RIP THE ANGELS
FROM HEAVEN
A NOVEL
DAVID KRUGLER
PEGASUS CRIME
NEW YORK LONDON
To my parents, John and Dee
RIP THE ANGELS
FROM HEAVEN
PART 1
Transgressions
Washington, D.C.
July 6–12, 1945
BP/5730A
OFFICE OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE
Sabotage, Espionage, and Countersubversion (B-7)
NAVY DEPARTMENT
SECRET Washington, 25, D.C. 12 May 1945
From: Lieutenant (j.g.) Ellis Voigt
To: Commander Burton Paslett
Subject: Summary findings death Lieutenant (j.g.) Logan Skerrill
MISSION
1. Investigation of April 25, 1945 murder Lt. (j.g.) Skerrill led myself and Lt. (j.g.) Terrance Daley to H & H Clipping Service, 1321 K Street, Washington, D.C. N.W. Suspicion H & H a Soviet spy front led me to adopt cover identity as dishonorably discharged Shipfitter Second Class Ted Barston, known communist sympathizer. Purpose: infiltrate H & H to determine if Skerrill a Soviet agent.
2. Clipping service owner Henry Himmel hired me, posing as Ted Barston, as deliveryman. Regular deliveries included receipt of coded messages from Soviet couriers, confirming espionage activity said clipping service and Skerrill’s active part in espionage. Coded messages copied for O.N.I. Content believed to relate to top-secret Army weapons project New Mexico.
3. Investigation proved clipping service employee Philip Greene, known communist, killed Lt. Skerrill at Himmel’s order. Motive: Skerrill was a double agent who had confessed his treason to the F.B.I. Rather than arrest Skerrill, F.B.I. kept him in Soviet cell to investigate scope of espionage. Greene killed Skerrill before he could expose cell.
4. Tail of Himmel led to F Street restaurant where he met with unknown male subject claiming to be from Army weapons project New Mexico. Subject delivered package with schematic or diagram of suspected significance.
5. Tail of Himmel after receiving package failed. Himmel now missing along with package. Identity New Mexico subject still unknown.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Capture of Himmel and package urgent.
2. Identification of New Mexico subject also urgent. He may try to again deliver copy of weapons project schematic to Soviet agents. Security of weapons project at grave risk until Himmel and New Mexico subject are captured.
CHAPTER 1
THE ROOM, LIKE EVERY OTHER ONE I’D BEEN QUESTIONED IN, WAS DIM, empty, industrial. Concrete columns supporting a latticed ceiling. Concrete floor with drains. Rows of worktables and sturdy metal shelves, all bare. Faint smell of machine oil. Narrow band of grimy windows on the exterior wall. War contracts had required the tool and die plant previously located here to move to a bigger building outside the city, making this abandoned factory the perfect place for an interrogation. Even in daytime, there wouldn’t be much sunlight. Of course, it wasn’t daytime—it never was.
“Tell us again,” the Russian asked. Face like a shovel blade, flat and hard. Broad nose, square chin, angular cheekbones, creased forehead. Black hair razed short, scalp visible. He was dressed decently—light gray summer weave suit, white dress shirt, and blue and white tie with diagonal stripes—but he was uncomfortable, tugging his cuffs, rolling his shoulders.
New to this? I wondered. Or maybe just the clothes were new. Maybe the N.K.V.D. had ordered its American agents to dress better. To try to fit in.
“Himmel asked me to meet him on F Street,” I said. “Outside the Automat at seven-thirty.” The third time I’d given this answer, but I said it plainly and clearly. No sigh, no protest, no impatience—I knew better. Those tired tricks didn’t play with the Soviet secret police. When it came to interrogations, the commies were all business, even if they were operating in a foreign land.
“Why?”
“He wanted to know what my C.O. had made of the documents I’d copied.” Slightly different phrasing this time.
“Made of?”
“Sorry. What Commander Paslett thought the documents were. What they meant.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I didn’t know because I hadn’t briefed the commander yet.”
“Did you tell Himmel this on F Street?”
A new question. The two times before, he’d asked where we’d gone after meeting outside the Automat.
