Operation Bamboozle

by Derek Robinson

  “People actually hang this in their homes?” Luis asked.

  “Their money. Their choice.”

  “We’ve seen enough dead cowboys today to fill Boot Hill,” Julie said. The rest of the stock was familiar to them. Paintings of rodeo riders in action, of prickly-pear cactus in bloom, of bighorn sheep and mountain lions in noble poses, of Apache braves with blank expressions and good pectorals, of half-naked Mexican girls with nothing to do but smolder. And one painting of two small commercial fishing boats in a bright, choppy sea.

  Small boats, much sea. The water bounced and glistened and frothed; it was alive. The picture was no bigger than a place mat. “Now where the hell did that come from?” she asked.

  “Oh …” The owner squinted at it. “She lives over in Mexico, some no-account two-bit village. Can’t paint worth a damn. See? All spots and speckles. Never sells.” He turned the picture over. “Princess Chuckling Stream. Pureblood Comanche, she says.”

  “Got any more?”

  He found a box on a shelf with six more, all place-mat size. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. He leaned them against the wall. Three seascapes, a mountain stream with snow, a blurred face seen through a rainy window, city kids dancing in the wild spray from a fire hydrant.

  “These six and the fishing boats,” she said. “Two hundred dollars.”

  The owner was in no hurry to agree. He stood, knees slightly bent or maybe the legs were straight and the pants were bent, and he picked flakes of dead skin off his finger ends. That took all his attention.

  “Say what,” he said. “Here’s a better deal. Four hundred, an’ I throw in the John Wesley Hardin, a Pancho Villa, and a General Black Jack Pershing who chased Villa all over New Mexico, never caught him.”

  Julie badly wanted the seven Chuckling Streams, and just as badly she hated the rest. She looked at Luis for help. But Luis had wandered off and was peering into the back room. It was half-full of motorbikes and bits of bikes. Scramblers, racers, even a sidecar model. Faded posters on the walls. Yellowed newspaper cuttings hung from thumbtacks. “Isn’t that a Triumph?” he asked, confidently. The machine certainly wore the Triumph logo. “Do you still race?”

  “Any chance I get. You only live once.”

  “How very true. My guess is …” Luis stood very still and spoke softly. “Art is not your first love, sir.”

  “Brother died. Left me this place. Still got a year on the lease. Don’t like to see it wasted.”

  “I’ll give you eight hundred dollars for your stock and what’s left on the lease,” Julie said. “And you can keep your motorcycles in back, if you want.”

  “Yes, ma’m.” They shook hands on the deal.

  There was no typewriter. Julie wrote out two brief Statements of Sale in longhand and they all signed both copies. “Hot damn!” she said. “We own an art gallery! Ain’t that somethin’?”

  “I’m too full to speak,” Luis said. “Paralysis caused by shock. We came in for a pint of milk and we bought the dairy.”

  “Chuckling Stream, kid. She’ll chuckle us to the bank.”

  Frankie Blanco saw them come out carrying a small box. They drove away. He waited thirty seconds and then went into the store.

  “All sold,” said the owner. Ex-owner. “Nothin’ left.”

  “Sure, no problem. Gonna meet my friends here, got held up, kinda late, so … Was that them just left? I saw a couple drive off.”

  “What can I tell you?” He picked up the Statement of Sale. “Julie Conroy, Luis Cabrillo. Mean anything?”

  “Yeah, sure. Conroy, Cabrillo, that’s them. Just my luck. How’s your luck? They buy anythin’?”

  “Look around you, pal. They bought the store.”

  Frankie went and sat in his car, found a ballpen, wrote their names on his arm before he forgot them. Worrying made him light a Pall Mall. See here. A car with New Jersey plates drives two thousand miles to hassle him in Truth or Consequences, a nowhere place nobody in Jersey ever even heard of. Cabrillo sounds Italian. Cuban, maybe. Damn Cuban hoods were all crazies, everyone knew that. So why get a house in El Paso? Then they bought a store sells paintings. What sort of hitman does that? Nothing was right here. He found a phone and called the number the FBI gave him.

  “You moved to El Paso, Floyd. Why did you do that?” the Agent asked. Frankie told again about the Chrysler, but now he had their names as well as the license plate. And an address. Also an art shop. Some kinda front, probably.

