The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  “Chamberlain will try to reason with Hitler,” Oster said. “When he learns that’s impossible, he’ll be back where he started. He’ll have to fight. When that moment arrives, we’re ready to move.”

  Oster left his half-eaten lunch to attend a briefing. Shortly after, Piekenbrock arrived and asked Gresser if he could see the Admiral on an important matter.

  Canaris was glad for the company. “Come in,” he said, “and let’s hear what vital secrets you’ve uncovered.”

  “It concerns that SS agent in New York.”

  “I’d almost forgotten about him. We’ve had far larger things to be concerned with, I’m afraid.”

  “The SS hasn’t forgotten. They’ve demanded the navy dispatch a U-boat to bring him back.”

  “A U-boat to violate American waters and return a single agent? Admiral Dönitz is vehemently opposed to the use of U-boats on such missions!”

  “The request—or, more accurately, the directive—was received by the admiralty last evening. The Admiral has been overruled, and it’s unclear how many are to be picked up. It seems more than one person is involved.”

  “It will take a U-boat two to three weeks to reach America.”

  “No, it won’t. There are a number already waiting off Iceland in case of war. The SS wants one of them to rendezvous with their man in one week, on September 21.” Piekenbrock laid an index card on the desk; on it, in block letters, was hand-printed a single word: MONTAUK.

  Canaris glanced down at it. “What’s the meaning?

  “The U-boat’s destination.”

  “In America?”

  Piekenbrock turned the card over. On the back, he’d drawn a crude map. On the left, a star was labeled “New York City.” A long two-pronged island jutted to the right. At the end of the southern and longer prong was another star, marked “Montauk.” He moved his finger from one side to the other. “Montauk is about 140 miles northeast of New York City.”

  “Is it a city?”

  “A fishing village, popular in the summer as a tourist resort but left to fishermen the rest of the year. American coastal defenses are paltry and this place seems remote. But, still, it seems a big risk for the navy to rescue one SS small fry, don’t you think?

  “No doubt. But you’ve done well in sticking with this and uncovering these facts. It’s old dogs like you who make me confident in the future of this department.”

  “If you’ll permit me to say so, that’s the first time anyone called me a dog and intended it as a compliment.”

  Oster seemed to have regained his spirits when Canaris told him of Piekenbrock’s discovery. Canaris supposed it would have that effect—a distraction from the consternation caused by Chamberlain’s parley with the Führer. “I’ve put in a call to Heydrich,” Canaris said. “This time he’s clearly crossed the line, not only interfering in foreign intelligence matters, but drawing in the navy.”

  “Outrageous,” Oster said. “And more and more to be expected.”

  The intercom signaled a phone call. “Line one, Herr Admiral,” Corporal Gresser said. “General Heydrich calling.”

  Canaris nodded at Oster, who stood next to the phone extension by the couch. He picked up the receiver simultaneously with Canaris, a small, practiced, perfectly synchronized duet. The General’s secretary confirmed that Canaris was on the line and asked him to hold. There was a click on the other end of the line. “Wilhelm, how are you?” Without waiting for an answer, Heydrich launched into a monologue about the coming assault on the Czechs and the need to follow annexation with a speedy roundup of Communists and German exiles before they had a chance to escape. “The Führer threw down the gauntlet at Nuremberg. There’s no turning back.” He seemed ready to hang up, either forgetful or unconcerned that he was returning Canaris’s call.

  “Before you go, Reinhard, I’ve a favor to ask.”

  “Whatever you wish.”

  “It’s a question really. I’ve been informed of a request by your department.”

  “What request?”

  “The use of a navy U-boat for an overseas operation directed by the SS.”

  “It was an order, not a request.”

  “From whom?”

  “Reichsführer-SS Himmler.”

  “He has no jurisdiction over military affairs or foreign intelligence.”

  “He has jurisdiction over whatever the Führer says he has.” Heydrich’s voice was taut, as though he were struggling to control himself.

