Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  This morning the deadly part had begun. His formal written report, covering everything in detail, had to be dictated and typed, then reviewed by his administrative superior, who would check and criticize, and finally sign the report and send it on to Washington.

  Len had notified the supervisor of the stenographic pool the day before that he would want to start dictation at nine in the morning on a report that would roughly take an hour. Since he and Connie had taken off the night before and neglected his home work, Len had come in at eight to organize his notes so when the girl arrived—as she would on the dot—he’d be ready to begin. At periodic intervals the stenographers were asked to report on various agents, regarding their organization of notes and whether their dictation was too fast or too slow.

  Len Ducro was blessed with an orderly mind and so far as the steno pool was concerned, he had received more orchids than punches to the chin.

  His report was finished at 9:45. The girl had just left when his telephone rang with a summons from Ed Waters. Len started checking himself for misdemeanors on his way to the office of the S.A.C. Usually you were on the carpet when summoned by the S.A.C. His trepidation vanished, for Ed Waters was smiling. Albeit the smile struck Len as cryptic, Waters greeted him cordially when he came in.

  “Sit down, Len.” Two years had taught Leonard Ducro to judge the temperature and depth of the hot water you were in by estimating the warmth and informality of Waters’ greetings. To be called just “Ducro” meant nothing worse than a delayed report—too many reports delayed from any one office and Washington started lighting a fire under the local S.A.C. The agents began to feel the burn immediately.

  “Mr. Ducro” was the worst. You’d made a blooper properly—lost your head, or let some important suspect shake you from a tail. Once you heard that opening, you didn’t leave Ed Waters’ office before the rug in front of his desk had been flaked with bits of your chewed-off skin.

  “Sit down, Len.” Special Agent Ducro took a chair and accepted a cigarette from Waters, feeling that for the moment the world was okay.

  “Have you closed the file on that Unison bankruptcy?”

  “Yes, sir. I just finished the report a few minutes ago.”

  Ed Waters’ level eyes studied Len’s broad shoulders, studious features, intelligent dark eyes that could glow with excitement, and nicely barbered black hair. “The police phoned me about you, Len.”

  “The police?” Lennie almost dropped his cigarette. He shifted uneasily in his chair.

  “Lieutenant Hutchins of the Safe and Loft Squad. Know him?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t. I hope I haven’t unwittingly gotten in his hair.”

  “Do you know Detective Sergeant Lawson?”

  “Yes, sir. We got into a hassel with a couple of goons in a warehouse—”

  “And you just happened in while Lawson, who had handcuffed one, was pinned under a crate with the other about to knife him. According to Lawson, you didn’t dare shoot for fear of wounding him, so you swarmed over the top of the crate, jumped this gorilla and took his knife away.”

  “I covered the incident in my report, Mr. Waters. I’m better than average at Judo. It really didn’t amount to anything.”

  “Washington seems to disagree, Len. The Monday meeting of the Executives Conference thought it amounted to something. Five hundred dollars’ worth to be exact. Here’s a check for you, and a personal note of commendation from the boss.” Waters pushed an envelope across his desk. “Don’t bother to thank me, Len. You earned it, or you wouldn’t have gotten it. We’ve already paid out over seventy-five thousand in those incentive awards this year. The Bureau rather likes that sort of thing. Now I have another assignment for you. This is ticklish and I don’t think you nor your wife are going to like any part of it.”

  “My wife? Connie?”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask her co-operation. I had a tip last night from a confidential source. There’s a patient in an institution called the Amity Rest Home, at Amityville, Long Island. He’s entered under the name of Igor Sandor. That may be an alias, or it may be real. If it’s an alias, Aaron Turlock is his actual name. He’s in Room 22 of the men’s section—a manic-depressive, supposedly undergoing electric shock treatment. He may be faking or really ill.”

  Lennie wrinkled his brow. “Where do I come in?”

  “You go in.” The S.A.C. leaned back in his chair. “This is an Internal Security Case. I got clearance last night from the Assistant Director in charge of Domestic Intelligence to enter you in the Amity Rest Home, tomorrow afternoon, as a patient. The doctor in charge of the home is a woman, Dr. Marian Rheinemann. She’s the ex-wife of Max Rheinemann, a stock broker. We don’t trust her, or him, so this is a clandestine type of investigation as you can see. We want everything you can get out of Sandor-Turlock to add to a raw file in Washington—not for admissible evidence. We don’t know how long it will take you, or what you can learn, but we want to give it a try.”

