Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  ‘You’re a very cynical man, Lieutenant. What makes you think I could get into those papers, even if I wanted to?’

  Doc watched the assistant cross and uncross her lovely white legs.

  ‘Because thirty years ago this man destroyed seven young girls. They were a little younger than your buddy over there.’

  I could see the girl’s quick blush. Then she restored the calm to her expression.

  ‘You know what this man is. I thought we both worked for justice. Or was that just the romantic in me?’

  Doc and I got up to leave Mason’s office. Doc struggled to stop concentrating on those two beautiful white Fed legs, but he finally mustered the self-discipline necessary for him to join me on my way out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  [September 1968]

  The long summer is coming to a close, but it isn’t coming easily. Naturally Eddie and I take the heat for not nailing Carl Anglin. The city looks to us for a reason why we couldn’t put him away. I can’t go public with excuses. Two witnesses, one of them dead and one of them Theresa Rojas, still in some sort of mental coma. I don’t want Miss Rojas to have to face the photographers and the news media. Her name has never been released, for her own protection. All the other seven witnesses are silent, of course.

  He’ll kill again, I keep thinking. We’ll catch him on the next round. But that further depresses Eddie and me because it means that someone else will have to get split open like a gutted fish in order for us to get a crack at Carl Anglin.

  We try the government over and over to get something about his background, but we come up cold. Just the way it was when we tried to shake the story about the four black gangbangers who supposedly did our witness at the rib joint.

  I finally resort to members of my clan that I’m not proud of. ‘Resort’ is the right word. They’re my last stop.

  *

  ‘I would consider it a favor, Marty. A favor that might get returned when one of your brothers gets caught selling from all those chop shops you own,’ I tell my cousin, Marty Genco. He’s connected to a crew in the northwest part of town. They’re into auto parts, but they’re also hooked up to the Genco clan, the main family of Chicago’s Outfit. And they have connections with the government on occasion. They were supposedly involved in one of the more notorious plots to kill Castro. The Bay of Pigs screwed things up for them for a while, but they’re still close to some good sources.

  Marty looks like my side of the family. He’s my cousin on the old man’s mother’s side of the familia. He has the same nose and the same facial structure that the Parisis do. People thought we were brothers when we were growing up on the North Side. But I went to the Second World War and he stuck around the city and made a fortune chopping up every loose auto on the northwest side.

  ‘Who is it you want to pop?’ Marty asks and smiles.

  ‘You know who the main guy is these days. Don’t fuck with me, Martin.’

  He hates to be called by his full name.

  We’re sitting in his office. The office in front of his ‘legitimate’ muffler repair shop.

  Eddie is with me, too, to make it official.

  ‘You think I’m gonna go to the family for you to get dirt on this Carl Anglin.’

  ‘I want you to find out what he did for the government during the 1950s. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all?’ my cousin laughs.

  ‘I can help you with three of your guys who’re headed to trial. I can get the price reduced on two of your cousins. I can’t get them off, but I can help with their sentences if you do this for me.’

  ‘Jake, I know about this guy.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How, Marty?’

  ‘He has the biggest connections. You don’t wanna know, cousin. This is over both of our heads.’

  ‘Why don’t you let me decide how deep the water is?’

  ‘Because it’s my ass here too.’

  ‘They’re not going to know about this conversation from me or Eddie here.’

  Marty looks us over carefully.

  ‘You wouldn’t be wired, would you, Jake?’

  I stand up and raise my arms.

  ‘Go ahead. Knock yourself out.’

  ‘One thing you never done is lie to me. I’ll give you that…This guy Anglin was a hit specialist. Good with a rifle. He took out guys in Asia during Korea. He was a government hit man. They sent him all over the Far East to whack guys who pissed us off. Then came all that flap about covert operations — you remember. We were the good guys, we didn’t do shit like that. They made the CIA and FBI play fair. All that horseshit. It’s no wonder we’re losin’ in that place where your kid’s at…’

  ‘So everything Anglin did was in Asia. He never did work closer to home?’

