Operation Bamboozle

by Derek Robinson

Genres: World War II; War & Military; Spy Thrillers; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

From 1941 to 1943 it was the Germans. Then it was the turn of the British. Come the Cold War, he's conning McCarthy. Now he's going head to head with the L.A. mob. For high-stakes con artist Luis Cabrillo, once known as Eldorado, the million-dollar spy, trouble is never far away. And when he and his corker-of-a-New-Yorker squeeze, Julie Conroy, run into the cream of Los Angeles' shady side, the result is a heady brew of disorganised crime, hot dollars, triple virgins and dead bodies in the begonias. The fourth and final Luis Cabrillo novel is yet another fiendishly plotted rollercoaster ride of wit and wisecracking, as the Second World War's most daring and audacious spy finds that old habits die hard, even in peacetime.

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 249

Sample

For a man who had been hauled out of Lake Michigan in 1949, headless, his legs and arms broken, and stabbed in the heart with a red ballpoint pen, Frankie Blanco was in pretty good shape in 1953.

Identification hadn’t been easy. Forget dental records. Fingerprints had gone too: eaten by the fishes, maybe. But one helpful mark survived. On the left buttock was a faint tattoo of a snarling dragon.

As a kid, Frankie Blanco had run with a Chicago street gang, the Flames, and that was their badge. The gang had been small and unlucky, and soon Blanco graduated to more ambitious, better organised crime, a wise move because the other Flames all died young.

Chicago PD fished the body out of the lake and showed pictures of the faint tattoo to Blanco’s known associates, including ex-girlfriends, a masseur, and a steam-bath attendant. All agreed; this was Frankie, last of the Flames. That was good enough for the coroner and he released the body. It was interred in St Luke’s graveyard (then the last restingplace of choice for the Mob in Chicago’s South Side), the headstone bearing the simple epitaph: Not Forgotten.

This begged the question, remembered for what? Frankie Blanco was a fat and happy whacker. Tell him, whack this guy, the guy got whacked. Hobbies were simple: comic books and hamburgers. So he fell in the lake, so his head got lost, maybe chewed off by the screw of a passing freighter. So Frankie got screwed. What’s not to forget?

After a decent interval – two, three days – the word began to circulate. Blanco sang. He had talked to the Reds, shared his memories of multiple homicides committed by numerous colleagues. Names, dates, places, who ate what at which restaurant afterwards. He sang like a canary. Arrests began. Somebody put two and two together and made Blanco; and soon Blanco made a hole in Lake Michigan. Nobody claimed credit, and nobody asked. The job was pro bono publico. And that red ballpen through the heart? Suicide. A guy killed by his own words.

In fact the body was that of a drunk who reckoned his pickup could beat a freight train to a crossing and lost by a length. Nobody claimed the remains, and the FBI took them. Similar height and build to Frankie. The locomotive had clipped the head off when the drunk went through the windscreen, so that was a bonus. The Bureau hired a tattoo artist who cut the strength of his ink and made a faded dragon on the left cheek, twenty-five dollars including tax. Then, into the lake, wearing nothing but clean underwear.

While the dragon was growing soft and wrinkled, the FBI smoothly relocated the real Frankie Blanco to the little town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and renamed him Floyd Boyd. He hated his new name. “Sounds like a bit part in a bum Western,” he said to the Agent who escorted him.

“That’s good. That’s exactly what you are, Floyd. Play dumb, stay sober, blend in.”

Frankie walked to the window and creaking floorboards walked with him. A small dust-devil tried to spin down the street but the effort was too great and it collapsed. “I do the right thing by you Feds, and you do this to me,” he said. “They got the name wrong, it ain’t Truth or Consequences. Truth and Consequences is what it is.”

“That’s very profound, Floyd,” the agent said. He gave him a card. “Your nearest FBI office. Don’t call us and we won’t call you.”



He never liked Floyd Boyd but he came to accept it, like some stupid nickname. He had a new Social Security number, arranged by the Bureau, which also paid a monthly living allowance. His bank statements identified it as US Army Disability Award. That explained the lack of a regular job. When a genuine war veteran showed signs of wanting to compare wounds, Blanco said: “Ain’t somethin’ I care to remember. No weddin’ bells for me, know what I mean?” That closed the conversation.

