Rip the Angels from Heaven

by David Krugler

  “You didn’t call her first?” He frowned. Donniker, too, was looking at me funny.

  “I was hoping the kid was there, sir. Maybe he was goldbricking, maybe he just forgot he had to work.”

  “What’d his mother say?”

  “That he left for work when he was supposed to.”

  The commander leaned forward to ash his cigarette, smoke drifting my way. “Who’d you tell her you were?”

  “William Brady of Horn and Hardart. Gave her a line about how there was theft at the F Street Automat, that her son had reported it and I was supposed to interview him before his shift that day.”

  “Christ almighty, Voigt! You’re about to finish a two-month spec, you want a two-year one? How’bout I bust you to ensign and put you on a water tender west of the Solomons?”

  I kept quiet and took it. Donniker did his best to study a corner of the ceiling as the commander dressed me down, ticking off all the mistakes I’d made in just one afternoon: improvising a cover, dragging a civilian—Kenny’s mother—into an intelligence case, starting an investigation without orders. When he paused to stub his Chesterfield, I said quietly:

  “They shot the kid, sir.”

  “What?”

  I described what had happened at the empty factory and how I’d broken in to save Kenny. Didn’t sugarcoat my failure, didn’t offer excuses. Telling the story, reliving the horror of staunching the boy’s wound and carrying him to the Harbor Patrol, made my mouth go dry, beyond dry—suddenly I was as parched as a dying man in a desert.

  Paslett brooded for a moment after I’d finished, poking a pencil eraser against his desk like a steam driver. Thunk, thunk.

  “Is the boy all right?” he finally asked.

  “Yessir, I called the hospital and pretended to be his father. The doctor said they’d stabilized his condition.”

  His glare was withering. “If you knew he was in danger, why didn’t you tell me back in May? We could’ve figured out a way to warn his family, get him a different job or something, get him outta the Automat!”

  “Sir, I don’t know, I just don’t know, it all happened so fast the night I was there with Donniker, we were so busy listening to what Himmel and his spy were saying and then I had to rush outta there to try and catch up with Himmel and I told Kenny not to tell anyone we’d been there and I thought, well, I guess I thought that was enough, I never guessed the Russians would come around looking for kitchen staff, I mean, how did they know we were there, but, but …”

  Paslett stood and walked to his window to give me a moment. Another officer might have angrily ordered me to get a hold of myself or even shaken me—not for the first time, I was grateful he wasn’t like most C.O.’s.

  “How’d you know where the Russians were taking the boy?” he asked after a long minute, his back still turned.

  I took a deep breath, steadied my voice. “When I was undercover at the clipping service, sir, I had to make a delivery to that factory. Seemed fishy, getting a delivery at an empty building. Figured if the Russians were using it as a drop, they might also use it other times.” I told myself that it wasn’t too much of a lie, told myself I’d tell Paslett about my meeting with the N.K.V.D. agents at a better time.

  “And what you heard was, they were asking the boy about Donniker?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Which means they’d already grilled the boy about you.”

  “M’sure they did, sir.”

  He looked at Donniker. “Did they come after you next?”

  “Nope. But Voigt, he showed up at my house after he saw what they did to the kid and told me I needed to clear out til this morning. So I did.”

  “Were you tailed? Did anyone unknown to you stop you to ask you questions, anything at all, like for directions or what time it was?”

  Donniker shook his head impatiently. “No, nothing like that.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  “With a pal, he does ham radio, known him for years.”

  “How about this morning? Did you see—”

  “Listen, nobody but nobody came after me,” Donniker interrupted. “I haven’t forgotten my training, you know.”

  If anyone else had cut off the commander like that, he’d have regretted it. But Donniker had been in uniform, years ago, before retiring and taking his civilian post as our radio and gadgets whiz. I didn’t know the first thing about his record, but judging from the commander’s respectful nod, Donniker had served admirably.

  “Did you go back to your house before you came in this morning?”

  “Nope.”

  “We’ll need to check to see if it’s been tossed.”

