Red Rag Blues (21 page)

“Jeez … you look like a morticians' convention,” Max said.

“That's a nice healthy tan, Max. It suits you.”

“Yeah. I bet you say that to all the stiffs.” Reluctantly, Max closed the script. He had named Cabrillo as a Red subversive. Now the bastard had come three thousand miles to see him. “Why do I have this dull, sickening sense of dread?”

“Relax, my boy.” Luis had a briefcase, and he patted it “I have here what all Hollywood has been waiting for.”

“It better be the world's best pastrami on rye with pickle,” Max said. “Or you're dead in the water.”

The screenplay was called
Double Trouble.
Max refused to read it. “Give me an outline,” he said. He was afraid to take his eyes off Cabrillo. The guy might have an ice-pick up his sleeve.

“Comedy-thriller set in Nazi Germany,” Luis said. Max winced. “Hitler has a double, a guy who appears instead of him,
decides to save Germany by killing the Nazi leaders, starting with Himmler. But when he tries to kill Himmler's double, he discovers that she's a woman. They fall in love and agree to kill Goering, but—”

“Don't tell me. I'm three reels ahead already.”

“They have an idea—”

“Enough!” Max said. “Wait here.” He took the screenplay, went inside, and came back without it. “Lunch?”

They ate in the commissary. With people all around, Max felt less afraid.

“Tell me,” Luis said. “Why did you change sides?”

“Americans are restless people. We thrive on change. Once it was ragtime and railroads, then the Charleston and wing-walking, and after that, Prohibition and the yo-yo. Now it's television and blacklisting. You can't tell people what they want. It's like flying a glider, you've got to catch the wind or you crash. No point in fighting the wind, that gets you nowhere. America knows best, Luis.” Max felt safe.

“No regrets, then.”

“This is Hollywood, chum. Like I said, we give the people what they want.”

“What they want is names. It amazes me. Lots and lots of names.”

“Sure. They had mine and they seemed to enjoy it.” A little bitterness was spilling out. Max was no longer acting.

“And this is reputedly the land of the free.”

“Yup. Everybody's free to be screwed by McCarthy. That's equality. The Jews have been fucked. The Indians have been fucked. The niggers have been fucked. That only leaves the goddamn Christians unfucked. Well, now they're getting their share. Makes a man proud, don't it?”

Luis could smell a fight in the air. He nodded, although he didn't know what he was agreeing to. He looked around the commissary. “Hey!” he said. “Isn't that Piper Laurie over there? Wearing green?”

“That's not green,” Max growled. Which brought the conversation to an end.

They were leaving when a stubby man with a silvery crewcut came in. “This the guy?” he asked. Max nodded. The crewcut handed Luis his screenplay. “Let's get out of here,” he said. They went into the sunshine. “You should know better,” the
crewcut said to Luis. “We can't take your stuff. You're on the list.”

“Welcome to the club,” Max said. “Now you're fucked too.”

Luis was so startled that he smiled. The crewcut continued to look disgusted. “How is that possible?” Luis asked. “This is the first screenplay I've written.”

“You pissed-off the New York publishers, Mac,” the crewcut said. “They liaise with us. We don't want Un-American writers any more than they do. Beat it.”

Luis had nothing to say. They wouldn't have listened anyway. He left.

“And you,” the crewcut told Max. “Keep your pinko pals out of here.”

Max shrugged. “I didn't ask him to come,” he said.

“Since when was that an excuse?”

Luis sat in his car and counted his money. Not enough. He had bought a one-way plane ticket, banking on a Warners deal to take care of the return. He could still fly home but it would knock another big hole in his savings. Then he'd have to tell Julie that he'd bombed in Hollywood. Three failures in a row: Madison Avenue, the British Consulate, and Hollywood. Poor show.

Glenn Ford strolled by, in cowboy gear. Luis sneered at him: a grown man who made a living out of waving a gun that fired blanks while a crew of thirty people took moving pictures of him sneaking around a gulch, whatever that was. “At least I haven't sunk that low,” Luis said aloud, and immediately felt better.

The car was too hot. He drove to the gate, and beckoned the guard. “Banks,” he said. “Where are all the banks in this town?”

San Francisco. That's where the banks were.

