by Peter Quinn
Dunne lit a cigarette of his own. “Business pretty much runs itself. It didn’t need me. I didn’t need it. Why should I hang around?”
“Traded the sunny southland for this ice box. You must need something.”
Dunne nodded at Mulholland’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He had a point. They exhaled simultaneously. The smoke seeped into watery yellow light above, flattening into a wavering line of gray vapor, ghostly, and conjuring in Dunne’s mind the image of a ridiculously young and hideously wounded Kraut lieutenant captured (stumbled over was closer to the truth) in late 1944. Intestines oozing across the charred, shredded remnants of what had been genitals and legs, he raises two fingers to his mouth, sign language for a cigarette. Somebody sticks a lit one in the boy soldier’s mouth. He utters something in German.
“What’d he say?” a G.I. asks.
A gaunt Jewish private from Yonkers (who’d be obliterated by an anti-tank gun the following week) translates: “Wants us to shoot him.”
In the background, a G.I. jams an ammo clip into place. Let the Kraut enjoy a drag before releasing him from his suffering; the most basic of battlefield mercies, though it never shows up in official reports or newspaper accounts or newsreels.
Kraut takes a deep draw, exhales a long wheezing breath, speaks a few ragged, agonized words that sound devoid of any parting salute to Hitler or National Socialism.
The G.I. aims. “Is he praying?”
The soon-to-die private shakes his head. “It’s a line from a poem, I think: ‘The souls of dead comrades vanish like smoke.’” Kraut’s last words.
The dimness of Mulholland’s reflections softened but didn’t erase his crooked smile. He sat with his arms folded on the bar. “Soon as I heard the need was for the ‘best detective in the business,’ I says, ‘Fintan Dunne, he’s your man.’”
“I’m out of the business.” A slight exaggeration, since he hadn’t sold the agency outright to ISC. But he was out of the day-to-day operations and, soon enough, ISC would amalgamate it into a highly predictable, hugely lucrative national network of franchises offering professional security services to corporations and manufacturers, about as exciting and interesting as applying for a driver’s license.
“If you were, you wouldn’t be here.” Mulholland dragged on his cigarette, sipped his drink, and coughed a harsh, gagging rasp. He stood, hands on the bar, shoulders heaving from the effort to catch his breath.
Dunne slapped his back hard. The coughing subsided. “Went down the wrong pipe, that’s all.” He wiped his eyes with a cocktail napkin. “I’m fine.”
Bartender handed Mulholland a glass of water. Dunne gave another pat, lighter than the last. Resting his hand on Mulholland’s jacket, he felt the sharp, prominent vertebrae beneath, angular components of a hard, spare body, repository of several slugs and jagged shards, souvenirs of wars local as well as global, several decades of blood-drenched history. He ran his hand in a casual frisk across his shoulders. No holster strap.
Mulholland retook his stool. “I said, ‘Dunne don’t need dough. Even if he did, that’s not why he’d enlist.’ I know you long enough to know that. What’s it been, Fin? How many years?”
“Enough, I guess.” They’d met on the NYPD after both were wounded and decorated in the first war. Mulholland’s baptismal name was Ambrose, which he despised and never used. Always introduced himself as Bud. Promoted to detective, he made a name for himself as a stylish denizen of the Broadway nightlife. He got in the headlines as a result of a gun battle with two of Dutch Schultz’s shooters in a dive on West 54th Street. Killed them both and took four slugs in the process. Out on his own, Mulholland was working private security for a Wall Street firm when intermission ended and war two began.
“‘Only one thing’ll bring you Dunne,’ I said. Know what it is?”
Bartender: “’Nother?”
Dunne passed him his glass. “Ice is all.”
Flanked by two crevices, Mulholland’s delicate, slightly rounded nose was like a small hill between two rifts. Puffy, half-moon blotches hung beneath each eye. Brooding and care-worn, his face retained a shadow of the darkly handsome, so-called black-Irish good looks the tabloids had plastered all over their front pages.
At the height of his career in the NYPD, not long after the shoot-out with Schultz’s associates, Mulholland landed back on the front pages. One morning while he was still asleep, his showgirl lover tiptoed into the bathroom with his service revolver, turned muzzle to chest, thumbs on trigger, squeezed—he’d taught her the squeezing part, at dusk, on the beach at Rockaway, the gun’s report echoing loudly, like a cannon shot—and blew a hole in her heart.
