The Tormenting of Lafayette Jackson
Hands On
Stillriver
Keeping Secrets
Without Prejudice
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2012 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © Andrew Rosenheim 2011
Lines from ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hutchinson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-413-8
By the Same Author
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: 1936-38
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two: 1939
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Three: 1940
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part Four: 1940
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
For Clare
August 1936
Klagenfurt, Austria
SCHELLENBERG CROSSED THE square quickly, avoiding the Town Hall, three storeys of pale quarried stone and a mansard roof that had originally been the house of a minor Hapsburg. Banners from a recent rally were still up, their red and black a vibrant contrast to the sombre grey slate of the paving stones. At the east end of the square, trencher tables stood in the bright sun, covered in crumbs from the platters of Schwarzbrot und Wurst that had been laid out for the attendees. Though there was no need to lure them with rewards.
He was tired from his trip, and had slept badly – but what could you expect from a railway hotel? He shuddered at the memory of his grim room, but the very pleasant accommodation he was used to when travelling might have led to questions – Are you here on business, Herr Schellenberg? Do you have relatives in Austria? What is your view of the ‘situation’? Questions required answers, and answers helped people’s recollections. On this trip he did not want to be remembered.
His colleagues thought he was in Linz, further north and the boyhood home of the Führer, meeting with members of the Austrian Nazi Party, helping to plan for what was now a certainty in one, maybe two years’ time – the Anschluss, when Germany came in and the two countries were united. Even his family thought he was there, for it was crucial that there be no slip, however unintended, that would link him to the man he’d meet today.
Klagenfurt was not a large city, but the train station was crowded: it was market day, and people came from all around to buy the local specialities – Speck, the slabs of smoked marble-white pork fat streaked by dark strips of lean, and produce from the Rosental, the Slovene-speaking valley that was the most fertile in the region. He was leaving town while the market visitors were coming in, so the carriage of his local train was deserted.
It was a short trip, just twenty minutes, the train gliding west along the north shore of the Wörthersee, a lake shaped like a thin elongated worm running east to west. On every side the land rose rapidly into foothills covered by firs, and in the further distance separate ranges of mountains loomed, which in the clear air of this summer day looked much closer than they were. On the shore itself sat a series of resort hotels, some gathered in clusters to form the core of several small towns – including Pörtschach, where Schellenberg left the train.
The main street was the same road that ringed the entire lake, and he walked west along it, past shops and cafés, and two grand hotels that faced the water. From their grounds he could hear the sound of tennis balls struck softly on clay courts, and across the road on the lawns running down to the water hotel guests were stretched out in deck chairs to catch the high midday sun. It must be nice to have a holiday, he thought – without resentment, for he knew his mission was potentially crucial for the Reich.
To the south he saw the range of the Karawanken Mountains, which formed the border with Yugoslavia. Behind them reared the Julian Alps, jagged and snow peaked. Here was the Dreiländereck, the corner where the three countries of Austria, Yugoslavia, and Italy met in an uneasy nexus. There had been fierce fighting near there in the last war, the Austrians and Italians locked into a system of battlements as complicated as any of the famous labyrinthine trench works in Belgium and France. His own father had fought there, as part of the German reinforcements sent to help the Austrians in the 1917 breakout at Caporetto. Much of the fighting had been waged almost invisibly, at the very top of the range of mountains Schellenberg could see now in the distance. We were fighting nearer to God, his father was fond of saying with a tart smile. Not that he seemed on our side by the end.
On the outskirts of Pörtschach a garage sat back from the road, with a solitary petrol pump, several cars parked to one side of the lot, and a shed that functioned as the office. Inside, a man in oil-stained overalls stood behind a counter, adding up figures on a scrap of paper.
‘Guten Tag,’ said Schellenberg.
‘Grüss Gott,’ muttered the man, without looking up.
‘Herr Schmidt has left a car for me, I believe.’ He didn’t give his name.
The man nodded, still intent on his sums. He reached with one hand under the counter and brought out a small brown envelope, which jingled as he pushed it across the counter. ‘The Mercedes-Benz,’ he said.
Schellenberg nodded. ‘Much obliged, I am sure,’ he said, and went out the door with the keys. He stopped for a moment and pulled a pair of tan driving gloves from a coat pocket. They were small-sized and tight; he had to stretch the leather over each finger until he could clench his fists.
The car was almost new – a 170 DS sedan. It started up with a roar, then purred like a spoiled cat. Thank you, Herr Schmidt, thought Schellenberg as he drove away, whoever you may be. A sympathiser of course, but then many Austrians were, especially here in Carinthia.
He drove into the hills, along winding paved roads, through small farms and past the occasional Gasthaus. Once he had to slow for cows on the road. The paved surface gave way to gravel as he climbed higher, then to rough track, and as he entered deep forest he turned off onto an old fire road. From the absence of tyre marks he could see that no vehicle had come this way for months.
The track moved laterally across the side of the hill, and after a mile he turned onto a small spur that ended abruptly in a cul de sac carved from a copse of towering spruce; here his car could not be seen from the track. He got out and locked it, then set off through the woods, moving quietly but quickly along the soft ground which was covered by dried pine needles that had accumulated over the seasons, scenting the air with a mild resinous perfume. After walking less than half a mile, heading down the mountain, he stopped and stood on a ledge of rock that perched over a small clearing, not even the size of a tennis court. He stayed here for a moment, listening carefully. Satisfied, he hopped down and stood waiting in the clearing.
