A Pure Double Cross

by John Knoerle

  “I don’t wanna hear it,” said Jimmy.

  “But the people, they don’t come!”

  “Not my problem.”

  “But you said…”

  “You signed the paper.”

  The man shook his head, fuming. “If my brothers were here they…”

  “Shut up, Dimitri, your brothers aren’t here. Your brothers are back on Mykonos, fucking sheep!”

  The deli owner threw a right that caught Jimmy just below the cheekbone. Jimmy grinned and said, “Hold him up.”

  I hesitated. The man turned to run. Jimmy snatched him by the collar and dragged him back. Jimmy turned to face me. Both eyes seemed to focus, was that possible?

  “Hold…him…up.”

  I did so. I’d done worse.

  Jimmy worked the man’s midsection methodically. The man’s hairpiece flopped off and clung to the side of his head by a stubborn wad of spirit gum. The toupee twitched and jiggled with every blow. Eight, ten, twelve. I felt Dimitri’s legs give. I dragged him back and laid him on the shiny blue and white tile.

  “He’s out.”

  And that would have been that if the dumb cantankerous son of a bitch hadn’t groaned to life and sat up with a mouthful of very colorful curses. Jimmy whipped out a leather sap and waded in for the kill.

  “Come on Jimmy,” I said, circling wide, arms outstretched. “We don’t need this headache. Leave this stupid gink be and...”

  Jimmy brushed past me and raised his sap. I snagged his arm on the way down and roped his stroke into a two-handed wrist lock. The sap fell to the floor.

  “Dimitri?” called a female voice from the back room.

  “Time to go, Jimmy. Time to go.”

  Jimmy tried to twist around. I bent back on his wrist and drove him to one knee.

  A young woman dashed out from the kitchen, looked down at Dimitri, looked up at me and put her hand to her mouth in shock.

  It was Jeannie. I blinked and looked again. It was Jeannie, my Jeannie. We stared at one another, dumbstruck.

  I released Jimmy’s wrist. He swung around, raring to go. I snagged both his wrists and stood on his shoes. “Not now,” I said, two inches from his face. “Not now, not here.”

  Jimmy bared his teeth. His breath was, of course, foul. I tightened my grip.

  I imagine we looked pretty ridiculous, nose to nose in Papa’s Deli, holding hands. God knows what Jeannie was thinking. This wasn’t the romantic reunion I had dreamed about and pictured in my mind.

  Jimmy grunted and closed his eyes. I took that for surrender and stepped back. Jimmy marched quickly for the door. I followed, with a look over my shoulder. Jeannie was bent over the deli owner, his head in her lap, soothing him.

  Jimmy slammed the door of the Buick and gunned the engine. I had to hurry to jump in. Pappas Deli read the sign as we wheeled away. Pappas Deli, not Papa’s Deli.

  Well of course, numb nuts, what else? The swarthy man with the bad rug was Jeannie’s husband.

  Chapter Six

  Jimmy gave me the silent treatment on the ride back. Not his usual dull silence, this was a barely breathing level of silence, a picturing revenge in gruesome detail level of silence. He stopped across from Mrs. Brennan’s rooming house and drove off before I had both feet on the pavement. I bounced off the curb, dusted myself off and climbed two flights of stairs.

  I hunted up my bar of soap and my boiled-in-a-pot and baked-in-the-oven towel. I kicked off my shoes and padded down the hall to the third floor shower bath. I showered, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, slapped some Bay Rum on my face and returned to my room. I put on a freshly laundered white shirt and my blue tie with the red clocks on it. I winked at the picture of Jeannie tucked in the mirror.

  I took the rattler down to Public Square. The Terminal Tower’s cathedral windows were hung with giant Christmas wreaths, Santa’s elves hammered away in the windows of Higbee’s Department Store. I took the escalator to the Men’s Department and bought a vicuna topcoat for $90. I walked next door to the Hotel Cleveland for dinner, had steak tartare and a snifter of 20-year-old cognac. What the hell, I was flush.

