The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know why I’ve called you here, Lucas?” Hoover’s speech was fast, clipped, staccato.

  “No, sir.”

  The director nodded but did not go on to enlighten me. He thumbed through my life as if it was the first time he had ever seen it, although I was certain that he had studied it carefully before I arrived.

  “I see you were born in 1912,” said Hoover. “In… ah… Brownsville, Texas.”

  “Yes, sir.” Despite the uselessness of guessing about the reason for my summons, I had done some speculating during the trip from Mexico. I did not flatter myself that I was in line for some sort of promotion or special recognition. What set me apart from most of the other four thousand or so special agents working for J. Edgar Hoover that year was that I had killed two men… three if he chose to count Krivitsky from the previous year. The last man in the FBI to get a reputation as a killer had been Special Agent in Charge Melvin Purvis, the agent credited with shooting both John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, and while it was common knowledge in the Bureau that Purvis had not actually killed either of those criminals, it was also understood that Hoover had forced Purvis into resigning in 1935. Purvis had become famous… more famous than his director, who had never shot at a crook or actually arrested anyone. The public was to associate only one name with the FBI—J. Edgar Hoover. Purvis had to go. This was one reason I had been damned sure never to claim special credit for anything—not for the cases when we had rounded up the last of the Abwehr agents in Mexico, not for the two shootings in that dark, adobe house when Schiller and his hired assassin tried to kill me, not for Krivitsky.

  “You have two brothers and a sister,” said Hoover.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked up from the file and stared at me. “Seems like a small family for Mexican Catholics,” he said.

  “My father was born in Mexico,” I said. “My mother was Irish.” This was the other possibility, that the Bureau had only recently discovered my father’s nationality.

  “Mexican and Irish,” said Hoover. “Then it’s a miracle that there were only four children in the family.”

  A miracle called the influenza epidemic and pneumonia, I thought, my face showing nothing.

  Hoover was looking at the file again. “Did they call you José at home, Agent Lucas?”

  My father had. He had not become an American citizen until the year before he died. “The name on my birth certificate is Joseph, Mr. Hoover,” I said.

  If this was the reason I had been called to Washington, I was ready for it. Not that the Bureau discriminated. There were 5,702 Negro FBI special agents in 1942—I had seen the number in a report at the Mexico City field office less than a week earlier. About 5,690 of these SAs had been appointed in the past six months—all of them black drivers, janitors, cooks, and office help whom Hoover had not wanted drafted. Hoover had worked hard to make sure that special agents of the FBI were immune from the draft, at the same time he had let it be known to every special agent in the weeks after Pearl Harbor that they could enlist if they wished but that there would be no place waiting for them in the Bureau if and when they got back.

  I knew that there had been at least five Negro G-men before Pearl Harbor—Mr. Hoover’s three chauffeurs, of course, as well as John Amos and Sam Noisette. Amos was an old man. He had been Theodore Roosevelt’s valet, personal bodyguard, and friend—TR had literally died in Sam Amos’s arms—and when Hoover had become director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, Amos was already on the payroll. I had seen the old black man once at the firing range, where his job was to clean the weapons.

  Sam Noisette was a more recent Negro success story, a special agent assigned to Mr. Hoover’s personal office—I was surprised that I had not seen him on the way in—who was often held up as an example of the Bureau’s generous policy toward blacks. When someone once showed me an article in Ebony magazine trumpeting the close working friendship between Special Agent Noisette and Mr. Hoover, I had to smile at the sentence “The relationship between the two men virtually sets the race relations pattern for the huge agency.” It was true, but perhaps not in the way the Ebony writer had meant it. Noisette—“Mr. Sam,” as Hoover and everyone else called him—was the director’s personal assistant and majordomo, given the responsibility of handing the director a dry towel when Hoover emerged from his private bathroom, of helping him into his coat, and—most important—of swatting the flies which J. Edgar Hoover loathed with a passion matched only by his fear and hatred of Communists.

