The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  “You’re joking,” I said. “I thought that he had been transferred to London.”

  “He has been transferred,” said Delgado, twitching the throttle of the motorcycle so that he had to shout even louder. “And I never joke.”

  The “hairless, hunchbacked dwarf” had to be Wallace Beta Phillips, the brilliant Latin American chief for the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. In truth, Phillips was hairless and hunchbacked, but not a true dwarf… merely short. I had worked in more than one operation out of Mexico City that had been designed and run by Phillips, and I had much respect for the man. Under his leadership, the ONI, SIS, FBI, and the fledgling COI of Wild Bill Donovan had begun to work as a team against the Nazi agents in Mexico. But Phillips had been urging an expansion of such interagency cooperation all through the winter of 1941–42, even while J. Edgar Hoover was demanding that the COI cease operations in the western hemisphere and the ONI restrain its activities to naval matters. After the January showdown in Washington in which Hoover had won full control of all SIS and other counterintelligence operations in the Western Hemisphere, the hunchback’s effective leadership had been undercut by resident FBI agents.

  Through the past few months, culminating in two failed missions in the spring, Phillips’s ONI operations and operatives in Mexico—and throughout the rest of Latin America—had been under increasing harassment from Hoover. In April, I had been ordered to follow and report on Phillips’s men, who were working with Donovan’s men, to watch the last Nazi agents in two of Mexico’s busier seaports. Soon after, Hoover had gone straight to FDR demanding that Donovan’s entire COI organization be dissolved and that Wallace Beta Phillips be reprimanded for cooperating with them.

  Donovan, who was recuperating from a serious automobile accident in New York the previous month—and who had a potentially fatal blood clot in his lung at the time—protested to the president that Hoover’s charge was a “dirty and contemptible lie,” and Roosevelt believed him. The COI was safe for the time being, but all interagency cooperation in Mexico and throughout Latin America had evaporated like dew in a desert morning. The hairless hunchback, Wallace Beta Phillips, had asked for and received a transfer from ONI to the COI and had—the last I had heard before I had flown to Washington—departed for London.

  What the hell was he doing in Cuba watching me go out in a fishing boat with Ernest Hemingway and his motley crew?

  I did not ask Delgado. “Tomorrow at five P.M.,” I said.

  “Don’t ride your bicycle into a tree in the dark.” Delgado laughed. He revved his motor and roared up the road toward San Francisco de Paula in a cloud of dust that settled on me slowly, like ash from a slow cremation.

  “UP AND AT ’EM, JOE LUCAS!” cried Hemingway, shouting through the screen door of the guest house that Tuesday afternoon. “Put on your best spymaster tie. We’re going to the embassy to sell a man an idea.”

  Forty minutes later we were in Ambassador Braden’s office with the thick light of Havana afternoon filtering through the blinds while the fan overhead worked to move the sluggish air. There were five of us present. Besides the ambassador, Hemingway, Ellis Briggs, and myself, there was the new Chief of Naval Intelligence for Central America, Colonel John W. Thomason Jr.—a trim, solid man who spoke quickly and precisely in a Texas accent. I had heard of Thomason, but it was obvious from the relaxed conversation before the business part of the meeting that Hemingway had already met the man—indeed, that he had been using Thomason’s technical expertise for the anthology of war stories he was editing. In fact, the colonel was a writer himself—Hemingway twice referred to Thomason’s biography of Jeb Stuart and suggested that one of the colonel’s short stories should be in the war anthology.

  Braden finally called the meeting to order. “Ernest, I understand you have another proposal for us.”

  “I do,” said Hemingway, “and it’s a good one.” He gestured toward me and turned toward the colonel. “John, Spruille’s probably told you that Lucas here is a State Department expert on counterintelligence assigned to my Crook Factory operation. I’ve already discussed this idea with Lucas and worked out the details…”

  Hemingway had not discussed the idea with me at all except to explain what he planned to propose as we drove hell-bent-for-leather toward Havana in the black Lincoln. Thomason squinted at me with the suspicion any military or intelligence man feels toward the State Department.

  “I think Spruille or Ellis has told you about our encounter with the German submarine yesterday,” Hemingway was saying.