The guard, anxious to please, told Luis the big bank headquarters were in Downtown Los Angeles, around Bunker Hill. Or, if he just wanted a lot of banks, Wilshire Boulevard had a fine selection. Luis took Sunset Boulevard to Downtown LA and didn't like it: too much space, not compact like Madison Avenue. And nobody walked, everyone drove. Hopeless. He found his way to Wilshire Boulevard and kept driving. Wilshire was sixteen miles long. It had more banks than he needed but they
were all remote from each other. Not helpful. LA sprawled. It was everywhere and so it was nowhere.

He parked, and looked at the road map of California. San Francisco was on a narrow peninsula; it seemed a lot like Manhattan. And he was already on the Pacific Coast highway, so that clinched it. 401 miles, the map said. Good. Gave him time to think.

The FBI would certainly have warned all its offices about a new style of bank robbery, involving messengers. They would be alert. Maybe his method needed refining. He drove, and examined various refinements.

The Pacific gleamed an emerald blue to his left. Mountains reared dramatically to his right. The tires of the Ford drummed softly. Two girls in a sports car waved as they passed, and he waved back, easily, almost lazily, just as Cary Grant would have done. In fact he was better than Cary Grant. This was better than Warners. Hollywood was dreams on a screen. This was
happening,
and he was making it happen.

Refinements came and went. He stopped for gas at Ventura. Coffee at Santa Barbara. A steak at Santa Maria. Checked into a hotel at San Luis Obispo. He was standing in the shower, trying to get his mind into fine focus, when he remembered the motto of the Double-Cross System. “Tell them what they want to hear,” he said aloud. “And keep it simple.” It had helped win World War Two. It should be good enough to knock over a few banks.

*

San Francisco was a nice city. The air was fresh, the views were dramatic, the people were pleasant, and in less than an hour he found seven banks, all within easy walking distance of a messenger agency and an office building with small suites to rent by the week. He took one. It was too late in the day for crime, but he spent a pleasant couple of hours in the office with scissors and paste, cutting up headlines and making threatening demand notes. “Dynamite” was not in the news. Pity. He assembled “TNT” from different typefaces, added an exclamation point, then removed it. “Moderation and restraint,” he said. But when he found a string of dollar signs in a department-store ad, he created GIVE ME YOUR $$$$$$$$. Neat but not gaudy, he thought.

Next day, at about one-thirty, he was finishing off a cream cheese and anchovies on rye when the first messenger came limping along the corridor. Luis was sitting in the office swivel chair, wearing the snap-brim hat, the aviator glasses, the dark blue suit. He signed the man's worksheet. “Leave it on the desk,” he said. He tipped him a dollar. Two more messengers made deliveries, took their dollar and left. Then the fourth man came in, followed by a plain-clothes cop. He had cop's eyes: a little weary, rarely blinking, and able to take in the whole room at a glance. He was fifty plus. He'd bought the jacket when he was forty plus and he would never button it again. He had jowls like a bulldog, and they seemed to weigh down his shoulders.

“That blows it,” Luis said. His voice was as flat as last night's beer. “He won't come here now.”

“Who the hell are you?”

Luis's arms were folded. He unfolded them, displayed the badge in his left palm, refolded them. “Special Agent Carlos, FBI. You?”

“Lieutenant Dwyer, robbery.”

“They know you're here, lieutenant.” Luis made a tiny nod toward the window. “They follow the messengers. If all the messengers arrive, and they reckon they're safe, they complete the operation. But they saw you bring this man.” He signed the work sheet and gave the tip. “Let him go. You know where to find him.”

“Sure-Thing Messengers,” the man said.

“Beat it,” Dwyer told him. He sounded disgusted. “You knew this was coming down? Why didn't the Bureau tell us?”

Luis looked at the ceiling and stroked the front of his neck. “You've had experience, lieutenant.” He spoke quietly: one pro to another. “Police departments don't always cooperate when they see a chance for kudos, do they? Too bad. The gang hit seven banks, didn't they?”

Now Dwyer was thoroughly disgusted. “You knew so much, why didn't you nail them?”

