“I’m in sales.” I nibbled a corner of burnt toast. “So where did you serve?”
Some pride came into his expression. “Korea,” he said, and shoveled some eggs in.
“You don’t look old enough.”
“I’m almost thirty.”
“That’s still not old enough for that war.”
He got a goofy little grin going. “So I lied about my age. I said I was eighteen but I was only fifteen.”
I laughed, sipped some juice. “I lied, too—but I had to shave some years
off,
to get in. I was in the big one.”
The dullness had left the blue eyes; they glittered with interest now. “Yeah? Where did
you
serve?”
“The Pacific. Guadalcanal.”
“No shit. You must have seen some real action.”
“Some,” I said, as casual as Audie Murphy trying to impress a starlet. I had a bite of eggs, then added, “I’d be lying if I said I had an easy time of it.”
“Nobody does. You get wounded?”
“Nothing serious, but, uh … they sent me home on a Section Eight. I went a little Asiatic.”
All of that was true, by the way. I’d gone home due to what they used to call shell shock and later termed battle fatigue, but was really just good old-fashioned crazy.
He was nodding. “Yeah, I got discharged, too. Didn’t get a Section Eight, but I talked to my share of Marine Corps shrinks, I’ll tell ya.”
My frankness had opened him up.
He was saying, “See, a mortar went off, right by me, and I got a concussion.” He tapped his head. “Got myself a steel plate in my scalp.”
“That’s rough.”
“You think
that’s
rough? Right after I get out, I manage to get myself into a damn
car
crash … not sayin’ I wasn’t partly to blame. I’d knocked back a few, and was out of sorts, ’cause I’d just been in, well, a kind of bar fight. Anyway, I wound up in a coma for three months.”
“You’re kidding. That
is
rough.”
“Tellin’
me
? Hell, I came out of it like a baby. Had to learn to walk, talk…” He held up his knife. “… even how to use a knife and fork. My old man had to teach me every basic skill of livin’, all over again. And you know what? It … it killed him.”
His eyes were moist.
“How do you mean, Tommy?”
“Hard to talk about. Day, very damn day, that I felt like I was myself again, like I could go out in the world and be a real man … he falls down dead with a goddamn heart attack. It just ain’t fair. Ain’t fuckin’ fair … excuse the French.”
A busboy stopped to collect our trays. Vallee exchanged smiles with the kid.
“That’s a lousy break, Tommy. What did you do?”
“I’ll tell you what I did. In ’55, I re-upped, is what I did. Got myself a second hitch.”
“After a
medical
discharge?” And a plate in the head?
He shrugged. “I must’ve healed up, at least enough to suit them. Not to say I didn’t hit my share of potholes, and, like I said, those shrinks made a hobby out of my ass.… Only served another year and a half or so before I got discharged, once and for all.”
“Any medals for your trouble?”
His chin raised a little, propelled by pride. “Purple Heart and oak-leaf cluster. How about you, Nate?”
“Purple Heart. Silver Star.” Also true. Not a card I like to play, but perfect for this game.
His eyes popped. “Silver Star! You’re the genuine article, man! That is goddamn impressive. I have to shake your hand.”
We already had, hadn’t we? But we did it again.
“Tommy, what made you enlist so young?”
“Oh, I always wanted to be Marine, long as I can remember. My older cousin, Mike, he was a Marine. He was a great guy. And I guess I was like every kid who watched Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers on TV—I
loved
to play guns.”
“Still like guns?”
“Oh yeah. I still go shooting. I, even, uh … well, I own a few. How about you?”
“I do a little shooting now and then.” I finished the orange juice. Breakfast hadn’t been bad, for cafeteria food. “Good to hear you have a trade, Tommy. Some military guys can’t seem to readjust to civilian life. They just can’t let go.”
He shrugged, his eyes twinkling. Yes, twinkling. “I keep my hand in.”
“Yeah? How is that possible?”
He leaned in, conspiratorially. “In New York … just between us gyrenes?… Would you believe I trained anti-Castro guerrillas?”
“This was before the Bay of Pigs?”
“Naw! We lost a hell of a lot of good men there, though, didn’t we?”
“Who were you training exactly?”
