Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  For now we’d turned the Park Avenue apartment into our place again. The hospital bed was set up in the sunken living room with its fancy mirrored bar and the chrome-rimmed stools and the complete and total complement of ghosts. Ghosts. Everywhere ghosts, waiting in the shadows, longing to come out for the night’s haunting. Some nights we had quite a party.

  The radio was on. The lights were on low. Terry’s eyes were closed. The nurse, a large and extremely strong, motherly sort in her robust fifties, was in her room, where Karin had once slammed the door in a rage and where I’d gone to tell her, somehow, that I loved her. It was the same room where I’d once kissed Cindy Squires and Max Bauman had sent Bennie the Brute to find out what was going on. Cindy and Max and Bennie and Karin were all dead, but the nurse taking care of Terry Leary didn’t know anything about the ghosts. She said she had no time for New Year’s Eve but she enjoyed listening to the football games on New Year’s Day. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t care about the football games. I tried to make her see that football had been my job, not my fantasy. I told her that playing football hurt. Baseball was my fantasy. She said that so far as she could tell I was a perfect example of the perversity of the human psyche. I told her she was probably right.

  Once back in New York Terry had begun to come around. He hadn’t said much for a while out there in Los Angeles. He told me he wished he were dead and he pretty much left it at that. He wasn’t kidding. But the past week he’d begun to come to grips with things. He was a cripple. He wasn’t going to change that. But he wasn’t a quitter, never had been. He was beginning to be glad he was alive. He was reinventing himself. We’d sit and listen to the radio and I’d read and he’d doze and we let Harry run Dependable Detective. Most days I’d spend an hour or two at Heliotrope with the books, making sure the waiters washed their hands when they went to the john. What the hell, the world could stagger along without us. And I was pretty low myself.

  The master of understatement. I was pretty low. I’d managed to preside over the killings of the two women in my life I’d loved. I’d buried Karin in the same cemetery where Cindy Squires lay, which was no doubt sappy but it was the way I wanted it. I visited them on Christmas Day and it was bleak and gray and cold and I wanted to give in to my grief, I wanted to go to sleep with them, just get out of it, slip off into the endless peace and silence of forever.

  Sometimes Terry and I’d get to talking about the ghosts and sometimes we’d both wind up crying and we’d look at each other blubbering like idiots and him with two useless legs and me with two dead women and then we’d get to laughing because it was so sad, and it was so ungodly damn sad it was funny because we couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Nothing. Those things clawing at the bars were our lives and we were stuck with them.

  One night Terry said: “Jesus, we got this way staying home. … Think, amigo, what mighta happened if we’d gone to war!” And we damn near went into hysterics at the thought because we couldn’t quite figure out how it could have been a whole lot worse. I mean, we knew how much worse it was for those guys invading Europe and taking South Pacific islands one at a time, but we’d made a fairly bloody hash of the home front, too.

  We’d sit there, or in Terry’s case he’d lie there, complaining that his legs hurt when we both knew that was impossible, and they’d come for us, the ghosts. We’d see Cindy Squires with that ash-blond hair swinging forward while she sang “The White Cliffs of Dover.” There was fat Markie Cookson, sweating, drinking champagne, his great hulk quivering with self-satisfaction, unaware of a last appointment on the Jersey shore. … And Max Bauman back in the days before he went off the deep end when he sat in the living room and told us how his son had gone down with his ship …

  The past would creep up on us and we’d see Karin and Rolf Moller and big Sam MacMurdo and we’d get to thinking about the night Rolf got killed but then we’d get to laughing when I’d tell Terry stories about Harry Madrid out in the Maine woods … and then Harry would show up and tell Terry how much better off he, Terry Leary, was stuck in bed where he couldn’t do himself any more harm. … We’d all get to laughing and then we’d make the mistake of thinking about things and Terry would take his pain pills and his sleeping pills and Harry and I would sit up late listening to Duke Ellington and Sinatra and Bing and Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman and Terry would snore in his drugged sleep and we’d smoke some of Max Bauman’s Havanas and then Harry would slap me on the back and shake his head and go on home and I’d be alone in another long night. …

  That’s when I’d start going over everything again.

