The Hess Cross

by James Thayer

The heavy odor of mothballs and cat urine smacked Crown as he stepped into the living room.

  "Please come in and make yourselves at home. Why don't you sit over there? Right over there." She pointed Crown to a sagging sofa under a dark landscape painting notable only because of its ornately carved wood frame. She guided Smithson to a delicate cherrywood rocking chair, but then, seeing his bulk, directed him to the other end of the sofa. Crown quickly grabbed the sofa's arm to prevent toppling as Smithson's ponderous weight buckled the cushion. Crown felt like he was sharing a hammock with Oliver Hardy.

  "Tea?"

  "Pardon?" Crown asked, having regained his balance.

  "Would you like some tea?"

  "No thanks, ma'am. We're here to ask you about . . . "

  "Tea?" She turned to Smithson. Her voice had a very high, almost falsetto pitch. "Tea" sounded like a bird's chirp.

  "Thank you, yes. Four lumps of sugar."

  While she puttered around the kitchen, Crown surveyed her living room. He doubted it had changed in twenty years. The curtains were drawn, and the room was dim, accenting the mothball odor. A Tiffany lamp sat on an end table near the sofa. A year of Saturday Evening Posts cluttered the tea table in front of them. Oval-framed photographs of relatives from the last century were perched on the mantel over the fireplace. Bookshelves built into the wall near the fireplace contained a hundred or more miniature pieces of furniture collected over a half-century. An early RCA radio rested on the radiator cover near the sofa. Between the radiator and the fireplace was her chair, a gray, worn, comfortable command chair replete with footstool and knitting pouch hanging from the antimacassar-covered arm. In front of the chair was an afghan that she tucked her feet into when knitting. An August Junghans eight-day clock hung on the wall across from Crown and filled the room with its soothing tick. The home was old and comfortable, the home of a woman enjoying her last years.

  The old woman padded from the kitchen to Smithson, handed him a cup and saucer, and said, "Sorry, young man. I don't have any cubes. I'll pour sugar, and you tell me when."

  After a sufficient time to half-fill the cup with sugar, Smithson waved his hand. She had forgotten a spoon, so he stirred the syrup with his watchband.

  When she had settled into her chair and balanced her cup and saucer on the arm, Crown began, "Ma'am, I'm John Crown. My friend, Everette Smithson, and I are with the Chicago police—"

  "Well, I'm always glad to see you boys, what with the neighborhood going like it is. Why, just this morning, you would not believe what was going on . . . "

  "What's your name, ma'am?"

  "Mrs. Falkenhausen," she answered, sipping her tea. For the first time, Crown noticed a slight accent, the light inflection of one who has spent decades minimizing that vestige of the old country.

  "Did you see the hijacking, Mrs. Falkenhausen?"

  "I've never seen anything like it. First I saw this big black car sitting in the Austens' driveway. I know the Austens' car, and that wasn't it, so I phoned the police . . . "

  She was not the rambling, senile woman Crown had expected when first seeing her. She had witnessed the hijacking from beginning to end. Her powers of observation were remarkable. The apparent leader was thirty-six or thirty-eight years old, five feet, nine inches tall, very muscular, and had short, very curly blond hair. He had used the pistol on the truck driver. The man who had shot out the windshield was very tall, perhaps six-four or -five, and had shoulders as wide as the elm tree in her front yard he had hidden behind. She described a purple blotch under his right ear. He had straight blond hair. She had not seen the smaller, dark-complexioned man until near the end, when he stood up from behind the hedge across the street. He had a small, almost invisible black mustache. All three wore shabby clothes. Both the giant and the mustached man used weapons that sounded like those she had heard on her radio shows. She nodded when Crown mentioned a submachine gun, but vigorously shook her head when he described the wooden stock of a Thompson submachine gun, the standard Chicago mob weapon.

  "No, no wood."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There wasn't any wood on the guns. Only metal."

  "Well, there has to be wood. It's the part that goes against the shoulder sometimes when you fire. It's the stock."

  "No," she repeated emphatically. "No wood. I know what I saw."

  Crown popped his arm several times. He said finally, "Yes, I believe you do."

