Red Rag Blues (37 page)

“Scandal?” Kim suggested.

“Bigger. We want Americans to wonder why their God has abandoned capitalism when they're paying an arm and a leg in taxes.”

“Maybe Cabrillo will come up trumps.”

Mikhail shook his head. “Cabrillo is tap-dancing on one leg. He's about to fall on his face. It's time the Cossacks rode to the rescue.”

“I suppose this means he's bugged.”

“We like to call it protective surveillance. It's for his own good.”

*

Julie and Stevie were at Metal Exchange when Luis came in. “Fantoni will plead the Fifth,” he said. “The senator is not a happy man.”

“That's too bad,” Julie said. “Any chance he'll die of despair before sundown?”

“I knew a girl at Bryn Mawr, her father died of a broken heart,” Stevie said.

“Misery kind of follows you around, don't it, honey?” Julie told Stevie.

“Whatcha mean, misery? He was pissed-off, that's all. His wife left him, and then he took two slugs in the chest from her boyfriend. Bust his heart wide open.”

Luis briefly forgot McCarthy. “Why?” he asked.

“It was in Texas,” Stevie explained. “You want some coffee?”

Luis waved no. He was eager to show off his creativity. “I found a way around the Fifth Amendment,” he told them. He was re-enacting his dialogue with Cohn, when Jerome Fantoni walked
in, his right hand in his jacket pocket, holding a revolver with a silencer as big as a beer bottle. “Nobody move,” he said.

“Hi, dad.” Stevie waved.

“She moved,” Luis said.

“Everyone shut up! You, you're a homicidal sonofabitch, you took out Sammy and Chick and for that I'm going to blow you away.” He was trying to ease the gun out of his pocket. It seemed to be trapped.

“Quite ludicrous,” Luis said.

“Then die laughing.” Jerome tugged harder. The gun was jammed, perhaps hooked on a tear in the lining.

“Is this a stick-up or a fuck-up?” Stevie asked. Her question sounded funnier when she heard it. She laughed. Jerome glared. He got both hands on the pocket, twisting the gun, making the problem worse. “Take your time, dad. Nobody's goin' anywhere. Just remember, if you kill Luis, you kill the father of your unborn grandchild too.”

“You did
what?”
Jerome demanded. He still gripped the gun but he stopped wrestling with it.

“So I married the guy,” she said. “So what? I can marry who I like. Whom. Whatever.”

“Unforgiveable. Beyond belief.”

“The marriage has been consummated,” Julie said.

“Fourth time lucky,” Stevie said. “Worth the wait.”

Luis had caught up. “They say it could be twins. Two boys.”

Stevie moved to her father and took his arm. “Be happy, dad. It's what you want. Give me a kiss, at least.” Stiffly, grudgingly, he bent to kiss her forehead. Her foot hooked his leg and her fist shoved his chest, hard. His legs went one way and his torso the other. His left shoulder hit the floor first and a splash of white-hot agony washed through him. A roar like surf rose in his ears. The last thing he saw was people diving for cover. He never heard the string of stunted detonations when his fingers tightened, blew holes in his pocket and massacred Stevie's desk. Then silence.

Julie raised her head. “That was slick,” she said.

“Bryn Mawr. Lacrosse. You learn how to protect yourself. I knew dad has a bum shoulder. He mashed it in the Princeton-Yale football game. Never recovered.” The gun had freed itself. She kicked it from his hand. The air smelt like the Fourth of July.

*

They rolled him onto his back. His nose was bleeding. His upper lip was split and also bleeding. It was hard to know which flow was which. He was breathing well enough to blow small red bubbles. By the time they fetched a doctor his eyes were open. “Shoulder,” he said.

“Uh-huh. Keep still.” The doctor did his stuff. “Dislocated it,” he said. “What happened?”

“Beats me. Act of God.”

The doctor had noticed the bullet-holed desk, the lingering cordite aroma. He said nothing. He cleaned up the face and put the arm in a sling. He telephoned the hospital. “Thirty dollars,” he said. “The ambulance will be extra.” Luis paid him. He left.

There was a difficult silence. Julie drank coffee. Stevie picked wood splinters out of her typewriter. Jerome sat on a couch and sucked his fat lip.

