The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  Here Shulman knew he had to tread a bit more carefully, to avoid upsetting the bankables and also to avoid tipping off his quarry that the Hebrew Hammer was on the trail. “I’m getting close,” he told Dave Danziger, who had dropped in to see Marty in his basement lair. “I can always tell when I’m getting close, because I can feel my ass twitching.”

  “So now your ass twitches?” asked Danziger.

  “My ass is starting to shimmy and shake like Little Egypt, so close I’m getting,” Shulman assured his brother-in-law. He tossed down a roster of names on Danziger’s desk. “This is our short list. Now we have to make it shorter. I’ve eliminated Jews and schvartzers and dykes and fairy-boys, on the assumption that none of them would be meshugah enough to get involved with Nazis who want to shove them into a gas chamber. These are all the goy players who had rooms up on the two top floors, or who were known to be up there partying hearty before the bloodbath. It’s one of those names, I’m sure of it.”

  Danziger looked over the list and whistled. “Gevalt, Marty you’d better be right! There’s a couple of hundred million a year in bankable talent on this list, and you know how temperamental some of them can be and how fragile their egos are. If you go around accusing them of being terrorists and murderers, they’ll plotz! They’ll scream and scream, to me they’ll scream, to Arnie and Moshe and Sam they’ll scream. My God, we made all these people! Why would any of them bite the hand that feeds them in this terrible way?”

  “They’re goyim, David,” said Shulman. “What’s the first lesson you and I both learned in yeshiva school? Never, ever trust a goy, for they are beasts without souls. All of the sons of Esau hate us unto death, because our blessed forefather Jacob stole their birthright and left them with nothing but a mess of pottage. They’ve never really resigned themselves and accepted that as a done deal. No matter how often we keep filling up their bowls with pottage, they secretly want their birthright back. I’m convinced I’m right. One of the people on that list betrayed our friends and our elders to their death, and they’re still doing it as we speak, still helping these animals to kill us.”

  “Yeah,” said Danziger bitterly. “Tell me about it. Before I came down, I heard on the news that the sons of bitches murdered Herschel Rabinowitz from MGM this morning. They got past his cameras, the guards, everything, and they shot him through the window at his own breakfast table in Malibu.”

  “Fuck me, Hesh is dead?” exclaimed Shulman.

  “Deader than a dog turd in the road, my friend,” confirmed Danziger with a grim nod. “The day before that they rammed a car bomb into the main office of Fox News and damned near leveled the building, killed everybody in the lobby. The day before that, somehow they found where Shelley Klein was hiding in Santa Barbara. They tied her up in a chair and then took her out back and dropped her into the swimming pool and watched her drown. As of this week it’s official, the movie industry and the television business are paying more for security costs than they’re paying in salaries for working employees, which isn’t hard since almost no one is working anymore. They’re all in hiding and wondering who will be the next to die? This can’t go on, Marty!”

  “So let’s get on with the job of putting a stop to it,” said Shulman firmly. “Now, what can you tell me about the people on that list? Let’s start with trying to figure a motive. For example, who’s having problems with their agents?”

  “What are you talking about, Marty?” asked Danziger in exasperation. “All of them have problems with their agents, always, and with their contracts and their royalties and their bonuses and their percentages and their fucking egos. No matter how much cash we shovel down their throats, it’s never enough.”

  “I mean specifically, recently, something that might make them turn on the industry out of revenge?” persisted Shulman. “Any of these celebs been really fleeced or shafted recently by one of our boys? Not just problems with agents, but arguments with studios or directors, some kind of personal or sex thing that might make them turn really vicious? How about their personal lives? Anybody gone weird in the head lately? I mean weirder than usual for Hollywood? Really bad drug trips, playing with guns, muttering to themselves in corners? Anybody had a bad breakup with a Jewish significant other or been shafted by a Jewish journalist in a tabloid? How many of them have been forced into rehab, I mean real rehab, when their booze or junk habits started to affect budgets or profits?”

