AHMM, July-August 2009 Read online

  Zagreb studied the man on the bed. He lay spreadeagle with wrists and ankles bound with twine to the posts, wearing nothing but a pair of BVDs soaked through with sweat or urine or both. The rest of what the lieutenant guessed were his clothes lay in a sodden heap on the floor. He looked to be in his early thirties, fair, with ribs that stuck out. One eye was swollen shut and his lower lip was split and bleeding and twice normal size. He was conscious, breathing heavily, but his open eye was opaque. The point of passing out was close.

  "Oh, and Alfred Schneider, the enemy.” The Special Agent in Charge sounded bored.

  "My name is Fred Taylor.” This information came in a mumble, with all the inflection pressed from it as if through constant repetition. The German accent was slight.

  "That's the name you write on the back of your paycheck, just before you turn some of it over to the North American Aryan Alliance,” Holinshead said. “It always clears, but that's between you and the Packard bookkeeping department."

  "I told you I have never heard of the North—the North Aryan Alliance. You have—"

  Junkers, the gaunt one, took a step and backhanded him hard across the cheek. One of his big knobby knuckles split it open. Taylor made a choking noise and his body lost all tension.

  Dial, the stocky one, got up, scooped a pitcher off the grubby nightstand, and dashed water into the unconscious man's face. Taylor groaned and his head rolled over, but both eyes remained closed. “Damn it, Neil, now we got to start all over again."

  "So what, you got a date with Betty Grable?"

  "Here, kid, make yourself useful and fill this up.” Dial thrust the pitcher at McReary, who reached for it.

  Burke put a hand on McReary's arm, stopping him. “Fetch it yourself. He ain't your errand boy."

  The stocky man looked Burke up and down. The city detective had three inches and twenty pounds on him, but for someone who had a little too much padding around the chest the agent seemed confident of whatever outcome this discussion might have. “Whoa there, hoss. I didn't just bring any carrots with me."

  Zagreb inserted a shoulder between them as Burke was bunching his muscles. “It won't hurt to give the kraut a breather. He's no good to you in a coma."

  "Let him rest, Dial."

  Dial nodded at his superior's quiet command and sat back down, dangling his arm over the back of the chair. Holinshead regarded Zagreb mildly. “Don't tell me you never bruised a knuckle on a stubborn suspect, Lieutenant."

  "We usually leave enough to stand up at the arraignment. What've you got on Taylor?"

  "That's classified."

  "Huh. Snitch.” Canal lit a cigar and tossed the match on the floor.

  The FBI man nodded. “I can confirm that, without going into detail. Our informant identified Taylor as a contributor to the Alliance."

  "Finger him in person?"Zagreb asked.

  "Too risky. He's in deep."

  "He just gave you the name Alfred Schneider, alias Fred Taylor? My grandmother spoke four languages; she taught me a little German. Schneider in English is tailor. He can't be the only one who took that name when he came here."

  "So far he's the only one who's turned up in a position to threaten our national interests."

  Burke said, “He's a grease monkey in an aircraft plant. There's thousands of ‘em."

  "But only one Fred Taylor."

  The lieutenant pierced his face with a Chesterfield and put his Zippo to the end. The acrid stench of fear and bodily fluids coming from the man on the bed was oppressive. “A little random sabotage doesn't call for a Special Agent in Charge; or are you trying to make an impression your first day?"

  "Even the smallest fish knows who leads the school. We offered him a pretty good deal if he'd give up some of his associates, but he turned us down. Isn't that right, Detective?"

  "They said they'd hold him for the duration, then deport him to Germany,” McReary said. “It was either that or life in Leavenworth. It wasn't Queen for a Day."

  Canal asked, “Can't you get those names from your rat in the Alliance?"

  "I didn't say our informant was in the Alliance. In any case, our methods aren't open to analysis outside the Bureau."

  Junkers chuckled, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down in time with the cigarette that never left his lips. He kept his head cocked to one side to keep the smoke out of his eyes, but it appeared to have cured his weathered brown face like leather. So far he'd spoken only once, to ask Dial if he had a date with Betty Grable.

  Canal shifted his attention to him. “Hope you got the right man this time. I heard that barber you gave a hotfoot to had to close up shop. Can't cut hair sitting down."

