The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “Clever. No.” I hesitated. “I had a notion—”

  “Tell me.”

  “Later.”

  “Get back to Courtny. How does it connect? The cocaine?”

  “I think so. That’s just a wild guess, but he’s an old pal of Jake Hallihan over at the West Side, and Finelli thinks it’s not too crazy to figure that Hallihan made the switch with the coke. You know, we live in a peculiar society. The people who run this country have a notion that you can stop something people want by making it illegal. That’s what they did with the Volstead Act, and it was Prohibition that turned petty larceny and bank heisting into organized crime. If you’re going to run whiskey, that requires organization. If you’re going to brew beer and distribute it, that also requires organization. The feds try to cover themselves by saying that it’s the Mafia and that the mob came here from Italy. Baloney. We created the mob, right here, with that crazy Prohibition. There never was anything like it before Prohibition. Then when Prohibition was repealed, the mob was organized and they turned to prostitution and heroin. The dope required international connections, so the mob became a little more organized. But heroin is limited. You can make junkies out of thousands of poor kids who don’t know any better, but they can only feed a habit by stealing, and that makes an uncertain and limited market. The mob needed something else, a drug that could base itself on the middle class and the upper class, a drug that didn’t frighten them and a drug that didn’t leave hen tracks all over the doper’s arm.”

  “Cocaine,” Fran said.

  “Absolutely. The caviar on the mob’s table. A drug whose horrors revealed themselves slowly, an in-drug, fashionable, smart, sniffed at parties by the best people, a real fancy upper-class drug, the dope dealer’s dream. And it’s big. Fran, it is the biggest illegal that ever hit this earth, billions and billions of dollars.”

  “That makes sense. Hallihan switched the coke, and you think Courtny was in it with him?”

  “Why not? Two of the most important precincts in the city, if not in the country. I think we have the best and most honest police force in the world, but cops are human and they can be bought. And if you’re buying a cop, why not a precinct captain? Buy the best.”

  She nodded. “I’m even more scared now.”

  “But it has to be connected. Can you connect it after today? Did you find it?”

  “I think so.” She stared at me thoughtfully. “You know, Harry, after what happened today, I don’t think they’re going to try to kill us anymore.”

  “Baby, I wish I felt that way. Why not?”

  “Because too many people know. Toomey and the other two, and their wives and certain other relatives too, and cop pals of Toomey and Keene and Bolansky—”

  “They promised not to talk.”

  “Harry.”

  “Fran, I’m not arguing. I am sick to death of being a target. I hope you’re right. But if they don’t kill me, what then?”

  She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know, but they’ll find a way to crucify you. We’re making too many waves.”

  I signed the check and we went up to our rooms. There was fresh ice in the tiny sitting room, and Fran poured two glasses of Lillet, and I fell into a chair and sipped my drink while Fran assembled her notes in the table.

  “I picked 1974 as a beginning point. I felt that farther back than that, I couldn’t handle. Also, 1974 was the year Eric Bellamy was killed. First, manner of death: Speeding car, hit-and-run. It rings a bell, doesn’t it. Now to connect: Eric Bellamy was CIA. He left, fed up and disgusted, and wrote a book. Did I mention that he lived in Cleveland? The book was titled: Kill Me, I Love It. Now listen, no card on file for the book in the library, no copy. But I found a review, small one, in The New York Review of Books. Bellamy’s thesis was that the money we were pouring into Santa Marina, ostensibly to help the crazy generals down there fight a ‘Marxist rebellion’ and to feed the hungry, actually went in two directions. One to buttress and develop their cocaine industry, and two to enrich the family that practically owned Santa Marina. Bellamy claimed he had proof that this family collected at least thirty million a year out of the funds Congress voted Santa Marina. The main residence of the family was here in the United States, and their home country of Santa Marina was used as a source of wealth, since in addition to the money I mentioned, they did a thriving business amounting to millions a year, selling the military supplies we shipped down there to the Middle East, the PLO and Iraq being their main customers. On the basis of this capitalization, the family had become the most powerful privately owned business entity in this country and had also imported the death-squad method of dealing with their enemies.”

