[18]
"Clayton," said Kintyre.
"Huh?" The pipe almost dropped from Yamamura's hand. "What the hell! Why, for God's sake?"
"Bruce got too much information about Clayton's rackets."
"What rackets? Clayton's straight! I never heard a hint—"
"Oh, yes. He's straight enough on this side of the Atlantic."
Yamamura muttered something profane. "How do you know?" he added.
"It fits the facts. Bruce was corresponding with his uncle Luigi, the secret service man. Some discussion of highly organized postwar crime syndicates in the Mediterranean countries came up. Now Clayton was a go-getter type who'd lost everything he had three times in a row: the Depression, his first wife's death, divorce from his second wife. It must have embittered him, so that he determined he would never again be poor and defenseless. He came to Italy as a Quartermaster officer in the war. Perfect chance for black marketing, if a man didn't mind taking a few risks. The miracle is not that a few QM people went bad but that most stayed honest. Clayton probably started in a very small way with cigarettes and K rations. But by the end of the war he was in touch with some pretty big figures in the Italian underworld, and saw the opportunities. He came right back after his discharge and went to work at it full time.
"Obviously, he's a hell of a good organizer. He got in on the postwar reconstruction of crime, along lines borrowed from gangland and Communism. He probably set out as a currency black marketeer, working through Switzerland. He soon expanded into other things, smuggling, dope, prostitution, gambling, the works. He became rich."