by Manhattan Mayhem: New Crime Stories From Mystery Writers of America
The office that didn’t exist.
Just like Brandon and Murphy and the other four men who shared this austere paint-peeling room didn’t exist. Oh, the Operation for Special Services, the intelligence agency, was as real as its colorful founder and head—Wild Bill Donovan (the name said it all)—but the OSS had been born from military intelligence and was supposed to take a backseat within the country’s borders. Here, spy catching was the province of J. Edgar and his not-so-special agents. The OSS’s bailiwick was overseas.
But a few years earlier, there’d been an incident. Once war broke out, Hitler wanted to strike Americans at home. He ordered his head of intelligence to come up with a sabotage plan, and Operation Pastorius was born, named after the first German settlement in America. In June of ’42, German U-boats dropped Nazi commandos on the East Coast. One team on Long Island, one in Florida. They had a large store of explosives and detonators with them. The saboteurs were to blow up economically important targets: the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, some of the Aluminum Company of America’s factories, the Ohio River locks near Louisville, the Horseshoe Curve railway stretch in Pennsylvania, Hell Gate Bridge in New York, and Penn Station in New Jersey, among others.
The plan fell apart and the spies were detected—though not by the FBI, which denied there was a conspiracy at first and then finally accepted the Coast Guard’s word that enemy troops were on U.S. soil. Still, the bureau had no luck whatsoever tracking the spies down. Indeed, they didn’t even believe the head of the German saboteurs when he confessed. It took him days to convince the agents that he and his men were the real thing.
Roosevelt and Donovan were furious over Hoover’s ineptness. Without telling the Justice Department, the president agreed that the OSS could open an office here in New York and run its own operations. Brandon handpicked the brash Irishman Jack Murphy and the others, and they set up shop.
He and the team had had some successes. They’d caught an Italian flashing an all-clear signal to a skiff bringing in a load of dynamite off Brooklyn, meant to sink ships taking Jeeps and other vehicles overseas. And stopped German and Japanese citizens from photographing military installations. There’d been an attempt to poison the Croton reservoir—a joint endeavor by Mussolini- and Nazi sympathizers.
They’d get Hauptman, too, if he was a spy and not simply too rude to take his hat off when he first sat down in the Rialto.
But now Brandon was tired of the movie theater incident and turned toward the Big Deal. He said firmly, “You said confirmation.”
“Our man just got to town,” Murphy said with a gleam in his eye.
“Well.”
Murphy was speaking of a German plan that he had uncovered a week or so ago, known as Betrieb Amortisations.
Or, in English: Operation Payback.
One of the wiry Irishman’s sources in the field had learned that a brilliant spy from Heidelberg, Germany, would soon be arriving in the United States. He was bringing in something “significant.” Whatever that was wouldn’t win the war for the Axis, but it could give Hitler bargaining power to sue for peace and keep the Nazi government intact.
“Swell, that’s swell!” Brandon wasn’t known for his enthusiasm, but he couldn’t contain himself.
Murphy pulled an apple from his pocket. He ate a lot of apples. Two or three a day. Brandon thought it gave him rosy cheeks, but that might have been because he associated apples with Norman Rockwell’s paintings on the Saturday Evening Post cover. Murphy explained, “Don’t know where he’s staying. But I do know that he’s picking up his special delivery tonight. I have an idea where.” He polished the apple on his sleeve and chomped down. Brandon believed he ate the stem as well as part of the core.
Brandon said, “I’ll get some boys together.”
“Nope. Let me handle this one alone. They smell a rat and they’ll scram. That damn leak, you know what I mean?”
Brandon sure did. It seemed that over the past few months somebody had tipped off several Nazi spies and sympathizers, who’d skipped town just before the OSS could get them. Evidence pointed to someone within the FBI itself. Brandon’s theory was that Hoover wanted them out of town because they’d learned about Hoover’s extensive network of illegal spying on citizens solely for political reasons. Better a little espionage than a lot of embarrassment.
“Get on with it, then,” Brandon told his star agent.
“Sure deal, boss. Only, keep some of the boys at the ready.”
“What’s this guy’s game?” Brandon mused.
