For all my trouble, I’d only turned up a letter posted to Silva three weeks ago from one Brenda Lawler, of 148 E. 61st Street, New York. Most of the letter was chatty, several long paragraphs about Lawler’s husband and son, a party she was hosting, some rationing tips she’d picked up. I got the impression that Silva and Lawler had been classmates—was Brenda one of the girls in the photograph by the fountain?—but I couldn’t be sure. Only one passage seemed noteworthy, so I memorized it:
. . . well, Nads, sorry to go on for pages about myself and all these trivial little happenings without commenting on your problem. Here’s my two cents: dump him! You’re far too dazzling and beautiful and smart (dare I say “a catch”? tho I know how you loathe that word because it smacks of that most bourgeois of institutions, marriage!) to tolerate a philandering dog, whatever his tricks. (Didn’t we forswear sailors ages ago? No matter.) Anyway, send him packing, Nads, and find yourself a better man. Call anytime if you want a heart-to-heart, we’ll reverse the charges.
All my love . . .
The sailor must be Logan Skerrill, he’d been cheating on Silva; she’d caught him, she’d confided in a dear friend. But like the clues hinting that Skerrill had been a fairy, something felt off. I had no trouble believing Skerrill had two-timed Silva. At the Funhouse, Skerrill had bragged about his conquests, which wasn’t unusual, we all did, but he had topped the rest of us by detailing the showdowns he set up with the gals who thought they were his steadies. He’d leave out a mash note from another broad, or show up for a date wafting another woman’s perfume. From the smug way he had told these stories, you could tell that’s what stoked his coals, revealing his betrayal and getting these poor girls to beg him to be true. Manipulators like him have no trouble finding weak girls.
But Silva wasn’t such a woman, and that’s what felt wrong about the letter. If I had to guess at what had fired the sparks between “Nads” and Skerrill, I’d go with the mutual attraction they felt as two cold-hearted operators who believed in the same cause. If Silva thought or knew Skerrill had been unfaithful, it seemed more plausible that she’d up the ante, that she’d play her own game, not send a weepy confession to a girlfriend.
So what did the letter mean for real? Did it mask something related to H & H’s espionage, or was it simply just what it appeared to be, a personal letter from an old friend?
CHAPTER 21
THE THING ABOUT TOSSING A STRANGER’S FLAT: GETS YOU WONDERING if it’s ever happened to you. Or, in this case, Ted Barston. If Himmel, Silva, and Greene suspected Barston wasn’t on the level, could they find out where he was flopping? The Jefferson Club didn’t keep a register, and I was pretty sure no one had ever tailed me there, but so what? The Reds knew good tradecraft, they could easily send someone around to the Ninth Street fleabags with a description of me as Barston, maybe even a photograph secretly snapped when I was coming or going from H & H. But did it matter? They could turn the rucksack inside out, nothing in it would trace back to Ellis Voigt.
Hell, a toss of my basement flat on Caroline Street wouldn’t turn up much of anything, either. The arrangement I had with the landlord Kleist, the favor he owed my pop—I hadn’t known how many months that was good for when I arrived in D.C., so I hadn’t moved in much, just my clothes and a few books. Even now, when I knew I had the place for at least the war’s duration, I still lived light. I didn’t keep letters from my folks and brother, ripped them up as soon as they were read. I had some framed family photographs, had toted them with me wherever this war had sent me, but they were now in my box at Riggs Bank. Told myself it was to keep them safe, but looking at them day-to-day had unsettled me. Wasn’t sure why. Got along with my folks, my brother, too. Maybe I felt guilty shredding their letters beneath their smiling faces in the black-and-white photographs. But if someone ever tossed my flat, I didn’t want them reading my private correspondence or looking at the pictures on the wall, as I’d just done to Nadine Silva.
When I arrived at the billiards parlor, Paslett and Terrance were playing eight-ball, two bottles of Schlitz on the rail by the table, smoke untwining from my partner’s cigarette as he missed a shot at the five ball. I nodded as I walked to the bar, returned with a cue and my own beer.