  “Well, the name?”

  “Ah. Sit back, Harry. Mrs. Murphy’s daughter is no fool, and I decided, when the name did not appear in the review, that the editor had decided that the book was absolutely actionable, and that his paper was not rich enough to print the name and stand the libel suit.”

  “So you called The New York Review?”

  “Right from the library, Harry. Any chance they still had the book? No way. Did they have the original copy of the review? No way. Would anyone there remember? Ten years—no way.”

  “No other reviews?”

  “They must have stopped every one—except this. Overlooked it, I suppose.”

  “And you asked a librarian why no book?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “She suggested that I call the Library of Congress, that they must have it. So I got a purse full of quarters and I called the Library of Congress. No book.”

  “I kind of admire that. That is control.”

  “Footnote. About a week after he was killed, Bellamy’s house burned down, wife and daughter dead in the burning house. Firemen thought it might have been torched but they weren’t sure. But—no man is an island unto himself.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “In 1976, Stanley Curtis charged, in a speech he made at Berkeley, that three members of Congress were in the pay of Alfred Porfetto. He didn’t repeat the charge and nothing was made of it—which is curiouser and curiouser, and even curiouser when a year later Stanley Curtis came up with the racing yacht, John Paul Jones, in which he began to train a crew for the America’s Cup trials. He was very mysterious about his backers, except to say they were old-money Newport. He eschewed publicity about the million-dollar yacht, yet it was known that it had been built by Listerman-Reed. Of course, that didn’t connect until you told me about your lunch at the Harvard Club. Now it connects.”

  “Good girl.”

  “Don’t thank me. I spent the day in a tunnel of death. The world will never be the same to me after this. He had a secretary, name of Thelma Goode, thirty or so, good-looking, maybe they had something going between them. She drove her car into a tree up in Connecticut. What were they doing, Harry, teaching her a lesson?”

  I said nothing. She blinked, shook her head, and said, “Let’s go on. We have a United States senator, Peter Lomast by name, and after he was elected, it came out that Porfetto had put up most of the money for his campaign. Laws broken, scandal, some unsavory hints about Porfetto. All of it blown away, and ever since, Mr. Lomast has been the lead Republican hound dog denouncing the Santa Marina rebels.

  “A story in the Times referred to an article in The Nation. They had some young fellow with more guts than caution who went down to Santa Marina to cover the recent election. He found out that if you don’t vote, you are listed and become a prime candidate for the death squads. During election time, the death squads were run by a degraded creature, name of Primo Porfetto. He asked whether Primo was related to Porfetto. Denied it.”

  “Did you read the Nation article?”

  “I did. Porfetto here denied it as well.”

  “What happened to the kid on The Nation?”

  “Nothing. But then, he was publicly connected, as a reporter, and well squelched. He became a correspon
dent in France, sends an occasional story to The Nation, and is paid almost nothing. But he seems to get along. At least, that’s what they tell me there. Then I looked up Porfetto in Current Biography. He was born in the U.S.A. We both took it for granted that he was born in Santa Marina. Well, Santa Marina has a consulate here, a little office, I would imagine, in an office building practically across the street from the library. I telephoned there and asked about the Porfetto family. They said nastily that they didn’t give out such information. Then I switched to Spanish, told them my name was Betty Lou Jamison, that I was one of the president’s very important secretaries, that he had decided to give the Medal of Freedom to Mr. Porfetto and had instructed me to call for background information. I said that if there was any concern on their part, they could call the White House and confirm me.”

  “You’re kidding,” I gasped, beginning to laugh for the first time in a long while. “You’re wonderful. Medal of Freedom. Oh, God, it’s so absolutely appropriate.”