“No,” I answered. “We were sitting on the bench beside the statue of General Hancock, at Seventh and Pennsylvania.”
“How did you get there?”
“We walked.”
“The streets, please.”
So I told him, again. Every corner, every turn, every street name. I’d lived in Washington, D.C., for more than three years—I didn’t need a map to tell someone the most direct route from the Automat to that statue.
For the first time, his partner said something. Loudly, swiftly, in Russian. He was thin and pasty, with a beak of a nose and a jutting Adam’s apple. He also looked uncomfortable in his suit. Shovel-face looked away from me as he replied. They knew I didn’t understand their language, they could have been swapping lines from Eugene Onegin for all I knew.
“Why did you go there?” Shovel-face asked me.
“To the statue? It’s a good place to talk without being overheard.”
“Did you pick this place?”
“Yes.”
“What else did you speak about?”
“The F.B.I.”
“Explain.”
“Himmel wanted to know more about how they’d questioned me when they’d picked me up.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That the Bureau knew he was operating a spy ring out of his clipping service. That the agents knew I was working as the courier. And that the Bureau didn’t believe I was who I said I was.”
My syntax tripped up the quiet Russian, but Shovel-face followed me. “The F.B.I. did not believe your cover story,” he said.
“Right.”
“What did Himmel say after you told him this?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“He just thanked me and left.”
“What time was this?”
“A little past eight o’clock.”
“How did he leave?”
“He walked south on Seventh Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“Did he tell you where he was going?”
“No. And I didn’t ask.”
“Where did you go?”
“I went home.” Just like I told you already.
More rapid-fire Russian from the quiet one. Shovel-face furrowed his brow in impatience, raised his hand to cut him off. “Da, da”—I caught. At least I understood that. Yes, yes. Which meant the quiet one was reminding his partner to tell me to—
“Keep reading the newspaper, Lieutenant Voigt,” Shovel-face said. He meant the classifieds in the Evening Star, the Lost and Found section. Lost: woman’s silver ring set with red gemstone, band engraved R.L. to E.B., reward offered, call Brentwood 3816 was my summons to this industrial building in Southwest Washington.
“I will,” I answered.
He ticked his head at the door. Russian for So long, see you tomorrow, I thought. I got up, strode to the rear, and wrenched open the heavy steel door. Pushed it shut and walked quickly out of the alley.
My story was good, it was tight, a close weave of facts and lies. The man in question, whom I’d known as Henry Himmel, had met me outside the Automat self-serve diner on the night of May 9, 1945—the day after the Germans surrendered. We’d talked about the work I’d done for him, but
not in the way I’d just told my N.K.V.D. interrogators. And we hadn’t done our talking on the park bench. Himmel and I had taken a taxi to the Jefferson Memorial, my idea. The memorial was closed for renovations, it had been secluded, quiet, absent passersby, that is, witnesses. I couldn’t tell the Russians any of this, of course—then they’d have all the more reason to believe I was the last person to see Himmel alive. The way this operation was set up, Shovel-face and his sidekick had to believe I was one hundred percent on their side, a Benedict Arnold, a traitor. And to sell my treachery to the Reds, I had to go it alone, I couldn’t give them any inkling I had no intention of actually helping them.
That’s why I wasn’t telling them the whole truth about what had happened at the Automat. The problem with my story was the kid, the eager-to-help teenager who’d been working in the Automat kitchen that night. He had let us in, I’d sworn him to secrecy after he saw the Office of Naval Intelligence identification card. The kid didn’t know why I was there, but he’d gotten a good, long look at me and Filbert Donniker, the communications technician I’d brought with me. He’d seen us set up the portable listening rig, he’d watched me put the headset on and listen to Himmel’s conversation with the scientist from New Mexico. I should’ve sent the kid on an errand, should’ve pushed him out the door, but that was easy to see now. In the Automat, I’d needed to get the rig up and running, needed to get Filbert out on the floor, posing as a beat-down old man so he could get the microphone close to Himmel and the scientist. Letting the kid hang around—well, I’d had no choice.
