The Hunt

by William Diehl

  “That’s very interesting but it doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Flight instructing is shitty business, Mr. Keegan—and boring. The same thing day after day. You got to set a good example for the cadets, do everything by the book. Hell, I came off a year flying airmail in weather so bad I’d put a cup of coffee in my lap to make sure I wasn’t flying upside down! Then all of a sudden I’m down in Florida wet-nursing a bunch of college boys. So to blow off a little steam, four of us instructors decided to have a race. Thirty miles. The finish line was a bridge out on the coast highway. Well, hell, I could have flown the last five upside down, there wasn’t anybody even close to me.”

  He paused to finish his whiskey and chase it with a sip of Coke.

  “Unfortunately,” he went on, “my CO. was driving over the bridge at exactly the same time I decided to fly under it. Colonel Frederick Metz. No sense of humor. He never saw the other boys, he was too busy ripping out his mustache when he saw me go under him. I said, ‘Colonel, what can I say, I got a wild hair up my ass.’ He says to me, ‘You got more than a wild hair up your ass, Dryman, you also got grounded for ninety days.’ Ninety days! Christ, a lifetime! And then He leaned back with his flashy grin, “. . . God smiled on me.”

  He waved an arm grandly around the room.

  “And what exactly were you told?” Keegan asked, wondering what Smith’s instructions to this crazy man were—and how Smith even found him.

  “I was told I was a White House courier—how about that, courier—and that I was to come here and report to you and do whatever you said. . . within reason.” He chuckled. “Whatever that means.”

  “It means don’t get us killed, H.P.”

  “Never happen,” Dryman said, brushing off the remark as if the idea were ludicrous. “Now, what’s the first thing! have to know?”

  “For the time being, here’s all you have to know. I’m looking for a guy. I don’t know what he looks like, what his name is, what he does, or where we might find him. And the way things are looking in the world these days, I probably don’t have a lot of time to track him down.”

  Dryman stared at Keegan across the table for several seconds and then he snickered.

  “O-kay.” He leaned across the table. “What are we really going to do?”

  “That’s it, H.P. I have no idea where we’re going to end up, but we’re going to start by flying to Washington tomorrow morning. You’ll stay in my guest room in the penthouse upstairs and you’ll be on call twenty-four hours a day. When we’re not working, I don’t care what you do. I have three cars, you can use the Rolls. I don’t drive it much anymore.”

  A look of awe crossed Dryman’s face.

  “Rolls?” he asked reverently. “As in Rolls-Royce?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dryman’s grin broadened to a laugh and then a bellow. He looked around The Rose again and said, “So this is what it looks like.”

  “What?” Keegan asked.

  “Why, heaven, Boss,” Dryman cried out through tears of joy. “Hea-VEN!”

  The file room of the FBI was as spotless as a hospital operating room. There was not a speck of dust on a lamp or table and the floor was polished to a dangerous sheen The rows of file cabinets stretched the entire length of the wing; row after row after row of gray metal drawers.

  Kirbo was a tall, soft-spoken man with thinning blond hair and gentle eyes. He wore a white lab coat over a white shirt and striped tie and was as impeccable as the room itself. He got up from his desk and limped across the room to greet Keegan and Dryman.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” he said pleasantly after the introductions. “You certainly didn’t waste any time getting here.”

  “We don’t have any to waste, Mr. Kirbo,” Keegan answered. “I appreciate your help.”

  He led them back to a wooden desk, well scarred from years of use but as neat as the rest of the place. He motioned them to chairs.

  “What are you looking for?” Kirbo asked. “Perhaps I can help. I’ve been the custodian of these files for five years now.” He tapped his leg. “Car thief ran me down. Can you believe it? Eighteen-year-old kid. Panicked and stomped on the gas. I didn’t jump fast enough.”

  “That’s a tough one,” said Keegan. “I’m sorry.”

  “I think my wife secretly figures it was a good trade. I’m home every night and all I had to give up was tennis. So.. . what are we looking for?”

  “I’m looking for a man who was either a witness—or maybe was just going to be interrogated—in connection with a federal crime. I don’t think he was directly involved in the case although I’m not positive of that.”

  “What was the offense?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Description?”

  “No idea.”

  “What do you have?” Kirbo asked.

