What’s real? What isn’t?
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
I was going to save this, but for some reason my gut tells me to put it here, and now.
What follows, as I wrote it a few years back, is the story of how I met John Apparite. It's a little rough, and there may be a few references you might not yet understand (like the Superagent Cemetery, which appears in book three), but I figure some of you might be interested in how this all began.
The Reappearance of an Enigma
I am sometimes asked, by those who have read the books, about the source for the Apparite tales: Was there truly a man named John Apparite? Was the head of his agency actually called the Director? If I go to the rear of the Royal Artillery Memorial in London, will there really be initials scratched into its concrete base? If I find the right Iowa back-country road, could I possibly stumble upon the "Superagent Cemetery"?
The answers--which should be to no one's surprise--are yes and no. Yes, there was a man named John Apparite. At least, that's what the man who told me his name was John Apparite told me his name was; and yes, he did call his chief the "Director." In fact, after John Apparite became a Superagent, others in that super-secret agency began calling their chief by that name as well (and secretly, he was supposed to have liked it). Lastly, there is a "Superagent Cemetery" but I have purposefully obscured its location (like Ballard tried to do with the sunken Titanic, and for similar reasons). It is in Iowa, but is not exactly where an investigative cartographer, using the clues provided in my books, might believe it to be. And as far as the Royal Artillery Memorial is concerned, my advice is simple: go there and see for yourself! You might be surprised at what you find. But getting back to the enigmatic Mr. Apparite, the means by which I met him is a story in itself, and one worth telling, now that I am able.
In the late eighties and early nineties, I was a physician in advanced medical training at a major Midwestern medical center. As is common with large, University-based medical programs, there was a close affiliation with a V.A. hospital. This particular V.A was a terrific place to train. You can get a huge cup of coffee and the best, greasiest breakfast sandwich in the United States there for under two bucks--an important consideration for a physician in-training of modest means--plus you can learn your medical specialty and cut your teeth on surgical procedures on the most indestructible people imaginable. V.A. patients, God Bless 'em, are like no others: they almost never die from neglect or medical misadventure, no matter what is done to them; they love going to the doctor, unlike everybody else with half a brain; and they all keep a close eye out for each other.
For instance, take this common occurrence. Our ward team is rounding. We go into a four-person inpatient ward room and ask how a "Mr. Doyle" did overnight. Here's how this interaction would often go:
"Well, how was your night, Mr. Doyle?"
Mr. Doyle does not stir, but one of his three roommates answers.
"He had it pretty rough--breathin' kinda' fast," said a Mr. Anderson.
"Tough time breathing, then, Mr. Doyle?" I ask.
"Yup, but he perked-up after a treatment," added another roommate, a Mr. Jones.
"Nurses said he had a fever, too," added his third roommate, a Mr. Schmidt.
"But he fell asleep an hour ago. Said he felt better," concluded Anderson, the room's apparent team-leader.
This was how our daily rounds went for about a third of our patients. You so often got the bulk of your history from a roommate, a wife, a child, or a nurse, that the last person you'd ask if you wanted actual information, it seemed, might be the patient. But it was a wonderful place to be treated as a patient, and an even more wonderful place to gain practical experience as a physician. And, for a physician like me who loved to hear the stories of those who'd fought in WWII, the greatest war in history, the V.A. Hospital was heaven. I can't tell you how many times I wished I'd written down the tales the patients there told me, and yet the most memorable of these men would be the one who had not told me anything at all.
One day an extremely elderly man was admitted to our service. He had lung cancer and was very weak. When first diagnosed with his cancer he had had surgery and radiation, and though he had done well with the treatments, it had come back. He then tried chemotherapy, but being an especially aggressive, stubborn tumor, it had come back. Though his prognosis was poor (and this was true for most of our lung cancer patients), the dying man continued to smoke pack after pack each day as if he hadn't a care in the world. After all, such men often told us, what the hell do I have to lose now?
I got along with him pretty well and we became friends (in a doctor-patient kind of way) and when he knew he only had a couple of days left in his tired body, he made a request of me. It was, by any stretch of my imagination, the strangest thing I have ever been asked to do by any patient, dying or not, but as it was also a fairly easy task to perform, I did it. This request, I later discovered, would open a new chapter in my life, but I'll save that for later.