  I bought a pack of Camels from the cigarette girl, though I’d lost the habit overseas. I couldn’t carry American cigarettes and Kraut cigs taste like pine tar. I paid my check, washed up in the men’s room and straightened my tie in the mirror. I was ready.

  I took the streetcar across the Detroit-Carnegie Bridge and hopped off at the corner of Lorain and 32nd. My wristwatch said 8:49. The window sign said that Pappas Deli closed at nine. Mr. Pappas would be recuperating with a hot water bottle and a tumbler of Ouzo. Jeannie would be alone.

  I hid in a doorway across the street just in case.

  The deli went dark promptly at nine. I crossed the street and waited two doors down. I unzipped the pack of Camels and parked one in my mush. My heart was pounding. The spark was still there, I’d felt it the second I saw her. Had Jeannie? That’s what I was huddled in this dark doorway to find out.

  Where was she? Had she gone out the back?

  No, the red OPEN sign was still in the window. Maybe she forgot to turn it over? I went to peer through the window and almost knocked Jeannie down as she stepped through the door.

  “Hal?”

  “Dammit Jeannie, you’ve ruined everything.”

  “What do you…I don’t…”

  “Don’t look at me,” I said. “Just go back inside, count to three and come out again.”

  “Hal, what the…”

  “Please.”

  Jeannie blew out a breath and did as I requested. I lipped a fresh butt, pulled a hank of hair across my forehead and leaned a shoulder against the doorway. Jeannie walked out. “Hey there, beautiful,” I said. “Got a match?”

  Jeannie looked me over coolly. “Your face and a donkey’s bum.”

  We cracked up, just like always.

  “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too. What in the world are you doing here? In Cleveland? With that awful man?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Aww, shit, Jeannie I can’t tell you. Not yet.”

  I expected to get her rubber-lipped eye-rolling look. Jeannie had more facial expressions than a rhesus monkey. But she regarded me with a plain sad face.

  “Hal, I thought you were dead.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Gee whiz, I wonder?”

  “I know your girlfriends got letters once a month…”

  “Once a week sometimes.”

  “I was behind enemy lines.”

  “Hal, you were a wireless agent, isn’t that right? Your job was to send messages, isn’t that right?”

  “Sure, but personal stuff was strictly forbidden.”

  “Dammit Hal, you could at least have tried.”

  “I suppose. I didn’t…”

  Jeannie pressed her strong dainty finger to my lips. It smelled of mustard.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, her eyes saying just the opposite.

  I bent to kiss her. “Not here,” she said, twisting away.

  “Where then?”

  She looked at me for a long time. “I’m a married woman now.”

  I watched her walk down the sidewalk, hugging herself for warmth, and enter her walk-up above the store. I trudged back toward Mrs. B’s and thought things over. I didn’t feel the cold.

  Jeannie had a lot of questions she wanted answered and so did I. But she was right. It didn’t matter now.

  I approached Kiefer’s German-American Tavern at the corner of Detroit and 25th. Rosy-cheeked couples spilled out onto the sidewalk, arm in arm. I wove my way through them. They looked sublimely happy and content.

  The sons of bitches.

  Chapter Seven

  This is the best part of being a double agent I thought as I climbed the stone stairs to the Standard Building the next day. As a spy I risked my neck every time I wirelessed my case officer. The SD,
Himmler’s spy hunters, had high-frequency direction-finding receivers mounted on trucks. ‘Huff Duffs’ we called them. They drove around sounding the sky, trying to triangulate the location of covert transmitters. I had to keep it short, and never the same place twice. But now, look at me, walking up the front steps of FBI headquarters at high noon!

  That’s the best part. The worst part is the mission.

  The mission of a spy is simple, gather information. The mission of a double agent is to gather information while sowing disinformation. Meaning you’ve got to lie your ass off in a convincing way. I could do that with the FBI. Problem was I hadn’t stayed above the fray, I had come to the rescue of Jeannie’s husband and humiliated Jimmy in front of a paying customer. Jimmy was now cheesed off. That was exceptionally stupid on my part because Jimmy had superior knowledge. One call to the feds and my cook was goosed.

  Which is where the mission got complicated. I was going to have to turn the setup once more so that I, not Jimmy, had superior knowledge. And the feds weren’t going to like it.