Had the Russians found him? My gut said no. If they had, I wouldn’t be sitting on a paint-splattered chair in an unused factory, calmly telling my tale to two N.K.V.D. agents. If they’d found the kid, I’d still be telling my story, only under much more stressful circumstances. One rumor was the N.K.V.D. liked to start with an ice pick. Probably a legend, wafting out of Mexico because of the way they did Trotsky, but I sure didn’t want to find out.
Maybe my story wasn’t so good, wasn’t so tight, after all. Not unless I found the kid before the Russians did.
CHAPTER 2
WHAT HAPPENED WAS, I GOT ASSIGNED TO WORK UNDERCOVER. I WAS detailed to B-7 in the Office of Naval Intelligence—the Sabotage, Espionage, and Countersubversion section. In late April 1945, a fellow officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Logan Skerrill, was murdered in an alley close to the Washington Navy Yard, and my C.O., Commander Burton Paslett, wrested the case from the Metropolitan Police Department and gave it to me and my partner Terrance Daley. Our investigation led us to H & H Clipping Service, owned and managed by Henry Himmel. Turned out Himmel was a pseudonym for a Russian who ran a spy ring out of the business. Paslett had given me a cover, Ted Barston, a dishonorably discharged shipfitter. The real Ted Barston was a doper who’d died of an overdose in the brig. He’d had no wife, no family, no people to claim his meager personal effects. The O.N.I. had sealed the records of his death, in effect keeping him alive to use as an alias. Posing as Barston, I’d gotten a job as a deliveryman at H & H. By getting in tight with the receptionist, I learned that Logan Skerrill had been hauling his ashes with the accounts manager, Nadine Silva. She was Red to her marrow—so was Skerrill. The good lieutenant had compromised the O.N.I. but good, giving Himmel details of every case he’d worked on, including a mission to deliver an escaped German physicist to a hush-hush weapons project in New Mexico.
The good news, or so it had appeared, was that Himmel began using me as a courier. During my regular deliveries—the clipping service was for real and had dozens of legitimate clients—I sometimes received sealed envelopes I was supposed to discreetly deliver to Himmel. I did, but not before copying the contents for Paslett. Within a few days, I’d intercepted a schematic from the National Bureau of Standards and a coded postcard about the New Mexico project. Before I could get anything more, two agents from the F.B.I. swept me off the street and interrogated me, just as I’d told the N.K.V.D. agents. The Bureau boys didn’t know I was actually a naval intelligence officer. To protect my cover, I didn’t enlighten them, even after they worked me over—they wanted “Ted Barston” to tell all about the espionage running through the clipping service. Paslett sure as hell hadn’t told J. Edgar we were investigating the spy ring, so how had the Bureau stumbled upon it?
Took me a bit, but I discovered that Skerrill had gone to the Bureau, confessed to being a spy, and volunteered to be an F.B.I. source. This dangerous game had signed his death warrant—once Himmel found out the fair-haired lieutenant was two-timing him, he’d ordered a hit. A gun I obtained from the apartment of another clipping service employee, a loyal commie named Philip Greene, matched a bullet taken from Skerrill’s body. Greene was in jail right now, no bail, but he wasn’t awaiting trial for murdering Skerrill; J. Edgar had pulled strings to transfer Greene to federal custody on espionage charges.
Which Himmel had wanted to happen all along. The morning after my confab with Himmel at the Jefferson Memorial, Commander Paslett informed me that what I’d brought in—the schematic, the coded postcard—was malarkey, all of it useless, feints to throw O.N.I. and the Bureau off the trail. Himmel had made me the moment I walked into the clipping service, he’d played all of us. While we were slathering over the decoys and the Bureau was following me, Himmel was setting up receipt of the real McCoy: a diagram from the New Mexico weapons project. That’s why he’d gone to the Automat, to meet a scientist who’d come all the way from New Mexico to deliver a sealed envelope and these instructions, which he had had Himmel memorize: To diffuse the Uranium-235, use uranium hexafluoride and a metal filter with submicroscopic perforations, do not use a mass spectrometer. I picked this up thanks to Filbert Donniker, the O.N.I.’s radio and electrical expert. His portable listening rig, the one we had set up in the Automat’s kitchen, allowed me to eavesdrop. Filbert wore a microphone disguised to look like a pen jutting from his shirt pocket. It had good range, so he didn’t have to sit close to Himmel and his contact. Only I could hear their conversation through the headset and, just like Himmel, I memorized the instructions about the uranium. It was all Greek to me, but Paslett and I did know this much: Army was building some kind of bomb down there in the desert. After the scientist left and Filbert returned to the Navy Building, I confronted Himmel outside the Automat and persuaded him to go with me to the Jefferson Memorial.