  Waters pushed two typewritten sheets across to Len. “Study these until you know them by heart. There’s one for your wife there, too. Any questions?”

  Lennie glanced at the sheets and his face reflected worry.

  “Connie is to drive me out there and make the necessary deposit?”

  Waters nodded.

  “How do you know I’ll be admitted? Suppose they’re full?”

  “They’re not,” the S.A.C. said briefly. “Dr. Harley H. Emerson, 720 Park Avenue, is your physician. He’s had you under his care for a year. You’re a reactive depressive. He’s making the necessary arrangements with Dr. Rheinemann today. You’ll pick up additional instructions from his office this afternoon—telling you exactly how to act and what to do.”

  “A reactive depressive! That’s a new one on me. I hope I can put this over. The idea of a booby hatch is enough to depress me.”

  “Wait until you’ve survived eighteen years of this picnic, Len. Once I spent a night in a straitjacket in with another maniac in a padded cell.” Waters grinned. “A reactive depressive is apathetic—not much interest in anything. You eat poorly. You sleep badly—prowl around the house at night. You’ve been losing weight. You sit in corners looking blankly at those around you and picking at your skin. At least that’s what Connie tells them when she enters you in. Dr. Emerson will undoubtedly have several more ideas for you.”

  “Such as a mild course of shock treatments?” He folded the instruction papers and creased them vigorously with his thumb nail. “My God, Mr. Waters, suppose they start me on those things—then what do I do?”

  “That’s an excellent expression you have on your face!” Ed Waters said. “You really do look slightly crazy. Relax, Len. They’re not giving shock treatments to you.”

  “Why not? In those places they often do.”

  “Unh-unh! Not to patients who have had shock treatments before and who suffered a fractured spine. They have no X-ray machine in Amity Rest Home to look at your spine. According to the X-ray pictures that Dr. Emerson is furnishing Connie to show Dr. Rheinemann, you have a fractured spine. You incurred it while you were taking shocks in an upstate sanitarium over a year ago.” Waters stood up in dismissal. “Skip your reports until you get out. I don’t think you can get to a phone. One of the doctors or orderlies will call your wife, if you ask him to. Maybe you’d better arrange some message to tell her when you’re ready to go home.”

  “What the hell will they do to me?” Len asked suspiciously.

  “Maybe wrap you in a few wet sheets if you start to get wild.” The S.A.C. stretched out his hand. “This whole deal will fall flat on its face if anyone smells the fact that you’re from the FBI. Good luck, Len!”

  “The only thing they’ll smell about me is the odor of stark unadulterated fear,” Len said as he shook the S.A.C.’s firm hand.

  Chapter Nine

  It wasn’t until he had been in Amity Rest Home for a couple of weeks and undergone the ordeal of four shock treatment
s that Igor Sandor began to think about his name.

  Perhaps he had made an error in letting Opal enter him under the name of Sandor when they had used the name of Turlock for so many years—Aaron Turlock. Opal was Mrs. Aaron Turlock, and Nikki had been born three years before under that name. Aaron had worked for Crescent Valves as Assistant Director of Production, and Mr. Philips knew him as Turlock. Bruno Vogl, the Production Manager, knew him as Turlock, as did everyone in the plant.

  Mr. Philips had told him and Opal about the Amity Rest Home after he—Aaron Turlock—had found that everyone was trying to kill him. There was nothing suspicious about that since the redheaded girl doctor was Mr. Philips’ daughter. She went by the name of Rheinemann, but that was really her married name.

  But wasn’t it ominous that she knew his real name was Igor Sandor, and advised him and Opal to use it when he entered the home?

  Very ominous! Fateful, even! Only the Russians could have told her. They had found it out somehow as they found out everything. Tortured it out of some pitiful wretch in Budapest. His brother, Zoltan? Who could tell? “Drink this, Zoltan. It’s warm and nice from your friends in the other cell. It’s all you’ll get until you tell us where Igor is and what name he uses in the U.S.A. See, it foams like beer.” You told anything and everything in the cellars of 60 Stalin Street—everything to the A.V.O.