“Hiya, Ted, how’s tricks?” Paslett asked. He’d improved his wardrobe: dungarees, corduroy shirt, sleeves rolled up. (I wondered how Terrance had broached that subject.)
I shrugged and said, “Ain’t been bit by a dog yet.”
“Still making deliveries, huh?”
“Had worse jobs.”
Terrance said, “Nobody misses you, that’s for sure.” With a crooked grin. His way of telling me that he and Paslett had set up the Iceland cover story to keep the F.B.I. from finding out who Ted Barston really was.
“Gee, thanks.” I slipped the envelope out of my pocket and handed it to Paslett.
“He sent it in care’a dis Joseph Charles, two-one-one-one Florida Avenue. Dat’s da last place I was staying.” Translation: the package for Himmel had come from a man using a pseudonym at that address.
“Careless of him,” Paslett remarked.
I nodded—not a bad set-up, that. “You know how dose eggheads are. Get a doctorate, dey lose all common sense. Anyways, after da letter got returned, Nagel remembered I got a new address.”
Terrance returned the nod. Dr. Nagel, got it.
“What’s he up to?” This from Paslett.
“Busy all da time, he says. Hardly ever leaves his office. Dey just made him headmaster at Holy Cross Academy.”
The commander hid his confusion, but my partner nodded. He remembered that a private school, Holy Cross, was located east of the National Bureau of Standards campus.
Terrance asked, “He got any work for you?” Will you pick up any more packages from Nagel?
“Who knows, I’m awful busy dese days.” Doubt it, and I’m still working the receptionist, still trying to find out what Skerrill did for H & H.
“Well, nice of him to drop a line,” Paslett said as he chalked his cue and took a bead on the twelve ball. He missed.
“You two ever gonna finish dis game, hey?” I said with a grin.
“Keep your pants on,” Terrance growled, taking a long drag on his cigarette. He stubbed it, picked up his cue, and ran the table, putting a soft kiss on the eight ball to drop it in the side pocket. “Rack ’em, hot-shot.”
I set the balls and took a long drink of beer as Terrance broke. The envelope was gone. I hoped Paslett had been subtle when he pocketed it. My partner sank the four and the seven on the break and was considering his options when I asked, “How was our buddy’s trip ta da Caribbean?”
Paslett clenched his jaw. Obviously, he didn’t want to talk about the Bermuda Special. Because he couldn’t figure out how to cloak his answers or because he wasn’t ready to tell us what he knew? Another bad sign: Terrance kept his gaze on the table, methodically chalking his cue. Blue powder sifted from the cube, the commander’s pause continued. C’mon, c’mon. . . .
“He never got there,” Paslett blurted out.
“No? Thought dat was a sure thing.”
“Uh-uh. Where he got sent, he said it was just like being underground.”
Underground—Skerrill had been part of a secret mission. But Terrance and I already knew that. So what else was Paslett trying to tell us?
“But the air turned out to be just fine,” the commander added.
Underground . . . worried about the air . . . a canary in a coal mine? Then it clicked: the Canary Islands. The destroyer had gone to the Canary Islands, in the Atlantic. Terrance still looked confused. I whistled, soft and low, warbling—he got it.
“Seems like an awful long trip to make these days,” my partner said.
“Well, he needed to bring a new friend home.” Translation: somebody important who couldn’t find his own way to the States.
I thought quickly. The Canary Islands were Spanish territory. Franco was neutral, but he leaned Nazi. A German trying
to escape Hitler could, with the right papers, get to Spain, get to the islands. But how did he make contact with the Allies? And who the hell was he? Sending a destroyer across U-Boat-infested seas to fetch one man was a hell of a risk. Was he a scientist, a Wehrmacht general, a Nazi official? Whoever he was, it smelled like an O.S.S. operation.
“Dis new guy, he must got friends in high society,” I said.
Paslett nodded vigorously. Around the Navy Building, Oh, So Social was our jeering nickname for the Office of Strategic Services because so many of its officers were East Coast, high-society elites.
“Yeah, plenty’a other suitors, too,” the commander said. Meaning, O.S.S. wanted to keep him; so did Army and Navy intelligence.
