Shoot It Again, Sam

by Michael Avallone

  This then is the man who kept company with a coffin on a train bearing a dead movie star to Los Angeles via San Francisco. A man the opposition had to know about or none of it made any sense at all.

  So what happens?

  The dead come back and in that split second of terror and animal fear, Noon goes into shock. Even as he is slugged down from behind. By Goolsby? A possibility. Jolly little men can be dirty old men, too.

  Noon is whisked off into the night.

  He wakes up in what seems a hospital or rest home room. A doctor named Hilton is a dead ringer for Peter Lorre. They talk about movies. Cooper, Dietrich, Menjou and Morocco. The doctor named Hilton calls Noon, Spade. He doesn't argue too much. Temporary amnesia? Drugs? Hypnosis? It doesn't matter. It works. Aided and abetted by time, enforced idleness and gimmicky voices in dark rooms that sound like Cooper, Gable, Cagney, Grant and Edward G. Robinson. And lots more drugs, and-or hypnosis and the power of autosuggestion.

  Dr. Hilton is no fool. He asks Noon-Spade if he knows anyone named Mike Monks, a police captain from New York who has been making inquiries. Noon says no and Hilton knows he is not playacting. Knows that Noon now really thinks he is Sam Spade, world-famous fictitious private eye. But a Spade reinforced and shored up by the movie image of Bogart and all of Noon's own mental daydreams of his formative years when everybody wanted to be a hero who could slug, use a gun and kiss beautiful women like Mary Astor. (Monks hasn't been asking questions, of course. He, like everybody else who might care, doesn't know where Our Hero has gone.) And Dr. Hilton, through clever make-up and acting ability, is easily able to suggest Peter Lorre. Ditto the Karloff and Harlow lookalikes standing around in hallways. All of this is ammunition to further brainwash and distort an already disoriented mind. Thank you, 1984 and Manchurian Candidate.

  Step Number Two is a lulu.

  Park Noon at the Arva Motel in Washington, D.C. Send him his Brigid O'Shaughnessy. This lady spy will serve two purposes. One, she will be able to spot if the Spade personality is wearing off—which it certainly isn't. Two, she can get the sucker's clothes off and doctor the Oxford shoe with the necessary needles which will become a murder weapon. And for herself, whoever she was, she could laugh her head off if she liked or just supply the body for a mental robot who hadn't forgotten how to satisfy a woman, in spite of his altered identity. Fun and games, no matter how you looked at it.

  I couldn't have been walking around with those Oxfords like that for too long. It would have been too risky. As for the outlandish Panama and the plum-colored worsted suit, they had their ulterior purpose, too. They made me easy to pick out in a crowd. Easy for a one-eared Chinaman to spot me. As well as two Secret Service men. No secret there. I had disappeared, dropped into a hole in the earth, while working a special job for the Man. He was a cinch to have alerted all departments to find me, whether he gave away all my cover or not. The opposition had to know that; they had to be counting on it. Which is where Charles Too comes in. His tragic smile made sense. He knew he was leading me right to the S men. That was the whole idea behind meeting in such an open place as the memorial. Maybe why he had been picked, too. How could the S men miss a gigantic, thin Oriental with one ear missing? Charles Too had known that. He had also known he was not to be taken alive, either. Self-immolation, the old fanatical stunt—it's been done for a lot less reason. Nobody was going to brainwash him or torture information out of him. It couldn't be risked, obviously, not when the prize was the death of the number one man in America. So Too took his medicine. There was no chance of my getting mine at that point. The fake Brigid had made certain I had left the Arva without a gun so I couldn't have started shooting at anybody and spoiled it all by getting myself killed. Accidentally or on purpose.

  Neat, the President had said.

  Neat? It was perfect.

  They knew I would be brought to him.

  They gambled we would have some time alone.

  They had equipped me to kill and somehow they had implanted in my brain, reflexes and willpower the choice and determination to slaughter him the first chance I got I had taken that chance.

