The Bells of Hell

by Michael Kurland

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To contrive this opportunity to speak with you unobserved.’

  ‘What will they – the Gestapo – do when they discover the deception?’

  ‘We must hope that they do not. But they are men of little imagination and they are seeing what they expect to see so there is little chance of that. So long as we have finished our business by the time your doppelgänger returns we will be safe.’ He paused and then added, ‘I believe.’

  Sir Henry thought this over for a minute. ‘It seems to me,’ he said finally, ‘that you are putting me in an uncomfortable position. If the Gestapo do tumble to your little ruse they will certainly assume that I was party to the deception. How could they not? Then I’ll be lucky not to be escorted to the nearest border with an armed guard.’

  ‘That is so,’ Felix agreed, ‘and probably after spending a few uncomfortable days in a small room at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 trying to explain why you arranged such a farce. They will assuredly call it a farce; everything they don’t like or don’t understand is, to them, a farce.’ He shook his head. ‘If it is any consolation I will, by that time, probably be dead. If they catch me.’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ Sir Henry said, ‘we should get on with our business – whatever that is.’

  ‘I agree,’ Felix said. ‘I have a proposition to put to you. A, ah, deal as you might say.’

  ‘What sort of deal?’

  ‘Well, here is the problem. I made the certainly not illogical assumption that you were British intelligence, but you say you are not. In which case you are, most probably, not in a position to make the sort of agreement that I require.’ He looked sharply at Sir Henry and then away again. When Sir Henry did not respond he went on: ‘So then what I must request of you is that you put me in touch with someone who is in such a position. You can do this, yes?’

  ‘I can certainly speak with someone in Military Intelligence when I get back,’ Sir Henry agreed. ‘But what am I to tell them?’

  ‘That is the question.’ Felix stared intently at a nearby tree. ‘Tell them,’ he said, transferring the intent stare to Sir Henry, ‘tell them that an officer in the Wehrmacht, presently serving as an adjunct to the intelligence section of the General Staff, offers to provide them with information of military value in return for a small service. Tell them that this must be accomplished soon, if possible within the month.’

  A small service? Then it was money after all, Sir Henry thought. A gambling debt? Paying off some woman? ‘How big a service?’ he asked. ‘They’ll want to know. Say a few hundred pounds? And you think your information will be worth that size, ah, service?’

  Felix stood up, his body rigid, his face white. His hand was raised as though he were going to slap Sir Henry. ‘You think …’ he said. ‘You suggest …’ Slowly he regained control of himself and sat back down. ‘Perhaps, after all, this is a farce,’ he said. He shook his head as though to chase away some unwelcome thoughts. ‘This is not simple for me. I am, in effect, becoming a traitor to my country, and whether I do it for money or for some nobler motive is not of the moment, nicht wahr?’ He took a deep breath. ‘I believe the true traitors … no, I will not get into that now. I assure you I have no need for money.’ Another deep breath, and then he smiled. ‘Certainly not from the British Secret Service in any event.’

  Sir Henry felt a flush wash across his face and wondered if the other could see it. He had jumped to a hasty conclusion and, with that, insulted a brother officer. A German officer, true, but still … ‘That was unwarranted and I apologize,’ he said. ‘Truly I am sorry. I had no right …’

  Felix waved it away. ‘Understandable under the circumstances. No, it is not money; it is a different sort of service I require.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can. How are they to get in touch with you?’

  ‘That is the problem, is it not? I had thought this meeting would suffice. But not so. If there is a god up there, he spends his time laughing when we humans make our plans.’ He shrugged. ‘That is what makes war so interesting. So many men armed thus and so against so many men armed thus and so, using these tactics in this terrain, with the weather just so, the results should be determined. But just at the last moment someone misreads a message, or a horse throws a shoe, or a gun fails to fire, and so history is changed.’

  ‘So …?’ Sir Henry asked.

  Felix took a deep breath and slowly let it out. ‘So, have them put an advertisement in the classified section of the Times. Something innocuous with the name Felix in it and a phone number. I will endeavor to call from a safe phone and we can plan.’