  “That’s what they thought. Call back to the White House? That would be an insult to the great President of a great country. Oh, Harry, stupidity and wickedness seem to go together. I said that the President wondered, since Porfetto was born in the United States, whether he actually maintained any family connections in Santa Marina. He would like to link your brave and steadfast country to the Medal Of Freedom. It doesn’t sound so hokey in Spanish, Harry. But of course, of course, a Porfetto’s heart is always in Santa Marina, wherever his body is. Also, not so schmaltzy in Spanish. Long ago, in the 1920s, when the rather unbelievable Warren G. Harding was President of the United States, Porfetto’s father came to this country at the invitation of President Harding himself, after President Harding had sent a brigade of marines to Santa Marina to fight off the Bolshevik menace. That was before it became a communist menace and then a Marxist menace. President Harding felt that the presence of one of the leading families of Santa Marina in the U.S. would assure the children of America a constant supply of healthful fruit, mostly bananas. So does joy and gladness enter our hearth and home.”

  “Medal of Freedom—and it feels perfectly natural. Why not? Every stinking dictator, capo, mass murderer on earth is on our payroll. Why not drape them all in medals of freedom? You know, what it amounts to is that we’re handing Porfetto enough money to eventually buy this whole country. And how many has he murdered that we know? Curtis, Thelma Goode, Asher Alan, Sanchez, Fitzpatrick, Oshun, Bert Smith, Ellis Wabash, his wife, Listerman, his wife, his daughter, his lawyer—”

  “Listerman?”

  “I told you about them downstairs—and those only begin the list. This, Fran, is a death squad. This is what it means to live in Santa Marina and make one little bleat of protest. We’re a big country, but it’s only begun, and Wabash is their damned legal private army of killers. And nobody says one word. Everything is either an accident, a coincidence, a mob rubout—and did I leave out that congressman hit by a piece of stone from a building here?”

  “Harry, take it easy,” she begged me. “Cool down. Let’s talk about this quietly and sanely.”

  “You know they’ll find us,” I said. “Another day, another two days—”

  “No,” she said, quietly and coldly, “they will not find us and they will not kill us. You men have made a monster out of this world, and always it’s the same. You take the children we have given life, and you murder them, with your wars and your death squads and your dirty little fascist-pig dictators. That has to stop, Harry. I am no candidate for sacrifice and neither are you.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It has to stop.” There was no way to argue with her, but what would stop it was beyond my imagining.

  “Shall we get back to Porfetto?”

  I nodded.

  “The good man’s a benefactor. Throws money everywhere. He has just given a new wing to the museum. It is to be called the Mayan Wing, as the Times put it, to be directed toward better understanding of the people south of the border. There was an art critic who wrote for Leonardo, a small and very esoteric art magazine. I went through half a dozen copies in the library, and this art critic, whose name was Felix Sandly, was outraged that the museum would accept a gift from what he called ‘the butchers Porfetto.’ I suppose he knew something, and I imagine that if we were to investigate it, we would find that Sandly had been to Santa Marina, or something of that sort.”

  “Of course, the poor bastard’s dead,” I said bitterly.

  “Died of a stroke. The magazine in which he defied the powers that be was bought and folded. It was losing money anyway.”

  “Is that it?”

  “More or less. Harry, I had to call Oscar with a question today. Don’t worry,” she said, seeing the look on my face. “I didn’t tell him where I was calling from. But do you know what he told me? Deborah is back in New York, Deborah Alan. Oh, Harry, I want so much to see her.”

  “No. That’s out. Why is she here?”

  “Some mission for the Foreign Office in Israel.”

  “Fran, you can’t even think of seeing her. You can’t. It’s too dangerous. They must have Oscar’s house staked out and watched constantly, and they probably have his phone tapped as well. I’m so tired,” I said. “It’s been a grim, awful day. Let’s go to bed.”

  Suddenly, she began to cry. “I’ve been so busy,” she said through the tears, “showing how clever I’ve been all day, and I never stopped to give some thought to what happened to you.”

  “Nothing happened to me.”

  In bed, she clutched me and whispered, “Please, please be careful, Harry. What would I do if something happened to you?”