  Someone had told. The letters had started coming to his house outside of Garden City. Igor Sandor, c/o Aron Turlock. “Everything is wonderful here now. Did you hear Khrushchev on the T.V.? Here’s a picture of me in my new suit. You are sure to get into trouble in the United States. They’ll find out what you’ve been doing there. Why don’t you and Opal bring Nikki back home and live with me? (Signed) Your brother, Zoltan Sandor.”

  Then the visits from the Embassy Under Secretary of the United Nations Delegations Headquarters on Park Avenue. “We’ll arrange for your transportation, Igor. You and your wife and little boy will be safe in our hands until you sail. We have full authority to aid all redefectors. Just leave it to me.”

  Everyone in the world against him. No home. No safety. No sanctuary. Letters: “They’ll find out what you’ve been doing there.” Opal against him. Nikki against him. No word from Opal in eight days now. She couldn’t tell what he’d been doing to save himself, and her and Nikki, and Zoltan. She didn’t know. How could she go to the FBI?

  Did the red-headed doctor know? What had he told when they strapped him down and blanked him out with electric shocks? He’d have to be doubly crafty now. Calm and crafty. Make his plans in secret. All of them might have to die!

  He must watch everyone and everything, and all the time he must watch his name. Aaron. Or Turlock. Or Aaron Turlock. If someone spoke it, or sometimes when he thought it, it was just as though two wires had touched each other and exploded a white electric shock inside his brain.

  The wires created a hot-shot spark that made him want to reply, but there was obviously something wrong with the circuit, possibly in the magnetic field that controlled the reflex motors in his brain.

  The dynamos weren’t running. Very tiring, that. Very wearying. Yet he knew about magnetic fields and dynamos and sparks and wires.

  It was much less effort and much more interesting just to concentrate on his name—Aaron Turlock—which wasn’t his name. Nor Opal’s name. Nor Nikki’s name.

  “Do you, Aaron Turlock, take this woman to be—?”

  “I do!”

  That was a long time in the past and it didn’t matter much anyhow. It was safer if he killed them both, except they had gone and he wouldn’t see them again.

  Everything was a long time in the past: Nikki being born. Opal couldn’t deceive him about Nikki. Nikki had been three years old on his last birthday. Not long enough ago to be long in the past, and forgotten.

  The pink frosted cake was still very vivid—a cake with three candles on it. Pouf! and all the candles were out and three wisps of smoke had combined into one and were trailing toward the ceiling with that smell, like when you dipped white hot metal into a barrel of oil to cool and temper.

  His errant thoughts had come back to machinery again. It was always machinery, the machinery of government, the machinery of ideology, the mechanics of thinking, breathing, and living. Machinery made you conscious of yourself and how superior you had grown to the others who wanted to crush and grind you.

  Machines that ran smooth and well oiled. Others that clanked, clattered, punched, and tore. Noise. Noise. Noise. Others worked so stealthily. Very quiet. Tearing splinters of flesh away, tearing brains apart as easily as they shattered pieces of steel.

  He was afraid of machinery, but he had never let them know. Opal had guessed it. That was why she’d persuaded him to come into this prison they called a home.

  Was he afraid of life? No, just the machinery of living. Certainly he had no fear of dying. No fear of God. No fear of hell. They’d robbed him of all those pleasant fears long years ago.

  There were many, many, pleasant ways of dying. But the unpleasant ways of staying alive were more unpleasant. Men could be reduced to screaming animals, chattering apes, empty faceless creatures like those confined with him now, and still kept alive.

  He’d return to his room and sit on the bed and think about the knife. That would get him away from the jailer in white who always wanted to play at chess. Such very bad chess. Igor Sandor could have beaten him without a Queen when Igor was just a boy. Even Aaron Turlock could beat him. Unless the jailer wasn’t trying. The jailers and the red-headed girl doctor were very sly. Aaron Turlock could see the jailer drawing closer now with that chess look in his eye.

