Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  They told me that the Commissioner was in his office and would wait for me, but they asked for an hour, which would give them time to set up the cab and driver and get them to Seventieth Street. They told me that the cab would be a Green Checker and that it would cross Columbus Avenue during the sixty seconds after ten o’clock. I got a time check on my watch and reminded myself to remind them to run a test on my telephone and make certain it was not tapped.

  Then I put on a pot of coffee, strong and black, drank a cup, smoked a cigarette and did some thinking. It was not pleasant thinking or productive thinking, and like most of my thoughts recently, it was evocative of no profound conclusions. I then went to the brief case, emptied it, and stuffed seventy-five packages of twenty-dollar bills into my shirt, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars close to my heart and skin. It bagged out my shirt, but my suit jacket pressed the money into shape and my loose raglan topcoat covered the bulge. I walked downstairs, hands in my pockets, over to Columbus and north. Now I made no effort to see whether I was being followed. It was just ten o’clock when I reached the corner of Seventieth Street, and as I paused on the corner, the light changed and a Green Checker moved across Columbus. I signaled the cab; it stopped; and as I got in the driver asked me,

  “Are you Clancy?”

  “That’s right.” My heart was hammering as I closed the door and sat back. The cab moved along Seventieth. As we reached Central Park West, two more cars had come into the street.

  “What do I do?” the driver asked.

  “Right turn and then go into the transverse. I want to see if we’re followed.”

  One of the two cars turned right, a Buick convertible. When we made our left turn into the transverse, the Buick continued south on the avenue.

  “We’re clean,” I said. “Take me downtown now.” Then I leaned back and lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly and with pleasure.

  It was an interesting revelation to me that I could become as afraid as I had just been and that I could follow that feeling with the sense of security I now had. Riding downtown, I made up my mind that I wanted a gun. I had never liked guns or put much faith in them, but I realized that my being afraid was beginning, not ending. The gun is a symbol, just as the crisp money against my skin was a symbol.

  At Centre Street, a uniformed officer was waiting for me and he took me directly to the Commissioner’s office. Commissioner Comaday was waiting there, and with him was Sidney Fredericks from the Justice Department.

  “Sit down, Clancy,” the Commissioner said, nodding at one of the brown leather chairs. “I suppose you had to come?”

  “I thought it best, sir,” I said, but before I sat down, I removed my coat, opened my jacket, and put the money from my shirt on the commissioner’s desk. Then I sat down. Comaday and Fredericks examined the money.

  “A lot of money,” Fredericks said.

  “Suppose you tell us about it,” the Commissioner nodded.

  I told them what had happened and gave a full description of the two men. They listened thoughtfully, and when I finished they were silent for a little while. Then Comaday cut in his inter-office and asked for Jacobs, the currency man. While we waited for Jacobs, Fredericks asked me about the Spanish accent of Mr. Brown.

  “I could almost swear that it was Spanish,” I said, “but almost—you understand. It could have been Portuguese. It just could have been Italian or Rumanian or French. I don’t know why I decided that it was Spanish. That was just a reaction. He began to talk and I pegged it. I don’t mean that he was Spanish, necessarily. Only the accent.”

  “A thick accent?”

  “No, sir. Very slight.”

  “Did he talk like a foreigner—I mean, grammatically, did he formulate his sentences as a foreigner would?”

  “No. His English was excellent. A trifle pompous, but excellent.”

  “You left the brief case there?” Comaday asked.

  “Yes, in case I was being watched. Also, I would appreciate it, sir, if you had my telephone checked out for a tap.”

  Comaday made a note of that. Fredericks shook his head and said, “We won’t learn anything from the brief case. These are careful men. What do you think of fingerprints, Clancy?”

  “The same thing, sir. Careful men.”

  Jacobs came in then. He was a thin, nearsighted man in his fifties, steel-rimmed glasses and a wisp of gray hair combed back over his bald head. Against the squat, bulldog bulk of Comaday, he was wraithlike, but he drew a look of intense interest from Fredericks. In a limited circle, Jacobs was not without fame.