  “Oh, they hate that,” said Danziger with a laugh. “Those glitterati ought to be glad we bother to salvage their sorry asses, glad we don’t just cut them up like an expired ATM card when the account is empty and throw them away. Sometimes we do, you know. A lot of them have been down that rehab road. Marty, I don’t know what to tell you. You know this town. It’s a snake pit. Hollywood is a place where a friend is someone who stabs you from the front. Somebody’s always feuding with somebody else. They fight and rip each other up over money, or who’s knocking boots with whom, or some dirty trick or slight real or imagined, or out of just plain boredom and meanness, but we don’t kill people over it!”

  “Not until recently,” Shulman reminded him. “What about Bart Payne? I hear he was hot under the collar with Seymour Grossberg over his last picture, and they were overheard arguing in the hallway of the Royale a few hours before the attack on the awards ceremonies?”

  “Yeah, that’s true, but Bart’s not interested in anything except money and pussy,” said Danziger dismissively. “He’s on the downward slide and he’s trying to grab as much of the life as he can before he does his last romantic action lead, and he starts getting cast in character parts. Besides, I don’t think he has the guts or the brains for something like this. He couldn’t pull it off. He’s not really a very good actor, you know.”

  “Ah, now that’s a very interesting remark, Dave. A very significant point,” said Shulman with a nod. “That should be part of our profile of who we’re looking for, someone who’s a real actor, who could maintain a deception like this in a town where everyone is trained to spot deception and phoniness at a thousand yards. How about some of those has-beens you’ve mentioned, the ones the studios have finally decided to cut up like that expired ATM card because they stopped bringing in enough at the box office to justify the tsimmes they created by constantly showing their butts? Somebody who didn’t appreciate being told that his fifteen minutes was up, and get the hell off the lot?”

  “The list of those would be a lot longer than this one,” said Danziger with a grim chuckle.

  “So make me up such a list, in case I’m wrong. But would any of those have rated a hotel suite on the Royale’s party floors on Oscar Night?”

  “Marty,” said Danziger thoughtfully, “You’ve got my kopf working now. What do you think about Max Garrett?”

  Shulman scowled. “Max Garrett is a schmuck and an anti-Semitic son of a bitch who is enjoying a well-earned exile. As far as I am concerned he should have had his celebrity immunity revoked and been charged with hatecrime after those drunken remarks he made to that cop who pulled him over for DUI. Under the jailhouse now he should be rotting, like an onion, with his head in the ground.”

  “That was discussed at the time,” ruminated Danziger. “You may recall that I advocated that very response from our community, but the usual so-called older and wiser heads prevailed, and we decided to deal with Garrett the old-fashioned way, which we have done. His films couldn’t very well be pulled out of circulation. They’re still making money. Too many classics, too many awards, too many millions in residuals. No point in cutting off the industry’s nose to spite our face. But we’ve made damned sure he’ll never eat lunch in this town again. No one will touch Garrett or any of his projects anymore, and the few times he’s tried to produce or direct indie flicks we made sure he couldn’t get so much as a grip or a script girl to work for him, and we made it clear that anyone whose face we saw in a Max Garrett production was out in the cold for good, just like Garrett himself. He is toxic. He is radioactiv
e. He is dead to us, dead to this town. So he just sits all day in his big empty mansion in Beverly Hills surrounded by his memories, while he waits for the phone to ring, which it never will. A man can do a lot of paranoid brooding in a situation like that, and we know that Garrett was an anti-Semite and a Catholic religious nut to begin with. How do you like him for the NVA’s inside man?”

  “Oh, I’ve thought about him,” said Shulman. “First person I checked into, in fact. And believe me, if I can find any way to link Garrett to that holocaust on Oscar night, I’ll see him burned alive on pay-per-view. But Garrett was not in the Royale that night, and he had no connection of any kind with the Oscars. Like you said, he’s radioactive. They wouldn’t even have let him in the theater. Garrett’s a thought, for sure, but not the one we’re looking for right now. I still think our man or woman is there,” said Shulman, pointing to the paper in Danziger’s hand. “Let’s get back to that list. What about Jeff Gallagher? I heard he was behind some really nasty tabloid rumors aimed at Sid Glick and Art Bernstein?”

