Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  Well, they couldn’t control Henry Lycoming’s secret thoughts. He wasn’t any Ukrainian peasant, depending on half a bushel of wheat from each acre he had sown and cultivated with his own backbreaking toil. He had ideas and a mastery of finance that powerful figures in the Comintern considered second to none. It was just too bad that some of those ideas were sprouting full fledged into poisonous flowers and turning what were doubts at first into firm convictions—that if a system was inherently false in itself, its managers had to be endowed from the top on down with feet of clay, and hearts of stone and heads of bone.

  His own situation was a case in point. He was a product of fallacious thinking. He had seen gold mined at the price of all else and had been told it was worthless, and then taught in the same breath that it was the only substance on earth of use to spread the Soviet doctrine by penetrating another nation’s economy. He had been teethed on the creed that capitalism was his country’s arch foe, and then turned into the greatest capitalist of them all to rout the enemy. Who in the world had the command of a tenth of the money that he had? Not even Onassis living on his yacht with the solid gold plumbing in Monaco.

  Then, after making him into an effigy of a capitalist who didn’t like capital, they steeped him in Americanism, isolated him for years in a closely guarded replica of a portion of New York City where he’d studied slang—Americanism, amateur and pro baseball and football, banking, economics, geography, history, city, county, state and country politics, restaurants and streets and the principal American cities, and transportation—until they considered him as he was supposed to consider himself a New Yorker to the manner born.

  So they’d made themselves a straw American who could pass with members of the N.A.M. or at a bankers’ convention, or talk with knowledge in home or bar about Perry Como, Althea Gibson, Stan Musial, the mid-East crisis, Satchmo, or Benny Goodman. Lycoming almost laughed out loud—they’d even taught him to think like one. But the biggest question these skillful trainers had blankly overlooked was: “What kind of a one?”

  The answer to that was the big black flaw in the perfect scheme: They’d taught him to think like an American Communist and the longer Lycoming stayed in the United States and followed its ways, the more he had learned to hate and despise the American Commie.

  They indeed to Henry Lycoming had exalted the cult of cravenness. They indeed were the men of straw. Not one could conceive the history of Russia that was part of Lycoming’s heritage. Not one in all his generations of ancestors had fought to grow some tiny blade of sustenance from the frozen stones of the Russian steppes. Not one had ever lain awake and heard the voice of a hundred babies wailing out their lives in hunger in some isolated hamlet. Not one had ever heard of wives and daughters seized as serfs and hustled off to the city brothels. Nor had their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents ever writhed under a Cossack’s knout or been crushed like a roach beneath the heel of some tyrannical Czar.

  Parents of horror had fathered the system that held Russia in its hands today. Its father had been drunk on blood and its mother weak with rape and terror. But the monster had grown. No one but the Russian people themselves would ever be able to tell the world whether their lives were better or worse. The outcome had been inevitable. Only time could show if anything saved from a bubbling bog of putrefying ignorance and suffering was worth the saving, or if a rescuer’s methods had been right or wrong.

  Whatever the answer, the Russian leaders at least were trying to save themselves and the system created by their country’s tragic history. Not so the American Communist. They were a brainless bunch of doodlebugs trying to delude the world and themselves by spouting all the patriotic clichés. They’d followed false gods and become so twisted that their meaningless manufactured jargon had finally assumed to them the sanctity of a prayer.

  Lycoming had some small sympathy for the Communists of Italy and France and Korea and Red China for they had suffered and known war and privation, and the bulwarks of their political systems were weak and shaky. For the American Communist Party he had built up only hatred. They had befouled their own nest and had no pride left, except pride in their deception, fraud, subterfuge, chicanery and double-dealing. They were lower than rats and more brainless. Rats didn’t gnaw holes through the hull of a sturdy ship and sink their own home.