He grew a shaggy cavalry moustache, and it changed the shape of his face: good. Then it turned silver-grey: even better. He experimented by shaving the top of his head and brushing the sides to make them fluffy, and startled himself. Now he looked like his dead uncle Eddie who drove his car over the side of the Grand Canyon, nobody knew why. For a while, Blanco wore a Panama to cover the damage, until he lost the hat or someone stole it and he realised he didn’t care. On impulse, he bought a corncob

pipe. Never smoked the thing, only kept it in the corner of his mouth. Kids called him Popeye, and he still didn’t care. He was moving further and further from Chicago. Once, indoors, he tried wearing an eyepatch and knew immediately it was too much. He wanted to be nobody, not somebody. Floyd Boyd, part of the furniture. He took an occasional part-time job, helping out when the regular guy was sick or on vacation. That’s how he came to be pumping gas at the Texaco station in 1953, seeing New Jersey plates on a Chrysler sedan and thinking: What in the name of sweet Jesus brings a Jersey car here? and finding only one answer. The Mob never quit.

Frankie Blanco was both right and wrong. The Chrysler with the New Jersey plates was Mafia but the occupants were not.

Both were in their early thirties. He was Luis Cabrillo. Born in Spain, but since then he had acquired an English patina to which he was now adding American bravura with extra flim-flam on the baloney. He liked words. She was Julie Conroy. She was a New Yorker with the kind of looks that make middle-aged accountants misplace the decimal point. Also she could detect bullshit at fifty paces on a foggy night, a useful talent for anyone living with Luis.

They had left Washington DC suddenly and hurriedly before the sky fell in, and driven west, using country roads. They reached the middle of Virginia when hunger took command and they stopped at a diner.

The place was busy. Customers were expected to share tables. Luis and Julie, enjoying their ham and eggs and hashed brown, nodded when two young men asked if they might join them. They were casually dressed: one in a sports jacket and chinos, no tie; the other in a tired-looking brown corduroy suit, the tie hanging loose. Cleanshaven, although each could do with a haircut. Graduate students, maybe, doing their PhDs. But that wasn’t likely, deep in rural Virginia, and it became less so when the corduroy suit said politely: “Miss Conroy? Mr Cabrillo?”

“A wild rumour,” Julie said. “Put it another way: who the hell are you?”

“I’m Todd Rivers and this is Martin Jones.” He spoke softly. “We’re reporters from the Washington Globe.” More softly still. “Doing a story on Senator Joe McCarthy. Thought you might help.”

“Digging up scandal,” Luis said. “A shoddy trade. I wouldn’t sully my hands with it.”

“We’re not looking for scandal,” Rivers said. “It’s the Russian embassy link we need to confirm.”

Julie pushed her food aside. “Don’t use that sort of language in public,” she said. “You’ll get us all blacklisted.”

“There is a Russian embassy link, then,” Jones said, gently. Nobody was blaming anyone. They just wanted the facts.

“Does this go back to the Double Cross Department?” Rivers asked. “That name keeps coming up.”

Luis carefully placed his knife and fork together. “Julie… you rip your clothes off and seduce these two nice young men on the table, while I make a run for it.”

“We can’t talk in here,” she told them. “Let’s go outside.”

They sat on a log. The reporters stood and opened their notebooks. “Suppose we tell you what we’ve learned,” Rivers said. “Which is that during the war you both worked in London for a department of the British Secret Service called Double Cross. Mr Cabrillo was a double agent sending reports to the German military, all part of the Allied deception plans, very highpowered secret stuff. Miss Conroy was on that team.”

“I corrected his spelling,” she said. “The poor guy’s Spanish. They put the exclamation point first and last. It’s a waste of excitement.”

“The war ends, the good guys win,” Rivers said. “Miss Conroy, you return to New York, and Mr Cabrillo, you move to Venezuela. Correct?”

“We all signed the Official Secrets Act,” Luis said. “You can’t print any of that. The Secret Service will hunt you down like mad dogs.”

“This is just background,” Jones assured him. “It doesn’t really matter.”

“I was awarded the British Empire Medal and the Iron Cross. You can’t tell me it didn’t matter.”

“Can we quote you on that?”

“No,” Julie said. “Listen: we worked in counter intelligence. Leave it at that. Better yet, forget it. It’s ancient history. Who cares? I can’t believe the Globe is so short of news.”

“Yes, you’re right, of course,” Rivers said. He turned a page. “Moving on… Earlier this year Mr Cabrillo left Venezuela and teamed up with Miss Conroy again. In New York.”

