Dawn of Betrayal

by Max Grant

  The set jangled at the edge of the desk and I picked up and held silent.

  “James?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Bert. Esther says you’re OK.” He chuckled over some private thought. “Is the Coconut Grove too rich for your blood? I’ll meet you in the lobby of the Ambassador at 11:30. Look for the crew cut and Aloha shirt.”

  I glanced at my wrist piece and found it was already pushing eleven, grabbed my hat and got downstairs. Figuring to hop the Red Car downtown I remembered belatedly that my line had been the latest to be dismantled just this spring. Now what was the sense in that?

  I crossed over to the new bus stop and sweated a good ten minutes before one of the shiny new conveyances rolled up to the stop in a sooty cloud of exhaust. The smell triggered an instant memory of the damned landing craft we’d floated in on too many times, and the adrenaline started coursing through my blood stream.

  Great.

  I stepped up and took the first available seat, sharing a bench with a blue-haired old doll that had evidently spent the better part of the morning shopping up this way. Downtown, I transferred to the Wilshire line and made it out to the Ambassador with a few minutes to spare. I chose a long, low overstuffed davenport near the elevator banks and sat down to consider just what it was that I wanted from Bert.

  The flashy crew cut sauntered through the lobby doors and stopped, casting a glance left, then right, before zeroing in on me. I tossed him a nod and rose as he ankled leisurely across the lobby.

  He was a tall one, broad of shoulder, and a little too filled in to call lanky. He was sporting tight khaki shorts and a pair of Chamorros beneath the flaming volcanoes, swaying palms, and dancing hula girls. And it wasn’t exactly a crew cut. It was more of an overgrown but immaculately cut flat top in battleship gray. Add an arresting cable and you could have landed a Corsair on it. Underneath it, his face was taut, tanned, and unlined, with just a hint of stubble along the jaw.

  He didn’t look like one who holed up in an office behind a typewriter. He bore a no-nonsense expression that wasn’t the least bit quizzical as he approached.

  “Raymond James,” I said as I offered my hand.

  He wrapped a calloused paw around it and put on a slow crush. I gave a little back, best as I could, and he grinned, “Call me Bert.” A few seconds more and he disengaged the death grip. We moved the party out the double doors and around the front to the restaurant.

  Bert was evidently a fixture here as we were most efficiently and solemnly ushered to a large table for two overlooking some tropical water scene out in the courtyard.

  Waiting on drinks, I broke the ice by mentioning I’d heard he was a veteran of the recent action. He demurred, so I filled him in on a bit of my recent past. He unstiffened to the point of letting me know he was ex-Army.

  “Dogface, huh? We tripped over a few of those getting back off the islands.” He looked distinctly unamused, and then cracked a new grin, although it had an aspect of the death’s head leer about it.

  “We didn’t run into too many jarheads over in my theater. No mud puddles to play in.” Lame, but passable, and he loosened up a little ‘til the waiter came back with the drinks.

  It turned out he’d been career Army since the mid ‘20s, specializing in the long-distance placement of hot steel on target. He’d been seconded to the OSS at the outbreak of hostilities and subsequently oversaw various enterprises around the globe. His final assignment had been as a creative consultant for war-time propaganda films, and he’d transitioned from there into his current employ at Millenium.

  Dispensing with the food orders, Bert got right down to business. “So, Esther says you’re a known quantity, but she apparently didn’t feel inclined to enlighten me as to just why that might be the case in Millenium’s particular circumstance.”

  I ruminated on that for just a moment before coming back with what I hoped was a suitable reply. “As I mentioned, I do a little work from time to time for several of the studios, often related to personnel matters. Lately it’s turned to the subject of on-lot recruitment by the American Communist Party. I’ve learned a fair bit about who’s talking to who at the studios, but I’m trying to get a line on the source of this activity off of the lots.”

  He sat back and pondered that for a minute, never once taking his eyes off me or betraying a thought on that impassive map of his.

