He scrambled away as I described Himmel to Filbert. He nodded briskly and exited into the alley, carrying the wooden box. The pen microphone was in his shirt pocket, its wire running down his sleeve, out of sight. Just as he’d said, all he had to do was set the box on a chair, connect the jack, and keep his left arm at his side.
I sidled up to the service doors and peeked through the portal window. Sure enough, Himmel was sitting at a corner table, facing the door. Across from him was a slender, young, intense-looking man. Dark eyes under thick, arched brows, black hair parted to the side, Brylcreem glistening. High cheekbones, narrow chin, thin wrists jutting from crisp white cuffs fastened with silver links. Navy blue sweater, yellow tie, herringbone jacket. They were already talking—nothing I could do but wait for Professor Gadget to get settled and wired.
He didn’t dawdle, Filbert, but he still had to buy a slice of pie to keep his cover. Wisely, he left an empty table between himself and Himmel, who eyed him over quickly, then turned his attention back to his contact. Filbert looked like a harmless old man with an ordinary box. I hurried back to the baking counter, giving the excited kid a thumbs-up. I fitted the headset on and got out pencil and notebook. A loud crackle as Filbert connected the cord to the circuit board’s jack, a brief humming, then—
. . . don’t care, don’t give a damn (Himmel’s contact, his voice surprisingly deep).
All right. Himmel calm, waiting.
What you call improvising, I call security.
Yes, I see. Another meaningless agreement. When your man breaks the rules, you let him explain, let him talk as long as he wants—only way to find out if you’ve been compromised.
This blind devotion to couriers, I just don’t understand it.
The old ways, they have their uses.
But this is the oldest way of all, isn’t it? A tête-à-tête?
Yes.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t followed, not once since I left the desert.
That’s good.
But enough chit-chat, right?
No reply from Himmel. A shrug, perhaps upturned palms?
How’s your memory?
Excellent.
Because what I’m about to say, you must commit to memory.
All right.
Don’t you want to know why?
No. Proceed.
Long pause, sounds of the Automat filling the silence: clatter of plates, murmur of conversation, burst of laughter from a distant table. I wished I could see what was happening. Was Himmel staring down his contact, trying to end a very risky meeting with someone who’d traveled such a long way to say something in person to the handler he was never supposed to meet? Then:
Fine, I’m only going to say it once: to diffuse the Uranium two-thirty-five, use uranium hexafluoride and a metal filter with submicroscopic perforations. Do not use a mass spectrometer. Got that?
Yes. How do you know this?
What, a Ph.D. in physics from Yale at twenty-two isn’t sufficient bond?
What a blunder! Boasting, giving away his biography—I scribbled happily.
How do you know this? Himmel unfazed, staying in control.
Look, even a brief summary would take all night and you wouldn’t understand a word anyway. So how’s this: our visitor from afar was indispensable in helping my team reach these conclusions and conduct the necessary tests with rousing success. And in a coupla months, maybe less, the whole world’s gonna find out what a big, big bang of a success we’ve pulled off.
Very good.
Now, as long as you remember exactly what I just told you, your physicists will know what to do with this.
A whisk, a scrape, something sliding. Had to be an envelope, its metal clasp dragging across the laminated tabletop. No response from Himmel.
Now you can tell me something. I’ve learned my contact on that trip met with an untimely demise.
Yes, he did. Himmel’s voice flat.
An accident?
He was murdered.
By whom?
The local police are still investigating.
And they’ll get their man, right. (Sarcastic laugh.) Now memorize this: this is my last delivery, my last contact. Scrape of chair, echo of steps; Automat sounds again, and Filbert’s shallow breathing. Then a loud crackle as Filbert disconnected. I peeled off the headset, dropped it to the counter, stared at my shorthand notes, the jumbled pieces fitting together. . . .