“How are those lovely boxer dogs of yours?” Luis asked.

“You planning on killing them too?”

“You are a truly miserable ingrate,” Stevie told him. Luis was impressed. “Yesterday's crossword,” she said. “An ingrate is a father who never calls you back even when you leave your number.”

“I was busy,” Jerome muttered. “I got subpoenaed.”

“You phoned your father?” Luis said. “You gave him this number?”

“Nothin' doin' here. I got bored.”

“Oh, sister,” Julie sighed. The mood was somber.

“These people didn't rub out Chick. I was there,” Stevie told Jerome. “I saw it all. Chick met some guy, they didn't agree.”

“So where is Chick?” Jerome demanded.

“West Virginia,” Julie said.

Nothing to add.

The ambulance arrived. Stevie sat in the back with her father.

“What's the matter with you?” she said. “You waste a fortune on violin lessons so I can appreciate Mozart, who in my opinion cannot hold a candle to the Andrews Sisters, and then you bust in and embarrass my friends. What you did with that gun was not a class act, it was crude, and I want to make it clear that I am not married and I am not pregnant.”

“Some lucky man,” he muttered.

“Yeah, sure, go on, be negative. Nobody likes an ingrate. Wait an' see if you got any friends in the Senate, cus Joe
McCarthy's gonna be gunnin' for you tomorrow. He is truly mean, and you, buster, are red meat in his sights.”

Jerome's shoulder felt as if it had been shot. That would teach him for taking liberties with the Almighty.

Luis poked pencils into the bullet holes in the desk. Red pencils, green, blue, brown. “Look,” he said “Modern art.”

“You're babbling, Luis.”

“I'm entitled to babble. That's twice the music critic of
The New York Times
has tried to kill me.”

“He's not the music critic.”

“And I wouldn't read the
Times
if he were,” Luis said. He had run out of babble. The sense of shock that lingered after Jerome left was slowly fading.

“He's gonna make quite a picture when he takes the stand,” she said. “One arm in a sling, a lip like a banana.”

“He'll be a basket case when Joe's finished with him.”

Julie was flicking through a copy of
Harper's Bazaar.
How could anyone spend that much on lingerie? “You're sure he'll plead the Fifth.”

“Of course.” But he knew that tone of voice. “What else can he do?”

She turned a page and saw a black silk bikini that was sexier than skin. “What would be the worst thing that could happen to McCarthy tomorrow?”

“Brain tumor?” She shook her head. “Give up,” he said.

“Go where the money is, Luis. See if you can get Fantoni out of his hole. After all, you put him there. Okay, I've done all the hard work, what I need now is a coffee milkshake.”

She went out. Luis picked up her magazine and let it fall open. On page after page, halfclad women, stunningly lovely, looked insolently into his eyes. Soon a cautious optimism invaded his loins. Perhaps she had forgiven him for Billy Jago's death. Not
that it had been his fault. He dropped the magazine. Time to do what he was good at: cheating.

*

It was all on two sheets of paper. Julie listened while Luis acted it out. To add a bit of drama he sat in a roller chair and scooted himself about the room while he spoke. Sometimes, for variety, he made the chair spin.

“Well, it's good and simple,” she said. “That's a start. There's one big weakness.”

“No authentication. No documents. Nothing to wave.” The chair slowly revolved to a halt. “Bullshit won't do the job.”

“Not in a Senate hearing.”

They looked at each other, soberly, hoping they'd overlooked something. Nothing offered itself. “Today I boosted McCarthy,” he said. “I almost married and impregnated the eternal virgin. I damn near got shot to pieces by the Mafia. I invented the lightbulb. All before lunch. Let's go eat.”

They went to a Mexican place whose name contained one vowel and seventeen consonants, mainly x, p and q. They ate chili with grated cheese and tiny crackers and Dos Equos beer. They went back to the office. A man they had never seen before was waiting. “You got a customer,” Stevie said.

“We haven't got a business,” Luis said.

“Metal Exchange is just a name,” Julie told the visitor. “I won it playing poker.”

“But you need something, Miss Conroy,” Mikhail said. “You need authentication and documents. Something to wave.” Nobody in the room moved, nobody breathed. Even the traffic noise seemed to stop. “You need help to get Mr. Fantoni out of his hole, and bullshit won't do it, Mr. Cabrillo.”