  ‘The London Times?’

  ‘Certainly. Why not?’

  ‘And the phone number?’

  ‘I shall assume it is a Berlin number unless the message says otherwise. And not from the embassy or the homes of any official, such calls are certainly overheard. Overseas calls also are likely not to be so private.’

  ‘I shall pass that on,’ Sir Henry said.

  ‘And please, with some haste. This is important.’

  ‘You have my word,’ Sir Henry said.

  ‘And, oh yes, give them this.’ He took a small packet of papers from his jacket pocket, perhaps three or four sheets folded into thirds, and passed it to Sir Henry.

  ‘What is this?’ Sir Henry asked.

  ‘Call it a proof of my good faith,’ Felix told him. ‘It is a brochure for the War Museum.’

  ‘I don’t …’

  ‘If a hot iron is passed over the back of the sheets, something of greater interest will be revealed,’ Felix explained.

  ‘Oh.’ Sir Henry said, holding the papers as though they might spontaneously combust.

  Felix laughed. ‘Now I believe that you are not an agent,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘I will now leave. Wait here until you see yourself approaching, and then return to the hotel. Your doppelgänger will destroy his resemblance to you and then wander off in another direction. Good luck!’

  ‘Yes,’ Sir Henry said. And then, after a second, ‘You also.’

  EIGHT

  It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo.

  An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.

  – Thomas Wolfe, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

  The Elderts Hotel was a five-story red-brick building on the corner of Myrtle and Spencer, with a neon sign that read DERT when the manager remembered to turn it on, and an adjoining stable for a horse and carriage that, according to local legend, had once been rented by Aaron Burr. These days the Elderts had few pretensions. The most that could be said for it was that it was clean, in a liberal interpretation of that word, and it wasn’t a hot-sheet joint: there was no two-hour rate, you had to pay for the whole night. And an extra fifteen cents if you brought in a companion of either sex or anything in between, and an extra fifteen cents if you wanted one of the rooms with its own bathroom instead of down the hall. And you had to be out by noon or you paid for another day – no exceptions.

  ‘They give a special discount if you’re on the job,’ Detective Covitt said. ‘I guess they figure it don’t hurt to have a cop or two on the premises.’

  ‘A rough clientele?’ Welker asked, looking around at the bare lobby as they went in. It had all the grace of a public men’s room and smelled vaguely of stale fried food.

  ‘Not so much. But, you know, it is Brooklyn. Like they say, if it can happen here, it will.’

  The room clerk didn’t look up from the copy of Astounding Science-Fiction he was reading as they passed him and headed up the stairs to the third floor. ‘There’s an elevator,’ Covitt said, ‘but it ain’t worked since the Coolidge administration.’

  There was a rustling noise from within room 314 as they knocked on the door, and an eye peered cautiously at them through the peephole; then the door opened and a disheveled man leaned forward at a precarious angle and frowned up at them. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Detective?’

  ‘Glad to catch you in, Mr Blake
,’ Covitt said. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here.’

  ‘Where would I be?’ Blake asked.

  Covitt eyed him. ‘You been drinking?’ he asked.

  ‘A little,’ Blake said, waving a hand toward the bottle of Muscatel on the bureau. ‘I don’t drink much, never have. But I thought that a few glasses of this stuff might make the pictures go away.’

  ‘The pictures?’

  ‘In my head. The pictures in my head.’

  ‘Oh,’ Covitt said. ‘I gotcha. What you saw back in that room.’

  ‘Actually I didn’t see much.’ Blake backpedaled into the room and waved them past him. ‘It’s the pictures I imagined while I was hiding behind the partition. I had my eyes squeezed closed, but I could hear what they were doing and these pictures came – and now they keep coming back.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like fun,’ Covitt said.

  ‘Trust me, it is not.’ Blake pushed the door closed and turned to face them.

  ‘This here’s Special Agent Welker,’ Covitt said, thrusting a thumb in Welker’s direction. ‘He has some questions for you.’

  Blake looked Welker over. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said. ‘At least not anything I haven’t already told the detectives.’