"Make a phone call for me, doc," the dying man had said. His condition had declined to where he had to pause between every other word to gasp a breath. Watching him reminded one of one's own mortality.
"Umm--okay" I replied, but with a little hesitation. Usually the nurses handled this kind of thing, especially so near the end. The man then handed me a small folded piece of scrap-paper.
"You must call from a pay phone, and you must say exactly what is on the paper. No more, no less."
"Why do I have to use a pay phone?" I asked. "I can call for free on the hospital's line anywhere. Even long distance."
He looked at me in a way he'd never had the power, it seemed, to do before. His glare had become intense, intimidating, and unexpectedly frightening and earnest.
"It must be a pay phone. Please do it that way, for your own safety."
I smiled at him and reminded myself to search his chart for any psych history. This personality change was abrupt and disturbing, and what he had said hinted at paranoia. But hell, I thought, he's a dying man, so do what he asks and forget how crazy it all sounds.
"Sure," I said. "I'll do it any way you want."
"Thank you; I won't forget it," the man responded. The fierce look on his face dissolved, and he managed a brief smile before falling asleep.
I left the hospital later that day having, of course, completely forgotten to make the call (I'd planned all along to do it from the M.O.D.'s call-room and not a pay-phone) but by chance I passed a pay-phone on my walk home from the hospital. I inserted a quarter, took the scrap-paper out of my pocket, and dialed.
I can't remember the exact number that was printed on the little folded piece of paper, but I do recall that, to my surprise, it had more than the usual number of digits for any phone number that I'd ever seen. There were fully twelve of them, broken up by dashes into groups of three, four, and five. And I was beyond surprise when, after punching them all in, a phone actually rang and immediately was answered.
"Yes."
Forgetting my instructions, I blurted out, "Hi, I'm supposed to call this number and…."
The phone went dead.
Shit! I said aloud, realizing my error. I quickly redialed the twelve numbers, hoping that I had not ruined the final wish of a dying man, and then the phone rang again. To my considerable relief it was immediately answered once more.
"Yes."
I looked down at the piece of paper to deliver the message. Other than the twelve digit phone number, all I saw on it was another series of six and then seven numbers, but each had been written out as a word, like a sentence made up only of numbers. That can't be it, I thought, turning the paper over, but the other side was blank. Strange as it seemed, I felt like I had no choice but to read the series of numbers into the phone, and I did so.
"Repeat," said the voice on the other end of the line.
I reread the numbers, wondering all the while what the hell this was all about--this was nuts!
"Thank you."
The line went dead again. I walked the rest of the way home in wonderment and confusion at what had just occurred. It was very, very strange, and although it would have made a terrific story to tell my friends over a few-too-many beers at our favorite tavern, I elected to tell no one.
Why? I can't really say, but I do know that the dying man's glare had something to do with it. I subconsciously gripped that little piece of scrap-paper tightly as I made my way home, almost as if I was keeping it from harm or discovery, and then I did a strange thing; a very strange thing indeed considering how carefully I had been protecting it: I flushed it right down the toilet. Something in the man's glare had told me to do that, too.
Returning to the hospital the next day, our ward-team--consisting of myself (I was the acting Chief Resident), three doctors-in-training, and four medical students--went on our usual rounds. Reaching the old, dying man's room, I saw that his roommates had been discharged and he was now alone. He did not make eye contact with me until after our ward team had visited, but just before I left the room, he called out to me.
"Doc, after you guys are done I'd like to speak with you. Alone."
What an unusual request, I thought. Most of the time, a patient only asked to speak confidentially with one of the medical team's senior members if there'd been a problem with one of the staff. Frankly, I wasn't in the mood for that kind of thing at the moment.
"What's up?" I asked, after I had returned from our rounds. "Is there a problem?"
"Did you make the call?" he said in a whisper, though urgently.
"Yes," I answered. "From a pay phone, just as you said."
You could feel the tension leave him, like a vacuum bottle that has been holding pent-up pressure for years and years, and which suddenly has been released.
"Thank you," he said with audible relief. "Tomorrow I may have a visitor. Please insure that we are not disturbed in any manner while he is here."
"Sure. I'll tell the nurses."
He held out his hands, took my right hand between them, and squeezed it softly. It seemed an unusually intimate and warm gesture, and I was quite touched by it. He let go, smiled warmly, and laid his head back onto his pillow. It would be the last time I would ever see him alive.
