by James Ellroy
60
(Washington, D.C., 3/6/61)
He took three shots a night—no more, no less.
He switched from whisky to straight gin. The burn compensated for the scant volume.
Three shots tweaked his hatreds. Four shots and up cut those hatreds all the way loose.
Three shots said, You project danger. Four shots or more said, You’re ugly and you limp.
He always drank facing his hallway mirror. The glass was chipped and cracked—his new apartment was furnished on the cheap.
Littell knocked the shots back, one-two-three. The glow let him spar with himself.
You’re two days shy of forty-eight years old. Helen left you. J. Edgar Hoover fucked you—you fucked him and he fucked you back much more efficaciously.
You risked your life for nothing. Robert F. Kennedy shunned you. You went to hell and back for a form-letter rejection.
You tried to contact Bobby in person. Yes-men showed you out. You sent four notes to Bobby. All four went unanswered.
Kemper tried to get you work at the Justice Department. Bobby nixed it—the alleged Hoover hater kowtowed to Hoover. Hoover put the fix in: No law firm or law school will employ you.
Kemper knows you’ve got the Fund books. His fear defines your bond now.
You went to a Jesuit retreat in Milwaukee. Newspapers lauded your burglary daring: MYSTERY ART THIEF TEARS LAKE GENEVA ESTATE DOWN! You did odd jobs for the monsignor and imposed your own code of silence.
You boiled the booze out. You put on some muscle. You studied cryptography texts. Prayer told you who to hate and who to forgive.
You read a Chicago Trib obit: Court Meade died of a massive heart attack. You toured old haunts. The foster homes you grew up in were still churning out Jesuit robots.
You’re licensed to practice in D.C. Hoover left you an escape hatch—in his own backyard.
The move east was invigorating. Washington law firms seeking applicants were shocked by your Commie pedigree.
Kemper comes through. Egalitarian Kemper was still friendly with old car-thief confreres. Car thieves were prone to Federal indictments and always in need of cheap representation.
Car thieves brought you occasional work—enough to sustain an apartment and three shots a night.
Kemper called to chat. He never mentioned the Fund books. You can’t hate a man so high up on a ledge. You can’t hate a man so immune to hatred himself.
He gave you great gifts. They compensate for his betrayals.
Kemper calls his civil rights work “moving.” It’s that cheap noblesse oblige the Kennedys evince so condescendingly.
You hate the mass seduction that Joe Kennedy financed, Your foster fathers bought you one cheap toy per Christmas. Joe bought his sons the world with cancerous money.
Prayer taught you to hate falsehood. Prayer gave you insight. Prayer was like a choke hold on mendacity.
You see the President’s face and see through it. You see Jimmy Hoffa skate on Sun Valley charges—a newsman cites insufficient evidence.
You hold numbers to reverse that injustice. You hold numbers to indict the Kennedy seduction.
You can break the remaining Fund code. You can expose the Robber Baron and his son the Priapic Boy Führer.
Littell got out his cryptography books. Three shots a night taught him this:
You’re down, but you’re capable of anything.
61
(Washington, D.C., 3/14/61)
Bobby held the floor. Fourteen lawyers pulled chairs up and balanced notebooks and ashtrays on their knees.
The briefing room was drafty. Kemper leaned against the back wall with his topcoat slung over his shoulders.
The AG brayed—there was no need to get close. He had free time—a storm delayed his flight to Alabama.
Bobby said, “You know why I called you in, and you know what your basic job is. I’ve been tied up in red tape since the Inauguration, so I haven’t been able to get to the applicable case files, and I’ve decided to let you do that on your own. You’re the Organized Crime Unit, and you know what your mandate is. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to dawdle any longer.”
The men got out pens and pencils. Bobby straddled a chair in front of them.
“We’ve got lawyers and investigators of our own, and any attorney worth his salt is also a catch-as-catch-can investigator. We’ve got FBI agents we can utilize as needed, if I can convince Mr. Hoover to shift his priorities a bit. He’s still convinced that domestic Communists are more dangerous than organized crime, and I think that making the FBI more cooperative is going to be a major obstacle to overcome.”
The men laughed. An ex-McClellan cop said, “We shall overcome.”
