Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“What do you intend to do?” he said. “You’re surely not going to make a career of working for that charming idiot in PIO?”

“I’m going to school in the fall.”

“Where?”

“Columbia, if I can get in.”

“To study what?”

“Oriental languages probably.”

“Then?”

“Teach.”

“That takes a Ph.D., unless you like to starve.”

“I have time.”

“How many prep schools have you gone to since 1942?”

I shrugged. “Eight or nine.”

“What happened?”

“I thought you’d been checking.”

“Let’s say that I’m confirming my research.”

“I got kicked out of most of them. Sometimes for gambling. Some times for drinking. Sometimes for what they called ‘incorrigibility’ and sometimes I just walked away.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“I learned how to read and write and I lost an Australian accent.”

“Your parents are dead, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Were they all private schools?”

“All but the last.”

“Who paid your tuition?”

“There was a revocable trust fund that my guardian set up.”

“Gorman Smalldane?”

“Yes.”

“Is he really your guardian?”

“He is whenever I need one.”

“And the rest of the time?”

“I’m on my own. Sometimes I’ve stayed with Gorman in New York. Once I joined him in Paris for a summer after the war. Once in Athens.”

“Do you speak Greek?”

“No.”

“How many languages?”

“It used to be six or seven. But it’s less now. My Chinese, French, and German are still good. I’ve forgotten the rest.”

“Those were all ‘progressive’ schools that you attended. I use progressive in quotes.”

“Their catalogues didn’t.”

“Where did you finally get your high school diploma?”

“Reno. Smalldane fixed it up, I dealt blackjack there the summer I was sixteen. He fixed that up, too. Then I took an equivalency test and they put me in the twelfth grade. I finished the year and they gave me a diploma. Gorman flew out from New York for the graduation exercises but we got too drunk to attend.”

“Then?”

“Then I went to Montana.”

“To school?”

“For a year.”

“Where?”

“The University of Montana. At Missoula.”

“Why there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I was born in Montana.”

“But you left when you were an infant.”

“When I was nine months old.”

“And went to Shanghai.”

“Where my father got killed by dumb pilot error and where I grew up in a whorehouse. Why all the questions, Colonel, when you know the answers?”

Gay studied me for several seconds as if he were trying to decide something. “Who were your friends when you were growing up? Or playmates, if they’re still called that.”

“In Shanghai?”

“Yes.”

“Whores mostly.”

“No children?”

“A few street Arabs.”

“And back in the States?”

I shook my head. “No childhood chums, Colonel.”

“Not even your classmates?”

“They were children.”

“What were you?”

“I don’t know. I just wasn’t a child anymore.”

“Were you always treated as an adult?”

“In Shanghai?”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t always treated as an adult, but I was talked to as one. There’s a difference.”

“And when you got back to the States they tried to talk to you as a child.”

“Something like that, but it was too late.”

“What about Smalldane?”

I smiled. “I think I’ve always been a contemporary to him. A fellow orphan. Which says something either about his childishness or my maturity.”

The colonel nodded as if satisfied on some important point. He turned to his daughter and smiled. “I think Mr. Dye and I could have another beer without endangering our poker skill.”

She rose, started toward the kitchen, and then stopped. “How long do you want it to take, five minutes or ten?”

“Five will do nicely,” Gay said.

When she had gone he put his head back on the couch and looked at the ceiling. “You’re set on Columbia?”

“I like New York,” I said.

“Sometimes I’m in a position to recommend full scholarships for deserving students. Not to Columbia unfortunately.”

“Where?”

He named a small, rich private school on the Eastern seaboard, not too far from Washington. “Interested?”

“Go on.”

“It has an excellent reputation in your field — Oriental studies and languages. Even Joe McCarthy thinks so. He’s having the chairman of the department hauled up before his committee next week.”

“Why?”

“He thinks the man caused us to lose China.”

“We never had it to lose,” I said. “Nobody did.”

“This guy can take care of himself,” Gay said. “We’re not worried about him. But it’s going to destroy some others and we’re going to have to replace them. And then we’ll have to replace our replacements.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I didn’t expect you to.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“I want to find out if you’re interested in a scholarship. It pays four hundred a month plus all fees and tuition. You can double the four hundred with poker.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m interested, but I never knew the army to be so generous.”

“I didn’t mention the army.”

“I’ll guess again. State Department.”

“Hardly.”

“That leaves the CIA.”

“They’re even more frightened of McCarthy than State. They’ve already started dumping and he hasn’t even mentioned them yet.”

“Just spell it out, Colonel.”

He lit a cigarette and leaned back on the couch so that he had a good view of the ceiling again. “It hasn’t got a name really, so we’ll just call it Section Two. Okay?”

“What’s Section One?”

“There isn’t any.”

“I see.”

“The Section is going to lose some of its best people as replacements for those who McCarthy will get through his witch-hunt. We can’t do anything about the witch-hunt. It’s got to run its course. All we can do is fill in the gaps that it creates at State and CIA with our own talent. In the meantime, we have to recruit new blood that four, five, or even ten years from now will start recruiting its own replacements. Do you follow me?”

“It’s perfectly clear,” I said. “The scholarship has strings.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

“You mean I can collect the four hundred dollars a month, pick up a degree, and then wave goodbye?”

“Or two degrees. Even three.”

“And no strings?”

“None,” he said.

“How much can you tell me about it?”

“Section Two?”

“Yes.”

“Not much. It doesn’t exist on paper.”

“And it’s not CIA?”

“Definitely not. It’s what you might call an intelligence bank. When the others run short, they borrow from us.”

“Borrow what?”

“Whatever they need.”

“When was it set up?”

“In 1945 when we knew China was going.”

“You didn’t anticipate McCarthy eight years ago.”

“No,” he said. “We anticipated the reaction, not the person. Some would be blamed and that we could predict fairly well. The individuals, I mean. Somebody, of course, would have to do the blaming and it turned out to be Joe McCarthy. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been another. We knew that valuable men would be lost and that they’d have to have replacements. Pure ones, if you follow me.”

“I do.”

“So we started recruiting them.”

“And now that you’re lending them out, you need some more.”