Operation Bamboozle Read online

  OPERATION BAMBOOZLE

  OPERATION BAMBOOZLE

  Derek Robinson

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  © 2010 by Derek Robinson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to [email protected].

  ISBN 978-1-62365-328-6

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  Novels by Derek Robinson

  THE R.F.C. TRILOGY*

  Goshawk Squadron

  Hornet’s Sting

  War Story

  THE R.A.F. QUARTET*

  Piece of Cake

  A Good Clean Fight

  Damned Good Show

  Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

  THE DOUBLE AGENT QUARTET**

  The Eldorado Network

  Artillery of Lies

  Red Rag Blues

  Operation Bamboozle

  OTHER FICTION

  Kentucky Blues

  Kramer’s War

  Rotten with Honour

  NON-FICTION

  Invasion 1940

  *Available from MacLehose Press from 2012/13

  **To be published in ebook by MacLehose Press

  To Juan Pujol

  Codenamed “Garbo” by MI5, arguably the best double agent of

  World War Two, whose achievements led me to write

  “The Eldorado Network” and its sequels, including this book.

  CONTENTS

  Rapid Exit

  Enough Dead Cowboys To Fill Boot Hill

  Justified Subterfuge

  Two Punks On Ice

  Californication

  Reckless Endangerment

  Tap-Dancing Through the Calendar

  The Goddamn B Strain

  The Tang of Battle

  Marriage Ain’t Like Buyin’ Shoes

  Bran for Brains

  Wet Enough for Sharks

  Think Caviare

  Friendly Fire

  Shots Fired

  The Bloody Remains

  Author’s Note

  RAPID EXIT

  1

  For a man who had been hauled out of Lake Michigan in 1949, headless, his legs and arms broken, and stabbed in the heart with a red ballpoint pen, Frankie Blanco was in pretty good shape in 1953.

  Identification hadn’t been easy. Forget dental records. Fingerprints had gone too: eaten by the fishes, maybe. But one helpful mark survived. On the left buttock was a faint tattoo of a snarling dragon.

  As a kid, Frankie Blanco had run with a Chicago street gang, the Flames, and that was their badge. The gang had been small and unlucky, and soon Blanco graduated to more ambitious, better organized crime, a wise move because the other Flames all died young.

  Chicago PD fished the body out of the lake and showed pictures of the faint tattoo to Blanco’s known associates, including ex-girlfriends, a masseur, and a steam-bath attendant. All agreed; this was Frankie, last of the Flames. That was good enough for the coroner and he released the body. It was interred in St. Luke’s graveyard (then the last restingplace of choice for the Mob in Chicago’s South Side), the headstone bearing the simple epitaph: Not Forgotten.

  This begged the question, remembered for what? Frankie Blanco was a fat and happy whacker. Tell him, whack this guy, the guy got whacked. Hobbies were simple: comic books and hamburgers. So he fell in the lake, so his head got lost, maybe chewed off by the screw of a passing freighter. So Frankie got screwed. What’s not to forget?

  After a decent interval—two, three days—the word began to circulate. Blanco sang. He had talked to the Reds, shared his memories of multiple homicides committed by numerous colleagues. Names, dates, places, who ate what at which restaurant afterward. He sang like a canary. Arrests began. Somebody put two and two together and made Blanco; and soon Blanco made a hole in Lake Michigan. Nobody claimed credit, and nobody asked. The job was pro bono publico. And that red ballpen through the heart? Suicide. A guy killed by his own words.

  In fact the body was that of a drunk who reckoned his pickup could beat a freight train to a crossing and lost by a length. Nobody claimed the remains, and the FBI took them. Similar height and build to Frankie. The locomotive had clipped the head off when the drunk went through the windscreen, so that was a bonus. The Bureau hired a tattoo artist who cut the strength of his ink and made a faded dragon on the left cheek, twenty-five dollars including tax. Then, into the lake, wearing nothing but clean underwear.

  While the dragon was growing soft and wrinkled, the FBI smoothly relocated the real Frankie Blanco to the little town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and renamed him Floyd Boyd. He hated his new name. “Sounds like a bit part in a bum Western,” he said to the Agent who escorted him.

  “That’s good. That’s exactly what you are, Floyd. Play dumb, stay sober, blend in.”

  Frankie walked to the window and creaking floorboards walked with him. A small dust-devil tried to spin down the street but the effort was too great and it collapsed. “I do the right thing by you Feds, and you do this to me,” he said. “They got the name wrong, it ain’t Truth or Consequences. Truth and Consequences is what it is.”

  “That’s very profound, Floyd,” the agent said. He gave him a card. “Your nearest FBI office. Don’t call us and we won’t call you.”

  He never liked Floyd Boyd but he came to accept it, like some stupid nickname. He had a new Social Security number, arranged by the Bureau, which also paid a monthly living allowance. His bank statements identified it as US Army Disability Award. That explained the lack of a regular job. When a genuine war veteran showed signs of wanting to compare wounds, Blanco said: “Ain’t somethin’ I care to remember. No weddin’ bells for me, know what I mean?” That closed the conversation.