The tabloids described him as “the hero cop with the map of Ireland on his face.” True enough. Irish by way of Hell’s Kitchen, Mulholland had the old country imprinted on his mug, all right. But over time that map had lost any resemblance to the phony-baloney, tin-pan-alley, little-bit-of-heaven version of Ireland. Mulholland’s was the real thing: A map with too much history, most of it bad: conquest, famine, rebellion, civil war. Stony, sullen, the joy knocked out of it.
“The suspense is killing me,” Dunne said. “What’s the one thing?”
“Vanity. Fintan Dunne won’t accept there’s a case he can’t solve.”
“Spell vanity b-o-r-e-d-o-m, you got a point.”
“Get the kind of ink you got for rescuing that guinea kid from the chair, you’re hooked. When it comes to getting high, heroin’s got nothing on fame.”
“Wilfredo Grillo was Cuban, not Italian, and he wasn’t a kid. He was almost forty. Besides, that was seventeen years ago.”
“Bible got it right. Look it up. Book of Ecclesiastes. ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.’”
“When did you become a Bible reader, Bud?”
“Haven’t gone Protestant, if that’s what you’re implying. But spend enough time in hotel rooms, you end up taking a look. Belongs as much to us as the left-footers, and once you get beyond the ‘begats’ and ‘beholds,’ there’s some gems. That vanity stuff made me think of you. ‘Christ,’ I says to myself, ‘one of these days they’ll probably make Dunne’s life into a movie, one I’ll be sure to miss.’”
In the casual mental accounting he sometimes did of friends, acquaintances, business contacts, Dunne always put Mulholland in column one, a consequence more of length of time than any emotional tie.
“You had your share of headlines, Bud.” Dunne didn’t go near the showgirl suicide, an old headline but still freshly printed on Mulholland’s face.
“Know why I recommended you?” Mulholland obviously intended to answer the question himself. “You’re lucky, that’s why. Any idiot can learn this racket. What he can’t learn is luck, and that’s what it comes down to: You’re either born lucky or not.”
Dunne used the horse-headed stirrer to swirl the shrunken ice in his drink, now more water than Scotch. He entertained pointing out that his luck was bad as well as good: orphaned, wounded, thwarted in his career as a cop, beaten, almost drowned, old wound behind his knee that made it hard to climb stairs, insomnia. But he knew Mulholland took for granted ordinary tragedies and hurts to focus on the totality of a life that included a happy marriage, business success and, if not fame, fleeting notice. Not a charmed life, but luckier than most.
“Neither of us would be here without our share of luck,” Dunne said.
Mulholland’s only acknowledgment of his own luck in arriving here, midway in a war-ridden century, all parts functioning—mostly—was a shrug. “You got the breaks, played them right. Not saying you don’t deserve what you got, but you’ve been luckier than the rest.” He checked his wristwatch against the clock above the bar, confirming that, like most time pieces in New York watering holes, it was fifteen minutes fast.” This is how he wants it, Fin. You’ll find out who he is when we get there. Said he didn’t want any leaks. Promised I’d have you there six sharp.” He lifted his overcoat from the back of the stool, slipped one arm in
a sleeve, pointed with the other to the door. “Better go.”
“Need to use the little boy’s room,” Dunne said.
“I’ll be outside.”
Dunne exited the Iron Horse as the light at the corner flashed red. Mulholland was nowhere in sight. The thought entered his mind that he’d been duped, the long-distance call and rendezvous a practical joke, a begrudger’s revenge. A ragging cough came from behind. He turned. Mulholland was in the half-lit doorway of a lingerie store that had just closed. Framed by the silhouettes of twin half-mannequins dressed in front-laced black corsets with racy red garters, he raised the match in his cupped hands to the cigarette between his lips. “Get it from the horse’s mouth. That’s what he wants. We’ll grab a cab in front of the station.”
The surge of pedestrians thickened along Eighth Avenue as they neared Penn Station. The massive colonnade of the General Post Office reinforced the station’s imperturbable magnitude, stone façades oblivious to the flood tide of rush-hour commuters en route from the city and work to a night’s rest in the vast, fast-expanding suburban tracts of New Jersey and Long Island.
