The Saboteurs

by Griffin, W. E. B. ; Butterworth IV, William

  “Frank, I’m going to need more than family snapshots. I need hard intel. How many troops and exactly where? Who is in charge of harbor security, of town security? The locations of minefields on the beaches and offshore, and what’s been booby-trapped. I need documents on enemy ops. And more….”

  “And you will have that,” Nola replied evenly.

  Canidy stared at him for a long time. Then he looked as his watch, then at Fulmar. “Let’s go see Lanza. Ready?”

  Fulmar nodded.

  “I’ll be in touch, Frank,” Canidy said sharply.

  He grabbed his attaché case and they went out the door.

  Canidy and Fulmar crossed South Street and started walking the block north toward Meyer’s Hotel.

  “Sonofabitch!” Canidy said. “I don’t know if I’m madder at Nola for saying he’s not going or at myself for assuming he was going.”

  “I would not worry about that too much,” Fulmar said. “You have what appears to be good information to get going now. Each bit—”

  “I know, I know. Each bit of info leads to more info. But I needed a lot yesterday.”

  Canidy stopped walking.

  When Fulmar stopped and looked back at him, Canidy said, “There’s just something about this that doesn’t feel right.”

  Fulmar laughed. He checked the immediate area around them, then said, “Are you fucking kidding me? Everything about this doesn’t feel right!”

  Canidy shook his head.

  “Thanks, pal. Thanks for making me feel better.”

  The door to room 201 could have used a fresh coat of paint. It actually could have used a complete refinishing since it had, judging by the fat flakes of paint that were peeling off, already been painted four or more times, layer upon layer. But then if renovation started with the door, there would be no end to it. The whole damned hotel needed work.

  Canidy, still fuming at Nola’s announcement that he was not going to Sicily, knocked on the door harder than he realized and chips of paint came flying off.

  “Easy, Dick,” Fulmar said.

  The door swung open quickly and noisily and Joe “Socks” Lanza stood there.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  He looked at Fulmar.

  “Who’s this?”

  “A good friend,” Canidy said.

  Lanza looked past them, down the hall, then said, “Let’s not talk in the hall.”

  He turned and walked back into the room. Canidy and Fulmar followed.

  The room was bare and ratty but brightly lit. It had a desk that was a mess of magazines and newspapers, and four mismatched chairs, one behind the desk. There was a single window that overlooked South Street, and the stained bedsheet that served as a curtain was pulled closed.

  “I just got the news that Frank Nola is not going to go with me,” Canidy said.

  Lanza sat down behind the desk. Canidy and Fulmar took seats across the desk from him.

  “Yeah—and?” Lanza said.

  “And I thought that that was what you were going to get for me—someone to get me into Sicily and to the locals there.”

  “He didn’t give you any names?”

  Canidy grunted.

  “I’ve got more names than the fucking Palermo phone book.”

  “Then what is the problem? You use that list, you will get what you want. That is a promise. Those names—” Lanza reached into his coat pocket, pulled out an envelope, and handed it across the desk “—those names and this are all you need.”

  Canidy took the envelope, opened it, and unfolded the letter.

  It was written in English and in what appeared to be Sicilian. Canidy’s eyes fell to the former:

  * * *

  March 1943

  The bearer of this letter is Mr. Richard Canidy.

  With this letter, the bearer brings to you my many good wishes.

  It is requested of you in turn that the bearer be given the same respect and con siderations that would be given if I were to personally appear before you.

  Your friendship is appreciated and it will not be forgotten.

  Charles Luciano

  (Salvatore Lucania)

  * * *

  It was clear that the date and the first line, slightly misaligned with the other lines, were newly typed.

  “You keep a stack of these around?” Canidy asked, his tone sarcastic. “Just type in a date and a name and you’re—what?—instantly made?”

  “It is necessary with Charlie being away,” Lanza said, clearly not pleased with being mocked. “He signed that letter. It will be honored.”

