Red Rag Blues

by Derek Robinson

  They drove down the road and passed Luis. “Dosvidanya,” Philby said.

  3

  “Leaving,” McCarthy said. “This is a hell of a time to resign, Bobby, just when I’m up to my ass in all this Arabel intelligence.”

  “I regret the inconvenience, senator, but—”

  “Fuck the inconvenience. You hate Roy Cohn’s guts. Schine makes you puke. Your problem, Bobby, is you waste your hate. Good mornin’, Ralph. You’re looking well.”

  They were walking along a corridor in the Capitol building. The senator McCarthy greeted cut him dead: no word, no glance, no change of expression.

  “Poor loser,” McCarthy said.

  “I admire your work, senator, but you’ve got your brand all over it. I need to find my own war to fight.”

  “Go fight the rich.” McCarthy sat on the marble plinth that held up a statue of a man in a toga. “Start a war on poverty. No, I forgot, you Kennedys never had much truck with the poor, did you?” He pressed his fingers against the artery under his chin.

  “I’m going after the Mafia,” Kennedy said.

  McCarthy sat in silence for twenty seconds and then took his fingers from his throat. “Gallopin’ to the grave,” he said. “What’s the rush? Damn doctors keep bitchin’ about booze. Shit, if I stopped drinkin’, my kidneys would die of fright. The Mafia, you say. Some folks reckon those gentlemen helped your brother get elected to the Senate. You sure know how to make people hate you, son.”

  “They’re scum,” Kennedy said. “They corrupt justice and brutalize American society.”

  “Uh-huh. You forgot how they provide whores, drugs and bookies, that being what Joe Public wants in a country that’s dumb enough to make prostitution, narcotics and gambling illegal in most States.” He stood up. “I shall miss you, Bobby. You’re like the son I never had. I refute them allegations by that red-headed cocktail waitress in Ohio, flattering though they were.” He walked away.

  BOUNDLESS DAMAGE

  1

  Julie took twenty thousand dollars in travelers checks and the rest in cash. That closed the account. The bank gave her some sturdy paper bags to put it all in. She drove back to the apartment and sat in the car.

  After an hour she ate part of a sandwich. By mid afternoon she was sick of sitting in the car, looking at the rain and Connecticut Avenue and not knowing what to do next. The rear view mirrors were coated with moisture and she didn’t see him until he opened the passenger door and dumped himself on the seat like a sack of second-class mail.

  Everything about him was wet and dirty. His clothes flopped and drooped. One side of his face was bruised and grazed. “Had a good day at the office?” she said.

  He yawned. “Never got there. Got kidnapped.”

  “Mikhail told me. He saw it happen, couldn’t stop it.”

  “Got kidnapped, got brainwashed, got blown up. Got away.” He rubbed his eyes, wiping away the rain. “Not sure about the last bit.”

  “Got away from where?”

  He aimed his right index finger at nothing, then gradually relaxed it. “Three miles, the cops said. It’s a long story.”

  His eyes closed and his whole body relaxed. Julie went back to looking at the rain and Connecticut Avenue. After a couple of minutes he woke up. “But enough about me. What about you? Why are you sitting in the car?”

  “The apartment’s full of tax men, Luis. Likewise the office. We’re being investigated by the Internal Revenue. Mikhail warned me they were on the way.”

  “Jolly decent of him.”

  “Yeah? I reckon he sicked them onto us.”

  “Surely not. Arabel’s partner? Never.”

  “Arabel’s dead. Crashed and burned.”

  He took a deep breath and slowly released it, making a long flubbering noise with his lips. “Tax men. That’s a really dirty trick. I’m surprised they didn’t arrest you.”

  “I told them I was the maid. Then I went and emptied our bank account.” She showed him the paper bags.

  “Crashed and burned. And this is the wreckage.” He was getting sleepy again.

  “We’re leaving right now,” she told him. “This here is a Rand McNally Atlas of the US. Shut your eyes.” She put the book on his lap. “Open it anywhere.” He fumbled with the pages. “No peeking. Point somewhere.” He stabbed with his forefinger. “Unbelievable,” she said. “You have chosen the town of Truth Or Consequences in New Mexico. Let’s go.” She started the car.

  “Only in America,” he mumbled. Within a few blocks he was asleep and gently steaming.

  *

  “I was wrong,” Mikhail said. “The temptation was irresistible, but I was wrong. I should never have tried to encourage McCarthy.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Kim said. “The man is a phenomenon, not a politician. Nobody can influence a phenomenon. It’s like trying to direct a tornado.”

  “Well put.” They were deep into the pepper vodka. Arabel and his agent had long since vanished. The KGB had ceased worrying about revelations concerning mind-control drugs. Wagner was dead and cremated and forgotten. Jerome Fantoni was old news. Routine had been restored. Mikhail took another slice of smoked eel. “What I failed to realize is that the senator has no policy. We’re so accustomed to sabotaging Western policies…”

  “McCarthy is the saboteur par excellence,” Kim said.