He didn’t have long to wait. Within ten minutes he could hear someone coming uphill, along the faded remnants of a trail. Moments later a man emerged from the trees. He was dressed in a loose-fitting green hunter’s jacket, with leather hiking shorts, knee socks and climbing boots; on his head sat a felt hat like those worn on Bavarian postcards. He was the incarnation of a hiking visitor, though the man was perspiring heavily and did not look as if he had enjoyed his climb. When he saw Schellenberg he raised a hand and gave a timid wave, then came across the small clearing.
‘Herr Werner, I presume,’ said Schellenberg cordially. The man nodded. ‘It is good of you to come.’
The man named Werner shrugged. ‘And you are?’
‘Schellenberg of the SD.’ He proffered a gloved hand, explaining, ‘Urticaria. Hives bother me terribly in this heat. But tell me, Werner, where did you travel from?’
‘Venice, of course,’ said Werner, looking slightly surprised. He took off his hat. ‘As you instructed I changed at Villach. Though my way here was pretty roundabout. I believe it would be thoroughly impossible for anyone to reconstruct my journey,’ he said with a touch of pride.
‘Excellent. Did they stamp your passport at the border?’
‘No.’
Schellenberg nodded. ‘It would have helped that your passport is American. If it had been Italian you’d have had a harder time. The Austrians round here are still sulking over the loss of the Kanaltal. Another injustice of Versailles we’ll need to sort out when we get here.’
‘I don’t understand why we couldn’t have met in Berlin,’ Werner said with a note of complaint.
‘It’s safer this way. Right now Berlin is crawling with foreign agents because of the Olympics.’
‘But Kuhn’s there. He claims he’s going to get to meet the Führer.’
‘Your work is more important than his.’ Especially since Kuhn is a fool, thought Schellenberg. ‘And it’s vital that there be no known link between us and you.’
Werner seemed pleased to hear he mattered more than Kuhn. ‘I am ready to brief you on the American developments,’ he said.
‘You’ve brought a report?’ demanded Schellenberg. He was alarmed that all his precautions might have been endangered by simple stupidity.
But to his relief Werner tapped his temple with a finger. ‘Just here.’
‘Ah, good. Proceed.’
‘We are preparing for the election. Naturally, if Lemke wins, we will not have anything to worry about.’
Lemke? Why was he talking about him? A fringe candidate surely. ‘What about the Republican?’ he asked.
‘Landon has no chance,’ said Werner confidently. ‘Lemke, on the other hand, has the support of all right-thinking groups – Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Coughlin both support him unequivocally. And their followers number in the millions.’
‘And what happens if Roosevelt wins?’
‘That won’t happen—’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right, but we need to cover all possibilities, however remote.’
Werner shrugged, as if he were humouring the German. ‘Then we will mobilise. The Bund has over 600,000 members; by the end of the year it will be a million.’
‘Really?’ said Schellenberg. ‘That’s impressive.’
‘We have set up three camps, as you approved. By next spring there will be six more.’
‘What about our special friend in America?’ he asked casually, though this was the most significant part of the conversation, indeed the only significant part.
‘You mean—?’ asked Werner, his eyes widening slightly.
‘Yes, the Dreiländer,’ said Schellenberg. ‘Tell me, why did you give him that code name?’
Werner shrugged a shoulder. ‘He picked it himself. He knew you and I were meeting in this part of Austria, so it seemed appropriate.’ Werner swept an arm around them, taking in the woods and the distant mountains too, spanning the three countries whose borders converged at a point less than fifteen miles away.
‘That makes sense,’ said Schellenberg approvingly. ‘Drei Volker. And three loyalties. American on the surface; German deep down and true. And then, the inevitable allegiance to himself.’
Werner looked a little shocked.
‘All agents have to have their own interests at heart,’ explained Schellenberg, as if he were talking to a much younger man. ‘As long as they coincide with their controller, it is a good thing.’ He suddenly asked with a sharp voice, ‘I take it no one else knows the Dreiländer name?’
Was there hesitation in Werner’s face? It was hard to tell, and he said emphatically, ‘Only me.’ He added jokily, ‘And Dreiländer himself, of course.’
Schellenberg nodded thoughtfully. ‘Tell me, is he well placed? You indicated he would be by now.’
‘Exceedingly. His patron has people in half of Washington, of course. He has access to everyone.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of everyone,’ said Schellenberg with a hint of steeliness. He softened, asking, ‘Is it really true that Roosevelt is confined to a wheelchair?’
‘Yes. He had polio as a young man. He cannot walk unassisted.’
‘To think a cripple’s at the helm of such an emerging power. It seems quite incredible.’
‘It makes him an easier target.’
‘Perhaps. Though that man killed the Mayor from Chicago instead of Roosevelt.’
‘Was the assassin one of ours?’
‘Certainly not. He was an Italian, as you well know,’ said Schellenberg sharply. ‘Now tell me, Herr Werner, did you bring the weapon we sent you?’
‘Yes. Though I was rather surprised you wanted me to bring it here.’