  That’s when I’d get back to Not Me Nicholson.

  Not Me was the one who knew the whole story. Or, at least, the only one who knew more was Vulkan. And Not Me worked for Vulkan.

  Vulkan turned out to be a man named Allen Welsh Dulles. That’s right. Allen Dulles, the spymaster, the total insider. He was fifty-two and he’d been a charter member of Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, since its formation in 1942. He’d spent the war based in Bern, Switzerland, running a spy network in Nazi-occupied Europe. As the war wound down he’d run Operation Sunrise, which involved the surrender of German forces in Italy.

  MacMurdo had worked for what he’d referred to as Army Intelligence—in Not Me’s view an oxymoron, whatever the hell that was—but in fact he’d also been part of OSS, too, and had been working for Dulles when he’d gone deep into Berlin. So MacMurdo and Dulles were old comrades-in-arms. They knew each other well. As it had played out, Dulles had known MacMurdo better. Though when MacMurdo rode that plane away into the fog Dulles and he both knew the game wasn’t over.

  Not Me told me some of the story, nowhere near all of it, and he helped me get through the Karin thing and the truth of Terry Leary’s condition. He came back to New York with me and we buried my wife and he explained how Allen Dulles had eased all the red tape we’d have run into in Los Angeles. There were a lot of corpses and not enough explanations to go around.

  From New York, Not Me took me down to Washington to have a talk with Mr. Dulles at a huge house in Georgetown set in a vast expanse of lawn speckled with beautiful dead leaves.

  Dulles had a squarish mustache on a long upper lip and he was to smiling what Terry Leary now was to walking. He stood in a book-lined study looking like my old headmaster. He wore a very dark suit with a vest, a white shirt, a dark tie. His face was pale and he looked permanently tired. He watched me from behind a fancy globe in a wooden frame over by a French door leading onto a stone veranda with this huge lawn stretching away. It reminded me of my first meeting with Sam MacMurdo, when I’d looked through the windows and seen Karin walking beneath the willow tree with the purple storm clouds building up in the sky.

  “I’m deeply sorry about your wife, Mr. Cassidy.”

  “Thank you. I know you are.”

  “She was a noncombatant. But I’ve gone over this with you before. Now, normally in events involving civilians such as yourself—particularly since we never had the slightest intention of involving you in any of this—you do realize that that was all Colonel MacMurdo’s doing, of course. … Normally we don’t talk with civilians. I am reminded of Wellington.”

  “Wellington?”

  “The Duke of Wellington said it. ‘Never explain, never apologize.’ For a man in my line of work, not a bad motto.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  His eyes flickered to Not Me. “Nicholson here has convinced me that you’re quite sound. You can’t have a better reference than Mr. Nicholson. Let’s go for a walk, Mr. Cassidy. Let me tell you a story.”

  It began in January of 1945 when Dulles in Bern learned from an agent he was running within the crumbling German High Command that Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring was setting up an American escape route that would be activated by an SS/SD officer, Manfred Moller, whose brother Rolf owned and operated a mountain clinic for the care of party bigwigs and the “special treatment” of certain prisoners of wa
r.

  Dulles knew also that Manfred Moller had been informed only of his first destination in the United States. Dulles knew the destination, too. So he set about doing an intense background study of this Tash Benedictus who’d be receiving Moller. And he learned that Benedictus wasn’t a Nazi sympathizer; rather, he hated the English, which put him in bed with the Nazis, with whom he’d been working during the war raising money. Anything to damage the English. Benedictus’s share of the money was going to the IRA. He had his own agenda.

  Dulles began formulating a plan for using Göring’s network, the Moller fellow, and Tash Benedictus. With these elements in mind he looked at what he wanted to accomplish.