“Cuban exiles. They want their country back. They want a free Cuba! Don’t you?”
“Where in New York did you train guerrillas?”
“Well, not in Manhattan!” He giggled. That’s right, giggled. “Long Island. Ever hear of Levittown?”
I had heard of Levittown, and a more unlikely place for guerrilla warfare training I could not picture.
Vallee was saying, “No, this is
today
, Nate, this is going on right now. There’s a war going on, you know. A secret war. Against the Communists. You ever hear of the John Birch Society?”
“I’m a member in good standing,” I lied.
The John Birch Society was an ultra-right-wing movement started by candy mogul Robert Welch, who deemed Dwight D. Eisenhower an agent of the Commies. For a bunch of screwballs, they had attracted considerable mainstream attention.
Vallee was talking very fast now, his high-pitched voice almost shrill. “Then you
get
it, Nate—you know we have to be vigilant. We have to be
more
than vigilant … we have to take action. What would you say if I told you another Cuban invasion was coming? And not to be surprised if you look in the papers someday soon and see somebody took care of that son of a bitch Castro.”
This little lunatic, if he’d been training guerrillas on Long Island, was—whether he knew it or not—a pawn of the CIA, and likely had been for some time. How else would a plate-in-the-head medical reject get to reenlist in the Marines? And the guerrilla training he’d done in fucking Levittown, aimed at taking Castro down, meant he was a part of Operation Mongoose, too … though he’d likely never heard the phrase.
“You’re right about the Bay of Pigs,” I said, quietly goading him. “It’s that bastard Kennedy’s fault.”
“
Yes!
Yes, exactly. He’s the primary obstacle.” If he’d opened his eyes any wider, they’d have rolled out of his head onto the Formica. “He’s surrendering our military forces, our security, into Communist hands. We have to eliminate the Communist influences in Washington, Nate, and we need to start with Jay Fucking Kay, pardon the French.”
“You know, he’s coming to town this Saturday—Kennedy.”
Vallee smiled his small smile. “I know. I know. He’ll be near where I work.…”
Mention of work made him think to check his watch. “Hell, I’m gonna be late! Nice meeting you, Nate.”
His breakfast gone, he rose, we shook hands again, and he was gone.
He was gone, all right.
* * *
The Eat Rite manager didn’t know where Tommy Vallee lived, but he thought that one of his busboys might, which turned out to be the case. The address was on Paulina, less than two blocks away, so I left the Jag parked on the street near the cafeteria and hoofed it over.
Once past a block of nondescript brick apartment buildings, this was a nice enough neighborhood, with plenty of trees and expansive lawns, in what many decades ago had been a well-to-do community, a small town that the city engulfed.
In less than five minutes, I was on the sidewalk outside the three-story paint-peeling-off white frame house where Vallee lived. Three stories was generous, since the top floor was the peaked-roofed attic. An open but roof-sheltered porch fronted what had once been a big one-family residence; acknowledging the structure’s current rooming-house status was a metal fire escape that climbed one side all the way to the attic.
I took the eight steps to the porch where several old worn wooden chairs sat, not yet hauled in for winter. In summer around neighborhoods like this, people sat out and watched kids, fireflies, and the world going by. The door I knocked on was an echo of the handsome residence this once had been—a solid if weathered well-crafted door with cut-glass decorations in an arc above with narrow stained-glass panels on either side. The only sign this still wasn’t a one-family dwelling was the oversize mailbox.
The woman who answered was slender and handsome in a severe, time-carved way, with very pretty light-blue eyes; probably in her mid-fifties. She wore a brown-and-orange-print housedress with an apron, her graying blonde hair tucked under a yellow scarf. No makeup, but you could tell she could have once given Leni Riefenstahl a run for the money back at the cabaret.
I think she liked my looks, too, because instead of frowning and beating me with that broom she was leaning on, she cast something my way that had the makings of a smile in it.
Her voice was a kind of guttural purr. “Yes, young man?”
Young man, huh? I was easily her age. She
did
like me.
I flashed her my credentials. I tried to make it quick enough that she wouldn’t catch the name “Heller.” Some people are known to hold grudges.
