Fever City

by Tim Baker

  The tell-tale sign of the irredeemable bigot: the vicious sneer in the voice, like a death-choke, whenever they utter those two, detested words. Politically Correct. It deprives them of the easy racial epithets they’d been freely using all their lives; that shorthand all extremists employed to create their simpleminded world of segregation and apartheid; of anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia. Of concentration camps and plantations. Then someone came along and said: you can’t say those words anymore.

  ‘Tex, I can see I made a big mistake . . . ’

  Fear and anger tremble across his drink-scarred face. ‘So blinded by mirrors, you don’t see what’s staring you right in the face.’

  He says it as though it were verse from Conspiracy Theology: the religion of the post-Atomic Age. In the beginning, the Roswell Saucer crashed. And on the Seventh Day we get the Gemstone Files because, hell, there’s just no time to rest when shape-shifting lizards are sitting in Buckingham Palace. When empty skyscrapers are being destroyed with controlled demolitions. Duck and cover, everybody, and don’t forget to look under the bed when you’re down on the floor—you might find a fake lunar rock.

  Why do so many people believe in Conspiracy? Is it simply easier to think you are being manipulated than to accept that the forty-five years you just put in working at a job you hated to pay off an overpriced mortgage were all wasted, with nothing left to show for your suffering serfdom other than a loveless marriage, ungrateful children, and some loose change?

  Or is it because we have all forsaken God but not our innate need to believe in the unknowable? In the Big Secret hidden behind the curtain. Something awe-inspiring; brighter than the Wizard.

  In this sad world, E. Howard Hunt is the iceberg apparent, the tiny fraction of the massive, submerged enigma; Atlantis, the hidden continent of conspiracy. ‘And what is staring me in the face, Tex?’

  ‘That Hunt knew about the Bannister kid.’ I hold on to the bar. His smile is a leer of triumph, the facial equivalent of a kick in the balls. ‘You smart-aleck, liberal greenhorn. Snooping around these parts with your nose in the air, and all the time you ain’t got a clue what’s buried under the very earth you’re stomping on. Well, I’ll tell you what’s buried there, tangled up amongst the skeletons and the oil. It’s the Truth, son, just as plain and ugly as a wart on a toad’s ass. So you can wipe that stupid look off your face and buy me another drink, jackass.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Los Angeles 1963

  Roselli had been quick with the down payment. The money had arrived the day after the meet at the Monogram Ranch. Roselli was trembling at the proximity of such wealth; so many possibilities. Forty Eldorado Biarritz Caddies lined in a row. An eighteen-hole golf course in Key Biscayne. Ten thousand call girls. Except that if Roselli wanted a car, he’d steal it; if he wanted land, he’d kill for it; and if he wanted a girl, he’d rape one. He had absolutely no need for money, which only made him want it all the more.

  Roselli’s eyes entertained betrayal as he whispered instructions to the three bagmen who carried in the loot, concealed inside hefty duffel sacks. There was a moment when Hastings watched Roselli in the reflection of the drinks cabinet, his hand dropping to an ice bucket, where he had camouflaged an S&W .38 nickel-plated revolver. A five-shooter. One for each gangster and one left over, just in case. Hastings could hear the flat, damp roll of Roselli’s brain struggling with a believable story for Momo. Scotch tumbled into heavy crystal. Hastings scooped a fistful of ice, dropped it in a glass, the handle of the piece exposed, Roselli’s greed retreating behind the logic of fear. He wouldn’t have to reach for more ice, he wouldn’t have to kill Roselli. Yet.

  Hastings waited until after they had left, watching the cars retreating down the street. He knew there was a tail out there somewhere. Roselli wasn’t that stupid. One sack on his back, one in each arm. Down the cellar. Through the plate in the wall. Along the storm water canal. Up by what passes for a river in LA. He had a ’57 Plymouth inside a rented garage looking on to the canal. The car started up first time. Hastings headed south towards Long Beach.