“How many banks get hit in California every week? In the US? These men hide in the general run of crime. We've been on this case for a year now. They hit seven banks in Pittsburgh, seven in Chicago, same in Detroit, St. Louis, Denver, Dallas and Omaha. Seven is their favorite number.”

Dwyer had not moved from the doorway. He looked from Luis to the bulky brown envelopes on the desk, and back to Luis. “This
is the strangest bank heist I ever come across.” He disapproved of strange robberies; that was clear from his voice. “Too cute. Way too cute.”

Luis stayed motionless. He counted to twenty, thinking: he's old enough to be a grandfather and still only a lieutenant. No genius, but good at waiting. Guys like him can wait for hours. “We live in cute times,” Luis said. He glanced at his watch. “I'm permitted to tell you something. Not everything. The dollars from these bank hits go to finance Left-Wing extremists and agitators.”

“Reds?” Now Dwyer's expression changed. “Commies?”

“The FBI is acting in strict liaison with Senator McCarthy.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you handle the politics and I'll take care of the money.”

“You'll get a subpoena to appear before McCarthy if you touch those envelopes. They're evidence. An FBI forensic unit will examine them.”

Dwyer and Luis exchanged stares. The detective couldn't read Luis's expression. Luis was pretty sure he knew what Dwyer was thinking. He was thinking that he was two years off retirement. Did he really want to risk his pension by getting accused of prejudicing a McCarthy Senate Committee investigation? A guy could get fired just for being subpoenaed. The hell with it. Let the banks wait for their dough. “I'd better report in,” he said, and moved toward the phone.

“Don't touch it. Prints.”

“Shoot. Nearly forgot.”

“Take these.” Luis gave him head-and-shoulder photographs of three men, two serious, one grinning. He had found them in a Sausalito junk shop that morning. “Names are no help. They change their names as often as their socks.” Even now, Dwyer didn't want to go. “Every minute you stay here,” Luis pointed out, “is an extra minute they use to get away.”

“I guess you're going to stick around.”

“This is my post,” Luis said. “I have no other.”

Dwyer left. Luis packed the four envelopes into his suitcase. Two more messengers arrived. “Are we late?” one asked. “Bumped into young Jimmy here, his birthday, had a beer to celebrate. Seventy today, I mean what the hell.”

Luis signed for the envelopes and gave them ten bucks each. “Have one on me,” he said.

“Okay if we have two?” Jimmy said. Very funny joke. They laughed all the way down the corridor. Luis let them take the
elevator. He took the stairs to the basement. The central-heating furnace was roaring softly, like a sleeping giant. A door opened onto the carpark. San Francisco was a trusting city. Nobody had stolen a central-heating furnace in living memory.

He drove unhurriedly to Salt Lake City, 751 miles, most of it uninhabited for obvious reasons. It took a day and a half. He went by plane to Denver and then got a first-class flight to Washington DC, another reckless extravagance now totally justified by his undeniable and staggering talent, and met Julie at the motel. “You're far too beautiful for a dump like this,” he declared.

“Does that mean we're rich again?”

“Moderately.” Six banks had provided ten thousand seven hundred and twelve dollars. Presumably the messenger from the seventh bank had run off with its money, the scoundrel. “Nothing to excess,” he said.

*

Lieutenant Dwyer had a bad day. When he reported in, he got roasted by his captain for leaving the banks' money. Then a detective recognized one of the photographs the FBI agent had provided. “He played short stop for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1930s,” the detective said. The captain phoned the FBI and the FBI said they had no Special Agent Carlos. The nearest police car went howling to the office building. Empty. The bankers were indignant. San Francisco FBI were extremely pissed-off. The cops had steam coming out of both ears. Dwyer got sudden chest pains and had to be sent home. “I don't see how I could of handled it any different,” he told his wife.

“That bastard Hoover's to blame,” she said bitterly. “You cops take all the risk and he takes all the credit.”

“It's a bitch.” Dwyer lay on a couch. The pains were coming back.

Soon a report clattered out of the teleprinter in the Bureau's New York office. Prendergast was amused. He could afford to be; he wasn't the one with egg dribbling down his chops. “I said this guy was a smart-ass, didn't I? It wasn't enough that he conned the banks, he had to con the San Francisco PD. He enjoys his crime. I like criminals who like risks. Now for the bad news.”