Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  “You mean even if they don’t want to be?” Catlett snorted vigorously. “Try interviewing a few, Morel. Try interviewing Max Rheinemann. They have their answers and their backgrounds cemented in, believe me. Everyone does, if he has. a brain or hopes to get away with anything. Suppose you’d been a Communist for twenty-five years, way up in the Party, and I asked you about it. Would you tell me?”

  “I’ll invoke the Fifth Amendment,” Maury said. “So you’d better not ask me.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Henry Lycoming had a way with women, and it was usually his own. Not that he couldn’t get along with men, too. That was an essential part of his business. For an investment counselor, many more attributes were necessary than a simple evaluation of business trends, and a slightly better than normal prescience of stock fluctuations.

  Simple valuation and guesswork were strictly for the birds, and fish—subscribers to Lycoming’s Leads who weren’t in the know. It was a very good tip sheet, or market letter, or business forecast, or whatever one chooses to call it.

  Ten well-paid statistical clerks—analysts, in Lycoming’s jargon—four male and six female, worked assiduously five days a week in Lycoming’s discreetly sumptuous offices of quiet decor on the tenth floor of the Midtown-Title Bank Bldg. at 46th Street and Madison Avenue.

  On the latest types of computing machines, they broke down the published figures of innumerable companies. Subscribers could make or lose on them all.

  They were no respecters of corporations big or small—those statistical sleuths of Henry Lycoming. Fingers flew. Keys were punched. Motors whirled. Page after page of copy, delectably typed on electric typewriters, was conscientiously edited for accuracy by Miss Dolores Stacy, Lycoming’s private secretary and office manager, and rushed to the printers every day.

  On Fridays all this concentrated effort hatched out Lycoming’s Leads bristling with “per share: operating income; dividends; recent price; dividend rate; yield;” and tables of price range for the past ten years—vital matters that every third-rate stock trader knew he could find daily in The New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal.

  But they couldn’t get the double-talk as supplied by Miss Dolores Stacy.

  Even her boss, Henry Lycoming, whose air transportation bill was a stupendous tax deduction, and who considered himself a connoisseur of the flowers of many nations, admitted ungrudgingly that Dolores earned her money.

  Given a fan, a mantilla, and a pair of castanets, and landed in Madrid—Dolores would have snagged herself a millionaire toreador in a day. She had all the other equipment, and that could be proved by just taking a look. None of the four males in the office needed to compute her measurements on a calculating machine.

  In addition, which seemed to the lesser endowed female members of the staff as unnecessary as stacking Mount Pelion on the much abused Mount Ossa, Dolores was endowed with bundles of active brains.

  It was Dolores who added the cryptic information in Lycoming’s Leads. Like the daily astrology information in the papers, except that they hit the true believers once a week, you couldn’t go wrong. Dolores had a two-edged vocabulary, and a cover-up like a prizefighter. The subscribers were free to win or lose either way.

  “Bazooka, Inc., with almost a score of years and experience, is the largest producer of frammis type self-leveling electronic anti-atomic four-stage interceptory and inter-continental experimental missiles and launching platforms. Not only does this company provide an additional source of investigative ballistics for the armed forces, but the great superiority of its products in performance and economy makes older models obsolete and should thus lead to a sustained replacement demand.

  “Finances are strong, with no funded debt or preferred ahead of the 2.2. million shares of common, and with current assets more than three times current liabilities at the last year-end.

  “The stock is of high quality and has good prospects of further increase in earnings and price since there is no apparent prospect of cancellations in the defense field. It might make a good switch for building stocks which have recently shown marked earnings declines.

  “However, it must be pointed out that the stock market has had a severe reaction and many of those who were optimistic only a short time ago are now equally pessimistic. The combination of narrowing profit margins caused by increased competition and concern over the advances of Russian science and unsettled conditions in the Near East are reflected in the price of stocks.”

  Every time Lycoming read one of those gems of tergiversation he wanted to boost Miss Stacey’s pay. Of course, every time he looked at her he wanted to boost her pay—except that Dolores was difficult. He was paying her plenty plus now for her literary efforts and she wouldn’t give him the time of day.

