Red Chaser
A noir thriller of the 1950s, the Cold War
and the Brooklyn Dodgers
Smashwords Edition
By
Jon Spoelstra
Red Chaser
The
novel Red
Chaser
tosses you right into the 1950s. You'll meet the kinkiest and
most beautiful spy this side of the Iron Curtain. You'll meet
Joe McCarthy. Best of all, you'll live the life of Jake
McHenry.
Jake seems to have a near-perfect life. After
all, he spent five years in Germany after World War II and came
back laden with ill-gotten Nazi riches. Being young and rich
ain't bad.
Back home in Brooklyn, Jake became a private
detective for the simple reason that he needed a pretend job to hide
the source of his riches. Mostly, however, he went to Brooklyn
Dodgers games at Ebbets Field and drank beer.
Between games,
Jake did occasionally work at being a detective. His specialty
was looking for candid photo-ops of husbands trying to get a little
on the side. Sort of seedy, but not a bad diversion.
Then
Joe McCarthy entered the picture. A childhood buddy introduced
Jake to Tailgunner Joe. They wanted Jake to steal a secret list
of celebrity communists from the Ice Queen, a rich high-society
leftist named Arabella Van Dyck. The Ice Queen also
happened to be the most beautiful--and most depraved--woman that Jake
had ever seen.
The break-in of the Ice Queen's brownstone in
Manhattan was easy, but it unleashed a flurry of Russians, North
Koreans, J. Edgar Hoover and mobsters in a wild chase for the list.
The backdrop to all this is the greatest pennant race in the
history of Major League Baseball. The New York Giants chased
the Brooklyn Dodgers all summer long for the National League
pennant. That’s the year that Bobby Thomson hit the "shot
heard 'round the world." The pennant--and Jake's
life--comes down to the last inning and the last pitch at the Polo
Grounds in New York City on Wednesday, October 3, 1951.
Red
Chaser
is a fresh spin on the historical mystery novel. It's fun, it's
1950s noir, it's Brooklyn, it keeps you guessing and when you finish
the last page you say, "Wow, that was fun."
Red Chaser
Copyright © 2008 by Jon Spoelstra
ISBN1451542569
EAN-139781451542561
All rights reserved. Excerpt as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
***
It’s sometimes difficult to portray accurately historical incidents in a novel. Some facts—like the Giants winning the pennant in 1951—are absolute. Other facts, because of sometimes conflicting and contradictory source material, are not so rock solid. So, in this novel, fact, theory, conjecture and fiction are blended at the author’s whim. Additionally, the historical characters and wholly fictional ones act and speak as the author dictates.
1
Friday, September 14, 1951
I went to war poor. Nine years later, I came back rich.
Along the way, I became known as a Red Chaser. Now, I was going to meet the greatest Red Chaser of them all. Senator Joe McCarthy. Tailgunner Joe himself.
I was in Dowling’s Oyster Bar, a small saloon in Brooklyn. It wasn’t a fancy joint; it was a drinking place more akin to pubs in Ireland. Gray cigarette smoke filled the room as if it had been pumped in from a sputtering bus.
Coming in the front door, there were four booths that went down the wall toward the toilet; three booths were wedged against the front window. A long bar ran the length of the room, dominating it. Above the bar was a sign: The food here is for the convenience of the drinkers. Bill Dowling, the owner, didn’t want people to think his joint was a restaurant, even though he had the best crab gumbo in the world.
This bar was just down the street from Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers play. Even though the Dodgers were playing a road game against the Pittsburgh Pirates, the bar was filled. The game blared over the large radios that Dowling had placed in each corner of the bar. It was hot in the middle of September of 1951. The drinkers didn’t mind the heat: they had their beer and their Dodgers had a five and a half game lead in the National League pennant race. It couldn’t get any better than that. Ebbets Field and saloons like Dowling’s were where I spent most of my time during the summer. Baseball and beer, that’s this rich man’s life.
Tailgunner Joe came barreling through the open front door like a fullback from the New York Giants football team. There was a New York Giants baseball team, of course, but I don’t talk about them much, if I can help it. Sure, I had seen McCarthy’s picture in the papers and I’d seen him on the television in the bar, but this was the first time in real life. He was big and blocky—maybe a hair shorter than six-feet—an offensive guard size. His pants were wrinkled as if he’d slept in them. His wrinkled white business shirt was soaked through with sweat in spots and matched the color of clam chowder. His tie had been loosened to where it looked like a colorful lasso.
As he clomped toward me, my immediate thought was that he could take care of himself in any bar that he walked into. He looked like he was born to a bar—the only thing better than a good dirty joke would be a good fight. A beer bottle smashed across the face would be considered hilarious.
He walked right over to the booth where I was sitting, stuck his meaty right hand in front of my face, took my hand and shook it with a quick crunch. “You must be the Red Chaser,” he said.
2
Friday, September 14, 1951
Before I could answer Senator McCarthy, he slid into the booth across from me. Quick too, he was. My long time friend, Nick Salzano, grabbed a chair and pulled it up to the booth. He was the matchmaker who had brought Tailgunner Joe and me together.
I had known Nick since we used to pop open fire hydrants, freeing gushers of water to cool us on those blistery summer days when we were kids. It was either the fire hydrant or grab a dime somewhere and go to an all-day Saturday matinee where the best feature was often the new air-cooled air. Heck, now we had cooled air in some bars.
Nick grew up to be a movie-star handsome guy—a tall, dark Italian movie star. He was an inch or so shorter than my six feet two, looked like he could go three rounds in the ring right now, hadn’t seen any of his hair run off, and had a face that should have been on a male model.
