I said, “I wanted the FBI around tonight. You think I wanted to go to that meeting alone?”
“I won’t argue with you,” P said, still feeling humorous. “Now,” he said, turning the twinkle off, “about your presence at that meeting in the first place, we’ve talked with this lawyer friend of yours, Murray Kesselberg, and he—”
“Murray? You woke him up?”
“Not exactly.” Twinkle on again, P said to O, “He wasn’t exactly asleep, was he?”
“Oh, no, sir,” said O, twinkling right back. “Not exactly asleep. In bed, all right, but not what you’d call asleep.”
“Murray,” I said, “will kill me.”
Angela reached out and took my hand. “It isn’t your fault, Gene,” she said softly. “Murray will understand.”
“Ho ho,” I said, and “Certainly,” and “Oh, sure.”
P said, “At any rate, Kesselberg verifies your motive in attending the meeting. As I understand it, from what both of you say, you were afraid Eustaly and the others might come to silence you if you did not attend, but that you could possibly get proof of the organization’s existence to turn over to the FBI if you did go.”
“Right,” I said.
Angela said, contritely, “I’m sorry about my notes.”
P smiled at her in a more or less fatherly fashion, saying, “That’s perfectly all right, Miss Ten Eyck. Very few people would be able to take legible shorthand notes under such trying circumstances.” He glanced at the notebook in question, sitting, on his desk, containing several pages of op art. “Perhaps,” he said doubtfully, “a shorthand expert will be able to read at least a part of it.”
“Nobody can ever read my shorthand,” Angela said mournfully. “Not ever.”
I looked at her. “You never told me that before,” I said.
“Well, I try,” she insisted. “I try and try and try, and it just never comes out right.”
I looked at P, and P looked at me, and for one blinding instant that must have been equally startling to both of us, there was a perfect bond of understanding and sympathy between us. Then he cleared his throat, and rattled some papers, and looked down at his desk, and said, “Well, it hasn’t been totally in vain.” He picked up a piece of paper, saying, “You have given us the names of some of the people present, and something of the affiliations of one or two of the others whose names you didn’t remember.” He looked at the list and shook his head. “I must say this shapes up as a rather unusual grouping.”
Angela said, “They kept wanting to fight one another all the time.”
P nodded at her. “I should think so.”
“I’m surprised the meeting lasted as long as it did,” I said.
“Are you?” P shook his head. “We’re not. In fact, Mr. Raxford,” he said, “we’re very concerned about this League for New Beginnings.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I know you people like to play foreign intrigue, but that crowd? They’re a bunch of cocoanuts.”
P looked at me, flat-eyed, and said, flat-voiced, “Do you think so, Mr. Raxford?”
“Not Eustaly,” I said. “Not Ten Eyck. I’ll grant you those two are probably dangerous. And Lobo, if somebody with brains tells him what to do. But all those other wacks kept reminding me of the kind of guy sits down next to you on a crowded subway and starts talking to little green men.”
P said, “You don’t take them seriously.”
“Not for a minute,” I said.
P motioned to O. “Give Mr. Raxford the essentials,” he said.
O got up from his perch on the radiator, said, “Right, Chief,” and went over to open the top drawer of the filing cabinet.
P said to me, “These are just on the names you remembered. The others present will more than likely be cut from the same cloth.”
“Crazy quilt,” I said.
“Perhaps,” said P, and gestured for O to begin.
O had taken a manila folder from the drawer, shut the drawer, and opened the folder atop the cabinet. He riffled through sheets of paper in the folder, selected one, and said, “Mrs. Elly Baba. Very religious woman. She was a Baptist until 1952, when, while serving a jail sentence for having stabbed her third husband, she was converted by the Black Muslims. The Muslims apparently tapped deep anti-white feelings that her Baptist religion had kept submerged, but didn’t really permit her any specific outlet for those feelings. Between 1954 and 1960 she belonged to a succession of rightist Negro organizations, each of a more violent type than the last, ultimately entering the Pan-Arabian World Freedom Society in 1961, and becoming the group’s leader in 1964. Its present membership is estimated at approximately forty-five. Mrs. Baba is generally considered by students on the subject to be the most violent woman in Harlem, and possibly in the world.”
He chose another sheet of paper. “Patrick Joseph Mulligan,” he said. “Native-born, so we can’t very well deport him. He’s served one term in a federal penitentiary for bank robbery. The Sons of Erin Expeditionary Force has been active for the last thirty-seven years in this country, primarily as an unacknowledged collector of moneys for Irish independence groups both in Ireland and the British Isles. Bank robbery was a favorite fund-raising technique of the IRA in its heyday, which seems to be where the Sons of Erin got the idea. For the last few years they seem to have been relatively inactive, though they have created street disturbances in front of the British Embassy and so on. Mulligan has led the organization for seven years.”
Another sheet. “Eli Zlott,” he said, “is something else again. He apparently wants to be a cold-blooded killer, in fact, a mass murderer, but he always changes his mind at the last minute. He has several times been successful in placing large and extremely dangerous explosive devices in German embassies, hotel suites occupied by visiting German dignitaries, and so on, but invariably, shortly before the bomb is to go off, he telephones, warns whoever answers that a bomb has been planted, and urges everyone to clear the area. In every case so far, a quick search has been made, the bomb has been found, and no explosion has occurred. It is believed that Zlott’s wife, Esther Zlott, has always been the softening influence who has convinced Zlott to make his phone calls. Esther Zlott died three months ago, run down by a hit-and-run driver in a Volkswagen.”
“Oh, dear,” said Angela.
“We believe,” O said quietly, “that Zlott will perhaps be more dangerous now.” He reached for a new sheet.
“Jack Armstrong,” he read, “appears to have been pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi all his life, even though he was only four years old in 1945, when the Third Reich came to an end. The National Fascist Reclamation Commission is a group he started personally while in high school, with a membership of his close friends, fluctuating between seven and twenty-two members. The group does a lot of swastika-painting, pickets civil rights pickets, and may be behind some rifle sniping and synagogue vandalism, though there’s never been convictable proof. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Armstrong is psychotic and at least potentially homicidal.”
Next. “Mrs. Selma Bodkin, widow, fifty-seven years of age. She has been a member of the Gentile Mothers for Peace since its founding in 1947, and its president since 1958. She was jailed just once, for assault. In that case, she had attended a wrestling show at St. Nick’s Arena, in which the main event was between a white wrestler called Captain America and a Negro wrestler called Violent Virgil. When Violent Virgil won the final fall by what Mrs. Bodkin considered unethical methods, she left her seat, climbed into the ring, and beat Violent Virgil with a rolled-up newspaper concealing a length of lead pipe. She was given a suspended sentence, and there was never sufficient proof to indict her for the subsequent bombing of Violent Virgil’s house in St. Albans, Queens. She and her group may have been involved in other bombings, though we can’t be sure, but we do know they’ve made a habit of attacking civil rights pickets with the lead pipes in rolled-up newspapers, they’ve descended en masse on lovers’ lanes in the area, and caused a great deal of damage to a Long Island drive-in theater which refused to turn away automobiles containing inter-racial groupings. Whether Mrs. Bodkin has personally killed anyone yet or not, we don’t know. We do know she wants to.”