The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “I agree,” said Danziger. “And I think maybe that’s the angle we need to be working on. Starting with the interesting question of just how the hell did they know about the two Northwest pictures we were planning? The FBI and the police seem to agree that these people are from out of town, the actual gunners, anyway. They’ve identified that sniper Lockhart for sure, because he left his calling card, and they’ve also identified one of the NVA’s top assassins as the man who gassed out the security control room at the Kodak, a man known as the Prince of Wands. They’ve also gone over security videos from the weeks before the Oscars, and they’re positive the Jerry Rebs actually took guided tours of the Kodak beforehand, just like typical tourists.”

  “Now, that’s chutzpah,” Walt Wexler reluctantly conceded.

  Danziger nodded. “They think they’ve identified two more, a man named Wingo and a woman named McGee, whom you may remember had that big shootout at the OK Corral up there in Portland along with Lockhart, the one that was on all the channels and won Cassie Ransome her Pulitzer. The point I am making is that the NVA has sent down their top guns for this operation down here, and they would not have done that and risked their best people without some very serious preliminary intelligence spadework. The cops all agree that there is some kind of spy network of racists here in Hollywood, working with the NVA. How else are they able to track our people so effectively and ambush them at exactly the right moment?”

  “Reading Variety and the tabloids and monitoring the internet will tell you just about anything you want to know about anyone in Hollywood,” suggested Wexler. “Part of the price we pay for being public figures.”

  “Mmm, the NVA’s knowledge seems to run a great deal deeper than that,” said Danziger. “You know how the cops now believe they got away from the Kodak on the night of the massacre? In two stolen police cars, wearing LAPD uniforms that were obtained from the 21st Century Fox costume department. Two full sets disappeared at about that time. So how did that come about? And how are these outsiders managing to move around town and hide from the law, in a place where everyone watches everyone else as part of the culture? From maps of the stars’ homes they buy from street peddlers on Hollywood and Vine? No, gentlemen, these people have help, inside help. Hollywood help. Some of our own are helping them. The cops are looking for the shooters, without much success. We need to concentrate on looking for the inside men. The traitors to our town and our industry who have brought this horror in among us.”

  “And how do we do that?” asked Blaustein.

  “We bring in Marty Shulman,” said Danziger decisively.

  “The Hebrew Hammer?” said Blaustein in surprise.

  “He doesn’t like that nickname much,” said Danziger. “He thought it was a stupid movie. Well, it was.”

  “Yeah, I forgot, he’s your brother-in-law,” said Blaustein. “Is he really as tough as they say he is?”

  “What can I tell you?” said Danziger, spreading his hands in the ancient traditional gesture of his people. “The man has lived with my sister Carol for almost fifteen years.”

  “Point taken,” said Blaustein with a nod. “Okay, so we hire your hotshot brother-in-law to do what, exactly?”

  “To find out exactly what the fuck happened on Oscar Night, who was involved, and I don’t mean those werewolves from the tundra up north, I mean who among our own domesticated goyim brought the wild ones here. Who betrayed us? Who has dared to lay their filthy paws on the Apple of God’s Eye? We find that out, then we figure out how to use that knowledge. Not to make a deal with these murderers, but to destroy them.”

  “If Marty can do that for us, you know that money will be no object,” said Blaustein, warming to the idea.

  “You haven’t gotten his bill yet,” warned Danziger.

  * * *

  Licensed private investigator Martin Shulman actually did dislike being referred to as the Hebrew Hammer, since it really was an exceptionally stupid movie even by Hollywood standards. The nickname had stuck, though, and so whenever he was asked about it he replied “It means I’m the Hebrew Mike Hammer.” In the looks department he wasn’t, not by a long shot. Shulman was forty-one, short, fat, bald, hairy as an ape, and possessed of a round fleshy Jewish camel-face and nose that looked like some German Nazi caricature from the 1930s. Marty’s jowls were always blue no matter how close he shaved, and he always reeked of stale cologne and sweat. He dressed like a slob in a dusty sports jacket, a frayed tie that was always loosened around an unbuttoned collar, scuffed shoes and a soup-stained shirt. He invariably had the biggest cheap cigar he could find protruding from one corner of his wide, veal-colored lips. He looked like a bookie or the sleaziest used car salesman imaginable.