The one flaw—and if he had been a male model he would have had to have it fixed—was his broken nose had never been set properly. Halfway up the bridge of his nose, there was the unmistakable bump of a long-ago broken nose. That was courtesy of me. We had not had a fight; it was basketball and his nose got in the way of one of my elbows. Nick had always been a ladies man, even when we were just twelve or thirteen. The broken nose added to his allure—a bit of testosterone plastered on his pretty face.
While Nick and I were like twins growing up, we weren’t identical twins. One look at Nick and you knew he was Italian. One look at me and you knew I was Irish, even though I was half German, fair skin, some freckles. I didn’t have carrot hair, but it was what some would call dirty blond. With the blue eyes and almost blond hair, I would have been a guy that Hitler would have waved on to the procreate line. Put Nick out in the sun for a while and he would bronze; put me in that same sun and I would blister.
We both went to college, which was something for our neighborhood. Nick went to Columbia; I went to Brooklyn College. Then I went off to the war and Nick went to law school. I guess Uncle Sam must’ve figured he needed lawyers more than just another grunt.
In college, Nick married his high school sweetheart, Gina Provenzano. Her father worked at the docks just like Nick’s, but I think he was pretty high up in the mob. He went by the name of Tony Pro, and I didn’t think it was just a nickname that shortened his last name. Gina had huge tits and Nick followed them around everywhere like a puppy dog. Being a good Italian Catholic girl, she would let him fondle them on occasion, but if he wanted to get into the honeypot, as he had told me years ago, he’d have to make the big commitment. So, he made that commitment; he married her.
Nick and Gina now had a couple of kids. His wife Gina, he had told me recently, had added some ample padding around that big bosom. Instead of the hourglass figure she had in high school, Nick said, she was looking more and more like a squash. “I think she’s grown a third tit and it’s bigger than the first two,” he had told me, laughing, “but it has no nipple and she claims it’s her stomach.” He now worked for some law office in Washington, D.C., and I had to figure that marriage hadn’t slowed him down with the ladies. That would have been like swearing off air to him. I’d bet there wasn’t a good-looking woman in DC within wooing distance that was safe from Nick. I wasn’t a natural ladies man like Nick even though I had matured into a rich, single guy. Any girl was safe with me—I had to make a big effort just to get to know the ones I wanted to know.
It was just two weeks ago that Nick had unexpectedly sat down next to me at a Dodgers game at Ebbets Field and said, handing me a beer, “Hey, Pal, you want a beer?”
“Whoa! What the hell are you doing here?” I asked. I was surprised to see him. It had been about a year since we had tossed back a few beers together. His movie-star face had started to age a bit—light crow’s webs were stretching around his eyes, and a small puff had sprouted under each eye. All work and all play would age even Nick.
It was after a couple of beers, a couple of Nathan’s dogs, a homer by Duke Snider, a great play at the plate when Roy Campanella threw down a tag that would dent a tree that Nick said, “I got a guy I want you to meet.”
“Sure,” I said, “who?”
“Joe McCarthy.”
“What? The guy on TV?” I asked. “The senator chasing down Commies?”
Nick nodded his head as he plopped the tail end of his second hot dog in his mouth. “The one and the same. I’m working for him now. Great guy. You’ll love him.”
“What’s this all about, Nick? When’d you start working for him?”
“Whoa,” Nick said, “he just wants to meet a guy like you. You’ll find out why when you meet him.”
Nick wouldn’t tell me anything about this mysterious meeting. No matter how many beers I bought, I couldn’t pry his tongue loose to tell me. So, here we were, two weeks later, me—Jakob Finbar McHenry—and Tailgunner Joe.
Nick ordered a round. The waitress—a stout Irish lass named Betty who could probably munch on glass like it was peanuts—brought a pitcher of Schaefer’s and a Scotch and soda for Joe. While Nick was pouring from the pitcher, Joe clanked his glass down on the table top. It was empty. He raised his hand above his head—the sweat ring under his arm was the circumference of a basketball—and waved to Betty for another.
“This was only half full when you delivered it,” Tailgunner Joe said, grinning, when Betty brought him a fresh one.
“Yeah, Sweetie, here’s the other half,” she said handing him the new drink. “Hey! Aren’t you that guy on TV?”
“Rocky Marciano?” Joe asked, referring to the heavyweight champion of the world.
“Nah, you ain’t him,” she said, “but I’ll figger it out.”
Joe took a sip of his drink. Now it was indeed half empty.
“So, Jake—I can call you Jake, right—you were a Red Chaser during the war?” Joe asked. No chit chat here.
“We got that fancy name because of Wild Bill Donovan,” I said. Wild Bill was the founder of the OSS during World War II. After the war, Truman changed its name to the Central Intelligence Agency. “Red Chaser sounded good, but we didn’t really chase any Reds.”
“What did you do then?” Joe asked. He knocked down the second half of his drink. Another one was on its way.
“Well, we chased down Waffen SS officers who had been in Eastern Europe for the last few years of the war. After the war, these SS guys were all over the place, trying to blend in as if they were rank-and-file soldiers or citizens or anything but SS. We had to track them down.”
“What’s that got to do with Reds?” Joe asked. His third tall Scotch and soda was placed in front of him. My buddy Nick just sat drinking his beer; he knew this was Joe’s show.
“These Waffen SS guys had spy networks in Eastern Europe during the war. It took them years to build those networks. These Eastern Europe spies had two missions: to rat on where any Jews were being hidden and, more importantly, to keep detailed lists on who the Commie sympathizers were. The Nazis had some great spy networks in Eastern Europe. The SS knew every Commie in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, places like those. Wild Bill wanted those networks. He wanted the guys who spied for the SS to spy for us—not
spying on Jews, of course, but spying on Communists. That was Wild Bill’s plan. He knew way early that it was the Russkies that would come out of that war as our enemy—and he wanted an experienced, built-in spy network.”
“Brilliant,” Joe said, “genius. Built-in spy network. So how many networks did you corral?”
