The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  There is, of course, always an afterwards and some are far better than others. This one was at first. We lay there in the tumbled sheets, not speaking, just breathing deeply while we each listened to the pound of our pulse. Finally, Carol stirred, rolled over on her side, and ran a fingertip down my chest. “I knew a girl once,” she said, “who was terribly afraid of dying until someone told her what death really was.”

  “What?”

  “One long orgasm.”

  “So she killed herself?”

  “No. She just took up parachute jumping, scuba diving, things like that. She’ll probably live to be a hundred.”

  The phone rang and I reached for it. “Is this Mr. Lucifer Dye?” the operator said.

  “Just a moment,” I said, crossed to the closet, slipped on the topcoat, and came back to the phone. “This is Mr. Dye.”

  “On your call to New York, we have Mr. Smalldane for you.”

  There was some more chatter while Smalldane’s secretary wanted to make sure that Mr. Dye was on the line and the long distance operator kept assuring her that I was. Smalldane came on in his usual style.

  “What do you want with an old fart like me?”

  “You’re not so old, Gorm,” I said.

  “I’m sixty-five and don’t you ever write?”

  “I’ve been in jail.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Not bad. Not as bad as Bridge House.”

  “How long?”

  “Three months.”

  He asked where and I told him.

  “What for?”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “You still with the spooks?”

  “They fired me.”

  “Good. You need some money? You want a job?”

  “I’m on a job.”

  “In Swankerton? That’s a horseshit town.”

  “So it seems.”

  “You know what it hit yesterday. It hit seventy-nine and it’s going up again today.”

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  “I told you to hang on to it. Hell, with that two-for-one split you’d have been worth almost a quarter of a million today.”

  “I was never intended to be worth a quarter of a million.”

  Smalldane switched to Cantonese. “Truly, you were destined to collect the wastes of cockroaches and turtles.”

  “It is unfortunate that old age is too often accompanied by the wisdom of a child.”

  “Huh,” Smalldane said and was silent for a moment. “That’s what they seem to think around here. You know what I am now? I’m chairman of the goddamned board. They booted my ass right upstairs. You sure you don’t want a job? I think we can use someone in the mail-room.”

  “Keep it open,” I said. “I may need it, but right now I need something else.”

  “What?”

  “You still run that executive check service for your clients?”

  “Sure.”

  “I need a few people checked out. I’ll even pay for it.”

  “You got something going down there that might be fun?”

  “I think so.”

  “You want some help?”

  “I just told you what I wanted.”

  “Shit, I’ll take care of that. I mean do you want some sage advice and wise counsel? I’m bored stiff.”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe.”

  “I can be there in six hours,” Smalldane said.

  “How long will it take you to run a check on these names?”

  “Forty-eight. We’ve got the FBI beat by twelve hours, but that’s because old man Hoover’s not sure that computers are here to stay. There’s one thing about him though that I like.”

  “What?”

  “He’s older than I am.” Smalldane’s tone changed. “Okay, Lucifer, just read off the names and I’ll get the rundown to you in forty-eight hours. What do you want, a full check?”

  “As much as you can get.”

  “Just read ‘em off.”

  “You’re taping?”

  “I’m taping,” he said.

  “First, Victor Orcutt, Los Angeles. President of Victor Orcutt Associates. Second, Homer Necessary.” I spelled it and gave the city where he was formerly the chief of police. “Third, Ramsey Lynch, Swankerton, that’s an alias. Real name is Montgomery Vicker. Spent some time in Atlanta. The Federal pen. Fourth, Cal—probably for Calvin— Loambaugh. I’ll spell it.” After I spelled it, I said. “He’s chief of police, Swankerton. Fifth and last, Miss Carol Thackerty, who’s from the same city that Necessary’s from.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Carol said.

  “What’s that—what’s that? You got a girl there, I can hear her.”

  “Her name’s Carol Thackerty.”

  “Well, you must have just screwed everything up royal,” Smalldane said.

  “I’d already done that.”

  “That’s all the names?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Forty-eight hours. I can either telex it to our New Orleans office and have somebody fly it over to you or I can call you back.”

  “Call me back and then we’ll decide.”

  “What do you have down there, Lu, something political?”

  “Partly.”

  “If you want an old fart’s help, let me know. I’m bored.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  “Fine,” I said and hung up.

  Carol Thackerty was sitting cross-legged on the bed and smoking a cigarette when I turned to her. She smiled at me, but all it contained were some very white teeth. “The fucking you get’s not worth the fucking you get, is it?”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Most have. Who was that?”

  “An old friend.”

  “So you’re checking us out?”

  “What you really mean is that I’m checking you out. You don’t give a damn about the others.”

  She shrugged and it made her breasts jiggle in an interesting manner. “You almost said that you would.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You don’t trust Orcutt?”

  “About as much as he trusts me. He didn’t pick my name out of the Yellow Pages.”