  "We got Dillinger in the end, didn't we?” The man's Southwestern accent was sharp enough to cut barbed wire.

  "Well, sure. You couldn't miss him once you ran out of barbers."

  Taylor groaned again and muttered something in German. He was coming around. Holinshead glanced from him to Zagreb. “You can file any grievances with the director in Washington. Meanwhile our boys are dying while we're losing the war at home."

  "Put it on a poster.” Zagreb looked at his men and jerked his head toward the door. The squad left.

  * * * *

  That night, responding to an anonymous tip, the Four Horsemen staked out a machine-tool warehouse on Riopelle near the river, where an exchange of black-market tires for cash was expected to take place. Before leaving 1300, Zagreb called the personnel department at the Packard plant, where a female clerk agreed to look up Fred Taylor's employee file and report what she found.

  The tip turned out to be a dud. When the squad returned to clock out two hours later, the sergeant at the desk handed Zagreb a message.

  "What do you mean it's missing?” demanded the lieutenant over the wire the next day. No one had answered the night before.

  "That's not exactly true.” This voice was male, and wearily patient. “The person you talked to last night couldn't find it because it wasn't there. I gave it to the FBI yesterday, a man named Holinshead."

  "He show you a court order?"

  "I didn't figure he needed one. There's a war on, you know."

  Zagreb's knuckles whitened on the receiver, but he kept his tone even. “Who's foreman on Taylor's shift?"

  There was a pause. Metal scraped against metal, paper rustled. The man's voice came back on. “Orville Sack, but he's busy on the line. He's on the eleven a.m. rotation for lunch."

  The Packard plant sprawled on East Grand at Mt. Elliott, as palatial and orderly as it had appeared on Albert Kahn's drawing board forty years before. Directed by an employee, Zagreb clanked a tin lunch pail onto the cafeteria table opposite where Orville Sack sat munching an egg salad sandwich. “Swap you a Baby Ruth for your apple."

  The foreman looked up with his mouth full, first at the stranger, then at the gold shield in his palm. He had thin, ginger-colored hair and an expression that seemed resigned to any sort of tragedy. Zagreb wondered if his acquaintances called him Sad Sack.

  Sack chewed and swallowed. “Nobody offers a trade like that."

  Zagreb opened the pail and set the candy bar in its bright wrapper in front of the foreman. Then he sat down facing him. “Fred Taylor."

  "Uh-uh.” Sack pushed it away. “Bad enough you took one of my hardest workers off the line. I won't put him in worse Dutch over dessert."

  "I'm not federal. I'm trying to find out why they're interested in him."

  "Beats me. He's a good Joe for a kraut. He usually sits right where you're sitting, telling me how much he loves this country and how he wouldn't go back to Germany if they made him Reichsfuhrer, whatever the hell that is."

  "He wouldn't be a very good spy if he didn't say that."

  "If he's a spy, I'm Mata Hari. He hates Hitler more than Churchill does. His girl's Jewish, for God's sake."

  "What's her name?"

  "Molly something-or-other. She's a secretary in the Fisher Building, he said. She volunteered for FDR in nineteen fo
rty. I guess that makes her a regular Axis Sally. You sure about the Baby Ruth?"

  "Sugar hurts my teeth.” Zagreb accepted Sack's apple, a McIntosh with a brown spot. “Where's Molly work in the Fisher?” He bit into it.

  Sack shrugged, peeling down the wrapper like a banana skin. “I need Fred on the line. The dames are okay, but they don't come here Rosie the Riveter; that takes time. These krauts got machine oil in their veins. They held a monkey wrench before they could pick up a spoon. Henry Ford ought to hire Krupp away from Berlin if he wants to win this war."

  "I'll see what I can do. About Taylor, not Krupp. Henry doesn't return my calls."

  "If Fred's a spy, I'm Sergeant York."

  "You've got your wars mixed up. We're fighting Nazis, not the Kaiser."

  "I got no beef with any of ‘em. I just want to make quota. I can't do that if I got to train somebody from scratch every day ‘cause somebody on the line don't talk American as good as me."

