Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  Hot Red Money

  Baynard Kendrick

  Chapter One

  Maurice Morel, Staff Writer for the Globe-Star Syndicate, and better known in thirty-seven newspapers as Maury Morel, cringed as he slid into the tattered threadbare mackintosh. He had bought it Saturday, two days before, from a Bowery second-hand store. Price 50ȼ.

  The dealer, slick as his greasy hair, had assured Maury with several appropriate oaths that the coat had been properly fumigated and deloused. Maury didn’t believe him, but he needed the mackintosh to keep a date. The man he was meeting had advised him to look as much as possible like a bum.

  Back of Maury’s deadpan expression, sleepy gray eyes, and fatuous grin that could light up his intelligent aquiline face at will, was one of the most complex and fastest working minds in the country. A four-track mind, with double lines running each way! Day and night to avoid a wreck he was alert to keep his signals clear.

  He had no illusions about that coat. Still, now that he had to put it on his skin began to crawl. He’d been stuck but good for a half dollar.

  He took a few short steps down the hall connecting the bedroom with the living-room. A bath and inadequate kitchen were the only two other rooms that made up the small apartment he had occupied for more than twenty-five years. The last eighteen with Anne, since their marriage. Not that he couldn’t have afforded something better. He was ace man in the G-S Syndicate with a five figure salary. His stories exposing Soviet activities in the United States had appeared for more than twenty years as front page features in the New York Evening Globe-Star and won Pulitzer Prizes for both Maury and the paper a few years before.

  His long unusual tenure of the cramped unfashionable ground-floor apartment in Morton Court, at the corner of Morton and Hudson Streets on the edge of Greenwich Village, had been a matter of habit and convenience, not of saving money. It was true that the rent was far cheaper there. Since Morton Court was old, it had not kept pace with the steadily rising costs of the city. The saving gave Maury and Anne a chance to travel—Florida in the winter, and occasional trips to California to visit Anne’s parents in San Francisco where she was right now.

  Anne claimed the main reason she couldn’t get Maury moved out of Morton Court was the fact that he could catch a bus almost outside of the front door—a bus that took him directly downtown on Hudson Street and put him off within half a block of the Globe-Star’s building on Barclay. He could reverse the process in the evening coming home, and Maury Morel was a man of tenaciousness and fixed habits.

  Those very traits had enabled him through the years to dig out and expose to the light of publicity some very well hidden and elusive Communist cover-ups. In addition to providing his paper with some really great stories, he had turned over many juicy morsels to the F.B.I. One very well hidden and elusive Communist cover-up that Maury had never exposed was his own good standing for twenty-seven years in the Communist Party.

  Tonight he had turned himself into a tatterdemalion. The offensive mackintosh covered his oldest fishing clothes. His feet flopped around in dirty white sneakers. An ancient crumpled fedora topped his thinning gray hair. With the aid of these props, Maury hoped he was well on his way, after six months’ work, to wrap up the greatest story of them all.

  He stopped and turned on an overhead light in front of the one full-length mirror set in the door of a clothes closet in the hall. He was a mess, all right, if he ever saw one. He’d been up until four and drunk too much Bourbon while he was batting out some copy the night before.

  A five-day growth of whiskers scraped miserably against his finger tips as he stroked his chin. Good job Anne wasn’t home! The meticulous Maury Morel. She wouldn’t have let him go out looking like that, story or no story.

  Cloak and dagger stuff!

  He hated it like hell. Never had believed in it. That’s why he seldom read fiction, and couldn’t write it. The get-up made him feel like Dick Tracy, with just about as much pretension to being alive and real.

  All his life he had lived by facts. He had never needed to smell out a Red by what the man did, or what he wrote, or the company he kept, or the fraudulent patriotic organizations he started or belonged to. That information was Maury’s for the asking—when the comrades got ready to pass it on. Never a month went by that the party leaders didn’t want some recalcitrant member expelled—deviationists, opportunists, left-wing sectarians—party jargon for non-conformers from leaders on down. Rather than have the party blamed, how easy to make them grist for the Morel mill.