  ‘Probably so,’ Welker agreed, ‘but let’s go over it again anyway.’ He looked around the tiny room. There was not much to see: a battered bureau that had probably once been white across from a battered, unmade bed that probably once hadn’t sagged in the middle, and a wooden chair that had never had any pretensions of any sort. ‘Can’t really talk in here,’ he said. ‘No place to sit. Is that diner on the corner any good?’

  ‘The Olympia?’ Covitt considered. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Let’s go over. I’ll buy lunch.’

  The room clerk looked up as they were leaving, but he didn’t see anything as interesting as ‘Duel in the Space Lanes’, so he went back to his magazine.

  It wasn’t quite noon and the Olympia was almost empty when they went in; the lunch crowd, if there was to be one, hadn’t begun yet. They settled into a corner booth, and the waitress appeared a few seconds later with three glasses of water and almanac-sized menus. ‘Morning, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Coffee?’

  They thought that was a good idea.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ she said.

  Blake studied the menu like he’d never seen one before. ‘They’ve got steak,’ he said wistfully.

  ‘Along with everything else human beings have ever eaten,’ Welker said, turning the pages of the menu. ‘This thing is a catalog of food. Three different kinds of sausages.’ He flipped a page. ‘No – four.’

  ‘They make good burgers and nice crisp, greasy fries,’ Covitt told him. ‘As for the rest, you’re on your own.’

  Blake looked at Welker hesitantly, ‘Uh …’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Can I have the sirloin steak plate?’ Blake asked.

  ‘Whatever you like,’ Welker told him. ‘It’s on Uncle Sam.’

  The waitress returned with their coffees and they ordered. Covitt went with the burger and fries, Blake with the steak, medium with baked and veg, and Welker ordered silver dollar pancakes, which the waitress assured him referred to the size not the color. She thought the question was the funniest thing she’d ever heard and went away chortling.

  Blake poured cream into his coffee, drank off about a third, and filled it with cream again. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘What can you tell me?’

  ‘Not much. Four guys beat up another guy and I listened to him screaming. A lot. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Made me feel like a real hero, it did.’

  ‘Well,’ Covitt said, ‘like you said, there wasn’t nothing you could do about it.’

  Welker asked, ‘Did you get a good look at their faces?’

  Blake considered. ‘One guy. The one who did most of the talking. The others not so much. I kept my head down a lot.’

  ‘But would you know him if you saw him again?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Besides, I’d know his voice anywhere. Kind of high-pitched. Mean. And a couple of the others, I might recognize their voices, but I don’t promise.’

  ‘Good. I mean that you’d recognize at least one of them again. Good.’ Welker leaned back, tipping his chair onto two legs. ‘Can you remember anything that he said?’

  ‘It was in German.’

  ‘Anything that wasn’t?’

  ‘Well, he told the other guy to search the place. Scared the crap out of me, that did. Didn’t find me though. Found my toothbrush.’

  ‘That’s it? Nothing else in English?’

  Blake stared through the window thoughtfully. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘There was something. Names.’

  The front legs of Welker’s chair thumped to the floor. His face had the expression of a man who has just seen a rabbit jump out of the sugar bowl. ‘What?’ he asked too loudly. Then a second later, in a more normal voice, ‘What did you say? Names? They told you their names?’

  ‘Well, they weren’t talking to me,’ Blake said. ‘The guy that was searching the place called the boss guy Herr, ah, Herr something.’

  ‘Close your eyes,’ Welker suggested. ‘Picture it happening.’

  Blake shook his head. ‘I don’t want to do that,’ he said. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘You never said nothing about names when we talked to you,’ Covitt said.

  Blake’s face was white and his eyes opened unnaturally wide. ‘I didn’t remember,’ he told Covitt. ‘I didn’t want to remember. I still don’t.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Welker said. ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘I’m going to throw up,’ Blake said. He got up and staggered down the aisle toward the men’s room.

  ‘You think I should follow him?’ Covitt asked Welker.

  ‘No,’ Welker said. ‘Let him go by himself. He doesn’t need us watching him barf. Let him keep some dignity.’