“You know, I’ve never really talked about it. I think it’s confidential, but since it’s you, I guess I can tell. I personally picked up seventeen networks. I had to first find the Waffen SS guy, then turn him, then get all of his information about his spy network. I didn’t go into the East to work the networks; Wild Bill had a different crew for that. That’s why I say I really wasn’t a Red Chaser. I guess you could say I was sorta a Red Spy Network Finder, but that didn’t really sound so hot, and Wild Bill sure knew how to make things sound better.”
Joe sipped his drink. This time it was just a sip. Almost ladylike.
“Interesting,” he said and took another ladylike sip. I guess his drinking was slowed down when he was thinking. I’d say a minute went by with nobody talking, though it seemed like an hour, just sitting there, not drinking, not smoking, just sitting.
“What’ya do for a living now? Private cop, Nick tells me,” Joe asked and answered in the same breath. “What type of cases?”
I don’t seriously consider myself much of a private detective. When I came back from Europe as a rich man, I didn’t want anybody to know that I was rich. Certainly not the OSS, definitely not the tax man, surely not my friends. But, I was rich. To follow my passion for baseball and beer, I had to at least pretend to have a job.
What better than a private detective? I could work my own hours, be out all hours of the night and nobody really knew who my clients were or who was paying me. I certainly didn’t need an office in an office building. When my folks bought the house out on Long Island in Levittown—my Mom had always wanted a backyard with trees and grass and maybe even a little tomato patch—I bought their brownstone in Brooklyn. There’s plenty of room for me to live in and, of course, to have an office. The office is where I kept track of the baseball box scores. I also kept a few files of my detecting work there.
“Divorces,” I said.
“Pay much?”
“About a hundred a week for each case. Sometimes I’ve got three cases in a week and sometimes I don’t have any.”
“So you sneak around…” Joe said, holding up his big hand like it was a stop sign, “I don’t mean to offend, Jake, it’s just that you’re used to sneaking around, being invisible, getting the goods on some guy.”
“Or some woman.” I said, “And I take no offense at your ‘sneaking around’ comment. Sure, when I’m working, I sneak around. I did that in Europe, too. The type of work I do isn’t like a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman. I gotta be sneaky. That’s what I do.”
Joe was back to sipping his Scotch, back to thinking.
He asked Nick to give him an envelope. Nick propped up his briefcase. It was one of those slim jobs. It might hold a sandwich, but never a thermos. Nick extracted a plain brown envelope, the sort you could buy at the post office. He pulled out a picture and laid it down on the table in front of me, right next to my beer. The picture was a head shot of a woman.
She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. When I say that, I’m not exaggerating. Heck, I had the pictures of Betty Grable and all the rest over in Germany. Betty was beautiful, and there must have been a million GIs that wanted to jump in her panties, but she was beautiful in a fake movie star way. You know, everything was posed and perfect and staged.
The woman in the picture in front of me was real. This wasn’t some glamour magazine picture with hours of makeup and queers fussing over her hair; this was a woman with little or no makeup staring into the camera in such a way that it was a miracle that the camera hadn’t melted. Now this might have been a one-shot wonder in which the camera had just caught her perfectly and, if she twitched her head just a little, the picture would have lost its magic, but I don’t think so. I got the feeling that you could take a warehouse full of Kodak film and snap pictures until your thumb fell off, and each picture of this woman would grab you and pull you into it.
I figured that she was all-day beautiful.
I imagine a professional fashion guy would say that she didn’t have a perfect face. It was clearly asymmetrical. Maybe she didn’t have the most beautiful nose you could find. Or the most stunning lips. Or the sultriest eyes or the best hair. But, there was no doubt about it, when it was all put together, this was a face that could knock you on your ass. And even though the picture was in black-and-white, I could just tell that her hair was flaming volcano-hot red.
I just stared at the picture. It was as if the noise was turned off in the bar.
Finally, after a part of a lifetime, Joe said, “The Ice Queen.”
“The Ice Queen?” I found it strange that it was difficult to find my voice.
“Diamonds, Jake, diamonds,” Joe said. “She’s the heir to one of those Dutch diamond merchants in New York. She wears them on her ears, her neck, her ankles, and for all I know on her little toes.”
I looked at the picture again. I couldn’t tell if there were diamonds on her ears. Her hair cascaded down covering anything on her ears whether it be diamonds or pickles.
“What’s her name?” I asked, “I mean, she doesn’t go by the Ice Queen, does she?”
“Arabella Van Dyck,” Nick said.
“I want you to do the same thing that you did with those SS bastards—I want you to get her Commie network.” Joe said.
“She’s a Commie?” I asked.
Joe nodded his head. “She’s got red hair, red toe nails, a red heart and a deep dark-red soul. She’s a Commie, all right. She’s like the Queen Bee. Everything flows through her, she’s got all the names that count; she knows everything. We’ve been told that the Ice Queen keeps a private list of celebrities that are Commies or lean so far left they walk around in a circle when they’re trying to walk straight. These celebrities come from all different types of Commie front organizations. Arabella Van Dyck is so connected to so many Red organizations that she knows which celebrities are in which Commie organization. There’s movie stars, there’s TV people, there’s newspaper columnists, there’s magazine editors, all belonging to different groups, but the Ice Queen has put together her own personal master list. Hell, you said yourself that you’re the Red Finder. This is right up your alley. I want you to find me a lot of Commies.”
I had experience tracking down Nazis in all types of backwater towns in Eastern Europe, but the Ice Queen wasn’t a Waffen SS and this wasn’t blown-out Europe. “Why not the FBI? Isn’t this what they do for you? Track down Reds? Isn’t that what gets Hoover going every morning?”