  “So,” the Agent said, “after this pair scared the bejesus out of you in Truth or Consequences, you upped and followed them into Texas, and now you’re keeping close company with them. Think about that, Floyd.”

  “Shadowin’. They don’t suspect nothin’. I’m shadowin’ them.”

  The Agent told him to stay out of trouble and asked where he was staying. Frankie gave him the phone number at the Texaco station. “Call evenings,” he said. “Don’t say you’re Feds. Say you’re …” He thought fast. “Say you’re the Lone Ranger. Code,” he explained.

  “Uh-huh. High-ho, Silver! My work here is done.” The Agent hung up.

  3

  The only way to San Carlos was by road. It took them four hours. They drove 80 miles from El Paso to Van Horn by Interstate 20, then 60 miles to Marfa by US 90, then 50 miles by US 67 to Presidio and the Rio Grande. Went through the unhurried customs and immigration check, over the bridge to Ojinaga, and now they were in Chihuahua Province. They took Highway 18 south for about 20 miles, then picked up a bulldozed track for maybe 40 miles, always climbing until they were more than four thousand feet above sea level, and at last they reached San Carlos, a tiny town in the middle of the biggest desert in North America.

  According to the former owner of The Picture Show, this was where Princess Chuckling Stream lived.

  Water ran in neat channels through the streets. Fields were green. Beyond stretched the mile-high desert. Within was an abundance of cool clear water. The stuff was irresistible. Julie got out and knelt and trailed her fingers in it and splashed some on her face. She looked up and a small boy was watching her intently. Didn’t Yankees have water in the street? Peculiar people. She sat on her heels, flicked water at him, he blinked, made a big smile. Eat your heart out, American Dental Association.

  “Por favor,” Julie said. “Señora Americana?”

  He led them, and kept up a flow of boy-soprano Mexican that meant nothing to them. “Can’t argue with that, kid,” Julie said. The boy pointed to an adobe house. Luis gave him a quarter, which bought a smile beyond price, and the boy ran off.

  The house was small and plain. No name, no number. She knocked on the door and it swung open. She murmured, “When Humphrey Bogart did that, he found a body in the bath.”

  “I hear voices.”

  Inside, a man said, uncertainly, clumsily, “I will work … for dollars.”

  A woman said, crisply, “Every day.”

  “Every … day.”

  “Okay. Now you want food. Arroz, leche …” She came in view, leaning in a doorway, a tall redhead in a black tee shirt and faded jeans, and she saw them. “Jesus H. Christ,” she said.

  “Yayzoos Etch …” the invisible man echoed.

  “Can it, Miguel,” she told him.

  “We’re looking for Princess Chuckling Stream,” Luis said.

  “She’s dead.”

  Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Then Miguel appeared, young and slim in white shirt and pants, and drifted past them.

  “Dead, huh,” Julie said.

  “Yeah. Caught in the crossfire, wrong place wrong time, bunch of bandidos fightin’ over drugs, women, poker, who knows what.” The redhead hadn’t moved from her doorway. “You’re law enforcement? Too late, amigos. The federales came, busted a few heads, made some arrests.” She took a thin black cigar from behind her ear and struck a match against the wall. “Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along, now. Keep movin’.”

  “We’re not the law,” Luis said.

&nb
sp; She heard a buttoned-down East Coast voice and didn’t like it. “Taxes.” She lit the cigar. “Wastin’ your time. She died in debt. I know, I bought the coffin.”

  “Not taxes,” Julie said. “Not law. Nothing official.”

  She blew smoke at a gecko on a wall and suddenly it was on a different wall. “Nothin’ doin’ with you,” she said. “Nothin’ doin’ with me. That’s Mexico. Plenty of nothin’.”

  “We’ve driven a long way,” Luis said. “At least show us the grave.”

  The redhead took the cigar from her mouth, blew softly on the tip and studied its glow. “Ain’t much to see.”

  They followed her. A black dog lying in the shade saw them walk past, and got up and shook himself and joined them. “You got a name, pooch?” Julie asked. The dog wagged his tail. “Says he’s called Pooch,” she told Luis.