That’s why the War Department had taken charge of the mission, I realized, and why we’d horned in by sending officers from O.N.I.’s Special Activities Branch, Skerrill included. So who’d claimed the prize? Maybe the Bureau had jumped into the fray, too. One of Washington’s oldest rumors was that John Edgar had copies of lesbo letters in Eleanor’s hand, leverage he could have used to force F.D.R. to let the Bureau take over. Now that Roosevelt was dead, the letters were no good, but the Bermuda Special had gone and returned six months ago.
Terrance and I were on the same wavelength.
“Who’s the lucky bridegroom?” he asked.
Paslett said, “Damned if it didn’t end up being my old football buddy.”
That threw both of us, though we feigned knowing nods. Paslett was Annapolis, sure, but he’d never been on the gridiron. Was he trying to tell us—
“Boy, you can’t win any bets with him, can you?” Terrance blurted out.
“Nope, but hope springs eternal,” Paslett replied.
Now I got it. Every autumn, Paslett and his friend General Leslie Groves wagered fifty bucks on the Army-Navy game. Groves was big-time, that rare breed who could soldier and politick, a Pentagon dandy who still had the respect of the men who served under him. That’s why we’d been surprised by the news he’d been sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, early in the war. What, we’re worried about Pancho Villa riding again?, I’d cracked to Paslett at the time, but he didn’t know any more than the rest of us. Since then, we’d picked up bits and scraps. Item: Scientists—physicists, mostly—were, like iron filings drawn to a magnet, clumping together in Chicago, Manhattan, and Los Alamos. Item: Army had built a secret city and plant in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in eastern Tennessee. Item: The Senate committee investigating waste and fraud in war contracts had stumbled onto missing millions but Secretary of War Henry Stimson had told its former chairman, Harry S. Truman, to back off. That mix of secrecy, moolah, and scientists could only mean one thing—some kind of weapons project.
Terrance had won our game, but I didn’t bother to rack the balls. We fell silent, sipping our beers and smoking. O.N.I. had placed Logan Skerrill and the other Special Activities officers on the Bermuda Special to find out all they could about the “new friend” being picked up in the Canary Islands and why he was being sent to New Mexico. If Skerrill had succeeded in learning all of that, then we had to assume the Soviets now knew, too. Terrance sighed and stubbed a cigarette. He gave me a baleful look as Paslett stood, watching me intensely. Different expressions, same thought. You gotta get more on Skerrill. The diagram I’d copied was part of the puzzle—hopefully Navy scientists could figure out what it meant—but that wasn’t enough. And I didn’t need either of them to figure out a way to tell me.
“Well, so long, see you next time,” I said, and left.
I HAD TIME TO KILL BEFORE MY DATE WITH MIRIAM. I WASN’T ONE TO show up for dates with liquor on my breath, but I figured Barston had no such qualms. I parked myself at a corner tap, all pine paneling and lazy ceiling fans, and chased flat beer with rye shots. The Rainbow, where I was meeting Miriam, was a low-rent dance hall in Southwest D.C., not far from the waterfront. It was popular with enlisted men who chafed at the rules of U.S.O. and Women’s Battalion socials, where the chaperones bussed in G-girls for two hours of punch and chit-chat and always did a head-count as the girls filed back onto the bus. The Rainbow attracted khaki-wacky teenage girls and lonely wives whose husbands were overseas. If you still couldn’t score, the local cops let prossies trawl K Street, a block away. The Rainbow used to be popular with Negroes until several dozen sailors and marines charged in one night, swinging clubs and bats while provost guards loafed outside, chatting and smoking. The cops were nowhere to be seen. The Negroes didn’t go quietly, but when they started to give as good as they were getting, the provost guards jumped in with their billies—some even led with their rifle butts. From that night on, the Rainbow was lily-white.
I found Miriam at the bar, fending off a pimply adolescent private who was squeezing close so he could drape a skinny arm around her shoulder.
“Go fish, Mac, she’s taken,” I growled.
His eyes flashed. I shifted my stance, getting ready to knee him if he wanted to play rough. He sneered, I clenched my fist, but he thought better of brawling and moved on.
