A Hello To Arms

Prologue:

The Snakes Are Looser

April 1947

It’s all over. They’re going to kill me.

Those were my only thoughts, holed up in my dilapidated hotel after a night of murder and mayhem. Well, mostly just murder. I didn’t kill Howard Portley, the president of First Fiduciary, a New York bank with octopus tentacles extending to Los Angeles. That had been the girl, battered and abused, who shot Porkley, as I liked to call him for good and stout reasons.

I’d let her go. She had seen and lived enough mayhem—she was 17 going on 87. In making it look like a suicide, though, I had inadvertently dropped a tie clasp my new lover, the starlet Eva Knox, had given me. The clasp was a police badge with a red line drawn through it and seemed like the calling card of an ex-cop like me.

That led the LAPD and Moose Milkowski, an ex—and very dirty—cop, to the door of my hotel room. I had some photos of Moose with an underaged girl. Both Moose and the police had a strong motive for wanting to shoot first and ask questions later: Moose to get rid of the last traces of the photos, and the homicide squad to quash and neatly wrap up a case with a number of important people connected to the film business looking bad—or at least, less important.

I thought I would give negotiating a shot.

Whatever you think you’ve got on me, I didn’t do it, I began. And if you give me a chance, I can prove it. I’ll throw out my gun and come out with my hands up.

This started some deliberation on the other side of the door. Moose’s voice was the loudest, but the result was this from the captain of the squad: We don’t trust you, Palmer. Looks like we’re going to have to shoot our way in.

Any last words? Moose asked.

Just two, I shouted. Get bent.

My .45 had six chambers. I pointed it at the entrance, ready to unload all six as they battered the door down.

Just before the whole thing went up in flames there came a rapping, softly tapping, as the poet says. Outside the door were two new goons. One of them added his soft refrain.

Aloha, Palmer, came a gravelly voice. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Aloha usually means hello, not goodbye, you idiot. I hoped it was what you call a teachable moment.

I recognized that voice. It might be a way out of this mess. It belonged to Mutt, the bigger and dumber of two FBI agents from a rogue unit of the force involved in three murders and a bombing. Undoubtedly outside as well was his smaller and only somewhat craftier partner Jeff. Their real names were Mack Whitiker and Budd Arnold but to me they would always be the inept comedy duo from the funny papers.

It was like a high school football game, and I was the visiting side. Everyone in the stadium was cheering, not for their victory but for my defeat. It was nice to be wanted, but I needed to put an end to this charade if I could. I decided to punt.

Whitiker, before you do something you’ll later regret, I said to the smaller agent Budd, I need to have a word with you two privately. Can you ask the others to step away from the door?

Why should we? came the answer from Mack, the bigger, dumber one. But I heard the muffled sounds of the police beating a retreat despite Moose’s protests, and the agents approached the door.

How did you get here? I began. I’m always one for small talk. It helps to break the ice.

Come closer to the door and we’ll tell you, Mack whistled. His small talk was all about me getting near enough for them to blast me. His idea of an ice breaker was a pickaxe in my skull. But I thought I heard a rustling, as if his partner had put a hand on him and was backing him away.

Let me guess, I yelled from my spot behind the bed, which I had backed up to barricade the door. You two went back to burgle my place, but you didn’t find what you were looking for. You intercepted a call from the LAPD and invited yourselves along for the ride. Or collision, as it’s turning out to be.

Something like that, Budd said. What do you got for us, Palmer?

I got your confessions to three murders and a bombing on a tape that a sound man recorded at my place. A key to the locker where I stored it is right now on its way to Captain Nader of the homicide squad. It’ll be the end of your rogue squad and it will come back to haunt your boss, Hoover. Three high-profile murders in Tinseltown, including one of its leading stars, and the felonious assault of a labor leader—tough to keep a thing like that quiet.

Won’t hold up in any court, the taller, dumber one spat out, not realizing that he had just confirmed everything they had said in my office.