  “I don’t have anything, Mr. Kirbo. I don’t really know a damn thing about this guy except that he’s a good skier, a master of disguise and he’s German by birth, although I’m sure he has American credentials. I know he came here sometime in 1933 and disappeared in the spring of’34 because he was involved in some way with an FBI investigation and couldn’t stand the heat. He resurfaced a year later, probably with a new identity, and he’s been here ever since.”

  Kirbo waited for a minute or so before he said, “That’s it?”

  “That and a strong inclination to find him.”

  “How are you planning to go about that?”

  “We’re only talking about three months here. March, April and May of 1934. I thought H.P. and I would go through the files for those three months and hope to bell something rings a bell.”

  The FBI agent laughed. He got up and limped down a row of file cabinets, pulling out drawers and leaving them open as he spoke:

  “We have files on stolen government property, extortion, stolen motor vehicles, kidnapping, bank robbery, unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. We have felony crimes committed on government property—except for Indian reservations, national parks and ships at sea—white slavery, interstate transport of stolen property, forgery .

  He turned at the end of the row. “Off the top of my head I would say you’re looking at, oh . . . two hundred fifty, three hundred cases—a month.”

  “A month!” Dryman gasped.

  “That’s my guess. Probably seven hundred cases give or take a few. But look on the bright side, you can forget counterfeiting and moonshining, that’s the Treasury Department.”

  “Ah,” Dryman said. “A real break.”

  “In ‘34 we would have had about thirty field offices, twenty, twenty-five agents to each office and we stayed busy.”

  Keegan whistled softly to himself. Seven hundred cases!

  “Mr. Kirbo,” he said. “Given the skimpy information I’ve given you, where would your instincts lead you?”

  Kirbo closed the drawers and sat back down.

  “First of all, the subject was obviously involved in some other criminal activity or he wouldn’t have run.”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t think the FBI knew that. I think his concern was that they would discover that he was using a false identity.”

  “Maybe there’s a warrant out on him. Of course, that’s

  · . . five years ago. I don’t know. Depends on how bad the bureau wanted to talk to him. It’s worth a try. We’ll see what’s outstanding from that period.” He jotted a note to himself. Then he put down the pencil and shook his head.

  “This could be anything,” he said. “He could have worked in a government office that was robbed or something like that

  · . . I mean He shrugged hopelessly. “We conceivably would interview seventy-five, one hundred people in a situation like that.”

  “I figure this way,” Keegan said. “Whatever it was, he had a little time to make his run before the G-men got there. I mean, this guy disappeared from someplace where
he was probably known by the locals. He had to move fast before the feds got there and still not look suspicious. So I’m guessing it was probably a small town, possibly in the Midwest somewhere, a place it would have taken your people an hour or two to get to.”

  “Maybe he was just real cautious,” Dryman offered.

  “That still doesn’t narrow down the categories,” Kirbo answered. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we start from the beginning. All these files have a cover sheet—the agent in charge always makes a report, kind of a summary of the case, and they are pretty complete. The director doesn’t react well to sloppy work. That cover sheet is backed up by all the testimony gathered in the investigation. If Mr. X was so nervous he took a powder, my guess is that he was either witness to something or knew somebody involved in some kind of criminal activity. I doubt that he would just run like that unless he was sure the bureau would turn up his identity problem. So, first round, let’s narrow it down. We’re looking for a missing witness or person involved in a federal crime in a small Midwest town.”

  “I say we start the first week in March and check the cover sheets first.” Kirbo looked back and forth between Keegan and Dryman. “A real fishing expedition, gentlemen.”

  They worked long hours, rarely leaving the file room before ten or eleven P.M. In the first week they waded through more than three hundred folders and dozens of old warrants and had set aside two dozen cases involving missing witnesses, suspects or fugitives. Most of those case folders involved known criminals who had “turned rabbit,” as Kirbo put it, because they were either involved in the crimes themselves or were wanted for something else. But they had to be checked out. Keegan pulled every file which, for any reason, involved missing people. The pile to be rechecked grew higher and higher.

  The cases were as simple as a stolen car and as complex as a scam to embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars from a regional office of the Department of the Interior. There were missing husbands, wives, sons and daughters sprinkled among the cases. Most were runaways peripherally involved in another crime and all quickly discarded because of age, sex or because they could easily be traced back ten or fifteen years by friends or family members.