  “Take a look at that money, Joe,” Comaday said to him.

  Jacobs went’ to the desk, spread out the packages, riffled several of them, and then drew a bill from each of five packages. He examined the bills carefully and knowingly.

  “Well?” Comaday demanded.

  “Seventy-five packages,” Jacobs nodded. “One hundred bills in each. I’m going by bulk, so that’s not an exact count. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Just an opinion.”

  Fredericks nodded and smiled slightly.

  “Clean money?” Comaday asked.

  “I wish it was mine, Commissioner. Made in Washington by the United States Government—pretty as a picture.”

  “Is it hot?” Fredericks asked. “Or couldn’t you tell us that?”

  “I might at that,” Jacobs grinned. “Just a guess, you understand.” He riffled through a dozen more packages. “No—it’s not stolen. That can be checked out. But if you want a snap opinion, it’s not stolen money.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This year’s money. I keep abreast of the movement of stolen funds. There’s been nothing in twenty-dollar bills over the past twelve months that adds up to one hundred fifty thousand. That doesn’t mean that part of it couldn’t be hot. I just doubt it. I got a feeling it’s nice money.”

  “Not nice money,” Comaday said.

  “Well—in a manner of speaking.”

  “Thank you, Jacobs,” Comaday nodded. “I’ll get it down to you tonight. I want a full report”

  Jacobs left, and we sat in silence again. We sat in silence until Comaday said, “A lot of money. A bribe. Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” I agreed.

  “A lousy, stinking situation this is!” Comaday burst out suddenly. He was Police Commissioner of New York City. I was a little surprised.

  “Difficult.” Fredericks agreed.

  Silence again. Then Comaday asked me, “How are you making out, Clancy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Progress?”

  “I don’t know. This isn’t anything I enjoy doing or anything I’ve done before.”

  “Right now, none of us enjoy what we’re doing.”

  “I know, sir, that it’s none of my business. But I can’t help being curious about other efforts. You can just tell me to mind my own business.”

  “We’ve drawn a blank, Clancy. Nothing has changed.”

  “I see. And is that the case in Moscow, too, sir?”

  “As far as we know. Incidentally, Clancy, one of their top security people is here, and he would like to meet with you. His name is Dmitri Grischov, and he suggested that you come around to their place on Park Avenue.”

  “What can come of that?”

  “I don’t know,” Comaday said with a shade of annoyance. “I can’t see that any harm will come of it.”

  “And if I’m being tailed?”

  “You’re a cop. Just make sure you’re not being tailed!”

  “Yes, sir. And about the bribe?”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s just it. I would like to know something more. I feel like someone in a thick fog at midnight.”

  “It’s a feeling we share.” Fredericks smiled.

  On my way out, I stopped at the door and said, “One other thing, if I may, Commissioner?”

  “What is it, Clancy?”

  “I would like to wear my gun.”<
br />
  “Why?”

  “I’m still a cop.”

  “A gun can wreck the whole thing.”

  “I know.”

  “You feel strongly about that?”

  “Very strongly,” I said.

  “All right then. Pick it up on your way out.”

  part two THOMAS CLANCY

  THIS WAS the second time I had been in the Commissioner’s office. Fifteen days before, I had been Detective Sergeant Thomas Clancy of lie New York City Police, attached to Homicide, with the reputation, beneficial and otherwise, of being an intelligent cop on his way up. Five feet, eleven inches, one hundred and seventy pounds, blue eyes, brown hair, and a college education, I was frequently reminded that I had a considerable future. For myself, I felt less optimistic. My past outweighed my future. I had been in a war that did something to me; I trained for a profession and a career, and I threw it away because it was no good and spoiled for me; and I married a woman I loved as much as I had ever loved anyone, and I watched her die. I was thirty-seven years old, and I was not waiting for anything, yearning for anything, or hoping for anything. I lived alone, and sometimes I read a book and sometimes I went to the movies. I welcomed twenty-four-hour duty, and if I did not go home for three days and lived by an electric razor and ham-on-toast, I had no complaints. That helped to make me a good cop.

