Yellow Dog Contract (20 page)

Koontz took another swallow of his beer. “Okay, so I'm outa my job, but I still keep in touch. Well, the next thing you know, the Council breaks off negotiations with the city. Wham! Just like that. Then these six guys that Gallops sends out from Washington come up with a new set of proposals. Well, one of the guys on the Council board, maybe you remember him, Ted Greenleaf?”

Murfin nodded to show that he remembered Ted Greenleaf.

“Well, Greenleaf's been around a long time and he takes one look at what these guys have come up with and he says to 'em that they're fuckin' crazy. Now Greenleaf's the one who led the fight for me in the Council meeting, although it wasn't much of a fight, so they don't even try to buy him off. They don't even try to argue with him. They just smile politely at him and let him have his say and on the way home that night his car is forced over to the curb and somebody beats the shit out of Ted Greenleaf and the next day he resigns from the Council board and puts it in writing. He has to put it in writing on account of he's in the hospital with his fuckin' jaws wired shut. You gettin' the picture?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Murfin said.

“What do the new demands ask for?” I said.

“Well, lemme tell you about that. That's really something. These new demands ask for a whole passel of stuff but the key points are real simple. They're demanding a flat twenty percent pay increase across the board and a four-day week. Well, I mean that sits with the city like a saddle on a sow. The city just laughs at em. But these six guys who've taken over the negotiations by now, they don't laugh back. They just smile as cool as you please and don't budge an inch.”

“What about the membership?” Murfin said.

Koontz shrugged. “Well, you know what the membership is like. You tell 'em that they can have Friday or maybe Monday off as well as Saturday and Sunday plus a twenty percent pay hike and, hell, they ain't gonna say no.”

“Yeah, but will they go out on strike for it?” Murfin said.

“We used to put the Council newspaper out once every month, right?”

Murfin nodded. “Right.”

“Well, now it's coming out every week and I mean it's slick. It's full of figures and statistics to show how the city can pay for all this stuff with no sweat. On top of that each member has received an individually robotyped letter explaining to him just how much money he'll make over the next five years when the city meets his demands. Well, shit, I mean it looks like a whole wad of money. All he has to do to get it is go out on strike for maybe a month or two. And even with what he'll lose in pay, he'll still come out way ahead, according to the phony figures that these six sharpers have come up with.”

Murfin shook his head. “The city'll never go for it. Hell, there's hardly a city in the country that's not almost flat-ass broke. They sure as shit won't go for any four-day week and a twenty percent pay increase.”

“You ain't exactly telling me anything new,” Koontz said. “But that's what they're gonna go for anyhow. After they dumped me they dipped down into the rank and file and came up with this loudmouth nigger who they made executive director. The second thing they did after they named him was to vote him a new Cadillac. Not a little Cadillac, but a big fuckin' Cadillac. Well, he gets his picture in the papers and on TV and they give him my salary and my expense account, and shit, there's nothing that nigger ain't gonna do for them.”

Murfin drank some of his beer and looked carefully at Koontz. “But you haven't just been sitting around the house all this time, have you, Freddie?”

Koontz took another look around the back of the booth toward the bar. Then he turned back, hunched forward, and lowered his voice to a hoarse, confidential whisper. “Well, I've been talking to some of the guys and we're gonna have a meeting tonight.”

“Where?”

“At the fuckin' Odd Fellows Hall, can you imagine? Ten years ago I got the membership to vote that we oughta have our own headquarters. So they gave me the okay and I built us a hell of a fine place. Two stories, nice big meeting hall, even a recreation room and plenty of office space. Even had a nice little wet bar in my office. Well, day before yesterday, I tell 'em I wanta use the union meeting hall and they lie to me and tell me it's all booked up. So I gotta go rent the goddamn Odd Fellows Hall for fifty dollars. Hell, I don't mind the money. I've paid more'n that to watch two flies fuck. It's the principle of the thing.”

“When's the meeting?” I said.

