by Ross Thomas
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
Also by Ross Thomas
The Cold War Swap
The Seersucker Whipsaw
Cast a Yellow Shadow
The Singapore Wink
The Backup Men
The Porkchoppers
If You Can’t Be Good
The Money Harvest
Yellow-Dog Contract
Chinaman’s Chance
The Eighth Dwarf
The Mordida Man
Missionary Stew
Briarpatch
Out on the Rim
The Fourth Durango
Twilight at Mac’s Place
Voodoo, Ltd.
Ah, Treachery!
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
Ross Thomas
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE FOOLS IN TOWN ARE ON OUR SIDE. Copyright © 1970 by Ross E. Thomas, Inc. Introduction © 2003 by Tony Hiss. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas, Ross, 1926–1995.
The fools in town are on our side / Ross Thomas.—1st St. Martin’s
Minotaur ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-31582-1
1. Gulf Coast (U.S.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.H58F66 2003
813′.54—dc21
2002191953
First published by William Morrow & Co., Inc., in 1971
D 1 0 9 8 7 6 5
Introduction
by Tony Hiss
It feels strangely out of sequence to be reintroducing Ross Thomas to American audiences since only eight years ago, at his death, he was a revered and enduring master among thriller writers.
Back in the mid-1990s, when cell phones were big and rare and used only for emergencies, all twenty-five of Thomas’s books, which had been appearing almost annually between 1969 and 1994, were in print, and selling well; then-President of the United States Bill Clinton told reporters, “I love Ross Thomas"; and for almost two decades new titles by this two-time Edgar Award winner had been pounced on by critics eager to praise: “The arrival of a new Ross Thomas mystery is an event combining elements of both Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras, creating alternative fits of solemn praise and uncontrollable glee.”
Still, the world has moved on, and so many new bad things have happened since 1995 that the Cold War years Thomas chronicled so brilliantly and mockingly have started to seem far tamer than they were. As “orphans of the Cold War"—Thomas’s own phrase, in an interview he gave during the last year of his life—his books have been slipping out of print, even though, as Thomas was quick to point out, “fraud and double-dealing for political or personal advantage are age-old themes that will not become extinct.” He could have added that great writing is great writing, and that Dickens’s novels weren’t remaindered just because people had stopped fighting the Crimean War.
The flip side of this country’s increasingly dysfunctional short-term memory loss is a chance to “rediscover” a writer whose light still shines brightly. Thomas, like Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler, was able to distill the postwar disillusionment of an entire generation of Americans. For Twain it was the wretched excesses of the Gilded Age after the Civil War, while Chandler got to write about staying honest during the Great Depression sandwiched in between World Wars I and II. Thomas came on the scene after America controlled half the world— and lost half its soul.
Generational links are often only symbolic (the title of The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, for instance, was adapted from Huckleberry Finn) but, according to Thomas, Raymond Chandler once helped save his life. In a short piece Thomas wrote for the Washington Post Sunday “Book World” section in 1984 that has somehow been retrieved by a small German Web site—www.crime-corner.de/autoren-rossthomas. html (so far, the only Web site dedicated to Thomas’s writings)—he remembered that, “One hour and thirty-five minutes before we were to land on the beach of an island in the Philippines called Cebu, the first scout handed me something called Farewell My Lovely by someone called Raymond Chandler. It was January of 1945, and 1 was eighteen.”
This, by the way, is a typical, even a classic Ross Thomas lead: laconic, spare, and fully accelerated from the outset; anchored in time and space and yet seen from afar; unsentimental, but so passionately interested in the possibilities that the next moment may bring some thing new, that he’s willing to give any character, even himself, the benefit of the doubt. (He was famous for not knowing how a book would turn out when he sat down to write it.)
“The title,” Thomas’s Chandler story continued, “sounded as if it could have been thought up by the American equivalent of Agatha Christie, whose works to this day I cannot read. Imagine my surprise, as Dame Agatha might say, when I opened it to discover Philip Marlowe over on that mixed Central Avenue block in east Los Angeles. I lost the half-read Marlowe book on the beach just after the first scout was killed. I took over the dead man’s job, and spent 109 days on the line wondering who Velma really was. In the midst of the heat and the fear and the dying, I decided I needed to be Philip Marlowe safely back in Los Angeles in that palmy year of 1940—in a time that would never change. It was a harmless enough notion that probably kept me sane.”
There is a biting, bracing wind blowing through Thomas’s books, sometimes at gale force, sometimes only stirring at the curtains, a kind of healing bleakness. (He was planting a clue to this bedrock quality, I’ve always thought, in the one pseudonym he chose for himself: Oliver Bleeck.) The underlying tonic in Thomas’s books—his lesson plan for transcending the intolerable—isn’t pushed forward, and many readers may find themselves content in simply taking pleasure from his immense storytelling gifts, which dazzle all the more because they are so seemingly tossed-off (the hard work, carefully concealed, was in fact continuous; as Thomas once confessed to an interviewer, “I rewrite virtually everything, even notes to the guy who delivers the bottled water”).