  Marty’s eyes widen. I look over to Eddie, who has noticed the change on my cousin’s face.

  ‘It gets to be what they call conjecture after that, Jake.’

  ‘So give me the story.’

  ‘The story is that he was at the Bay of Pigs. He got himself captured and he got himself escaped. And that’s all I know about Carl Anglin in this hemisphere. Gimme a break, Jake. A guy like Anglin can get everyone in his wake killed. Just figure you caught a break by him gettin’ off the hook for those girls.’

  I show him the file. I let him see the photos. He’s impressed. Marty’s not all that much into the muscle side of the family.

  ‘He likes the knife, this guy.’

  I nod.

  ‘All I heard is what a great shooter he is. Maybe he separates business and pleasure. Knife and gun. You know.’

  ‘I think you know more than you’re telling us.’

  ‘I swear I told you everything…Are you gonna keep your end of the deal?’

  ‘I am.’

  Eddie and I get up and walk out of Marty’s office.

  We walk toward the street and our vehicle.

  The heat is on the wane. You can smell the fall creeping into the atmosphere.

  I get in and I do the driving. Eddie rides shotgun. He doesn’t like traffic anyhow, so I’m usually the wheelman.

  ‘What was he leaving out, Jake?’ he asks. He rolls his window down. It isn’t that cool yet.

  ‘Something dangerous. Something he’s not immune to.’

  ‘Since when has his crew developed a fear of the United States government?’

  ‘There’s the everyday people, and then there are the guys you never see or hear from.’

  ‘The covert assholes. The contract killers. They call themselves shit like the Division or the Bureau or whatever.’

  ‘Spooks within the spooks. They’re the guys anybody ought to be afraid of. They hide behind the flag. In the dark corners. They’re the ones we hire instead of negotiating. You were in the war, Eddie. You know who I’m talking about.’

  ‘You mean the distant cousins of the OSS and the CIA. Their nameless brethren.’

  ‘So Carl is a shooter for some unnamed outfit. He does his business halfway around the world and is successful, but when he comes back home, he gets nailed in that mess in Cuba…So what does that tell us?’

  ‘He has a grudge.’

  ‘Big grudge. The vendetta. He does the girls for pleasure, he does the shooting for profit, maybe even because he thinks he’s some kind of patriot…But killing the nurses has to reel in a lot of big-time favors for Carl. Now he owes them. He owes them his life and his freedom. But he becomes a celebrity instead of a mutt killer, which is what he really is. And the only word we have on his past is what my cousin the auto thief tells us. So how does any of that help us?’

  ‘Maybe we could talk to some of our friends in the media,’ Eddie suggests.

  So I’ve humbled myself to the Outfit. I came begging. It’s something my wife and son cannot understand. This Sicilian ‘thing’ that Eleanor says died back in the old country with our grandparents. Maybe Jimmy will leave history behind him, but I’m too close to the old ways, t
he ways my father taught me. He came here from the island. Jimmy was never taught a lot about Nick’s and my ancestors, and maybe it’s a good thing. Sicily’s the past. The old things are gone. This is the new country. This is a world for my son, even if he really belongs to another man.

  *

  We talk to Jack Lescano on the Tribune. He’s interested in the paramilitary angle on Anglin. We talk also to Milt Kamin at the Sun-Times. He is likewise interested. Two weeks go by, but nothing is printed in either paper. So I call the two of them and find out that their editors have canceled the story for lack of supporting documentation. They’ve heard the tale about ‘National Security’, then. It has silenced the two reporters, and Eddie and I are on our own, just like at the start.

  Until an FBI special agent named Callan contacts us. He wants to meet. Privately. He wants to talk to us about our favorite whacker, Carl Anglin.

  *

  We meet Special Agent Callan in a restaurant in Cicero. He orders the lasagna and tells us both to try it. Says it’s the best in the city.

  ‘You know why I’m here,’ he tells us as the waiter fills our water glasses.

  ‘What do you have on Anglin?’ I ask him as Eddie takes a sip of ice water.