  One interview of the jerk first-hand, a search of his background, and a survey of his earnest associates, with a few more interviews along the line, and the heat would be on full. A couple of stories would blow the lid off and the details would be quickly completed by the F.B.I.

  He opened the hall closet door and took down a carton from the top shelf. It was about six inches long, three inches wide, and two inches thick. It contained a battery operated tape recorder that fitted inconspicuously into his left hand coat pocket.

  His resentment still growing, he poked a hole through the inside of the pocket and ran a wire from the recorder up to the second button hole from the top in front of the ancient coat. The wire ended in a tiny microphone with a button shaped top. Maury pushed it through the buttonhole where it fitted neatly. He had sewed on three buttons that matched the mike the day before.

  He wasn’t anticipating any trouble, but neither was he taking chances. The Reds were playing footsie with capital imperialists again and had gotten cocky—but not so cocky that they weren’t careful. Maury was the last to have any illusions about them. He’d been one of the inner circle far too long. When they thought the time was ripe they could be bad bad boys!

  For twenty years they had been threatening him by mail and phone and picketing papers where his stories had appeared. Too many comrades in the lower echelons understood those smoke-screen tactics not at all.

  No, Maury had no illusions about Soviet Russia! He had in his time, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, made the very Kremlin squirm. Cold war, or hot, on Khrushchev’s list of Free World annoyances that should be removed, Maury Morel must rank very close to Public Enemy No. 1—he hoped! The day his status changed to good, and the change was whispered to the Central Intelligence Agency, was the day that Maury’s house of cards would fall.

  Meanwhile, be careful! Look at his hands right now! Much too clean. He went in the living room, crumpled up a sheet of carbon and fingered the ribbon of his portable. Between carbon and ribbon he finally got a rim of black beneath his nails and nicely blackened fingers.

  Back in the hall at the mirror he put a not too obvious smudge at the roots of the beard on one side of his face.

  “An artist!” he muttered. “Looks exactly like I’ve been changing a typewriter ribbon. Why the hell didn’t I take up sports twenty years ago!”

  He counted the change in his pocket—a dollar thirty-five. Enough to pay for a beer or two and maybe a shot of whiskey.

  When he turned out the overhead light in the hall it left the apartment in darkness. In the living room the luminous hands of an electric clock showed 11:20. Maury opened the slats of the Venetian blind and looked out at the courtyard.

  Six connected houses of five stories each made up the square of Morton Court. They were walk-ups, all, with two two-room apartments to each floor.

  It was drizzling. That was a break! The mackintosh fitted right in. Lights from several apartment windows threw yellow patches on the flagstone walks that radiated spokelike out from a scraggly fountain in the center of the court. Across the court from his living room window a high brick slit between two of the buildings led out under an iron grille to Morton Street.

  The courtyard
was deserted, familiar, and depressing.

  Maury fingered the key to the apartment in his trouser pocket and decided not to take it along. He tossed it on the table, put the thumb latch on the door so he could get in again, and closed the hall door behind him.

  Upstairs a TV was blaring a commercial preparatory to the Late Show. Under the dim light of the foyer Maury took a quick automatic look at his mail box—a ritual of years even if he went in and out ten times a day. Just one of his habits that lit a slow burn in Anne. Well, she had a few that burned him, too!

  Out in the courtyard he found it was hotter than inside. He turned up his ragged collar against the driving rain and prepared to sweat it out. The raincoat gave about as much protection as a sheet of tissue paper. In a minute, Maury was soaked clear through. The coat was a steam bath, but necessary to take the recorder along.

  Leaving the entrance for Morton Street, he turned west and crossed Hudson. In the daytime it was a thundering welter of trucks. Tonight, like most nights, it was deserted except for one speeding yellow cab that flashed by with its flag down carrying some fare uptown.

