Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  “Octavus Ball traced down her car and his feet are still sore. Anyhow, we got blood stains from it. They’re not Turlock’s blood, but they may be from Beshara Shebab. Also the police lifted some prints from the Beirut Café that prove without a doubt that Turlock was there the night that Shebab was knifed. He sat at a table close to Shebab and Maury Morel. In addition, there were a couple of smudge prints on the knife—enough, according to the police, to hang Shebab’s murder directly on Aaron Turlock.”

  “He wore no gloves, then?”

  “Monty, Turlock was a paranoiac. He had no idea what he was doing. He’d have killed anyone if he was put up to it. He’s dead anyhow. We want the man who put him up to it. The man who killed him.”

  “Ilyanoff—Pringle?”

  “He’ll do.” Waters shoved half-a-dozen typed report sheets across the desk to Wells. “Now look at these.”

  Monty read them through slowly, his forehead wrinkling deeper as he went along. He went through them all a second time, and gave a long low whistle. “Washington. Knoxville. San Diego. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Miami, Jacksonville, and Atlanta,” he said half aloud. He looked up at the S.A.C., his face pale and sallow. “Good lord, Ed, they’re pulling out our eyeteeth in a single week. What’s their rush? Is somebody getting ready to kick the ball?”

  “That’s it exactly,” Waters said grimly. “If that bunch of information about our defenses ever gets into Kamilkoff’s hands, or gets short-waved out of this country—well—” He shrugged. “It just can’t happen, that’s all!”

  “What’s to stop it, Ed?”

  “We know where the short-wave is, and have a monitor on it—and a jammer, too. Their processing is being done in the same place—in the basement of that bookstore on Fourth Avenue.”

  “Are you going to hit it now?”

  Waters shook his head. “Not until we’re ready. It looks like Pringle is getting ready to take a powder. Maybe he’s already picked a successor. All this info is being processed into films to be tucked into nickels, cuff links, pencils and what have you, by a Communist Party technician, Erick Sorenson.”

  “What then?”

  “He’ll turn it over to Pringle, and Pringle will shove it into the horse’s mouth—slip it to Kamilkoff. I’m giving them five days to process this stuff.”

  “Five days?”

  “Until next Wednesday night.”

  “I know you’re not taking chances like that, Ed, without some definite information.”

  “There’s a summit meeting of Commie brass taking place next Wednesday night at a house in Larchmont. Pringle’s sure to be there, and the man who is to take his place, along with five or six others that I badly want to see out of circulation. Sorenson will bring all that processed info to pass on to Pringle, or his successor.”

  “All in one bunch. I don’t get it. They’ve always spread anything they collected out over a long time. Taken every care.”

  “Monty, I tell you they haven’t got time to take days and weeks of trailing around with thumbtack signals and covered-up telephone calls. We’re going to hit that house next Wednesday night. In addition we’re making a simultaneous raid from coast to coast to round up a list of twenty-one comrades in this spy ring.”

  “You’ve got them all?”

  “Names, addresses, duties, and the information obtained from the plants they work in—every one except Pringle. That includes a fellow named Whit Seymor, in whose house the meeting will be held. Also Bruno Vogl, Seymor’s boss at Crescent Valves, Inc., right here in town.” Ed Waters leaned across his desk, the weariness wiped from his face. “I not only want Colonel Vladimir Ilyanoff to put in the coop along with Golikov, I want to see Kamilkoff bounced out of this country.”

  “And suppose by any long chance this Erick Sorenson slips through our fingers and takes all this info with him?”

  “There will be a lot of new faces around the New York office of the FBI,” Waters said. “I have a round the clock stake-out of twenty men on Sorenson. Monty, this time we’re going to get them all.”

  “You appear to have collected quite a lot of information yourself, Ed, and in a very short time.”

  Ed Waters grinned. “I didn’t get it. It was accumulated due to the efficiency of the agents in the cities you just read on that list. For a week they’ve been passing on Maury Morel from one to another—and they’ve nailed down every contact he’s made and followed them all through. No fish slipped through their nets as a big fish named Henry Lycoming did here.”