  “But this transgresses established lines of command and violates the territorial waters of the United States, a nation with whom the Führer has expressed the desire to remain at peace.”

  “Who told you it was going to the United States?”

  “It’s my responsibility to know such things and, when they are withheld, to ferret them out.” Canaris was careful to sound calm and matter-of-fact.

  “Your responsibility is the same as mine and every German’s: to obey. I suggest you remember that. Good day.”

  Oster put down the receiver. “Well done. You got under his skin. I don’t suppose there are many who can do that anymore.”

  “We still don’t know what’s behind this mission. What requires the risk they’re taking?”

  “If war comes and our plan succeeds, this will be forgotten. If not, it will be remembered as only a tiny contribution to Germany’s transformation from a law-abiding state to a gangster nation.” Oster began to review the details of the plot, rehashing how Witzleben’s troops would secure Berlin, surround the government quarter, and arrest the leadership. His initial animation descended into a flat monotone. “In the end,” he said, “we must do what we can do and hope fate is on our side, not his.”

  NEW YORK

  Dunne practiced the most ancient and well-known secret of the world’s most thrilling profession, doling out baksheesh to a passing parade of janitors and doormen, a few surly and uncooperative even after they were paid, the majority willing to help as long as the basic ground rule was understood: Look, pal, I don’t want to get mixed up in any trouble.

  Where Sparks’s secretary went, nobody could say. She’d kept to herself. Never hostile but not very friendly either, she’d made it clear to her neighbors that she wanted to be left alone. The doorman at Sparks’s building had an idea she was originally from Canada but couldn’t remember exactly where. Huber had vacated his furnished room on 90th and First Avenue—only a few blocks from the Ignatzs’—right after the fire at the Hermes Sanatorium. The dour Hungarian landlady let Dunne look at the stuffy, pigeonhole room after they’d haggled over the cost. She wanted a week’s rent for granting Dunne the privilege—“five dollars or no peek”—but settled for two. “Mr. Huber was no trouble,” she said. “Quiet and sober. Some Germans aren’t like that. They’re loud and drink too much, but they’re not dirty, like the Irish. Mostly, I rent to my own. Magyars know how to behave, and they’re as clean as cats.” Spare and small, the room had no trace of Huber or anyone else, not so much as a stray dust ball.

  Irene Loben never existed, at least as far as the official records were concerned. Sparks’s doorman had never met her, although he’d heard her name or was pretty sure he had. There was no entry for her in any of the phone directories for the five boroughs, no mention in the police files, no birth record as far as he could tell. After the fire, not a single inquiry was made with the police about her. Whoever she was, she apparently went up in smoke with the Hermes Sanatorium.

  There was a memorial service in the lobby of the Bronx County Building. A crowd of about fifty oldsters, gray-haired and shabby, were dispersed amid four times as many folding chairs. Their motive for attending seemed a lack of anything better to do. Borough President Lyons offered several minutes of platitudes capped by a litany of the fine Bronx hospitals and medical institutions that hadn’t burned down and were still in operation. A doctor praised the Hermes Sanatorium as an example of “the compassionate heart” of private physicians as opposed to the “coldness and i
mpersonality of socialistic medicine.” A minister ended the service by reading the Beatitudes.

  People stood around for a moment or two as two court officers rolled away the podium. The Borough President shook hands and searched unsuccessfully for any reporters who might have attended. Dunne exited down the steps of the building’s main entrance on 161st Street. The park on the other side of the street was named after Joyce Kilmer, who’d served with the 69th in France as the staff sergeant in charge of intelligence reports. Dunne remembered him as cordial in his own quiet way. He’d been killed at the Ourcq by the same sniper who drilled Tommy Scanlon in the head. They had been planted in nearby plots in the same military cemetery under identical crosses. But since Kilmer had a reputation as something of a poet, he also got a park named after him on the swank Grand Concourse. The Professor thought the honor excessive. “In view of the quality of Mr. Kilmer’s work,” he’d told Dunne, “Erato, the muse of poetry, would have been satisfied to see a fire hydrant named in Kilmer’s honor, preferably in some quarter of the city with a large population of micturating canines.”