Now Himmel was missing and the N.K.V.D. wanted to find him in the worst way. The Russians knew he’d received the diagram, they knew the egghead from New Mexico had told Himmel something awfully important about that bomb project. And they knew I was involved, they just weren’t sure how. If I wanted to keep the Russians from getting the information they needed to build their own bomb, I had to convince them I was telling the truth about that night, had to keep them from learning where Himmel and I had gone for real. I also needed to track down the scientist who’d turned over the diagram before he passed on another copy to the Russians.
First things first, I told myself as I walked away from the factory. Selling my lie to the N.K.V.D. required finding that kid from the Automat. The Russians weren’t just grilling me, they were methodically retracing every step Himmel had made on the night of May 9. Pretty soon it was going to occur to them they should show my photograph to Automat employees. If the kid still worked there, he’d have a pretty hard time acting like he’d never seen me before. Even if he tried not to, he’d flash a tell. A gulp, a blink, a stutter, something. (Takes a lot of practice to become an effortless liar.) If the kid—hell, I’d never even asked his name—still worked at the Automat, and if Shovel-face and his partner came around, he was in danger. I needed to check on him, figure out a way to keep his existence a secret from the Russians, do whatever it took to keep him safe. Tomorrow, I told myself, I’ll find him tomorrow …
RATTLED BY THE RUSSIANS, I WENT INTO THE FIRST TAVERN I SAW ON Fourth Street. Corner one-story brick heap, rusty Pabst sign swinging from a truss. Men shoulder-to-shoulder at a long bar, shot glasses and bee
r bottles lined up like sentinels. Cloud of blue smoke, buzz of idle chatter, barkeep wringing out a towel—same scene you’d find in a hundred and one other joints. I claimed an empty stool at the bar’s end, facing the door. The barkeep padded over, looked me up and down. I circled my finger in the direction of the nearest beer bottle and shot glass, he nodded. Returning with a Natty Bo and the rye, he swept up my dollar with a meaty fist. Silent transactions, my favorite.
I sipped the whiskey, took a long draw of cold beer, lit a Lucky. Inhaled like a pearl diver about to go under—the Russians, damn them, hadn’t smoked during my interrogation, which meant I hadn’t been able to light up either. Put me about four cigarettes behind for the day, I figured. Told myself I’d pay down that debt, go one more round, then get some chow—I’d been too nervous to eat before my “appointment” at that abandoned factory. It was my duty to keep the Russians at bay, to protect our New Mexico weapons project, whatever it was, but going in by myself, without backup, had shaken me hard. What if Shovel-face had decided he didn’t like my answers, what if he had orders to “take care of” that troublesome naval intelligence officer who kept turning up like a bad penny?
Too many what-ifs, not enough whiskey. I finished my shot, squinted through my cigarette smoke, surveyed the scene. Rickety tables filled the floor between the bar and the plaster wall. His and her washrooms, a pay phone, rear exit. No booths, no jukebox, no dance floor—this tavern wasn’t laid out for romance or atmosphere.
Which is why the couple at a table along the far wall caught my eye. Young, smartly dressed, attractive. Her: ginger-brown hair, bangs cut high and straight, tight curls tucked behind her ears. Apple cheeks, demure nose, full lips. Slender, her shapely legs crossed under a belted maroon dress with white trim and sharp collars. First thought: she’s the girl the girl next door confides in. Him: blond, tan, square-jawed, narrow-set eyes. Athletic build, biceps filling out the short sleeves of his blue and white sport shirt. Sharp-creased chinos, polished two-tone wingtips. First thought: runner-up high school tennis champ. Two fish out of water, why were they bending elbows in a watering hole for working stiffs?
Rip the Angels from Heaven Page 1