by James Philip
The two men drove to work together, vacationed together and ate together, practically living and working in each other’s pockets. Promoted to assistant director as long ago as 1930, Tolson had been with Hoover in 1936 to arrest the back robber Alvin Karpis, and in the same year had been involved in a famous gun fight with the notorious gangster Harry Brunette. He and Hoover had thrown the dragnet over the Long Island spy ring in 1942; and for as long as anybody remembered, Tolson had been FBI Associate Director responsible for discipline, budget and administration.
“Frederick M. Miller,” Tolson intoned through clenched teeth. His lowly pitched voice was loud in the small concrete room below street level beneath the three-floor FBI Albuquerque Field Office. “Aged forty-one. He won a Purple Heart at Iwo Jima. He had a wife and two young children.”
“Fred was a good guy,” the other man in the room observed mildly.
Whereas Tolson was attired in a crisply pressed business suit, his face shaved and his thinning hair slicked back, wearing brightly buffed black shoes; his hand-cuffed companion was unshaven, tousled, his face bruised, blotched. He had not washed for several days, his shirt was grime-stained – with both dirt and his blood – he stank like a raccoon and his shoes were ruinously scuffed. He also felt like shit but Tolson was beyond caring about little things like that.
“Karl E. Richter, junior...”
“Eric was a jerk.”
Tolson looked up with murder in his grey hooded eyes.
The other, younger man shrugged.
“Karl Eric Richter,” Tolson continued. “Aged forty-three. Twenty years unblemished service to the Bureau. He leaves a wife and three children.”
“He was hitting on a kid in the typing pool at the San Francisco Field Office,” retorted the prisoner. “He always hit on the girls fresh out of typing school.”
Former Special Agent Dwight Christie had wondered, now and then, what it would be like being a prisoner. When first he betrayed the Agency, his country and the majority of the people he had ever called ‘friends’ he had expected to be quickly uncovered, captured, condemned and probably hung, gassed or electrocuted – depending upon which state he was arraigned in – or shot in some last gasp desperate OK Corral-type shoot out...every day. However, when it had not happened after the first year he had started to relax. In fact as the years had rolled by he had become a little blasé about the prospect.
No fool like an old fool.
The handcuffs chaffed; the connecting chain of his manacles was strung through a rugged steel loop buried in the table before him. Even had he been able to get to his feet his ankles were shackled. The chains made sense; he was after all, a very dangerous man.
“Tadeusz Drzewiecki. Aged twenty-nine years.”
Tolson had not called the goons in the corridor back into the interrogation cell yet. On balance that was likely a good sign. They would have stayed around if today was the day he got to be beaten to a pulp. Problematically, the day was still young but the thing about being a prisoner was that you learned - faster than most people imagine - to live minute by minute because your life belonged to somebody else. The hardest thing to get used to was not having to make any plans, or take any decisions. After a while it tended to leave a huge empty void in a man’s mind.
“I shot Richter,” Dwight Christie confessed. “I could pretend I did it because he raped a seventeen year old girl in the car lot behind the Santa Fe Field Office one night, but,” he shrugged as demonstrably as his manacled hands allowed, “I’d have capped the jerk when I found out about that if I was half the man I like to think I am. Before you ask, I killed Jansen, too. He was the guy who carried out the hit on Admiral Braithwaite and his wife in Oakland. Jansen was the one who capped Drzewiecki and Miller.”
Tolson scowled.
“Who ordered the assassination of Admiral and Mrs Braithwaite?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” Two lies.
“How did you meet Jansen?”
Christie said nothing.
“Okay,” Tolson grunted. “Why kill everybody at the safe house in Berkeley?”
“How far would I have got if I’d just disappeared?”
The older man sucked in an asthmatic breath.
“It took you what,” Christie inquired, “two months to figure out I wasn’t one of the bodies in Berkeley? I knew the Bureau would work it out sooner or later. Later was better at the time. Besides, Jansen had it coming to him. Guys like me hate contracting work out to the mob as much as you and the Director, Mr Tolson.”
“Guys like you?”
“Guys like you and me who protect and serve the swindlers who profit from this country’s wars.”
Clyde Tolson was looking at him as if he was mad.
Heck, maybe I am mad!
I must have been crazy risking getting caught playing the good fucking Samaritan once too often...
“The women and children at the address where you were arrested,” Tolson inquired, “claim that you were their guardian angel?”
Christie snorted a short laugh.
“I put distance between them and Galen Cheney and brought them food and medicine when I could, if that’s what you mean?”
Tolson had been thumbing through a sheaf of notes.
He paused, read several lines.
“There were two older women. A lady in her forties and another in her twenties, and several girls...” He looked up. “All of whom had been violated. Including the youngest, who claims her age to be only twelve years?”
“Sarah Jane was raped by Galen Cheney’s son Isaac the night before the pair of them took off north,” Christie said. There was no point holding back things the bastards already knew. “Before you ask; for what it’s worth I didn’t know they planned to assassinate Dr King. I’ve got no problem being a communist, if that’s what you want to call me but I’ve got no quarrel with blacks who want a fair deal. I thought that was what the Civil War was about...”