  “The supreme nihilist.” Mikhail enjoyed the word. “The ultimate rabble-rouser. The prince of hatred.”

  “And yet arguably the biggest democrat in Congress. He gives America what it craves.”

  “Yes? What does it crave?”

  “Political thuggery. A nation can get drunk on fear.”

  Mikhail poured more vodka. “Well, McCarthy doesn’t need us. Never did. He can inflict boundless damage on this country without our help. You might as well go back to London, Kim.”

  “Yes. This is an awful town, isn’t it? My sinuses are in a permanent rage.”

  *

  Manfred Sturmer left the CIA. He moved to California and made a slim but steady living as a crossword puzzle compiler.

  *

  J. Reuben Knox, 47, vice-president of a San Francisco bank, knew he’d been given the title in lieu of the stock options and a bonus he believed he deserved. He had a thyroid condition, and from all he knew of the family history, Knox men did not live long. Termites were invading his house. Treatment would be hideously expensive. Also he was keeping a woman in Berkeley who was not his wife, and he had fallen in love with a female cashier called Belinda who was a hell of a lay but not cheap.

  J. Reuben Knox took a couple of days’ leave and drove to Seattle. He rented an office, paid for ten messengers to go to ten banks with ten envelopes, and got arrested by the Seattle PD while he was counting the first delivery. As the detectives drove him away, he said, “None of it was for me. I was going to give it all away.” The detectives made no comment.

  In New York, Special Agent Prendergast took the news in his stride: neither excited nor discouraged. “Another fool takes a fall,” he said.

  “Does this mean Cabrillo is right out of the picture?” Fisk asked.

  “There is no picture, Fisk. No shape, no pattern, no symmetry. Crime is the fly in your wine glass. The fly gets greedy, gets reckless, and gets drowned. J. Reuben Knox is that fly.”

  “Uh-huh,” Fisk said.

  END

  Author’s Note

  Red Rag Blues is a mixture of fact and fiction. The reader is entitled to know which is which.

  Apart from the bank-robbery con, which is based on an actual crime in New York in the 1960s, the plot—Cabrillo’s arrival from Venezuela, broke; his attempts to make money; his move to Washington and his double-dealing with Senator McCarthy—is invented, like most of the characters. Joe McCarthy existed, of course, and Bobby Kennedy worked for him, as did Cohn and Schine, in 1953. Kim Philby was a reality too (although he didn’t visit America that year) and details of his remarkable career as a KGB agent who almo
st became head of MI6 are as accurate as I could make them. Philby’s KGB controller, Peter Cottington-Beaufort—surely a nom de guerre—is fictitious. All the words spoken by these people are imagined (although, in the chapter on the Fantoni hearing, the events studied by the Sub-Committee—union disputes, race riots, sabotage—are based on fact).

  The rest—from Max Webber and Billy Jago to Prendergast and Fisk to Stevie and Scatola, and all the others—are invented characters. Two people are re-invented, so to speak. Luis Cabrillo and Julie Conroy first appeared in earlier novels of mine: The Eldorado Network and Artillery of Lies, which described his career (with her guidance) as a double agent in World War Two. The Double-Cross System existed. It sold the Abwehr a stream of “secret” information, largely false, all part of a hugely successful Allied deception campaign. (Wagner appears in there too.) I based Cabrillo on a real double agent, codenamed Garbo, who satisfied both sides so much that he was awarded the Iron Cross by Germany and the MBE by Britain. When the war ended he vanished to South America. So there are echoes of reality in Cabrillo.

  Max’s U-turn with HUAC in exchange for a Warners contract is fiction. Nevertheless, Warner Brothers enjoyed a good working relationship with HUAC: in 1952 the studio made Big Jim McClain (John Wayne as a HUAC investigator rooting out Communist spies) and the film ends with a big credit to the Committee for its help.

  As far as I know there was no Mafia family called Fantoni in the New York area. I found no record of HUAC or McCarthy’s Sub-Committee accusing the Mafia of Communist infiltration, although God knows the Mobs did more damage to the fabric of American society than Larry Adler, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel and Dashiel Hammett, who—along with many hundred of individuals—were caught up in the witch hunt for no good reason, and sometimes for no reason at all; and got harassed, sacked, jailed or exiled.

  One exile who typified many was Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplay for an outstanding Western, High Noon. When John Wayne gave Gary Cooper the Oscar for his role in the movie, he growled: “Why can’t I find me a scriptwriter to write me a part like that?” Too late: Carl Foreman had been blacklisted in Hollywood (he had refused to name names) and was now in England, looking for work. Soon the Duke joined The Motion Picture Alliance For The Preservation Of American Ideals—one of several McCarthyite organizations—and he discovered that High Noon was in fact stuffed with subversive, anti-American ideas. Foreman spent the next twenty years in England, making films. He collaborated on the script of The Bridge On The River Kwai and got no credit. The film would have been refused distribution in the US if his name had appeared on it. The blacklist cast a very long shadow.