  Briefly, that was my condition a few weeks past when I was instructed to report to the Commissioner’s office at Centre Street. I was there at two o’clock in the afternoon, and the Commissioner’s secretary sent in the information that Detective Clancy had arrived. I was told to wait. For thirty-five minutes I gave my attention to a printed copy of the budget of the City of New York, and then I was asked to go in.

  In the Commissioner’s office, there is a mahogany table that is used for high-level meetings and, I suppose, for some of the endless discussions as to why a police department can’t make the largest and least homogeneous city in the world the crimeless equivalent of Pretty Valley, Vermont. Around this mahogany table, six men were seated. Going from my left to my right, I believe that they were seated in this order—first, Joseph Maggio, a police stenographer, then John Comaday, Police Commissioner of the city, then Arthur Jackson, a plump, gold-eyeglass banker type, who was attached to Central Intelligence, then Sidney Fredericks of the Justice Department, that is, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whom I spoke of before, then Jerome Greene, Mayor of the City of New York, and finally Senator Hiram U. Dawes, who was the senior member of the Senate Internal Security Committee.

  As I came in, they all turned to look at me, but only John Comaday rose and offered me an empty chair. There were things about the Commissioner that I liked. There were other things that I would learn to hate. “Sit down, Clancy,” he said to me, and then he went around the table introducing me to the people present. They nodded. Only Fredericks, who was seated beside me, bothered to shake hands; but the others were troubled, and sometimes when you are troubled, you can forget the small niceties.

  “We called you in here, Clancy,” the Commissioner said, “because we need a city cop with certain qualifications. Maybe a couple of other men on the force have those qualifications, but we are pressed for time, and a quick rundown sorted you out. Now, the point is that we are engaged in a matter that must remain very confidential. From the people present here, you can presume that this is a matter which affects the federal government and the welfare of the entire nation—as well as specifically and pointedly, the welfare of this city and its people. Maybe it’s the nastiest thing we ever had to deal with and maybe it isn’t. That remains to be determined. The point is that it’s a large thing, yet up until now knowledge of the circumstances has been restricted to no more than thirty-five people. This had to be and this is important—for reasons you will soon be given. No word of this has leaked to the press and no word must. What is told to you here today is told to you in the utmost confidence. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “I would make it stronger than that,” Senator Dawes put in.

  “No use making it stronger,” Comaday shrugged. “A man gives his word. That’s it.”

  “Tell us something about yourself,” Jackson, the intelligence man, said. He made it sound ominous, but that was a trick of speech he had with everything he said.

  “What sort of thing?”

  “They have your official biography,” Comaday said. “Just fill in.”

  “I was born in Brooklyn, grew up there. Local high school, then New York University——”

  “We know that,” Jackson nodded. “No radical organization in your youth—Young Socialist League, Young Communist League?”

  “I held a job through high school and college. I had no time,” I said.

  “Just time? Not a matter of conviction?”

  “I worked eight hours a day through college. I was too tired for convictions.”

  “This point interests me,” Senator Dawes said. “According to your record, you were an honor student. Your mathematical aptitude is noted as extraordinary. You majored in physics. We are told that you did a remarkable piece of work on cosmic radiation——”

  “It was not original work,” I noted. “I collated the work of other men and drew some long-shot conclusions.”

  “Yet your record shows talent, even brilliance. You had your degree. Yet when the war was over, you chose to join the New York City police force—at a time when this nation pleaded for support from every scientist?”

  “Yes, sir. That was my own personal decision.”

  “At a moment like this,” Jackson said sharply, “nothing is personal, Detective Clancy.”