  "That's the clue I was talking about," Smithson said. "Sullivan told me that he has never known either an Irish or a Sicilian gang to use anything but American-made Thompsons. The gun Mrs. Falkenhausen is describing is foreign."

  "That's not the only thing foreign about them," the old lady said, putting her cup and saucer down with importance.

  Crown's eyes darted to her. She was a watcher and a reliable reporter. She had delivered her information like a cub newspaperman to his editor. If she regarded it as important, it was.

  "What else, ma'am?"

  "Well, this didn't occur to me until after Mr. Sullivan talked to me. It didn't even ring a bell when I heard it first. But later it just struck me. Funny how that works."

  "What was that?"

  "The leader, the curly-headed one, yelled, 'Lange, down the street.' "

  Crown was mildly disappointed. Of course, the name of one of the men was an important clue. The Chicago police and the FBI would scour their files looking for hoodlums named Lange. But it wasn't a clue that sparked Crown's interest.

  "Mrs. Falkenhausen, that's really sharp of you to pick the man's name up. Very important." Crown collected his feet under him to rise. "We really appreciate your time."

  "The name's not the important part."

  "Oh?"

  "The leader didn't yell, 'Lange, down the street.' He yelled, 'Lange, unten auf der Strasse.'"

  "What?"

  "That's right," she said, appreciating the impact of her statement. "I spent my first fifteen years in Berlin. I know the mother tongue when I hear it."

  "Find anything else?" Lieutenant Sullivan asked as he wiped automobile grease from his hands with a towel. The Cadillac's front bumper was now attached to a police wrecker, which jolted forward. Glass fragments popped as the Cadillac rolled over remnants of the Chevrolet's windshield. Only a dozen or so police remained. A street sweeper was parked against the curb, with its engine idling, ready to erase the last trace of the ambush.

  "Nothing important," Smithson lied smoothly. "How's your search going?"

  "No results yet. All we can do is look for the dynamite truck. There must be five hundred cops doing nothing but that right now. We've formed circles. Here, let me show you."

  Sullivan withdrew a street map from his pocket and laid it across the hood of the Chevrolet.

  "Here's where we are. These two red circles are the lines where we have men posted. I'm pretty sure that, should the dynamite truck cross any of these lines, it'll be spotted."

  "How far is the outside circle from where we are?" Crown asked.

  "Two miles."

  "You're probably too late, then. It's been hours since the heist."

  "You don't think I know that?" Sullivan snapped, reflecting the pressure he had been under since the chief of police and the mayor had personally issued his orders that morning. "But it's better than doing nothing. And nothing's all we have to go on right now. Plus, it's giving a lot of damned angry cops something constructive to do."

  "What else is being done?" Crown asked, looking up and down the street, for nothing in particular.

  "All the radio stations are announcing the description of the truck. There's a good chance someone will spot it. It's hard to hide something that big when the entire city is looking for it."

  "What about the hood? Know anything about him?"

  "Name was Patrick Kenney Flannery, known as Paddy. He's got a sheet on him two yards long, dating back to when he was fourteen. He's been charged with everything from burglary to whiskey running to extortion. Served a tot
al of five years. When he was a kid, he was with the O'Banion gang, and as far as we can tell, after that he was associated with a series of small-timers. He was used mostly for muscle. Never aspired to anything else, at least not till now."

  "Anything distinctive about him? Anything that would explain this?"

  "The big thing is that he worked at the powder company."

  "Everette told me about that. What about his background?" Crown asked. "His parents?"

  "Irish as you can get."

  "Any ties to Europe?"

  Sullivan turned directly to Crown and spoke with the authority of two decades on the beat. "I know what that old lady said about their weapons with no wood stocks. Sure, that sounds mysterious and international, just like your and Smithson's business. But believe me, Crown, I know this type. Flannery was a scumbag from the word go. All he did was cause trouble all his life. Not even big trouble, just nickel-and-dime stuff. Shit, if he hadn't been hauled into police stations once a week, he wouldn't have known what to do with himself.