Bobby loosened his tie. “We shall. And roving counsel Kemper Boyd, who’s spying from the peanut gallery, will overcome racial exclusion practices in the South. I won’t ask Mr. Boyd to join us, because skulking at the back of the room is very much his modus operandi.”
Kemper waved. “I’m a spy.”
Bobby waved back. “The President has always contended that.”
Kemper laughed. Bobby half-ass liked him now—breaking off with Laura clinched it. Claire and Laura stayed close—he got regular updates from New York.
Bobby said, “Enough bullshit. The McClellan Committee hearings have provided us with a hit list, and at the top we’ve got Jimmy Hoffa, Sam Giancana, Johnny Rosselli and Carlos Marcello. I want the IRS files on these men pulled, and I want the intelligence files of the Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland and Tampa PDs combed for mention of them. I also want probable-cause briefs written, so that we can subpoena their financial books and personal records.”
A man said, “What about Hoffa specifically? He got hung-juried on Sun Valley, but there’s got to be other approaches we can use.”
Bobby rolled up his sleeves. “A hung jury first time out means an acquittal next time. I’ve given up hope of tracing the Spooky Three Million, and I’m starting to think that the so-called ‘Real’ Pension Fund books are nothing but a pipe dream. I think we need to impanel grand juries and deluge them with Hoffa evidence. And while we’re at it, I want to pass a Federal law requiring all municipal PDs to obtain Justice Department writs to implement their wiretaps, so that we can have access to every bit of wiretap intelligence seized nationwide.”
The men cheered. An old McClellanite threw some mock punches.
Bobby stood up. “I found an old deportation order on Carlos Marcello. He was born in Tunis, North Africa, of Italian parents, but he’s got a phony Guatemalan birth certificate. I want to deport him to Guatemala, and I want to do it damn soon.”
Kemper broke a little lightweight sweat—
62
(Rural Mexico, 3/22/61)
Poppy fields blitzed the horizon. Stalk bulbs oozing dope covered a valley half the size of Rhode Island.
Prison inmates did the plucking. Mexican cops cracked the whip and did all the conversion work.
Heshie Ryskind led the tour. Pete and Chuck Rogers tagged along and let him play MC.
“This farm has supplied me and Santo for years. They convert ‘Q’ into morphine for the Agency, too, ’cause the Agency’s always backing some right-wing insurgents that get shot at and wounded a lot, and they always need the morph as medication. Most of the zombies they got working here stay past the end of their sentence ’cause all they want to do is suck a pipe and nosh a few tortillas on the side. I wish I had such simple needs. I wish I didn’t have to keep nine fucking doctors on retainer ’cause I’m such a fucking hypochondriac, and I wish I didn’t have the chutzpah—which is the same as ‘audacity’ to you goyim—to try to break the world’s record for getting blow jobs, ’cause I think I’ve reached the point where all that suction is doing my prostate more harm than good. And I’m not the blow-job magnet I used to be. I’ve got to travel with a good cunt man now to see any action at all. Lately, I’ve had Dick Contino bird-dogging for me. I catch all his lounge gigs, and Dick shoots
me all the surplus suction I can handle.”
The sun slammed down. They rode out in rickshaws, with junkie inmates at the helm.
Pete said, “We need ten pounds precut for the Cadre. I won’t be able to get back here until after the invasion.”
Chuck laughed. “If and when your boy Jack approves it.”
Pete flicked a bulb—white shit oozed out. “And I want a substantial morphine supply for the medics at Blessington. Let’s just figure this is our last visit for a while.”
Heshie leaned against his rickshaw. The pilot wore a loincloth and a Dodger baseball cap.
“All this can be arranged. It’s a lot simpler than arranging blow jobs for sixty at some farkakte Teamster convention.”
Chuck dabbed bulb goo on a shaving cut. “My jaw’s going a little numb. It’s a nice effect, but I wouldn’t ruin my life for it.”
Pete laughed. Heshie said, “I’m tired. I’ll go back and get your stuff loaded up, then I’m taking a nap.”
Chuck hopped in his rickshaw. The pilot looked like fucking Quasimodo.
Pete stood on his tiptoes. The view spread waaay out.