The rest of that day, and well into the next, our ward team was terribly busy. Admission piled upon admission, and "crashing" patients had to be rushed to the ICU. But at about three p.m. I saw a thin though well-built man with gray hair enter the dying man's room. He looked to be about sixty and wore a form-fitting sweater-vest and chino pants. His face was expressionless, but was kind and pleasant in its own way. You could tell that he was a very nice man, but also that he could be as hard as granite when the situation required it. He entered the dying man's room, and shortly thereafter I heard the sound of the curtain being drawn around the bed.
Just then, we had an emergency: a terminal patient in another room man had just decided to die. Oddly, he'd sat bolt upright to do so, and the bizarre, disturbing sight briefly sent his nurses into a panic. I was called to the room, stat. Two nurses held a thin, ashen, sitting figure, and you did not have to be a physician to see that he was quite dead. We gently laid him back down again (I never did figure out why he'd sat upright so abruptly just at the moment he'd let go of his life) and covered his face. His family was called; we told them the sad news and they cried; the orderlies arrived to take him to the morgue; I spoke about death with our medical students; and before I knew it nearly three hours had gone by and it was time to go home.
As I passed the dying old man's room, I could hear the soft sound of muffled voices, and then that of the curtain being opened from around the bed. The dying man's friend left the room, but spied me as I ducked into the nurses's station.
"Say, doc," he said, getting my attention.
"Do you need anything?" I asked.
"Just wanted to say thanks. Thanks for letting me visit with him like that."
Looking at the man's face, I noticed an unusual number of subtle but visible scars, as well as the marks of recently wiped-away tears that had stained his cheeks.
"No problem," I replied. "He's one of my favorite patients, you know."
"He really appreciated all you've did for him." He stopped for a moment in thought. "I feel like I should give you something for taking such good care of him," he added in a tone of utmost sincerity.
"Hearing that somebody appreciates us is enough, sometimes!" I said with a laugh. "He's an interesting guy. I'm curious to know what he did in the war. I love hearing their stories."
And then, after another brief pause--during which I had the distinct feeling I was being sized-up--the visitor said something I have never forgotten.
"Someday, someone will tell you about it. And even then, you probably won't believe it."
He turned and briskly walked down the corridor, directly into the elevator which, almost as if by design, had opened its doors in-synch with his arrival.
I stood dumbly in the hallway, trying to figure out the meaning of his last, enigmatic statement. Someone will tell me--tell me what? Was the "someone" this visitor? When would he tell me? Just what the hell had the dying old man done in the war to merit such weird, reclusive behavior?
A nurse touched my shoulder to get my attention, disturbing my very deep and convoluted thoughts, startling me.
"The man in seven twenty-eight bed-one just died. What a day! Two in one shift."
"Seven twenty-eight?" This was the room of the visitor's dying friend, the old man with the lung cancer, my mystery patient. I ran down the hall in that direction.
The nurse called after me:
"He was DNR! You don't have to call a 'Code'!"
I knew that he was DNR--"Do Not Resuscitate"--but my sprint had nothing to do with calling an emergency "Code Blue." It was a reflex spurred on by the vague hope that when I reached the room she would be wrong.
But she was not. The dying old man had passed, his stories untold, and his death was one that would haunt me for many years. It was not, however, because there was some way to have prevented or cured his cancer, nor because I or my ward team had done something wrong in his care. No. His death haunted me because I had been left to wonder whether he had been killed by the visitor I had called to see him; whether he had been killed to protect some secret, or fulfill some terrible means to an end. It seemed such a strange coincidence--the visitor comes, the visitor leaves, the dying old man is dead--that it took many years before I accepted the fact that I would almost certainly never know what had truly happened.
That is, until my phone rang one week after the change of the millennium, nearly a decade later. I was alone in the house (my wife having taken our kids on a visit to her parents'), and I jumped when I heard it (I had been watching a show on paranormal phenomena and that sort of thing always makes me jumpy) but soon recovered my wits and answered it.
"Is this Dr. ------ who trained at the ------ V.A. Hospital in nineteen ----?"
"Yes…" I said. I wondered what sort of telemarketer, or medical investigator, or God-knows-what pain-in-my-ass was on the line.
"Do you remember the man in room seven twenty-eight? The one that had you call me?"