  That roughly was all there was to it. But the Red Chinese, if the Chief was right, had spent like three weeks readying me for the job. I'd been hijacked off a train, spirited away to the fake Richmond rest home and done up brown by Brainwash, Incorporated. And it had all worked. The President was alive only because he wasn't a First of May.

  There was a lot yet I still didn't know. Even the two weeks when the situation had been reversed and it was our boys working on me instead of their boys— effecting the miraculous cure and the long road back —was a long, long burst of impressions and memories. But, at least, I now knew what had happened to me. I had a faint idea, anyway.

  What I didn't know was where the train, the coffin, Dan Davis and the President fit in. That might make all the difference in the world. My being on the spot had provided a shot at the President. Well and good. But that had fizzled. What was left?

  All of this had leap-frogged and jumped through my mind while the President composed his own thoughts. Both of us sitting around that little deal table in a bare room with a one-way mirror, might have been posing for an oil painting. Something in still life.

  The room was silent. Not so much as a whisper, even though it was an air-conditioned cubicle. I leaned back in my chair and stared across the table at him. My man in Washington. Your man, too.

  "Well," I said.

  "Well? "he echoed.

  "I've thought it all over. What there is to think over. And now I want to know. I have to know. What was the connection between the White House and Dan Davis? Or if it works out as a really private matter—why did you want me to ride shotgun with a coffin that didn't contain the dead body of a movie star? You see, I don't believe in ghosts, reincarnation or seance readings. Everything that's ever happened in this cockeyed universe does have some kind of explanation sooner or later. Give."

  He smiled bleakly across the table at me. I could see he had made up his mind about something.

  "You're a rare man, Ed. I think I've told you that many times."

  "Not rare enough the way it worked out. Please, Chief. You have to tell me if you want my thinking to stay on the straight and narrow. I'm walking a hairline and I want to get off."

  He nodded and steepled his hands again. The blue eyes studied me very soberly. As if he were trying to find any last traces of lunacy in my face or manner. He didn't and a determined frown creased his handsome forehead. He always looked good on TV but it never really did him justice. He had a fine head. It belonged on statues in museums and places like that. The democrats had always regretted his great face.

  "All right, Ed. I'll shoot straight with you. You're entitled to all of the truth, such as it is. I am guilty. Perhaps it's an unpardonable guilt and a method I shouldn't have taken but I took it all the same." He took a deep breath, exhaled and let me have it right between the eyes. "I put your head on the line. You were sent as a decoy to Grand Central. To ride with an empty coffin to Frisco and there, no matter what happened in between, we would have had our answer one way or the other. It was very necessary, Ed. As you will presently see—"

  "Decoy? Empty coffin? But—"

  I sounded very dangerously like a dumb parrot, again.

  The President shook his head, sadly.

  "Let me finish first. Then I'll take your questions and your recriminations. But I'll also want your help and any ideas you may have or come up with. It's big, Ed, very big. And what it all boils down to, when the scales are balanced, is that Dan Davis was our number one man in California. And had been for the last eight years."

  "Number one man—" I couldn't follow him and blurted that out in spite of what he had said about me opening my mouth.

  "Agent, Ed. On special service with me and all the government pipelines. Dan Davis was the finest public servant of them all. He gave it everything he had in more ways than one."

  I put my li
ps together and shut up.

  I listened to him.

  I had to.

  There was no other way out of the wonderland maze.

  Like Alice, I was losing my bearings all over again.

  The President had just shown me the White Rabbit skipping across the lawn on his way to the Mad Hatter's tea party, looking at his watch so the Duchess wouldn't bawl him out for being late again.

  Stanley Kramer was right.

  It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

  ". . . and with all of Honest Abe's ideals. A rare man these days, Susan. . . ."