  Donniker turned to glare at me. “Don’t forget what I told you, Voigt. If those Reds busted up my house, you’re going to pay for the damage down to the last penny.”

  “You might need to stay in a safe house a few nights, Donniker, til we’re sure the Russians aren’t after you too.”

  “Oh, for chrissake! Goddammit, Voigt, what have you gotten me into?”

  Paslett gave me a hard look. He had this face, you see it on a lot of career Navy men, looks carved from flint, a sculptor’s rendering of a man who gives orders like the rest of us take breaths. Gray eyes boring down, pincer eyebrows, vise lips prying apart to ask:

  “S’a damn good question, Lieutenant: What the hell have you gotten us into?”

  CHAPTER 13

  PASLETT TOLD DONNIKER HE COULD RETURN TO HIS WORKSHOP. THE parting look I got from the old man told me I’d have to buy him a lot of scotch before he forgave me for disrupting his life. But I hadn’t overreacted, I knew that in my bones, not after what I’d seen Shovel-face and his partner do to Kenny Newhurst.

  The commander walked over to his cabinet. He ran his forefinger along the top, as if an omen might come off like wet varnish.

  “What did you do after leaving Donniker’s house?” he asked.

  I told him, omitting nothing. After I finished, he returned to his desk chair and tilted back, the spring creaking.

  Finally he spoke. “The Russians think you killed Himmel.”

  “Yessir.” And left it at that.

  “He’s still missing, you know.”

  I nodded slowly, as if that was news to me, waiting for him to continue.

  “While you were on the nutter line, I had Daley try to find him.” Daley—Lieutenant (j.g.) Terrance Daley—had worked with me on the Himmel case, but only I had gone undercover.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” he repeated.

  “What about the front, sir, the clipping service?”

  “The Bureau shut it down. At some point, the Russians sent in a team to clear everything out.”

  “The Bureau didn’t have it locked up?”

  “A’course. But they had cops watching the place at night. Russians doped a flatfoot’s coffee—he always took his break at the same diner—and went in while he snored away in his prowl car.”

  “Has the Bureau given anything up?”

  He gave me a cynical look. What d’you think?

  “Daley was able to put this together,” he said. He riffled through a stack of folders on his desk and slid one over. I took out a packet of stapled documents with the subject lineIDENTITY OF HENRY HIMMEL (FOREIGN NATIONAL, RUSSIAN). Daley had worn out some shoe leather. Visits to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the State Department, the Office of Strategic Services; he’d even gone to the municipal government building to pull the business license for the clipping service.

  Himmel (I learned) had emigrated to the States from Pavlograd, a city somewhere in Ukraine. Russian passport, German ancestry. Volkdeutsch—a good cover. He wouldn’t even have to speak German well; some of those German families had been in Ukraine or Russia for generations. Terrance had obtained a photostat of Himmel’s Certificate of Residency, dated August 14, 1934: Personal description of holder as of date of entry: Age 37 years; sex Male; color White; complexion Dark; color of eyes Brown; color of hair
Brown; height 5 feet 7 inches; weight 140 pounds; visible distinctive marks none. Himmel had looked impassively into the camera for his photograph. Cool eyes, tight lips. That same inscrutable expression he’d had the last time I saw him, on the night of the Automat meeting, only now on the younger man in the photograph, no gray in his hair. Not too many Russians, whatever their ethnicity, could have obtained legal entry to the States in the early ’30s; the immigration restrictions passed a decade earlier had kept the Russian quota low. I wondered if the N.K.V.D. had greased the wheels for Himmel; the Russians were sure to have a friend or two at Immigration.

  Upon arrival, Himmel had settled in New York, where he’d worked at the vaguely named German-American Information Service. Too vague—the outfit screamed front. Probably an offshoot of the Bund, the Nazis’ premier organization of American-dwelling Hitler lovers and Master Race hopefuls. “Didn’t the Bureau raid them in ’38, ’39?” Terrance had scribbled in the margin. Good catch, partner, I thought. Hoover’s boys had swept up the leadership of the German-American Information Service from its New York office right after the Germans pounded into Poland. But Himmel hadn’t been there, otherwise the immigration authorities would have deported him. Which meant Himmel had moved on; he’d cut ties before the raid. An easy guess as to why he’d been mixed up with a Nazi fan club in the first place: the Russians wanted to know everything they could about American fascists and their ties to the Nazis.