Maybe a thousand stalk rows. Maybe twenty slaves per row. Low worker overhead: cot space, rice and beans came cheap.
Chuck and Heshie took off—dig that crazy rickshaw drag race.
Boyd said Mr. Hoover had a maxim: Anti-Communism breeds strange bedfellows.
They flew from Mexico to Guatemala. The Piper Deuce cruised sluggish—Chucky overstuffed the cargo hold.
With rifles, hate pamphlets, heroin, morphine, tortillas, tequila, Army surplus jump boots, Martin Luther Coon voodoo dolls, back issues of Hush-Hush, and five hundred mimeographed copies of a Guy Banister-circulated report culled from the L.A. FBI office, stating that even though Mr. Hoover knew full well that President John F. Kennedy was not playing bury-the-brisket with Marilyn Monroe, he kept her under intensive surveillance anyway, and duly noted that during the last six weeks Miss Monroe fucked Louis Prima, two off-duty Marines, Spade Cooley, Franchot Tone, Yves Montand, Stan Kenton, David Seville of David Seville and the Chipmunks, four pizza delivery boys, bantamweight battler Fighting Harada and a disc jockey at an all-spook R&B station.
Chuck called it “essential ordnance.”
Pete tried to doze. Air sickness kept him awake. The training camp popped out of a cloud bank, right on schedule.
It loomed biggg. From the air it looked like ten Blessingtons.
Chuck cut his flaps and eased down. Pete puked out his window just shy of the runway.
They taxied in. Pete gargled tequila for a breath rinse. Cuban trainees hit the hold and off-loaded the rifles.
A case officer trotted up with supply forms. Pete got out and itemized them: guns, R&R booze, Hush-Hush anti-Beard propaganda.
The guy said, “You can eat now, or wait for Mr. Boyd and Mr. Stanton.”
“Let me walk around a little. I’ve never seen the place.”
Chuck pissed on the runway. Pete said, “Any word on a go date?”
The guy shook his head. “Kennedy’s waffling. Mr. Bissell’s starting to think we’ll be lucky to go before summer.”
“Jack will come through. He’ll see that it’s too sweet a deal to pass up.”
Pete meandered. The camp was Disneyland for killers.
Six hundred Cubans. Fifty white men running herd. Twelve barracks, a drill field, a rifle range, a pistol range, a landing strip, a mess hall, an infiltration course and a chemical-warfare simulation tunnel.
Three launch inlets gouged out of the Gulf a mile south. Four dozen amphibious crawlers rigged with .50-caliber machine guns.
An ammo dump. A field hospital. A Catholic chapel with a bilingual chaplain.
Pete meandered. Old Blessington grads waved hello. Case officers showed him some good shit.
Dig Néstor Chasco—staging mock-assassination maneuvers.
Dig that anti-Red indoctrination workshop.
Dig the verbal abuse drills—calculated to increase troop subservience.
Dig the corpsman’s amphetamine stash—pre-packaged pre-invasion courage.
Dig the action in that barbed-wire enclosure—peons flying on a drug called LSD.
Some of them screamed. Some wept. Some grinned like LSD was a blast. A case officer said John Stanton hatched the idea—let’s flood Cuba with this shit before we invade.
Langley co-signed the brainstorm. Langley embellished it: Let’s induce mass hallucinations and stage the Second Coming of Christ!!!!!
Langley found some suicidal actors. Langley dolled them up to look like J.C. Langley had them set to pre-invade Cuba, concurrent with the dope saturation.
Pete howled. The case officer said, “It’s not funny.” A drug-zorched peon whipped out his wang and jacked off.
Pete meandered. Everything sparkled and gleamed.
Dig the bayonet drills. Dig the spit-shined jeeps. Dig that rummy-looking priest dispensing outdoor Holy Communion.
Loudspeakers announced chow call. It was 5:00 and nowhere near dark—military types dined early.
Pete walked over to the lounge hut. A pool table and wet bar ate up two-thirds of the floor space.
Boyd and Stanton walked in. A large fucker blocked the doorway—resplendent in French paratrooper khakis.
Kemper said, “Entrez, Laurent.”
He was jug-eared and plain huge. He had that frog imperialist swagger down pat.