Boy Genius from New Mexico gives Himmel instructions on Uranium 235 . . . not the first reference to uranium—Terrance says Paslett blanched when he heard it earlier. Terrance on the hush-hush base in New Mexico: my guess, it’s our version a’the V-2. Millions of dollars rushed through Congress, no public record, no hearings, funneling straight into New Mexico. Boy Genius to Himmel: my contact on that trip met with an untimely demise. Boy Genius running scared, blustering past the fright, asking casually about his contact but then saying: I’m done, got it? Not wanting the same fate as his contact, a.k.a. Logan Skerrill, both men aboard the Bermuda Special, fetching that runaway German scientist. Worth the trouble, worth the time—said German indispensable. Two months, maybe less: bang, bang, predicts Boy Genius. Can’t be V-2s, he’s too proud of what he’s done, has to be something new, original, out-of-the-blue. With uranium. Can you make a bomb from uranium? No idea, a question for the physicists, for Paslett—all I know is: down in New Mexico, they’ve built some kind of bomb, a real doozy. Japs are still fighting. Bang, bang, Tokyo?
Can’t know, not my job. This is: thanks to Boy Genius, the Reds have the last piece of the puzzle to build their own bomb. And thanks to Skerrill, the F.B.I. knows the Reds know a lot about that bomb. But my pals Slater and Reid, they don’t know about the last, vital step needed to finish the bomb. Only Himmel and I do.
The alley door burst open, a breathless Filbert rushed in, clutching his wooden box.
“I was too far away, didn’t hear anything—did you get it?” Practically quivering with excitement.
“Your rig worked great, Filbert—I got it all.”
CHAPTER 37
I GAVE FILBERT CAB FARE, TOLD HIM TO TELL NO ONE WHERE HE’D BEEN, and swore the kid to secrecy. Then I exited through the alley, walking around to F Street to wait for Himmel. Sound tradecraft: let your contact go first, give him time. Himmel would stay at the table, maybe refill his coffee. Figure he had men waiting outside. Boy Genius had told Himmel, Don’t worry, I wasn’t followed. Himmel’d figure he was wrong, just hadn’t seen his shadows all the way from New Mexico. The Reds were awful careful, awful suspicious, wouldn’t let a source like him roam free, not after he sent word he was leaving the reservation to make his delivery in person. Final one, too, according to him. This is my last delivery, my last contact. Maybe, maybe not. Parting ways with the Reds wasn’t so easy. Better avoid Washington’s alleys, Boy Genius.
I smoked a Lucky Strike, glad to be done with Barston’s Old Golds. Wishing I had time for a drink or three. Dusky sky, day giving way, city cast in twilight’s unreliable light, distances hard to gauge, lights blinking on in buildings, curtains being drawn. At ten to eight, Himmel came out of the Automat and stepped to the curb, looking for a hack. One pulled to the curb, he opened the rear door. I sprinted forward and jumped in behind the driver right after Himmel shut his door.
“Hopin’ you got a moment ta talk, Mister Himmel,” I said.
“We already had our talk, Ted.”
“I know, but sometin’s come up I wanna tell you about.”
“All right.” Calm, unfazed—just like at the Automat.
“Jefferson Memorial,” I told the driver.
He nodded at me in his mirror and headed west to Fourteenth. I didn’t tell Himmel why we were going there, he knew. Public space, wide open—neutral ground, good for us both. Did he know the memorial had just been closed for renovations? I figured no, city happenings not his concern. Short ride, long silence, neither of us talking, hack quiet, too. Almost fully dark when he dropped us off. Funn
y how that happens, last light goes so quickly on spring nights.
I paid the driver, we got out. I motioned toward the memorial, relieved to see a temporary wooden fence encircling the marble base. Even better: the gravel path beneath the cherry trees, the route Liv and I had taken during our closed-eye stroll, was blocked off, so passersby couldn’t come around to the west side.
“It’s closed,” Himmel said.
“S’alright, Thomas Jefferson doesn’t need to hear any of this.” In my normal voice.
He gave a faint smile, looking around to make sure we were alone. “You shouldn’t have been able to find me.”
“Shouldn’t have been able to overhear your conversation, either.”
He shook his head, not believing me, reaching into his jacket for a cigar.
“‘To diffuse the Uranium two-thirty-five, use uranium hexafluoride and a metal filter with submicroscopic perforations, do not use a mass spectrometer,’” I said softly but clearly.
His head snapped up, right hand still holding the unlit cigar to his lips. Had to give him credit, he recovered quickly. Didn’t sputter, didn’t demand to know how. Just—“You are resourceful, aren’t you, Lieutenant Voigt?”
