The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (30 page)

“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 until 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.”

 

 

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 motivation 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.

“Bring them out,” Speke said to one of the men, who nodded and rose. He took out a ring of big keys and unlocked the door with two of them and then slid back a heavy iron bar which squeaked and for a moment I was back in Shanghai, in Bridge House, where the sounds
had been the same, and I could imagine the apprehension felt by the two inside the cell. They must have known that there never would be any good news again.

Both of the men who guarded the cell were up now. Both had produced revolvers, .38s from the look of them. One stood directly in front of the door while the other pulled it open. Two men dressed in dark suits and sweaters came out. They wore no ties and probably no belts. The laces were gone from their shoes and they had to shuffle to keep them on. One was tall and one was short.

Speke told them what to do in English. “Stand over here,” he said, motioning to the brick wall. They shuffled over to the wall and stood facing it. “Turn around,” he said. They turned around. I walked over and looked at them.

Mutt, the taller one, was about five-eleven with sloping shoulders and long arms that ended in hairy-backed hands. He had brownish hair and light blue eyes with ordinary brows that ran into each other across a nose that leaned a little to the left. His mouth was small and almost pursed and it didn't go with his big chin and thick neck. He also needed a shave.

Jeff, the shorter one, had long, light blonde hair, almost white, that kept flopping down into blue eyes that were a little piggy and mean. He had a potato nose and red splotches on his cheekbones, light almost invisible eyebrows, and a surprisingly hard slice of a mouth that looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. He had a sharp chin, a slight build that was probably all gristle, and skinny hands.

“Well?” Carmingler said. He was standing at my elbow.

“They wore masks,” I said. “Halloween masks. The rubber kind.”

“Their size, their build?” he said.

“Could be.”

“The big one. Hairy hands.”

“A lot of people have hairy hands,” I said.

“You can't make either of them?”

“Drop your pants,” I said to the taller one.

He looked at Speke and frowned so I said it again in German and told him to be goddamned quick about it. Speke told him the same
thing. The man grumbled something and then undid his fly and dropped his pants so that they lay in what seemed to be a dark puddle about his shoes.