No, but it’ll make a big sensation in the court of public opinion, I said. Your unit and you two will be front page news. I hoped to hell this would work. I’d say you gentlemen need me alive.

I could hear Mack, the big dumb one, shuffling his feet—what for him passed as thinking. The wheels were apparently turning in Budd’s head as well. In his case this involved actual grey matter.

What do you want, and what are you offering? he asked.

I want free passage out of here. I want you guys to take over the investigation, impound the tie clasp so it looks I was never at the murder scene. In return, I’ll take you to the locker and you can have the tape. Then the whole thing goes away. You guys keep your jobs and your pensions and get back to murdering people in pursuit of truth, justice and the American way.

From back in the corridor, I heard Moose rumbling, Let’s get this show on the road. But the two FBI men had a different thought. They were about to ring down the curtain before our little play even got underway. They didn’t like it, but they had to accept it.

I heard some scurrying down the hallway. Soon came Moose’s exasperated This blows, and then the retreat of the homicide squad, leaving, I hoped, just my two friendly neighborhood FBI agents and me.

We’re impounding the evidence and taking over the investigation. You can come out of there, Palmer, Whitiker said.

I dismantled the obstacle course I had created in the room and opened the door, leaving my weapon inside, well aware they could still choose to open fire. When they didn’t, I felt I had cheated death in a big way—or maybe I was dead, and this was the afterlife. No, I thought as I looked at their frowning faces and crumpled suits. Hell has to be better than this.

Okay, Palmer, let’s get to the locker, Arnold said. And the tape better be there. He raised both fists at me, as if he would beat me to a pulp if the tape wasn’t there, or maybe if it was.

First, I said, I want a formal, written statement granting me immunity in the case of Portley’s death in return for the ‘help’ I am providing.

That was met with even more shuffling of the big one’s feet, but in the end they agreed.

On our way to the Union Station lockers, we stopped by the FBI office on Wilshire. The two agents disappeared into their office, I assume to place a frantic call to either their boss or the boss of bosses. They came out lickety-split with a typed agreement.

It was a grant of immunity. Apparently, my threat to expose this rogue part of the Bureau had ruffled some serious feathers. I signed it and we were on our merry way.

I took the agents to the locker. They quickly sealed off the area, claiming they were seeking evidence of a Communist cell, and jacked the door open. Inside they found the tape. They grabbed it. Jeff Whitiker tapped my arm in gratitude while Mutt Arnold, in as nice an exit as he could muster, slammed me into the lockers. I slid to the floor and looked up at them as he waved goodbye.

I had the sinking sensation that I had let two murderers walk free, trading my worthless life for their continual employment—except I hadn’t.

The locker was deep, with a dark recess at the back. Something had told me I needed to protect myself and Kelly the soundman who had done the recording had given me an extra tape, a blank. I had put the blank in front and shoved the real one in the shadows at the back. In their haste they had not searched the locker, just grabbed the tape in front.

Once they discovered the tape was blank, I was a dead man, so I had to act fast.

I took the real tape to a sound lab, one that the studio I was working for used that was not so far from the station. They made me a copy. I put the original back in the locker, and I got Union Station maintenance to repair the lock and relock it with a master key.

I phoned in an anonymous tip to Nader’s secretary, urging him to open his mail and get down to the station with the key immediately because inside that locker he would find the solution to three murders.

From a restaurant nearby, I watched Nader and two of his detectives show up and secure the tape. I labelled it Harry Palmer uncovers FBI assassins. I saw Nader’s disgust when he read the inscription, not probably about the FBI assassins, but about the Harry Palmer uncovers portion of the label.

What do you think I should do with this? he asked, after calling me into his office later that afternoon.

I think if you make a bunch of copies with a note and a ribbon, they’ll be excellent Christmas gifts.

I haven’t got time for this, Palmer.

Okay, this is what I think you should do. Call the bureau and ask to talk to someone at FDN, the rogue outfit these two operate out of. They’ll deny it exists, but you’ll get a response. Set up a meeting, go in with the tape, and tell them that for you to return it rather than taking it to the press you want three things: the FDN disbanded, Whitaker and Arnold fired or let go or put on terminal leave or however they want to manage it, and Harry Palmer left alone.

