The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Chapter 1

The debriefing took ten days in a sealed-off suite in the old section of the Army’s Letterman General Hospital on the Presidio in San Francisco and when it was finished, so was my career — if it could be called that.

They were polite enough throughout, perhaps even a bit embarrassed, providing that they felt anything at all, which I doubted, and the embarrassment may have prompted their unusual generosity when it came to the matter of severance pay. It amounted to twenty thousand dollars and, as Carmingler kept saying, it was all tax-free so that really ran it up to the equivalent of twenty-eight or even thirty thousand.

It was Carmingler himself who handed me the new passport along with the certified check drawn on something called the Brookhaven Corporation. He did it quickly, without comment, much in the same manner as he would shoot a crippled horse — a favorite perhaps, and when it was done, that last official act, he even unbent enough to pick up the phone and call a cab. I was almost sure it was the first time he had ever called a cab for anyone other than himself.

“It shouldn’t take long,” he said.

“I’ll wait outside.”

“No need for that.”

“I think there is.”

Carmingler produced his dubious look. He managed that by sticking out his lower lip and frowning at the same time. He would use the same expression even if someone were to tell him it had stopped raining. “There’s really no reason to—”

I interrupted. “We’re through, aren’t we? The loose ends are neatly tied off. The crumbs are all brushed away. It’s over.” I liked to mix metaphors around Carmingler. It bothered him.

He nodded slowly, produced his pipe, and began to stuff it with that special mixture of his which he got from some tobacco shop in New York. I could never remember the shop’s name although he had mentioned it often enough. He kept on nodding while he filled his pipe. “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”

“No,” I said, “you wouldn’t. But I would and that’s why I’ll wait outside.”

Carmingler, who loved horses if he loved anything, which again was doubtful, rose and walked around his desk to where I stood. He must have been forty or even forty-two then, all elbows and knee joints and what I had long felt was a carefully practiced, coltish kind of awkwardness. The flaming hair that stopped just short of being true madder scarlet half-framed his long narrow face, which I think he secretly wanted to resemble a horse. It looked more like a mule. A stubborn one. He held out his hand.

“Good luck to you.”

Sweet Christ, I thought, the firm handshake of sad parting. “By God, I appreciate that, Carmingler,” I said, giving his hand a brief, hard grasp. “You don’t know how much I appreciate it.”

“No need for sarcasm,” he said stiffly. “No call for that at all.”

“Not for that or for anything else,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said. “Good luck.”

“Sure,” I said and picked up the new plastic suitcase that failed utterly in its attempt to resemble cordovan. I turned, went through a door, down a hall, and out onto the semicircular drive where a pair of chained-down mortars that had been made in 1859 by some Boston firm called C.A. & Co. guarded the flagpole and the entrance to Letterman General Hospital, established 1898, just in time for the war with Spain. In the distance, there was Russian Hill to look at.

The cab arrived ten minutes later and I placed the bag in the front seat next to the driver. He turned to look at me.

“Where to, buddy?”

“A hotel.”

“Which one?”

“I haven’t thought about it. What do you suggest?”

He looked at me some more with eyes that were too old for his acolyte’s face. “You want high-priced, medium high-priced, or cheap?”

“Medium.”

“How about the Sir Francis Drake?”

“Fine.”

He let me off at the Sutter Street entrance and the desk clerk gave me a room on the seventeenth floor with a view of the Bay Bridge. I unpacked the new plastic suitcase they had given me and hung the two suits and the topcoat in the closet. I was wearing one of the three new suits, the gray one with the small, muted herringbone weave. It had a vest, as did the other two, and I suspected that Carmingler himself must have chosen them. He always wore vests. And smoked a pipe. And fiddled with his Phi Beta Kappa key.

I had been mildly surprised that everything fitted so well until I remembered that they had my exact measurements on file, had had them, in fact, for eleven years and even required new ones every January 15th on the off-chance that I might have developed a penchant for sauce-soaked noodles and ballooned out by thirty pounds or so, or even grown too fond of the bottle, given up eating, and dropped unhealthfully below my normal 162½ pounds. They always wanted everything exact. Height, 6′ ¼″. Neck, 15¼″. Chest, 41½″. Waist, 32¾. Arm, right, 34¼. Arm, left, 34″. Shoe 10-B with a double-A heel. Hat, 7¼. But they hadn’t bought me a hat, just the three suits to replace the gray cotton, pajamalike prison uniform that I had arrived in, plus a top coat and six shirts (all white, oxford cloth, all button-down collars — Carmingler again); six pairs of calf-length socks (all black); one pair of shoes: black, plain-toed, pebble-grained and expensive; six pairs of Jockey shorts; one belt, black alligator, and four ties (awful).

I estimated that it had cost them around seven or eight hundred dollars. Less than a thousand anyhow. If I’d been more important, they might have gone as high as fifteen hundred, but what they had spent accurately reflected my former niche in the hierarchy. It also reflected their fussy conviction that no ex-colleague, regardless of how wretched or ignominious, should be shunted into the real world unless he were properly (if not richly) attired.

The contents of the closet and the bureau were my sole possessions other than the new passport and the check for $20,000. I also owned a renewed aversion, or perhaps only antipathy, toward the word debriefing, but that didn’t have any cash value.

After the clothing was stored away I called down to the desk to find out the time and where the nearest bank was and whether it was open. I had no watch. It had been taken from me at the prison, at that damp, sweating, gray stone structure that the British had erected almost a century ago. When I was released after three months, nobody had ever heard of the watch. I hadn’t really expected to get it back, but I had asked anyway.

The man at the desk said the nearest bank was just up the street, that it was now 12:36, that the bank was open, and that if I didn’t have a watch I could look out the window at an insurance building whose flashing tower sign would tell me not only the time, but also the temperature. I told the man at the desk to send up a bottle of Scotch.

When the sad-faced bellhop handed me the bill for the whisky, I was surprised at its cost.

“It’s gone up,” I said.

“What hasn’t?”

“Talk,” I said. “It’s still cheap.”

I signed the bill, adding a twenty percent tip, which made the bellhop happy, or at least a little less morose. After he left I mixed a drink and stood by the window gazing out over the city with its bridge in the background. It was one of those spectacularly fine days that San Francisco manages to come up with sometimes in early September: a few quiet clouds, an indulgent sun, and air so sparkling that you know somebody’s eventually going to bottle it. I stood there in my room on the seventeenth floor and sipped the Scotch and stared out at what was once touted as America’s favorite city. Maybe it still is. I also thought about the future, which seemed to offer less than the past, and about the past, which offered nothing at all. Carmingler had seen to that.

I finished the drink and went in search of the bank, which turned out to be a branch of Wells Fargo. One of its minor officers, a young man with a handlebar mustache, seemed busily idle so I told him I wanted to open a checking account. The mustache jiggled a little at that and I assumed that the jiggle was a smile of welcome or at least acquiescence. A nameplate on his desk said that he was C. D. Littrell and I tried to remember whether I had ever seen a bank official with a handlebar mustache before and decided that I hadn’t except in some old Westerns and then he had usually turned out to be a crook. But this was Wells Fargo and perhaps its traditions encouraged handlebar mustaches.

After I sat down Littrell produced some forms and the forms contained questions to which I would have to think up some answers. I decided to tell the truth when convenient and to lie when it wasn’t.

“Your full name?” Littrell said.

“Dye, D-y-e. Lucifer C. Dye.” The C stood for Clarence but I saw no sense in mentioning that. Lucifer was bad enough.

“Your address?”

Another good question. “Temporarily the Sir Francis Drake.”

The mustache twitched slightly and this time I knew it wasn’t a smile. Littrell looked up from his writing and stared at me. I returned his gaze, gravely, I hoped.

“How long do you plan to stay there?” he said, coming down hard on the “there” as if he felt that anyone who stayed at a hotel for an extended period of time was either profligate or flighty. Perhaps both.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“You should let us know as soon as you get a permanent address.”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Your previous address?”

“Hong Kong. You want the street number?”

Littrell shook his head, a little sadly, I thought, and wrote down Hong Kong. He would have been happier had J said Boise or Denver or even East St. Louis.

“Your previous bank?”

“Barclays,” I said. “Also in Hong Kong.”

“I mean in the States.”

“None.”

“None at all — ever?” He seemed a little shocked.

“None at all.”

This time Littrell did shake his head. I couldn’t decide whether it was a gesture of disapproval or commiseration. “Where are you employed, Mr. Dye?” he said, and from his tone I knew he expected the worst.

“Self-employed.”

“Your place of business.”

“The Sir Francis Drake.”

Littrell had given up. He was scribbling hastily now. “What kind of business, Mr. Dye?”

“Export-import.”

“The name of your firm?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“I see,” Littrell said, a little glumly, and wrote down unemployed. “How much would you like to deposit?”

I could tell that if I said fifty dollars, he would be pleasantly surprised. If I said a hundred, he would be ecstatic.

“Twenty thousand,” I said. “No, better make it nineteen thousand, five hundred.”

Littrell muttered something to himself which I didn’t catch and then pushed two cards over to me. “These are the signature cards. Would you sign them the way that you’ll be signing your checks?”

I signed the cards and handed them back along with the certified check for $20,000. Littrell examined the check carefully and for a moment I thought he might even sniff it for some telltale odor. But he went on examining it, knowing it was good and, I thought, hating the fact that it was. He turned it over and looked for the endorsement. There was none. “Would you endorse it, please, Mr. Dye?” I wrote my name for the third time.

“Do you have some identification?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have some.”

We waited. He was going to have to ask for it. After fifteen seconds or so he sighed and said, “May I see it, please?”

I produced the passport, newly issued, never used, which said that my hair was brown, that my eyes were hazel, that I had been born in 1933 in a place called Moncrief, Montana, and if anyone still cared, I was a businessman. It didn’t mention that my slightly crooked teeth had just been cleaned by an Army dentist, a major who wanted desperately to get back into civilian practice.

Littrell accepted the passport, glanced at it, gathered up the forms, and excused himself. He headed for a glass and wood enclosed office a few feet away which barricaded an older man from those who dropped by wanting to borrow money. The older man’s head was pinkly bald and his eyes were colored a suspicious blue.

Littrell didn’t try to keep his voice down and I easily overheard the conversation, “A hot shot with a certified twenty thousand,” he said. “Regular checking.”

The older man looked at the check first, riffled through the forms, and then examined the passport. Carefully. He pursed his lips for a long moment and finally initialed the papers. “It’s only money,” he said, and I had the feeling that he was saying it for the four-hundredth time that year.

Littrell took the check and the forms, disappeared behind the tellers’ cages, and then came back to his desk where, still standing, he counted $500 on to its surface and then counted them again into my hand. He sat down after that, reached into a desk drawer, and produced a checkbook and some deposit forms, which he handed me.

“These checks are only temporary as are the deposit slips,” he said. “We’ll mail you a supply with your name and address printed on them, if you get a permanent address.”

I ignored the “if” and put the checks and deposit slips in my inside jacket pocket. The $500 I folded and casually stuck in my right-hand trouser pocket, which seemed to irritate Littrell. That’s probably why I did it — that and because I had no billfold or wallet or anything to put in one other than the $500. No driver’s license or credit cards. No snapshots or old letters, not even a pocket calendar from the corner liquor store. The only proof that I was who I said I was rested with my new passport that, with a few exceptions, allowed me to journey to any spot in the world that struck my fancy, providing I could think of one that did which, as a matter of fact, I couldn’t.

I said goodbye to Littrell who gave me a final twitch of his mustache. Once outside the bank, I turned right up Sutter Street. I was looking for a jewelry store so that I could buy a watch and it was at least ten minutes before I found one and five minutes before I spotted the man in the brown suit who was tailing me and seven minutes before I came to the pleasant realization that I really didn’t give a damn if he followed me to the ends of the earth — which some thoughtful San Franciscans claimed lay just across the bridge in Oakland.

Chapter 2

It had all begun, the entire mess, or my fall from grace, I suppose it could be called, when they overheaded the instructions by commercial rate from the home office of Minneapolis Mutual, which was located, for some unfathomable reason, in Las Vegas. The message arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th. It was in an antiquated, one-time code that was keyed that week to page 356 of the thirteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations which turned out to be excerpts from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. It took me a good half hour to break it down and I felt that any reasonably bright computer could have made it in seconds and, for all I knew, might already have done so. Decoded, the message was still childishly cryptic, as if whoever had sent it clung to a wistful hope that it would be meaningless to anyone but me. Its four words read: Cipher the Village Statesman.

It was one of their more asinine orders, a shade dumber than most, so I tore everything up and flushed it down the toilet. I then called in Joyce Jungroth, my Minnesota-born secretary who after three years still clung to her romantic notions about Hong Kong, had a bad complexion, and always smelled faintly of Noxzema. I handed her the Bartlett’s.

“Get rid of it,” I said.

She sighed and accepted the book. “Don’t you ever use dirty novels, something that I could read?”

“You’re not supposed to read them; you’re supposed to get rid of them.”

I suspected that she took the books home to her apartment. Not that it mattered, because the method — inexcusably old-fashioned, outdated, even juvenile — was used but once or twice a year and always by someone like Carmingler whose inbred distrust of technological innovations caused him to choose kitchen matches over a butane lighter, a bicycle (whenever possible) over a car, and even a knife over a revolver. You couldn’t pay Carmingler enough to travel by subway.

By then I had spent ten years in Hong Kong as managing director of an American-owned life insurance company called Minneapolis Mutual. During that time I had personally sold three policies, all straight life. I was running six agents, supposedly insurance salesmen, who worked the Southeast Asian territory. They were fortunate that they didn’t have to live on their commissions because their combined efforts over the decade had brought the total number of Minneapolis Mutual policies sold up to an even dozen.

Two of my own three sales, each with a face value of $100,000, had been bought six years previously by a Ford dealer and his wife from Mobile who were on a world tour and suffering from twin cases of diarrhea which proved uncomfortable enough to convince them that they would never see the heart of Dixie again. Arriving in Hong Kong by ship, and determined to complete their tour, they had looked up insurance companies and gratefully spotted Minneapolis Mutual which was, after all, American, even if its headquarters in the States were located a little far up north. Nobody had anticipated drop-in business when they had plunked me into the managing directorship and I still knew next to nothing about insurance. So when the American couple descended on me, checkbook in hand, I had to call in my secretary (not Joyce Jungroth; I had a different one then) who at least knew something about the drill, where the forms were anyway, and she wrote up the policies and dispatched the couple to a doctor, as much for their diarrhea as for the mandatory physicals.

It was the only drop-in business that Minneapolis Mutual’s tenth-floor island office on Pedder Street ever got, but it bothered me enough to take out $10,000 worth of straight life on myself that afternoon. I even wrote it up under the amused tutelage of my secretary. But since no one ever came around again, other than the odd office-supply salesman, I let the policy expire after a couple of years.

About the only thing I ever did learn about selling life insurance was that Southeast Asia is a rotten territory.

After Joyce Jungroth left, the copy of Bartlett’s clutched to her under-inflated bosom, I leaned back in my chair, the one with the moulded back that was supposed to correct posture, and pondered the instructions from Las Vegas.

For six months I had been trying to convince a plump, fiftyish Chinese agent that he should double. It had been an odd courtship and for my efforts I had been treated to long recitals of random quotations from Chairman Mao. Nevertheless, Li Teh kept all of the appointments. When he finally ran down, I would murmur something inane such as, “How true,” and drop two hundred-dollar bills on the floor or deck or even desk, adding: “Think about it, won’t you?” Li always took the money.

I learned eventually that Li Teh had been barely thirty years old when he had entered Hong Kong in late September of 1949, virtually indistinguishable from the swarmy horde of Chinese who sought sanctuary in the colony after Chiang Kai-shek boarded the C-47 called Meiling, in honor of his redoubtable wife, and skipped to Formosa, remembering to pack along the $200 million (U.S.) gold reserves of the Central Bank of China.

The thing that did distinguish Li Teh from his fellow pai hua, or refugees, was capital, a goodly amount in American dollars that Mao’s forces had stripped from a money belt found on the dead body of one of the more corrupt members of the Generalissimo’s personal staff. It was enough to allow Li to open a camera shop in Kowloon on Nathan Road with a franchise from an East German manufacturer who before World War II had been famous for the quality of the firm’s lenses. The shop prospered and Li opened another one on Kimberly Road a few years later, this time specializing in Canons and Nikons from Japan.

From there it was only a short step to Swiss watches (I’d bought one from him), transistor tape recorders, miniature television sets, and transistor radios — anything that hard currency tourists could tote along with them. Had it been his own capital, Li would have been a rich man by the time he was fifty, but his profits were either plowed back into his burgeoning businesses or funneled to Peking where his backers found ready use for the dollars and pounds and francs and marks.

I always thought that Li was a better businessman than he was a spy, although he was that too, dealing in information of all kinds, stealing it when he could, buying it when he couldn’t. Once a month he journeyed by train to Peking, a long, hard, uncomfortable trip, bearing a suitcase jammed with as much cash as the profits from his various enterprises would permit. It would have been simpler and more efficient, of course, to have deposited the funds in the Bank of China, but Li also carried along whatever information he had been able to pick up or scrounge and although it was, I understand, welcomed in Peking, it was not met with the same degree of warmth that greeted the hard currency.

Li was a communist and, I suppose, a good one. He once told me that it had all begun in 1938 when as a student he had managed to escape from a Nationalist Army press gang that had roped him to eleven other students. He made his way to Yenan in North China where Mao had located his provisional command post or field headquarters. Although still a teenager, Li was obviously bright and, for China, well educated. He had been allowed to live in one of the clean whitewashed caves that was the home of a senior officer who assumed responsibility for Li’s military training, party indoctrination, morality, and introduction to espionage techniques and practices. The officer was of middling rank in the communists’ intelligence apparatus and as the officer rose, so did Li Teh, until 1949 when they dispatched him to Hong Kong, his even then widening girth encircled by a money belt stuffed with American dollars.

As one of Hong Kong’s fairly prominent businessmen, Li had half-convinced his Peking superiors that he should live up to his reputation. They had given him what must have been grudging, reluctant permission, and he drove a Porsche, which he loved, dwelt as a widower in an elegant apartment building not too far from the Bank of China and the Cricket Club, and entertained frequently with a certain amount of grace and even style. He was a member of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, three civic organizations, and one private Chinese club that offered a quite excellent bill of fare. Li did all this with the approval if not the good grace of his superiors, whose tolerance of the high life ran out on the last day of each month when they scrutinized his books to make sure that he wasn’t left with a dime that he could call his own.

So Li Teh lived a little too well and as a consequence he was broke. Worse, he was in debt, and moneylenders in Hong Kong are even less forgiving than their loan-sharking colleagues in the States. So I corrupted Li Teh with money. It was what I was paid to do and it was what I knew best. In some circles they even said I was very good at it.

Our last meeting was held in a temporarily vacant godown and we followed the usual script except that Li cut his lecture short by almost six minutes, and even what he did say was delivered in a mechanical, totally uninspired manner. When he was through, he was silent for several long moments. I waited. Finally, in a voice so low that I could scarcely hear it, he said: “Your best price?”

“You name it.”

He decided on a moon shot. “Three thousand dollars a month.”

I tried to counter. “Hong Kong, of course.”

“American.”

We were sitting on a couple of empty packing cases. Li Teh leaned back and folded his arms over his bulging belly, which was smoothly cased in a dark green sharkskin suit that must have cost about one hundred and fifty (U.S.) dollars which, in Hong Kong, is a steep price for a suit, even a tailored one. His eyes were half-closed and he sat there, rocking a little, a fat, unlaughing communist Buddha, content in the certainty that he had just set a price which the buyer couldn’t possibly afford to turn down. It was an example of supply and demand at its best. Or worst.

“All right,” I said. “You’ve got it — if it’s worth it.”

“It will be.”

“What?”

“Verbal reports twice each month. Nothing in writing.”

“Whose?”

“My own.”

“And if they’re worthless?”

He smiled pleasantly. “Then, Mr. Dye, I seriously doubt that you will pay.”

I smiled back. “You’ve come to know me well.”

“Yes, I have, haven’t I?”

“When do you plan to return?” I said.

“To Peking?”

“Yes.”

“Two weeks from now.”

“Good,” I said. “That’ll give me a chance to obtain clearance.”

That troubled Li. To prove it, he arched his eyebrows. “You do not yet have clearance?”

“I never anticipate good news so I didn’t ask for it.”

“And bad news?” Li said.

“I never anticipate that either.”

“Then you must surely live a rather bland existence, Mr. Dye.”

I nodded and produced two one hundred-dollar bills and laid them carefully on the packing case which Li was using as a perch. Never once had I handed money to him directly. He ignored the bills.

“In our business, Mr. Li,” I said, “a bland existence is sometimes desperately sought.”

Chapter 3

The jewelry store that I found was near Taylor and Bush Streets, about three blocks from the hotel. It was a small shop, and when I tried the door, I found it locked. Inside, I could see a clerk, or perhaps the owner, hurrying toward the door. He unlocked it quickly. The man in the brown suit had stopped three or four doors down, where he made a careful inspection of some hernia trusses and artificial legs that an orthopedic shop had on display.

“I keep it locked now,” said the man who opened the door. “I’ve been robbed three times in the last six months, so I keep it locked now.”

“You probably discourage more customers than you do thieves,” I said.

“Who cares?” he said. “I’m going bankrupt anyhow. If the punks don’t ruin me, the insurance rates will. You know, I remember when this used to be a fairly honest town. Now take a look at it.”

He was a thin, short man of about fifty who wore thick-lensed, heavily framed glasses that made his brown eyes pop a little. He looked worn and used up. His thin mouth was an almost lipless, bitter line and his nose kept sniffing as though he could smell his impending economic doom.

“I’d like to see a watch,” I said.

“Any special kind?”

“I want an Omega Seamaster, stainless steel, the kind with the calendar thing on it.”

“It’s a good watch,” the man said because he had to say something and he probably felt that there was no sense in wasting salesmanship on someone who had already made up his mind. He darted behind a counter and handed me a watch. It was exactly like the one they had taken from me in the prison, except that this one had a leather strap.

“Do you have one with an expansion bracelet?” I said.

“No, they all come with the strap, but we can put an expansion on for you in a jiffy.”

“How much?”

“For the watch or the expansion bracelet?”

“For both.”

He told me and it was fifty dollars more than I had paid Li Teh in Hong Kong, but that was what Hong Kong was for, among other things. Cheap watches. “All right,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

“It’ll only be a minute or two,” the man said, picking up the watch and heading for the rear of the shop where the resident expansion-bracelet expert apparently waited. I turned and looked out the front window. The man in the brown suit stood before it, seemingly transfixed by the display that lay behind the plate glass which was imbedded with thin, gray, metallic strips that would sound an alarm if anyone tried a smash and grab with a brickbat.

“Here we are,” the man said, returning a few minutes later with the watch, and as always, I wanted to say “where?” but there seemed to be no sense in it. I paid for the watch, checked to see that it was correctly set, and slipped it on to my left wrist. The shopowner started to put the black case that had contained the watch into a paper sack. I told him to keep it.

“But it contains the guarantee.”

“I don’t want that either,” I said.

Out on the sidewalk I paused for a moment beside the man in the brown suit who still seemed mesmerized by the window display. I looked but could see nothing special other than some watches, several trays of junky rings, and a medium-sized clock with a small sign boasting that it was within three seconds of absolute accuracy. I glanced at my new watch and was vaguely pleased to see that it still kept the right time.

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” I said to the man in the brown suit, turned, and started to walk back: toward Sutter Street and the Sir Francis Drake.

He was a good tail when he wanted to be. In fact, very good. He made all the right moves, as if he had been making them ail his life, but now made them only out of habit, as if he didn’t care whether he was spotted or not.

I stopped a few doors from the hotel in front of a bookstore on Sutter Street and inspected the latest crop of best-sellers. Through the diagonally placed window I could read the names of the authors and the titles as well as keep the sidewalk behind me in view through the reflection of the glass. I had heard of some of the authors but only two of the titles, but that’s what comes from not reading a newspaper for a hundred days or so. The man in the brown suit was walking toward me rapidly now that it was downhill and the going was easier.

Almost fat, I thought. Overweight by twenty pounds, at least. Perhaps thirty. Around five-ten, probably forty-five or forty-six, but possibly a dissipated forty-two. The brown suit wasn’t shabby, just unpressed, and his black shoes needed a shine. The collar of his white shirt was too small and its points stuck up in the air. He wore a blue and purple striped tie and for a moment I wondered if he were color blind. When he was about twenty feet from me, I turned and watched him approach. He walked on his heels, bringing them down hard on the sidewalk. If his body was overweight, his face wasn’t. It was all planes and angles with a set of dark brown eyebrows that looked as if they should be combed. His hair was brown, too, but dotted with splotches of dirty gray as though certain spots of it had once been shaved and when they grew back, they had grown back a different color. Underneath the fuzzy brows was a set of eyes that regarded me fixedly as he approached. When he drew near enough I could see that one was brown and one was blue and neither of them contained any more warmth than you would find in a slaughterhouse freezer.

He was about three feet away when he stopped and looked me up and down carefully with his two-toned eyes. “Your name’s Dye,” he said in a quiet, hard tone that made it more like a threat than a statement of fact.

“My name’s Dye,” I said. “Why the tail job?”

“I wasn’t sure it was you until you started back for the hotel. The desk told me you’d gone to the bank, but all I had was a general description. You fitted it pretty well, so I tailed you.”

“I noticed,” I said.

“You wouldn’t have if I’d been trying.”

“But you weren’t.”

“No.”

“All right,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I’m with Victor Orcutt,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“What’s he sell?”

“Nothing.”

“Why me?”

He reached into the pocket of his brown suit and brought out a package of Camels. He offered me one. I shook my head no. He lit it with a stainless steel Zippo, inhaled deeply and then blew some smoke up into the air. He seemed to have all the time that there was. He seemed to have almost as much time as I did;

“He didn’t think you’d be much interested,” the man in the brown suit said.

“In what?”

“An invitation to go see him.”

“He’s right,” I said. “I’m not.”

His blue and brown gaze never left my face. “Like I said, he didn’t think you’d accept an invitation, so he told me to give you this.” He reached into his inside breast pocket and produced a square, buffcolored envelope which he handed to me.

“You could have left it at the desk,” I said, pocketing the envelope, not looking at it.

He nodded slightly, but not very much. His heavy, thick chin moved a half-inch down and then up. Twice. “I could have, couldn’t I,” he said, “except that Victor Orcutt told me to give it to you personally. He gets a little fussy sometimes so I like to do what he says. Makes for harmony, if you know what I mean.”

“Only too well,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, still memorizing my face with his two-color eyes. “I bet you do at that.” Then he turned abruptly and walked on down Sutter Street without a goodbye or even a farewell wave of the hand. I noticed that he still came down hard on his heels.

I didn’t open the envelope until I was up in the hotel room. The buff paper could have been made out of fine old linen rags and it crackled richly as I tore the flap open. Inside there was a single sheet of paper, folded once. Centered near its top was the name Victor Orcutt in discreet, squared-off, capitals and small capital letters. There was nothing else on the letterhead. No address, no phone number, no zip code. The name was printed in dark brown ink, the color of old mahogany, and I ran my thumb over the letters to make sure that they were engraved. The hand-written message, also in dark brown ink, was simple, knowing, and even polite:

The handwriting was calligraphy really and it was so good that it almost made up for its air of affectation. It was a clear, bold hand, straight up and down, without an unnecessary whorl or flourish or serif. It was a studied, strangely economical style and I decided that it must have taken Victor Orcutt a couple of years of hard practice to perfect it.

I tossed the letter onto a table, mixed a drink, and stood by the window to watch the fog roll in and think bad thoughts about Carmingler and his sealed-off suite and his Boy Scout security.

They had chartered a C-130 to fly me the eight thousand miles or so to San Francisco. It had touched down only once on the way, at Honolulu International to refuel, and even then I wasn’t allowed off the plane. There had been only two passengers, Carmingler and myself, and it was Carmingler alone who had met me at that gray, crumbling ruin of a prison at midnight when I was released. He wore a hot tweed jacket with leather patches on its sleeves and insisted that there wasn’t time for me to change clothes, but that I should wear the pajamalike gray cotton uniform, the same one that I had worn continuously for three months.

Aboard the C-130, I told him: “I’ve got lice.”

“Really?” he said. “Oh, well, I suppose a great many people do. We’ll get rid of them for you in a few hours. In the meantime, scratch if you like. I don’t mind.”

We flew from Honolulu International to Hamilton Air Force Base where a private ambulance waited with its windows carefully blacked out. The ambulance whisked Carmingler and me to Letterman General and I wasn’t allowed outside the sealed-off suite except to go to the dentist. According to Carmingler, no one knew that I was at Letterman General. And perhaps no one did, except Victor Orcutt. So much for Carmingler’s security measures.

He had talked little on the long flight back, except at Honolulu when we had refueled and he couldn’t smoke his pipe. “There’s been a bit of a flap, you know,” he said.

“How bad?”

“Bad enough, I’m afraid.”

“So?”

He took his dead pipe out of his mouth long enough to give me what I assume he thought was a reassuring smile. “We’ll get it straightened out. In San Francisco.”

“How bad?” I asked again.

Carmingler went through his coltish act. He rose awkwardly, balanced himself on his right foot, and knocked the empty pipe against the heel of his raised left shoe.

“It’s bad enough,” he said, and his head ducked toward the pipe that he was pounding against his shoe. “Actually, it’s about as bad as it could possibly be.”

Chapter 4

I had been waiting for the go-ahead signal on Li Teh for more than a week when the childish message arrived instructing me to Cipher the Village Statesman. Translated, it meant that I was to subject Li to a polygraph or lie detector test. Despite his horror of most things mechanical, especially computers, Carmingler’s faith in the polygraph bordered on the mystical. It was the kind of faith that the clergy likes to call deep and abiding.

I decided that it must have been a committee decision. Four or five or even six of them sitting around a table, covering their ruled, yellow legal pads with penciled doodles as they discussed Li Teh and whether he would be worth $3,000 a month to the taxpayers. There would be, of course, the suspicious one, perhaps an old hand, but more likely a new boy trying to make a name for himself. He would chew on his pencil’s eraser for a while, look worried, and then raise the question as to whether Li could really be trusted. You know. Really. After all, if he’s agreed to double, couldn’t he just as easily triple? Young Masterman might have something there, another of them would say, and cock an eyebrow to show the colors of a true skeptic.

And Carmingler, sitting quietly, sucking on his aged pipe, would toss it out casually, as if he didn’t really care, but if they were really worried about Li, the lie machine could clear everything up nicely to the satisfaction of all. If you agree, I’ll get a signal off to Dye this afternoon. So they would all nod in agreement, with the exception of Li Teh, unrepresented, who could blow the whole thing with a farewell address delivered in his normal screech and interspersed with a few choice quotations from Chairman Mao. And there would go six months of work out the window or down the drain or even up the spout, depending upon which cliché I felt like using that day. I sighed and picked up the phone and buzzed Joyce Jungroth.

“Put in a call to Shoftstall,” I said.

“It might take quite a while,” she said. Joyce Jungroth disapproved of the extravagance of overseas calls.

“Just put it through.”

She caught the tone of my voice and said, “Yes, sir.” She called me sir at least three times a year. While I waited for the call I dialed another number and when Li answered, I said hello in English and then switched to rapid, fluent Mandarin. I know it was fluent because I spoke little else until I was nearly six years old.

“There has been a change in plans,” I said.

“They have refused my application?” Li said.

“Not at all. It is only that the underwriters require a careful examination, a simple test, one might say.”

“I have heard of such tests,” Li said.

I bet you have, I thought. “It is only routine.”

“Where will it be held?”

I mentioned that island city-state that lies two thousand miles south of its half-sister, Hong Kong.

“A far distance,” Li said. “I am no longer sure that I am even interested in the policy.”

“There will be added benefits once you have received the examiner’s approval.”

“When will the examiner be in attendance?” he asked.

“Tomorrow evening, around nine.”

“The place?”

“That is yet to be decided,” I said. “However, a message will await you at the airline ticket counter.”

There was a brief silence and I could almost hear the abacus that was Li’s brain adding up the advantages and subtracting the disadvantages. Finally, he said: “I trust that you, too, will be present.”

“It would be remiss if I were not, considering the value of the policy.”

Another silence was followed by a soft sigh. “I will make the necessary arrangements,” Li said and hung up.

I had stumbled on to Li Teh by accident which, at base, is responsible for most intelligence coups as well as disasters. A Canadian journalist stationed in Peking had once met Li at a cocktail party in Hong Kong. Blessed with an unusual memory for names and faces, the journalist had grown curious when Li had entered the most forbidden government building in Peking, the Forbidden City of forbidden buildings. He waited for two hours for Li to reappear, but when he didn’t, the journalist made a note of the date and time. Our Tokyo office kept the Canadian journalist on a small retainer and when he made a routine report to them on Li they had just as routinely forwarded it to me.

I had snooped around until I was positive that Li Teh was an agent and that his personal financial position was not as flush as it seemed. Threats of exposure or an appeal to his concern for the future of mankind would be met with either hostility or giggles, so I decided that immediate financial relief would be the most promising avenue of approach and I traveled up and down it so often that I almost began to think like what I assuredly was not: a life insurance salesman with the solid chance of a quick close on a million dollar annuity.

So now that I had him doubled, I had to fly him two thousand miles and put him through a test of doubtful validity by a machine that probably had been thrown out of whack by the humidity. I remembered my own lie detector test, the one that they’d given me just prior to employment. It was just for the record, they’d said. First, there was the stream of innocuous questions: “Did you drive here this morning? Was the sun shining? Did you eat breakfast?” All yes or no. Then they slipped the shaft in: “Have you ever had a homosexual experience?” I had answered yes.

My answer startled both the technician and the machine. The machine said I was lying and the technician insisted that we run through the whole set of questions five more times but the machine still said that I lied.

“Look, fella,” the technician had said. “The thing says you’re lying about the homosexual bit.” I remember that everyone was using “bit” that year.

“Then it’s wrong. I did have one. I was four and my consenting partner was five and a half.”

“Aw, shit,” the technician said. “Just say no and let’s see what happens.”

“Then I’d be lying, wouldn’t I?”

“Just say no, fella. For my sake.”

I said no and the machine registered nothing, not even a tremor. “Four years old,” the technician muttered. “Jesus.”

While waiting for the overseas call to go through I thought about the new help that Carmingler had sent me. I lumped them together as the two smart boys from Illinois, making it Illinoyz for the sake of the rhyme. The first, the so-called polygraph expert, was Lynn Shoftstall from Evanston. The other was John Bourland from Libertyville. Both were recent graduates of what Carmingler referred to as “our new in-service training program” which only meant that you could start them out cheap at the bottom and keep them there until it was determined whether they could hack it as junior-grade spies. I thought of the program as something less than a smashing success.

Carmingler had sent them out to replace two of my former salesmen-agents, a seasoned pair, one of whom had been reassigned to Tokyo, a kind of a promotion, while the other had awakened in Bangkok one impossibly hot afternoon, suffering from a dreadful hangover which, among other things, had caused him to say to hell with it and catch the next plane to Sydney where, some said, he was writing a book. I hoped that it would make him a lot of money.

