by Joseph Kanon
Riordan picked up his glass, staring at Ben over the rim as he drank, buying a minute.
“If I’d done it, you wouldn’t have known anybody was there,” he said finally.
“So someone else. But you’d tell him what to look for. Now you want to tell me?”
“You think I knocked over your place? What for?”
“For something you didn’t get. Maybe I can help.”
“You’re going in circles.”
“And I keep coming back here. You were tailing him. You’re still tailing him. A dead man. What do you want? Didn’t you have enough on him already? A nice big file down in Tenney’s office.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you work for Tenney. Take love notes to Polly. God knows what else. Keep tabs on Liesl’s father, dangerous characters like him. So we can sleep safe at night. While you’re breaking into the house.”
“I don’t work for Tenney.”
“Were you getting stuff on Danny while he was paying you? Maybe little notes on his love life. Tenney likes that, I hear.”
“Where is this coming from?” Riordan said evenly. “Your information’s old. I don’t work for Tenney. I did. A while ago. But that’s a while ago. And by the way, I’m not tailing Ostermann.”
“You just like having lunch at the Farmers Market.”
Riordan sat back, his eyes steady on Ben.
“You going to tell me what this is all about?”
Ben slid the envelope to Riordan. “Have a look.”
Ben watched him open the envelope and take out the picture, his face registering no emotion at all, a practiced blank. But when he did raise his eyes, they had a new directness.
“Where did you get this?”
“The police had it. They just didn’t know what they had.”
“What did they have?”
“Someone he knew, right at the scene, who didn’t identify himself. Just stood there watching him bleed out. They might be interested in that. I was.”
“And?”
“And they might want to know more. Show your picture around- do those things the police do. To see what connection there might be.”
“They have any reason to do that?”
Ben shrugged. “A courtesy to the family. After they start making noise. Plus interfering with police procedures. Getting a report changed. They really don’t like that. Unless they’re the ones doing it, but that can’t be all of them, can it?”
“And I’m supposed to be the one asking.”
“Continental asked. But the studio had to get a call from somebody who was there. Otherwise it’s too late, the time doesn’t fit. I’ve been looking for the girlfriend, whoever he must have been meeting. But the girlfriend wasn’t there. You were. The meeting was with you?”
Riordan said nothing.
“So we’re back in the circle again-what were you doing there?”
“Maybe I happened to be passing by.”
“Passing by.”
“Who can say different?”
“Well, there’s the call. Why call Bunny if you’re just passing by.”
“He told you this?”
“Not a word. Loose lips sink ships. Your secret’s safe with him. I just figured. But put him under oath and he’s not going to keep ducking and weaving-he’ll have other things to think about. So will you. The police might want to change the accident report again. Make it a criminal case this time.”
“What are you saying? You think I killed him?”
“Somebody did.”
Riordan looked at him sharply. “Nobody else thinks so.”
“Just the two of us, huh?”
Riordan paused for a minute, staring at him, then nodded. “But I don’t know it. Neither do you.”
“Then you won’t mind if the police give us a hand. So we’ll all know.” Ben slid the picture back. “I can get more made, if you’d like one.”
Riordan sat forward, his shoulders hunched. “We need to talk.”
“Start.”
“You think you know something, but you have things a little confused. So let’s put them straight. First, I didn’t kill your brother. And you don’t think so either or you wouldn’t be sitting here. Kind of a dangerous thing to say to somebody if it were true.”
“Why? Because you’d plug me here in Lucey’s?”
“You won’t always be in Lucey’s,” Riordan said calmly. “And you can save the tough guy talk. I know people who really are tough.”
“What are they like? You?”
“They don’t talk much at all. Second, you’re not going to the cops. You don’t have anything to give them except a picture that doesn’t mean much. And you start anything, they’ll mess it up. You don’t want any mess with this. They closed it out as an accident, keep it that way.”
“Thanks to you.”
Riordan opened his hand, conceding the point.
“You don’t want anybody nosing around. Trust me on that.”
“I know what Danny was. You must, too, or you wouldn’t have been hounding him. More Red meat. Is that why you didn’t want it as a suicide? They’d blame you for hounding him?”
“I wasn’t hounding him.”
“Then what were you doing at the Cherokee? We’re back there again,” he said, tapping his finger on the photo.
“I was keeping an eye.”
“Jesus,” Ben said, turning his head in disgust. “And what did you think when you saw him there? What was in your head? One less Red? Keeping an eye.”
“You want to listen to this or just get up on a soapbox? I was keeping an eye because something was wrong. I knew your brother. We did business together. And then all of a sudden he was acting funny. Upset. And I thought, which? Is he upsetting himself or is somebody upsetting him? So I started keeping an eye, friendly, to see what was going on. That night I’m sitting in the car on Cherokee. No idea what he was doing there. A woman? Maybe. I see him go in, but I don’t see anyone else. So somebody who lives there. Then the crash. People come running out. I go take a look. And there he is.” He pointed to the picture. “The police come right away. Everybody’s talking in the alley, he’s a jumper. That fairy night clerk, carrying on. And I get that he rents there, it’s his place. And I think, this is going to be a mess.”