  “You know, Fran, danger increases the sex drive.”

  “Harry.”

  “It’s a well-known fact.”

  “It is not. The reverse is true. Danger dries up the sex drive and makes people impotent.”

  “Look at the James Bond movies,” I reminded her.

  “You’re not a bit like James Bond, Harry. You’re shorter. You’re getting bald. You have a nice little belly and you never shoot anyone. But, you know, you do make love better.”

  That was nice. It made up for other things.

  Chapter 13

  IT WAS RAINING in the morning, a bleak, cloudy March day, the kind of a day where the brief promise of spring slips back under the edge of winter. You want security on such a day. You want to be inside where there are lights and warmth and people.

  “Not the worst day in the world to curl up and read.”

  “Harry, I have nothing to read,” Fran said.

  “You could watch television.”

  “Daytime television. Have you ever tried to watch daytime television?”

  “Sure. Last year, when I had the flu. It’s like taking a sleeping pill. You doze off and time passes. The point is, Fran, that I want you to spend the day here. I don’t want you to leave these rooms. It’s only one day, and that’s not too terrible.”

  “It is too terrible. The way I feel, I’ll simply go out of my mind. I don’t mind the rain, Harry. If I could just take a walk—”

  “Please.”

  “All right. I won’t argue. I love you and trust you, Harry. Don’t let anything terrible happen.”

  We had slept late and I was already late for the station house. I called and asked for Toomey. Tracing a call in New York is much harder than the movies make it out to be, and there was no reason for me to imagine that anyone at the station would try to trace a call from me. When Toomey answered, the first sound of his voice told me that if it had been bad before, it was worse now.

  “Lieutenant, where are you? I’ve been trying to find you.”

  “What happened?”

  “I know you and Finelli are old friends—”

  “The hell with that! What happened to him?”

  “He was shot.”

  “All right, tell me.”

  “About an hour ago. I guess he was coming here to talk to you. He parks across the street, and
as he gets out of his car, a car rolls up and puts three slugs into him, heavy stuff, forty-fives, and then takes off and we don’t even have the license plate.”

  “Sure. That’s great, right in front of the goddamn police station. Is he alive?”

  “He’s alive, but he’s hurt bad,” Toomey said. “He’s over here at Lenox Hill. We’re lucky the hospital’s so close.”

  “Toomey, you put a uniform over there outside his room, and do it right now.”

  “Courtny—”

  “To hell with Courtny! Go downstairs and let them arrange it. Courtny doesn’t have to know. I’ll go straight to the hospital. Suppose you meet me there, say fifteen minutes.”

  I put down the phone, and turned to Fran. “Joe Finelli,” I said. “They shot him.”

  “But he’s not dead. I heard you mention the hospital.”

  “He’s badly hurt. The way Toomey talked, it doesn’t seem that he has much chance. Frannie, darling, please stay here.”

  “Okay, I’m here.”

  She hugged me again, and then I left.

  Toomey and the uniformed officer were already at Lenox Hill Hospital when I got there, and there were two of Finelli’s squad and Paula and Finelli’s daughter, a sweet-looking kid of fourteen or so, and Finelli’s mother, a little old woman in black who sat on a bench in the hallway, hunched over and weeping quietly. When Paula saw me, she threw her arms around me, crying and begging me to tell them not to let Finelli die.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I lied. “You don’t kill Joe Finelli with a couple of bullets.”

  She pulled me over to Finelli’s mother and said, “Mama, this is Joey’s friend, Lieutenant Golding. He says Joey ain’t going to die. That’s what he says, Mama.”

  “You love Joey,” the old lady said to me. “He’s a good boy.” Her words came faintly through her sobs. “Nobody has such a good boy.”

  “He takes care of her,” Paula said. “He always takes care of her.”

  A doctor in a green operating gown came through the double doors at the end of the corridor, and he stood there waiting and looking around. I went over to him and told him who I was and that I was Joe Finelli’s friend.