  Anglin was a hit man for an agency in the federal government that shall go nameless because even I don’t know their working moniker. He killed for hire in Asia during and after Korea. He did hits in South America after that. Then he became involved in Cuba, and he was — ’

  ‘Captured at the Bay of Pigs and became very pissed off at everyone’s incompetence.’

  ‘So why do you need to listen to me?’ Callan asks, smiling.

  ‘What else you got?’ I grin back at him.

  ‘He was pissed off, all right. He dumped whatever agency he was affiliated with and he started to go solo. He’d shoot anyone for the right price. The Pope, anybody. Everyone became a target.’

  ‘But The Bay stuck in his throat,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. A permanent bad taste,’ Callan confirms.

  He’s a big man. Six-three or better. No body fat that I can make out. The poster-boy G-man.

  ‘So what does he do that’s so terrible that even the Outfit don’t want to talk about it?’ Eddie throws in.

  The lasagna arrives. It’s as good as the FBI agent says it is.

  ‘That’s all supposition. Nobody knows for sure,’ Callan continues. ‘But I have a theory. Only I’m not at liberty to share it with you at present because I’m filling in the details.’

  ‘Why did you come to us?’ I ask him.

  ‘Because you two took undeserved heat for Anglin’s getting away with the nurse murders. I was on scene that afternoon. You don’t remember me, do you?’

  ‘There were lots of police there,’ Eddie reminds him.

  ‘Yeah. There were. All those cops. And no justice. Anglin did it. Everyone knows he did it. He’s probably telling all his celebrity friends about the gruesome details. He’s quite the showman now…But I’m telling you what you already know anyway.’

  ‘When are you going to have an idea on what it was that Anglin — ’

  ‘Lieutenant, I’m just here to find out if I have your confidence.’

  ‘You do. Yes.’

  Eddie nods in affirmation.

  ‘I know we at the Bureau don’t always get along with local law-enforcement folk…but this might be too big for petty grievances to get in the way…I don’t mean to leave you hanging here, but I want to be sure that I’ve got my ducks in rows. I want clean details to go to the grand jury with. I don’t want a last-minute bailing-out, like there was, unfortunately, with Anglin. When I hook him, I want the tip of the hook to wind up in his guts, all the way to the bottom…Anglin’s a very bad man. What he’s done can’t go unpunished. Will you trust me for a little while longer?’

  I go to work on the lasagna, but my gaze doesn’t leave Callan’s. Eddie’s watching the two of us watch each other.

  *

  The call gets me out of bed at 3.42 a.m. on a Thursday. I get downtown, and Eddie meets me at Headquarters.

  ‘What?’ I ask. He looks half asleep — either that or he’s about to break into tears.

  ‘I don’t know. The captain requested our presence at the address on the sheet there.’

  We take the elevator down and then walk out to the car. Traffic is very light, naturally, so we’re able to get to the location in just a few minutes. It’s on the North Side, only a few miles from the Headquarters.

  We get out of the car and walk to the entrance of the apartment building here at 4949 N. Biltmore Avenue. Not far from the Lake. You can smell the morning breeze wafting in off the water. The sun won’t rise for a couple of hours, so there’s a cool breeze that suggests early fall.

  He’s sitting on his couch in his one-bedroom apartment. We’re early on scene. Just the captain and a few technicians are present so far.

  Special Agent Andrew Callan sits slumped on that couch with his eyes closed. In front of him is a bottle of what turns out to have been tranquilizers. There’d been thirty pills, the prescription label reads, and now the bottle is empty. There is a suicide note on the coffee table where the bottle lies. The note reads: ‘Not any more. Too much. Too often. Forgive.’

  But there’s no signature and the words are written in black capitals, in ink. Eddie picks up the note with a pair of tweezers.

  I go into his bathroom. There is a shelf full of prescriptions for dealing with depression, the captain tells me over my shoulder.

  The captain is rawboned and pale. He tends

  to blush at the scene of crimes like this, as if he’s embarrassed to be here with us.

  ‘He didn’t seem depressed or suicidal when we had dinner,’ I tell him. Then I have to explain that Eddie and I had dinner with the special agent.

