Face of the Enemy

by Beverle Graves Myers

  McKenna ran a hand over his face, then peered into the dark corners of the third gallery as if the ghost he sought might take shape in the blackness. Show yourself, you bastard, so I can get this fucking case wrapped up. He realized he was straining his ears, but hearing only his own ragged breath. He patted his pocket, looking for a cigarette, then hesitated. There was another sound. A door had closed softly. Footsteps were coming up the staircase. Slow, dragging.

  McKenna reached under his jacket, into his shoulder holster.

  A gray fedora appeared at the top of the stairs. And then, in the dim light, a pair of massive shoulders.

  “Who are ya?” McKenna demanded, tense fingers curled around the butt of his pistol, other hand holding his jacket out of the way. “Whaddya want?”

  The hat brim tipped back. Patsy Dolan’s wide face broke into a grin. “It’s me, Lute. Didn’t scare ya, did I?”

  McKenna dropped both hands. Took a deep breath. “I thought I told ya to stay with the car.”

  “Yeah, Lute.” Dolan shuffled his feet uneasily. “It’s just that I found somethin’ I thought you’d want to know about. Somethin’ I was supposed to give ya.”

  “What are you talking about?” McKenna made his voice deliberately patient.

  “This.” Dolan fished in his overcoat pocket and brought out a folded pink square. He handed it to McKenna and moved to hit the light switch. “What have you been doing up here in the dark, anyhow?”

  McKenna held the printed memo sheet at arm’s length. In the sudden glare, he had to close one eye and tilt his head to make sense of Doris’ hurried scrawl. “When did you get this?” he barked.

  “That’s the thing. Doris must’ve handed it to me on Friday—to give to you.” The big shoulders hunched apologetically. “What with being so busy and pulling double duty for the guys who’ve joined up…well, it just slipped my mind. Sorry, Lute.”

  McKenna had stopped listening. He was looking at a crucial fact about his ghost. The pay phone Detective Perroni had asked the telephone company to run down? It was located smack dab in the middle of the Columbia University campus.

  Chapter Eighty-three

  Howie tossed in the last shovelful of coal, damping down the red-orange glare of the fire. He clanged the furnace door shut, dropped the shovel into the scuttle and suddenly realized he was smiling. He wouldn’t admit it to anyone, especially not to Ma, but he was happy to be home, sleeping in his own bed without fear of being robbed—or worse. And eating Ma’s cooking. She’d made waffles for breakfast, with stewed apples and heavy cream. She’d even let him drink a cup of coffee with the boarders at the dining room table.

  They’d been nice, well, most of them, and made a big deal of his adventures. He’d come away from the table feeling a little glow, not red-hot like the fire in the furnace, but a good warm feeling in his heart. Or somewhere.

  He rubbed his hands on his dungarees to get rid of coal dust, coughed, and turned around.

  And jumped.

  A man stood in the shadows. A tall man in a tan raincoat with blond hair that didn’t bunch up as much as it used to.

  “Papa!”

  Papa put a finger to his lips, took Howie by the arm and jerked him over to an old bench by the coal bin. “Hush. Do not let your mother know I am here. She would not like it, but I must speak to you, my boy, my son.” His blue eyes were busy, staring Howie up and down, as if he were taking inventory of four years’ worth of growth.

  Howie drew away, his heart racing like a fire truck. This man—so familiar, so strange—Howie didn’t know what to say to him.

  Papa continued, bending toward him. “I don’t have long, son, so I must speak quickly. You are a young man, now. Ach! So big. So strong. No more the tiny boy I push on the swings.”

  “Papa, I—” Howie could feel himself shrinking even further back. What was Papa doing here? Papa was the enemy.

  “Hush! Your mother mustn’t hear. Women do not understand. You must come with me. We—my comrades and I—have a job for you.”

  Howie tried to pull away. The cellar air was dank and close, gritty with coal dust. It filled his throat.

  “Don’t say no. It must be. Important work is waiting. Crucial work.”

  Howie felt like he was going to be sick. “Do you think I would work for Hitler?” He choked it out.

