The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  “Still in Mexico?” said Tom.

  “Hmm,” I said. We stopped for a red light. White House workers hurried by, some with brown lunch bags in their hands. “Tell me, Tom,” I said, “what’s been happening here in Domestic Division since Pearl Harbor?” If queried by someone, Tom Dillon would probably say that he and I had shared confidences from the beginning, speaking openly about almost everything. The truth was that Tom shared confidences. “Caught any Nazi or Jap spies?” I said.

  Tom chuckled and shifted the coupe into gear as the light changed. “Heck, Joe, we’ve been so busy being sicced onto our own people, we don’t have time for Nazis or Japs.”

  “Which people?” I knew that Tom loved name-dropping. It would probably cost him his job someday. “Who’s the Bureau been sicced on since the war began, Tom?”

  He peeled a stick of Wrigley’s and began chewing loudly. “Oh, the vice president,” he said casually.

  I laughed. Vice President Henry Agard Wallace was an idealist and an honest man. He was also known as an idiot and a dupe for the Communists.

  Tom looked hurt at my laughter. “I mean it, Joe. We’ve been on him since last spring. Bugs, taps, tails, black bag jobs… the man can’t take a piss without Mr. Hoover getting a lab report on it.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Wallace is a threat….”

  Tom missed my irony. “Damned straight,” he said. “We’ve got proof that the Communists are considering using him as an active agent, Joe.”

  I shrugged. “The Russians are our allies now, remember?”

  Tom glanced over at me. He was shocked enough that he had quit chewing his gum. “Jesus, Joe… don’t joke about things like that. Mr. Hoover doesn’t—”

  “I know, I know,” I said. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and Adolf Hitler was the most dangerous man in the world, but Mr. Hoover was famous for his desire to deal with the Communist menace first. “Who else is taking up your time these days?” I said.

  “Sumner Welles,” said Tom, squinting in the bright sunlight as we stopped for another red light. A streetcar rumbled and screeched its way in front of us. We were only a few blocks from Tom’s apartment, but the traffic was almost solid here.

  I pushed the brim of my hat back. “Sumner Welles?” I repeated. Welles was undersecretary of state, as well as a personal friend and close adviser to the president. Welles was an expert on Latin American policy and crucial to the intelligence community there; his name had come across the Colombian embassy desk a dozen times in decision-making situations that had affected me. There had been rumors that Sumner Welles had been recalled from his embassy post in Colombia long before I had arrived, but no one was sure of the reason.

  “Is Welles a Communist?” I said.

  Tom shook his head. “Uh-uh. A fruit.”

  “Come again?”

  He looked at me and the old Tom Dillon smirk was back. “You heard me, Joe. A fruit. A queer. A fag.”

  I waited.

  “It started almost two years ago, Joe. September 1940. On the president’s special train coming back from Alabama after Speaker Bankhead’s funeral.”

  Tom looked at me as if I was supposed to ask eager questions at this point. I waited.

  The light changed. We ground forward a few yards and then stopped behind a mass of trucks and cars. Tom’s voice rose to be heard over the honking and engine noises. “I guess Welles had too much to drink, rang for the porter… several of them showed up… and then he, well, exposed himself to them and suggested… well, you know, Joe, fag stuff.” Tom was blushing. He was a tough G-man, but still a good Catholic boy at heart.

  “That’s been confirmed?” I said, thinking about how it would affect the SIS if Welles were to be replaced.

  “Hell, yes,” said Tom. “Mr. Hoover put Ed Tamm on it, and the Bureau’s been watching Welles for a year and a half. The old fag gets drunk and trolls the parks for little boys. We’ve got SA reports, eyewitness reports, depositions, wire recordings of phone conversations…”

  I tugged the brim of my hat lower to shade my eyes. According to the embassy people I trusted most, Sumner Welles was the smartest man in the State Department. “Has Mr. Hoover briefed the president?” I said.