“This isn’t a Hoover thing,” Joe said. “Sure, Hoover has slipped me plenty enough files over the year, but most of them—all of them, let me say—are intended to embarrass Harry Truman. I certainly got no problem with embarrassing Truman, but this list ain’t state department folks. This list is celebrities and media types. If the FBI grabbed the Ice Queen, she’s Hoover’s, her information is Hoover’s. He’s always sidled up to media people like Walter Winchell. He’s always parceled out the information to his media favorites like penny candy, one here, one there, but rest assured, he’s always got headlines every time he handed out a little sweet. So, if that kinky bastard got the Ice Queen’s information there’s no guarantees he’d pass it along to me. He’d probably just use it as blackmail to get himself more ink. Nope, this is all off the books. This is my private venture. This is a big deal. You get me the Ice Queen’s list and this will be a bigger blow to Communism than if you put a bullet between Joe Stalin’s eyes.”
“How do you expect that I’m going to get this list?” I asked.
“That’s what I don’t want to know,” Tailgunner Joe said. “You can talk to Nick about all the details, but me, I don’t know. I will tell you this, it’s not likely that she’s going to mimeograph the list and hand it over to you.” He laughed hard—a good bar room laugh.
Steal it, that’s what Joe meant, but he didn’t want to say it nor did he really want to know if that’s what I would do. All he wanted was the Ice Queen’s list.
“Do we know where the list is supposed to be?” I asked.
“We’ve heard it’s in a safe in her house—a brownstone on the Upper East Side,” Nick said, speaking for just the second time since he sat down.
Joe asked Nick to give him another envelope. This envelope was the size of a normal business envelope. It wasn’t glued shut; it had a rubber band around it.
“Expenses,” Joe said. “There’s two grand in there. That’s to get you started. There’s no end to it—you need more, call Nick, we got an unlimited supply for this job.”
I didn’t reach for the envelope.
“Get us the list, Jake,” Joe said. “I’ve got a young tiger on the committee—name’s Bobby Kennedy—and he’s chawing at the bit to get at that list. He’s an intense little sonofabitch—a real pisser. Hell, he’s more intense than Richard Nixon, but Nixon looks like a criminal, my little guy looks like a fucking altar boy. But he’s an assassin, a real assassin. His old man, Joe Kennedy—a former bootlegger no less—wants to get rid of Commies as much as I do. Along with my boys back in Wisconsin, he’ll fund whatever we need. Go on, pick up that envelope. The Ice Queen is waiting for you.”
Before I could answer, Joe was out of the booth as if he had just sat on a thumbtack. “Got another meeting to go to,” he said. He turned to Betty and twirled his fist signaling another drink. With his new drink in hand, he had his roadie. He turned to me, tossed out that big hand and shook mine. “Nick’s got all the details,” he said. Then he looked me square in the eyes so hard that it seemed that a few volts of electricity jumped from his eyeballs to mine, “This is important to me, Jake. Really important. Don’t let me down.”
He turned and barreled out of the bar, roadie in hand. If a guy with a beer in his hand had been standing in his way, that guy would have been the seven bowling pin on a seven-ten split. I thought at the time that the Commies better head for the hills because that guy was going after any and all of them with a maniac’s fervor.
After Joe was out of the bar, I said to myself: Yeah, I’m going to do it, I’ll chase that Ice Queen, I’ll get all the things that she knows. It wasn’t for the money, it wasn’t because I hated Commies, it was for one reason and one reason only. I wanted to see that picture materialize into a real person. Yep, I wanted the Ice Queen.
3
Monday, September 17, 1951
“When are you going to go in to get the list?” Nick had asked me Friday night at Dowling’s Oyster Bar.
“In a week, probably,” I had said.
Nick had shaken his head. “We don’t want to wait. We want the Ice Queen’s information now.”
It seemed like every client wanted the goods right away. The cuckolded husband wanted evidence right away and didn’t want to wait for me to get rock-solid evidence on his wife’s next tryst with the tennis pro at the country club. I guess getting a list of Commies was no different.
“Well, usually I like to case the place,” I had said. “I like to go into a house when I know nobody’s there.”
“Nobody’ll be there,” Nick had said. “I’m gonna give you a couple of shortcuts. The Ice Queen leaves her brownstone every Monday morning for most of the day. I guess that’s her day to go down to Wall Street and visit her money and then go to Fifth Avenue and spend some of it. That’s this coming Monday, pal. She lives alone in that big old brownstone, does not have a maid, doesn’t have an alarm system, doesn’t have a dog, doesn’t even have a fucking cat. It’s got locks. And a safe. You told me you could handle that, right?”
I nodded. “They taught me that stuff in OSS.”
“The place will be just sitting there waiting for you. And, if you want to do some homework, study this.” Nick reached into the briefcase and brought out a set of blueprints.
“That’s her brownstone, right there,” Nick had said, his finger stabbing at the blueprint. “Look at it over the weekend to get a feel where the rooms are, go in on Monday, snatch the list, and we’ll have a few beers afterward. Easy as pie.”
“Nick, you’ve got this job really scoped out,” I said. I was amazed. “Why don’t you guys do it? Why me?”
Nick stared at me. “Jake, for Christ’s sake, we’re the McCarthy Committee of Un-American Activities, we don’t do such things. We don’t have any B and E guys on our staff. Just lawyers. The FBI could do this, but then the list would end up in Hoover’s mitts and not Joe’s. So, I thought, we want the list, we know where it is, why not bring in an old buddy who knows how to do these things, who wouldn’t mind making a pretty good hunk of change for a pretty easy B and E and do something patriotic in the process.”
All those reasons made sense, but I wasn’t feeling comfortable about it. I felt uncomfortable going in so quickly without being able to case the place to my own satisfaction. It’s not as if I had a regular routine for breaking and entering. Heck, I’m the good guy, not a crook. There have been occasions where I’ve had to break-in to get some evidence in a divorce case, but no way could breaking and entering be considered as one of my usual activities. Still, with all the background stuff that Nick already had, it did seem to be easy as pie.