  Canidy raised his eyebrows dubiously.

  “We’ll see. But this is one reason why I wanted Nola.”

  “Look, Charlie Lucky said to give you whatever the hell you wanted and we will. But it is not possible for Nola to go with you.”

  Canidy’s eyebrows went up again.

  “Anything?” he repeated.

  Lanza sighed.

  “Anything but Nola—”

  “For starters,” Canidy interrupted, “I want one of the Johnson LMGs, like the one that you gave Nola.”

  Lanza looked into Canidy’s eyes and frowned slightly.

  Bingo, Canidy thought. It was Lanza. Why am I not surprised?

  Canidy glanced at Fulmar and added, “Make that two. We will each need one, with a full ammo box.”

  Lanza considered the request for a long quiet moment, then said, “What else?”

  “How many do you have?” Canidy asked.

  Lanza did not respond, verbally or physically.

  “You want to tell me where the hell you got them?” Canidy pursued.

  Lanza didn’t answer.

  “They were supposed to go to the Marines,” Canidy said pointedly. “I can bring a lot of goddamned heat down on you for grabbing them.”

  Lanza’s eyes narrowed. He studied both Canidy and Fulmar, then, after a long moment, picked up the telephone receiver and dialed.

  “Yeah, it’s Joe. Put two of those new sticks in a box and put them in the trunk of the car—

  “Yeah, those sticks. Don’t ask questions. Just do it. Make sure they’re complete…. What? Yeah, complete. You know what I mean.”

  He hung up the receiver and stared at Canidy.

  “Bringing in ‘heat,’ as you say, would not be wise. The fact is—and you can check this out—it was the military that ordered those guns pulled off of a Liberty ship”—he outstretched his left arm and pointed with his index finger at the window covered with a bedsheet—“right over there across the river. So it was your guys that did that. And here we’re doing as you ask. So easy on the threats, huh?”

  “Those pulled from the ship were ones for the Dutch?”

  Lanza made a thin smile.

  “There. You already know.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you have them.”

  Lanza shrugged.

  “A small part of a total shipment got lost between the ship and the warehouse,” he said simply. “Some guys found it.”

  “And didn’t turn it over?”

  Lanza made the thin smile again, then said dryly, “That’s not the way it works.”

  Canidy shook his head.

  “What the fuck does it matter?” Lanza said casually. “So instead of, say, a hundred boxes locked down and collecting dust, now there’s only ninety-nine. Or ninety-eight. Whatever.”

  He paused to make his point.

  “And now you’re going to get yours. Ones you wouldn’t even know about—let alone get—if they’d been turned in to be locked up for who the hell knows how long.”

  Jesus Christ, Canidy thought, he’s beginning to make sense.

  Canidy looked to the desk, at the newspaper there, then at Fulmar—and he had a wild idea.

  What the hell? What’s to lose? This whole damned dance with the devil is wild.

  Canidy reached forward and took from the desk a copy of the New York World-Telegram.

  One of the headlines
read: MORE BOMBINGS LEAD TO MORE QUESTIONS.

  “Let me ask you about something else,” he said, holding up the newspaper. “What do you know about these bombings?”

  “Not much. Less than you, I’d guess.”

  Canidy locked eyes with him.

  Lanza said, “It’s not our guys, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Can you ask around?” Fulmar said.

  Lanza shrugged.

  “I’ll keep my ears open,” he said after a moment. “Anything else?”

  “Not right now,” Canidy said.

  Lanza stood up.

  “Then I’ll show you the way out.”

  They left the office, went down the hallway to the back of the hotel, then down a flight of wooden steps that led to the alley.

  It was almost completely dark there, but the yellow of the taxicab made itself known. As did, Canidy noticed, the hulking silhouette of the monster fishmonger.

  “You get the sticks?” Lanza asked the driver.

  “In the trunk.”

  “Good. They now belong to these guys. Take them wherever they want.”