“I was broke, he was broke,” she said. “That’s a crime in the USA. There’s your story. Page 17 in the Metro Section.”

“Our information is the FBI took an interest. Opened a file on you.”

“Files on both of you,” Jones said.

“Because I was reading War and Peace on the Subway. And Luis wore red pyjamas. Obviously the FBI had files on us. Jesus! Where do you guys get all this stuff?”

“That shaggy haircut of yours…” Luis pointed at Jones. “Rather UnAmerican, wouldn’t you say?”

“Smacks of the Bolsheviks,” Julie agreed. “Fetch a cop. Call the Marines. God Save America.”

The reporters were smiling. “You’ve got a point,” Jones said. “But the New York angle we’re looking at is the Mafia. Seems you made the acquaintance of Jerome Fantoni, who is a major player in that game.”

“Yeah.” Julie stood up and stretched. “His nephew dated me a couple of times. Nothing serious. His daughter Stevie had the hots for Luis, but Stevie had the hots for anyone in pants who would lie still for three minutes. Fantoni asked Luis and me to dinner. We ate, we left.”

“He gave you a Chrysler.”

“He loaned us a Chrysler,” Luis said. He pointed. “That’s it, over there.”

“Which brings us to Washington DC,” Rivers said. “In the Chrysler.” He was flicking through his notebook. “You go to work for Senator Joe McCarthy. That’s hard fact, isn’t it? You’ve been photographed standing alongside the senator.”

“On TV too,” Jones said.

“I was never on salary,” Luis said. “Freelance adviser.”

“Well, this is where we need to nail down the story,” Rivers said. “For instance, the senator acquired written evidence of Soviet subversion in hitherto unsuspected areas of activity. So our source tells us.”

“That source wouldn’t be the Washington Globe, would it?” Louis asked. “I seem to remember reading something about it there.”

“Subversion in the church, the General Electric company, the Idaho potato crop.” Jones was reading from his notes. “Also The US Treasury, the Ohio school system, the San Andreas Fault.” He looked up. “I don’t understand that last one.”

“McCarthy must be a desperate man,” Julie said. She spread her hands and looked helpless. “That’s what I read in the Globe, anyway. But don’t trust me, I’m blacklisted.”

“Maybe the senator is running out of treachery,” Rivers said. “And maybe Mr Cabrillo sold him some fresh treachery, and to prove it’s true he provided genuine documentation, in Russian. Any maybe those documents came from an accomplice working in the Soviet embassy. That’s what we’re hearing.”

“To quote the senator,” Luis said, “that’s the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of.”

“It gets better, or maybe worse,” Jones said. “McCarthy subpoenaed your pal Jerome Fantoni on the strength of a dossier you sold McCarthy that proved the Soviets infiltrated and subverted the Mafia. Then you sold Fantoni a different dossier that proved he’d been an undercover FBI agent, inside the Communists, in the Mafia, all the time.”

“You checked this with the FBI, of course.”

“They deny it,” Rivers said.

“Deniability is built into their system.”

“And you also checked it with McCarthy,” Julie said.

“He hates the Globe. We’re all Pinko liberals throwing dust in the eyes of good patriotic Americans.”

“Jerome Fantoni?”

“Unavailable for comment.”

“That leaves the Russian embassy.”

“Out to lunch,” Jones said. “Dos vedanya.”

Luis got up from the log and put his arms around their shoulders. “You seem like decent, hardworking young chaps. It’s sad to see two promising careers threatened by guesswork about fantasy. Possibly you are the victims of a practical joker. We wish you well. Meanwhile, we must head for Arkansas, where we hope to help celebrate the hundredth birthday of Miss Conroy’s granny. A big event in Arkansas, but perhaps too small for the Washington Globe.”

They shook hands. The reporters thanked them and drove away.

“No story,” Rivers said. “Guilty as hell, but…”

“Oh, they did it,” Jones said. “You don’t spread bullshit that thick unless you’re hiding something big.”

“Double agent and con artist. Not much difference between the two, I reckon. But still… Nobody’s willing to go on record. No facts, no story. Damn damn damn.”

“Miss Conroy was something, huh? What the British call a corker. A corker of a New Yorker. Her picture alone would be worth a four-column spread.”

“Cabrillo’s a lucky bastard.” Rivers concentrated on the road. With luck, there might be a juicy multiple pile-up ahead, involving a truckload of toilets, a school bus and a blazing gasoline tanker. Anything to make the news editor happy.