  Claude Rains as Senator Paine in

  Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. (1939)

  STAR

  □ "Dan Davis was an American," the President said in the utter stillness of the little room. "The best kind. On the movie screens of the world, he had represented all that was fine and wonderful in this country. Rugged, he-men heroes of a pioneer type the doves in this land of ours now seem to lament. It doesn't matter. Davis played cowboys, prizefighters, tough cops, men-with-integrity, in his Hollywood roles. The world saw him that way and that's exactly the way he was. He'd fought his way up from being an orphan in the mid-West, taught himself to be an actor from the very beginning and he made it the hard way. And all down the line, though his private life was a very unhappy one, he was what you'd call a solid Bill-of-Rights American. Yes, he won an Oscar, he owned about a thousand acres both in Hollywood and out in South Dakota where he came from but he always remembered he came from the other side of the tracks. Or no side of the tracks, you could say. Orphans must have a special set of psychological reflexes. I can't really say, never having had the misfortune to be one. But Davis paid a price for his fame and his fortune. He never seemed to find the right woman, the right family life. Which is all I will say about his many marriages and four children. He was around Hollywood for a span of four decades and survived through it all. The early talkies, the war, the television revolution, the new thinking, new scripts, new sense of values everybody had about what entertainment is and what it isn't. But it doesn't matter. What I'm trying to tell you is that when we got to him he was fifty two years old and though he had never lost his interest in making pictures and making them make his personal statement, there were really no more worlds for him to conquer. He was a major celebrity all over the world, people in Moscow still remembered him as "the American actor"—more so than anyone else. John Wayne is the only name now that would approximate the particular type of world star that Dan Davis was when he died. I might add, Wayne has his detractors in this country for almost the same reasons. What the opposition likes to call America Firsters, far right radicals. But that doesn't matter—now. What matters is that Dan Davis laid it on the line when we asked him to."

  "Eight years you said," I interrupted. "That would have been around the year when his stand-in was killed during the filming of that picture about Vietnam. Hell's Heroes?"

  The Man nodded very slowly.

  "Exactly. I have always personally thought it was the one decisive factor that made Dan Davis offer his services to us. The stand-in, you may also recall, was Willis Jensen and he had been with Davis in that capacity from his earliest days at the Fox Studios. Davis seemed to take the loss harder than any man I have ever seen. Jensen was killed, doubling in for Davis in a scene where the action called for the Davis character to drive a jeep into a wall. The wall collapsed more than was bargained for and Jensen's skull was crushed by a flying brick. It isn't all papier-mache out there in Hollywood. Consequently, Davis went on a real rough tear. A bender that lasted as long as two months. When he came out of that, it was only to learn that his oldest child, Pamela, the issue of his first marriage to Rita Carlino the dancer, had a brain tumor. Surgery was successful and the young lady is now a happily married mother expecting a baby but eight years ago, it just about killed Dan Davis. In any case, in the fall of that year, he contacted our Washington offices and asked for some kind of work that was important. Very important. He was too old to go to Vietnam and shoulder a rifle but he wanted to find some meaning in life—those are his exact words on the dossier, incidentally, which we have on him— some meaning beyond just making motion pictures, though he had never lost sight of their inherent worth as a wonderful propaganda if you will for the better things in life, for a better world and yes, a better America."

  I didn't say anything as the Man chose his next words very very carefully. But my mind was full of the face of Dan Davis, remembering now how he had once beat up a truckdriver in downtown L.A. because the guy had hollered Nigger! at a black woman crossing the intersection against the light. Davis had been driving by in his new Thunderbird and it had cost the studio plenty bailing him out of that one even though the press and the public made a real hero out of a reel hero. Dan Davis had been in his fifties at the time and the truckdriver was an ex-Marine in his thirties, weighing about forty pounds more but it hadn't meant a damn to Davis. He'd sailed right in because that was the kind of man he was.

  I also remember how much I had liked Dan Davis for doing what he did when I read about it in the papers at the time.

