I was more than done with the hero routine but Julia had other ideas.
“It makes a better story if you did it,” she said.
I had put Julia in harm’s way and gotten her neighbor killed. Whatever she wanted. But what I’d told Leonid wasn’t strictly true. The cops would ask hard questions of good fortune.
“This is a big deal, Julia, a double homicide, with one of the victims a foreign diplomat. We have solid evidence – Leonid’s coat soaked with your neighbor’s blood, her blood on his knife. Why give the cops a reason to doubt our story by making shit up?”
“Because I don’t want to be known as the ashtray killer the rest of my life. Men find me scary enough as it is.”
I agreed to do it her way. But it meant keeping the FBI at bay. By rights they should get the call, the killing of a diplomat being a federal matter. But G-men have secret potions for tracking footsteps and detecting partial prints and all like that. Better to have the local coppers barge in and trample the crime scene like a herd of cattle. I would make sure they treated Leonid’s blood-soaked coat and knife with care.
We took a moment to contemplate Leonid’s corpse splayed out on the bare wood of the entryway, his deep-set eyes staring skyward, his skull resting in a pool of purpling blood. I had expected to feel joy at vanquishing my stalwart foe. I felt satisfied he was gone, sure, but nothing approaching joy. It’s a peculiar thing to say but somehow my youth – my wild, intemperate, fortune-kissed youth – died with Leonid.
We wiped Julia’s prints from the ashtray and replaced them with mine. We quickly bogused up a story. I got up to call the cops, thinking Leonid was unconscious. Leonid came at me with his knife, we struggled. I grabbed the ashtray and bonked him.
The yarn was well-ventilated. Why didn’t I tie up the suspect before leaving him unattended? How did I grab the ashtray off the coffee table in the parlor when I was wrestling Leonid in the entryway? But I would make it work somehow.
Tommy entered and surveyed the wreckage. “I gave the neighbor lady mouth to mouth,” he said, “but she was too far gone.” He looked down at Leonid. “What happened to him?”
“Go home, Tommy, go home to your wife and kids.”
“I don’t gotta talk to the coppers?”
“I’ll handle it, you’ve done enough for one night,” I said. “Just keep it on the QT for now.”
He turned to go with a quick wave and stopped. “How’d you know I got a wife and kids?”
“You look exhausted.”
Tommy laughed and banged off down the hall.
Julia got out her Kodak and said she wanted to snap my photo for her story. I told her no.
“Hal, you were on television.”
“Yes, but a photo in a newspaper is a document. It’ll go into a thousand file cabinets and come back to bite me someday.”
“I can’t do the story without your photo!”
“I’m in the Chaney High School yearbook, Class of ’43.”
I didn’t really care about getting my picture in the paper, my cloak and dagger days were behind me. But I wasn’t posing for one. Wisner would be cheesed off enough without seeing my dopey mug on the front page.
-----
I got through my late night sweat session at Washington D.C. Police Headquarters in one piece. The graveyard shift watch commander didn’t really swallow my account of what happened but he couldn’t prove different. Miss Julia must have held up her end because the watch commander gave up on me about four a.m.
I got a few hours of blessed shuteye in an empty holding cell and a leftover baloney sandwich. The food in my Romanian barn stall was better.
Chief of Police Hyram Johnson was a beefy man with a Southern twang and thinning rust-colored hair. He wasn’t interested in trying to poke holes in my story the next morning. He wanted the big picture. Who I reported to at CIA. Why a Soviet Embassy attaché had taken such an interest in me and a small time reporter.
I told him enough to make him scuttlebutt king of the PD lunch room for a week. Why not? My life was an open book.
The Chief plied me with coffee and donuts in a most congenial interrogation, in no particular hurry to turn me loose. I wondered who of my many admirers would finally kick down the door and spring me. William King Harvey? Captain Candybar? J. Edgar Hoover?
Turns out it was Chief Johnson’s secretary. She breezed into his office following a cursory tap tap on the door to present him with a newspaper. I was sitting across from his desk, left wrist cuffed to the chair leg, right hand free to sip and chew.
The Chief read the front page and gave out with a low whistle. “Well,” he said, “she shore din’t waste any time.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Your girlfriend,” he said with a wink and showed me the headline in the early afternoon edition of the Evening Star.
CIA Hero Bests Soviet Spy in Desperate Fight to the Death!
Good Lord.
“I got a coupla G-men cooling their heels in the lobby who are just itchin’ to talk to you.”
No doubt.
“But I hate them stuck-up cokesackers. What say we smuggle you out the back door and send you down to E Street in Foggy Bottom.”
“Where’s that?”
“I thought you worked for Frank Wisner?”
“I do.”
“That’s where his office is.”
How did he know that? Had Wisner called? So far as I knew he was still in London.
“Never been there,” I said.
“Why not?”
It looked like Chief Johnson was angling for one last dollop of juicy gossip before he’d turn me loose.
“Because, Chief Johnson, I am what the Office of Policy Co-ordination terms a covert agent without portfolio.”
The Chief liked this, but his eyebrows indicated he wanted more. I laid it on thick.
“I’m an off-the-books operative authorized to perform sabotage, subterfuge and, in extreme cases, subject to National Security Council sanction, termination with extreme prejudice.”
Chief Johnson’s eyes narrowed. “Are you funnin’ me?”
“No sir.” I gave him my best hard-eyed stare. “And we never had this conversation.”
I was uncuffed and bundled out the back door in short order.