Julie and Luis were sitting in the Chrysler, analysing the Washington Globe. “They must have followed us from DC,” she said. “Long way to drive.”

“We deserved more credit for our work in Double Cross,” Luis said. “Young people today, they take the Hitler war for granted.”

“You sound like my old granny in Arkansas. The one who died in Nebraska five years ago.”

“And I felt shortchanged about our McCarthy dealings. They obviously haven’t done their homework. Not a word about Stevie. Nothing on The Metal Exchange.”

Stevie – Jerome Fantoni’s daughter – had shared their apartment in Washington until she fell in love with an Air France pilot and followed him to Paris. The Metal Exchange was Luis’s joke: it was the name he gave his business because he exchanged high-grade Russian paperwork for McCarthy’s cash. But the business had been too good to last. It affected too many covert operators – FBI, CIA, KGB, even the Mafia. Cabrillo’s doings angered people. Eventually he was punished with the same blunt instrument that stopped Al Capone. The tax men raided The Metal Exchange.

Luis was elsewhere, doing business, but Julie reached the office just as men with snapbrim hats and short haircuts were smashing the locks. She went to the bank and emptied their account; went home and packed their bags; then found Luis. “Party’s over,” she said. “Shut your eyes and pick a town.” She gave him a Rand McNally US roadmap. He opened it blindly and stabbed a finger.

“Unbelievable,” she said. “You have chosen the town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico. Let’s go.”

He drove. “Which way?” he asked.

“West. Just follow the bleached bones of the pioneers.”

They took country roads into Virginia until they got hungry. That was when they had their long conversation with Rivers and Jones. “They were fishing,” Julie said. “If they had any proof, they would’ve said the paper was going to run the story anyway. They were bluffing. Let’s go.”

Ahead lay the Appalachians. They climbed over the mountains and, still using back roads, they entered Kentucky, dipped down into Tennessee and crossed Arkansas. That took them to Texas where they found some fine federal concrete highways which went from one end of that great state to the other and finally delivered them to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It had taken a week.

The car sounded a little weary. They gave it to a garage to be refreshed, and found an outdoors restaurant which offered twenty kinds of omelette, with chilled beer.

Julie spread the road map. Truth or Consequences was 150 miles south. “We don’t have to go there,” she said.

He looked at her. She seemed unhappy. It was time to say something wise. “Huh,” he said. But he tried to make it thoughtful and sympathetic.

“We could keep driving,” she said. “Away from DC. Away from all those complications. I want a simple life.”

He looked at the map. “Arizona, Nevada, California. North to Oregon. Alaska. I could be a lumberjack. Simple enough?”

Her beer had a head like a cap of snow. She wrote her name in it with her finger but the name dissolved before she finished it. “Driving this far, it’s addictive. I don’t want to stop. Keep driving and you’re free. Floating along, flying forever until…”

He waited. “Until what?”

“Oh, you live to be ninety, go rockclimbing, break your neck.” She was happy again, or at least not unhappy. So his worry was wasted. Bloody women. He thought of making a witty remark about getting driven to distraction but it took too long to assemble so he abandoned it. Better never than late.



Truth or Consequences would not die of thirst. It had twenty miles of reservoir to its north and much the same to the south. Apart from that, the map was noncommittal.

Julie was driving. She cruised into town and saw nobody. Well, it was New Mexico, it was afternoon, it was hot. “Here we are,” she said. “But where are we?”

“Shangri-la it’s not,” Luis said.

She pulled over and parked under a tree. It was next to a building site that had been coming along nicely until the builder lost interest or went bust or died, or all three, and left a flight of concrete steps leading up to half a house. A breeze, as bored as a small boy, chased a yellowed newspaper up the steps, kicked it around and wandered away. “Well, that was gripping,” Luis said.

“You want tickertape?”

“I must say I expected more splendour. This is the West. It should have grandeur. Immense grandeur. Also heroic status.”

“Let’s go find the sheriff.” She started the car. “Maybe he’ll let you hold his sixshooter.”

Nothing much was happening in the town square. Well, it was still hot. An old man sitting on a bench watched Julie pull into a space between nothing and nothing else. She killed the motor and they got out. “You done wrong,” the old man said. “Can’t leave your ve-hickle there. We got laws in this town. Got regulations. You done wrong. See, where you made your mistake was leavin’ your ve-hickle where it ain’t legal.” He spat.