  "So I'll tell you what happened here." Sullivan's voice rose. "He and a couple other losers scratched their heads and realized that if they didn't do something big, hit somebody hard for a big prize, they'd be punks all their lives. This results—a hairbrained scheme that got a lot of people killed for nothing. Those gunsels have as much use for dynamite as I do for hair on my palm."

  "Then how do you explain the foreign weapons?" Smithson asked. Crown wanted to drop the subject. The lieutenant would be of little help now that his mind was set.

  "I figure that's what started this whole business, those guns. Flannery or one of the others came across a couple of heavy-duty submachine guns. Maybe bought them from a fence. Who knows? The guns started it, because it gave them big ideas. They were probably thinking of the St. Valentine's day massacre and the Hymie Weiss shooting. The big time. So they brewed up this scheme for nothing more than to get into the papers."

  A uniformed motorcycle policeman trotted up to Sullivan and handed him three or four slips of paper. "From headquarters and the morgue, sir."

  "Assholes," muttered Sullivan as he flipped through the sheets. "Wish the hell they'd get off my back and let me do my job. If the goddamn mayor wants to play cop, why doesn't he put on a badge and . . . " Sullivan stopped abruptly and screwed his eyebrows in concentration.

  "What is it, Lieutenant?" Crown asked, suspecting Sullivan was confronted with evidence from the morgue that belied his theory.

  "This doesn't make sense," he said after several seconds. "The Irishman was hit with the same type of bullets that killed the escort-car men. I thought Flannery had been shotgunned, but they pulled six slugs from him. No buckshot at all."

  "What caliber?" Crown asked.

  "It says here they're nine-double-M. What the hell's that?"

  "It's the standard German caliber for service pistols and submachine guns. Any markings on the casings you found?"

  "Yeah, a small K punched on the bottom of the shells," Sullivan answered, without looking up from the sheets, embarrassed by his lack of knowledge.

  Crown said, "Krupp. The German munitions manufacturer."

  "None of the powder-company people had submachine guns. So one of Flannery's own men killed him," the lieutenant said. "Figures. Goddamn bunch of lunatics." He paled, reached for his belt buckle, and bit his lower lip. A flaming peptic ulcer was his constant companion.

  The courier-cop ran up again, out of breath and beaming. "Lieutenant, they've found the dynamite truck. At the corner of Pulaski and Fullerton."

  "You still think there's something international about this, Crown?" Sullivan asked, the pain having subsided.

  "I don't know." Like hell he didn't know. "I'd like to tag along awhile, though."

  "Sure, sure. I figured as much. Let's go in my car. The truck isn't far from here. Inside our first goddamn ring of police." Sullivan took the street map from his back pocket, tore it in half, and threw it on the ground.

  The truck was parked in an alley behind a two-story brick warehouse. By the time Sullivan's car arrived, the Dodge six-wheel two-tonner was already surrounded by policemen trying to keep the souvenir hunters from dismantling it.

  Piles of garbage leaned against the warehouse. Curious onlookers waded through the mire to get a closer look. An enterprising Tribune photographer rapidly ascended a stagnant pile, precariously balanced himself atop an apple crate perched at the crest, and just as he snapped the photo, lost his footing and pitched sideways into the festering rubbish.

  "Sergeant," Sullivan bellowed as he shouldered his way through the crowd, "get these people out of here."

  Sullivan's reputation as an uncharitable boss must have been widespread, because the phalanx of bluecoats now moved with resolve, linking arms and pushing the throng back.

  "Goddamn tourists," Sullivan said under his breath, swallowing rapidly in a ineffectual attempt to drown the stab of pain in his belly.

  The curious were eventually restrained, but not before malodorous clumps of garbage had been strewn across the site. Crown lifted his feet carefully as he slowly circled the truck. He ran his hand over the ruptured sheet metal of the driver's-side door, through which a stream of Krupp products had poured.

  "I think the doctors'll find that Patrolman Bates also has bits of metal in his chest from this door," Sullivan said.

  "Fired from inside the cab?"

