by James Mauro
Nevertheless, Pyke was insistent; they could not afford to miss the one warning that would turn out to be fatal.
Then, on June 20, the reason for Pyke’s persistent uneasiness materialized. Without any warning whatsoever, two bombs exploded within an hour of each other, one on the eighteenth floor of 17 Battery Place at four-ten p.m. and the second at 35 East Twelfth Street at four fifty-three. The Battery Place building held the offices of the German Consulate General, but they were one floor below the explosion. The actual bomb went off at the Deutsche Handels und Wirtschaftdienst (the German Trade and Industrial Service). Yet the locations and appointments of both were written in German, and there was speculation that the saboteurs had mistakenly placed their bomb in the wrong office.
The second bomb went off in a building that housed a number of Communist agencies, including the Daily Worker, a popular Stalinist newspaper, and the New York headquarters of the Young Communist League. A handful of people had been injured at both sites, none of them seriously.
Pyke and his men began an immediate investigation. Routine procedure after a device had been detonated involved collecting material considered to be bomb fragments for analysis. It was a methodical job that meant scraping even the finest bits and pieces of suspect cloth and metal from floors, walls, even ceilings and furniture. Witnesses were quickly rounded up. An employee of the German agency reported seeing a young blond man who dropped a brown paper parcel in front of the office door. After the explosion, he was nowhere to be found.
At the Twelfth Street building, the bomb had been placed just outside the front entrance, but the blast was sufficiently strong enough to blow a hole through the bottom of the floor inside the doorway. Fragments of evidence were few and far between, but Deputy Fire Chief William Taubert speculated that it might have been a time bomb. Analysis of the findings would quickly prove they both had been.
Within hours, the police rounded up thirty suspects for questioning. None of them revealed any leads. Pyke and his men returned to their offices with an eerie feeling that this was only the beginning—a warning, perhaps a test run. Why the Germans and the Communists? The placement of the bombs seemed to suggest that the sabotage was “designed to create2 more sensation than damage,” as one reporter noted, and the timing of the two explosions left little doubt that it was the work of the same man or agency.
Two days later, Pyke’s office received notice of an anonymous phone caller who threatened that the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges were about to be blown up. Although telephone threats almost always turned out to be hoaxes, the men of the Bomb and Forgery Squad were at it again, crawling all over the bridges for days to no avail. Still, Pyke was insistent. He convinced Commissioner Valentine to double the number of policemen guarding all piers, foreign consulates, and foreign-language newspapers, not wishing to be surprised next time by what he was convinced would not be a practice run again.
The World’s Fair was now familiar territory for Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha. They had combed over the International Area and walked the perimeter of the Court of Peace so many times, they could do it blindfolded. Except for the absence of the USSR Pavilion the overall layout of this quadrant of the fairgrounds had changed little since 1939 (the shuttered pavilions notwithstanding). The Flushing River acted as a kind of barrier between it and the main area, except for the pavilions of Brazil, France, and Belgium, which fronted a somewhat less decoratively planted Rainbow Avenue.
Now they were at it again. On June 21, the day after the twin explosions in Manhattan, an operator in the Italian Pavilion got a call threatening to bomb the building. Security in the area was doubled. After yet another thorough, exhausting search, no bomb was found in the Italian building or anywhere else in the vicinity. Nevertheless, Pyke decided to send a regular crew of his detectives out to the fairgrounds on a rotating basis, just in case.
Aside from the Great White Way, which Gibson was hell-bent on promoting this season, the foreign pavilions were drawing the biggest crowds. The war brought them out to view what many New Yorkers considered to be the battlegrounds of Europe in miniature. Of particular concern was the fact that a Boy Scouts camp had been placed along the perimeter of the area at its northernmost point, just behind the U.S. Federal Building.
Thoroughly isolated and trafficked at all hours by the Scouts, along with their parents and visitors, the camp offered easy access and anonymity to potential saboteurs. Not to mention the safety issues for the constant stream of one hundred and sixty Boy Scouts who lived there for one week and then changed troops. There was simply no way to protect it.