  Finally, he leaned forward and said, barely audibly, his lips hardly parted at all, “I’ve been doing some thinking along those lines myself. It’s definitely going on, down on the lots, although it’s pretty hush-hush and no one has ever thought to get me in on it one way or the other.

  “I don’t like it either, never did, but I know why they’re there. They have a few cheerleaders in the script-writing and production end of things, although most of their red meat is still in the trades and the unions. The question I have is just who and how many of those of any consequence have actually been recruited into the Party, are under discipline, and are working per instructions from ol’ Joe.”

  Taken back a bit, I hadn’t before quite thought about the subject from his perspective: the propaganda potential of influencing the creative product coming out of the major studios. I had been thinking more in terms of espionage, sabotage, and the baser dirty tricks usually associated with the commies. Bert sounded like someone I could work with on this.

  The waiter dropped the New York Strip platters and, as he left, Bert said, “Give me another name, someone who can vouch that you have a legitimate interest in this subject. I don’t want to waste my time.”

  “Call Moe Silverstein over at Magnum. Tell his girl Sally I want you to speak with him.”

  That seemed to work for him so we got busy with the chow and left the follow-on for another time.

  * * *

  It was a little after three when Yuki strode purposefully into my office and plopped into the overstuffed chair with a sigh and a wry little pout.

  “What’s on your mind, little girl?”

  “I didn’t have much luck finding anything concrete on the studios or their unions down at the Central Library. But I chatted up Monica’s friend Lupe some more. She’s now the senior reference librarian.

  “She told me that folks associated with the communists have been caught stealing books over the past several years. In fact they pretty well succeeded in emptying the place of anti-communist publications dating back to the 1930s before the library got wise to what they were up to. Still they can’t keep those books on the shelf.

  “Anyways, she did have this clipping from last year that she had retrieved and kept under wraps in her ‘special’ collection. It’s from the Chicago Herald. She agreed to mimeograph it for me after I told her what we were interested in.”

  She pulled the clipping from her handbag and handed it across the desk. “I’m afraid it has nothing much to tell us about the bunch we’re looking for.”

  I spread the yellowing newsprint carefully across the blotter, noting last year’s date and the byline of Gavin Hughes. The headline read:

  CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE DOCUMENTS RED PLOTS

  WASHINGTON, March 30—In today’s report to Congress the house un-American activities committee claims to have compiled irrefutable proof that the Communist Party of the United States operates under direct orders originating within the USSR. According to the committee, the central purposes of this Kremlin-controlled domestic organization are to reduce military effectiveness, commit sabotage in time of war, and undertake related actions tasked to the overthrow of the Constitutional Republic.

  Committee Chairman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey was quoted as charging: ‘…the communist party in this country is a fifth-column pawn of Moscow.’

  The article went on to detail ways in which the CPUSA had taken control of or brought under its influence various labor unions, schools and universities, newspapers and even some local governments. The committee’s report identified specific ties between American cit
izens under CPUSA discipline, remnants of the Communist International, and the primary Soviet intelligence agencies.

  ‘Well, well…” I thought. This bit of news came as no particular surprise to me, as I had been somewhat disinterestedly following the buzz on this issue for a year or so now. Similar pronouncements had come out of FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover.

  But the mention of unions had tickled a stray nerve, and I all of a sudden wondered might these film studio clowns have a little more up their sleeve than the recruitment angle I was working.

  * * *

  Bert got back to me a few days later. Seems he’d been busy, busy trying to figure out who at Millenium had had the touch put on them by the Party but had declined to take the bait. He hadn’t got far.

  He said Moe had told him I was working to help him get the Red recruiters off of Magnum’s lot. Bert told me he’d decided to toss his hand in doing the same at Millenium, but it hadn’t been an easy nut to crack.

  He said he was on it and would get back to me.

  July 1947

  After moping around the office one fine morning, Yuki wandered into the office and found her place again in the over-stuffed chair.

