Hell Gate

by Jeff Dawson

  She was sitting alone in a chair, reading. The door was closed. He tapped lightly at the window, upon which she slammed down the book and rushed to it, her face a mix of relief and anger.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  She released the catch on the French door and let him in.

  ‘You’re going to get us both killed.’

  Danger didn’t need to heighten the senses. She was, knew Finch, highly desirable to him, something both amplified by what he knew about her, yet tainted by knowledge that she had prostituted herself in the line of her work. That she didn’t touch him, kiss him on the cheek or show any sign of anything physical couldn’t be attributed solely to his current wretched state. It only added to the confusion. But she had no time for anything as frail as emotion, she’d already declared that. She was protecting him, he understood. He was, as she had also warned him, too innocent for the harsh realities of the intelligence game.

  ‘Please, sit,’ she said, and poured him a bourbon, which he downed in one and she refilled. ‘Muller’s not here. I’m alone, but for how long I don’t know. There are two of his men…’

  ‘I saw.’

  He pointed to the vase of daffodils.

  ‘You followed me? Damn you, Finch. Were you born stupid?’

  ‘Let me explain.’

  She was reading Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. He thought of the last time he had seen that book, in Annie’s room at London’s Savoy Hotel.

  ‘Keep it short and to the point,’ she said. ‘They’ll be back to keep an eye on me. Trust is in very short supply around here. I’m under virtual house-arrest.’

  She lit them both a cigarette from a long silver case while Finch told her of his theory regarding Muller and the General Slocum. Her face betrayed nothing.

  ‘I wanted to inform you that the heroin – the heroin you claimed to know nothing about, by the way – is being smuggled in in coffee bean shipments under the cover of a company called Herulian Holdings… I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’

  He took out the brown paper parcel that had been pressed deep into an inside pocket. He handed it to her and she examined it.

  ‘In order to link Muller – and by association Schultz – to these drugs,’ he continued, ‘we need to find physical evidence… documents pertaining to such a company.’

  She gave it back.

  ‘We? Why do you assume that I’m on your side?’

  He tucked the parcel in his pocket again.

  ‘I think you need Muller to be put away as much as I do.’

  He wondered whether he’d overplayed his hand again – tipping her off that he knew who she really was. But then if she knew that he was working with MO3, and was still trusting her, there was every chance he might.

  She stood and paced.

  ‘It’s true, I did know – about the heroin – just not the “how” or the “where”. Muller kept that a closely guarded secret. But his papers are kept in a safe. If there is any evidence of this “Herulian Holdings”, it would be in there.’

  ‘A safe? Where?’

  ‘The next room. This is the study, but in there…’ she pointed, ‘is his private office. He keeps it locked at all times.’

  ‘You have a key?’

  ‘To the private office? No, but I know where it’s kept.’

  ‘And to the safe?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s a combination lock. The only ones who know the code are Muller and his lawyer, Krank, a man I despise even more than Muller himself, if that’s even possible. He’s the person who trusts me least of all. He’s already told me so.’

  ‘Are you sure? About the code…? The ones who know…?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Then do you know a safecracker… a safebreaker?’

  She rolled her eyes.

  Were you born stupid?

  ‘I mean… is there someone trusted we could approach who does?’ he said. ‘You know, in a professional capacity?’

  ‘Trust…? You mean on top of the not insignificant business of then having to smuggle said safecracker in and out of the house?’

  He sipped his whisky.

  ‘Then what do you suggest?’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘Muller, every day – every weekday – he comes home… three o’clock… remember?’

  Finch nodded his understanding.

  ‘Most days the pair of them – he and Krank – open the safe while attending to their business. They leave it that way, taking papers in and out.’

  ‘And you think you can get in there with them?’

  ‘No… Not in there. Like I say, the private office is small. They tend to come into this room to do their work. They sit either side of this desk here, spreading things out. The safe isn’t unlocked for long, but it’s unattended. I’m often around to pour them a drink or whatever. My presence wouldn’t be unusual.’

  ‘And what about the bodyguards?’

  ‘Up here? No way. Their place is strictly downstairs.’

  Finch rubbed his chin.

  ‘It sounds like a risk. Is there another way?’

  ‘None better than this.’

  ‘And if you get caught?’

  The silence said it all. She stood.

  ‘You need to go,’ she urged. ‘If I find what I need, I will let the relevant people know. You have to trust me on that.’

  ‘That word again.’

  There was the faint trace of a smile. She motioned for him to leave, then hastened him down the stairs and out the back.

  ‘Goodbye, Captain Finch.’

  She shook his hand. It felt final.

  There was a noise at the front door.

  ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’

  It was the first time she’d made a joke. Then her face darkened again. There were some dollar bills and loose change in a brass saucer on a shelf. She scooped them up and pressed them into his hands.

  ‘You need to get out of here.’

  * * *

  Back outside, Finch made his way to Greenwich Avenue and turned towards the florist’s. As he walked past the brick wall, he saw the note still wedged into place. He wondered whether to read it but decided not to.