  Monty Wells stood up and stretched. “It’s lucky for us that no Russian was ever born with a one-track mind like yours, Ed. But it’s lucky for the Bureau that you have it. As I recall it, you made the statement about a week ago that sooner or later Maury Morel would lead us to Pringle—and when we got Pringle, we’d have them all.” Monty paused at the door. “You saw my report on Abul Khaled, didn’t you?”

  Waters nodded. “I wasn’t interested. Khaled is just robbing drunken sailors and shanghaiing a few. That’s police business. We have enough headaches without messing around with some Syrian punk who’s only running a deadfall.”

  Whit Seymor and Maggie, his wife, lived in a modest two-story house on a tree-shaded street in Larchmont. They had lived there nearly fourteen years, and the neighbors considered them friendly, although somewhat standoffish.

  They had no children and both of them worked. Whit had studied engineering and was a skilled mechanic. He had had steady employment, so far as the neighbors knew, with several commercial airlines—work which entailed a lot of overtime.

  Recently, Whit had been employed by Crescent Valves, Inc., on Long Island, and the Seymors had mentioned casually that if the job worked out, they might consider selling their home. The drive from Larchmont to the plant on Long Island and back every day was wearing Whit down.

  Maggie was a top secretary, with a knowledge of bookkeeping, and had worked for a long time for a brokerage house in New York City—Metzger, Montross and Stoane.

  Maggie commuted back and forth every day, and also put in a lot of overtime. It seemed quite in order to the neighbors that the Seymors were both generally late in getting home.

  They wanted to be friendly and take a part in things but they just never had the time. Nearly every week end, when the Seymors had a chance, they took off in Whit’s green Chevvy on a fishing trip, or to visit some relatives in Hartford, Connecticut.

  On Wednesday night, July 23rd, Maggie wasn’t at the house, but Whit was home. A friend, who had seen his car drive in, called up and asked if Whit wanted to sit in a poker game. Whit begged off, saying he was bushed and was going to watch a show on TV and hit the hay.

  At nine o’clock, with the Venetian blinds lowered, one electric bulb burning in a corner, and the room air-conditioner working, Whit sat down alone in the living room and tuned in a mystery play.

  At ten past nine the front doorbell buzzed—two longs and two shorts. Whit left his comfortable chair, slightly lowered the volume on the TV, and went to answer the door.

  The comrades were coming!

  For the next hour and a half they would start drifting in, ten to fifteen minutes apart and one at a time. By train, by bus, and by automobile. Twisting and turning. Backing and filling. But always reaching the house on foot, with their cars parked several blocks away.

  Anything and everything to avoid being followed and to keep themselves clean.

  The first to arrive was Maury Morel. This was his meeting, called on his authority. As a member of the sacrosanct National Committee, his word was law.

  He’d lost his wife, and most likely his job with the Globe-Star. He hadn’t even been in touch with the office since he returned to New York. But he’d lost them with just one purpose in view, to hold his authority and maintain his place with the Communist National Committee.

  Lycoming and Pringle were made in Moscow, Comintern representatives. They’d find out tonight, as would Pringle’s successor, that they couldn’t dictate to
a member of the National Committee—certainly not while they were operating on the American scene. The hell with what their authority might have been when they were in the USSR at home!

  Maury went into the living room and left Whit Seymor standing at the door to await the next arrival. His attention was caught by the TV show because it concerned the murder of a star reporter.

  Among the suspects were the reporter’s wife and a photographer. It didn’t sit well with Maury. Unless he was wrong, Sorenson was a photographer, with a darkroom in the basement of the bookstore on Fourth Avenue. The memory of the look on Sorenson’s face, and the unwavering muzzle of that Beretta automatic were still too vivid for comfort. “Maybe you’ll learn some day, Morel, that we’re not playing games. You’ll probably be dead by the time you do!”

  Sorenson might be a punk, but he wasn’t any punk with a pistol. Maury could tell. The dirty little gunsel would have dropped him in his tracks if he’d batted an eye.

