“Are you listening, Barston?” Greene squawked.
“Yeah, sure, be nice ta Mrs. McClellan and tell her about da note.” I took the clipboard and held out my hand for his car key. He dropped it grudgingly.
“Remember what I told you about the springs!” he called out as I left.
I pretended not to hear him.
MY HEADACHE HAD ONLY GROWN WORSE, SO I STOPPED OFF AT A TAVERN a block from my first stop and downed a shot of rye. That helped. I bought some Listerine to kill the whiskey smell. The morning went fast, one delivery after another. I shut out all thoughts of the investigation and what I needed to do. I was in a groove as Barston, chatting with clients, buttering up the elderly Mrs. McClellan by complimenting her on the fruit basket she was passing off as a hat.
I made such good time, I treated myself to eggs, hash, potatoes, and a Schlitz or two at a greasy spoon on Seventeenth and Columbia.
“Beer with breakfast, I like it,” the counterman said.
“Dis is lunch, hey,” I shot back.
On my way to the final delivery, to one Randall Kovacevic, I went into Western Union and sent a telegram to Liv at her rooming house—one of the other girls was sure to be home to sign for it. REPORT OLD FRIEND MISBEHAVED STOP (it read) APOLOGY DUE ALSO DANCING DINNER AND MORE STOP PREPARED TO DELIVER LOTUS TONIGHT EIGHT STOP YOUR SUPPLICANT L STOP
Meeting Liv when I was supposed to be in Iceland was even more stupid and reckless than my last date, the one I’d fled like a kid with a curfew, but I had a plan. I’d say that I’d wanted to tell her, on the night we met at the Little Palace, that I was being sent to Iceland, but I hadn’t been able to break the news. Weak tea, sure, and a lie, but all that mattered was not losing Liv. If she believed I was going to Iceland, then hopefully we could pick up when I “got back.” If she hadn’t already left for the South Pacific. No way that could happen until we put the Japs down for good, I reminded myself, and the way they were fighting, that was months off.
Randall Kovacevic’s address was a residence, a third-floor flat in an apartment hotel on A Street, SE. My manifest listed the flat number, 3F, but out of instinct I checked the mailboxes. The label on 3F’s box was a typed slip of paper with Kovacevic’s name—it had been taped on. I carefully peeled back the tape. Underneath was a handlettered card: R. Kudlower.
“Sloppy, very sloppy,” I muttered. Whoever had trained this Kudlower and Nagel, the scientist from the National Bureau of Standards, had botched his job but good. I wondered if it had been Greene. Maybe Himmel hadn’t had the time to train his spies properly. More likely, he didn’t care what happened to them after he got what he wanted. Another reminder that time was running out on me.
I went up the stairs and down a dimly lit, creaky corridor with a worn runner. I knocked and got a Who’s there?
“H & H Clipping Service, got a package for Randall Kova, Kovacev—”
“Okay, okay, come in,” the door swinging open.
Another rookie mistake. If Kudlower didn’t want his neighbors to overhear his pseudonym, he should’ve opened his door immediately. Hell, he shouldn’t have been couriering out of his flat to start with—at least Nagel had taken the precaution of meeting in a place he had no connection to.
I held up a fat envelope. I’d checked the contents in the car: nothing but clippings from the papers’ Federal Diary section, which reported Congressional committee hearings, assignments, and actions. Awful boring stuff, a cover, I assumed, for the real reason I was there.
Kudlower grabbed the envelope. He looked to be my age, mid-twenties, with an Irish complexion, freckles and fair skin. Husky build, but he was going soft, a paunch tugging at his sweater. His flat was small and common. Murphy bed (down, unmade), kitchenette, bathroom with just a toilet and sink. For furnishings, a table with fold-down flaps, a few chairs, a divan. I noticed, stacked on one chair, a dozen or so thick volumes bound in black leatherette covers, the kind with a sleeve to put a title card in. I could only read the card attached to the top volume: Department of the Interior Appropriation Bill for 1945, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations. Maybe the clippings weren’t a cover, maybe Kudlower actually used them in his job.
“Sign here, please, Mister Kova—how da you say yer name?”
“Kova-cev-ick,” he said, scribbling a signature.
Wrong again. In high school, I’d known a kid named Petrovic—Serb names ending in a c were pronounced as ch.
