The Accidental Agent

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Guttman said quietly, ‘Can you tell me what all that means?’

  Mullen looked deflated. ‘It means I can’t figure out how this could have happened. It’s a mystery to me.’

  ‘You absolutely sure of that? I’m not asking you as the representative of your company. I’m asking you as a man who understands, talking to a man who doesn’t.’

  The Otis man nodded. ‘I’m positive. The last service was only two days before the accident. The check list was complete. All A-Okay.’

  ‘Then I have another question for you.’

  Mullen looked intrigued. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If you wanted this to happen, how would you go about it?’

  Mullen looked alarmed. ‘You mean cause the accident?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re suggesting –?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything – it’s strictly hypothetical. But try and tell me how you’d do it.’

  And this time, though the vocabulary remained alien and technical, Guttman could make out the gist of what was being said. It would have required two men, and would have needed two different days. The first day was almost certainly that of the service; it was then that the controller had been rejigged so that it could interpret floor numbers differently from how it should. It wouldn’t have been before then, since according to Mullen that would have been detected during the service check. On the day of the accident itself, timing would have been critical. Someone had to gain access to the elevator controller and recalibrate it to read eleven as twelve, then nip downstairs to the eleventh floor and unlock the hoistway door – or else, regardless of the controller, it wouldn’t have opened. Though couldn’t the man doing the service have done this already? Guttman put it to Mullen.

  The Otis man looked horrified. ‘Why would he do that?’

  Guttman shrugged. ‘We’re talking hypothetically, remember? Who was the service guy?’

  ‘Bergen. Nice fellow.’

  ‘Still with the firm?’

  ‘Funny you should ask. He was too old to be drafted but he signed up anyway. Wife and kid too. Guess he can’t be wild about the wife.’

  ‘You know where he is?’

  ‘Last I heard he was at Fort Sheridan. He sent a postcard to the guys in the repair shop.’

  ‘Okay. But what I wonder is, if you primed the controller at the time of the service, wouldn’t that do the trick?’

  ‘No, otherwise you’d have elevators stopping on wrong floors or not opening at all. You’d have to do it right before you wanted the wrong door to open. Then you’d have to be sure someone pushed the button at eleven. That way, the elevator car would go to twelve but the hoist door would open on the floor below.’ He paused, seeming suddenly to appreciate the implications of this. ‘What are you driving at? Is Bergen in trouble?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m just working out the possibles. That’s what I get paid for.’

  ‘Should I be worried about this?’

  ‘Nah. I get paid to do the worrying too.’

  It was raining as Guttman waited for the crosstown bus on 86th Street. He had on the old black raincoat Isabel had made him buy years before, and underneath a brown double-breasted suit and a striped Brooks Brothers tie. Without his wife to supervise him sartorially, he knew he was in danger of becoming entirely slovenly, but he was doing his best – and he’d shaved with special care early that morning, nicking himself only once and tending to that with a styptic pencil instead of sticking toilet paper on the cut.

  From the bus stand he could see out to the Hudson, where a navy biplane flew low over the river, then turned hard left towards New Jersey. Two Negro ladies waited with him, done with their morning jobs and heading to the East Side now to work for other masters. They were complaining about the service – how late the buses were and how crowded. 86th Street was in bad shape, full of potholes from the previous winter that had still not been filled. The war was imposing new priorities, and anything without a military benefit was being put on hold.

  As if to confirm this, a black Ford came barrelling by and hit a pothole full of water, soaking a passing man’s coat with a black spray of filthy gutter water. As the car kept going, Guttman saw that the pothole had left it with a warped hubcap, turning like a wobbly plate with every revolution of the wheel.

  Finally the bus came. Once across Central Park, he got off at Third Avenue, and caught the L train downtown. It was virtually deserted, and half of the cars were the old sort, pressed back into service. As on the bus he found himself about the only passenger under the age of seventy, and one of the few men. New York seemed to have regressed in the war; and the city seemed dull and deadened. What was missing? Young men, away in uniform? Maybe, but that was true in Washington too, where the influx of white-collar workers was two to one women.

