Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “I asked you to show me.”

  “I know you did, Cooper. But I don't like you.” He grinned again. “If you can't run Big Wally, you can stew in your own juice.” Kaplan turned to leave.

  “Suppose I told you that Murphy was waiting for a story and I told him you wouldn’t cooperate,” Copper said.

  “That would make you a rat, wouldn’t it?”

  “Suppose I threatened to beat the crap out of you if you screw around on this?”

  Kaplan sighed. He squirmed. Finally he pulled off his coat, sat down, and turned on a video display screen.

  “What do you want?” Lou asked.

  “A few names. Show me how to get complete biographical references,” Cooper said. “I also want to cross-reference names: listings of when one name might have appeared in relation to another. Can we do that?”

  Lou blew out a long breath. “I can do anything,” he said. He motioned to a second chair. Cooper pulled it over and sat down. “What you must remember, Cooper,” Lou began, “is that Big Wally is smarter than you are. But unlike me, he's also your friend. You ask him questions. If you ask nicely, he gives you the answer. How many names you got?” he asked.

  “Two to start. Then maybe two more.”

  “Give me the first one,” Lou said. “I'll access a complete periodical reference and show you your options for cross-references and print. There's also a condensation option. You tell Big Wally you want a condensed printout of the subject and approximately how many words, by increments of twenty-five hundred. Does that float your boat?”

  “For now, yes.”

  “I'll do the first one,” Lou said. “Then I'll guide you while you do the second. After that, you're on your own. Who do you want? Give me a name.”

  “Popov.” He spelled it out. “First name, Pyotr.” Kaplan proceeded, starting an access with an open question.

  “Living or dead?” Kaplan asked.

  “I don't know. Try both.”

  “Okay,” Kaplan said. Four minutes later, Lou had accessed Popov from among the many millions of names in the WLE-2000 storage bank. There were fifty pages of references.

  “What do you want on Popov? Condensed bio?” Lou prepared to punch a key.

  “Give me a ten-thousand-word condensed biography,” Cooper asked. “Then give me everything else in the memory bank. A complete printout. And I'm going to want the same for a man named Michal Goleniewski immediately after Popov.”

  Over the next forty-five minutes. Cooper became a quick study of Big Wally's research capacity. Other Eagle staffers came and went. Cooper made notes in a reporter's pad as they proceeded so that he'd be able to repeat the search for other names. When he was finished, it was quarter to eight. Lou pushed his chair back from the computer screen.

  “Can you handle the rest?” Lou asked.

  “I can. Thanks, Lou.”

  He offered his hand. Lou accepted it. Lou picked up his coat, draped it over his shoulder, and retreated toward the door. “Call me at home if you have problems,” Lou said. “It’s nice that you finally entered the Twentieth Century.”

  “Beat it, Lou. Go home and get laid. If you can.”

  “Screw you, Cooper,” he said with a smile.

  Cooper punched a RETURN key on Big Wally's keyboard. Across the room, a daisy wheel printer rattled to life. Half an hour later, Cooper gathered two hundred pages of printed-out biographies, complete with cross-references and sources. He slid them into a manila envelope, wrote his name on the front of it, and sealed it.

  He was prepared to go home. Or was he? He stood at the door for a moment. Then he thought for a moment, returned to the keyboard and sat down.

  The greatest secret of the Sixties.

  Having mastered the biographical access of Big Wally, Cooper sent two other inquiries burrowing deeply into the sterile electronic darkness of the computer's memory:

  David Charles, the phantom acting ambassador.

  Stanley Rudawski, recently retired from the United States Department of State.

  Both inquiries came up cold. “Nothing,” Cooper muttered to the empty room. Plumbers from Jersey City and firefighters from Bayside left more of a written record of their existences than that. He wondered: How could these two guys fly through life like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, never leaving a discernible footprint on anything?

