Operation Bamboozle (5 page)

An hour later they were all heading down the road, with thirty-seven more paintings in the trunk.

It was Princess's idea to come with them. When she got her $100, heard real enthusiasm for her work, and knew that they owned an art gallery, she had no wish to stay in San Carlos. It wasn't an artists' colony. Farmers there grew the best hot chili peppers in Mexico. They made your eyeballs sweat, blew steam out your ears, and set your hair on fire. Two or three times a year someone died, the people laid on a big funeral. Nothing else to talk about in San Carlos, just hot chillis and fancy checkouts. Quiet town. It got so she never knew the month, leave alone the day.

Julie asked why she went there in the first place.

Scared, she said. Scared and broke, a miserable combination. “I'd been the drummer in an all-girl band, touring Texas, The Humdingers, corny name. We were playing a dance hall in San Antone and our manager amscrayed with the money, left us flat broke.

“Then—stroke of luck. Met Ted. He flew fighters in the Air Force. Love at first sight, both ways. Married at the base chapel, honeymoon in Chihuahua. Hey! Life is lookin' up. If we'd been lookin' down, might of seen a couple of Mex hitmen waitin' outside the hotel. Didn't have to wait long. Me and my shiny new husband are arm in arm, strollin' along the main drag, guns go bang-bang, there's blood everywhere an' I'm a widow.

“So the Mex cops haul the body away and they get on the horn to the military police at Ted's base in Texas. Turns out I'd married a gambling man, the worst kind, the losing and borrowing kind who keeps losing until the shylocks turn up the heat. He beats it to Mexico, not far enough, and they close his account. I'm left with thirty bucks and a feeling they'll come after me next because I inherit everything including his debts, which is crazy but who knows how these people think?

“So I get the bus to Ojinaga. Four hours, five bucks. Thought I'd walk over the bridge to Presidio an' think again. Then someone on the bus tells me about San Carlos, so I bummed a ride there instead. Hope the shylocks forget. Five years ago.”

“Five years,” Luis said. “How did you make a living?”

“Taught simple English to Mex kids aimin' to be wetbacks. Charged fifty cents an hour. Good value.”

“Last question,” Julie said. “Ever seen the sea?”

“Nope. Saw a picture in
Life
magazine once. Didn't look real,” she said.

The brief presence of a Chrysler with New Jersey plates—it had been in the state for only a few hours, for God's sake—did not agitate the agents in the New Mexico office of the FBI. The behavior of Frankie Blanco/Floyd Boyd was another matter. They were responsible for ensuring he led a quiet life, doing nothing in nowhere, and now suddenly he was playing private eye in the big bad city. Frankie wasn't bright enough to play bass drum with a breadstick. Action was required. For a start, they telexed the FBI in New Jersey, which replied within an hour that the Chrysler was registered to Jerome Fantoni and he had not reported it stolen.

The Fantonis being one of five Mafia families operating in New York City, as a matter of courtesy the exchange was copied to the Manhattan office of the Bureau, where it soon reached Agents Prendergast and Fisk.

Both of them were loyal to the FBI's methods of detection, but they had widely differing attitudes toward crime. Agent Prendergast, who was twenty years the senior, regarded crime as something similar to an outbreak of disease. He believed crime was a random and unpredictable failure of behavior that civilized people had to protect themselves against and stamp out fast. So burglary was like influenza: everybody got it, more or less, sooner or later. The difference was the influenza bug went about its business in a calm, methodical (if totally selfish) way; whereas criminals—in Prendergast's experience—were usually sloppy,
erratic, opportunistic. In a word: untidy. Their untidiness got them caught. Prendergast looked for it and usually found it.

Fisk was his deputy, fresh out of the FBI Academy. He didn't believe crime had to be untidy, but he didn't say so. He looked for patterns in crime, connections, logical sequences. For him, crime wasn't like a disease, it was part of the law of averages. Give everybody a car, which is essentially a chunk of money on wheels with a motor to help the thief, and car crime becomes inevitable. A percentage of cars always get stolen, so owners pay more for their insurance. Fisk saw a natural pattern in this sequence: it was a formula by which the underprivileged got their hands on a share of the nation's wealth. Prendergast found crime untidy. Fisk found it a predictable response to stimulus. Both were right and both were wrong, so they made a good team.