  Lycoming spat to get the taste out of his mouth as he entered the hotel. In his suite he showered and poured himself a drink of Bourbon and downed it straight. He put on a less conspicuous suit, glanced out the window and grimaced. The sky was darker, the storm growing closer. He was going to have a lot of driving and walking, too—he could feel it in his bones. He lit a cigarette and eased himself down into the chair and turned his thoughts to Pringle.

  Pringle was his superior—that had been made very clear. Pringle had more contact with the men high up. Nevertheless, Pringle distrusted them—of that Lycoming was sure. Maybe they disgusted him as much as they did Lycoming—Pringle wouldn’t be the man to say—he’d work them and use them and play on their every weakness to further his own ends, then remorselessly discard them once they’d served their purpose. He’d do the same to Lycoming if pushed too far or threatened with danger. He’d proved already that he’d kill. Even in America Pringle couldn’t shunt the trappings of the typical MVD.

  Pringle was either better trained than he was or just naturally more wary. Maybe he knew more than Lycoming did about the machinations of American guardians of the country’s security—particularly the FBI.

  Certainly Pringle trusted no one—not even himself, Lycoming thought. It was a major operation of intrigue and subterfuge to contact him by phone. When it came right down to meeting Pringle in person, it was akin to dating a female werewolf in a witches’ glen.

  It was twenty to six. Lycoming went out without his raincoat, intending to return. He couldn’t tell what he might need right now. He walked uptown two blocks and then west over to Madison. There were two doors to the drugstore—a main entrance on Madison and a rear door on 56th Street.

  Lycoming went in the rear one which was close to the three telephone booths. Two of them were occupied—the one he wanted was vacant—the one with the number PL 6-9102. It was five minutes to six. He went into the booth, found a dime, and dialed the Hotel Beauchamps. When he got it, changing his voice slightly, he asked the operator to ring his suite. By the time she had reported that Mr. Lycoming wasn’t in and asked if there was any message, please, it was a few seconds off the appointed hour.

  He sweated it out until four minutes past six, getting more and more apprehensive when no call came. He was about to leave the booth and stand outside when he noticed that a girl was partially blocking the door, deeply intent on a copy of Look magazine with the cover turned toward Lycoming.

  Covering the movements of his left hand by holding his hat in his right hand, Lycoming reached in under the shelf and found an envelope fastened there with a thumbtack. He detached it, took a glance that showed him the thumbtack was red, and slipped both tack and envelope into his coat pocket, put his hat back on, opened the door, stepped out, bumping gently into the girl.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t notice you.”

  But he had noticed her very definitely. She had on a transparent hood-slicker. Her hat and dress and shoes were flaming red.

  “It’s all my fault,” the girl said quickly. “I’m waiting here for my boy friend. All I do is stand around every evening and wait and read magazines, and by the time he gets here I’m so darn mad I don’t know what I’ve read.”

  “Well, then everything’s okay with us both,” Lycoming said.

  In the adjoining booth Special Agent Calvin Lynch was talking now into the telephone through communications—to agents Henderson and Lewis parked in a baby-blue Ford halfway up the block on Madison. “He’s all yours, Henderson. He just went out the front door. No telephone call. … No, I don’t believe Vanazzia blabbed—he was too scared and he’s a real good loyal Amer
ican. If I thought he’d blabbed I’d go out there personally and punch him one on the head.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A mid-July thunderstorm hit before Lycoming got back to the hotel, dashing down raindrops the size of half dollars. He had to run for it, the last half block on 54th Street, and shake himself like a shaggy dog, once he was under the canopy. Even at that he got a drenching. Lightning was flashing and thunder reverberating over the city when he got up to his suite. It was only twenty past six, but the violent storm had cheated daylight saving time and it was already dark outside.

  Lycoming stripped off his dampened suit, put it on a hanger and fixed himself another straight drink. He pulled down the window shades, turned on the reading light and, in shorts and shirt, sat down in the easy chair and ripped open the envelope that had been thumb-tacked under the shelf in the telephone booth. His hands were steady but he was trembling inside as he read the note typed on a cheap piece of paper.

