As it happened, Girardin’s reforms were swept away by an unexpected event—although perhaps not entirely unexpected by Girardin, since he had predicted it—the Detroit riots of 1967.
Affable and soft-spoken, Girardin promised to have me picked up at the airport by a police car and taken straight to meet him, which sounded a lot better than a taxi. When I arrived, two cops were waiting for me. In keeping with the Detroit police department’s well-earned reputation for macho policing, they carried huge amounts of extra ammunition on their belts, leather “slappers,” weighted nightsticks, the kind of old-fashioned policeman’s gloves that had strips of flexible lead sewn into the leather over the knuckles, and not one but two pairs of handcuffs. They looked at me stonily through dark Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses—anybody coming to visit Commissioner Girardin from New York was potentially the enemy, a liberal, a do-gooder, a bleeding heart, perhaps even a journalist. Wordlessly, they led me outside, as if they had just arrested me.
Inside their police car, two twelve-gauge Winchester riot guns were fixed in clamps to the dashboard and the floor, a sight not often seen in the Big Apple. I did not listen to the chatter on the radio as we drove into town from the airport, but I noticed a certain uneasiness in my two escorts, who were whispering to each other in the front seat. I asked if there was a problem. No, I was told, everything was OK, but they needed to make a slight detour, if I didn’t mind. I said I didn’t mind at all, at which point the siren and the flashing lights were turned on, and with a screech of tires we set off through the endless suburbs of Detroit, ignoring red lights and stop signs.
By now, the radio chatter had a certain hysterical tone to it, and even I could make out the word shootings and the phrase officer in need of assistance. We were driving through poorer neighborhoods now, and a number of black men in the streets looked at the police car with undisguised anger. From time to time I heard what seemed to me the sound of shots. At last the police car pulled to a sudden stop, my two escorts unclipped their shotguns, and they got out of the car. “Just stay put,” one of them said. “We’ll lock the doors. You’ll be OK.” I didn’t much fancy sitting in a locked police car for who knew how long, while angry crowds roamed the streets, but the two cops didn’t pause long enough to debate the point—besides, better inside the car than out on the pavement as possibly the only white civilian for miles around. From time to time, somebody threw a rock or a bottle at the police car, and a couple of kids spat on the windshield. It was not exactly comfortable, but I told myself that for somebody who had lived through the Hungarian Revolution, this was small potatoes. Soon, there was an odor of burning. Through the windshield, I could make out fires. From somewhere behind me came the noise of breaking glass. I hunkered down in the backseat and hoped for the best.
What seemed like hours passed, though it was probably not more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Eventually, my two escorts reappeared, unlocked the door, and got in. They brought with them an aroma that I recognized instantly from Budapest: a pungent combination of spent gunpowder, sweat, and soot. They were clearly in no mood for explanations. Wearily, they reloaded their guns, then we set off again. Two or three times more we stopped and repeated this little drama, until we headed back toward the center of Detroit, away from the angry mob.
“We’ll have you there in a couple of minutes,” the cop next to the driver said, swiveling around to look at me. His face was darkened with smoke, and his eyes were bloodshot. Looking at him, I was reminded of the duke of Wellington’s remark on the first sight of his army in Spain: “I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.”
“What’s going on out there?” I asked.
“A riot.”
“How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad.”
“If they want to burn down their own neighborhoods, let ’em,” the driver said, with a shrug.
His companion nodded. “Sure. But you got to stop them looting. And shooting at us.”
They both fell silent for a moment. I had no difficulty in imagining what was likely to happen to anybody who was suspected of opening fire on a Detroit cop.
“You’ll be OK at headquarters,” the driver said. “I’ll say one thing for Girardin. At least he was smart enough to take a few precautions. I mean he must have seen it coming. That’s why he had all the manhole covers around headquarters welded shut. He didn’t want them pulling the manhole covers, then breaking into the building from underground.”
Even in Budapest, I reflected, nobody had taken this precaution. The idea that the manhole covers around police headquarters had been welded shut at the last minute gave me some sense of just what was taking place here—a realization confirmed by the sight of my destination, which was ringed by armored cars and floodlights.
As it turned out—and not surprisingly—Girardin was too busy to spend any time with me. His office had the look of the Smolny Institute, from which Lenin directed the 1918 revolution: heavily armed men trooping up and down the stairs, weapons stacked everywhere, people rushing back and forth with urgent messages, an almost palpable sense of urgency in the air, and the unmistakable scent of violence everywhere. At least half a dozen people told me that the manhole covers had been welded shut.
I flew back the next morning, having been driven to the airport by another silent pair of cops, through streets that were deserted and over which hung a thick pall of smoke.
Few of my subsequent books from the right side of the law led me into any similar adventure. I was taken on a tour of Chinatown by the precinct captain, introduced to the NYPD detective who specialized in art theft, and spent a good deal of time at One Police Plaza, meeting prospective authors. Since law enforcement is a small world, I soon had books by FBI agents and even by U.S. marshals. Just like the people in organized crime, every law-enforcement officer has a story to tell, and most of them are good raconteurs.
