Operation Bamboozle Read online

  She took the picture from him. “Who needs time? Ten seconds is all it takes to know it’s good. When it’s not good, you could look for a year and it never gets better.”

  “I had five years to crank out this crap,” Princess said. “It ain’t so hot. I can do better.”

  “Dynamite. Gonna kick this town on its ass.”

  “She was never like this in New York,” Luis told Princess.

  “They put bromides in New York’s water supply,” Princess said. “Seems the mayor wanted folk to stop shootin’ each other so much. Guy in a bar in Dallas told me. Didn’t work, he said.” There was such disillusion in her voice that they let the subject pass. Disillusion and defiance: these seemed to be her dominant moods.

  They had lunch on the terrace. Tortillas and iced coffee.

  “Far be it from me to intrude on your privacy,” Luis began.

  “He talks like that sometimes,” Julie said. “It’s the English starch in his underpants does it.”

  “I’m Spanish,” he said, “Castilian. Old Castilian, actually.”

  “His father was the Duke of Guacamole. Luis got a secret birthmark that proves it. Looks kinda like Di Maggio at bat.”

  “Anyone want that last tortilla?” Five years of living alone in San Carlos had not prepared Princess for verbal ping-pong. She took the tortilla. “You’re gonna ask, what’s my real name. Only got one. This it.”

  “Okay. Now tell us where you’re from.”

  “And talk Comanche,” Luis said.

  “Sheboygan.” Princess wiped her lips. “Pop’s a cop in Sheboygan.”

  Luis looked at Julie. “That’s not Comanche. Swedish, maybe.”

  “Pop’s folks came from the Ukraine,” Princess said. “Name of Shtremakov. Dumb immigration officer couldn’t handle that, wrote down Stream. Mom’s Irish, she liked movies, Westerns specially. Saw an actress play a squaw called Wanderin’ Breeze. I come along, pretty as peaches, headed for Hollywood obviously, she calls me Princess Chucklin’ Stream. One up on Wanderin’ Breeze.”

  “Heard worse ideas,” Julie said.

  “I can’t act. Can’t speak the lines. Mom took it hard. I got out of Sheboygan, frostbite capital of America, came south for the sun. Humdingers needed a drummer. I ain’t no Gene Krupa but I faked it. The band screwed up, I shouted ‘Hey baby! Play that thing’ or some such shit, got us out of trouble.” She nearly smiled. “You know the rest.”

  “Yeah. Well, you got shafted twice. Now this is act three. We’re gonna have a big show. You mind being a Comanche maiden?”

  “Stick a feather up my ass and I’ll be Donald Duck, if it makes a dollar.”

  “I don’t think the fine art market works quite like that,” Luis said.

  “This is Texas, kid,” Julie said. “Nothin’s out, everythin’s in, and that includes feathers.”

  The phone rang. Luis went inside. He came back looking pleased. “What a surprise,” he said. “James de Courcy, of all people. Here. I’m lunching with him.”

  “That J.D.C?” Julie said. “From the Double Cross Department?”

  “The very same. Wartime colleague,” he told Princess. “We all toiled in the cloak-and-dagger factory. Delightful chap.”

  “I used to play tennis with James,” Julie said. “Better than me, but he always lost. He believed a gentleman doesn’t beat a lady. Not done.”

  “We got coffee ice cream in the fridge,” Princess said.

  “What’s he doing here?” Julie asked.

  “Lawyer. Maclean, de Courcy and Gould. He saw my picture in the paper. That real estate thing.”

  “Or there’s fruit salad,” Princess said. “I kinda lean toward both.”

  3

  Agents Prendergast and Fisk had been to Jerome Fantoni’s home before, and they enjoyed visiting again. It was far removed from the petrochemical plants that enrich northern New Jersey with their cocktail from hell.

  They drove through many miles of wooded countryside. They saw deer, pheasant, flights of duck. They slowed, courteously, as they passed men and women on large horses. Finally they cruised up a long drive that made easy curves to left and right, as nature intended, until the highway was out of sight. The house was big and made of small red bricks that had taken a hundred years or more to fade. It was a property built for a gentleman. What was the hurry?