Bourland was the linguist, fluent in both Thai and Mandarin. Shoftstall, not nearly so keen a language student, in fact, barely proficient, was a mechanical whiz. I was informed that he knew virtually all there was to know about such gadgets as phone taps, room bugging devices, and a host of other miniaturized marvels, most of which were anathema to Carmingler and a mystery to me, although some said that they could prove useful. Shoftstall was rated expert in the use of the polygraph, but it didn’t really matter whether he was or not. He had the only polygraph around and supposedly only he could peep into Li Teh’s mind by measuring the beat of his pulse, the rate of his breathing, the amount of sweat in his palms, and the flutter of his heart as the lies tripped over themselves in their haste to leave his tongue.

My telephone rang and Joyce Jungroth informed me that my call to Shoftstall had gone through and that he was on the line.

“How’s the truth business today?” I said after we said hello.

“Beautiful.”

“Tomorrow night,” I said.

“On what?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Where?”

“The usual place,” I said.

“We’ll be there.”

The usual place was a hotel that had been built a hundred years or so ago when they still built hotels with fine, thick walls. It enjoyed a worldwide reputation and now that it was air-conditioned, it even managed to give the new Hilton some stiff competition.

“Check everything out by nine tomorrow night.”

“You want it permanent?” Shoftstall asked. He meant taped.

“Yes,” I said.

“Consider it done. By the way,” he said, “I’ve been experimenting with a new kind of—”

“Later,” I said and hung up.

Li and I ignored each other on the Philippine Air Lines flight to the island city-state whose Chinese premier, armed with a double first from Cambridge, was still groping for a formula that would make his tiny Republic a viable, thriving, unaligned community. It could scarcely be called a nation.

It wasn’t hard for Li and me to ignore each other because Li flew first class while I settled for tourist, or economy, as the going euphemism had it. When we landed I left a note for Li at the airline’s counter. It told him where to go and when to be there. I took a taxi to the old hotel and walked up a broad flight of stairs to the second floor where Shoftstall and Bourland had rented a large room.

At twenty-six John Bourland was twenty pounds overweight, which wouldn’t have been so bad had it not all settled into a paunch that, because of his small frame, made him look as if he were trying to conceal a soccer ball under his jacket. It was Bourland who answered my knock and greeted me in Mandarin. He still seemed amazed that when he opened his mouth another language might pop out.

“You staying over?” Bourland asked.

“Not if I can help it,” I said.

“How are you, Luci?” Shoftstall said from his prone position on the bed. Tail and lean, Shoftstall had once been a second-string guard on a losing Northwestern basketball team and was considered something of a prodigy in the electrical engineering field, although he had had to hire someone else to take his final examinations in history, English, and political science. I tried not to wince at the Luci, but failed. It didn’t really matter because Shoftstall didn’t notice. He didn’t notice much of anything unless it had a wire connected to it.

“Is all your stuff set?” I said.

“We checked everything out at the office. Perfect.”

“Who’s the pigeon?” Bourland asked.

“Just a man.”

“You want me to help with the questioning?” Bourland said. He was pressing too hard, I thought, and once again wondered what they were teaching them these days in that in-service training program. Not enough, it seemed.

“Just help with the gadgets,” I said.

Shoftstall swung his long legs over the side of the bed and sat up, stretching and yawning mightily. Our nation’s yearning, blue-eyed pride, I remembered from somewhere. Cummings, I decided. Or cummings.

“When’s he due?” Shoftstall asked, yawning again.

“Any minute if you can stay awake.”

Three minutes later there was a rap on the door and I opened it. Li Teh came in quickly, his eyes darting as he catalogued and classified the occupants, the furniture, and the equipment. “This is Mr. Jones,” I said, not trying to be clever, only simple. “My associates.”

Li didn’t even nod at them. “Let’s get on with it,” he said in English.

I nodded at Shoftstall, who moved to a writing desk which held the lie detector in its gray metal case. “Would you remove your coat and roll up your sleeves, Mr. Jones?” he said. “Then please sit in this straight chair in front of the desk.”

Li removed his coat, folded it neatly, and put it carefully on the bed. He sat in the chair. Gingerly, I thought. Shoftstall bustled around, readying his equipment and giving out with an endless line of chatter which he seemed to think would soothe the obviously nervous Li, but which, in fact, only made him more jittery. Li obviously wished that the American fool would shut up.

I let Shoftstall talk. “The purpose of this machine, Mr. Jones, is simply to establish validity. That’s all. Nothing else. It’s painless, and there’s absolutely no reason to worry — Mr. Dye here will just ask some simple questions to which you can answer either yes or no. That’s all. Just yes or no. Before you know it, we’ll be through.”

Li said nothing. Bourland plugged his tape recorder into the outlet under the desk. Shoftstall continued to chatter away as he affixed the lie detector’s attachments to Li’s chest, forearm, and palm. “Now if you’ll just turn your chair a little this way — to the right,” Shoftstall said. “Fine. That’s just fine.”

“We brought the big Ampex,” Bourland said. “I thought you might want the fidelity and its mike will pick up everything.”

“Good,” I said, not really caring, eager only that the entire sorry scene end itself as soon as possible.

Shoftstall stepped back from Li as if to admire his work. “Okay,” he said to Bourland. “You can roll the tape.”

Bourland turned a knob on the recorder, made a couple of adjustments, and said, “Tape one and rolling. Interview with Mr. Jones.” He looked at Shoftstall. “It’s rolling.”

Shoftstall dropped to his hands and knees and groped for the polygraph’s plug that dangled down behind the writing desk. He glanced up at me. “As soon as I plug it in, you can start,” he said.

“All right.”

He groped again for the electric cord, found it, and plugged it into the wall socket, the same one that powered the Ampex.

The flashes were cobalt blue, I suppose. Whatever the color, they leaped three feet out into the room, twice, and they were accompanied by a series of sputtering, wet-sounding plops. The lights in the room died instantaneously, but it took Li Teh a little longer. He screamed only once. It really wasn’t much of a scream; it was more like something that a dying kitten would make.

I groped my way over to Li Teh and held the lighter before his face. His eyes were open but they didn’t see the flame. I stood there and stared at him until the lighter burned itself out. Shoftstall and Bourland were moving around, cursing and muttering as they rummaged for their equipment. It seemed that we were there in the dark with the dead man for a long time, but it was really only a matter of minutes before the police began pounding on the door and I moved over to open it before they broke it down.

Chapter 5

They handed Carmingler the chore of telling me that I was finished. He said so when we were about halfway through the debriefing at Letterman General. I don’t think he relished doing it, but then it didn’t bother him much either. Nothing did really, unless it was when one of his horses came down with the croup or rale or whatever it is that horses get. He sat there behind a gray metal desk in the bare tan room and fiddled with his Phi Beta Kappa key which most thought came from Princeton, a misconception that Carmingler never discouraged, but which actually came from Louisiana State. There was one thing about Carmingler though: he had shucked his bayou accent.

“It’s a pity, of course,” he had said. “Especially since it wasn’t your fault. Not your fault at all. But I’m sure you appreciate our position.” If he had been smoother, or if that course in sensitivity that he had once taken had had any effect, Carmingler would have said their position, not ours. I let it pass.

“After they issued the initial denial that none of you belonged to them, well, I’m afraid we got stuck with it.”

“You could fix it,” I said, again not really caring, but willing to argue a little for the sake of form.

“I’m afraid not.”

“You’ve fixed worse ones.”

He frowned and gave up on his Phi Beta Kappa key and started to mess with his pipe. “Not recently,” he said.

“What about the other two?” I said.

“What other two?”

“Those two clowns you sent me. Shoftstall and Bourland.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Carmingler said, as if I had just recalled two mutual acquaintances who really didn’t quite belong in his social set. “The same thing for them, although we’re not being quite as liberal. Financially, I mean.”

“Why should you?” I said. “They’ve only got eighteen months in. I’ve got eleven years and when I go looking for a job I can’t very well tell a prospective employer that I’ve had amnesia for the past eleven years.”

Carmingler had finally got his pipe lighted and he was sucking away on it. “That does present a bit of a problem and if it weren’t for all that publicity—”

“My name was never mentioned,” I said.

“Of course not. But that insurance company’s name was. Minneapolis Mutual. People remember. Possibly we can work something out, a few letters of reference from some firm or other saying that you’d been employed by them. That kind of thing. Let me think about it.”

“You do that,” I said, and never brought it up again because I knew that there wasn’t any use.

Carmingler glanced at his watch. “Well, I suppose that’ll wrap it up for today.”

“Just one other thing,” I said.

“What?”

“I hope those eleven years that I put in were worth it.”

“Worth what?”

“Worth that million dollars you spent getting me out of jail.”

I thought or perhaps brooded about Carmingler and the past three months of my life as I stood there on the seventeenth floor of the Sir Francis Drake and watched the fog roll in. Even with the windows closed, I could hear the anachronistic clang of the cable cars as they ground their way up and down Powell. The streets were still visible, but the Bay Bridge had disappeared. In a few more minutes the fog would settle down for the evening and all I’d have left to admire would be the insurance company tower whose electric sign informed me that it was 64° outside and 3:59 P.M., both inside and out. I checked my new watch and found that the tower was right.

The brisk knock on my door came at precisely 4:02 P.M., according to the tower sign. I opened the door and he was younger than I’d expected. Much younger.

“Mr. Dye,” he said and smiled pleasantly enough. “I’m Victor Orcutt. May we come in?”

I opened the door wider and moved back. “Sure,” I said. “Come in. We can either have a party or a rubber of bridge.”

There were three of them. First came Victor Orcutt, then the man in the brown suit with the two-tone eyes, and last the honey blonde. She was still several years under thirty and her hair came as close to that shade of honey that bees make from yellow clover as nature or her beauty parlor could get it. She let a small smile play around her full mouth, but her mild brown eyes failed to back it up. They seemed sad, even hurt, but then I hadn’t even had a woman glance at me in a hundred days or so, and if I’d stared at her a little longer, I probably could have found anything that I was looking for, even my own private version of the land of Prester John.

Once in the room Orcutt spun around gracefully and waved a hand at the man in the brown suit. “I believe you’ve met my associate, Homer Necessary. I always delight in introducing him to people because of that wonderful surname. Don’t you think it’s wonderful, Mr. Dye?”

He didn’t give me a chance to say what I thought because he kept on talking. “And this is my executive assistant, Miss Carol Thackerty. Miss Thackerty, Mr. Dye.” I had nodded at Necessary and now I said how do you do or hello or how are you to Carol Thackerty who merely smiled and looked past me at something more interesting. The radiator perhaps.

Orcutt started to talk some more. “Well, I must say that you look awfully fit for having spent three months in what I understand to be a perfectly wretched prison.” He moved quickly to the window. Or flitted. “And this view should be simply glorious when the fog’s gone.” He spun around again and if it weren’t for his height, or rather lack of it, I would have been almost sure that at one time or other he’d spent a few years in the chorus line. He had the build, but not the height, not even with the elevator shoes. He stared at me for a moment and then smiled again. “I should confess, Mr. Dye, that I did expect you to be more — well — shall we say, emaciated?”

“We’ll say that,” I said and turned to Carol Thackerty. “Won’t you sit down?”

She managed that fleeting half-smile of hers again and gracefully lowered herself into a chair by the window with a murmured, “Thank you.” Her legs were fine, I noticed, long and well moulded. She wore a beige dress that was topped by a tweedy sort of cape-coat and she carried a tan leather bag that looked large enough to be a briefcase. It matched her shoes. She had a kind of finishing-school poise and she knew how to sit and wasn’t at all worried about what to do with her hands.

“Sit down, Homer,” Victor Orcutt said to the man in the brown suit. Necessary looked around and found a chair that he seemed to like and was about to sit in it when Orcutt snapped, “No, not that one. Use the couch over there.” Necessary’s expression didn’t change. He seemed not to have heard Orcutt; at least he didn’t respond or even look at him, but he did move to the couch.

“Let’s see now,” Orcutt said, surveying the room with his right forefinger pressed against his lower lip. “I think I will sit—” He looked around some more. “Over there. Yes!” Over there was the seat that Necessary had chosen first.

Even with the elevator shoes Victor Orcutt wasn’t much over five foot three and I can’t say that I ever saw him walk anyplace. He glided instead. He wore a dark blue suit which looked as if it might be velvet, but on closer inspection turned out to be cashmere. I had never seen a cashmere suit before. An odd jacket perhaps, or an overcoat, but never a suit, especially one that was buttoned up the front with twenty dollar gold pieces. Six of them. Underneath the suit was a Lord Byron shirt, probably silk, and a carefully knotted cravat as red as ox blood and twice as rich that only a boor would have called a necktie. For shoes he favored black alligator, blunt-toed loafers which boasted buckles that were probably real gold too. I assumed that his drawers were also silk, but I never found out.

He perched on the edge of the chair to make sure that his feet could touch the floor. I bet myself another bottle of Scotch that he wasn’t a day over twenty-six, if that. His poise reminded me of an actor’s whose ego will never allow him to be offstage. His hair was curly and blond and he wore it long, I suspected, because someone had once told him that it made him look like Byron. He had the same thin nose, sensual mouth, and strong, jutting chin which, for some reason, I decided was made out of glass. He smiled a lot, but it didn’t mean anything, and I had the feeling he would smile just like that if a dog got run over. He looked, all in all, a little prissy until you noticed his dark blue eyes which he may have borrowed from the local hangman, if there were one. They were eyes that rightfully belonged to a gunfighter or a pirate or perhaps an astronaut gone slightly mad. They were eyes that valued human life cheaply, including his own, and if he had any intelligence at all, he would be an enemy to respect. I doubted that you could ever count on him as a friend.

“I’m not Jewish,” he said in a completely ingenuous manner. “Are you?”

“No,” I said.

“Necessary isn’t either. And, of course, Miss Thackerty is just pure WASP. I do so wish you were Jewish. Even Italian would do.”

“Sorry,” I said. “By the way, I have Scotch, and water to mix it with. If you want anything else, I’ll have to call down for it.”

“Carol?” Orcutt said.

“Nothing, thank you,” she said.

“Homer?”

“Scotch is okay,” Necessary said. It was the first time he’d said anything since he arrived.

“I would like — let’s see now. Yes! I would like a Dr Pepper.”

“Dr Pepper,” I murmured and moved to the phone. I got room service and told them to send up a Dr Pepper, a bucket of ice, four glasses, and some Pall Mall cigarettes. Two packs. I thought that the cigarettes made the order a little more respectable. “Hold on,” I said into the phone and turned to the girl. “You sure you wouldn’t like something — tea perhaps?”

She smiled again — or almost did. “Why, yes, tea would be nice.”

“And a pot of tea with—” I looked at her.

“Lemon,” she said.

“With lemon,” I said.

“This is extremely kind of you, Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said as he patted a few curls into place.

“My Southern upbringing,” I said as I took a seat on the opposite end of the couch from Necessary.

Orcutt waved his right forefinger at me as if I’d said something naughty. “You were born in Montana, Mr. Dye. In Moncrief, Montana.”

I didn’t bother to answer and I suppose it was the girl that kept me from kicking them all out. It had been a long time since I’d been near a woman, more than three months, and Carol Thackerty seemed to be as pleasant a prospect as I could hope to encounter. Carmingler, flushing a little and staring out the window, had once offered to run a whore into Letterman General for me, although he’d said that she was an Army nurse. I’d passed it up, more out of pique than moral squeamishness.

After the bellhop came and left, the one who looked as if he cried whenever they played “Melancholy Baby,” I served Carol Thackerty her tea, handed Orcutt a glass of Dr Pepper, and mixed two Scotches with water for Necessary and myself. They all said thank you, even Necessary.

“Now then,” Victor Orcutt said as he wriggled around in his chair to make himself more comfortable. “Let me tell you something about me. I won’t tell all, of course. No one does that, not even to their very best friends. But I will tell you quite a bit because I know you’re curious and I just love talking about myself, don’t you?”

“Not especially,” I said, “except when I’m drunk.”

“Do you get drunk often?” he said.

“Probably not often enough. It’s one of my failings.”

“You’re teasing!” Victor Orcutt said. “I like that. But now let me give you a little personal background and then we’ll talk about the proposal.”

I was looking at Carol Thackerty. She was looking out the window at either the fog or the insurance company tower. “All right,” I said.

“Well, I was born in Los Angeles twenty-six years ago. Not Los Angeles exactly. It was actually in the San Fernando valley. You know where that is.”

It wasn’t a question, so I said nothing.

“Now then, I was graduated — summa cum laude I might add, if you don’t think it’s boasting — from the University of Chicago Law School seven years ago—”

“That would make you nineteen,” I said.

“That’s right. I was nineteen.”

“And summa cum laude.”

“He was nineteen,” Necessary said. “I checked it out. The laude stuff, too.”

“Really, Homer, you don’t have to—”

“You want another drink?” I said to Necessary. He drank fast.

“Why not?” he said and handed me his glass.

I got up and went over to the bottle and the ice. “Go on,” I said to Orcutt.

“After graduation I went to Europe and studied international law at the Free University in Berlin for a year and was awarded my doctorate degree, again with honors.”

“In a year,” I said.

“I checked that out, too,” Necessary said. “He’s a fucking genius.”

“I do wish you would do something about your language, Homer, especially when a lady is present.”

Necessary glanced at Carol Thackerty, who was still staring out the window. He said, “Huh,” and took a long swallow of his fresh drink. I followed suit.

“After Berlin,” Orcutt went on, “I came back to the States and toyed with several positions that were offered to me at the time.”

“He got thirty-two job offers,” Necessary said. “None of them for less than thirty grand a year.”

Orcutt preened a little at that and forgot about admonishing Necessary. “Well, as I said, I toyed with them, but they really didn’t interest me. It was all big corporation law and that can be terribly boring. So for a while I even thought that I might join the Peace Corps, but, well, you know—”

“I know,” I said.

“So I simply sat down and made a list of things that I really thought I could become interested in and which, by the way, would enable me to earn a comfortable living. Well, I had this list of about twenty things that ranged from undersea exploration to diplomacy. I narrowed that down to just three things. You know what they were?”

“I wouldn’t even guess.”

“The three areas I finally selected were the practice of law, the problems of our metropolitan areas, and politics. Now guess which one I chose.”

“Private practice,” I said because I had to say something.

Orcutt seemed delighted that I’d guessed wrong and squirmed pleasurably in his chair. “I almost did. Almost. But I decided that I was too young and it would take too long. Not mentally too young, mind you, but chronologically. It would have prevented me from having the kind of clients I would like.” When he talked he supplied his own italics, like a bad editorial writer.

“The kind of clients you wanted were the kind with money,” I said.

“Precisely.”

“What about those thirty-two corporations who wanted to hire you?”

“That’s just it. They wanted to hire me. They wanted me on their payroll at X number of dollars. It would have been most confining.”

“What did you choose, politics?”

“No, I chose to become an expert consultant on the problems facing our fair city. Or cities. You know, Mr. Dye, cities are fascinating microcosms of the world we live in. We’re destroying them, of course, and they in turn are destroying us. Oh, I don’t mean literally, although smog and traffic and fire and riots do take their toll. But the role of the city has changed drastically in the last thirty years — within our lifetimes.”

“So have we,” I said.

“Quite true. But now we flee the city to the suburbs to regain exactly what the city formerly offered — a sense of community, if you will. A sense of belonging, of having some voice in the affairs of the day. The city at one time offered all this, plus a sense of safety, brought about, quite probably, by what was once called the herd instinct, before the term went out of style. Now it offers nothing of the kind. The city is the enemy. And most of those who still live in it, really don’t. They have set up their own private enclaves. Not neighborhoods, mind you, but enclaves from which they rarely stir — except to go to work, usually in neutral territory, or to another friendly enclave. It’s all really quite feudal, if you think about it. People who live in cities are actually afraid to venture into what they quite frankly regard as the enemy camp. Some of this is based on race, some on income, and also on such things as resentment, hate, prejudice, greed, and all the other seven deadly sins. It’s really most depressing if one has a liking for what cities have traditionally provided.”

“All right,” I said, “let’s say that our cities are sick and that some of them are almost terminal cases. What cure do you suggest other than faith healing?”

“You’re teasing again. Oh, I do like that! No, Mr. Dye, I don’t propose to cure all of the ills that afflict our metropolitan areas. I specialize. You see, the fears of those who continue to live in our cities often prevent them from taking an active role in their community. They become apathetic, indifferent, and spend most of their time staring at television or drinking or wondering whether they shouldn’t really move to the suburbs — for the children’s sake, of course. A climate of such apathy is a perfect breeding ground for civic corruption. And that’s where Victor Orcutt Associates come in. We cure civic corruption and we’re paid handsomely to do it. Of course, all we cure is the symptom, not the disease. But most of our clients cling to the belief that if the symptom disappears, the disease will shortly follow. They’re wrong, of course, and sometimes out of sheer deviltry, I tell them that they’re wrong, but they usually smile knowingly and thank me for a job well done and then hand over a fat check. Over the last four years, Victor Orcutt Associates have been moderately successful.”

“What’s moderate?” I said.

“Well, we netted a little over four hundred thousand dollars last year, and our gross — which included all of our living expenses — was approximately four million dollars.”

“Four million two,” Carol Thackerty said.

Orcutt shrugged. “Miss Thackerty does have a head for figures. By the way, I met Miss Thackerty and Homer Necessary when I landed my first assignment.” He mentioned the name of a city in the Midwest that was about the size of Youngstown, Ohio.

“The mayor’s son was a college buddy,” Necessary said. “That’s how he got his in.”

“Well, what are friends for, Homer?” Orcutt said. “Incidentally, Homer was chief of police there, and my first recommendation was that he be fired. You’ve never seen such graft — or perhaps you have, in China.”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, I immediately hired Homer as a consultant. I did it quietly, of course, but I thought to myself, now who would know more about foxes than another fox?”

“Maybe a chicken,” I said.

“Mr. Dye, you’ve just ruined my favorite allegory.”

“Sorry.”

“At any rate,” Orcutt said, “that city was absolutely corrupt. Rotten to the core. To the very core. The police sold protection along with football betting cards. They had a burglary ring going. The numbers’ racket flourished. The tax assessors could be had for as little as five dollars per five thousand dollar evaluation. Gambling was nearly wide open. Not quite, but nearly. Dope was peddled in the junior high schools. The city itself was bankrupt. The city manager was a drunk, pathetically inept, and hadn’t been paid in nearly three months. Neither had the police, but they didn’t seem to mind. Prostitution. Well, it was simply awful. Anything the perverted taste wanted, from thirteen-year-old girls — or boys — on up. Shocking. Really shocking. And, of course, Miss Thackerty here, then a senior in the local college, was part of the vice ring. She’d even bought a very large motel out on the edge of town.”

“Just working her way through college,” Necessary said.

Carol Thackerty shifted her gaze from the window to Necessary. She smiled shyly, even sweetly, and in a quiet tone told Necessary to fuck off.

“Swell kid, huh?” Necessary said to me. “Nice, I mean.”

“To continue,” Orcutt said, ignoring the exchange as if it happened often enough, “we first — Homer and I, that is — turned our attention to the police. Homer had collected enough evidence to fascinate a grand jury, but unfortunately most of it was self-incriminating. We decided we needed something else. Homer came up with the idea. My word, he should, I was paying him enough.”

“I made more as a chief of police,” Necessary said.

“But not honestly, Homer.”

“Who cares about how?”

Orcutt shook his head sadly. “Totally amoral. But he did have a splendid idea, one that would bring the city’s police immediately into line. Of course, we had to enlist Carol’s aid, and that took some persuasion, but she finally agreed that cooperating with us would be better than spending a number of months behind bars. I must say she cooperated so nicely that I asked her to become my executive assistant. That was four years ago, wasn’t it, Carol?”

“Four,” she said, still staring out the window. I noticed that her teacup was empty.

“Through her cooperation we were able to obtain some rather provocative photographs of most of the police force as they lay, deshabille, shall we say, in the arms of a series of very young ladies.”

“What he’s saying is that we got pictures of most of the cops shacking up with some of her high school whores,” Necessary said. “That’s what he means. We mailed prints to them at headquarters. They shaped up real good after that.”

“So for a modest fee you brought in honest government, morality, and reform?” I said.

Orcutt smiled that meaningless smile of his, rose and walked over to the ice, put another cube into his glass, and filled it with the remains of the Dr Pepper. “No, Mr. Dye, we didn’t. You see, although the city was in bad condition, it really wasn’t bad enough. The majority of the citizens weren’t yet ready. They liked paying off fifteen-dollar traffic tickets with a dollar bill. They liked the close-by gambling and the teenage prostitutes. They liked paying less real estate taxes, if all it took was a small bribe. I’m afraid I misjudged that town. Six months later it was worse than it was when I came. But by then some people from Chicago had moved in. They run the city now. Formerly, its vice and corruption were home-grown products. Now they come from outside and the people are frightened. I can’t say that I blame them.”

“Did they ask you to give it another go?” I said.

“Yes, they did, as a matter of fact. But I wasn’t interested in dying.”

“I can understand that.”

“But I did gain two things from that experience,” Orcutt said slowly, apparently speaking to the Dr Pepper in his glass. “I acquired the services of Miss Thackerty and Homer. That’s one. Secondly, I was able to formulate what I’m vain enough to call Orcutt’s First Law. I haven’t come up with a second one yet.”

“What’s the first one?”

“To get better, it must get much worse.”

“I’m afraid it’s a little familiar.”

“Not really. Not when applied to my particular field. And that, I think, brings us to the crux of this meeting, which is how I hope to involve you with Victor Orcutt Associates.”

“All right,” I said. “How?”

“You first of all should understand, Mr. Dye, that I’ve spent a considerable amount of money investigating your background, experience, capabilities, and even your philosophical leanings.”

“I wasn’t aware that I had any.”

“Oh, but you do! You do, indeed. A little existentialistic perhaps, but admirably suited for the task at hand. As are your experience and training and educational achievements. With just a few exceptions, you’re almost perfect. Now I’ll bet no one has ever called you almost perfect before.”

“You’re right,” I said. “They haven’t.” Not even you, Carmingler, I thought. “Just what do you have in mind?”

“You remember that I asked whether you were Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“It would be better if you were. Or Negro or Polish or even Italian. You see, Mr. Dye, I need a scapegoat — a whipping boy, if you prefer. Someone whom the citizens of a particular town can chase to the city limits. A kind of a ‘don’t let the sun set on your head in this town, boy’ thing, if you follow me, but I’m speaking figuratively, of course. They wouldn’t actually do that; it would just be the tone of their attitude. A member of a minority group is so suited for such a role.”

“Maybe they could just dislike me for myself,” I said.

“Oh, my, that’s very good,” Orcutt said, and to prove that he meant it he let me see that empty smile of his again. The smile went as quickly as it came and he paused to take a sip of his Dr Pepper. After that he produced a white handkerchief, Irish linen, I assumed, and patted his lips dry. “Now then,” he said, “in return for your services I’m prepared to offer the usual incentive: money.”

“What kind of money?” I said.

“The fifty thousand dollar kind.”

“That is a nice kind. What do I do to earn it?”

“You perform certain tasks — under my direction, of course.”

“What tasks?”

“They revolve around Orcutt’s First Law, Mr. Dye. What I want you to do is to corrupt me a city.”

Chapter 6

I was born December 5, 1933, the day they repealed prohibition. Although the information surrounding my birth is largely hearsay, most of it came from my father’s diaries and I have no reason to suspect that it isn’t true. He didn’t have enough imagination to make a good liar.

I was the only child of Dr. and Mrs. Clarence Dye, a couple of Texans from Beaumont, who bought a medical practice in Moncrief, Montana, in 1932. Moncrief is the county seat and its population was then around 360. I understand it’s dropped some since. The first year in practice, my father earned $986 cash, sixty-two chickens, two sides of beef, several bushels of vegetables in the late spring and summer, and about two hundred quart Mason jars filled with something called chow-chow, pickled beets, string beans, corn and tomatoes. “We’ve always eaten well,” my father wrote.

Unfortunately, at least for my mother, my father was out celebrating repeal the day I was born and when he got back to the house he found himself confronted with a Caesarian. He was drunk, “Godawful drunk,” he wrote later, and he never was sure what really happened. Either the scalpel slipped or he forgot to wash his hands and sepsis set in or it may have been that my mother was just one of those women who is destined to die in childbirth. He was never certain because he blacked out during the delivery and when he came to my mother was dead and I was lying well wrapped in a crib that they had bought for me. He’d managed that while out on his feet. The temperature outside, my father wrote, was 11 below zero and a blizzard had started. He wrapped my mother up in a sheet and carried her out to the garage where she froze nicely and stayed that way until the blizzard ended four days later and he could get around to having her buried in Missoula. He never did write why he decided to name me Lucifer.

My father really wasn’t a very good doctor. He barely passed his pre-med at the University of Texas and the only medical school that he could get into in the twenties was the University of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City and that was by a fluke. Somehow he made it through, working as a theater usher at night at the old Empress on Main Street. He had married my mother by then and she worked in a department store, Rohrbaugh-Brown’s it was called then. He made $9 a week; she made $12.

My father interned at St. Anthony’s hospital in Oklahoma City and got through that without killing anyone. He had enough sense to realize that he would never be a good doctor and barely a competent one. For a while he thought about becoming a ship’s physician, but the competition in 1932 was too stiff. Then he heard about the practice that could be bought for a thousand dollars in Moncrief. He borrowed the money from my mother’s parents, who died in a car wreck before he had to pay it back. My father didn’t kill anyone in Moncrief either, except my mother.

After she died my father suffered fits of what he diagnosed as “depression and remorse.” He drank a lot and scribbled long passages in his diary, alternately blaming himself and me for her death. Ultimately, he accepted all of the blame. But I still remained Lucifer Clarence Dye.

He had hired a sixteen-year-old farm girl to look after me. Her name, I later read, was Betty Maude Christianson and he paid her $3.50 a week plus room and board and whatever pleasure she got from his thrice-weekly visits to her bedroom. Or so he wrote.

It was in the spring of 1934 that he sobered up and began writing the letters. He wrote to the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians. He sent long letters to the Assembly of God, the Church of the Brethren, the Episcopalians, the Christians and Missionary Alliance, and the Ethical Culture Society. He wrote to the Evangelical Covenant, the Evangelical Free, and the Evangelical and Reformed. He wrote to the Lutherans, the Friends, and the Latter Day Saints. He wrote to the Pentecostal Holiness and the Christian Scientists. Finally, he wrote to the Seventh-Day Adventists and, in desperation, to a Catholic cardinal in St. Louis, I think, offering to “come over to your side.”

My father, in a spirit of atonement, had decided to become a medical missionary, preferably in China, and he was offering his services to any organized religion that would accept them. None did, unless you can call Texaco a religion. Through an old college friend whose father was the vice-president in charge of Texaco’s overseas operations in Asia, my father was offered a job as company doctor in Shanghai. We sailed from San Francisco on August 19, 1934, aboard the Midori Maru, bound for Kobe and Shanghai.

My father and I lived in a company house in the International Settlement on Yuen Ming Road with my amah, Pai Shang-wa, a thirty-five-year-old spinster from Canton who spoke Cantonese as well as Mandarin and the harsh Shanghai dialect. She insisted that I learn all three, and when I made a mistake she slapped me, but not very hard. I didn’t speak English too well until I was nearly six, and this made it a little difficult to communicate with my father, who spoke no Chinese, not even passable pidgin. We also had two other servants, a cook whose name was Ma Yiu-ha, and a house boy-driver, Fu Ying. I remember that I called him Foo-Foo and sometimes he carried me around the house piggyback.

My father wasn’t home much, not that his duties were either arduous or pressing, but he preferred to spend his evenings at either the American Club or the Shanghai Club, which then featured the longest bar in the world. It still does, I understand, except for one in Las Vegas, but that one curves, and the one in Shanghai is straight, which still makes it the longest straight bar in the world.

Up until August 14, 1937, I have only the dim recollections that any child would have who was three years and nine months old. But on that Saturday my father, feeling either expansive or guilty for having neglected his only son, took me to lunch at the Palace Hotel. I remember that we had Shanghai duck and that it was very good and that my father cut up my pieces for me.

I remember, too, that outside the hotel, Nanking Road was packed with people, mostly refugees from Hongkew and other northern areas. Although I didn’t know it, Japan had launched its attack on Shanghai the day before, once again demonstrating its preference for beginning wars over the weekend, just as it had done in 1932 and would again do in 1941.

Refugees packed Nanking Road. They were the blind, the sick, the old men carrying old women on their backs, babies in their mothers’ arms, and just ordinary people, all sagging with the burdens of whatever they could rescue — pans, chickens, pots, their much-prized blue teacups, and rolls of straw matting. They flowed over Soochow Creek Bridge near the Russian Consulate and fanned out over the Bund and Nanking Road, a half-million persons who snarled traffic and stalled streetcars as they tried to escape the war that was to last almost eight years to the day.

Most of them had given up moving. They huddled at the curb, against walls, on any step they could find. Nanking Road was a refugee camp, a reluctant one which offered neither refuge nor safety.

I recall that we came out of the Palace and stood there for a while, looking at the crowd, as my father probed away at a molar with a toothpick. I held his left hand. Across the street were the Sassoon House and the Cathay Hotel. But they were only a couple of buildings to me at the time. In the distance we could hear the crunch of shells as Chiang’s big Northrup bombers tried to knock out the Idzumo, the Japanese flagship, a superannuated cruiser that had been built by the British. The Japanese Third Fleet was then in the Whampoa River and its cruisers were shelling the Chinese troops, mostly the crack 87th and 88th Divisions, softening them up for the Japanese infantry which had landed at the mouth of the Whampoa at Wusung. I liked the noise because it sounded like firecrackers.

My father started to say something, but just then the Chinese Air Corps’ Northrups came over, heading west, and we both looked up. Some cylindrical things fell out of one of the bombers and glistened in the sun.

The first bomb hit the Cathay Hotel across the street. It blew out all the windows. Another bomb ricocheted off the Cathay and into Nanking Road where it exploded. The blast blew us against the red brick wall of the Palace Hotel. Then another bomb hit the Palace and hurled us back into the street. I found myself lying there in the street, still clutching my father’s left hand. There was the hand and the wrist and part of the forearm. And that was all. I couldn’t find any more of him as I wandered among the dead, trying not to step into pools of blood or on pieces of flesh. Everybody seemed dead. I walked around, still holding my father’s hand so that the end of his forearm dragged in the dirt and blood. It was quiet. Almost the only sound I could hear was my own voice, speaking Mandarin, asking a man without a head, “Have you seen the rest of my father?” I looked around and saw another man’s body smeared flat against the red bricks of the Palace Hotel. Some parked cars had caught fire. Streetcar lines were down and tangled like old fishing line. I stumbled over the lower half of a woman’s body. There was no top half. I kept asking the dead if they had seen the rest of my father and when they didn’t answer I started walking up Nanking Road, the blood squishing in my brown high-topped shoes. I still carried all that was left of my father.

For a block there was nothing but mangled bodies. A dead traffic cop was doubled over the side of his control tower, his eyes open. Flies crawled over them. I passed Honan Road where Nanking Road curves slightly and kept on going through a crowd that gradually came alive and chattered and moaned and screamed. They hadn’t been hit. I passed Chekiang Road and the Sincere and Wing On department stores and kept on going. A Sikh policeman stared at me once and then looked quickly away. My amah had told me to stay away from the Sikh cops because they were mean. The only ones who were meaner, she said, were the Annamites that the French had brought into their Concession. They call them Vietnamese now. I suppose the Sikh cop looked away because he didn’t want to fool with a four-year-old foreigner smeared with his own blood and that of others, dirty, disheveled, and bawling, who stumbled through the crowd, panicky, carrying a man’s hand, wrist, and forearm against his chest much as he would hold his favorite teddy bear. I remember that after the bombs exploded there was that Godawful silence, so profound that all I could hear was my own voice and the tick of the watch which was still strapped to my father’s wrist.