“So you decide to be the janitor.”
“You know what happens? A suicide, anything suspicious? They’re going to seal the place. Make an investigation. That’s not going to do anybody good.”
“Not you anyway. How does it look? You go after somebody and he finally runs so hard he jumps. That’s not the kind of press Tenney needs. What his files are really doing to people.”
Riordan sat back. “Whoa,” he said, putting up his hand in a stop gesture. “Look, you’re not playing with a full deck here. That’s not how it was.”
“No?”
“Nobody was chasing him. He was working with me. He was a source.”
For a second, even the sounds of Lucey’s seemed to fall away, his head stopped up with a cotton numbness.
“What kind of source,” he said quietly.
“A source. He gave me names. Things to follow up. You’ve got this backwards. He helped make the files.”
“I don’t believe that,” Ben said, suddenly chilled, his blood stopped for a minute.
Riordan shrugged. “That doesn’t change anything.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“I can show you reports. In the files.”
Ben said nothing, still digesting this. Then he looked down to the photo.
“You bastard,” he said. “That’s why you thought he jumped. That he couldn’t live with himself anymore.”
Riordan looked away, embarrassed. “People are unpredictable.”
“Especially informers. They turn on everybody. Then themselves. Is that it?”
“What are you talking about? Informer. He was a patriot.”
“Jesus Fucking Chr
ist. A patriot. What did you do to make him do it? What club did you use.”
“You’ve got this wrong. Nobody made him do anything. We were all on the same side in this.”
“He was a Communist.”
“In Germany. Was. He saw what it meant. Right here.” He held his hand close to his face. “You see it that clear, you want to do something.”
“Like shop people to you.”
Riordan took a breath. “Sometimes, you stop believing in something, you go the other way. You hate it.”
“And hate yourself.”
“No, not like that.”
“Then why did you think he’d jumped?”
Riordan looked away again. “People get ideas. You never know how they’re going to-” He stopped, leaning forward. “But that’s why. It didn’t make sense to me, the way I knew him. So I thought, what if it wasn’t? Just the way you did. I thought, what if he had help? Someone who knew. Wanted him stopped.”
“Communists, you mean. At it again. Is that the way you think Party discipline works? Throw people out of windows. You should go to work for Minot.”
Riordan looked at him. “I do.”
“You work for Minot?”
“It’s not a secret.”
Ben studied him again, as if he were moving pieces of his face, seeing him new, rearranged. “And that’s why Bunny made the call,” he said, half to himself. “Not for you.”
“Ken doesn’t forget a favor.”
“And nobody would know Danny was feeding you. Minot’s own Bureau.”
“Just one of the field agents,” Riordan said smoothly. “Tenney recommended me.”
“After all your good work there.”
“You want to be a wiseass, go ahead. I don’t care. Your brother knew what was what. Maybe you will, too, someday. Everybody will. Minot’s going to take this national.”
“Take what national?”
“The threat in the industry.” He held out his hand, stopping a passing waitress. “You want another?”
Ben looked at his beer, scarcely touched, then sat back, staring at the picture. Riordan waited, letting him catch his breath.
“You’re surprised.”
“Why would he do it?”
“Why wouldn’t he? It’s the right thing to do.”
Ben looked up at him. “To fight the threat. Which one? Betty Grable taking over the government?”
“You think it’s a joke. It’s not. This is a war of ideas.”
“What’s the last idea you saw in the movies?”
Riordan said nothing, not wanting to quarrel.
“How long was all this?” Ben said. “How long did you know him?”
“Couple of years. Since the Bureau. He was a friend to the Bureau.”
“What kind of friend?”
“We asked for some help, he gave it.”
“You asked for help? What, go through Herb Yates’s mail?”
“We don’t need people for that. We know what people say, what they write to each other. What we need to know is what they think. Your brother had special access.”
“To whom?” Ben said, chilled again, apprehensive.
“He did us a service. But I think he did them a service, too. Wartime, the Bureau has to keep an eye on enemy aliens. It’s our job. But you don’t want to make people uncomfortable. Not if they’re what they say they are.”
“He spied on his friends?” Ben said, suddenly seeing the exile faces at the funeral, Heinrich and Alma and Feuchtwanger. Hans and Liesl. Family.
“I wouldn’t use that term. He reassured us, that’s closer. That they were all right. Well, Brecht I still wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw. But we got nothing yet, so we can’t touch him. Eisler we already knew. And the Mann kid’s a fruit, that’s always a risk. The others, harmless, more or less. But we had to know that. So like I say, he did everybody a service.”
“The Bureau spied on them? These people risked their lives. Fighting Nazis.”
“So they say. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good for America. They have a different idea of politics over there. You ask me to tell you the difference between a Nazi and a Communist and what would I say? This much?” He held up two fingers, a tiny space apart. “At the Bureau we call them Communazis-they’re both on the same side, so why not put them together? We needed to keep tabs. Your brother saw it. How the Reds tried to use them-small stuff, innocent, put your name on a letter, then maybe not so innocent. He was worried about them being used. We knew how he felt.”
