“More ginger,” Patterson said.
“Okay, good, now we’re comfortable,” McCarthy said. “Fire away.”
Luis sat in a corner and got used to the switch. The well-dressed guy who’d delivered the blast was not the senator; he was the reporter. The guy in the baggy suit who needed a drink and a new razor was Senator McCarthy.
Patterson did the interview. Luis thought McCarthy won without breaking sweat. “Americans don’t mess with Russian politics,” he told Patterson, “so what brings Communists to this country except to cause trouble?” Patterson had no answer to that. The session ended. McCarthy gave him a souvenir jug of Wisconsin maple syrup, a signed copy of his book McCarthyism, The Fight for America, and a warm handshake. “Any time,” he said. “Ain’t just sayin’ that. My door is never closed to the gentlemen of the Press.” Patterson left, looking flat. “How about that,” McCarthy said. “Two yards of piss and a Princeton Ph.D, and he never laid a glove on me. Do I know you?”
“I sincerely hope not,” Luis said crisply. “I spend considerable time and money on preserving my anonymity.”
“Claims he had an appointment,” counsel said. “He lied. He’s here on false pretenses.”
“Oh, don’t be such a sore loser, for Chrissake. Half of Washington is here on false pretenses.” McCarthy boosted his drink and groped for a handful of ice cubes. “This guy says he’s a spook, I believe him, the other half of Washington are all spooks, why not him? Got a codename, Mr. Spook? Something we can put in my appointments diary, keep our little friend here happy?”
Luis searched his memory. “Arabel,” he said. “Call me Arabel.” It had been the Abwehr’s codename for him during the second half of the war. To the British he was Eldorado; to the Germans, Arabel. Eldorado might still mean something to intelligence veterans in Washington but the Abwehr was long since dismantled and demolished. And Arabel was a name that Luis could easily remember.
“Sounds like a floozy to me.” McCarthy would never be handsome. Too bulky. Between receding black hair and dark jowls was a job-lot of features: heavy eyes, bulbous nose, slanting mouth. But he had an easy grin. “Not that I got anything against floozies. Well, that ain’t true. I got my tumescent genital organ against ’em, every chance I got. Only kidding, Mr. Arabel. I say things like that to give our little friend here a vicarious and illicit thrill, on account of his family never lets him have any fun. Take a drink, Mr. Arabel, and tell me somethin’. You here to buy or to sell?”
“Buy?” Luis was surprised and a little amused. “What should I buy?”
“Oh … well … folks sometimes value my goodwill. My good works. My good nature.” Now McCarthy was amused.
“Senator, this man told me he had crucial information,” counsel said. Not amused. We were not put on Earth to enjoy ourselves.
“I’m here to sell,” Luis said. “You investigate and expose Communists. I can supply you with Reds. Top quality. All fresh.”
McCarthy strolled across the room and straightened a framed photograph of himself shaking hands with Eisenhower in uniform. Ike’s grin looked like it had been set in stone. “Mr. Arabel … I’ve been doing this job for a few years now. Reckon I know as much as any man. How come I missed what you say you found?”
“Maybe we’re talking about two different kinds of Communists, senator. There’s the kind that goes about like a snail, leaving a trail behind it. And there’s the other kind that leaves no trail. Really dangerous Communists don’t address meetings, or publish newsletters, or carry membership cards, or get elected to party positions.” He felt the kick of spontaneous creation and knew it was time to take a break before he pushed it too far. He walked to the drinks cabinet and poured a glass of tonic water. He plopped a lump of ice into it. He dried his fingers on a bar towel monogrammed with the senator’s initials. The tonic fizzed against his palate. Everything in the room seemed heightened, the colors, the shapes, even the silence. Especially the silence.
“Well, you got a point, Mr. Arabel,” McCarthy said. “Question is, how d’you catch these snails? The no-trail kind.”
“Do you care how I do it, senator?”
McCarthy laughed. “No, sir. I don’t give a damn. Hey … I’m late for lunch. Politics is all food, you know. Steaks are going to kill me. Good to meet you, Mr. Arabel.” They shook hands. “Stop by again, we’ll compare slime. Bobby knows how to find me.”
“Bobby?”