  Frank Cooper returned to his office to use the telephone. He dialed the main switchboard in Virginia of the Central Intelligence Agency. He asked if a message could be routed to a Brett Molloy, the name Stanly Rudawski had mentioned. The operator took the message—Cooper's name, current journalistic affiliation, and return telephone number—without confirming whether the agency employed any Brett Molloy.

  Cooper set down the telephone. He stood. He picked up the envelope bearing the biographical profiles on Popov and Goleniewski and tucked it under his arm. Finally satisfied with the day, he went home.

  Chapter 15

  In Ohio, Governor George Wallace continued to parlay his success in Indiana and Illinois. At a shopping mall in Steubenville, a young white workingman in blue jeans and a heavy shirt asked Mr. Wallace who his constituency was. Wallace in response said, “The Forgotten American.”

  Wallace was well read, particularly in American political biographies, and the phrase had always appealed to him. Huey Long had liked it, too. So now Wallace elaborated.

  “Franklin Roosevelt used the term many years ago,” he told the voters. “Roosevelt spoke for the average American, the people who had been betrayed by the economic interests that caused the Great Depression. So today I'm also speaking for the same folks, the people whose financial security has been done in by Republican bankers, the elite press, the crooked big city Democrats, pushy Civil Rights workers, minorities, Communists and hippies.”

  It was a seemingly extemporaneous moment. It played nicely on Ohio television and, within another twenty-four hours, before approximately twenty million people across the United States. A lot of Americans felt forgotten. Wallace knew how hijack a good turn of a phrase. As for the workingman who had posed the question, some of the media people attempted to interview him after the rally. They suspected he was a shill. But he quickly vanished.

  Wallace had eighty-six reporters following him in Ohio. Half of them had electronic broadcast equipment or sound crews. Most were from the Old Confederacy. Several were northern, what the Wallace camp openly referred to as “Hostiles.” Mostly, the Hostiles were the credentialed representatives of what was perceived to be the liberal media, mostly wire services, big city journals with liberal editorial policies, and the three major news networks. They were not to be confused with the “Friendlies,” whose label was self-explanatory.

  Running herd on the press was Jerry Huddleston, Wallace's media supervisor. Huddleston was a big, lumbering, overweight, fifty-five-year-old Alabaman. He had a bushy mustache and twenty different size fifty-two brown suits. Huddleston helped George Wallace navigate the media minefields. He was an old Wallace friend, an attorney who had begun his career in Mobile, moved to Montgomery and opened his law firm where he practiced contract law relating to the gas industry, usually defending the industry from people and smaller companies whom they’d screwed. Gradually, Huddleston had been drawn into direct-mail fund-raising for the far fringes of segregationist Southern politics. He enjoyed private ties to some ascendant far right groups such as The John Birch Society and The Minutemen. He was also in charge of the “Bundlers,” a shadowy network of Wallace supporters who bundled money from various sources and delivered it to the campaign in cash in suitcases.

  Huddleston had a cozy manner of speech that could be likened to warm fudge. He was a likable, affable man, hulking and gregarious. The press used to call him The Big Brown Bear. Now it was just The Bear. When pressed about the far-right credentials of some of his boss’s backers, Huddleston sought to dismiss the issue with a big self-effacing grin. “Aw, shucks, fellas. These old John Birch boys are good people just like you and me.�
��

  Well, not exactly.

  The Birch Society had been founded in Indianapolis ten years earlier by a dozen white men led by Robert W. Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer. Welch named the new group after an American Baptist missionary and military intelligence officer named John Birch who was killed by communist forces in mainland China in 1945. Welch claimed that Birch was not just the first American casualty of the Cold War but also a dedicated anti-Communist. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, who met Birch after bailing out over China following the Tokyo Raid, said that he was certain that Birch would never have approved of the use of his name. Other core founders included Fred C. Koch, founder of Koch Industries.

  According to Welch, the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians controlled both the U.S. and Soviet governments. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a “one-world socialist government.” Apparently, they really did believe this.

