The walk along the last blocks of Bank Street to his building quieted Rhonda, as it often did. This part of the Village was little traveled, and many of the blocks were industrial and unpeopled at night. The darkness seemed denser, and it spooked her. ‘I want a big glass of cognac when we get home,’ she said.
‘You said you don’t sleep when you have cognac.’
‘So we’ll stay up.’ She jabbed him with an elbow, and her eyes were shining.
Cassidy found his keys, and they went in through the front door bumping hips and laughing.
The stalker watched from the darkness of a deep doorway across the street. He hadn’t counted on the girl being with Cassidy. He had hoped to have a conversation with him tonight, to clear up the confusion, to bring it all out into the open. It would have to wait. It didn’t matter. A few more days wouldn’t change anything.
Cassidy and Rhonda stopped to kiss at the fourth-floor landing and then went up to the top floor in a rush of anticipation. A large florist’s delivery stood on the mat in front of Cassidy’s door. All they could see was the curve of the black vase. The flowers were shrouded in white paper. An envelope with Cassidy’s name on it was pinned to the paper. Cassidy pushed Rhonda up against the door and kissed her while he fumbled the key blind into the lock. The door swung open, and they half stumbled, half fell into the apartment still locked in the kiss. Cassidy heeled the door shut and went to work on the buttons on Rhonda’s blouse.
Rhonda broke the kiss. ‘Michael, what about the flowers?’
‘What flowers?’
‘Michael …’
He pulled the blouse out from the waistband of her skirt. ‘They’ll be fine till morning. They’re in water.’ He reached up her back to undo her bra.
‘At least bring them inside.’
‘Women,’ Cassidy said, ‘have no sense of priorities.’ He opened the door, swept the vase in, and pushed it out of the way. He kicked the door shut, picked up Rhonda, and carried her in laughing protest to the bedroom.
FOURTEEN
Rhonda got up at first light. She kissed Cassidy awake enough to tell him she was going home to change before she went to work. He grunted and turned over and the alarm clock woke him an hour later. He padded naked into the kitchen and started the coffee. As he headed back toward the shower, he noticed the vase by the front door. When he pulled the envelope, the covering of paper came off. There were six white lilies in the black vase. They were tied with a large black bow. It was a funeral arrangement. He ripped open the envelope. The card read:
SO SORRY TO HEAR OF YOUR APPROACHING DEATH.
Cassidy threw the flowers in the trash and dumped the vase in the garbage can hard enough to break it. This son of a bitch was beginning to get on his nerves.
The man in the flower store on Hudson looked at the card and nodded. ‘Yep, that’s what they wanted. Some sort of joke, I guess. Bad taste in my opinion, but what the hell, the customer is always right. Right?’
‘Can you describe him?’ Cassidy asked.
‘Never saw him. A letter through the slot some time during the day when I was busy. Instructions, address, and twenty bucks. Never saw him.’
Clips of the archived stories from the New York Post were kept in dusty brown envelopes on shelves in the paper’s morgue. The morgue was overseen by an equally dusty, gray-haired dragon named Tuttle, her first name known only to history and the payroll department, who sat behind the wooden counter in a worn, rump-sprung upholstered chair and knitted something long and shapeless and brown. When you presented your requests, Tuttle would look at them suspiciously and then yell for Ralph, who would appear from a small office behind her desk. Ralph was stooped and bald, with a monk’s fringe of white hair. One leg dragged a bit, and the house rumor was that he had been wounded in the First World War by a shell that had left him with a vague but cheerful manner in contrast to Tuttle’s. Ralph would take the request slip and disappear into the rows of shelves with the invariable promise of ‘Back in a minute. Tout de suite,’ which sometimes proved true.
Rhonda sat at a long wooden table and looked through the clips Ralph brought. By late afternoon, the dust was in her nose and lungs, and her fingers were black with printer’s ink. One story held her interest. It had been written in October of 1953 under the byline of William Long. She did not recognize the name.