  ". . . of course, in the beginning, when he asked for a job, the government personnel involved thought of USO tours, go-see-the-troops, the Bob Hope sort of good will thing. And why not? Most of the fathers and mothers of those boys in Southeast Asia were Dan Davis fans and a good many of the boys themselves were too. I don't think there was a movie fan in the world who wouldn't remember the last scene in that boxing film where Davis realizes he's killed his opponent and breaks down and cries. It's been run on TV for a decade."

  "Come Out And Fight," I said.

  "For which he won an Academy Award. Pure justice, too. But, then, one of the brighter young men in Government saw an opportunity. Which is when he sent Davis around to the inner circle people. The CIA, FBI, Diplomatic Corps crowd. You have to remember, this was just a very short time after the Kennedy Assassination and everybody was in a pretty foul and vindictive mood. As it turned out, someone came up with the brilliant thought that a Dan Davis, with the unique entree that only a world-famous man could have for getting into the damnedest places and most intimate groups—VIP meetings, palaces, top level parties, would be absolutely indispensable as a secret agent working for this government. Maybe you'll call it dirty pool, Ed. And perhaps unfair but I'll remind you that those were terrible times as these are now. In any case, that was the birth of Dan Davis' greatest and most secret part. Special Agent, U.S.A. As it turned out, he might have been born to play the role. He went after it with all the enthusiasm he was famous for and it seemed to give him a new lease on life. And it was a secret he kept right up until the very end. Nobody ever knew, as far as we know—except the opposition it now seems to be. But for eight years, Dan Davis played a dual role. Top star, top agent—to the benefit of his public as well as his government."

  I mentioned something about Boris Morros, the famed Paramount Pictures musical genius of a score of films who had led a double life as a double agent for the FBI. When the story had finally leaked out, the damage had been done. Morros had been successful for years.

  "Exactly, Ed. Davis performed the same function for us. Able to weed out the Communists working at major studios. Able to give us the means of keeping California's elite under observation. He was able to go everywhere, be everywhere—and no one could have suspected him for a second. We hauled many a Red into the net thanks to his efforts. I can't detail all his successes for you, there were failures for us too, but it all comes down to this last operation. Up to his untimely death in New York. What Davis was working on for us then would have been the culmination of all his years of service. You can never know what a blow it was to us when that fatal stroke hit him in New York. He was there as you may know shooting the first scenes of The Night Man. Walker's Pulitzer Prize novel. But he had the stroke, was hospitalized and for those agonizing two weeks before his death, we were really up a tree. Our hands were tied. He was in an oxygen t
ent, couldn't talk to tell us what he knew and there was nothing we could do but wait for him to come out of it. Oh, Security kept the hospital under surveillance just to make sure everything was kosher but—nothing out of the way occurred—and Dan Davis died. With whole armies of people, the press, the TV and Hollywood world, as well as John Q. Public anxious to see him come out of it. But he died—and he took with him to the grave the information he had been collecting for us. Over a very long period of time."

  He was going too fast for me now and I wanted to slow him down so I did. I coughed. He paused, eyebrows arching.

  "What information?"

  "I can't tell you that just yet."

  "Why not?"

  "Because even I'm not sure just exactly what it is."

  "Come again?"

  He sighed. "You heard me correctly. All we did know was that he had alerted us. Told us he was gathering evidence of a kind incredible enough to upset the balance of power in this country. Beyond that he couldn't say more and before we could get back to him again, he had the stroke."

  I cursed. An unprintable oath.

  "Easy, Ed," the Man said.

  "Easy? What kind of nonsense are you handing me now? How could you risk everything on such slight material as that? Davis merely telling you he was onto something? No, it isn't enough. I'm sure you know more but I see you're not quite convinced yet as to me having all my marbles. Okay. If that's the way you want to play—" I started to get up, sick to hell of all of it, tired of having my mind toyed with like a bean bag. A very battered bean bag.

  "Sit down," the President said quietly.

  I stared down at him.

  "You pulling rank on me?"

  "I am."

  "Then I'll sit down. But you have to tell me more. My sanity depends on it."