Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “They couldn’t have just hired outside accountants?” Lauren asked.

  “In deference to all involved,” Moreland said, “they needed to keep the situation very quiet. “That’s all for now, Mr. Cooper. I can’t comment further on any of this.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Same thing, really.”

  “Then just one other thing,” Cooper continued. “Was there a second sniper in Dallas? God know there must have been. Oswald’s rifle could never fire a second shot in three point seven seconds. And god knows you must have some insights. Certainly, Lukashenko had knowledge of this and surely you discussed it with him. My guess is yes. Or is this a topic for another day?”

  “It’s a topic for another day, Mr. Cooper. Or maybe another decade. And that decade will never come for anyone in this room. Now, out! Time’s up. Leave. Or I’ll summon my bodyguard back. Or someone far worse. And take your sad girlfriend with you.”

  “You know,” Cooper said, standing. “I've been tracing this down for weeks. I've had theories. Suspicions. Wild flights of the imagination, involving who was overseeing the CIA files on this subject. You're sitting here calmly confirming the most jaded ones of all, all by not saying anything,” Cooper said.

  Moreland pointed to the door.

  “It’s all right. I’m leaving,” Cooper said. “Cheers.”

  Moreland nodded. “Sure. Cheers. And cheers ever after,” Deke Moreland answered.

  Chapter 88

  By late evening, the electorate had spoken.

  Wallace ran strongly in the deep south, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama went solidly into his column. But the first glimmer of hope for Nixon came from the other states in the south. Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Kentucky. And then it became evident that what Wallace had taken from Nixon in the south, he was now stealing from Humphrey in the northern Midwest and in California. It soon became clear that Cleveland and Chicago had not delivered sufficient votes for Humphrey to counter suburban and rural Republican votes.

  In Illinois, where it was never unusual to see four legs in a voting booth, there again proved a special case in the art of political chicanery. Nixon had contended for eight bitter years that Chicago had stolen a victory from him in 1960 when Mayor Daley had held out reporting the Chicago precincts until he could provide sufficient numbers for JFK to carry the state. This time, several Republican strongholds downstate withheld their total votes until Chicago’s returns could be estimated. Then they released their own numbers. Nixon took the state.

  When it was beyond any doubt that Illinois and Ohio were going for Nixon, it was clear to Humphrey that he had lost. “Well, sir,” he said to those around him, “the American people will soon learn that they elected a hollow deeply dishonest man.”

  Chapter 89

  When Cooper and Richie were out of the hotel and on the street, Lauren spoke again.

  “The bodyguard was Ukrainian, maybe?” she asked.

  “Possible,” Cooper said. Well, at least he was armed.

  They stopped at Grand Central. There were a few eateries still open. The bars were noisy. Many people were celebrating Nixon’s win or decrying it. By this time, it was what it was. After food, they took a taxi uptown to Frank’s place.

  It was nearly one thirty in the morning when their taxi pulled to the curb on the south side of 96th Street. Cooper paid the driver, edged out of the cab and extended his hand to help Lauren. Cooper did a quick scan of the street as he always did but saw nothing. He took Lauren’s arm and they headed toward the entrance of his apartment building while in conversation. Cooper would realize moments later how badly he had dropped his guard.

  A voice from the darkness accosted him, a voice from the very recent past. The voice that accosted him had an accent and came out of the doorway of the bar next door.

  “Mr. Cooper?”

  The voice jolted Cooper for a moment. A man stepped out of the shadows carrying something. Lauren was alarmed also. Cooper stepped half in front of her to shield her and in case the stranger did anything threatening.

  Then Cooper recognized Misha.

  Cooper was already cursing himself for dropping his guard. In a lifetime, It only took two or three seconds of carelessness or distraction, to het oneself killed.

  “Mr. Moreland, my boss,” said Misha. “Some paperwork, hey,” he said. “Like he promised. He sent me after you to give it.”