So, today was the easy as pie day. Monday, September 17, 1951.
The break-in would be a three-man job. The first man was me, of course. Then I needed a lookout in case the Ice Queen came back unexpectedly. That would be Rafael Ordonez.
Rafael was a Puerto Rican kid who lived in Red Hook, the neighborhood bordering Brooklyn Heights, where I lived. Many Puerto Ricans tended to live close to where they worked, and many worked at the rope manufacturer in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in Red Hook. I had met him, however, not in Red Hook but at a Dodger game. I caught him trying to pick my pocket. I offered him alternative employment and I used him occasionally on jobs like this. This beat working in the rope factory.
Rafael had spent most of his young life dodging the police, so he was a world-class lookout. He was thin, a little bit shorter than me, and looked as innocent as a choir boy. The cops in Brooklyn knew that he would steal something in a blink of an eye, but here in Manhattan he was a portrait of honesty. He was even carrying a small shoulder satchel that made him look like a delivery boy.
The third man wasn’t just critical—the safe cracker—but essential. I was accurate when I had told Nick that the OSS had taught me how to get into locked safes. Easy, just blow it open with dynamite. But, this job was stealth. My resident safecracker was a person nobody would ever suspect. It was my secret weapon from Japan. And she wasn’t a man; she was a she.
Hiromi Kitahara could pick a lock almost faster than I could open it with a key. She could crack a safe faster than I could memorize the combination. These skills had been developed, oddly, after her family had left Hiroshima.
It’s a long story, but her family had immigrated to the United States two years before Pearl Harbor. Hiromi’s father came to help his younger brother in his business. Considering that Hiroshima was literally blown off the map just a few years later, the move to the United States should have been considered a gift from God. That gift, however, wasn’t free. Just two years after Hiromi and her parents had arrived in the United States they had been tossed into an American prison in Tule Lake, California. Our government didn’t call them prisons, of course; we called them Internment Camps. Welcome to the good old U.S. of A.
In the Internment Camp, Hiromi refined two skills: painting and locks. The locks was a family thing. Her father was a locksmith as was her uncle and her grandfather. While in Internment, Hiromi learned the family locksmith trade. She practiced on the locks on the doors. With the painting, I’m not talking about painting a wall or something, I’m talking about art. Hiromi’s painting brought her a scholarship at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn after the war.
Halfway through her first year at Pratt, she found my house. Our family house in Brooklyn was massive; a classic three-story brownstone on Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights.
We had been taking boarders since I left for the war. When my folks bought the house out on Long Island in Levittown—tomato patch and all—I bought their brownstone in Brooklyn. Hiromi became my third boarder on my third floor.
She was nothing close to the buck-toothed slit-eyed thick-eyeglassed Jap that the movies had stereotyped the Japanese to be in the 1940s. Her eyes were much rounder than a movie goer would expect. She had black hair that was so shiny that it seemed that it was wet. She didn’t wear glasses. She was taller than the women I would see down in Chinatown—I would imagine she was about five-six or so. She had a smile that Pepsodent could use in a magazine ad. She was thin, of course, but instead of frail looking she looked athletic. I don’t think she was beautiful in the sense that we Americans understand—not knock-down beautiful like the Ice Queen was or the big tits like Marilyn Monroe—but there was a certain radiance about her that made her pleasing to look at.
Like any college kid, Hiromi needed money. When I found out that she had this unusual skill with locks, I made her a part-time employee. Cash didn’t exchange hands exactly. We worked on the barter system. For every lock she picked, she’d get a free month’s rent. She just had one rule for me: she would not use her skill to steal. However, getting evidence about a wayward husband was, as she would say, hunky-dory. So, working part-time for me was a heck of a lot better than working in a Chinese laundry.
That was my team: a Puerto Rican, a Jap and me. And today our United Nations-like forces were going to invade the Ice Queen’s castle. Easy as pie.
4
Monday, September 17, 1951
I found a parking spot on the Ice Queen’s street, a few houses down from her brownstone. She lived in a large brownstone on 72nd Street, in between Second and Third Avenue in the Upper East Side. The street was lined with three-story brownstones. Nick had told me that the Ice Queen lived alone. No relatives, no live-in maid, no caretaker, no nothing.
Hiromi and I were in my parked Ford when the Ice Queen stepped out of her brownstone. Rafael was already positioned down the street.
I savored what I was seeing: the Ice Queen was tall, I’d say about five-eight or so; she had long and shapely legs that looked strong and feminine at the same time. She walked with a certain bounce that spilled off supreme confidence. Her hair was indeed flaming red. You could tell from a mile away that her hair was no dye job. It bounced and flowed as she walked, leaving a lightly luminous trail.
She was wearing a dark green suit that made her look like a million dollars, which being the Ice Queen, was probably worth at least that. You don’t see too many women that have that presence; I would bet that most men who met her would be instantly intimidated. The files that Nick had given me said that she was thirty-one—the same age as me—but she had a bearing that practically made her timeless. And, somehow she had become a Commie and was under the microscope of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. What a waste.
From his position at the end of the block, Rafael could see the Ice Queen walking toward him. He would stand by a pay phone, giving the impression that he was waiting for instructions for his next delivery or pick up. He would stay near the phone after the Ice Queen caught a cab. If the Ice Queen came back earlier than he expected, he could see that from his position near the pay phone. He would then drop a nickel into the phone box and call the Ice Queen’s home, allowing the phone to ring just once. He would then hang up and quickly redial the same number and allow it to ring twice. That one-two rings sequence would give us the warning that the Ice Queen had changed her patterns and was coming back to the brownstone earlier than expected.
