Joseph Kanon - Stardust

“You want to listen to this or just get up on a soapbox? I was keeping an eye because something was wrong. I knew your brother. We did business together. And then all of a sudden he was acting funny. Upset. And I thought, which? Is he upsetting himself or is somebody upsetting him? So I started keeping an eye, friendly, to see what was going on. That night I’m sitting in the car on Cherokee. No idea what he was doing there. A woman? Maybe. I see him go in, but I don’t see anyone else. So somebody who lives there. Then the crash. People come running out. I go take a look. And there he is.” He pointed to the picture. “The police come right away. Everybody’s talking in the alley, he’s a jumper. That fairy night clerk, carrying on. And I get that he rents there, it’s his place. And I think, this is going to be a mess.”

“So you decide to be the janitor.”

“You know what happens? A suicide, anything suspicious? They’re going to seal the place. Make an investigation. That’s not going to do anybody good.”

“Not you anyway. How does it look? You go after somebody and he finally runs so hard he jumps. That’s not the kind of press Tenney needs. What his files are really doing to people.”

Riordan sat back. “Whoa,” he said, putting up his hand in a stop gesture. “Look, you’re not playing with a full deck here. That’s not how it was.”

“No?”

“Nobody was chasing him. He was working with me. He was a source.”

For a second, even the sounds of Lucey’s seemed to fall away, his head stopped up with a cotton numbness.

“What kind of source,” he said quietly.

“A source. He gave me names. Things to follow up. You’ve got this backwards. He helped make the files.”

“I don’t believe that,” Ben said, suddenly chilled, his blood stopped for a minute.

Riordan shrugged. “That doesn’t change anything.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“I can show you reports. In the files.”

Ben said nothing, still digesting this. Then he looked down to the photo.

“You bastard,” he said. “That’s why you thought he jumped. That he couldn’t live with himself anymore.”

Riordan looked away, embarrassed. “People are unpredictable.”

“Especially informers. They turn on everybody. Then themselves. Is that it?”

“What are you talking about? Informer. He was a patriot.”

“Jesus Fucking Christ. A patriot. What did you do to make him do it? What club did you use.”

“You’ve got this wrong. Nobody made him do anything. We were all on the same side in this.”

“He was a Communist.”

“In Germany. Was. He saw what it meant. Right here.” He held his hand close to his face. “You see it that clear, you want to do something.”

“Like shop people to you.”

Riordan took a breath. “Sometimes, you stop believing in something, you go the other way. You hate it.”

“And hate yourself.”

“No, not like that.”

“Then why did you think he’d jumped?”

Riordan looked away again. “People get ideas. You never know how they’re going to-” He stopped, leaning forward. “But that’s why. It didn’t make sense to me, the way I knew him. So I thought, what if it wasn’t? Just the way you did. I thought, what if he had help? Someone who knew. Wanted him stopped.”

“Communists, you mean. At it again. Is that the way you think Party discipline works? Throw people out of windows. You should go to work for Minot.”

Riordan looked at him. “I do.”

“You work for Minot?”

“It’s not a secret.”

Ben studied him again, as if he were moving pieces of his face, seeing him new, rearranged. “And that’s why Bunny made the call,” he said, half to himself. “Not for you.”

“Ken doesn’t forget a favor.”

“And nobody would know Danny was feeding you. Minot’s own Bureau.”

“Just one of the field agents,” Riordan said smoothly. “Tenney recommended me.”

“After all your good work there.”

“You want to be a wiseass, go ahead. I don’t care. Your brother knew what was what. Maybe you will, too, someday. Everybody will. Minot’s going to take this national.”

“Take what national?”

“The threat in the industry.” He held out his hand, stopping a passing waitress. “You want another?”

Ben looked at his beer, scarcely touched, then sat back, staring at the picture. Riordan waited, letting him catch his breath.

“You’re surprised.”

“Why would he do it?”

“Why wouldn’t he? It’s the right thing to do.”

Ben looked up at him. “To fight the threat. Which one? Betty Grable taking over the government?”

“You think it’s a joke. It’s not. This is a war of ideas.”

“What’s the last idea you saw in the movies?”

Riordan said nothing, not wanting to quarrel.

“How long was all this?” Ben said. “How long did you know him?”

“Couple of years. Since the Bureau. He was a friend to the Bureau.”

“What kind of friend?”

“We asked for some help, he gave it.”

“You asked for help? What, go through Herb Yates’s mail?”

“We don’t need people for that. We know what people say, what they write to each other. What we need to know is what they think. Your brother had special access.”

“To whom?” Ben said, chilled again, apprehensive.

“He did us a service. But I think he did them a service, too. Wartime, the Bureau has to keep an eye on enemy aliens. It’s our job. But you don’t want to make people uncomfortable. Not if they’re what they say they are.”

“He spied on his friends?” Ben said, suddenly seeing the exile faces at the funeral, Heinrich and Alma and Feuchtwanger. Hans and Liesl. Family.

“I wouldn’t use that term. He reassured us, that’s closer. That they were all right. Well, Brecht I still wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw. But we got nothing yet, so we can’t touch him. Eisler we already knew. And the Mann kid’s a fruit, that’s always a risk. The others, harmless, more or less. But we had to know that. So like I say, he did everybody a service.”

“The Bureau spied on them? These people risked their lives. Fighting Nazis.”

“So they say. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good for America. They have a different idea of politics over there. You ask me to tell you the difference between a Nazi and a Communist and what would I say? This much?” He held up two fingers, a tiny space apart. “At the Bureau we call them Communazis-they’re both on the same side, so why not put them together? We needed to keep tabs. Your brother saw it. How the Reds tried to use them-small stuff, innocent, put your name on a letter, then maybe not so innocent. He was worried about them being used. We knew how he felt.”

“How? You tap his phone?”

Riordan ignored this. “So we asked him to help. You know, the Bureau, it’s hard to say no. Wartime, it’s a patriotic duty.”

“And then you kept asking.”

“He saw how it was going in the industry. So he gave me a hand.”

“Real pals.” Ben looked again at the alley picture. “But you couldn’t even go over to the body, see if you could help. Just stood there thinking how to cover your ass.”

“He was dead. I thought he was dead.”

“How’s that feel? Having someone’s blood on your hands?”

Riordan glanced up at the returning waitress, but she seemed not to have overheard, smiling as she put down his glass and moved on. He took a sip of his beer.

“How do you figure that?”

“First you think he jumped because he got disgusted with himself. For what? The work he was doing for you. That’s what you thought, isn’t it?”

Riordan said nothing.