“El Paso,” Prendergast said. “Hot goods go south, hard drugs go north. It's the boil on America's backside.”

“Surprisingly low rate for murder.” Fisk was looking at the FBI crime statistics. “Dallas's figures are double, Houston's are triple. However, El Paso beats them both on aggravated assault. That's curious. You'd think …”

“I think they're too quick with their fists in El Paso but they can't shoot straight. What's the figure for El Paso's brains?”

“Not here.”

“Too small to measure,” Prendergast said. “You've got to learn to read between the lines in that book. Forget it. What is our wandering boy doing in Texas?”

“What exactly was he doing here and in DC? If we knew that …”

“He had a couple of scams going here. Yeah, I know, nothing we could prove. But nobody dines with Fantoni just for the meatloaf.”

“It's not a crime. We know Cabrillo and Conroy got out of this city in a hell of a hurry, but that's also not a crime, and next thing he's in DC as a paid consultant to Senator Joseph McCarthy. You think he had another scam going, yet the senator has made no complaint, and I'm sure you'll agree we'd better be very sure of ourselves before we rattle
that
cage.”

Prendergast opened a desk drawer and took out a thick black notebook. “British consulate won't help. CIA won't help. McCarthy can't even spell the word help. That leaves one loose end we can pull.”

“Fantoni?” Fisk said.

Prendergast reached for the phone. “Clean in thought, word and deed,” he said. “A regular Boy Scout.”

Princess Chuckling Stream moved into the house on Cliff Boulevard. They turned a room into a studio: took the furniture out, spread dropcloths over the floor, propped her paintings against the wall.

“Now what?” Luis asked.

“Now we have a show,” Julie said. “A hell of a show. El Paso discovers a genius in its midst. We'll knock this town on its ass.”

Princess used her foot to straighten a crease in a dropcloth. “Ain't too sure about this genius shit,” she said.

Luis picked up the painting of two little fishing boats on a broken, glittering sea. He said to Julie, “As I recall, you fell in love with this in about ten seconds. Tiny bit impulsive, perhaps?”

She took the picture from him. “Who needs time? Ten seconds is all it takes to know it's good. When it's not good, you could look for a year and it never gets better.”

“I had five years to crank out this crap,” Princess said. “It ain't so hot. I can do better.”

“Dynamite. Gonna kick this town on its ass.”

“She was never like this in New York,” Luis told Princess.

“They put bromides in New York's water supply,” Princess said. “Seems the mayor wanted folk to stop shootin' each other so much. Guy in a bar in Dallas told me. Didn't work, he said.” There was such disillusion in her voice that they let the subject pass. Disillusion and defiance: these seemed to be her dominant moods.

They had lunch on the terrace. Tortillas and iced coffee.

“Far be it from me to intrude on your privacy,” Luis began.

“He talks like that sometimes,” Julie said. “It's the English starch in his underpants does it.”

“I'm Spanish,” he said, “Castilian. Old Castilian, actually.”

“His father was the Duke of Guacamole. Luis got a secret birthmark that proves it. Looks kinda like Di Maggio at bat.”

“Anyone want that last tortilla?” Five years of living alone in San Carlos had not prepared Princess for verbal ping-pong. She
took the tortilla. “You're gonna ask, what's my real name. Only got one. This it.”

“Okay. Now tell us where you're from.”

“And talk Comanche,” Luis said.

“Sheboygan.” Princess wiped her lips. “Pop's a cop in Sheboygan.”

Luis looked at Julie. “That's not Comanche. Swedish, maybe.”

“Pop's folks came from the Ukraine,” Princess said. “Name of Shtremakov. Dumb immigration officer couldn't handle that, wrote down
Stream.
Mom's Irish, she liked movies, Westerns specially. Saw an actress play a squaw called Wanderin' Breeze. I come along, pretty as peaches, headed for Hollywood obviously, she calls me Princess Chucklin' Stream. One up on Wanderin' Breeze.”

“Heard worse ideas,” Julie said.