Tolson’s pale face was wearing a troubled, vaguely confused expression.
“You must have known Cheney’s planned to assassinate the Reverend King?”
Christie shook his head.
“No. I didn’t know he planned to take a pot shot at the Presidential cavalcade in Dallas either.” He shook his head again. “Or any of the other shit he got up to before I met up with him again back in December. The rebellion in DC was as big a surprise to me as it was to you and the Director, by the way.” That was lie, of course. “I guessed the Braithwaite killing was something to do with that, but that’s just twenty-twenty hindsight. Maybe the Admiral found out what was in the wind and somebody wanted him silenced?”
Tolson was quiet for some seconds.
“Everybody says you’re a sharp operator, Christie.” It was no kind of question so the younger man did not reply.
Instead, he asked a question of his own.
“It was one of the girls who tipped you off, wasn’t it?”
Nothing else made sense. The women were terrified of Galen Cheney and his idiot surviving son. Retarded or not Isaac had to have been the man who fired the shots responsible for the Bedford Pine Park tragedy in Atlanta in February. The kid had a gift with a long rifle, the eyesight of a hawk and the untroubled conscience of a child who simply does not realize that taking down another human being of ranges of up to a mile is wrong.
Isaac had damaged Sarah Jane that night before he went away. Inseminated her, and subsequently beaten her so badly she had passed blood for two days. A fortnight ago the kid had miscarried and the bleeding had gone on and on...
She would have died if he had not driven her and Selma, the oldest of the surviving Cheney women to the nearest hospital over thirty miles north from the bayou hideaway where, until then, the women had been safe from the Cheney’s.
Sarah Jane had been delirious.
She would not have been able to help herself...
“I am informed that the child is recovering,” Tolson explained, obviously fi
nding the whole discussion about the hospitalization of a twelve year old victim of unspeakable sexual abuse intensely distasteful, “as well as can be expected in the circumstances.”
Dwight Christie was beginning to realize he was no longer being interrogated; possibly, because his captors suspected that he had little or no useful intelligence to betray. He had had no contact with his former minders since before the Battle of Washington; and so far as he knew he had only a single unburned contact left in the whole of North America. He had trawled the south western states checking dead letter drops, slipping the standard key words – code words – into conversations in places where he had met comrades in the past. He had watched old safe houses, trailed the friends and relations of old associates. All to no avail; the network was gone, anybody still ‘sleeping’ was comatose and everybody else was dead or in the hands of the Bureau.
Yes, something was definitely sticking in Associate Director Tolson’s throat.
No witnesses in the cell.
No visible sign of any bugging or recording equipment.
No double-sided mirrors.
Perhaps, Tolson needed whatever he wanted to say to him to be private with a capital ‘P’.
Christie waited. He had all the time in the world; he was going nowhere but Clyde Tolson was a busy man. He would get to the punch line sooner or later.
“It it was my decision I’d have you taken outside and shot,” the older man stated unhappily. “However, Director Hoover has empowered me to put a,” he choked on this for a moment, “proposition to you.”
Dwight Christie’s ears pricked up in surprise. From Tolson’s self-evident discomfort the proposition in question clearly did not concern the color of the bullets with which he was to be dispatched.
“The number one priority of the Bureau at this time is to bring the murderers of Bedford Pine Park to justice.”
“The number one priority?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Christie murmured, still not really knowing where this bizarre turn of events was heading.
“If you materially assist the Bureau in the apprehension of Galen Cheney, his son Isaac and any other associates engaged in his murderous activities presently or in the past,” Tolson went on, his tone increasingly terse and breathless with unmitigated disgust, “you will be granted immunity from prosecution for any of the heinous crimes you have committed against the United States up to and including this time.”
Jesus wept...
I honestly did not see that coming!
Dwight Christie’s brain clicked back into gear.
“Okay,” he muttered. Then, finding his voice he asked: “Do I get that in writing from the US Attorney General’s Office?”
“That’s hardly...”
“I want it in writing signed by the Attorney General or his Deputy, and I want that letter notarized by and locked away in the safe of the sort of lawyer even you and Director Hoover will think twice before rousting.”
“You are in no position to make conditions, Christie.”
But they both knew that was not true.
“Look, Mr Tolson,” the man in chains reasoned wearily. “Here’s the thing. I’m not about to deny anything you think I’ve done. I don’t care what you think of me or about any of that. For what it’s worth I’m not even a communist; leastways, not in my own head. I may have been working for the Soviets for most of the last twenty years, I don’t know. I don’t speak Russian; and I never wanted to live in the Soviet Union. I just got angry with the way things are, were, in this country. I saw all those fat cats getting fatter while our boys – well, my brothers in particular, actually – were getting killed on the beaches of all those shitty little islands in the Pacific and over there in Europe. Hell, I never understood why that was our fight anyway. So, here I am in,” actually he had no idea where he was, “in wherever this is with my hands and feet in chains waiting for somebody to cap me. I’m okay with that. I’ve done bad things, crazy mixed up bad things now that I think about it but it all made a kind of sense at the time.”