The Fools in Town showcases all his talents and hard-won effortlessness. As a scene-setter, Thomas instantly conjured richly detailed milieus on every continent (well, not Antarctica); the relentlessly drawn, full-scale portrait in this book of a corrupt Southern city almost creates a new genre—that of “investigative storyteller.” There were his endlessly inventive, eel-twisty plots; his flawlessly cadenced, movie-sharp dialogue; and the strengths and clevernesses of the complex, devious, hard-pressed, often disgraced, and frequently arrestingly named characters that he hurtles into nonstop action. (If you’ve ever wished for a book never to end, The Fools in Town comes close, with enough interlocking plots to stockpile a newly formed small country through its first ten years of literary production; the various adventures of Lucifer C. Dye, Gorman Smalldane, and Homer Necessary take more than thirty-five years to play themselves out.)
A tour de force to end all tours de force—an Eiffel tour de force. Yet at the core of the book is something else again, since, for those who want to think about it, it raises, and offers an answer to, an unexpected question: What can you hope to find when you have only yourself to fall back on? An indelible scene near the beginning of the book describes the brutal Japanese bombing of Shanghai in August 1937, and according to that German Web site, it was written only after Thomas had scoured one hundred obscure memoirs of the incident, mostly by retired Europ
ean civil servants. The picture he leaves you with is of a four-year-old American boy (Dye) clinging to the severed hand and wrist of his father, still with its wristwatch. Thomas is telling us to look always, at the same time, both at and beyond the immediate. The suggestion resonates in the body of another character, Homer Necessary, a hard-bitten ex-police chief, who has one brown eye, one blue eye.
All in all, an enormously rewarding, complicated book, that can be read for its exuberance or its sobriety. Either way, it lingers in the mind and soul. As reintroducers love to say, you’re in for a real treat.
Welcome to Bleeck House.
Hain’t we got all the fools in town
on our side? And ain’t that a big
enough majority in any town?
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
The debriefing took ten days in a sealed-off suite in the old section of the Army’s Letterman General Hospital on the Presidio in San Francisco and when it was finished, so was my career—if it could be called that.
They were polite enough throughout, perhaps even a bit embarrassed, providing that they felt anything at all, which I doubted, and the embarrassment may have prompted their unusual generosity when it came to the matter of severance pay. It amounted to twenty thousand dollars and, as Carmingler kept saying, it was all tax-free so that really ran it up to the equivalent of twenty-eight or even thirty thousand.
It was Carmingler himself who handed me the new passport along with the certified check drawn on something called the Brookhaven Corporation. He did it quickly, without comment, much in the same manner as he would shoot a crippled horse—a favorite perhaps, and when it was done, that last official act, he even unbent enough to pick up the phone and call a cab. I was almost sure it was the first time he had ever called a cab for anyone other than himself.
“It shouldn’t take long,” he said.
“I’ll wait outside.”
“No need for that.”
“I think there is.”
Carmingler produced his dubious look. He managed that by sticking out his lower lip and frowning at the same time. He would use the same expression even if someone were to tell him it had stopped raining. “There’s really no reason to—”
I interrupted. “We’re through, aren’t we? The loose ends are neatly tied off. The crumbs are all brushed away. It’s over.” I liked to mix metaphors around Carmingler. It bothered him.
He nodded slowly, produced his pipe, and began to stuff it with that special mixture of his which he got from some tobacco shop in New York. I could never remember the shop’s name although he had mentioned it often enough. He kept on nodding while he filled his pipe. “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”
“No,” I said, “you wouldn’t. But I would and that’s why I’ll wait outside.”
Carmingler, who loved horses if he loved anything, which again was doubtful, rose and walked around his desk to where I stood. He must have been forty or even forty-two then, all elbows and knee joints and what I had long felt was a carefully practiced, coltish kind of awkwardness. The flaming hair that stopped just short of being true madder scarlet half-framed his long narrow face, which I think he secretly wanted to resemble a horse. It looked more like a mule. A stubborn one. He held out his hand.
“Good luck to you.”
Sweet Christ, I thought, the firm handshake of sad parting. “By God, I appreciate that, Carmingler,” I said, giving his hand a brief, hard grasp. “You don’t know how much I appreciate it.”
“No need for sarcasm,” he said stiffly. “No call for that at all.”
“Not for that or for anything else,” I said.
“I mean it,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Sure,” I said and picked up the new plastic suitcase that failed utterly in its attempt to resemble cordovan. I turned, went through a door, down a hall, and out onto the semicircular drive where a pair of chained-down mortars that had been made in 1859 by some Boston firm called C.A. & Co. guarded the flagpole and the entrance to Letterman General Hospital, established 1898, just in time for the war with Spain. In the distance, there was Russian Hill to look at.