‘We need to ensure you are well equipped,’ said Schellenberg flatly. ‘May I see it, please?’
Werner reached into his jacket and brought out a pistol, handing it over grip first. The gun was short-barrelled and handsome – with a royal blue metal finish, and walnut checking around the rubber of its distinctive sloping butt. ‘It’s a very nice Luger,’ said Werner. ‘Be careful: it’s loaded.’
Schellenberg held the gun, barrel down. ‘It’s very light,’ he said approvingly. He smiled at Werner, then suddenly his face grew alarmed. ‘Did you hear that, Herr Werner?’ he asked tensely, pointing towards the woods on one side.
Werner turned to look, and Schellenberg lifted the pistol and shot him in the head.
In the thin mountain air the noise of the gun reverberated as Werner fell to his knees. His hand gradually released his green felt hat as he toppled over, his head falling with a heavy thud on the thin grass.
Schellenberg reached down and calmly placed the pistol on the grass. The noise of the shot wouldn’t travel far – not in this dense foliage and thick forest. And there was virtually no blood to speak of, just a dark maroon hole the size of a pfennig in Werner’s temple.
Kneeling down, Schellenberg went through Werner’s pockets, taking off the dead man’s watch and extricating his wallet and passport. He found a few coins – schillings and some lira – and took these as well. Grabbing Werner’s jacket by both shoulders, he stood up and dragged the corpse across the ground to the edge of the forest, where he stopped and caught his breath. Then he propped the body to sit against the base of an enormous spruce, next to the boulder he had stood on just half an hour before. He spent a few moments brushing off the grass and earth on the knees of the man’s trousers.
He went back into the clearing and retrieved the pistol, then came back to the corpse, where he took Werner’s right arm and let it flop to one side, so the hand trailed on the bed of dead needles that carpeted the ground. He placed the butt of the pistol flush against the still-warm palm, then closed the fingers gently until they encircled the gun.
Stepping back, he examined his handiwork. It would do. An observant eye might notice the grass stains on the man’s knees and wonder how they got there, but it seemed unlikely – it was too obviously a suicide to let doubts creep in very easily. Even if someone went to the lengths of checking the prints on the gun, they would only find Werner’s – the driving gloves had seen to that.
When the Austrian police arrived (if they ever did; it didn’t look as if anyone had been here for ages), they would be more interested in establishing the identity of the corpse than in questioning how the man had died. Good luck, thought Schellenberg. No wallet, no passport. It could be months before they even discovered Werner wasn’t Austrian, much less that he had come from the United States. And if they ever did succeed in establishing his identity, what of it?
Werner had clearly been a fantasist. For all the many million German descendants in the United States, they seem ill-placed for power – located in communities hundreds, even thousands of miles from Washington, in places like Wisconsin and Texas. There were German communities closer to the hub, of course, especially in Baltimore and New York, but in these cities there were also many outlying ethnic groups. Jews by the thousand, especially in New York; the Irish, filling up Boston and never very reliable; even Negroes. A mongrel kind of state, which might make for a weak body politic in Schellenberg’s view, but it didn’t make that body pro-German. Werner’s idea that a popular uprising against the American government might take place, in support of a foreign power to boot, was misconceived nonsense. Schellenberg would leave that, as well as straightforward efforts at espionage, to the Abwehr – military intelligence, staffed by strait-laced officers of the old school. Most of them hopelessly antique.
Not that it would matter any more, thought Schellenberg, looking at Werner’s corpse, propped up like a dummy against a tree. And most crucially, the identity of this ‘Dreiländer’ was safe. Only Schellenberg knew, the man’s ‘real’ American name – no, he corrected himself, strictly speaking that was not the case. Heydrich knew, of course – it was he who originally briefed Schellenberg on his mission, one-to-one, making it clear without actually saying so that he was keeping it from his direct superior, Himmler.
None of these others knew. Not Himmler or Goering or Goebbels or Bormann. Röhm had known, for it had been Röhm who had drawn in Werner, as an American liaison he thought helpful. Fortunately Röhm was dead. Perhaps that was the reason he had been murdered.
The thought was chilling. Could not the same thing happen to him?
No, Schellenberg told himself, not unless he got in so much trouble that it was decided to silence him in case he talked to save his skin. Well, he would just have to make sure that didn’t happen, so that he would still be there to give the signal, when and if the moment came, for ‘Dreiländer’ to act. Hitler himself would give the order; it was Hitler who had already likened the position of the Dreiländer to that of a bat – eine Fledermaus – that had hung unseen for years, unnoticed while people moved around him, until the command came, the bat’s wings stirred, and the creature swooped down to attack.
March 1937
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
MILWAUKEE HAD NO sky. Nessheim parked on a small side street and got out of the car, searching in vain for stars in the black canopy above him. A pungent aroma filled the air, a rich nutty smell of malt and burnt hops. It was early spring, but the evening held the vestigial chill of winter. When he exhaled, curled feathers of breath hung in the air.
He took off his suit jacket and swapped it for a dark duffel coat on the back seat, quickly wrapping the coat around him to hide the .38 that hung in a holster from his right shoulder. Smith & Wesson – Model 10, apparently; not that he had any idea of what models 1 to 9 had been like. He unknotted his striped tie and laid it on top of the jacket, then pushed the lock down and closed the door. Turning around, he looked at the two houses on this side of the street. One was boarded up, the other run down and unlit.