  “A year ago this January,” said Tom. He spit his gum out over the side of the coupe. Traffic began to move. We turned right off Wisconsin. “According to Dick Ferris, who worked with Tamm on this, Mr. Hoover didn’t make any recommendations… wasn’t asked for any… and the president didn’t really say anything. Dick says that Attorney General Biddle tried to take this up with the president later and FDR just said, ‘Well, he’s not doing it on government time, is he?’ ”

  I nodded. “Making homosexual overtures is a felony,” I said.

  “Yeah, and Dick says that Ed Tamm says that Mr. Hoover pointed this out to the president and explained how it opens Welles up to blackmail. The president’s just sitting on it for now, but that won’t last for long….”

  “Why not?” I said. I saw the block where I had lived four years ago, sharing an apartment with two other special agents. Tom’s apartment was only three blocks west.

  “Bullitt’s after Welles now,” said Tom, turning the wheel with both hands.

  William Christian Bullitt. A man whom one of the columnists had once called “an Iago of Iagos.” I had never read Shakespeare, but I understood the allusion. Mr. Hoover had a file on Bullitt, as well, and in one of my earlier jobs in Washington I had been forced to review it. William Christian Bullitt was another buddy of FDR’s, an ambassador who made enemies in every country he was assigned to, and the kind of opportunist who would fuck a woodpile in the off chance there might be a snake in it. At the very least, according to the file I’d read, Bullitt had seduced FDR’s adoring and naive secretary, Missy LeHand, just so he could get a little better access to the president.

  If Bullitt was after Sumner Welles, he would bring him down someday… by leaking stories to FDR’s political enemies, by whispering to the columnists, by expressing his shock to Cordell Hull, the secretary of state. Bullitt would destroy Welles come hell or high water, and in so doing destroy the Latin American desk at State, sink the Good Neighbor Policy that was working down there, and weaken the nation in time of war. But a man who had homosexual urges when drunk would be out of government service and Mr. William Christian Bullitt would probably gain some leverage in the never-ending power game.

  Ah, Washington.

  “Who else is the Bureau after?” I said tiredly.

  Amazingly, there was a parking spot right in front of Tom’s apartment building. He swept the coupe into the little space, left the engine running, but pulled on the parking brake. He rubbed his nose. “You’ll never guess, Joe. I’ve been involved in this one personally. I’ve gotta work on it tonight. I’ll leave you the keys… maybe see you tomorrow.”

  I probably won’t be here tomorrow, I thought. I said, “Great.”

  “Go ahead, guess.” Tom still wanted to play his game.

  I sighed. “Eleanor Roosevelt,” I said.

  Tom blinked. “Damn. You’ve heard about the investigation?”

  “You have to be fucking kidding,” I said. Mr. Hoover had Official/Confidential files on most of the important people in Washington—in the United States—and everyone knew that he hated Eleanor Roosevelt, but the director would never go after a member of a sitting president’s family. He was too concerned about his own job for that.

  Tom saw that I was in the dark. He pushed back the brim of his hat with a confident gesture and laid his arm on the top of the steering wheel as he faced me. “No joke, Joe. Of course, we’re not following Mrs. Roosevelt personally, but…”

  “You had me going, Tom.”

  “No, no,” he said, leaning closer so that I could smell the spearmint on his breath. “For the last three years the old lady’s been nuts about a kid named Joe Lash…”

  I knew all about Lash, had seen his file in relation to a case I had worked on in 1939 regarding
the American Youth Congress, even interviewed him once myself while pretending to be a student interested in his organization. Lash had been national secretary of the Youth Congress then, a perennial student himself, older than me but decades younger in every way that counts—one of those boys in a man’s body, going on thirty but with all the wisdom and sophistication of a ten-year-old. The Youth Congress was a left-wing debating society, just the kind of organization the Communists loved to fund and infiltrate, and it was a pet of Mrs. Roosevelt’s.

  “They’re lovers…” Tom was saying.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “She’s sixty years old—”

  “Fifty-eight,” said Tom. “Lash is thirty-three. Mrs. Roosevelt has her own apartment in New York, Joe. She refused Secret Service protection.”

