“I assume you have the Party membership cards,” McCarthy said. “Okay. Now let’s think about the press conference. On live TV. How to handle that.”
“Your speech writes itself,” Luis said. “Exposed, the Red Tsar of Crime. For decades, Stalin’s men in the New York Mafia have conspired to sell America down the river. Jerome Fantoni, the double traitor. First he betrays justice, then he betrays patriotism. When the Mob takes orders from the Kremlin, what hope is there for decency and honor in the USA?”
“Hold it there.” McCarthy was scribbling fast. “Okay … Listen … People are going to wonder how this conspiracy works. Fantoni’s business is corruption. How can the Commies subvert corruption?”
“Let’s not get bogged down in detail,” Luis said. “Let’s just remember the strategy of Red infiltration. They target the vital organs: the State Department, the Atom Bomb, the Army, Hollywood, and now we discover their tentacles inside the Mafia, probably the biggest business operation in America.”
“Vital organs,” McCarthy said. “Good point.”
“It’s no wonder the FBI can’t capture Communist agents,” Luis said. “They’ve never got a grip on the Mafia, who are one and the same thing.”
“Dandy.” McCarthy made a note. “But if I was Fantoni, I’d be saying something like, ‘Look, I’m a successful businessman, why should I be a Commy? What’s in it for me?’ Answer that one.”
“It’s not for us to answer,” Luis said. “History does that. What was in it for diplomats? Atom bomb scientists? Pentagon officials? They all turned traitor. Why not leading Mobsters?”
“Enough,” Julie said. “Before my client says another word, senator, you and I need to agree contractual terms, with particular regard to financial remuneration.”
“Sure. Toss a figure in the air.”
“Thirty thousand dollars retainer.”
“Hey!” McCarthy collapsed as if shot, clutching his heart. “I don’t have that.”
“You can get it. Ask one of your millionaire campaign supporters. When this story breaks, you’ll be the hottest ticket in the G.O.P. You’ll make ten grand a night on the rubber-chicken circuit. Plus radio, books, magazine interviews. I can see a whole TV drama series coming out of it. Roll the credits: Joseph R. McCarthy was played by himself.”
“Twenty-five grand retainer. Only after I get the originals of all these documents.”
“Twenty-five, and a thousand a month. Plus bonus payments to be agreed for special discoveries by my client.”
They bickered professionally for five minutes, but the deal was done. “I’ll draw up the papers,” she said. “Obviously my client retains all literary rights, stage and motion-picture rights, radio serial rights, newspaper and magazine one-shot and serial rights, Book Club rights, translation rights and strip-cartoon rights, both US and worldwide.”
“Lady, I got a cute birthmark on my right butt,” McCarthy said. “You can have the rights on that too.” They shook on it.
3
“I want to be clear about one thing,” Julie said. “Just what exactly are we trying to do?”
“Make money, sweetie.” Luis was still slightly manic. They had opened a bank account on the strength of McCarthy’s 25 grand, and they were walking back to the apartment. Success made all the colors brighter. He could see that she enjoyed being his agent; she had known literary and theatrical agents in New York, knew their tone, style, language. Her pleasure doubled his feeling of fizz.
“We’re boosting Joe bloody McCarthy too,” she said. “Is that part of the plot?”
“He’s a windbag! We keep pumping him up, one day he’ll explode.”
“No more names, Luis.” She grabbed his arm and made him stop. “No more blacklisting. You start sticking pins in the phone book, just to sell names to that miserable monomaniac fascist fart, and I’ll kill you.”
“Me? Why me? Kill him. He started it.”
“I don’t care about him. I do care about you.”
Happiness flooded his being. He embraced her and they kissed, long and hard. A passing convertible played La Cucuracha on its horn. They waved, and walked on. Jolly good, Luis thought. But I’ve still got to feed the senator a steady diet of red meat, and if not names, then what?