  Nonetheless, Marty Shulman was smart, and more importantly in Hollywood, he was cunning. He was tough, he was completely without conscience, and he was very good at what he did, which was to take care of problems for the cinematic kosher mafia that ran Tinsel Town. That was how he described himself on his business cards, rather than as a PI: Martin Shulman—Problem Resolution Consultant. Many times he had sat in the office of Sid Glick or Lou Woltz or some other mogul, or in the palatial home of some well-known actor or actress, and said to the client, “Sid,” (or Lou or whoever) “It’s like this. I don’t do divorce work or background checks or surveillance or inventory control or anything like that. You don’t hire me to follow somebody around like a schnook and see who they’re shtupping, you don’t hire me to catch somebody dipping their fingers in the till, you don’t hire me to find out what other studios are offering your directors and your talent or what scripts they’re plumping, none of that crap. I solve problems. You tell me what your problem is, you tell me who your problem is, and I make that problem go away. When the problem is resolved, I tell you how much, you pay me without question, and how it was done you don’t ask. Not ever.”

  Marty Shulman knew everybody in Hollywood who counted, and many of those who didn’t. He had a stable of paid informants in every studio, every city government office, every chic restaurant, every bistro, every hotel and no-tell motel, every hospital and doctor’s office, every security company, every private gym and rehab center in southern California. It was a private intelligence operation that put the FBI’s snitch networks to shame. Not to mention the fact that he had half the LAPD and L.A. County Sheriff’s Department on his pad, plus the county coroner for good measure. Shulman knew who was taking the bribes, the backhanders and the sweeteners from whom, for what, and for how much. He knew where all Hollywood’s bodies were buried, in some cases literally. He knew who was addicted to what drugs and all the stupid things they’d done under the influence. He knew who was straight, who was gay, who was bi, and who liked animals and dead bodies. His intricate system of unofficial wiretaps and electronic surveillance rivaled that of the Department of Homeland Security. In a secret storage locker he kept long rows of filing cabinets containing not only paper files but thousands of cassette tapes, CDs, DVDS and videos of illegally obtained information obtained from his private spying activities that provided him with a blackmail income equal to that on the returns he filed with the IRS every year. This hoard of dirt on the whole town’s denizens had acquired mythical proportions on the gossip grapevine, and a large segment of Hollywood’s élite lived in terror that Marty’s tapes and videos and transcripts of every secret sin would somehow be made public.

  Shulman’s specialty was making inconvenient people disappear—the stalker; the blackmailer; the drug dealer who refused to cut a bankable talent off their supply so they could clean up for a shooting schedule or who was selling the talent bad shit and causing embarrassing ODs; the union shop steward who got greedy or stupid and wouldn’t stay on the studio’s pad; the shiksa starlet or wannabe starlet from a weekend party who couldn’t seem to distinguish between passionate lovemaking and rape, and who was raising a stink and wasting police time with her complaints; stage mothers who were interfering with the development of promising child star
s and asking too many financial questions; ex-wives who were entirely too familiar with California’s community property laws in divorce settlements; ambulance-chasing attorneys who chased the wrong ambulance and threatened to embarrass the glitterati or the power-men; free-lance journalists who thought they could make a name for themselves by digging up skeletons and airing the dirty laundry of the patriarchs of Israel; paparazzi who took embarrassing photographs of people and events where no photographs were wanted; security guards and secretaries who saw or heard something they shouldn’t have. Shulman took care of a whole gamut of people who threatened to gum up the works or annoy the potentates of the mighty Hollywood Dream Machine.