  A block farther west he turned south on Greenwich, crossed Leroy and Clarkson Streets and turned west again on Houston over to Washington. He remembered once, years before, asking a cabbie for Hueston Street and being told there was no such street in New York. It took a cop to set Maury straight that the New York pronunciation was Howston.

  It was a Syrian neighborhood. The short stretch of Washington Street was lined with importing warehouses. The air was redolent of strange and pungent eastern smells.

  Maury stood on the corner for a while, huddled against the wind and rain. A short block away below Charlton Street a red neon sign fuzzy through the moisture read: BEIRUT CAFÉ.

  He had broken plenty of stories in his time, but never one with a grade B, TV build-up like this. He had an appointment with a Lebanese seaman named Beshara Shebab.

  Maury had never laid eyes on the man, or heard of him, until a tip-off was phoned into the office two weeks before that Beshara Shebab might have some interesting information about the ownership of certain large sums of money deposited under the anonymity of numbered accounts in several banks in Lebanon. This information was available—if Maury wanted to play the game under Beshara’s rules and was willing to pay.

  It was the mention of a man named Pringle that had sucked Maury in.

  It was Maury’s guess that Beshara Shebab had jumped his ship and needed money as well as a certain amount of protection. Hence this bewhiskered midnight meeting in the Beirut Café. Somehow this defecting Lebanese seaman had gotten wind that his best bet was Maury Morel.

  Maury chewed at his bristly upper lip and stared some more at the Beirut Café sign. He wanted information badly on a couple of things, and the main one was the identity of a man called Pringle. The second, and probably just as important, was what Moscow was doing with a little matter of fifteen billion dollars of gold reserve that she had accumulated since World War II. It was a double play if he made it.

  From where he stood it looked like a fifteen billion to one chance that this character Beshara Shebab knew any part of the answers to either question. Except for one fact: part of that hot Red Soviet money was in numbered accounts in a bank in Beirut, Lebanon—the name of that bank was the “Banque du Shebab-Syrie.”

  The coincidence of the name Shebab was pretty thin. Shebab was probably as common in Lebanon and Syria as Smith is here. Still it was enough to make Maury decide to give Beshara at least one play.

  The miniature tape recorder in his pocket would run forty-five minutes. That was more than enough to get down in a single interview the leading questions and answers that would prove Beshara really knew something, or to show him up as a phony.

  Maury tested the on-off switch on the recorder. He could work it easily without being noticed. Or it might be better just to leave the machine on. He’d decide when he found his man.

  The rain increased in a sudden wild spurt, bouncing off the sidewalk and knocking against his old coat and fedora with audible thumps. He felt uneasy without any cause, touched with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature and the downpour.

  Hunching himself down turtle-wise, he hastened south a block on Washington Street and went into the Beirut Café.

  Chapter Two

  Inside the restaurant the atmosphere was steamy. Fog seemed to rise from a hundred damp pea jackets, floating ceilingward to form puffballs of moisture around the unshaded electric bulbs.

  Trapped in the moisture were a thousand smells—shish-kebab that had blackened the skewers for innumerable meals, onions, garlic, herbs, cooking olive oil, and lamb prepared in fifty forms overlay the fumes of whisky, beer, and pungent raki.

  Exuding sailors crowded the tables, even at that late hour, stuffing food and scooping up mouthfuls of chick peas, and a yogurt type cheese, in torn-off pieces of thin flat Syrian bread, folded to be used as an edible spoon.

  Maury stopped for an instant inside the door, checked by the odoriferous warmth, and dazzled by the shining clean white of tablecloths on every table, and the linen napkins, tucked bib-fashion into the sweatered necks of most of the eaters. The napery was a bizarre and unexpected touch in such a murky atmosphere.

  He didn’t see any women, except two olive-skinned waitresses, who moved adroitly among the tables, apparently serving the entire room.