  An elderly man in a white jacket and black pants was on hand to open the car door. Guests were not expected to exert themselves. Fantoni was waiting on the steps by the front door. Two boxer dogs sat, one on each side of him. As the agents approached, the dogs showed their breeding by moving out of the way. Fantoni shook hands, they all exchanged goodwill and went inside.

  Coffee was waiting in a room so big it had two fireplaces and a slight echo. “You serve the best coffee from Boston to Washington, sir,” Prendergast said. “With the best cream.”

  “From my own herd. I know each cow by name.”

  Fisk took his coffee black. “Burnished is the word I’d choose,” he said. “Burnished to perfection.” He had to score quickly or Prendergast would hog the talk.

  They settled into kingsize armchairs. Fisk’s feet were two inches off the floor. The boxers sprawled, but kept a degree of nobility.

  “You have the Chrysler,” Fantoni said. The elderly man faded out of the room and closed the door, gently. It was an elderly door.

  “Probably,” Prendergast said. “It’s certainly a Chrysler wearing your plates, and reportedly being driven by the couple who borrowed it several months ago. Cabrillo and Conroy. We’ve codenamed them Cabroy. They’re living in El Pasco, Texas.”

  Fantoni sighed. He was about fifty, cleanshaven, trim, must have been handsome once but now his face was scored with the tiny fractures of stress. In ten years it would look battered. He was wearing a pewter-gray suit of lightweight cavalry twill, old but timeless.

  “El Paso. The nearest symphony orchestra must be the Houston. Dallas would be marginally closer but I wouldn’t cross the road to hear their string section. I’m told they murdered poor Beethoven’s Ninth recently, just hacked it to bits. El Paso probably prides itself on its marching bands. Not so much a destination as a place of exile. What are Cabroy doing there?”

  “Opening an art gallery,” Fisk said.

  “Such courage.”

  “And living on Cliff Boulevard, which is a blue-chip address in El Paso, we’re told.”

  “Getting back to the car,” Prendergast said. “When it left your possession, and we came out here to discuss the situation, you linked Cabroy with a couple of homicides and a case of arson.”

  “There was a reason for that.” Fantoni stretched his legs and made a steeple of his fingers. His head did not move but his eyes switched from one agent to the other and back again. “It was justified subterfuge.”

  “Subterfuge,” Fisk said. “As in deception?”

  “Bear in mind what I have in common with Cabroy, which is national security. They served in counter intelligence with Britain’s MI5. They needed a car, I gave them a Chrysler, for reasons I had to conceal then and cannot discuss now. Hence the subterfuge.”

  “You’re on record, sir, as claiming to have infiltrated organized crime for the benefit of the FBI,” Fisk said. “Was that part of the subterfuge?”

  “What a shrewd question,” Fantoni said. “It goes to the heart of national security. I can’t answer it, of course.”

  “Maybe your subterfuge was itself a subterfuge,” Prendergast suggested.

  “Can’t answer that.”

  “A lot of counter intelligence is deception,” Fisk said. “Maybe Cabroy posed as MI5 agents. Maybe they subterfuged you first.”

  “Can’t answer that, either. Which makes me forty-love up, doesn’t it? Please abandon this line of questioning. I can see that Agent Fisk is struggling.”

  “If it was a triple subterfuge,” Fisk said, “that means they conned you, then you conned us, then they conned you again, which cancels out the first con, so …
uh …” He looked at the nearest boxer. It cocked its head and looked right back.

  “Mine wasn’t really a full-blooded subterfuge,” Fantoni said. “More of an authorized misdirection.”

  “God help us,” Prendergast said quietly.

  “My apologies. I didn’t mean to confuse you. Shall we take a stroll around the garden? One of the benefits of keeping a few horses is the contribution they made to the roses.”

  They stood, and moved to the door. Prendergast said, evenly: “This has all been horseshit, hasn’t it?”

  Fantoni didn’t stop. “I willingly yield to your greater expertise in that area, Agent Prendergast,” he said, and clicked his fingers. The boxers bustled forward and led the way. Fresh air! You can’t beat it.

  Half an hour later the agents were on the road back to Manhattan. Prendergast said: “The only part of his story I believe is he testified to Joe McCarthy’s witchhunt committee and said what he said he said. The rest is smoke and mirrors.”