  “Nah, he was just pissed because he flew back from location a day early and he walked into his own bedroom and found the two of them making a sandwich with Charlene Dawson. It was just business. Charlene was up for the lead in a Paradigm flick. She was clinching the deal in the traditional manner, and adding an extra million onto her advance, but Gallagher took it personally and broke off their engagement, with all the usual tabloid and TV ruckus following the bust-up. So Jeff claimed he hadn’t caught Sid and Artie with Charlene, but with a pair of golden retrievers. Nasty, yeah, but par for the course in Tinsel Town. That blew over a long time ago. It wasn’t Jeff. He’s in hiding now, scared out of his wits. Remember, Jeff was the second buggeroo in that homo cowboy flick with Hugh Lewis? Now Hugh’s dead and Jeff’s scared shitless he’s on the NVA’s death list himself, which he probably is. It’s not him.”

  “Okay, how about one of our lovely ladies of the silver screen?” asked Shulman. “I understand Brittany Malloy isn’t too happy about being sidelined into rehab after that drunken stunt she pulled at last year’s Oscars. Maybe she thought this was the way to make sure she stole the scene again this year?”

  “Brittany’s been on probation since she got out of Betty Ford, exiled to Dancing With The Stars and guest appearances on sitcoms, so she can think about how naughty she’s been. She wants back in, wants it in the worst way. She doesn’t want to bring the whole house down like Samson in the Temple. It’s not her,” said Danziger, shaking his head.

  “Well, here’s another question for you,” said Shulman. “What about Erica Collingwood? She’s from Seattle originally, isn’t she? And wasn’t there some buzz about how Chase Clayburn ending up in the U.S. Army wasn’t really because he longed to do his patriotic duty to our land of the free and home of the brave? Something about how Erica wouldn’t put out for Sid and Artie and they decided to teach her some manners? Any truth to that?”

  “Hmmmm . . .” said Danziger thoughtfully, rubbing his chin. “Yes, in fact there is quite a bit of truth to that. Sid ruled this town with a velvet glove, but every now and then he liked to let everyone know there was an iron hand inside it, and the Collingwood bimbo pissed him off. Now that I think of it, Marty, you might have something there! I know she’s a prude, won’t strip off for the camera, won’t do lesbian roles, and I heard somewhere she always manages to take herself out of the running for any interracial romantic or sex role. Always a good excuse of course, prior commitments or whatever, but that sort of thing does get noticed after a while. Of course there’s also the objection that she was standing right there on stage beside Marty Rudin and his chocolate fageleh when the shooting started. The first bullet almost clipped her too.”

  “Is that really an insurmountable objection?” asked Shulman keenly. “Look, Dave, these Nazis are devils in human form, but they’re sharp bastards. They’re cool and calculating, enough so they’ve been one jump ahead of us all the way on this. What better way to draw suspicion away from the inside man, or woman, than to have them right out in public view and screaming like crazy for the cameras when the shit comes down? She says she was able to drop and roll and cover behind the curtain when the shooting started. Maybe. Or maybe the whole thing was a set-up from the get-go, and she was the one doing the setting up. You know from talent, you must know something about this Collingwood twist. Is she a good actress?”

  “Damned good,” conceded Danziger with a nod. “One of the few Americans who can do Shakespeare and get a standing ovation from a British audience. You know, Marty,” he went on slowly. “Damned if I don’t think you might have something here! Erica Collingwood has never said or done anything overtly anti-Semitic or racist or political that I know of, other than declining to be the filling in Sid and Artie’s sandwich that one time. But it seems to me I’ve heard she never has paid her dues or given any of our people their props, not with anybody on any picture or TV show she’s ever been on. Nor can I remember her dating any minorities or doing any of the usual girl-on-girl dabbling at weekend parties, nothing like that. And she can’t have been too happy with her boyfriend coming back as a paraplegic. That’s the kind of thing that might turn a chick pretty bitter. Yes, I think maybe you should have a little talk with Ms. Collingwood.”