  “I’d be interested in what it will say about me. Have you ever seen one of those government reports that they write about people who they’re thinking of hiring?”

  “A few,” I said.

  “They throw in everything. Rumor, speculation, lies, conjecture, intuitive leaps—what have you. They’re all neatly typed up on little green-lined forms, although the typing’s not always so neat. Sometimes it looks like hunt and peck.”

  “Where did you see any?”

  “I had a friend once who was going after a government job. Federal. It was a presidential appointment. The FBI ran a check on him and this FBI type passed it to someone who passed it to me. Or a copy of it.”

  “How’d you know it was a green form?”

  “I don’t remember. He must have told me. But I remember what it said. It’s a wonder he got the job. It said he drank too much and played around and owed a lot of money.”

  “That’s called the raw, unevaluated report. It’s the FBI speciality. They don’t pass judgment, they just go out like a vacuum cleaner and sweep everything up and then dump it out.”

  “I wonder if they have one on me?”

  “Probably.”

  “Carol Portia Thackerty, twenty-six, born July 22, 1944, daughter of Lieutenant and Mrs. Ernest Thackerty of San Francisco. Lieutenant Thackerty killed in action, June 8, 1944, Omaha Beach. Mother proprietor of a fancy house, Monterey, California, 1946-1955. Known narcotics user. Died of cancer, July 4, 1955, Monterey General Hospital. Carol Portia Thackerty educated in private schools. Tuition paid by aunt, Ceil Thackerty, sister of late Lieutenant Thackerty. Aunt died, September, 1961. Niece, Carol Portia Thackerty, worked way through college, first as a call girl, second as owner of small motel specializing in teenage whores unti
l joining present firm of Victor Orcutt Associ ates. And that’s how a bad girl like me and so forth. Like it?”

  “I didn’t ask,” I said.

  “No. There’s that about you. You didn’t. Why?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You mean that I was a whore or why I did it?”

  “I don’t care about either. You wanted to go to college. You just didn’t want to go the hard way.”

  “And you think I should have?”

  “I don’t think anything. You haven’t got much of a white slave story, so the only thing I might be curious about is what you studied.”

  “Home economics,” she said, rose, and started to put on her clothes.

  I watched her dress. “You’ll find that Victor’s just what he says he is.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Then why all the bother?”

  “It only took a phone call.”

  “Why the topcoat?”

  “The what?” I said.

  “You were naked, but before you’d talk over the phone, you put on a topcoat.”

  “I never answer the phone naked.”

  “I like to,” she said.

  “So did I.”

  “But you don’t anymore?”

  “No.”

  She looked at me for a moment. “I think you’re a little weird after all.”

  “A little,” I said.

  “Where do you want it, on the dresser?”

  “What?”

  “Your twenty thousand I got from the bank this morning. By the way, Orcutt wants to see you at noon,”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, where do you want the money?”

  “On the dresser, honey,” I said. “I like to preserve the traditions.”

  CHAPTER 24

  They caught a Mutt and Jeff pair in Bonn who they thought might have raped and murdered my wife. It was in January of 1958 and I had just finished the training program that Section Two claimed would equip me to go out into the world and cope with the enemies of the Republic. I could divine a map, shoot a pistol with what everyone agreed was fair accuracy, and even use a knife should the occasion arrive. Not only that, but I could burgle a house or a flat with reasonable competency, defend myself unarmed against the neighborhood bully, and decipher a code or two. There were some other courses which were taught to the five of us who composed the class of ’57, and the instructors would usually preface their lectures with the phrase, “This may save your life.” But since there were no tests, only an evaluation by a board, I no more listened to the lectures than I did to those that I had endured while in basic infantry training at Camp Hood.

  Halfway through the course I received a written evaluation which I suppose was designed to shake me up a little. It noted that I was “inattentive” and “unmotivated,” whatever that meant. It didn’t bother me. They had spent close to twenty-six thousand dollars sending me to college for four years and they were buying that and my languages, not what I had learned in a six-month course in Maryland. I must have been graduated, if that’s the term, at the bottom of my class.

  Again it was Carmingler who told me about the pair in Bonn. He wore a greenish-gray tweed suit that day, which emphasized his flaming hair and once more I thought that he must be the world’s most conspicuous secret agent. “They fit the description you gave,” he said.

  “It wasn’t much of a description except that one was a little short and the other one was taller than that.”

  “There are a couple of other things that fit,” he said. “They’re East Germans and that’s where the colonel had been operating.”

  “Doing what?” I said.

  He ignored the question and didn’t even wince as much as usual. Carmingler had been on my evaluation board and in his appraisal had written that I had a “facile mind, but an unfortunately flippant attitude which bodes him ill.” Nobody but Carmingler could have written “bodes him ill.” He really should have been a major in a proper British regiment seconded to special operations during World War I. It would have made him extremely happy.

  “The other thing,” he said, “is that the pair removed someone in Bonn who had been working closely with the colonel.”