“Could say the same about you, Pavel Nevelskoi.”
He smiled, took his time lighting the cigar.
I lit up, too, trying to kill the shake that wanted to overtake my hands.
He said, “It will not do you any good, that name. No more than the names Lenin, or Stalin, or Trotsky.” Legends, aliases, pseudonyms—the Russians were masters. Not that it mattered who Pavel Nevelskoi was for real.
“Gotta say, you played along perfectly,” I said. “I just about pissed my pants when I saw you at H & H.”
“You hid your surprise well, lieutenant.”
“Wasn’t so easy, fooling Silva all that time.”
“No, she is quite observant.”
“How did you know the Navy would send me in with a cover?”
“That’s not important now. What is, is that the result has worked to the benefit of both of us.”
“How’s that?”
But he didn’t answer, instead asked, “How did you trace Skerrill to H & H?”
“Our internal security detail observed him entering the office. We’re prohibited from using clipping services, so my partner and I followed up.” I didn’t tell him that Paslett, working off the partial report obtained from the F.B.I., had suspected the clipping service was a front.
“Very thorough. How lucky for us, that your superior selected you to go—what is the phrase you Americans use, under cover?”
I said, “Yeah, it was his idea for me to get a job with you.”
“Yes. Your approach was quite unusual, but, I think, suited the situation.”
“How come you didn’t already have a deliveryman?”
“We did—Philip made all the deliveries. After you came in, I told him and Nadine that I had asked the party to find someone else we could use and that you had been sent. Philip believed me, but Nadine, she wasn’t so easily persuaded.”
“Like you said, she’s awful observant. But she went along, always the loyal Red.”
He shrugged, puffed on his cigar. We’d walked to the south side of the memorial, its dome and colonnade dark.
“Musta been hard to set up her lover,” I said. “But she knew it had to be done after she got the letter meant to sound like a note from an old friend, telling her to dump Skerrill pronto. That was the order for the hit, wasn’t it?”
Again, no reply. He was still wondering how much I knew, letting me tell it. I had nothing to lose by opening up, but I couldn’t let him get suspicious, had to keep him thinking I had something important to tell him.
“So you told her you’d take care of it. But she didn’t know what that would feel like, did she, till the news broke.” I laughed. “No way to avoid reading about it, is there, at a clipping service? And when she realized it had happened for real, she got emotional, even shed a few tears for Logan Skerrill, her lover boy and fellow Red.”
“Are you trying to coax me into telling you why we had Skerrill killed?” Smiling contemptuously.
“Don’t be shy, I know he was working for the Bureau.”
“If this is true, this is a very good reason to kill him, yes?”
“If you say so.”
He laughed cynically. “Now who is being shy? You took pleasure in what you did.”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you.” Drawing on his cigar, squinting at me through the plume of smoke. “Skerrill was your rival, he was better than you, he was the darling of the Office of Naval Intelligence. You, Voigt, struggled to complete your training and you failed in your first field assignment, couldn’t even fool those ersatz fascists.”
“How did you find out Skerrill had gone to the Bureau?” I asked calmly, ignoring the taunts.
He shrugged. Translation: you’re not meant to know, you’re just the hired hand used to take care of a problem.
“He always was too clever for his own good, wasn’t he?” I pressed. “Always wanting more excitement, more risk.”
“His motive for helping the Bureau doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
“Nothing matters to Logan Skerrill anymore.”
A harsh laugh. “Is that why we are here, Voigt? Do you need reassurance, do you want me to say you are safe, as long as you keep quiet?”
“No, I’m here to tell you the police have arrested Philip Greene for Skerrill’s murder.”
“I already know, he called me—”
“That was me. Pretending to be him.”
“To see if I answered.” Understanding immediately that was how I’d followed him.
I nodded.
Himmel said, “How clever of you. But it’s true, Greene has been arrested?”
