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.”