Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  “So you owe me an explanation,” Cassidy said. “We’d better get it out of the way.”

  He sat on a stool at the bar. He was grinning in a lopsided way, making a major production of clipping and lighting one of Max’s cigars. It was built along the lines of a rifle barrel. Glenn Miller was stringing the pearls on the record player.

  “All right,” he said. “Fella risks his life for you, fella gets an explanation. Reagan and Madrid had some of this figured out, I don’t deny that. Markie was a generous, grateful soul when it came to services rendered. Technically I was on the take … but that’s not quite as bad as it sounds. What Harry’s been doing—hell, guys have been telling me this for months, you can’t keep a secret among a bunch of cops—he’s been poking around the Sylvester Bean murder, trying to pin it on Markie … and on me for covering up for Markie. Well, the fact is Markie didn’t have a damn thing to do with Bean’s murder. He had a crush on him at one time but that didn’t come into it. Harry was adding two and two and crapping out. Derek Boyce killed Bean, though my own guess is that he was too hopped up to know what the hell he was doing. Raggedy Ann and Andy time, y’know? I figure Bean got Boyce high as King Kong on the Empire State Building and said he wanted to be tortured in a nice genteel way. A little gentlemanly sadism, that’s what Bean enjoyed.”

  “Masochism,” Cassidy said.

  “All comes down to the same thing. Anyway, Boyce was listening to voices from out near Jupiter somewhere and got carried away. That’s my guess. Boyce’s brain was a piece of green cheese by the time we got him. Anyway, he was the right guy. Harry was chasing the wild goose.

  “Markie was questioned during the investigation, no favoritism. But I treated him like a human being—not Harry’s style—and he appreciated that. I could have turned the whole thing into a Page One Extra. I mean, hell, Markie and Bean were old pals, belonged to the same coven of witches, probably had their robes run up by the same mysterious gypsy woman. Yeah. I peeled the scab off all this witchcraft stuff but what was the point in scaring the pants off everybody? Hell, they’re just a bunch of harmless loonies. Markie knew I could have blown the gay world to smithereens if I’d been out to grab some headlines. But he watched and he saw me keep my word. I didn’t make the poor old fairies the scapegoats, I sat on the lid and made it tight.

  “Markie was a sweet guy, really. He told me he’d like to show his thanks. You think I’d turn him down?”

  Cassidy interrupted: “You did take it, then? And the drug side, Markie supplying the gay community?”

  “Markie moved some reefers, some coke, sure. I put him in touch with Max on that. It was between them. Look, Markie was buying a friend on the inside and I let him. He felt better and safer. And I sure put the cash to good use. What the hell? Nobody got hurt, amigo.”

  “What are you talking about, Terry? Nobody got hurt? What about dear sweet old Markie?”

  “You know what I mean. Nobody got hurt in my deal with Markie. Sure, Harry killed him but that’s different. Harry’s psycho. He’s obsessed with me. With getting me. Markie was a natural victim, Harry’s a predator.”

  “He’s a monster.”

  Terry nodded philosophically, watching the Havana grow an ash. “Well, you gotta know Harry. Personality quirk. He figures some guys are expendable. And Markie was expendable because he was a hophead and a fairy. Harry’s sort of old school about that. Traditionalist. The way old Harry looks at things there’s only one thing worse than fairies and that’s cops who get above their station, a show-off cop … like me. Not a cop on the take—just the show-offs. A cop who thinks he’s smarter than the system. Well, hell, I am smarter.”

  “But Markie’s dead,” Cassidy said. “The money tree’s been cut down.”

  “Well, the same thought occurred to me, believe it or not. And I’ve been thinking. I can’t make a living being an honest cop. This lousy job has forced me into taking money from people to create the illusion that they have a tame cop … and I can’t even give them honest value. So”—he slid down off the stool and began changing the stack of records on the changer spindle—“so I’ve decided to rethink the situation. I want to hear your thoughts about the future. What should the kid do with his life?”

  “Punt.”

  Terry laughed. He was so damned happy, so intensely alive, dancing along the abyss. For a moment Cassidy couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t share it. But he kept laughing at all the beasts in his dark night, his eyes twinkling, moving around the room, reflected in the mirrors, swirling an imaginary girl to the Glenn Miller records.