After the Ice Queen started to walk toward Third Avenue, I pulled out of the parking spot and found a spot on the street behind the Ice Queen’s. I liked to break into a house through the back door. Exits were better too at the back door.
Hiromi and I walked toward the Ice Queen’s street and turned in to the alley. We ducked through the gate to the Ice Queen’s backyard and walked up to the back door. A deadbolt lock stared us in the face.
“Easy to crack,” Hiromi said as she nimbly worked her tools to pop open the lock.
“That goes for safes, Hiromi,” I said, “Not for deadbolts.”
“What you say for deadbolts then?” She whispered.
I said, “Pick.” She looked quizzically at me not knowing if I had tried to make a joke. After about ten seconds of fiddling with the lock with her kit of bobby pins, she opened the door. She led me to the foyer at the front of the house as if she had been born there. Hiromi walked with a certain familiarity through the house; she had studied the blueprints better than I had.
The blueprints showed that the Ice Queen’s safe was in a small office off of her bedroom on the second floor. Hiromi knew the path better that I did; she was a woman on a mission, all business-like, heading up the stairs moving as quietly as a ghost. I followed.
I walked up the stairs slower. There was art lining both walls of the staircase. It was marvelous art, including a Pablo Picasso. I touched the frame and jiggled it. It wasn’t screwed into the wall. This would have been easy to swipe. It seemed strange to me to have works of art like Picasso and not have some type of protection against thievery. Maybe the Ice Queen had so much money that she didn’t give a fuck.
“This way,” Hiromi whispered with some urgency underscoring her words. She moved so quietly that she had already found the bedroom and had floated back to me admiring Picasso.
At the second level of the brownstone, there were six doors that branched off the hallway. Hiromi pointed to the first door on the right. It was open.
“Ice Queen’s bedroom,” Hiromi whispered.
She motioned for me to follow her. We walked into a very large room. On the far wall was the biggest bed that I had ever seen. It looked to be the size of three queen-sized beds. Above it was a huge mirror bolted into the ceiling.
“Funny times,” Hiromi said, smiling, pointing at the ceiling. That was the first time she had ever said something to me that had a hint of a sexual connotation. It looked like she blushed, but it wasn’t easy to tell with Orientals.
Hiromi skittered ahead while I gave the bed a closer inspection. I wondered where the Ice Queen had got sheets big enough to cover this monstrosity.
I walked to a large Hieronymus Bosch painting on the wall. With all of its demons, half-human animals and tortured souls, I found a Bosch to be a strange painting to have on your bedroom wall, but what the hell, I wasn’t the Ice Queen. I jiggled it. Like the Picasso, the Bosch wasn’t screwed to the wall and I could have lifted both. The Picasso might have worked in my house, but the Bosch I would have donated to Dowling’s. Let those drunks there figure out what the hell Hell was all about.
Hiromi hissed a ‘pssssst’ at me. She moved around as quickly as a dragonfly over water; she had probably cased the whole upstairs while I was looking for myself in the Bosch painting.
She motioned me to follow her. She led me to a bathroom. Some bathroom! There was a large bathtub that could pass for a swimming pool in some neighborhoods. There was also a walk-in stall shower. This bathroom was bigger than most people’s living room.
“Funny times here, too,” Hiromi said, this time not blushing.
She then pivoted and led me across the bedroom to two open French doors leading to a small office. On the opposite side of the small office was another door, leading to who knows where.
“Safe,” Hiromi said, pointing at another Picasso. It was located just left of the desk. This Picasso, like the one on the stairwell, wasn’t a print. It was the real McCoy. Hiromi pulled the Picasso frame from the left side and it pivoted like a door. On the wall was the safe.
“Excuse me now, Jake, I must listen. You be quiet.” Hiromi twisted the combination dial a few times and put her ear to the lock. I wandered back into the Ice Queen’s bedroom.
I had never seen a bed so large. It had to have been custom made, along with the dust ruffles, the sheets, everything about it including the mirror above it. I leaned over and looked at myself in the mirror.
Before I could fantasize about the different movie sequences running in my head, I heard Hiromi say, “Okay.”
It had been just a minute—two at the most—and Hiromi had cracked the safe. When I walked into the office, I just saw the open safe in the wall. “It’s all yours,” Hiromi said.
I carefully pulled out of the safe a large bundle of papers. They were held together with a rubber band. The papers were of various sizes with some longer with their ends sticking out of the pile. I put the papers down on the desk and began to sift through them looking for a list. Hiromi had the small camera ready to take photos of any of the pages.
Hiromi pointed at the safe. I looked in the deep recess. This was a very large safe. I peered in. Cash. I pulled out one bundle. It was all hundred-dollar bills. Probably about fifty of them. There were at least ten more bundles. I put the money back. We were there to get The List, not steal. No Picassos, no cash for us—we had honor.
I pulled the rubber band off of another pile of papers and started to shuffle through them. Halfway through the papers, I ran into something surprising. It wasn’t the list; it was a bundle of folded papers that looked like they were written in Japanese.
“What do these say?” I asked Hiromi.
She looked at the papers. “I don’t know,” she said. “That is Korean.” She said it with a very slight sneer; if she had been raised in Brooklyn she would have said, “I don’t read that shit.” I guessed that she didn’t like Koreans. That stumped me; I’d ask her about it later.
“I don’t read Korean. But, look at this,” she said, pointing to a page full of diagrams. I stared at the diagrams. I couldn’t figure out what the drawings represented. I did know they didn’t represent a bike or a baseball diamond; it looked like they represented some type of bomb.
“Take a picture of this page,” I said, handing it to her. I found five more pages of drawings to be photographed. She snapped off pictures as quickly as she turned the pages.
The phone rang and Hiromi and I both jolted up straight. It rang only once. We froze. After a three count, the phone rang again. This time it rang twice.