“I’m here on a confidential matter for the government,” I said. “May I step in?”
“Certainly.” She had the kind of accent that made each syllable seem considered.
I stepped inside and she closed the door behind us. She rested the broom against a wall and casually removed the scarf from beauty-shop hair, and the apron, too, setting them on a small table with tenant mail piled up on it.
The foyer was enclosed, with several apartment doors on either side, a spindle-banister stairway rising to more doors. No framed paintings or family pictures were on the uncluttered wallpapered walls to remind you that this had been a home, before it got chopped up into flats.
“My name is Peters. How may I help you, Mr. Heller?”
She
had
seen the name.
“
Miss
Peters?”
“Missus, I am a widow.”
“Sorry.”
“It has been twenty years. He drove a bus and had a heart attack in the intersection at State and Randolph. No condolences are necessary.”
“Oh. All right.”
“Do we need to go somewhere and sit, Mr. Heller? Would you like coffee, tea?”
“I don’t think so, no thank you. You have a roomer named Vallee? Thomas Vallee?”
Thin curves of eyebrow arched. “I do. He is a polite, strange little man. Is the government interested in him?”
Not
why
is the government interested in him—
is
the government interested in him. She’d been in Germany during the war, all right.
“This is fairly routine,” I said, going the Jack Webb route, “but Mr. Vallee is known to have made threatening remarks about the President. And since Mr. Kennedy is coming to town on Saturday, we would like to check up on him.”
Her nicely carved face was placid. “Of him I know very little. He pays his rent on time. He sometimes has men in his room. But I do not judge. Not when he pays his rent on time.”
The way she said that made me think less of co-conspirators than of something sexual. Maybe I was just remembering the glance Vallee and that busboy exchanged.
I asked straight out: “Is he a homosexual?”
“I have my suspicions.”
I found myself recalling that the homosexuals had been in line right next to the Jews at those very special showers. Still, I kind of dug her. She was a nice-looking middle-aged gal, and she couldn’t help being a German any more than I could being a sort of Jew.
“Do you know his place of employment?”
“It is a printing business. Downtown. Where it is exactly, I do not know.”
We’d have to find that out. According to Vallee, it was on the parade route.
“What I’d like to do, Mrs. Peters, is have a look at your tenant’s flat.”
“Certainly.”
She did not ask if I had a search warrant or any official document justifying such a request.
Boy,
had she been in Germany during the war.…
As I followed her up the stairs, she glanced back at me and said, “I hope you will not be critical of me to your people.”
“Why is that?”
“Because there are things in Mr. Vallee’s room.”
“Things in his room?”
We were on the landing now.
She said, “Things that I find troubling. Things that perhaps I should have alerted you of.”
“Okay. Well, I guess I’ll see for myself.”
Vallee’s room was unremarkable in most ways—a good-size single room with a living area and a bedroom area, no kitchenette, just a place to stay. Furniture dating back twenty years or more, faded floral wallpaper of similar vintage. A small rabbit-ears portable TV perched on a stand near his bed, and a plank-and-brick bookcase under a window bore paperbacks by Fleming, Robbins, and Spillane—not far removed from my own reading habits. The muscle-building magazines on his nightstand wasn’t my scene, but to each his own.
Where our tastes really differed was the collage on the wall next to his bed—a homemade artistic masterpiece consisting of newspaper and magazines clippings, all pertaining to JFK, whose face was inevitably doctored in various ways: red ink turning him into a devil, or an X through his face, or just plain scribbled out. Various threats were scrawled in margins, not that subtle—for example, “Bastard must die!” and that oldie but goodie by the ever-popular John Wilkes Booth, “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” Vallee misspelled the latter, however, as “Tyrranous.” Dinosaurs, presidents—just so they’re extinct, right?
Frau Peters was at my side suddenly. “Will he pay?”
I said, “Well, he has to actually try something before he can be arrested. This kind of thing is covered by freedom of speech.”
“No, I mean, will he pay for ruining my wallpaper?”
I almost laughed. “That’s between you and him, Mrs. Peters.”
She nodded, filing that away. She pointed, like the Wicked Queen in “Snow White” indicating which direction the huntsman should go. “There is something you should see in the closet.”