As he went around the corner he saw four grain silos looming like bleached minareted towers a quarter-mile away. The air turned thick and strangely moist, then Nessheim realised it was dispersed steam, floating over from the malt-house chimneys. Across from them was the bottling plant, which had a neon sign – Pabst, it said, glowing like a purple trail of wax above the open iron gates. The second shift had started an hour before. How many factories had a second shift these days? Though if anything sold in the Depression, it was movie tickets and beer.
It took him ten minutes to cross the vast complex of buildings and traverse an empty lot, where a group of men in one corner were huddled around a small fire. Tramps. Milwaukee was meant to be a red town, a Socialist-leaning city, though it had its share of down-and-outs – but then what city in America didn’t? The only difference was that here the cops didn’t chase them out of town.
He passed two blocks of brick row houses, the light from their living rooms spilling like yellow gas onto the sidewalk. Then he came to a wider commercial avenue, where cars were parked on both sides of the street, most of them black and old, Model Ts and As. The stores were a smorgasbord of retail business – a pharmacist, a baker, a Chinese laundry, a greasy spoon – but their shop fronts were dingy and worn. Most were now shut for the day, though the drugstore, more in hope than real expectation, was open for any after-work trade.
Ahead of him a new-model Dodge was parked by the kerb. Passing it, he noticed that the driver was inside, his feet propped on the dashboard with a fedora pulled halfway down his face. An awkward way to snooze. On the corner he saw the flashing sign – Reno’s. Nessheim didn’t know if the bar was named after its owner, or for the city in the one state where you could get a divorce in six weeks. He stopped outside its entrance, and casually looked around. No one along the sidewalk seemed to be paying him attention, so he went into the bar.
Inside, a group of men in working clothes stood holding bottles of beer while another guy chalked up numbers on a board. The horses? College basketball scores? Nessheim didn’t stop to watch, but walked towards the bar itself, a long worn slab of dark mahogany, fronted by a row of padded bar stools with thin chrome legs. Behind it, the bartender was drying glasses with a cloth; he looked at Nessheim with careful, noncommittal eyes as a bakelite radio played soft swing piano.
‘Hiya,’ said Nessheim, as he stood and propped a foot against the low brass rail of the bar. On the bar top a pig’s foot sat on a plate in a congealed pool of jellied fat, a leftover from lunch, part of the nickel Beer & Eats offered by a sign on the wall behind the bar.
The bartender nodded grudgingly. The music stopped, and the announcer’s voice declared, ‘That was Count Basie, live from the Grand Terrace Ballroom in Chicago.’ Nessheim gave a small smile; he had heard Basie play there three weeks before.
‘Eddie Le Saux around?’ he asked.
The bartender gave a quick jerk of his head towards the rear. Wooden booths ran along one side wall in the back area of the bar, which was suffused by smoke and the dim light of a single ceiling bulb. Through the gloom Nessheim could just make out a solitary figure sitting in the last of the line of booths.
‘What’s he drinking?’
‘Beer and a shot.’
‘Give me another round for him, and a regular coffee for me.’
The bartender filled a mug from a tin coffee pot and added a slurp of cream. Then he poured a big shot of whiskey and put it, the coffee, and a bottle of Pabst on a small tin tray. ‘Forty cents,’ he said.
Nessheim put two quarters on the bar, then took the tray and walked to the last booth. He set the drinks down on the table, and sat across from the man already sitting there.
‘Well, if it isn’t Christmas come early,’ said Eddie Le Saux, and he lifted the fresh bottle of beer in greeting. ‘My thanks to the FBI.’
‘We missed your birthday and wanted to make up for it.’ Nessheim had half a dozen informants in Chicago, but he didn’t trade banter with any of them – probably because they were too frightened of the Bureau. Le Saux, by contrast, didn’t seem scared of anything.
He was in his late forties, more than twenty years older than Nessheim. His hair, black and straight and shiny, was long in front, and he flicked it back now with his hand when it tumbled over his mahogany face – he could have passed for an Indian, or a man with Mexican blood. In fact he was French Canadian, and though only average height, he cut a powerful figure, bulked out by years of pulling hand saws through timber – he had worked as a lumberjack through pine plantations from Halifax to Seattle, before arriving (he never said how or why) in Milwaukee, where he’d met his wife, taken a job in the brewery, and settled down.
Le Saux was a Party member, and had been since the mid-1920s. He was quick and quick-tongued, and a natural leader of men. He was too savvy, sometimes even cynical, about human nature to be fanatical, and though his politics were always reflexively on the side of ‘the workers’, his attitude towards them was benign rather than expectant, as if he’d learned that high hopes suffer the biggest bump on landing. Still, Nessheim felt confident that if push ever came to shove, Eddie Le Saux would always storm the Bastille rather than defend it, and however friendly he may have acted, would if ordered happily put Nessheim up against the wall with the other counter-revolutionaries to be shot.
Which made the man’s willingness to inform on his ‘comrades’ mystifying to Nessheim – Le Saux was paid to do so, but not that well, and he had never asked to be paid more, a diffidence not shared by any other of Nessheim’s informants.