McCarthy aimed his glass at counsel. “Bobby Kennedy. Didn’t you guys meet?”
“Not formally.”
McCarthy took his drink with him as he went out. “Don’t you mess with Bobby Kennedy,” he said. “Medical Science ain’t got no antidote to Bobby’s venom.”
They listened to his footsteps fade.
“And it’s Bob, not Bobby,” Kennedy said, in a cracked monotone. “I wish people would get it right, for God’s sake.”
3
The Central Intelligence Agency did not exist. That’s why the food there had to be so good. It wasn’t like the FBI, where you could set your watch by J. Edgar Hoover and his sidekick Clyde Tolson stepping out to lunch at Harvey’s restaurant. The CIA fed its workers on the premises, and fed them well. It says a lot for Mrs. Bailey’s dedication to duty that she damn near worked through her lunch break.
Mrs. Bailey was an audio typist. She listened to spools of tape and made transcripts of what she heard: not absolutely everything, not chitchat about the weather or sexual longings or borrowing ten bucks; just serious business. The trouble with audio was people wandered, coughed, mumbled, chewed gum, interrupted. Mrs. Bailey was patient, persistent. She replayed the tape. Even so, some words troubled her, so she added a query in red ink in the margin.
She did this with Arabel, if it really was Arabel. Sometimes it sounded like Annabel. Mrs. Bailey had only ever come across Arabel as a girl’s name and this was a man talking. She couldn’t find it in any of her dictionaries: English, French, Italian, Spanish, German. She was now very hungry. In the margin she wrote Arabel or Annabel? and went to lunch.
The CIA operative who read her transcript was not impressed by big talk in McCarthy’s office. “Same old stuff,” he said. Then he noticed the red-ink query. It intrigued him. Why would a male use a female codename? There was a reason for everything, and he wanted to know it. He sent a memo to all departments of the agency, asking if the name rang a bell.
Wagner had been a brigadier in the Abwehr. German military intelligence. When World War Two ended, he was in a prisoner-of-war camp. At first it was scoured by Allied investigators, picking out individuals to stand trial for war crimes. Wagner was not one. Soon the Soviet Union was building its Iron Curtain, a buffer zone from the Baltic to the Black Sea. That was a lucky break for Wagner and many like him. Some of their Abwehr colleagues, unlucky enough to be captured by the Russians, found themselves back at work in East Germany. Wagner’s wartime operations involved sending spies into Britain and receiving their reports: exactly what American intelligence now wished to do in East Germany. It made sense to counter one set of Abwehr officers with another. The US cherrypicked the best, including Wagner. When the CIA was set up in 1947, Wagner was one of several ex-Abwehr men on the strength.
He was still there in 1953, looking at a memo that was all about a name.
“Arabel,” he said aloud. Agent at the heart of the Abwehr triumph of the war. Could there be two Arabels? Coincidence? No, he knew this must be the same man. But here, in Washington, dickering with Senator McCarthy? Bizarre. Wagner was quite excited. He must find out more.
ALL SORTS OF FREAKS AND WEIRDOS
1
Every day the garbage scow went down New York’s East River and far out to sea, where one of the crew pulled a lever, the hull opened like bomb doors and another several hundred tons of metropolitan crap got dumped into the Atlantic.
On the way back, midway between the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Navy Yard, a deckhand saw an unusually large piece of garbage drifting with the
current. The skipper ordered that a striped buoy be dropped near to it, and he got the Harbor Police on the radio. “It’s a floater,” he reported. Let the cops get their hands dirty.
Ten minutes later, a police launch found it. The cops slid boathooks under the ropes and hauled it over the stern and onto a tarpaulin. Nobody got his hands dirty, which was just as well because Sonny Deakin was coated with oil and sewage. At one time there had been a concrete block around his feet, but the salty Atlantic had quickly found so many weaknesses where it could penetrate and degrade that it had nibbled the block down to nearly nothing, and the bloat in the body brought him to the surface.
Too much sand in the cement, perhaps. Or maybe not enough patience to let it harden.
Sloppy.