  Zagreb asked a few more questions, but got nothing more he could use. He threw his apple core into a trash bin, went back to headquarters, and put the lunch pail on the desk Burke was using. “Hey, I been looking for that.” The officer undid the catches.

  "Eat while you work. I need you and Mac to call every office in the Fisher Buildiing and ask if they've got a woman named Molly working there. She's Taylor's girl."

  "We investigating Taylor now?” McReary had a game of double solitaire going on a pair of desks left vacant by a sergeant training at Ft. Bragg and a detective first-grade missing in action in the Pacific.

  "We're investigating Holinshead."

  McReary looked up from his cards and Burke looked up from his lunch pail. Canal, smoking a cigar near the open window assigned to him on such occasions, grinned around the stump.

  "That doesn't leave this room,” said the lieutenant. “The commissioner thinks Hoover hung the moon."

  "The commissioner thinks we should be storming a beach somewhere.” Burke scratched his chin, making a sound like a snow shovel scraping concrete. “I thought we were supposed to be all in this together: Us versus Them."

  "That's what they say in the war bonds ads. Holinshead's working on some gripe of his own. Even a flag-waving nut takes a coffee break now and then."

  "Maybe he's got a bet down on the enemy,” Canal said.

  McReary shuffled the pasteboards back into the deck. “I always knew I'd wind up in dog tags. Who's got the Yellow Pages?” He began opening and closing drawers.

  "Here.” Burke tore the directory in two and handed him half.

  Canal asked Zagreb what he wanted him to do.

  "Hop over to the hotel and find out if Taylor's still breathing. Pick up a sack of burgers on the way, just in case he is. I doubt those bastards have been feeding him."

  "What if they don't like it?"

  "That's why I'm sending you."

  The sergeant grinned wider, tossed his cigar out the window, and buttoned his jacket around his barrel torso. Whistling, he rolled on out.

  "I bet they stick me in a submarine.” McReary planted a finger on the page in front of him and picked up a receiver. “I get claustrophobic just putting on a vest."

  "I heard they feed you good in them tin cans,"said Burke.

  "That's just for ballast when the depth charges start falling."

  "You're dreaming, both of you,” Zagreb said. “It's the infantry for us all if we blow this."

  Burke said, “Where the hell's my Baby Ruth?"

  * * * *

  They found Molly Wenk in the mail room of an insurance underwriter on the Fisher's fourteenth floor, putting letters and reports in tin canisters and poking them into rows of pneumatic tubes connected to the various offices. Her best asset was her auburn hair, which she wore Andrews Sisters style in a pompadour atop her high forehead and curling in at her padded shoulders. She had sharp features and spoke in a harsh New York accent that Zagreb had heard previously only in Patsy Kelly movies.

  She found someone to spell her and accompanied the lieutenant and McReary to a coffee shop on the ground floor. Zagreb had left Burke behind to answer the phones on the theory that a single woman in her late twenties might find the younger officer's presence less daunting. He determined quickly that Miss Wenk wouldn't be daunted by anything this side of a German .88.

  "I ain't heard back from Fred in a couple of days.” She tapped a Camel on the back of a pigskin cigarette case and set fire to it from a book of matches in an ashtray before Zagreb could get his Zippo going. “I thought maybe the five o'clock whistle didn't blow, you know, like in the song."

  "He's in good hands,” Zagreb lied. “Known him long?"

  "He was the first person I met when I came here on the bus. I was schlepping this huge suitcase, looking for a cab, when suddenly somebody jerks it out of my hand. Well, I'm a Brooklyn girl. I kicked him in the shin. Only it turned out he was just trying to give me a hand. He carried the suitcase for me to a streetcar stop and told me how I could get to my friend's address where I was staying. Next day he showed up at the door with a bunch of flowers. I'd've thought he was a real smooth operator, except his English was all mixed up. He was cute. We go out to dinner and a movie sometimes. I wouldn't call him my boyfriend, exactly. All he ever done was kiss me on the cheek. What kind of a girl do you think I am?"

  "How's he feel about the war?"

  "Oh, he's all for it, buys bonds and contributes to the scrap drives. He's registered for the draft, but his number's high on account of he works in a defense plant where he's needed. That's just as well."

  "Why?"

