The Case of the Russian Diplomat: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Three)

by Howard Fast

  “Okay. Sure. I got to take off.”

  “Why?”

  “The agronomists. I got to stay with them.”

  Masuto, Beckman, and Binnie Vance turned to watch Phillips. Two enormous black Cadillac limousines had drawn up at the curb, and from them emerged the agronomists, their interpreter, several county officials, and Boris Gritchov, the consul general.

  “Well, we finally caught up with the agronomists,” Beckman said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Masuto told him.

  Beckman took Binnie Vance’s arm. She turned on him suddenly and screamed, “Let go of me! Keep your hands off me, you lousy Jew bastard!”

  Her shrill cry attracted the attention of the arriving delegation, and they turned to watch Beckman, who, ignoring his injured hand, practically lifted Binnie Vance into the car. Gritchov met Masuto’s eyes, and Masuto smiled, bowed ever so slightly, and said, “So very sorry, Consul General.”

  They were in the car, driving north on the San Diego Freeway toward Beverly Hills, with Binnie Vance huddled in the back seat next to Beckman. Beckman leaned forward and whispered to Masuto, “Do I look that Jewish, Masao?”

  “Do I look Japanese?” Masuto said.

  12

  THE

  QUIET WOMAN

  AGAIN

  It was five-thirty and Masuto sat at his desk, staring at his typewriter. Beckman sat facing him and rubbing his hand.

  “I can’t write this,” Masuto said. “I don’t know where to start. There was too much yesterday and too much today.”

  “Can you move your fingers if your hand is broken?” Beckman asked.

  “Suppose you write the report, Sy.”

  “How can I type with this hand? Do you think I ought to have it X-rayed?”

  “The hell with it,” Masuto said. “I’ll do it tomorrow. I’m going home. I need a bath. You know, we don’t eat anymore. Did you have lunch today?”

  “When?” Beckman asked sourly.

  Wainwright came into the room then and stood there, staring at them bleakly.

  “Something wrong?” Beckman asked.

  “You two give me a pain.”

  “That’s understandable,” Masuto agreed.

  “You got a kidnapping, and you treat it like a personal affair. You bust into a house in Los Angeles and maim two suspects, and you operate like this wasn’t a police department and like you studied to be a pair of lunatics. This Clinton from the F.B.I. says you are arrogant and unreliable, and I’m inclined to agree with him.”

  “We couldn’t reach you,” Masuto said lamely.

  “That’s one lousy excuse. Suddenly you don’t have a radio in your car. You knew goddamn well that I was over in the hotel with this Clinton guy, but you couldn’t take five minutes to phone me. Oh, no. Now what the hell am I supposed to tell this guy? You got us involved in an international incident with these creeps from Washington crawling all over the place, and it don’t help one bit for me to tell them that you kept their five lousy agronomists and a lot of plain citizens from being blown out of the sky. Oh, no. All they want to know is why they weren’t informed of what was absolutely an F.B.I. matter, and what kind of a lousy, insubordinate police department do I run, and how come one of my cops nearly beats a suspect to death out of his own personal animosity?”

  “I swear I only hit him once,” Beckman protested. “Look at my hand!”

  “Well, he’s outside,” Wainwright said.

  “Who?”

  “The F.B.I. guy, Clinton. And he wants to talk to you, Masao, and I don’t want you giving him any lip or any of your goddamn Charlie Chan routine. You just listen to what he has to say, because we got trouble enough.”

  Masuto nodded, rose, and walked outside. Clinton was sitting at a table, his attaché case open in front of him, writing. When he saw Masuto, he closed his notebook and rose to face the detective.

  “So you finally condescend to speak to me, Sergeant Masuto. You had an appointment with me at eleven o’clock this morning, but you chose to ignore that—”

  Now Wainwright and Beckman joined them, standing a few feet behind Masuto. Clinton went on talking.