My heart skipped a beat: God Almighty, what is happening? For a moment, I actually feared for my safety, for my family, for everything I held dear. I steadied myself and answered him.
"I remember. You're the man who visited him?"
"Yes. He died right before I left."
"I know." I wondered how to ask him whether he had anything to do with it. "I remember it well."
"Good," he answered. "Just before I left him--by the way, he knew he was going to die that day--he told me I could tell you everything someday."
"Everything about what?" I asked. Did it have something to do with the dying man's World War II experiences?
A thought suddenly sprang to mind: Oh, I know what it's about. He's heard about my book; the book I was writing on the WWII veterans in my town.
"You must be talking about my WWII book," I said. "Well, I'm only writing about people who live within three miles of my house."
I heard a relaxed chuckle on the other end of the line. "No, it's not for any book. But someone has to know. Someone has to know what he did. What we did."
I remembered that the mysterious visitor had looked too young to have been a WWII vet himself, but maybe, I thought, he had fought in Korea.
"Were you in the Korean War or something? I'm only writing about WWII."
"No. It's different than that. I can't say any more on a public phone line. I'll contact you soon."
And then the line went dead.
When my wife returned, I told her nothing. I didn't see the point in upsetting her, and I sensed that this man meant no harm. Since I'd started writing my WWII book, I'd had veterans and the like call me to discuss their experiences, although the idea that this man had somehow gotten our unlisted number bothered me for some time.
But after a few days, and then weeks, and then months, I'd nearly forgotten about the mysterious phone call, and then gradually even about the dying man and his visitor once more. A year passed, and soon it had been two, but just when I thought I would never hear from the man again--if ever I would have thought of him at all again--there was a knock on my door. Such a funny thing, a knock is. It can sound warm and inviting or cold and intruding, and you sometimes can't tell which it is until you see who is doing the knocking. On this day, this knock was on of those knocks, and I went to the door with some trepidation to see who was making it.
It was the visitor. At first I did not recognize him--I'd seen him only briefly over ten years earlier--but as soon as he spoke, it came powerfully flooding back to me, like an ocean wave that nearly bowled me over.
"Hi, doc. Good to see you after all these years." He had a smile on his face, and his manner was not only non-threatening, it was damned friendly and comfortable.
"I thought I'd never hear from you again. Can I ask why you're here?" I figured that polite directness would be a good course to take, and one that he would respect.
"I bought a house down the road. Why don't you stop by tonight. Do you like beer?"
"Heck yeah," I answered. "I brew my own, that's how much I like it. I'll bring some down for you to try."
"Great," he said with enthusiasm. "Drop by about eight."
And I did. Six months later, he'd sold his house and moved on. But he had left behind not only hours upon hours of stories and clues and riddles on which I have spent the last six years in the solving, but also the memory of a very decent man and his supervisor who somehow found it in themselves to do some very terrible, terrible things; all in the name of their country.
That very first day, when we talked over a couple (okay, it was a few more than a couple) of cold beers, he memorably told me that the name on his mailbox (which said "Joe Judge") was not his own. This was my first clue that he had been a spy, like in the CIA (although he always called it "CI"), or that he was a complete wacko. Either one, frankly, seemed a real possibility at the time. But the more we talked, and as I gauged the truthfulness in what he told me--and after practicing medicine for well over a decade, I'm a pretty good judge on when I'm being snow-jobbed, believe me--I could not shake this feeling that he was telling the absolute, unvarnished, brutally crushing truth.
He told me how he had been named "John Apparite" by his fiercely intimidating chief, whom he called the "Director." He told me that he was born in Eckhart Springs, Maryland (look at a map and you'll only find 'Eckhart Mines'--I assume the town named 'Springs' eventually dried up and was forgotten), and that his father was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. He told me of his love for the Washington Senators, and how his heart had first been crushed when they had moved to Minneapolis, and again when they left D.C. a second time for Texas, although by then he had moved most of his loyalties over to the Orioles in Baltimore.
He shared his adventures, his many friends (most dead), his women (dead or deserted), and enemies (all dead); and most movingly of all, his unusual and unlikely friendship with the Director. He told me that after his chief had passed, he had claimed the body and taken it to the "Superagent Cemetery," where, in solemn reverie, his legendary boss was laid to rest under the bright Iowa sun.