  The swelling sounds coming from Yankee Stadium two blocks west indicated that the home team was pulverizing another opponent in their routine of bringing the World Series to the Bronx. Dunne hurried to the subway before the game was over and the train filled with kids wielding pennants on long sticks expertly designed to poke somebody’s eye out.

  A special-delivery letter from the Vermont Welfare Commissioner’s office was waiting for him at the Hackett Building. On behalf of the commissioner, some flunky offered thanks for the expression of condolences on the tragic death of Peyton Waldruff, superintendent of the State Asylum for Feebleminded Idiots (an expression Dunne had no recollection of making). As to the inquiry about Mr. Waldruff’s relationship to the Hermes Sanatorium and the transfer of any of those under Mr. Waldruff’s care to that facility, the records were sealed in order to protect the inmates. Any breach of that protection would require a court order.

  The rest of the afternoon was expended once again in contemplating how smooth a wall appears till you stare at it long enough and the true surface reveals itself, a complicated terrain of bumps, depressions, cracks, nicks, and replasterings. The Hackett Building had gone up in the early Twenties. But the wall had an ancient texture, as if lifted from some centuries-old prison or monastery and, like the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, transported here so that those with too much time on their hands would have something to keep their minds busy. Once the wall stopped providing sufficient distraction there was always the radio.

  It was hard to find any station without hearing the refrain, “We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you the latest news on the situation in Europe.” The surprise announcement by Prime Minister Chamberlain that he intended to fly to Germany to meet Hitler had electrified the world press. It seemed certain Chamberlain and the French would pressure the Czechs to make the concessions needed to avoid a general war. The citizens of Munich cheered when he drove through their streets to reach the train that would take him to Berchtesgaden for his meeting with the Führer. When he returned to England, British crowds shouted their approval.

  The previous evening, the London correspondent for CBS, Edward R. Murrow, had described the profound relief that overtook the city when Chamberlain came back with the hope of preserving peace. As one of the Englishmen interviewed put it, “Surely reasonable men can reach a reasonable compromise.” Only a few, Murrow reported, thought that Britain was confronted by a regime whose ultimate purpose was war and conquest, not negotiation, and that it must resist. One of them was Winston Churchill, a member of parliament and former cabinet minister, who had once been considered as a potential prime minister but whose extreme views on the need for English rearmament had made him increasingly irrelevant. He’d issued a statement to the European press, declaring that “The personal intervention of Mr. Chamberlain does not at all alter the gravity of the issue at stake. We must hope it does not foreshadow another complete failure of the Western democracies to withstand the threats and violence of Nazi Germany.” For the time being, Murrow concluded, Mr. Churchill remained in a distinct minority.

  BERLIN

  Canaris opened the middle drawer of his desk and rummaged through a disorderly heap of old memos, outdated schedules, and unused requisition forms. In the corner, beneath a sheaf of forgotten correspondence, he found what he was looking for: the card the English visitor had left with him the previous June. The U-boat was due at Montauk in less than a week. Oster was right. The failure of its mission wouldn’t mean much in the scheme of things. But at least it would mean something.

  He recalled how as a small boy vacationing with his parents on the Adriatic he’d written a letter on thick, important-looking stationery he found in the desk in their hotel room. He addressed it TO WHOMEVER FINDS THIS and included a childish message about having been captured by pirates. He stuck it in a bottle and threw it into the sea, wondering whether it would float to North Africa or perhaps into the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic, across to America. On their last day at the shore, he found the bottle washed back on the very spot from which he tossed it. Water had seeped in and obliterated the message. Still, it was worth a try. A vote in favor of Oster’s conspiracy. He’d never voted in an election. Never wanted to. A useless gesture, he’d imagined. Now, he experienced the satisfaction sometimes even a gesture can bring. Who could say where it would lead? A bottle tossed into the sea. Let the tides take it where they will.