"I’m not sure I’m even in favor of the third condition, Nader growled. Why would they leave you alone? Seems like it would be easier to kill you, maybe easier for all of us."

Nader could be a real pal sometimes.

Because I’ve got another copy of the tape which I’m happy to bury, but if I turn up the victim of some freak accident, the tape will go to the papers.

All right, Palmer. Wait for my call. He motioned me out of his office. He didn’t smoke but had taken to popping sunflower seeds when he was nervous. He swallowed what looked like a whole bag as I was leaving.

It worked. How do I know? Well, for one thing, I’m still alive. I got a call from Nader a few days later and the deal had gone down. Mutt and Jeff were out of the agency. The FDN, which had never officially existed, was either disbanded or had gone further underground. And I was off the hook, at least for the moment.

Not justice, given the mayhem the two agents, their boss and the banker had caused, but in this town, in these days, in this country with the lawless hiding behind the law and using it to persecute the innocent and with the odds stacked against anyone getting a fair break, small victories count. I told myself it would help me sleep better at night. It didn’t at first and for a while I tossed and turned with my gun under my pillow, but after a spell it seemed things had gotten back to normal.

The banker Portley’s death was ruled a suicide. Some traces of the FDN appeared in a vague story in the Times but Hoover had established a chain of plausible deniability, claiming he had recently cleansed the bureau of rogue elements that were demeaning its mission, rather than carrying it out. Eva and I were a thing for a hot minute, but she went on to her next picture and her next leading man. I took the paychecks from the indie studio I was working for, from their actor’s starlet ex, and even Portley’s estate and was able to hole up in Bunker Hill for a bit without taking clients.

I was glad to be through with the Hollywood dream factory, the underside of which made it seem more like a dream sweatshop. Not only was I happy for a break, I was also, in a big way, happy to be alive. Mainly I was glad to be through with Mutt and Jeff, little dreaming that they, and the climate of fear that had birthed and nurtured them, were not through with me.

***

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

George Kennan, 1987

Act I:

Arms and the (Black) Man

***

1

Late February 1948

It was one of those days when you wished there was winter in L.A. Instead, the Dream Factory had only faux winter, a fake winter where temperatures dropped down into the ’50s with an occasional gale wind. People got into the spirit of faking it and, since many of them were from parts of the country that had real weather, they complained about the freezing chill in the air. It got so cold that sometimes the surf bums would be forced to leave the beach by 4 o’clock in the afternoon to avoid the evening frost. Such was life in a place where we all lived in the shadows of the Hollywood sign, which hung like an albatross over the city.

My little corner of it was Bunker Hill. The Hill was the rot in the center of a constantly expanding metropolis. Just below us, only a few streets away, was the still-thriving command post where the bank directors and the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times plotted the course of their empire. They were mostly concerned with how to continue to keep downtown as the hub and central axis of an ever-widening city—that is, how to maintain their grip on power.

My neck of the woods was a conglomeration of pimps, hos, hustlers, seedy con men, drug-addled losers at the end of their rope, and the working poor. These last were Spanish speakers mainly, from Mexico, drawn to the place because it had affordable rents. They lived in a series of flop houses that they could hunker down in as they tried to make a buck and hang on in the home of the brave and the land of the free.

Dorothy Chandler, the wife of the Times owner, was always talking about cleaning up the place, about bringing culture and civilization to the Hill. I guessed that would happen just about the time that Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, wherever that is. (That’s Shakespeare, somebody told me. As soon as I got some more time off, I was going to have to start reading.) Nope, there was no civilizing the Hill. They would have to clean out the place lock, stock and barrel, gut it and then build their cultural temples. People down below us were planning just that all the time. But we weren’t going without a fight.

These were my people and I was proud to be a part of them. I too was there for the rent, low enough so I could have my own office. My name’s Palmer, Harry Palmer, and I don’t carry a badge. I’m a private dick, to some. To others, I’m just a dick.