  Bean, Boyce, Herrin, Markie, his little nameless boyfriend, Irvie Bauman on the Yorktown, five gunsels blown to shit in a parking lot … They were all dead but there was a war on and people were dying everywhere. And nothing was the way it had been once and it would never be again. Karin was fading, the love-light fading like a beautiful song, and he’d told another woman he loved her …

  Terry lifted his glass again, managed to stop laughing, tears on his cheeks. “To absent friends!” he said and began to laugh again.

  Without quite realizing why, Cassidy heard himself laughing along with Terry, as if there were some great joke.

  One morning in May, walking in Central Park with the city’s towers rising in a balmy haze around them, Cassidy asked a question that had been on his mind since Max had made his crazy suggestion about Terry’s betraying him. There hadn’t been any contact with Max and Bennie for a couple of weeks. Max and Cindy were said to have gone to Los Angeles on the train. If they had, Bennie had certainly gone with them.

  “Somebody had to tip Madrid so he could stage his little wake-up party in the parking lot. Who would you bet on?”

  Terry leaned on a railing, staring down into a lake, staring at the man he saw looking back. He was still drawing his NYPD check and probably a retainer from Max. But he was looking around for something else. Maybe the face in the lake had an answer.

  “Well, it all depends, doesn’t it? If they figured Max and Rocco were gonna be there, then you gotta ask yourself who wants to climb over Max and Rocco … if it was a question of putting away some of Rocco’s infantry, it’d look like Max was the source. Whatta you think, sport?”

  “I think whoever did it set it up thinking Max was going to be there, then it was too late to change it.”

  “Narrows the field,” Terry said thoughtfully. “Who’s got a motive? Motive and opportunity, that’s all a cop ever thinks about. Well, we don’t really know who had opportunity ’cause we don’t know who all might have known about the meeting … but it’s not so hard to think of motive. Money’s a motive, power’s a motive; that’s what matters to guys like Max and Rocco. And, believe me, Lew, the plot hardly ever changes. Thing like what happened in Jersey, it’s always some guy who figures it’s his turn, he’s waited long enough. The serpent in the bosom.” Terry grinned.

  It was the second time Cassidy had been told about the serpent in the bosom. “So who are you nominating?”

  “Obvious,” Terry said. “But none of our affair—”

  “Who?”

  “It’s always the closest person to you, the Judas. The traitor is always the one you trust the most …”

  “Who?”

  “Bennie,” Terry Leary said.

  It was all a puzzle and the problem was you couldn’t be sure what was really important. Cassidy could identify the players without a program. That wasn’t the problem. What mattered was getting a picture of the connections. But they were all blurred.

  Terry and Harry Madrid were both cops, had worked together, you’d think they were on the same side. But they weren’t. Terry had already killed one cop with the gun strapped inside his pants leg and it looked like Harry was willing to do damn near anything to put Terry down.

  Terry worked for Max Bauman … but Max thought Terry was betraying him … to Harry Madrid, of all people. And Harry was working with a hotshot politician like Tom Dewey and the biggest mobster of all, Luciano, to bring
Max Bauman down, to put Dewey in Albany, and to get Luciano out of the slammer. And Luciano was in line to get Terry, too.

  Max thought Harry Madrid was a scoundrel, at least partially because he’d been a bagman for Luciano in the old days. Conversely, Max’s good right hand was Bennie the Brute … and Terry figured Bennie was in fact the serpent Bauman felt writhing at his bosom.

  And Cassidy was supposed to be watching Terry for Madrid and Bauman while he was in fact the only player on the field who was betraying Max … and Max trusted him. Betrayal—because Cassidy had fallen for Cindy Squires, who belonged to Max. But even that hadn’t gone unnoticed. Bennie the Brute had seen it coming all along.

  It was a puzzle.