  As the ageing cars rattled and shook, he thought about the strange death of Arthur Perkins. Guttman didn’t share Nessheim’s intuitive sense of connections: he was best at disconnections, and at sensing when something was wrong. That certainly seemed the case with Arthur Perkins; Guttman had no doubt it hadn’t been an accident. But how could you possibly prove it was a homicide after a year had passed? Even if Guttman could, who was he going to tell – and to what end? What link could there be between Perkins’s death and Nessheim’s search for a German agent in the Met Lab?

  He got off at Grand Street, steeling himself for the transition as he moved back into the Lower East Side, the rough world of his childhood, where the superficial civility of uptown gave way like melting ice.

  14

  GUTTMAN’S MOTHER HAD dozed off within ten minutes of his arrival, so he told Mrs Warshaw he’d come back, though they both knew he wouldn’t. He gave the woman a sawbuck, guilt money paid in advance which she took with insincere thanks. He knew she thought he was a lousy son, but on the last visit his mother hadn’t even known who he was. That had spared him telling her that Isabel had died. Not that his mother would have cared. Isabel had never met her or Guttman’s father, and had been persona non grata without even being seen by either of them. They had punished their son ostensibly for marrying ‘out’, but really it was for finding the kind of love they had never shown him, or each other.

  He went down the two floors from the small apartment which he paid for, and out on to Orchard Street. On the alley wall someone had painted in harsh letters: ‘HITLER IS A PRICK’, the word ‘prick’ resurfacing in a milky pentimento behind the paint used to scrub it out. Beneath it someone else had written: ‘STALIN IS OUR HERO’ – though now ‘our hero’ had been effaced, and substituted with ‘A PRICK TOO’.

  Guttman laughed. The ins and outs of the political Left down here were notorious – Trotsky himself had lived in New York for a time, in the Bronx, and had used the large neighbourhood library on East Broadway. Guttman had initially been hired by the Bureau because it was thought he understood them. He never had; Isabel had once said he possessed the ideological sophistication of a prune. His mentor hadn’t been Marx (or later on Lenin), but the lowly local cop, an Irishman named Keane, who wouldn’t have known the theory of surplus value from a hole in the ground, but had been a towering one-man dispenser of justice, fearless and incorruptible.

  At the intersection of Delancey, Guttman looked across the street and noticed a black Ford passing slowly by. It was heading towards the Williamsburg Bridge and its left rear hubcap was wobbling. He stopped, pretending to check his watch, keeping the corner of an eye on the Ford, hoping it was going to Brooklyn. When it turned right instead his heart began to race. He looked at his watch for real; he had ten minutes to shake them – if he was right that it was the same car.

  It’s your home turf, he told himself; use that advantage. He looked for anyone on foot following him, but saw only old Jewish women, wearing thick coats, heavy woollen stockings and stout dark shoes, out shopping for groceries. And a few stooped old men, taking their midday constitutionals.

  Then a pack of small boys approached along the
cracked Delancey Street sidewalk. Their leader approached him, bold as brass. He had his hair slicked back like a crooner popular with the ladies, though he barely came up to Guttman’s belly. ‘Any spare change, mister?’

  ‘Not for you,’ Guttman said. ‘Why aren’t you in school, kid?’

  The boy looked affronted. ‘We’re collecting scrap for the war effort.’

  ‘I bet.’

  ‘What are you anyway, der Inspector?’

  The school board official from the Katzenjammer Kids. Guttman tried not to smile. ‘Maybe I am,’ he said.

  ‘Never,’ the kid said emphatically and hitched up his pants. He puffed his chest out before declaring, ‘Anyway, I graduated.’

  The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. ‘What’s your name, Mr Graduate?’

  ‘They call me Doby.’

  ‘All right, Doby, you want to earn two bits for three minutes’ work?’

  ‘Maybe,’ the kid said. No flies on him.