  Maury went over and fiddled with the TV until he’d tuned in a baseball game.

  By half-past ten all the comrades were there, ranged into a semicircle around Maury, who had moved a chair into the shadow of a corner. He sat facing them like a teacher, to make the seniority of his service and the superiority of his position perfectly clear.

  He counted noses.

  Lycoming, dressed with a banker’s perfection in an imported suit of Italian silk. Sorenson, who had acquired a certain repulsive dignity tonight that Maury had never noticed before. His clothes were better than those he usually wore. His hair was trimmed. He looked as if he might even have had a bath.

  Bruno Vogl, tall, with the impassive face of an Indian and straight black hair. Whit Seymor, their host, powerful and capable looking, with a flat-top cut. Maury’s guess was that Seymor had greater depths than appeared on the surface, and might be chosen to replace the departing Comintern representative—who had become too hot to handle.

  In the end chair on the right was the dapper ferret-faced Max Rheinemann with the shifty eyes, clad as always in his charcoal flannel suit.

  In a conversational tone, just loud enough to be heard above the TV, Maury said: “Comrades, I called this meeting tonight by virtue of my position with the National Committee. I spent all of last week completing an exacting mission—collecting information for a Russian representative who has been working in this country for some years now.”

  His sleepy eyes opened wide and he glanced around the semicircle, weighing and judging. “I gave orders that he was to be here tonight—orders that were to be passed on by the one person whom I believe to know this man—comrade Lycoming, since the Russian representative has insisted on working lone-handed without seeing fit to contact me. I know him only as Pringle, and that is by hearsay. Did you tell him, comrade Lycoming?”

  The TV emitted the sound of cheers as a player stole second.

  Lycoming nodded. “He got your orders, comrade.”

  “Then why isn’t he here?”

  “I can tell you why,” Sorenson said. “He has deliberately avoided contacting you, Morel. Pringle is the contact name of Colonel Vladimir Ilyanoff, an officer of the MVD. For some time he has been suspicious of you. Consequently, he has refused to recognize your authority.”

  “That’s most unfortunate.” Maury lowered his tone so they were forced to lean forward to hear. “I wanted to warn him.”

  “Warn him of what?” Bruno Vogl asked.

  “The comrade Colonel has let himself get careless. So careless that the FBI is tracking him down relentlessly. I understand that he is about to leave this country—but he won’t get out, without the help of every comrade in the American Communist Party. By failing to come here tonight, he has placed us all in jeopardy.”

  “That’s a lie,” Sorenson said.

  He jumped to his feet, and so did Maury. Sorenson’s mouth was working strangely. “I take my orders from the Comintern. I am Colonel Vladimir llyanoff. I’ll leave this country when I choose—without your help, or the help of any stupid American Party. If I’m under any suspicion, I know who informed on me.”

  Somewhere in the back of the house a window crashed, and there was a noise of breaking glass from the locked front door.

  “I was afraid of this,” Erick Sorenson said. “But before I go, Comrade Maury the Fink, I’m purging the party of its most dangerous informer!”

  The Beretta snaked out of Sorenson’s pocket, but the bullet intended for Maury Morel went into the floor. Colonel Vladimir Ilyanoff may have been well trained in the Russian technique, but Maury had been trained to shoot in a tougher and faster school. With his left leg forward, in a shortstop’s crouch, he had snapped out a .38 revolver and squeezed off five shots into Colonel Ilyanoff’s middle without sighting or aiming.

  Ed Waters’ annoying insistence that Maury subject himself to endless years of that rigorous training had finally paid off. Waters had been telling him for fifteen years that everybody’s luck ran out some day—particularly the luck of a man who had pushed it hard enough to spend nearly thirty years as a double-agent of the FBI.

  “So that’s another one cleared up,” Ed Waters said wearily. “But one thing we can always count on—there’ll be more.”

  “More spies like Pringle?” Maury looked around the S.A.C.’s office where Waters and five special agents were still discussing details at half-past one. “What’s the answer, Ed?”