  “He certainly made McCarthy look stupid. I mean, people were laughing. I was there, I saw.”

  “Well, McCarthy was stupid. What in God’s name made him think he’d find Reds inside the Mafia? Asinine. Shot himself in both feet.”

  “That’s not how it looked at the time,” Fisk said. “Red subversion aims at our centers of power, which has got to include organized crime. All part of a pattern.”

  “You know your trouble? Your trouble is you’d find a pattern in a field of daisies.” Fisk had an answer to that, based on sound observation of wild-flower growth patterns, but he let it pass. “The only clear pattern in the Mafia is blood spatter,” Prendergast said. “Every leap year the families fall out and shoot each other. It’s nature’s way of thinning the herd so there’s always enough to eat. Plus Mafiosi are second to none in patriotism. They have more flags on the lawn than Arlington National Cemetery. Fantoni wants us to believe he was in bed with the Kremlin and the FBI simultaneously. That’s horseshit. It’s contrary to his religion, American free enterprise, the God-given right of the Mafia to screw everyone they like and whack everyone they don’t. End of story.”

  “Rather like Stalinism,” Fisk said. What the hell. “This is a 50-mile-an-hour zone,” he added.

  “So’s your old man.” But Prendergast took his foot off the gas. “Listen, Fisk. We just played a game with Fantoni. A little game, that’s all it was. Most guys like him wouldn’t take the risk, why should they? But Fantoni, because he’s Princeton, class of ’29, Phi Beta Kappa, thinks he’s smarter than the Bureau. Okay, game’s over. What’s the score? What did he get out of it?”

  “El Paso. The car, Cabroy.”

  “What did we get?”

  “Nothing. He doesn’t care about El Paso.”

  “He went to a lot of trouble to tell us that. A lot of subterfuge. Why bother? Guys like him usually lie to guys like us, they feel more comfortable.” Prendergast poked Fisk in the ribs. Rank has its privileges. “So … if, sometime soon, artillery lights up the night sky over Cliff Boulevard, what might that indicate?”

  “Unfinished business? Between Fantoni and Cabroy?”

  “Or Mexico has invaded Texas. But Mexicans aren’t that stupid. Maybe Fantoni ain’t half as smart as he thinks he is. You stay in touch with the Bureau office out there. Call daily.”

  4

  In 1953 if you were in Europe and you wanted to cross the Atlantic you got on a ship. It took at least five days. You could fly if you wanted, but weather often delayed takeoff, and there might be stops at Iceland and Newfoundland, where a different kind of weather caused more of the same delays, so by the time you reached Idlewild Airport, New York, it felt like five aching days since you left Paris.

  Stevie Fantoni got off the plane. It was raining. At Customs they made her pay import duty on items of French clothing. At Immigration they made her wait while they thumbed through hefty black ledgers, searching for entries under F. They asked her for her date of birth. “It’s in my passport,” she told them. They asked again. “I wasn’t born yesterday,” she snarled. They told her to go wait in an office. An air conditioner throbbed, out of sync with her pulse. A man came and read her passport, omitting no detail, however slight. The smallest item may turn out to be a vital clue. “Get me a black coffee, I’ll give you my date of birth,” she said. He sucked his teeth. “Why did you go to Paris, Miss Fantoni?” he asked.

  “To get married. And it’s Mrs. I was married before.”

  He opened a file. His forefinger slowly chased down the typed page. “Three times before,” he said.

  “Will it get me outta here if I tell you the story?”

  “That depends on the story.”

  “I pick losers. My first liked boys, my second’s heart quit on him, my third had no lead in his pencil. Three rings, no cigar. Then I met this Air France pilot. French invented sex, right? We’re all set to get married in Paris, sonofabitch drove too fast, hit a tree, broke both hips. I’m waitin’ at the church, he’s up to the waist in plaster. Inconceivable. I quit. Came here. People say, no virgins in New York? Meet me. I’m a virgin three times over. Four, if you count the cripple Pierre.”

  The immigration officer was looking at a young woman with a pageboy haircut, a delightful, sad face and the kind of figure that should never be allowed near men operating heavy machinery. His training had not prepared him for this. He returned her passport and said, “Better luck in future.”