Bomb hysteria was reaching a peak as summer officially began: A time bomb was discovered in the washroom of a Communist workers school in Philadelphia after an anonymous tip had been phoned in; another bomb scare shut down New York’s Pennsylvania Station for several hours when an artillery shell was found abandoned in a Pullman car. It turned out to be a sample casing left behind by an absentminded and thoroughly mortified munitions salesman.
Again, Pyke took no chances. As the four-day Fourth of July weekend approached, he ordered all of his men to remain on duty whether or not they were required in the office. He needed to be able to reach them by telephone, if necessary, on a moment’s notice.
On the afternoon of Thursday, July 4, 1940, Joe Lynch was sitting at home studying to take the exam for promotion to detective, first grade, which would almost certainly guarantee him a ticket out of the Bomb and Forgery Squad. His wife would be grateful for that. Over the past few months, Easter had grown more and more worried now that an ever-increasing amount of Joe’s time and responsibility was being consumed by the dangerous machinery of bombs rather than the subdued language of letters, however threatening their content.
The truth was that Lynch liked the squad, had great admiration for Lieutenant Pyke, and had grown close enough to Freddy to wonder why he and Jennie had not had any children yet, especially since Freddy had come from a large family himself. But the hard fact was that Joe needed the pay raise, now more than ever. His eldest daughter, Essie, was in St. Joseph’s Hospital up in Yonkers. The little girl had just turned ten and was suffering from osteomyelitis, a bone infection for which the doctors at St. Joe had assured him they were doing everything they could. With proper treatment, her body would fight the infection and she would be fine. But it would take time.
Crowded as it was, the Lynch family’s little Bronx apartment seemed empty without her. The hospital bills were a minor concern for Joe compared with Essie’s health, but they were a concern nonetheless. Worse, the idea that his daughter had gotten so sick over a bacterial infection ate at the core of his sensibilities as a parent and protector. Whatever cut or scrape she’d received had gone unnoticed, apparently, until Essie’s pain and fever became too great to ignore.
Joe had once studied pharmacy, yet he had been too busy with his police work to notice something as simple as an infected cut on his own child. With soap and water she’d have been fine. But there he was, scouring bridges and office buildings looking for evidence of damage when he should have been noticing it in his own household.
The weather, equal to his mood, had been miserable all week. At times this season, it seemed as if the rain would never stop, as if a day hadn’t gone by since May when it didn’t rain for at least an hour or two. Joe supposed he could take some comfort in that, being forced to remain at home and on call until he was officially off duty later that evening. The skies, heavy and overcast, were probably keeping everyone indoors anyway.
That evening, he planned on borrowing his sister’s car and driving up to Yonkers with his wife to visit Essie. His mother was coming over to look after the other kids since they weren’t allowed to visit the hospital, and now he worried over them and their cuts and bruises as if to compensate for his lack of attention with his eldest.
Joe tried to focus on the exam booklets in front of him but found himself distracted again and again. At a little after two o’clock, t
he doorbell rang; his mother was here, Easter told him. Since the murder of her own mother two and a half years ago, Easter had grown close to Mary Lynch. Throughout the early part of 1938, while Easter mourned her mother’s violent death, Mary had stepped in to help her care for the children. Now that Mary was recently widowed, something about their mutual loss had brought them together.
Joe decided he’d best give up studying for the day, and the trio worked up a card game. It was too nasty outside to do anything else. They sat at a little table and played three-handed bridge.
Three days earlier, on July 1, another bomb threat was phoned in to the Fair, this time at the British Pavilion. An operator, Marjorie Rosser, picked up and heard a man with a muffled voice say, “Get out of the building.3 We are going to blow it up. Get everybody out before the box explodes!” She reported the call to Cecil Pickthall, the pavilion’s commissioner general, who in turn immediately notified the police.
