Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  It was like pushing a plank of wood through the window. When Archie was about halfway through, the wind caught him, twisting him out of von Niehauser’s grasp. His foot caught for an instant on the window frame, and then he was gone. Von Niehauser looked back after him, but he was lost in the darkness.

  Three and a half hours later, the train pulled into the station at Lamy, New Mexico. There was only a tiny station house there, and only half a dozen or so people got off. Among them was a thin, handsome man in the uniform of a British major. He carried a battered leather valise held together with two straps. There was no one there to meet him, and he stepped off the platform almost immediately and started in the direction of town, out of the pools of pale light that illuminated the railway yard. No one noticed him.

  16

  “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere if all we do is try to track him down. He’s already got the jump on us there, and he isn’t the stupidest man I’ve ever had the pleasure of hounding to his doom. What we’ve got to do is to start at the end and work our way backward.”

  That was how he had explained his plans to General Groves, but as George Havens sat in the dark Park Avenue apartment, which he had entered illegally and where he was waiting for the second secretary to the Mexican Legation to return from a visit to his mistress, he found himself entertaining certain doubts.

  After all, von Niehauser might be planning to make it out of the country entirely on his own. Or he might have devised some other method of getting his information back to Germany, such as short wave or even the mails. Perhaps it had been a mistake to concede the first innings to him so completely.

  But really there wasn’t any choice. No one had ever disappeared from Pennsylvania Station so completely without a trace as Joachim von Niehauser. At that moment he could be anywhere.

  “I’ve informed the security offices at all the more important installations that we’ve got a German agent on the loose,” General Groves said as they drove together to the Washington railway terminal—the general had to be in Chicago the next afternoon and he didn’t like to waste time in transit, so they held the last part of Havens’ briefing in the car. “They don’t have to be told to keep on the alert.”

  “And I’ll try to have my own teams in place by this evening. Then all we can do is wait.”

  Well—not quite all. After seeing the general off, Havens hitched a ride back to Seat of Government. He had a friend in Records.

  “Smitty, who’s the number one Axis sympathizer in the Latin American diplomatic community right now? I want somebody who really knows what’s going on with that crowd.”

  Smitty, whose thin hair was so pale that his head looked positively naked, who was probably more overweight than anyone else in Mr. Hoover’s employ, folded his hands across his belly as he leaned back in his oversized swivel chair, blinked a few times, and ended up blowing a gust of air out through his puckered lips.

  “José Ernesto de Rivera del Suñer,” he said finally, as if the name had been on the tip of his tongue all along. “A couple of times there’s been talk about asking the Mexicans to have him recalled, but it seems he’s got a lot of drag with el Presidente. We know he went to Germany a couple of times in the last two years before the war, and he’s never made any particular secret of his ties with the Abwehr. He’s your man.”

  “Can I see his file?”

  “Sure.”

  There was a lot there—transcripts of telephone calls, photographs, lists of contact points and times. Several of the names were familiar; Suñer was posted to New York, and that had been Havens’ bailiwick before Hoover had moored him to a desk in Washington. Suñer had been a very bad boy.

  “Come on, Smitty—where’s the rest of it?”

  “What rest?” Smitty’s voice, which was hardly more than a high-pitched squeak to begin with, went up another fourth as he wriggled uncomfortably in his chair. “There is no rest. That’s the file, George.”

  It was almost pathetic. Nobody likes to lie to his friends, and it was worse somehow when there was no real intention to deceive. Smitty didn’t even expect to be believed.

  “You wouldn’t kid a kidder, would you, pal?” Havens grinned his best ratlike grin. “You know as well as I do that with this much on him Suñer would have been on his way back over the border a long time ago if J. Edgar didn’t have him in his pocket. El Presidente be damned. Come on—I want to know what The Boss has got on him. I want to see the special file, Smitty.”

  “I can’t give you that. It’s my ass if I give you that.” Smitty pressed his hands into his lap, as if it were really another part of his anatomy that he was worried about, and his eyes glittered with apprehension. But Havens remained unmoved.

  “Ask him.”

  “Ask him! Are you out of your mind?”

  But if he was, he was persistently so. Finally Smitty gave in and made a call to the dreaded office on the fifth floor.

  “Yes, sir. . . That’s what I told him, sir. . . No, sir—I mean, yes, sir, I know that. . . That’s what he said, sir. . . Yes, sir. . . Yes, sir. . .”

  By the time he had hung up, the assistant chief clerk of Records was as pale as water and his breath was coming in little gulps, as if he had just had his foot cut off. As soon as there was room in his face for anything except fear, he looked up at Havens with genuine reproach.

  “I think you’ve just cost me my pension, George. But you can see the goddam file.”

  Havens took it with him. It made very interesting reading while he was being driven back to his apartment.

  He had already made up his mind about what he needed to do, and after that the choice of personnel more or less made itself; the list of specialists for operations of this kind was reasonably short. Half a dozen phone calls to old friends from the race-and­chase days before the war and he had things lined up, both in New York and Washington. It was wonderful to be back in the game, but the best part was not having to work everything around the Director. A couple of the people he talked to, guys who had finally had it up to the eyebrows and gone into business for themselves, agreed to help only after they had been assured that it wasn’t going to be Hoover’s show.