  Instead he crossed the road and, with his new-found relative wealth, he smartened himself up enough to go into an Italian café. It had been so long since he had eaten. He was not only enticed by the aroma – it also afforded a good vantage point.

  He bought himself a slice, as if from a giant flan, of something called a ‘pizza’. It was made of crisped dough base with a thick tomato sauce and ground beef and assorted vegetable toppings, added according to the various random nods he gave to the server. He then stood at an outside stand, fashioned from a large barrel, and observed how the others ate, folding the slice in half and manipulating it by hand. It was, he determined, at that very moment in time, the most delicious thing he’d ever consumed. A second slice later, with a cup of coffee to wash it down, he found himself just leaning, watching, waiting.

  It was done so discreetly that it was barely perceptible, but eventually a short, fat man with a moustache in a drab business suit and homburg walked past, briefcase in hand. Barely breaking stride, and certainly without even looking down, he had filched Katia’s note out of its hiding place.

  Finch wolfed his coffee and set off after him. As he crossed the road, he saw that the man had not only retrieved the note but put a new one in its place, on yellow paper rather than white. And now he was marching off – the anonymous little fellow in the humdrum uniform of the office clerk.

  He was anything but, of course, and Finch watched him undertake the professional manoeuvres of his kind – the criss-crossing of the road, using the cover of vehicles, or stopping in doorways, checking reflections as he made his way eastwards.

  There was a streetcar clanging towards them. Though it looked to be of no interest, in one darting movement the man moved behind it, using it as a screen while he
crossed the road, scuttled to the cast-iron cupola and down the steps of the new Bleecker Street subway station.

  Finch followed him underground amid the beautiful blue ceramic signage and sculpted tulips, a nod to the area’s Dutch heritage. He stood back while the man bought a ticket at a wooden booth and hastened towards the Manhattan Main Line. Finch rooted for five cents and did the same, handing the pasteboard ticket to the gate attendant, who slotted it into the ‘chopper box’ and allowed him through to the platform.

  There was an immediacy about the New York Subway compared with the London Underground, he observed. It was right there, literally, ‘cut and covered’ by the street, its grilles venting right up into the sidewalk – not seemingly miles beneath the earth in a subterranean warren. There was an electric Uptown train pulling in and the man climbed aboard. As he moved down the aisle, easing past passengers, he gave no impression of having seen Finch, no hint of eye contact, although he couldn’t be sure.

  Finch hurried along as best he could and climbed into the red steel carriage. But then he saw the man step off at the next set of doors, just as they were sliding closed. Finch managed to squeeze out again just in time. The man hadn’t looked back, so Finch pursued him once more, back up the steps and into the street.

  They continued for several blocks north and west back into Greenwich Village until the irregular slants of the roads gave way to the regular grid street pattern and with Finch so far back he occasionally, briefly, lost sight. Finch had no idea where he was now – the Chelsea district, he thought – but found the man again and watched as he turned off the main thoroughfare into a side street, and then left again into another.

  But it was a trap – not a street but a dead-end alley, clearly part of a well-rehearsed manoeuvre, the very kind that Katia had employed on the way to their escape by ferry, evidently a trick out of the Deuxième Bureau manual. The man stepped out from nowhere, right behind him. And he was brandishing an automatic pistol. The clip hung open on the briefcase in which he’d been carrying it. There was nowhere for Finch to go. Instinctively, he put his hands up.

  The man’s voice came in a monotone; neutral, without a trace of emotion.

  ‘Stay away from her, Captain Finch.’

  With his left hand he eased his hat back. He was, saw Finch, quite bald.

  ‘Muller too. Your very presence has already put a number of people in very grave danger. Myself included.’

  ‘I just…’

  He raised a hand to silence him, then reached into the briefcase, pulled out a silencer and began screwing it on.

  ‘Trust me, Mr Finch, when I tell you that, according to protocol, I am supposed to terminate you right here and now…’

  He raised the gun and pointed it at Finch’s head.

  ‘And believe me too when I tell you I have done such things several times before, including twice right here on this very spot. We’ve found it to be a most convenient location.’

  ‘But…’

  He casually squeezed the trigger and, with an innocuous click, a bullet was loosed off, thudding into the wall behind.

  ‘That is, if it weren’t for the fact that your death would bring unnecessary attention at a critical juncture. This will be your only warning. Do you understand?’

  Finch shook like a leaf, but nodded.

  ‘You will count to one hundred before leaving.’

  Finch thought of the kid back on the Indiana farm.

  And with that, the little man was gone.

  Chapter 26

  At one minute to three o’clock, Katia heard the rattle of the car engine and the ratchet of the handbrake. The two goons were downstairs, smoking, drinking coffee, casually – and too loudly – discussing acts of physical violence they had committed in the line of duty. It was for her benefit, she knew – to let her know of the consequences should she stray from the fold.