  In the first place, he wanted to employ many officers of the Third Reich in the rebuilding of Germany and, in particular, the German intelligence system. Toward this end, he had been working with the enigmatic Admiral Canaris who had run the Abwehr, the German armed-forces intelligence service, until the time of Canaris’s arrest, July 23, 1944, for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler. With Canaris held in Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse, Dulles turned his attention to Reinhard Gehlen, who was directing all German intelligence relating to Russia and Eastern Europe. His offer to Gehlen was simple: Gehlen could direct all West German intelligence operations following the war. Gehlen would effectively become one of the most important players in the dawning anti-Communist era. Gehlen liked the idea. No punishment, no war-criminal status, a secure post with prestige and the backing of the United States, a world in which he would indeed be appreciated. Hitler had not appreciated him; again and again Hitler had refused to accept Gehlen’s dead-on analyses of Soviet strength and plans, with disastrous results. Dulles wanted him precisely because of his expertise in Soviet affairs. Gehlen was forty-two years old. He was contemplating twenty-five or thirty years of worthwhile work to come … but he’d had another offer.

  The other offer had come from an unexpected source—a field man on the other side, an American. And this offer differed from Dulles’s in two significant ways. There would be risk … but there was the chance to live the rest of his life as a very rich man. Probably in South America. The American suggested the creation of a privately run intelligence operation, with information-gathering and action branches. It would be targeted on Eastern Europe to begin with but would have worldwide potential as more survivors of the war were signed on board. The service would be available to governments, to individuals, and to the newly emerging industrial firms that would be impervious to the old rules of national boundaries. The American used to tell Gehlen that the new world was going to be a very different place. “Forget Germans, Brits, Japs, Yanks, Chinks, Russkies—that’s the past. From now on it’s dollars, marks, pounds, yen, rubles. And the one thing everybody will need is information. They’ll pay anything, do anything to get it … it’s the edge. They’ll pay us. We’re the wave of the future, pard.”

  Sam MacMurdo’s plan for the future.

  Sam MacMurdo was a rogue, an adventurer, who had moved through World War II like a kind of crazy corsair. Daring, brazen, impossibly useful—and most important, charmed. Gehlen almost went for it, at least for a moment or two. Then his careful nature reasserted itself. The plan was full of holes. Sam MacMurdo was the kind of man who could get you killed pursuing his dreams rather than your own. Reinhard Gehlen thought he should, as evidence of his good will, tell Mr. Dulles what this brigand MacMurdo was up to.

  In the second place, Dulles wanted to bring MacMurdo down. But he didn’t want to waste him. Dulles hated waste. “Use every part of the pig,” he used to say, “including the squeal.” Somehow, he would use MacMurdo before deciding what to do with him in the end.

  So Dulles added MacMurdo to the mix. Manfred Moller, the Göring network with its Ludwig Minotaur, and Benedictus. MacMurdo was a natural fit. The plan Dulles developed was about as elegant as things got in Allen Dulles’s world.

  Dulles first contacted Benedictus, told him he knew Göring was sending Manfred Moller and that he, Dulles, had a proposition that would keep him, Benedictus, out of prison on a treason charge. Benedictus would be able to continue his activities raising money for the anti-English forces he supported in Ireland; he would work for “Vulkan” rather than the Nazis. It required only a slight recalibration of his mental set. It was easy. Done. Since Moller had no instructions from Göring beyond reaching Benedictus, Benedictus’s job was to keep him at the castle while telling him that it was taking time to get the network in motion.

  With Moller having arrived in Maine, Dulles had two elements in place. He then arranged for MacMurdo to learn of the Göring network, of Manfred Moller’s part in it. … And it was then that he, Dulles, realized that Manfred Moller’s brother Rolf owned the clinic, had access to inside information of a sensitive nature about some of the Nazis he wanted to install in the new structure of West Germany. Tracking down Manfred Moller, MacMurdo had gone to the clinic and once there drew Rolf and Karin into the plot to find Manfred and the minotaur and the Göring network in America. All this was fine … except for the existence of Karin. She was the wild card. Dulles didn’t know who she was and he’d never heard of Lew Cassidy. And MacMurdo told Dulles only that Rolf Moller was going to help locate his brother.