Pete bowed. “Salut, capitaine.”
Boyd smiled. “Laurent Guéry, Pete Bondurant.”
Froggy clicked his heels. “Monsieur Bondurant. C’est un grand plaisir de faire votre connaissance. On dit que vous êtes un grand patriote.”
Pete tossed out some Québecois. “Tout le plaisir est à moi, capitaine. Mais je suis beaucoup plus profiteur que patriote.”
Froggy laughed. Stanton said, “Translate for me, Kemper. I’m starting to feel like a rube.”
“You’re not missing much.”
“You mean it’s just Pete trying to be civilized with the only other six-foot-six Frenchman on earth?”
Froggy shrugged—Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?
Pete winked. “Vous êtes quoi done, capitaine? Etes-vous un ‘right-wing crackpot’? Etes-vous un ‘mercenary on the Cuban gravy train’?”
Froggy shrugged—Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?
Boyd steered Pete out to the porch. Spics double-timed through a chow line across from the drill field.
“Be nice, Pete. He’s Agency.”
“In what fucking capacity?”
“He shoots people.”
“Then tell him to clip Fidel and learn English. Tell him to do something impressive, or he’s just another frog geek to me.”
Boyd laughed. “He killed a man named Lumumba in the Congo last month.”
“So what?”
“He’s killed quite a few uppity Algerians.”
Pete lit a cigarette. “So tell Jack to send him down to Havana. And send Néstor down with him. And tell Jack that he owes me one for the Nixon-Hughes thing, and as far as I’m concerned, history’s not moving fast enough. Tell him to give us a go date, or I’ll boat on down to Cuba and whack Fidel myself.”
Boyd said, “Be patient. Jack’s still getting his sea legs, and invading a Communist-held country is a big commitment. Dulles and Bissell are keeping after him, and I’m convinced he’ll say yes before too long.”
Pete kicked a tin can off the porch. Boyd pulled his piece and unloaded it. The can danced all the way across the drill field.
The chow-line crew applauded. Big-bore reverb had a few guys clutching their ears.
Pete kicked at the shell casings. “You talk to Jack. Tell him the invasion’s good for business.”
Boyd twirled his gun on one finger. “I can’t openly proselytize for the invasion without blowing my Agency cover, and I’m damn lucky to have FBI cover to be in Florida in the first place.”
“That civil rights gig must be sweet. You just go through the motions and fly to Miam
i when the niggers start getting on your nerves.”
“It’s not like that.”
“No?”
“No. I like the Negro people I work with just as much as you like our Cubans, and offhand I’d say that their grievances are considerably more justified.”
Pete tossed his cigarette. “Say what you like. And I’ll say this again. You cut people too much slack.”
“You mean I don’t let people get to me.”
“That’s not what I mean. What I mean is you accept too much weak shit in people, and for my money it’s some condescending rich-kid quality you picked up from the Kennedys.”
Boyd popped in a iresh clip and slid a round in the chamber. “I’ll grant Jack that quality, but not Bobby. Bobby’s a true judger and hater.”
“He hates some pretty tight friends of ours.”
“He does. And he’s starting to hate Carlos Marcello more than I’d like him to”
“Did you tell Carlos that?”
“Not yet. But if things escalate a bit more, I might ask you to help him out of a scrape.”
Pete cracked a few knuckles. “And I’ll say yes, no questions asked. Now, you say yes to something.”
Boyd aimed at a mound of dirt twenty yards off. “No, you cannot kill Ward Littell.”
“Why?”
“He’s got the books fail-safed.”
“So I torture him for the pertinent information, then kill him.”
“It won’t work.”
“Why?”
Boyd shot a rattlesnake headless.
“I said ‘Why?,’ Kemper.”
“Because he’d die just to prove he could do it.”
63
(Washington, D.C., 3/26/61)
His cards read:
Ward J. Littell
Counselor-At-Law
Federal Bar Licensed
OL6-4809
No address—he didn’t want clients to know that he worked out of his apartment. No glossy stock or embossed letters—he couldn’t really afford them.
Littell cruised the third-floor hallway. Indicted felons took the cards and looked at him like he was crazy.
Shyster. Ambulance chaser. Middle-aged lawyer on the skids.