I must have gone two or three streets past the department stores before I saw her. She wore an organdy dress with lots of ruffles and flounces in a style that I later found had been popularized by an American actress called Deanna Durbin. I’ve yet to see one of her films.

I thought then, and perhaps still do, that the woman in the organdy dress was the most beautiful person in the world. She stood there at the curb, waving a silk parasol, and yelling for someone called Fat Li-san. Her blond hair was capped by a wide-brimmed, floppy hat. Dark green, I remember, a color that almost matched her eyes. Slightly behind her stood a Chinese woman who also yelled for Fat Li-san.

I stumbled over to her and stood there, gazing up at her face, my father’s remains clutched tightly to my chest. I bawled. She looked at me, frowned, and gestured that I should go away. When I didn’t, but just stood there bawling some more, smeared from top to bottom with blood, she turned and snapped something at the Chinese woman. She spoke French, but I didn’t know it then. All I knew was that my cuts and scratches and abrasions hurt, that I was lost, and that I couldn’t find the rest of my father.

The Chinese woman came over to me and knelt down and began speaking softly in English. I knew it was English but I couldn’t understand very much of it and when she saw that it wasn’t working too well, she switched to the Shanghai dialect. That was better. She wanted to know who I was and how I’d gotten hurt and where my parents were. The blond woman in the floppy hat kept waving her parasol and yelling for Fat Li-san. I told the Chinese woman that I was Lucifer Clarence Dye and had she seen my father? The woman in the Deanna Durbin dress moved closer, but not too close. She said something in French to the Chinese woman, who turned out to be her amah. The amah shook her head, rose, and backed off. The woman with the big floppy green hat grimaced and stretched out her hand.

“Donnez la moi!” she said. Or so she told me later. Much later. I didn’t understand her then, but the outstretched hand made things plain enough and I hugged my father’s severed forearm, wrist, hand, and watch even closer. I bawled some more, partly because I was one of the 865 wounded by the Chinese Air Corps which bombed its own city and partly because my father was among the 729 who were dead for the same reason.

The woman in the green hat stripped the white glove from her right hand, snatched all that was left of my father away from me, and started to throw it in the gutter. However, she saw the watch and paused long enough to remove it from the wrist. She was always quite practical. After that, she tossed it into the gutter. A dusty red dog covered with sores nuzzled my father’s hand, picked it up in his jaws, and trotted off down the street. The dog seemed to be grinning.

The woman in the floppy hat smiled at me and started to pat me on the head, but thought better of it. My hair was matted with blood. “We go my house,” she said in her best pidgin English. I understood that and asked her, this time in Mandarin, if she’d seen my father. I wasn’t too familiar with death, not familiar at all really, and I’d have liked to have given my father back his hand and wrist and forearm and watch.

“We go,” she said and once more yelled for the missing Fat Li-san. A large maroon 1935 Airflow Chrysler, an automotive abortion that was to be rivaled by the Edsel years later, bulldozed its way to the curb, clipping a rickshaw. Fat Li-san had finally arrived. The woman in the green hat sent him off for some newspapers and when he returned he spread them over the back seat so that I wouldn’t bleed all over the mohair. The amah got in the front with Fat Li-san and I was guided to the newspapers. The woman in the green hat got in at last. Fat Li-san leaned on the horn and bluffed his way through the jammed traffic.

The blond woman started talking to me. She used a mixture of pidgin English, some of which I got, French (which I didn’t understand), and Russian (totally incomprehensible). With the help of some interpretative asides from the amah in the Shanghai dialect, I gathered that I could stay at her house until she located my parents; that I was to call her Tante Catherine or Katerine, and that if I were good, she would give me something nice.

Her house was in Nantao, the Old Chinese City with its Confucius Temple and its Willow Teahouse. It was painted a green that matched her hat and her eyes and had a high brick wall across its front which shielded a tiny garden. The house was an unusual (for Shanghai) three stories high, and not more than forty feet wide, and it looked magnificently immense to me. It was furnished with an odd mixture of carved Chinese pieces with lots of dragons’ heads and with what passed for modern in the 1930s. I thought it all very beautiful. Tante Katerine called out as we entered the house followed by the amah. A number of young women came into the wide reception hall and started to make a fuss over me. One of them was assigned the task of giving me a bath. Another was instructed to buy me some new clothes. Tante Katerine remembered her promise and gave me a piece of candied ginger. There was a peculiarly sweetish, pungent, odor in the air and an old man with a whisp of a white beard shuffled slowly toward the door that led to the garden and the gate and the street. He didn’t look at me; he didn’t look at anybody. One of the girls took my hand and started pulling me toward the stairs. She was Chinese and I asked her if she had seen my father. She said no. About half of the girls were Chinese and about half were foreign: French, American, White Russian, a couple of big-boned Australians, three Germans from Berlin, and a lone representative from Italy. Rome, as I recall. They were all very nice to me, but it was a year or so later before I fully understood that Tante Katerine, a White Russian late of Manchuria, ran what was generally regarded as the fanciest whorehouse in Shanghai.

Chapter 7

It took twenty-four hours and an autopsy before the island city-state’s police were satisfied that we hadn’t murdered Li Teh with some kind of infernal machine. He had died of cardiac arrest — or what was once called heart failure — brought on, so I understand, by severe emotional shock. It could have been the blue flashes that had danced around the room. He probably thought that he was being electrocuted.

I learned later that Shoftstall went stupid and came up with a fanciful story that no one believed. He told them that Li Teh’s name was Mr. Jones and that I’d wanted to question him with a lie detector because he’d applied for a $200,000 life insurance policy and I wasn’t at all satisfied with the information he’d given on his application. After that, they knocked Shoftstall around for a while, which only made him stubborn. All he would say after the beating was that as an American citizen, he demanded to see a representative of the U.S. Embassy. They threw him back in a cell.

Bourland was a little brighter, but not much. He said that the polygraph examination of Li Teh was merely routine.

“What kind of routine, Mr. Bourland?” one of them asked.

“Why, routine procedure,” he said.

They knocked him around until they got tired and then threw him back in a cell, too. He didn’t get a chance to call the Embassy either. I later learned all this from Carmingler.

They questioned us separately, of course, and they were good. At least the man who questioned me and who called himself Mr. Tung was good. Quite good. He said that he was from the Ministry of Defense and Security and I found no reason to doubt it.

I spent the first twenty-four hours in solitary. They had taken away my clothes, cigarettes, keys, wallet, and watch. I missed the cigarettes most of all. It really didn’t seem to matter much what time it was. They gave me the gray cotton, pajamalike uniform, the one that I was to wear for three months without change. The cell was small, five-feet wide and seven-feet long. It was windowless and contained a strawstuffed mattress, a bucket that served as a toilet, and a small plastic jug of water. Nothing else. The walls were built of gray, porous stones that were clammy and wet. The floor was concrete. A single forty-watt bulb was screwed into the ceiling. It never went off. The temperature seemed to be in the upper nineties, right alongside the humidity.

I was fed twice before I saw Tung. The first meal was a large bowl of rice with some pieces of unidentifiable fish mixed into it. The second meal was the same and so were all the other meals during the next three months. From long ago experience I choked down everything they gave me and didn’t lose a pound. Maybe they’re right after all and fish and rice are everything you really need.

The room that Tung questioned me in was on the second floor of the prison that the British had built a hundred years or so before with loving attention to all the details that would make it as uncomfortable as possible. The room had two windows that looked out over the prison yard which was surrounded by walls built of that same gray, porous stone. They must have been at least twenty-five feet high. A number of prisoners were walking around the yard, either by themselves or in twos and threes. I didn’t bother to ask if I could join them.

Mr. Tung (I never knew his other names, if he had any), was somewhere in his thirties, short, slim, and dapper. He wore a crisp white shirt with a neatly knotted blue tie and light blue linen slacks that were pressed to perfection. There were four ball-point pens clipped to his shirt pocket, all different colors. His black eyes seemed to snap a little and he had the nervous habit of tugging at his right earlobe when he was trying to phrase a question. He didn’t smile much, at least not when talking to me, and we spent quite some time talking.

Two prison guards brought me into the room and then left. I stood before Tung’s desk while he carefully looked me over. The room contained only the desk, Tung’s chair, and the one that he motioned me to sit in. There was nothing on his desk other than a round tin of Players, the kind that holds fifty cigarettes. He offered me one and I accepted it gratefully.

We sat there smoking for a while and then Tung said, “Well, you blew it, didn’t you?” I couldn’t place his accent despite the use of the vernacular. It wasn’t American and it wasn’t British. It was that in between, international brand, the kind that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. used to speak before he began spending too much time in London.

I shrugged at his question and said nothing. There really wasn’t anything to say.

“Too bad about Li Teh,” Tung said. “I take it that you didn’t know about his heart condition?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t a bad chap really.”

“You knew him?”

“Not too well,” Tung said. “He was dickering to open one of his shops here, but I suppose you knew that.”

“No.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, he’d recently received a promotion. But I’m sure you did know that.”

“No,” I said.

Tung looked at me carefully and then took a tin ashtray from a desk drawer and placed it halfway between us. I put some ashes into it.

“Really, Mr. Dye, I almost believe that you are as ignorant as you pretend to be.”

“I’m just ignorant,” I said.

“Then I’ll bring you up to date. Peking promoted Li Teh six weeks ago. He was told to keep his operations going in Hong Kong, but to set up a shop down here and run it on a part-time basis. When it was a going concern, they would send someone down from Peking to take over. In the meantime, he’d commute between here and Hong Kong. He didn’t tell you any of this?” Tung tugged at his earlobe again. The right one.

“No,” I said.

“I think you’re lying,” Tung said. “But that’s to be expected. At any rate, we approached Li. I confess that our approach was none too subtle. Either he doubled for us, or we’d throw him in jail.”

“Why did you think he was an agent?” I said.

Tung smiled a little, but not much. “Why did you?”

There seemed to be nothing to say to that either. Tung, however, was waiting for an answer. I let him wait while a fat, heavy silence spread through the room.

“The premier’s most unhappy,” he said after a time, “Really? Why?”

“Because of you, Mr. Dye, and your organization which, I might add, fully lives up to its reputation for bungling. Really remarkable. The premier, of course, is just hopping mad. But I’ve said that, haven’t I?”

“Just what am I charged with?” I said.

“We’ll think of something.”

“I’m sure.”

“You should be. But to return to Li Teh. He told us that he thought you’d go as high as three thousand dollars a month. American. Did you?” When I didn’t say anything, Tung continued. “We offered to pay him something. Of course, we could never match your largesse, but we did offer him one thousand dollars a month (our variety) and the promise that he wouldn’t go to jail which was, I think you’ll agree since you’ve seen our jail, a rather enticing fringe benefit. And by the way, he told us all about you — how you used to meet in out of the way places in Hong Kong and so forth. Even gave us dates and times.”

“He talked a lot,” I said.

“We can be rather persuasive.”

“I can imagine.”

Tung rose and walked over to the window and looked out. He was silent for a time and I thought that he may have been counting the prisoners. With his back still to me, he said, “We’re going to ask your people for thirty million dollars.”

“You’ll never get it,” I said and helped myself to another cigarette.

“That’s our asking price,” he said, turning from the window. “We’ll settle for ten cents on the dollar. A million each for you and your two colleagues.” He lowered himself into his chair again, reached for one of the cigarettes, and this time he did smile. He had good teeth. “But the money’s not really important, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“What we really want is a letter of apology.”

“From whom?”

“From your Secretary of State. The premier was thinking of going directly to the White House, but he was dissuaded.”

“You won’t get anything,” I said.

“You think not?”

“I think not.”

“Well, let’s see what we have to offer,” Tung said and laid his cigarette in the tin tray so that he could count on the fingers of his right hand. “On the surface, we have the dead body of a Chinese spy; two insurance salesmen from here, and their managing director from Hong Kong. Minneapolis Mutual, isn’t it?”

“Minneapolis Mutual,” I said.

“That’s on the surface. Now beneath the surface we have the following interesting documentation.” He was using his fingers to count on again. “One, we have a tape recording of the conversation that took place last night in the hotel between you and your two colleagues, even that part where one of them was reassuring Li Teh that the lie detector wouldn’t hurt a bit. That’s one. I’ll play it for you, if you like.”

“No need,” I said and swore silently at Shoftstall for not checking the hotel room for bugs.

“Two, we have Peking’s file on you, Mr. Dye. Li Teh graciously provided us with a copy. Three, we have your tape recorder and the polygraph machine as exhibits D and E. You and your two colleagues, of course, are exhibits A, B, and C. The Peking dossier on you is, I suppose, exhibit F, which possibly could stand for failure. You did fail, didn’t you?”

“I don’t think I should count on a Christmas bonus this year.”

“Tell me something, Mr. Dye, does your organization, which I’ll call Minneapolis Mutual, if you insist, really put that much faith in the efficacy of the polygraph?”

“It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”

“And yourself, Mr. Dye?”

I shrugged. “It’s company policy.”

“A rather strange company and a rather strange policy.”

“It’s the new management,” I said.

Tung rose, tugged at his earlobe, and said, “I really have no more questions. I think I know as much about you as I need to, and even if I did have some questions, I’m sure that your answers would be totally unresponsive unless we used tactics which are far more primitive than the lie detector, but also more — oh, I suppose fruitful is as good a word as any.”

I got up, too, and helped myself to another cigarette. “Take the tin,” he said. “And here’re some matches.”

“Thanks,” I said. “How about a call to my embassy?”

“You don’t really expect me to say yes?”

“No, but I thought I’d ask.”

“We’ll be in touch with your embassy and also your ‘company.’” I could almost see the quotation marks around company.

“When?”

“Soon.”

The guards came and took me back to my cell. Four days later, despite what I considered to be strict self-rationing, I ran out of cigarettes and didn’t smoke until eighty-five days later when Carmingler bummed a pack for me from the pilot of the C-130 that flew us to San Francisco.

The only visitors that I had during those three months were the guards who brought me my bowls of soggy rice and doubtful fish each day. Once a photographer came to take my picture with an old 4 by 5 Speed Graphic. But that was all. I had nothing to read, nothing to look at, and no one to talk to other than myself.

Since the forty-watt light never went out I didn’t know whether it was day or night. They seemed to feed me at erratic times, but I wasn’t even sure of that. I came to realize that time indeed is relative and what I thought was an entire day could have been an hour and what I was sure was three hours could have been fifteen minutes. None of the time that I spent in that cell went quickly. Some of it just dragged by more slowly than the rest.

So I talked to myself and tried to remember stories and novels that I’d read. I rewrote them aloud. I exercised a lot, mostly push-ups and toe-touching and knee-bends and sit-ups and running in place. I wasn’t trying to keep in shape. I was trying to grow tired enough to sleep. I slept as much as possible and hoped that I would have nightmares. They gave me something new to think about.

When I wasn’t talking aloud or exercising or just sitting there staring at the wall, I searched for lice. My record kill was 126. I counted the dead ones carefully every day and then dumped them into the pail that served as a toilet. The guards emptied it daily, but I was never sure whether they did it in the morning or the evening. For all I knew, they emptied it promptly at midnight.

I didn’t shave or bathe for ninety days. I stunk. I couldn’t smell it myself, but I could tell that I did from the way that the guards wrinkled their noses when they brought me the food. They seldom looked at me and they never spoke. I tried to remember the Count of Monte Cristo and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, whose title I had never fully appreciated until now. I tried to remember what they did to keep themselves busy and entertained and even amused. Apparently, I wasn’t as resourceful as they. The only thing that really amused me was killing lice.

On the ninetieth day the guards took me back up to Tung’s office. He wore tan slacks this time with another white shirt and a black and brown striped tie. He was down to three ball-point pens. He didn’t offer me a cigarette and he didn’t ask me to sit.

“Except for your beard you look well enough, Mr. Dye. A little ripe perhaps, but fit.”

“Thanks.”

“You’ll be released at midnight.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight.”

“What time is it now?”

Tung glanced at his watch. “Four thirty-five, P.M., in case you’re wondering. They do sometimes, you know.”

“I know.”

“Everything has worked out most satisfactorily since I last spoke with you in June.”

“What month is it now?”

“August. August twenty-fourth to be precise.”

“I’ve been here almost three months.”

“Three months exactly. Ninety days.”

“You run a rotten jail.”

“It’s something we picked up from our Colonial friends. You may be interested to learn that it went much the way I predicted it would when we had our first chat. It went better than I predicted, in fact.”

“They paid up.”

“They did indeed, Mr. Dye. Ten cents on the dollar, just as I said they would. Three million dollars in all. The ramifications are even better than that though — far better. But I think I won’t gloat. It’s not at all becoming and I’m sure that your people are most anxious to tell you about it themselves.”

“They probably can’t wait.”

“Well, I suppose that’s all,” Tung said. “A Mr. Carmingler will meet you just outside the prison at midnight. Do you know him?”

“I know him. What about the other two?”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland? They were released about an hour ago. I regret that they somehow injured themselves, but photographs of their injuries helped convince your people that they should — uh — cooperate. Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland are now both in hospital, I understand. Would you like to know which one?”

“Not especially.”

Tung nodded as if he understood that perfectly. Perhaps he did. “Well, I’ve enjoyed our two chats, Mr. Dye; I’m only sorry that we didn’t have more of them.”

“I’m surprised that we didn’t.”

“Yes. However, Mr. Shoftstall and Mr. Bourland became most cooperative so we saw no need to disturb you, especially since poor Li Teh had provided us with such extensive documentation on your activities as, shall we say, a China watcher. A felicitous phrase, if ever I heard one. Incidentally, Mr. Dye, while you were our — uh — guest the People’s Republic removed the hyphen from Mao Tsetung’s name in all their official dispatches. It’s now one word. Some seem to place an extraordinary amount of significance on this. Do you?”

“Tremendous. Anything else?”

“No. Nothing I can think of. Is there something that you’d care to mention?”

“I’d like my watch back and I still think you run a rotten jail.”

Tung smiled broadly and his teeth were just as nice as they were before. “Yes,” he said, “we do manage that quite well, don’t we?” He didn’t say anything about the watch.

First of all they deloused me. Then I showered for twenty minutes. Following that, I put on a red hospital bathrobe and was shaved, barbered, and stuffed with a four-egg breakfast. After all that I got to sit across the desk from Carmingler, wearing one of my new suits, and watch him use three matches to get his pipe going. He used the wooden kitchen kind that come in cardboard boxes and used to sell for a nickel. They’re probably a dime now. Everything else has gone up.

We sat in the office that Letterman General had assigned him, the one in the sealed-off suite that was painted a depressing tan and contained a gray desk and four matching chairs and whose lone window offered a gloomy view of the rear of the hospital’s kitchen.

“Okay,” I said. “Now that I’m all tidied up and sweet-smelling, you can start.”

“Well, to begin with,” he said, “it wasn’t my idea.”

“Whose was it?”

“Mugar’s.”

“I don’t know any Mugar.”

“He’s new.”

“I’m sure he is,” I said. “What about the lie detector? Whose idea was that? Mugar’s again?”

“They were dead set against Li Teh,” Carmingler said and dragged on his pipe. “It was all I could think of.”

“Then you’re losing your touch. Five years ago you could have thought of a dozen ways, but five years ago you weren’t in love with a polygraph.”

“They wanted to make sure,” he said. “They had to be positive about Li.”

“All of them?”

“Most of them.”

“How many?” I said.

“There were five of us. Me, Mugar, Reo, Werbin, and Pilalas.”

“What side was the Greek on?”

“He was the only one with me. He’d go along, but the other three wouldn’t. They were following Mugar.”

“How old’s Mugar?”

“I don’t know; twenty-eight, twenty-nine.”

“And he’s this year’s new boy,” I said.

“Very new. But he bought the polygraph.”

I sighed and lit another cigarette. My tenth for the morning. “It doesn’t matter now. Li’s dead. I’m blown all over Asia. I just want to know what happened.”

“It was a mess,” Carmingler said. “A real fuck-up.” Carmingler never swore unless he meant it and when he got through describing what had happened, I could see that he did.

“They thought you were CIA, of course,” he said. “That started it.”

I nodded. Then Carmingler told me the rest of it. On the perfectly sound theory that the United States’ left hand seldom knows what its right big toe is doing, the premier of the island city-state republic decided to make two approaches, one to the State Department and one to the CIA who, they mistakenly thought, employed me. It was their Foreign Minister himself who summoned the local U.S. ambassador and then confronted him with extensive documentation that proved beyond doubt that American agents had been fiddling with his country’s affairs. The Foreign Minister demanded a written apology from the U.S. Secretary of State. The U.S. ambassador promptly dispatched copies of the damaging material to Washington where the Secretary of State, new to his job and anxious to please, went through the usual seventh-floor shilly-shallying and then wrote, or had someone write, the letter of apology (an almost unheard of gesture) which promised that the culprits (meaning Shoftstall, Bourland, and me) would be severely disciplined. The Secretary himself was under the impression that we were with CIA. He didn’t bother to check.

It was my former prison host, Mr. Tung, who approached the CIA. He made the approach in Djakarta, Carmingler said, and when he demanded the thirty million dollar ransom, they just laughed at him. They didn’t check with anyone either; they just laughed. It was the wrong thing to do, of course. Mr. Tung merely smiled back and then hurried across the street (or wherever it was) to the local British MI-6 representative and told him all about how the Americans no longer trusted their English colleagues and were running their own agents on what by gentlemen’s agreement, had been considered the private turf of Perfidious Albion. Actually, Carmingler said, the CIA was thinking about it. They just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

“Well, the British got most upset,” he said. “They accused the CIA of double-dealing and God knows what else. The CIA just kept on denying that any of you belonged to them. They had no choice, of course.”

“There’s always a choice,” I said.

“Name it.”

I could think of a number of things, but I let it pass. Having brought the British in and carefully bruised their already tender sensibilities, Tung then leaked the whole story to the press.

“Made headlines everywhere. Every damned place you could think of, and the British got sore all over again.” His pipe had gone out so Carmingler used four matches to light it. He seemed to have forgotten his Phi Beta Kappa key, which I thought was just as well. “So all CIA could do was to deny again that you were one of them. They didn’t know about the Secretary’s letter. State hadn’t bothered to tell them about that. Then the premier himself called a press conference, distributed Xeroxed copies of the letter, and made a feisty little speech that lasted an hour all about how the United States was trying to dominate Asia through a program of subversion and what have you. He even hinted that he might play those tapes for the press — you know, the ones that they got in your hotel room.”

“Did he?”

“No. But he said — and he was lying, of course — that we had offered him thirty million dollars in foreign aid to release the three of you, and he said that he had evidence to prove it. Well, he did have that fool letter of apology from the Secretary. That was real enough. The British were still fuming and leaking stuff all over the place, so the press went along. Can’t say I blame them really. More headlines, and God, the editorials. The New York Times called it a ‘tragedy of errors.’ The Washington Post said it was ‘inane chicanery.’ And the New York Daily News wanted somebody ‘horsewhipped.’ So the word came down from the White House. Buy them out no matter how much.”

“How much was it?” I said.

Carmingler gave me his need to know look. “Oh, they still asked for thirty million, but it was less than that. Much, much less.”

“Ten cents on the dollar,” I said. “Three million.”

Carmingler glared at me suspiciously. “Only six persons in the country are supposed to know that.”

“Now you can make it seven.”

“Who told you?”

“A wily Oriental.”

The deep flush started at the top of Carmingler’s faultless collar and rose slowly until it reached his temples. It made him look like a traffic light that would never say go again. He sucked away on his pipe and fooled with his Phi Beta Kappa key at the same time, a sure sign that he was upset.

“I assume,” he said, spitting the words at me from around his pipe, “that the wily Oriental also told you why you were kept in solitary.”

I shrugged. “Standard procedure, I suppose.”

“You suppose wrong. Has it occurred to you that we could debrief you in Hong Kong just as well as we could in San Francisco? After all, Hong Kong’s been your home for the past ten years. You probably have more friends there than you do in the States.”

“It crossed my mind,” I said, “and since it might make you feel better, I’ll ask why — about both the solitary and being hustled back to the States, although I don’t mind that. I left nothing in Hong Kong except some cheap suits in my hotel and some equally cheap books. My car was leased and my bank account wasn’t over two hundred dollars.”

“You were paid enough.”

“I’m a spendthrift.”

The flush in Carmingler’s face had receded. He put his pipe carefully into the ashtray and placed the palms of his hands flat on the table. His elbows jutted out as he leaned toward me. He looked something like a middle-aged turkey who thought he would try to fly just one more time.

“They kept you in solitary and we brought you back here because Li Teh’s people have put a price on your head.” He enjoyed saying that.

“How much?”

“Enough.”

“How much, goddamn it?”

He smiled. “Five thousand dollars. American. At that price you wouldn’t live two hours in Hong Kong.”

“And here?”

“It doesn’t matter here.”

I nodded. “Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.”

“Where’s that from?”

“From China,” I said. “From Chairman Mao.”

Chapter 8

Until I was a little more than eight years old I went to school each afternoon for three hours following lunch. My teachers were prostitutes. I would have liked to have gone to school in the morning, but the ladies were never up.

I learned simple arithmetic (they were all good at that), French, Russian, German, and English — speaking the last, I was told, with a pronounced Australian accent. I also learned a highly garbled version of world history, spiced with tales of high romance and shattered dreams during the impossibly good old days in Berlin, Sydney, Canton, Rome, Marseilles, St. Petersburg, and San Diego. My Chinese also improved, but by the time I was eight I still couldn’t read or write my name in any language.

And it wasn’t until my seventh birthday that they stopped dressing me in rich brocades and silk. Until then I wore a series of long Mandarin gowns with high collars. My trousers were made of contrasting raw silk and red felt slippers covered my feet. The girls took turns painting my cheeks and plucking my eyebrows and powdering my face until it was chalk white except for two round spots of rouge on either cheek. I was a hell of a sight.

I’ve never been quite sure why Tante Katerine took me home with her or even kept me around after she did. It may have been some latent maternal instinct, but that’s doubtful. More likely, she made one of her usually accurate snap judgments and decided that having an American towel boy in her whorehouse would provide a novelty well worth the cost of my room and board.

Three years later, when I was nearly seven, she told me that the officials at the U.S. Consulate, as well as the Texaco management, as sumed that both my father and I had been blown to bits in 1937 by the Nanking Road explosions. A few days after she brought me home with her she had coached one of her American girls — the one from San Diego, Doris, I recall — for an hour or so and then had had her telephone both the Consulate and Texaco.

Posing as an old friend of the Dye family, Doris inquired if the doctor’s relatives in the States had been informed of his death and that of his son. She was told that the doctor had no living relatives. She then asked if there were any personal effects and the Texaco man said that there was nothing other than the doctor’s medical bag, his clothes and those of his son, and four five-year diaries that the doctor had faithfully kept since he was fourteen years old. Doris somehow talked the Texaco man into sending her the diaries to some poste restante or other under the unlikely pretext that they would be of immense value to the Montana State Historical Society, of whose board of directors she claimed to be chairman. After the diaries arrived, Doris occasionally read me some of the juicier passages. I’m still not sure how Doris knew about the Montana State Historical Society, but it may have been that she had once whored in Helena for a while.

Tante Katerine must have been close to forty in 1939. Her full name, so she said, was Katerine Obrenovitch, and she claimed to be a distant cousin of ex-King Alexander of Serbia, who took over the throne when his father, King Milan, abdicated in 1889. She also said that she had been born in St. Petersburg (she could never bring herself to say Leningrad) and had fled the revolution to Manchuria along with a sizeable bunch of other White Russians. I heard the tale dozens of times. It always had a lot of snow in it and even some wolves chasing a sleigh. Although still a very small child, I knew that most of it was a lie, but it was one that I never grew tired of hearing.

When the Japanese took control of Shanghai on November 8, 1937 — except for the International Settlement and the French Concession — Katerine employed every guile she had learned during twenty years of varied experience to determine who was what she, in her cosmopolitan patois, called, “Señor Number One Garçon.”

Mr. Number One Boy turned out to be a Japanese major who had been too long in grade, at least in his opinion, and was not at all averse to being bribed with both money and free samples. I remember the major, although I can’t recall his real name. The girls referred to him as Major Dogshit. That was close enough and since he didn’t understand English, he didn’t mind. His preferences in money ran to English pounds and American dollars, which commanded an exorbitant rate of exchange on the black market. He liked his girls in matched sets of twos and threes and when that was over, he liked his opium pipe. If I’d been a little older, he might even have liked me.

Tante Katerine’s cultivation of Major Dogshit paid off. Hers was the last foreign-staffed whorehouse in Nantao to close its doors, on Christmas Day, 1941. There were about twenty of them running wide open in 1937, offering not only whores and opium, but also gambling. After 6 P.M., my task was to greet the procession of Chinese quislings, Japanese big shots, and foreign dignitaries who often clogged the narrow street in the cool of the evening, borne by their Pierce-Arrows, Chryslers, Humbers, and the occasional Lincoln-Zephyr V-12, a car that I passionately admired.

The Chinese always arrived with four or five hard-faced bodyguards standing on the running boards. The bodyguards wore big Colt .45 automatics strapped to their bellies and they liked to wave them around a lot. All decked out in my silk and brocade finery, which was topped off by a round hat copied from the one that Johnny used to wear in the old Philip Morris ads, my eyebrows plucked, my face powdered and painted, but unlipsticked (I drew the line there), I greeted the guests, each in his own language, with florid phrases of welcome. The scripts had been written by Tante Katerine and I’d learned them by rote. One of the Chinese girls taught me what she considered to be the proper bows and flourishes.

I can still remember that the English paean went something like this in my best Australian twang: “May it please your lordship (even a merchant seaman arriving in a rickshaw was a lordship if he had the cash) to accept the poor hospitality of this humble house (flourish and bow and up). Your presence brings great honor to this wretched establishment and we humbly seek to satisfy your every need (leer and flourish and bow and up). We pray that time spent with us will help to banish the great cares that surely accompany your exalted position (flourish and bow and up). This way, sir, if you please.”

I could rattle that off by the time I was five and a half in English, French, Chinese, Russian (not much call), Japanese, and German, even if I didn’t understand a tenth of what I was saying.

That chore kept me busy from nine until eleven P.M. After that I sometimes prepared a few opium pipes and by midnight I usually had prepared enough so that I fell into my own dopey stupor and had to be undressed and put to bed, where I discovered what pleasant dreams really are. I still don’t know why I didn’t get hooked.

Occasionally, I accompanied Tante Katerine on shopping sprees in the International Settlement and the French Concession. She liked to show off her figure and her looks, which she kept through rigid dieting, chin straps, massage, and carefully applied makeup. It usually took her two hours at the mirror before she felt she was ready to greet customers. Her hair was still blond in 1939, although she had discarded Deanna Durbin in favor of the ringlets of Jeanette MacDonald. To me she remained the most beautiful person in the world and I remember clutching her hand as we sometimes strolled along the Bund, her silk parasol in her right hand and mine in her left, the devoted amah, Yen Chi, trotting along behind us. Tante Katerine nodded and smiled at regular customers if they were alone or with other men and ignored them if they were with their wives or mistresses. She kept up a running commentary to me on the sexual prowess and eccentricities of each which I found educational as well as interesting.

By 1939 the Japanese had taken control of the maritime customs and in the months that followed they absorbed the postal system, the Chinese-run radio stations, the railroads, the telephones, and the telegraph lines. They also clamped down on the press, except for those newspapers that were located in the sacrosanct French Concession and International Settlement. But if the Japanese couldn’t influence editorial policy, they could influence the editors themselves and they proceeded to do so in a forthright, graphic manner.

I think it was near the busy junction of the French Concession and the International Settlement. Tante Katerine had taken me shopping with her. I was wearing my Buster Brown suit (the brocades and silks were my working uniform) and was minus the powder and paint. I think she got the idea for the Buster Brown suit from an ancient issue of The Woman*s Home Companion that had happened to come her way. I’d have preferred corduroy knickers, although I’m still not sure how I knew that they even existed, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings because she thought that my tailored Buster Brown suit would please me immensely.

There was a crowd gathered at the junction, I recall, and Tante Katerine, always curious, used her elbows and parasol to snake us through it until we were on the front row with the rest of the professional gawkers. There were an even dozen objects to admire and I remember she said, “Oh, my dear Mary Mother of God!” grabbed my hand, and plowed our way back through the crowd with Yen Chi following as best she could.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“Men,” she said in French. “Very good men.”

“What did they do?”

She was grim now. “They wrote the truth, Lucifer. Always remember that. They wrote the truth.” Tante Katerine was much given to dramatics.

“Then why,” I said, speaking French, which I often did when I had a logical question to ask, “are their heads on poles?” They were really pikes, but I didn’t know the difference.

“Because—” she began and then changed the subject. “How would you like a sherbet?”

I forgot about the Chinese newspapermen whose heads the Japanese had chopped off and stuck on pikes for all to see. “Oh, that would be sehr schön,” the multilingual little bastard said.

I can thank Tante Katerine that by the time I was eight I was a streetwise, cynical little snot, much given to gossip and slander, a toady when it suited my purpose, which it often did, and enough of a ham so that I fully enjoyed my role as whorehouse doorman. The tips that I got from the arriving guests, along with what I rolled the pipe smokers and the drunks for, never taking more than five percent of what they had in their pockets, gave me an income that was equivalent to around fifty to sixty American dollars a week which, at first, I dutifully turned over to Tante Katerine, who said that she was investing it for me. I didn’t understand what investing meant, but I did know that I never had a dime, so I started squirreling away about a third of my weekly take. I must have been about seven then and on my eighth birthday, three days before Pearl Harbor, I had stashed away a little more than a thousand dollars in American and British currency. I didn’t trust anything else. If Tante Katerine suspected that I was skimming a third of my tips, she never said anything. If she had, I would have denied it. Hotly. I was already an accomplished liar. I think she approved of my rolling the drunks and the pipe smokers as long as I didn’t get too greedy, but she never said anything about that either.

Another of my daily tasks after school was to provide an audience for Tante Katerine during the two hours that she took to make up her face. She regaled me with tales of her social life in St. Petersburg before the Bolshevik swine took over and it wasn’t until years later that I discovered that most of her plots had been borrowed from some of the more impossible Viennese operettas. As I’ve said, I didn’t believe the stories even then, but I was fascinated by the intrigue, the duels (always over her), the romance, and the vivid descriptions of balls, parties, and court receptions. All in all, it was far better than Mother Goose and quite on a par with the Brothers Grimm.

It was also during these daily two-hour sessions that Tante Katerine tried to provide me with a philosophical approach to life that would steer me around a long list of pitfalls, provide comfort and solace in moments of stress, and possibly keep me out of jail. It was a curious mixture of copybook maxims, borrowed and invented proverbs, and what I later came to regard as pure Katerinisms.

“Never trust a redheaded Mexican,” she once said. That one was lost on me because I didn’t even know what a Mexican was. My geography had been so neglected that I was quite sure that Berlin was just on the other side of the International Settlement and that San Diego lay a couple of miles farther on. One of the girls had once told me that the world was round like a ball, but that, I reasoned, was obviously a complete fabrication.

Tante Katerine, sitting before her vanity, slapping on creams and unguents, plucking an eyebrow or affixing an earring, would break off one of her more fanciful tales in which all the men were handsome and all the women beautiful, turn those dark green eyes of hers on me, lower her voice until it was almost a high baritone, and say: “Get this straight, my little Kuppler, free advice is the worst kind you can buy.” Or, “Listen well, petit ami, nobody’s ever as sad or as happy as they think they are. They’re more so.” But the one I liked best, because I was never sure that I really had it figured out, was one that she always said at the end of the two-hour operation when she was staring at herself in the mirror and perhaps patting a stray wisp of blond hair into place: “My known vices are my hidden virtues, did you know that, Lucifer?” and I would always say yes, I knew that.

