removable lighter, and a crystal ashtray that was as big as a car hubcap. There were two books on the otherwise empty shelves - The Intellectuals by George B. de Huszar, and Harry and Bonara Overstreet's What We Must Know about Communism - and an eight-hundred-dollar Bolex Rex cine camera that O'Connell, a keen amateur movie- maker, greatly coveted. The Bolex had everything: auto-threading, tri-turret lens system with corresponding telescopic viewfinders, a built-in exposure meter can lap dissolve, and, best of all, a fantastic Pan Cinor zoom lens.
Goldman was thinner than O'Connell remembered, which also made him seem taller. And his normally robust New Orleans voice, which always made him sound like Burl Ives playing Big Daddy, had been reduced almost to a near whisper, as if it had been boiled off in a saucepan. He was recovering from a heavy cold, only the story he had given out at the FBI, in order to account for his several absences from the office, was rather less prosaic.
I've had cholera,' he explained, in response to O'Connell's polite enquiry after his health, and after they had exhausted the compliments of the season. Just a mild dose, but a mild dose is bad enough. Picked it up when I was down in Mexico City. The whole of Central America's lousy with it. Taken me over a month to recover. You ever had cholera, Big Jim?'
O'Connell recalled a dose of turista he had had in Guatemala which had seemed bad enough to warrant being called something more serious than plain diarrhoea, and said, I don't think so.'
Oh, you'd know if you had. It's the stomach cramps that really fuck with you. And the stink of yourself. Until you have cholera you never know what bad company you can be.'
So, how are you now?'
Not too bad, I guess. So what can I do for the CIA?'
Tom and Mary Jefferson. I was wondering if you could tell us anything about them.'
She's dead, I can tell you that right away.'
That much we know. We would very much like to speak to him, now. As a matter of some urgency.'
We're off the record here, right?'
Record?' O'Connell smirked. What the hell's that? What with Eisenhower's committee to keep the CIA under policy control, we're not much interested in paperwork at the Security Office.' O'Connell glanced over the empty bookshelves, and smiled wryly. I can see you have the same free-thinking attitude as we do.'
Goldman lit his pipe and said, Keep it all in your head, huh? Damn right. It's the only really secure place I know.' He puffed a nimbus cloud of smoke across the office and, with pipe clenched between his discoloured teeth, like Popeye, leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then he said, Back in fifty-four, the FBI in Miami received an anonymous letter, most probably from one of Jefferson's neighbours, to the effect that Mrs Jefferson was half-Chinese, and might therefore be communist. I'm pretty sure this was around January of that year, and it was certainly before Joe McCarthy went and let Ed Murrow make an idiot of him on television. I guess maybe he was an idiot, but that's another story. It wasn't exactly the height of the red scare, but the witch hunt was still on, and there were some prominent people who had to be burned. I think it was another few months before Oppenheimer got stripped of his security clearance.
The letter received here was fairly standard Salem stuff. You know the kind of thing: Mary Jefferson was an atheist, she was a passionate Democrat, she was clever, she thought housing discrimination against coloureds ought to be outlawed, she thought there ought to be state-regulated house insurance, and she wore a lot of red. I guess maybe there'd been some coffee morning at which Mary Jefferson spoke her mind, and wore a red scarf. Seems strange, but even a few years ago, some of those things were enough to arouse the suspicions of ordinary citizens. And this office received hundreds of letters like the one about Mary Jefferson. I think Hoover probably wrote a lot of them himself.
At that time, it was my job to check out this kind of thing. So I went around to where the Jeffersons lived and met them both. She was a beautiful, clever woman, maybe a little liberal, but no more of a communist than Harry Truman, or Dean Acheson, or you, or me. I remember now. A couple of days after I was there visiting with them, we got another letter from the same source, this time saying that a suspicious character wearing a black hat had been at the Jefferson's house. The letter gave the licence plate of this Rooskie spy character's car, which turned out to be my own. A lot of people thought that was very funny, I can tell you.