Pyke, although he thought it was probably nothing more than a repeat of the Italian threat, sent his team back out to Flushing Meadows. By now, the squad was making so many trips out to Queens, he thought they ought to at least get a discount train fare. October couldn’t come soon enough.
Once again, his detectives found nothing. This was getting to be repetitive and frustrating. Sitting around and waiting for advance notice seemed pointless, an exercise in futility if ever there was one. Not to mention naïve. The two explosions that had gone off in the city had occurred without prior warning, so as an extra precaution, Pyke added two more detectives to the squad’s regular World’s Fair beat assignment. He instructed the men who pulled the duty to dress in ordinary street clothes, mingle with the crowds, and see if they could pick up on any suspicious activity. At least it was better than twiddling their thumbs while waiting for the phone to ring.
On Wednesday, July 3, an electrician named William Strachan4 noticed something that seemed a little strange. He was working on some wiring in the fan room of the British Pavilion, where the vents for the new air-conditioning system had been installed over the winter and which served as a sort of all-around control room for its electrical equipment. Up on one of the shelves, a small, tan-colored canvas bag caught his eye. It looked, he said later, like an overnight suitcase. Strachan assumed it had been left there by one of the building’s employees, since the room itself was off-limits to the general public. Maybe, he figured, someone had packed it for a quick getaway on the holiday tomorrow. In any case, he decided not to bother with it.
It was there again5 when Strachan returned the next day, on the Fourth of July. This time, he leaned in for a closer look. The suitcase, he now discovered, was ticking. He looked at his watch; it was three-thirty in the afternoon,6 and the pavilion was swarming with visitors. Strachan, from the Bronx, was one of the few Americans who worked in the place, and he understood the fascination of coming here on the day his country was celebrating its independence from the British.
In fact, despite the bad weather, almost a quarter million people turned out at the Fair that day. And while many of them preferred the merriment of the midway, where an enormous fireworks show was going on all afternoon, the foreign pavilions remained as popular as they had been in recent months since the war. Great Britain, fighting bravely as the last great hope against the Nazis, had become the new focus of the crowd’s fascination. It was estimated that throughout the afternoon, the number of visitors hovered somewhere between several hundred and a thousand at any given time.
Strachan, like many other of the building’s employees and certainly most if not all of its visitors, had probably not been made aware of the bomb threat a few days earlier. Unlike the phone call to the Italian Pavilion, this one for some reason had not yet made the papers. Thinking there might be nothing more dangerous than a radio or something inside the bag that was making the noise, he nevertheless decided to turn it in, just in case. So he nonchalantly picked up the suitcase, carried it down the public stairway, and knocked on the office door of Cyril Hawkings, his boss.
Hawkings didn’t know what to do about it, either. The suitcase was, he agreed, “ticking like a clock.”7 That neither man panicked and ran for the cops is testament to either bravery or complete incomprehension and ignorance of what could be inside. What they did next seems to show evidence of the latter: Strachan picked it up again, and he and Hawkings walked through the crowded building in search of Sidney Wood, head of the pavilion’s uniformed security.
It wasn’t hard to find him. Wood, who was serious about his duties in protecting the priceless artifacts and historical documents that had been lent to the World’s Fair for display, could most often be found in the Magna Carta Room. There, in front of the pavilion’s most popular exhibit, one of four original manuscripts, they held the case up to Wood for inspection. Wood, apparently thinking no more about it than the other two, asked Commissioner Pickthall to join them.
All the while, the suitcase remained ticking in Strachan’s hands.
Pickthall had the sense at last to call in the police. The two men on duty to patrol the area that day were Detectives Martin Schuchman and Fred Morlach. Morlach called in a report to his commanding officer, James Leggett, and they were quickly met by Detectives Joe Gallagher and Bill Federer. It was Morlach8 who finally, after the suitcase had been traveling around the pavilion for about half an hour, suggested they carry it outside the building and away from all the people. They left via a rear entrance and walked down an alley9 separating the British and Italian pavilions, then swung over on Continental Avenue to Poland’s.