  “That was eleven years ago, sir. I did not want to be a scientist.”

  “You were at Hiroshima after the bombing,” Fredericks put in quietly. “Did that influence you?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Did you think we were wrong in using the atom bomb?” Senator Dawes asked me, but before I could reply, Commissioner Comaday said,

  “Please, gentlemen—you know as well as I do how pressed we are for time. With all due respect, I can’t see how this line of questioning can profit us. We need a policeman who is a physicist. We can’t have one, unless we begin with the premise that he had good and sufficient personal reasons for changing his profession.”

  “There is also a question of loyalty!” Jackson snapped.

  “The fact that he is here as member of my department speaks for his loyalty,” Comaday replied with growing irritation.

  Mayor Greene spread his hands. “Just a moment, gentlemen—let me say that my point of view takes another direction. So far, you have kept this a closed thing. But unless we come up with some answers in short order, it can’t be kept that way. I am not trying to impugn the motives or necessities of intelligence or counterintelligence; let me only point out that very soon this may become the concern of ten million people in the metropolitan area. This is not a question of loyalty in any narrow sense; it’s a question of survival.”

  Fredericks nodded and said, “I go along with that, Mr. Mayor. I think the department would. We are more concerned with intelligence in the old-fashioned sense—Detective Clancy’s intelligence. Because unless we use our brains, our common sense, and our intelligence, we are in a very great pickle indeed.”

  “Agreed!” Senator Dawes said. “Tell me, Mr. Clancy, you’re a physicist?”

  “I’m a policeman, sir. I studied physics a long time ago.”

  “Have you kept up with your reading?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “What do you know about the atom bomb?”

  “What anyone else does.”

  “Surely a little more. You are a physicist.”

  “A little more,” I admitted. “I can follow the mathematics as well as the theory.”

  “More to the point,” Commissioner Comaday put in, “could you make an atom bomb, Clancy?”

  “What?”

  “I said, could yo
u make an atom bomb? I address you, Clancy, in the framework of what you are. You are policeman with a grounding in physics. I am asking you whether you could make an atom bomb?”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “I am deadly serious. We all are. Now see whether you can give us a serious answer.”

  “All right.” I took a deep breath and nodded. “If you mean, could I produce plutonium 239 or uranium 235, the two fissionable elements from which the simplest types of bombs are constructed, the answer is no. No individual could. No nation could unless it could assemble a very large investment in plant and power and undertake some sort of diffusion process with the uranium ore.”

  “We understand that,” the senator said impatiently. ‘The question Mr. Comaday asks is whether you think you could make a bomb given the finished products—plutonium or uranium 235?”

  “Alone?” I asked bewilderedly.

  “Yes, alone.”

  “Well, that depends. I mean, that depends on whether you were going to say to me, here and now, make a bomb. I have only a cursory knowledge of what goes into the bomb. I would want to do some reading.”

  “We grant that,” Comaday said grimly.

  “Well—I don’t know. It would be a very dangerous business. For me, I mean. But I might.” “Just a moment,” Jackson, the C.I. man, said. “Do you mean to tell me that you would have all the information at your fingertips? That this classified information would be available to you?”

  “It’s not classified, sir,” I said. ‘It’s not secret either. It’s been published a thousand times in a thousand different places. Any competent physicist knows how to make an atom bomb.”

  “We’ve been through all that, Mr. Jackson,” Commissioner Comaday said tiredly, ‘“and we’ve had the same answer from half a dozen people. All we wish to do here is to establish certain facts about Detective Clancy to the satisfaction of what we represent. You asked to be here. Would you permit us to continue?”

  “I can’t say that I appreciate your attitude,” Jackson replied.

  Almost harshly, the Justice Department man put in, “Whether you appreciate an attitude is beside the point. Are you forcing me to point out that my department, not yours, is concerned with internal security? What are we to do, quibble like children? The question was put to Detective Clancy. I, for one, would like to hear his answer.”