‘Have you got the minutes?’ asked Nessheim, trying to keep to business. Never easy with Eddie Le Saux, who would prefer to yack about anything under the sun rather than deal directly with what Nessheim was there for.
‘Not yet.’
Nessheim stirred uneasily – Ferguson, his boss, had been showing signs of impatience with Le Saux’s failure to deliver. Or rather, Nessheim’s failure to deliver info from Le Saux.
‘I thought you were the branch secretary – can’t you even get the minutes out on time?’
Le Saux just grinned. ‘Too busy. Minutes can wait; it’s money we’re trying to raise. I’ve been selling raffle tickets until they come out of my ass.’
‘What for?’
‘I told you we had a guy head for Spain at Christmas with the first bunch of volunteers. Now we got two more trying to go over there and help defend Madrid.’
‘They can’t get there on their own steam?’
‘Even a steerage ticket to Europe costs more than a wort master’s pay runs to. Or do you think they’ve got first-class cabin tickets courtesy of Moscow Central?’ Le Saux gave a weary shake to his head. ‘I’ve told you, you’ve got it all wrong. There isn’t any pipeline from the Soviet.’
‘They’re happy enough to send instructions.’
Le Saux shrugged. ‘Instructions are free.’
‘Sure. And Zinoviev and his friends got a fair trial.’
‘They were traitors to the state,’ Le Saux said, but the ironic tilt to his lips hinted at a lack of conviction. ‘Don’t pretend you’re some kind of Trotskyite – I know you played football at college.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘But what’s the point of my arguing? You probably think it’s right that your countrymen are helping Franco.’
It took him a second to realise Le Saux meant the Germans. ‘They’re not my countrymen.’
‘Nessheim? Don’t try and tell me it’s a Norwegian name.’
‘I’d like to think it was American. And actually, I think we should stay out of it. That’s what Roosevelt says.’
‘You and your Roosevelt. Can’t you see he’s as bad as the rest? I wouldn’t mind his wanting to sit it out if Germany and Italy were doing the same. But they’re not.’
‘Russia’s helping on the other side,’ Nessheim said. When Le Saux started to lecture him, he felt compelled to argue back. He knew it was unprofessional, but he couldn’t help himself.
‘Why shouldn’t they – when the Fascists are intervening on the side of the Falange? Britain and us should be doing the same. Don’t forget, the Spanish government was elected.’ Le Saux shook his head, as if stuck with a recalcitrant child. ‘You don’t get it, do you, Jimmy? We can’t stay on the sidelines for ever.’
He picked up the fresh shot glass of whiskey and drank it down in one fierce gulp, wincing slightly from the harshness of the cheap booze. He wiped his mouth with one hand, then said, ‘There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Nessheim, wary of more runaround.
Le Saux leaned forward confidentially, even though they had the row of booths to themselves. ‘I’ve got a boat. Nothing fancy, just a little skiff, hardly bigger than a row boat, though when I stick the outboard on it I can get around just fine on the big lake. I keep it down on the shore, just outside the downtown harbour; there’s a little hut I built where I can store it during winter. A couple more weeks and I’ll bring it out.’
Nessheim wondered what this had to do with the Communist Party’s branch in Milwaukee.
‘There’re other guys down there – a few from the brewery. By and large I keep to myself, but you can’t help getting to know each other.’
‘Right,’ said Nessheim, thinking only of the missing minutes he knew Special Agent in Charge Ferguson was going to chew his ass out for not obtaining.
‘One of these guys was named Heydeman. Big fellah, with buck teeth. Blonde as sauerkraut, and Perch-crazy like me – that’s how I got to know him. Heydeman was a newcomer. He said he was born upstate somewhere – maybe Fond Du Lac.’ He spoke as if the town were five thousand miles from Milwaukee instead of a hundred.
‘We never talked politics; it was fishing we had in common. To cut a long story short and keep you from asking me to get to the point’ – Le Saux gave a knowing smirk – ‘Heydeman hasn’t been around for a couple of months. Nobody seemed to know where he’d gone. But then last week there’s a knock on my door; this was Thursday night. Must have been ten o’clock – I was about to go to bed. When I opened it there was Heydeman. He’d never been to my house, I wouldn’t have bet he even knew where I lived, but he says he’s got a favour to ask – could he store some stuff for a couple of days in my hut by the harbour? He says he’s got no place else – he’s moved away, and he’s only back for a day or two.
‘I was a little surprised to see him, but I said sure – why not? No skin off my nose. I wasn’t gonna be around – my wife and kids and me were going to Racine for the weekend to see my old lady’s parents. So I gave Heydeman my spare key to the hut.
‘But we didn’t go to Racine after all – one of the kids got sick. That Sunday I went down to the harbour like I always do. When I opened the hut I got one hell of a surprise. This “stuff” of Heydeman’s turned out to be guns.’
Nessheim stiffened. ‘What kind of guns?’
‘That’s the thing. It wasn’t a couple of shotguns, or a pair of deer rifles. These were sub-machine guns. Thompson submachine guns.’
‘How did you know they were Thompsons?’
Le Saux gave him a look. ‘Come the revolution we’ll need to know our weaponry.’
Nessheim let this pass. ‘So how many guns are we talking about exactly?’
