“Excellent.” He rose, adjusting his scarf and buttoning his topcoat. “The password,” he said, “will be greensleeves.” The Mediterranean smile warmed me again. “It has been most enjoyable meeting you at last, Mr. Raxford. I have followed your career with a good deal of interest.”
“Thank you,” I said, knowing he was an out-and-out liar. If he’d so much as known my name more than two or three days I’d be mightily surprised.
He now offered to shake hands, but I showed him the state of my palm and he gave me a final smile instead and elegantly bowed himself out. “Auf wiedersehen,” he said, as he stepped out to the hall.
“Vaya con Dios,” I suggested, and shut the door.
I still carried the pamphlet, What Is the CIU? now a bit the inkier for wear. If my late visitor had taken the time to open it and read it, he would have learned several things about the Citizens’ Independence Union, first and foremost of which being that we are anything but a terrorist organization. In point of fact, we are a pacifist organization, begun in the early fifties by a group of undergraduates at City College of New York, in protest against the drafting of students for Army duty in the Korean War. The organization had a distinctly pacifist bent to begin with, and when the Korean War ended, bringing to a close the immediate purpose of the group, we militant pacifists within it took over the reins, and general pacifist activity became our sole concern. We join Peace Marches, distribute leaflets, picket visiting dignitaries, write letters of warning to newspapers and magazines, challenge political candidates to debates, etc., etc.
What with one thing and another, our original 1952 strength of some fourteen hundred young men and women of high purpose and unflagging devotion has dwindled over the years to our present membership of seventeen, twelve of whom are on the inactive list. A large body of the membership defected, of course, immediately the Korean War came to a close. Others drifted away upon graduation from college. Internal struggles among varying pacifist persuasions — moral pacifism, ethical pacifism, religious pacifism, political pacifism, sociological pacifism, etc., etc. — further sapped the membership, and the unwelcome attentions of the FBI and other official agencies over the years have helped considerably to dwindle our ranks.
Although, frankly, I’ve always suspected that most of our early members joined us primarily in hopes of finding somebody to have sex with. God knows they all did it incessantly. You couldn’t keep them vertical long enough to march around Washington Square. (Not that I was above a dedicated morsel now and again myself; pacifism and wrinkled sheets, “But tomorrow I may refuse to go overseas.”).
Well. I returned the unread pamphlet to the untidy clutter of the table, put on a fresh pot of coffee for the FBI, and went back to work on the damned machine.
2
They arrived about an hour later, two new ones, tall lean sandy types in the inevitable gray suits, clean jawlines, flat blue eyes and out-of-date hats. “You’re late,” I told them. “Your coffee’s cold.”
(I try to be nice to people from the FBI in the hope that sooner or later they’ll decide to leave me alone again, though I fear the hope is probably vain. The CIU was under surveillance in the middle fifties because that’s what life was like in the middle fifties, but along toward the end of that witch-hunting decade the Feds began to leave me pretty much alone. Then I made my mistake.
(My mistake [We’re continuing the parenthesis, you notice] was in assuming that an organization called Students for Non-Violence and Disarmament was probably a pacifist group. When the secretary of SFNAD called me and asked if our group would march with hers in a protest demonstration against the British Embassy, I naturally agreed; we small groups very frequently band together to give a more impressive appearance.
(Well [The same parenthesis marches on and on], it turned out SFNAD was an excessively left-wing Communist front having something to do with the violent overthrow of a North African nation which was just in the process of no longer being a British colony or protectorate or some such thing. [Are you following this? I never did.] When the dust settled, SFNAD was down on the FBI’s list of Dangerous Organizations We Better Keep an Eye On, and so — guilt by association — was the poor little CIU. The FBI and I had been on rather close terms ever since. [End parenthesis.])
Anyway, new Feds assigned to me had a habit of treating me like I was James Cagney, and these two were no exception. They came in, snicked the door shut, and one of them said severely, “You are J. Eugene Raxford?”
“J. Eugene Raxford,” I said. “Right. Just a minute.”
I started away to get the coffee, but the other one stepped quickly in front of me, saying, “Where do you think you’re going?”
(FBI men never tell you their names, so I’ll have to identify these two simply as A and B. A had asked my name, and B was now standing in front of me, blocking my path.)
To B, I said, “I’m going to the kitchen, get the coffee.”
“What coffee?”
“The coffee I put on for you people.”
B looked at A and made a head motion. A promptly left the room, apparently to search the kitchen, and B turned his attention back to me, giving me the gimlet eye. “How’d you know we were coming?”
“You always do,” I said.
He said, “Who called you?”
I looked at him, astonished. Didn’t he know my phone was tapped? I said, “What? Called me? Nobody called me.”
A came back from the kitchen and shook his head. B grimaced and said to me, “Don’t give me that. You couldn’t have known unless somebody tipped you.”
“Then,” I said, “why don’t you pick up the phone and ask your man in the basement to play you the tape of the call? Maybe you’ll recognize the voice.”
A and B looked at one another. B said, “There’s something wrong with the security here.”
“No, there isn’t,” I said. “You people have me under constant surveillance. Frankly, I think you’re doing a first-rate job.”
A said to B, “We better get on with it.”
“There’s a security leak here,” B answered him. “We ought to find out what’s what.”
“The thing for us to do is report it, and let HQ decide,” A insisted. “Our job is identification.” He turned to me. “Where’s the bedroom?”
“Through the door there,” I said.
They never say thank you. A merely went away to the bedroom, while B pulled a glossy photograph from his jacket pocket, pushed it in front of my face, and barked, “Who is that man?”
I squinted at it. The picture was a blurred and murky series of grays, an unfocused attempt with a telephoto lens. It appeared to be a street scene, and possibly that long dark blob in the middle was a man, though it could just as easily have been a telephone pole.
“Well?” B snapped. “Who is it?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” I said.
“Don’t give me that! You know who he is, and if you’re smart you’ll tell us now and save yourself a trip downtown.”
A came back from the bedroom and shook his head. He had ink on the back of his left hand. (The mimeograph is in the bedroom; I sleep on the sofabed in the living room.)
“Uptown,” I said. “Or maybe crosstown.”
They both stared at me. B said, “What?”
“Foley Square,” I told him, “is both uptown and crosstown from here.”
Squinting like a seagoing parrot, B said, slowly and dangerously, “Foley — Square? — What — about — Foley — Square?”
“It’s your Headquarters. You said I could save myself a trip downtown, but there’s nothing downtown from here except the Manhattan Bridge. You meant I could save myself a trip crosstown, or maybe a trip uptown. But not a trip downtown.”