  ‘What’d you talk about?’ the captain wants to know.

  For the first time, fear hits me squarely in the middle. I feel almost nauseous. Anglin slithers away from seven murders. We hear about his exploits in Asia only through the underworld of this city. And now an FBI man kills himself because he’s depressed.

  Our first stop, later this morning, will be at Callan’s physician.

  *

  Dr Morley tells us that yes, Andrew Callan was suffering from chronic depression, but that he had his condition under control with the use of lithium. As long as he took his prescribed dosage, he didn’t plunge to the depths of despair. He had been on lithium for three years and had shown no ill effects. He had also not shown any tendencies toward suicide that the doctor could recall. Morley puts us onto Callan’s psychiatrist, Jack Pederson.

  Pederson sings the same refrain. Callan was fine while he was on his medication. He’d had only one bad ‘episode’ in the two years he’d visited the shrink. That had taken place only one month earlier, but it seemed that the special agent had got over the rough patch and carried on with his life.

  Andrew Callan was unmarried. It’s my job to notify the sister since she’s the FBI man’s only surviving relation.

  ‘Somebody whacked Callan,’ Eddie intones as we drive away from the therapist’s.

  It’s almost noon now, mid-shift, so we head to Garvin’s saloon to take our lunch.

  We arrive at the railroad tracks, and I park the car out in the weeds that Garvin never cuts. It’s like dwarf elephant grass.

  We order a couple of sandwiches and two soft drinks. I notice I’ve been imbibing less alcohol recently. I guess I’ve tried to convince myself that I need to be sober to catch this son of a bitch Anglin. Maybe I haven’t had the time for the booze. Or maybe I’m just becoming immune to its numbing effect, the main reason I drink the stuff. I don’t know.

  Garvin shambles away to prepare our orders.

  ‘How’s Jimmy?’ Eddie wants to know.

  He’d just got out of the hospital, the last letter had said. ‘He’s going back into the bush, he says. He told us that things were quieting down, but I think that’s for Ele
anor’s consumption,’ I tell Eddie.

  ‘I’m praying for him, Jake.’

  We’re sitting in a bar in Berwyn in the middle of the day. We’re currently the only two patrons. Carl Anglin eludes us like some haunted-house ghost, and a federal agent has committed suicide because he was onto Carl’s exploits close to home.

  It feels like the end of something. I feel numb even without the booze.

  My boy is halfway around the world, being shot at, like I was in 1944 and 1945. The whole planet’s gone mad, and here we sit, quietly having lunch.

  I change my order from a soft drink to a draft beer.

  ‘Shit,’ Eddie says. ‘I’m with you. Hit me with a cold one too, Mr Garvin.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  [March 1999]

  Mason came up with something for Doc and me. The female assistant with the legs presented the material to us in a sealed folder in our office there in Homicide. She didn’t say anything, just dropped the envelope on my desk and immediately walked out.

  ‘Jesus, she’s good,’ Doc moaned.

  I opened the file and began to see the maze of cutouts in Anglin’s military history. But there was nothing there that we didn’t already know.

  Except about his capture in the Bay of Pigs. After that he disappeared, it said, and became what the CIA people called a ‘rogue’. He was like a marauding elephant that stomped an occasional village or two and then disappeared into the bush.

  It fit him perfectly, that description.

  What struck me, what intrigued me, was that episode in Cuba. Anglin had to have been scared at being trapped on Castro’s island. He had to have been enraged by the lack of backup his own country provided him there. It was almost like a small-scale Vietnam. There they were, on the beach, with their lily-white asses hanging out in the tropical sun. But the troops didn’t come to save them.

  So how would I react if I were Anglin, this quasi-007 with a license to terminate? I thought about who left my private parts out in the breeze and I thought about ending a few lives, here and there. But who did I rub out? Allen Dulles or some other CIA honcho? Too tough to get at. Some military chief? Who? No one put their name to the Bay of Pigs. It was too big an embarrassment. The Kennedys took some hits for the plan, but those were the guys in Camelot, those were the lords of the realm. Who was a more likely target?