  "Well, on account of him being a kraut. It stands to reason he don't want to kill somebody that might be a friend."

  "He could join the marines and fight Japs.” It was McReary's first contribution to the conversation.

  She studied him under lowered lids. “So could you. Can I see your badges again? I didn't get a good look at them upstairs. You could be Crackerjacks cops for all I know."

  They showed her their shields and IDs. She sat back, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “What kind of jam is he in? He's no rackets boy, I'd swear that on a stack of Bibles."

  "He's in custody on suspicion of spying and sabotage."

  "Banana oil. He came here to get away from the Nazis. I'm Jewish on my father's side. Hanging around with me wouldn't make him points back home."

  "On the other hand,” Zagreb said, “it's good cover."

  "You boys are full of hooey.” She stabbed her cigarette half smoked. “If you had Fred in jail, if you spent any time with him at all, you'd know he wasn't fifth column material. He couldn't tell a lie if lies was water and he was on fire."

  "I didn't say we had him in jail. I said he was in custody. The FBI's got him."

  In her agitation, Molly Wenk had plucked another Camel out of her case. She stopped in mid tap and stared at Zagreb. “Tell me something about the man in charge. He have a crewcut?"

  "Plenty of them do."

  "Maybe thirties, maybe forties, has eyes like a dead mackerel? Uses words like ‘satisfactory’ and never takes off his coat or sweats?"

  The two plainclothesmen exchanged a look.

  Zagreb rested his forearms on the table. “Didn't you tell us you came here from Brooklyn?"

  "I left when I was eighteen. I was a file clerk in Bureau headquarters in Washington for seven years, the last three of which I threw away on that snake in the grass. He's the reason I bought a bus ticket, just like Fred leaving Germany to duck Hitler.” She lit the cigarette and shook out the match viciously. “I dropped fifteen pounds, changed jobs twice, went through four stylists, got a complete new wardrobe. It's just like that creep Holinshead not even to change the way he cuts his hair."

  * * * *

  Time seemed to have stood still at the California since yesterday, and for that matter since Repeal; even the flies in the bowl fixtures lay frozen in the same death throes. The same bored clerk was reading the same pulp magazine behind the desk and the
same tired Negro worked the lever to lift Zagreb, Burke, and McReary to the eleventh floor, where they breathed the air they'd breathed a day earlier, including the exhaust from yesterday's cigar clamped between Canal's teeth.

  Canal opened the door, minus the cigar and his jacket. The air in the room was as fetid as ever, and he wore two dark circles under his armpits. A thread of dried blood bifurcated his lower lip.

  "Run into something?” Zagreb asked.

  "Washington red tape.” The big man grinned, wincing slightly when a fresh trickle broke through the scab.

  Inside, Holinshead was at his station near the open window, looking as crisp as usual. The color scheme was the same, but he must have gone home to rest and change because the two cowboys had the unpressed look of men who'd taken turns sleeping in the hard wooden chair. Both men needed a shave, and Junkers, the scarecrow, had a purple welt under one eye the size of Canal's ham fist. Dial, his stocky partner, leaned back against a grimy papered wall with his arms folded and a swelling on one side of his jaw.

  The Special Agent in Charge noted Zagreb's reaction. “It took my service piece to back that mad bull of yours off my agents,” he said. “I'm considering filing federal charges."

  Canal grunted. “I told ‘em they ought to take better care of their pets. Some people just don't like advice."

  Fred Taylor, alias Alfred Schneider, was sitting up now on the edge of the bed, dressed in wrinkled Packard Motor Car Co. coveralls and oil-stained black work boots. His hands dangled between his spread knees and his chin rested on his chest. The lieutenant approached and lifted Taylor's chin gently. His face was swollen and his breath whistled in and out through a broken septum.

  Zagreb lowered the prisoner's head. A greasy paper sack leaned at a drunken angle on the nightstand. “He eat anything?"

  "Couple of bites of burger,” said Canal. “That's all he could chew. I gave him some water, he took more of that. I wouldn't go away and trust these boys to water my plants."

  "Let's all file charges, starting with false arrest and unlawful detention.” Zagreb faced Holinshead. “This isn't the Fred Taylor your snitch gave you, but you knew that."