  They were pathetic, she thought. Little schoolyard bullies. Indeed, the scrape of the key in the front door induced an instant servile reaction on their part – springing alert; their menace mere child’s play compared with the sort of terror that Muller could visit upon them… or anybody else for that matter. It reminded her of something she had been reading about the Nobel Prize and the study of its latest recipient, the scientist Pavlov, who’d been conditioning responses in dogs.

  Krank and his pompous basso voce reverberated up the stairs, following Muller as he ascended. She stepped out onto the landing to greet them and was met with a light impersonal kiss from Muller and a look of veiled scepticism from Krank. Muller signalled for her to fetch them drinks – schnapps… Kirschwasser – a sign, she knew, that they had had a good day. She had been careful to wash and replace the tumblers that she and Finch had used, remove the cigarette butts, and had brushed away any evidence of his entry via the window.

  Muller unlocked the private office next door and, right on cue, clanged open the wall safe. Dutifully she went to the drinks tray on the sideboard in the study and poured two shots.

  I could poison you both right now if I wanted to.

  When they entered the study, Muller gave a slight flick of the head, indicating that she should leave. Krank issued one of his supercilious grins.

  ‘Would you like anything else?’ she asked, employing a suitably subservient tone. The silence told her that they did not.

  She went to close the study door on her way out.

  ‘Leave it open,’ commanded Krank.

  From the table in the study you could see the landing mirror which, ordinarily, gave a reflected view into the private office. She had made sure to place the vase of daffodils on the occasional table below it, part-obstructing the view, affording her a critical blind spot. Downstairs, meanwhile, the two goons were behaving themselves, just compliant foot soldiers.

  Now… It has to be now.

  Muller and Krank had commenced with a discussion about the economic standing of the Bierkeller. Funny, she thought, despite the raging criminality and sadistic brutality, they still talked about prosaic matters such as profits, turnover, overheads, staffing levels and taxation. Krank seemed most exercised about the colour scheme of some new upholstery.

  The door of the private office was half open. She nudged it further. The room was small, just a strong room, a castle keep. It had a single window, the only one in the house with bars, and a small rosewood davenport with a blotter and inkwell – the modest inner sanctum of Muller’s nefarious underworld.

  Behind the davenport was a false bookcase. It hinged like a cupboard, the spines of the books merely fake. And there, set into the wall, mounted at chest height, its capacity about the size of a small suitcase, was the safe. And its door was hanging open. Tantalizingly so.

  Now!

  She took a deep breath and entered the room.

  Despite the solid steel and the combination wheel, the safe was quite unassuming, just another repository for paperwork, its interior lined with the sort of green baize they used on pool tables. It had a shelf that split the interior into two sections. There were some bound bundles of dollar bills in the rear – not an extraordinary sum of cash. In front of that, piles of neatly stacked papers and brown cardboard folders – three on the shelf itself and three below it.

  She removed the top left-hand pile, placed it on the davenport and began rifling through. There were invoices from the Bierkeller and other businesses; bills of sale; a certificate of health from the sanitation department; some documents pertaining to a court case regarding a disputed liquor licence.

  As she proceeded through the mound of innocuous admin, the chances of finding what was required were beginning to diminish. She wondered whether there might be a better way of doing this… maybe go through the companies register at City Hall?

  ‘Katia!’

  The voice induced a cold shiver. She shoved the documents back and dashed to the landing, pretending to rearrange the daffodils in the vase. There was the reflection from an adjoining parlour of the sauwastika that hung on
the wall.

  Muller appeared.

  ‘What was the name of that city councillor?’ he asked. ‘The one we met at dinner the other night… the one who came over and introduced himself? Johnson? Johns? Jacobs?’

  She looked up.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

  She cast a furtive eye while Muller re-entered the private office, watching him in the mirror. It had been inevitable that he would return to the safe. He took something. Then, to her horror, paused in confusion.

  Had he noticed?

  ‘Krank… did you move…?’

  ‘Jacobson,’ she interjected.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jacobson… That was his name.’

  He shouted the name back through to Krank, who uttered something profane and contemptuous at its mention. Then he shrugged to himself, put the papers back, and returned to the larger study.

  I have to move quickly.

  She noted the positioning of everything in the safe this time, careful to leave it all exactly as she found it, then resumed leafing through the papers, flipping methodically – the top-left pile again, then the centre one, then the right. There were maybe 100, 200 papers in each. She sped through them looking for one thing only, senses primed for any movement in the room next door.

  Finding nothing of relevance, she replaced what she’d gone through, then began work on the bottom shelf. The first pile, the fourth in total, yielded nothing. But then, in the next, about midway through a bunch of bank statements, it leapt out at her. The figures were in a handwritten ledger beneath a typed heading…

  Herulian Holdings.

  * * *

  With the sun setting, Finch gripped the rungs of the ladder that descended from the skeletal structure of the incomplete Queensboro’ Bridge. He had no head for heights and the prospect of edging down what amounted to a series of wooden ladders lashed together over a drop of 100 or more feet put the fear of God in him. But with insufficient cash now to pay a ferryman – at which he cursed himself – it was the only way possible to access Blackwell’s Island.