  “I don’t know, Ray. People are getting kind of cold. They don’t seem the same anymore. Some of them seem to have lost that ‘We’re all in it together’ attitude you saw during the Depression and during the war, although I missed some of that. After the war, we were all together, proud of our achievements and what we had been able to do for the rest of the world.

  “But now you see these whiners cropping up. This city seems to be getting fractured. I hear some people in the old neighborhood bitching about the way things are, like they’re owed a living or something.

  “I really don’t get it. What makes them think they’re any different from anyone else?

  “I mean look at my people. They aren’t kicking up a storm about everything they lost from the internment. Sure they’re not happy about it, but most of them understand well enough why it happened. It pretty much had to happen.

  “And it might have been just as well and good for our own safety. I don’t think all our friendly neighbors would have felt the same if we had been visible the whole time that carnage was going on over in the Pacific. I’m glad to be back, but I don’t much like the way things seem to be headed these days.”

  “Buck up, kid,” I told her. “Those are just the noisemakers. We know some good folk. They’re all around, but mostly laying low, working for a living. These others got no self-respect. They just want someone to notice ‘em.”

  * * *

  Later that week Bert called back to say he’d finally cracked open a few nuts. The recruitment appeared to come right out of the craft guilds, and he’d marked a big boy in the set transport department. The mug was fairly well known as a rabble rouser amongst the tradesmen, but it seemed as though it was some of the slicker types that were approaching the front office and the talent. In any event, Burt had taken it upon himself to put a tail on the boy and by mid-week he believed he had hit pay dirt.

  Seems the guy lived alone and returned most nights to his apartment in the Silver Lake district. Last night he’d popped right back out before Bert had even set up a stake-out, and Bert had followed him all the way down to the docks at San Pedro.

  “Good thing I’d gassed up the heap that morning! It was a hell of a long ride. The boy finally pulled into a lot off Harbor Boulevard and waltzed right in the front door of the Longshoreman’s Hall.

  “He came out ten minutes later hefting a big box of what looked like print, and hot-footed it back up to home. Well, I eased up a little on the way back, but sure enough when I got up there he had a steady line of guys, and one or two manly-looking dames, floating in and out of that place all night. Each left with a handful of whatever was being passed out. I never got a look at the material, and I didn’t recognize any of those birds as being from our lot.

  “I don’t know who the slick types are dealing with, but my guess is that some union is behind this. Seems I recall hearing once of the Comintern floating its own seafaring union. I’d be surprised if it was that obvious, but there you have it.”

  This was worthy sleuthing and it had produced results that seemed to coincide nicely with what Yuki had come up with, although I wasn’t much sure how.

  “You know Bert, I think you just opened this up for me. I’ll see what I can scrape up down there at the harbor. Do you want in?”

  “Naw, I think I’ll pass for the time being. I’m a little more interested in the screenplay manipulation angle to this and I want to work on that some more. But let’s stay in touch.”

  I thanked him for his efforts and rang off.

  Noodling this over for a while the thought occurred to me that a union was a rather formidable target to approach. And given the solidarity and infamous thuggery of its more stalwart adherents, let alone the paranoia one might expect among subversive moles, getting to the bottom of this business was likely to involve a fairly delicate strategy.

  But I never did figure that one out, opting instead for the direct approach; a quick tactical strike to the heart of the matter, assuming my conclusions had any validity whatsoever.

  Over the next few evenings I burned up the phone lines with Manny, grilling him about the San Pedro unions. Manuel Ortiz was an old service pal that worked out of Homicide in the Harbor Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. He’d grown up in the harbor town and he knew the docks well.

  Manny told me the PD generally steered clear of that lot since they’d calmed down somewhat over the past few years. According to him there had been a lot of striking, thieving, monkey-wrenching, and general havoc during the early days of the war when the unions were under instructions to sabotage the Allied war effort on behalf of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

  But all that changed with the Nazi invasion of the USSR and the subsequent Comintern directive to reverse course and support the Allied cause. With all parties in ideological harmony, the docks had never seen such peace. Nowadays it was assumed there was plenty of the usual smuggling, hijacking, and what not going on and perhaps some of the PD was in on it, the others content to look the other way.