  He came out of his inner office shortly before five on Tuesday afternoon (Sandor had been killed the night before), and as always at his appearance there was a momentary lull as the staff looked up from their clattering machines. Even Dolores, from her private corner behind two mahogany tables set at right angles, flicked up her Castilian eyes and favored him with an impersonal smile.

  He was a big man, shaggy and expensively tweedy, remindful of steam rooms, cold showers, golf courses, Huckins Cruisers, and regular hours spent in the gym. Fortyish, he looked younger. His blue eyes were quiet, mild, reticent, and watchful. His voice was low, but incisive. His step was purposeful and firm, his gestures and handclasp the same.

  The office chorused a “Good-night, Mr. Lycoming!” as he went through the gate in the mahogany fence, separating work space from a four chair waiting area, and let the hall door sigh behind him. Then like a class in school, at teacher’s signal for departure, they made immediate preparations to call it a day.

  Of all the staff only Dolores Stacy had sensed that Henry Lycoming was seething inside, and that his casual ordinary exit was skilfully covering cold, revengeful rage. Miss Stacy had read the papers. She knew a lot more about the private life of Henry Lycoming than she cared to say.

  Lycoming walked briskly up Madison to 52nd Street, then west across Fifth Avenue where he dropped into “21.” He checked his hat, then telephoned a nearby garage to deliver his car in fifteen minutes. That done, he went in the bar, already crowded, and shook hands with one of the bartenders, who mixed him his regular Martini on the rocks.

  Two men, whom he didn’t know from Adam, pushed their way in beside him and greeted him cordially. They were frayed at the edges already.

  “Great coup (he pronounced it koop) you fed us last week, Hank, old boy. We cleaned up. Didn’t we, Irv?” one of them said in a husky whisper.

  “Cleaned up is right, Hank, old boy.” Irv agreed, and turned to the bartender. “Mr. Lycoming’s drinks are on Fawcett and me.” Irv gave Lycoming a ponderous wink. “Know better than to mention info as good as that at a bar. Right, Fawcett, old boy?”

  “Right you are, Irv. Mr. Lycoming, your drinks are on Irv and me.”

  “Somebody always has to win sometime. It’s just like the slot machines,” Lycoming said steadily. “My drinks are already on my check and paid for. I have an appointment and have to blow. Sorry!” He signed his check, got his hat, and went out front where he waited five minutes more for his Continental.

  His anger and perturbation hadn’t been cooled by Irv and Fawcett and his one Martini. The six o’clock traffic fanned them into full flame on the drive uptown.

  You just couldn’t figure Americans, any more than you could figure Russians, unless you’d been born one! American men were nuts, and the women were still more crazy. The English were difficult—everything under the surface, but after a while you began to realize how soft they seemed and how tough they were.

  The Germans were a pushover. All cast in the same mold. A bunch of sheep no matter what direction they were running in. Jump from a plane if the voice of authority shouted “Vaterland!” As Dr. Hans Lenz he’d fooled them all in the Claudius office, before they’d taken it to Moscow from Berl
in.

  But after ten years of cramming on American ways of talking and living and history, forgetting that he was Russian born, and ten more years of living right in New York City, with all the money in the world to play with—here he was having the jitters because he couldn’t figure Americans. They had no national pattern you could figure. That was the trouble. No standards of class.

  Take those two men in “21”—Irv and Fawcett. Were they both native born Americans, or was Fawcett Welsh, or were they Slavic, maybe Russian like himself? No answer. Take some of the city’s best night clubs. Once they had been speaks, breaking the law—now they’re the country’s finest restaurants. You shake hands with the proprietor, if he happens to know and like you, but you have to be even better known and liked to shake hands with the man who is tending bar.

  You couldn’t even trust the racketeers. He’d shown a couple of big shots how they could invest their money safely right here in the country by letting him take it abroad. Then the third one he’d talked to had called him a lousy Communist, and threatened either to have him killed or turn him in to the FBI as a foreign spy. Loot a million from a labor union, then call a man who wants to help you a spy!