  “You’re being watched—your hotel rooms and your office are probably bugged, and the phone’s tapped—you’re using phone booths too close to your hotel and office, and some of your booth calls are being picked up by induction mikes. Pick booths that are farther away and as close as you can find them to a neon sign in the window of a store or bar—the interference from the sign will make it impossible to record what you’re saying, or what’s being said to you. Choose places with only a single booth—never two or three. Don’t do anything to remedy this or show that you’re suspicious. Just be doubly careful.

  “Now: Take a taxi down Lexington to Grand Central terminal. Go in the Lexington Avenue entrance, walk through to the station, and buy a ticket for Pawling. Go in the drugstore and make a purchase. Come out on 42nd Street. Walk to the corner of Vanderbilt and go back into the station again. From the station go into the subway and catch a shuttle train to Times Square. Change to the BMT, get off at 34th Street, and walk through the Gimbel tunnel to the Long Island station. Buy a ticket for Jamaica. Take the next train and get off at Forest Hills. Walk to the nearest subway station and take the subway back in town to the Pennsylvania station. If you think you’ve been thoroughly dry-cleaned, buy a ticket to Philadelphia and take the nine o’clock (daylight saving time) train. Buy some magazines, be reading, and get off suddenly at Trenton. Take a cab to the Delaware Hotel. Ask for Whit Seymor in Room 317. He’ll say, ‘Hank—wonderful! I’ll be right down,’ when you get him on the house phone. He’ll take ten minutes while you’re waiting in the lobby. He has a front room and will check out of the window to see that no cars have stopped anywhere, and that everything looks clean. You watch for cabs that might pull up. Keep an eye on anyone who comes in. When Seymor gets off the elevator he’ll be carrying a copy of Redbook magazine. You say: ‘I’m sorry I’m late, Whit.’ He’ll say: ‘Well, I was wondering where you’d been.’ He’ll take you where you want to go—just leave it to him.”

  Lycoming read through the note a second time, then tore it up with the envelope and flushed it down the toilet, sending the red thumbtack with it.

  Typical security tactics of the American Communist underground, he thought morosely as he hurried into another suit. Maybe with just a few added touches from the fine hand of the MVD. He shuddered at the thought of spending an hour, maybe longer, riding trains and the hot, smelly subway. He had to admit that somewhere along the line he’d slipped—gotten himself as dirty as a pair of grease-monkey’s overalls. Bugs in his room and his office! No wonder Pringle was sending him to the dry-cleaners before their meeting. The FBI must have been close enough to snap pieces out of his tail.

  Yet all the fault couldn’t be laid on him—he was a business man fighting an international economic war, a penetrator of industries, a manipulator of the stock market, a financial saboteur. But take a look at any of the big international tycoons—weren’t they all? He hadn’t been trained in that back-alley doubling stuff as Pringle had, and heaven knows he didn’t want to be. The farthest desire from his heart was to become a master spy.

  But he’d have to obey his orders now, no matter how distasteful. Pringle was the boss. He was also bad news. He’d have no tolerance for what he’d be sure to term Lycoming’s carelessness. There’d be swift retribution if Lycoming turned up at the Delaware Hotel in Trenton accompanied, a couple of blocks in the rear, by some inconspicuous member of the FBI. He didn’t intend to.

  He slipped into an expensive, dark-blue, belted raincoat, went downstairs and five minutes later had caught a taxi headed down Lexington. In the cab he considered cutting a few corners, but immediately decided against it. Pringle’s instructions had been too specific. There’d undoubtedly be some rear guard comrades spotchecking at various points along the circuitous journey to make sure that Lycoming was free of his tail.

  He might not be as well trained as Pringle, but he knew quite a few tricks of his own and, since he’d been warned, he decided tonight to use them all.