  ‘I’m going in there,’ said Guttman, pointing to the drugstore on the corner. ‘While I’m inside I want you to keep watch for a black Ford. Nice car – shiny, but with a funny back wheel. It will have a man in it, maybe two. If you spot it, I want to know. If you don’t see it, I want to know that too. Don’t make anything up, and don’t let them catch you watching. Got it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Doby considered the deal. ‘Two bits, huh? How about one of them up front?’

  Guttman considered this, then dug into his trouser pocket and came up with a dime. ‘This is forty per cent down – consider yourself lucky. And if you run off on me you might discover you haven’t graduated after all.’

  Guttman went into the drugstore and walked the aisles, pretending to be interested in different brands of tooth powder and packets of safety razor blades and Mr Comfort’s Pills for Piles, all the while listening as two adolescent-looking sailors on shore leave gathered their collective courage to buy condoms from the pharmacist. Before their transaction was concluded, Guttman went out and found Doby standing on the corner, his little mob waiting eagerly behind him like a passel of Fagan’s followers.

  ‘Did you see the car?’ Guttman asked.

  ‘Sure did. It’s right over there, mister.’

  Doby started to turn around and point, but Guttman leaned forward and held his arm. ‘Good going,’ he said. ‘How many people in the car?’

  ‘Two guys.’

  ‘Okay. Don’t look at the automobile, and walk the other way. This is for your help.’ He fished a crumpled dollar out of his pocket and stuffed it into Doby’s little hand, then started walking quickly across Delancey Street. When Doby cried out, ‘Gee, thanks, mister,’ Guttman didn’t look back, but turned his head sideways until he spied the Ford parked further along Delancey, facing against the traffic. A heavyset man in a dark overcoat was standing on the sidewalk next to it. As Guttman continued to cross he saw the man tap once on the window of the car.

  So they had a guy on foot as well.

  He set off the other way on Delancey Street, pondering his next move. Local knowledge, he told himself again; it had to be worth something. On instinct he turned on to Orchard Street. As a boy he had worked for many of the stores there, making deliveries. He could barely remember a time when he hadn’t worked after school, or a time when his father hadn’t complained that he hadn’t worked enough.

  He saw that Loesser had closed down, no surprise since Fine half a block up had always sold a better grade of vegetable. Guttman stopped by the vacant storefront and casually looked back up the street. The heavyset man on foot had stopped to inspect the storefront at Lilenthal’s, an act which would have been more plausible had it not been a ladies’ underwear store. In the distance beyond, closer to Delancey, the black Ford had moved and then pulled over. There were two guys sitting in the front.

  Turning round, he saw Schneiderman’s across the street, unchanged from his days there, nestled in the basement behind a plate-glass window with embossed letters: ‘Dry Cleaning & Alterations’. Suddenly inspired, Guttman jaywalked and went down the steps to the store. Opening the door, he heard the bell tinkle as it always had, and found a small gaggle of women standing by the counter, jabbering among themselves while Schneiderman and his daughter Esther moved along the racks behind the counter, tickets in hand as they searched for the dry-cleaned garments. Guttman stood by the door for a moment, looking out through the embossed letters on the window.

  The heavyset man ambled past on the other side of the street. He didn’t even glance Guttman’s way. A pro, thought Guttman, as the Ford moved forwards and slid into an empty space about a hundred feet down the street.

  Schneiderman came from the rear of the store, holding a man’s suit on a hanger. When he saw Guttman his face broke into a big grin. ‘Harry!’ he exclaimed. The women at the counter turned as one to inspect the newcomer.

  He worked his way round them, taking care not to meet anyone’s gaze, since at least one would have been a friend of his mother. Lifting the heavy wooden lid at one end of the counter, he stepped into the owner’s side of the store.

  Shaking hands, Schneiderman slapped Guttman on the shoulder. He was a little man, addicted to bad puns and loud bow ties. He had been the nicest of Guttman’s various childhood bosses, always telling him to take his time, defending him once when Mrs Meltzer had complained he’d dropped her overcoat in the mud (he had). For a while he had tried to pair the younger Guttman up with his daughter Esther, but seemed to bear him no malice for declining the offer – Esther had even then been a sour girl, who took after her mother.