“Let’s go,” I said. I folded the Korean sheets of paper back into the bundle and put them back into the safe as we had found them. Hiromi closed the safe door and actually repositioned the dial to be at the same number that she had found it.
We walked quietly back through the massive bedroom. In the hallway, we heard the lock open and somebody walk across the hardwood vestibule. Rafael must have been asleep at the switch, I thought. There was no way the Ice Queen could have walked down from Third Avenue to her brownstone in the time between the phone call warning and the opening of the front door.
“This way,” Hiromi whispered. We tiptoed through the master bedroom again, tiptoed through the office, and Hiromi opened the door on the far side. It led to another bathroom. This was a more conventional bathroom. Next to the bathtub was another door and Hiromi was through it like a practiced tour guide. It led to a smaller bedroom. Two beds, a large wardrobe dresser, a sitting area with two large chairs and a love seat. Across the way was another door. A closet.
Hiromi whispered, “We can hide in here until she leaves again.”
“What if she doesn’t leave?” I asked.
“We wait,” Hiromi said, separating the hanging clothes with her hands as she burrowed in to the back of the large closet. There must have been a hundred dresses hanging in the closet and maybe two hundred pairs of shoes. We had burrowed to the back; for the Ice Queen to find us she would have to decline to wear the ninety-nine dresses in front of the last one that was hiding us.
We were in pitch darkness, and feeling like we were suspended in a vast void. Through the closet door, we heard the voices of a woman and at least two men. Both of the men were speaking with Asian accents.
Hiromi touched my face with her fingers and then positioned her mouth over my ear and whispered in the darkness, “Korean.” The word didn’t titillate me, but her whisper sure did.
We stood there in the back of the closet; my arm around her shoulders. We heard a tinkling sound—one of the men was taking a piss. He said something and both men laughed. He didn’t flush. Then we heard nothing. It seemed like they had left the bathroom.
About ten minutes later, what we heard confused us. It came muted through the Ice Queen’s office, the bathroom and finally to us in the closet. It was a woman’s squeal, then a laugh, then a scream, then another squeal. I tiptoed toward the door of the closet. A moment later, I peered out. Nobody was there. I heard the woman’s squeal again and then some Korean words that sounded very harsh.
I whispered back to Hiromi, “Stay here.”
I tiptoed out of the closet, then through the bathroom, stopped for a moment and heard a squeal that turned into a scream. I tiptoed through the small office and held my breath. There were grunts. I peered around the door to look into the Ice Queen’s bedroom.
There she was on that football field-sized bed. She was naked. The two Korean men were naked. Their cocks filled two of the major orifices of the Ice Queen, her mouth and her vagina. The Korean that was filling her mouth was standing on the bed and the Ice Queen was in a doggy position; the other Korean had entered her vagina from behind her. They were all looking at the ceiling as if they were watching a dirty movie.
I felt pressure on my arm. Hiromi had ducked under my armpit to see what I was seeing. I don’t know if she zeroed in on the same thing that I saw, but I saw that the Ice Queen’s flaming red hair was indeed natural and something glittered from her navel. It looked like a huge diamond. The Ice Queen, you betcha.
The Koreans faces were contorted. They looked strong, their muscles extending. It looked like they were on the brink of a rousing finish. They twisted the Ice Queen around. I saw a tattoo on the small of her back. It looked like a snake.
Hiromi pulled my arm and I followed her through the bathroom to the office.
“I found a backstairs,” she whispered, “I think it comes down into the kitchen. It is locked. I think I’ll have a few seconds to pick it. Should we try?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Let’s get out of here. She might be here all day.”
From the guest bedroom where we had been hiding in the closet, Hiromi opened the door to the hallway. It sounded like the Koreans and the Ice Queen were still going strong. We tiptoed down the hallway. At the end was another door and Hiromi knelt down, her lock picks in her hand, and manipulated the lock. She opened the door, stepped through it and down the stairs. I gently closed the door and followed her.
Within a minute we were out the back door and in the alley. The fresh air felt to us like the air must feel to a released prisoner. Both of our faces were sweaty; both of us had sweated through our shirts; both of us just wanted to get back to the car.
I had never seen an orgy before, a ménage de la whatever hadn’t been one of my experiences in life. I’m sure that it hadn’t been one of Hiromi’s life experiences either. As a voyeur, it was shocking. It wasn’t appealing. It seemed so violent. I had never seen a rape before either—even in all my post-war days in Berlin—but the orgy we had witnessed had to be a cousin to rape. That could be the Catholic upbringing in me censoring my feelings, but I knew that that type of sexual exercise wasn’t going to be a part of my lifestyle.
I did, however, still feel the sensuality of Hiromi’s whisper in my ear when we were in the closet. I still felt the touch of her hand on my face and on my neck. When I looked over to her as we walked down the alley, I noticed her sweaty shirt clinging to her and saw a different Hiromi than the one I’d known as a boarder.
Back at the car, Rafael was waiting for us, leaning against the fender. He started explaining right away. “She didn’t come walking down the street,” he said, “she was dropped off in front of her home in a black Cadillac. Two Oriental guys got out of the car with her. That’s when I called. Are you okay?”
I mumbled that we were. We didn’t say much on our drive back to Brooklyn. I think Rafael was feeling so guilty about the close call that he didn’t ask any questions and he slumped in the back seat taking a quick siesta.
When I pulled the Ford onto the Brooklyn Bridge, Hiromi finally spoke. “Did you see the diamond on her stomach?” she asked.
I nodded. Then I asked a dumb question, “How does it stick? How does it stay there?”
“I think it was attached to her skin,” Hiromi said, “like those African natives that we see in National Geographic that have different things sticking through their bodies. It’s probably like an earring that is stuck through an earlobe, but this is her belly button instead.”