  He paid off the cab, started in the entrance to the station, then stopped and turned right and stood in the rain, staring into the window of a book store, watching cars whiz by in back of him. One disturbed him—a baby-blue Ford that was moving too slowly—it could have made the light at 42nd Street with half a try. As it was, it stopped.

  Lycoming stayed watching until the red light turned green and the Ford turned right around the corner onto 42nd Street. Then he dashed around the corner after it to watch.

  It kept on going and so did Lycoming—Pringle wasn’t the only one who’d had a course in trailing tactics of the FBI. He had a sneaking idea that a car parked between 42nd and 43rd, that his taxi had passed, also contained a couple of agents.

  If that was true, he’d been sandwiched—one car in front and one car in back, talking back and forth to each other. One thing they didn’t lack for was men in automobiles in the New York FBI—it was most discouraging.

  A man had come around the corner after him. Lycoming stopped and looked in another window until he saw the reflection of the man go by. He figured quickly—one man had been left around on Lexington to stake out the station door, the other had followed him around the corner. The baby-blue Ford, still running too slowly to suit Lycoming, had just passed Vanderbilt Avenue.

  Lycoming turned away from the window and started walking at a normal pace after the man he’d marked down as one of the enemy. Then, without any altering of his pace, he stepped through the street door into the crowded air-conditioned Hotel Commodore bar. The door at the back led into Grand Central Station—another door to his left led up steps into the lobby of the big hotel. Lycoming took the left-hand door, scuttled up the steps, crossed the lobby and went up another flight. There a door led out on to the Park Avenue ramp far above the street. There was a cab stand there, but no cabs on it—not at that time of the evening and in a rain.

  Then Lycoming got a break—a cab swooped in and discharged a fare. Lycoming hopped in before the driver’s flag was up, said, “House of Chan restaurant, 52nd Street and 7th Avenue,” and huddled back in a corner. The driver lifted the meter flag to clear the old fare and pushed it down again. They moved down the ramp to Park Avenue, and for a few minutes Henry Lycoming breathed freely again.

  Still he was taking no chances—at the House of Chan, without going inside, he waited until his cab moved off, and finally flagged another one. He left it at 42nd Street and went down into the BMT and began to follow instructions to the letter—leaving the subway train at the very last minute, holding the door open and jumping off, stooping over to tie his shoe in the Gimbel tunnel, then straightening up suddenly and looking in back to see if anyone was following.

  Worn out, soaked through, and miserable from his journey to Forest Hills on the train and back on the subway, he caught the nine o’clock train to Philadelphia from the Pennsylvania station and dashed off of it at the very last minute at Trenton.

  There, to his disgust, he found it hadn’t been raining—it was just insufferably warm. Feeling that his raincoat would attra
ct attention, as well as broil him alive, he put it in a locker in the station. He was hoping against hope, as he doubtfully pocketed the key, that Seymor wouldn’t drive him to Newark airport to catch a plane to Chicago where he could contact Pringle in the morning.

  It was twenty minutes to eleven when he contacted Whit Seymor at the Delaware Hotel. The Delaware was a quiet residential hotel on the outskirts of Trenton, not far from the river. Nobody came or went in the lobby during Lycoming’s ten-minute wait, and not more than half a dozen cars passed on the isolated road. Apparently, for the moment, Henry Lycoming’s strenuous efforts had been worthwhile. He had shampooed the omniscient sleuthhounds of the FBI out of his hair and was clean as a—he had to search his mind for a simile. He didn’t like either “hound’s tooth” or “whistle”—they were far too reminiscent of the hot breath of bloodhounds and the whistles of pursuing minions of the law.

  Whit Seymor appeared promptly from the elevator at ten minutes to eleven, carrying his Redbook. The proper exchange of recognition, just as they had on the house telephone, passed between him and Lycoming without a flaw. They went out together and walked around the hotel to a parking lot where a sign on a thin pole, with an unshaded electric bulb at the top, read: For Guests Only.