“Are you the sheriff?” Luis asked.

“Was once. Ain’t now.” His voice was weaker. It had been a long conversation.

“We’re looking for immense grandeur. It’s somewhat lacking in these parts.”

“Get in, schmuck,” Julie told him.

They drove away. She said, “Towns like this, they don’t like out-of-State drivers. Soon as he saw our Jersey plates he was really pissed at us.”

“A little cheery banter might have helped.”

“Lack of grandeur? Around here, that kind of banter is an excuse to shoot a hole in you.”

“How quaint. Nobody in New York needed an excuse. What makes these people so fastidious?”

“Fastidious, that’s another insult. We need gas.”

She found a Texaco station. Luis walked around the car, kicking the tyres to show what an experienced driver he was, and ended up watching the attendant filling the tank. Now this man was the real McCoy. Beat-up cowboy boots, shaggy moustache, corncob pipe. “Howdy,” Luis said. The man grunted. Well, that’s how they were in the West: laconic. “Cute little town you got here,” Luis said. “Could a man buy a spread here, real easy?”

“Pay no attention,” Julie said. “He thinks he’s Jimmy Stewart. We’re from the East.”

“Uh-huh.” Frankie Blanco finished with the pump and made a long job of washing the windscreen, which allowed him a good look into the car. No weapons in sight. Proved nothing. “Don’t get many strangers here,” he said. “You folks on business?”

“Could be. You thinkin’ of sellin’?” Frankie didn’t like the idea. “Joke,” she said. He didn’t like jokes, either. She gave up.

Luis had been looking at the map. “Ben Hur,” he said. “There’s a place near here actually called Ben Hur! And look, there’s Pumpkin Center, and Noodle, and Cut and Shoot. There’s even somewhere called Uncertain.” He smiled at Frankie. “Could you live happily in Uncertain?”

“Ain’t never given it no thought.”

Julie paid him. “Where’s the best place to eat?” she asked.

“Texas.”

They cruised quietly out of Truth or Consequences. Julie drove, observing the speed limit and highway instructions at all times. “Watch out for the sheriff’s posse,” she said. “New Mexico hangs traffic violators without trial. That’s how Kit Carson took out the Comanches.” Luis was map-reading. “It’s a hundred and some miles to El Paso,” he said. “That’s Spanish for ‘the pass’. You’re lucky to have someone like me, fluent in ten languages including Khachachurian.”

“Gesundheit,” she said. “Whatever that means.”



Frankie Blanco dug out the card given him four years ago and he dialled the number of the nearest FBI office. He said he was Floyd Boyd, and he told an agent that a man and a woman in a car with Jersey plates had been snooping around Truth or Consequences, acting peculiar. Tan Chrysler, recent model. He had the license plate number.

“In what way peculiar?” the agent asked.

Frankie thought hard. “The guy wanted to know how did I feel about livin’ in Uncertain. That’s a town I never been in, Uncertain.” It didn’t sound like much. “She asked me did I want to retire. Asked real nasty. Pair of freaks.”

“Not exactly discreet, were they? I mean, if they came to do a number on you… Why drive from New Jersey? Take the plane, rent a car, makes more sense. Were they armed?”

Frankie felt he was losing. “He’s carryin’ a 38, she got a 22 in her purse. I saw a big old shotgun in the car. They said they’re goin’ to Texas,” he added. “For the food.”

“So they’re not stupid,” the agent said. “Lock your doors, Floyd. Callus if they comeback.”

Not good enough. If the FBI wouldn’t watch his ass, Frankie knew he’d have to do it himself. He took fifty dollars from the till, gassed up his Chevy, locked up the station and headed south on Interstate 25. By driving flat out and collecting a black harvest of bugs on his windshield, he caught up with the tan Chrysler after about twenty-five miles. Then it was easy. He dropped back until he was a small soft blur in their rear-view mirror. They’d never suspect he was following, and he couldn’t lose them, because the road went to Texas and nowhere else. He enjoyed driving. He sprawled across the bench seat and hung his left leg out the window, in the breeze. He was taking positive action for the first time in four years, and that felt good. Felt strong. What next? Leave it to fate. Screw the Bureau. Besides, thinking hurt.



As they hit the outskirts, Luis said, “We don’t have to stay here. If El Paso looks like el dumpo, then Fort Stockton is only 260 miles further on.” But El Paso turned out to be a li. . .