Free Red Rag Blues by Derek Robinson Page B

said. “Most criminals like to act but hate to think, because thinking is such an effort. He’s the opposite. Couldn’t rob a gas station if you gave him Genghis Khan for back-up. All his activity isbetween the ears. That’s where we’ll catch him. He thinks he knows everything. Well, nobody knows everything.”
3
    Harding had been with MI5 or MI6 since the beginning of the Hitler war, and he had no illusions about the kind of men who were attracted to work in intelligence. Some were crooks. The winds of war scattered money and they wanted it. Some were dreamers, romantics who believed secrecy had a magic quality. Some were crusaders, determined to save their country by subterfuge. These types were dangerous men who killed their friends and chalked it up to bad luck, and went on and did it again. Fortunately they were few, and usually, in time, they managed to kill themselves.
    Most of the other people in intelligence were as sober and hardworking as accountants but secrecy breeds arrogance as night grows mushrooms, and every intelligence organization has its share of shits. Harding had known the good and the bad. The best of the good, in his opinion—the cleverest, most balanced, certainly most successful and yet still the most approachable—was Kim Philby. Shame about the early retirement: a great waste, Harding thought. Still, friends were friends. He made it his business to know Kim’s home number.
    Early in the afternoon, he called Philby and reported that a search had turned up no sign of Eldorado’s manuscript autobiography. “Of course it may be in a suitcase in a locker in Penn Station.”
    â€œOr it may be on a publisher’s desk,” Philby said.
    â€œYes.”
    Pause.
    â€œEven from three thousand miles, I can hear you wondering,” Philby said. They both laughed. “Why should it matter? War’s long since over. We won. Who cares what a superannuated double agent has to say?”
    â€œBut you care, sir.”
    â€œLuis Cabrillo has more enemies than he knows, some of them quite frightful types. It would be unwise to excite them. Luis worked day and night for the Allies. Hate to see him killed.”
    â€œAll three of us agree on that, sir.”
    It won a chuckle from Philby, which made Harding’s day.
4
    Luis annoyed Bonnie Scott.
    She’d given up talking about the blacklist and the witchhunt to anyone who wasn’t in the firing line. People didn’t want to know. Some were crusading anti-Communist bigots. Some were tired survivors of the Depression years who would agree with anything rather than risk losing their jobs. Most were ordinary Americans with a gut feeling that McCarthy must have stumbled across some vast Commie conspiracy, otherwise why all this panic every time he turned over another rock? So what if he didn’t have class? Who would you sooner have as sheriff: John Wayne or Fred Astaire? Well, then.
    But Luis Cabrillo was a clean sheet. He arrived in New York knowing nothing about McCarthyism, and when he was told, he refused to take it seriously. His dismissive shrug infuriated Bonnie. She phoned Max at his fortified apartment on Avenue C. Max had a suggestion. “Billy Jago,” he said. “Let’s go now.”
    â€œWill he be in?”
    â€œIs Bismark a herring? See you at the ferry.”
    Bonnie, Julie and Luis went by subway. They took the express and got off at South Ferry. “Told you it was fast,” Julie said to him.
    â€œNot fast enough. A chap can take only so much advice about rectal itch.”
    Max was waiting for them. He looked pleased. An old friend had promised him work, recording radio commercials for Standard Oil of Indiana. He couldn’t do it as Max Webber, so he was calling himself David Meyer. “Guy I knew in the army,” he said. “Got hit by artillery, ours, theirs, who cares? We shoveled Italian dirt into a mattress cover and buried it and