  Marty prided himself on his creativity in arranging for such people to vanish. He used outright assassination only as a last resort, because he understood the dangers of unforeseen blowback. Besides, he considered murder to be sloppy and inartistic, the province of stupid goy gangsters and hoodlums. Jews were always much more clever about such things, he thought, always displaying more creativity and panache. Sometimes simple cash was enough to persuade some paparazzi to relocate to New York, or some would-be actress to go home to Indiana or wherever. When shekels wouldn’t serve, blackmail often did the trick. This being Hollywood, everybody had skeletons in their closet, and Shulman was tireless in ferreting out secrets and using them to leverage others into cooperating. Then there was the carefully orchestrated frame-up or the LSD slipped into a target’s drink. Shulman’s targets often vanished into prisons and mental institutions and heavily fortified rehab centers, which were in effect private jails maintained by the studios. Sometimes a thorough and bloody beating administered by some of Shulman’s special contractors in some discreet back alley or parking garage sufficed to get the message through, although when it came down to it Marty himself was never shy about rolling up his sleeves and getting his hands wet. His favorite instrument of correction for uppity goyim was a bloodstained crowbar he carried in the trunk of his Lincoln Town car, the one with the Israeli flag on the rear windshield, the “Jew Canoe” sticker on the front bumper, and the “Kiss Me, I’m Jewish!” sticker plastered on the trunk.

  Marty Shulman’s heart had swelled with pride and anticipation when he was called into the Bunker, and he was given the assignment by the top men in the industry to find and break the NVA’s operational network in Hollywood. This would be his greatest case ever. He had impressed the surviving studio bosses and execs by agreeing to do the job for free, purely out of ahavat Yisroel, for love of the Jewish people. Marty knew, and so did they, that he’d be able to turn his success into mega-bucks without them paying him a dime directly. After it was over, the book deal alone should net him a couple of million. Plus the job came with a bottomless expense account he could fiddle for all it was worth. “Just one thing I am asking,” he said at the end of the interview. “When you come to make the movie of this, my greatest exploit, I want I should play myself.” A bemused Blaustein had agreed. Shulman was in seventh heaven. He had lived all his life around movie stars, and now at long last he would get a chance to be one.

  Shulman was given his own office in the Bunker, a nice corner one with carpet and a mahogany desk and a secretary, but he took one look and turned it down. “No, no,” he said to his brother in law, Dave Danziger, “This is serious business. I need a place to work, not schmooze.” Instead he took over a cubbyhole in the basement next to the roaring air conditioning system, that he fitted out with two metal desks, a folding table, and some creaky old swivel chairs he found stacked in a storeroom, as well as several battered filing cabinets. On one desk he installed a state of the art computer system with high-speed wireless and satellite connections. In the drawer of the other desk he plunked a bottle of Jack Daniels and his .45 automatic. He always kept both in any desk he used. They fitted with his Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe-esque self-image. He had even kept his own public office in a seedy part of downtown, with his name on a frosted glass door; it had taken him months to find a place that had a garish neon sign flashing outside the second floor window at night to create the true private dick ambience. His Hollywood clientele ate it up.

  Dave Danziger was to act as liaison with the bosses and make sure he had everything he needed. He came to see Marty on the morning after he moved into the basement. “I give you an office down the hall from my own, and you choose this dump instead?” he asked, looking around the shabby room.

  “This is where I shall sit like Buddha in contemplation, and prove for all time that Jewish brain is greater than Nazi brawn,” said Shulman with an expansive gesture. “You got what I asked for from the G-men?”

  Danziger opened his briefcase and pulled out a huge accordion file so thick he could barely grasp it with one hand. “Our boychik at the FBI assures me that this is all the essential stuff, everything they’ve found out that they think might mean anything. If you see a reference to something in there that’s not in that file, some document or witness statement or something, let me know and I’ll get it for you. What else do you need?”