And then, on the last day that we would speak, he told me something about the Director that meant perhaps more to him, and me, than anything that had preceded it.
"Just before I left the Director, on the day that he died, he asked me whether I still remembered my birth name. I told him I did, but that I had forgotten what it sounded like. And that I had not seen it in print for so long, I might have forgotten how it was spelled. He laughed, you know--that sort of self-deprecating comment always made him laugh--and then he said this: 'John, you shouldn't have to live the rest of your life with a name I gave you in a crappy government office in 1955. Go back to your old one someday, will you?' He gripped my arm, and it took a moment for me to realize that he had called me 'John.' It was only the third time he'd ever done that, you know.
"So I held out my hand to him, like I was introducing myself, and I said, 'Frank Kisamore. Glad to meet you.' He smiled and shook my hand. We both were crying. He then spoke the last words he ever said to me, and they were probably the most meaningful ones he'd ever said, too: 'Pleasure to meet you Frank. I'm Arthur Morgan. But you can call me 'Art.'
"He let go of my hand, closed his eyes, and then he died. But after all these years, there's something that I've always thought was kinda' funny. You know, he really didn't look much like an 'Art' to me! I'd never have guessed it. But he was a great guy, and I miss him. If you want to know why I've told you all this--well, there's a million reasons, I guess. But the main one, I think, is this: I just don't want people to forget what he did, and maybe even what guys like me did. Being loved or hated or anything at all is better than being forgotten, you know."
Joe Judge/John Apparite/Frank Kisamore spoke those words to me many years ago, and I've not had any contact from him since. He'd be almost eighty now, but I know he's alive. How, you ask? Because I believe that when he finally passes, he'll make sure that someone like me is there to watch him being lowered into the ground at his beloved "Superagent Cemetery"--just as he did for the Director almost ten years ago. And until that day occurs, nothing will convince me otherwise.
Frank Kisamore, I have learned, is just that sort of guy.
The Author
In books like Under Cloak of Darkness and A Matter of Revenge, which involve secret agents, espionage, and dozens and dozens of facts and historical references, the obvious question is this one:
What's real, and what's made up?
Let's tackle things one at a time. First of all, the combat methods: all real. There really is such a thing as combat SAMBO, as Isshin-Ryu karate, and as Krav Maga. Each of those is quite historically accurate to the time period: Krav Maga was developed at about the same time as the State of Israel came into being (the late 1940’s), SAMBO had been used in Soviet intelligence for decades, and Isshin-Ryu karate was developed in the early 1950's. I tried to keep Apparite's actual combat moves consistent with Isshin-Ryu principles: the thumb-on-top fist, the direct kicks aimed below the umbilicus, and the short, whip-like, ‘snapping’ punches are all accurate to Isshin-Ryu. Even the test at Butch's is based (loosely) on fact: back in the late forties there was a martial arts master in Honolulu named William Chow who tested his new karate innovations by going to the rough part of town and getting in brawls (often with American GI’s).
The weapons are factual as well, including the Colt Super Automatic (with appropriate Clark modification), Soviet Tokarev and Makarov, British Webley revolver, Beretta 1951, Colt M1911—-they were all actual pistols at that time. The only made up one on my part is the "mini-Colt M1911" in AMOR. Why? Well, I wanted Apparite to have a small pistol he could easily conceal, and while in real life there is the famed Derringer, it's rather a crappy weapon. Apparite deserved better than one of those! So he got a "mini-Colt." As for the knives, I have taken some liberties, though not unrealistically so—-there really are switch-blades, throwing-knives and such, of course, though most spies to do not use them as extensively as Apparite.
The assassination devices are absolutely real, including the use of Ricin with a miniature poison-pellet, although this one has not been documented, to my knowledge, to have been used as far back as 1955 (though it certainly seems possible if not likely, as the Soviets, for one, had the technology at the time). The derivation of Ricin and its deadly effects as I described them in the book are well-documented. As for tetrodotoxin, used in AMOR, I suspect derivations of it have indeed been used in real-life, since it is a rather notorious naturally-occurring poison (and can also be synthesized artificially as well). I am not, however, aware of any specific instances where it has been used as a murder weapon. But I bet that someday we'll hear of one (though radioactive materials in a tea-cup seem to be all the rage at the moment). The poison-well bullets and knives are my own invention, but I'd bet that at least the bullet version has actually been developed by someone. It's just too obvious a device to stay only in the realm of fiction!