She spent ten minutes in the ladies’ room trying to get the old ink off her and the dust out of her, gave up and took the elevator to the newsroom. The people at the desks near hers did not know William Long, but the Metro Editor, who had been at the paper for years said, ‘Sure, Bill Long. A good reporter. Left the paper a few years back, I don’t remember why. Some beef with somebody about something. The last I heard he was working in his family’s business. Check with Stan Nagosy in sports. They were pals.’
Rhonda’s taxi took her through the financial district. The Stock Exchange, the brokerage houses, and the banks were closed, and the streets were empty-lighted canyons. The moneymen had gone home and the money slept or did whatever it did when no one was watching. She got out at Front Street and Beekman and walked the last block to South Street. The Fulton Fish Market came awake late in the evening, and now it was running full blast. Loaded trucks whined away from the market in low gear. Growling forklifts carrying stacked wooden boxes rumbled and rocked over the wet cobblestones. Gulls wheeled and squalled in the air and landed heavily to tear at fish guts discarded in the gutter. Men in rubber boots and bloodstained overalls shouted prices and come-ons at buyers in overcoats and fedoras. The air smelled of fish, and diesel, and the sea. Sometimes when a workman turned and the light hit just right, the fish scales on his clothes glinted like sequins.
Two men with long knives were filleting big tunas on wooden tables at the entrance to one of the market houses. Rhonda stopped to watch the long blades slide in along the spines, the dark red meat revealed as the men lifted the fillets away. One of the men stopped to light a cigarette and to take an admiring look at Rhonda. ‘Can I help you, Miss?’
‘I’m looking for William Long.’
‘Bill? Two stalls up. Where the van’s parked.’
A young man with an Elvis pompadour, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and the sullen look of someone with better things to do was shoving boxes of fish into a dark green panel truck with a silver swordfish painted on the side below Long and Sons Fresh Fish in silver script.
‘Is Bill Long here?’ Rhonda asked.
The young man loaded the last box, slammed the doors, and turned to look her up and down. ‘Yeah. In the back.’
She could feel his eyes on her as she went into the stall past the trays of fish on crushed ice and into a back area stacked with empty fish boxes. Two men were gutting fish at a knife-scarred wooden table with blood grooves along its sides. The tall, thin man who looked up at her had curly gray hair and the broken-veined face of a drinker.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m looking for Bill Long.’
The younger man, a newer version of the older man opposite, said, ‘That’s me.’ He slit the belly of a large fish, jerked out the guts and gills, and tossed them in a metal bucket at his feet. The fish went onto ice on a shallow wooden tray next to the bodies of two others. They shone silver under the harsh overhead lights in metal shades.
‘My name’s Rhonda Raskin. I work for the New York Post. I wanted to ask you about a story you wrote in 1953.’
‘Oh, yeah? What story was that? I wrote a lot of stories in 1953. I was a story writing maniac in 1953.’ He grinned at her, pulled another fish over, inserted the point of his knife in its anus, and sliced it open to the gills with one rip.
‘It was about a German scientist who was brought over to work for Wernher Von Braun on the rocket program in Huntsville, Alabama. The guy turned out to be a Nazi war criminal. Hans Muller.’
Bill Long put down the knife, and his face clenched. ‘Yeah, yeah. I know his name. But who are you, really?’ The man on
the other side of the table stopped working.
‘Rhonda Raskin. I told you.’
‘Why do you want to talk about that story?’ His eyes were suspicious.
‘I wanted to know why you didn’t follow up. That story was just the beginning. It begged for follow up, but there was none. I couldn’t find another story on it in the morgue. Why not?’
‘Who sent you?’
‘Nobody sent me. I work for the Post, just like you did. Call Stan Nagosy if you don’t believe me.’
‘Yeah? So what do you care?’
‘Easy, Billy,’ the older man said.
‘Sure, Dad. I’ll take it easy.’
‘I think what you found was the tip of the iceberg,’ Rhonda said. ‘I think there are a lot more Nazis working here. I want to know about it. I want to write about it.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
He studied her for a moment. ‘Let’s you and me go have a drink.’
‘Billy,’ his father’s warning voice.