  Did they call you José at home? Hoover was telling me that he knew… the Bureau knew… that my father had not been an American citizen at the time of my birth, that technically I was the son of a beaner, a wetback.

  I looked the pug dog of a little man in the eye and waited.

  “I see you moved around a lot as a boy, Special Agent Lucas. Texas. Then California. Then Florida. Then back to Texas for college.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hoover still looked at the file. “Your father died in 1919, in France, I see. As a result of war wounds?”

  “The influenza,” I said.

  “But he was there in the army?”

  “Yes, sir.” In a labor battalion. Which was the last to be shipped home. Which is why he was still there to catch the influenza at the height of the epidemic.

  “Yes, yes,” said Hoover, dismissing my father without looking up from the file. “And your mother died the same year.” Now he looked up, one dark eyebrow rising slightly.

  “Pneumonia,” I said. A broken heart, I thought.

  Hoover shuffled the papers. “But you and the other children weren’t put in an orphanage?”

  “No, sir. My sister went to live with my aunt’s family.” In Mexico, I thought, and prayed that this detail was not in my dossier. “My two brothers and I went to live with my father’s brother in Florida. He had only one son to help him on his fishing boat. My brothers and I worked with him on it for several years while we were in school—I used to return and work every summer with him while I was putting myself through college.”

  “So you are familiar with the Caribbean?” said Hoover.

  “Not really, sir. We fished on the Gulf side. One summer I worked on a charter boat that sailed around to Miami and then to Bimini, but we never saw the other islands.”

  “But you know boats,” said Hoover, his popped eyes staring blackly at me. I had no idea what he was thinking.

  “Yes, sir. Enough to get by on one.”

  The director looked back at the file. “Tell me about the Veracruz incident, Special Agent Lucas.”

  I knew that he was looking at my ten-page, single-spaced report in the file. “You’re aware, sir, of the details of the operation up to the point that Schiller was tipped off by an informant in the Mexican police?”

  Hoover nodded. The sun had come out for a moment, and its glare through the blinds behind the director gave the effect he liked. I could no longer see Hoover’s eyes—only the silhouette of his burly shoulders extending to either side of the dark shape that was his chair… that and the gleam of sunlight on his oiled hair.

  “I was supposed to meet them at the house on Simón Bolívar Street at eleven P.M. to make the drop,” I said. “Just as I had a dozen times before. I always came at least an hour before the meeting to check out the place. Only this time they had come ninety minutes before the rendezvous time. They were waiting in the darkened house when I let myself in the front door. At the last minute, I realized that they were there.”

  “What tipped you off, Special Agent Lucas?” came Hoover’s voice from the dark silhouette.

  “The dog, sir. There had been an old yellow hound that had barked every time I’d come before. Usually dogs in Mexico aren’t all that territorial, but this was a bitch who belonged to the peasant who watched the house for Schiller. It was chained up in the side yard. The peasant had been picked up in our sweep two days previously, and the dog was starve
d.”

  “So you heard it barking?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t hear it. My guess is that it had been barking since Schiller had arrived, and he told the man with him to cut its throat.”

  Hoover chuckled. “Just like that Sherlock Holmes case. The dog in the night.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Haven’t you read Sherlock Holmes, Special Agent Lucas?”

  “No, sir. I don’t read make-believe books.”

  “Make-believe books? You mean novels?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, go on. What happened next?”

  I creased the brim of my hat as it sat in my lap. “Not much, sir. Or, rather, quite a bit, but very quickly. I was already at the door before I realized that the dog wasn’t barking. I decided to go in. They weren’t expecting me that early. They hadn’t found good firing positions yet. I went in fast. They shot at me, but it was dark and they missed. I shot back.”

  Hoover folded his hands as if in prayer. “The ballistics report said that between the two of them they fired more than forty bullets. Nine millimeter. Lugers?”

  “Lopez, the hired gun, had a Luger,” I said. “Schiller was firing a Schmeisser.”

  “Machine pistol,” said Hoover. “It must have been loud in that little room.”

  I nodded.