‘There were eight of them.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. I’m too old to get killed out of curiosity. I locked up and went on my way.’
‘You could have called the cops.’
Le Saux looked at him scornfully. ‘Of course I could have. I’m sure they’d have been pleased as punch to see me – five gets you three they’d have my confession by now, too. Think of the headline – ‘Guns Found in Red Subversion Plot.’ He shook his head disgustedly.
‘Okay,’ said Nessheim. ‘I get it. But are the guns still there?’
‘No. I went back to the hut on Monday morning before work. They were gone.’
‘Did you hear from Heydeman again?’
Le Saux shook his head. ‘Not a peep. He left the key for me at the brewery. But no note with them, nothing.’ He added wryly, ‘Not even thanks.’
‘So where do we find him?’
Le Saux shrugged. Nessheim asked impatiently, ‘Did he give any idea where he’d moved to?’
Le Saux shook his head, but there was a knowing look to his eyes. He asked, ‘Ever heard of the Friends of New Germany?’
‘Sure,’ said Nessheim. In fact Nessheim’s uncle Eric, husband of his mother’s sister Greta, was a member. A social thing mainly, full of recent immigrants from Germany. They spoke German, sang songs of the old country, played pinochle and strange card games using wooden boards carved in Bavaria. It all seemed harmless enough, though Nessheim had wondered why these people had not embraced their new country uninhibitedly. That was the point of America, wasn’t it? To join in the great adventure.
Le Saux said, ‘The Bund is the new name for it. They’ve renamed themselves – I guess to sound even more like Krauts. No offence, Jimmy. And most of them are Nazis – sympathisers anyway. They’d like to spread the word over here.’
Nessheim nodded curtly; he wasn’t there for Le Saux’s views on Hitler, he wanted to know about these guns. Le Saux saw his impatience and bristled slightly. ‘They have camps now – like the ones in Germany.’
‘So? Kids go to them. They swim and play ball and do all the things kids do – just with a German-American coating.’
Le Saux ignored him. ‘There’s one ten miles north of here, another in Michigan and I think there’s one in New York. For the little kids it’s harmless, I agree, if a little weird – yodelling away, wearing those funny shorts and hats. But they’re not all kids. And the older ones aren’t spending their time singing Christmas carols. More like Deutschland Über Alles.’
‘What’s this got to do with Heydeman?’
‘I asked around the harbour. Nobody seemed to know for sure where he was, but one guy said he thought Heydeman’s gone to Michigan, to do training in a camp over there.’
‘Training for what?’
‘Whatever you need a tommy gun for, I guess.’
This could be serious, thought Nessheim, or it could be malarkey intended to compensate for the missing Party meeting minutes. He looked hard at Le Saux, searching for any sign that he had made this up. But the French-Canadian returned his stare with unwavering eyes. Nessheim asked, ‘Can you find out anything more specific?’
‘I can ask, though I can’t promise I’ll get anywhere. Heydeman kept to himself pretty much. I seem to have been his only friend, which isn’t saying much – I don’t know anything about the guy.’
‘Do your best.’ There was a Pabst beer mat next to the ashtray on the table and Nessheim picked it up and turned it over on its blank side, taking a pencil from the inner pocket of his duffel coat. He wrote a number down – the phone in the hallway of his boarding house. ‘You’ve got my office number in Chicago. This will get me after work. Phone me if you learn anything, okay? And even if you don’t, I want to talk again. Say a week from today, same time.’ He looked around the empty back of the bar. ‘This place will do.’
‘I get extra for the extra meeting?’ asked Le Saux flatly.
This was unlike Le Saux. ‘I guess so,’ Nessheim said slowly.
Le Saux nodded, then drained his beer and stood up. ‘See you in a week then. I’ll go first.’
Nessheim nursed his coffee for ten minutes before leaving the bar. When he came out he saw a new car parked across the street, its back half lit up by a streetlamp. Another Dodge, or was it the same car he’d seen before? He stood and studied it for a moment – it was unoccupied, but he saw a fedora on the dashboard, sitting like a marker left to keep the driver’s place.
Looking both ways, he crossed the street and stopped behind the car, putting a shoe up on the chrome bumper to tie his laces. The licence plate was from Michigan. In the streetlamp’s semi-halo of light he could read its numbers. He was memorising them for the second time in his head when a voice said coldly, ‘You’re on my car, bud.’
Nessheim put his foot down and stood up straight. Ten feet away a man in a long wool overcoat stood on the pavement. He was as tall as Nessheim and had both his hands in his coat’s pockets. The man stepped forward until Nessheim could see his face in the streetlamp’s light. His eyes were deep set, dark as raisins, and he had a tight, mean-looking mouth. But what Nessheim noticed most was the strawberry birthmark, stretching like an ink stain from just below his left eye to the corner of his mouth.
‘Just tying my shoe,’ said Nessheim. He pointed at the car’s bumper. ‘I didn’t scratch your chrome.’ He gave a witless smile.
‘So beat it, in case I decide to scratch yours.’
Nessheim stiffened. There was nothing to worry about – he had a badge under his coat that should calm this man down, and if that didn’t do the job, he figured his .38 would. But the last thing he needed was an altercation: putting this guy in the local hoosegow would drag in higher-ups from the Bureau – he could hear Ferguson’s complaint already. He said with a feigned sense of hurt, ‘Okay, no need to get tough about it, pal.’
