“What does that mean?” Beaumont said, into the phone.
“What’s it sound like? I thought you were expecting this call.”
“It sounds pretty complicated,” Beaumont said. “And it sounds like business, too. Not the kind of business we discuss on the phone.”
“So come on over, and I’ll tell you to your-”
“It’s not exactly that easy for me to get around,” Beaumont said, stiffly. “You don’t have any problem coming out here one more time, do you? I mean, since we’re going to be partners and all.”
“Nobody said anything about partners.”
“Not until now, maybe. Is it worth an hour of your time to hear more?”
1959 October 08 Thursday 10:48
“I think one of our investments is going sour,” SAC Wainwright said.
“Which one would that be?” asked the bland-looking man seated on the other side of Wainwright’s bird’s-eye maple desk. Only the thick weal of a repaired harelip rescued his features from total anonymity.
“The Führer.”
“Him? He’s a nothing. Just some freak who likes to dress up and play Nazi.”
“No,” Wainwright said. “No, he’s not. Maybe he has only ten, twelve ‘followers,’ but he’s got something else, too. Something we helped him get. He’s got a platform.”
“I thought that was what we wanted him to have.”
“That’s right. But the chain of command is now… rethinking the whole scenario. If he does go ahead and announce he’s running for office, where do you think he’s going to get votes from?”
“Mohr? What’s he going to run for, state rep? He’ll get the… I don’t know what you’d call it, the votes from people who hate the coloreds. And the Jews, I guess.”
“Don’t forget the Catholics. They’re on Mohr’s list, too.”
“So? Those kind of people wouldn’t be voting for our guy, anyway.”
“That’s what we thought, what everyone thought, when the operation was launched. But that’s not what we’ve been hearing lately.”
“I don’t understand,” the man with the harelip said, a faint sprinkling of hostility edging his words.
“It’s the chickens coming home to roost,” Wainwright said. “During the war, men like Mohr, they were very useful, especially in dealing with union problems. Instead of focusing on things like wages and hours and working conditions-you know, stuff the Commies could organize around-they had the men ready to riot if they had to work next to coloreds on the assembly lines.
“But some people fell asleep at the switch. What our intelligence says now is, if a man like Mohr ran for office, he’d be pulling his votes from some of the same people-the same white people-who would have voted Democrat.”
“Our intelligence? Or do you mean-?”
“In-house,” Wainwright said, carefully enunciating each syllable. “And our… friends don’t know any more about it than they do about you working for us.”
“Why don’t you just tell Mohr to-?”
“We can’t tell him anything. He’s not on our payroll. And all the money we spent on his group just made him worse.”
“Then…”
“Can’t do that, either,” Wainwright said. “The last thing we need is another Jew conspiracy. We don’t want to make him a martyr. We need him neutralized. Discredited.”
“How the hell can you discredit a guy who runs around calling himself a Nazi? What’s left?”
“This,” Wainwright said, sliding a blue folder across the glossy surface of his desk. Clipped to the outside of the folder was a photograph of Carl Gustavson.
1959 October 08 Thursday 11:17
“It’s so beautiful,” Tussy said. “I was never out here before except in the summer.”
“If you’re cold…”
“Not me,” she said. “I’m pretty well insulated. Or haven’t you noticed?”
“I…”
“Some men just like women who’re… hefty,” she said, hands on hips. “Gloria told me-”
“Gloria may know a lot about men,” Dett said. “She might even be an expert, maybe. But she doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know anything about me.”
1959 October 08 Thursday 11:22
“So they’re both fruits,” the man with the repaired harelip said, putting down the dossier. “What can we do with that?”
“That’s a good question,” Wainwright replied. “After all, Mohr says he’s a Nazi, and they marched fags into the ovens right along with the Jews. We’ve got a tape of a speech he made. Mohr said there’s no room in the party-that’s what he calls that collection of pathetic misfits he’s got, a ‘party’-for fags. ‘A man that can’t fuck can’t fight,’ is what he said. So you’d think, we threaten to release what we’ve got, he backs off, plays along like he’s supposed to.”
“Only…?”
“Only we’ve got men inside, like I told you. Sometimes, I think all of these freak-show organizations would dry up and die if we pulled our informants out-they’re probably the only ones who ever pay their dues on time. Anyway, we had one of our assets get into a conversation with Mohr about it. The subject, I mean. Nothing confrontational, just sounding him out.
“This asset of ours, he spent time in prison-that’s like a credential to those people-so it was a natural subject for him to bring up. What our man did, he admitted butt-fucking some boys while he was doing time. But he didn’t say it like a confession; he said it like, what would you expect a real man to do when there were no women around?
“And Mohr never blinked. In fact, he said he’d do the same thing himself. He said a true member of the master race is a master of his situation, too. Fucking a man doesn’t make you a fag, only getting fucked.”
“But Mohr’s… relationship with this Gustavson fruit, that’s not because he’s in prison,” the man with the harelip protested.
“Mohr’s got a line that covers that, too. He has this whole long story about ancient Greek warriors-”
“Greeks aren’t Aryans.”
“You know that, and I know that,” Wainwright said, smiling thinly. “But these homegrown Nazis don’t. Anyway, Mohr told our guy that part of being a real man is doing whatever you want. He didn’t come right out and say he was doing… that with anyone, but it’s easy to see how he expects it to come out someday. And he’s ready for it.”
“So where’s our edge?”
“Our boy Carl. He’s not a fraud like most of them. He’s the real thing. A true believer.”
“So?”
“So that’s where the finesse comes in,” Wainwright said. “And that’s why I sent for you.”
1959 October 08 Thursday 11:29
Tussy bent at the waist and scooped a flat piece of slate from the ground in the same motion, as agile as a gymnast.
“Want to see something?” she said, holding the stone with her forefinger curled around its edge.
“Sure.”
“Come on,” Tussy said, tugging Dett toward the water’s edge with her free hand. Fireball followed at a judicious distance, eyeing the water distrustfully.
“Watch,” she said. She stood sideways to the water, her right arm extended. Then she took a step forward, twisting her hips as she whipped her arm across her body, releasing the flat piece of slate. It hit the water, skipped, flew through the air, skipped again, and continued until it finally sank, a long way from shore.
“Damn! That must have gone a couple of hundred feet,” Dett said.
“I can do long ones with just a couple of skips, or I can make it skip a whole bunch of little ones,” she said, grinning.
“Where did you learn how to do that?”
“My father taught me. I was watching him do it one day, when I was just a little girl, and I wanted to do it, too. Mom told me girls didn’t throw rocks, and I told her, well, I sure did, every time boys threw them at me. She said she’d better not catch me doing that. Then my dad said we’d make a deal. He would show me how to skip stones, the way he did, and I wouldn’t make my mother frantic by throwing them unless we were at the lake.”