  Which takes me to McCarthy, a difficult man to re-create because he was so unlike his cartoon image. He joined the witch hunt late in the day. In 1950, four years after his election to Congress, his prospects were poor. He’d accomplished very little, he faced re-election in two years, and the tax people were on his tail. He urgently needed a popular cause, to boost his career. Friends offered ideas. Develop the St. Lawrence Seaway? Introduce a pension for elderly Americans? Worthy, but dull. Then someone said Americans were worried by the threat of Communist infiltration in Washington. McCarthy liked the sound of that. A month later, during a speech in Wheeling, Virginia, he held up a piece of paper: a list, he said, of 205 known members of the Communist Party still working at the State Department. Or was it 57 members? Later, McCarthy couldn’t remember. By then he’d lost the paper. No matter; and no matter that he couldn’t prove his accusation. That speech was the pebble that started an avalanche of national support. He’d found his cause, he’d won his publicity; and by the time he was re-elected in 1952 his reckless offensive had destroyed so many jobs, reputations, even lives, that he was known as the most feared man in America.

  McCarthy was not the first US senator to exploit the Red Scare for political gains. In 1949—the year before McCarthy’s Wheeling speech—Senator Lyndon B. Johnson already had his sights on the Presidency. LBJ was from Texas, and he needed Texas oil money to back his ambition. The Texas oil barons hated a man called Leland Olds, who for nine years had been head of the Federal Power Commission. He was patriotic, hardworking, fair-minded and effective. LBJ used his chairmanship of a Senate subcommittee to remove Olds. By smear and distortion, he painted Olds as a Communist and destroyed his career, a skilled hatchet-job which McCarthy must have observed. The Texas oil barons were grateful. Eventually, with their help, LBJ made it to the White House. Meanwhile, as long as McCarthyism was in full flood, LBJ never spoke out against it. (Nor did Senator John F. Kennedy.) “You don’t get in a pissin’ contest with a polecat,” Johnson said privately.

  McCarthy wasn’t so much a politician as an operator. All he had going for him was his Red Scare. He must keep exposing more and more security risks, attacking great institutions, because his power came from knocking over his enemies. His fall was as stunning as his rise. In 1954 he chose to fight the Army, lost, was censured by the Senate and ridiculed in the Press, and soon found himself ignored. Two years later he was dead, virtually a suicide. He drank himself to death.

  Yet McCarthy was likable; that’s what is so surprising. When he wasn’t damning citizens as traitors he was relaxed and friendly. He had a bluff, Irish charm. He was, at first, welcomed by the Kennedys; might even have married into the family. Bobby Kennedy worked for him loyally in the summer of 1953, a career move which Kennedy biographers have found hard to explain and even harder to justify. At that age, Bobby was a grim and unforgiving soul for whom “liberal” was a dirty word. Later—much later—he discovered the hardships that poverty, hunger and ill health could inflict on others, and his outlook became humanitarian. But in 1953, Bobby Kennedy didn’t like people. (His reluctant, fingertip handshake kept them at bay.) He liked a fight. He was impressed by McCarthy, and he respected his politics. He grieved when McCarthy died. Few politicians attended the funeral; Bobby did.

  In Red Rag Blues, all the intelligence agencies eavesdrop on each other. This is only a slight exaggeration. By 1953, the FBI had a free hand to bug and tap. Hoover had certainly penetrated the CIA, so it’s hard to believe the CIA didn’t return the compliment. The FBI bugged many senators, and McCarthy must have been a prime target—he was under constant surveillance by Hoover’s agents and the Bureau had a fat file on him. The CIA bugged McCarthy as a matter of course. MI6, KGB and CIA existed for the purpose of gathering intelligence, so it would be surprising if they didn’t bug and tap everyone who interested them.

  If this suggests a certain lack of secrecy in Washington, think of William Hansen, the FBI agent who spied for the Russians for 22 years, earning $643,000, which lay in his bank account for any investigator to see. In 1993, after a break in his spying, he got in touch with his handlers again. The Russians didn’t trust their luck. This had to be a trap. They complained to the American authorities that an FBI agent tried to sell them secrets. The Bureau searched, but couldn’t find him, although there were many telltale signs that Hansen was not to be trusted. When, eventually, he was arrested, he described the FBI’s security procedures in two words: “Criminal negligence.”

  Even Hansen was overshadowed by the CIA agent Aldrich Ames, Chief of Counter-intelligence in the Agency’s Soviet Division, and therefore a man with a safe full of secrets. He also had a home full of debts. With no prospect of promotion to help pay his bills, he sold the secrets to the Russians. They gave him two million dollars. His CIA record wasn’t spotless (he’d had a bad drink problem), but no alarm bells rang when he bought two new Jaguars and a half-million-dollar house—for cash. He spied for the Russians for eight years. He was arrested in 1994. By then, despite all that Ames had done for the KGB and against the CIA, the USSR was collapsing. Ames’s treachery wasn’t even a footnote to history.

  By contrast, anything in Red Rag Blues seems almost routine.

  D.R.

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