  The man held a black folder. Like the rest of him, the folder was in a shadow cast by the overhead street lamp and the flat metal sign for the bar next door. Already, the positioning was beyond coincidence.

  “If he sent you after me, and you had to retrieve it, how did you get here so fast?” Cooper asked.

  The man smiled, fighting with English. “Good question, man. But look here. See?”

  The man's right hand disappeared fast into the black folder and emerged with an automatic pistol. It looked like a small German weapon, a Heckler and Koch, maybe.

  Cooper was hardly in a position to examine it. Lauren grabbed his arm.

  Cooper knew he had been beaten. Maybe for the final time. To lunge for his own weapon now would get them both killed.

  “Okay, you two lovebirds separate. We go upstairs,” the man said affably. “You walk first, Mr. Cooper. You do a foolish thing and the lady dies. Understand?”

  “I understand,” Cooper said.

  “Now!” he said. “March. Or I shoot you right here! Go! Go! Move!”

  “Let her go,” Cooper said. “Your quarrel is with me.”

  “I make rules, not you,” Misha said. “Now you move! I don’t warn you again. More words and I shoot her in the head. Hear me, hey?”

  He waved the pistol as if he were anxious to use it. Abruptly, he pulled Lauren to him and held the nose of his pistol to the back of her head.

  “You go first,” he said to Cooper. “The lady second. You walk three steps ahead. I have gun to her head. You see that, yes? You do anything wrong, I blow her brains out then I shoot you with fast second shot.”

  And you’re going to do that, anyway, Cooper thought.

  The man jerked his head to indicate that Cooper should move immediately.

  Cooper went to the front door of his apartment building. He unlocked it. He knew he was dealing with a professional killer because he had seen them before: the gunman was keeping Lauren close to him. Cooper had no chance to whirl and counterattack.

  Cooper stepped into the lobby. He held the door behind him. Two seconds lapsed. The man followed with Lauren hostage. One of them held the door.

  Cooper took two more steps forward.

  “Okay! Stop!” he barked.

  Cooper halted. His gaze slid to the doorway of Jonas Halász, the superintendent. There was no light under the doorway. Unusual. Presumably, Jonas had retired, American elections being of little interest to him. Cooper remembered what Jonas had said about a Ukrainian looking for him.

  Then the man, still holding Lauren, made a deft step forward. Keeping the gun to her head, he lunged with his other hand under Cooper’s jacket and checked for a weapon. He took Cooper’s gun and stepped back quickly. The frisk was complete so fast that Cooper felt like a fool. There went his last chance to survive the evening.

  “Go!” the gunman demanded. “We go upstairs. Your home! Move it!”

  Cooper went to the staircase. He climbed it slowly, his mind teeming, looking for a chance to avoid execution.

  They arrived at a second-floor landing. Cooper’s mind raced with what to do, how to get out of this. There was something wrong with every approach. He hoped he’d run into someone on the steps or in the hallway, anything to distract attention, but he knew the man would shoot any person who happened in the way. Cooper guessed that his only hope was to get to his apartment, then turn quickly upon the killer when he tried to bring Lauren in. Cooper knew that if the man got them alone in the apartment, he would kill them.

  Cooper was two or three paces up the step
s to the third floor. He could hear Lauren two steps behind him and the assassin two steps behind her.

  “Now, halt,” Misha said. “Spread your hands wide,” he demanded.

  This was it, Cooper reckoned. A vision flashed before him of his obituary in the Eagle. Lauren’s obituary, too. Who would write that?

  What to do? Was this the moment?

  Cooper reckoned his executioner was about six feet behind him. He didn’t have a chance. In a moment that was so fast that it had no measurement in time, Cooper thought of his late parents…

  He thought of Lauren…

  He thought of the write-up his murder would receive on the obit page of the Eagle…

  He prayed that some other writers would pick up the fallen standard.

  Who? Marty? Topher?

  He cursed the bitter irony of having just put his own death notice on paper that night, the last one he would ever write.