4
Kim Philby sat in his room, newspapers littering the floor, and told himself that he had been in tighter corners than this, often when he was just one slip from disaster. Burgess and Maclean had been huge risks. Maclean had soaked his tattered nerves in so much alcohol that when he bragged of being a Soviet spy, his friends put it down to booze. Burgess had flaunted pictures of the pretty boys he’d seduced, and generally buggered everyone about until a Foreign Office report said he was “dirty, drunk and idle.” Kim shuddered at the memory. Hard questioning would have cracked either of them, and then Kim would really have been in the hot seat. Someone would surely have remembered the Volkov affair. Kim had nearly come a cropper over Volkov. When the head of Soviet Intelligence in Istanbul tries to defect, and says he knows the names of Soviet agents inside the British government, one name is bound to be Philby’s. Kim had flown to Istanbul, alone, and on his own authority had rejected Volkov as unreliable. Kim returned to London, Volkov to Moscow, strapped to a KGB stretcher. Touch-and-go, that. Compared with hairy episodes like that, the threat from Cabrillo was a fleabite. But a man could die from a fleabite.
Cabrillo was still in Washington; he was convinced of that. He was sick and tired of the search; literally sick and tired: his sinuses were inflamed, possibly infected, and the bicycling gave his calves the most painful cramps. And now Jack Anderson, a political columnist for a Washington paper, was telling his readers to expect another bombshell from Senator Joe McCarthy. Shocking revelations. Commy treachery. Big names.
Kim assembled the rifle and practiced by aiming out the window at the guy who ran the corner newsstand. One clear shot. That was all he asked.
5
World War Two had been a piece of cake. All it took to baffle the Abwehr was a bucket of warm sympathy, laced with a generous splash of convincing technical data. Warm sympathy was not Joe McCarthy’s diet. He needed hot blood.
Luis prowled around the Library of Congress, brooding over his problem: how to find evidence of the damage that Communist treachery was doing to America, when America was conspicuously wealthy, and getting more so by the minute. Chrysler had power steering. Hotels had vibrating mattresses. RCA was introducing color TV. Remington Rand had built a revolutionary computer as big as a locker room. Playboy magazine made men glad to be alive. Ike was in the White House. A six-pack of Bud cost a buck and a quarter. Who’s complaining?
The library’s card index system was just standing there, doing nothing, like him, so he went over and poked around in it. Nothing under crooks or gangsters. He tried Organized Crime and struck gold. In 1951 Senator Kefauver chaired hearings of the Senate Crime Investigating Committee. The cream of the underworld took the stand. Big TV audience.
Luis spent the rest of the day picking the plums out of the Kefauver reports, and then writing intelligence summaries about Mob leaders who were secret Communist party members or sympathizers, doing the Kremlin’s dirty work by siphoning the life-blood from the American economy.
He went home and showed it all to Julie.
“They’re crooks,” he told her. “They steal from the poor, they bankrupt small merchants with protection rackets, they corrupt judges and cops and politicians. You can’t object to their names being named, can you? They’re scum. We’re doing a public service.”
“They’re not Party members,” she said.
“Oh … steady on. Some of them might be.”
“But you can’t prove—”
“Who in hell cares? They’ll deny it, and nobody’ll believe them, because they’re crooks, for Christ’s sake! They always lie.” Luis was so pleased with himself that he performed a slow foxtrot across the room to the balcony. Slow, so that he wouldn’t spill his gin and tonic.
Julie, cool in a running singlet and beach shorts, stretched out on a divan and browsed through his stuff. After a while she said, “All this flim-flam about labor racketeering in Illinois is damn dull. Of course, I know it’s meant to be dull.”
“Look at my graphs of economic inactivity.” He waved to a girl on a balcony across the street. “Look at my box summaries of wage-dollars stolen during the last ten years. I sweated blood on those.”
“Sure you did. Still damn dull. This thing you did about businesses in southern California going bust when they can’t pay for protection: that’s not bad. Everyone knows someone’s brother-in-law who got screwed that way.”
“Larry ‘Boom-Boom’ Garcia,” Luis said. “He’s to blame. Dreadful man. The pride of the KGB.”
“The Cleveland story’s okay, too. City taxes are high because so much gets skimmed off by the Mafia. Nobody likes taxes.”
“Everyone pays for the Mafia,” he said happily. “I reckon the Kremlin takes twenty percent. Moe Dalitz runs Cleveland.”
“That’s all crap,” Stevie said.