“Yes. I framed him for the killing of Skerrill.” Remembering how I’d imagined myself as Greene after I broke into his apartment, imagining him killing Skerrill, pretending that he’d hidden the gun in the jacket hanging on his coat rack. I’d had the gun with me the whole time, of course—it had been in the rucksack at the Jefferson Club. But I couldn’t imagine myself out of this spot. “I planted the gun in his car, then let it get towed,” I continued. “Once it was in the city impoundment lot, we could search it without a warrant. Of course the gun matches the bullet taken from the body.”
“What if he has an alibi for that night?”
“Probably he does—that’s why he’s eager to go to trial.”
“What do you mean?”
“When he yelped for a lawyer, I threatened to hand him over to the Bureau to face espionage charges. He thinks our case is weak—hell, he knows he’s innocent. Why wouldn’t he go into D.C. Superior Court instead’a facing up to the Bureau for crimes he knows he’s guilty of?”
“I see. I suppose I should thank you.”
“For?”
“Protecting the cell. That must not be easy, you must still feel some allegiance to the Navy.”
“I’m protecting myself more than anything, aren’t I?”
Laughing, he said, “Yes, but as I said earlier, the results are serving both of us nicely.”
I let that ride and said, “I convinced my partner that Silva put Greene up to the murder, so she was also arrested today. They’re gonna put the same squeeze on her—‘take an accessory to murder charge or we’ll turn you over to the Bureau.’ I thought you’d want to know all this. They’ll see through the scam soon enough, Greene and Silva, but not until you’ve had time to roll up your operation.”
“Very helpful, Voigt. Maybe too helpful.”
“Come again?”
“What is it you want for doing this? Please don’t tell me you did this because you consider yourself to be, how did you put it, a ‘loyal Red’?”
“I’m not asking for anything,” I answered in a steady voice.
We’d reached the fencing enclosing stacks of stone and brick for the memor
ial’s renovation. If anyone was looking across the Tidal Basin, the cherry trees along the bank obscured our figures. No lights, no shadows. I checked the urge to look around—I’d already done that, a minute ago, when Himmel wasn’t watching my face. We were alone.
“I don’t believe you,” he said firmly. “Is it that you want to say what my contact told me at the restaurant? That you are also finished, you want nothing more to do with us?”
“I’m not that naïve, Mister Nevelskoi. Once in, you never leave, right?”
He laughed softly. “You make it sound like a life sentence, lieutenant. Don’t you know—”
I leapt forward, catlike, squeezing the trigger of the thirty-two I’d slipped from my waistband as I pressed the barrel with its homemade silencer just beneath his heart. I just caught his cry, thrusting the handkerchief I’d wadded up with my left hand into his open mouth. Took him to the ground, tossing the gun so he couldn’t grab it. He struggled underneath me, kicking, flailing, biting. I turned my head, dug my toes into the ground, clutched fistfuls of grass, seeking purchase, weight. Had to smother him, had to keep him quiet, wait for him to bleed out, had to trust in that single shot. I pushed the gag in harder, took a vicious bite on the pad of my thumb, gritted my teeth against the pain. He managed to knee me, I shifted my weight. His right hand worked free, pounded my back. Then—
He went limp. I didn’t dare move, fearing he was playing possum. Tried to control my rushed breathing, so I could listen for his breath, but I was panting like a dog. I lay on top of Himmel, my shirt soaked with sweat, my left hand throbbing and slick with blood from the bite. Finally I thought to reach around for the hand lying on my back, fumbled to find his wrist, awkwardly pressed two fingers against the still-warm, damp skin. No pulse.
I rolled off but didn’t stand. Had to stay low to the ground in case the muffled sounds of our struggle had cocked a faraway ear, had caused someone across the Tidal Basin to stop and ask, “What’s that?” On my hands and knees, I searched for the thirty-two, found it five feet from Himmel’s body. A year ago I’d found that weapon during the search of a suspect’s billet, had taken it without telling anyone. The serial number was filed off, the suspect drew a ten-year sentence for black marketeering and theft of government property. Figured someday I might need an untraceable weapon. So I’d outfitted the thirty-two with the type of silencer they’d taught us to make at the Funhouse, wrapped it in an oiled rag, and put it in my safety deposit box at the Riggs Bank, along with the forged passport and 854 dollars in cash that I now also carried.
The Dead Don't Bleed: A Novel Page 29