  Colonel Thomason nodded.

  Ellis Briggs said, “You’re sure it was German, Ernest?”

  “Goddamn, absolutely sure,” said Hemingway. He described the conning tower, the deck gun, and the numerals on the side.

  “Almost certainly a seven-forty-class German sub,” said Colonel Thomason. “And what was the last heading you saw it on before it submerged?”

  “Lucas?” said the writer.

  “North-northwest,” I said, feeling like an actor with a bit part in a bad melodrama.

  Thomason nodded. “Early this morning a seven-forty-class sub was sighted off New Orleans. It’s thought that they might have dropped three or four German agents at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Probably your same boat, Papa.”

  I looked at the military man. Papa? Thomason was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Hemingway was forty-one. What was this “Papa” crap? Why did everyone want to play the writer’s idiotic nickname games… all of his childish games? Now we were playing the submarine game. The tone was manly and serious in the quiet room.

  Hemingway was on his feet again, bobbing and weaving, using his hands to jab home his points as he moved lightly on the balls of his feet. Ambassador Braden looked polite and pleased, like a housewife who has bought the Electrolux vacuum from a friendly salesman and who is now ready to fork out more money for some labor-saving attachments.

  “So here’s the plan,” said Hemingway, sweeping his arms as if to bring us into his huddle. “My agents in the Crook Factory have reported that quite a few local boats have been stopped and boarded by Nazi subs in the last month or so. Hell, one old man who fishes out of Nuevitas had to hand over all his catch and fresh fruit to a German boat. Anyway, I think that this seven-forty boat was checking out the big yacht we saw… the Southern Cross… to see if they should board it or sink it with gunfire. The Cross looked suspicious… almost destroyer size. But the sea was too rough and then we came on the scene…”

  What is he talking about? I wondered. We had seen a signal light on the yacht and on the sub’s conning tower. It had not been in Morse but in a private code. All the way back yesterday, following the huge yacht past Cojímar to where it had anchored in Havana Harbor, Hemingway had speculated that the ship and the sub were in cahoots. He had theorized that the private ship was a refueling vessel for the U-boats, what the Germans called a “milch cow,” and had worked out a plan to gain intelligence about the Southern Cross’s crew, cargo, and purported mission. He had worked until midnight siccing his Crook Factory wharf rats, waiters, and bartenders onto the fact-gathering project. And now this. What was he up to?

  “Here’s the plan,” he said again. “We take my craft, the Pilar, and disguise it as a local fishing boat… or maybe as some sort of scientific mission. Hydrographic survey mission or somesuch. Drape a Woods Hole sign over the side or something. Let the Germans take a look at us through their periscope, incite their curiosity, lure their boat to the surface, and when they close to board us… blooey! We hit them with small arms fire, grenades, machine guns, bazookas… everything.”

  “A Q-boat,” said Ambassador Braden, obviously enjoying the idea.

  “Exactly,” said Hemingway.

  “It would be dangerous, Ernest,” said Ellis Briggs.

  The writer shrugged. “I’ll get a good crew. Seven or eight good men should do it. You can send somebody along if you want, Spruille… maybe a Marine to handle the fifty-caliber and t
he radio.”

  “Does the Pilar have a radio, Papa?” asked Colonel Thomason. “Or a machine gun?”

  “Not yet,” said Hemingway, and grinned.

  “What else would you need?” asked the ambassador, jotting notes on a pad with a silver fountain pen.

  “Just the small arms I mentioned. Some Thompson submachine guns would be good. Grenades to lob down their hatches when we close on them. A bazooka or two maybe. A military radio. Oh… and Radio Detection Finding gear. We could work with the naval bases along the coast and any destroyers in this part of the Caribbean to triangulate on a wolf pack’s signals. I’ll provide the food. We’d need gas, of course. With the shortages and rationing, I couldn’t buy enough to patrol for five days, much less the weeks and months this operation would demand.”

  “What about the rest of your… ah… Crook Factory’s operation?” said Ambassador Braden. “You’re just getting it up and running, I presume. Would you set that aside for this Q-boat mission?”