She had come out of the bath, hair still dripping wet. Already the towel wrapped around her was losing its grip. On its left a nipple showed. On its right there was more leg than towel, and the parting was growing wider by the second. “Wear a robe, can’t you?” Julie said.
“I heard you say that stuff about Garcia in LA and Dalitz in Cleveland. It’s all crap. You ain’t foolin’ nobody, believe me.”
Luis came in from the balcony. “It may be crap to you, but it’s bread and butter to me,” he said.
“It ain’t the done thing to say ‘Mafia’ in Cleveland.” Stevie fixed herself a drink. “And John Scalisi has the Cleveland territory, not Moe Dalitz. John would show you the door if you said Mafia. It would cause offense. Like if I called you Benny instead of Luis. You wouldn’t like being called Benny.”
“I might.” Luis was fascinated by the glimpse of nipple.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Julie told him, “and don’t get horny. I want to eat soon.”
“In Cleveland, it’s always ‘the Combination,’” Stevie said. “That’s because of the Greeks an’ Swedes an’ Irish they let in.”
“An Equal-Opportunity Employer,” Julie said. “God bless America.”
“What’s wrong with my report on the notorious West Coast mobster, Larry ‘Boom-Boom’ Garcia?” Luis asked. “The guy’s an enormous thug.”
“He’s stoopid” Stevie hitched up her towel, hid one nipple, exposed the other. “Garcia couldn’t organize a walk in the woods. The guy running the protection racket out of LA is Frankie DeSimone. That man is an artist, he loves his work. In San Francisco, Jimmy Lanza. You speak of Garcia in the same breath, you make yourself look foolish.” She took a swig of gin and nearly lost the towel again. “Who you got for top banana in Chicago?”
“The Fischetti brothers,” Julie said.
“You’re pathetic.”
“Paul Ricca?” Luis suggested.
“All gun, no brain. Sam Giancana runs the Mid-West. If you want to put the fix in, Murray Humphreys knows the price of every Chicago politician down to the last nickel.”
Luis said, “So the Mafia actually—”
“Not the goddamn Mafia! In Chicago it’s called ‘The Outfit.’ Maybe ‘The Syndicate.’ Jeez, you guys see too many movies.”
“Who runs Buffalo?” Julie asked.
“Stefano Magaddino. His organization’s called ‘The Office.’”
“New Orleans?”
“Carlos Marcello. The Syndicate. He’s got Louisiana and half Texas, too.”
“How come you know so much?”
“How come you know so little? I’m a Fantoni. I was brought up to take a pride in my heritage.” She strode away with such dignity that the towel fell off. She let it lie.
“Triple Virgin,” Julie said. “And she’s built like Miss America with new Ultra-Glide Hydromatic Suspension.”
Luis was staring into space. “Nobody says Mafia in the Mafia,” he said softly. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
“I’ll tell you what’s even more wonderful.” She stood up. “Dinner can wait. Can you decode that message?”
“I may need help.” He got to his feet. “Meanwhile, can I interest you in a roll in the hay?”
“Is Garibaldi a cookie?”
It was dusk when they wandered out of the bedroom, showered, dressed, and took Stevie to dinner, oyster-stuffed fish fillets, all you can eat for five dollars. She ate her fill, but she was not happy. “They say there’s somebody for everyone. Why is it I keep finding somebody who’s nobody?” she said.
“A good-looking woman makes a man nervous,” Julie said. “He takes one look, he knows he’s not in the same league, his poor little prong goes A WOL.”
“Yeah, but not in the dark with the lights out.” Nevertheless, Stevie was slightly encouraged.
“I would be a huge disappointment to you,” Luis said. “Just a moth in the flames of your beauty.”
“I’ll wear a paper bag over my head,” she said.
“You are a truly desperate woman,” Julie said.
They went back to the apartment and worked through the pile of Soviet-Mafia intelligence reports. Stevie corrected the names, added convincing details. “Joe Zerilli runs the Syndicate in Detroit,” she said. “Very thorough. There’s seven men on the Detroit Police Review Board and Joe’s got five. This here, where you mention Tommy Lucchese in New York? He should get credit for double-boxing. It’s his way of disposin’ of stiffs when a lot of guys been whacked. Two bodies in one box, the top one bein’ the genuine customer. Who’s gonna go pokin’ about in a coffin? People got more respect.”