Chapter 9

After Victor Orcutt got through telling me what he wanted done and how much he was willing to pay me to do it everyone sat there without speaking while I digested the information, much as if it were a half-dozen oysters that could have been a trifle long from the sea. Homer Necessary cleared his throat once. The fretful cable-car bells clanged and railed against the afternoon traffic. A foghorn moaned twice, as if seeking commiseration, or at least sympathy. I got up and mixed a drink and on the way back to the couch stopped to look at Orcutt, who seemed fascinated by the tip of his left shoe.

“How’d you get on to me?”

He looked up and smiled that meaningless smile of his “Do you mean how or why?”

“Both.”

“Very well,” he said. “I think you should know. First how. It was through Gerald Vicker. You know him, I believe.”

“I know him.”

“But you don’t like him?”

“It runs a little deeper than that. A mile or so.”

“He has quite an organization,” Orcutt said. “Expensive, but reliable.”

“Then he’s changed,” I said.

“Really? He came well recommended and he did produce on extremely short notice.”

“He recommended me?”

“Highly. But you weren’t our only candidate. There were three others who were put forth by organizations similar to Mr. Vicker’s.”

“Who?” I said.

“The candidates?”

“No. The organizations.”

“I don’t really believe that concerns you, Mr. Dye.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

I put my drink down on the coffee table and leaned forward, resting my arms on my knees. I stared at Orcutt, who stared back, not in the least perturbed but only curious about what came next, if anything.

“I don’t know you,” I said. “I only know what you’ve told me about yourself and that’s not much of a recommendation.”

“You can check him out,” Necessary said.

“I plan to. Maybe I’ll be surprised and find that it was just a run of bad luck that got you tied in with Vicker. That could be. But you claim Vicker put my name up for membership in the club. That doesn’t flatter me; it scares the hell out of me because I know the only thing that Vicker would recommend me for is something that he could send flowers to.”

“Mr. Dye, I assure you—”

“I’m not finished. Assurances aren’t any good, not if Vicker’s tied into them. I learned long ago to stay away from people who deal with Vicker. They’re usually thieves or even worse, fools. So I’ll stay away from you unless you tell me the names of the other three firms that you dealt with. Then I might believe it was just bad luck that got you in with Vicker. But if you don’t come up with their names, then we’ve just run out of things to talk about.”

Orcutt was quick. If he hesitated, it wasn’t for more than a second. “Chance Tubio. Singapore. Do you know him?”

“He’s okay,” I said. “Some of his people are a little slimy, but he’s okay.”

“Eugene Elmelder. Tokyo.”

“The biggest,” I said, “but stuffy, slow, and very, very proper.”

“My impression, too,” Orcutt said. “Max von Krapp. Manila.”

“The best of the lot. He combines Teutonic thoroughness with a vivid imagination. The von is phoney.”

“He was the most expensive,” Orcutt said.

“Then he’s gone up. How did you get involved with Vicker?”

“He was one of four names suggested by a completely disinterested party.”

“Why take Vicker’s recommendation — why choose me?”

“There is a time factor, Mr. Dye. None of the other three could recommend satisfactory candidates who were immediately available. Vicker could. He named you. It’s as simple as that — except for the frightfully large retainers that the other three organizations demanded.”

I lit a cigarette that I didn’t really need and leaned back on the couch. “If you want another drink help yourself,” I said to Necessary. He nodded, rose, and crossed over to the bottle.

“Why go looking in the East?” I said to Orcutt. “Local talent must be plentiful. I’ve heard that Europe’s swarming with it.”

“I needed someone who could command a certain degree of anonymity in the States. It seemed to me that a person who has lived in the Far East for an extended period of time might well have achieved this. More so than if he’d lived in Europe. But I also listed a number of other qualifications.”

“Such as?”

Orcutt waved a hand, his left one. He did it gracefully, I thought. “We were terribly frank with all of them,” he said. “Naturally, we didn’t tell them exactly what the candidate would do. Rather, we told them what he should be.”

“How much checking did you do on the people that you dealt with — Tubio, von Krapp, and the other two?”

“They came highly recommended.”

“By whom?”

“I simply cannot reveal that,” Orcutt said and I thought for a moment that he was going to pout.

“Hint.”

“All right,” he said. “He was a United States Senator. There’re a hundred or so of them, so you can take your choice.”

“Simple the Wise,” I said. “From Idaho.”

Necessary snorted, received a glare from Orcutt, and I knew I was right but it hadn’t been hard to guess.

“Senator Solomon Simple,” I went on. “And if I had a name like that I’d change it to Lucifer Dye. Chairman of the Senate External Security subcommittee. He doesn’t trust U.S. intelligence — any of it — and he spends a lot of government money with outfits like the ones you’ve just done business with. How much did he cost you? I mean he’s still on the take, isn’t he?”

“I made a small campaign contribution,” Orcutt said, his tone swathed in frost. “Perfectly legitimate.”

“Perfectly legitimate,” Carol Thackerty said from her outpost by the window, “but not so small. He nicked you for ten thousand.”

“I refuse to have my—”

I interrupted Orcutt. “You know how he works it, don’t you?”

“Who?”

“Senator Simple.”

“Mr. Dye, I want you to know that I consider the Senator a personal friend of mine.”

“So much the better. You should be interested in his personal welfare. He’s chairman of the subcommittee that deals with external security. It was created about three or four years ago—”

“I know when it was created, Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said.

“After all the ruckus about the CIA’s subsidies to labor unions, student organizations, and what have you, including one that never made the papers.”

“What one was that?” Necessary said.

“An international garden club.”

“Crap,” Necessary said.

“But still true,” I said. “Well, the Senator became the darling of the Old and the New Left as well as all the ragtag liberals who see something sinister in wiretapping, J. Edgar Hoover, the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala, and whatever it was I was doing when they threw me in jail.”

Orcutt squirmed in his chair. Necessary was grinning happily. Carol Thackerty seemed bored by the view through the window.

“Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, “if you’re going to sit there and slander Senator Simple like some... some carbon copy William Buckley—”

“I like Buckley,” I said. “I think he’s funny. I also think he’s right about one percent of the time, although that may be just a little high. But what I think isn’t important. I was talking about the Senator.”

“It was just getting good,” Necessary said.

“Well, Simple the Wise—”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that name,” Orcutt said.

“All right. Senator Simple’s subcommittee has contracted with three of the firms that you dealt with to provide him with intelligence reports that mostly concern what’s going on in China. If I remember the figures, the contracts are for one million to von Krapp in Manila, two million to Tubio in Singapore, and two and a half million to Elmelder’s outfit in Tokyo. They’re probably worth it. All of them are good, but they’re also profit conscious, which is a polite word for greedy. All of them have branched out into industrial intelligence — or espionage, if you like — and they’ve made a good thing out of it, especially in Japan. But still, those millions authorized by the subcommittee help meet the payroll. So they got together and decided to put the Senator on their payroll. I suppose you could call it a kind of intelligence cartel and the Senator gets X number of dollars deposited in Panama, Zurich, and some other place that I’ll think of in a moment. Lichtenstein. The last estimate that I heard had the Senator dragging down about a quarter of a million a year, tax free, of course. If he were to ever balk on renewing their contracts, they’d expose him. So you see, the liberals are right after all. It is a little sinister.”

I could see that Orcutt believed me, probably because it was his own kind of a deal. “Your organization knows this?”

“Sure,” I said. “But it’s my ex-organization.”

“Why don’t they—”

“Expose him?”

“Yes.”

“Why should they? They get the information from the Senator — even before the CIA — as soon as he’s milked it for whatever publicity value it has, if any. If it’s too hot, he turns it over to them — free. It’s usually top-grade stuff, or nearly so. The Senator’s content with his quarter of a million a year. The cartel, if you want to call it that, has got a multimillion dollar annuity as long as Simple stays in office. Of course when he comes up for election next year, they’ll see to it that some legitimate funds are dumped into his campaign.”

“It’s all real cozy, isn’t it?” Necessary said to me. “I like it. I like it a hell of a lot.” He turned to Orcutt. “Couldn’t we sort of drop a hint to the Senator and—”

“Shut up, Homer,” Orcutt said. “Mr. Dye, you must have had some reason for telling me this. I wouldn’t quite classify you as the town gossip.”

I nodded. “I had a reason and the reason is Gerald Vicker. If the Senator recommended him to you then I have to assume that Vicker’s got his hooks in the Senator. I don’t much mind the others. Their information’s as good as anybody’s and sometimes a hell of a lot better. At least that’s what my organization — sorry — ex-organization thought. But Vicker’s something else. Vicker and I go back a long way. When did you first get in touch with him?”

Orcutt looked at Carol Thackerty. “August third,” she said.

“How much did you pay him?”

“Twelve thousand dollars,” she said, turning her head from the window.

“When did you get his first report?”

“August tenth,” Orcutt said.

“What was it?”

“A six-page, single-spaced precis of you,” he said.

“Detailed?”

“Extremely.”

“Did it say where I was at the time?”

“In jail.”

“Did it say when I would get out?”

“To the day. It also said that you would be brought back to San Francisco, that you would be debriefed for from ten to twelve days in Letterman General, and that you would then be at liberty — I think that was the term he used. In fact, Vicker was most complimentary — even effusive — except for one thing.”

“What?”

“Well, he said that you might be a little nervous.”

“He didn’t say nervous. Not Vicker.”

“He said chicken,” Necessary said and grinned at me. “Are you chicken, Dye?”

I looked at him, studying his brown and blue eyes. The right one was brown; the left one blue. “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?”

Orcutt had been admiring the toes of his shoes again. He looked up quickly. “Does that mean that you’ve decided to accept my proposition, Mr. Dye?”

“You mean to corrupt you a city?”

Orcutt smiled the only way he knew how. “That was a little rich, wasn’t it?”

“A little.”

“Corn,” Carol Thackerty said. “Pure corn. You can never resist it, can you, Victor?”

“Shut up, Carol,” he said. It seemed that Victor Orcutt spent a lot of time telling people to shut up.

“Well, Mr. Dye?” he said.

“If you’ll answer a question or two.”

“All right.”

“What qualifications did you specify other than a certain degree of anonymity?”

“You mean to the four firms that I dealt with?”

“Yes.”

Orcutt nodded slowly. “Yes, I can see that you’d be interested in that. I was really quite specific. The candidate should be unattached, not too old, possessed of some social graces, presentable, and willing to undergo a slight risk. Availability was another consideration, of course, because our lead time is just slipping away. He should also have a certain amount of experience in clandestine activities, either for government or for private industry. Preferably he should belong to some minority group, but I had to give up on that one. He should have rather deep insight into human nature, be slightly skeptical but not so much that it clouds his judgment, and above all he must be intelligent. Not book smart, mind you, but quickish, cleverish, sharpish—”

“Shrewdish?” I offered.

“You’re teasing again. I do like that. But to continue. He should also be articulate. Not a salesman, mind you, but sincere and well spoken.”

“And you think I’m all that?”

“No one is, Mr. Dye. But you possess a majority of the qualifications. Ones that Homer, Miss Thackerty, and even I lack. You will, shall I say, round out our team. Now that you’re virtually one of us, I can tell you about our project.”

The city that Victor Orcutt wanted me to corrupt had a population of a little more than two hundred thousand and was located on the Gulf Coast somewhere between Mobile and Galveston. It was called Swankerton but the local wits had long ago changed that to Chancre Town, which, Orcutt said, had some basis of fact.

He went on for quite a while and I half-listened, knowing that a recitation of facts and names and statistics was no substitute for personal appraisal. Necessary was on his fourth Scotch without visible effect and Carol Thackerty, still looking bored, kept her vigil at the window. I liked to look at her. Her profile offered a high calm forehead, a straight nose, not at all thin, just delicate, or some might even say aristocratic. She had a good chin, rounded and firm, which swept gracefully back to her long, slender neck.

Victor Orcutt had stopped talking and was looking at me as if he expected a remark or a question. I decided on a question. “What’s the deadline?”

“The first Tuesday in November.”

“This year?”

“This year.”

“It’s not enough. You can’t even shake down city hall for the Heart Fund in two months.”

“We’ll have to,” Orcutt said. “There’s absolutely no lead time, Mr. Dye. The persons whom I’m dealing with in Swankerton have been dilatory. They now recognize full well that they started late. Very late. That’s why I was able to demand my fee and that’s why I’m able to offer you fifty thousand dollars for two months’ work.”

“That’s too much money for two months’ work,” I said. “But I won’t argue about it. It just means that I’ll have to do something that I don’t want to do. Something tricky probably. But the real reason I’m taking it is because Gerald Vicker wants me to. And the only reason he wants me to is because he thinks something nasty might happen to me. So do you, or you wouldn’t make the ante so high. Vicker worries me. He worries me enough so that I’ll go along until I learn what it’s all about.”

“This seems to be a long-standing feud between you and Vicker, Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said.

“It’s more of a vendetta than a feud and it goes back about six years.”

“What happened?”

“He used to work for the same people I did. I got him fired.”

“Jealousy? Rivalry?”

“No. It was because he killed someone.”

“Who?”

“The wrong man.”

We talked some more about Swankerton and then Homer Necessary announced that he was hungry. “Just a minute, Homer,” Orcutt said and turned to me. “Your decision is firm, Mr. Dye? You will go to Swankerton with us?”

I looked at Orcutt, took a breath, then sighed and said, “When do we leave?”

He rose and clapped his hands together in pleasure. I thought for a moment that he might even do us a little dance. “Tomorrow morning. There’s a direct flight, but we still have so many things to discuss. You’ll join us for dinner?”

“Fine,” I said.

“But not here. I just can’t abide hotel food. Any hotel. Homer, go down and get the car. Carol, call Ernie’s and make a reservation for four. A good table, mind you. Do you know Ernie’s, Mr. Dye? It’s on Montgomery.”

I told him no.

“It’s marvelous. Simply marvelous.”

Victor Orcutt did the ordering and everything was as good as he said it would be. We had the Tortue au Sherry; Dover Sole Ernie’s with a bottle of Chablis Bougros; Tournedos Rossini with some more wine, this time Pommard Les Epenots. There was a Belgian endive salad followed by a crêpe soufflé, coffee, and cognac. It was all simply marvelous and it only cost Victor Orcutt $162.00.

Orcutt sent Necessary for the car while he headed toward the rear, either to compliment the chef or to pee. That left me with Carol Thackerty. She put a cigarette between her lips and I leaned over to light it.

When she had it going she smiled and said, “I understand that you grew up in a whorehouse.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” she said, “we have that much in common. So did I.”

Chapter 10

It must have been in the autumn of 1939 that I first met Gorman Smalldane. I was five then, going on six, and sober, and Gorman Smalldane was thirty-four and a little drunk. It was either a Monday or a Tuesday night, about ten o’clock, and I was at my usual post outside the door of Tante Katerine’s joy emporium, waiting to greet customers. There weren’t many and I was glad when the taxi drew up and the man in the blue suit jumped out, paid off the driver, and checked the polished brass plate to make sure that this was Number 27. That was all the identification that Tante Katerine’s establishment ever had. It was all it needed.

Smalldane pushed through the brick wall’s wrought-iron gates, which Tante Katerine claimed came all the way from New Orleans, and made his way towards me, tacking only a little now and then. I was wearing my fancy uniform with the pillbox monkey hat. My face was powdered and painted and for added splendor two of my front teeth were missing.

Smalldane stopped in front of me, all six feet three inches of him. He cocked his blond head to one side and studied me carefully. Then he cocked it to the other side and studied me some more. After that he shook his head in mild disbelief and walked around me to see whether the view was any better from the rear. In front of me once more, he bent from the waist until his face was no more than six inches from mine and I could smell the whiskey. It was Scotch. “Now just what in fuck’s name are you supposed to be, little man?” he said.

“The humble greeter of clients, my lordship,” I lisped because of my teeth, backed up a step, and bowed. Then I launched into a lisping, Australian-accented, English version of the official welcome with all of its bows and flourishes and leers.

Smalldane stood there listening to it all and shaking his head from side to side. When I was done, he bent down from the waist again and said: “You know what I think you are? I think you are a gap-toothed sissy, that’s what.”

I gave him the full benefit of my black and white smile, bowed again, and said in Cantonese, “And your mother, drunken pig, was an ancient turtle who coupled with a running dog.” I’d picked that one up someplace.

Still bent down, Smalldane smiled and nodded his head as if in full agreement. Then he straightened up, put his hands on his hips, and said softly: “You should guard that dung-coated tongue of yours, my little pimp for poisonous toads, or I will rip it from your mouth and shove it up your rectum where it can flap in the breeze of your own wind.” His Cantonese was as good as mine, his imagery more vivid.

He didn’t scare me. Nothing scared me then, probably because I was spoiled rotten. But Smalldane did impress me with his size and his brilliant command of the foul invective. I bowed again, quite low, and made a sweeping gesture toward the door. “This way, my lordship, if you please.”

“Here you go, sonny,” he said and tossed me an American half-dollar.

“A thousand thank yous, kind sir,” I said, another archaic phrase that someone had taught me, but which — because of my absent teeth — came out with all the sibilants missing.

Smalldane went through the door and I followed, partly because I was curious, partly because business was slack, but mostly because I wanted the cup of hot cocoa that Yen Chi, Tante Katerine’s amah, prepared for me nightly.

I was right behind Smalldane when the madame of the house swept into the large entrance hall. She stopped abruptly, her eyes widened, and her hand went to her throat, a dramatic ploy that she copied rather successfully from either Norma Shearer or Kay Francis. I had watched her practice it often enough before her vanity table mirror. But now, for once in her life, she abandoned her pose and ran with arms outstretched toward Smalldane, crying, “Gormy!” at the top of her voice. He wrapped her in an embrace and kissed her for a long time while I watched with clinical interest. That’s one thing about being reared in a whorehouse: displays of affection and emotion will never embarrass you.

There were a number of half-sentences and unintelligible phrases such as “you promised to” and “I couldn’t get away” and “over two years without” and “long time” and “it’s so good to” and all the rest of the things that two persons who are fond of each other say after a long separation. I stood there, probably smirking a little, and watched and listened.

Tante Katerine spotted me then and beckoned. “Lucifer, dear, come. I want you to meet a very good and old friend of mine, Mr. Gorman Smalldane, the famous American radio correspondent. Gorman, this is my ward, Lucifer Dye.” She must have looked up “ward” someplace because it was the first time I’d ever heard her use it.

“Mr. Smalldane,” I said, bowing stiffly, more in the European than the Chinese manner. One of the girls from Berlin had contributed that. Her name was Use.

“He’s an insufferable little prick, isn’t he?” Smalldane said. “Who the hell lets him paint himself up like that?”

“I think it’s sehr aufgeweckt,” she said because nobody in Shanghai then had much use for “cute.”

“Looks like you’re training him for a job in Sammy Ching’s place down on the waterfront — if the Japs haven’t closed it yet. Sailors like little pogey bait like him.”

“Well, you’re wrong, Mr. Gorman Famous Smalldane,” Tante Katerine said. “He’s just a little boy and he goes to school every day. For three hours.”

“Where?”

“Here. We teach him here.”

Smalldane grinned and shook his head. “I bet he does learn a lot at that. And all of it useful.”

I found the conversation fascinating, doubtless because they were talking about me.

“He can do his multiplication through the twelveses,” Tante Katerine said, her English lapsing as her anger rose. “You want to hear him? What’s twelve times eleven, Lucifer?”

“One hundred and thirty two,” the insufferable little prick said.

“There!” she said triumphantly. “See. I bet you can’t do that when you are six.”

“I can’t do it now,” Smalldane said. “I never got past my elevenses.”

“He also speaks six languages. Maybe even seven. How many could you speak when you were his age, Mr. Know-some-all?”

“That’s know-it-all,” Smalldane said, “and I could barely get by in English, but at least I stayed out of Mother’s rouge and powder and wore pants, for God’s sake, and not her bathrobe.”

“Now you don’t like his clothes,” she said, her voice rising. “Now you’re making funny of his clothes. Do you know how much that gown cost? Do you know how many I paid for it? I paid fifteen dollars for it American, that’s how many.”

“He still looks silly.”

“That’s not all he’s got. He’s got four more just as expensive. And he’s got fine American clothes too that come from a famous house of fashion.”

“Sears, Roebuck?”

“Buster Brown, that’s who,” she said.

“Jesus,” Smalldane said. “I quit. Look, Katie, I didn’t come here to argue about some Australian kid that you’ve taken to raise. It’s been more than—”

“I’m not Australian, sir,” I said, “I am an American,” thus proving that there’s a little chauvinism in the best of us.

“You didn’t pick that accent up in Pittsburgh, kid.”

I stood straight as a plumb line, scrunched my eyes closed, and recited: “I am six years old and my name is Lucifer Clarence Dye and I was born December 5, 1933, in Moncrief, Montana, United States of America, and my father’s name was Dr. Clarence Dye and I live at Number Twenty-seven.”

“Okay, Lucifer,” Smalldane interrupted. “That’s fine. I believe you. Relax.” He knelt down so that his head was level with mine and I could smell the Scotch again. “Look, tomorrow I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You’ll play hookey—”

“What’s hookey?” I said.

“You’ll miss school and we’ll go down and get you some American clothes and maybe hoist a few at the Shanghai Club.” He looked up at Tante Katerine. “Is old Chi Fo’s tailor shop still going, you know, near the American School in the French Concession?”

Tante Katerine shrugged to show her indifference. “The American School was closed two years ago, but I assume Chi Fo is still in business.”

“You mind if I take the kid?”

“Why should I mind? I’m only a poor Russian, exiled from her country to this war-torn land, friendless and alone, who’s tried to give a decent home to this poor—”

She was going to the afterburners when Smalldane shot her down. “I don’t want to adopt him, goddamn it, Kate, I just want to buy him a pair of corduroy knickers so he can hear them squeak when he walks. It’s his birthright. I didn’t get any until I was almost eleven and before that I had to wear short pants. God knows what it did to me psychologically. I’m not sure, but maybe it’s already too late.”

“What do you mean too late?” she said.

“For the kid. Still,” he added thoughtfully, “perhaps he could do real fine as a female impersonator.”

“Take him!” she yelled. “Buy him anything you want to! Buy him the — the whole Bund!”

“How about it, Lucifer?” Smalldane said, still kneeling in front of me. “Would you like some knickers? The corduroy kind?”

I bowed in the Chinese fashion and then gave him my very best ail-American boy gap-toothed grin. “Very much, sir.”

“Good,” he said, rising. He turned to Tante Katerine. “Does he go to bed now or do you work him on the night shift?”

“Goddamn you, Gorman—” she began, but he whacked her on the rear with the palm of his hand and laughed. It’s still the most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard. Then she laughed and he took her hand and they almost raced upstairs. Neither one of them told me good night. Yen Chi brought me my cocoa and I drank it there in the reception hall and thought about Smalldane and the corduroy knickers and Tante Katerine. I had seen her go upstairs before on rare occasions with special “old friends” and it hadn’t bothered me. This time it did. I was only six and didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just met not only my first rival, but also my first male friend. Or maybe cobber, since I spoke as if I came from down that way.

Gorman Smalldane had been a twenty-seven-year-old reporter for United Press in 1932 when he met Tante Katerine in Mukden. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria had just begun and Tante Katerine wanted out. With Smalldane’s help, she made it to Shanghai where she went into business for herself, found a wealthy Chinese protector or patron, who turned out to be the local version of Lucky Luciano, and opened her sin palace in 1933.

Her sponsor was Du Wei-sung (some spelled it Dou-Yen-Seng or even Fu-Seng), a peasant who had started out in the best Horatio Alger tradition as a fruit hawker in the French Concession. Ambitious, tough, and completely ruthless, Du staked out the opium trade as his own private monopoly. He also branched out into gambling, prostitution and the protection racket, operating eventually out of a luxurious high-walled compound in the French Concession.

A self-cured opium addict himself, which indicated his singlemindedness, Du fully appreciated the rich potential that lay within a drug monopoly. He dominated the opium traffic completely after he combined the Red and Green Societies, two rival groups that had started out as secret political fraternities but had degenerated into criminal gangs interested in anything that would turn a quick Shanghai dollar. Before Du merged the rival mobs they spent much of their time shooting each other up on Shanghai’s west side.

With a fortune securely based on his opium monopoly, Du diversified further and went into legitimate business. China’s Who’s Who listed him as a director of paper mills, forty banks, cotton mills, and shipping companies. He was also a member of the executive committee of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and bought himself the managing directorship of Shanghai’s leading newspaper, The China Press, at one time Shanghai’s leading American newspaper.

Du seemed to be as shrewd at public relations as he was at finance. He supported two free hospitals and served as their president; he was the chief angel for a couple of orphanages; he buried beggars free, and even sponsored a model farming community.

He also ran the French Concession and the two thousand French who lived there were content to ignore his shady sidelines as long as he maintained a semblance of law and order. They were so grateful, in fact, that they even elected him to the Concession’s governing municipal council.

But perhaps Du’s crowning achievement came from his fellow member in the Ching Pang, or Green Society. The fellow member’s name was Chiang Kai-shek, and he addressed Du as Elder Brother. As a newly converted Methodist, Chiang was understandably concerned about the increasing opium traffic. To control it he created something called the Shanghai Opium Oppression Bureau, which was an offshoot of the Nationalist government’s six-year opium suppression program. Only the congenitally naive were surprised when Chiang appointed Du as director of the Shanghai Opium Oppression Bureau. In return for the honor, Du sometimes impounded fifty pounds or so of opium and publicly burned it. Everyone agreed it was a nice gesture. In the meantime, he controlled the opium trade, contributed millions to the Nationalist treasury for the purchase of American fighter planes, and whenever an epidemic or a flood ravaged the land, Du could be counted on for a hefty contribution.

Tante Katerine kicked back twenty percent of her profits to Du’s organization and the vice squad never got around to bothering her.

I soon learned that Gorman Smalldane was not the famous radio correspondent that Tante Katerine claimed. After Manchuria, he had continued to work for United Press in Nanking until they transferred him to Hong Kong. From there he went to Ethiopia in 1935 to write about what Mussolini was up to and from there to Spain to cover Franco’s side of the Civil War.

In Spain he met H. V. Kaltenborn, who was then broadcasting twice a week for CBS for $50 a broadcast and paying his own expenses. In October of 1937 Kaltenborn came down with a bad case of laryngitis and couldn’t go on the air. He offered Smalldane $25 to come to a French border town and do his broadcast for him. Edward R. Murrow, then European manager of CBS, heard it, liked Smalldane’s voice, as well as the style and content of his news, and hired him as a stringer.

Smalldane probably knew China as well as any American correspondent. He had been born in Canton in 1905 of Methodist missionary parents, now dead, and had gone to Northwestern — a sound Methodist school — on a scholarship, graduating in 1926. He returned to Shanghai in 1927 and because he was fluent in Chinese he got a job with the then American-run China Press, later transferring to United Press. At thirty-four when I met him, Smalldane still thought of himself as an orphan, which established a bond between us and also indicated something or other about his personality.

His downfall — at least a temporary one — came late in 1939. He had written a series of what he called “goddamned brilliant” features on Shanghai which had received unusually wide play in the U.S. He then came up with the idea of doing an exposé of Du Wei-sung, the opium king, and his connections with Chiang Kai-shek. He spent seven weeks of hard, intensive digging on the three-part series and mailed it to the States. The first one ran, the other two were killed, and UP fired Smalldane, supposedly at the insistence of Chiang himself, who then refused him accreditation to Chungking.

At Tante Katerine’s urging, Smalldane gave up his room at the American Club (she paid his considerable tab) and moved to Number 27. He made a couple of broadcasts a month for CBS, sold some harmless freelance stuff to North American Newspaper Alliance, and once to Liberty Magazine, and worked a few rather profitable deals on the black market. If Du Wei-sung knew that Smalldane was living rent-and-board free in one of the whorehouses that he protected, it didn’t seem to bother him, and the American got along famously with the Japanese’s number one boy, Major Dogshit. But then Smalldane got along famously with everyone most of the time, especially me.

It was a kind of hero worship, I suppose. He got me out of the brocade robe and into corduroy knickers. He taught me how to throw a baseball like a boy instead of a girl. He spent long hours lecturing me on the finer points and intricacies of football, although I’d never seen a game; he demonstrated (often) the making of a proper martini; extolled the merits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the shortcomings of Wendell Willkie; described the sexual aberrations of Adolf Hitler; explained the fact that the earth was really round after all; and predicted the coming war between the United States and Japan in the Pacific, Of this, Smalldane was completely convinced.

Although Major Dogshit spoke no English and Smalldane spoke no Japanese, they communicated well enough in a mixture of French, Chinese, and graphic sign language. And it was in early November of 1941 that the major, well into his cups, gave Smalldane what could have been the biggest newsbeat in history. The major was paying his last visit to Number 27 and he was maudlin about it. He was distressed that he had to leave his great friend “Smardane” and his little friend “Rucifer.” But most distressing of all was that he had to give up his monthly stipend and free samples from Number 27 where, he assured us, he had spent the happiest days of his life. He liked Americans, he said, or at least that’s what we thought he said, and he did not want to fight them.

Smalldane asked what part of China he was being transferred to, but Major Dogshit wagged a finger at him and shook his head. Not China, he said. No more China. He was going South — far, far South. He was being assigned to a special force for intensive training. Then he giggled and mumbled something in French about not from the sea, but from the land. After that he passed out and Smalldane got one of the house boys to get him home.

Sitting there in what Tante Katerine referred to as Number 27’s “hospitality room,” which was really a medium-sized cocktail lounge where customers could look over the merchandise, Smalldane tried to figure it out. He got a map from his room and spread it over the table.

“Dogshit said South,” he said.

“Which way is that?” I asked.

“Straight down, you ignorant piece of filth,” he said to me in Cantonese.

“How could it be down on the map when it is that way where we now are?” I asked, pointing to my left, and since it was a most logical question, speaking in French.

“What’s that say right there?” Smalldane asked, jabbing his finger at the map’s compass.

“How should I know?” I said. “I am only eight years old and can neither read nor write.”

“Christ, I keep forgetting.”

“I can now do my multiplication tables up to fifteen,” I said. “You want to know what fifteen times fourteen is? It’s two hundred and ten.”

“Kate!” Smalldane roared at Tante Katerine who was across the room listening to the marital problems of a minor French official. She excused herself and came over to our table.

“When’re you going to teach him to read and write?” he said, jerking a thumb at me.

She shrugged. “He has plenty of time. Perhaps we’ll teach him next year. Or the next. You’re the expert writer. Why don’t you teach him?”

“Goddamn it, I will, starting right now!”

Tante Katerine shrugged and swayed back to her Frenchman and the problems that he was having with his wife. He was a regular customer who came to Number 27 more for advice than for sex.

“Here,” Smalldane said to me in a harsh tone. “What’s that word?” And he jabbed his forefinger at a dot on the map.

I looked carefully. “It’s a dot with a circle around it,” I said.

“Not the symbol, my little snot, the word! Don’t you even know the goddamned alphabet?”

“I am only a child of eight years and can—”

“Start learning right now,” Smalldane said. “That’s an S, that’s an I, that’s an N, and that’s a G. Now repeat them.”

“S-I-N-G,” I said promptly and then yawned on purpose. “There’s really not much to it, is there?”

“What does it spell, stupid?”

“I have no idea.”

“It spells sing. S-I-N-G. Sing.”

“Like a song,” I said.

“Like Singapore, you toad of a pimp.” Then he forgot about his tutorial ambitions and started running his finger down Indo-China. “Look,” he said to me because he had no other audience, “the Japs have already got Indo-China and they can jump off to Malaya and hit Singapore from the rear. South, Dogshit said. And I’ll bet seventeen dollars and thirty-eight cents that means Singapore from the land and not from the sea.” Smalldane was always betting $17.38 on something. I never knew why.

For the next four weeks he was out all day and half the night trying to confirm his theory. He borrowed money from Tante Katerine to get Japanese officers drunk and to bribe privates and non-coms to tell him what little they knew about troop movements. He spent hours in the Shanghai Club talking to its British members about Malaya and Singapore’s defenses. “Impregnable, old boy,” he would say to me, mocking their accent. “Absolutely impregnable.”

I didn’t know when or where he got what he thought was the last piece to his jigsaw, but he got it, and then spent three days writing a two thousand-word story. I still remember its lead. Smalldane read it to me at least six times:

“You left out a few words, didn’t you?” I said, still completely vague about where Singapore was.

“They’ll put them back in in New York,” Smalldane said. “You want to go with me to file it?”

“Sure,” I said.

We borrowed Tante Katerine’s Airflow Chrysler and started to the Press Wireless office. It was the morning of December 8, 1941, and Japanese troops arrested us both before we got halfway there.

Chapter 11

We flew first class from San Francisco to Swankerton and it was dull and fast as most air travel is now that they keep the jets up around thirty-five thousand or more where you can’t see anything.

After dinner the night before, Orcutt had asked us to stop by his suite. He was staying at the Fairmont on California and Mason and the suite probably didn’t cost him much more than $125 a day. He told Carol Thackerty to order him a cup of hot chocolate and anything that we wanted. Necessary and I asked for brandy; Carol Thackerty wanted nothing.

Orcutt made some small talk, mostly about Ernie’s, while we waited for the drinks to arrive. After they came, he took a sip of his hot chocolate and said, “I like to drink it quickly before that slimy skim forms on top.” We waited silently while he drank it in small, rapid sips, much like a bird drinks, except that he didn’t have to raise his head to let the chocolate flow down his throat. He said, “Ah,” when he finished and I assumed that he had gotten it all down without running into any of the slimy skim that forms on top.

“Now then,” he said to me, “there are a few items that I’ve had prepared in anticipation of your joining us, Mr. Dye.”

“You must have been confident,” I said.

“Not altogether. It’s just that I always like everything ready. I simply detest last-minute scrambling about doing things that could have been done at a normal pace. Carol, would you please give me Mr. Dye’s envelope?”

She reached into her large, almost briefcase-sized purse and took out an oblong manila envelope which she handed to him. Orcutt peeked inside it and then motioned for me to join him on the couch. I took my brandy with me.

“First,” he said, “your Social Security card. In case you don’t remember, it’s your right number.” I glanced at the card and Orcutt was correct: it was the right number. “Strange about the Social Security card,” he said. “It’s almost worthless as identification, but the number itself is becoming increasingly important. It’s replaced the individual serial number in the armed forces, in fact. I think it’s safe to predict that one of these days — quite soon, really — the number will be used to maintain a full dossier on every citizen of this country. What do you think, Mr. Dye?”

“I wouldn’t bet against it,” I said.

“No,” Orcutt said, “I didn’t think you would. Next, here is a driver’s license issued by the Commonwealth of Virginia just before they began to require a photograph to be attached to each license. We would have secured a District of Columbia license for you, but there they require color photographs on their licenses, which presented an almost insurmountable problem.”

He handed me the license and I read the information on it. It would expire in six months, but everything was accurate except that it had me living in Alexandria.

“Now here,” Orcutt said, “are three credit cards, American Express, Gulf Oil, and Carte Blanche. They’re legitimate, so use them wisely.” He smiled after he said it to show that it was a joke, but with that smile of his, I couldn’t believe him.