The traffic moved again. “How did you…” Luis began.

“Oh,” Mikhail said, “you know.”

*

They moved into the conference room, where the chairs were more comfortable. He said his name was Mikhail; no surname. “The only authentication I cannot provide is my own,” he said.

“Let's get this straight,” Luis said. “We've prepared a new scenario for Fantoni's hearing that says—”

“I know what it says.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course. Sorry. Well, it needs a dossier to support it, by tomorrow morning …”

“I've done this before, Mr. Cabrillo.”

“Okay,” Julie said. “Suppose you tell us.”

Mikhail told them. They made suggestions, added this, discarded that. After forty minutes he looked at his watch. “If I go now, you can have it by ten tonight,” he said.

They walked with him to the elevator. “You know, this is very strange,” Luis said. “The senator believes my stuff comes from a secret informant. But that's all balls.”

“Yes. I know.”

“And now you turn up.”

“Just in time.”

“But you haven't asked for money,” Julie said.

“Not that we have any money,” Luis said.

“You have twenty-nine thousand two hundred and eighty dollars, as of this morning,” Mikhail said. “Relax. My services are free.” The doors opened. They all shook hands.
“Dosvedanya,”
he said. “Whatever that means.”

*

Jerome Fantoni had a suite in the Hotel Washington. Julie met him in the rooftop bar. The hospital had put his shoulder back and given him a stylish black sling, but there was little they could do for his swollen lip. He was drinking milk: the doctors had advised no booze for a couple of days. She asked for a champagne cocktail.

“I read your script,” he said. “I see no problems.”

“Good. We kept everything simple.”

“Too simple. I've added color, emphasized the chiaroscuro. Or, to use a metaphor from the concert hall, I've written my own cadenzas.”

“Bully for you. You realize the hearing's liable to get kind of intense.”

“Miss Conroy, I played Macbeth for the Princeton Dramatic Society. My performance was described by the
Herald-Tribune's
critic as ‘majestic, manly, momentous.' You have the dossier?”

“You have ten thousand dollars?”

She gave him a fat file. He gave her a briefcase. For a moment their eyes met. He said. “It would be crass of each of us to ask the other how this was done so speedily.”

“You bet.”

After that, there was nothing left to do but enjoy the view. Jerome sipped his milk. He pointed to the floodlit White House. “The Tomb of the Weil-Known Warrior,” he said. “I feel sorry for Eisenhower.”

“Why?”

“People tried to kill FDR, and Truman, so chances are that someone is planning to kill Ike. We are a violent nation.”

“Yeah. That reminds me: d'you want your gun back?”

He shook his head. She finished her drink. Said goodnight. Got a taxi. Hugged the briefcase. Ten percent of this should buy a black silk bikini and leave some change.

*

“How much?” Luis asked. They were in bed.

“Ten grand.”

“Good God.” He watched the shifting pattern of moonlight reflected on the ceiling as the curtains blew with the breeze. “Did you have to haggle?”

“No. Ten grand is the right price, Luis. Us agents know this sort of thing.”

He turned onto his side, so that his body matched hers, his knees behind her knees, his chest against her back, and he slipped an arm around her waist. “You're brilliant,” he murmured into her hair, “and you smell wonderfully of lemons.” She made pleasantly agreeable sounds. “You could have tried for fifteen,” he said.

“You're a turd, Luis,” she said softly. “A turd with talent, but still a turd. Now go to sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

This was theater. The hearing had precious little to do with law. The chairman and his fellow-senators sat in a row and looked down on the witness. Around him and behind, the room was packed with reporters, cameramen, public, lawyers, cops. The
gallery was full. Cohn and Kennedy lurked near McCarthy. As chairman, he had the gavel and everyone expected him to hammer damn hard. The crowd wanted high drama. They hadn't come for a civics lecture, they'd come for blood.

Jerome Fantoni took the oath. He looked good: hair thick, silvering at the temples and well disciplined; a dark gray suit of conservative cut, buttoned over the sling but the left sleeve hung empty, obvious to everyone; a discreet tie of dark red and navy blue stripes; white shirt with the cuffs just showing.