I have tried to be as medically accurate as possible in the works, describing what actually occurs when a bullet strikes the chest and heart, for example (which usually results in a pneumothorax—-sometimes a tension pneumothorax, as in Apparite’s case in UCOD), and have even tried to make Apparite's recovery (with chest-tube, petrolatum gauze, penicillin, etc.) as realistic as possible. Maybe he gets up and around a little fast, but even that's not out of the realm of possibility: after bypass grafting, patients often leave the hospital within a week nowadays and, of course, John Apparite is otherwise young and healthy, so him healing rapidly from a chest wound and being ambulatory after only a few days’ recovery would not be unexpected, even for the fifties. The other wounds in the books--the severed carotid, a bullet in the thigh, L-pill poison, etc--all act as they likely would in real life.
The bottom line (and what people all too often get wrong in films and books) is this: human beings are, in general, much harder to kill than most people think. Most bullet "head shots" don't kill immediately--often there's some thrashing about a bit or a seizure. Most chest wounds don't kill right away, either. It usually takes a minute or two at a minimum to bleed to death, unless your heart goes into fibrillation first (which I suspect sometimes happens when one is shot in the heart). Often, survival in these instances is based more on luck than anything else, unless you get hit in one of the point-of-no-return places (brainstem, direct left ventricle shot, aortic shot, or fast-acting no-antidote poison).
Most of the other major facts as stated are true and accurate to the period: the C-43 Dakota that takes Apparite out of Berlin in AMOR was used in the Berlin air-lift and dropped D-Day Pathfinders; the Boeing Stratocruiser that takes Apparite to London in UCOD was used as such; the cars in Berlin, D.C., and London existed at the time and would have been there; the missile fuel formulas are what the U.S. and Soviets were using at the time; Grace Kelly was on the Life magazine cover in April 1955; the novel PEYTON PLACE did come out in 1956; trans-Atlantic flights did take-off from Friendship Airport in Baltimore (and not from National in D.C.), etc.—-all true, according to my sources from the period. In fact, almost every little bit of 'factual business' was documented by some reputable source or another, even the wondrous taste of A La Mort Subite Kriek Lambic beer.
The Washington Senators information is factual as well, from the players and trades on down to the scores of most of the games on the dates they would have taken place (including the game Apparite goes to in AMOR in April 1956--I obtained the actual box-score and used it to write the chapter). The only 'fudges' that I cannot document are that Early Wynn was indeed the pitcher the night Apparite listens to the Senators-Indians game in the warehouse in UCOD (or that the game was lost for the 'Nats' on a Vic Wertz double), and I'm not sure Moose Skowron hit a "screaming liner" into the stands in the game Apparite attended, but that's about it. And yes, Bob Feller really did throw a fastball ninety-eight point six miles per hour, although in my opinion, Lefty Grove was probably the greatest pitcher of all-time (yes, perhaps not the great Walter Johnson, despite what the Director says.)
The Hoover and Mafia business in UCOD is based on rumor, though not outside the realm of possibility: Hoover was thought to have been homosexual by many; the Mafia was rumored to have something on him; and Hoover did persecute homosexuals in the FBI. Interestingly, mobster Carmine Galante really did kill an American Communist Party leader for the KGB for fifty grand, which I think is quite fascinating in its own way and was my inspiration for the SMERSH-KGB-Mafia assassination and defection scheme. My Wilhelm Heydrich material in AMOR is loosely based on famed SS commander Joachim Peiper, who indeed did likely kill POW's in cold blood, was indeed tried at Dachau and sent to prison, and did indeed die under mysterious circumstances in France in a cottage fire. I've also heard a tale of some American ex-GI's who went to Europe after the war and killed an SS man for revenge, but I don't have any more information on that other than rumor.