‘It’s okay, Dad. It’s okay. What’s your name again?’
‘Rhonda Raskin.’
‘Okay, Rhonda. You’re buying.’
They walked to a bar on Front Street. It was a dingy joint with a low ceiling and sawdust and peanut shells on the floor and an odor of fish competing with the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke. A tired-looking sailfish hung on a wall near the door. Its blue had faded, its silver belly was dull, its sail drooped, and the tip of its bill had broken off. Men stood shoulder to shoulder at the bar, but few of the tables were occupied.
‘What are you drinking,’ Bill Long asked.
‘A shot and a Knick.’
He nodded approval and waited.
‘Right,’ she said, and dug a five dollar bill from her pocket.
‘Expense account,’ he said.
‘Maybe.’
‘Hey, if you haven’t learned to fiddle your expense account, you’re no newspaper man. Table in the corner. I’ll be right there.’
She watched him move to the bar. He seemed a cheerful man except when she mentioned the Nazi story. He hadn’t liked that.
She took a chair with her back to the angle so she could see the whole barroom and lit a cigarette. Her feet and back hurt, and her eyes were gritty from too little sleep, too much coffee. All she really wanted to do was go home, take a hot bath, crawl into bed, and pull the covers up. Perfect, she thought, you’ve got a story that could change your life, and you want to go home and cuddle with your teddy bear. They say women can’t cut it, and you sure ain’t going to help the cause by giving up easily.
Bill Long carried their drinks to the table, and put them down carefully. ‘Don’t want to spill a precious drop.’ He took her change from his breast pocket and passed it across the table. ‘I left Sammy a bit of a tip. Hope you don’t mind.’
‘No. Of course not.’
Long pulled out the chair and sat with a sigh of relief. ‘Feels good to sit for a while. Been on my feet all day. Either the floors are getting harder, or I’m getting older.’
‘Just what I was thinking.’
‘Well, the hell with it. Life goes on.’ He raised his shot glass to her, ‘First of the day,’ and took a sip and then a swallow of beer. He took another sip of whiskey and chased it with beer. ‘Okay. What’ve we got?’
Rhonda told him about Leon Dudek and his search for Nazis in the city.
When she finished, Long shrugged. ‘Dudek sounds a little screwy. Of course he has every right to be after what he went through He didn’t leave you much to work with.’
‘Do you think he was right?’
‘Well, he may not have been right about the guys he went after, but he wasn’t wrong about there being Nazis in the city.’ He shook a couple of cigarettes out of a pack of Camels and lit hers first.
‘A lot?’
‘I don’t know about a lot, but some. I just don’t know what the hell people are thinking. We fight them for years. We’re told that they’re the worst of the worst, the end of civilization and freedom if they win, and then when it’s over, the same guys who’ve been telling us that stuff start bringing them over here to work for us.’ He shook his head at the idiocy of the world. ‘My brother didn’t make it back. Killed at Anzio. Then I discover this Nazi son of a bitch is here living high on the hog working for the government on rocket development. I think, well, it’s a mistake. He covered his tracks in Germany, and they don’t know who they’ve got working for them. I do a little digging and find out he was on the list of bad guys.’
‘What did he do?’ Rhonda tasted the whiskey. It had a rawness to it that she liked.
‘He was an engineer who helped design the V-1 and V-2 rockets. He ran a factory for the Krauts building parts for them. They used slave labor from the concentration camps. They figure more than fifteen thousand prisoners died of starvation on his watch. He fed them just enough to keep them alive for a while, and when they died, they brought in more. Muller rented the prisoners for pennies a day from the SS who ran the camps. Every week he would select two men and a woman and have them hung from a beam near the entrance to the factory as examples against disobedience.’ Bill’s grin was awful.
The cigarette, forgotten, burned Rhonda’s fingers. Startled, she flicked it to the floor.
‘At the time I figured that maybe he forged some papers, took someone else’s name, something. Arrogant prick, excuse my French, told me that he was here legit, and that I could go piss up a rope. So I wrote the story, identified him, said what he had done over there. A couple of the wire services picked it up, and pretty soon he disappeared back to Germany. Like they say in the movie, the government was “shocked, shocked” to discover there were Nazis working here.’