“How? You tap his phone?”
Riordan ignored this. “So we asked him to help. You know, the Bureau, it’s hard to say no. Wartime, it’s a patriotic duty.”
“And then you kept asking.”
“He saw how it was going in the industry. So he gave me a hand.”
“Real pals.” Ben looked again at the alley picture. “But you couldn’t even go over to the body, see if you could help. Just stood there thinking how to cover your ass.”
“He was dead. I thought he was dead.”
“How’s that feel? Having someone’s blood on your hands?”
Riordan glanced up at the returning waitress, but she seemed not to have overheard, smiling as she put down his glass and moved on. He took a sip of his beer.
“How do you figure that?”
“First you think he jumped because he got disgusted with himself. For what? The work he was doing for you. That’s what you thought, isn’t it?”
Riordan said nothing.
“But what if somebody killed him. Who would that be? Who’d hate him that much? How about somebody he sold out to you?” He picked up the photo, both of them glancing at it again, back in the alley, then slid it into the envelope. “Either way it comes back to you,” he said, his voice lower, drained.
Behind him he heard the tinkle of glasses, then a roll of thunder. He turned to the window, even darker now, and suddenly thought of the window on the Chief, looking out at the endless bright fields, everything getting bigger and more open, golden, the way he imagined Danny’s life had become, not shadowy and squalid.
“I don’t see it that way,” Riordan said. “He did what he thought was right. I didn’t kill him. But somebody did. You’re his brother. If you’d stop spitting at me for two minutes, maybe we could help each other out.”
Ben stared for a second, hearing the voice, steady and reasonable, then separating it from the words. What he might have said to Danny, help each other out, while he wrapped the coil around him. Ben stood up.
“It’s still on them,” he said, nodding to Riordan’s hands. He reached into his pocket to pull out some money, then stopped. “I’ll let you get this one.”
He didn’t turn until he was at the door, seeing Riordan drop some change on the table.
Outside it had finally begun to rain, heavy sheets of it, so that he was trapped under the small awning. The Mediterranean hills had disappeared, even the Paramount water tower, leaving a few flat streets with running gutters and a tangle of overhead wires.
“Christ,” Riordan said, coming out. “Where’s your car?”
“I walked.”
Riordan looked at him, puzzled, a joke he didn’t quite get. “I’m there,” he said, pointing to a car. “Come on, I’ll drop you.”
“I’ll wait it out.”
Riordan gave him a suit-yourself shrug, then turned up the back of his collar, ready to dart to the car. “By the way,” he said. “You’re going in circles again. You think it’s somebody he gave me. If he’d already done that, it’d be too late, wouldn’t it? No point then. Right?”
He dashed out into the rain, fumbling with his keys, and got into his car. The rain was blowing in under the awning. In a real city there’d be taxis or a bus rumbling along. Ben watched Riordan’s car move into the street. Circles. No point then. Right?
Riordan pulled up in front and rolled down his window. “Don’t be a jerk. Get in.”
Ben looked at the rain agai
n, feeling the bottom of his pants already wet, and sprinted to the passenger door.
“You’ve got a short fuse,” Riordan said, pulling out into traffic.
Ben brushed the front of his jacket, damp in patches.
“I liked him, you know. Whatever you think.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. He took out a cigarette and lit it. They were passing RKO. Only a few blocks, the windshield wipers keeping rhythm. “Everybody did.”
Even as a kid, friends clung to him, following him home. Jokes about the teachers, plans for later. But what had he felt about them? Nothing can lie like a smile. Kaltenbach spoke of him as a hero. But Danny must have filed reports on him, too. Long talks with Liesl’s father-taken down later? Bedtime reading for Riordan. Who must have supplied the lever. Maybe not blackmail, a plot out of Partners, just a soft pressure point, and then he was in it. But at least part of him must have wanted to be. Sometimes you stop believing, you go the other way. But when had it happened? Had he enjoyed it? Even justified it to himself-keeping the wolf away from innocent people? But not from everybody. How did it feel, giving Riordan a name?
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Riordan was saying. “It’s a funny thing to say, but I’m glad it’s this way. That he didn’t do it to himself. I’d hate to think that.”
“Just as long as everybody else does.”
Riordan was quiet for a minute. “You’ve got some mouth on you. That’s not even fair. I got it changed.”
Ben rolled down the window and tossed the cigarette. The quick storm had slowed to a light drizzle. “Just up here,” he said.
At the Continental gate they idled behind a white convertible with a canvas top, its tail lights bathing the trunk in neon red. Even the cars were different here, bright pieces of color, not gray jeeps and flatbed convoys. Like waking up in Oz. Maybe it had been that simple, not some blinding light on the road to Damascus. Maybe Danny had just seen a red convertible, an aqua swimming pool, and decided to leave the old world behind.
“Why Bunny?” Ben said suddenly. “Why ask Bunny? Doesn’t Minot know anybody downtown?”
“Picture people. Call comes from the studio, they figure the usual, a dame, maybe high on weed. Something. A congressman calls, they wonder. People talk. And word gets out.” He looked at Ben. “How’d you hear, by the way?”