  He stashed the dough in his safe house in Chula Vista. A Chubb customized anti-blowpipe key and combination double lock hidden inside an underground tank. Chula Vista was his lifeboat in case the good ship SS America hit a reef. Ten minutes’ chase distance to Tijuana. Disappearable. He wanted all options open. Especially flight. He made it back to LA after midnight. Fourteen hours for a 300-mile round trip, half of that making sure no one was tailing him. That there was no surveillance. That’s what being sure does: slows movement down to a molasses creep. Gives you time to see the faces behind the windows, the wires under the car; the glint of gunmetal through the branches of a tree.

  Hastings entered back through the cellar, closing the secret door soundlessly behind him; listening. He waited an hour down there, until he was sure, then came up, checking all the doors and windows for signs of entry. Nothing. He unbolted the front door, so that it was just on its latch, and spread canvas on the floor in front of it. Then he waited in the shadows scoping the street, the jacaranda trees outside trembling with betrayal. Just after three a car pulled up on the far corner. Two men got out, walking hunched away from the streetlights, casing windows for witnesses. There weren’t any. This was a respectable neighbourhood. There was the rasp of the latch being lifted, then they were inside; violent faces masked by darkness. One of them tripped on the canvas and cursed. Maybe he knew at that very moment what was about to happen. Four suppressed shots. The hammer of two falling bodies. Then silence. Hastings sat there, alert, straining for an indication of departure, a spirit shifting away.

  Outside, the street was empty except for a draining moon and the weaving flutter of bats.

  He set to work with towels and tape, staunching the bleeding as he ID’d the goons. Dallas. Joe Civello’s boys. Chicago owned the Midwest, Texas, the West Coast. This was Roselli’s way of trying to recuperate the money via one of the back doors. Roselli would have arranged a cut in exchange for the tip. A nice piece of safe pie with enough deniability to probably get away with it.

  Hastings wrapped them in separate bundles, and hauled them through the house and into the garage one at a time. Getting them into the back of his Mercury Colony Park was hard work. They were both big men, heavy with guilt.

  He drove south down small, modest roads unused to crime, and dropped them into the sea off Bluff Cove. Their bodies hit the water with a light, unlucky slap. He watched the current take them out into the night. He checked the back of the car for evidence, and then headed back north. He would have to lose the car. But before that, he needed to call Roselli, just to let him know he was safe and sound.

  CHAPTER 8

  Los Angeles 1960

  Schiller is outside, swaying gently as he whistles to himself. A dozen patrolmen are spread out, going through the gardens.

  ‘Any word on that nanny?’

  ‘Nothing yet. We checked her room though. Nothing to suggest she was planning on skipping town.’

  If she were planning on skipping town, she wouldn’t exactly leave a sign on the door handle. ‘You find anything out here?’

  Schiller looks up at the rising sun then turns and squints at me, shaking his head. ‘No footprints, tread marks, broken windows, forced entry . . . Nothing to suggest a snatch.’ Schiller toes a flower out of the dew-wet soil. ‘How about you?’

  ‘There’s no way the kid’s inside. I even checked the bomb shelter.’ There is a shout from one of the patrolmen, standing at the edge of the grove. ‘Captain. Over here.’

  We both start running, all the other cops sprinting too, a converging ring of blue targeting the grove. Some of the patrolmen, inexplicably, have already drawn their service revolvers. Perhaps they had sensed the evil; the violence that was about to ensnare them, the city—the entire country.

  The Bannister case was about to go wide.

  The o
fficer who found it turns, pushes his way out of the ring and retches onto the manicured lawn. Schiller shoves his way through the wall of uniforms, me riding his wake. He stops so suddenly that I run into him. His curse whip-cracks across the morning.

  I peer over his shoulder into the humming shade. Two female hands have started to flower from the soil, the slender fingers reaching up towards the light, the fine sheen of nail polish chipped from digging, the red tips curled like petals withering in the sun. The golden gleam of a wedding ring is barely visible; the promise of buried treasure. Something swells between the hands, the morning breeze lifting it like threads of gossamer: long fine black hair. I crouch down and gently brush the soil away from the forehead, the pursed lips grimed and cracked by dirt, the eyelashes heavy with the endless sleep of the tomb. Her face is tilted upwards, as though caught in the act of contemplative prayer. ‘Does anyone know her?’ I look up at the circle of stunned faces haloing this grave, still as death. No one moves. Then a cop crosses himself.