  Dangerous, these Americans! Henry Lycoming could speak like one, live like one, look like one, and be one with an air-tight built-in family background that had so far fooled the authorities when he’d made that slip on Albatross Press.

  That was bad. Rheinemann’s fault. Lycoming didn’t know where Rheinemann stood. Max was all for making profit, and Lycoming couldn’t very well tell him that the few billion he, Lycoming, had to juggle was only incidentally to be used for profit—and never if it put Lycoming in the public eye.

  It was to be used for deals like the one that had removed Dr. Wolfgang von Bessinger from Operation Orbiter. There he turned America’s security measures right against them. Twenty-five thousand dollars profit was shown on the books of a couple of brokerage houses—profit made on facility stocks in Wolfgang von Bessinger’s name, stocks of facilities the eminent Doctor was advising. Then information was leaked to the Head of the United States Advisory Board on the International Geophysical year.

  Result: Nobody believed the anguished howls of the man who had been Hitler’s rocket scientist when he denied knowing anything about twenty-five thousand dollars credited to profits in his name. The louder von Bessinger protested, the worse the transaction looked. Where had the original investment money come from? From foreign numbered bank accounts remitted direct to legitimate brokers and invested in utmost confidence in your name.

  Utmost confidence was right! Lycoming chuckled at the memory. The Pentagon promptly removed Operation Orbiter from the Army and von Bessinger’s guidance, and placed it under control of the Navy alone. The Army was left with six unlaunched satellites in Alabama, and Russia’s Sputnik went flaming up into outer space spreading Communist propaganda all over the sky.

  Lycoming liked that kind of a game.

  He didn’t like the kind of game he was mixed up in now. Playing the part of an eager lover wasn’t too hard to take even at his age, and he was older than he looked, with anyone possessing the architectural lines of Marian Rheinemann. But again he was faced with cryptic Americanism, and a woman to boot, this time.

  The fact that he had to cultivate her in order to influence her father, and Max Rheinemann, had right at the start detracted somewhat from good dishonorable fun. Still it had been necessary if he wished to get Aaron Turlock and Bruno Vogl in the key spots at Crescent Valves. Lycoming had full say, and it was most important that he maintain it by remote control.

  There was a salient fact that Henry Lycoming had learned in the school of Comintern Diplomacy years before—no matter how big you might think yourself, or how important your mission was, you were never on your own.

  Lycoming had an immediate superior whom he had seen only twice, and then at night, once in Philadelphia and the second time in Hartford. On both personal contacts he had talked to the man for not more than fifteen minutes while driving with him in a car. He knew the man only as Pringle.

  Later contacts were made by phone, Lycoming calling from a pay booth in a drugstore, sometimes on Broadway, sometimes on the upper West Side. The place made no difference so long as it was never twice the same.

  The number Lycoming called was always another Pringle chosen drugstore, where Lycoming left a prescription number to be called for in a name furnished by Pringle on their last telephone contact.

  Actually, the prescription number Lycoming gave was the dial number of a pay booth, and the hour when Lycoming would be there waiting for Pringle’s call. Eight hours notice was required.

  Pringle had various means of contacting Lycoming, but it was all one way—circulars and printed ads—marked cryptically with an indication of the hour Lycoming was to phone the prearranged drugstore and leave his prescription. No name. Nothing.

  On receipt of one of those circulars at his hotel in the morning, Lycoming would phone at the specified hour. Then, promptly in the evening, he would be in some drugstore booth of his own choosing, hoping Pringle would call. There were times that he didn’t, but Lycoming had orders not to wait over fifteen minutes. He found it very nerveracking to have to go through it all the following day.

  It was a pain in the neck. Lycoming was certain that Pringle was a highly trained officer of the MVD. Now he was beginning to think that Pringle was a killer as well as a spy.

  God, he hadn’t even known Turlock was in Marian’s Rest Home. Who the devil but Pringle would want Turlock out of the way? And Lycoming was going to bear the brunt for not reporting—not keeping that cold-blooded MVD agent informed that Turlock was off the job at Crescent.