“No idea yet. But it’s bad, Tom. The Battle of the Bulge isn’t going the way the Krauts hoped—they’re getting their keisters kicked. And now they want to hit back. Hard.”
Payback …
The agent regarded his gold pocket watch, which would be a pretentious affectation on most anyone else, certainly an intelligence agent. For Murphy, though, it seemed completely natural. Indeed, to see him strap on a Timex would be out of place. His next accessory, too, was right at home in his sinewy hand: he took his 1911 Colt .45 from a desk drawer and eased back the slide to make sure the gun was loaded.
Murphy rose, pulled on his dark gray overcoat, and slipped the pistol into his pocket. He winked at his boss. “Time to go catch a spy. Stay close to that phone, boss. I’ve got a feeling I’m going to need you.”
The two men were sitting on metal chairs upholstered in red vinyl at the Horn and Hardart automat on Forty-Second Street. The atmosphere was loud; voices and the collision of china reverberated off the glossy walls and the row upon row of small glass doors in the vending machines, behind which an abundance of food sat.
A sign on the table read:
HOW AN AUTOMAT WORKS
FIRST DROP YOUR NICKELS IN THE SLOT
THEN TURN THE KNOB
THE GLASS DOOR OPENS
LIFT THE DOOR AND HELP YOURSELF
Luca Cracco was eating pumpkin pie. The custard wasn’t bound with enough eggs, which were strictly rationed by the Office of Price Administration. He suspected gelatin as a substitute. Mamma mia … The OPA had also rationed butter and other fats since 1943. Margarine, too, was on the list. But lard had been okayed a year ago, in March of ’44. Cracco could tell, from the coating on the roof of his mouth, that, yes, pig fat was the shortening in the crust. With a pang, he remembered when he and his brother, Vincenzo, would stand at their mother’s hip on Saturday afternoon and watch her cut flour and butter into pastry dough. “Butter only,” she’d instructed gravely. Her son’s own output at his bakery was far less—and his income much smaller—because he refused to compromise.
Butter only …
The tall blonde man across from him was eating beef with broad noodles and burgundy sauce. Cracco had tried to talk him into H & H’s signature chicken pot pie, a New World original, but he was sticking to something he was more familiar with. A dish similar to what he might have at home. Like spaetzel, Cracco imagined. Heinrich Kohl, presently Hank Coleman, had just snuck into the country from Heidelberg, deep in the heart of Nazi Germany.
They sipped steaming coffee and ate in silence for a time. Kohl often looked around, though not, apparently, for threats. He simply seemed astonished at the variety and amount of food available here. The Fatherland was in the throes of crushing deprivation.
In whispered conversation that could not be overheard, Cracco asked about the man’s clandestine trip as a stowaway on the freighter that had brought him here just last night. About life in Germany as the Allies inched toward Berlin. About his career in the SS. Kohl corrected that he was Abwehr, regular German army, not the elite “protection squad.”
Kohl in turn inquired about the bakery business and Cracco’s wife and children.
Finally, Cracco leaned forward slightly and asked about Vincenzo. “Your brother is fine. He was captured near Monte Casino, when the Americans made their fourth offensive there. He was sent to a POW camp. But he managed to escape and made his way north—he knew that Italy would fall s
oon—and was not willing to let the war pass him by. He still wanted to do more.”
“Yes, yes, that’s my baby brother.”
Kohl continued. “He met with some people and expressed that sentiment. Word came to me, and I met with him. He said that you and he had been in touch and you expressed a passion about getting revenge for what had happened to your country. That you could be trusted completely.” The German ate a robust spoonful of noodles and sauce; the meat had disappeared first. “We contacted your handler, Geller, and he, you.” The handsome man looked down at the dish before Cracco. “Your pie?”
“Lard.” As if that explained it all. Which, of course, it did.
A laugh. “In the Fatherland, we would be lucky for lard.” He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, inhaled slowly, enjoying the sensation.
Cracco joined him. Terzo.
Kohl examined the Chesterfield. “At home, we make cigarettes from lettuce leaves. When we can find lettuce. And your country, Italy, is no better. Ah, what those bastards have done to her.” Then, a shrug. He smoked half the cigarette down, stubbed it out, and put the rest in his pocket. “The shipment will arrive this evening. You and I will pick it up.”