  The rest of it was MacMurdo’s plan: recognizing Karin as the former skater and actress who’d married the football player; discovering that Cassidy was a partner in a New York detective agency. He began building his own plot to get away with the minotaur; at least that was what Dulles believed in the aftermath of the mess in California. “MacMurdo was fresh out of wars and he was tired of being poor,” Dulles said. “He could keep himself busy if he set himself up somewhere with a nice little private information-gathering agency—and he wouldn’t ever have to worry about money again.”

  Watching MacMurdo, Dulles’s mind kept ticking over. MacMurdo was a rogue, that was a given. This show was getting very complicated and the more complicated it got, the likelier it was that MacMurdo could turn it around, make it work for him. Dulles tried to make sure MacMurdo had plenty of other responsibilities and he himself had more to do than he could handle. So he needed a number two, someone who could go inside the gears and wheels of the plot and make it work. That would be Not Me Nicholson. Dulles had him seconded from MI5 to MI6 or some more arcane branch of British intelligence and briefed him, turned him loose as the art supplier for Benedictus. Once again, the fact that Not Me and Cassidy knew one another was coincidental, not crucial but useful.

  MacMurdo had told Dulles that Harry Madrid was in Maine looking about for signs of Moller, that Cassidy was sure to follow. Vulkan had then warned Benedictus; but Moller had made a break for it after learning of the destruction of Karl Dauner’s end of the network, stopping to pick up the minotaur on the way. Moller had simply reacted like a soldier.

  It was then that Dulles’s plan skidded into a kind of crack-up. The only control he had any more was Nicholson: Benedictus needed Nicholson to provide the art to sell in Los Angeles.

  And it was then, when Manfred Moller had disappeared and Nicholson was waiting to hear from Benedictus as to what in the world was going on, that Rolf Moller decided to make a move. He was scared. People were getting killed wholesale. He hadn’t counted on this. He wanted more. More assurances, more money, more power in the Brave New Germany To Be. He simply overplayed his hand. He threatened to go to the newspapers, particularly to Nazi-hater Walter Winchell, with the story of the plan to use Nazi war criminals in the rebuilding of postwar Germany. …

  Dulles had gotten almost all he wanted from Rolf Moller. And he couldn’t run the risk of having everything blown to bits. Rolf had to be eliminated. On the night that Cassidy and Madrid got back from Maine and met Not Me at Heliotrope, Not Me had just killed Rolf Moller.

  “The rest you know,” Dulles said.

  “Did any of it work?” I asked.

  “What a remarkably straightforward question,” he said. “We seldom hear them in my
business, you understand. Did any of it work?” he mused softly. “Well, let me think. In the first place, the use of some of our German friends to rebuild their country … I suggest you keep your eye on Germany, Mr. Cassidy. Pay attention to Germany. Yes, that part of it worked and to a certain small extent Dr. Rolf Moller played a part. We had two programs running, Paperclip and Haven. Yes, they seem to be paying dividends. The Göring network didn’t produce much for us, largely because you destroyed the heart of it one night in Karl Dauner’s tennis court—well, the fortunes of war. You did what the moment required, I daresay.”

  “Kind of you,” I said.

  “Think nothing of it.” Dulles plodded on across the lawn, kicking his way through the leaves. “We were able to use Mr. Benedictus to achieve some of our aims and you saved us from having to settle his accounts. And finally there is the case of Colonel MacMurdo. … What shall we say? Unfinished business, I suppose. He’s up to mischief somewhere. Unless he died of his wounds—”

  I laughed. “Not MacMurdo.”

  “No, of course not. We both know MacMurdo. Sometimes I think he is immortal.”

  “Where is he?”

  “We’re looking for him. He’ll surface. He’ll want to go into business. We’ll find him.”

  “I don’t want you to kill him,” I said. “I need him.”

  “Kill him? Good heavens! We’ll be more likely to hire him.”

  “I want my daughter,” I said. “He’s my only hope.”

  Dulles looked at me appraisingly.

  “I will do anything to find my daughter. Do you fully understand? Anything.”

  “I fully understand.”

  Mr. Dulles was doubtless already constructing a plan.

  So, it was New Year’s Eve of 1945.

  Since I’d seen Dulles it had been reported in the papers that seven Nazi agents in South America had eluded deportation by various writs and transparent ruses.