  He grew a shaggy cavalry mustache, and it changed the shape of his face: good. Then it turned silver-gray: even better. He experimented by shaving the top of his head and brushing the sides to make them fluffy, and startled himself. Now he looked like his dead uncle Eddie who drove his car over the side of the Grand Canyon, nobody knew why. For a while, Blanco wore a Panama to cover the damage, until he lost the hat or someone stole it and he realized he didn’t care. On impulse, he bought a corncob pipe. Never smoked the thing, only kept it in the corner of his mouth. Kids called him Popeye, and he still didn’t care. He was moving further and further from Chicago. Once, indoors, he tried wearing an eyepatch and knew immediately it was too much. He wanted to be nobody, not somebody. Floyd Boyd, part of the furniture. He took an occasional part-time job, helping out when the regular guy was sick or on vacation. That’s
how he came to be pumping gas at the Texaco station in 1953, seeing New Jersey plates on a Chrysler sedan and thinking: What in the name of sweet Jesus brings a Jersey car here? and finding only one answer. The Mob never quit.

  2

  Frankie Blanco was both right and wrong. The Chrysler with the New Jersey plates was Mafia but the occupants were not.

  Both were in their early thirties. He was Luis Cabrillo. Born in Spain, but since then he had acquired an English patina to which he was now adding American bravura with extra flim-flam on the baloney. He liked words. She was Julie Conroy. She was a New Yorker with the kind of looks that make middle-aged accountants misplace the decimal point. Also she could detect bullshit at fifty paces on a foggy night, a useful talent for anyone living with Luis.

  They had left Washington DC suddenly and hurriedly before the sky fell in, and driven west, using country roads. They reached the middle of Virginia when hunger took command and they stopped at a diner.

  The place was busy. Customers were expected to share tables. Luis and Julie, enjoying their ham and eggs and hashed brown, nodded when two young men asked if they might join them. They were casually dressed: one in a sports jacket and chinos, no tie; the other in a tired-looking brown corduroy suit, the tie hanging loose. Cleanshaven, although each could do with a haircut. Graduate students, maybe, doing their PhDs. But that wasn’t likely, deep in rural Virginia, and it became less so when the corduroy suit said politely: “Miss Conroy? Mr. Cabrillo?”

  “A wild rumor,” Julie said. “Put it another way: who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Todd Rivers and this is Martin Jones.” He spoke softly. “We’re reporters from the Washington Globe.” More softly still. “Doing a story on Senator Joe McCarthy. Thought you might help.”

  “Digging up scandal,” Luis said. “A shoddy trade. I wouldn’t sully my hands with it.”

  “We’re not looking for scandal,” Rivers said. “It’s the Russian embassy link we need to confirm.”

  Julie pushed her food aside. “Don’t use that sort of language in public,” she said. “You’ll get us all blacklisted.”

  “There is a Russian embassy link, then,” Jones said, gently. Nobody was blaming anyone. They just wanted the facts.

  “Does this go back to the Double Cross Department?” Rivers asked. “That name keeps coming up.”

  Luis carefully placed his knife and fork together. “Julie … you rip your clothes off and seduce these two nice young men on the table, while I make a run for it.”

  “We can’t talk in here,” she told them. “Let’s go outside.”

  They sat on a log. The reporters stood and opened their notebooks. “Suppose we tell you what we’ve learned,” Rivers said. “Which is that during the war you both worked in London for a department of the British Secret Service called Double Cross. Mr. Cabrillo was a double agent sending reports to the German military, all part of the Allied deception plans, very highpowered secret stuff. Miss Conroy was on that team.”

  “I corrected his spelling,” she said. “The poor guy’s Spanish. They put the exclamation point first and last. It’s a waste of excitement.”

  “The war ends, the good guys win,” Rivers said. “Miss Conroy, you return to New York, and Mr. Cabrillo, you move to Venezuela. Correct?”

  “We all signed the Official Secrets Act,” Luis said. “You can’t print any of that. The Secret Service will hunt you down like mad dogs.”

  “This is just background,” Jones assured him. “It doesn’t really matter.”

  “I was awarded the British Empire Medal and the Iron Cross. You can’t tell me it didn’t matter.”

  “Can we quote you on that?”

  “No,” Julie said. “Listen: we worked in counter intelligence. Leave it at that. Better yet, forget it. It’s ancient history. Who cares? I can’t believe the Globe is so short of news.”

  “Yes, you’re right, of course,” Rivers said. He turned a page. “Moving on … Earlier this year Mr. Cabrillo left Venezuela and teamed up with Miss Conroy again. In New York.”

  “I was broke, he was broke,” she said. “That’s a crime in the USA. There’s your story. Page 17 in the Metro Section.”

  “Our information is the FBI took an interest. Opened a file on you.”

  “Files on both of you,” Jones said.

  “Because I was reading War and Peace on the Subway. And Luis wore red pajamas. Obviously the FBI had files on us. Jesus! Where do you guys get all this stuff?”