“Good, yes. But Geller tells me we have to be very careful. The ones we need to be particularly wary of are the FBI and the OSS, the intelligence service.”
“There is a specific threat?”
“It seems so. But he doesn’t know what, exactly.”
“Well, if this is to be my last meal, I’ll have another.” Kohl laughed and nodded at the empty bowl before him. “You would like some more pie, yes?”
Lard, thought Luca Cracco and shook his head.
After the late lunch, Heinrich Kohl vanished into the forever-migrating Midtown crowds. Gray and black greatcoats and fedoras for the men, overcoats and scarves for the women, some of whom wore trousers against the cold, though most were in cotton lisle stockings—which had replaced silk after the start of the war.
Luca Cracco descended beneath Grand Central Station and caught the subway shuttle for the trip of less than a mile to the Eighth Avenue IND line. He took a southbound train to West Fourth Street and walked to the bakery, which Violetta was closing up. It was a quarter to five and the shelves were nearly empty—only a few loaves remained. She would now return home. Beppe and Cristina were in the care of Mrs. Menotti, the woman who lived in the basement of their apartment building. A widow, she earned money by doing laundry and overseeing the children of the couples in the building who both worked, as many families now had to do.
Luca and Violetta had met ten years ago at the Piazza di Spagna, near the bottom of the famed steps. He had approached and asked if she knew which house the poet John Keats had lived in. He knew exactly which dwelling it was, but he was too shy to directly ask if the raven-haired beauty would have a cappuccino with him. Three years later, they were married. Now, they were both heavier than then, but she, in his opinion, was more beautiful. She was quiet on the whole but spoke her mind, often with a coy disarming smile. Cracco believed her to be the smarter of the couple; he was given to impulse. Luca was the artist, Violetta the businesswoman. And woe to any banker or tradesman who tried to take advantage.
He told her about Kohl and the meeting.
“You trust him?”
“Yes,” Cracco said. “Geller vouches for him. And I asked certain questions that only the real Kohl would know the answers to.” A smile. “And he asked me questions, too. I passed the test. The dance of spies.” He thought, as he often did: Who would have guessed, when he came to America—to avoid the looming war, for the sake of his future children—that he would become a soldier, after all.
“I need to get the truck.”
He could have gone directly to the parking lot from lunch with Kohl, but he’d wanted to stop by the bakery. And see his wife.
She nodded.
Nothing more was said of the assignment. They both knew its danger, both knew there was a chance he might not be coming back this evening. He now stepped forward and kissed her quickly on the mouth and told her he loved her. Violetta would not acknowledge even this glancing sentiment and turned away. But then she stopped and spun around and hugged him hard. She went into the backroom quickly. He wondered if she was crying.
Cracco now walked out the door and, hands in pockets, turned and headed east to collect his bread delivery truck; you could spend an hour finding an empty place to park in this neighborhood, so he paid a warehouse $3 a month to leave the vehicle there. He maneuvered carefully as he walked; the streets and sidewalks here were not as meticulously cleared of ice and snow as the more elegant Upper East and Upper West Sides. And, as always, there was the obstacle course of people, all ages, bundled against the freezing air and hurrying on errands this way and that.
His walk took him through the complex panorama of Greenwich Village, a pocket of nearly 80,000 souls three miles north of Wall Street and three south of Midtown. Nearly half the inhabitants were immigrants of varying generations. In the west, where the Craccos lived, the majority was Italian. Whereas the family was lucky enough to have their own modest apartment, many residents lived in shared units, two or three families together. It was a bustling world of shops and coffeehouses and clubs from which jazz and swing music escaped into the streets though open windows on hot nights, blending into a hypnotic cacophony. In this area you would also find bohemians—and not necessarily real ones from Czechoslovakia. It was the term used to describe New York’s intelligentsia, painters, writers, socialists, and even a communist or two. The Village had become their home.
In the north—from Washington Square College of New York University and the park, which Cracco could now see on his left, to Fourteenth Street—were the elegant apartments of financiers and lawyers and heads of corporations. Some of those inhabitants earned as much as $7,000 a year!