“This,” he said, handing me another card, “is your Blue Cross and Blue Shield identification card. Also legitimate. We’ve already paid the premiums. And this is a card from Sibley Hospital in Washington which notes that your blood type is AB. Quite rare, really.”

“I know,” I said.

“We had the devil’s own time getting that one because it was so difficult to learn what your blood type is. We — or I should say Homer — finally got it from the State Department’s medical division. He’s quite good at things such as that. A real ferret.”

“How did State have it?” I said.

“You took a physical there eleven years ago,” Necessary said. “Remember it?”

“I do now,” I said.

Orcutt poked around in the envelope some more. “And here,” he said, “is an Alexandria library card, your voter’s registration, and a membership card in the Gaslight Club in Washington. That takes care of your identification problem.”

“Why Washington?” I said.

“Because the man who supplies us with several of these items of identification operates from there. If you’d like a totally new identity, complete with an honorable discharge from the Army, he’ll sell you a package that contains a Social Security number, a driver’s license, the aforementioned discharge, a library card, and a voter’s registration certificate for one hundred and fifty dollars. Credit cards cost fifty dollars each, but he strongly advises against them. They’re too much of a temptation. By the way, your credit cards are issued in the name of Victor Orcutt Associates.”

“Very thorough,” I said.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Orcutt said. “Now here is a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars with which you’ll open a personal checking account at the First National Bank in Swankerton. And this is a letter of credit from my St. Louis bank. I believe it’s for — yes — twenty thousand. I hope you don’t have to use all of it, but you may. And since you have nothing to carry these various items in, here’s a wallet that should contain five hundred dollars cash.” He looked inside and counted rapidly. “Yes, it does.” Then he turned to Carol Thackerty and frowned. “I specified pin seal,” he said.

“They didn’t have any,” she said.

Orcutt looked at the wallet with distaste. “I suppose this will do, but it’s certainly not what I had in mind, Mr. Dye.”

“It’s fine,” I said and started to put all the cards into their proper compartments.

“I’ve saved the most important until last,” Orcutt said. “It’s the culmination of more than a month of intensive work on the part of myself, Miss Thackerty, and Homer.” He handed me five folded sheets of what seemed to be ordinary typing paper. When I unfolded them I saw that it was a long list of typewritten names that were divided into two sections and labeled “Advocates” and “Adversaries,” which I thought to be a little fancy. The adversaries ran four pages; the advocates only one. After each name were four or five single-spaced lines of biographical data which included such personal information as sexual inclinations and preferences; drinking habits; financial peccadilloes; emotional hang-ups; social and political position; chronic illnesses; mental aberrations; family background; educational attainments; current and past professions or businesses; estimated net worth; outstanding loans and debts; youthful indiscretions; and previous arrests, if any.

It was condensed and abbreviated enough to make Who’s Who seem garrulous. But it was all perfectly readable and I skimmed through it quickly, then folded it and stuffed it away in an inside coat pocket.

“It was a two-man job,” I said.

“Why two? Why not six or nine or even twenty?” Orcutt said and permitted me another inspection of his nothing smile.

“First, the information is useful for only two things: coercion or blackmail. A committee doesn’t do that. Second, one of them is a doctor; the medical terms give that away. So do the personal physical details. The other one is a trained researcher, probably a newspaperman, but somebody who knows where to look and who has a keen sense of the relevant.”

Homer Necessary put his empty brandy glass down and squirmed in his chair. When he couldn’t keep quiet any longer, he leaned toward me, his arms resting on his knees. “Maybe we dug it all up by ourselves, Dye. Maybe we just looked here and there, asked around, and then put it down on paper.”

“Maybe,” I said, “if you had a couple of years, instead of a couple of months. But you didn’t.”

“You’re quite right, Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said. “Two persons did compile the information. One is Dr. Warner Colfax. He owns a rather large clinic — the Colfax Clinic, to be precise. In addition to the regular medical services that its sixty-bed hospital provides, it’s also a drying-out haven for drunks and narcotics addicts — those who can afford it, at any rate. Then, too, it’s a place that the aged can comfortably spend their remaining golden years, providing that they, or their children, can come up with fifteen hundred dollars a month; and it’s also a place of comfort and care for those who suffer minor mental aberrations.”

“He didn’t miss much,” I said. “The drunks and the addicts will spill anything for a bottle or a fix and the old folks will reminisce and ramble as long as somebody’ll listen. God knows what the psychotics would babble. No doubt Dr. Colfax has access to all records.”

“No doubt,” Orcutt said. “The newspaperman deserves a more fitting appellation, however He’s actually the editor and publisher of The Swankerton Advocate and its evening sister, The Swankerton News-Calliope. Odd name for a paper, don’t you think?”

“Very,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“Channing d’Arcy Phetwick, the third. Phetwick is spelled with a p-h, not an f. There’s a Channing d’Arcy Phetwick the fourth around, too, but he’s turned out to be something of a wastrel. The senior Phetwick also owns a television station which is the local NBC affiliate; a fifty-thousand-watt radio station, also NBC affiliated; a tremendous amount of timberland on the Coosa River in Alabama (pulp for newsprint, of course), a statewide trucking service in which he ships his papers, thus boosting his circulation considerably; numerous valuable downtown and suburban real-estate properties, plus a couple of profitable plantations, I suppose one should call them.”

“I assume that Phetwick and Colfax are paying your fee?” I said.

“You assume correctly.”

“That list of thumbnail biographies is divided into two parts, the advocates and the adversaries.”

“Isn’t that precious?” Carol Thackerty said.

“Merely convenient, Carol,” Orcutt said.

“Maybe you’d better tell me some more about the town,” I said.

“Swankerton has changed tremendously in the past ten years,” Orcutt said. “A number of manufacturing concerns, formerly located in the North, have moved here for the usual reasons — tax concessions, cheap, unorganized labor, adequate housing, what have you. About six years ago the Defense Department built an Air Force supply depot there which is, I think, the second or third largest in the country and employs about fifteen thousand persons. Swankerton was formerly a nice quiet town of around one hundred thousand. There was an established order, and one would be hard put to cite the sociological difference between the Swankerton of 1915 and the Swankerton of 1960. It grew a little, of course, during those forty-five years, but there was that established order. Certain people ran certain things. This one had the gambling and that one had the Chamber of Commerce. Another one had the prostitution franchise, if you will, and yet another one might have the city council in his hip pocket. It was really quite cozy. Homer has made a thorough study of it and I think we may consider him to be our authority.”

Orcutt nodded at Necessary benignly, like a piano teacher encouraging a good but bashful pupil at the annual parents’ day recital.

“Like Victor says,” Necessary said, “it was all very, very sweet. Everybody had everything staked out — from Coca-Cola to moonshine. One guy had the ABC — you know, the bar and liquor licensing office. It cost you anywhere from two to five thousand to get a bar license. Liquor stores came cheaper — about fifteen hundred. The gambling was mostly wide-open blackjack and the county sheriff and the Swankerton police chief split that. They got a ten percent rakeoff and they had guys spotted around who could tell what the nightly take was down to the last nickel. They had a sweet little burglary ring going with the buttons working the lookout for the thieves. That was a sixty-forty split. The cops got the sixty naturally. The whores were all local talent, mostly broads from the sticks. Nothing fancy.”

He paused and looked at Orcutt. “If you want me to tell him the rest, I need something to gargle with.”

Orcutt looked at Carol Thackerty. “There’s a rather good bottle of Scotch in my bedroom, Carol — would you mind?”

She rose, got halfway across the room, and then turned to me. “You, too?” she said.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Do go on, Homer,” Orcutt said.

“Well, these new plants and factories start moving in about 1964 and 1965 and they bring a hell of a lot of their top-and-middle-echelon people with them. They all had families and they were used to the kind of schools and stuff that they’d had in Jersey and Connecticut and New York and Pennsylvania. A lot of them were real bright kikes, if you know what I mean.”

“Could you possibly avoid the anti-Semitic slurs, Homer?” Orcutt said it as if he didn’t really think there was much hope.

“I haven’t got anything against Jews,” Necessary said. “I just call them kikes. I always have and I probably always will.”

“Go on,” Orcutt said and sighed.

“Well, they start agitating and about that time the niggers start getting riled up and they start agitating. You know, all that desegregation stuff. There’s a reform movement and about 1965 the reformers put up a slate. Well, hell, they win a few offices — they get the school board for instance. Maybe the county coroner, but not much else. But it scares the shit out of the old guard.

“In the meantime, some of the boys over in New Orleans hear about the action in Swankerton, so they start scouting around. And when the government announced that they’re going to build an air depot in Swankerton, the New Orleans bunch moves in fast.”

“How?” I said.

“Look at it this way,” Necessary said. “The town’s going to have a floating population for a while — about five thousand skilled construction workers, all spenders. After that there’ll be the soldier boys plus the civilian employees. That creates a market — a demand. The New Orleans outfit decides to be the sole supplier.”

Carol Thackerty came back in the room with a glass of Scotch and water and handed it to Necessary. “There’s no ice,” she said.

“That’s okay,” Necessary said and took a gulp of the drink, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Do continue, Homer,” Orcutt said, “and try to be as concise as possible.”

“What the hell you think I been doing?” Necessary said. “You told me to tell him so I’m telling him and if you think I’m too long-winded, then tell him yourself.”

“You’re doing fine,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll just tell it the way it happened. Well, the New Orleans crowd comes in and they land hard. First, they move in on the numbers in Niggertown and take that over. Then they run all the white whores out of town and bring in their own and jack up the prices from fifteen and twenty bucks a lay to thirty-five and forty. They don’t bother the nigger whores any. Then they knock over a few blackjack games and the next day drop around selling protection. They spread a lot of juice around — the city council, the mayor, the chief of police, and a few of his buddies all get well, if you know what I mean.”

I said that I did and went on listening to Homer Necessary’s tale, which for him would now and forever remain in the present tense.

“Finally, they move in on the nightclubs and bars. They bust up a few and then work the protection slam. If the guy hasn’t got enough money, they loan it to him at twenty percent a week — or ten percent, if they like him real well. If he can’t pay, they buy him out for maybe forty cents on the dollar. I mean they really make it legal and everything. Next they get the city council to pass a new ordinance allowing the bars to stay open twenty-four hours a day. They do this because they got three shifts working to build that new air depot and when it’s finished the civilians are going to be working three shifts, too.”

Necessary stopped for a large gulp of his warm Scotch and water. “Now then,” he said, “they finally get the air depot built and then they start hiring the civilian help. Well, the niggers get all upset because not enough of them are being hired. At least that’s what they say. So some of their fire-eaters move down from up North and start stirring up the colored people. Then the unions get mad because they still aren’t able to organize the runaway plants from up North, although they do all right with the air depot because that’s all Federal money. So they finally call a strike at six of the biggest textile plants and then the union guys at the depot walk out in sympathy. I hear it’s against the law, but what the hell, they do it anyway.”

After that, Necessary said, the city officials turned to the New Orleans crowd to break the strike and also put an end to the mounting pressure from the black population.

“It takes them a week,” Necessary said with something akin to admiration. “Just a week. The niggers and the laborskates are getting together, you know — starting to cooperate — so the New Orleans people import a few hard cases from somewhere, up North probably. Well, they knock off a couple of the chief niggers and make it look like it’s done by a couple of local rednecks from the union. They leave evidence all around, like a rifle that belongs to one of the rednecks. Well, the chief of police can’t do anything but bring the two white guys in. Or have ‘em brought in. But on the way four niggers stop the car, take the two white boys out, and blast them deader’n hell. Well, that tears it.”

“I would imagine,” I said.

“The town gets real ugly,” Necessary said, after another swallow. “The whites are scared of the niggers and the niggers are scared of the whites. The strike just peters out and a carload of new nigger agitators from up North can’t even round up a crowd big enough to fill an outhouse. So everything settles back to just like it was before with the New Orleans crowd running things nice and smooth.”

“At this point, Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, “I suppose you do have some questions.”

“Lots of them,” I said, “but only a few that won’t keep for a while. First of all, the deadline of the first Tuesday in November means an election is coming up, right?”

“Right,” Orcutt said.

“Since it’s an off-year, that means a local election.”

“Yes.”

“Those who’re paying your fee,” I said. “Doctor Colfax and Phet wick the third. I assume that they want to throw the rascals out so that theirs will get in?”

“Precisely.”

“And what you want me to do in the next two months is to make this town so corrupt that even the pimps will vote for reform?” I said.

“Most graphic, Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said. “Most graphic indeed.”

“You’re not taking this on a contingency basis are you?”

Orcutt smiled. “I may be young, Mr. Dye, but I am not naive.”

“No, I don’t think you are. But I’m quite sure that you haven’t collected your fee in advance.”

“No.”

“I’ve heard of deals like this,” I said. “One that comes to mind happened in Germany.”

“In Hamelin?” Orcutt said.

“That’s right.”

“They didn’t want to pay off after the man got rid of the rats,” he said.

“No. They didn’t.”

“So he piped their children out of town, I recall,” he said.

“Everybody does. You may need something like a pipe.”

“What do you suggest?”

I tapped my breast pocket that contained the Xeroxed list. “This list is missing a couple of names,” I said.

There was always that about Orcutt. He never needed the simple diagram that came with the do-it yourself kit. He just smiled again and even managed to put something into it other than nothing.

“You mean the names of Doctor Colfax and Mr. Phetwick?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I’m glad you mentioned it,” he said. “I really am. It demonstrates your level of awareness. However, while we were negotiating our contract, we also investigated the personal background and history of the two gentlemen in question. We secured some most interesting information,”

“Okay,” I said. “You’ve answered my first question. The advocates, I take it, are Dr. Colfax and Phetwick the third and the people they can control through sympathy or blackmail or coercion. Right?”

“Right,” Orcutt said.

“My last question — for tonight, at least. The New Orleans adversaries or bunch or crowd. Who runs it?”

“He’s on the list under adversaries,” Orcutt said.

“I only skimmed it.”

“His name is Ramsey Lynch.”

I leaned back into the couch and rested my head against its rich green upholstery. For several moments, long ones, I inspected the ceiling, which was painted the color of vanilla ice cream. Finally, I said, “Middle name Montgomery?”

“Lynch’s?” Orcutt said.

“Yes.”

“I really couldn’t say. Homer dug up most of the information on him.”

“Then he didn’t dig far enough,” I said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You should. Ramsey Lynch. That isn’t his real name.”

Necessary snorted. “He did eighteen months in Atlanta under it and that was a Federal rap.”

“I know,” I said. “But that still doesn’t make it his real name.”

“Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, “I’m really not overly fond of melodrama. If you have something to say...” He let the sentence die as if it had bored itself to death.

I looked at him. His dark blue eyes were chillier than usual. So was his expression. I examined him carefully for a few moments and could find nothing that I really liked.

“Well?” he said in his own private brand of frozen italics.

“Well,” I said, mimicking him for no special reason other than I felt he was being a little pompous for twenty-six. “His name isn’t Ramsey Lynch. His name is Montgomery Vicker. He’s the brother of Gerald Vicker. You remember Gerald. He’s the one you retained in Hong Kong who recommended me. He’s the one I got fired because he killed the wrong man.”

Chapter 12

I inherited Gerald Vicker. He came with the desk and the filing cabinets and the stationery and the thirty-six-year-old Memphis secretary (my first one) who finally found romance in the Far East and married a pink ginfaced Volkswagen dealer from Malaysia. He was a widower who, after a few drinks, had once confided that my former secretary was a terrific old girl in the sack. She was the one who taught me how to write up an insurance policy.

It was Carmingler, of course, who finally told me about Vicker only three or four hours before I was to catch a plane to San Francisco and there make a connecting flight to Hong Kong. Carmingler brought up Vicker’s name casually, as if he were mentioning a mutual friend who had just changed jobs, got married, or gone to jail. We were sitting in one of those bare offices that Carmingler always seemed to prefer. This one was in the Kansas City Post Office and although I’ve tried often enough, I still can’t remember why we met in Kansas City.

The room was small, with only one window. It held a Federal-green desk and two matching chairs, a black telephone, and a picture of the President. It was during the last days of Eisenhower’s administration and the photograph was the one that made him look as if he had actually enjoyed the job.

“You’ll be in full control, of course,” Carmingler said.

“Vicker was number two under Grimes, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was. Did a good job of it, too.”

“And he’ll be number two under me, the new boy?”

“I can see what you’re driving at, but there’s no need to worry. None at all.”

“Then he’s not human,” I said. Carmingler puffed on his pipe two or three times and then waved it at me for either emphasis or reassurance. “Vicker is all right,” he said. “He’s one of the old crowd who came with us during the big war, drifted away, and then came back. He’s solid.”

Carmingler had been either fourteen or fifteen when World War II ended, but he always referred to the OSS as the “old crowd” or “us” or “we.” It was one of his minor foibles that I eventually found time to forgive.

“Does Vicker know anything about insurance?” I said.

“No more than you, but your secretary does. Her name’s Klett, I believe.” He took out a small Leathersmith notebook to make sure. “Francine Klett. Miss.”

“Any more surprises?” I said.

Carmingler looked around for an ashtray to knock his pipe out in, but finding none, settled on a metal wastebasket that was filled with paper. For a moment I thought that he wanted to burn down the post office.

“This is quite a leg up for you,” he said.

“That’s been impressed on me often enough.”

“Vicker should prove quite useful. He’s been out there a long time, knows everyone, and has a quick mind.”

“Then why doesn’t he have my job?”

Carmingler rubbed the bowl of his pipe against some of the freckles that were sprinkled over his large pink nose which some kindly person had once described to me as distinguished. If that meant it was a nose that you wouldn’t soon forget, the kindly person was right. “We thought about that,” he finally said when he finished his internal debate about how much to tell me.

“And?”

“We decided that you were the better man for the job.”

“That still doesn’t tell me anything,” I said. “What’s the matter with Vicker? Does he drink, gamble, whore around, and talk too much? Or does he just diddle the expense account and stay out late at night?”

Carmingler smiled, displaying his long, wide, strong teeth that helped him to resemble a horse. “No, it’s none of that. It’s simply that we find him — well — a bit overly ambitious.”

“Christ,” I said. “I bet he has a lean and hungry look, too.”

Despite the Phi Beta Kappa key there were some gaping holes in Carmingler’s education. He looked surprised for a second and then nodded thoughtfully. “Why, yes, now that you mention it. He does look a bit that way.”

It was no good from the beginning and both Vicker and I knew it. Age had something to do with it, but not all. He was forty and I was barely twenty-seven. He was patronizing and I was insufficiently deferential. He talked too much, sometimes even brilliantly, but I listened too little. His attention to detail was phenomenal and he resented my cavalier attitude. His Chinese had been painfully acquired and my easy fluency irritated him. He had an opinion about everything in God’s world and if I didn’t share them, he sulked. He would spend an hour telling me why a Patek Phillippe was better than a Rolex Oyster; or why a Nikon was better than a Leica and how a Canon was the match for both; or why the memory of Mao would be banished in less than a year after his death. He was shrewd, glib, and forgot nothing. He lied beautifully, fretted incessantly, and vaguely alluded to tragic experiences during his stretch with the OSS. He was a walking definition of overweening ambition that I found awful and which I got stuck with until one August day three years and eight months later.

It was the middle of August, around the fifteenth, and Vicker was already at his desk when I arrived at the then fancy, new downtown island offices of Minneapolis Mutual on Pedder Street, which I’d leased just to shut him up. I did balk, however, when he wanted to issue a press release claiming that the reason for our move was a recordshattering jump in business.

He walked into my office carrying his coffee cup, the one with “Vicker” carefully glazed on it in a Chinese ideograph. He liked having his name on things and his shirts, ties, lighter, and cigarette case were all monogrammed. He sat in one of the chairs and propped his feet on my desk, probably because he knew that it irritated me.

“Lucky I was here this morning,” he said so that I would have to ask why. I think he sometimes sat up half the night figuring out his morning opener which would cause me to ask about something that I didn’t know.

“I’m grateful.”

“Might have missed him if I hadn’t arrived early.”

“You’re always early and it’s earned you a head start in life’s great race.” It also gave him the chance to read the mail first, both his and mine.

“He wants five thousand,” he said.

“Sounds like a bargain.”

Vicker lowered his feet, brushed some imaginary lint from the lapel of his burnt orange, raw-silk jacket, put his coffee cup on my desk where it was sure to make a ring, and reached for his silver lighter and cigarette case. He was about my height and about my weight, but I always thought of him as lean and of myself as skinny. He had a smooth, oval face, nicely tanned, and his black hair was thick and straight. He wore it long for the times and it looped down over his high forehead and then back in a style that would become popular years later. His eyes were deep-set and dark brown and he could hold them perfectly steady in the middle of an enormous lie. They also had that cool glow peculiar to persons who will never need glasses. Some commercial airline pilots in their fifties have eyes like that. Vicker’s nose was a right triangle and he sported a carefully clipped mustache above thin lips that he sometimes licked around lunch time. His chin was unremarkable in any respect.

When Vicker finished lighting his cigarette and putting his case and lighter back where they belonged, he blew some smoke at his brown and green foulard tie and said, “He’s yours, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“They’re on to him,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “Who?”

“Pai Chung-liang.”

“He’s not worth five thousand.”

“He meant Hong Kong, not U.S.”

“He’s still not worth it.”

“He wants to go to Singapore. He said he has relatives in Singapore.”

Pai Chung-liang was a middle-aged man who worked in the Bank of China and occasionally passed us fresh snippets of information of varying authenticity. He swore, for example, that the bank, which serves as Peking’s financial arm as well as its Hong Kong diplomatic, espionage, and cultural headquarters, had a cache of 6,129 rifles and carbines, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, 197 cases of grenades, and enough food to withstand a four-month siege. Just who the siege-layers would be, he didn’t say. He didn’t even guess. But some of his information about Peking’s financial transactions had proved interesting, if not vital, and we paid him enough to make it worth his time.

“What did he do, call?” I said.

“Around eight-fifteen.”

“How did he sound?”

Vicker thought for a moment. “Desperate, I’d say. Panicky even.”

“How does he know they’re on to him?”

“He didn’t say. He just said that they are.”

Pai was a shy, slight man, short by even Chinese standards, barely over five feet, who liked flowers and figures. We had needed someone inside the bank and Pai was the best I could do. I got to him when his wife became ill and needed the services of an expensive surgeon whom Pai couldn’t possibly afford. It was one of those things that you hear about when you’re standing around some cocktail party, halflistening to a doctor talk about his rare ones. Mrs. Pai had been one of the rare ones and when the expensive surgeon mentioned that her husband worked for the Bank of China I began to listen in earnest. I employed the usual flimflam to reach Pai. We made a deal. The life of his wife in exchange for whatever information he thought might prove interesting. I think Pai loved his wife very much, even more than he did figures and flowers. He was embarrassingly grateful, even after she died on the operating table under the skilled hands of the noted surgeon, and he wanted to know how he could demonstrate his gratitude. I told him and he readily agreed, partly because he was grateful, partly out of pique at the bank because it had done little about his wife’s illness, but mostly because of the 500 Hong Kong dollars that I agreed to pay him each month.

Pai Chung-liang was another living testimony to my skill as a corruptor of civil servants. I wondered how his superiors had found out and even if they had. Perhaps Pai was just bored with Hong Kong and thought that Singapore would be pleasant in late August and if he could get an additional five thousand out of me, it might prove even more pleasant than he had anticipated.

There was the chance, of course, that he was telling the truth and if he were, he would soon be telling them about us. Not that there wasn’t much they didn’t already know, but we still had to go through the motions of maintaining our tattered cover.

“I’m going to pay him,” I said to Vicker.

“You just said he wasn’t worth it.”

“He’s not, but I’m still going to pay him.”

“Of course,” Vicker said thoughtfully, “it could be a setup.”

“I know.”

“I never did trust the little bastard.”

“That puts him at the bottom of a long list,” I said.

The telephone rang then and it was Pai. “Mr. Dye?” he said in his soft, shy voice and I said yes.

“I called earlier this morning.”

“Are you on a safe phone?”

“Yes. Very safe. I did not go to my employment this morning.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I have some vital information.”

“About the bank?”

“Yes and no. But they have become suspicious and the information I have is vital to you. Personally.”

“And you’re asking five thousand dollars?”

“Yes. I would not do so unless I needed it desperately. I must go to Singapore. I have relatives in Singapore.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Oh, yes. My conversation with Mr. Vicker this morning. He is your trusted colleague, is he not?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“All right, Mr. Pai, where and when do you want to meet?”

He suggested a number on Upper Lascar or Cat Street. We had met there twice before in a gewgaw shop stuffed with carvings, lacquered ware, ceramics of doubtful merit, very bad Ming-type copies of Chinese mustangs, gongs of various sizes, and the inevitable scrolls. The old man who owned the place locked the doors and left whenever we appeared. His hour’s absence cost another HK $100.

“Anything else?” I said.

“Only one thing, Mr. Dye. I strongly urge that you come alone.”

“Fine,” I said.

I hung up and looked at Vicker. “He suggests that I come alone,” I said.

Vicker smiled a little, but not very much. “Then I’d better go with you.

“Maybe you’d better.”

“How’d he sound to you?” he said.

“Just as you described him: desperate and panicked.”

We arrived at the shop a little before ten, which was the agreed-upon time for the meeting. I paid the old man his $100 and he left, leaving the door unlocked on the promise that I would snap it shut after Pai arrived.

“If he’s skittish, maybe I’d better get in the back,” Vicker said.

There was a rear room, small and stuffy, which the old man used for an occasional nap. It had a six-inch peephole that was shielded by a flimsy see-through of split bamboo.

I stood near the six-hundred-year-old table that the shop owner used for a desk and looked out into Cat Street, which was as packed as usual. I sniffed and thought I could smell opium, but it may have been my imagination, although on Cat Street that wasn’t necessarily true. I saw Pai Chung-liang burrowing his way through the crowd. He wore a white linen suit and clutched a plastic briefcase under his arm. He paused at the door of the shop, looked carefully both ways, and then slipped in looking for all the world as if he’d just made off with the factory’s weekly payroll. He hadn’t been born to the business.

“Mr. Dye,” he said. “You are in good health?”

“Excellent.”

“It is kind of you to meet at such short notice.”

“Time is most valuable to those who suddenly are in short supply,” I said, making it all up as I went along.

He nodded, looked around shyly, and then started to say something, probably about the money. Before he had to embarrass himself I handed him an envelope. He didn’t even look inside, but instead quickly stuffed it into his briefcase which, I thought, demonstrated a pleasant degree of mutual trust.

“I have some information of a most delicate nature,” he said. “I scarcely know how to begin—”

He never got the chance really. The door that I’d forgotten to lock burst open and two chunky Chinese were suddenly in the room. They were mumbling something that I didn’t catch. I’m sure Pai Chung-liang never really heard what it was either because Vicker shot him right through the briefcase that he had clutched to his chest. The two chunky types looked at me, saw that I didn’t have a gun, and then at Pai who was now sprawled on the floor, his briefcase still tight against his chest. They both produced short-barreled revolvers. One of them waved his gun at me, nudged Pai with his foot, and said finished to his partner. The partner nodded, bent down, and took the briefcase. Neither of them seemed to care much about who’d shot Pai as long as he was dead. They backed to the door and disappeared into the crowd.

I bent over Pai. He wasn’t quite dead. He opened his eyes and coughed once. It seemed to hurt him terribly to do so. Then he said in a faint voice, “Mr. Dye, they couldn’t have known... I’m afraid your Mr. Vicker—” He never did finish what he thought Vicker might have said or done. He coughed and died instead.

Vicker came into the room as I rose. I looked at him. He was nodding a little in that self-satisfied way that he did when things went as he predicted. “A setup,” he said. “Just like I—”

“You didn’t have to shoot him,” I said.

“Christ, he set you up. He was about to finger you. If I hadn’t shot him, you’d be on your way to Canton.”

“They weren’t after me.”

“Not after he was dead, they weren’t. Not after he couldn’t finger you.”

It was a poor lie, but Vicker was magnificent. His dark brown eyes didn’t flicker and his voice dripped oily gobs of sincerity. “Good God, Dye, even a child could see what he was up to.”

“You didn’t hear what he said. Just before he died.”

“What?”

“He said three things.” I decided to do some lying myself. “First, he said that you’ve sold out. Second, he said that you tipped off the meeting to the opposition. And third, he said that you’re through. I agree with him on everything.”

“You believe him?” he said in the same, hurt tone that he’d use if I were to disagree with his favorite contention that Marciano could have taken Clay in three rounds.

“He was dying,” I said. “Why should he lie?”

“You’re not that naive.”

“Maybe I am. But then he said something else, too,” I said, rather pleased with my own skill as a liar.

“What?”

“He said you made a mistake. I agree with him.”

That didn’t bother Vicker either. It only caused him to raise an eyebrow. His left one. “What mistake?”

Vicker actually had made a number of mistakes and some of them he couldn’t help, such as the fact that I didn’t much like him. But there were others. One was the call that he’d made from his office just before we left for the meeting with Pai. After that, the two chunky Chinese showed up. That might be called a coincidental mistake, Then he accused Pai of trying to tumble me to the Chinese Communists who already knew everything they needed to know about me. That could only be called a dumb mistake — one very much unlike Vicker. Almost last was the mistake Vicker made when he shot Pai before the Chinese could tell me what he had on his mind. That, I suppose, could be labeled an irritating mistake. But I wasn’t going to tell him about all of them just then — only about the final and worst mistake that he’d made.

“Pai said you shot the wrong man, Gerald,” I said. “That was your big mistake. You should have shot me instead.”

Chapter 13

I learned to recite the alphabet and how to write a name in the Bridge House Apartments, which the Japanese had converted into a prison. The alphabet was the usual one, but the name was my new one, William Smalldane, firstborn son of the noted American correspondent, Gorman Smalldane.

The Japanese who arrested us on December 8 made Smalldane drive Tante Katerine’s Chrysler across Szechwan Road Bridge and into the Bridge House compound, which was located about two blocks from the central post office in the Hongkew section. During the drive Smalldane managed to slip me his two thousand-word story that never got filed. I dropped it on the floorboards and kicked it back under the front seat. They must never have found it. If they had, Smalldane probably would have been executed either as a top-grade spy or a small-time prophet.

There was a crowd of foreigners at Bridge House that morning, some of them half-dressed, all of them a little bewildered. They kept talking about Pearl Harbor, but it meant nothing to me. I was more interested in watching them empty their pockets onto a desk behind which sat two Japanese officers, a captain and a major.

“Get this straight, Lucifer,” Smalldane whispered to me. “You’re now William Smalldane. My only son. You got that? William Smalldane.”

“William Smalldane,” I said, reveling a little in the sound of it. Even then I didn’t care much for Lucifer. When we got to the major and the captain they made Smalldane empty his pockets. They placed the items in a brown envelope and then demanded that he remove his belt.

“The child,” the captain said. “Your son?”

“Yes,” Smalldane said.

“He must empty his pockets.”

I had quite a nice collection. A half-package of Lucky Strikes; a switchblade knife with a seven-inch blade; an empty spool; four dirty pictures; a lint-flaked piece of candied ginger; a chain to a bathtub stopper; a box of wax matches; an Indian head U.S. penny, dated 1902; a purple Crayola; and a Three Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolf pocket watch which didn’t run.

The Japanese captain listed everything, even the ginger, and then sealed it in an official envelope, except for the dirty pictures. He snickered at them and kept two for himself and gave the major the other two.

It was cold in Shanghai and I was wearing my treasured corduroy knickers with thick woolen socks; high-topped brown shoes; a flannel shirt; a woolen sweater; a plaid woolen lumberjack coat; a knitted red cap; and long underwear. Underneath all that I wore the handmade money belt that I had painstakingly fashioned out of an old pillowcase. It contained around $1,000 in American and British currency. The money was the proceeds from my drunk-rolling efforts and I always wore it, even to bed.

The Japanese officers produced another form and began asking Smalldane questions about where we were born, nationality, occupation, age, and length of residence in Shanghai. Smalldane answered everything and even volunteered information about his alleged ex-wife, and my new mother, who had died in what he claimed to have been the terrible San Francisco cholera epidemic of 1934. They seemed to believe him.

When they were through asking questions, they made Smalldane sign the form. Then they handed me the pen, but Smalldane took it away from me, shook his head sadly at the Japanese officers, and tapped his forehead in the universal gesture that means not quite bright. The Japanese nodded, almost in sympathy, I thought, and let Smalldane sign the form for me. They did, however, insist on fingerprinting us both.

We were turned over to a couple of Japanese guards who escorted us through a door that led to the ground floor of the former Bridge House Apartments. The ground floor was designed originally to house small shops, but it had been converted into cells whose thick doors were bolted with chains and locks and bars. The guards directed us to a Japanese sergeant who seemed to be the chief jailer. He sat behind a plain wooden desk. On the wall back of him were lists of what I guessed were names, written in Chinese and several other languages, or so Smalldane later told me.

“By God,” he said to me, “they’ve had it planned for months. All that time I spent digging and nobody even had a smell of this place.” He was, forever, the reporter. The jailer told him to shut up.

It was cold and the light was dim in Bridge House. The jailer looked at us carefully and then selected some keys from a bunch that must have weighed six pounds. He motioned for the guards to follow him and they prodded us down the hall to one of the cells. The jailer twisted keys in the two locks, slid back the bolt, undid some chains, and motioned us in. Then he clanged the door behind us. We weren’t alone. There were almost three-dozen other persons in the cell, which was eighteen feet long and twelve feet wide. Smalldane grabbed my hand and we managed to find a place near enough to a wall so that we could lean against it.

I counted the persons in the room. There were thirty-three of them, including eleven women. It was a cosmopolitan bunch: English, Americans, Chinese, one Korean, four Canadians, and a redheaded man who claimed to be a Mexican national, but remembering Tante Katerine’s admonition, I didn’t believe him. The Japanese didn’t either.

“Will somebody please tell me just what the hell happened at Pearl Harbor?” Smalldane said.

They told him, those who’d listened to the radio that morning of December 8, 1941, in Shanghai. It was December 7 at Pearl Harbor because of the international dateline. Others had heard that the Japanese had landed on the east coast of Malaya, which both depressed and elated Smalldane. “By God,” he said, “if I’d just filed last week I’d’ve had fifteen job offers today and I could’ve named the price.”

“Would it not present a formidable problem to report a war from the inside of a jail?” I said in my most logical French.

“Why don’t you take a nap?” Smalldane said. “A long one.”

The meals came twice a day, shoved through a twelve-inch aperture in the cell door. The first meal was a bowl of rice which contained the heads of three dried herrings. It was warm. The second meal was the same, except that it was cold. There was no third meal. Having been reared on much superior fare, I refused to eat the first day. Smalldane shrugged, reached for my bowl, and polished it off, fish heads and all. On the second day and thereafter I ate everything edible and some that was not.

The Japanese started coming for Smalldane after we had been in Bridge House a week. They led him away and when he came back, he came with bruises, and once with a black eye, and once with a tooth missing. A lower one on the left side.

“They think I’m the goddamned Scarlet Pimpernel of Shanghai,” he told me and when I said I didn’t know who the Scarlet Pimpernel was, he spent the next three or four days reciting the tale and improving on its dialogue. The other prisoners listened intently. They had nothing else to do.

Bridge House prison had either fifteen or sixteen cells which were solid, windowless walls on three sides. At the front of the cell large wooden bars, about six inches in diameter, were set a couple of inches apart. The door was wood, at least four inches thick, and there was a great deal of clanging and banging of chains and bars whenever it was opened. The sound haunted me for years.