  “Removed?”

  “Eliminated.”

  “Killed?”

  “Yes, damn it.”

  “I won’t even ask who.”

  “Good.”

  “You want me to try to identify them?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” I said. “When do we leave?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  We flew from Baltimore to what was then still Idlewild and made the long prop flight to Gander and Scotland and London and finally to Cologne. Carmingler read books and documents and otherwise improved his mind during the trip. I stared out the window, drank what was offered, and slept. We didn’t talk much.

  We were met at the Cologne-Bonn airport by a driver with a black Opel Kapitan. It was one of those wet, nasty January days that the Rhine is so good at producing. The heater didn’t work in the Opel and when we finally got to where we were going I was chilled and irritable.

  It was an old brick warehouse that somehow had escaped the bombing, probably because it was built just outside of Cologne in a sparsely settled residential area. It hadn’t escaped completely, however, and I could see where shell fragments had torn into the brick leaving scars that still looked like pink scabs.

  “Ours?” I said.

  “Belongs to the British really,” Carmingler said.

  We went up a short flight of concrete steps, through a door, and down a hall that was covered with scuffed green linoleum. The walls were painted a dirty tan and some notices in German about what to do in case of an air raid were still thumbtacked up in several places. Carmingler seemed to have been there before and he walked briskly down the hall as if headed for the executive washroom. He stopped at the door that was half wood, half frosted-glass, knocked, and opened it before anyone said who is it or come in. He held it open for me and I entered into what once must have been Herr Direktors office. There was a carpet on the floor and a massive oak desk at one end of the almost square room. There was also a long table with nine or ten chairs around it that could have been used for meetings of the board or the staff. Some photographs of the Rhine decorated the tan walls, along with a calendar whose pages no one had turned since June, 1945. I suppose the British needed the calendar to remind them that they had really won the war.

  A man behind the desk rose as we entered and said, “Hullo, Carmingler.” They didn’t shake hands and Carmingler said, “Dye, Speke,” which may have set a record for short introductions.

  “Where are they?” Carmingler said.

  “In the cellar.” Speke was English.

  “Did your people do any good?”

  Speke nodded his head. “Some, but they both talked a lot of gibberish. Their English is excellent, you know, and they could pass as Americans. Both were P.O.W.s in Mississippi during the war. One even has what I’d venture is a slight Southern accent.”

  Carmingler looked at me and I shook my head. “They never said a word.”

  “Anything else?” Carmingler said.

  Speke looked down at his bare desk as if trying to remember. “We’re quite satisfied that they’re a team who’ve been operating out of the GDR since forty-nine or so. They admit that they did for a chap that we had in Hamburg in fifty-three and to a long list of other probables.”

  “They admit anything else?” Carmingler said.

  “Well, they could scarcely deny the Bonn thing after your people caught them in the act—or just after the act, since poor old Basserton was already dead.”

  “Political?” Carmingler asked, and I noticed that he was shaving his consonants and elongating his vowels more than usual. He always did that around the British.

  “No,” Speke said, “no we don’t think so any more than your people do. They’re professionals, no doubt of that. But their motiva
tion is exclusively money, not politics.”

  “What about before the war?”

  “They both claim that they were petty crooks in Berlin. It could be. They’ve got the accent and the argot. After they were sent back from the States and demobbed, they say that they drifted into this, although they are a little vague about how one drifts into the assassination profession.”

  “And despite the necktie they still deny having been back to the States?” Carmingler said.

  “What necktie?” I said.

  “One of them was wearing a tie with a Hecht Company label on it. The Hecht Company’s a Washington department store. We checked the tie out and it can’t be more than a year old.”

  “The one with the tie claims that he traded with a drunken American tourist in a Frankfurt bar,” Speke said.

  “Who paid them?” Carmingler said.

  “The same story they told your people. Some chap in Berlin whom they know only as Willi. They got two thousand marks each plus expenses.”

  “D’you think you’ve got everything out of them that you can?”

  Speke nodded. “I think so. We’ve been at them day and night for three weeks.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Your people did. We used—uh—other methods and after a while they talked readily enough.”

  “But not about Mrs. Dye?”

  “Curiously no. They don’t seem to mind confessing any number of political assassinations, but they were quite adamant in their denial that they had participated in a rape-murder.” He glanced at me. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “So you’re through with them?” Carmingler said.

  “Yes. I should think so.”

  “Dye needs to look at them.”

  “Quite.”

  We left the office and went down the hall to another door that opened onto a flight of stairs. The stairs led to a bricked cellar with a cement floor that ran underneath the entire length and breadth of the warehouse. At one end was a small room, not more than twelve by twelve. It was much newer than the rest of the building and had been constructed of cement blocks with a metal door that had a small opening covered with heavy iron mesh. Two men sat outside the door in wooden armchairs. They wore coats and sweaters and had an electric three-bar heater which was plugged into the double-socket of a bare bulb that hung overhead.