“At eight o'clock tonight. Some of the guys who ain't got just shit, clabber or mud for brains are gonna be there. They don't like all this strike talk either. Hell, if it was gonna come to a strike, we'd go for compulsory arbitration first. That's what Arch always said and I agree with him. Nobody knows how a strike's gonna turn out. For all you know it might bust the union and the first thing you know you'd be signing a yellow-dog contract to keep your job. You know, sign something where you'd agree to get out of the union if you're in it or not join it if you're not.”

“You think that's a possibility?” I said.

Koontz shrugged. “Who the hell knows?” he said. “You get a long strike and who's gonna get pissed off most? Well, the fuckin' voters, that's who, and they're already screamin' about how the city's got too many people on the payroll anyhow. Well, if a strike keeps them from getting their garbage picked up for two months, then come election day they're sure as shit stinks gonna vote for somebody who ain't gonna play patty-cake with no union. And don't think the pols don't know this.”

“Have you been talking to some of them?” Murfin said.

Koontz nodded glumly. “Yeah, I've been talking to them. Or they been talking to me, although they sorta sneak around to do it now that I'm out of a job. They're worried that if there's a strike, the party's gonna lose St. Louis and if it loses St. Louis, it's gonna lose the whole state. Well, that started me thinkin'.”

“About what?” I said.

“I started thinkin', ‘How come Gallops picked on me?' I mean, shit, I'm not the only frog in the pond. So I make a couple of long distance calls. Like I said, I ain't got nothing else to do. I call Jimmy Horsely over in Philadelphia and Buck McCreight up in Boston. I figure maybe they might have a spot for me. But whaddya know, they're just about to call me because the same thing's happened to them just like it happened to me. They got dumped and they're looking for jobs. And they tell me it ain't no use callin' Phil Leonard in New York or Sid Gershman out in L.A. or Jack Childers up in Chicago because they're dumped, too, just like I was, except Gallops sent in more guys and spent a hell of a lot more money to get the job done in those places than he did here. Whaddya think of that?”

Murfin looked at me with a glance full of something, significance probably, and then looked back at Koontz. “How about Detroit?” he said.

“Same thing,” Koontz said. “Baltimore and Cleveland, too.”

“Milwaukee?” I said.

“Same thing. Also Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

“They're talking strike in all those places?” Murfin asked.

“That's all they're talking.”

“Well,” Murfin said, “ain't that fuckin' interesting?”

“Ain't it though?” Koontz said.

“You know what you just named, don't you?” I said.

“Sure I do,” Koontz said. “I just named the ten or twelve biggest goddamned cities in the country.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

M
URFIN WAS ON THE PHONE
for nearly two hours before he finally hung up, turned to me, and held out his empty glass. I took it, poured some bourbon into it, and then filled it with water from the bathroom tap. When I came back, Murfin looked up from the notes he had been making, reached for his drink, and took an appreciative swallow.

“It all checks out,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I was listening.”

“I think we could use a few more details though. We'll go to this meeting tonight and then I think I'll take the long way back tomorrow.”

“Chicago?”

“Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and probably Baltimore. I'll land at Friendship and rent a car. A few more details won't hurt.” He studied his notes for a moment. “How come nobody's put all this together before?”

“You mean the papers?”

“Yeah, the papers or maybe TV.”

“Well, first of all it's never happened before so nobody's expecting it, and second, they don't have anyone to remind them of Chaddi Jugo.”

Murfin nodded. “It all goes back to Hundermark, doesn't it.”

“To him and the CIA.”

“They brought you in, didn't they, back in '64?”

“Except that I didn't know it at the time. They wanted to make sure Hundermark got re-elected because if he didn't, they'd lose their pipeline into the Public Workers International. And they were right.”

“It made quite a stink, didn't it?” Murfin said. “All about how the CIA was footing the bill for the PWI. It was Hundermark's pet project. He got some good trips out of it—London, Hong Kong, Tokyo—all over. I thought it was one big bore.”

