Operation Bamboozle
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Authors: Derek Robinson
OPERATION BAMBOOZLE
Derek Robinson
An imprint of Quercus
New York ⢠London
© 2010 by Derek Robinson
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ISBN 978-1-62365-328-6
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual personsâliving or deadâevents, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Novels by Derek Robinson
THE R.F.C. TRILOGY*
Goshawk Squadron
Hornet's Sting
War Story
THE R.A.F. QUARTET*
Piece of Cake
A Good Clean Fight
Damned Good Show
Hullo Russia, Goodbye England
THE DOUBLE AGENT QUARTET**
The Eldorado Network
Artillery of Lies
Red Rag Blues
Operation Bamboozle
OTHER FICTION
Kentucky Blues
Kramer's War
Rotten with Honour
NON-FICTION
Invasion 1940
*Available from MacLehose Press from 2012/13
**To be published in ebook by MacLehose Press
To Juan Pujol
Codenamed “Garbo” by MI5, arguably the best double agent of
World War Two, whose achievements led me to write
“The Eldorado Network” and its sequels, including this book.
Enough Dead Cowboys To Fill Boot Hill
Tap-Dancing Through the Calendar
Marriage Ain't Like Buyin' Shoes
1
For a man who had been hauled out of Lake Michigan in 1949, headless, his legs and arms broken, and stabbed in the heart with a red ballpoint pen, Frankie Blanco was in pretty good shape in 1953.
Identification hadn't been easy. Forget dental records. Fingerprints had gone too: eaten by the fishes, maybe. But one helpful mark survived. On the left buttock was a faint tattoo of a snarling dragon.
As a kid, Frankie Blanco had run with a Chicago street gang, the Flames, and that was their badge. The gang had been small and unlucky, and soon Blanco graduated to more ambitious, better organized crime, a wise move because the other Flames all died young.
Chicago PD fished the body out of the lake and showed pictures of the faint tattoo to Blanco's known associates, including ex-girlfriends, a masseur, and a steam-bath attendant. All agreed; this was Frankie, last of the Flames. That was good enough for the coroner and he released the body. It was interred in St. Luke's graveyard (then the last restingplace of choice for the Mob in Chicago's South Side), the headstone bearing the simple epitaph:
Not Forgotten.
This begged the question, remembered for what? Frankie Blanco was a fat and happy whacker. Tell him, whack this guy, the guy got whacked. Hobbies were simple: comic books and hamburgers. So he fell in the lake, so his head got lost, maybe chewed off by the screw of a passing freighter. So Frankie got screwed. What's not to forget?
After a decent intervalâtwo, three daysâthe word began to circulate. Blanco sang. He had talked to the Reds, shared his memories of multiple homicides committed by numerous colleagues. Names, dates, places, who ate what at which restaurant afterward. He sang like a canary. Arrests began. Somebody put two and two together and made Blanco; and soon Blanco made a hole in Lake Michigan. Nobody claimed credit, and nobody asked. The job was pro bono publico. And that red ballpen through the heart? Suicide. A guy killed by his own words.
In fact the body was that of a drunk who reckoned his pickup could beat a freight train to a crossing and lost by a length. Nobody claimed the remains, and the FBI took them. Similar height and build to Frankie. The locomotive had clipped the head off when the drunk went through the windscreen, so that was a bonus. The Bureau hired a tattoo artist who cut the strength of his ink and made a faded dragon on the left cheek, twenty-five dollars including tax. Then, into the lake, wearing nothing but clean underwear.
While the dragon was growing soft and wrinkled, the FBI smoothly relocated the real Frankie Blanco to the little town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and renamed him Floyd Boyd. He hated his new name. “Sounds like a bit part in a bum Western,” he said to the Agent who escorted him.
“That's good. That's exactly what you are, Floyd. Play dumb, stay sober, blend in.”
Frankie walked to the window and creaking floorboards walked with him. A small dust-devil tried to spin down the street but the effort was too great and it collapsed. “I do the right thing by you Feds, and you do this to me,” he said. “They got the name wrong, it ain't Truth or Consequences. Truth
and
Consequences is what it is.”
“That's very profound, Floyd,” the agent said. He gave him a card. “Your nearest FBI office. Don't call us and we won't call you.”
He never liked Floyd Boyd but he came to accept it, like some stupid nickname. He had a new Social Security number, arranged by the Bureau, which also paid a monthly living allowance. His bank statements identified it as
US Army Disability Award.
That
explained the lack of a regular job. When a genuine war veteran showed signs of wanting to compare wounds, Blanco said: “Ain't somethin' I care to remember. No weddin' bells for me, know what I mean?” That closed the conversation.
He grew a shaggy cavalry mustache, and it changed the shape of his face: good. Then it turned silver-gray: even better. He experimented by shaving the top of his head and brushing the sides to make them fluffy, and startled himself. Now he looked like his dead uncle Eddie who drove his car over the side of the Grand Canyon, nobody knew why. For a while, Blanco wore a Panama to cover the damage, until he lost the hat or someone stole it and he realized he didn't care. On impulse, he bought a corncob pipe. Never smoked the thing, only kept it in the corner of his mouth. Kids called him Popeye, and he still didn't care. He was moving further and further from Chicago. Once, indoors, he tried wearing an eyepatch and knew immediately it was too much. He wanted to be nobody, not somebody. Floyd Boyd, part of the furniture. He took an occasional part-time job, helping out when the regular guy was sick or on vacation. That's how he came to be pumping gas at the Texaco station in 1953, seeing New Jersey plates on a Chrysler sedan and thinking:
What in the name of sweet Jesus brings a Jersey car here?
and finding only one answer. The Mob never quit.
Frankie Blanco was both right and wrong. The Chrysler with the New Jersey plates was Mafia but the occupants were not.
Both were in their early thirties. He was Luis Cabrillo. Born in Spain, but since then he had acquired an English patina to which he was now adding American bravura with extra flim-flam on the baloney. He liked words. She was Julie Conroy. She was a New Yorker with the kind of looks that make middle-aged accountants misplace the decimal point. Also she could detect bullshit at fifty paces on a foggy night, a useful talent for anyone living with Luis.
They had left Washington DC suddenly and hurriedly before the sky fell in, and driven west, using country roads. They
reached the middle of Virginia when hunger took command and they stopped at a diner.
The place was busy. Customers were expected to share tables. Luis and Julie, enjoying their ham and eggs and hashed brown, nodded when two young men asked if they might join them. They were casually dressed: one in a sports jacket and chinos, no tie; the other in a tired-looking brown corduroy suit, the tie hanging loose. Cleanshaven, although each could do with a haircut. Graduate students, maybe, doing their PhDs. But that wasn't likely, deep in rural Virginia, and it became less so when the corduroy suit said politely: “Miss Conroy? Mr. Cabrillo?”
“A wild rumor,” Julie said. “Put it another way: who the hell are you?”
“I'm Todd Rivers and this is Martin Jones.” He spoke softly. “We're reporters from the Washington
Globe.”
More softly still. “Doing a story on Senator Joe McCarthy. Thought you might help.”
“Digging up scandal,” Luis said. “A shoddy trade. I wouldn't sully my hands with it.”
“We're not looking for scandal,” Rivers said. “It's the Russian embassy link we need to confirm.”
Julie pushed her food aside. “Don't use that sort of language in public,” she said. “You'll get us all blacklisted.”
“There is a Russian embassy link, then,” Jones said, gently. Nobody was blaming anyone. They just wanted the facts.
“Does this go back to the Double Cross Department?” Rivers asked. “That name keeps coming up.”