  “Right now I need for you to make like an amoeba and split. I am going to sit down and read everything in this file, then I am going to think about it. When I am through thinking about it, be it today or tomorrow or next week, I will come upstairs and see you.” Shulman was a quick reader and he had a nearly photographic memory. As soon as Dave left he poured himself a huge mug of black coffee from a pot in the corner, added a generous belt of Jack Daniels, sat down and opened the purloined FBI folder. By four o’clock that afternoon he was back up in Danziger’s office, and he handed the huge file back to him. “You can take this back before it gets our friend in trouble. I got it all in my kopf. I made some notes and a couple of copies,” said Shulman, seating himself across from Danziger’s polished desk.

  “So how the hell did the bastards pull this horror show off?” asked Danziger.

  “It’s obvious,” said Shulman with a shrug. “We know they escaped through the Trap Door, the CCTV footage shows that, so they must have come in the same way. They came from the Hotel Royale and they had a key card. Their inside man in the theater was this Centurion Security Sergeant Farrell, who disappeared before anyone could catch up to him and question him. He was also the putz who started the big tsimmes up at the front entrance that lured the chief of security out of the control room just at the very moment they got hit with the tear gas. That was no coincidence. All very meticulous and well planned. You can tell that some of these people are military veterans.”

  “Yes, we know all this, the FBI already figured it out,” said Danziger impatiently. “They’re not complete idiots, you know. We also know the terrorists fled the scene in two stolen LAPD police cruisers, two of them wearing copper’s outfits stolen from one of our own studios, and at least one of them entered the Royale’s security control room, killed the guard on duty, and took the security surveillance system’s hard drive, presumably because it would have revealed their activities in the hotel. Farrell’s crummy apartment was ripped to pieces, and everyone he ever knew even slightly has been pulled in and interrogated. Every place in town where he ever had a beer or bought a grocery item or a gallon of gas has been tracked down from his credit and his store cards, every library book he ever read has been gone over, all his relatives all over the country are being watched and their phones tapped, and he is now the subject of a worldwide terrorist APB. Farrell’s our only link to the killers.”

  “No, he’s not our only link,” corrected Shulman. “Forget about the guard. He’s probably up in some shithole in Idaho right now wiring bombs to a moose or whatever. They had at least one more inside man. That’s the one we need to find.”

  “How do you know there’s any such person?” asked Danziger.

  “I deduce him. I sense his presence. He is a disturbance in the Force and I feel him. A couple questions I am asking myself,” said Shulman, waving his hands about like palm trees in a breeze. “The question of entry. Where did the shooters get the k
ey card or cards they used to come in through the Trap Door?”

  “From the traitor guard sergeant, of course,” said Danziger.

  “Marvin Hagerman swears that’s impossible, he had the Kodak management’s key card, the only one, on his own person all the time or else locked up in the control room arms cabinet, which Farrell had no access to. Plus it would have triggered an alarm if anyone had gotten into the cabinet and removed the card from its slot. Let’s assume he’s telling the truth and the NVA didn’t get the card from Farrell. Where, then? The Hotel Royale management have the only other cards. Tomorrow I go down and do some schmoozing at the Royale, maybe slap the maître-d and a bellhop or two around, and I bet my ass I’ll learn that copies of that keycard were going for a hundred bucks a pop to all kinds of people that night, and there was more than one unauthorized copy floating around. The Trap Door is the worst kept secret in town, and all manner of naughty munchkins might have had reasons of work or play to want to get in and out of the ceremonies on the QT. Second question, why did the terrorists take the hotel security hard drive?”

  “So they wouldn’t be recognized when they were caught on video entering the hotel,” said Danziger.

  “You need to understand these people’s minds, David. I can see why they wouldn’t want to be recognized on entering the hotel before they made their attack, true, but afterward? They don’t give a shit. They want the whole world to know who did this, they’re proud of it. They’ve claimed credit for it, and they even left their fucking calling cards on the scene along with all the dead bodies. So why take the hard drive if not to protect someone’s identity who isn’t so eager to be known? How did they enter the hotel, with all their gear?” asked Shulman. “They should walk in the front door wearing their masks and holding their machine guns?”

  “No, obviously not, they must have slipped in somehow, without their masks,” said Danziger. “They must have snuck their weapons and disguises and whatnot in separately.”