

  “Listen, Bodge. This guy…”

  “I’ve got work to do, Stan.”

  Mooney was starting to understand how the boy who cried “wolf” must have felt till he remembered the card in his top pocket. He took it out and dropped it on Bodge’s desk.

  “See?”

  Bodge looked up into the supervisor’s eyes and back down at the card. He picked it up and read aloud from it,

  “A. Palmer, CIA Department of Special Operations.”

  Lou let out one of his rude laughs. “Stan, you have got to be kidding me. Just how stupid do you take us for?”

  “Oh, I already know how stupid you are. This doesn’t change that any.”

  “So, you want us to believe this guy up on the hill, working in special ops, goes around giving out name cards. Come on.”

  “I think it’s real, Lou,” Bodge said at last. He could feel the quality of the shiny card and the expense of the raised lettering under his fingers. Lou laughed again.

  “Well, hell. If that’s what it takes to get into operations, I’m taking out an ad in the Yellow Pages. I guess we’ve been too discreet about things all these years. What’s he want with my brother, Stan?”

  “Didn’t say. But I tell you what…”

  “What?”

  “He’s wearing a two-hundred-buck suit.”

  3.

  “Agent Leon?”

  “Yes sir.”

  The man in the two-hundred-buck suit stood politely and held out his hand. Bodge walked over and shook it. He felt its authority and confidence. The man’s hand had established who was in charge. All Bodge’s own hand could ever do was grab and shake. It didn’t establish anything, except that he was sweating.

  “Take a seat, son.”

  They were alone in a director’s office that had been vacated so this meeting could take place. Bodge sat on the sofa across the room from the desk and sank lower than he wanted. He knew the seat was deliberately made soft so guests would feel inferior. It worked.

  Palmer was pouring them both coffee at the cocktail counter. There was nothing physically distinguished about the man. He was somewhere in his late fifties, slim, gray-haired, and not particularly tall. If you took him out of his suit and his hair cream he might be the kind of wiry guy you’d meet at weekends in the hardware store. But he did have one of t
hose presences Bodge had read about. He hadn’t asked whether his guest wanted coffee or how he took it. But it arrived perfect. Bodge was impressed.

  On his walk up the stairwell to the fifth floor a number of things had reeled through Bodge’s mind. He had two scenarios worked out even before he’d heaved open the fire door. Both of them scared him. In the first case they were about to throw him out on his ear. They’d invited some impartial executive from another division to do the dirty work because at the Adams Center all the long-term people knew each other. This was his last day at work, and, although he wasn’t fond of the job, he wasn’t sure what else he could do. That was the first theory.

  But the second theory was even more terrifying. After all these years of putting in for transfers and missions and overseas duties — they were finally going to give him one. They were going to send him on an operation. He’d halved his pace along the silent hall carpet as that possibility sank in. It suddenly occurred to him he wasn’t ready any more. After seven years he’d gone soft; the muscle behind his heroism had atrophied along with all the others. All this applying and lobbying he did was no longer a result of that urge, it was just what he’d always done. It was expected. Some while back he’d given up hope. He couldn’t put his finger on when that happened. It just crawled up on him one day.

  He wasn’t sure he really wanted a mission any more. He had a season ticket for Giants games at the Polo Grounds and membership of a couple of exclusive supper clubs. He had a nice apartment now with a state of the art hi-fi system, a Frigidaire, and a TV with a color receiver. That TV stuck there in his mind for a second and he stood still on the high pile carpet. Perhaps if he hadn’t invested in that latest folly he might have been more prepared to thrust himself into danger.

  Five months earlier, RCA had made the first color television broadcast, from New York's Empire State Building. The following month, CBS followed suit. Department stores attracted huge crowds that came to view one more miracle from an already prodigious media. The CBS executives could imagine nothing but awe from a population in love with Technicolor at the cinema. Now Americans could witness living color in their very own homes. What could go wrong?

  It only took a month before the company was facing accusations of Satanism. In a pervading atmosphere of communist dread that hung over the country, who but a communist-funded station would do anything so barbaric, so tasteless? The CBS liaison desk was inundated with calls and letters from disgusted viewers. What pornography were they decrying? Nothing less than The Evening News Hour. The executives were astounded by the reaction.

  For months, news footage had been arriving from Korea. It had become a familiar if sometimes annoying feature of the prime time bulletins. And, indeed, nothing had changed in the presentation or in the selected items. It was agreed that nobody would have even noticed had it not been for the experimentation with color and CBS’s race to one-up its rivals. But what, in black and white, could have been oil patches or mud from a rainy season foxhole, had in fact turned out to be glowingly crimson blood.

  In those early days TV red was brighter than a Florida sunset. At the cinema, whole legions of Roman warriors could be slain in battle and audiences would see nothing more than a dull red speck of paint artistically daubed on the armor. And that, of course, was paint. Everyone in the movie house knew it was paint. It even looked like paint. It never spurted from a severed vein or spread beneath a slain centurion, because — it was paint. But what they were seeing on the news was blood; the real thing. In black and white it had been easy to ignore. But here was a television station with the audacity to send pictures of real red blood into everyone’s home. Our boys in the field were bleeding in color. It just wasn’t good enough.