“I can't act. Can't speak the lines. Mom took it hard. I got out of Sheboygan, frostbite capital of America, came south for the sun. Humdingers needed a drummer. I ain't no Gene Krupa but I faked it. The band screwed up, I shouted ‘Hey baby! Play that thing' or some such shit, got us out of trouble.” She nearly smiled. “You know the rest.”

“Yeah. Well, you got shafted twice. Now this is act three. We're gonna have a big show. You mind being a Comanche maiden?”

“Stick a feather up my ass and I'll be Donald Duck, if it makes a dollar.”

“I don't think the fine art market works quite like that,” Luis said.

“This is Texas, kid,” Julie said. “Nothin's out, everythin's in, and that includes feathers.”

The phone rang. Luis went inside. He came back looking pleased. “What a surprise,” he said. “James de Courcy, of all people. Here. I'm lunching with him.”

“That
J.D.C?” Julie said. “From the Double Cross Department?”

“The very same. Wartime colleague,” he told Princess. “We all toiled in the cloak-and-dagger factory. Delightful chap.”

“I used to play tennis with James,” Julie said. “Better than me, but he always lost. He believed a gentleman doesn't beat a lady. Not done.”

“We got coffee ice cream in the fridge,” Princess said.

“What's he doing here?” Julie asked.

“Lawyer. Maclean, de Courcy and Gould. He saw my picture in the paper. That real estate thing.”

“Or there's fruit salad,” Princess said. “I kinda lean toward both.”

Agents Prendergast and Fisk had been to Jerome Fantoni's home before, and they enjoyed visiting again. It was far removed from the petrochemical plants that enrich northern New Jersey with their cocktail from hell.

They drove through many miles of wooded countryside. They saw deer, pheasant, flights of duck. They slowed, courteously, as they passed men and women on large horses. Finally they cruised up a long drive that made easy curves to left and right, as nature intended, until the highway was out of sight. The house was big and made of small red bricks that had taken a hundred years or more to fade. It was a property built for a gentleman. What was the hurry?

An elderly man in a white jacket and black pants was on hand to open the car door. Guests were not expected to exert themselves. Fantoni was waiting on the steps by the front door. Two boxer dogs sat, one on each side of him. As the agents approached, the dogs showed their breeding by moving out of the way. Fantoni shook hands, they all exchanged goodwill and went inside.

Coffee was waiting in a room so big it had two fireplaces and a slight echo. “You serve the best coffee from Boston to Washington, sir,” Prendergast said. “With the best cream.”

“From my own herd. I know each cow by name.”

Fisk took his coffee black. “Burnished is the word I'd choose,” he said. “Burnished to perfection.” He had to score quickly or Prendergast would hog the talk.

They settled into kingsize armchairs. Fisk's feet were two inches off the floor. The boxers sprawled, but kept a degree of nobility.

“You have the Chrysler,” Fantoni said. The elderly man faded out of the room and closed the door, gently. It was an elderly door.

“Probably,” Prendergast said. “It's certainly a Chrysler wearing your plates, and reportedly being driven by the couple who borrowed it several months ago. Cabrillo and Conroy. We've codenamed them Cabroy. They're living in El Pasco, Texas.”

Fantoni sighed. He was about fifty, cleanshaven, trim, must have been handsome once but now his face was scored with the tiny fractures of stress. In ten years it would look battered. He was wearing a pewter-gray suit of lightweight cavalry twill, old but timeless.

“El Paso. The nearest symphony orchestra must be the Houston. Dallas would be marginally closer but I wouldn't cross the road to hear their string section. I'm told they murdered poor Beethoven's Ninth recently, just hacked it to bits. El Paso probably prides itself on its marching bands. Not so much a destination as a place of exile. What are Cabroy doing there?”

“Opening an art gallery,” Fisk said.

“Such courage.”

“And living on Cliff Boulevard, which is a blue-chip address in El Paso, we're told.”

“Getting back to the car,” Prendergast said. “When it left your possession, and we came out here to discuss the situation, you linked Cabroy with a couple of homicides and a case of arson.”

“There was a reason for that.” Fantoni stretched his legs and made a steeple of his fingers. His head did not move but his eyes switched from one agent to the other and back again. “It was justified subterfuge.”

“Subterfuge,” Fisk said. “As in deception?”