  Papa narrowed his eyes. His blond lashes were almost invisible. He looked dangerous. He looked, Howie realized with a sinking heart, like a real Nazi. The boy took a deep breath, but Papa wouldn’t let him speak.

  “All that propaganda you get in your schools? In your newspapers? In the films?” He shook his head furiously. “All lies! Think back to what you were taught at Camp Siegfried. Ours is the true cause.”

  The true cause? Howie took another breath. It hurt in his chest, but suddenly he knew what he had to do. It was a lot more important than lying his way into the Army. And much, much riskier. But he would do it. Okay. Now. He widened his eyes and tilted his head, as if he were waiting to be instructed. “I remember some things. Not all.”

  Papa seemed to relax. He smiled, and Howie’s heart tore. He remembered that smile.

  “How to explain when time is so short?” Papa’s tones were quiet, but vehement. He glowed with zeal. “The Aryan people were lost for many years, and der Fuhrer helped us to find ourselves. He awakened our strength. He renewed our faith in der Vaterland. Now, we are powerful! And we have a place for you. So young! So strong! So agile! You will be part of der Fuhrer’s great plan.”

  Howie forced his face to remain interested. Papa took that as assent.

  “Such a fine boy. Just look at you. You will be such a help.” Papa seemed awfully proud of him. Despite his resolve, something in Howie’s spirit felt as if it were rising to meet his father’s pride. As if—

  Bang! At the top of the stairs, the kitchen door hit the back wall. Howie’s spirit fell with thud.

  “What you doing, liebchen?” Ma called down. “Does it take so long to stoke the furnace?”

  Papa’s hand was over his mouth. His expression warned Howie not to give him away. Then he dropped his hand.

  “Just cleaning up, Ma.” Howie’s voice cracked. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Since when you clean up without I tell you?” But she closed the door.

  Howie stared at his father. He stared and stared. This was Ernst Schroeder, all right. But it wasn’t his father. All these years his father had been missing. No papa at his baseball games. No papa at the school concerts to hear him play trombone. No papa to help him with algebra. No papa to…The face might be the same. The sound of the voice. The hunch of the shoulders. The smile, even. But this man was a stranger to him. To bug out on him—and Ma! And for what? For an evil idea. For der Fuhrer!

  A memory flashed through his mind: Papa at Camp Siggy in his uniform, goose-stepping with the other fathers and the bigger boys. They had been preparing for war—with Howie’s country!

  He should have known. He should have known, then!

  Papa read his face, misunderstanding his intensity. “It is in your blood as it is in mine. I am doing my duty as every loyal German should. And so must you.”

  Duty? What was duty? It was Ma who had done her duty. Kept the house going. Kept him in clothes and comic books. Fed him so well he was the tallest boy in the class. Through the grate in the furnace door he could see the warm red glow of the fire. The fire was the heart of the house. Ma was like that—the heart of the house. He could not let her know Papa was here. It would kill her.

  Howie knew he had to convince Papa that he was leaning his way, so he nodded, lips tight to hide their quivering. “I will have to think it over.” He could hear how oddly formal his words were. He looked this stranger in the eye. Man to man. “If I go with you…there are things I have to do…first.”

&n
bsp; Ernst nodded slowly. “I come back tomorrow. No—” He looked past Howie, thinking. “Must be later. Tomorrow we have serious business Who knows—may take several days. I will come on Saturday…jah?” He clapped both hands on Howie’s shoulders.

  The boy answered with a nod.

  “Gut, gut.” More thinking. “When do the women here eat their supper?”

  “Six.”

  “Do you and your mother eat with them?”

  What was Papa getting at? “Ma always does. Sometimes I eat in the kitchen while I work on my algebra or something.”

  “Perfect. You see, fortune smiles on the brave. Saturday evening, you be on the kitchen porch at a quarter past six. You will see my cigarette glow over by Mr. Lampton’s shed. That will be your sign.” Papa nodded emphatically. “We have great work to do—you and me. I am counting on you, jah? You will be here? Ready to go, mein Sohn?”

  “Howie?” The kitchen door opened again. Footsteps clattered down the stairs.

