The Cold Six Thousand

"The Cold Six Thousand" by James Ellroy; Knopf, 688 pages, $2 5.95.

Lock into the ethos. Slide into the groove. Synchronize your psyche with the frenzied, staccato explosions of red-misted violence and the jarring, busted-knuckle prose of James Ellroy.

In this bold, electrifying new novel, the author of "L.A. Confidential," "American Tabloid" and "My Dark Places" doesn`t so much deconstruct the 1960s as dismember it. "The Cold Six Thousand" is fiction as demolition, storytelling as scorched-earth policy. Paranoids will feel comfortable in its skin; skeptics will likely remain unconvinced, but may find themselves checking their rear-views for tails. Just in case.

Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963. Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young cop who is said to be "incorruptable by Las Vegas Police standards," is en route with an assignment he`s less than enthusiastic about: Hunt down and kill a black pimp named Wendell Durfee, who had the audacity to shank a casino employee who pulled a knife on him. Doesn`t seem fair to Wayne Jr., but the casinos are run by the Boys, who also run the police, and an order is an order. He has a cold $6,000 for his expenses and trouble.

Within minutes of landing, Tedrow hooks up with his Dallas PD liaison, Maynard D. Moore, a lumbering, Stetson-sporting, Red Man-chewing redneck who informs him with a smile that the president has been assassinated. He stops smiling a little while later when he learns that Dallas policeman J.D. Tippet has been shot to death. Spooked, Moore takes off, and it`s not purely out of sympathy for a fellow officer: Something seems to be up.

Something`s up, all right. The next chapter introduces superlawyer and ex-FBI man Ward J. Littell. Ten minutes after the sound of - how many? - shots echoed through Dealy Plaza, Littell received a phone call from his former boss, J. Edgar Hoover: Get to Dallas for damage control. Soon Littell is skittering deftly through Dallas police headquarters, working around and through the post-assassination chaos to spring some "bums" picked up near the grassy knoll.

Next chapter: Mobbed-up anti-Castro warrior Pete Bondurant. His sleazy torch-singer girlfriend, under orders to co-opt, once slept with JFK. Bondurant topped her, helping plan the assassination.

Oswald? A patsy. Tippet? Supposed to kill Oswald; didn`t get it done. Jack Ruby? Littell and Bondurant convince him to do Oswald by beating Ruby nearly to death and threatening to kill his whole family.

Everything fits, but nothing is clear. Wayne Tedrow Sr. is a powerful right-wing lunatic who distributes hate literature nationwide and has connections to Howard Hughes, who is eager to buy up a good part of Las Vegas from the Mob, who are just as eager to have him do so - at exorbitant prices, and so long as they can continue to skim millions from the casinos.

Part of the skim goes to organizations dedicated to overthrowing Castro and returning Cuba to its glory days of Mob rule and money-laundering casino paradise. Violence threatens, ripples, bursts forth: Witnesses are eliminated, turncoats eviscerated, innocents butchered. The guys find a nighttime raid to slaughter some unsuspecting Cuban soldiers pleasurable enough, but the real action, it seems, is over in Southeast Asia, where this Vietnam thing is heating up. The war will provide good cover: They plan to take over the heroin trade, funnel the millions toward La Causa. Death to The Beard!

The pimp that Wayne Jr. eventually declined to murder returns to wreak a kind of mindless vengeance, severing Wayne Jr. from any remaining strands of moral mooring that kept him tethered to a sane universe; before long he`s in-country as a master heroin chef, turning poppy into powder. Littell, retaining enough soul to feel conflicted (he once believed in Robert Kennedy, then hated him, but now ...) plays convoluted mind games with Hoover in their veiled, deeply bizarre telephone conversations. Bondurant produces: heroin, guns, death. Bondurant believes.