  “So?” I said. “That doesn’t prove anything except that the old broad has sense. Who wants those Treasury assholes breathing down your neck twenty-four hours a day?”

  Tom was shaking his head. “Mr. Hoover knows that it means something.”

  I had a headache. For the briefest of seconds, I again had the urge to grab Tom’s tie and slam his face into the coupe’s dash until that pert, freckled nose was a shapeless, bleeding mass. “Tom,” I said softly, “are you telling me that we’re doing black bag jobs on Mrs. Roosevelt? Chamfering her mail?”

  He shook his head again. “Of course not, Joe. But we’re photographing Lash’s mail, bugging his phone and apartment. You should read the letters that our dear First Lady Nigger Lover sends that Commie jerk… hot stuff, Joe.”

  “I bet,” I said. The thought of that homely old lady writing passionate letters to this boy made me sad.

  “That’s where I’m going tonight,” said Tom, adjusting his hat again. “Lash got drafted a couple of weeks ago, and we’re handing over the investigation to the CIC.”

  “It figures,” I said. The army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps, a branch of its Military Intelligence Division run by General John Bissell, might have been generously described as a drunken chimpanzee cluster fuck. Bissell’s group might also have been described as a bunch of right-wing assholes, but not by me. Not this day. One thing was for sure, I knew—the CIC would have no hesitation in tailing, bugging, tapping, or black bagging Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. And I also knew that FDR, for all his patience with sad fools like Sumner Welles, would have Bissell’s ass transferred to the South Pacific in a minute when he discovered that the army was after his wife.

  Tom tossed me his keys. “Could beer in the icebox,” he said. “Sorry there’s no food. We can go out for dinner tomorrow when I get off duty.”

  “Hope so,” I said. I jingled the keys in my fist. “Thanks for this, Tom. If I have to leave before you get back tomorrow…”

  “Put ’em over the door, just like the old days,” said Tom. He leaned over to shake hands above the hot metal of the car door. “See you later, buddy.”

  I watched him pull the coupe out into traffic before I hustled up the stairs. Tom Dillon was the perfect FBI man—eager to please but basically lazy, willing to eat shit if Mr. Hoover or Mr. Hoover’s men said to eat shit, quick at following orders and slow to think on his own, a defender of democracy who hated niggers, spics, kikes, wops, and greasers. Without doubt Tom fired his .38 religiously at the Bureau firing range in the basement of the Justice Department Building and would be proficient with submachine guns, shotguns, high-velocity rifles, and hand-to-hand combat. On paper, he was a competent killer. Tom would last about three days in SIS field operations.

  I climbed the stairs to my shower and put him out of my mind.

  3

  THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the huge Department of Justice Building was at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The classic porticoes, each with four massive pillars on each side of that corner, started above the second-floor windows and ran all the way to the roofline, four stories above. On the Pennsylvania Avenue side, near the corner, the only balcony was outside the fifth-floor window to the left of those pillars. This was Mr. Hoover’s personal balcony. Already, in 1942, he had watched eighteen years’ worth of U.S. presidents pass by in inaugural parades, then had stood there to watch some of them returning in funeral processions.

  I knew the building, of course, but I had never had a desk in it, having been relegated to various field offices or undercover work during my earlier stays in the District of Columbia. This worked in my favor as I came in ten minutes early for my eleven-thirty appointment, looking showered, shaved, hair pomaded, wearing a clean shirt and suit, shoes polished, hat carried carefully in my not-damp hands. The place was huge, and there were a few faces I would have recognized and who might have recognized me, but I did not encounter them as I got off the elevator on the fifth floor and headed for the director’s sanctum sanctorum.

  Mr. Hoover’s office was not at the center of the building, but actually almost hidden away. To find it one had to traipse down a long hallway, then through a large conference room with ashtrays set along a polished table, then through an outer office where Miss Gandy waited like the proverbial dragon guarding the legendary virgin. In 1942, Miss Gandy was already a legend herself: Hoover’s one indispensable employee, part protector, part nursemaid, and the only human being allowed to see, catalog, index, and read Hoover’s Personal Files. She was forty-five years old when I walked into that outer office in 1942, but Hoover already referred to her as “that old biddy” to his male friends and closest assistants. And it was true that there was something of the biddy hen about her.