  There the trail went cold, until Himmel surfaced in D.C. with sufficient capital to open his clipping service. Terrance had appended a list of subscribers to the service and he’d come up with short biographies of all the employees. The report closed with In re: espionage activities of H & H, see report Lt. (j.g.) Voigt, File B-7 5730A. This was the official designation for Paslett’s Do Not File records, the documents he didn’t want indexed. Any intelligence agency, the Bureau included, could make an official request for our records, using the Central Files index, so everything we wanted to keep under wraps carried the designation 5730A.

  “No wonder the Russians want to find Himmel, sir—eleven years in the States, he knows a thing or two,” I said as I handed the report back.

  “I was beginning to think the N.K.V.D. had done him in, but with them coming hard after you and Donniker, that doesn’t add up.”

  “Nosir.” I lit up.

  “But that might be his fear right now,” Paslett continued.

  “That the N.K.V.D. wants to kill him?”

  A nod. “S’happening to a lot of ’em, especially the ones getting long in the tooth, like Himmel.”

  I thought for a moment. “So he makes the meet at the Automat, he gets the package from their spy, then he takes a powder. Because he knows he’ll be killed as soon as he turns over the package. Which means he’s holding it as insurance.”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it? Except—?” Wanting me to finish the sentence.

  “But what guarantee does he have they won’t kill him once he turns over the package?”

  “Right. Himmel’s not stupid, he knows they’ll break any promise they make.”

  “Sell it to the highest bidder, then?”

  “And who would that be, Voigt?”

  “Well, us, sir.”

  Trace of a smile. “But that puts Himmel back where he started, doesn’t it?”

  “He can’t trust us to keep our promises either.”

  “Bingo.”

  “So what d’you think happened, sir?”

  “Someone killed Himmel for the package. And the Russians think it was you.”

  “Sir!?”

  “So we gotta find out who it was for real.”

  “Who killed Himmel, you mean.”

  The commander shot me an impatient look—who else could he mean?

  “D’you think it could have been the spy, sir?”

  “But why deliver the package at all if he was just going to kill Himmel?”

  “To bring him out, sir. The contact hands over the goods, doubles back on Himmel, kills him and takes back the delivery.”

  “Awful risky. Why stick his neck out like that?”

  “Maybe he wants out, sir. If he kills Himmel and disappears, he could be trying to convince the Russians someone took them both out.”

  Paslett shook his head. “Too complicated.” He sighed, drummed his fingers along his desk. “After you gave me your report about that night, I called Groves and told him one’a my men had spotted someone from his project.”

  I tried to hide my surprise—and excitement. “Groves” as in Major General Leslie Groves, an old pal of Paslett’s now heading up the hush-hush weapons project in New Mexico. The man whom Himmel had received the package from had come from New Mexico. We knew Himmel’s clipping service had been the conduit between Russian spies down in the desert and the N.K.V.D., but we didn’t as yet know what the weapons project was or how much the Russians had gotten on it. Identifying the man I’d seen with Himmel at the Automat was the first step to answering these questions.

  “What’d he say, sir?”

  “He asked for your report, which I sent.”

  “You think he’s identified the man I saw, sir?”

  “If he has, he hasn’t told me. And I’m not holding my breath he will.”

  “Serious breach like that and he wants to handle it himself?”

  “Maybe he already has.”

  “Say he has, sir. That doesn’t bring back what Himmel has. Our man from New Mexico, he could lie or bluff about what he handed over.”

  Paslett exhaled frustration. “I know that, Groves knows that. But whatever leak he has, he wants to plug it himself. He’s already got O.S.S. telling him he needs their help on security.”

  “What’s their angle?”

  “They’ve warned him there’s people in his project—civilians—who are cozy with the Russians.”