A wooden box in the corner served as a toilet. Whenever the women used it, the men turned their backs or looked the other way. It was emptied by the Chinese prisoners at night. They often argued for the privilege since it at least got them out of the cell.

Because the Hongkew section of Shanghai had been under Japanese military control since 1937, they had had no trouble in keeping Bridge House prison a secret. Before Pearl Harbor, I learned that it had been used to jail those Chinese who disappeared suddenly from either the French Concession or the International Settlement. Two of the Chinese in our cell told Smalldane that they had been there so long that they had forgotten what they were originally charged with.

Smalldane was the only foreigner that I ever knew the Japanese to beat, although the guards smacked the Chinese around regularly, often with one-by-four-inch planks that they liked to break over Chinese heads. Any Chinese head. It seemed to be a favorite form of exercise. We were treated casually enough for the first month, except for Smalldane, and then the word apparently came down and the Japanese got tough. There was absolutely no heat in the Bridge House cells and our only warmth came from huddling close together under thin, lice-infested blankets. Smalldane taught me how to kill lice by cracking them between my fingernails. You couldn’t just mash them to death. The Japanese guards laughed about the lice. When they weren’t laughing about that, they cackled over a Chinese prisoner whose right leg one of them had jabbed with a bayonet. The wound developed gangrene and the Chinese moaned and screamed a lot before he died.

The new crackdown ruled that prisoners couldn’t talk to each other, something that the Japanese didn’t enforce too stringently except when they had nothing better to do. But because more prisoners were daily being jammed into the cells, they forced us to sit in rows. That made it easier for them to conduct their head count every four hours. We sat, our knees drawn up to our chests, our heads bowed, facing in the general direction of Tokyo and, I suppose, Hirohito. As punishment, they made us sit Japanese fashion, which didn’t bother me too much, but which played hell with the circulation of the older prisoners. After six or seven hours of it, some couldn’t walk for days.

They searched each prisoner every two days or so. All but me. For some reason the guards didn’t think that a child would conceal anything. It wasn’t until we’d been in jail for a month that I told Smalldane about the money belt.

“You have what?” he said, and he must have said it in an incredulous whisper although I no longer remember.

“My money belt.”

“How much?” he said.

“What’s the British pound worth now?” said the rotten little money changer.

“Damn it, I don’t know, make it five dollars a pound.”

“Then I have twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars U.S.”

“Jesus,” Smalldane muttered and then slumped into a halfway comfortable position so that he could think about what use to make of the windfall.

On Christmas, 1941, Tante Katerine sent us a basket of food containing three roast chickens, cigarettes, brandy, tinned goods, including a plum pudding that she had scrounged somewhere, candy, nuts, and about four-dozen dainty sandwiches filled with pâté de foie gras. One of the Japanese guards pounded on the small opening of the cell door and yelled for the Smardane. When the Smardane made his way to the door, the guard displayed each item in the basket. Then he ripped off a chicken leg and chewed it noisily. Next he tried some of the candy. He liked that, too. Finally, he bit into one of the sandwiches, didn’t like the pâté, and spat it out. “Here,” he said and shoved the sandwiches at Smalldane, who brought them back to our row.

Smalldane wasn’t as interested in eating the sandwiches as he was in examining their filling. On the dozenth one that he opened, he found what he was looking for, a note from Tante Katerine.

“Well, it looks like we have Christmas dinner after all, Lucifer.” I shook my head and made a vague kind of gesture that took in the entire cell. We were all scruffy by then, dirty, cold, and incredibly hungry. Most of the prisoners sat or knelt huddled in their filthy blankets, their sunken eyes staring at the pile of sandwiches. The Chinese prisoners were the worst of all because they didn’t for a minute believe that they would share in our luck. They looked, then looked away, and then looked back again. They couldn’t help themselves.

“Aw, shit,” Smalldane said. He took four of the sandwiches and gave me the rest. “Here, Tiny Tim, it’s your last chance to play Scrooge.”

“Who’re they?” I said.

“Go pass out the sandwiches and I’ll tell you.”

I crawled around the filthy floor, passing out cute little pâté de fois gras Sandwiches which had all the crust carefully sliced off. Some said thank you. Others said Merry Christmas or God bless you. And still others just silently snatched the food from my hand and crammed it into their mouths.

“What’s the note from Tante Katerine say?” I asked Smalldane when I crawled back to our row.

“Read it yourself. But, hell, you can’t read. She says that a boat’s leaving for the States with foreign civilians that are going to be traded for Japanese civilians. You got that?”

I nodded.

“She’s trying to juice our way on to that boat. She’s gone to the Swiss Embassy, to Wu, to everybody she can think of. It’s cost her a packet. She mentioned how much, of course.”

I nodded again. “Of course. How much?”

“Six thousand American so far.”

I was impressed, not with the amount so much as with Tante Katerine’s willingness to part with a dollar that didn’t guarantee her a rapid return of at least eight percent compounded semi-annually. I started to cry. It was the first time I’d cried since I’d been in jail.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Smalldane said.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Your home’s in the States now, kid.”

“I don’t know anybody there,” I said between sobs, “I want to go home to Number Twenty-seven and Tante Katerine.”

Smalldane sighed and patted me on the shoulder. “You can’t anymore.”

“Why?”

“They closed it down today. That’s what Kate says. The whorehouse is no longer your home.”

When you’re eight years old and in jail and someone tells you that the only home you ever really remember no longer exists, it hits hard. I think I went into shock for a few moments and then I stopped crying and started to bawl — in earnest. Smalldane kept patting away on my shoulder, a little embarrassed. He nodded apologetically at the rest of the prisoners, some of whom nodded back, some sympathetically, some dully. But none complained. Finally, Smalldane got bored with my emotional exhibition, leaned over, and speaking Cantonese, whispered into my ear: “If you don’t silence yourself, my cowardly little turtle, I will sell you to the fat Japanese guard for the night. He has offered more than a fair price.”

I shut up.

“That’s better,” Smalldane said. “Now for your education. First the alphabet.”

It took me an hour to memorize the alphabet by rote and another hour to learn how to draw William Smalldane with my finger in the dirt and filth of the floor. I didn’t know which letter was which, but I could draw it fairly well after an hour.

“That’s my new name?”

“That’s it,” Smalldane said.

“Please, Gorman, could you teach me something else?”

“What?”

“Could you teach me how to draw Lucifer Clarence Dye?”

He smiled at me, a sad kind of a smile, I thought, then nodded and said, “Sure, kid. You might even need it again one of these days.”

Chapter 14

They didn’t waste any time. The phone rang in my room in the Sycamore Hotel (Swankerton’s Oldest and Finest) before the bellhop got through showing me how the color television set worked. I gave him a dollar and a smile and nodded my goodbye as I picked up the green instrument and said hello.

“Mr. Dye?” It was a woman’s voice.

“Yes.”

“Would you hold on for Mr. Ramsey Lynch?”

I told her yes and then Lynch was talking, his voice as smooth and as buttery as his brother’s, but deeper, more confident, and with much less contentiousness in the tone. It was a good voice for a liar and I automatically assumed that he was one of the best.

“Welcome to Swankerton, Mr. Dye,” Lynch said.

“Thank you.”

“I understand that you’re the man.”

“From whom?”

“From here and there.”

“That’s where, not who.”

“Well, Brother Gerald did mention you to me.”

“I thought he might.”

“He sent his best.”

“His best what?”

Lynch chuckled. It was a rich, warm, comfortable sound such as fat men make after they no longer mind being fat. “Regards, of course,” he said. “Gerry mentioned that he’d recommended you highly.”

“So I heard.”

“Surprised?”

“Probably not as much as I should be, but then Gerald was always full of surprises.”

Lynch chuckled again, happily. “Even as a kid. Never knew what he’d do next. But the real reason I called is that we’re having a little policy meeting this afternoon, and I kind of thought you might like to sit in.”

“What kind of policy?”

“Civic policy, Mr. Dye. Seems that there may be sort of a hassle going on during the next couple of months so we thought we’d lay out some ground rules.”

“Your ground and your rules,” I said.

Lynch thought that was funny, too, but not as much as before, and his chuckle was reduced to three or four sharp, deep barks.

“Well, what do you say?”

“All right. What time?”

“About an hour from now. Around five.”

“Where?” I said.

“My place, but don’t worry about it. We’ll send someone for you. Room eight-nineteen, isn’t it?”

I looked at the telephone to make sure. “Eight-nineteen,” I said.

“Look forward to it,” Lynch said before he said goodbye and we hung up.

I stood there by the phone for a few moments and then picked it up and asked the operator for Victor Orcutt. Carol Thackerty answered in what was called, for God knows what reason, the Eddie Rickenbacker suite. Maybe he had once slept there when they were still calling it the Theodore Bilbo suite.

“Is your room all right?” Orcutt said when he came on.

“It’s fine. The chief adversary just called.”

“Lynch.” He didn’t make it a question. He just said Lynch to confirm a fact and to give his mind time to hop around and sort out all of the implications.

“He wants to meet me at five this afternoon. Or maybe they call it evening down here.”

“Evening,” Orcutt said.

“I agreed.”

“Good.”

“He said he wants to lay out some ground rules.”

“There aren’t any,” Orcutt said.

“I know. It’s probably just a mutual sizing-up session. He said that some others will be there.”

“What else?”

“I think Gerald Vicker wants his brother to settle a grudge for him and the brother wants to find out how much trouble that could be.”

“That’s one,” Orcutt said. “Two is he might try to buy you off. How much would that take?”

“You’re forgetting my loyalty to the old firm.”

“You’re teasing again. I do like that. We’ll wait until you get back and then we’ll all have dinner together at a simply marvelous place that I know.”

“I’ll call when I can,” I said and hung up, reflecting that I was going to have to watch Orcutt’s perfectly marvelous places. Although my taste buds relished the rich fare, my stomach still expected rank fish and gummy rice. When it didn’t get the expected, it rebelled, just as it had done twice the night before in San Francisco.

Eight-nineteen in the Sycamore Hotel was a corner room with a view of Marseille Boulevard and Snow Street, the latter being the principal downtown thoroughfare, which I assumed was named after somebody called Snow and not for the weather. I judged the hotel to be at least sixty or seventy years old, built in a vaguely European style so that the floors formed a high hollow square. The corridors on each floor ran around the hollow square, and nothing kept the drunks from tumbling down to the lobby other than waist-level iron railings. The hotel ceiling, nine floors above the lobby, was covered with frosted glass which during the day provided the interior with a soft, filtered light that made the profusion of potted plants look even greener than they were.

It was a well-designed hotel with comfortably furnished, spacious rooms whose high ceilings boasted fans that supplemented the central air-conditioning. Unless you were well bundled up when they were both going full blast, the chances for catching pneumonia must have been excellent. The bath in 819 was large enough to have done for a single room in an ordinary motel, its fixtures were fairly new and even included a bidet. Someone had spent a lot of money and thought on the Sycamore’s geriatric care.

I hung up the suits and topcoat that Carmingler had provided, regretting that I would have to buy some new clothing to go with the temperature. I unbuttoned the vest of the suit I was wearing, the blue one with the faint gray stripe, and hung it in the closet.

After that I stood by the window, sipped a drink of cool water and Scotch, and watched the citizens of Swankerton go about their business. Across the street was the First National Bank. Next to it was Elene’s Boutique, then Osterman’s Bar & Grill which offered fine food, and then a Rexall drugstore, a Kress’s five and ten, a five-story department store called Mitchell and Farnes, and another bar and grill called The Easy Alibi, which was a little cute for the main drag.

Down Marseille Boulevard was the Liberty National Bank, twenty-four stories tall and the city’s only skyscraper; another department store called Biendorfer’s, a pancake and waffle shop, and another drug store which seemed to be the member of a local chain called Mouton’s.

The citizens looked just like their town. There was nothing in their dress or gait or color that would distinguish them from those who lived in Pittsburgh, or Atlanta, or Pierre, South Dakota. Some shuffled, some walked briskly, even in the heat, and some just ambled along as if they had nowhere important to go and nothing much to do when they got there. Although I was eight stories up, the citizens seemed to lack animation. There was none of Hong Kong’s squealing vibrancy and I found that I missed it. But then there weren’t many places in the States that I’d ever really liked, not the way I’d once loved Shanghai, and there was no real reason why Swankerton should prove an exception.

I turned from the window and tried the most comfortable appearing chair in the room, which was even more restful than it looked. I sank into it and stared at the slowly spinning ceiling fan that made an oily click after every third revolution. I could have thought about what I was doing in Swankerton, but I already knew that. I was there because I had nothing better to do and I wanted to find out why someone was willing to pay me $50,000 to do it. The fee, of course, was exorbitant. Far too high for two months’ work unless I was supposed to kill a few persons, but I was no good at that. If I had liked coincidences, I could have puzzled over the one that had Gerald Vicker recommending me to do a job of sorts in a town where his brother was obviously Señor Number One Garçon, as Tante Katerine would have had it. But since this was obviously no coincidence, a phenomenon in which I had little or no faith anyhow, there was no need to puzzle over it any more than one puzzles over being dealt a pat hand. When it comes along, you don’t fret about it, you play it.

The phone rang and a man’s voice wanted to know if I were Mr. Dye. When I said yes, he said that his name was Robineaux and that Mr. Lynch had told him to wait in the lobby. I said I would be right down and when I got there, Mr. Robineaux turned out to be a tall young man with the posture of a question mark who had some interesting scars on his face that looked as if they had been stitched there by a sewing machine. I followed him out to a Lincoln Continental and he opened the rear door for me. The car was air-conditioned and Mr. Robineaux had nothing much to say until we arrived at a house in a residential section some twenty minutes later. Then he said, “This is it,” and got out and opened the door for me.

It was an old residential section of Swankerton where the pines grew tall and when the wind passed through them, they sighed a little, as if bored with their murmured, never-ending conversation about the weather. The house was a large, two-story frame structure with a turret at one end which poked up another story and was crowned by what looked to be a shingled dunce cap. There were screened porches running around both the first and second floors and carefully carved gingerbread scrollwork was nailed onto everything that would support it. It was a large house, perhaps three-quarters of a century old, and far too big for most of today’s families. Somehow I expected to spot a discreet sign announcing, in a hesitant manner, that there were rooms for rent providing, of course, that one could furnish proper references.

But there was no sign and I followed Robineaux and his interesting scars up the five steps that led to the screened-in porch. There was a lot of honeysuckle climbing around and its odor competed with that of the lawn’s freshly cut Bermuda grass. There were some magnolia trees and some azaleas, too, I noticed, but they weren’t in bloom, although they must have been a pleasant enough sight when they were, if one cared for that sort of thing.

Ramsey Lynch opened the door and gave me his hand to shake. He said “It’s good to see you” and I said something in reply that was equally meaningless. I knew he was Ramsey Lynch because he looked like his brother, Gerald Vicker, although Lynch was a little younger, but not much. His granite gray hair was long and thick and he wore it looped down and back over his forehead much in the same style that his brother favored. His eyes were steady and clear and somehow I knew that although they must have been in use for close to forty-five or even fifty years they still didn’t need glasses. He had Vicker’s right-triangle nose and the same thin lips but no mustache. He had three or four unremarkable chins, depending upon how high he held his head. Ramsey Lynch was a very fat man and he made no attempt to disguise it. He wore a pale blue suit of some synthetic fabric, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie. It all looked cool, loosely comfortable, and cheap.

The house was air-conditioned, I was relieved to find, as I followed Lynch into the living room or perhaps parlor. He turned and made a vague little gesture. “This was the parlor. Still is, I suppose. We bought it from two old maid sisters who finally couldn’t keep it up and went to a rest home. Everything is just like they left it — except the air-conditioning.”

It was a stiff room, filled with spindly chairs made out of dark wood and woven cane. There was a purple sofa, a loveseat, and a grand piano. Dead relatives or friends gazed down from the walls where they were trapped in their oval, glass-covered frames.

“We’re meeting in the dining room,” Lynch said and opened two sliding doors. Five men sat around an ornately carved table. There was a matching sideboard at the right and a tall, glass-fronted highboy at the left which held a collection of china and colored glassware that, to me, looked Bavarian.

The men were down to shirtsleeves. Three of them smoked cigarettes and from the looks of their ashtrays they had been there for at least two hours.

“This is Lucifer Dye,” Lynch said to the men. “You know who he works for and why he’s here. So I’ll just make the introductions and then we can get on with it.” Lynch started at the left hand side of the table and worked his way around it clockwise.

“Fred Merriweather,” he said. “Fred’s a city councilman and owns a lot of property over in Niggertown. Also has a restaurant on Snow Street, right across from your hotel, called the Easy Alibi. He’s up for re-election.” I nodded at Merriweather, who had a big-jawed face, stupid blue eyes, and a yellow-toothed smile.

“Next to him is Ancel Carp, who’s city tax assessor. We elect him, too, and he’s running again. He’s also the city surveyor.” Carp was around forty-five. He looked as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. His hands were extraordinarily large and they went with the rest of him. When he looked at me, his gray eyes seemed to be calculating my net worth and I felt that he wouldn’t be much more than two cents off.

“Now at the end of the table is his honor, the mayor. Pierre Robineaux. We call him Pete and his boy’s the one who carried you here.”

“Glad to have you with us, Mr. Dye,” Robineaux said, bobbing his head at me. He had a high forehead and a long chin, and both of them seemed to be too far removed from his button nose, small eyes, and pursed mouth.

“Next to the mayor is our chief of police, Cal Loambaugh. He’s appointed so he doesn’t have to worry about running. Not much.” The chief was younger than I expected, not more than thirty-five. He was dressed in a neat brown suit and had a tight, controlled look about him, like an alcoholic turning down a drink after he’s three days off the sauce. Loambaugh didn’t smile or nod. He just looked at me, and there was nothing in his gaze that I could find to like.

“And finally, this is Alex Couturier. He’s the executive secretary for the Chamber of Commerce, and belongs to the Lions, Kiwanis, American Legion, VFW, and God knows what else. He’s sort of the city’s public relations man.”

Couturier had one of those professionally friendly faces, loose and relaxed. His mouth seemed to be on the verge of a smile and I decided that it always looked that way. He was a big, bluff-looking man, well-dressed, but not so much that it would offend those who bought their suits at J. C. Penney’s. “Good to see you, Dye, good to see you,” he said and his voice boomed it all out and I thought it might have been nicer if his eyes had managed to join in on the chorus.

“Well, now, I think that’s everybody,” Lynch said. “Why don’t you sit right down here on my left and we’ll get started as soon as the mayor yells at that boy of his to bring us something cool.”

The mayor yelled “Booboo,” and the younger Robineaux popped his head through the door that must have led to the kitchen.

He said, “What?” and his father told him to bring bourbon and water all around.

After the drinks were served we sat there sipping them and waiting for someone to say something. Lynch was leaning back in his chair, his hands crossed over his belly, his thin lips smiling gently, at peace with himself and, for all I knew, with the world.

“You banging that blonde yet, Dye?” It was Loambaugh, the chief of police, and he didn’t look at me when he said it.

“Not yet,” I said.

“You know what I’d like to do?” he said softly. I looked at him. With a better barber, he could have posed for an FBI recruiting poster, if they had any.

“What?” I said.

“I’d like to get my head right down there between her legs and then have somebody jump up and down on the back of it. That’s what I’d like.”

The mayor snuffled and said something that sounded like, “Pshaw.” The other three grinned at each other and Lynch barked his fat man’s laugh. The chief had set the tone for the meeting. The preliminaries were over. The niceties were dispensed with. Nut-cutting time had arrived. I had seen it done often enough before, usually with more polish and grace, but seldom with such dispatch.

Alex Couturier, the Chamber of Commerce lackey, was up next. “I don’t know, chief,” he said in an exaggerated drawl, “of a real warm summer evening I wouldn’t mind taking it out and letting little old Orcutt have a go at it. Not so much sweating and flopping about. He appears to me like a real tube cleaner. How about that, Mr. Dye? Is that little old boss of yours as good as he sounds like?”

“He probably hasn’t had as much time to practice as you have,” I said and smiled my boyish grin, the one that I kept in reserve for such events as famine, flood, and afternoon sessions with professional country boys.

There was some more tittering by the mayor, and the rest of them did some honking and har-harring, which I assumed was laughter. There was no humor in any of it and they seemed to be the kind who laughed only at someone else’s discomfort, but then that’s what a lot of laughter stems from. All except Lynch. His deep chuckle sounded as if he really thought that my remark was funny, but he seemed to always chuckle like that.

It was Fred Merriweather’s time at the plate. He rolled his stupid blue eyes and moved his big jaw around as if it were taking a couple of practice swings. Even before he spoke, he’d already lost my vote. “You know, I was just recollecting somebody that reminds me of that Orcutt feller.” The city councilman paused and let his jaw ruminate about it for a few more moments. “Name was Sanderson and it was right after the war and he was shoe clerking at Mitchell and Fames, I think it was.”

“It was Mitchell and Fames all right,” the mayor said. “His name was Thad Sanderson and he taught Sunday School at the First Methodist when it was still over on Jasper Street.”

“Believe you’re right, Pete,” Councilman Merriweather said and then rolled his blue eyes at me. “Feller reminded me of your Mr. Orcutt. Way he talked and walked and all, but none of us thought anything about it.”

“That was way before my time,” the police chief said, “but I remember hearing about it.”

“Old man Kenbold was chief then,” the mayor said.

“Well,” the city councilman went on, still rolling his blue eyes at me, “they caught this Sanderson feller fooling around with these two youngsters. Weren’t more’n eleven or twelve. Know what happened, Mr. Dye?”

“The chief of police went fishing,” I said.

The stupid blue eyes popped a little at that. “How’d you know?”

“I just guessed.”

“You’re a pretty good guesser, aren’t you?” said the current police chief.

“Just fair,” I said.

“Maybe you can even guess what happened,” the city councilman said.

“Probably. But I’ll let you tell me.”

Councilman Merriweather moved his jaw up and down again, leaned over the table toward me, and licked his lips with a furry, yellow tongue. Bad liver, I thought. “Well,” he said, “a bunch of them caught him right in the act, so to speak, so they cut off his gonads with a dull old Barlow knife, but they didn’t want him to bleed to death, so they doctored him up.” He paused to snigger a moment. “You know what they doctored him up with? Hot tar, that’s what. Hot tar. Feller left town.”

I nodded and waited. There was nothing to say.

Ancel Carp, the tax assessor, cracked the knuckles on his huge hands, looked up at the ceiling, and said, “I don’t think Mr. Dye’s too much interested in our past history. He’s probably more interested in the current scene so if we’ve got anything to say, let’s say it.”

“Well, Ancel, I suppose that sort of serves it right into my court,” Lynch said. “Reason we asked you here, Mr. Dye, is that we’re just a little upset. Now this is a fine community. A fine one. And although I’ve only lived here about seven or eight years, I kind of like to think of myself as an adopted native son.”

“That’s the way we think of you, Ramsey,” the mayor said.

“Thank you, your honor. But to get back to it. We don’t get upset unless the town’s upset. It’s sort of like when the town’s constipated, we fart.” He paused and took a long drink of his bourbon. I’d barely touched mine.

“Well,” Lynch said, “the symptoms started about a couple of months ago when this fella Homer Necessary came into town with his two-toned eyes and started asking around. He didn’t come to any of us. He just nosed around asking questions that were sort of personal. We checked him out and found that he used to be a police chief himself up north. And not too honest a one at that, was he, Chief Loambaugh?”

“Crooked,” the FBI poster said. “Crooked as cat shit.”

“So after about a week or ten days of Necessary, we get your Mr. Orcutt and that girlfriend of his, Miss Thackerty. Well, she’s all right, but we’re kind of country down here and maybe we’re just not used to the likes of your Mr. Orcutt, especially if he’s messing around with all the wrong people.”

“Who’re they?” I said.

“Well, let’s just say that they’re not on our side.”

“Who is?”

“The folks, Mr. Dye,” Lynch said and his tone was no longer genial. “The folks in town are on our side.”

“Then what are you worried about?”

“Folks can get foolish if they catch the notion. And with a little investigation, we found out that your Mr. Orcutt was going to try to turn them into fools.”

“How?”

“I hear,” Lynch said in a gentle voice, “I hear that’s where you come in.”

I looked at my new watch. “I’ve been here for half an hour and you haven’t said anything yet. You’ve talked a lot, but it’s all been the kind of bullshit that I can hear in any four-table poolhall. You’ve got five more minutes. That’s all.”

“My brother said you were a little impatient, Mr. Dye.”

“Your brother lies a lot.”

“But good. Well, since your time is limited, I’ll come to the point. We have some of our people in the other camp, so to speak, who tell us things, and they told us about how Mr. Orcutt was trying to find someone out in Asia who might be useful to him here in Swankerton. So, because Gerald’s located out there and all, I spent about a couple of hundred dollars of my own money and called him up, told him the situation, and asked him to do what he could. I think he did real fine.”

“By recommending me to Orcutt?”

“Well, he really recommended you to us first, if you know what I mean. He gave us a pretty good rundown on you and we told him to go ahead and recommend you to Mr. Orcutt. He said you’re pretty good, Mr. Dye, but that you’re awfully unlucky. I’m serious now. Bad luck just seems to dog some people and from what I hear, you’re one of them. I mean what happened to your wife and all.”

“You can leave that alone,” I said.

Lynch nodded sympathetically. “I’m sorry I mentioned it. Really am. But you’ve had your share of bad luck, Mr. Dye. My brother Gerald seems to think that it’ll probably continue. But he made me promise him one thing before he would recommend you to Mr. Orcutt.”

“What?”

“Well, Gerald isn’t really as superstitious about luck as he lets on. Deep down inside he really feels that people make their own. So he made us promise that we’d make some for you here in Swankerton. You can guess what kind. So you got a choice. We can either make you some bad luck or some good luck, despite what I promised my brother. Now just which one are you going to choose?”

They were all leaning forward a little, staring at me. “How much is the good luck worth?” I said.

“Twenty-five percent more than what Orcutt’s paying you, whatever it is.

“And how much is your bad luck going for?” I said.

Lynch shook his head sadly and his chins bobbed alone in funereal time. “Well, Mr. Dye, bad luck is just bad luck. Let’s say that the kind you might come by would be about as bad as luck can be.”

I rose and looked at each of them, one at a time. “I’ll think about it and let you know,” I said and then moved to the door, stopping only at the sound of Lynch’s voice. I turned and he was twisted around in his chair.

“Don’t study about it too long, Mr. Dye,” he said. “Neither good nor bad luck’ll wait forever.”

“You’re forgetting one kind,” I said.

“What’s that, Mr. Dye?”

“Dumb luck — the kind you’re going to need.”

Chapter 15

They flew Carmingler, of course, out to Hong Kong to deal with Gerald Vicker and me. I met him at the airport and he seemed none too happy with his assignment.

“I was on leave,” he said, rather than hello or how are you. “My first in three years.”

“I didn’t ask for you.”

He grunted at that, but said nothing else until we had picked up his bag and were in my rented Volkswagen. “Where’s Vicker?”

“Waiting for you.”

“At the office?”

“We flipped a coin to see who’d meet you. I lost.”

“I read your report,” Carmingler said. “Vicker’s, too.”

“That was thoughtful.”

Carmingler turned to look at me. “I didn’t fly out here just to listen to your smart cracks. Vicker writes a better report.”

“He has a flair,” I said.

“You’re in trouble,” Carmingler said.

“What about Vicker?”

Carmingler didn’t say anything until he had used his usual three or four matches to light his pipe. “He’s in trouble, too.”

“Who’s in deeper?” I said.

Carmingler puffed away on his pipe before answering. I glanced at him and he seemed to look less confident than usual. He looked gloomy. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “That’s why I’m here.”

“And when do you decide?”

He looked out the window at a new building that was going up. “Those workmen on the scaffolding,” he said. “They’re the highest-paid skilled labor in Hong Kong. Did you know that?”

“I live here,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

Carmingler slumped down in the seat and put his bony knees against the dashboard. It didn’t look very comfortable, but they weren’t my knees. “You know what Star Chamber justice is?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s what you’re going to get. Both you and Vicker. I’m judge and jury.”

“Old Judge Carmingler,” I said. “The hanging judge.”

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“Who did?”

Carmingler looked at me and smiled for the first time. “Vicker. He asked for me.”

I said, “Oh.”

Carmingler smiled again. Contentedly. “I thought that might cheer you up.”

It could have been called a trial, I suppose. Whatever it was, it was held in my office late that afternoon after we sent the secretary home. Carmingler sat behind my desk and Vicker and I sat in front of it. Our Star Chamber judge carefully arranged six sharpened pencils on the desk beside a fresh yellow legal pad. Next he produced his pipe, tobacco pouch, and match box, and placed them within easy reach. He then adopted an expression which he may have thought was his best horse-sense look. He made his face as long as possible, showed both of us his teeth in an impartial manner, and nodded several times as if he were adjusting to some invisible halter. I almost expected to hear him neigh us to order.

“This place been swept recently?” he asked.

“This morning,” Vicker said. “I had the consulate’s man over.”

“Good,” Carmingler said and made a note that I was too far away to read upside down. He put the pencil on the pad, leaned back in his chair, and locked his hands behind his head. “Let’s begin with the facts — the ones that nobody disputes. Both of you went to the rendezvous with Pai Chung-liang, the chap who worked for the Bank of China. Vicker hid in the back room. Dye stayed in the shop itself. Pai came in, said something to Dye, who handed him an envelope. Then Pai said something else, something that only Dye could hear. About that time the two Chinese busted in. Vicker shot Pai. The two Chinese snatched his briefcase and fled. Dye bent down and Pai either said or did not say something before he died.” He looked at both of us. “Is that a fair summation?”

I nodded. So did Vicker.

Carmingler picked his briefcase up from the floor and rested it in his lap. He fished out a single sheet of paper that had some typing on it and placed it on the desk before him. He put the briefcase back on the floor.

“You were issued a side arm,” he said to me. “A .38 Smith & Wesson, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You still have it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have it the day that Pai was killed?”

“No.”

“Where is it now?”

“At home.”

“In your hotel?”

“Yes.”

“Do you always keep it there?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“You mean where in the room?”

“That’s right.”

“In a locked suitcase. The suitcase is in a closet. The closet is also locked. It’s a special lock. I’m the only one with a key.”

“Why?”

“Do you mean why do I keep it there?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged. “It seems safe enough.”

“Don’t you ever carry it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t have any use for it.”

“Ever?”

“Ever.”

Carmingler tapped the single sheet of paper. “It says here that you’re very good with a gun. Or used to be. I seem to remember that you were. Why don’t you ever carry it?”

“I just don’t. I don’t need it.”

“You still don’t think you needed it the day that Pai got shot?”

“No.”

“And you don’t think that Pai needed shooting?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got my report.”

“Vicker doesn’t have it.”

“All right,” I said. “I think they were on to Pai. I think they would have shot him that morning if Vicker hadn’t saved them the trouble.”

“Who tipped them off about your rendezvous with Pai?”

I looked at Vicker. “Ask him.”

Carmingler nodded and made another note. I still couldn’t read it. He turned to Vicker. He looked at him for several moments and for all I knew he may have been admiring Vicker’s suit. It was a new one.

“You carry your side arm, don’t you?” he said.

Vicker nodded. “Always.”

“Why?”

“It’s a tough town.”

“Any other reason?”

“I’m in a tough business.”

“In a tough town,” Carmingler said.

“I think so.”

Carmingler looked at the sheet of paper again. “Let’s see. Mr. Pai was thirty-nine years old. He liked flowers. He liked figures and his wife. He was a bank clerk. He was just a little over five feet tall and weighed a hundred and twenty-eight pounds. And he didn’t carry a gun. So you shot him.”

“That’s right,” Vicker said.

“When?”

“Just after the two with the guns came in.”

“Did they have their guns out when they came into the shop or did they start waving them around later — after you’d shot Pai?”

Vicker seemed to think about the question. “They had them out when they came in.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Carmingler nodded. “All right. We’ll come back to that.” He turned to me. “What do you remember? Did they have their guns out when they came in or did they pull them later?”

“They pulled them later. After Pai was shot.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

He turned back to Vicker. “You say just the opposite — that the two men came into the shop with their guns drawn?”

“Yes.”

“So you knew that they were opposition?”

“It was obvious.”

“So you shot Pai.”

“Yes.”

“To keep him from doing what?”

“From fingering Dye.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Vicker looked pained. “You know what fingering means, for God’s sake. They were on to Pai. He was going to accuse Dye.”

“Of what?” Carmingler said and made it sound as if he were deeply interested.

“Of having bribed him to feed Dye information from the bank.”

“I see,” Carmingler said and made another note.

“How long were you in the back room before Pai came in the shop?” Carmingler asked Vicker.

“Two or three minutes.”

“Pai was prompt?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have your gun in your hand when he entered or did you wait until the two men came in?”

“I didn’t draw it until they came in.”

“And you still say that they came in with their guns drawn?”

“Yes.”

“They pulled the guns from their pockets on Upper Lascar? Wasn’t it crowded as usual?”

Vicker crossed his legs. It was the first thing that he had moved other than his mouth. “It was crowded.”

“Doesn’t it seem strange that they would pull guns on a crowded street?”

“I didn’t think about it.”

“I find it very unlikely that they would.”

Vicker shrugged. “Maybe they pulled them just as they entered the shop.”

“Did you see them do that?”

“No.”

“But if they hadn’t pulled the guns, then you would have thought they were just a couple of customers?”

“I suppose. Maybe.”

“And if they hadn’t pulled them, and if you had taken them for a couple of customers, you wouldn’t have shot Pai? You would have let him tell Dye what he came to tell?”

Vicker waited before answering that one. Then he said yes.

“All right,” Carmingler said, making another note. “Let’s suppose, just for the hell of it, that Dye’s version is correct. The two men didn’t pull their revolvers or automatics or whatever until after you had shot Pai. If that’s true, then you couldn’t have known that they were the opposition, could you?”

“No.”

“And you would have had no reason for shooting Pai? I mean he couldn’t have fingered Dye to a couple of strangers?”

“That’s right.”

Carmingler reached for his briefcase again and produced a sheaf of papers. “This is the Hong Kong Special Branch report on the murder of one Pai Chung-liang. It’s quite interesting. They’re most thorough people, you know. They interviewed twenty-three persons before they came up with a reliable eyewitness. They then interviewed another fifty-two before they found one who could corroborate his story. Let’s see, I’ll just paraphrase it for you.” Carmingler ran his right forefinger down the first sheet, flipped it over, and then ran it halfway down the second sheet. “Yes, here it is. At about ten o’clock on the morning in question two male foreigners (that’s you two) dressed thus and so entered the shop on Upper Lascar... then the proprietor left... then a Chinese in a white suit carrying a briefcase entered... then two other Chinese entered... and, yes, here it is, no guns were visible. A few minutes later there was the sound of a single shot and the two Chinese were seen running from the shop carrying a briefcase. They disappeared. That’s from the first witness. Another witness, a twelve-year-old-boy, actually saw the whole thing. Through the shop’s window. He backs up the first witness in full and then swears, or whatever they do here, that the two Chinese gentlemen in question did not pull their guns until after Pai was shot. So...” Carmingler put the report back into his briefcase. He put the briefcase on the floor and then smiled at Vicker.

“So,” he said again. “We have two witnesses now who swear, or affirm, or whatever it is, that the pair didn’t draw their guns until after you shot Pai.”

“Who’s the other witness besides the twelve-year-old?” Vicker said.

“Dye, of course,” Carmingler said.

“Shit,” Vicker said.