  Too quick and sharp to be Ma.

  Must be one of the boarders.

  “We were worried about you,” the voice said. Before he knew it, that nice Miss Furnish had entered the furnace room.

  And Papa had vanished into the shadows just outside the cellar door.

  Chapter Eighty-four

  Alone in an interview room a few hours after he’d read Doris’ memo, McKenna opened an eight-by-ten manila envelope and removed four photos. Spreading them in a neat row on the scarred tabletop, face up, he reached for the coffee Dolan had handed him as he’d left the homicide office. He was convinced that one of the individuals pictured had hired Hermann Rupp to picket Masako Fumi Oakley’s show—not for patriotism’s sake, but on some intensely personal matter. And that matter had ended with Shelton’s corpse propped up artistically beneath the blood-streaked canvas.

  McKenna blew on his mug and took one scalding sip. Damn, how did Dolan get coffee so hot? Blowtorch? Too bad Doris didn’t work weekends.

  As he fanned his open mouth with the envelope, the door to the interview room clicked open. Brenner swung in, one hand grasping the door frame. “O’Connell has Rupp downstairs. You ready for him?”

  Using his fingertips, McKenna pushed the coffee mug to one side. “Yeah. Send ‘em up.” Then he took a last look at his photo lineup. Unlike a lot of guys on the force, he’d never been a betting man. Never backed a team in the football pools. Never played the ponies. But now, based on little more than a sense of unease creeping up the back of his neck, he’d be willing to bet a week’s pay on the dark horse—photo number four.

  He’d just turned that last eight-by-ten face down when the door opened again, and O’Connell escorted Herman Rupp to the opposite side of the table. McKenna half rose, made his tone formal. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Rupp. Have a seat.”

  A reek of rancid sweat accompanied the squat, muscular man. His every movement—jerking the seat out, dropping his lard ass onto it, depositing his elbows on the table with a clunk—screamed his reluctance to enter the cops’ domain.

  McKenna sighed. The man who could turn out to be his star witness looked anything but cooperative. To grease the union organizer’s obviously rough skids, McKenna slapped on some flattering phrases regarding a citizen’s duty and official appreciation. No surprise—Herman Rupp wasn’t buying it. His thick lips remained set in something between a scowl and a sneer.

  “We could find you some coffee,” McKenna finally offered, ready to send the waiting O’Connell after a mug of Dolan’s fire brew.

  “Just get on with it, will ya?” Rupp fired back, sending uneasy glances over his shoulders.

  Rupp must feel like a man with a big red target on his back, McKenna thought. As if some of the mob boys might materialize out of the walls to catch him ratting! It didn’t matter that he would be fingering somebody from uptown, somebody who had probably never set foot on their Bowery turf. Ratting was ratting.

  McKenna lowered his gaze to the four pale rectangles that punctuated the dark surface between them. While Rupp squirmed in discomfort, a familiar feeling swelled under McKenna’s ribs, the sense of a case finally knitting together. The triumphant sense of impending justice.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re going to take a squint at four photos, one by one. Study each one carefully. Take your time. Then tell me whether it could be the person who hired you for the art gallery job.”

  McKenna flipped the first rectangle: a smiling Lawrence Smoot posed in three-quarter view, displaying his movie-star profile.

  Rupp’s expression went blank, then he pushed his stubbled jaw forward. “What kinda game is this? It was a woman that hired me—I told ya.”

  “You never heard of a guy rigging himself out like a woman? Word is, up in Harlem, they even have their own coming-out soirees, just like a debutante ball at the Waldorf.”

  “Hell, yeah—fairies. I seen ‘em around. They’re thick as fleas up on Forty-second Street.” Rupp chewed at his lower lip. “But, Christ on a bike, doncha think I can tell the difference between some pansy boy and a real dame?”

  “I need you to keep an open mind. Just picture the man in this photo dolled up like the woman who hired you.” To give him time, McKenna sat back and laced his fingers over his belt. He traded a carefully veiled glance with O’Connell and Brenner down at the other end of the table.