Morlach thought he knew a good spot behind the Polish Pavilion, about a hundred and fifty feet away from an open court where a small group of customers sat at tables under big umbrellas and sipped afternoon refreshments. There was a cyclone fence that marked the edge of the fairgrounds, but it gave them enough distance, and other than the bar patrons, the area seemed to be completely deserted.
Pickthall meanwhile had notified the World’s Fair police, while Federer called Lieutenant Pyke’s office. The four detectives10 convened on Front Street, where they nervously watched the suitcase and waited for the Bomb and Forgery Squad to show up.
At a little after four o’clock,11 the call came. Joe, Easter, and Mary Lynch were still playing cards. Joe looked at the phone and shook his head; in another hour or so, he was off duty and they could leave for Yonkers. He picked it up. It was Pyke, as he had feared. Something about a suspicious package found at the British Pavilion. Lynch needed to get out there and check it out.
Freddy’s off today, he told his boss. Who do you want to go with me?
Get Hayias, Pyke told him. He’s on home duty, same as you. The lieutenant hung up.
Lynch called Peter Hayias’s number12 and got no answer. He tried again several minutes later. No answer. After cleaning up and changing into his uniform, he tried the number again. No answer. Now he wasn’t sure what to do. Hayias was a good man who’d been on the force a lot longer than either him or Freddy Socha, and he knew his way around a bomb site. Lynch looked at the phone, thought it over, and then picked it up and called Freddy at home.
Sorry to call you on your day off, he said; it was a rotten break for the both of them. Socha shrugged him off. The crummy weather had kept him from heading out to the beach with his wife anyway. He had nothing else to do. Why not go out to the World’s Fair and check out a bomb?
I’ll pick you up, Joe told him, and hung up.
“I’ll be back in an hour,”13 he told Easter, heading out the door.
Lynch drove out on the Grand Central Parkway, hung a left on World’s Fair Boulevard, and parked the car on Rodman Street. He and Socha entered the fairgrounds at the Flushing Gate; from there, it was a brisk walk across Federal Place to the Court of Peace to Continental Avenue and back behind Poland, where all the hubbub was. They came on the scene at around a quarter to five14 and found a pair of World’s Fair policemen, John Sullivan and John McLaughlin, standing guard with Morlach and Fe
derer.
They also saw another cop, who turned out to be Patrolman Emil Vyskocil,15 literally hovering over the suitcase. Morlach had assigned him to watch it until Lynch and Socha arrived, and he took the job seriously. Lynch relieved him of his immediate duty, and he and Freddy got down to work.
The suitcase was about twelve inches by eighteen by six,16 they measured, and hell, yes, it was ticking. How long had it been ticking? The electrician first heard it about an hour and a half ago. He hadn’t noticed the sound yesterday.
Yesterday? How long had it been sitting around? About thirty hours, someone figured. At least that’s how long it had been since Strachan first spotted it.
Lynch scratched his head on that one. Time bombs were set off by clocks, and clocks had the stubborn tendency to register the same time once every twelve hours. How in the hell could this one have been ticking for a minimum of two trips around the dial, maybe three?
They talked it over. Almost certainly, it had to be a hoax. Or if it was real, then surely it was a dud. No one had ever heard of a time bomb that couldn’t tell time. But it was still ticking. So Lynch, recalling Pyke’s new instructions on how to defuse bombs without completely destroying the evidence, decided to cut a small hole in the bottom of the suitcase in order to determine first whether there was, in fact, a bomb inside.
He and Freddy tipped the thing over. Morlach drew closer, angling in for a look. Gallagher and Schuchman stood nearby and waited for the verdict. Lynch took out his pocketknife and carefully cut away a two-inch strip17 off the bottom of the case. He and Freddy bent their heads down close to peer inside. They saw several sticks of dynamite bound together by cloth.
“This looks like the real goods,”18 Lynch said, squinting up at Freddy. They were squatting knee to knee as they decided what to do next.
Morlach bit his lip and turned away to tell the others to get back. “It’s the business,”19 he warned them.