“Hey, kiddo, what’s cookin’?” I dipped to give Miriam a kiss.
“Ooh, tastes like somebody’s been celebrating already.”
I scowled and said, “Da hell dat’s s’posed ta mean?”
“Nothing, Teddy, I just—do you want another drink?”
“Nah, I don’t wanna drink—did we come here ta dance or what?”
“Sure, honey, let’s go dance.”
She slid off the stool, I took her roughly by the hand. I hadn’t noticed that Miriam had barely touched her drink, something tall with vodka or gin, but it was too late to change my mind. Barston was no Prince Charming, but I was laying it on a little thick. The confab with Paslett and my partner had aggravated me. I’d scored big with Nagel’s drawing, but Skerrill still hovered out of my reach, taunting me, like a skeleton that drops in front of you at a Halloween haunted house and then jerks out of sight. I was deep inside the Himmel cell, I’d identified a National Bureau of Standards bigwig who was passing secrets to the Reds; yet I felt like I was stumbling around, groping in the dark. It was my own fault, I realized. I’d assumed that Miriam would be packed to the gills with rumors, gossip, and secrets about H & H and all who’d passed through its doors. And she had given me everything she knew about Silva and Skerrill’s relationship, but I could hardly expect a communist cell as watertight as Himmel’s to let anything related to espionage leak to the staff. That same flawed thinking had guided my toss of Silva’s flat. What had I expected to find, a goddamned diary with dated entries detailing the who, what, and why of the Bermuda Special?
My predicament wasn’t entirely my fault. Paslett nurtured his own misguided assumptions about my undercover work. He believed just because I’d gotten the delivery job, I’d completely fooled Silva, Greene, and Himmel. Not by a long shot. Greene bought my act, but the other two still watched me like peregrine falcons. How many more packages could I divert before I was caught? Being a lieutenant j.g. U.S.N. was no protection—the uniform sure hadn’t saved Skerrill. As for Skerrill, Paslett didn’t realize that my placement inside the cell only enabled me to observe what was happening now, not what had happened. Whatever Skerrill had told Silva and Himmel about the Bermuda Special was long done and gone, whisked on to Himmel’s Soviet handlers, no traces left behind. Spy cells weren’t government agencies, they didn’t leave paper trails, a fact Paslett, who had never done undercover work, didn’t get. But I couldn’t make excuses, I couldn’t ask Terrance to argue on my behalf. All that mattered were results, and I had to get them. Just gotta be ready to roll with the punches, I told myself as I forced a smile at Miriam on the dance floor.
A prophetic resolution, as it turned out.
CHAPTER 22
THE BAND AT THE RAINBOW WAS LOUD AND MEDIOCRE, A MOTLEY pile-up of hacks who couldn’t make the grade at class joints. They mangled last year’s hits and wrung out tired standards. The trumpet player kept looking at his instrument wit
h mild surprise after each number, as if he still couldn’t believe he’d managed to get it out of hock for that night’s gig. Not that the patrons cared. No one came to the Rainbow for the music, he came for the noise, the scene, the booze, the girls. I tried to shut out memories of my visit to the Lotus with Liv, of what we’d talked about in between trips to the dance floor, but the more Miriam prattled, the more pressing the memories became.
“What’s wrong, Teddy?” Miriam whined in my ear as we slow-danced to a lackluster cover of “Like Someone in Love.”
“Nuttin’, kiddo.”
“You’re not mad at me, are you, Teddy?”
I mumbled something, lost in a recollection of Liv, her teasing question that night at the Lotus. So you don’t think there’s anything literary about pulp fiction?
“D’you want to get a drink?” Miriam asked.
“Nah, let’s stay out for anudder number.” Did I say that?
“Okay, sure, baby.” You implied it.
“Havin’ a good time, toots?” Enlighten me, my favorite femme fatale.
“A’course, Teddy, thanks for taking me out.” So you’re hit by a car, El, you lose your memory. But who you’ve just lost, the man of the last three years—what if that’s not who you really are? What if you’ve been living a lie, and now you gotta find out why you had to become someone else, and who you were before that?
The Dead Don't Bleed: A Novel Page 17