***On Being  Kadin- With Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin In Mind

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

Sometimes it was hard to know about a guy, about whether he was on the level, whether he was playing straight with you. That thought had crossed Frank Leroy’s mind a few weeks before as he heard the proposition put before him by a guy who had been standing right in front of him in his office, a guy named, let’s just call him Mr. Welles, a name that might just have been his real name and after all hell broke loose in the couple of weeks after that who really knew what his damn name was, or who he really was before the whole thing crashed in on him. That playing it straight part though was important to Frank even though in that Welles case he had made a serious error in judgment, an error that in his business, the private, very private, eye business where a life, his life, might depend on whether the guy was on the square, was on the level, or not.

Funny it all seemed so straight at the time, or maybe the money that Mr. Welles flashed at him was just too green and plentiful for him to not push the envelope of  straight a little further than necessary. He needed dough just then, needed it to keep the dunning landlord from putting a For Rent on his crummy Acme Office Building two-bit office in London’s East End and more importantly keep his ex-wife’s attorney from slamming him before some irate domestic relations judge for being way behind on his alimony and child support payments. And so he bit, although he knew, no, sensed Welles’ story was just a little too pat.  

Of course everybody, everybody in post-world, post-World War II Europe, if you are asking which war, knew who Simon Welles was, or knew the name, knew that he had his hand in every kind of activity, legal and illegal, and that he as a result was one of the richest men in Europe, and maybe the most ruthless in that eerie black market, Marshall aid, red scare cold war night that was descending on Europe. And Welles had the inside track on every kind of angle, had every connection, especially to the Americans, and had, if it came to that, many angels on his side because he spread dough around, enough dough around to make people, hungry, ravaged people, forget the source of his largesse. So when he stood in front Frank, with some kind of weird wig and false beard disguise that he said he needed to protect himself from some guys trying to find him, find him and put a couple of slugs in his skull, he knew he had hit the gravy train. (Welles’ took that wig and beard get-up and Frank immediately knew he was the legendary, ah, financier. At least that was what the sympathetic press called him. )     

And here was Mr. Welles’ simple request. It seems that when he had started out his “career,” his early corner boy gangster career in Germany (Frank later found out, found out the hard way, that Welles had started out that very real career in Croatia under the name Arkady, or something like that) that he had been involved in some rough stuff and now that he was well-known certain parties from back then were searching for him with designs on his head, designs to take it off. The problem was that Mr. Welles claimed he had had an accident, a head injury accident, shortly before the war and could not remember what he had done then, whose wrath he might have drawn, and who had sent the guys who had already taken one pot shot at him in Barcelona. (That turned out to be actually have been Madrid where he was known by the name Arkins and that pot shot turned out to be just short of a full field- fire infantry assault on his home there in Welles- friendly Spain.)

So Mr. Welles wanted Frank, since he was English and unknown on the continent to reconstruct his past. And as he flashed those hundred dollar American bills (the only money worth taking in Europe just then. The money turned out to be real enough just in case you are wondering, although not nearly enough to catch him just short of death, and in the end just plain not enough.) Frank saw that the proposition certainly had it risks but not more so than some of the jobs he had handled before for much less kale. So he played his hunch, his spin-the-wheel guy on the level hunch, and took the job.                   

That was the last safe moment he had. Welles had given him a few leads, a few names of guys who might be able to steer him in the right direction. Yah, he should have known, should have known who was doing the steering, if not why. He went to the first guy, a guy down at the Thames docks, Wally, and asked if he knew a certain name, Aberdeen, and where he might have known it from. He said he knew a guy by that name, or a name like that, Arkwright, back in the early 1930s, a Russian, he thought who brought dough from the Communist International, maybe from Stalin himself , he wasn’t sure, to support a long strike on the docks. He said ask a guy Bruno who he heard was over in Paris working in a café, The Flower, something like that, the last he had heard.  (Wally, real name Orlov, unknown to Frank, was found dead three day later face down fished out from along the Thames two well-placed shots through his eyes.)      

So Frank moved on to Paris, did some simple leg work and, and found Bruno at the Red Rose Café that catered to Americans with some dough. Frank asked about Aberdeen/Arkwright (it turned out to be Arkwright). Bruno thought for a bit and remembered that he had known that name because he was the guy who provided the funds to get him and his buddies some weapons to form a private militia in Austria when the Germans were egging the Austrian fascists on in the early 1930s to overthrow the Socialist government there. (The money actually came from Italy although it might have originated in Germany; Frank was in no position to follow that up.) Bruno said Mann, a guy still in Vienna, who owned a smoke shoppe, The Cigar Factory, might know more since he was in charge of the militia before all hell broke loose in 1938. (Bruno was found a week later in mysterious circumstances hanging from the ceiling light of his small room, ruled an “accident” as suicides were then labeled by the Paris police).         

In Vienna Frank hit pay-dirt. Frank arrived at the smoke shoppe as Mann was about to close. Mann knew everything about the man Frank called Arkwright but that he called Arkov. See Arkov was an émigré Russian who hated the Bolsheviks and he had been there in 1923 when Hitler tried to seize power or whatever the hell he was doing to create havoc. This Arkov was something like Hitler’s bodyguard or something, rough stuff, a real gangster but a gangster with politics and he had helped Mann and his boys out with dough and weapons when things were looking good in Germany in the 1930s and they wanted the same in Austria. This Arkov bragged that he had killed a few Reds in the 1923 melee and then fled. The last he had heard was the Russians still wanted a word with him. That was in early 1941. As the pair finished their conversation and Mann headed to the door to go home for the day a deadly fuselage of gun fire cut Mann down. Frank, who was nicked by a passing bullet, ducked behind the counter and worked his way out the back door and got the hell away from that death trap.     

And it was a close thing. See Oscar Kadin, a Croat, our Mister Welles, actually had been an agent of Hitler’s, had killed a number of Reds, and those Reds having long memories, long post-war Cold War memories, decided that they needed to have more than a word with Kadin. They had been following Kadin into Vienna. They had caught up with him later that night in the Imperial Hotel and took care of their business with Mr. Kadin. Frank, forgetting his close call for a minute, thought   damn he never got paid the rest of his fee, damn that Mister Welles.