  Hemingway shook his head. “We can do both. In fact, if the subs are sniffing around here because… as our early intelligence indicates… they’re landing more agents on Cuban as well as American shores, well, we’ll need both aspects of the operation to find them and stop them.”

  Colonel Thomason cleared his throat. He spoke slowly, but there was no laziness in his dialect. “Suppose you pull off your innocent fishing boat routine and the German submarine gets suspicious and stands off and blows you and the Pilar out of the water with his deck gun? What then, Papa?”

  “If he does that, we’ve had it,” said Hemingway. “But why should a submarine risk attracting attention with gunfire when the skipper can send sailors aboard and scuttle us by opening our seacocks? He’ll be curious about fishermen in wartime. He’ll want to know what kind of profiteers are trying to tag marlin in the Gulf Stream with the war on.”

  “What if he recognizes you?” asked the colonel. “The Pilar is pretty well known in these waters. And if the German sub is involved with intelligence matters, as you suspect, he may know about the crazy gringo writer and his fishing boat.”

  “So much the better.” Hemingway grinned. “Carry enemy sportsman back to Berlin to write dirty limericks for the Führer. Feather in the bonnet for der Kapitan. Fame and promotion for the crew. Why not? Those underwater boys are suckers for publicity.”

  The colonel nodded but obviously was not in full agreement yet. “Look, Papa, even if you get ordered alongside, your Nazi skipper isn’t an idiot. He isn’t going to pipe you aboard to have a glass of schnapps with him. He’ll have men on deck… they’ve been fighting this war at sea for three years, remember… and they won’t be holding slingshots.”

  “That’s right,” said Hemingway. “That’s why along with the grenades we need a machine gun. I shoot a machine gun good, John. Practiced on my grandmother. Nazis won’t know what hit them. Now, what Lucas and I need to know is… how big is a conning tower on a typical German sub? How wide is the hatch? And what we really need to know is… how much damage will the grenades do inside a submarine? Is there any chance we could put a prize crew aboard and sail that sucker back into Havana Harbor or one of the U.S. naval bases?”

  I quite paying close attention somewhere around there. This was not just fantasy… it was nonsense. But Ambassador Braden, First Secretary Briggs, and Chief of Naval Intelligence for Central America Colonel John W. Thomason Jr. were treating it seriously. Another thirty minutes, and despite the ambassador’s comment that he would have to consult with others before getting back to Hemingway, it was obvious that the writer would get his fuel, grenades, machine guns, and license of marque. Insanity.

  “Oh, Ernest,” said the ambassador after we had all shaken hands again and I was at the door with the writer, “is this officially part of your Operation Crook Factory?”

  “Different code name.” Hemingway grunted. “Let’s call it Operation Friendless.”

  “Friendless… yes… very good,” said the ambassador, jotting notes on his pad.

  Outside in the heavy afternoon sun, I said, “Friendless?”

  Hemingway rubbed his chin, looking up and down the street as if he had lost something. “You met Friendless,” he said, distracted.

  “I did?”

  “You did. The big tabby cat in the kitchen. The one with the mean disposition.” He brightened as if remembering what he had lost. “The Floridita,” he said, checking his watch. “We have four hours until dinner. Daiquiris.”

  THREE HOURS AND too many daiquiris later, I told Hemingway that I would take an evening bus back to the finca.

  “Nonsense. The last bus going that way leaves the downtown at seven.”

  “I’ll walk, then.”

  “That’ll take all night, Lucas. You’ll miss dinner at the finca.”

  “I didn’t know that I was invited to dinner at the finca.”

  “ ’Course you are. At least you will be after I talk to Marty. Probably.”

  “I’ll eat in town and get back somehow,” I said.

  Hemingway shrugged. “Forgot. You have to report to your masters. Whoever they are. Fine. Good. Fuck it.”

  I watched the Lincoln drive off and then strolled toward the Plaza de la Catedral. I zigzagged back and forth from Obispo Street to Obrapia, back two blocks to O’Reilly, and then back to Obispo. There was no sign of Delgado or the tall man Delgado had said was from the Cuban National Police, but at the corner of Obispo and San Ignacio, the dark Buick pulled up alongside and the hairless humpback in the back seat said through the open window, “Need a ride, Mr. Lucas?”