  "Sure. The steel fragments are bent out. Bates never knew what hit him." Sullivan swung the truck's door open and squinted at the perforated door panel. He scraped a thin film of gray-brown particles from the remnants of the panel. "The man sitting in the middle or on the right fired, probably the middle man. He fired over the driver's lap. These powder burns are too wide to have been fired pointblank by the driver. The driver kept both his hands on the wheel so Bates wouldn't suspect he was in danger. And the driver had a hell of a lot of confidence in the gunner. The bullets went above the driver's thighs but below his elbows. Look at this, too. He must have fired ten or fifteen rounds through this door, yet the hole here is no bigger than my fist. Jesus," Sullivan exclaimed. "He's one steady son of a bitch."

  "Unbelievable," wheezed Everette Smithson, on his tiptoes peering at the door.

  "That's a warning to us, Crown, just as plain as if it were in print," Sullivan said. "The little one, the one the old lady said sat in the middle of the cab, is extremely dangerous. Deadly."

  "A professional," Crown said in a voice inaudible to the surrounding policemen.

  Sullivan hopped down from the running board and looked at Crown squarely, with his basketball stomach almost touching Crown's belt buckle. "You're pretty sure about that?" It was not a challenge. The lieutenant was not preparing a rebuttal. He wanted advice.

  Crown nodded. "The old lady, Mrs. Falkenhausen, told us something you don't know. She's a German immigrant. She heard one of the men, apparently the leader, the one who drove the truck away, give a command in German. He slipped, because she also heard them speak English. Good English. Plus, the submachine gun used. They're not American-made. They sound like MP40's, called Schmeissers, made in Germany and used in all the German services. And now your conclusion about the man in the middle of the seat being extremely competent with the weapon. Now, I don't know much about your Chicago gangs, but this doesn't sound like a mob hijacking. Smithson and I agree. The three hijackers were German stormtroopers."

  "What the hell are they doing in Chicago?" asked Sullivan, who believed every word Crown had said.

  "If we can find that out, we can find them."

  A young red-haired policeman Crown guessed had been on the force all of two weeks broke through the circle of policemen and ran up to Sullivan, losing his footing several times on the slippery refuse. He didn't wait to be addressed by his superior. "Lieutenant, we've got it."

  "Got what?"

  "A housewife across the street saw the men change trucks. She saw the dynamite truck drive up, and then she saw three men unload boxes an
d put them into a van."

  "When?"

  "About nine-thirty or quarter to ten."

  "What kind of van?"

  "She doesn't know the make or the plates, but it's light blue and has 'Bakery' printed on the side of it."

  "What bakery?"

  "She said the name of the bakery had been painted over or erased. All it said on the side was 'Bakery.' "

  "Which way did it go?"

  The red-haired cop pointed over Sullivan's shoulder. "They turned around and went north."

  "What else did she see?" Sullivan asked.

  "She doesn't remember anything else. We've checked the other houses along the block, and no one else saw anything."

  Sullivan nodded his approval and dismissed the rookie. A tired man, one who had spent his week's energy that morning, stepped up to Sullivan. He was about sixty years old. A shock of white hair hung over his ears. He wore a thin black tie and a wool sweater. As if to contradict this office wear, his hands were callused and scarred. He was a man who was assigned a desk job but escaped to the plant floor, to the days of honest labor, as often as possible.

  "Officer . . . " He addressed Sullivan, but had decided Smithson and Crown were ranking police officers, so he joined their circle. "I'm Henry Harter, the manager of the Guy Fawkes Powder Company. This's my truck." Without further explanation he handed Sullivan a sheet of lined paper with figures running down one of the columns.

  "What's this?"

  "It's my inventory of the truck. It left the plant this morning with thirty crates of explosives. It still has twenty-eight crates. They took only two of them."

  "How much dynamite in each crate?" Crown asked.

  "The powder's in paraffin wrappers. Each crate has eight wrappers, and each wrapper weighs twenty pounds. So we've got three hundred and twenty pounds of explosives missing." Harter sighed as if it were his life's last breath and returned to the rear of the truck.

  Sullivan worked his throat as he stared at the inventory sheet. He shook his head. "I've got to report to the mayor and the chief that we've got three German stormtroopers walking around Chicago with three hundred and twenty pounds of explosives."