“So it would seem that you knew who the two gentlemen were before they even produced their guns. It would also seem that you had a very good reason for shooting Pai. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what it was.”

“It’s the reason I gave you,” Vicker said.

“Yes,” Carmingler said. “Well, I think that does it nicely. You’re through, Vicker. Don’t remove anything from the office. Any personal effects will be sent to you. So will your back pay and leave time, if you have any coming. And by the way, don’t try to stir this up in any fashion. Special Branch is still awfully anxious to talk to you and we’ve had a hell of a time smoothing things over.”

Vicker looked at me and then back at Carmingler. “This goes to the review board, fella.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Carmingler said. “Not if you think about it, it doesn’t. Those two Chinese gentlemen. The opposition, as we’re so fond of calling them. Unless they came in with drawn guns, you couldn’t possibly have known who they were. But they didn’t. That indicates that you knew who they were and that, I think you’ll agree, might lead us all down a rather rocky path. We don’t want that, Vicker, and you’re lucky that we don’t. Very lucky. So don’t press.”

Vicker frowned, first at Carmingler, then at me, and then back at Carmingler. It was a very sincere frown. His voice was level and low when he spoke. His brown eyes were steady. He lied beautifully. “I thought it was a setup when I shot Pai. I still do. What I think is in my report to you and I don’t care how many so-called eyewitnesses Special Branch dug up. Somebody had to be the goat. Someone picked me and then sent you out to give me the news. I don’t blame you, Carmingler. You’re just the chore boy.” He turned to look at me then. “But you’re something else, Dye. You’re really something. I owe you a lot. I really mean that. I owe you a hell of a lot and one of these days I’ll remember to pay it all off.” He rose then and headed for the door. He stopped when he was almost there and then his right arm flashed under his coat and a .38 revolver appeared in his hand, the twin of the Smith & Wesson that I had locked away in a suitcase. He was fast. Too fast for his age. He looked at the gun, smiled slightly, and then walked over and laid it carefully on the desk next to the sharpened pencils. “This belongs under office equipment, I believe,” he said, nodded at Carmingler, but not at me, and left.

Carmingler picked up a pencil and poked idly at the revolver. “Nasty things, aren’t they?” he said.

“I liked the part about the twelve-year-old boy,” I said.

“Yes.”

“There wasn’t any.”

“No?”

“No. It wasn’t even Star Chamber. Not even that. It was all laid on before you got here. It was locked in.”

“You disagree with the verdict?”

“The method maybe. Not the verdict.”

“The means,” Carmingler said. “You don’t like the means.” He picked up his pipe and got it going again. “You don’t really believe that we’d leave something like this to chance or whimsy?”

“Why not?” I said. “It would match everything else. Blend right in.”

Carmingler nodded and looked out the window. Another new building was going up. Hong Kong was booming. “There’re a couple of things I really like about old Vicker,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, first of all he lies better than you do.”

“Better than anybody.”

“Secondly, his reports.”

“What about them?”

“Very well written,” Carmingler said. “Damned fine reading, in fact. It’s a pity that there was hardly a word of truth in any of them.”

“Why press about the gun?” I said. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Yours?”

“Yes?”

“I was told to.”

“You already knew.”

Carmingler nodded, picked up a pencil again, and used it to shove the short barrel of Vicker’s revolver back and forth. “You still don’t like these things much, do you?”

“No.”

“All because of your wife.” It wasn’t a question.

“That had a lot to do with it, but you knew that.”

“I had to ask.”

“Why?” I said.

“They thought you might have gotten over it, but you haven’t.”

“No.”

We sat there in the office for a while, neither of us saying anything. Then Carmingler shoved Vicker’s gun over to me with the pencil. “Here,” he said, “you can lock this one away with yours. I don’t think you’ll ever use one again.”

“No,” I said, “I probably won’t.”

Chapter 16

It must have been freezing inside Bridge House prison the day that Captain Toyofuku came for Gorman Smalldane and me. He really didn’t come for me, but Smalldane insisted that I be permitted out of the cell for the first time in three months, and Toyofuku simply nodded his agreement. He didn’t speak. It was the first decent thing that I had seen any of the Japanese do and I should have noted the date, but all I can remember is that it was sometime in March, 1942.

Escorted by two bundled-up guards, we were led to a small room on the second floor of Bridge House. It was warmer there and Toyofuku motioned us to a couple of chairs. He sat behind a table, stripped off his gloves, and produced a package of cigarettes, offering one to Smalldane.

“How about the kid?” Smalldane said, taking a cigarette. “He hasn’t had a smoke in three months.”

Toyofuku looked at me, shook his head sadly, and offered me a cigarette. I accepted it with a grateful sitting-down-type bow.

After we were all lighted up, Toyofuku gazed at Smalldane and said, “You’ve got a lot of big-shot friends in the States, don’t you?” His accent was pure California, which meant that it had about as much regional character as a bowl of cold oatmeal.

Smalldane picked it up. “I’ll make two guesses. The first is UCLA. The second is Southern Cal.”

“Berkeley,” Toyofuku said. “Class of thirty-eight. Your son’s too young to smoke.”

“That’s what I’ve told him.”

“Slap the shit out of him a couple of times and he’ll stop. It’s not the Japanese way, but it works.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Toyofuku nodded approvingly. “Now let’s not go through how I was caught in Japan when the war broke out and was forced into the army. I wasn’t. I joined in 1940. I should make major next month. I like it fine and with a few breaks we’ll keep a lot of what we’ve already taken. Not the Philippines necessarily, but maybe Indochina, Malaya, the East Indies, and some of the islands.”

“What about China?” Smalldane said.

“Nobody can take China.”

“Treason.”

“Make the most of it,” Toyofuku said and smiled for the first time. “But as I said you’ve got a lot of big-shot friends in the States. So you’re on the list. We were going to shoot you.”

“Why?” Smalldane said.

“You wrote nasty things about us in Manchouku in 1932. Then you wrote some more nasty things when you came back in thirty-nine. We’ve got long memories, but you’ve got big-shot friends. If we hadn’t agreed to put you on the list, then they were going to take one of our bankers off. He’s in New York now and we’d very much like him to come home.”

“This is the repatriation list?” Smalldane said.

“Right. It’s divided into five classifications: diplomatic and consular officials, correspondents, missionaries, Canadians, and Latin Americans. Also some businessmen.”

“When do we leave?”

“That presents a problem,” Toyofuku said. “I studied business administration at Berkeley. The stock market fascinated me. So did the commodity market. I learned all about hedging.”

Smalldane grunted and ground out his cigarette. I still had a couple of puffs left. “How much?”

“Three thousand for you. Two thousand for the kid.”

“What about that banker in New York?”

“You could always come down with pneumonia and die. They’d just exchange him for somebody else.”

“I haven’t got five thousand.”

“You can get it. Just write a note.” Toyofuku took a pad from a pocket and handed it to Smalldane along with a thick fountain pen. “She’s still in good health and prosperous. She married, you know.”

Smalldane looked up. “I didn’t.”

“A Frenchman. She’s now a Vichy citizen. Sort of an ally of mine.”

Smalldane finished the note and handed it to Toyofuku, who read it and said, “It tugs at the heart strings.”

“I gave it my all,” Smalldane said.

“You’ll sail in two or three months on the Conte Verde. It’s Italian. The Gripsholm will sail out of New York with our people. You’ll rendezvous at Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa and trade ships. The Gripsholm will take you to New York, the Conte Verde will bring our people to Japan. Probably Kobe.” He tapped the note that Smalldane had written. “If this works, I’ll let her see you off.”

“How many bets are you hedging?” Smalldane asked.

“Twenty or so. It’s my personal share in the greater co-prosperity sphere.”

“I think you think you’ll lose.”

Toyofuku shrugged. It must have been something he’d learned in San Francisco. Possibly from an Italian girlfriend. “If we do, we’ll bounce back. And with a hundred thousand bucks I’ll be right on the ground floor.”

“You know something, Captain?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not really so sure that you could keep anyone off that repatriation list.”

Toyofuku picked up the note from the table and offered it back to Smalldane. “Would you like to bet your lives against it?”

Smalldane shook his head. “No, and I don’t want to play poker with you either.”

Toyofuku smiled for the second time. “I didn’t think that you would.”

Except for the widespread bribing, the International Red Cross handled the whole thing out of Geneva. Only three of us left the cell at Bridge House in late May: Smalldane, me, and the redheaded man who claimed to be a Mexican. They took us to General Hospital, where we were examined by a British doctor. Except for the lice, he complimented us on our health and then gave us a series of inoculations which made me sick. They also gave us some new clothing and Smalldane grinned when I insisted that I be permitted to change mine in complete privacy.

“He’s very shy,” he said to a nurse.

I wasn’t really. I needed the privacy to shift my hoard of dollars and pounds from the lice-infested money belt to the pockets of my new clothing. I distributed it evenly to avoid bulges.

We stayed in the hospital for ten days and then a truck came to take us to the Conte Verde. Smalldane was carrying our vaccination certificates and an authorization that allowed us to draw $100 each from the ship’s purser for incidental expenses. Before we left for the ship, Smalldane borrowed $10 from me to spend on a wardboy, a born scrounger, who came back an hour later with the order: six pairs of dice.

The Conte Verde was one of the better Italian liners that sailed the Pacific route to the Orient and had been caught in Shanghai on December 8. It carried an Italian crew of about 300, and would sail for East Africa with a contingent of Japanese foreign-office officials aboard to make sure that Japan’s new allies didn’t head straight for San Francisco. None of the Italian crew seemed overly patriotic.

Tante Katerine met us at the dock with a basket of fruit, booze, cigarettes, and her new husband, a wisp of a man, about sixty-five, whom she introduced as M’sieu Gauvreau in French and as Mr. Soft stick in English, assuring us that he didn’t understand a word.

“He does something in the Vichy government,” Tante Katerine said, holding my hand in both of hers, “but nothing in bed.” She shrugged, released my hand, and patted her new husband on the cheek. He smiled, delighted at any attention.

“Lucifer’s too thin and you owe me eleven thousand dollars,” she said to Smalldane. “That Captain Toyofuku was such a nice man, but greedy.”

“There’s a redheaded Mexican on board,” I said.

“Don’t trust him,” Tante Katerine said automatically. “When do you intend to repay me, Gorm?”

“After the war.”

“Yes,” she said and smiled sadly. “After the war.”

“What are your plans, Kate?” Smalldane said.

“Fatten Lucifer up,” she said. “He’s far too thin.”

“He’s been in jail. What are your plans?”

She turned to smile at her husband and to tell him in French that he wouldn’t be shivering if he had worn his long underwear as she had suggested. He replied that the weather was too warm and that it made him itch. She said that she had no desire to become a widow and he said that he would wear it from now on even if it did make him itch. It was all very domestic and it was one of those conversations about nothing that somehow become inextricably stuck in memory. It’s really the only thing I remember that M. Gauvreau ever said.

“I have no plans, Gorm,” Tante Katerine said, turning from her husband. “He talks about returning to France, but he’s only dreaming. They have no use for him there. My only plans are to keep alive. As long as he lives, the Japanese will let me alone. Just promise me one thing.”

“What?” Smalldane said.

“Take care of Lucifer. Get him safely to America,”

“All right.”

“See that he brushes his teeth.”

“All right.”

“Make him change his underwear.”

“All right.”

“Lucifer.”

“Yes, Tante Katerine.”

“Look after Gorman.”

“Yes, ma am.”

“Don’t let him drink too much.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Keep him away from the poules. The bad ones at least.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She leaned down to kiss me and then fussed with my clothing, straightening it here and there. “I’ll miss you, Lucifer. Don’t trust that redheaded Mexican. Stay away from him.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned back to Smalldane. “I don’t want to come aboard, Gorm. I don’t think I could.”

“I know.”

He kissed her then. It was a long, friendly, warm, passionate, memorable kiss that I watched with delight. M. Gauvreau turned his head and cleared his throat, but no one paid him any attention.

A harried official from the Swiss Consulate stopped to tell us to get aboard. Tante Katerine backed away from Smalldane, still holding his hands. I think she was doing Ginger Rogers then. “Come back to me, Gorm,” she said. “Come back to me in Shanghai.”

Smalldane winked at her, gathered her up in his arms again, and then smacked her sharply on the butt. M. Gauvreau hissed in some breath.

“We’ll both come back, Kate.”

She nodded, her right fist to her mouth, a few tears streaming down her cheeks, but not so many that they would ruin her makeup. She waved a little with her left hand as we started up the gangplank. When we were halfway up, Smalldane whispered to me, “Don’t ruin her scene. Turn and wave at her and rub your knuckles in your eyes like you’re crying.”

I turned and waved and knuckled my left eye.

“Gorm!” Tante Katerine shouted.

Smalldane turned. “What?” he yelled.

“Make him change his underwear.”

It was the last thing she said, the last time I ever saw her.

We sailed out of Shanghai on June 8, 1942, carrying 1,036 missionaries, both ecclesiastical and medical, nurses, State Department types, correspondents, most of whom Smalldane knew, children, wives, assorted businessmen with varying degrees of influence, a handful of Canadians, two spies (or so Smalldane said), a smuggled kitten, and one redheaded Mexican.

We sailed for Singapore where the Japanese liner Asama Maru joined us on June 10. She was carrying North and South Americans from Korea, Japan, and Manchuria. She was just out of Hong Kong, where she had stopped to pick up some more U.S. and Canadian citizens. As soon as we had cleared Singapore and were sailing south toward the Dutch East Indies and the Coral Sea, Smalldane made me his proposition. We spent the next two days going over figures before I agreed to finance the venture that eventually was to launch Smalldane Communications, Inc.

It was a crap game, of course, and when Smalldane got through explaining the odds to me, he made a projection of the profit potential

“We’ve got about a thousand persons aboard,” he said. “Let’s say that three hundred of them are gamblers. When we reach Lourenço Marques the passengers aboard the Asama Maru will double up with us on the Gripsholm. That’ll give us a total of some sixteen hundred passengers. Out of that there should be five hundred hard-nosed gamblers — the kind who’ll bet their last dime. Now we know that they’ve all got the hundred-dollar draw from the purser. So one hundred times five hundred is what?”

“Fifty thousand,” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “We’re rich.”

“But it is still gambling,” I said.

“Of course it’s gambling.”

“In that event one must lose so that the other might win,” I said, switching to French to help the logic of my thoughts along.

“Oui, M’sieu Petit Merde,” Smalldane said.

“Then I stand the chance to lose my money, and you much face. I would very much like it the other way around.”

“The odds,” Smalldane said. “Remember the odds. We bet only against the dice. We bank the game. Time is on our side. Sixty to seventy-five days. Maybe three months.”

“The risk is great.”

“The rewards are greater.”

“I don’t think—”

“I have been in deep conversation with the redheaded Mexican,” Smalldane said in Cantonese. “He is a man of much wealth but strange tastes. He longs for you, but is shy. He has offered me a modest sum to—”

“When do we start the game?” I said.

“Tonight,” he said. “I was lying about the Mexican, kid.”

“I know,” I said. “Already he sleeps with two of the nurses from Hong Kong.”

The wire services were the first to fall. AP dropped a little more than $300; UP was good for $275, and INS had only $100 to contribute. Smalldane lent it all back to them on markers at ten percent interest for the remainder of the trip. Collectively, they lost somewhere around $2,000. The doctors and businessmen were next. My job was to return the dice to the proper shooter and quote the odds.

“Two to one no four,” I said to a portly physician from New York.

“Hard way, dice,” the portly physician said on his knees and bounced them against the bulkhead for a seven. Smalldane gathered up the money. I handed the dice to the next shooter. By the time we arrived in Lourenço Marques on July 23, 1942, the Conte Verde crapshooters were broke, we were $21,795 in the black and anxious for the fresh meat aboard the Asama Maru.

The Swedish passenger liner Gripsholm was already docked at Lourenço Marques when the Conte Verde and the Asama Maru arrived and docked on either side of her. The crap game was suspended until the new supply of gamblers assembled on the Gripsholm. I wandered up to the deck while the rest of the passengers were packing and getting ready to debark. A Japanese boy of about my age was leaning over the rail of the Gripsholm, spitting into the water. He looked up, and we stared at each other.

“How’s the food on that tub?” he said.

“Lousy,” I said. “How’s it on yours?”

“Lousy.”

He leaned over and spat into the water again. I did the same thing from my rail.

“Where you from?” he said.

“Shanghai. Where you from?”

“New York.”

We played spit in the ocean again.

“You American?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess. You Japanese?”

He nodded slowly and spat one more time. “That’s what they tell me,” he said.

The crap game started up two days after we left Lourenço Marques bound for Rio, and by the time we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the informal gaming firm of Smalldane and Dye was $39,792 ahead. I helped Smalldane count it. When we were finished he looked at me. “Let’s quit winners, Lucifer.”

“Whatever you say.”

“We’ve got enough.”

“What will we do with it?”

“You’re going to get an education with yours.”

“I am already educated.”

“You don’t even know how to read and write.”

“I am wise in the ways of the world.”

“Where’d you learn that one?”

I shrugged. “I heard it someplace.”

Smalldane shook his head. “Okay, let’s agree that you’re smart. You can shill a crap game, pimp for a whorehouse, speak six or seven languages, roll drunks, and hustle the rubes. But you can’t read or write and you’re goddamned well going to school to learn how.”

“Will you go too, Gorman?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too old.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet, kid. But I think I’ve got an idea.”

In Rio the FBI agents came aboard and started asking Smalldane how he’d acquired a son since he had never married.

“What do you care?” he said. “The kid’s American.”

“We’ve checked your record, Mr. Smalldane. You’ve never even been engaged.”

“So he’s a bastard.”

There were two of them. One was rather young, somewhere in his twenties. The other was older, thirty-five or so. Both were suspicious.

“If he’s not an American citizen, Mr. Smalldane, he can’t be permitted to enter the—”

“Tell them, Lucifer.”

“My name is William Smalldane. I was born in San Francisco on—”

“For Christ’s sake, the real one,” Smalldane said.

“Oh,” I said. “I am eight years old and my name is Lucifer Clarence Dye and I was born December 5, 1933, in Moncrief, Montana, United States of America, and my father’s name was Dr. Clarence Dye and I live at... at—” I stopped.

“He lives with me,” Smalldane said. “He’s my ward.”

“Where are his parents?” the younger man asked.

“Dead.”

“This is most irregular,” the older man said, and it was the first time I’d heard that phrase. I regret that it wasn’t the last.

“Cable Moncrief, Montana, and find out whether there was a Lucifer Clarence Dye born there on December 5, 1933, like the kid says.”

“Well, if you’ll accept responsibility for him—”

“I’ll accept it. Where do I sign?”

“That’ll be done in New York,” the older one said. “Still I don’t know.”

“Hell, he’s too dumb to be a spy,” Smalldane said. “He can’t even read or write.”

That was when I made up my mind to go to school.

On the voyage to New York from Rio a couple of the passengers panicked over what they claimed to be Nazi submarines, but nothing happened and we docked in Manhattan on August 26, 1942. There was nobody to meet us.

Once through officialdom’s incredible red tape, we took a cab to the Gotham where Smalldane had reserved us a room. He’d won the reservation from a correspondent who had had nothing left to gamble. When we were in the room and the money was in the hotel’s safe, Smalldane produced a package wrapped in red paper.

“It’s from Kate,” he said. “It was in the bottom of that basket of fruit and whiskey. She told me to give them to you when we got to New York.”

“What are they?”

“Your father’s diaries. She wants you to read them.”

“But I can’t read.”

“Kate said for you to learn,”

Chapter 17

Booboo Robineaux drove me back to the hotel from the session with what I suppose could be called Swankerton’s city fathers. About halfway there I asked him, “Why do they call you Booboo?”

“My friends don’t,” he said. “Just my father.”

“What do your friends call you?”

“Boo.”

I thought about asking him how his face had come to be so nicely stitched, but I was afraid that it might turn into a longer story than I really wanted to hear, so I didn’t, but instead just thanked him for the lift.

I unlocked the door to my room in the Sycamore and started in. The Venetian blinds were down and the drapes were drawn. They hadn’t been that way when I left. It was dark. The door opened to my right so I slammed it against the wall, but it didn’t hit the wall. It hit someone who grunted. I started backing quickly into the corridor, but I didn’t move fast enough. I heard a faint sound like the beginning of a sigh, perhaps a sigh of regret, and something hard smashed into my left shoulder. I kept backing into the corridor and bumped against someone. I turned and it was Homer Necessary who gave me a genial smile.

“Trouble?” he said.

I massaged my shoulder with my right hand. “Trouble,” I said. “Two of them.”

“Well, now,” he said and smiled again. “Which side of the door is the light switch on?”

I thought a moment. “The left, lust inside. There’re two of them.”

Necessary reached into his right hip pocket and brought out a woven leather blackjack. He thumped it into his left palm. “Well, now,” he said again and moved to the door, reached his arm quickly around the jamb, and switched on the room’s overhead light. He was fast despite his bulk. He went in low, whirled, and the blackjack started up from near his ankles. I couldn’t see it land, but I heard it. It was a wet smack. Necessary turned to his left, still moving quickly, almost sinuously, like an overstuffed snake. Then he stopped, straightened, and grinned at me.

“He doesn’t want to get out from behind the door,” Necessary said. “You might as well come on in.”

I went in. On the floor at my left was the crumpled up body of a man. He wore a yellow velour short-sleeved shirt and tan khaki slacks. He wasn’t more than twenty-two or twenty-three and some blood drooled out of the left corner of his mouth. A piece of pipe wrapped in black friction tape lay a few inches from his right hand.

“Just reach over careful-like and close the door,” Necessary said. “You might even sort of slam it.”

I slammed the door shut. Behind it was another member of what I suppose is the misunderstood generation. He was all of twenty, wore a short-sleeved shirt with a turtleneck, some unsuccessful sideburns, and a panicky look. He carried a nine-inch length of tape-wrapped pipe in his right hand, but he seemed to have forgotten it.

Necessary slapped his blackjack into the palm of his left hand a couple of times. “Just drop it, kid,” he said. “Just drop it onto the floor.” The youngster looked at the pipe, smiled feebly and a little foolishly, and let the pipe fall to the carpet.

“Now go and sit in that chair over there,” he said. The youth moved to the chair that Necessary indicated and lowered himself into it. He still looked panicky.

I bent over the one who lay on the floor. “He’s not hurt bad,” Necessary said. “I didn’t even break his jaw, but he might have a few loose teeth. I got him right along here.” I looked up and watched him move his right forefinger along his jaw, just below the left ear.

“You’re good,” I said to Necessary, rising.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “I know.” Then he turned to the young man in the chair. “You got a name?”

“Frank. Frank Smith. That’s the God’s truth. It’s Smith.”

Necessary returned the blackjack to his hip pocket and slapped Frank Smith across the face. It was a hard, brisk slap. “That’s what you get for telling the truth, Frank. You can just let your imagination work on what you’re going to get when you start lying.”

Not if, I noticed, but when. I lit a cigarette and watched the exchief of police operate. I decided that he must have enjoyed his former line of work.

“How much?” Necessary said.

“For what?”

Necessary slapped him again. “Fifty bucks. Each.”

“Who? I mean who paid you?”

“I don’t know. Just a guy.”

That earned him another slap.

Frank Smith’s face was red now from both rage and the slaps. “He was just a guy, I tell you. We meet him in Emmett’s—”

“What’s Emmett’s?” Necessary said.

“We shoot pool there, hang around, you know.”

Necessary shook his head. “It always starts in a poolhall,” he said. “It always starts there with just a guy. What did just a guy look like, Frank?”

Frank Smith moved his shoulders up and down a little. “I don’t know. Christ, he was about average.”

Necessary reached into his hip pocket and took out the blackjack. He did it casually, as if fishing out a pack of cigarettes. Frank Smith tried to ignore it, but failed. It fascinated him.

“I don’t want to use this on your arm, Frank,” Necessary said. “Right below your shoulder. It’ll make it sore. Maybe for weeks. I don’t want you to have a sore arm. I don’t think you do either, do you?”

“No.” It was barely a whisper.

Necessary slapped the blackjack into his left palm again. He had a certain way of doing it so that it made a crackling sound as if he were breaking all the bones in his hand. I wondered what old-time cop he had learned that from.

“He was medium heighth—” Frank Smith pronounced height with a “th” at the end and I couldn’t see how he would profit from it if I were to correct him. “Around five foot nine or ten. Weighed maybe hundred and fifty, hundred and sixty. Black hair. He had on a suit, I remember. A tan suit.”

“What color were his eyes?”

“I don’t know,” Frank Smith said. “Shit, I don’t remember the color of his eyes.”

“You’d be in trouble if you did,” Necessary said. “What’d he call himself?”

“He didn’t.”

“No name at all?”

Frank Smith shook his head.

“You ever see him before?”

“No.”

“Okay. What’d he say? Everything you can remember.”

“Well, he says there’s this guy over in eight-nineteen in the Sycamore and this guy owed him some gambling money and won’t pay. So he says he’ll give us fifty apiece to mess the guy up a little. Then he gives us the key to the room and an envelope to leave with the guy when we get done.”

“What else, Frank?”

“Well, he says the guy’s out of the hotel right now and we can wait for him in his room. Then he gives us the fifty each and we come on over and start waiting.”

“Why you?”

“Huh?”

The “huh” won him another slap. “Why’d he pick you two, Frank?” Necessary said, and his voice was curiously gentle.

Frank Smith didn’t seem to find much comfort in the tone. “I don’t know — and don’t hit me! He seemed to know us. He walked right up to us and called us by name.”

“How many times’ve you been booked, Frank?”

“Three. Maybe four.”

“Car theft?”

“Once.”

“Assault?”

“Maybe twice.”

“D and D?”

“Once.”

“What else?”

“Nothing.”

“What else, Frank?”

“Nothing. I swear.”

“How much time in the joint?”

“Six months.” Frank Smith muttered it.

“Car theft?”

“Yeah.”

“State?”

“At Mandersfield.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“What’s your buddy’s name?”

“Joe Carson.”

“Where’d you meet him, at Mandersfield?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What was he in for?”

“Breaking and entry. He done a year.”

“How long’ve you been out?”

“Couple of months.”

Joe Carson groaned and I turned around. Necessary didn’t bother. Carson moved a little, but it was really only a twitch.

“Either of you on parole?” Necessary said.

“No. We done it all.”

“You’re lucky.”

Joe Carson groaned again and this time Necessary turned to look at him. Then he looked at his watch and nodded in a satisfied way. “Just about right,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. He turned back to Frank Smith. “You got the envelope?”

“Joe’s got it,” Frank Smith said.

“Well, then, I want you to go over to Joe and get the envelope and hand it to Mr. Dye who you were supposed to give it to in the first place. I also want you to give me the fifty bucks that ‘just a guy’ gave you and I also want the fifty he gave Joe over there. You got that?”

Frank Smith nodded and moved over to Carson. He took an envelope from Carson’s hip pocket, found the fifty dollars, and returned to where Necessary stood. “You want the money?” he said to Necessary.

“That’s right.”

“Here’s Joe’s fifty.” He handed it over. Then he dug into his own pocket and came up with another wad of bills. “Here’s mine.” Necessary stuffed them into his own pocket.

“He gets the envelope?” Frank Smith said. He seemed determined to do everything correctly.

“That’s right,” Necessary said.

“Here,” Frank Smith said and handed me the envelope.

“Now drag him out of here before he wakes up and vomits all over the place,” Necessary said.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, Frank.”

“Yessir.”

Frank Smith bent over Carson, grasped him under the armpits, and started dragging him toward the door. Carson groaned again. “Can you get the door, mister?” Frank Smith said to me, I held it open while he dragged Carson into the corridor. “What do I do with him now?” he said.

“That’s your problem,” I said and closed the door.

“How was your meeting?” Necessary said.

I nodded my head as I opened the envelope. “They propositioned me.”

“What’s it say?”

I handed the single sheet to him. It was printed in penciled block letters. Necessary read it aloud, giving each word the same emphasis as those who aren’t accustomed to reading aloud usually do. “Just a sample,” he read. “Next time is for keeps.” He shook his head. “Amateurs,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Pros don’t give away second chances.”

“I know.”

“They may try again and then it won’t be a couple of punks.”

“Probably not.”

“It bother you?”

“Sure it bothers me,” I said.

“That’s good. I’d be a little worried if it didn’t.” He sighed deeply. “I guess I’d better stick a little closer.”

“You did fine a while ago. Thanks.”

“Orcutt sent me down.”

“He want something?”

Necessary shook his head. “He just got a hunch. He gets them sometimes. So he got a hunch that I should come down to your room. He was right.” He paused a moment. “As usual.”

“I’ll thank him too.”

“We’d better go see him.”

“Has he got a drink up there?”

“Sure.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

Necessary started toward the door but paused. “You want I should split the hundred with you?”

“You keep it.”

“Half’s yours if you want it.”

“You earned it,” I said.

He started moving toward the door again and again stopped. “What’d they really want with you at that meeting?”

“They wanted to know if I was banging Carol Thackerty yet.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“The truth. I said not yet.”

Chapter 18

Major Albert Schiller and I got hit within thirty seconds of each other on April 17, 1953, about halfway up — or down — the Korean hill called Pork Chop which they made a motion picture about some years later. I think it starred Gregory Peck. The major and I could have used him. I was then nineteen years old and a master sergeant, the youngest in the entire United States Army, or so I’d been told. The major was thirty-six which made him, he falsely claimed, the oldest major in the army, and he didn’t make lieutenant colonel until shortly before he retired in 1961.

We had stumbled halfway to the top of Pork Chop Hill to set up our equipment at an outpost supposedly held by E Company of the 31st Infantry. The equipment consisted of a battery of loudspeakers similar to those used for public address systems in ball parks, college gymnasiums, and football stadiums. I was to use the speakers to address the CCF from the E-Company outpost. I was to insult the CCF, revile it, even taunt it.

“Hit ‘em right in the guts, son,” the general had said to me. “Make ‘em wonder who’s screwing their wives. Make ‘em itchy to get home. You know, undermine their morale.”

The CCF, whose morale I was supposed to undermine, was of course the Communist Chinese Forces who were more or less ignoring the truce negotiations that were then underway at Panmunjom.

Major Schiller had dreamed up the project all by himself and then went scouting for a Chinese-speaking American. He found me, fresh from the States, in an infantry repple depple and promptly had me transferred to what he fondly called his “little psy-war shop.” He somehow had convinced a National Guard general of the merit of his scheme and the general personally had bucked most of Schiller’s proposed table of organization through channels. The approval enabled the major to zoom me from private to master sergeant in two weeks. I had a corporal who was a clerk-typist under my command and together we composed all that there was of Major Schiller’s little psy-war shop.

On April 15, 1953 — or 15 April 53, as the army likes to write it — the major got permission from the general to launch the project that was supposed to undermine Chinese morale to the point where they would lay down their arms and rush back home. But first, the major and I went calling on the general to show off my proficiency in Chinese. “Say something in Chinese, sergeant,” the general said, so I smiled and called him the abandoned son of a syphilitic running dog.

“Sure knows it, doesn’t he, sir?” Major Schiller said and smiled at me fondly. “Of course, he won’t talk that politely to them. He’ll talk to them in gutter Chinese that’ll hit ‘em right where it hurts.”

“Right in the guts, son,” the general said again.

“Right in the guts, sir,” the grizzled young sergeant with the steely eyes replied.

I didn’t see any reason to mention that most of the CCF around Pork Chop Hill were probably Mongolians and would understand less than ten percent of what I was saying. I rationalized that they would at least recognize that it was Chinese and probably assume that it wasn’t a pep talk. I further rationalized that being a master sergeant in a little psy-war shop was far better than being a replacement rifleman in a line company. Anything was better.

E Company of the 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Division had sent back word that the CCF was whooping it up with chants and Mongolian music. The major had convinced the general that it would be a “damned fine spot to give ‘em a bit of their own medicine.” Major Schiller knew a lot of clichés and used them lavishly.

So we rounded up a squad or so of spare riflemen who were dogging it on sick call, loaded them and the speakers and amplifiers into jeeps, and headed for Pork Chop Hill. When the jeeps could go no farther, we loaded the equipment on to the riflemen’s backs. The infantry, I thought at the time, hadn’t changed much in the last three thousand years or so.

Major Schiller had found himself a swagger stick some place, probably the only one in Korea other than those employed by the officers of England’s two brigades, and he led us up Pork Chop Hill, swishing the swagger stick around and checking every few minutes to see that his .45 Colt automatic hadn’t fallen out of its holster.

By the time we were halfway to E Company, it had been overrun by the Chinese and most of its men were either killed, wounded or captured. We no longer needed the loudspeakers and the amplifiers to insult the CCF. A conversational tone would do nicely. Major Schiller summoned his ranking non-coms (both of us) for a strategy conference. The corporal and I agreed that a rapid withdrawal would be expedient. The riflemen abandoned the expensive amplifiers and speakers and joined the discussion. To a man, they backed the major’s decision.

It wasn’t really a withdrawal. It wasn’t even a retreat. It was a rout. I carried a Thompson .45 submachine gun that I’d found along the way. The major had lost his swagger stick and now gestured with his .45, but only after I had made sure that the safety catches were on. We plunged down a deep gully, the major still in the lead. Two Chinese soldiers popped out at us from behind a rock outcropping. The major tried to shoot them with his automatic, but he’d forgotten about the safety catches. I yelled, “Stinking turtles!” in Mandarin at the two Chinese, which they may or may not have understood, but which was enough of a surprise to make them hesitate. As I yelled, I dived for the cover of a rock to the left of the major and fired the Thompson as I went. I didn’t hit anything.

The two Chinese were both armed with the highly prized, Soviet-made 7.62mm PPsh 41 burp gun. They must have had them on full automatic because they each fired long bursts at the major and me for at least forty-five seconds. If fully loaded, it meant that they had fired 144 rounds. They were rotten shots, but not all that rotten. One of the 144 rounds ricocheted into my right thigh. Another creased the major’s right forearm and made him drop his automatic, which he still hadn’t fired. I poked my head around the rock and saw that the Chinese were trying to change magazines, but that they weren’t too quick at it, so I killed them both with the Thompson, aiming it low and watching with satisfaction as it climbed up and to the left just as the sergeant at Fort Hood had promised me that it would.

Major Schiller put me in for the Silver Star and got the National Guard general to recommend him for the Distinguished Service Cross, but neither of the medals ever made it past corps headquarters. They did, however, give us a couple of Purple Hearts and then sent us back to recuperate at Brooke General Hospital at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

Major Schiller quickly recovered and landed his usual cushy job, this time in Fort Sam’s Public Information Office, where his principal daily task was to issue press releases about the posthumous awarding of medals to the mothers and wives of dead servicemen. The releases were sent to the hometown newspapers and to the San Antonio Light and Express and they invariably began: “In a brief but stirring ceremony, the Silver Star today was awarded to...” It was the same release that the Public Information Office had been using since 1942 and they were used to it. So were the rewrite men on the Light and the Express.

Schiller had promoted himself a large house on the post not too far from the Snake Hill area of cheap bars at Fort Sam’s south end. He lived there with his wife, Ruby, an accomplished legal-engineering secretary who made more money than Schiller, something that never bothered him in the least.

The major looked like a soldier. He was tall, carried himself well, wore his uniform beautifully, and had spent most of World War II in London and Paris on what he called a “sensitive assignment.” He had a bachelor’s degree from a small college in Pennsylvania and when he was drafted in 1941 he was selling time for a radio station. Before that, he sold Willys cars. When asked about his civilian experience, Schiller always said that he had been “involved” in “radio promotion” and prior to that he had been “involved” in “the management side of the automotive industry.”