  ‘You.’ Schiller grabs him by the arm. ‘Go find someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A gardener, someone in the house—anyone who can tell us who she is.’

  I continue to free her face from the soil. Schiller kneels reverentially next to me. ‘She was alive,’ I whisper. ‘When they buried her here, she was still alive . . . ’

  ‘How are you so sure?’

  ‘Look at the soil under the nails, now look at the patterns on her palms. She did that to herself, struggling to get out. See how the soil’s been driven under the skin? And look here . . . ’ I gently purse her lips open. Schiller moves closer. ‘You’re kneeling on her throat.’ He apologizes, moving back—a perfect gentleman. ‘See how it’s packed in the front corners of her mouth? She was trying not to swallow the soil . . . ’

  There’s a noise behind us and the officer leads Mrs. Bannister through the wall of police. I watch her as she stares down at the corpse. Something huge ripples across her face. An enormous emotion that she grabbed by the scruff of the neck and hauled back, just before it had time to escape her. Admiration overwhelms me.

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Elaine . . . ’

  Red. That’s what’s been bothering me about Mrs. Bannister standing there above me; she’s still wearing her silk robe, but she’s wearing a different coloured negligée underneath. I could swear it was black before. Why did she change?

  ‘She work here?’

  The question drives Mrs. Bannister’s eyes away from the grave.

  ‘She’s Elaine Bannister. Ronnie’s mother . . . ’

  I turn back to the half-revealed face staring up at us. Something has caught my attention. Schiller goes to speak, but I silence him with a finger to my lips. Everyone goes quiet, the cops all stepping back, as though expecting a geyser to erupt at any moment, showering them with scalding debris. I put my ear to the soil. It’s uncanny, but for a second I could have sworn I heard a child crying.

  Schiller’s on edge. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something’s happening but I don’t know what . . . ’ I glance up at Mrs. Bannister. This time she can’t control it, the emotion leaching her face of colour, her mouth gaping open in disbelief.

  I turn back fast to the body of Elaine, and then I see it too: a tear slowly pushing a trench through the grime on her cheek.

  CHAPTER 9

  Los Angeles 1963

  Roselli didn’t call until the last Saturday of October, setting a meet at 3 P.M. at the Hollywood Roosevelt. Roselli looked pale and nervous against the blue agitation of the swimming pool. Every time someone dived in, punching a hole in the water with a loud wallop, he looked up. In the distance a dog was barking. Ghosts lurked just outside his peripheral vision.

  Hastings sat in the interrogating sunlight, feeling revolt at his profession; at the way his life turned out. An unknown father. A dead mother. A brutal stepfather. A tour in the Pacific. A homecoming marriage to a childhood sweetheart; an impossibly cruel story . . . that turned out to be possible. A tragic death that he should have been able to stop. Revenge and flight. Hands soaked in the blood of the innocent and the guilty. Nothing, except regret and self-hate. And a decade of menial work, trying to deny the calling that had chosen him in the Pacific: murderer.

  During the war, Susan had been everything. She was the reason he suffered and fought to survive all those times when it would have been easier simply to give in to the call of death. She was his polestar, his way out of the torment of mosquitoes, mud and suppurating tropical ulcers, of dysentery and fear and the constant stench of decomposing human flesh. He came to understand that the point of the war was not to win or to lose but simply to teach each soldier the meaning of suffering; to remove them from their assumptions about humanity and kindness; to strip them of the sense of their own identity.

  To change their world forever.

  Only then would they allow themselves to be sacrificed, to gladly follow the whistle into enemy fire and the near certainty of oblivion. On this death journey of young men, all taboos were broken. Enemy soldiers were raped, tortured, murdered and mutilated. Civilians were gang-raped and beaten to death. Officers were shot in the back. Wounded were left behind.

