Yellow-Dog Contract

Chapter Seventeen

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

“It all checks out,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I was listening.”

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

“Chicago?”

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

“You mean the papers?”

“Yeah, the papers or maybe TV.”

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

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

“To him and the CIA.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’d already quit.”

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

I nodded. “Joe Dawkins. From Kilgore.”

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

“You mean after he dumped Chaddi Jugo?”

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

“I always liked that place.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Plus the Newspaper Guild,” Murfin said.

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

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

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

“What happened to him?” Murfin said.

“He got whipped.”

“I mean after the election.”

“I’m not sure.”

“You know something?” Murfin said.

“What?”

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

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

“How?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not the Democrats,” I said.

“Not fuckin’ likely. If they don’t carry the big cities, then they don’t carry the big states, and if they don’t carry New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and at least a couple of others, they’re fuckin’ dead come November second, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

Murfin wagged his head from side to side in sheer admiration. “It’s sure a sweetheart, isn’t it?” Suddenly something seemed to bother him because his mouth went down at the corners and he wrinkled his forehead. “What I can’t figure out is who the hell’s steering it? It’s not Gallops all by himself. He couldn’t put something like this together. Not Warner B-for-Baxter Gallops.”

“No,” I said, “he probably couldn’t.”

“And it sure as shit couldn’t be the fuckin’ CIA again.”

I shook my head. “No, it’d be a little rich even for them, especially just now.”

“And the Republicans wouldn’t wanta take a chance on something like this, not with Watergate still hanging over them.”

“I don’t think they’d do it even if they knew how, although if it works, they’re going to be the principal beneficiaries.”

“You got any ideas?” Murfin said.

“I don’t, but I think I know somebody who might.”

“Who?”

“My Uncle Slick.”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“I’m not sure that he has anything to do with it, but he might have some interesting notions. Especially since dumping Chaddi Jugo was all his idea to begin with.”