  “Finally,” said the gunman. There was a chilly happiness in his voice

  Cooper knew that all he had was a long wild chance to turn and attack. He knew that the odds were short, but he had to—

  Before he could move, from behind him, a pistol erupted. Bone chips and blood flew forward from behind him. Cooper recoiled from the blast and went down with it, losing the ability to stand. From his peripheral view he could see blood, flash and bone stretched across the walls and the staircase.

  Some of the blood and bone had hit Cooper across his face as he was turning, flooding his eyes, taking away his clear vision. And the first shot was still thundering in Cooper’s ear when Cooper saw Lauren’s body down, blood all over the upper part of her body.

  He saw the figure of Misha behind him with the gun raised.

  He felt Lauren’s warm shuddering body under his and all he could think about was Firebird.

  Then there was a second and final shot.

  His final case, he felt in this moment of agony, his ultimate death watch, was now closed.

  Chapter 90

  At the same moment that Cooper’s body fell upon Lauren’s on the tenement staircase, Marty Friedkin sat calmly at his desk in the offices of the New York Eagle. On a small Sony television, he watched the mop-up of election results.

  It was nearly two a.m. in the east.

  Nixon was officially closing in on 302 votes in the electoral college. Humphrey was left with 191. Wallace was well ahead with his five states in the deep south. If the numbers held, and Friedkin had no reason to think they wouldn’t, Nixon had thirty-two electoral college votes more than he needed to keep the election out of the House of Representatives.

  He was now within a few minutes of being elected the 37th President of the United States.

  Friedkin’s mind teemed with reactions. Eventually, half an hour before his deadline, as the electoral results became even clearer, he leaned into his Olympia typewriter and began to write.

  He typed the title of his piece:

  America is Un-American!

  The floodgates of opinion opened. Marty let it rip.

  For all that has gone on this year, it would now appear that America has elected Richard Nixon as the leader of the free world. Nixon! Here is a vile scheming gut-punching dishonest man who six years ago promised we would not have him to kick around anymore. Most likely, many of us will soon wish we didn’t.

  Nixon’s own campaign literature, at a time when the country is torn apart socially and racially, proudly lists him as a member of “impressive in-town clubs, Metropolitan, Links, Recess and fashionable country clubs Blind Brook and Baltusrol.”

  Well, hooray! Tricky Dick has a country club membership! We are so fucking impressed! This is a year when America has seen a bloodied Bobby Kennedy dying on a dirty hotel floor of a hotel kitchen, heard the sobs of adults and children at the funeral of Martin Luther King, have seen a riot of badge-less police officers in Chicago and have witnessed the anguish of families losing tens of thousands of their sons in the rice paddies of Indochina. And now we have the old red-baiter as America’s president, along with the buffoonish corrupt Spiro Agnew, who can best be viewed as Nixon’s grotesque life insurance policy.

  Nixon says he has a plan to end the war in Vietnam but won’t tell us what it is. The fact is, he doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t even have a clue. And with his back-alley borderline-treasonous dealings with the current South Vietnamese government, he may have already extended the war. But the dimwit American public can’t fathom that.

  But more than that, more than Richard Nixon’s election, we have also seen something even more ominous. I’m talking about the shadow of the swastika that has emerged on this once noble country. I am talking about George Wallace and I am deeply pessimistic about the future of America.

  It is impossible to ignore what George Wallace may have unleashed. Wallace has legitimized the people who were previously seen as disreputable: the unabashed white racists, the socially embittered, the overtly ignorant, the willfully anti-intellectual, the socially frustrated and the nasty lowbrow stupid thuggish white Protestant punks looking for an easy fight. Nearly ten million of these “good God-fearing folks” voted for Wallace and LeMay. Wallace has given respectability to the most benighted segments of American society. He has vindicated hate and bigotry. Keep in mind, Wallace did not come out of nowhere. He is an inevitable consequence of the modern racially-tinged American politics, not an aberration of them.