  “Same answer. Look’s like it always will be as the world is setup today—eternal vigilance. Russia has plenty of men, plenty of money, plenty of time, and very few scruples. We close one chink and immediately they start prying open another—like this financial penetration of our industries.”

  “Well, that’s closed up, too, isn’t it—with Lycoming in the bag?”

  Waters shrugged. “It’s closed up with the plants we know about, Maury: Crescent Valves and the plants you fingered on your grand tour of the west and south. It’s up to Congress, now.”

  “To do what?”

  “Pass more laws, maybe. Perhaps deprive stockholders of voting powers unless proper disclosures of ownership are made. But, that’s tricky—the old familiar two edged sword—and Russia knows it. It might result in a refusal of a large number of foreign investors to vote their stock because of a desire to avoid full disclosure. That might very well give them a negative control and hamper some of our best defense facilities.”

  “You mean some top plant fallen under foreign control might not be able to get approval from its stockholders to accept defense contracts—say for manufacturing missiles?”

  “That’s it exactly,” Waters told him. “And Congress, of course, has no control over what banks do anywhere outside of this country. All of which brings us right back to tightening up our internal security with what laws we have on the books right now.”

  Ed Waters leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his neck. “There are a few things in this picture, Maury, that aren’t too clear. How did you ever get put in that job of courier—collecting all that information in a lump? Normally, the Party would have had ten different comrades, all unknown to one another, collecting that dope and bringing it to Sorenson one at a time.”

  “You just don’t recognize genius, Ed.” Maury gave his slow grin. “You have to keep in mind that you’re talking to one of the five anonymous members of the American Communist National Committee—and one who gave lots of orders in the Party, but seldom took orders from anyone else.

  “Sorenson-Pringle, claiming to be a Commie defector, had been sucking around me for some time when I got him the job on the Globe-Star. Neither of us knew then exactly where the other stood—that’s for sure—but I did know that he was still in good standing with the Party. I discussed it with Hal Gow, and we agreed that Sorenson might feed me with some good leads from lower party levels.

  “He did feed me some, but they were all tests on his part—trying to find out exactly where I stood, a question that has caused even me to lose a lot of sleep
as time went by. I’ll have to hand him one thing—he was far more clever and cautious than most of my phrenetic comrades in the Communist Party.” Maury paused and looked around. “What the hell am I telling you this for, Ed? You know all of it, already.”

  “We asked for it,” Waters said. “Let’s just call it a psychiatric purge so that Morel can sleep. Go ahead.”

  “Okay,” Maury continued. “Colonel Ilyanoff-Sorenson found it difficult to swallow the hammering I’d given his beloved Kremlin in the Globe-Star. Or maybe he was sore over being bounced and losing his nice soft front. I don’t know. Comrade, or not, he decided to make trouble for me. He went to Hal Gow with the news that I’d done some articles for the New Lines. You remember them, Ed.”

  Waters nodded.

  “Hal Gow covered for me,” Maury went on, “but it weakened my position with the paper. At the same time, it strengthened me with Sorenson and the Communist Party brass. Apparently I had more standing with the G-S than they figured. Anyhow, while I wasn’t wise to Sorenson as being the big wheel, Pringle, I began to think the Party was lining me up for some big deal.”

  Maury stopped to light a cigarette. “They were!” He grinned through the smoke. “You fellows were getting uncomfortably hot on Lycoming and on Pringle’s tail. They began to get the jitters.”

  “And just how did Lycoming and Pringle find out we were so hot on their respective tails?” Waters asked suspiciously.

  “I told them.” Maury blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate. “Inside information from the infallible Morel. I started by breaking the news to Dr. Rheinemann, her ex-hubby, and Lycoming, that you’d had a man planted in Amity Rest Home.”

  “And who let that leak?” Ed Waters’ face was a study.

  “Nobody. You’re getting touchy, Ed. After all, I’m the one who tipped you off to Turlock being in Amity Rest. It was a fair bet you’d put a man in there, but it made no difference if you had or hadn’t. The very fact that Max Rheinemann and Lycoming thought you had was enough to get them panicky—just as I figured.