  “I’m not lifting a finger to polish his halo,” one of them said. “Not so that he can grab all the glory and keep the world conned into thinking he’s the world’s greatest G-man. I mean it, George. You tell the old fart to go out and catch his own crooks.”

  “J. Edgar’s not in on it, and there won’t be any glory for anybody. I seem to be working for the Army right now.”

  “Okay, then—count me in.”

  The Washington end was easier. That was simply a matter of monitoring police reports, and there were plenty of people inside Seat of Government who could do that. By about three in the afternoon everything was ready.

  He had to be back in New York by the next morning, and that meant another long drive at night. But he just wasn’t up to it yet—he had to have a couple of hours in the sack first. As he lay on top of his bed, fully clothed, waiting for sleep to come, he kept thinking about that cop they had scraped off the rails in Pennsylvania Station. How many would that final darkness cover before this crazy business was finished? How many. . .

  . . . . .

  “He left the señora and their kids back in Mexico City—maybe he thought they’d just get in the way, and from what I’ve been hearing they probably would have. He seems to fancy himself as the Latin Lover.”

  Dick Stevenson was a private detective these days, with an office down in Greenwich Village and a long list of fashionable clients. Since leaving the Bureau he had made kind of a specialty of divorce work, but time was when he had been the number one man in Bunco. He’d probably put more con men in the slammer than anybody else in the Western Hemisphere, and nobody could touch him when it came to laying a sucker trap.

  They sat together on the front seat of Stevenson’s 1938 DeSoto, on Sixty-eighth Street just around the corner from Park Avenue, where they had a p
erfect view of the awning over the door of Suñer’s apartment building—you could almost make out the design on the brass buttons of the doorman’s overcoat—and Stevenson was calmly chewing on a wad of antacid gum. He always claimed that it was Hoover who had given him his ulcers.

  George Havens kept checking his watch. Five minutes to eight. Now three and a half. Now two.

  “Relax.” Stevenson turned a little to the right and his face came partly out from underneath the shadow of his gray felt hat; it was the face of a ribbon clerk at Woolworth’s—soft, slightly pockmarked, forgettable. His face was one of his great professional advantages. “He’ll be along. He’s a very punctual man, even in his lechery.”

  “You ought to know.”

  Stevenson laughed, and the dull brown eyes suddenly flickered into life. “That’s right, pal. I ought to know.”

  And, sure enough, at about thirty seconds after eight the man himself strode out from under the awning, accepting the doorman’s salute like a grandee. He turned left and an instant later was out of their line of sight.

  “He was the same way the whole time I tailed him on account of that upholstery tycoon’s wife. They had a suite they were keeping for just that purpose up at the Waldorf Astoria—there’s nothing cheap about this hombre—and you could set your watch by his walks there and back.”

  “Did the tycoon get his divorce?”

  “No.” Stevenson shook his head, showing his teeth in a pitiless smile. “As it turned out, the wife had just as much on him and, besides, there was the little matter of diplomatic immunity. He couldn’t haul the Señor into the dock, so the wife got a big allowance and a boat ticket to the Virgin Islands, which struck me as just a trifle snide. I don’t think Suñer ever even found out that the jig was up, not that he would have much cared.”

  “Well, I suppose I’d better get going—you’re sure that back door is taped open?”

  “Would I lie to you?”

  The rear of the building faced onto an alley not much wider than your shoulders, the walls of which were coated with soot, and at the far end it opened up into a tiny courtyard, about the size of first base, which was stacked with empty wooden crates that looked like they must have been left there by the original settlers. The door, which was covered with about eighty coats of green paint, yielded with a push.

  “The service elevator is on the other side from the laundry room,” Stevenson had said. “The custodian’s room faces that way, and he usually leaves his door open a few inches, but he plays the radio so fucking loud that you could march a battalion through there without him ever suspecting. I used to take that way so often you would have thought I was one of the tenants, and he never even stuck his head out.”

  Havens hadn’t taken a step inside before he heard an audience laughing at a joke about Fibber McGee’s closet—Stevenson had been right. All the way up to the seventh floor, he never saw a soul.

  There were little skills that weren’t part of the curriculum at Quantico but that you were supposed to pick up along the way, and one of them was knowing how to do without keys. Techniques differed, but Havens had learned to carry the needle probe from the dissection kit he had bought for college biology. It did the job; Suñer’s kitchen door had a lock that would have opened with a sharp look.

  You’ll have two hours—tons of time. As soon as I spot him coming back, I’ll call you from that telephone booth across the street. Three rings.

  Two minutes would have done it. Havens was only interested in making sure Suñer didn’t have any revolvers stuck away in a desk drawer—in such circumstances people had been known to panic.

  The living room had to be seen to be believed. The walls were covered with fuzzy red paper, and all the furniture was upholstered in black leather; right in front of the fireplace was—you guessed it—a white bearskin rug. There were liquor stains here and there on the carpet, but otherwise the place was impressively clean and tidy. The total effect was one of vulgarity raised to the level of high art.