  For a moment he was so upset he thought of stopping the car and calling Bruno Vogl before he talked to Marian. He realized immediately that Vogl might not even be aware of his, Lycoming’s, existence. Vogl was an American Communist—a different breed of cat from Pringle. He’d pass on classified information, but he was motivated by—what? Lycoming was beginning to wonder about that very thing. They were nuts, and rotten at the core. That’s why the Kremlin had started planting Pringles to watch them at their ideological play.

  Karl Marx, babushka! If these meatheads didn’t quit fighting to get the grand and glorious freedom of Russia they might wake up some fine morning and find they’d won it. He just couldn’t understand Americans at all!

  He turned his car over to the doorman of the Salford Arms at 74th Street and Park Avenue and took a red and gold elevator operated by a scarlet-uniformed girl up to the sixth floor. His appearance didn’t excite her enough to stop her chewing gum.

  He rang the door chime at apartment A, which wasn’t necessary since he had a key. A neat colored maid in a gray uniform and white apron let him in.

  Lycoming gave her his guest smile along with his hat, and said, “Hello, Carry. How’s tricks?”

  “Pretty good, Mr. Lycoming, pretty good considering—”

  “Is the doctor in?”

  “In the shower, Mr. Lycoming. She’s had her a bad day. Murder at her sanitarium last night. Didn’t you hear?”

  “I saw the papers, Carry. Tell her I’ll mix myself a Martini, will you? I’ll wait in the bar.”

  He found ice ready in the oversize silver container and went to work with the French vermouth and Beefeaters gin, making just one on the rocks. Marian would want her’s fresh when she came to join him.

  The apartment always jarred on him. It was lavishly furnished in black, white, and gold in a strict adherence to modernistic style. The rugs were white and thick as platters of hominy grits. The chairs were parts of sectional sofas that divided into three. They were upholstered, like the bar stools, in some type of white kid and had no arms.

  Lycoming always had a sensation of sliding when he sat on one. The cocktail table was black onyx, like the top of the bar. The baby grand Chickering was white and gold. So was the built-in combination record player and TV.

 
Only the varicolored spines of books in the recessed cases surrounding the TV added any brightness to the monotony, which Lycoming had decided long since had just one purpose—to set off the blaze of Marian’s red hair.

  He took his drink to the bookcase and looked over the titles. Book club, mostly, best-sellers with a sprinkling of mysteries. A shelf of medical textbooks, leaning toward psychiatry.

  On the bottom shelf, built to hold books larger than the normal size, were twenty volumes of a medical encyclopedia.

  Lycoming through years of training had an eye that could detect an error in figures almost at a glance. The books were numbered from 1 to 20, but the last two volumes next to the wall had been transposed. One to eighteen were in sequence—then came 20 and 19.

  He set his drink down, knelt on the floor, and removed the two heavy volumes to change them about, then sucked in his breath.

  A thin white wire had been run along the back edge of the bookcase behind the encyclopedia. Back of the volumes Lycoming was holding it vanished through a hole drilled in the wall.

  He put the volumes back in correctly, walked to the radiator, concealed by a built-in box below the window, and raised the lid.

  It took just an instant for him to detect the hidden microphone.

  Bugged! The apartment was bugged!

  “But who the devil is being checked?” he asked himself. “Marian, Max, or me, or all three? And who’s doing the checking—The FBI, the New York Police, or the Communist Party?” Then he had another thought he liked less than any. “Could it be that b——Pringle checking for the MVD!”

  He gulped his drink and was mixing another when Marian came in.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Exotic Dr. Marian Rheinemann was wearing velvet lounging pajamas of Lincoln green. Most unprofessional polished toenails peeped from under the straps of gold sandals.

  “Hi, Henry!” She gave him a casual kiss, but her mind wasn’t on her work. “Fix me a drink, like a dear.” She pulled two of the heavy white pieces together to form two-thirds of a divan, and flung herself down, arms outstretched along the back, long legs extended in front of her.