  The cemetery was crowded. They zigzagged between gravestones and crosses until the redhead reached a far corner and stood by an unmarked mound. “Like I said,” she told them.

  They stood in a half-circle, Luis, Julie and Pooch, and looked at a long heap of dirt. “What brought her to San Carlos?” Julie asked. “Kind of … remote.”

  “Never asked. Never said.”

  “When exactly was the tragedy?” Luis asked.

  “Oh …” the redhead shrugged. “Way back.”

  “We could check it out,” Julie suggested. “Records? Church, police, mayor?”

  “Wouldn’t bet on it.”

  Luis stooped and took a handful of dirt. “Feels fresh.” He offered it to the dog. The dog sniffed, looked away, yawned. “Pooch estimates about a week old.”

  “Your stupid hound got all the answers, you don’t need me.” The redhead walked away.

  “Suppose I said I’ve got a check for twenty-five thousand dollars,” Julie said, “made out to Princess Chuckling Stream.”

  The redhead came back.

  “That’s you, isn’t it?” Luis said.

  “What’s this all about?”

  “Ask the stupid hound,” Julie said. “He’s got all the answers.”

  The redhead thought about it for so long that the dog went to sleep. Luis stretched out on the ground and put his hat over his eyes. Julie filed her nails.

  “Okay, it’s me. I’m her. So what? Show me the damn check.”

  “I only said suppose.”

  “You lied.”

  “Well, you lied first,” Luis said. “And we came all the way from El Paso, so we’re entitled to some payback.”

  Julie said: “If you’re still Princess Roaring River, you can have a hundred bucks in cash, now, for your best painting.”

  “What d’you reckon, Pooch?” The redhead gently rubbed the dog’s ribs with the side of her boot. He rolled onto his back, legs splayed, and showed a fine pair of balls. “Looks like a yes to me. Let’s get out of here. I need a beer.”

  “Who was buried, if not you?” Luis asked.

  “Some bum,” she said. “Does it matter?”

  An hour later they were all heading down the road, with thirty-seven more paintings in the trunk.

  It was Princess’s idea to come with them. When she got her $100, heard real enthusiasm for her work, and knew that they owned an art gallery, she had no wish to stay in San Carlos. It wasn’t an artists’ colony. Farmers there grew the best hot chili peppers in Mexico. They made your eyeballs sweat, blew steam out your ears, and set your hair on fire. Two or three times a year someone died, the people laid on a big funeral. Nothing else to talk about in San Carlos, just hot chillis and fancy checkouts. Quiet town. It got so she never knew the month, leave alone the day.

  Julie asked why she went there in the first place.

  Scared, she said. Scared and broke, a miserable combination. “I’d been the drummer in an all-girl band, touring Texas, The Humdingers, corny name. We were playing a dance hall in San Antone and our manager amscrayed with the money, left us flat broke.

  “Then—stroke of luck. Met Ted. He flew fighters in the Air Force. Love at first sight, both ways. Married at the base chapel, honeymoon in Chihuahua. Hey! Life is lookin’ up. If we’d been lookin’ down, might of seen a couple of Mex hitmen waitin’ outside the hotel. Didn’t have to wait long. Me and my shiny new husband are arm in arm, strollin’ along the main drag, guns go bang-bang, there’s blood everywhere an’ I’m a widow.

  “So the Mex cops haul the body away and they get on the horn to the military police at Ted’s base in Texas. Turns out I’d married a gambling man, the worst kind, the losing and borrowing kind who keeps losing until the shylocks turn up the heat. He beats it to Mexico, not far enough, and they close his account. I’m left with thirty bucks and a feeling they’ll come after me next because I inherit everything including his debts, which is crazy but who knows how these people think?

  “So I get the bus to Ojinaga. Four hours, five bucks. Thought I’d walk over the bridge to Presidio an’ think again. Then someone on the bus tells me about San Carlos, so I bummed a ride there instead. Hope the shylocks forget. Five years ago.”

  “Five years,” Luis said. “How did you make a living?”

  “Taught simple English to Mex kids aimin’ to be wetbacks. Charged fifty cents an hour. Good value.”

  “Last question,” Julie said. “Ever seen the sea?”

  “Nope. Saw a picture in Life magazine once. Didn’t look real,” she said.