  Kookier still was a group called The Minutemen, a self-styled “militia” and fervently anti-Communist organization formed in the early 1960s. The founder was Robert Bolivar DePugh, a veterinary medicine entrepreneur from Norborne, Missouri. The Minutemen believed that Communism would soon take over all of America. The group armed themselves and was preparing to take back the country from the “subversives.” The Minutemen organized into small cells and stockpiled weapons for an anticipated counter-revolution. Like the John Birch Society, they were enthusiastic about Wallace. He kept them in the background but did nothing to discourage their support. Far from it—the rousing speech he gave on an evening in Cleveland would have had any Bircher or Minuteman on his feet in delight.

  “The federal troops who have invaded our fair state of Alabama today to force school integration upon us,” Wallace ranted from behind his bulletproof podium, “could be better used guarding the safety of the citizens of Washington, D.C. I was safer in a B-29 bomber over Japan during the war in an air raid than the people of Washington are walking to a ball game. A closer example is Atlanta. The liberal city officials fawn over school integration and then they build barricades to stop residential integration. What hypocrisy!”

  All of which left Wallace and his advisors in a lengthy strategy conference on their final night in Ohio. They sat in Wallace’s hotel suite over sandwiches and soft drinks, revisiting the possibilities for Governor Wallace’s Vice-Presidential running mate.

  On paper they had a candidate, a man named Marvin Griffin.

  Griffin, the ex-Governor of Georgia, had agreed to be a temporary running mate in order to get the Wallace candidacy on the ballot in several states. Griffin, a Harvard graduate, was a man of wealth and prodigious charm, qualities that were hard to reconcile with his public record.

  In 1958, for example, Griffin took advantage of the intense media coverage surrounding the Springhill mining disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia, to promote tourism to Georgia. He publicly offered a group of survivors free vacations to Jekyll Island, Georgia. However, one of the rescued miners was black, resulting in a public relations nightmare. Griffin fell over his feet earlier, also, in a controversy that preceded the 1956 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, where the Panthers of the University of Pittsburgh, including a star African-American player named Bobby Grier, were scheduled to meet the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.

  There was controversy over whether Grier should be allowed to play, and whether Georgia Tech should even play at all. Griffin sent a telegram to his state's Board of Regents. Griffin implored teams from Georgia not to engage in events which had African Americans either as participants or as spectators.

  A large contingent from the New Orleans community, as well as many related to Georgia Tech, openly fought to bar either Grier, Pitt, or the Yellow Jacket team from the game. However, students and football players from the Atlanta-based school, civil rights leaders, as well as a large number of the Pitt community, succeeded in ensuring that the game took place.

  Griffin was also gloriously corrupt. During Griffin’s four-year term from 1954 to 1958, the state was buying rowboats that would not float. They were then sent to state parks that had no lakes. A columnist for the Atlanta Journal, Charlie Pou, wrote that the Griffin administration motto might have been, “If you ain’t for stealin’, you ain’t for segregation….” Kickbacks were a way of life for Southern politicians. Thus, Marvin Griffin just wouldn’t do for a permanent spot on the national ticket. Eventually, someone else would have to be found.

  But who?

  Chapter 16

  Frank Cooper’s weekends were Fridays and Saturdays. Staffers covered his page unless something “significant” happened. On the Friday morning after Labor Day, all was quiet. The printout on Popov and Goleniewski sat unopened in the safe in his bedroom. It had been Cooper's intention to read it the previous evening, but fatigue had overtaken him when he had returned home.

  Home. To Cooper “home” was a term that was vague. When he was younger, how could he have imagined that he would pass his fortieth birthday living alone in a fading apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side?

  Cooper’s building—in the eyes of the developers who were intent on gang-banging the neighborhood—was the “worst” on the block. That meant that it was the most likely target for demolition. Cooper knew it would take at an armada of bulldozers, a handful of eviction notices and years of litigation to dislodge him from his current tenancy.