A waitress stopped near the table. ‘You and your friend want another, Billy?’
Long raised his eyebrows in question, and Rhonda nodded. The waitress took the empty glasses and went away.
‘You never wrote a follow-up story.’
‘No.’
The waitress arrived with their drinks, took Rhonda’s money and went away.
‘Why not?’
Long looked uncomfortable. He fiddled with his shot glass and took a sip. Then he sighed and shrugged. ‘A few days after the story ran, a couple of guys came to see me. Not at the paper. They picked me up on the street when I left to go home. Very polite. Very firm. Put me in a car and took me to a house up in the Village. Sat me down and told me how it was. Muller was going back to Germany. The story was dead. No follow-up necessary. I wanted to be a good American, didn’t I? I didn’t want to help the Ruskies by undermining our military preparedness, did I? I asked if Muller was the only one. “Sure,” they said, “he’s the only one.” But they didn’t give a shit if I believed them or not, because the next day they showed me who had the power, me or them. A bunch of city inspectors showed up at Dad’s stall over there and closed him down. This violation and that violation, closed until further notice. The next day he got a summons from the IRS to go over his taxes back five years. A couple of FBI agents show up at my brother’s widow’s place of work to ask her about an organization she belonged to in college that had ties to the Communist Party.’
‘I get it,’ Rhonda said.
‘Yeah, I got it too. And you know what the final straw was?’
‘No, what?’
‘My editor never asked for a follow-up. It was a good story, maybe the beginning of a really big story, but no one asked me to go on with it. Maybe someone talked to them. I don’t know. Maybe they just didn’t see it the way I saw it, but they were done. Okay, so was I. Sometimes you just can’t fight City Hall.’
‘Who were the men who talked to you? Were they FBI? Did they show you IDs?’
‘They didn’t show me anything, but they didn’t have to. They had that look, that fuck-you arrogance, pardon my French, of guys with a lot of clout behind them. You could tell.’
‘Where was the house in the Village where they
took you?’
Long took a sip of his drink and watched her for a moment over the rim of the glass. He shook his head. ‘Jesus, you’ve got the bug, don’t you? You want the story and the hell with everything else. The reason I didn’t push on it, the reason I quit, is that I cared about everything else more than the story. Once I knew that, I knew I was going to be a mediocre reporter. I’d rather sell fish.’
‘Do you remember the address?’
He shook his head again. ‘Lady, forget it. I’m not telling you. I don’t want them coming back at me and mine.’
‘They wouldn’t know. I don’t give up my sources.’
‘They’d know.’
‘How would they know? They’ve probably taken plenty of people to that house. Why would they pick you to come back at three years later?’
‘I don’t know how, but they’d know. I’m not risking it.’
‘Bill—’
‘No. Forget it.’ He shoved his chair back and stood up fast.
‘Give me something. Anything. A hint, a name, something.’
‘I can’t. I’ve got to protect me and mine. Thanks for the drinks. Nice meeting you.’ He got up and walked away.
‘Shit.’ She stubbed out her cigarette, left money on the table for the waitress and went out into the night.
Rhonda’s story in the Post came out three days later in time to pull a cloud over Magda and Karl Brandt’s early lunch at Rumpelmayer’s in the Hotel St Moritz. Magda had ordered the jellied tomato bouillon and then the filet of flounder grille St Germain. Karl preferred the sea food cocktail and the prime ribs of beef au jus. She asked for a half bottle of the Paul Ruinart champagne, and he would have a half of the St Moritz special reserve Claret. They would decide on dessert later, something with whipped cream for her, chocolate for him, Rumpelmayer’s specialties.
Karl picked up the newspaper from the sill of the window that looked out across 59th Street at Central Park and toward the horse-drawn carriages that parked along the curb. They did not usually read the Post, because, Magda said, ‘It is not a paper of any culture,’ but it was there, so he took a look.
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