“Hold on, I got something for you,” Kudlower said. He went into the kitchenette and returned with a letter-sized envelope. “Will you take this back with you?”
“Sure, you bet.”
Now Kudlower couldn’t get me out of his flat fast enough, crowding me to the door. I examined the envelope as I thudded down the stairs. Just like the one Nagel had given me, it was plain white, no markings, sealed with a lick. I’d have no trouble replacing it. I checked my watch, which had started working again after I’d banged it twice: a quarter past one. Plenty of time to see what R. Kudlower was passing on to Himmel and make a copy.
Only I never got the chance. Two men fell in stride with me as I rounded the corner of Seventh and A, headed to the car. They’d been standing outside a Peoples Drug Store, smoking, looking at boxes of cigars in the display window. But I knew that trick, too—I could see their reflection as easily as they could see mine. The one on my left wore a gray suit, wrinkle-free white shirt, and a blue tie with a pebble pattern. You could have used the crease in his trousers as a letter opener, and the polished toes of his black wingtips shone like the North Star. He looked about forty, slight build, average height, with a jutting jaw and a slightly bent nose. The man on his right was short and stocky, not as neatly dressed. His blue jacket was unbuttoned, his gold and red tie carelessly knotted. He had a stub of a nose, small ears, and dark eyes with heavy lids. I had dealt with enough F.B.I. agents to know the look, to know how they approached a mark on the street. I should have been ready for this, I realized. If the Bureau was watching Silva, for sure it was also watching the people suspected of spying for Himmel. As the two men caught up with me, I slipped Kudlower’s envelope under my manifest, hoping they hadn’t noticed it when I passed them.
“Hey pal, mind if we talk to you?” the sloppy one asked.
“Buzz off,” I answered.
They didn’t like that. Mr. Neat double-timed and planted himself in front of me, forcing me to halt.
“Outta my way, Mac,” I growled.
“You can’t spare a minute?” The sloppy one again, this time touching my forearm.
“Get yer filthy hands off me! Leave me alone!” As I wanted, my angry cries stopped passersby.
“Cut it out,” Mr. Neat said, quietly but firmly. “You’re going with us, and it’s up to you, pal, you wanna go easy or hard.”
“For what?” I shot back. “I ain’t done nuttin’, I’m just working here. Leave me alone!”
“Say, what’s the trouble here?” asked a concerned citizen, a Rotarian-looking fellow in a suit and eyeglasses.
Now Neat and Sloppy had no choice but to badge him and the other onlookers. They stepped back, and a whistle from Sloppy brought a sleek black Plymouth sedan to the curb. Neat opened the rear passenger door and hustled around to the other side as Sloppy pinched me right below my elbow, grabbed my clipboard, and pushed me into the car. A man will do exactly what you want if you know how to hit the nerve, as Sloppy did—I’d learned that same grip at the Funhouse. He made sure my head banged the car’s ceiling as I went in. I’d expected that cheap shot, for gumming up their roust, but I hadn’t expected the knock to bring my hangover back. And I had a feeling I’d be going without a drink for a while.
CHAPTER 24
I KICKED UP QUITE A FUSS IN THE PLYMOUTH, SQUAWKING ABOUT MY rights and how I was going to lose my job, working myself into a Barston-worthy tantrum. The two agents and the driver, another standard issue G-man, pretended not to hear me, until finally Mr. Neat couldn’t take it an
ymore.
“Stop the car, Loula,” he ordered the driver, who dutifully pulled to the curb. (With a name like that, I understood why he got stuck driving.)
“You wanna get out, go ahead, get out,” Neat addressed me. “But the second you leave this vehicle, we’re gonna arrest you under Section Six-eighty-three of the Espionage Act. Then you can have all the lawyers you want. If you shut up and stay in the car, you’re not under arrest. We’ll have our little talk, then you’ll be free to go.”
“For real?” I asked, though I wanted to laugh in his face. Only the Bureau could come up with a gimmick like that: you’re free to go, but if you leave, then we’ll arrest you, so you better do what we want.