The East Village, his destination now, was populated by Ukrainians and Poles and Jews and refugees from the Balkans. The men were largely laborers and tradesmen, the women wives and mothers and occasionally washerwomen and shop tenders. Their homes were tenements, tall and grim—outriders of the Lower East Side, to the south, where the early immigrants to New York had settled. The perfume of those streets was cabbage and garlic.
Soon, after only two near-misses on the ice, he arrived at the snow-filled parking lot near the Bowery. He climbed into his Chevrolet and after five minutes bullied and tricked the engine to life. The gears protested as he sought first, and, when they finally engaged, he pulled out of the lot and drove north.
At seven p.m., Cracco collected Heinrich Kohl in front of a flophouse in lower Hell’s Kitchen, west in the Thirties.
The man climbed into the passenger seat.
“Anyone follow?” the German asked.
“No. I’m sure.”
Amid the dense traffic, Cracco piloted his truck south and west until he hit Miller Highway, the main thoroughfare along the Hudson River shore.
He heard a snap of metal and looked to his right. The German’s deft hands were slipping cartridges into the cylinder of a revolver. He put it in his pocket and loaded another gun.
Cracco thought: War is raging on virtually every continent on earth, a thousand people at least have died in the time it took this truck to drive from the hotel to the highway, yet that horror was distant. More shocking was the pistol he was now staring at. Six small bullets. The baker wondered if he could actually point the weapon at another man and pull the trigger.
Then, he pictured his country being so savagely attacked and decided that, yes, he could.
The truck eased slowly along the highway, through the northern portion of the West Village. He could see, now dark, the famed West Washington and the Gansevoort farmers markets—the city’s main meat packers and produce venues. Mornings here were beyond chaos, with purveyors and restaurateurs and individual shoppers mobbing the stalls. By eight a.m. the cobblestones grew slick with blood and fat from the sides of
beef, the split-open pigs, and racks of lamb hanging from hooks in the open air. Poultry could be bought here as well. Not much fish; that market was in the Bronx. And at the produce market, every vegetable, legume, and fruit God had created could be found.
Now, glancing to his right, Cracco noted the many piers and docks striking out into the Hudson. Another memory: he and his brother Vincenzo and dozens of other boys leaping off the docks in Gaeta, south of Rome, a beach town where the Cracco family would drive in their Fiat on summer days. That is, they would make the trip if the sputtering temperamental vehicle didn’t overheat—which both brothers prayed at Mass would not happen, Cracco suspecting it was a minor sin to bend His ear for something so selfish. (Though He seemed to grant the supplications with blessed frequency.)
Here, too, in the sweltering days of summer, boys—and the occasional girl—would launch themselves into the gray Hudson River, not the most aromatic or clean body of water. But what did youth care?
He realized that Kohl was speaking to him.
“Si?” Then corrected himself, angry at the slip. He was, after all, supposed to be a spy. “Yes?”
“There. That’s it.”
A listing freighter was docking beside a pier, the structure and the ship equally dilapidated. The docks in Greenwich Village were not like those in Brooklyn or New Jersey, where the big cargo ships offloaded their valuable goods. Smaller ships plied these waters, like the hundred-footer that had carried their precious cargo into the country from Europe.
Cracco recalled the family’s voyage here from Genoa in a state-room—an elegant but deceptive term for a three-meter-square chamber with one bare light and no windows. The only passenger in the family untroubled by seasickness was Beppe, yet unborn, and sleeping without care in the warmth of his own private ocean.
The men looked around carefully. The highway was crowded with traffic but the pier was hidden from view by a half dozen boxcars on a siding. No pedestrians here; there were no walkways and all the businesses nearby were closed for the night. Cracco noted boat traffic on the Hudson, of course, the hulls largely invisible in the dark but their running lights bright and festive. The massive black expanse of river was dominated by the huge Maxwell House coffee sign, with its forty-five-foot cup, tilted and empty (the company’s slogan: “Good to the last drop”). It glowed brightly. Cracco believed there’d been a time when it had been shut off in the evenings—not to save money but so that it wouldn’t serve as a beacon to enemy bombers. Now it was lit again, the country apparently no longer believing that the enemy would bring the war to its home shores. Erroneously, of course.