  Voices boomed against his ears in an indistinguishable clatter of twenty tongues: Russian, Greek, Arabic, Turkish. A Tower of Babel that made Maury feel like an idiot. Probably every man there spoke passable English, and one or two other languages as well. Yet Maury Morel, high-priced syndicated writer, like most of his countrymen had really mastered only English, graduated from college with some utterly inadequate French, and a smattering of German words, which he couldn’t even decipher if they were shown to him in German script. No wonder the Russians were beginning to pick our brains out, he thought unhappily. While we were teaching courses in safe driving and rock-’n’-roll, Russia was training a new generation to master other languages. Forty thousand Soviet children were learning to read, write, and speak perfect English every year before they left high school.

  Maury Morel! Ace Commie fighter of the G-S Syndicate—and the only Russian word he knew was da—which meant yes, he hoped. If it did, it was a word taboo to every Russian diplomat on any state occasion.

  Nobody came near him. The recorder began to grow to the size of a suitcase weighting down his left coat pocket. Back of the minuscule bar to his right, the bartender, a swarthy fat man with nice teeth and mean eyes was watching Maury with an expression that could soon turn into undesirable interest.

  Most of the customers were eating with their hats on—the visored sea caps of officers in a minority to the flat sailor hats, some with ribbons down the back, others with red pom-poms on the top, many with the unreadable names of ships done in faded gilt on the front of the hatbands.

  Maury kept his own hat on and pushed his way through the tables toward the shadowed rear of the restaurant.

  Too close to a door marked men for pleasant dining, a man in a long-sleeved turtle-neck jersey was sitting alone at a tiny table with a vacant chair across from him. He wore no hat, and a pea jacket lay across his knees half under the table. He wasn’t eating, but a half-full tumbler of milky raki stood at his elbow.

  As Maury drew close, the man flicked a glance at the tattered raincoat and shifted sharp dark eyes to Maury’s unshaven face.

  “Sit down, Mr. Morel.” Under the table the man used his foot to push out the opposite chair.

  Maury sat down and looked him over. He was young, somewhere in his late twenties. His lean olive face was burned dark and reddened by wind and sun, but it was the face of a thoroughbred—breeding and refinement in the features.

  “You’re Beshara Shebab?”

  The young man surveyed the other tables before he nodded.

  Maury slipped his left hand down toward his coa
t pocket.

  Shebab smiled with a touch of scorn. “It isn’t really necessary to turn your tape recorder on. That is, unless you want to. I’m only going to give you a few highlights here. Just enough to prove that I do have some information which is valuable to you, your paper, and your country. If we can both be satisfied, perhaps we can go someplace where there is privacy. That will be time enough to turn your pocket recorder on. Meanwhile, could I buy you a raki?”

  “Make it a beer.” Maury slumped down in his seat feeling discomfited. He’d expected to find almost anything when he invested in the second-hand coat—anything but this poised young seaman with his incongruous flow of faultless English.

  “I understood you were Lebanese,” Maury said. “Your English is better than mine.”

  “Oxford. Forty-nine.” Beshara Shebab signaled one of the waitresses and ordered a beer and another raki. When she’d gone for the order, he continued: “However, I was born in the hills above Beirut among the tall cedars of Lebanon. Ever been there?”

  Maury shook his head.

  “Wait a while before you go. It used to be peaceful there. Lovely. But my country’s a bloody mess today. My father is Director, and majority share-holder of the Banque du Shebab-Syrie. That’s why I’m here—on behalf of my father.”

  Maury looked at the seaman’s jersey, and the cracked and blistered palm of one of Shebab’s hands on the table. “Oh, I see!”

  “I didn’t make this voyage First Class, if that’s what you’re referring to. Given a little more dissension, and a few more millions of Soviet money spread around in the proper places to stir up riots, and Lebanon, as well as my father’s bank, will cease to be.”

  “You think you can stop that blow-out?”

  “Certainly not single handed, but there are men high up in your State Department, and in the United Nations, that I hope to be able to see.”

  The waitress came with the drinks and the check. Beshara Shebab took a crumpled dollar from his pocket and told her to keep the change. She nodded her thanks and went away.