  “—and take matters into your own hand. You were involved in a kidnapping, but you saw no reason to report that to the F.B.I., and then you undertook an illegal search and seizure without a warrant or a court order, and then you and your partner gave a classic demonstration of police brutality. Well, just let me tell you this. That kind of thing is over. This matter is out of your hands. The man found dead in the pool at the Beverly Glen Hotel died of drowning accidentally. Both my government and the government of the Soviet Union concur in that decision, and you are to do nothing and say nothing to contradict this. Furthermore, Mrs. Stillman’s murder of her husband will be treated and tried as an act of jealousy and revenge, and nothing will be said of her connection with the two Arabs. They will be deported, turned over to the German authorities, who have a prior claim and indictment against them. Nothing will be released on the attempt to destroy the airliner, and I have suggested to Captain Wainwright that he take measures concerning the insubordination of you and Detective Beckman. Now, do you understand this?”

  Masuto nodded.

  “Have you any comment?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Most humble apologies. So very sorry for long and painful list of my ineptitudes. But must make one comment. It seems to me that you are one of the most incompetent and stupid men I have ever encountered, and you can stuff that right up your bureaucratic federal asshole.”

  And with that, Masuto turned on his heel and walked out. There was a long moment of silence, and then Beckman began to sputter.

  “Get out of here!” Wainwright yelled.

  Beckman fled. Clinton took a deep breath and said to Wainwright, “I want you to get rid of that man.”

  “Oh?”

  “How can you run a police force, even a force like yours, with men like that?”

  “I manage,” Wainwright said.

  “That insolent bastard! That damn Jap!”

  “Hold on,” Wainwright said coldly. “You turn my stomach, mister.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s an American, He’s not Japanese. This is California, Mr. Clinton. We don’t talk that way.”

  Clinton stared and Wainwright stared back.

  “He’s also a damn good cop,” Wainwright said. “Maybe the best I got. I cooperated with you right down the line, and if you want to twist this filthy mess to your own ends, I got nothing to say about that. But right here you’re on my turf. I don’t come to Washington and tell you how to run your organization, and I’ll thank you not to tell me how to run my police department. So let’s finish up what we got and put this case away.”

  Masuto drove home to Culver City. He was tired. His mind had stopped functioning. Rage had wiped out any sense of achievement, and he felt lifeless.

  He came into the house, and his son and daughter ran to greet him. They were in their pajamas, ready for bed, and Ana appeared to be none the worse for her experience. She had evidently informed Uraga of all the details of her kidnapping, and they both chattered away, excitedly. Masuto embraced them mechanically and listened without hearing. He was also very conscious of the fact that Kati had not come to greet him as he entered. Usually she was so anxious about his coming home that she would look for him through the window or listen for the sound of his car.

  “Where is your mother?” he asked Uraga.

  “In the kitchen.”

  “Go and play,” he said to them. “I must talk to her.”

  He went into the kitchen. Kati stood at the sink, her back to him, cleaning shrimp and vegetables for tempura. She did not turn as he entered, and after a moment he went to her and kissed the bare spot on her shoulder.

  “That will not help,” she said coldly, without turning around.

  “What have I done?”

  “It’s not what you have done. It’s what you haven’t done. Do you
know what I went through today?”

  He took her shoulders and turned her around to face him. “Don’t you think I went thorugh the same thing?”

  “Did you? Did you have to sit here and wait? And wait? Do you know what that is? Days go by and I don’t see you and the children don’t see you. Do you know what that is? I’m not Japanese. I’m Nisei, as you are, but you treat me the way the Japanese men treat their wives.”

  “I don’t. That’s not fair.”

  “It is true, and you know it.”

  He shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know what to say. I’m going to take a bath.”

  He was lying in the hot tub, the water as hot as his skin could bear, half asleep, relaxed for the first time in hours, when the door opened and Kati entered, carrying two huge fluffly white towels. She sat down beside the tub, the towels in her lap.

  “Do you know, you are right,” he said to her.

  “I know I am.”

  “I saw you preparing tempura, so you can’t be too angry at me.”

  “Ah, so. It’s not because I am not angry, it’s because I decided what to do.”

  “And what is that?”