  JUSTIFIED SUBTERFUGE

  1

  The brief presence of a Chrysler with New Jersey plates—it had been in the state for only a few hours, for God’s sake—did not agitate the agents in the New Mexico office of the FBI. The behavior of Frankie Blanco/Floyd Boyd was another matter. They were responsible for ensuring he led a quiet life, doing nothing in nowhere, and now suddenly he was playing private eye in the big bad city. Frankie wasn’t bright enough to play bass drum with a breadstick. Action was required. For a start, they telexed the FBI in New Jersey, which replied within an hour that the Chrysler was registered to Jerome Fantoni and he had not reported it stolen.

  The Fantonis being one of five Mafia families operating in New York City, as a matter of courtesy the exchange was copied to the Manhattan office of the Bureau, where it soon reached Agents Prendergast and Fisk.

  Both of them were loyal to the FBI’s methods of detection, but they had widely differing attitudes toward crime. Agent Prendergast, who was twenty years the senior, regarded crime as something similar to an outbreak of disease. He believed crime was a random and unpredictable failure of behavior that civilized people had to protect themselves against and stamp out fast. So burglary was like influenza: everybody got it, more or less, sooner or later. The difference was the influenza bug went about its business in a calm, methodical (if totally selfish) way; whereas criminals—in Prendergast’s experience—were usually sloppy, erratic, opportunistic. In a word: untidy. Their untidiness got them caught. Prendergast looked for it and usually found it.

  Fisk was his deputy, fresh out of the FBI Academy. He didn’t believe crime had to be untidy, but he didn’t say so. He looked for patterns in crime, connections, logical sequences. For him, crime wasn’t like a disease, it was part of the law of averages. Give everybody a car, which is essentially a chunk of money on wheels with a motor to help the thief, and car crime becomes inevitable. A percentage of cars always get stolen, so owners pay more for their insurance. Fisk saw a natural pattern in this sequence: it was a formula by which the underprivileged got their hands on a share of the nation’s wealth. Prendergast found crime untidy. Fisk found it a predictable response to stimulus. Both were right and both were wrong, so they made a good team.

  “El Paso,” Prendergast said. “Hot goods go south, hard drugs go north. It’s the boil on America’s backside.”

  “Surprisingly low rate for murder.” Fisk was looking at the FBI crime statistics. “Dallas’s figures are double, Houston’s are triple. However, El Paso beats them both on aggravated assault. That’s curious. You’d think …”r />
  “I think they’re too quick with their fists in El Paso but they can’t shoot straight. What’s the figure for El Paso’s brains?”

  “Not here.”

  “Too small to measure,” Prendergast said. “You’ve got to learn to read between the lines in that book. Forget it. What is our wandering boy doing in Texas?”

  “What exactly was he doing here and in DC? If we knew that …”

  “He had a couple of scams going here. Yeah, I know, nothing we could prove. But nobody dines with Fantoni just for the meatloaf.”

  “It’s not a crime. We know Cabrillo and Conroy got out of this city in a hell of a hurry, but that’s also not a crime, and next thing he’s in DC as a paid consultant to Senator Joseph McCarthy. You think he had another scam going, yet the senator has made no complaint, and I’m sure you’ll agree we’d better be very sure of ourselves before we rattle that cage.”

  Prendergast opened a desk drawer and took out a thick black notebook. “British consulate won’t help. CIA won’t help. McCarthy can’t even spell the word help. That leaves one loose end we can pull.”

  “Fantoni?” Fisk said.

  Prendergast reached for the phone. “Clean in thought, word and deed,” he said. “A regular Boy Scout.”

  2

  Princess Chuckling Stream moved into the house on Cliff Boulevard. They turned a room into a studio: took the furniture out, spread dropcloths over the floor, propped her paintings against the wall.

  “Now what?” Luis asked.

  “Now we have a show,” Julie said. “A hell of a show. El Paso discovers a genius in its midst. We’ll knock this town on its ass.”

  Princess used her foot to straighten a crease in a dropcloth. “Ain’t too sure about this genius shit,” she said.

  Luis picked up the painting of two little fishing boats on a broken, glittering sea. He said to Julie, “As I recall, you fell in love with this in about ten seconds. Tiny bit impulsive, perhaps?”