  There wasn’t so much as a knitting needle anywhere, so nobody had anything to worry about. Havens collapsed into a huge, thronelike chair that creaked under him like a saddle. There wasn’t anything more to do but wait.

  He whiled away the time trying to estimate how much an apartment like this one would cost every month in rent—probably more than Havens brought home in half a year. And Suñer didn’t have to break into people’s kitchens in the middle of the goddam night. Maybe Karen had done a smart thing when she had pushed off in search of her bus conductor from Queens.

  And maybe divorced Special Agents should stay the hell out of New York. God, that woman—what a laugh it would probably hand her that her ex was still up to his old tricks, and still hadn’t gotten over being sent to the outfield. He wondered if the war made any difference, or if women all over the country were shucking their husbands as they went off to fight the enemy. It didn’t seem very likely. Maybe Karen had been an exception to the rule and the world was really full of the self-sacrificing ladies that Mr. Hoover had always recommended so highly. Of course, there was always the draft to consider. Maybe not having any choice was viewed as an extenuating circumstance.

  It was two minutes after ten when the telephone rang. Once, twice, three times and then silence. Suñer was probably already walking across the lobby.

  Havens got out his .38 police special and rested it on his knee. He had no idea how he was going to explain himself to anyone if for some reason he should have to burn down the second secretary, but there was nothing like pointing a revolver at a man for commanding his undivided attention. With any luck at all he wouldn’t have to wait very long before Suñer realized that the possibility of catching just one bullet in his New York apartment was going to be the least of his problems.

  He tiptoed over to the front door, pressing his ear against it, and listened for the whisper of the elevator. He could hear the cable rattling in the shaft and then the grinding sound of the doors opening. Suñer’s apartment took up the entire floor, so the second secretary only had to walk a few paces to be on his own threshold.

  Even before he heard the sound of the key being inserted into the lock, Havens had stepped back so he would be behind the door when it opened. He was holding his revolver like a club, but then he thought better of the idea; the time for guns might come later, but right at the moment he didn’t want to take a chance on killing the poor guy.

  Suñer came inside and closed the door. His back was to Havens and he was taking off his overcoat—all that was visible was a thick head of black hair, threaded here and there with silver. Perhaps he heard something as Havens stepped forward, because he began to turn slightly. Havens chopped him on the back of the neck and he pitched over, just exactly as if his feet had been kicked out from underneath him. His face seemed to be the first thing to hit the floor; the impact sounded like someone clapping his hands. After that he didn’t move.

  Havens rolled him over, thinking how proud his instructor in hand to hand combat would have been.

  “Wake up, Señor. Rise and shine.” The one hall light that Suñer had turned on when he first entered bathed the carpet and walls in a soft pinkish glow. Probably that was the first thing the second secretary saw when finally he opened his eyes. When he saw Havens grinning at him, his face contracted in pain and he brought his hand up slowly to cover his cheek. “Come on, Señor, it can’t be that bad.”

  He was an elegant little man, with lightly tanned skin and a pencil line mustache. His nails were cut short and seemed to have some sort of clear polish on them—it was the first time Havens had ever seen a man wearing nail polish—and his hands were small, sensitive, and faintly pudgy. In all, he looked a man very much devoted to the care and comfort of José Ernesto de Rivera del Suñer.

  Fine—it just made life easier. This wasn’t anybody who was going to sacrifice himself to anybody’s sacred cause.

  “Dios,” he said quietly, apparently to no one in particular. And then his eyes fo
cused on the revolver in George Havens’ right hand; it was lined up on a spot just a little to one side of his nose. “This is going to bring you a great deal of trouble, my friend.”

  “We can discuss my problems some other time—I’m not the one staring down the muzzle of a .38.”

  Havens made an impatient gesture, and Suñer took the hint. Turning it into a great production, he picked himself from the floor and threw himself down on one corner of the black leather sofa that seemed to be about fifteen feet long. He groaned quietly, just in case you should forget how much he was suffering, and leaned forward to support his forehead against the palm of his hand. He was almost good enough to make you believe him.

  “If you’re thinking about trying to jump me, forget it.” Havens sat down on the chair opposite, crossed his legs casually, and smiled. The .38 was resting on his knee, not pointed at anything in particular. “The distance is lousy; besides, if you’re not a good boy it’ll be el Presidente who shoots you, not me. We know all about your involvement in that bungled coup d’etat back in ‘41—don’t you think he’d love hearing about that?”

  Perhaps it was just some trick of the artificial light, but Suñer’s eyes seemed to turn yellow with fear. Suddenly he was sitting up very straight. It was as if he could already feel the bullets from the firing squad tearing through his body.

  “Are you from Mr. Hoover?” he asked finally. He appeared to be having a certain amount of trouble getting his tongue to work.

  Havens shook his head, not really sure whether he was lying or not.

  “No. But I have Mr. Hoover’s file on you—I’ve even got wire recordings of some of your telephone conversations back and forth to the military reservation at Tocula. For a man who planned to have himself made foreign minister, you weren’t very cagey.”

  “And what do you plan to do with all this—this innuendo?”