I’ve never done a police cookbook, though. Not yet. Probably somebody is writing one right now in the front seat of a patrol car.
THE SEARCH for a different kind of criminal, by a very different kind of cop, brought Peter Mayer and me together again briefly when I was presented with the opportunity to buy Ladislas Farago’s Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, by his longtime (and long-suffering) agent, Maximillian Becker. Farago was the author of a best-selling biography of Patton and a kind of self-appointed expert on matters of secret intelligence. “Laci” (the Hungarian diminutive of Ladislas), as Farago was always called by his friends, was a rotund, bearded man, with an ingratiating smile and definitely uningratiating eyes.
In Farago, I instantly recognized a type completely familiar to me: the transplanted Hungarian with the deliberately mysterious background who knows (or claims to know) everyone and is so far beyond scruples as not to understand their existence. Farago embodied all those stories about the cleverness of Hungarians—“A Hungarian is a man who enters a revolving door behind you, and comes out ahead of you”; “The Hungarian recipe for an omelet begins, ‘First, steal a dozen eggs.’ ”
Farago might have posed for the portrait of “the Hungarian on the make,” with his soft, heavily accented voice, his gestures, his charm, his endless fund of anecdotes, his hypnotic self-confidence, and his total imperviousness to abuse, insults, or refusals. It was a waste of breath saying no to Farago—he simply bounced back like an inflated rubber beach toy and came at you from another direction. Once, later in our relationship, when I had learned to be cautious, Farago appeared in my office in distress, tears in his eyes, to ask for a further advance of $5,000 against the book he had been writing for many months, none of which I had as yet seen because it was “too secret and dangerous” to show me. He had spent so much money on research, Farago said, that he was broke. His house was about to be taken away from him, his beloved, patient wife was prostrate with fear and distress, he was a ruined man if I said no. Nothing less than $5,000 could save him. He would go down on his knees befor
e me, if necessary. I said no anyway—after several such pleas, Dick Snyder had warned me to turn off the money tap until we saw some manuscript—but Laci, far from breaking down or getting angry, kept right on smiling. “Well,” he said, “if not five thousand, how about five hundred as a personal loan, from one Hungarian to another?”
It was Farago’s thesis that the Fourth Reich was in existence and flourishing in South America and that an active Nazi underground was thriving there. He had set out to document this, and in the course of his researches had come upon proof that Martin Bormann was alive and well and living in prosperity as one of the leaders of this movement. Of course, there was a grain of truth to all this, as everybody knew, particularly since the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann. Farago documented a whole subculture of escaped Nazis, with their social clubs, their own German villages painstakingly re-created in the Andes and on the rolling plains of Argentina. He even produced photographs of an annual beauty contest in which “Miss Teenage Nazi South America” was chosen in a beer hall draped in swastikas that looked alarmingly like the one in Munich from which the Führer had launched his movement.
All this was interesting, but what was sensational was the claim that Farago had found Bormann, not only alive and well but in control of a vast fortune in Nazi funds smuggled to South America in the last years of the war. Bormann, Farago alleged, had fled to Argentina with the help of the Vatican, paid over a substantial part of his fortune to Eva Perón in exchange for protection, then moved among half a dozen South American countries, and ended up in a convent-hospital in the windswept Bolivian Andes run by Redemptorist nuns, where “between freshly laundered sheets,” he recovered from injections designed to prolong his life and awaited the return to power of Juan Perón. Farago had not only actually seen the ailing Reichsleiter, but in a complicated transaction, for which we had paid him another emergency transfusion of money to travel to South America again, had acquired a beer bottle that bore Bormann’s fingerprints, as well as a photograph of Bormann taken as he crossed the Bolivian frontier on his way to the convent.
It was Farago’s way to declare his own documentation “beyond dispute,” without showing it, usually on the grounds that it was far too dangerous and explosive to let out of his hands. On those occasions when I insisted on seeing some proof, Farago went to the opposite extreme and produced cartons of documents, all of them in Spanish, German, or Portuguese, either in the form of blurred photocopies or retypings of the originals. Either way, there was nothing to be gained by plunging into them. Seldom has the truth that the publisher is at the mercy of the author been proven more amply. Farago could prove anything, given his hoard of documents, so in the end you either had to believe him or not. But where I was cautious, Peter Mayer, who bought the mass-market rights from us for Avon for a small fortune, was a confirmed believer, perhaps because he had not grown up surrounded by Hungarians, as I had. Mayer was convinced that Aftermath was destined to be the most important book any of us would ever publish, and he eventually persuaded Dick, who was initially a skeptic, that Farago had the goods.
In a rare burst of synergy, Dick managed to procure an audience for Farago with the executives of Paramount, who were bowled over when he produced the beer bottle for them to look at, and Paramount soon bought the motion-picture rights. Whatever else may be said about Farago, he was a brilliant salesman—at the time they bought the rights, Paramount had seen no more of the manuscript than Peter Mayer or I had.