He nodded sternly. I canned it. We drove to the Bureau’s headquarters in the Department of Justice building, an impressive structure. Fluted columns held up friezes and sculpted panels, the decorative aluminum window trim shone bright. The Stars and Stripes fluttered above the Constitution Avenue entrance, but Loula took us to the loading dock. The Bureau didn’t have jail cells in the building—anyway, I wasn’t under arrest, right?—but it did have some awful nice interrogation rooms in the basement, or so I’d heard from Commander Paslett. Opaque glass, hidden mics, and Hollywood-quality film cameras, specially designed chairs to make a sitter uncomfortable.
Loula stayed in the car as the two agents got out and led me into the building. Clerks and janitors stepped to the side as Neat and Sloppy walked me down a long corridor. John Edgar’s vaunted files—tens of thousands of index cards on suspect Americans and aliens—were rumored to be kept somewhere here, but I wasn’t getting a tour. Neat unlocked a windowless door and motioned for me to sit in a chair with its back to the door. An old, old interrogator’s trick, that. To my right and left were observation windows; directly in front of me was a gray metallic screen. I couldn’t catch any reflection from it, but I was certain that anyone on the other side could see the entire room.
My chaperones sat down side-by-side across from me. The table between us was burnished metal brightly lit by humming overhead fluorescents.
“I’m Agent Slater, my partner’s Agent Reid,” Mr. Neat announced. “The quicker you answer our questions, the sooner you’re outta here.” Slater and Reid, the same two agents who had picked up Traub and confronted Paslett and Terrance at the Navy Building.
“Why da hell are you hassling me?”
Reid wagged a finger at me. “He said answer, not ask.”
I shot him my best defiant Barston look but didn’t smart-aleck him. Already my legs were starting to hurt—the two front legs of my chair were slightly shorter than the rear legs.
“Okay, your full name and place and date of birth,” Slater began.
I told them, grateful for the hours I’d spent in my flat, drilling the facts of Ted Barston’s brief, unhappy life into my head. The Bureau doesn’t do the good cop, bad cop routine—Hoover thinks it’s amateurish. His agents grind down their prey with relentless questions about their lives, habits, and everyday comings and goings. This approach lulls you into a false sense of security. Who can’t answer questions about where he grew up and what his pop did for a living, easy-breezy, right? But after a while, you get restless, anxious, frazzled. All the probing causes you to doubt your own memory. You worry that if you forget something, make a mistake, they’ll accuse you of lying. Once the G-men have you on edge (and aching to take a leak), they spring the questions they really want answers for. And if you hesitate, if you hem, haw, and er, then it’s bad cop, bad cop all the rest of the way. Hell, by the end it’s going to be bad cop, bad cop no matter what.
I wasn’t worried about passing the “This Is Your Life, Ted Barston” test, and I was confident that the Bureau, even with its enviable resources, hadn’t learned anything more about Ted Barston than Paslett’s researchers. As long as I kept my facts straight and flashed Barston’s temper, I’d be okay. Easy, breezy. . . .
“. . . your father was pretty important in the I.L.A.,” Reid was saying.
“Yeah, so?”
“The I.L.A. was and is a communist-affiliated union, led by known agents of the Soviet Union, responsible for a wave of disruptive dock strikes in the New Jersey ports throughout the nineteen-thirties.”
“Thanks for the history lesson, can I go now?” But you can’t bait Hoover’s boys, they shrug off insults like a duck sheds water.
“Why’d you seek employment at H & H?” This from Slater.
“Cause I needed a job, whattya think?”
“Why that particular establishment? You have no work history with clipping services or the newspaper trade. Why not a machinist or shop position?”
Now I was in a bind. Why would a guy like Barston ask for work at a clipping service? It looked fishy, but I sure as hell didn’t want to tell them about Griffin Crieve.
“Maybe Mister Himmel’s a friend’a mine,” I decided to say, defiantly.
“Had you been in contact with Himmel after your release from the brig?” Slater, still.
“No.”
“How’d you know he needed a delivery man?” Now Reid.
“I didn’t.”
“You just went to see him out of the blue?”
“Hell, yeah! Goddamned Navy left me flat broke, what else was I s’posed ta do?”
“Find a job in Charleston,” Slater interjected.
“Or go back to New Jersey,” Reid suggested.
“I hate Charleston, nobody I know’s left in Joisey.”
“Why D.C.?” Slater asked.