As soon as they entered the cab, Mulholland barked an address in the east 70s. Staring out the window with the intensity of a onetime occupant of a squad car, he absentmindedly handed Dunne his folded copy of the Standard. Dunne glanced at the screaming headline: REDS SET TO STORM FORMOSA. As a boy, he’d sold the Standard on the southeast corner of Bowery and Delancey, under the El, fighting off the interlopers who tried to take his spot. The Standard’s headlines were always the same, always like this one, large print that SCREAMED! at passers-by. Didn’t matter whether a socialite/chorine shot her husband/lover or war declared/ended or a milk strike called/settled or firemen pulled a cat out of a tree, whatever the Standard decided was the top story of the day was made an event of epic significance.
Inside, blood-and-thunder editorials railed against radicals, bureaucrats, cowardly diplomats, blood-sucking bankers, foreign conspirator, et al., an array of villains that had been hard to categorize until the Roosevelt administration, which the paper at first supported and then made an object of concentrated scorn “for its deranged desire to collectivize our economy and Sovietize our government.”
Dunne couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought a copy of the Standard. Sometimes Roberta read him an item from the gossip columns or from the daily horoscope—it had the most extensive of any in the country—or he’d pick up a copy in a dentist’s or doctor’s office, or find one on a train seat, in which case he’d jump to sports or the funnies, or maybe browse the society pages, a habit left over from when his bread and butter was matrimonial and divorce cases.
Beneath today’s headline, in a center-page box that continued inside, was an editorial entitled “Reds Ready for War! Are We?” The gist was that the Chinese, with the assistance of the Russians, had built a vast series of tunnels in case of atomic war. The U.S., on the other hand, had almost none. “For what are the hapless bureaucrats in Washington waiting?” the editorial thundered. “Shouldn’t we have leaders with the strategic sense to employ our superior arsenal of new and improved atomic bombs against the Reds before they drop theirs on us? Or does this inattention suggest more than ineptitude? Could the decision to leave the American people to be vaporized beneath a merciless deluge of Russian hydrogen bombs be rooted in treason?”
Dunne handed the paper back to Mulholland. “Wilkes never gets tired of beating the same drum, does he?”
The traffic barely moved. Mulholland stared out the window. His right hand held a loose grip on the strap beside the door. At the mention of Wilkes, the long-time owner and publisher of the Standard, he turned slowly toward Dunne. “I guess.”
“What’s he like?”
The traffic eased as they entered Central Park. Light from the full moon raised a white glow from snow that everywhere else had been trampled, obliterated, or turned the color of soot. The cab sped up.
Mulholland tightened his grip on the strap. “Who?”
“Walter Wilkes. That’s who we’re headed to see, right?”
Leaning back, the rear of his hat almost touching the window, Mulholland shifted in his seat to face Dunne. “Figured you knew.” His face, impassive, gave no sign he was bothered by the news. “Didn’t imagine a single call from me would do the trick. Won’t waste my breath asking how.”
“A bird told me.”
“What kind?”
“The early bird.”
“Two birds I never liked. That’s one. Stool pigeon is the other.” The curve of Mulholland’s mouth could have been a real grin. Maybe not.
This early bird’s name was Louis Pohl. (He pronounced his last name Pull. Friends, acquaintances and associates called him Pully.) Dunne had called him first thing after he got back from Cuba. They’d met a dozen years before, at the OSS office in Washington, when Pully headed one of the thirty-odd sections related to intelligence operations. His small unit of two or three recruits was focused on making statistical estimates of Germany’s remaining economic and military reserves. His figures were usually at odds with what other military intelligence agencies came up with and, as events turned out, always on target.