  Nothing exposed the tenuous membrane of civilization like war. Back home newspaper editorialists wrote about the good fight; politicians made speeches in Congress about brave soldiers dying for their loved ones. Grandfathers lamented the lack of gumption in the younger generation. But on the beaches of Normandy and the Pacific, words no longer existed. Conversation was dead in the face of the only law that counted. Kill or be killed. Survive. But how could you survive after all of that? The ‘you’ before the war was as dead as the bloated corpses washing up in the shallows. The ‘you’ after the war was just another dangerous stranger, to be avoided; above all never to be encountered alone and unarmed.

  Hastings wept when the rain sent mildew blooming across Susan’s photo, leaching the colour from her face, depositing a sick black stain there, a primitive totem; the Mark of Fate. It invaded his heart; took over its chambers one at a time. Insidious. Relentless. Shutting out the oxygen and the light. Hastings became the killer he was always meant to be. He even began to believe it was normal; this jungle suffering. But instead of killing, he should have been by her side, fighting to save her in the one place he thought she was safe: their hometown. After the war she broke his heart. He took his revenge, the only way he knew how. Then he ran and he hid. And he fell for a woman who was the opposite of Susan. He even thought he might be safe. But then came the Bannister case . . . One lousy break after another, driving him back towards the only job he ever did well. It was almost enough to make him believe in God. It sure as hell made him believe in the devil . . .

  Hastings and Roselli sat in silence in the sunshine. Every day was the same in LA, the city’s shadows slowly stalked, isolated, and killed under the tyrannous solar stare. Hastings believed in nocturnal amnesty. He had to hold out until the night, when the shadows rioted again, swarming in dark triumph. When the nicotine-yellow sky gave way to the jazz-blue heaven of despair. When he could sleep a few moments, imagining Susan still beside him. Pretending he hadn’t done what he’d done after she’d left him.

  He turned to Roselli. ‘So what’s it going to be?’

  Hastings saw the pulse of a lie working its way up Roselli’s neck. The impulse was enormous to end it right there, to slash Roselli’s neck and watch his body pulsing red whorls of rotten life into the swimming pool, the clients screaming and backing away, a bellboy choking back sobs as he called the police and tried to describe the scene over the phone, the dog still worrying the horizon with its bark. ‘Ambush. Sniper shot, like that Sinatra movie.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Soldier Field. Chicago. The Army-Air Force football game.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘November 2nd . . . ’ His eyes na
rrowed. ‘You said you were ready.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well, fucking A, no problems then. Alderisio will be along for the ride.’

  Felix ‘Milwaukee Phil’ Alderisio was Nicoletti’s cousin and the best cat burglar in the country. He was also a sick and brutal killer. A Chicago setup on home turf featuring kissing cousin sadists. He and Luchino would do the job and get clipped coming out by Nicoletti and Alderisio. The mad cousins would score a bonus and Roselli a commission on the six hundred grand and whatever advance money he could recover. Everyone would be happy, except Hastings and Luchino.

  Hastings finished his drink, masking his eyes behind glass and ice. If he told Luchino, the Corsican might flip and take out Nicoletti and Alderisio, and maybe Hastings for good measure. If Hastings pulled out, Roselli would make him an example to remember. Roselli had created the perfect trap without really meaning to.

  ‘Your plan . . . ’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘For starters, Chicago . . . ’ Hitting the President in Momo Giancana’s home town was crazy. It’d be his own death warrant. Whoever had chosen Chicago must have done so because they wanted to take out two institutions for the price of one: the Presidency and the Outfit. The mob knew Momo could never withstand the heat. Momo was a talker. Momo was a turner. They’d move in fast and take him out before he could open his mouth and scream, ‘State’s Evidence.’ Roselli too. They’d dice him up and feed him to the sharks. And then they’d turn on each other. It wasn’t just Chicago that was at play, it was all the Midwest, it was Kansas City and St. Louis; it was Detroit. It was Texas and the Mexican border. All that shit coming up from South America. It was LA and the whole West Coast. Most of all, it was Vegas. It’d end up a civil war: New York against Trafficante and Marcello, with Meyer Lansky sitting on the fence as usual, a carrion bird, waiting to suck the bones of the dead. Alliances would shift, betrayals would squirm through the bullet holes. The whole Five Families would be up for grabs. Then the conspirators would move in, clean up and take over. It was too big to fight. They were all dead, JFK included, unless he figured something out fast.