  So, after a week of colored news from Korea, everything went back to black and white and the complaints stopped. But although the blood was gray again, it still registered as red in the minds of those who’d seen it. For people like Bodge, who’d been on battlefields where bodies lay like veal in fresh blood sauce, nightmares were rekindled. He had no desire to watch men die slowly or watch blood ooze from their wounds. He had no desire to be one of them. If anyone were to ask, he’d tell them. He was afraid of death and all the unnecessary violence that led to it. CBS had reminded him he was a coward.

  At that moment, on the soft sofa with his perfect cup of coffee, he was silently hoping to get fired. Palmer sat on the armchair with his head a good eighteen inches above Bodge’s. He tasted his own coffee and smiled warmly like a cocktail host before speaking. Bodge noticed that the man’s fingernails were impeccably neat.

  “You know who I am and where I’m from?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “This visit is what we call an appraisal.”

  “Of?”

  “Of you, Bodge.” He used the nickname comfortably as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a perfect stranger to know all your secrets.

  “I’m here to see what you’re made of. Do you mind if I ask you one or two questions?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “If you had to select three adjectives to describe yourself, what would they be?”

  Bodge kept his smile to himself. It was going to be one of those interviews: psychological tests devised by agency shrinks to find the real man inside the man. He pushed his luck a little.

  “Do you want all three of them right away?”

  Palmer didn’t hold back his own smile. “It’s up to you.”

  “Then, if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to give them to you as they come to me.”

  “May I ask you why?”

  “I’d hate to say something just to be smart and wind up regretting it. So, okay, here’s the first one; Careful.”

  “You’re happy with that?”

  “Yes.”

  Palmer noted it down on a pad that had been strategically placed on the coffee table in front of him. He then scribbled down some notes that kept Bodge hanging. He started to believe the whole interview would be a barrage of IQ and personality tests he could probably manipulate to get himself ousted. But the next question shook him out of that theory.

  “Your parents…”

  The interviewer waited for some reaction but there was none.

  “…are devout Baptists. They raised you very strictly by the good book. Would you say that’s true?”

  “I would.”

  “Did any of it rub off?”

  “Do you mean, am I a good Christian?”

  “Not really. I suppose I mean, could you convince someone else that you were?”

  Bodge looked up for his reservoir of flippant answers but realized the question was serious.

  “My parents, particularly my father, hammered the scriptures into me from the first day I could recognize words. I had a theological lecture every evening until I was old enough to get away from home. By then I had no feeling for religion. I can’t say whether the messages rubbed off but the advertising certainly stuck. I guess I could recite the Bible verbatim if I were pushed.”

  “Good.” Bodge couldn’t imagine what was good about it. He watched the man scribble down more notes in a shorthand Bodge didn’t recognize before continuing.

  “How’s your French these days?”

  “I haven’t had much chance to speak it down there in my cubby hole over the past seven years.” He didn’t bother to catch Palmer’ gaze although he noticed the man look up from his notepad. Bodge continued to speak in the direction of the notations on the pad. “Observant.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’d like observant to be my second adjective.”

  “Certainly. What have you observed?”

  “That you’re using your note-taking as a distraction device, probably to give you time to think about your next question or to let me trip over my own feet. You aren’t really writing anything I’m telling you.”

  “What makes you think that?” Palmer smiled again.

  “From the number of characters you’ve sc
ribbled down there, I should by now have noticed some repetitions. Even if I don’t know your shorthand, there’d logically be symbols that repeat from time to time. What you have there is just a chain of decorations.”

  Bodge hoped this was all getting him black marks. Palmer put down his pencil.

  “We were talking about your French.”

  “It’s been several years since I last had to open a dictionary. And every document in French that comes into this building passes over my desk.”

  “And how is that desk?”

  “How is the desk?”

  “You must be on quite intimate terms with it after seven years.”

  “Five years. I had a different one when I first started.”

  “They tend to be pretty much alike. You want to get away from it?”

  There. That was the moment. That was the exit. A second of hesitation, a straightforward, “No” and it would all be over. It was that easy. Bodge would be filing for another thirty years. Despite the anxiety he’d brought with him to the Director’s office, he suddenly understood exactly what it was he needed. The answer rose up through the murky doubts, ignoring his whiney subconscious cowardice. He looked into Palmer’ pale blue eyes and said, very firmly,

  “Yes. I do.”

  The operations man smiled and was about to make another note until he realized there was no longer a point. There were other questions but Bodge got the feeling they were no longer appraising him. They’d turned to orientation. Do you know anything about the situation in Indochina? Would you be prepared to learn a third language? Do you have any health issues which might preclude you from staying in a hot climate? They were all asked matter-of-factly as if a decision had already been made. There was only one question where Palmer might have noticed a hesitation, but he’d probably expected it. Do you have any familial or social attachments that would preclude your accepting a two-year assignment away from the United States?