  On a plain index card, he printed:SS-AGENT GUSTAV HAUSSER (HUBER)/RENDEZVOUS: MONTAUK, 22.9.

  He put it, along with the Englishman’s card, in an envelope, addressed it, and attached a note directing it be sent express post, via air mail, to the addressee in New York. He then fit it inside a larger envelope. He summoned Piekenbrock, who arrived quickly. “I have an assignment for you,” he said. “You’ve been working too hard. I want you to take a few days rest.”

  “Thank you, Admiral. I’m a bit tired, but so is everyone else. Besides, all leaves are canceled.”

  “I canceled them. In your case, however, I’m countermanding my order.”

  “You’re very thoughtful. But I have neither the need nor the desire for a leave.”

  “No matter. Mens sans in corpore sano has long been a principle of mine. I’m ordering you to take a rest. More, I’m ordering you to take it in Copenhagen, immediately. The Danes know how to relax.”

  “This is most unnecessary, Admiral. I’m perfectly fine. I really am.”

  “And while you’re there, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind dropping this off with a former member of this department, a cryptographer. He’s a partner in an import-export firm. It’s a bit of personal business.”

  Piekenbrock held the letter in front of him. “Yes, I remember him,” he said. “A good officer. I was sorry when he transferred out of the department; sorrier still, when I heard he felt compelled to resign from the service.”

  Canaris suspected for an instant Piekenbrock might put it up to the light and try to peer at the contents. Instead, he unfastened the next-to-top button of his tunic and slipped it in the inner breast pocket. “Is there anything else, Herr Admiral?”

  “Yes, enjoy your leave. That too is an order.”

  NEW YORK

  Half a bottle of bourbon helped put Lina Linnet to sleep. Roberta had packed the refrigerator with food and convinced Fin to hire a cleaning lady to tidy up his apartment before Lina arrived. There was a pile of old magazines next to the radio. But Lina didn’t have an appetite and couldn’t concentrate enough to do more than skim the magazines. She took a long bath and smoked cigarettes while listening to the radio. In the late afternoon, she had a nap. When she woke, she telephoned the liquor store on the corner and had a bottle delivered. By midnight she was asleep again.

  She was roused by what sounded like someone fumbling with the lock. She lay still and listened. The clock next to the bed read 3:10. There were
more sounds from the hallway. Tiptoeing to the door, she raised the peephole. Across the hall, a man swayed back and forth as he made one unsuccessful attempt after another to put his key into the lock. Finally, a woman opened the door. “You’re drunk, Frank,” she hissed. “You swore you’d stay sober, but you’re drunk.” She grabbed his arm and jerked him inside.

  Lina sat in the dark by the window next to the fire escape and smoked a cigarette. High above the building opposite, a three-quarters moon shone brightly. She hummed to herself; a song from twenty years ago when she was fourteen; the night Jimmy Ryan took her to Bronx Park and they drank whiskey from the bottle he’d lifted from his father’s bar on Tremont Avenue; her first time lying with a boy:“By the light of the silv’ry moon I want to spoon

  To my honey I’ll croon love’s tune

  Honeymoon, keep a-shinin’ in June

  Your silv’ry beams will bring love’s dreams . . .”

  Jimmy turned out to be a rotten egg, like the others, a crate of rotten eggs. Getting laid, that’s all that was ever on their minds. At least he got his, gunned down in the speakeasy he took over from his father for refusing to buy beer from Dutch Schultz’s gang. She put out the cigarette and went back to bed.

  The pressure of someone sitting down on the bed awakened her before the gentle jiggling of a hand on her shoulder. It took her several seconds to remember where she was. The clock indicated 5:15. She turned, expecting to see Roberta, but it was a man. He had a long face, not unattractive, and when she looked at him, he broke into a wide smile. He leaned toward her and said softly, “Where’s Fintan Dunne?”