  The receptionist escorted me through the maze of corridors to my twelve o’clock with Agent Schram. She tapped on his door and announced me.

  “Come in,” said Schram gruffly a short time later. He looked odd, standing behind his desk, his face flushed and covered with a scrim of sweat. I looked around. Had Assistant Special Agent Richard Schram been enjoying a nooner?

  “Push ups,” said Schram off my look. “I do fifty three times a day.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Schram dried off with a hand towel and tossed it to the receptionist. She held it between thumb and forefinger and left the office, closing the door behind her. “What do you have for me?”

  I stuck out my chest, put my hands behind my back. “A positive report sir. I was able to penetrate the Fulton Road Mob using the bait money from the bank robbery. I met with the man they call The Schooler and presented my - our - heist plans and he carried them upstairs to Mr. Big. They’re interested.”

  Agent Schram was rolling his head on his neck, all the way to the left, all the way to the right.

  “They’re waiting for the results of this meeting,” I said. “For the detailed heist plan before they agree to proceed.”

  Agent Schram stopped his head in mid-roll and regarded me at a 45 degree angle. He licked his lips. “This meeting. You said this meeting.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “How do they know about this meeting?”

  I hadn’t said they did. But never underestimate the intuitive powers of a paranoid. “They don’t sir. Not from me.”

  Schram leaned on his desk and mouthed the words ‘Who then?’

  “Sir to my knowledge the Fulton Road Mob doesn’t know about this meeting.”

  Schram licked his lips in anticipation. I cleared my throat. What was it about this guy that made me so twitchy? “I did tell The Schooler I was working for the FBI.”

  Agent Schram liked this for about two seconds. He was right! Then he thrust out his canines and bit his lips white.

  “I had no choice sir. I ran into someone, a classmate from Youngstown, who can make me.”

  Agent Schram charged around from behind his desk. “Make you as what?” he sputtered. “A traitor?”

  I wiped his spray from my face, I kept a calm and confident demeanor. “Sir, the Fulton Road Mob thinks I’m working for them. I’m not. I’m working for you.”

  “You say.”

  “Agent Schram, if I was a turncoat...”

  Schram jumped ahead. “You wouldn’t have told me what you just told me. Unless…” He waited for me to complete the sentence.

  I looked confused, took my time, Schram’s watery blue eyes eating a hole in my forehead. “Unless I told you that I told the mob that I was working for the FBI in order to…what? Cover my ass in case you had another source inside the gang? Someone who could keep an eye on me?” I wiped my brow. “Whew. That’s more thinking than I’ve done in a month.”

  I paused to see how my act was going over but it was hard to tell. Schram’s watery blue eyes had gone glassy. “Sir?”

  Schram came to. “How are you going to work your way up to Mr. Big if they know that’s why we sent you?”

  “I’ll make myself indispensable. Mr. Big will come to me.”

  Agent Schram turned back to his desk and keyed the intercom. “Get Gilliam,” he barked. “ With the plans.”

  Schram sat down and shuffled through papers. This was it? The green light? At the very least I had expected to be braced by Chester Halladay about my unauthorized change in strategy. Not to mention the twelve grand I had left over after I bought myself a meeting with The Schooler.

  Joe Gilliam announced himself from the other side of the door. I opened it on a corn-fed linebacker with a boyish face and thick reddish-blonde hair that came to a peak halfway down his forehead.

  “Meet Harold Schroeder,” said Schram from behind his desk. Gilliam’s mitt swallowed mine whole. “Lay it out.”

  Agent Gilliam pulled diagrams and timetables from his briefcase and spread them out on a glass drafting table against the far wall. He turned a switch, the table lit up. Gilliam ran it down. The job was an armored car robbery, and not just any armored car, the armored car that collected citizen donations to the city’s Help the Needy Christmas Fund!

  “That ought to get the attention of the Press and Plain-Dealer,” said Gilliam. Schram grunted from his desk.

  Good Lord. My suspicion that the higher ups at the Cleveland District Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had bats in their belfry was, officially, confirmed. They wanted to conduct an undercover sting operation that garnered maximum publicity.