  “That shaggy haircut of yours …” Luis pointed at Jones. “Rather UnAmerican, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Smacks of the Bolsheviks,” Julie agreed. “Fetch a cop. Call the Marines. God Save America.”

  The reporters were smiling. “You’ve got a point,” Jones said. “But the New York angle we’re looking at is the Mafia. Seems you made the acquaintance of Jerome Fantoni, who is a major player in that game.”

  “Yeah.” Julie stood up and stretched. “His nephew dated me a couple of times. Nothing serious. His daughter Stevie had the hots for Luis, but Stevie had the hots for anyone in pants who would lie still for three minutes. Fantoni asked Luis and me to dinner. We ate, we left.”

  “He gave you a Chrysler.”

  “He loaned us a Chrysler,” Luis said. He pointed. “That’s it, over there.”

  “Which brings us to Washington DC,” Rivers said. “In the Chrysler.” He was flicking through his notebook. “You go to work for Senator Joe McCarthy. That’s hard fact, isn’t it? You’ve been photographed standing alongside the senator.”

  “On TV too,” Jones said.

  “I was never on salary,” Luis said. “Freelance adviser.”

  “Well, this is where we need to nail down the story,” Rivers said. “For instance, the senator acquired written evidence of Soviet subversion in hitherto unsuspected areas of activity. So our source tells us.”

  “That source wouldn’t be the Washington Globe, would it?” Louis asked. “I seem to remember reading something about it there.”

  “Subversion in the church, the General Electric company, the Idaho potato crop.” Jones was reading from his notes. “Also The US Treasury, the Ohio school system, the San Andreas Fault.” He looked up. “I don’t understand that last one.”

  “McCarthy must be a desperate man,” Julie said. She spread her hands and looked helpless. “That’s what I read in the Globe, anyway. But don’t trust me, I’m blacklisted.”

  “Maybe the senator is running out of treachery,” Rivers said. “And maybe Mr. Cabrillo sold him some fresh treachery, and to prove it’s true he provided genuine documentation, in Russian. Any maybe those documents came from an accomplice working in the Soviet embassy. That’s what we’re hearing.”

  “To quote the senator,” Luis said, “that’s the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of.”

  “It gets better, or maybe worse,” Jones said. “McCarthy subpoenaed your pal Jerome Fantoni on the strength of a dossier you sold McCarthy that proved the Soviets infiltrated and subverted the Mafia. Then you sold Fantoni a different dossier that proved he’d been an undercover FBI agent, inside the Communists, in the Mafia, all the time.”

  “You checked this with the FBI, of course.”

  “They deny it,” Rivers said.

  “Deniability is built into their system.”

  “And you also checked it with McCarthy,” Julie said.

  “He hates the Globe. We’re all Pinko liberals throwing dust in the eyes of good patriotic Americans.”

  “Jerome Fantoni?”

  “Unavailable for comment.”

  “That leaves the Russian embassy.”

  “Out to lunch,” Jones said. “Dos vedanya.”

  Luis got up from the log and put his arms around their shoulders. “You seem like decent, hardworking young chaps. It’s sad to see two promising careers threatened by guesswork about fantasy. Possibly you are the victims of a practical joker. We wish you well. Meanwhile, we must head for Arkansas, where
we hope to help celebrate the hundredth birthday of Miss Conroy’s granny. A big event in Arkansas, but perhaps too small for the Washington Globe.”

  They shook hands. The reporters thanked them and drove away.

  “No story,” Rivers said. “Guilty as hell, but …”

  “Oh, they did it,” Jones said. “You don’t spread bullshit that thick unless you’re hiding something big.”

  “Double agent and con artist. Not much difference between the two, I reckon. But still … Nobody’s willing to go on record. No facts, no story. Damn damn damn.”

  “Miss Conroy was something, huh? What the British call a corker. A corker of a New Yorker. Her picture alone would be worth a four-column spread.”

  “Cabrillo’s a lucky bastard.” Rivers concentrated on the road. With luck, there might be a juicy multiple pile-up ahead, involving a truckload of toilets, a school bus and a blazing gasoline tanker. Anything to make the news editor happy.

  Julie and Luis were sitting in the Chrysler, analyzing the Washington Globe. “They must have followed us from DC,” she said. “Long way to drive.”

  “We deserved more credit for our work in Double Cross,” Luis said. “Young people today, they take the Hitler war for granted.”

  “You sound like my old granny in Arkansas. The one who died in Nebraska five years ago.”

  “And I felt shortchanged about our McCarthy dealings. They obviously haven’t done their homework. Not a word about Stevie. Nothing on The Metal Exchange.”

  Stevie—Jerome Fantoni’s daughter—had shared their apartment in Washington until she fell in love with an Air France pilot and followed him to Paris. The Metal Exchange was Luis’s joke: it was the name he gave his business because he exchanged high-grade Russian paperwork for McCarthy’s cash. But the business had been too good to last. It affected too many covert operators—FBI, CIA, KGB, even the Mafia. Cabrillo’s doings angered people. Eventually he was punished with the same blunt instrument that stopped Al Capone. The tax men raided The Metal Exchange.