  “Sure.”

  I sat next to him in the back seat. I did not recognize the only other occupant, the driver, a thin man about my age. He was wearing glasses and a tweed suit more suitable to a New England autumn than to spring in Havana. Something about the driver’s alert, overly tense posture and grip on the wheel told me that he was no field agent.

  “This is Mr. Cowley,” said Wallace Beta Phillips, nodding toward the driver. “No relation to the late special agent in charge from Chicago. Mr. Cowley, Mr. Joseph Lucas.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the driver.

  I looked at the back of the nervous man’s neck for a moment and then back at Phillips. The phrase “hairless humpbacked dwarf” sounds almost bizarre, but in person Phillips was not all that strange-looking: short, yes, but not shockingly so, and his expensive panama suit was tailored to minimize the sight of his curved spine. The most striking things about Phillips were his hairless skin, intelligent eyes, and the fact that he did not seem to sweat. We had never met, but the little man was behaving as if we were old acquaintances.

  “Mr. Cowley is in Mr. Hemingway’s line of work,” said Phillips. He offered me an American cigarette, and I shook my head. Phillips used a lighter on his and exhaled toward the open window on the opposite side of the Buick. We were driving along San Pedro Avenue past the docks. “We thought it might be useful to get another literary gentleman’s point of view on Mr. Hemingway’s operation,” continued Phillips, lifting his little finger in a delicate motion to remove a fleck of tobacco from his lower lip.

  “Why?” I said.

  Wallace Beta Phillips smiled. He had perfect teeth. “Mr. Cowley is new to our organization. An analyst, actually, not a field man. But we thought that this might be mutually enlightening for his first outing.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” I said. “Not ONI.”

  “The OSS,” said the former Latin America chief of naval intelligence.

  “Never heard of it,” I said. “It sounds German. And I thought that you were joining COI and going to London.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Phillips. “Mr. Donovan is renaming the office of the Coordinator of Intelligence the Office of Strategic Services. The name will become official soon… no later than June, I believe. Our guess is that Mr. Hoover will refer to us as ‘Oh So Stupid.’ ”

  “Probably,” I said. “I hear that Donovan refers to the Bureau as
‘Foreign Born Irish.’ ”

  Phillips made a gesture with his palms up. “Only on bad days,” he said. “I believe that the stereotype originated with the belief that Mr. Hoover—although quite Protestant—prefers hiring Catholics.”

  “There’s the equally strong stereotype that Mr. Donovan enjoys hiring dilettantes and rank amateurs,” I said.

  Mr. Cowley glanced sharply at me in the rearview mirror.

  “No offense meant toward anyone here,” I said. “I was just thinking that ‘Oh So Social’ might be the Bureau’s take on your new acronym.”

  Phillips chuckled. “It is true, it is true. Mr. Donovan does work at bringing unlikely lambs into the fold. Count Oleg Cassini and Julia Child, for instance.”

  “Never heard of them,” I said. They could not have been actual operatives if Phillips was telling me their names. More of Donovan’s “analysts,” probably.

  “Of course you have never heard of them,” said Phillips. “One is a fashion designer and the other a chef. I shall not divulge which is which for reasons of national security. Then there is Mr. John Ford.”

  “The movie director?” I liked John Ford westerns.

  “Precisely,” said the hairless man. We were moving quickly along the central highway now, the breeze cooling us. “And many, many literary sorts. Besides Mr. Cowley here—who evinces a strong literary interest in Hemingway the writer, as opposed to Hemingway the spy—we currently enjoy the services of several of Mr. Hemingway’s former friends, including Archibald MacLeish and Robert Sherwood.”

  The names meant nothing to me. This entire conversation made no sense to me.

  “Mr. Hemingway betrayed both of these gentlemen,” continued Phillips. “As friends, I mean. I do hope he does not betray you, Mr. Lucas.”

  “Hemingway and I aren’t friends,” I said. “What do you want, Mr. Phillips?”

  “Just this chat, Mr. Lucas. I understand that Commodore Fleming had a chance to speak to you on your flight down here.”