His name, he said, as he sat there talking in the cluttered, half-lighted room, was Michael Padillo. He was half Estonian, half Spanish. His father had been an attorney in Madrid who chose the losing side during the civil war and was shot in 1937. His mother was the daughter of an Estonian doctor. She had met Padillo senior in Paris in 1925 while on a holiday. They were married and he, the son, was born the following year. His mother had been a striking, even beautiful, woman of considerable culture and accomplishment.
After the death of her husband she used her Estonian passport to reach Lisbon and eventually Mexico City. There she survived by teaching piano and giving language lessons in French, German, English and, occasionally, Russian.
“If you can speak Estonian, you can speak anything,” Padillo said. “She spoke eight without accent. She told me once that the first three languages are the hardest. One month we would speak nothing but English, the next month French. Then German or Russian or Estonian or Polish and back to Spanish or Italian and then start the whole thing over. I was young enough to think it was fun.”
Padillo’s mother died of tuberculosis in the spring of 1941. “I was fifteen then and I spoke six languages, so I said to hell with Mexico and headed for the States. I got as far as El Paso. I became a bellhop, a guide, and a part- time smuggler. I also picked up the fundamentals of bartending.
“By mid-1942 I decided that El Paso had offered all it was going to. I got a Social Security card and a driver’s license and registered for the draft although I was still under age. I swiped a couple of letterheads from two of the better hotels and wrote myself glowing recommendations as a bartender. I forged the managers' names on both of them.”
He hitchhiked through the Big Bend country of Texas up to Albuquerque, where he caught 66 all the way to Los Angeles. Padillo talked about Los Angeles in its palmy, scared, war-feverish days of 1942 as if it were a personal but long-lost Beulah Land.
“It was a crazy town, full of phonies, dames, soldiers and nuts. I got a job tending bar. It was a nice place, they treated me well, but it only lasted a little while before they caught up with me.”
“Who?”
“The FBI. It was August of 1942 and I was just opening up. The pair of them. Polite as preachers. They showed me their little black passbooks that said sure enough they were with the FBI and asked if I would mind coming along because the draft board had been writing letters to me for the longest time and they kept coming back marked ‘address unknown.’ And they were sure it was a mistake, but it had taken them five goddamn months to trace me and so forth.
“Well, I went downtown with them and gave a story of sorts. I made a statement and signed it. I was mugged and fingerprinted. And then they took me in to see an assistant U.S. attorney general and he gave me a lecture and a choice. I could either join up or go to jail for draft evasion.”
Padillo joined the Army and applied for cooks and bakers school. In late 1942 he was happily running the bar of an officers’ club at a small Infantry Training Replacement Center in north Texas, not too far from Dallas and Fort Worth, before someone, browsing through his records, discovered that he could speak and write six languages.
“They came at night,” he said. “The top sergeant and the CO. and this jerk in civilian clothes. It was all very bad, late TV. The olive-drab Packard, the silent ride to the airport, the tight-lipped pilots glancing at their watches while they paced up and down under the wing of the C-47. Pure corn.”
The plane landed in Washington and Padillo was shuffled from office to office. “Some of them were dressed in civilian clothes, some in uniform. I seem to remember that they all smoked pipes that year.”
They tested him on his languages. “I can speak English with either a Mississippi or an Oxford accent. I can talk like a Berliner or a Marseille pimp. Berlitz would love me.
“They sent me to Maryland then, where I learned some tricks and I taught them a few I’d picked up in Juirez. It was all very gung-ho with assumed names and identities. I said I was a towel boy in a Mexican whorehouse. The rest of the guys never busted me, but they liked to ask detailed questions about my occupation.”
When the Maryland training was over, Padillo was hustled back to Washington. It was a house on R Street, just west of Connecticut Avenue. They told him the colonel wanted to see him. “He looked very much like the Hollywood actor who used to play the colonel in all the VD movies they showed you in basic,” Padillo said. “I think it embarrassed him.
“He told me that I could make a very important contribution to what he called the ‘national effort’. If I would agree to do so, I would be discharged, given American citizenship, and a certain amount of money would be paid to an account in my name at the American Security and Trust Company. I could collect the money when I got back.
“So I asked him back from where.
“ ‘Paris,’ he said, sucked on his pipe, and stared out the window. He was having a fine time for a former assistant professor of French at Ohio State.”
Padillo spent two years in France with the underground, most of the time in Paris, where he operated as American liaison with the Maquis. After the war they shipped him back to the States. He collected his money from the bank, was handed a draft card that said he was 4-F, and received a discreet pat on the back from the General himself.
“I headed for L.A. It was still wacky in 1945, but it wasn’t like it was. But perhaps the reason I liked it is because it was so goddamned phony, I’d had enough of reality.
“I also had enough money so I could hang around the strip for a while. I got a few jobs as an extra and then started bartending in this small place on Santa Monica. I was even buying in when they came. You know: young, single-breasted suits, hats. They had a little job, they said, that would take two or three weeks. In Warsaw. Nobody would ever know I was gone, and there was a couple of grand in it for me.”
Padillo ground his cigarette out on the floor and lighted another. “I went. That time and maybe two dozen times more, and the last time they came around in their dark suits and their fraternity-house manners I told them no. They just got even more polite and reasonable and kept coming back. They started dropping hints about the fact that some question had been raised in Washington about the validity of my citizenship, but they were sure that if I took on this one more job everything could be straightened out.
“I got back part of the money I had invested in the place and headed east. I was working in Denver at the Senate Lounge on Colfax and they found me there. So I went to Chicago and from Chicago to Pittsburgh and from there to New York. In New York I heard about this place in Jersey. It was nice and it was quiet. Some college kids,