  The United States is a gun-happy lynch mob of a nation. It is a country awash in grievances and racial hatred. America has become a lazy, aging, fairly ignorant democracy. Even in the most turbulent election in modern history, about thirty million eligible voters didn’t bother to cast a ballot, the most basic task of citizenship. Wallace took his thirteen-plus percent of those who did vote, many of whom believe fake-moon-landing-level lies, talking snakes in the Garden of Eden, and has tried to act like the earth moved, as he said on Tuesday. It did, but not in the ways that he meant it.

  Fifty-six percent of the vote went to a snake oil salesman or an overt racist. The plodding but comparatively honorable Hubert Humphrey was left far behind in the filthy dust, no thanks in part to the infantile self-serving holier-than-thou left wing of his party who would rather be ideologically pure than compromise.

  I’m disgusted with my adopted country. Much like the readers of this newspaper, the average American voter is a fucking know-nothing moron and half of them are even dumber than that. It’s only a matter of time before the United States elects an overt fascist and becomes the type of nation that one moves from, not to.

  Where might this ugliness lead? Not now, maybe but in twenty years? Or fifty? How long will it take?

  Mark my angry words! The shadow of the swastika is already across the land. Eventually, people like these ‘good Americans’ will choose a fascist as their leader, and God help us all.

  Friedkin pulled his opinion piece from his typewriter. He re-read it and made a few tiny edits in pencil. He was pleased with what he had written.

  He took the elevator to the sixth floor. He went to Murphy’s office. In the chaos of election evening, the sixth floor was busy, but Murphy’s office was empty.

  Friedkin forged Murphy’s signature initials to the lower right corner of his pages and placed the article in the APPROVED box, carefully slipping it under several others so that no one would see it on top, happen to read it, and alert Murphy of the f-bombs and overall content.

  He stalled and smoked a cigarette until Jean Claude, the Haitian kamikaze bike messenger appeared in his leather jacket to take the article directly to the type-setters for the next day’s special first edition.

  Jean Claude gave him a nod. Friedkin nodded back. The messenger shoved several late articles into his leather pouch and departed.

  There was no stopping the piece now. The typesetters never thought much about what they were setting in print. The rant would appear in print the next day, anger and profanity and included.

  “There,” Friedkin said aloud to
himself. “That ought to get me fired.”

  He went down to the lobby where a new lady friend was waiting for him. She was an aspiring musician named Elizabeth who couldn’t decide whether to go rock or classical. She carried a violin case, wore boots, a red and blue mini-kilt and a navy p-coat. There was a vague scent of promiscuity and marijuana about her.

  “Nixon’s been elected,” Friedkin said.

  “I know.”

  “Can you believe it? What a country.”

  “At least it wasn’t Wallace.”

  “Don’t get me started,” Friedkin said.

  “Anything else important happen today?” Elizabeth asked.

  Friedkin shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

  He took her hand. They went back to his place.

  Chapter 91

  On the south of West 96th Street, four green and white NYPD cruisers were banked against the sidewalk outside the building where the fatal shooting had occurred. Red lights flashed.

  Homicide detectives arrived at a few minutes before two a.m. Yellow tape marked the door that led to the crime scene. Street cops kept the curious at a safe distance.

  On the third-floor landing, where floor and bone fragments marked the wall near the stairs, Police Office John Ironhorse stared downward at the body of a man. Someone had shot him from behind. Once in the back, the second time in the skull. The lower part of his head was gone.

  “Jesus. Dead as a fucking mackerel,” Ironhorse said.

  In an oblique way, Ironhorse admired the precision with which the murder had transpired. A powerful handgun, fired to the back upper portion of the victim’s neck, probably from less than five feet away.

  “You gotta love what goes on in this city,” Ironhorse said.

  Along the side of the hallway there were crimson streaks where blood and bone fragments had blown up against the wall. The dead man had been lifted into the air by the force of the bullet from behind. Then he had fallen over backwards. The blood on the walls had started to run, or drip. A touch of Jackson Pollack on a tenement wall.