  “And you fired only four bullets from your .357 Magnum, Special Agent Lucas?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Two head shots and an upper body hit. From a prone position. In the dark. Amidst all that noise and confusion?”

  “Their muzzle flashes gave them away, sir. I wasn’t trying for head shots, necessarily, just firing above the flashes. One usually shoots a bit high in the dark. And I think that the noise rattled Schiller. Lopez was a professional. Schiller was an amateur and a fool.”

  “A dead fool now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you still carrying the .357 Magnum, Agent Lucas?”

  “No, sir. I have the regulation .38 with me.”

  Hoover looked back at the file. “Krivitsky,” he said softly, as if to himself.

  I said nothing. If I was here because of a problem, this could be it. Hoover turned pages in the thick file.

  General Walter Gregorievitch Krivitsky had been chief of the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Service in Western Europe, until late in 1937, when he had come out of the shadows at The Hague, seeking asylum in the West and telling reporters that he had “broken with Stalin.” No one breaks with Stalin and lives. Krivitsky was a follower of Leon Trotsky, who had become a prime example of that dictum in Mexico City.

  The Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence group, had been interested in what Krivitsky knew. A crack Abwehr agent, Commander Traugott Andreas Richard Protze—formerly a counterespionage expert in the old Marine Nachrichtendienst, the German Naval Intelligence Office—had put his people to work on turning Walter Krivitsky, who had decided that a high-profile life in Paris was his ticket to safety. There was no ticket to safety. With GPU assassins on their way from the Soviet Union and Protze’s Abwehr agents all around—one got close to Krivitsky by posing as a Jewish refugee being hunted by both the Nazis and the Communists—the ex-NKVD agent’s life was becoming cheaper by the moment.

  Krivitsky bolted from Paris to the United States, where the FBI and the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence soon joined the Abwehr and the GPU in following the small, thin, shaggy-browed Krivitsky. Once again, the ex-Soviet decided that being in the eye of the public was his best defense. Krivitsky wrote a book—I Was Stalin’s Agent—published articles in the Saturday Evening Post, and even testified before the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities. In every public appearance, Krivitsky announced to everyone who would listen that he was being tailed by GPU assassins.

  He was, of course—the foremost among them being a killer known as “Hans the Red Judas,” who had just come from Europe after murdering Ignace Reiss, Krivitsky’s old friend and another deserter from the Soviet Secret Service. By the time the war broke out in Europe in 1939, Krivitsky could not go to the corner newsstand for a copy of Look without half a dozen agencies, foreign and domestic, reading it over his shoulder.

  My job was not to follow Krivitsky—I would have had to have taken a number and gotten in line to do that—but to tail “Hans the Red Judas,” the Abwehr agent who was following Krivitsky. This was Dr. Hans Wesemann, a former Marxist, a debonair European man-about-town, and a specialist in kidnapping or killing former émigrés. Wesemann was in the United States on a journalist’s passport, but although the FBI had been tipped to his presence almost immediately upon his entering the country, the Bureau had ignored Wesemann until it became obvious that he was closing in on Krivitsky.

  So in September 1939, I was brought back to the States as part of the FBI/BSC operation to turn the Krivitsky–Red Judas–Hans Wesemann situation to our advantage. Wesemann must have sensed the crowds gathering around his attempt to grab Krivitsky, because the Abwehr agent asked his superior, Commander Protze, for permission to get out of the country and lie low. We learned this later because the British had broken the German code and would occasionally drop us such crumbs. Protze then conferred with the Abwehr director, Admiral Canaris, and in late September 1939, Wesemann was on his way to Tokyo on a Japanese ship. We could not follow him there, but the British ONI and BSC could—and did—and they let us know immediately when Wesemann arrived in Tokyo only to receive a cable from Protze ordering him back to the United States.