Everyone was bracing for March coming in like a lion—not weather-wise, but employment-wise. Lots of people were out of work as the defense industry stopped hiring, with the war over. The great boom that had seen the city leap forward during the war was grinding to a halt. Workers were losing their jobs, and many industries had announced hiring freezes.

It hit the Hill particularly hard. The diners and automats were slowing down or closing, sometimes almost deserted at the dinner hour. The junkies, alkies, and beggars who wandered over from Skid Row were finding slim pickings among those who usually were able to spare some loose change and, if they were shanghaied in an alley, a few bucks.

I hadn’t had much of a caseload since that business with the movie studio, which should have cost me my life. I was happy to lie low for a few months. I was lolling around the back office. Crystal, my new live-in secretary, was in the outer office pretending she wasn’t storing her stuff under her desk. She had gotten a small part in the next film at Democritus, the studio I was working for, after I got her a screen test. Until it started, she was living on her secretary’s wage. Her roommate Jade, who was probably livid that she had the beginnings of a stable income, had kicked her out. Crystal was looking for a new place. She pretended she wasn’t living in my office, and I pretended I didn’t know she was.

When I arrived that morning, she was looking fresh, already at her desk, probably having showered in the gym downstairs in the building. She was wearing a bright red and white pastel number that matched the red streak in her otherwise brown hair. The dress was cut low enough to stress her ample décolletage, which she heaved as I entered as if to salute me.

The red head effect I guessed she was borrowing from the current movie flavor of the month, Lucille O’Ball. It looked fetching on her and seemed to be working, as the phone had rung three times that morning and none of them was a client. From the outer office I could hear Crystal fawning over each call. Oh, to be young and in heat, or in love, or whatever they’re calling it these days.

I heard a rustling. The front door opened, and I heard Crystal leading someone back into my office. The man who followed her, a Negro with medium dark skin, had a kind of dignity about him. His tweed suit, though a bit tattered, was pressed. He had a worn look that would have made him a natural denizen of the Hill.

You look like hell, I said.

That’s where I came from, he replied.

He sat in the chair across from my desk without being invited in a way that indicated that he often had to push his way in to be seen in a white man’s world.

I’m Horace Williams, and I’ve been robbed, he began.

Okay, Mr. Williams, just tell me what happened and when. Was it on the street?

No, it was in one of the airplane factories, and it didn’t happen fast. It happened slowly, over some months. They stole my know-how, endangered my life, and at the end I lost part of my memory and can’t get it back. To thank me for my devotion to their plant, they fired me, put me out on the street.

Where was this and when?

"The Aerodynamics aircraft plant. I was hired in ’43 during the war when they needed me. They threw me into their secret defense project, which smelled of noxious fumes. In fact, they called it the Stink House. When there was dirty work to be done, they always called me to do it first, ’cause I was their nigger. I breathed so many of the fumes I lost part of my memory, and when they started slowing down after the war, they canned me.

Been more than a year now off the line, he continued. All I ever wanted out of the place was to be able to afford my own house, to finally have a place of my own. Now that’s gone and I want my dream back. I’m damaged goods, and I want com-pen-sa-tion. He stretched the word out, as if he wanted it to go on for the rest of his life.

And you’re gonna help me get it.

Let’s back up a bit. How did you hear about me?

My girlfriend saw an ad you posted in the local gazette. She works downtown by day and she picked it up. It says you’re friendly and honest. Is that true?

Half true.

Which half?

I’m friendly. I smiled, trying to look the part.

That’s okay. I may not need honest.

Horace had originally thought about blackmailing the company, he said, but now he wanted to go a more legal route—sort of. He wanted someone to case the place, do a bit of burglarizing if possible and get the facts on the company’s unsafe practices so he could go to court and claim his com-pen-sa-tion.

Is that up your alley? he asked.

Could be. I’m an ex-cop, one of LAPD’s finest. I know about illegal surveillance and breaking and entering.