I winced. The Ice Queen was really weird. She had a body that didn’t need any adornments, so why in the world let something be jabbed through her belly button?
“Yakuza,” Hiromi said.
“Yock what?”
“Ice Queen have tattoo, you see? Only gangsters in Japan have tattoos,” Hiromi said. “Gangsters. Yakuza. Gangsters.”
5
Monday, September 17, 1951
The phone was ringing when we walked in the back door to my house.
I walked to the living room to answer it.
“Hey, buddy, how’sitgoin?” Nick Salzano asked.
Wow. News travels fast.
“Can we talk over the phone?” I asked. Yes, I was getting paranoid. After all, I was on a secret mission for Tailgunner Joe against the Commies. Before my drinks with Tailgunner Joe and Nick, I was pretty naïve about Communism in America. I knew we were fighting Communism way back when I was working for the OSS. Wild Bill Donovan never let a day go by when he didn’t remind us. But that was Russian Communism.
That Communism wasn’t on American soil; it was on European land. After Tailgunner Joe had left Dowling’s, Nick told me the full scope of Communism in America. It seemed that half the people I saw walking down the street could be Commies. In a span of two days, I went from thinking that Communism was for a handful of beatniks down in the Village and union rabble rousers to a wicked virus that had caught the right winds from Europe and seeped into almost every household in America. Heck, I was getting just as paranoid as Joe McCarthy and Nick.
“Not really,” Nick said. “Just tell me if you got the list or not.”
“I haven’t got it yet,” I answered. How did he know that I have already been in and out of the Ice Queen’s brownstone? Was he in New York? Was he casing the Ice Queen’s place?
“How did you know I’ve already been in her house?” I asked Nick point blank. “Are you in town?”
“Naw, I’m in Washington,” Nick said. “You told me that you were going in first thing Monday morning. I figured it was a pretty easy deal. Joe’s anxious about this and he wanted me to call. Heck, he wanted me to call a half-hour ago, but I knew that there was no way you could be back already. So, what happened?”
“We did go in first thing. She left just about the same time you said that she would. I got into the safe all right, but there was a lot of shit in there. I was going through it, but she came back just thirty minutes or so later. I just didn’t have the time and had to hightail it out of there.”
“Okay, but what’ll I tell Joe? When are you going back in?”
“Do you know the Ice Queen’s movements on any days this week?” I asked.
I heard rustling of paper coming from Nick’s end of the phone. “I got nothing on Tuesday or Thursday,” Nick said, referring to his notes, “must mean that there is no pattern. She usually leaves the house on Wednesday morning for a couple of hours. That might be the safest time to try again.”
“Well, I’ll go in Wednesday then.”
“That’ll work for me,” Nick said. “I’ll give you a call on Wednesday about noon or so. If you’ve got the list, I’ll take the train up to New York and we’ll have a few beers and laughs.”
“Got it,” I said.
“See you then,” Nick said, “gotta go, Joe’s calling.”
Nick hung up the phone first. I held the handset for a second and then heard another click on the line. Was Tailgunner Joe listening in? Was somebody else listening in? Or, was it my paranoia kicking in? My paranoia was a treasured tool for me in Europe. Most folks consider paranoia a mental disorder, and in its extreme I guess it is. But, if you’re trying to track down former Nazi SS, you find out quickly that you can’t trust anybody. At times, it seemed that the world I was in was full of liars. So, I looked at paranoia as giving me an edge. It got me back to Brooklyn and it got me rich.
It’s not that my paranoia was left behind in Europe. God knows it was still around, but each day it seemed to seep further and further into the background. Now it was asking to be recognized. For reasons that I was having trouble in identifying, I didn’t feel good about this job for Nick and Tailgunner Joe.
Still holding the phone in my hand I asked myself: Why in the world had I taken this job anyways?
Sure, the Ice Queen herself was mesmerizing.
And, being asked by Tailgunner Joe could be considered an honor, of sorts.
And, the money. Two grand in one week was about what a working stiff could make after a few months.
But, those were all bogus reasons. I sat down on the couch and examined each reason.
The Ice Queen was indeed beautiful. I wouldn’t be the first guy to get snowed into making a bad decision because of a beautiful face; I wouldn’t be the last. So, this reason was indeed stupid.
As for the honor of working for Tailgunner Joe—now that was really stupid. I wasn’t even sure if I liked the guy. Or believed in what he was doing. I didn’t believe in politics; I believed in living my life, going to Dodgers games, having a few beers and that’s it. Being a private detective was a pretend job. I needed something to do that was unaccountable to anybody else. Being a private detective with a modicum of divorce cases was just that.
The last reason—money—was the dumbest reason of them all. I already had enough money to last a lifetime. That money wasn’t exactly legal, but it was safe.
The phone rang, startling me. If it was Nick, I might just quit the job now.
I answered the phone.
“Jake, Ed Stebbings here.” Ed was a hotshot lawyer from Manhattan whose skin I had saved once.
His wife’s attorney had hired me to catch him in the act of doing the deed with some broad. I did catch him; it was some of my best photography. Really graphic stuff. With those photos, I had him crucified. It was as if I had him stretched out on the cross, the nails clenched in my teeth, the hammer gripped hard in my hand and one nail was poised on his open palm. All I had to do was pound and he was as nailed to the cross as anybody could be. He found out about my pictures and offered me a lot of money to lose the negatives. I didn’t take the money. Nor did I hand over the prints and negatives to the wife’s lawyer. Surprisingly, I had developed a conscience; by accident I found out that the wife wasn’t any saint either. So, I withdrew the nails from my pursed lips, threw the hammer away and helped him up off the cross. He was the sole case where I had burned the photos and the negatives. Ed got divorced, but under more favorable terms.
“You forgot,” Ed said.