  Now he called out, ‘Esther, look who’s here.’

  From the far end of the counter, Esther contented herself with a quick wave. She didn’t look as though she’d grown any nicer. Schneiderman shrugged, then said jokingly, ‘You back to do some deliveries?’

  Guttman smiled. ‘Actually, Eli, I’m on my way to visit my mother.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not getting any younger. You know how it is.’ Realising the women were listening to the exchange, he leaned forward, wincing as if in pain. ‘Can you do me a favour, Eli?’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Eli, with a small note of concern.

  ‘Can I use the biffy, please? I got caught short.’

  Eli stood back and laughed. ‘You know where it is. Not even a world war changes Schneiderman’s prime ass-et.’

  Guttman smiled weakly in gratitude, then headed towards the back of the building, while Eli went to serve the next customer. Passing the creaking door to the toilet, Guttman opened the store’s back door instead. He estimated he had five minutes before the occupants of the Ford and the heavyset guy came looking for him.

  Little had changed from the days when he used to sneak a cigarette here in the tiny backyard and hope Esther wouldn’t tell on him. The same empty drums of the chemicals used for the dry cleaning, stacked by the back door; the same sodden grass that even in spring didn’t seem to grow. And blessedly, the same low fence, separating Schneiderman’s from the back of the building behind. That was a tenement in Guttman’s time, three small apartments stacked like checkers on top of each other, filled with transient tenants. Unlike Schneiderman’s, the building had a thin outside alleyway running from the yard to the street.

  Guttman found the weak point of the fence, which years before he had hopped easily enough, as a shortcut for deliveries. Now he found he could step over the fence when he pressed down on its ancient wire, and ten seconds later he was out in front, on Eldridge Street. He turned right and hurried. He wasn’t going to run – a telltale in this neighbourhood of a person in trouble – but he didn’t hang around.

  Five minutes later he was through the door of Katz’s, just off Houston, certain that neither the Ford nor the man on foot were on his tail. At the counter he ordered a knish and a cream soda, then took them and went and sat in a booth by himself. A coat rack obscured the view in from the street.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’
said a man sidling into the booth to sit across from him. ‘The Second Avenue subway’s closed but nobody told me.’

  It was Stephenson, whose offices at the British Security Coordination group were in midtown, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Guttman hadn’t wanted to meet with him there, now that the FBI had opened a liaison office next door. They had been spotted together there once before.

  ‘I just got here myself. I had to take a detour – I’m pretty sure I had some company.’

  Stephenson looked over Guttman’s shoulder towards the deli’s front window. He was about Guttman’s age and had a square face and a fine bony nose. ‘Do you know who it was?’

  ‘No. I can’t even prove they were following me. There’s a black Ford and a heavy on foot. I lost them twenty minutes ago, and I doubt they’d wander in here just by chance.’

  The waitress came up, pencil and pad at the ready. ‘What’ll it be?’ she said impatiently.

  Stephenson’s eyes widened slightly as he looked at the remains of Guttmann’s knish. He hesitated, so Guttman decided to help out. ‘Give him turkey breast on white bread, slightly toasted. A little bit of mayo.’ He looked at Stephenson. ‘Sound okay?’

  Stephenson nodded. He looked relieved not to be eating the native fare.

  ‘And to drink?’ demanded the waitress.

  ‘A cup of mud,’ said Guttman firmly. He saw Stephenson’s face and explained, ‘That’s coffee.’

  ‘And for you, sir?’ The ‘sir’ was sarcastic.

  ‘Give me a half-order of chopped liver and an onion bagel. Plus another cream soda.’

  ‘Half an order?’ The waitress sounded annoyed. ‘Since when have we got all hoity-toity, Harry Guttman?’

  Guttman looked sharply at the woman, and realised he recognised her from grade school, almost forty years ago. Though back then Lilian Rabinowitz had worn her hair in long greasy braids, which she liked to chew on lovingly during math class.