2
The bullet that clipped Sammy’s femoral lay in the sodden carpet of the penthouse until the police found it. They already knew he hadn’t been shot when he was in the Studebaker: no slug, no hole in the seat, and the angle of entry of the leg wound was wrong. Plus he’d been in the penthouse. They found the same carpet fibers plastered all over the bloody seat of his pants. Also, blood splashes in the elevator and the lobby matched Sammy’s type. He was a Fantoni, so the NYPD was happy to let the FBI have the case as part of its investigation of organized crime. But shooting a guy in the leg, torching somebody else’s apartment, driving the guy up Broadway in the rain until he’s dead and the vehicle quit because nobody ever took the trouble to change the oil filter: that wasn’t organized crime. That was disheveled crime.
The coroner kept Sammy while the FBI went poking around, listening for leaks from the other New York families and hearing nothing but disbelief and disdain at the decline of professional standards, no wonder you couldn’t find a good plumber nowadays. So the coroner released the body. Jerome Fantoni organized the funeral. It took place in Jersey, at the church of St. Nicholas of Tolentino, a spacious venue, it needed to be, three hundred and twenty mourners. An orchestra of fifteen and a choir of thirty performed a Monteverdi Requiem, after which everyone retired to the residence of Jerome Fantoni to restore their fluid balance.
This was announced, briefly, in The New York Times. The notice added that a private interment would take place next day at Yonkers cemetery. Prendergast and Fisk attended.
They stood under a majestic chestnut, out of the sun, and watched a small group of people walk down a winding driveway through parkland that would cost a hundred dollars an inch in Manhattan. The hearse followed, crunching the gravel as softly as a burglar. The mausoleum had been built in the Yonkers house-style: a square room and a gable roof, all made of simple white stone. FANTONI was carved above the entrance in foot-high capitals. In this leafy setting, the place looked more like a pretentious Wendy house than a tomb. “Even when they die, the rich live better,” Prendergast said. “It’s a lousy shame.”
A man who was either the funeral director or the maitre d’ at the Waldorf-Astoria walked over to them and said this was a private occasion and would they please move on.
“We’re family,” Prendergast said. “I’m Uncle Sam, and so is he.”
The man liked that. His left eyebrow climbed one millimeter. In the circumstances it was as good as a standing ovation. He turned and went back.
Folding chairs had been arranged in a half-circle. The party sat and listened to a violinist and a cellist play Bach. Even the birds shut up, out of respect. Then the casket got carried inside. Finally there was more Bach, much livelier. The chairs were packed away. Limos drifted down the drive, collected the party, drifted away. Now only Jerome Fantoni was left. He lit a pipe and ambled across the grass to the giant chestnut.
“The purists will never forgive me for tampering with a sonata for unaccompanied violin,” he said, “but the cello adds such gravitas. The arrangement is my own.”
“I wouldn’t change a note,” Prendergast said. “I’m a tenor sax man myself, and Fisk here favors the harmonica.”
“Yes? Very brave of him. Have you any news?”
“Well, a pattern is emerging, sir,” Fisk said. “Sightings at Hoboken docks, then at East 84th Street, West 10th Street, your own residence in New Jersey, plus the arson attack on the penthouse on Central Park West. We have your nephew at all those places when Luis Cabrillo was there too.”
“And, of course, we have him ultimately in Cabrillo’s Studebaker,” Prendergast added.
“Cabrillo had been my dinner guest. Sammy’s idea. There was a girl, too, I fancy Sammy was more interested in her. Nothing memorable happened. I have a lot of dinner guests.”
“This one disappeared,” Fisk said. “The girl also. Could be they had a lot to disappear from. Cabrillo has Known Communist Associates. They’re both blacklisted.”
“So he’s a Red. That’s no reason to kill my nephew. What is Cabrillo’s motive, for God’s sake?”
“Sammy wanted his girl. We found a .38 in Sammy’s coat pocket. Maybe Cabrillo fired first.” There was a silence while they all thought about that.
“We found another .38 in the Studebaker,” Prendergast said. “Under the seat. With written directions about how to find Vinnie Biaggi.”
“Cabrillo.” Fantoni tapped out his pipe on his heel. “It’s all Cabrillo, isn’t it?” he said. They walked toward the drive. A squirrel saw its chance and ran to the shreds of tobacco lying in the grass, sniffed, hesitated, backed off. It might be a trap. You got all sorts of freaks and weirdos in this cemetery.