  And in Cassidy’s eyes nothing was more puzzling than Cindy Squires and his feelings for her. He hadn’t seen her or had word from her since the night at the shore. The longer her silence, the more he thought about her. He played their conversation again and again in his mind, all of it, so often sticking on her harsh judgments of herself, or on the image of the little girl sitting swinging her legs on the country gravestone, or on her pleas for help, the arrangement she’d suggested …

  He spent too damn much time thinking about her, which was dumb in several ways. She was Max Bauman’s girl. Which made all the other reasons unimportant. But he thought of her adolescent’s breasts and the sturdy width of her hips and the sapphire eyes and the voice that stayed on one note so much of the time. After a while he began consciously trying to push her out of his mind, exercising what passed for his will. He didn’t mention her to Terry, didn’t ask Terry if he’d seen her. Sometimes he’d find a matchbook on the coffee table and Terry’d have been to Heliotrope. But Cassidy didn’t ask and he didn’t go to Heliotrope. But he read his Bleak House …

  And he’d think about Karin, too. He’d think about the downy hair on her tan arms and he’d get out the photo albums and look at them for hours. Karin on the ice back in ’36. Karin with Paul Cassidy outside the Beverly Wilshire. Karin, Lew, and Terry on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City … a great many pictures. And he’d close his eyes and see her on the day she’d left to go back to Germany, all dressed up in a navy blue suit with white piping and blue and white spectators. He’d taste her lipstick and her tears and kiss the hair at her temples and kiss her delicate ears and she’d whisper things in German and then he’d fall asleep and dream of her and wake up afraid he’d never see her again.

  As summer crept up on them, the last day of May was no different from any other day that spring. The flowers were in bloom and the trees green, just as if there were no war at all. Bing Crosby was in great voice on the radio and Gabriel Heatter tried to find something hopeful in the war news but night after night he came up with the sentence that was becoming his trademark and part of the American landscape. Ah, there’s bad news tonight …

  Cassidy went to bed that last night of May thinking of Karin.

  He didn’t know she was already dead.

  Chapter Nine

  MONDAY, THE FIRST DAY OF June, 1942. The three-layer headlines stretched all the way across the front page of the Times.

  1,000 BRITISH BOMBERS SET COLOGNE ON FIRE; USE 3,000 TONS OF EXPLOSIVES IN RECORD RAID; GERMANS ARE HURLED BACK IN BID FOR TOBRUK

  Centered under the headlines was a photograph of an RAF bomber crew sipping tea before their airplane after the raid. The caption read: “Tea After the Greatest Air Raid in History.”

  Cassidy’s breathing had just about stopped.

  He began reading the stories, gulping down the words, choking on them. The ninety-minute raid had demolished the city on the Rhine where Karin had grown up, where she had returned to her father’s side.

  He read the report beneath another headline: “Cologne ‘Inferno’ Astonishes Pilots.” It was datelined May 31, London, from United Press.

  Seven-eighths of Cologne, a city the size of Boston, was in flames, an inferno “almost too gigantic to be real,” when the history-making raid was over last night, pilots who took part in it said tonight …

  “Cologne was just a sea of flames,” said Squadron Leader Len Frazer of Winnipeg, one of the more than 1,000 Canadian airmen who had a hand in the epic raid.

  “I saw London burning during the Battle of Britain and it was nothing compared to Cologne,” Pilot Officer H. J. M. Lacelle of Toronto, gunner in the tail of a bomber, contributed.

  These reports were typical of the thousands being sifted tonight and compiled into a record of the mightiest piece of destruction ever devised by man.

  The lurid sky over Cologne for ninety minutes was as busy as Piccadilly Circus as the great Lancasters and Halifaxes, Stirlings and Manchesters, streaked in at the rate of one every six seconds to unload their total cargo of steel-cased death …

  “It was almost too gigantic to be real,” said the pilot of one Halifax. In every part of the city buildings were ablaze. Here and there you could see their outlines, but mostly it was just one big stretch of fire.

  “It was strange to see the flames reflected on our aircraft. It looked at times as if we were on fire ourselves, with the red glow dancing up and down our wings …”

  He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of orange juice, stared out at the air shaft and the sparrows who came down to eat bread crumbs from the windowsill. Terry was still in his room asleep.

  Karin.