He’d had a brief stint with the NYPD, in 1929, while Dunne was still there, but they’d never met. Commissioner Grover Whelan hired him to head up a newly formed Office for Statistical Research and Information, a high-sounding title for an office with one chief—Pully—and no Indians. A glad-handing Wanamaker’s executive who had elevated the ticker-tape parade to an art form as the city’s official greeter, Whelan was Mayor Jimmy Walker’s choice for commissioner in the wake of Arnold Rothstein’s rub-out, when all the papers were calling for a shakeup. Whelan, an experienced department store VIP, provided a first-class job of window dressing. He refurbished the police headquarters, hired Pully away from the U.S. Department of Commerce to plan “a new scientific approach to crime fighting,” staged some showy raids, then ran things pretty much as before. The corruption that flowed from Prohibition kept on flowing.
Pully lasted barely a year. He quit and took a job in Binghamton with International Business Machines. After Pearl Harbor, he offered his services to Army Intelligence and was borrowed by Colonel Donovan for the OSS. Dunne was only with him a few weeks in Washington, in 1943, before he left for London, but they came to like each other a great deal. He didn’t see Pully again until the day he showed up and introduced himself as a vice-president with International Service Corporation—ISC. He had a proposition, as he put it, “you’d be most foolish not to seriously consider.”
After an on-and-off courtship, Dunne agreed to the business arrangement Pully offered on behalf of ISC. Despite a slightly stiff way of talking, Pully had an easy, relaxed way. Dunne had never asked where he went to school. He suspected it was one of the Ivy League snob factories but, unlike most of their graduates, Pully never brought it up. Short, with a thick neck welded into his torso and a protruding stomach, he was shaped like a thumb. His blue double-breasted suits, which were a kind of uniform with him, hung on him like a set of cheap drapes.
“I’ve undertaken the assignment of turning private investigation from the rag-tag, disreputable stepchild of police work into a cadre of professional intelligence workers,” Pully said the day they shook on the deal.
He didn’t lie when he phoned Pully and asked if he’d nose out Mulholland’s employer. Told him he was being offered a possible assignment, maybe a big one. Knew it conflicted with his non-compete agreement with ISC. He’d be glad to sign over whatever fee was involved. “Thing is, Pully, once a rag-tag stepkid, always a rag-tag stepkid.”
After a half minute of silence that felt to Dunne like five, Pully said, “I’ll see what I can do. No promises.” He called back the day before Dunne left for New York. “I got what you asked for. Mulholland is employed by Walter Wilkes, proprietor of the New York Standard. He works out of Wilkes’s penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Theirs is a relationship wrapped in secrecy wort
hy of the Manhattan Project. A piece of friendly advice: if you go ahead with this, don’t sign a contract. It’ll only complicate your deal with us.”
Mulholland waited in front of the building off Fifth Avenue until the cab that dropped them off pulled away. They went south half a block. The harsh wind coming up the avenue stung Dunne’s cheeks and pressed against his eyes, squeezing out a single tear. “How far?”
“Right here.” Mulholland veered under a green canopy, into a brightly lit marble lobby where the doorman let them pass with a nod. At the end of the entrance hall was a set of brass elevator doors with the signs of the zodiac embossed in three rows. Hands moving impatiently in and out of his overcoat pockets, Mulholland glanced up at the floor indicator. “The cloak-and-dagger crap isn’t my idea, but I do what I get paid to do.” He pressed the button to summon the elevator several times.
“From the looks of it, you’re well paid.” On the door, second from the top, in the middle: a brass image of a woman with a spike of grain in her left hand. Virgo. A remembered line, like a song lyric—Virgos should stay close to home—came and went.
“Relatively speaking.”
Relative to what, Dunne didn’t ask. He followed Mulholland into an elegantly paneled elevator. A boy-sized, gray-haired operator, stiff as the starched shirt beneath his uniform, closed the door with one spotless white-gloved hand and pushed the operator’s lever with the other. He didn’t ask for a floor. Mulholland didn’t give one. The lights on the control panel flashed as the elevator climbed from L to 28 and stopped at PH.
“Had a hunch we were headed to the penthouse,” Dunne said.
“Early bird tell you that too?”
They exited into an anteroom awash in the scent of an extravagant bouquet that overflowed a copper vase, the aroma of bon voyage parties, funeral homes, first-class hotels. A maid held the door open to an immense coffer-ceiling living room filled with ponderous oak furniture. It had a stuffy, pre-war feel, old money so flush with new that it didn’t worry about keeping up. A wide staircase curved gracefully to the floor above. She took their coats, carefully folding them over her arm.