  This is the point where I came into play. I had been brought to Washington the previous autumn because we had hoped that Wesemann might go to ground in Mexico, the center for most of the Abwehr’s operations in this hemisphere. Instead, the German ended up spending October and November 1940 in Nicaragua, waiting for his re-entry into the United States. The Abwehr organization was skimpy in Nicaragua, and by this time, Wesemann’s concern for his own safety was approaching Krivitsky’s level. One evening the debonair Wesemann was jumped by three thugs and managed to escape serious injury only by the intervention of a disrated, expatriate American merchant seaman who jumped into the fray and managed to get a broken nose and a knife blade along his ribs before he succeeded in driving the assailants off. The BSC and SIS had paid the three thugs to attack Wesemann, trusting my training in hand-to-hand combat to triumph when I joined the brawl. The three idiots almost killed me.

  My cover was simple and deep—I was a not-very-bright but frequently brutal able-bodied seaman and ex-boxer who had been cashiered for striking his bosun, who had managed to lose all of his papers and his American passport while getting the Managua police looking for him, and who was willing to do damned near anything to get out of that hellhole and back to the States. In the next two months, in Wesemann’s employ, I did have to do damned near anything—including acting as a courier to the desultory group of Abwehr agents in Panama who had been watching the canal for two years and once again acting as bodyguard for the aristocrat, this time fighting off a real attack by a ham-handed Soviet agent—before Wesemann grew to depend on me and speak freely in front of me. Brain-damaged old Joe could barely understand English, but Special Agent Lucas had no trouble with the group’s German and Spanish and Portuguese.

  When Wesemann received the green light to slip back into the United States, in December 1940, I was the only hired hand he brought in with him. The Abwehr was kind enough to forge a replacement passport for me.

  I could see J. Edgar Hoover flipping the last few pages of this Official/Confidential report. It had been Hoover himself who had set up the SIS—the Special Intelligence Service—early in 1940 as a separate subentity of the FBI designed to work closely with the British Security Coordination to manage counterespionage in Latin America. But the SIS worked in ways more similar to British military intelligence than to FBI procedure, and I would have been amazed if it had not made Hoover nervous. Case in point—FBI agents were on call twenty-four hours a day; it was cause for dismissal for Tom Dillon
to be out of reach of a call from his office for more than an hour or two. When I was working the Wesemann case in Nicaragua, New York, and Washington, there had been intervals of a week or more when I had not been in contact with any of my superiors or controllers. That was the reality of deep-cover counterespionage.

  At any rate, I had spent New Year’s Eve of 1940 in New York with Dr. Wesemann and three other Abwehr agents. The good doctor and his friends went to half a dozen of the best nightclubs in New York—hardly the low profile one expects of serious spies—while old Bodyguard Joe stood out in the snow next to the car, hearing the cheers from the direction of Times Square and hoping that his ass would not freeze off by the time the celebrating Krauts called it a night. By this time, poor Walter Krivitsky had become an embarrassment not only to the NKVD and Joseph Stalin, but to the Abwehr and the FBI as well. The terrified agent had blabbed all he knew about the now-five-years-out-of-date Soviet intelligence network in Europe, so he was planning to stay in the safety of the limelight by going into detail about the German network he had once been in charge of ferreting out. The GPU killers were still closing in on him. Now the word came down from Canaris via Protze to Dr. Wesemann that Krivitsky was no longer a target for abduction and interrogation, only for elimination.

  Wesemann gave the job to his most trusted, naive, ignorant, and violent hired thug. He gave it to me.

  By the end of January, Krivitsky bolted New York and made a run for it. I followed him to Virginia, where I made contact with him, identifying myself as an FBI and SIS agent who could protect him from the Abwehr and the GPU. Together, we traveled back through Washington, D.C., where—on the night of Sunday, February 9, 1941—he checked into the Hotel Bellevue, near Union Station. It was a cold night. I went down to the nearest diner and came back with a greasy white sack of sandwiches and two rancid coffees. We ate the sandwiches together in his fifth-floor room.

  The next morning, the maid found Krivitsky dead in his bed, a gun that was not his own next to his hand. The door to his room had been locked and there was no fire escape outside his window. Detectives in the Washington police department ruled it suicide.