“It wasn't after Mix found out about it,” I said.

“Yeah, first he fired you, then he blasted the PWI, and then he fired me.”

“I'd already quit.”

“Sure,” Murfin said. “Who'd they send down there, the guy from Texas?”

I nodded. “Joe Dawkins. From Kilgore.”

“He seemed like a hell of a nice guy. I wonder whatever happened to him.”

“You mean after he dumped Chaddi Jugo?”

“Yeah.”

“Last I heard he was doing good works for the CIA in Vietnam.”

“Hell of a nice guy,” Murfin said. “You ever talk to him about it? About Chaddi Jugo, I mean.”

“Once. He got a little drunk and came over to my place. It was when I was still living in the coach house on Massachusetts.”

“I always liked that place.”

“Well, we talked about it just that once. I think Dawkins was trying to justify it. Chaddi Jugo was something of a Marxist, of course, who'd got himself elected president in 1962 of that former British colony on the east coast of South America.”

“That didn't sit too well with the CIA,” Murfin said.

“Chaddi wasn't just a Marxist, he was also from Chicago, but he'd somehow wound up down there and gone into politics and taken out citizenship. And right after Independence in 1962 he got himself elected president for a two-year term.”

“Yeah, but the British didn't like it.”

“They didn't like it at all, according to Dawkins. They couldn't quite stomach having some Chicago Marxist being president of their former colony so they got together with the CIA to see whether there wasn't some way to dump Jugo in the 1964 election. Well, the CIA just happened to have its pipeline into the Public Workers International. It was into a lot of things back then—the National Students Association, a couple of magazines, and I think even a book publishing firm.”

“Plus the Newspaper Guild,” Murfin said.

“You're right. I'd forgotten. Well, anyway the CIA cleared it all with the AFL-CIO and it sent good old Joe Dawkins and God knows how much money down to South America to see what he could do about dumping Chaddi Jugo.”

“And Dawkins pulled the strike,” Murfin said. “It was a long one, I remember, but I don't remember just how long.”

“Two months,” I said. “It was the two months just before the election. Dawkins used his pot full of CIA money and his ties with the Public Workers International and somehow they struck everything—the buses, the railroad, the docks, the firemen, the police, the hospitals, and the whole damned government bureaucracy—even, or so Dawkins told me, the night-soil collectors. And most important of all Dawkins managed to make the blame for the strike land on Chaddi Jugo and stick to him. And that was about the last that anyone ever heard of Chaddi.”

“What happened to him?” Murfin said.

“He got whipped.”

“I mean after the election.”

“I'm not sure.”

“You know something?” Murfin said.

“What?”

“Max probably didn't have much more to go on than we do.”

“And look what happened to him,” I said. “All Max probably needed to set him off was the mention of Chaddi Jugo's name and he got that from Sally Raines who got it from my sister. After that he must have made some phone calls just like you did and figured out why Arch Mix disappeared. Max's only problem was that he probably tried to cash in on what he found out.”

“How?”

“I don't know,” I said, “but he told Dorothy that he had a big one going that might be worth two hundred thousand.”

“That'd be a little rich for Max,” Murfin said.

“That's what I thought. But apparently whoever he was trying to get the money from decided that he wasn't worth it, or didn't trust him, so they had him killed. I guess they had Sally Raines killed for about the same reason. She must have known what Max knew. I don't know whether she tried to cash in on it or not, but it doesn't much matter. She's just as dead either way.”

Murfin took another swallow of his drink. “I figure the Arch Mix thing like this,” he said. “I figure Arch somehow got wind of the whole deal and they had to take him out, right?”

“Probably. I know he'd never have gone along with it.”

“No,” Murfin said, “he wouldn't've.” He was silent for a moment and then his face broke into one of his dirty smiles. “Jesus, it's sweet though, isn't it? You get a labor union to strike the public employees in ten or twelve of the biggest cities in the country just two months before election. Now who's gonna benefit from that?”