  Rupp stared at Smoot’s photo for a good thirty seconds, then shook his head. “Nah, boss. No way.”

  “All right.” McKenna leaned forward and turned over the second photo.

  “Okay, this is more like it.” Rupp’s admiring gaze swept a head shot of Tiffy De Forest lifted from a Town & Country spread. Her lips were parted in a sexy smile, and blonde curls dusted her shoulders. “But…nah. My dame was older and not as jazzy.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I know a dame what’s past it when I see one.”

  McKenna flipped the third photo. Desmond Cox, full face, hair lifted by the wind blowing down Fifty-seventh. Snapped by a police photographer waiting across from the gallery just the other day.

  Rupp heaved a sigh “Not another fairy?”

  “Same deal.” McKenna’s stare remained implacable. “Imagine this face in a blonde wig, with a black veil coming down to the bridge of the nose.”

  Rupp burped, emitting a whiff of stale garlic. Then, focusing his gaze reluctantly, he said, “Nah. That dame was no queer.”

  McKenna lifted a corner of the last photo. This one had taken some doing. Dolan’d had to go all the way uptown to Columbia’s library for a recent annual, and then the photo lab in Centre Street’s basement had blown the postage stamp photo up to a slightly fuzzy eight-by-ten glossy. On a deep inhalation, McKenna turned the photo right side up.

  Rupp narrowed his eyes and canted forward. When his chin tilted back up, his sullen expression had changed to a grin. “That’s her—the snooty bitch.”

  McKenna released his breath. The triumphant feeling blossomed in his chest.

  “So, can I go now?” Hermann Rupp scraped his chair back.

  “Not just yet.” McKenna stood, gathering the photos into a pile. “Not until Detective O’Connell types up a statement for you to sign.”

  “Aw, come on. Give a guy a break…”

  Rupp went on, but McKenna wasn’t listening. He was already out the door, taking long strides toward homicide.

  He needed a car. And Brenner. She might be just a dame, but no way was he going to question Professor Lillian Bridges without some muscle on hand.

  Chapter Eighty-five

  “Do you think he believed her? Really?” Professor Oakley asked for the third time in as many minutes. “Is he really looking for the person Masako heard moving around the gallery?”

  Louise smoothed the pea-green cotton hospital blanket. Then she enclosed his hand
in hers. “Lieutenant McKenna seems like an intelligent man—honest, too—a very different sort than Agent Bagwell.”

  “So…McKenna must have believed her.” The professor inched up on the bolstered pillows. “How could anyone look into Masako’s eyes and not believe her?” He coughed, weakly, then squeezed Louise’s hand. “You believed her, didn’t you?”

  Louise hesitated before answering, knowing she should attempt to fix the professor’s mind on a quieter, safer topic. Pneumonia was a funny thing. After the crisis, the pulse, respiration, and temperature suddenly dropped to normal, leaving the body in a recuperating, but considerably weakened, state. If possible she should keep her patient from fretting about things over which he had no control. Just overnight, Professor Oakley had improved greatly, but he wasn’t out of the woods yet. Before Louise had left Louisville, she’d nursed a mother with six children through a pneumonia crisis. The woman didn’t trust the father, who “liked his pail of beer of an evening,” so she left the hospital against advice and died of a secondary infection. She literally worked herself to death taking care of those children.

  “Your silence speaks volumes.” Oakley’s gaze was bleak, worried. Only a hair less anxious than when Masako’s guard had officiously insisted on transporting her back to Ellis Island.

  “No. No. No.” Louise shook her head. “I know Masako didn’t kill Arthur Shelton. I’ve always known.” Despite everything, she added to herself. “I just don’t want you working yourself into a lather.”

  “Plato’s ball—er, balderdash! What I need is to get back home so I can work on getting my wife out of the FBI’s clutches.” The blankets stirred as the professor tried to sit up. “Everything is there—address book, writing paper—”

  Louise pushed him back and pinned him on his pillows. It was like subduing a kitten. “Do I have to call the ward nurse?” She gave the call button above the bed a pointed look. “If you need something from your apartment I’ll go get it, but you have to promise you’ll take a nap.”