As the manuscript, finally, did begin to come in, the S&S legal department raised all sorts of queries about Farago’s “proofs,” which he dismissed angrily. What, after all, did lawyers know? They were professional skeptics, trained not to be able to see the forest for the trees. Of course the documents were ambiguous and full of holes! Brave men had risked their lives to get him these documents. We were trying to expose a vast, dangerous Nazi conspiracy, well provided with funds and professional killers, with tentacles reaching to the highest levels of the Vatican, the CIA, and every South American government. Of course there would be gaps in the documents, ambiguous evidence, difficult puzzles—this was not a real-estate transaction, after all, this was living history, serious politics, the most explosive news story since World War Two. Certain assumptions had to be taken, certain risks accepted—this was not a book for the weak of heart to publish.
Since nobody wanted to be classed among the weak of heart—and since we had already invested a considerable fortune in Farago’s book—we proceeded, eventually convincing everyone, including ourselves and the S&S sales reps, that Aftermath was going to be a huge best-seller that would make front-page news. Even Hugh Collins acknowledged that in Aftermath we had the real goods—he pledged to get the book into the windows of every major bookseller in Chicago.
WELL, WE did make front-page news, well before publication—and above the fold in The New York Times at that. Unfortunately, it was with a story that the presumed Martin Bormann whom Farago had discovered and photographed was in fact a harmless Argentinean schoolteacher named Nicolas Siri. Before long, the Germans produced Martin Bormann’s skull and dental fittings, allegedly found in the rubble of Berlin, just where he had last been seen by Arthur Axmann, Baldur von Shirach’s successor as head of the Hitler Youth, during their escape from the Führerbunker in May 1945. Not to be outdone, the Russians revealed Bormann’s diary of his last weeks with Hitler, which he had left behind in the bunker. Although Farago argued that the skull was a fake perpetrated by reporters from Der Spiegel and the diary a forgery by the KGB (for what purpose it was not clear), the air was definitely out of his balloon. The distinguished English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper gave the book the coup de grâce in a long, devastatingly destructive review in The New York Review of Books that would have led anyone but Farago to hide his head in shame.
Needless to say, the idea of doing so did not occur to him—shame was not one of the emotions he was capable of feeling strongly—however, the news scuppered Aftermath. Farago’s explanation that this was a simple and unfortunate case of “mistaken identity” that in no way reflected upon the rest of the book went nowhere, but did not dismay Paramount, since whatever they had in mind as a movie had nothing much to do with the facts anyway, nor with Farago’s book, come to that.
Apparently loyal to the old Hollywood belief that there is no such thing as bad publicity, they proceeded with their plans for the movie. The signature of the contract had been delayed for months, but when it was finally ready, Max Becker, Farago’s agent, a Central European with the sad face of a beagle and a quality of weary chutzpah, announced that rather than waste time sending it back and forth for signature, he and Farago would come to the Paramount office in New York to sign. There was a little personal request of Farago’s that he also wanted to convey, Becker said. Farago was a sentimental soul, deeply stirred by the trust that Paramount had shown in him. It would mean a great deal to him if Paramount could make something of a ceremony of the occasion—perhaps a bottle of champagne and a toast, as between friends, while the check was handed directly to Farago.
The bottle of champagne was not a problem, of course, but the check was. Normally, once a movie contract has been signed by both parties, the check request is made out and circulates through the accounting department for ages. In many cases, the documents are sent from New York to Los Angeles for multiple signatures of people who are either too busy to sign or on vacation, then back to New York, until, finally, the check is issued by some bank in Des Moines or Oklahoma City and sent on from there by the slowest possible form of mail—yak mail, if it existed—the object being to keep the money earning interest in the movie company’s account for as long as possible. The idea of actually handing a six-figure check to anybody struck at the very heart of motion-picture economics.
Still, under the monotonous drip-by-drip pressure of Max Becker, Paramount eventually caved in. Mountains were moved, miracles performed, as a gesture of faith and friendship the impossible was arranged. The check was
to be handed to Farago as he signed the contract. Farago, Becker reported, had tears in his eyes when he heard the news, so moved was he.
On the appointed day, early in the afternoon, everybody involved in Aftermath gathered in a conference room at Paramount. Champagne was served, while Farago, dewy-eyed, made a small speech. He was a deeply sentimental soul, he emphasized, personal loyalties were what mattered to him more than anything. This was a vote of confidence that he would never, never forget. Even the hard-bitten film executives were moved as Farago went on about the Holocaust, his own experiences, the heavy weight of history. Finally, at about a quarter to three, he sat down and signed the contracts with a flourish. The envelope containing the check was handed to him.
Becker, it was noticed, had not taken a seat or drunk his champagne. He was, in fact, poised, like an Olympic runner in the blocks for the start of a sprint, overcoat on, hat wedged firmly on his head. Although he was the least athletic man imaginable—with the possible exception of Farago himself—he looked like a man determined to break some record, nostrils flared, hand outstretched, every muscle tense. No sooner had Farago received his check than he handed it to Becker, who ran, not walked, to the door, as if a starter’s pistol had been fired, and left, so quickly in fact that it was impossible to ignore his hasty departure.
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