‘I’m not your pal. Like I said, beat it.’
The man took a further, threatening step towards him. Nessheim backed out into the street, his hands up in surrender. ‘Take it easy, take it easy,’ he said, sounding as feeble as he could. He turned and walked away fast, looking back over his shoulder to make sure the man wasn’t following.
As he headed back towards his own car, he wondered what the guy was doing here. And why had he moved his car until it sat directly across from Reno’s? Probably a coincidence, he told himself, then mentally recited the licence plate numbers again, since he’d decided he’d check them out after the weekend, back in Chicago. If they’d been Wisconsin plates he probably wouldn’t have bothered. Not that a Michigan car in Milwaukee was all that unusual.
Unless you’d had another mention of the state already. What had Eddie Le Saux’s harbour friend said? Heydeman’s gone to Michigan. Too many Michigans for me, thought Nessheim.
JIMMY NESSHEIM WAS twenty-six years old and had been an agent in the Chicago Field Office of the FBI for two and a half years – by accident, as he remembered each day that he went to work. This morning he was dressed in his best suit, a three-piece grey worsted one from Brooks Brothers. It had cost more than his father made in a month, and Nessheim had bought it for days like this one, when he needed to look professional and experienced, since he knew his boyish face made people think he was younger than he was. It also meant they tended to underestimate him – not always wisely, for there was an inner steeliness in Nessheim of a kind usually found in older, jaded men. The hardness had been forged by a personal disappointment that he thought he had got over – he knew he was fortunate to have landed where he had. There weren’t many people who could say the same, not with so many lives damaged in the eight years since Wall Street committed suicide.
He had stayed up late, writing up his notes, trying to summarise as tightly as possible his conversation with Eddie Le Saux. Concision was at a premium with Warner Ferguson, the Special Agent in Charge (SAC for short), who made a point of doing everything as differently as possible from his predecessor, the legendary and loquacious Melvin H. Purvis.
Nessheim dropped the pool car he had taken to Milwaukee back at the Bureau’s garage on Wabash, across the street from the sludge-filled Chicago River. In the early sunshine, the air was gradually warming as Nessheim walked across the Loop to the FBI offices. They were curiously anonymous, an entire floor of a new building located on the corner of La Salle and Adams, in the heart of Chicago’s famous Loop, almost next door to the Board of Trade, where the agricultural futures of the country – corn and pigs and soy beans and wheat – were traded, these days still fetching prices lower than a decade before. Known as the Bankers Building, the forty-storey tower had been designed by the Burnham Brothers ten years ago, one of the skyscrapers for which both they and the city were now renowned.
In the lobby, a two-storeyed lavish galleria of marble and brass, he bought a copy of the Tribune from Leo, the one-armed owner of the news kiosk, then walked across the polished floor to the bank of elevators. He got in with several other early birds, and pressed the button for his floor – the building owners crowed about these automatic elevators, a heartless kind of boast when they could have filled each job of elevator operator a hundred times over. As the doors closed, their rubber edges met with a jolt, and Nessheim took a deep silent breath as the steel box started to rise with a gradual, growing whoosh. As always, it made him slightly dizzy, and triggered another mental replay of the moment his life had changed.
They’d been Fourth and Six on the Michigan 42-yard line. Too far for a field goal, though Northwestern were behind by only two points. There were ninety seconds left, and in the huddle Beckerbaugh the quarterback told him to go long. Nessheim had lined up wide, on the far touchline, and with the hike he sprinted to the 25-yard line, planning to curl in for the pass. But the safety was slow to cover, so Nessheim kept going, turning his head on the 10-yard line to see the ball floating towards him, in one of Beckerbaugh’s wobbly spiral passes. He timed his leap and jumped with both hands fully extended, and as he felt the pigskin on his fingertips he knew the ball was his.
Then the safety showed up.
They told him later he’d landed directly on his head. He woke up in the locker room, with Coach Goetz looking on anxiously while a doctor, summoned over the PA system from the stands, stood over him.
‘What happened?’ Nessheim asked groggily.
‘You got decked,’ the doctor said, and Jimmy saw he was wearing a Northwestern scarf.
‘Did I hold onto the ball?’
The doctor shook his head. ‘I wish to hell you had – I had twenty bucks riding on you guys.’
Nessheim had missed the last two games of the season, for his immediate concussion was followed by headaches so excruciating that he couldn’t walk more than a block at a time. After Christmas they receded, but then the dizzy spells began. They would attack him out of the blue, a vertiginous imbalance that made him fear he would fall down – once, buying gum in a Walgreen’s Drugstore, he actually did. When spring practice started he didn’t make it through the first day, and the coach had called him in.
‘You look kind of shaky.’
‘I’m all right,’ he’d insisted.
‘I want you to see the doctor before you come back to practice.’
It was not a request. Dutifully he had gone down to Michael Reese Hospital on the near South Side to see a specialist, Dr Morris Abrams, a Northwestern graduate who waived his fees in return for season tickets. Abrams had given him a thorough physical, then asked a battery of short, penetrating questions. To his eternal regret Nessheim had answered them all truthfully, and four minutes later Dr Abrams had ended his football career.