  “You think O.S.S. is on to the same man we are, sir?”

  “Could be, but I doubt it. They’re just trying to keep Truman from axing them by starting new operations with anyone who will say yes. You should see the crap they send me.”

  If Groves was saying no to the O.S.S., he likely would rebuff us as well. So how to convince the general to say yes? I thought of a news article I’d read years ago about a Swiss mountain climber whose rope broke during a storm. He fell into a crevasse and broke his leg. Unable to climb out, and knowing his fellow climbers couldn’t find him in the swirling snow, he realized his only hope of survival was to burrow deeper into the snow, to claw, scrape, and worm his way through the pitch-black, icy depth in hopes of finding another way out. His every instinct resisted going headfirst into that hole, yet somehow he forced himself to blindly traverse the darkness, to go deeper until the crevasse turned and led him out.

  I fixed the commander with a steady gaze. “Sir, I need to let the N.K.V.D. pick me up.”

  “That a joke?”

  “For real, sir. We can’t let it look obvious, they gotta think they’re nabbing me, but once they have me, we can mislead them.”

  “How?”

  “By letting them think we know where Himmel is. What I’ll do is, I’ll let ’em think I can’t hack it anymore, that I’ve cracked and wanna give up Himmel on my own to get ’em off my back. Or I could play greedy, offer to sell his whereabouts.”

  “Why would we want to do this?” he said, frowning.

  “We both gotta find Himmel, sir, the Russians and us. If I can find out what they know while feeding them misinformation, we can scoop up Himmel and his package before they know we were stringing them along.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t like it. What this sounds like is, you wanna barnstorm back into action after your spec. The Russians are gonna be looking for a plant, they’ll work you over something fierce to see if you’re faking it. Even if you pull that off, we still gotta give them something on Himmel—and we got diddley-squat on what happened to him.”

  “What if we shift the blame onto our man from New Mexico, s
ir?”

  He said nothing but gestured for me to continue.

  “I convince the Reds that Himmel’s contact killed him, killed Himmel, and took the package back, that he arranged the meeting at the Automat to bring Himmel out—just like we were guessing a little bit ago. I pitch that story, sir, I sell it but good. If the Russians think Himmel’s dead, they’re gonna need to find a way to reach their man in New Mexico. If you can convince General Groves to bring me down, I can sell myself to the Russians as their contact.”

  Paslett looked doubtful. “If you go to New Mexico and identify the Red spy for Groves to arrest, the Russians are gonna know you pulled a fast one.”

  “Not if I bring back misinformation, sir. I’ll convince the Russians I made contact with the spy and forced him to give me the package he was supposed to deliver to Himmel before I identified him for Groves. We’ll give the Reds fool’s gold. By the time they figure out they’ve been had, it’ll be too late for them to do anything about it, because their spy will be locked up tight. But you’ve gotta get General Groves to let me come to New Mexico.”

  Paslett bit his lower lip, thinking hard, but I caught the gleam in his eyes. Before he could answer, though, there was a bracing rap on his door.

  “Who is it?” he called out.

  “Agent Slater, F.B.I.”

  CHAPTER 14

  IHAD TO GIVE IT TO HOOVER, HIS BOYS HAD AN IMPECCABLY BAD SENSE of timing. Paslett said to me, “Let’s see what he wants, then I’ll tell you if I’m gonna let you cozy up to the Russians.” Translation: Not a word about this to the G-man.

  “Yessir,” I said.

  “Come in,” Paslett shouted as I looked over my shoulder.

  If you spotted Special Agent Clayton Slater on the street, you wouldn’t give him a second glance. Middle-aged, slight build, average height, light brown hair, not close to handsome but far from ugly, too, sporting the kind of face that floats unnoticed through a crowd. His nose wasn’t bulbous, broad, hooked, or long; it was just a nose. His lips weren’t thin or full; they were just there. Search for words to describe him, and average would top that short list. Slater was standard issue G-man, the Model A of bureaucrats, available in two suit colors, gray or blue. That day he wore blue with an ivory shirt and a maroon patterned tie.