That’s what I figured. How come you’re ex?

Let’s just say the force and I had a disagreement, and we parted company before anyone went to court.

Meaning you had your hand in the till?

Meaning I’m not saying.

All right, sounds like you got the qualifications to do the job.

Horace launched into his life story. If I understood what he had been through to get to where he was, he seemed to think, I would be more likely to help him. He was right.

He’d had a little college before the war, but after a semester had to drop out to support his mother after his father died. That took up a lot of his life. I’d place him in his late 30s, but he looked a good deal older.

After school he continued to study, taught himself about mechanical instruments. My mother named me Horace after the poet, but I could never see no poetry in fancy word play. My poetry was engineering. I love to build things.

He studied on his own, burned the candle at both ends while working a delivery job in Watts for almost no wages. When the war came, he went to enlist.

But, he said, they wouldn’t take me because of this." He pulled on his shirt to reveal a scar that ran across his shoulder and down his back.

Where’d you get that? I asked. It had healed long ago but was still a nasty gash.

He didn’t want to answer at first. I likes me a drink from time to time. Earlier, ’fo I discovered what I wanted to do, I could get to brawlin’, only I likes to call it bruisin’.

And that’s where you got the scar?

Maybe, maybe not.

Tell me about the maybe not.

Mr. Palmer, I grew up in Tulsa in the 1920s. Do you know what that means?

I had heard this story from the other side when the Okie recruits on the force let down their hair and started bragging.

It means you were in the riot where whites destroyed the Negro businesses.

That’s it, and they did physical damage as well. That’s all I aims to say.

Horace had a strange way of going in and out of the Negro argot, as if he would use it when he was comfortable and shed it when he wasn’t. Since he was shifting in and out, he was probably deciding whether or not he was comfortable with me.

I wasn’t part of the war in Europe, but I was definitely part of the war at home, he continued.

He had made the rounds but at first could not get a job with the plane manufacturers. After the war started, they were in a hiring frenzy, but that did not initially include Negro workers. With the employee shortage because white males went off to fight the war, he had finally got in the gate at Aerodynamics.

He started on the assembly line, but they had caught on that he was bright. He soon got promoted off the line. He was doing the work of an engineer without the title—and, I guessed, without the full salary.

Horace had gotten himself signed up for a top-secret project working on a fighter jet that was especially deadly, but the work was dangerous. They constantly sent him in ahead whenever there were chemical resins in the air.

What I means by the war at home was the way us Negroes were treated by the white Southerners come to town for jobs. That was a real war. I was made the head of the testing crew, which meant I was exposed to all kinds of fumes they were trying out as part of the paint they were using to conceal the plane.

Horace’s particular war was with one foreman, an Okie named Judd Jyrko who ran roughshod over him.

Is he still with the company? I asked.

Far as I know. I’m out on the street and he keeps gettin’ promoted. Doesn’t know the first thing about engineerin’, just knows how to crack the whip.

What Horace was describing sounded as much like a Southern slave plantation as it did a supposedly modern Northern factory.

As he described the big, burly foreman who always sent him in on the most dangerous missions in the least safe parts of the plant, something seemed to cross his face. He’d encountered Jyrkos before. They were both from Oklahoma. I thought I would ask him about this later. Instead, I asked about how I could do the job.

If I go prowling around the plant, is there anyone you trust who would help me?

Horace had two friends in the factory. One was a Lou’siana boy named Maurice Avery, who he described affectionately as a no-good nigger.

Keeps his head down, but he’s a survivor, and cagey as hell.

I got the feeling Maurice Avery could help me if he wanted to.

The other was a worker’s advocate, Jack Norris.

He’s white as the day is long and with some kind of political creed up his ass, but he can be counted on, Horace said. Norris was nervous, though, with the appearance of some FBI men around the plant, who said they were there to ferret out communists.

"When I was bringin’ home a salary, I bought a car, a Chevy, a big ramblin’ roadster that was like a rolling home. But I never owned no home of my own. Dixie and I have