What is it about old photographs? Did they always look old? On a shelf at home, my grandmother and grandfather look out at me from a sepia print. He wears a thin tie and suit coat, she a simple, light-colored blouse. He is blond, with a wide, sensual mouth. She is black Irish, her eyes brooding and intelligent. Both wear serious expressions-the style of the day, and, as Grandfather told me much later, a style that helped conceal the dental problems that were rampant then. Those days were 1910, and Grandmother and Grandfather were newlyweds, twenty and twenty-four years old respectively. And of course that photo was the leading edge of technology of that day. They didn’t sit for the photographer in dusty territorial Arizona knowing that many decades later they would look like a museum piece to their grandson, who lived with everyday miracles such as jet travel, air-conditioning, biotechnology, and computers.
I reminded myself of this as I sat in Vince Renzetti’s parlor and took in a lifetime of old photos that sat on tables, shelves, and walls-everywhere that didn’t house a plant. He was one of those men who were told “You haven’t changed a bit!” at reunions. So he was instantly recognizable in the Army Air Corps officer’s uniform of World War II. Same in the photo with J. Edgar Hoover, both men wearing double-breasted suits and expressions of straight-mouthed seriousness. And another picture showing him with a young man who had a thin nose and an earnest Kentucky face: John Pilgrim. They were walking with their hands on the arms of a fleshy-faced guy who tried to look away from the camera.
“That was just after we were assigned to Phoenix, in 1947,” Renzetti said, noticing me noticing the photo. “Everybody wore suits, ties, and hats back then. Even the bad guys.”
He sat in a straight-backed chair opposite me, drinking green tea. This day he wore a blue blazer and red and white rep tie. Outside a screen door the weather was chill and rainy. Inside, it was uncomfortably warm and smelled vaguely of dill and Williams LectricShave.
“I’ve checked you out, Mapstone,” he said in the booming master-of-ceremonies voice. “You worked as a sheriff’s deputy when you were young. Then you got your Ph.D. in history and taught for fifteen years. When you failed to gain tenure, you went back home to Phoenix. You got a job from your old partner, who was the chief deputy.”
“Now he’s the sheriff,” I interposed.
“You use the historian’s techniques to solve old cases,” he went on. “Very innovative.”
Renzetti’s eyes never left me. His hands didn’t move from the teacup he held in his lap-no gesticulating Italian-American stereotype in Vincent Renzetti. His posture was relaxed and businesslike. Only his sentences, short, chopped, conveyed any sense of energy or agitation.
“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 were spies,” Renzetti said emphatically, fixing me with the yellow eyes. “It wasn’t like that cocksucker McCarthy told it. But Soviet agents had penetrated parts of the government. John was transferred from Los Angeles to Phoenix to shadow this Dimitri. And I was just some shavetail kid who was assigned to go with him.”
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 loved women. It was a different kind of world then. But he was a damned good agent. We got an indictment against the one commissioner, Duke Simms. We sent some of the local cops to prison, and we slowed down the mobsters.”
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.