“Three dead, and two on the run,” Fisk said. “A pattern is definitely emerging, sir.”
“You know where to find us if they turn up for dinner,” Prendergast said. They left him staring at the mausoleum as if someone had told him it had a spelling mistake but he was damned if he could see it.
They turned a bend in the drive, walking slowly because of the heat.
“I feel uncomfortable about using the Mob to find Cabrillo,” Fisk said.
“I don’t,” Prendergast said. “Their budget’s bigger than ours.”
He was right about that. Fantoni had one potential clue as to Cabrillo’s whereabouts: the black Buick Cabrillo had driven away in. Had vanished in. Fantoni’s organization had associates and affiliates all up and down the East Coast. Quite quickly they knew the license-plate number. It was a start.
3
Time passed. This was out of the control of the CIA, the FBI, the NYPD, or even the Mafia.
Jerome Fantoni was surprised how much he missed Sammy. In his industry, people came and went; and Sammy hadn’t been the sharpest knife in the box, but he had been loyal and attentive, and in his uncle’s scale of values that rated high. There was too much dishonesty in the industry. You hijacked a truckload of booze and then people stole. They got paid for hijacking yet still they stole, a case of Scotch here and there, it all added up. Sammy never stole. He did as he was told and whacked the guys who stole. Now Jerome had lost that portion of loyalty and honesty, and he didn’t know why, and this upset him. Jerome wanted balance, equity, closure. He wanted Cabrillo. He had his people out looking for him.
Kim Philby missed Cabrillo in a very different way. He knew—because the Consulate knew what the FBI knew—that Luis had probably gone to San Francisco, presumably after being scared out of Central Park West. Maybe the fright would persuade him to stop making a nuisance of himself; but Philby remembered the Cabrillo of the Double-Cross days: tireless, restless, never satisfied. “I think he’ll be back,” Philby told Harding. “I’ll hang about for a while.”
4
Frank Magee was a cop in Washington, hardworking, honest, reliable. In fifteen years working the toughest part of town, the harbor area, Magee racked up commendations and scars equally. Then, in six months, a burglar with a knife slashed his face and a drunk with a baseball bat broke his arm. The bone healed but most days the arm ached. The Department transferred him to Georgetown, where the crime of choice was adultery. Burglary was left to the possums. Nobody’s peach trees were safe. It was a scandal.
It was a quiet day. The sergeant didn’t like Buicks. His first wife had wanted a Buick, bitched about their Chevy, wasn’t going to be happy until they got a fat stinkin’ Buick, so in the end he took out a lousy bank loan and bought a Buick and guess what? She still wasn’t happy. The sergeant told the captain that Magee was papering a Buick with tickets in Georgetown.
The captain didn’t like Georgetown. Everyone there made three times the money he’d ever make and their neurotic wives phoned the police department if the garbage men dropped half an eggshell in the driveway. He talked to an assistant DA and they agreed that this was blatant and persistent contempt of law, aggravated by the fact that the car belonged to a shithead who lived in New Jersey. The assistant DA had gone through Marine Corps boot camp in New Jersey. He drew up a warrant for the arrest of the owner of the Buick and began the process of extradition for trial in DC. It probably wouldn’t work, but at least it would pay back New Jersey for shaving his head.
*
Jerome Fantoni had friends in DC, and these friends had friends in the DA’s office. Where was the harm in that? It was only a goddam parking offense. Before the warrant and the extradition order had been completed, Jerome knew the details.
He could have contracted the job to a local affiliate. But this thing was about Sammy. This was family. He chose one of Sammy’s cousins, Chick Scatola. Scatola listened when you spoke, did what you said, and dressed like he worked for IBM, so nobody should look twice at him in Georgetown. “Luis Cabrillo,” Jerome said. “Your age, height, build. Probably lives on or near Potomac Street. Took my black Buick. Here’s the license number, spare keys. Find the car, you’ll find Cabrillo. He knocked off Sammy and he’s a Communist sympathizer. Erase him. Lose the man, lose the car, call me when.”
Red Rag Blues Page 18