“You’re in Albuquerque,” Tolson said hoarsely.
“Oh, right. Albuquerque. Whatever, with the greatest respect, unless you want to make this ‘proposition’ of yours official as in signed, sealed and delivered if it’s all the same with you I’ll carry on sitting here on my arse waiting for the bullet, Mr Tolson.”
Chapter 3
Saturday 6th June 1964
Berkeley, California
Fifty-one year old Professor Caroline Konstantis had been in the process of ‘retiring’ from the United States Air Force Reserve at the time of the Cuban Missiles War. She had finally been appointed a fellow of the School of Medicine at the University of Chicago in 1961 and her military ‘duties’ – mostly the requirement to serve sixty to ninety days per annum on ‘standby’ or actually on active service - was likely, going forward, to become an onerous distraction as her medical career blossomed.
In medicine as in any other profession just being a woman was a big disadvantage in itself, and looking ahead not being around to fight her department’s battles at the School of Medicine two to three months most years, even assuming there was no new major war in the next ten years, was going to be a real career issue going forward. She had ambitions to be the School’s first female Dean of Psychiatry and that was not going to happen if she was stabbed in the back every time she performed her ‘reserve duties’ in DC or Hawaii or Guam or Stuttgart. Thus, if things had gone to plan by the fall of 1963 she ought to have been a free woman again.
But then in late October 1962 the missiles had started flying, the bombs dropping and everything had gone the Hell; and now she had another career. Or rather, two careers, a public and a secret role. For public consumption she appeared in all Veterans Administration documentation as Lieutenant Colonel, Psychiatric Services attached to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. Sometimes she even made an appearance at her office in Philly; but not often. In real life she reported directly to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Curtis LeMay and other than when she was face to face with her immediate colleagues she never talked about her work.
‘I’ve got a Helluva a lot of damaged boys in my Air Force,’ the legendary former commander of Strategic Air Command had told her with the bluntness for which he was famed. Not for nothing was Curtis LeMay, the man who had led the 3rd Air Division of the Eighth Air Force to Regensburg in 1943, and orchestrated the fire-bombing of the Japanese Cities in 1945, known by his men as ‘Old Iron Pants’, ‘the Big Cigar’ and ‘Bombs Away LeMay’ but that was only one side of the man whose missiles and bombers had won World War III in a single night. ‘That’s not a thing I can make a big thing about right now,” he had gone on grimly, ‘but I’m not about to brush any of this shit under the carpet like those assholes in DC want!’
Caroline Konstantis had been flown from Illinois to meet LeMay at Barksdale Air Force Base, near Shreveport in Louisiana the week before Christmas 1962, and never returned to Chicago. She had survived the night of the war because she was staying overnight with friends in Joliet, forty miles south west of city, well beyond the blast radius of either of the big bombs which had wrecked the north of the Windy City. LeMay’s people had only tracked her down because she had registered her reserve status with the Illinois Emergency Disaster Management Office in Joliet.
The National Guard had closed all the roads into Chicago in the weeks after the cataclysm; and she had reported for duty at the local hospital.
The whole World had been traumatized in those days.
As if under the surface it was any less traumatized now...
Caroline Konstantis turned off University Avenue and parked her car, a 1960 Plymouth from the US Air Force car pool in Oakland, on Hearst Street. It was one of those beautiful, balmy, bright California mornings that made everybody from out of state wonder what on earth they were doing living somewhere else. Lately, there were a host of other reasons why right thinking Americans wo
uld want to live in California; not least because the state was beginning to seem to many Americans like an island of sanity in an ever madder World. A lot of the places she travelled to – her job meant she spent every third day in the air or on the road – there were National Guardsman on street corners, the roads were littered with the detritus of riots, people treated out of towners and the military like enemies, and politics had become well...positively feral. The country had turned in upon itself; and to be accused of being un-American was a thing that could get a man - or a woman - beaten up in the street in most states.
She switched off the motor, pushed up her Ray-Bans and adjusted the mirror. Her hair seemed streaked with straw as much as grey; spending so much time in the sun agreed with her. The grey-blue in her eyes seemed brighter than she had noticed years ago, and the crows’ feet at the corners of her eyes were no more pronounced than before the war. There had been a time when she would have imagined that her new life – her post-cataclysm life – might have worn her down; instead it had freed her from a narrow middle-aged professional rut which had become her prison. Her ex-husband, a history professor ten years her senior, had been in Niagara with his latest floozy the night of the war. Sometimes she wondered if they had been coupling at the moment they were vaporized by the Buffalo bomb. Her son, Simon, was a junior houseman at Shore Memorial in Atlantic City. Simon had been his father’s son and he had not spoken to her since the divorce, five years ago.
After the divorce her precious ‘career’ had become everything and her whole pre-October War life, a life almost totally bereft of family and real friends. She had become old before her time cultivating stern professorial dowdiness, careful never to risk personal involvements.
