Elmore Leonard: Up in Honey's Room

An easygoing type. He might not be her idea of a Kevin, but that’s what he was. She said, “Kevin, how long have you been a G-man?”

See if she could find out how old he was.

“I finished my training this past summer. Before that I was in the service.”

“Where’re you from?” Honey said. “I hear someplace faintly down-home the way you speak.”

“I didn’t think I had an accent.”

She said, “It isn’t East Texas, but around there.”

He told her Tulsa, Oklahoma. He went to school there, the University of Tulsa, graduated midyear right after Pearl and joined the cavalry.

Making him no more than twenty-five, Honey at least five years older than this good-looking boy from Oklahoma. She said, “The cavalry?”

“I went to language school to learn Japanese, then spent the next year with the First Cavalry Division in Louisiana, Australia, and New Guinea, training for jungle combat, the kind they had on Guadalcanal. I made second lieutenant and was assigned to the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, the one J. E. B. Stuart commanded before the Civil War. He was always a hero of mine, the reason I joined the First Cav, not knowing we’d be dismounted in the Pacific theater. You know the Stuart I’m talking about?”

“You told me, Jeb Stuart.”

“Shot through the lungs at Yellow Tavern, the war almost over. Do you have a hero?”

“Jane Austen,” Honey said. “Where were you in the Pacific with the cavalry?”

“Los Negros in the Admiralties, two hundred miles north of New Guinea, two degrees south of the equator. Destroyers dropped us off and we went ashore twenty-nine February of this year, to draw fire and locate enemy positions. I was with a recon unit so we were the first wave. We wanted an airstrip on Momote plantation, thirteen hundred yards from the beach, sitting in there among rows and rows of palm trees, coconuts all over the ground.”

Honey said, “Were you scared to death?” at ease with him, able to say something like that.

“You bet I was scared, but you’re with all these serious guys sharpening their trench knives. On the destroyer taking us to the drop-off that’s what you did, sharpened your knife. Some of the guys had brand-new tattoos that said death before dishonor and you start to think, Wait a minute, what am I doing here? What you don’t want to do is throw up or wet your pants. Right before you go in is a tricky time.”

“Well, you made it.”

“I made it with metal frags in my back. The evening of the second day a Jap threw a grenade I saw coming and it took me out of the war. I never did get to ride with the cavalry. But I got a Purple Heart out of it, an honorable discharge and a visit from the Bureau. They came to the VA hospital and got around to asking if I’d like to be an FBI agent, since I’d finished college, had taken accounting and spoke Japanese, sort of.”

“So they send you after German spies,” Honey said. “Tell me, does Walter still live in that house on Kenilworth? He’s rigid about his appearance, but he sure let the house run down, never put any money in it. He was saving up for something.”

“He turned the floor above the market into a small apartment.”

“He isn’t married, is he?”

“Not since you left him. There is a woman who might be his girlfriend, Countess Vera Mezwa Radzykewycz.” Kevin looked at his notebook. “Born in Odessa, in the Ukraine. She claims she was married to a Polish count, killed leading a cavalry charge against German panzers.”

“You and the count,” Honey said, “a couple of cavalrymen.”

He saw her smile and looked at his notes again. “Vera came here in 1943 and leased a home on Boston Boulevard. She has a young guy, Bohdan Kravchenko, also Ukrainian, cooks and keeps house for her.”

“If Vera lives on Boston Boulevard she’s got money. Walter’s interested in her?”

“They see each other.”

“The countess climbs the stairs to his apartment over a meat market?”

“Most of the time it’s at her place.”

“Why do you think she’s a spy, because she’s keeping company with Walter?”

“I’m not telling you everything we have on her.”

“But she was married to a Polish count, a war hero?”

“There’s no record of the count as an officer in the Polish Army. That’s the cover they made up for Vera. We believe she was trained by the Gestapo, was given money and credentials and came on a ship to Canada as a highly respected Ukrainian refugee. Vera moved to Detroit and gives lectures to women’s groups, tells them how awful it is to live under the Nazis, no shampoo, no cold cream. We’ve got her down as a possible enemy alien.”

“Doing what?”

“Gathering information about war production.”

“The Germans don’t know we’re making bombers?”

“Now you’re acting smart.”

“What I’m asking,” Honey said, “is if you think what Vera sends the Germans does them any good.”

“It doesn’t matter. If she’s working as a German agent, the U.S. attorney will bring her up on the charge and put her away. It doesn’t matter if her information helps the enemy or not.”

“What about Walter?”

“He’s been a U.S. citizen since he was fourteen. If he’s involved in anything subversive it’s an act of treason. He could hang.”

Kevin looked at his notebook and turned a page, then a few more and stopped. “How about Joseph John Aubrey?”

Honey shook her head.

“Lives in Griffin, Georgia.”

“Oh, Joe Aubrey, yeah,” Honey said, “owns restaurants. He was big in the German-American Bund at that time. Walter met him at the rally they had in New York.”

“Madison Square Garden,” Kevin said, “1939.”

“Walter brought me along thinking I’d be impressed by all the fans Fritz Kuhn had, the American Hitler.”

“Over twenty thousand,” Kevin said, “they filled the Garden. You met Joseph J. Aubrey, talked to him?”

“You don’t talk to Joe Aubrey, you listen to his rant or walk away. Joe was an active member of the Bund and a Grand Dragon of the Klan. Bund get-togethers he’d say, ‘Heah’s some more of the dirty tricks international Jewery is doin’ to spread Commonism.’ That’s what he called it, ‘Commonism.’ At Klan rallies he’d say, ‘We gonna have integration, nigger kids and our white children goin’ to the same school-’”

“Over his dead body,” Kevin said.

“You’re close. Joe said, ‘When they pry my hands from my empty rifle and lay me to rest in the cold ground.’ Joe Aubrey never shuts up. He got rich in the restaurant business promoting finger-lickin’ barbecue.”

“He has a plane, a Cessna?”

“Yeah, he’d fly up and spend a few days at the Book Cadillac. He always stayed at the Book. One time he was there, Joe said he was at the desk registering, he looked up and could not believe his eyes. He said, ‘You know that dude nigger Count Basil? Wears that kind of skipper cap so you think he has a yacht? He’s walkin’ around the hotel lobby bold as brass. What was he doin’ there? He couldn’t of been stayin’ at the ho-tel.’”

Kevin said, “Who’s Count Basil?”

“He meant Count Basie. Joe doesn’t know the ‘One O’Clock Jump’ from ‘Turkey in the Straw.’”

Kevin looked at the notebook page he held open.

“Did you know a Dr. Michael George Taylor?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He might’ve come later,” Kevin said, looked at his book again and said, “No, he was at the rally in New York. Though I bet Walter knew him from before.”

“That rally,” Honey said, “a sports arena full of all these boobs sieg heil ing everything Fritz Kuhn said, this thug in a uniform standing in front of a giant portrait of George Washington. He led the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and then talked forever, saying President Roosevelt was part of the international Jewish banking conspiracy. I remember Joe Aubrey calling FDR Frank D. Rosenfeld and the New Deal the Jew Deal. That’s what the whole thing was about, blame the Jews for whatever was wrong with the world.”