  … the mightiest piece of destruction ever devised by man … it looked as if we were on fire ourselves …

  The sparrows were going on about their breakfast.

  Karin. He found he couldn’t take a deep breath. He closed his eyes, flattened his hands on the tabletop. There was no point in kidding himself.

  He went back into the living room and picked up the Times and began pacing, reading as he toured the room, trying to control the movement of his eyes, unaware of time or where he was or anything but the bombs raining down on Cologne, the sea of fire.

  There was no point in kidding himself. Karin had been in Cologne with her father. Maybe she survived, maybe she’d gotten to the basement and had lived through it in the debris, maybe she’d been out of the city and maybe it was all a bad dream …

  But no, it wasn’t that way at all. No, it was one of those things you heard during the war and you knew the news was bad, it was meant for you, it was inescapable and you couldn’t pretend. You’d never forget the moment you heard it, where you were and what you were doing. You’d never forget that frozen instant when you got the bad news. It was the worst news you could imagine and maybe you were having a piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee in the kitchen and the Western Union man was slowly coming up the walk and you knew, you knew for sure. Or maybe you were listening on the radio and you heard your husband’s ship had gone down or your boyfriend was on Bataan and you just knew you’d never be the same again, that the last of your trust and innocence had been used up. It was always the worst news you could imagine.

  On an inside page was the story released from Berlin by official radio. They admitted serious damage to Cologne due to “terror attacks” with incendiary bombs on the civilian population. But they said it wasn’t such a big raid. They said seventy RAF planes had gotten to the city. They said 111 people were killed.

  Among the dead they named an actor well known to the German public. And a prominent scientist, several times mentioned for a Nobel Prize. Herr Professor Richter. And his daughter, the famous Olympic skater and film star. Karin Richter. Karin …

  She was a German and the Germans were beginning to die in large numbers and they were the enemy and when he turned on the radio everybody was pretty happy about the thousand-bomber raid, about the mightiest piece of destruction ever devised by man. Karin was just an unimportant casualty. In the inferno of Cologne she wouldn’t be missed. A woman who hadn’t ever done much but ice-skate and fall in love and get married. No kids and she hadn’t had time to grow old. She’d been merely another frightened speck beneath the falling bombs.

  Karin was d
ead.

  The telephone rang and it was his father.

  “My God, son, I’m sorry. You’ve got to be strong, Lew … it’s the goddamn war,” his father said, calling from the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. He sounded as if he’d been crying and when he hung up, Lew broke down.

  When Gabriel Heatter came on that night, he finally had a legitimate reason to make America feel good.

  “Ah,” he said, “there’s good news tonight. History’s first thousand-bomber raid, more than twice as many RAF bombers than Reichsmarschall Göring’s Luftwaffe ever managed to put in the night sky over London, struck at the heart of Hitler’s Reich last night … ah, yes, there’s good news tonight …”

  Karin was dead.

  It was a long mean summer for Cassidy. His thirtieth summer. When he wasn’t wandering in a daze of helplessness and sorrow, he was fuming in the furious frustration of not being able to get into the service. He hated his leg and he drank too much and when he was drunk he wanted to die for Karin and for his country. Some nights he just wanted to die. He sought the punishment he believed he deserved for falling in love with Cindy Squires, for letting Karin slip away even before she died. He sailed on a stormy sea of bourbon, tried to fill the unfillable empty blackness at his core with booze and self-pity. He limped around with his cane and fell off the occasional barstool.

  And Terry Leary was always there to catch him. Stinking drunk and maudlin and full of anger and yelling and screaming and crying—and still Terry Leary was there to catch him when the trapdoor opened and the hungry monsters beckoned.

  Cindy, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen. He began to think of her as a phantom, an illusion. She’d never happened at all and he’d never told her he loved her and he’d never spoken her name. And Terry set out to bring him back from the mists of the dead where he seemed to hover like one of the bad spirits from poor Markie’s Necronomicon.

  Terry bought all the new records everybody was playing. He made sure Cassidy had all the new books to read. Every so often the gloom lifted. See Here, Private Hargrove left them both on the floor helpless with laughter. The Robe wasn’t as funny.