  “It concerns tomorrow, Saturday. Tomorrow, I will prepare a picnic lunch, and we will take the children and our bathing suits and we will drive up to Malibu and have a picnic on the beach, and the children will play all day in the sand and the water, and you and I will have an opportunity to resume our acquaintance.”

  “That would be wonderful.” Masuto sighed. “But I have to go into the office and prepare my report.”

  “No,” Kati said calmly. “You will call Captain Wainwright and tell him you cannot come in tomorrow. You can even lie to him, if you wish, and tell him that you are sick. You never use any of your sick time.”

  “I don’t think Wainwright would appreciate that.”

  “But I would. So when you are out of the tub, you will call Captain Wainwright.”

  Masuto thought about it. “It’s too sudden to get sick. I would have to tell him the truth.”

  “Then you will tell him the truth. Then you can meditate if you wish, and then we will have your supper. I also have sushi.”

  “Why did you prepare my favorite food if you were so angry at me?” Masuto wondered.

  “What has one thing got to do with the other?”

  “Yes. I see. You are a remarkable woman, Kati.”

  After he had dried himself and put on his saffron-colored robe, he called the station and spoke to Wainwright.

  “I just don’t believe you,” Wainwright said. “After the way you loused things up with the whole goddamn federal government?”

  “It’s either that or get a divorce.”

  “You give me one pain in the ass, Masao.”

  “Do I get the day off?”

  “Take it, take it. It’ll be a relief not to see you around for a whole weekend.”

  He put down the phone and turned to Kati, who stood there smiling.

  “You see,” she said, “it was very simple, wasn’t it?”

  He shook his head hopelessly.

  “The children are in bed. Shall we eat?”

  He nodded.

  Later, heaping tempura onto his plate, she asked innocently, “What happened to the dancer?”

  “She’s in jail.”

  Kati smiled again. “Tomorrow will be a nice day,” she said. “A married man should enjoy his wife and children.”

  A Biography of Howard Fast

  Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast’s commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

  Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast’s mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London’s The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

  Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

  Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast’s appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin’s purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

  Fast’s career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast’s books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).

  Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side’s Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.

  Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother “had no childhood.” As a result of their mother’s death in 1923 and their father’s absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper
called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. “My brother was like a rock,” he wrote, “and without him I surely would have perished.”

  A copy of Fast’s military identification from World War II. During the war Fast worked as a war correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, writing articles for publications such as PM, Esquire, and Coronet. He also contributed scripts to Voice of America, a radio program developed by Elmer Davis that the United States broadcast throughout occupied Europe.

  Here Fast poses for a picture with a fellow inmate at Mill Point prison, where he was sent in 1950 for his refusal to disclose information about other members of the Communist Party. Mill Point was a progressive federal institution made up of a series of army bunkhouses. “Everyone worked at the prison,” said Fast during a 1998 interview, “and while I hate prison, I hate the whole concept of prison, I must say this was the most intelligent and humane prison, probably that existed in America.” Indeed, Fast felt that his three-month stint there served him well as a writer: “I think a writer should see a little bit of prison and a little bit of war. Neither of these things can be properly invented. So that was my prison.”

  Fast with his wife Bette and their two children, Jonathan and Rachel, in 1952. The family has a long history of literary achievement. Bette’s father founded the Hudson County News Company. Jonathan Fast would go on to become a successful popular novelist, as would his daughter, Molly, whose mother, Erica Jong, is the author of the groundbreaking feminist novel Fear of Flying. (Photo courtesy of Lotte Jacobi.)

  Fast at a bookstand during his campaign for Congress in 1952. He ran on the American Labor Party ticket for the twenty-third congressional district in the Bronx. Although Fast remained a committed leftist his entire life, he looked back on his foray into national politics with a bit of amusement. “I got a disease, which is called ‘candidateitis,’” he told Donald Swaim in a 1990 radio interview. “And this disease takes hold of your mind, and it convinces you that your winning an election is important, very often the most important thing on earth. And it grips you to a point that you’re ready to kill to win that election.” He concluded: “I was soundly defeated, but it was a fascinating experience.”