“Didn’t have da fare ta get ta New York, figgered I could find work here da same as anywhere else.”
“Did you know Himmel ran a clipping service before you picked Washington?”
“Nope.”
The two agents exchanged looks. I was taking a big risk, but I had to get them off the subject of why Barston had ended up in Washington—that was the weakest link in my chain.
“How exactly do you know Himmel?” Reid pressed. “Start by telling us about the first time you met, where it was and when, who introduced—”
“I never met da man before I walked into his business, okay?”
“You said he’s a friend.”
“I said maybe. Anyways, you know I was kidding, da way I said it.”
“All right, then why’d you go to Himmel?” Slater leaned over the table.
“A friend told me ta look him up.”
“Name, occupation, and address of the friend.”
“Uh uh,” I said. “Go ahead and arrest me, ’cause I ain’t giving you dat name.”
If they did arrest me, I was in a heap of trouble. Because they really would use the Espionage Act, and an obscure provision of the law allowed suspects to be detained for forty-eight hours before arraignment, to allow the government to ensure that “state secrets” would stay secret after a suspect appeared in court. But I was gambling that Slater and Reid didn’t want to take that step. They didn’t want a case against Ted Barston, they wanted to stop the espionage; and if they arrested me, then the envelope I’d picked up from Kudlower (posing as Kovacevic) would become evidence and would have to be shown to a defense attorney.
My hunch was right—sort of.
“All right, let’s set that question aside and talk about this envelope,” Reid said smoothly. Like a magician’s card, it had appeared out of nowhere—he must have had my clipboard on his lap.
“What about it? Last guy I made a delivery ta, he gave me dat.”
“What’s in it?”
I shrugged. “Hell if I know—I don’t open da packages.”
Slater asked, “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that H & H’s clients are giving you envelopes after you make deliveries?”
“Mister Himmel told me some of ’em might, so I should just bring da envelope or package or whatever ta him.”
Reid perked up. “Have you picked up a lotta packages for Himmel?”
“What, you think I count ’em? C’mon, pal.”
&nb
sp; “That’s ‘Agent Reid,’ not ‘pal,’ Barston, and you’d better answer the question,” Slater said.
“I did! Goddammit, I’m just da delivery boy, I take whatever’s listed on da manifest ta da addresses dey give me, and if dey give me sometin’ for Himmel, I take it back ta da office for him, end’a story.”
“And you’ve never opened one of these envelopes?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe you should open this one,” Reid said quietly. He slid the envelope toward me.
“Want us to get you a letter opener?” Slater cracked.
Bastards, I thought. They didn’t have a warrant, the chances of convincing a federal judge they had probable cause for picking me up were fifty-fifty. If they opened the envelope, it might not be allowed as evidence in a trial to nail Himmel et al. for espionage. But if I opened the envelope voluntarily—and Slater and Reid would swear under oath that I had, backed up by an edited cut of the film they were shooting of the interrogation—a federal prosecutor would have all that he needed. I wouldn’t be charged, of course, not after my real identity was revealed, but I had to do whatever I could to preserve my cover.
“Fuck you both,” I snarled, crumpling the envelope into a ball and throwing it at Slater’s head.
“Goddammit!” Reid shouted, smoothing the envelope out as if it were a ten-thousand-dollar bill.
Slater jumped out of his chair and raced over to the metal screen on the wall. He rapped twice, no doubt a signal to stop the filming and the recording.
“Gimme back dat clipboard and da envelope,” I ordered Reid. I jumped up, kicked my chair over. “You keep telling me I ain’t under arrest, so I’m leaving, understand? I’m going back ta work and if you wanna know what’s in dat envelope, you come ask Himmel, because—”
Slater punched me in the left kidney. I knew the blow was coming—he’d come around the table as I was yelling at his partner—so I’d shifted my posture slightly to take the hit on my lower back. But there wasn’t much I could do to soften the rest of the workover. Reid pinned me in a half-Nelson while Slater, grinning like a kid who’s trapped an alley cat he wants to torture, let me have it: blow to the solar plexus, leaving me gasping; one-two punch to the kidneys; knee to the groin. Reid released me, I fell to the floor, instinctively drawing my knees up and covering my head with my arms.
The Dead Don't Bleed: A Novel Page 19