  “Yeah, sure. You know any castrated paraplegics, keep ’em away from me.”

  The limo was late. Traffic was murder. When she got home the sun was out and her father was showing the rose garden to a pair of suits.

  Jerome came in and saw her lying on a sofa so big it swallowed her. She was holding a pewter tankard, pint size. He knew it was vodka. It always was. “Good flight?” he asked.

  “I could have swum faster. Also I got hassled by Immigration again. Christ, they hate our name. Christ, I hate it too.”

  “Paris wasn’t a great success, huh?”

  “Speak your mind, dad. You mean no grandchild for you this year. Or next. Probably never, so get used to it. I got better things to do.”

  “The Church says there is no better thing.”

  “Yeah? Show me a Catholic priest knows the first damn thing about sex except Rome says it’s dirty.”

  They bickered for a while, batting the same old tired opinions back and forth, until she got bored. “What did those two Feds want?” she asked. “I know they were FBI, I seen them before.”

  “I saw them before.”

  “You were there too, huh? What is it, you been subpoenaed again?”

  “They’ve found my Chrysler. The one your Washington pals forgot to return.” He told her about El Paso, the art gallery, the house on Cliff Boulevard. “God knows why you chose to share an apartment with that pair, but you’re well out of the arrangement. It’s unhealthy. I wouldn’t allow it in my organization. And if the Bureau’s tracking those two, they’re dead meat. Cabrillo’s a romantic. He enjoys flying by the seat of his pants. He’ll crash and burn, you watch. Crash and burn.”

  “He saved your sad ass when it got hauled before McCarthy,” Stevie said. “He fed you that undercover shit.”

  “Simple intellectual judo. I threw McCarthy with his own weight.”

  She finished her vodka and rolled off the sofa. “El Paso,” she said. “Cliff Boulevard. That’s where I’ll be. Crashing and burning’s got to be better than living with you.”

  She left. He sat and looked at the boxers. “Where did I go wrong?” he asked. “Why is she so hostile?” They licked their lips. It sounded like grub to them. Most words did.

  TWO PUNKS ON ICE

  1

  Princess went on painting. A buffalo, head-down in a rainstorm; a fly fisherman thigh-deep in a busy stream; a small boy in a small rowboat, the oars splashing. Always water.

  Mornings, Luis drove Julie down to The Picture Show. End of the afternoon, he picked her up. During the
day, she washed the windows, swept the store, made coffee for customers. She made a lot of coffee. No customers came. “Can we afford to advertise?” she asked Luis.

  “Saying what?”

  “Tell you sayin’ what.” Princess was washing her hands with paint cleaner. “Sayin’ we’re between the Mex dentist an’ the charity shop, you can’t miss us, which ain’t true. El Paso misses that part of town every chance it gets.”

  “That’s good,” Luis said. “It’s a hell of a headline. Bold, challenging, controversial.”

  “And dumb,” Julie said. “We’re pissing in the wind. Princess is right, we’re in the wrong part of town. Buggeration.”

  “That’s an old English word. We said it a lot in the war,” Luis explained. “It means oh dear, the cat has pissed on the strawberries again.”

  “You’re a pissy couple today.”

  “Well, she started it.”

  “Go make a pitcher of martinis,” Julie told him. “Make two.”

  Next morning Julie went to find a small space on a short lease in the classy quarter of El Paso. After a couple of hours the only thing she’d found was a bar, The Watering Hole, now empty and boarded up. It was two blocks away from the high-rent quarter. Two long blocks. She phoned Luis. He brought Princess to see it. Julie was inside, waiting.

  “What’s that curious smell?” Luis asked.

  “The real estate guy said they had a fire in back.”

  Princess had found the light switches. Fluorescent tubes flickered. Half went out. The other half kept flickering. “Rather dim,” Luis said.

  “It was a bar. You expect floodlights?”

  Princess joined them. “Only way you’ll make money out of puttin’ on a show in this barn is if you charge two bucks to come in and five bucks to get out.” Her voice was as flat as last night’s beer.

  “You’re no damn help,” Julie muttered.

  “Ain’t here to help. Here to paint.”