  The driver wordlessly got in behind the wheel and slammed the door closed.

  Canidy turned to thank Lanza but he had already gone back in the hotel.

  Fulmar and Canidy got in the backseat.

  “Gramercy,” Canidy said to the driver. “I think you know the way.”

  [ ONE ]

  Gramercy Park Hotel

  2 Lexington Avenue

  New York City, New York

  2210 7 March 1943

  The monster fishmonger opened the trunk of the cab, and inside there were three parcels, each wrapped in the same heavy brown paper used for packing seafood. The two smaller packages were cubes about eight by ten inches; the one larger parcel was flat and rectangular, some two feet long, a foot wide, and eighteen inches high.

  Fulmar reached in for one of the smaller parcels, expecting it to be lighter than the big one.

  “Jesus,” he said. “That’s heavy as hell.”

  “That’s because that’s a can of thirty-ought-six,” Canidy said, standing there holding his attaché case.

  Fulmar picked up the bigger box.

  “Much better.”

  “About twenty-five pounds?” Canidy said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’d be the ‘sticks.’ I have only one free hand. I’ll carry them while you get the cans.”

  Fulmar raised an eyebrow.

  “Gee, thanks, pal.”

  In the suite, Canidy put the large parcel on the coffee table in the sitting room. Fulmar entered a moment later, somewhat struggling with the weight of the two metal cans of .30-06 caliber ammunition, one awkwardly cradled under each arm.

  He pushed the door closed with his right heel, then put the cans on the floor with a solid thump, thump. He tore off the brown paper wrapping.

  “I’m going to hit the head,” Canidy said and started in that direction.

  The ammo boxes, dark green with a stencil of yellow lettering on the side indicating the contents, each had a metal handle that folded flat against the lid. Fulmar pulled up a handle as he worked the lid latch.

  “It would have been far easier to carry these using the handles.”

  Canidy chuckled.

  “Yeah, and far easier for anyone to have recognized them as ammo cans,” he answered from the bathroom, then swung the door shut.

  When he came back into the room a few minutes later, Fulmar had the brown paper off of the sturdy cardboard containers holding the Johnny guns and was opening the lid to the one on top.

  He looked inside and said, “Oh, shit. Original packing.”

  Canidy pulled back the lid to get a better look.

  “Oh, shit, indeed. I hate Cosmoline.”

  The rust preventative that coated the entire gun—metal and wood—was a petroleum jelly much like Vase-line—but stiffer and stinkier and harder than hell to remove completely. It had a nasty tendency, particularly in hot weather, to ooze out of every pore of the weapon, notably from the stock, and onto the shooter’s face, which was the last place anyone wanted greasy oil when they were hot and sweaty.

  “How’re we going to get it off?”

  “How else? Same as usual. Make a mess. And hope we get most of it off….”

  Some forty minutes later, the floor was a pile of petroleum-fouled hotel towels. But the Johnny guns practically gleamed.

  “I knew it!” Fulmar said disgustedly, holding out his hands.

  “What?”

  “Look at me. There’s fucking Cosmoline all over me. And I need to take a quick shower before I see Ingrid.”

  Canidy began laughing.

  “A shower? Good luck. You’re going to bead water better than a goose’s ass!”

  Fulmar made a face.

  “I’m sorry,” Canidy said, not at all convincingly and visibly trying to suppress more laughter. “Really. Look, maybe I’d better go for you. I’d probably have a better chance of bagging her, anyway.”

  “I’ll go like this before I let that happen.”

  Canidy, smiling and shaking his head, got up and went to the door.

  “Be right back,” he said and left.

  Fulmar walked into the bathroom, turned on the sink faucets, blending the water till the temperature was as hot as he could stand it. He began soaping and scrubbing the petroleum jelly from his hands and forearms.

  After ten minutes, there was a knock at the door.

  “Shit.”

  With no clean towels, he shook his hands to try to dry them as he went to answer the door.