The London material is based on a trip I took to that great city, and is as accurate as my jotting the facts down in a spiral notebook can be, limited mainly by my ability to later read my own disjointed handwriting. But the location of the safe-house in the mews of Queen's Gate Place; the descriptions of the Reading Room and St. Paul's; and basically all of the other tidbits about London are all accurate and consistent with the period (the Reading Room, in fact, looks different today than in 1955, so don't expect to sit in a black leather chair or see card catalogues near the front entrance if you visit). An old Geographia Visitors' Guide to London I had that was from the early sixties proved to be a valuable resource, as was a World Book Atlas from that period as well. And just to reiterate it: Yankee Stadium was NOT white in 1956! It was still the original brown concrete color at the time. As for Berlin, I elected not to go there for AMOR because I had access to countless films and photos and eyewitness accounts that painted a good portrait of what it would have been like in the post-WWII, Cold War era. Since so much of it has been redeveloped since Apparite's visit (unlike much of London), I didn't think it would be worth the time and effort (in particular, the Eastern Sector has been rebuilt since the Wall came down, especially in the western part of it. Just look at the Potsdamerplatz and you'll see the difference between 1989 and today!) For the fourth book, however, I plan on going to Prague, since that city remains a wonder to behold, and should still evoke the past with some accuracy.
I’ll admit that a few things have been overstated, if not overheated, for the sake of clarity or drama: In AMOR, I don't know if PEYTON PLACE had made it quite all the way to Europe by May 1956; I think the Brussels cafe A La Mort Subite would have been more crowded than I painted it (but maybe not--it was in mid-afternoon, I recall); I'm not sure that tetrodotoxin, even the Director's super-powered version, could kill THAT fast; and I don't know that Hoevenaers would have survived his poison even if he had his leg cut off. As far as UCOD goes, the Soviet political stuff is perhaps overly-simplified (it's not like Malenkov was completely the good-guy pacifist and Molotov completely the bad-guy war-monger in real-life), and it's not clear to me that the Soviets would really ever try and kill American officials (or pay the Mafia to do so), or that they were desperate enough for solid missile-fuel to pay a defector $500,000 for it, but each episode is based on what was plausible at the time, and with some preceding true event as its inspiration (the Soviets did launch a missile from a barge so it looked like it came from a submarine, for example, and they did not have good solid missile fuels—-unbelievably, they did not use them regularly until the early seventies!). I do know this: Apparite COULD have caught that foul ball just as he did. The man's reflexes were UNBELIEVABLE!
And now the $64,000 Question: Were there Superagents? I don't know, but I guess it would not surprise me if there were: given the lengths the Soviets went to back in the fifties, I bet there likely were CIA agents that operated basically as rogues in order to counter this Soviet threat, having assassination and espionage responsibilities similar to those of a Superagent. Even the possibility that such agents existed outside the knowledge of the President does not seem unlikely to me given the climate of the time, and the powers and ambitions of those in power (like the Dulles Brothers, and later, James Angleton).
Was there a Director? Not as far as I know, and he's not based on Allen Dulles or Angleton or anyone like that, either. The Director's character is (loosely) based on an actual ball-player (a catcher) by the name of Moe Berg who became an American spy in WWII though, of course, Moe never became the director of a super-secret espionage agency, although he did play for a time with the Senators (my 'shout-out' to Moe is the inclusion of 'Berg's Deli' as the source of J and Apparite's sandwiches for the Dolci butcher-shop surveillance).
The man now named John Apparite is based on no single person, though if you were to see me in person you might be struck at the similarities in our physical appearance (and handedness), though it must be admitted that I needed Lasik surgery to correct my fuzzy eyesight, am a life-long Baltimore Orioles’ fan, and am also significantly older than my 'alter-ego.' However, like Apparite, I, too, enjoy a good beer and even suffer from an occasional fear of flying (mine is mild—-Apparite's more severe). And no, Apparite's last name, K-------, does not stand for 'Koontz.’
In the end, my goal was to provide a factual framework for Under Cloak of Darkness and A Matter of Revenge that was as rock-solid as I could make it, so if, say, ninety-five percent of each book was apparently factual (and documentably so), then maybe people would buy the rest (all book legal disclaimers aside) as being factual as well—and since that five percent includes the existence of the Director's agency and John Apparite, it was pretty important that I get this right. I also think that by being as detailed as possible in regard to the spy-game and the period of the fifties, then people might lose themselves in the book and feel like it had been conceived by someone with 'inside knowledge' of fifties espionage, perhaps even believing that the book had been written in that time period.
If anyone has any comments regarding the books, I’d be happy to reply as time allows. You can contact me through the 'Ask the Author' section, or send me an e-mail at: imichaelkoontz@yahoo.com