  Now all the empty creatures around were watching how he’d get a cigarette from the jailer, let the jailer light it, and then escape to his room to think about the knife.

  What was he thinking about now?

  When you tried to remember what you wanted to remember you only remembered what you wanted to forget.

  Recsk! The prison at Recsk, outside of Budapest. They knew how to keep you alive at Recsk—alive while you stood on a single foot—alive while you stood against a wall holding a pencil between your forehead and the wall—alive while you squatted in excrement under the blinding lights that robbed all trace of night and day.

  Now when he tried to think of Aaron Turlock, and Opal and Nikki, he could only think about Recsk. He could think about Zoltan, but not about Zoltan’s mother and father. Not his mother and father. Aaron Turlock hadn’t betrayed them to the A.V.O. It was Igor Sandor, the machine-made communist manufactured in Recsk, who had told the truth about them. Igor, who couldn’t stand the tortures. Igor who had been made a jailer as a reward for betraying those two old enemies of the people—his mother and father—and allowed to watch them die.

  He would have to kill Nikki before he grew up and betrayed his parents. Better to kill Opal, too. Both of them had the name of Turlock, just as Turlock had had the name of Sandor when he was born.

  Forty years! Now he was thinking about being born. Yet he couldn’t remember Nikki being born. He couldn’t remember marrying Opal, nor why she’d betrayed him into this prison. A judgment! A Daniel come to judgment!

  You couldn’t kill yourself in Recsk and you couldn’t kill yourself in Amity Rest. There were jailers here just as cruel as the ones at Recsk. A Chief Interrogator, Dr. Crill, and the Prison Warden, the red-headed Dr. Rheinemann. A jailer named Dave. A jailer name Steve, who played at chess.

  The other prisoners just sat around and listened as he did. Sometimes they made so bold as to actually talk, and he’d manufacture monstrous lies knowing they were informers, all, and Dr. Rheinemann’s servile spies.

  There were still more prisoners kept in the security dungeons on the second floor. Women as well. He shut his ears to their tortured screams during the daytime, but at night he’d lie sleepless listening to their anguished howls—usually quickly stilled.

  Those released from security, women and men, ate together in one large ba
sement dining hall. Some of the more daring ones even talked together—right under the eyes and nose of the woman guard, Miss Kirby, who pretended to be kind.

  Igor Sandor could have told them that women wardens were the worst of all, more nasty, more brutal, more fiendishly sadistic than the men. He had broken bones from the women at Recsk—and a broken spirit. Nightmares of unspeakable indignities when he was made their naked cringing victim haunted him still.

  The harder he tried to forget, the more he remembered. Never talk to other prisoners. Never talk to anyone. Women guards are the torturers! All women are the torturers! Why had he ever married one?

  Sooner or later it might be Dr. Rheinemann who would break him down. He’d stolen a knife from right under Miss Kirby’s suspicious nose. It was taped with adhesive to the asbestos covering of the steam pipe in the corner of his room, wrapped round and round. You learned many things at Recsk—just how quiet a knife could be was only one. The day might come if the pressure increased when he’d teach that trick to Dr. Rheinemann.

  Opal knew what he could do with a knife. Maybe that was why she didn’t come.

  Dr. Rheinemann was always asking what he was afraid of—telling him there was nothing to fear. Then if he sat in stony silence thinking about his last night out with Opal, Dr. Crill, the Chief Interrogator, would appear.

  That meant a trip to the torture room. There while Dr. Rhinemann stroked his forehead, and rubbed his temples with soothing cream, while she muttered, “Just relax now, Mr. Sandor. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Dr. Crill and Miss Kirby would strap him down.

  How futile was resistance. He always relaxed as the red-haired warden told him. Inside he knew, that even with his broken bones, the day would come when he’d kill them all!

  Then he’d crawl back out of the darkness and start thinking again, just as he was doing now. The Crescent Valves plant. The blueprints. The machinery. The microfilms made so skillfully and passed on to him in hollowed out nickels and pencils, to be passed on to Kamilkoff on his next visit. Three nickels and a pencil he had now. And next week he must get out again. Opal must come and get him out, and the nickels and pencil must be passed back to Pringle, since Kamilkoff hadn’t come to call. Otherwise Pringle would come to him.