Real-life figures mingle with the fictitious. Littell, at Hoover`s behest, attempts to corrupt civil rights leader Bayard Rustin by funding his cause with skimmed casino cash; the FBI director`s mission is to "... reveal the socialistic underpinnings of the entire civil-rights movement." But who, in the end, is Littell betraying, besides himself and his shredded ideals? Hoover schemes against LBJ, although his prognostication is just about exactly 180 degrees off: "I view the words `Great Society` as fresh lyrics to `The Internationale.` Lyndon Johnson will deplete his prestige on the homefront and recoup it in Vietnam. History will judge him as a tall man with big ears who needed wretched people to love him."

(Hoover also mouths an anachronism: "warp speed" was not a part of any Earthly lexicon in 1964.)

Rock Hudson and Sal Mineo cruise Las Vegas for homosexual trysts. A defeated and downward-spiraling Sonny Liston goes to work as an enforcer for a right-wing front organization. Howard Hughes grows increasingly squirrelly. ("Good morning, gentlemen," he is heard saying on a tape to some assembled corporate honchos. "I trust that you have clean air in your conference room, along with appropriate snacks such as Fritos corn chips and Slim Jim beef jerky.")

Robert Kennedy suspects too much, is secretly taped acknowledging that he knows who was behind his brother`s murder, and will go after them when the time is right. Martin Luther King - "Martin Lucifer Coon," in far-right terminology - will also need dealing with ...

Conspiracies, gun-running, assassinations, co-opting of governments, FBI/Mob collusion - what, exactly, is going on here? Surely in "The Cold Six Thousand" Ellroy isn`t attempting anything so simplistic as a template of reality. Rather the novel is an emotional re-creation of a testosterone-fueled, gung-ho Cold War Weltanschauung in which superpatriots gorked out on hardware dreams, cordite haze and the heavenly vision of millions of dead Reds gained purchase on a not insignificant chunk of the American psychic landscape. Lee Harvey Oswald may or may not have acted alone, as the phrase goes, but the assassination may as well have been a wide-ranging conspiracy: "They" were certainly out there, as any monitoring of newspaper editorials, radio broadcasts or full-size billboards in and around Dallas in the autumn of 1963 would have made manifest.

Ellroy strips prose to raw, gleaming bone. Except for the occasional line of dialogue or transcription of a departmental memo, few sentences - or, just as frequently, sentence fragments - run to more than five or six words. The effect can be hypnotic, but over the course of more than 600 pages it can also become numbing. The combination of short, sharp declarative bursts, icy rendering of grotesque violence and matter-of-fact descriptions of lurid sexual encounters does tend to wear a reader down; one gets to feeling not nibbled to death by ducks, as the fuzzy-warm saying goes, but - more in the spirit of things - pummelled to literary pulp by a bad-cop writer, a verb puncher and noun slinger who works over the soft tissue and never leaves a mark.

None of the characters in "The Cold Six Thousand" seems even close to being fully human; it`s impossible to imagine any of them pushing a cart through Ralphs, taking in a movie, falling asleep over a crossword puzzle, having the brakes checked - and take a look at those tires, too, wouldya? But it`s not clear that they`re supposed to behave like real people. Like the prose medium in which they stew, they`ve been shorn of extraneous attributes in order to do their bit in explicating an era, a feeling - a putrescent slice of the sub-subconcious mindset of a country on a sickening plunge into what can appear, in retrospect, to have been near-madness: Three national leaders assassinated in less than five years.

If anything, Ellroy seems to be getting even better at shorthand storytelling. The twisting, interconnecting plots that wind through "The Cold Six Thousand" are compact and generally comprehensible - unlike the otherwise estimable "L.A. Confidential," for example, in which readers could be excused for occasionally feeling as if they had been sapped, slung into a trunk and dumped at the scene of an ongoing massacre.

Perhaps it was from John Dos Passos that Ellroy borrowed the dodge of foreshortening events by reproducing headlines, but other influences are pretty much nonexistent: James Ellroy is an American original, a sophisticated primitive as smooth as the snick-snick! of a pump shotgun and as subtle as the inevitable blast.

(c) Copley News Service

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Author: Arthur Salm