  Five minutes later Blake returned to the table and stared down at the bowl of soup at his place. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, prodding the edge of the bowl with his finger and looking disappointed.

  ‘Chicken noodle,’ Covitt told him. ‘Comes with the dinner.’

  ‘Oh,’ Blake said. He sat down. ‘So I still get the dinner?’

  ‘A salad too,’ Covitt said. ‘Soup and a salad.’

  ‘Oh,’ Blake said. He put his spoon in the soup cautiously, as though he half thought the spoon would dissolve, and then he brought it to his lips. ‘Not bad,’ he said.

  ‘You never had a dinner before?’ Covitt asked him. ‘Like with soup, salad, and the works?’

  ‘I guess,’ Blake said. ‘It’s been a while. We didn’t eat out much.’

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Pennsylvania,’ Blake told him. ‘outside Philadelphia.’

  ‘How long have you been here – in New York?’ Welker asked.

  ‘I don’t know. About seven or eight months, I guess.’

  ‘You don’t know how long you’ve been here?’ Covitt asked, sounding surprised.

  Blake shrugged. ‘The time, you know. It’s hard to keep track of the time when there’s nothing to separate it into, like, little pieces. It just kind of passes by.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Covitt asked.

  ‘Well, I came here to take a job.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Typesetting – Linotype or by hand. I’m a Linotype operator. I can also do letterpress, my dad had a letterpress shop, but there ain’t much call for that anymore.’

  ‘Oh, a newspaperman.’

  ‘Books, mostly,’ Blake told him. ‘I worked for Janifer, Harris, and Company in Philly. Books on agriculture, textbooks. Did high-school graduation books, but that fell off; the kids can’t afford to buy them. Then Harris died and they closed the business.’

  ‘Janifer retired?’

  ‘He was already dead.’
r />   ‘Ah!’

  ‘So I met a guy at a convention and he offered me a position here in Brooklyn. A job shop on Myrtle Avenue. Their Linotype guy had palsy or some such so bad he couldn’t type, and they needed a replacement. A union shop, and I’m union – or was, I haven’t paid dues for a while. And I didn’t have anybody at home when my mom died, with my sister married and moved to Cleveland, so I figured what the hell.’

  The waitress came over with plates precariously balanced on her arms and set them down, and Blake paused to stare at his steak.

  ‘So you came here and he reneged on the job?’ Covitt suggested.

  ‘So I got here and the job was gone. The shop was closed.’

  ‘Oh,’ Covitt said. ‘Yeah, that’s happening. Still.’

  ‘Eat your steak,’ Welker said.

  For a while there was no conversation while they ate, then Welker pushed his plate back. ‘These names you overheard,’ he said, consulting a scrap of paper he’d pulled out of his pocket, ‘was one of them Otto Lehman, do you remember?’ He waved at the waitress and pointed to his coffee cup.

  Blake screwed his face up in concentration. ‘Yeah, I think so.’ After a minute he nodded. ‘Yeah. That was the guy in the chair – the guy they beat up. One of them called him that. No, I’m wrong – they called him something else but he insisted that was his name, Lehman. At first.’ He stopped talking and stared down at the table, then repeated, ‘At first.’

  ‘So he called himself Otto Lehman, but they insisted he was really someone else?’ Welker asked.

  ‘Yeah, that’s about right. Lehman, anyway, I don’t know about the Otto. At first. Then he agreed with them. Everything they said, he agreed.’

  The waitress appeared at the table with the coffee pot, refilled their cups, and set the check down. ‘No rush,’ she said. ‘Whenever.’

  Covitt waited until she walked away, and then asked, ‘Who’s Lehman?’

  ‘He’s the one Hoover’s boys were trying to pick up at the docks,’ Welker told him.

  ‘The Commie?’

  ‘Right. When they missed him, they thought a couple of his pals got to the ship first, and figured they could get at him later. But when I heard about this,’ he waved his hand at Blake, ‘I figured the dead guy was Lehman and whoever picked him up wasn’t so much his pal after all.’