“You were raised by your paternal grandparents,” he said. “Why?”
“My parents died,” I said, trying to force down a feeling that we were playing a game of personal manipulation, maybe just as he played it as a G-man. “They were in a small plane.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and a little warmth took his voice down a few decibels. “My wife and child are dead, too.” He motioned to a shelf of family photos, a black-and-white of a fair-haired woman with merry eyes and a wide, glistening forehead, and a color photo of what seemed like her clone in long hippy hair-a daughter. But he offered no explanation.
“I gave my life to the Bureau,” he said. “I don’t regret it. Most of the time.”
And he told his story. He was a kid from San Francisco, North Beach, born in 1919. His parents came over from Naples before the Great War. His father, who couldn’t read or write, delivered milk with a horse-drawn wagon. But young Vincent was forced to stay in school. He went on to Cal-Berkeley. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Air Corps, and flew P-51 Mustang fighters in Europe. He didn’t say it, but I noticed a Silver Star pinned on the uniform of the young officer in the photo. After the war, he went to law school and then joined the FBI. He was a rookie when he came to Phoenix.
“My point is that I’ve decided to take a chance on you, Mapstone,” he said. “The Bureau was good to me. I’ve had a good career, and a good life. The only thing I regret is what happened to John Pilgrim.”
He sipped his tea and I watched, afraid even to breathe.
“Nowdays, I read these stories about a special agent who was passing secrets to the Russians. Another one who was selling information to the Mafia. Then the agents who warned about terrorists, and they were ignored. That hurts, personally. It makes me wonder why I stayed silent all those years.”
The room grew large with expectation. Outside the screen door, I could hear soft rain, and beyond that, a siren. I asked quietly, “Did Pilgrim kill himself?”
“No, hell no,” Renzetti said, his nostrils flaring. He set the teacup aside and shook his head in short, exasperated jerks. “That’s just nonsense. John loved life. He loved everything about it. Maybe too much.”
“So why…?”
“Why? Because John was a maverick. Because John made his bosses look bad when he solved cases his own way. Because they didn’t know what the hell happened, and saying he was a suicide tied a neat little ribbon around it. Even if that ribbon was only for internal consumption. Look, the Bureau probably told you John was a head case of some kind, that he was sent to Phoenix to get one last chance. That’s bullshit. He was a top agent. He was sent to Phoenix to trap a spy.” He sipped his tea and watched my reaction. “That’s right. The Soviets had moles at Los Alamos. People working on the nuclear program. All this has come out the past few years, Moscow releasing documents, American papers declassified…”
“The Venona documents.”
“Very good. So in the late forties, the Bureau moved against these spies, and it became too risky for them to meet their handlers in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. But Phoenix was a day’s train ride away for someone working at Los Alamos. It was big enough that you could go unnoticed. We got a tip that a Russian had set up shop in Phoenix, a guy named Dimitri. He spoke good English, and passed himself off as a hard-working immigrant. His real mission was to pass along atomic secrets.”
I eased back in my chair, trying to take it all in. My case of a homeless man carrying a missing badge had suddenly catapulted me into the dawn of the Cold War. The Red Scare.
“There
They had arrived in Phoenix in the summer of 1947, and soon found themselves handling more than the Russian. “It was a wide-open town,” Renzetti said. “Like the old West meets Tammany Hall. Phoenix was run by a city commission, and the commissioners were dirty. One of them was running prostitution and drugs on the south side of town. There were allegations that some of the local contractors who had built the training bases during the war had defrauded the government of huge amounts of money and material. There were problems on the Indian reservations. On top of that, the Mafia started to move in, buying land, selling protection. The Chicago Outfit set up a little satellite operation, and they started taking over the rackets from the locals. Lot of bloodshed. We had a six-man field office, and we could have used a hundred agents.”
“Sounds like Pilgrim could have made a lot of enemies,” I said.
“He did. Look, Pilgrim was no saint. He liked drink and he liked women. Hell, he
I noted the name Duke-Pilgrim’s son had mentioned a Duke. I said, “What about Dimitri?”
“Disappeared. After John was shot.”
“And you don’t buy the suicide theory.”
“No.”
“His son seems to believe it. The Bureau definitely does.”
“They didn’t know him the way I did. Look, Pilgrim told me he was going to meet a guy. Somebody who had information about Dimitri. That was the last I saw him. He turned up dead two days later.”
“Why didn’t you go with him?”
“I was a newlywed, Mapstone. It was the weekend, and I wanted to be with my wife.”
I unconsciously looked at the photo of his wife. Renzetti continued. “If it was a suicide, why did Pilgrim’s car turn up in downtown Phoenix, miles from where the body was found? Why did his badge and gun disappear?”
“Wait,” I said. “I didn’t know his gun wasn’t found. That wasn’t in the report.”
“I know,” Renzetti said.
“So you’re saying the FBI covered this up?”
Renzetti stared at his bony fingers folded in his lap. “I’m saying they didn’t know what happened. Everything about this case was embarrassing, and the Bureau under Mr. Hoover was very averse to being embarrassed. Get it? We interviewed over a thousand people, and never could even find a suspect to bring in. The guy we came to bag escaped, maybe back to Russia. But there’s more to it. John was his own man, did things his own way. The bosses didn’t like him, and there were things I didn’t like, either. Maybe the brass was afraid they’d find he was dirty, and they didn’t want to know.”
“Was he?”
Renzetti’s head moved from side to side with finality. “No way. John drank too much and womanized way too much. But he was a great FBI man.”
“So Dimitri killed him?”
“Yes,” he said emphatically. Then his arms slowly extended, hands palms up. “I can’t prove anything. It’s always haunted me. After John was killed, I was transferred to the Bay Area, and I spent my career here.”
Here seemed a lonely place now. A picture palace of beloved dead. Men like Vince Renzetti had always made me feel small, in an admiring way. They had served their country in combat in a great cause, something most Baby Boomers would never know. Strong, taciturn men who knew whether they were cowards or not. They walked to a Sousa march, “Semper Fidelis,” perhaps. Peralta was such a man. Finally, I was always dumbstruck in their presence. When nothing more could be said, I was tempted to ask if there was anything I could do for him, anyone I could call. But he hadn’t invited that intimacy. So I gathered up my trench coat and, thanking him, walked away into the rain.
Chapter Twenty
I rode the train back to San Francisco feeling the weight of too many Russians in my life. Yuri, the shadowy cyber-criminal who had a contract out on my wife. Dimitri, the spy, who may have killed John Pilgrim. But my list of questions was only growing, topped by: how did the badge get from the murdered G-man to the jacket of the dead homeless man? Had it been passed from person to person over the years, perhaps bringing a cursed fate to the