For all that my first inclination was to close the file, instead I decided to keep tabs on her. This was for two reasons, neither of them anything to do with any national security threat that she might have posed. One was that she was gorgeous and I thought, married or not, she might be turned on by me being in the FBI. Faint hope. The second was that I wanted to maintain contact with him. Because by now I had checked him out and was aware of his army past, and how some of what he had done was classified. Over the next few months I got to know him pretty well and found out that he was a highly decorated marksman. He always had plenty of money and, without an obvious source of income other than a private detective agency he ran out of a box number here in Miami, and which didn't seem to have any clients, I began to wonder if he was now working for the CIA.
So then, nineteen fifty-six. The FBI's counter-intelligence programme, COINTELPRO, is initiated and I'm asked to handle it here in Miami. At first it was just harassment and disruption of people who were considered to be subversives. Ruining careers, bankrupting businesses, planting stories, smearing reputations, fucking with people's lives, all routine intelligence stuff. But then, the following year, we got this secret directive from Constitution Avenue to make things a lot rougher, so I began to look around for guys to help me handle that kind of thing.
In early fifty-eight, we decided to take out Ernesto Pereira. He was a communist friend of Jacobo Arbenz, the deposed Guatemalan President, who we suspected of trying to raise money to bring down whatever right-wing spic it was you guys had put in there. Tom Jefferson did the job for us right here in Miami.'
O'Connell nodded, but said nothing about how the CIA had employed Jefferson around the same time, to assassinate Carlos Armas, the army colonel who had taken over from Arbenz. This was Goldman's show.
The following year, he assassinated an Indonesian businessman, a friend of Sukarno's, who was selling narcotics for guns, down in Key West. Since when, he's done a couple other jobs for me, not to mention his having become an excellent source of information. He worked for me down in Mexico City as recently as October, when he took out a Russian by the name of Pavel Zaitsev. Zaitsev worked for the Russian embassy in Washington which, as you know, handles Florida as part of its consular and spying jurisdiction. Zaitsev was in and out of Miami like a fucking pelican. Flying to Cuba a lot. That was okay, we kept an eye on his comings and goings. But when he started meeting up with leftist Chileans from the Popular Action Front in Miami, and in Mexico City, we decided to get rid of him permanently. Tom did that job, too. He's a good man.
That was when I got sick. Not long afterwards I heard that Mary was dead and that Tom had gone away. He often did that, and I presumed he'd be back when he was over it. Until you showed up, that is. Now that the Security Office of the CIA is visiting with me, I'm not so sure. Look Jim, my cards are on the table. I think it's about time you did the same. What's this all about?'
O'Connell shrugged. We think it's possible they were both working for the communists.'
What? Bullshit. I vetted them myself. She never liked me all that much, but if she was a communist I'll eat my hat. And some of those people he killed. They were communists themselves. How do you work that out?'
He was in a Korean POW camp. We think it's possible they turned him while he was there. And we both know that killing other communists has never been a problem for the Russians. Look at Hungary. Recently, there have been a number of betrayals in our local anti-Castro organisation. Cuban agents who got picked up in Havana. It looks very much as though it was Tom Jefferson who betrayed them. Maybe he's G2, maybe he's KGB. We're not sure. That's why we want to find Jefferson and speak with him.'
Well, I guess he is half-Cuban,' admitted Goldman.
Yeah, but which half?'
Goldman puffed in silence. Is that all you have?' he said pointedly.
Isn't it enough?'
Like I said before, Tom was a pretty good informant, too. He told me about this Castro hit you have planned with Rosselli.'
He told you that, did he? Do you think he told anyone else?'
Come on, Jim, you're really not telling me very much. If I am going to help, I'll need a little fuckin' more than we think that it's possible, and maybe.
Okay. The mob has put a guy on Tom Jefferson's tail. A local cop by the name of Jimmy Nimmo.'
The assistant police superintendent?'
You know him?'