‘Another knock could be fatal,’ he had declared. ‘You can’t take that risk.’
He remembered the meeting that followed with Coach Goetz. It hadn’t lasted very long: Coach had said, his voice sympathetic but firm, If you can’t play, we can’t pay. Sorry, Jimmy.
Now when the elevator in the Bankers Building opened on the nineteenth floor and Nessheim stepped out, it was just seven-thirty; only the night security man sat yawning at reception. Nessheim could see Ferguson’s office, down the hall at the front of the building, its door wide open. He walked down and snuck a look inside; it was empty, so he went and stood by the window, taking in the view of the lake, which spread like a blue tablecloth, unruffled and calm this sunny morning. He never got tired of this view, and he loved to look out across the high buildings of the Loop – until he’d come to Chicago, the highest man-made vantage point he’d known had been the bell tower in the Bremen Wisconsin Lutheran church. He pulled back from the window, remembering where he was. One day I’ll have an office like this, he told himself, half-defiant, half-joking. He returned to reception, then down the carpeted corridor that ran the other way along this floor. The small agent offices that lined one side of the corridor were empty; on the other side the fingerprint and forensic lab was still locked.
He walked into the Bullpen, an open area of half a dozen desks. It was separated by a half-wood, half-glass partition from the typing pool, where a woman sat at one end, facing the small tables where the secretaries worked.
‘Morning,’ he said as he went to his desk.
‘Hi, kid,’ the woman said without turning her head.
Her name was Eloise Tate, but everyone knew her as Tatie. She was a slim woman with sharp features punctuated by a sliver of dimple in her chin, short black hair, and a tart mouth which spoke as if words were burning her tongue. She smoked any kind of cigarette that didn’t have a filter, and dressed in the dull uniform – white blouse, grey skirt, black heels – of a woman who made it clear she wasn’t going to push the boat out in an effort to impress you. With Tatie, you either took her as she was, or left her well alone. Attractive in a Girl Friday kind of way, she was probably in her early forties and definitely unmarried, and in the absence of a known boyfriend everyone assumed she’d stay that way. Some of the agents said she had to be a lezzy; others claimed she’d had a thing for Melvin Purvis when he’d been Chicago Special Agent in Charge. Either way, no one had the balls to try their luck.
It was Purvis, the legendary G-Man, who had plucked Tatie out of the ranks. He made her head of the typing pool, but she did a lot more than hammer a keyboard – she’d already been in the bureau for a dozen years by the time Nessheim started, and she knew where the bodies were buried, and just as important, where the files were stored. Her formal rise through the organisation had reached the dead end imposed by her sex, but Purvis relied on her to handle most of his communications with HQ in D.C., and whenever a crisis arose – with Purvis that was at least once a month – it was no accident that Tatie was always around to help. For all the flamboyance that got him in the papers – this was the man who’d arrested Ma Barker – Purvis was careful, and he confided in no man. But Tatie wasn’t a man; though she could type 95 words a minute and take shorthand as fast anyone could talk, with Purvis her most important job had been to listen.
Nessheim walked over to her now, holding the notes he’d written the night before. ‘You busy, Tatie?’
She looked up at him sourly. ‘No, I’m here this early because I like the place so much. What do you want me to type?’ ‘This,’ he said, giving her the handwritten pages. ‘It’s important. It’s for the SAC.’
‘Everything’s important, kid. Even documents that never reach the eyes of Warner Ferguson.’ She turned back to her typewriter. As he walked away she called over her shoulder, ‘I’ll have it by noon, okay?’
He stopped. ‘Have you heard from Mr P. lately?’
‘Postcard from Hollywood. It’s 78 degrees there. Lucky bastard.’
He spent the morning writing up his other recent meetings with informants – Mike Louis, at the meat-processing factory, who claimed there was a plot by Trotskyites to take over the union, and asked for an extra ten bucks a month; ‘Domino’ Reading, a mulatto piano player who doubled as a Pullman waiter and kept tabs on political dissidents in the jazz world (this month Nessheim was glad to see there weren’t any); and Dankiewicz, first name unknown, who warned of trouble ahead with the steelworkers out in South Chicago.
When he was through he checked with Tatie in the Bullpen and she handed over a sheaf of carbon typed pages with a shake of her head. ‘I’m flattered you asked me to do this – and I can see why you did. I just hope you know what you’re getting into.’
‘It’s just a proposal, Tatie,’ he said. ‘He can always say no.’
‘He’ll say no all right, believe you me. It’s what else Ferguson says that worries me.’
‘It can’t be that bad.’
‘Oh, kid, you’re green as chartreuse. This isn’t a football game, and if it was, you’d be on your own goal line.’
‘Thanks a lot. Listen, do you think I can get in there after lunch? I want to leave early because I’m driving up to my folks’ house in Wisconsin.’
‘Oh, he’ll see you as soon as he’s read your report. I wouldn’t worry about that. I’ll put it on the top of his stack for when he gets back from lunch.’
And right after lunch Ferguson called him in. He was standing stork-like (for he was six foot three) at the window of his corner office, looking down at the small figures far below heading back to work on La Salle Street. He turned as Jimmy entered and signalled for him to sit down, then took his time before sitting down himself, pushing his chair back from his desk to give his legs room to extend.