  “I’ve already penciled her in for tonight,” said Shulman.

  * * *

  Marty Shulman pulled his Jew canoe into the courtyard of Erica Collingwood’s Spanish Colonial-style apartment complex at a little past midnight. He had done his homework. It had cost him $500 slipped to one of the technicians at the private security company employed by the apartment management to get Erica’s own security code for the automatic wrought-iron gates, to ensure that the cameras monitoring the entrance and the courtyard itself would suffer a mysterious malfunction on the stroke of twelve, and that the alarm system on Erica’s apartment would be similarly disabled. He wasn’t certain yet what he was going to learn from Erica, but he had an idea that he should cover his tracks.

  Shulman parked the car and turned off the engine, then quietly got out and popped his trunk. He checked the .45 in its shoulder holster, jacking a round into the chamber. He pulled a Trilby hat down over his balding skull, and from his pockets he drew a pair of latex gloves that he pulled onto his stubby hands. From the trunk he took a gym bag containing a very special kit he had put together for those occasions when vigorous private questioning of naughty goyim seemed to be called for. It contained his favorite crowbar, of course. There was also a set of plastic restraints as well as two pairs of standard handcuffs, a full set of Dershowitz needles, several pairs of pliers and channel locks, a rolled packet of bladed instruments ranging from a surgical dermatome scalpel to a small hacksaw, a small propane burner for heating same, and a packet of cigars cheaper even than those Marty normally smoked, but that burned hot with a glowing tip that could be applied to human flesh in order to loosen tongues. Marty sighed; even if he was wrong about Erica, he knew this would be one of those moments that made him love his job so, and he was looking forward to it with anticipation.

  He crept up to her front door. Secure in the knowledge that the alarm had been disabled, he drew a rubber suction cup from the gym bag, affixed it to one of the glass panes beside the door, and then used a glass cutter quickly to cut a hole around the cup and pull the circle of glass away, stowing the suction cup and glass in his bag. He reached in with his gloved hand and carefully turned the dead bolt, removed the chain, then turned the doorknob from the inside. The door slid open several inches. Shulman stopped, put everything back in his bag, and then slowly eased the door open, being careful not to make any noise. He slipped inside like a greasy shadow. The apartment was dark except for a single table lamp on in the living room, and a light coming from the kitchen, not bright, probably the little bulb over the stovetop. A radio or CD player in the bedroom was softly playing some kind of Celtic mystical New Age sound, or maybe Loreena McKennit. Shulman didn’t know what it was and didn�
��t care, but it indicated to him that his quarry was home and in the bedroom. He drew the .45 from its shoulder holster and clicked off the safety. He didn’t plan to use it except as a conversation piece to get the terrified woman he had come for to submit to being bound, on her own bed, and then he would remove any extraneous fabric and begin to question her. His long liver lips curled in a grin, and he began to tiptoe across the living room. In his growing excitement, he forgot to check out the kitchen.

  Behind him Marty Shulman heard the sound of a cartridge being jacked into the chamber of an automatic pistol. He turned and saw a tall, blond, stone-faced young man wearing nothing but dark green boxer shorts, not four feet behind him, leveling a 10-mm Browning High Power automatic at his head. “G’day, mate,” said the young man. He sounded Australian. He had Shulman nailed, and Shulman knew it. His bowels began to tremble preparatory to releasing his supper of Chinese and Chivas Regal into his trousers. Shulman shrugged, “Nu?” he said.

  “And what’s nu with you, mate?” snarled the Australian. Shulman jerked the .45 around and managed to get off one round that plowed into Erica’s wall, while Charlie Randall fired again and again into Shulman’s chest, into his pendulous belly, sending a final round crashing through his fleshy Judaic nose into his skull as he lay on the floor, thrashing, kicking, flopping, shitting, then dying.