  “Special Agent Lucas?” she said, glancing up at me as I stood there with my hat in my hands. “You are four minutes early.”

  I nodded.

  “Take a seat, please. The Director is running on schedule.”

  I resisted the impulse to smile at the sound of the capital letter on “Director” and took a seat as ordered. The room was almost dowdy—two over-stuffed chairs and a sprung sofa against the wall. I sat on the sofa. I knew that this was the only glimpse of J. Edgar Hoover’s office that most special agents ever saw: the director (I thought of him with no capital letter) usually met his lower-level subordinates in the conference room or in this outer office. I looked around, expecting to see John Dillinger’s scalp on one of the few shelves of the display case across from me, but the exhibit Tom and my other SA friends had described in loving detail was absent. Only a few plaques and a dusty trophy sat there. Perhaps the scalp was out at the cleaners.

  At precisely eleven-thirty, Miss Gandy said, “The Director will see you now, Special Agent Lucas.” I confess that my pulse rate was higher than usual as I went through that inner door.

  Mr. Hoover leaped up as I came in, bustled around his desk, shook my hand in the center of the room, and waved me to a chair to the right of his desk while he returned to his own place. I knew from hearing other special agents talk that this was the invariable routine if one were lucky enough to meet with the director in his inner office.

  “Well, Special Agent Lucas,” said Mr. Hoover as he settled back in his throne. I say throne without sarcasm, because his office was set up that way—his desk and chair were on a raised dais, his own chair was much more substantial than the low guest chair in which I sat, and the tall window was at his back, the blinds open so that if the sun were shining, Mr. Hoover would be little more than a massive silhouette against the light. But the day had become partly cloudy since the glorious morning, the light behind him was muted, and I could make out Hoover’s features easily enough.

  J. Edgar Hoover was forty-six years old on that April day in 1942—the only time I ever met with him, before or since—and I took my assessment of him at the same time he was assessing me. When meeting other men, it was a habit of mine—although weakness might be a better word—to judge them according to how I would deal with them in a fistfight. Physically, Hoover would not have been a problem. He was short for an agent—exactly my height, I’d noticed as we had shaken hands—and while I still would have qualified in the light heavyweight catego
ry, he must have outweighed me by at least twenty pounds. He was probably around five foot ten and 183, well above the weight-for-height guidelines he had set for his FBI agents. The first impression was of squatness, and that impression was enhanced by the fact that his broad upper body tapered down to the smallest feet I had ever seen on a man. Hoover was well dressed, his dark, double-breasted suit impeccably tailored, his silk tie showing hints of pink and burgundy which no SA would have dared wear, and I made note of the matching pink silk handkerchief puffed out in his breast pocket. His hair looked black and was slicked back so firmly on his head that his characteristic scowl and squint looked like they were caused by a flat wig pulled too tight.

  The popular caricature of Hoover was of a bulldog—the squinting or popped eyes, the squashed-in nose, the massive, clenched jaw—and all those elements were visible in that first moment of encounter with him, but my own thought was more of a Chinese pug than a bulldog. Hoover moved fast—his walk out to the center of the room, his handshake, and his retreat to his chair had taken less than fifteen seconds—but his was a nervously purposeful energy. If I had to fight the man, I would have gone for his belly—obviously his softest part, second only to his gonads—but I would have made damned sure not to turn my back on him when he went down. Those eyes and that set of mouth belonged to a man who would try to bite you to death after you’d cut off his arms and legs.

  “Well, Special Agent Lucas,” he said again, flipping open a thick personnel file that I was sure was mine. Except for a few other files and a black, leather-bound book a few inches from his left elbow—the Bible that had been a gift from his mother, an artifact all of us had heard about—his desk was bare. “Did you have a good trip to Washington, Lucas?”