by Don Satalic
***
Joe left Vookie’s, walked around the corner, slid into his 1940 Special Deluxe Chevrolet, a black coupe, and drove to his Commercial Ave office. He found a space down the block and walked leisurely back to the three-story building. His office was on the second floor above the Law Offices of Albert Strugala.
Albert Strugala used to live on the second floor, and he rented the third floor apartment. That was in his early days before his law practice grew. Now he lived on the near north side with all the other lawyers. He had the second floor renovated into a two room office with a private shower and was planning to do the same on the third floor now that the war was over and young businesses were hungry for space.
You entered the upper floors through the small door to the far left of Strugala's impressive plate glass window with only the words "Law Offices" in gold leaf Times Roman lettering in a delicate arc across the expanse of glass. Wood venetian blinds shuttered the office from curious passersby, but occasionally, on quiet afternoons, the secretary would open them to watch the world go by from her desk in front of row of wooden file cabinets filled with documents and records of the practice.
Strugala had two law clerks to do research and help prepare briefs. For now, they were students at the University of Chicago School of Law, hoping someday to become as wealthy as their boss.
Joe first met Albert Strugala through an insurance case a number of years before the war. Strugala represented a real estate man who was suing the insurance company Joe was working for at the time. The case involved a fall by the real estate man at a construction site.
The insurance company had their doubts about the extent of the claimant's back injury, so they had Joe run a routine surveillance. For two weeks, the real estate man did nothing out of the ordinary, nothing strenuous. He didn't take the garbage out. He didn't open the garage door. He even had the next-door neighbor kid mow his lawn. He did nothing.
The insurance company's agent was adamant that the reports from the job site indicated there should be nothing wrong with this man. Joe offered a plan to test the veracity of the claim. He had Wilma Murphy, an attractive secretary at the insurance company, pose as a prospective real estate seller, a girl who had inherited some industrial property near the Crawford Power Station on the city's southwest side, a booming industrial area. The real estate man jumped at the bait.
The claimant told Wilma he would like to help but couldn't drive because of his back– just as Joe had expected. So, she agreed to drive him to the property. On the way there, the real estate man concluded that Wilma was a typical scatterbrain, without a clue about land development or anything else for that matter. She was a good actress.
When they arrived, Wilma just pointed out the boundaries of the property. "I don't want to ruin my shoes on this bumpy ground."
"Oh, that's fine. I'll just take a walk around, survey the area."
"Sure, I'll wait here."
The man walked along the property lines. It was perhaps thirty acres of undeveloped land in what would soon be a factory, as soon as he got it away from "witless" Wilma. While he perused the land, licking his lips at this unbelievable opportunity, she let the air out of her rear tire. When he returned, she said, "Oh, goodness! Look at that darn tire. What am I going to do now? I don't know anything about cars."
The real estate man was hesitant at first, looking around carefully, but with Wilma's pleading and her skirt ruffling in the breeze, he relented and set about changing the tire. Joe was in a warehouse right down the street with a Crown Graphic camera fitted with a telephoto lens. He photographed the real estate man jacking the car up, tossing around the tires, and tightening the lug nuts.
Later, when presented with the photographs, Strugala advised his client to withdraw the law suit and accept a moderate settlement. Out of curiosity, he asked the insurance representative, "Who did this surveillance work?" The agent gave him Joe's name and number. He called Joe that night.
Strugala asked if he would like to moonlight for him, serving summons, surveillance, interviewing witnesses, even acting as a body guard. Joe accepted, and they have worked together off and on ever since.
And when Strugala took up residence on the north side some years before the war, he asked Joe if he would be interested in renting the second floor apartment as an office. He was hesitant at first, but Strugala coaxed him by offering the first month's rent free. Joe agreed. He even talked Wilma Murphy into joining his new company. The frosted glass upper panel on the door to his offices read: Jos. Ganzer Investigations.
Joe cantered up the stairs to the second floor. When he walked in, he could feel the heat sear into his clothes. Wilma hadn't left the windows open, fearing it might rain. Joe turned on the fans, opened some windows, and a whisper of a breeze came in through the gangway between the buildings. As light perspiration formed on his brow and his dark brown hair formed two semicircles on each side of his head, Joe thought: In just a few weeks autumn will be here.
Wilma refused to dust and straighten Joe's inner office. She would tidy up her outer area, but not Joe's. "I'm not your maid. I'm your secretary," she would say every time he asked. So, tonight, Joe laughed and wrote her a note telling her to find them a maid. He dropped it on her desk.
Wilma's outer office was smaller than Joe's because of the stairway, but it had a large window that faced the street below and let morning light in to nourish the plants she had throughout. Alongside her desk and against the wall was a leather sofa. In front was a small coffee table with newspapers and magazines neatly stacked on it. Behind her desk were five tall file cabinets filled with reports and relevant documents for all the cases, past and present.
Joe's office had dark oak wainscoting, with a repeating pattern of recessed rectangular panels capped by a fluted chair rail and plastered walls painted a light beige, an office remodeled by Albert Strugala with a lawyer in mind.
Joe's desk was large with papers and notes strewn all over its surface. On the left-hand side was his phone and the intercom. Sometimes, when he was consulting with a talkative client, Wilma would buzz him on the intercom reminding him he had an appointment with the police or whatever, which was code for "time's up."
On the right-hand side of his desk, along the wall, were Joe's private file cabinets, filled with sensitive information about everything and anything; and only Joe knew how to fathom their depths– but not always.
After an hour pouring through his haphazard files in the heat of his office, he found the current address of his former instructor and associate from the British counter-intelligence agency MI5– Lawrence Hamilton. After the war, Hamilton had been assigned to work surreptitiously with Interpol. Joe purposely lost contact with almost everyone involved with the OSS and the Manhattan Project and Die Glocke, including Hamilton.
But now Joe needed him to check into the whereabouts of Yuri Kemidov. He suspected Uncle Yuri was hiding from the KGB. As an MI5 agent with ties to Interpol, Lawrence Hamilton could surely locate Kemidov without leading the KGB right to his door. Joe took no chances when contacting Hamilton.
He walked over to his bookshelf and pulled from among his law books a copy of Telegraphic Code to Ensure Secrecy in the Transmission of Telegrams by Robert Slater. Slater's Code was a dictionary of 25,000 alphabetized words. Each word was assigned a five-digit number from 00001 through 25000. No one but a cryptographer could decode a message in Slater's Code unless they had the key number, an offset value added to the value of the intended word.
Joe used the number 1776 as his key number offset because he and Hamilton had used it before. Joe came up with it in 1942 during training in Canada. It was the birth date of the United States, it was the number shown at the bottom of the pyramid on the American dollar bill, and it was on the tablet held by the Statue of Liberty. Just a little playfulness on Joe's part to barb his instructor Lawrence Hamilton who lampooned Joe by insisting that the States were still British colonies.
Joe co
mposed his message carefully, looking up each word in the Slater book and its corresponding number. To that number he added his 1776 offset to reveal the number of the new coded word. When Joe had to include the name "Kemidov" in his message, he used a transposition code Hamilton had also taught him at Camp X. After twenty minutes he was finished. He picked up the phone and called Vookie’s.
“Eddie? Is Benny there?... Tell him to get over here quick?”