They finished at two in the morning.
“One thing puzzles me,” Julie said. “Your father went to Princeton. Where did you go? Hell’s Kitchen?”
“He sent me to Bryn Mawr. I got my letter in lacrosse. Bust three heads wide open when we played Sarah Lawrence. But I quit. They was too polite. I like to be around people who speak their minds.”
“No shit,” Julie said.
“There you go,” Stevie said.
HOW CAN YOU FIGHT DEATH?
1
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. All born to be poets. With names like that, what else could they do? Some people live up to their names. Some people live down to them. Wiley Foxx, for instance, had to be a smalltime crook. What is it, an act of premature vengeance against an unwanted child? The Stones have a daughter they christen Cherry. The Carts have a son and they reject Elmer and Duke and Floyd because, hey, Orson, that’s a nice name. Orson Cart. It’s not enough the kid gets their tattered, battered genes; they have to make him a cartoon character. A lot of people thought Wiley was Foxx’s nickname. No such luck.
Wiley was 22 when Luis gave him the Buick. So far his life had been a bad joke. Kicked out of high school for attempted arson (the matches were damp), medically unfit for the army, barely literate, he was too stupid to know he was stupid. It made him just a digit in the stats that require a certain number of schmucks to counterbalance the clever people. You can’t reward genius without penalizing the putz.
Wiley got a temporary job as attendant in Long-Stay Parking at Washington International Airport while the regular guy recovered from sciatica. The job was easy, plenty of dead time between flights when Wiley could steal. People left cars unlocked, windows a half-inch open, spare keys on a magnet stuck inside a wing. Pickings were slim: a pack of Lifesavers, a thermos flask, a Zippo lighter. On a good day, a travel rug. Not enough to feed Wiley’s greed. When travelers collected their cars and paid the parking fee, Wiley short-changed them, if he felt brave.
One day he short-changed an off-duty Washington cop, back from a wedding in Bermuda. Big mistake.
The cop let the bills lie on his open palm. “I gave you a twenty,” he said.
Wiley gave him more money and apologized with a grin that sent out wav
es of dishonesty as loud as if he’d fouled his pants, which he almost had.
The cop put his thumb on the bills to stop them blowing away but he still did not close his fist. He thought: This piece of piss needs to suffer. Needs to bleed. He nodded at the attendant’s hut. “That where you guys hang out?” Wiley grunted, yeah. The cop said, “Mind if I go in, take a look around?” Now Wiley wet himself, a hot rush down his left thigh. In the hut was stuff he stole. Hidden, but…
“Locked,” he said. “Ain’t got the key. Other guy, he got the key. But he ain’t here …” His bladder pumped itself empty. “That’s how come it’s locked.” Wiley wanted to cry.
“Too bad.” The cop looked at the sky. “Rain on the way. You’re gonna get wet.” He drove on. When he glanced at the rearview mirror, the attendant was sitting on the ground. You ask a guy, can I look around your hut, he doesn’t know you’re a cop, he says go to hell. This sad specimen, he panics.
Washington airport is in Virginia. The cop phoned the local law. Fifteen minutes later, two State troopers in a handsome tan-and-bitter-chocolate patrol car swung into Long-Stay Parking, and Wiley discovered a fluid ounce he thought he’d spent. He was going to jail. He wouldn’t last ten minutes in jail.
They were friendly, just wanted to check out security arrangements. “We talk inside this hut of yours?” one said. Fat splashes of rain were blackening the ground. The cop had been right. Wiley’s nerve was as limp as old lettuce, he couldn’t con these big, smart troopers with his shit about keys. He opened the door and let them in. That was when he got lucky. A car horn blared. “Customer,” he said. “Be right back.”
The rain became serious while he was taking the money, giving the ticket, leaning on the counterweight to raise the barrier arm. He left it upright. He ran to the Buick, his crappy old sneakers skidding on the wet tarmac, got in, rammed the key into the dash. More luck. The motor fired. He set the wipers to max and slipped the brakes and rushed such power to the wheels that his head bounced. What a punk.
Red Rag Blues Page 24