  Being in Homicide, this was not really Manny’s beat.

  “I do know that there is one major son of a bitch down there that seems to run the place, and he’s got a reputation for being a real hard case, running gangs, probably setting up scores, who knows what else, but nothing good you can be sure. Like I said, it’s quietened down there a good bit since the war. The dickhead’s name is Gus Shafter.”

  After mulling this lead all afternoon I decided that the thing to do was to lay everything out on the venerable Mr. Shafter, with the expectation that my requirements in the matter would be relayed to the responsible party. The unfortunate aspect was, if this nonsense with Miss Lane didn’t stop, I still wouldn’t know if I had missed the mark with Shafter or was simply being shined on.

  * * *

  I picked a hot morning in mid- month to motor on down to the harbor. As a precaution, I left word with Yuki I’d be meeting with officials of the Dockworker’s Brotherhood, the largest of the longshoremen’s unions, but I was less than specific about what I had planned to do there. Probably because I didn’t really have a plan.

  I tried out a few on the way down there, but nothing came together and I was thoroughly overheated and fresh out of ideas by the time I broke over the rise at the north end of the harbor city. It was a few degrees cooler down by the waterfront as I eased into a row of reserved parking slots off the south end of the building housing the Dockworker’s local. I pulled into a space near the entrance. The convertible top was down, and my ride looked pretty spiffy next to the newer, but utilitarian, iron holding down the rest of the lot.

  Like a man with a purpose I strode on in the front door and straight down the main hall hoping to find the executive suite. I was right. It took up the whole back wall of the building, facing the waterfront. I push
ed through the pebbled glass door and stopped to adjust my jacket. Two goons sitting against the far wall made as if to rise, but I ignored them and proceeded to the large desk manned by the ugliest human female I’d ever seen.

  Big Bertha, or was it Bruno, was so enormous she looked as if she was molded to the back of the desk. She glanced up with a pair of beady, yellowed porcine eyes and grunted “Yeah?”

  It was a strangely high-pitched, simpering voice, but it took nothing away from the prison-guard-from-Hell look pasted across her ugly mug. That face could scare the fleas off a junkyard dog. The rest of her would intimidate a full-grown gorilla. I’d seen illustrations of dinosaurs that looked better than this one. If she could be any less appealing I didn’t see how. It occurred to me that the perks of a commie warlord mightn’t be all that great.

  I slapped my card down on her desk and informed her I needed to speak at once with Mr. Shafter on a matter of the utmost urgency. Probably the wrong approach, but in any case she wasn’t buying it. She just sat there and glared.

  “Now, ma’am. This cannot wait until after lunch.”

  Besides I wanted to get back out of there while I still had the chance to hold an appetite for the noon hour. I was starting to fear this horrific image of retrograde femininity was going to be burned onto my retinas for the next month and I was praying she wouldn’t open her nasty yap again. But she did.

  The beast picked up my card, waved it in the air, and said, “Ollie. Take this on in to the man and see if he’s got a few minutes for this shamus.”

  I turned around to get a good look-see at the two clowns for the first time. The big one’s eyeballs did a double take upon hearing of my profession, so I assumed this was the gentleman known as Ollie.

  The other fellow retained his air of ignorant bliss. A little scrawnier than he had first appeared, he was a weasel-faced little cuss with a greased-back ducktail. He kept his eyes averted and assumed a posture of calculated indifference. Still, the mutt looked like he’d been born guilty.

  Ollie rose slowly, stretched, yawned and gave me the poker face as he passed by, snatched up the card, and rapped on the inner office door. He was gone a good five minutes, a frightfully long time to be left in Bertha’s presence. I moved over and took a load off in Ollie’s spot. The weasel avoided eye contact for about another minute and then jumped up suddenly and exited through the double doors.