He had a nose that just missed being a beak, a high, intelligent-looking forehead, thick black hair, a good, thin-lipped smile, and puzzled, blue eyes. He also had boundless enthusiasm for any project at hand, a remarkable ability to forget past failures, and a bad case of satyriasis. He tried to screw anything in skirts and often as not succeeded.

They had decided to discharge me from the army in late May of 1953 despite my lack of points. It was mostly because they didn’t know what to do with a nineteen-year-old master sergeant. I had been hanging around the hospital ward, waiting for them to make up their minds, when Schiller dropped by to see me. He came by once or twice a week, usually to borrow ten or twenty until payday. He was always broke.

“Well, I fixed it, son. You go to work next Monday morning.”

“I go to work where?”

“In PIO. You’re my new civilian assistant. Thirty-six fifty a year. How’s that?”

“Lousy.”

It didn’t faze the major. “Well, it’s not too hot to start with, but I can probably jump you a grade or two after a few months.”

“In a few months I’ll be back in school. I told you that.”

Schiller made one of his more expansive gestures with a new swagger stick. He had six of them, his wife later told me. “Well, hell, Lu, take it for the summer. What else have you got to do?”

“What’ll I have to do at PIO?”

“Just what I said. You’ll be my assistant.”

“What do you do?”

Schiller looked around the ward to see whether anyone was listening. They weren’t. They were reading Captain Marvel as usual. “Just between you and me and the gatepost, not a hell of a lot, but I have a good time doing it.”

“What’ll I have to do?” I said again.

“Well, you’ll accompany me on my appointed rounds. We check into the office about nine, leave for coffee at ten, then lunch at the officer’s club at twelve, back to the office at two. Downtown to the newspapers at two-thirty and then to the Gunther Hotel for a refreshing bottle of Pearl beer and to review the day’s activities. How’s it sound?”

“Exhausting,” I said.

“We have a staff car.”

“What else?”

“A WAC driver.”

“You screwing her?”

“Not anymore. She’s all yours.”

“Thanks.”

“But now the piece of resistance.” Despite Paris, the major’s French was nonexistent.

“What?”

“You live with us.”

“With you and Ruby?”

“I’ve already talked it over with her. Room and board for only seventy-five bucks a month and you supply your own liquor. Or most of it.”

“That house only costs you eighty-five.”

“Home-cooking, Lu. Ruby’s own.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“What else have you got to do until September?”

“I know a guy in New York. I should go see him.”

“See him in September. And by the way, there’s an added attraction.”

“I’m already underwhelmed,” I said, stealing a line from somebody. But even a stolen line was wasted on Schiller.

“Weekly poker with the brass. I don’t mean captains and lieutenants and light-colonels. The real brass. Nothing less than a bird colonel.”

“Except you.”

“I’m in public relations,” Schiller said, as if that sliced through all social barriers. I don’t know, maybe it does.

“I’m an EM,” I said. “You know, an enlisted man, the people that the Pentagon designs uniforms for with the nicely padded hips and the carefully narrowed shoulders so that we’ll keep on looking ridiculous.”

“As of Friday at 1500 hours you will be a civilian and as such outrank any man in the army,” Schiller said, and his sincerity was as thick as hot fudge. That was the trouble with Schiller. He was too sincere about everything. His other trouble was that he was a compulsive gambler.

I moved in with the Schillers a week later and Ruby gave me the room with the southeast exposure on the second floor. The army hadn’t yet gotten round to air-conditioning its post houses and I welcomed the breeze at night. San Antonio is hot in May.

Ruby and I got along well enough after I made it clear that I wasn’t to be her prime source of information about her husband’s philandering. She was a short, slim brunette in her early thirties, quite attractive in an elfish sort of a way, far more intelligent than her husband, and a fine cook. I found her to be excellent company, imagined that she was extraordinary in bed, and thought that Schiller was a fool for chasing his roundheels. I spent quite a few summer nights with Ruby as she manned the nightwatch for the wandering major. We sat there on the screened porch and looked at fireflies and drank while I told her stories about Shanghai. She liked the stories, but I never did develop a taste for Coke and Southern Comfort, which was all that Ruby drank.

Each time that Schiller strayed she would pour her last drink around midnight and say to me, “I’m going to leave that rotten sonofabitch in the morning,” and about that time Schiller would turn in the drive with the top down on his 1949 Ford and a story of impossible misadventure that only a child would believe. Sometimes, if he had had enough to drink, he would play the piano and sing songs from the thirties and forties such as “Deep Purple,” “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “Together.” He had natural pitch, knew all the words, and his piano playing was, I suppose, enthusiastic. He sang to Ruby, partly to mollify her and partly because she was the only woman available just then. By one o’clock they were on their way upstairs, sometimes arguing bitterly, but by one-fifteen the creaking bed springs either lulled me to sleep or kept me wide awake. It all depended. Ruby never did get around to leaving him in the morning.

I met Colonel Elmore Gay at the fourth weekly poker session that I attended, this one at the house of a two-star general whom I’d taken the week before for $195. They played pot limit and four raises. No wild cards. Check and raise was not only permissible, but expected. It occasionally got hairy and more than once Schiller wrote a bum check. He usually covered them by rushing down to the finance company the next morning to see how much they would lend him on his Ford convertible. When the Ford was already in hock, he borrowed from me.

Colonel Gay played dull, dispassionate poker. The fifth man in the game was a buck general. They were all good, but I found that the one to beat was Colonel Gay. He was thin and tall with extraordinarily wide shoulders, an amused mouth, and questioning dark gray eyes, the kind that always add up the check and count the change. It was his deal and he dealt five-card draw.

“They tell me, Mr. Dye, that you were reared in Shanghai.”

“That’s right,” I said, watching the deck. It was one of a number of things that Smalldane had taught me. “No matter if it’s the bishop himself dealing, kid,” he’d said. “Keep your eyes on the deck when it’s dealt.”

“Do you speak Chinese?”

“A little.”

He switched to Mandarin. “Then I very much hope that you will join us when the cards are laid out next week. The game is to be held at my house and your presence would honor it.”

“One cannot refuse so gracious an invitation,” I replied.

“Yes,” he said in English, looking at the hand he’d dealt himself, “you do speak it a bit.”

“Let’s play cards,” the two-star general said from around his cigar. “You open, Dye?”

I opened for ten dollars on three tens. Everybody stayed and I filled with a pair of fives. I bet twenty-five into Colonel Gay’s one-card draw. He raised me twenty-five, the two-star general called. He had drawn two cards. I folded and Colonel Gay looked at me and smiled. “Four sixes,” he said, laying down his hand.

“Beats kings over,” the general grumbled.

“Openers, Dye?”

I flipped three cards out in the center of the table. “Tens,” I said.

“A lot of persons would have stayed with a full house,” Colonel Gay said.

“A lot of persons don’t know any better,” I said and earned a glare from the two-star general.

“They also tell me,” Colonel Gay said, “that you were the youngest master sergeant in the Army.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Why didn’t you apply for OCS?”

“That’s what I told him,” Schiller said.

“I’m not very ambitious, Colonel.”

“Pot’s light,” the two-star general said.

Gay slid two one-dollar chips in. “Sorry.”

“Five-card stud,” the buck general said.

“Deal,” said the general with two stars.

“Did you like military life?” Colonel Gay asked me.

“Not much.”

“First king bets, Dye,” said the two star general.

“King bets five,” I said.

“What are your plans?” Gay asked.

“Go back to school.”

“Where?”

“King-jack bets,” said the two-star general.

“Another five,” I said. “I don’t know. Columbia maybe.”

Colonel Gay looked at his hole card. He had a seven and a queen showing. “Raise five,” he said. I had the kings wired, so I raised him back. Only the one-star general dropped out.

The next round brought me another king and Colonel Gay picked up another queen. I bet twenty-five on the kings and he only called. The rest of them dropped out. Neither of us improved on the final card and I bet twenty-five again. Gay folded.

“A lot of persons would have paid to see my hole card,” I said.

“A lot of persons don’t know any better,” he said. “By the way, here’s my address.” He gave me a card. “Why don’t you drop around early next Friday night. For dinner, say around seven?”

The two generals exchanged glances and smiled faintly. “Why don’t you recruit on your own time, Colonel?” the two-star general said.

“We take what we can get where we find it,” Gay said.

“Let’s play cards,” the one-star general said.

We played cards for the rest of the evening and nobody cheated and I won $265, two hundred of which I lent Major Schiller to cover the bum check that he wrote for his losses.

Chapter 19

Her eyes were lighter than her father’s, almost dove gray and just as gentle. She opened the door to my knock and said, “You’re Lucifer Dye. I’m Beverly Gay, the colonel’s favorite daughter. Please come in.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She was eighteen then and she wore the standard college-girl’s uniform, a sweater, a skirt, and brown loafers, but she wore them better than most. We moved down the hall of the middle-class bungalow in a middle-class San Antonio neighborhood and I admired the way that she walked and the sway of her skirt. “What do you like people to call you, Lu, Lucifer, or Mr. Dye?”

“Sam,” I said.

“Is that your middle name?”

“No. It’s Clarence.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what I think, too. I would use my initials, but...”

“You don’t look like an Elsie,” she said. “Why Sam?”

“I don’t know. I just made it up.”

We were in the living room then and it looked as if it had been furnished by a peripatetic world collector who could never say no in the native bazaars. There were spears from East Africa and rugs from the mideast. Woven cane chairs from the Philippines nestled next to American Indian pottery. Chinese scrolls of doubtful merit flanked a tapestry from Iraq. Some of the heavier pieces looked as if they had been manufactured in Berlin during the thirties and they competed grimly with some small knurled tables that may or may not have been early American. Tasseled ottomans from the mideast and gaudy leather poufs from West Africa were scattered about the room for those whose feet were weary. A large Bechstein grand piano crouched in one corner.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” she said.

“Well, it’s different.”

“It belongs to some old friends of the colonel. He’s retired from the State Department and they’re doing Europe this summer. For the fifteenth time, I think. They let us have the house while Dad gets his treatments at the hospital.”

“I didn’t know he was ill.”

“Schistosomiasis,” she said. “It’s a blood fluke that he picked up in Burma during the war.”

Colonel Gay came in from the hall and smiled at me. “I see you’ve met the favorite daughter.”

“So she claimed,” I said, accepting a firm grip from his curiously slender hand.

“She’s also my only one. What would you like to drink — martini?”

“Not when I play poker.”

He gave me an amused look. “You like to win, don’t you?”

“It’s better than losing.”

“A beer?”

“Fine.”

Beverly Gay served us each a beer, but drank nothing herself. She sat on the severe couch with her father. I sat in a leather chair that was all angles and sharp edges.

“I’ve done some checking on you during the past week,” Gay said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“If it’s already done, there’s not much I can do about it. I don’t know whether I mind or not.”

“I’d mind,” Beverly Gay said. “There’re too many Paul Prys around as it is.”

“She doesn’t much care for the Senator from Wisconsin,” the colonel said. “What do you think of him?”

“Joe McCarthy? He’s a menace.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like being told what I should be frightened of. I like to find out for myself. Maybe I won’t be frightened. Maybe I’ll like it.”

“Such as a hot stove?”

“That’s an oversimplification, Colonel.”

“Hah,” his daughter said to him and smiled at me. She had a fine smile that came quickly and went slowly, leaving a warm afterglow. I thought that she was less than beautiful, but more than pretty. Appealing perhaps. It may have been her grace and poise and grooming, but that was only part of it. She looked as if she might have been made yesterday, still too new to be shopworn, and incredibly fresh and clean — not clean as the antonym of dirty, but in the sense that a meadowlark’s call at dawn is clean — if you’ve ever been up that early. Her gray eyes as she looked at the colonel seemed solemnly mischievous and her mobile face was seldom in repose. She used only a touch of color on her full, sensitive mouth, and somehow I forgave her for being able to wrinkle her nose like a rabbit.

“My daughter is hopelessly partisan,” the colonel said.

“They sometimes make the best cooks.”

“What does that mean?” she said.

“I’m not sure.”

“Probably that he’s hungry.”

“You’ll eat in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Besides, if I left you’d lose half your audience.”

Colonel Gay leaned back in the sofa and looked at me quizzically. His wide shoulders made him resemble an inverted isosceles triangle that was loosely hinged in two places.

“What do you intend to do?” he said. “You’re surely not going to make a career of working for that charming idiot in PIO?”

“I’m going to school in the fall.”

“Where?”

“Columbia, if I can get in.”

“To study what?”

“Oriental languages probably.”

“Then?”

“Teach.”

“That takes a Ph.D., unless you like to starve.”

“I have time.”

“How many prep schools have you gone to since 1942?”

I shrugged. “Eight or nine.”

“What happened?”

“I thought you’d been checking.”

“Let’s say that I’m confirming my research.”

“I got kicked out of most of them. Sometimes for gambling. Some times for drinking. Sometimes for what they called ‘incorrigibility’ and sometimes I just walked away.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“I learned how to read and write and I lost an Australian accent.”

“Your parents are dead, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Were they all private schools?”

“All but the last.”

“Who paid your tuition?”

“There was a revocable trust fund that my guardian set up.”

“Gorman Smalldane?”

“Yes.”

“Is he really your guardian?”

“He is whenever I need one.”

“And the rest of the time?”

“I’m on my own. Sometimes I’ve stayed with Gorman in New York. Once I joined him in Paris for a summer after the war. Once in Athens.”

“Do you speak Greek?”

“No.”

“How many languages?”

“It used to be six or seven. But it’s less now. My Chinese, French, and German are still good. I’ve forgotten the rest.”

“Those were all ‘progressive’ schools that you attended. I use progressive in quotes.”

“Their catalogues didn’t.”

“Where did you finally get your high school diploma?”

“Reno. Smalldane fixed it up, I dealt blackjack there the summer I was sixteen. He fixed that up, too. Then I took an equivalency test and they put me in the twelfth grade. I finished the year and they gave me a diploma. Gorman flew out from New York for the graduation exercises but we got too drunk to attend.”

“Then?”

“Then I went to Montana.”

“To school?”

“For a year.”

“Where?”

“The University of Montana. At Missoula.”

“Why there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I was born in Montana.”

“But you left when you were an infant.”

“When I was nine months old.”

“And went to Shanghai.”

“Where my father got killed by dumb pilot error and where I grew up in a whorehouse. Why all the questions, Colonel, when you know the answers?”

Gay studied me for several seconds as if he were trying to decide something. “Who were your friends when you were growing up? Or playmates, if they’re still called that.”

“In Shanghai?”

“Yes.”

“Whores mostly.”

“No children?”

“A few street Arabs.”

“And back in the States?”

I shook my head. “No childhood chums, Colonel.”

“Not even your classmates?”

“They were children.”

“What were you?”

“I don’t know. I just wasn’t a child anymore.”

“Were you always treated as an adult?”

“In Shanghai?”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t always treated as an adult, but I was talked to as one. There’s a difference.”

“And when you got back to the States they tried to talk to you as a child.”

“Something like that, but it was too late.”

“What about Smalldane?”

I smiled. “I think I’ve always been a contemporary to him. A fellow orphan. Which says something either about his childishness or my maturity.”

The colonel nodded as if satisfied on some important point. He turned to his daughter and smiled. “I think Mr. Dye and I could have another beer without endangering our poker skill.”

She rose, started toward the kitchen, and then stopped. “How long do you want it to take, five minutes or ten?”

“Five will do nicely,” Gay said.

When she had gone he put his head back on the couch and looked at the ceiling. “You’re set on Columbia?”

“I like New York,” I said.

“Sometimes I’m in a position to recommend full scholarships for deserving students. Not to Columbia unfortunately.”

“Where?”

He named a small, rich private school on the Eastern seaboard, not too far from Washington. “Interested?”

“Go on.”

“It has an excellent reputation in your field — Oriental studies and languages. Even Joe McCarthy thinks so. He’s having the chairman of the department hauled up before his committee next week.”

“Why?”

“He thinks the man caused us to lose China.”

“We never had it to lose,” I said. “Nobody did.”

“This guy can take care of himself,” Gay said. “We’re not worried about him. But it’s going to destroy some others and we’re going to have to replace them. And then we’ll have to replace our replacements.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I didn’t expect you to.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“I want to find out if you’re interested in a scholarship. It pays four hundred a month plus all fees and tuition. You can double the four hundred with poker.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m interested, but I never knew the army to be so generous.”

“I didn’t mention the army.”

“I’ll guess again. State Department.”

“Hardly.”

“That leaves the CIA.”

“They’re even more frightened of McCarthy than State. They’ve already started dumping and he hasn’t even mentioned them yet.”

“Just spell it out, Colonel.”

He lit a cigarette and leaned back on the couch so that he had a good view of the ceiling again. “It hasn’t got a name really, so we’ll just call it Section Two. Okay?”

“What’s Section One?”

“There isn’t any.”

“I see.”

“The Section is going to lose some of its best people as replacements for those who McCarthy will get through his witch-hunt. We can’t do anything about the witch-hunt. It’s got to run its course. All we can do is fill in the gaps that it creates at State and CIA with our own talent. In the meantime, we have to recruit new blood that four, five, or even ten years from now will start recruiting its own replacements. Do you follow me?”

“It’s perfectly clear,” I said. “The scholarship has strings.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

“You mean I can collect the four hundred dollars a month, pick up a degree, and then wave goodbye?”

“Or two degrees. Even three.”

“And no strings?”

“None,” he said.

“How much can you tell me about it?”

“Section Two?”

“Yes.”

“Not much. It doesn’t exist on paper.”

“And it’s not CIA?”

“Definitely not. It’s what you might call an intelligence bank. When the others run short, they borrow from us.”

“Borrow what?”

“Whatever they need.”

“When was it set up?”

“In 1945 when we knew China was going.”

“You didn’t anticipate McCarthy eight years ago.”

“No,” he said. “We anticipated the reaction, not the person. Some would be blamed and that we could predict fairly well. The individuals, I mean. Somebody, of course, would have to do the blaming and it turned out to be Joe McCarthy. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been another. We knew that valuable men would be lost and that they’d have to have replacements. Pure ones, if you follow me.”

“I do.”

“So we started recruiting them.”

“And now that you’re lending them out, you need some more.”

“We always need more,” he said.

“Just for China?”

He shook his head. “For everywhere.”

“You’re more than a central bank then?”

“Let’s just say that we have branch offices in a lot of places.”

“And what do they do?”

“Whatever’s necessary.”

“Who runs it?”

“Section Two?”

“Yes.”

“I do.”

“Then you’re not in the army?”

“I’m on detached service.”

“Those two generals we played poker with last week seemed to know what you do.”

“No,” the colonel said. “They think I’m CIA. I don’t discourage it.”

“You’re telling me a lot.”

“Not really.”

“All right,” I said. “What do I have to do?”

“Nothing. You’ll get a letter of acceptance from the university next week.”

“And that’s all there is to it?”

“That’s all. Your check will come every month from a foundation. When you’ve decided that you’ve had enough school, somebody’ll be around to see you.”

“But not until then?” I said.

“No. Anything else?”

“I’d be a fool to say no.”

The colonel looked at me thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “You would be, wouldn’t you? But if you were a fool, you’d never have been asked.”

Chapter 20

Beverly Gay and I were married that September in the living room of Major and Mrs. Albert Schiller. Colonel Gay reluctantly gave the bride away and Gorman Smalldane flew in from New York to be best man and to give his legal consent as my guardian. I was still under twenty-one and in Texas the man then had to be of age before he could marry without consent. The woman had to be eighteen. If they had consent, the man could be sixteen, the girl fourteen. They may have changed the law by now, but I doubt it.

I got married because of the usual reason: I was in love with a girl who loved me. The colonel had been a stickler for form. “Goddamn it, Dye, you’re going to have to ask for her hand. You’re going to have to convince me. She’s the only daughter I’ve got and by Jesus Christ you’re going to play by the book.”

“My prospects are excellent,” I said.

“I know what your prospects are.”

“My income is assured for the next several years.”

“I know what your income will be down to a dime.”

“What about dowry?” I said.

The colonel rose and began to pace the living room that was furnished with the junk of all the world. “I had it all figured out,” he said, as if to himself. “Three months with Beverly in San Antonio while I got rid of the bug and then back to work, and you turned up.” He spun around. “I’m not sure I want you as a son-in-law.”

“I’m not sure that I give a damn what you want.”

“It could hurt your career.”

“Marrying the boss’s daughter? It’s the well-known path to success.”

“You’re both too young,” he said, paused, and then smoothed his gray hair back with a thin, hard hand. “No. That’s not right either. You re not too young. You’re too old for her. It’s like marrying her off to the town rake.” He turned toward me quickly. “How many girls have you laid?”

“How should I know?” I said. “I never kept score. Did you?”

He ignored the question and paced some more. It was the only time I ever saw him even slightly agitated. He whirled once more and aimed his right forefinger at me like a district attorney who’s long on style and short on evidence. “Goddamn it, do you love her?”

“Do you expect me to say no?”

Gay resumed his pacing for a while and then stopped and faced me again. He stood quite still and looked at me carefully, as if he hoped that what he saw wasn’t as unsavory as it seemed. When he spoke, his tone was low, soft, and controlled. It sounded almost dangerous. It may have been. “Something might happen to me,” he said. “If it does, take care of her. I mean good care. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“If something happens to me and you’re in Section Two by then, get out. If you’re not yet in, don’t go. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

He raised his voice slightly and nodded toward the dining room. “She’s in there, you know. Ear to the keyhole.”

“There’s no door,” I said.

“It didn’t go right,” he said. “I was lousy as the forbidding father.”

Beverly came in from the dining room. “I thought you were fine.”

The colonel shook his head. “No, you didn’t,” he said. “It should have been a Sunday afternoon. All bad domestic scenes should take place on Sunday afternoon, the worst time of the week. Agreements for divorce. Accusations of infidelity. If a husband’s going to beat his wife, he should do it on Sunday afternoon.” He turned toward me. “You weren’t right either. You should have been more nervous.”

“What the hell for?” I said.

“Because, goddamn it, I deserve my slice of American banality. I’ve never had my share.”

“It doesn’t happen that way,” Beverly said.

“I know it doesn’t happen that way,” the colonel said. “I know that as well as I know that you’re not a virgin and probably haven’t been one since two weeks after you met the cocksman here.”

“Three weeks,” she said. “I held out.”

“Three weeks. I’d just like something tried and trite, something banal in my own borrowed living room. Something that looks like it stepped out of an ad or MGM. I’m thirsty for the insipid.”

“How about a martini?” Beverly said.

“If he wants something insipid, champagne would be better,” I said.

The colonel sighed. “We don’t have any champagne, we’ve run out of vermouth, and it’s not even Sunday afternoon.” He grinned at Beverly. “What the hell,” he said. “Just make it a hooker of gin.”

It was a small, if not quiet wedding. Ruby cried throughout and Major Schiller pinched Beverly three times, once during the ceremony, which caused her to jump and say “ouch” when she should have been saying, “I, Beverly.” The major got a little drunk and played the piano and sang. The colonel looked morose throughout while his daughter looked as if she were about to succumb to a fit of giggles. The groom was hungover and testy. Smalldane, twenty or thirty pounds heavier than when I’d seen him last, performed as best man with more gusto than was really necessary, but he seemed to enjoy his role. A fat army chaplain, a major who claimed to be a Baptist, mumbled the ceremony so that I had to ask him “What?” twice. Afterwards, he drank eleven glasses of champagne and wept a little, perhaps for his own sins as well as for ours.

When it was over the colonel dragged me into the kitchen and produced two items. The first was a set of keys to a new Chevrolet. He did it brusquely, as if embarrassed by his own generosity, or perhaps because he thought he was playing it a shade close to the hearty father. He made up for that with the second item, a .38 Colt automatic. “Keep it handy,” he said.

“You mean carry it?”

A pained look spread across his face. It was the look of a man who has just discovered that he has a lout for a son-in-law. “Just handy. Around the house.”

I nodded and because I didn’t know what to do with it, I shoved it into a hip pocket and later transferred it to a suitcase.

Gorman Smalldane was equally furtive. He also chose the kitchen, which seemed to be the favorite clandestine meeting place for wedding guests. He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. “Your wedding present,” he said.

I thanked him and started to put it into a pocket.

“Go ahead, open it,” he said.

I opened it and found a bundle of what seemed to be shares of common stock.

“Two thousand shares,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Smalldane Communications, Incorporated. We just went public. First PR outfit in the country to do it. Maybe in the world.”

“How’s it look?” I said.

“Well, it’s not on the big board, of course; it’s still over-the-counter, but it started at two and it’s only slid to one and a quarter.”

“Encouraging, huh?” I said.

“It’s the big league, kid. By this time next year, I’ll be rich and so will you if you hang on to it. We’ve got offices opening next month in Paris, London and Rome. They’re just desks with telephones now, but they’ll look real fine on the letterhead.”

“Business is good?” I said.

“Terrific. Everyone who’s made more than a million needs a public relations man to get rid of the guilt that the psychiatrists can’t root out. If they see something nice about themselves printed in a newspaper or magazine, they really believe it must be true and their consciences are eased. The potential is unlimited.”

“Thanks for the shares, Gorm.”

“Just hang on to them. They’ll hit fifty before you know it.”

He paused then and looked over my shoulder at something that seemed to be far away. “When’s the last time you heard from Kate?”

“Couple of weeks ago,” I said. “She wrote from Hong Kong, giving me some advice about marriage.”

“She’s dead.”

Tante Katerine was too alive to be dead, of course, and it didn’t register because Smalldane’s words had tripped the switch that brought the automatic denier into operation. It worked for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds before it sputtered to a stop. There must be something else to say besides “no” when you learn of death. I supposed I could have asked “how” or “when,” but instead I denied it, as if the denial would prevent me from having to feel anything, at least for a few more seconds.

“I got a cable yesterday. It was a heart attack. I wasn’t sure that I should tell you. It’s not a very good day for it.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t, but it’s all right — I mean that you told me.”

“I knew you’d want to know.”

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t really all that old,” he said, as if to himself.

“No, not that way, she wasn’t. I suppose I should ask if there’s anything I can do.”

“Nothing,” he said. “What the hell could you do? It’s just over. She’s dead.”

“Okay, Gorman,” I said. “She’s dead. There’s nothing either of us can do.”

“Well, hell — there should be something.”

“But there isn’t.”

Smalldane shook his head. “You know,” he said, “she was something different — really different. Or the times were.”

“Both probably,” I said.

“I paid her back that eleven thousand dollars, you know?”

“I know.”

“Kate’d tell you to hang on to that stock, kid,” he said.

“I’ll take her advice.” But I didn’t. I sold it two years later when it hit twelve and a quarter. It went to sixty-one and a half before it split two for one. The last time I looked, Smalldane Communications, Inc., was hovering somewhere around eighty-three or eighty-four on the American Stock Exchange.

Beverly and I enjoyed each other for the next four years. She turned out to be the one totally unselfish person that I’ve ever known and I suppose that I took what she had to offer greedily, unable to get enough, fearful that the supply would run out before I was full. It was her love that I took, of course, and in the taking finally discovered that it was unrationed and inexhaustible and that I could spare some myself. It required a year or so before I learned what others had known for years and when I did we became impossibly close.

We lived in a small, frame house that I kept threatening to paint a flat black. It was on the edge of the campus, where a portion of what has been described as the silent generation was enrolled. I majored in Oriental languages and history; Beverly studied anthropology which, she once said, was the polite way of expressing one’s concern for humanity.

Sometimes we would go into Baltimore on weekends, or down to Washington, or up to New York where we could stay free with Smalldane who was becoming impossibly rich as the public relations dodge acquired new tones of respectability. He spent his money, as always, on women, some of whom he even married for as long as a year or so.

The check from the foundation arrived on the first of the month along with the one from the Veterans’ Administration, by courtesy of the G.I. Bill of Rights that had been extended to the survivors of Korea by a grateful Congress. The foundation check was my only reminder of the Section Two scholarship. The colonel, working most of the time in Washington, would sometimes disappear for a year or six months and then pop up unexpectedly with the same question:

“He still beating you, Bev?”

As a joke, his infrequent visits made it wear well enough. He never mentioned Section Two and neither did I.

In May of 1957, two weeks before she was to be graduated and I was to be awarded my Master’s degree, Beverly announced that she was pregnant. She did so proudly, as if it were something she had done quite alone in defiance of overwhelming odds.

“Well, we tried hard enough,” I said.

“But not often enough.”

“Any more often and I’d have had to send in a substitute.”

“I was going to suggest it once or twice, but—”

“My tender feelings?”

“You are awfully sensitive.”

“A weakness.”

“Let’s celebrate,” she said, her gray eyes dancing a little — or even a lot. “Let’s celebrate with louder wine and stronger music.”

“I think you’ve got it backwards.”

“It sounds better.”

“Where?” I said.

“Where what?”

“Where shall we celebrate?”

She glanced around the room as if seeking something that would help her to decide. Then she looked at me and winked. No nice girl knows how to wink like that. “In bed,” she said, “where else?”

We were on our third glass of wine with something by Miles Davis on the record player when the phone rang. For some reason I once liked to answer the phone naked. I don’t know why, but I did. I don’t anymore. It was a station-to-station call before the time of direct dialing and it was the colonel. He sounded bad and his voice was a harsh, bitter croak.

“Get her out, Dye,” he said.

“Where?” I said because I had to make some response.

“That friend of yours — Smalldane. Get her out to him now — they’re—” The phone went dead. I hung it up and said to Beverly, “Get dressed.”

“Why should I—”

“Just get dressed. It was your old man.”

I fumbled through the drawer of the small table that stood next to the bed. I was looking for the .38 automatic that the colonel had given me. I found it, and then I found something to load it with. I had two rounds in the clip when they came in. There was nothing to keep them out. It had been warm and we’d left the front door open with the screen door latched. We did that when it was warm. The screen door latch was only a hook and eye and that hadn’t bothered them.

I held the clip in my left hand and the automatic in my right when they came in the bedroom. They came in fast and both wore dark suits and Halloween masks and revolvers. One was several inches shorter than the other. The shorter one waved his revolver at me and then waved it again before I got the idea. I put the automatic and the magazine on the table beside the bed. Beverly pulled the sheet up over her breasts, up to her neck. She did it slowly. The shorter one held his revolver on me and then nodded at the taller one who slipped his revolver into a coat pocket. He started undoing his buckle and the buttons on his fly. Buttons instead of a zipper. He dropped his pants and shorts, blue-and-white striped ones. Then he ripped the sheet away from Beverly. I noticed that he wasn’t circumsized. I started to rise, but the shorter one prodded me back with his revolver and used it to turn my head so that I had to watch.

I watched for fifteen minutes or so while the taller one grunted and sweated and clutched and grabbed. When he tired of the front he turned her over and tried it from the rear. When he tired of that he used her mouth. At first, she said, “Don’t” several times, but he slapped her across the mouth and after that she didn’t say anything. She lay perfectly still and let him rape her. I got to watch her disintegrate, to watch the fear in her eyes grow until it melted away into a kind of resigned madness.

When he was through, he stood up, shook it a couple of times as if he had just taken a pee, and then pulled his trousers back up. He took the revolver from his pocket and turned his head slightly to look at the shorter man whose gun was still pressed against my ear. The shorter man must have nodded because the taller one shot Beverly twice. Once in the right cheek and once through the forehead. It slammed her up against the headboard of the bed. The taller of the two turned his revolver on me. I waited, but the only thing that happened was that the shorter man removed the barrel of his revolver from my ear. He went to the foot of the bed so that I could watch him shoot Beverly in the right breast and stomach. He didn’t have to do that, of course. She was already dead. Still wearing their Halloween masks, they backed out of the room. I watched them leave. Neither had made a sound except the taller one, the one who had raped Beverly without taking off his mask. Or shoes. He had grunted a few times. They backed into the living room, and a moment later I heard the screen door slam. Another moment later I heard a car speed away. I looked at what had been Beverly and clinically noted how the right side of her face had been torn away and how white the bone was. There also seemed to be a vast amount of blood.

Carmingler arrived at four that morning after the police had gone and after they had taken Beverly away. I don’t remember much about that except the confusion and the noise. Carmingler came in without knocking and I didn’t look up until he cleared his throat. He told me who he was and I noticed that he carried a copy of the Washington Post.

He was younger then, of course, only twenty-nine or thirty, but he already wore a vest and diddled with his Phi Beta Kappa key. He also smoked a pipe, but was polite enough then to ask if he could light it. He never asked me that again.

“The colonel’s dead,” he said after he got his pipe going. He never seemed to say anything important until he had lighted the pipe.

I said, “Oh.” I wasn’t really interested.

“The story’s here in the Post,” he said and tapped the newspaper.

I said nothing.

“The police are calling it suicide. They say he shot himself because of what happened to Beverly.”

“But it wasn’t,” I said, “and he didn’t.”

“No. We got the police to say that and it took a little doing. Somebody shot him, of course. They tried to get to him through his daughter. They must have told him what was going to happen to her; probably had it timed down to the minute. He was supposed to break. They even let him make that phone call to you so that he could be sure she was home.”

“He just sat there and let it happen,” I said.

“He couldn’t do anything else. There was always the chance that they were bluffing. When it didn’t work, they gave up and killed him. Not much point to that, really.”

“What about my wife, goddamn it?” I yelled. “What was the point there?”

Carmingler was unruffled. “He might have cracked when they were halfway through. If so, he’d have to talk to her — she’d have to tell him what — well, that’s how it happened.”

“Who was it?” I said.

“The colonel had been in the East.”

“East what?” I said. “East Baltimore?”

“Europe,” Carmingler said. “Someone from there probably, but we’re not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

“No.”

“You want a drink?”

“No.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“We have to know about you.”

“What about me?”

“If you’re coming with Section Two?”

I stared at him. “Jesus, you’re a cold-blooded shit.”

He shrugged. “Not really. We just have to know.”

“Why?”

Carmingler made a vague gesture with his pipe. “With the colonel dead, there’ll be a shake-up. Top to bottom. The Section’s a small, specialized organization. He was counting on you heavily. We want to know if we can.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “He never counted on anyone in his life except his daughter and she’s dead.”

“Have it your way,” Carmingler said. “But are you in or out? We have to know.”

I looked around the room and at the things in it that had once been ours. When they were ours they had looked fine. Now that they were mine they just looked old and worn and used up. I examined the carpet on the floor and noted how shabby it looked. I didn’t think about my answer; I just said it. “I’m in.”

“Good,” Carmingler said. “We’ll be in touch.”

I looked up as he rose, moved to the door, and paused. “By the way,” he said, gesturing toward the chair he’d sat in. “I left the Post in case you’d like to read about the colonel.”

“You’re too kind,” I said and kept some of what I felt out of my voice.

“Not at all,” he said.

I didn’t attend the colonel’s funeral, but Carmingler said that a lot of people were there. I wondered who they were. Beverly didn’t have much of a funeral. She’d once said that she didn’t want one, so it was just a hearse and a limousine from the funeral home that carried Smalldane, Carmingler and me to the cemetery. There was no graveside service either. Some men in blue overalls lowered the casket and I stood there watching for a time, but it seemed to take them forever, so I turned away and walked back to the limousine. Carmingler was still there. He hadn’t approached the grave.

The three of us rode back to town in silence. Carmingler got out first. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, and I said all right.

Smalldane didn’t look at him but stared through a window instead. Finally, he said, “Fuck it.” I nodded and he seemed to understand that I knew what he meant. I don’t think that I ever did introduce him to Carmingler.