  Cooper's set of rooms had once been part of a larger unit that comprised the entire floor. There was a small entrance foyer and a long narrow living room which overlooked both 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The living room had a low ceiling that was slightly convex. Cooper could stand on a chair and touch it at its center, but not near the walls.

  Connected to this room was a windowless kitchen with appliances that dated from the building's last renovation in 1962. Off from the kitchen were a bathroom and a bedroom that was narrow and cramped. The room was situated on the southwest corner of the building. If Cooper stood by a side window, he would have a clear view up and down Amsterdam Avenue. If he looked out the rear window, he could overlook the roof of the adjoining walk-up as well as uptown beyond the intersection of Amsterdam and 97th Street.

  Cooper liked the bedroom for reasons that would have escaped even the most studious observers. By some fluke of Manhattan real estate, no taller building afforded a view into his bedroom. Not for five hundred yards at least. This was beyond the range of accuracy for a sorehead with a pistol. Cooper had figured this out very carefully. A sorehead with a rifle, of course, would have changed the equation.

  Recently, a young couple had moved in next door. Barbara and Jim Shields. They both worked during the day and rarely returned home before ten. They were newly married and spent a good deal of their time making high-decibel love on the other side of Cooper's bedroom wall. Cooper had recently purchased a large box of foam rubber earplugs. He left the Sheilds couple to their carnal fun, never letting on that they occasionally had a captive audience.

  At ten p.m. on Friday evening, the street noise outside diminished to a low, constant rumble. Cooper settled in to his bedroom. From the safe, he withdrew the lengthy printout from The Eagle's official memory bank. He seated himself at the small rectangular table near his bed. He marked a manila folder with the name: FIREBIRD. Keeping a pack of Kools and a warm cup of coffee at arm's length, Cooper leaned forward to begin reconciling Big Wally's memory with the words of Margot's father. He was ninety minutes into this task when his phone rang.

  It startled him. He answered.

  The caller was Margot. Her father had died twenty minutes earlier.

  Chapter 17

  New Rochelle was forty minutes from Manhattan on the old highway that wove through Westchester County. Cooper knew the area well. He drove from Manhattan on Sunday evening, a rare time when he used his car, a weather-beaten dented
Ford.

  Marston's Funeral Home in New Rochelle was the anchor of its block, occupying two storefronts, flanked by a liquor store and an auto parts outlet. Both left their window grates in place during daylight hours.

  Cooper had no trouble parking near Marston's. Two other cars were already parked there. One was Margot's. Inside the funeral home, a single elderly man met Cooper wearing a black suit and introducing himself as Mr. Edwards. He directed Cooper toward the viewing room where the man who had poured out his story of youth, intrigue, and Paris in 1965 lay in an open rosewood coffin before his final biographer.

  Cooper looked down at the deceased, who looked smaller than Cooper had remembered him. He looked peaceful. It fascinated Cooper how death managed to lift so many cares and worries from a human face. Death, that is, and the undertakers.

  Flowers flanked the coffin. A simple wreath lay upon the dead man's body. A small scroll in gothic letters identified the departed as Stanley Schofield Rudawski. Beyond the coffin, between arrangements of silk orchids, was also a small cross.

  Cooper looked to the rest of the room. Margot sat in the second row in an uneven semicircle of empty chairs. She wore a dark dress and a subdued scarf. Her face was drawn and tired. Cooper sat down next to her. Margot's hands were gripped tightly together. There was a handkerchief interlocked within her palm and fingers. Cooper placed his hand on hers. Her hands were chilly, tense, and unsteady. There were no other mourners.

  “I'm sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you for coming.” Her voice rasped. Beneath her dark glasses, her eyes were red.

  “How are you?” he asked. “It's never easy.”

  “I'm all right,” she said.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  She forced an appreciative smile then shook her head. “Thank you, though,” she said.

  “Not much of a turnout.”