  I should have walked out there and then. I didn’t. Too stupid, too stubborn. I examined the documents on the light board instead. Someone had a done a lot of work. The diagrams were precisely drawn. But they ignored a key concern.

  “And federal agents will be posing as the armored car guards?” I said to Gilliam.

  “Of course. Didn’t I make that clear?”

  “Sure you did Joe, it’s just this.” I looked the question to Schram. He nodded curtly. “I told the mob I was working for the FBI.” Joe Gilliam’s bovine face froze in mid-grin. “It’s okay, we’re still in the driver’s seat, but it gets complicated.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, on the face of it this armored car job should be a cakewalk. The crooks know the heist is FBI-approved, the FBI now knows that the crooks know. But - and here’s the tricky part - the crooks don’t know that the FBI knows that they know. The mob will think they have the advantage, but it’s your agents who will have superior knowledge.”

  Joe Gilliam’s eyeballs ping-ponged around the room, looking for answers. Agent Schram, who was busy wrestling a sprung paper clip back into proper alignment, ignored him.

  “And I’m supposed to do what?” said Gilliam.

  “Convince your guys to sell their roles,” I said, patting his lamb shank forearm. “Because once they know that the crooks know that this heist is just a charade, your guys will want to leer at them, taunt them, pinch their cheeks. And then all hell will break loose.” I patted Agent Gilliam again. “Got that?”

  “Uh huh.”

  I unwound the maze of corridors, rode the lift to the lobby and walked down the stone steps of the Standard Building with a queasy feeling. Joe Gilliam was a good egg, he would do his best. It wasn’t that.

  My foot gave way on a patch of ice and I rode my duff down the final four steps to the plaza.

  Ow.

  I sat there a moment, contemplating the fates and rubbing my tailbone. It wasn’t Joe Gilliam I was queasy about. The feds’ misunderstanding of the nature of covert operations was troubling, but it was the quick, almost offhanded go-ahead I received from Agent Schram that was giving me the wim wams.

  Chapter Eight

  I’d lied to Assistant Special Agent Richard Schram, the Fulton Road Mob knew about my meeting with him.
The Schooler was waiting at an undisclosed location to see the plans. I was to walk eight blocks to the corner of St. Clair and East 17th. If the coast was clear someone would pick me up. And I had a good idea who that someone would be.

  The wind whipped down the concrete canyon of St. Clair Avenue, frosting my eyebrows. The women I passed wore fur hats. The younger ones, rabbit or beaver, the matrons, mink or sable. All the men wore felt fedoras, brims snapped low against the wind.

  I must have looked like the Nickel Plate pulling into Union Terminal with the geyser of steam pouring off my dome. I have never gotten along with hats, was forever leaving them behind or chasing them down the sidewalk. But maybe it was time to buy a lid.

  The street changed once I passed East 9th. Got colder too, if that’s possible. The skyscrapers gave way to soot darkened brick buildings the color of dried blood. Lunch bucket guys in Elmer Fudd caps took the place of swanky dames in fur hats.

  I cut across St. Clair, ducked down an alley behind a block long building that hummed with turbines and muffled shouts and hid behind a dumpster at the far end and waited. No one followed. Apparently Agent Schram had bought my story.

  I went to the anointed corner and listened to my teeth chatter for ten minutes. Skimmer, hell, I was going to have to buy some long johns.

  Jimmy’s Buick pulled up a short time later. I climbed in and said, “You’re late.” Jimmy did not reply. “It’s not that I mind freezing my yobs off in subzero temperatures you understand, nothing like that. It’s just I felt a wee bit…conspicuous standing out there on the street corner.”

  Jimmy turned left on East 20th. “Hadda make sure you weren’t tailed.”

  I removed my gloves and tried to rub some feeling back into my fingers. No, you beak-nosed prick, you knew I had already made sure of that. What you wanted was for me to shiver on that street corner till the FBI tail car you expected after your anonymous ratting-me-out-to-the-feds phone call had tracked me down.

  That’s what I wanted to say. What I did say was, “Sure.” I had some fence-mending to do.