  “Yeah?” he called.

  “Housekeeping,” Canidy answered in a falsetto voice.

  Fulmar turned the knob—getting on his hand the Cosmoline that Canidy had smeared there when he had gone out—and opened the door.

  There stood Canidy with a Cheshire cat grin and holding a stack of five fat bath towels.

  “Midnight requisition,” Canidy said in his normal voice.

  He entered and tossed the stack on one of the armchairs.

  Fulmar carefully pulled one from the middle, where Canidy’s oily hands had not touched.

  “Ingrid thanks you,” Fulmar said.

  “I can think of plenty of ways she can do that personally.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  Fulmar took the towel back into the bathroom and started running the shower water.

  Canidy walked over to the cans of ammunition, unlatched the lid of one, and popped it open. It was packed with shiny brass cartridges. He reached in, took a handful, then started feeding them round by round into one of the six magazines that came in each Johnny gun cardboard container.

  When Fulmar came out of the bathroom, he was wearing his suit pants and was buttoning the top button of a clean white dress shirt and snugging up the knot of his blue-and-silver rep necktie.

  He saw that Canidy was taking another towel—one of the clean ones he had just procured—to a Johnny gun and methodically rubbing off more Cosmoline. The magazines were all now full of ammunition, lined up neatly next to the ammo cans.

  “This gun’s about as good as it’s going to get,” Canidy said. “That is, without sitting for a couple hours under a summer sun to melt out the remainder.”

  “It looks nice.”

  “Any need to take it with you tonight?”

  Fulmar considered that a moment.

  “Thanks, but that’s not practical. And not necessary. I have my .45”—he patted his lower back—“and”—he patted his left forearm—“my baby Fairbairn.”

  Under the shirtsleeve, in a leather scabbard, was a stiletto-shaped knife that Fulmar used as the situation demanded—he pulled it out first if absolute silence was required or used it as a backup if making noise was not a factor.

  Fulmar subscribed to Canidy’s hand-to-hand combat school of thought: If you were close enough to stick a blade in someone’s brain, you damned sure were close enough to pu
t a bullet in it instead.

  The Fairbairn had been invented by an Englishman named William Ewart Fairbairn, who ran the Shanghai police force. He developed the black, double-edged blade for close combat with street thugs. Lately, he could be found at The Farm in Virginia, teaching OSS agents how to silently kill using his knife, or a silenced .22 caliber pistol, or a number of other highly effective tools and methods—including a newspaper rolled into a cone.

  The “regular” version of the Fairbairn was issued to all British commandos, its scabbard customarily sewn to the boot or trouser leg.

  Fulmar’s smaller model, which he had bought from an English sergeant at SOE’s Station X, looked a lot like the big one but instead featured a six-inch-long, double-edged blade and a short handle just long enough for fingers to be wrapped around it. It was carried, hilt downward, in the scabbard hidden between the bottom of his left wrist and the inside bend of his elbow.

  Canidy knew that Fulmar, as he had fled Germany with Professor Dyer and Dyer’s daughter, Gisella, had used the baby Fairbairn quite effectively to scramble the brains of a string of German SS officers who had had the misfortune of getting between them and safety.

  “Right,” Canidy said. “That should be enough to protect you as you attempt to secure the fair maiden’s affections.”

  “One can only hope.”

  Fulmar pulled on his suit coat.

  “Changing the subject,” Canidy said, “I was doing more than cleaning your weapon while you primped in there.”

  “Yeah?”

  “This has nothing to do with your qualities as a roommate but I decided that I may not be here when you get back.” He paused. “Probably won’t be.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, I have, as you say, enough information to get started…and the clock is ticking. I’ll take my new friend Johnny here and get to work. Unless you think there is anything that I can do to help you.”

  Fulmar looked off in the distance in deep thought.

  “Not for me, Dick,” he said finally. “But I do wish I could go with you.”