The cab arrived ten minutes later and I placed the bag in the front seat next to the driver. He turned to look at me.
“Where to, buddy?”
“A hotel.”
“Which one?”
“I haven’t thought about it. What do you suggest?”
He looked at me some more with eyes that were too old for his acolyte’s face. “You want high-priced, medium high-priced, or cheap?”
“Medium.”
“How about the Sir Francis Drake?”
“Fine.”
He let me off at the Sutter Street entrance and the desk clerk gave me a room on the seventeenth floor with a view of the Bay Bridge. I unpacked the new plastic suitcase they had given me and hung the two suits and the topcoat in the closet. I was wearing one of the three new suits, the gray one with the small, muted herringbone weave. It had a vest, as did the other two, and I suspected that Carmingler himself must have chosen them. He always wore vests. And smoked a pipe. And fiddled with his Phi Beta Kappa key.
I had been mildly surprised that everything fitted so well until I remembered that they had my exact measurements on file, had had them, in fact, for eleven years and even required new ones every January 15th on the off-chance that I might have developed a penchant for sauce-soaked noodles and ballooned out by thirty pounds or so, or even grown too fond of the bottle, given up eating, and dropped unhealthfully below my normal 162½ pounds. They always wanted everything exact. Height, 6′ ¼″. Neck, 15¼". Chest, 41½″. Waist, 32¾. Arm, right, 34¼. Arm, left, 34". Shoe 10-B with a double-A heel. Hat, 7¼. But they hadn’t bought me a hat, just the three suits to replace the gray cotton, pajamalike prison uniform that I had arrived in, plus a top coat and six shirts (all white, oxford cloth, all button-down collars—Carmingler again); six pairs of calf-length socks (all black); one pair of shoes: black, plain-toed, pebble-grained and expensive; six pairs of Jockey shorts; one belt, black alligator, and four ties (awful).
I estimated that it had cost them around seven or eight hundred dollars. Less than a thousand anyhow. If I’d been more important, they might have gone as high as fifteen hundred, but what they had spent accurately reflected my former niche in the hierarchy. It also reflected their fussy conviction that no ex-colleague, regardless of how wretched or ignominious, should be shunted into the real world unless he were properly (if not richly) attired.
The contents of the closet and the bureau were my sole possessions other than the new passport and the check for $20,000. I also owned a renewed aversion, or perhaps only antipathy, toward the word debriefing, but that didn’t have any cash value.
After the clothing was stored away I called down to the desk to find out the time and where the nearest bank was and whether it was open. I had no watch. It had been taken from me at the prison, at that damp, sweating, gray stone structure that the British had erected almost a century ago. When I was released after three months, nobody had ever heard of the watch. I hadn’t really expected to get it back, but I had asked anyway.
The man at the desk said the nearest bank was just up the street, that it was now 12:36, that the bank was open, and that if I didn’t have a watch I could look out the window at an insurance building whose flashing tower sign would tell me not only the time, but also the temperature. I told the man at the desk to send up a bottle of Scotch.
When the sad-faced bellhop handed me the bill for the whisky, I was surprised at its cost.
“It’s gone up,” I said.
“What hasn’t?”
“Talk,” I said. “It’s still cheap.”
I signed the bill, adding a twenty percent tip, which made the bellhop happy, or at least a little less morose. After he left I mixed a drink and stood by the window gazing out over the city
with its bridge in the background. It was one of those spectacularly fine days that San Francisco manages to come up with sometimes in early September: a few quiet clouds, an indulgent sun, and air so sparkling that you know somebody’s eventually going to bottle it. I stood there in my room on the seventeenth floor and sipped the Scotch and stared out at what was once touted as America’s favorite city. Maybe it still is. I also thought about the future, which seemed to offer less than the past, and about the past, which offered nothing at all. Carmingler had seen to that.
I finished the drink and went in search of the bank, which turned out to be a branch of Wells Fargo. One of its minor officers, a young man with a handlebar mustache, seemed busily idle so I told him I wanted to open a checking account. The mustache jiggled a little at that and I assumed that the jiggle was a smile of welcome or at least acquiescence. A nameplate on his desk said that he was C. D. Littrell and I tried to remember whether I had ever seen a bank official with a handlebar mustache before and decided that I hadn’t except in some old Westerns and then he had usually turned out to be a crook. But this was Wells Fargo and perhaps its traditions encouraged handlebar mustaches.
After I sat down Littrell produced some forms and the forms contained questions to which I would have to think up some answers. I decided to tell the truth when convenient and to lie when it wasn’t.
“Your full name?” Littrell said.
“Dye, D-y-e. Lucifer C. Dye.” The C stood for Clarence but I saw no sense in mentioning that. Lucifer was bad enough.
“Your address?”
Another good question. “Temporarily the Sir Francis Drake.”
The mustache twitched slightly and this time I knew it wasn’t a smile. Littrell looked up from his writing and stared at me. I returned his gaze, gravely, I hoped.