  They flew to Akron, Ohio, and Buffalo, both wild goose chases.

  As one pile got smaller, the other grew. They started making phone calls, checking out the stories of what they called “maybes.” People couldn’t remember things. The amateur investigators heard a lot of rumors and gossip. Nothing struck a chord.

  They flew to Pittsburgh and chased another wild goose. Dryman loved the trips. He occasionally swooped down to five hundred feet to “check out the sunbathers” or did a sudden slow roll or loop to break the monotony of a long trip. Sometimes he sang cowboy songs at the top of his lungs in his Boston accent. Flying anywhere with H.P. was never dull.

  “Hey, Boss, are you ever gonna tell me what the hell this is all about?” Dryman asked as they returned from another abortive trip to Illinois.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s classified ‘secret.’

  “Are you kidding? I got a top secret clearance. Hell, I’m checked out on the Norden bombsight. You can’t get any more secret than that.”

  “You can if it’s my secret.”

  Keegan laughed. H.P. did a sudden snap roll that almost broke his neck.

  Vanessa sighed with satisfaction and slid off Keegan, lying beside him and rubbing his chest with the palm of her hand, her left leg still stretched across his waist. He turned to her, drawing her in tight, his hands caressing her back. The only escape Keegan and Dryman had from the monotony of their daily drudgery were weekends in New York where Dryman could blow off steam and Keegan could spend time with Vanessa.

  “Christ, you feel good,” he whispered.

  “Thank you.”

  “No,” he said. “Thank you

  “I don’t mean just the lovemaking.”

  “For what, then?”

  “Letting me come back into your life. That night, six months ago, I was terrified. I just knew you were going to run me off.”

  “I could never have run you off, Vannie. Hell, we were friends long before we were lovers.”

  Keegan was a man reborn, fired by two passions: Vanessa and the quest for the Nazi specter nobody else really believed existed. Before Jenny’s death, he had been a man obsessed by a consuming love, a love that had become an open wound. His feelings of culpability and remorse were confused by anger and malice. But her death had released him from his self-imposed bondage of guilt and his wrath was now directed at 27. For the first time in years he had a sense of purpose.

  “You saved my life, Vannie. My God, I had stopped laughing before you came back in my life.”

  She tucked her head down beside his and whispered, “Oh, how I adore you, Kee.”

  Five months had passed since Keegan had learned of Jenny’s death in Dachau. Vanessa had sensed the subtle changes in him almost immediately: the sense of relief that came with the end of the waiting; the gradual end to the guilt that had affected his feelings toward her. Freed by divorce, she, too, had been an emotional bomb waiting to explode. Together, they slowly healed each other and as the months passed, they became as impassioned as they had been years before during their brief flirtation in Berlin.

  They had celebrated her thirtieth birthday earlier that night with dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Bronx, then had spent the rest of the evening dancing at the Cafe Rouge where Glenn Miller was playing. It had been a perfect night.

  Keegan got up suddenly and padded naked into the kitchen, taking a bottle of champagne from the wine closet.

  “Kee,” she called to him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Daddy wants to know if you want to spend Thanksgiving with us this year?”

  “Hell, I don’t know where I’ll even be on Thanksgiving,” he answered, searching for a corkscrew. “Do you really want to go to Boston for the day?”

  “They’re not going to be in Boston, they’re going to the island.”

  “What island?” He called back, digging the corkscrew out of a kitchen drawer.

  “Down in Georgia.”

  “You mean that rich boys’ hangout?’’ he answered, taking two champagne glasses from a cabinet. “Do you want to spend Thanksgiving playing croquet with a bunch of snobby, crotchety old millionaires?”

  “I’ll tell him you said that,” she joked.

  “He knows how I feel about that bunch,” he said, returning to the bedroom.

  “We’ve been going there for years but it isn’t the same as it used to be. Most of the old gang has drifted away. I don’t want to go either, but I promised I’d ask.”

  “How does he feel about us?” Keegan asked, sitting on the edge of the bed and working the cork out of the bottle.

  “He never says. Actually, he likes you a lot, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked us to go to Jekyll with them.”

  “Go ahead and tell him what I said,” Keegan said and laughed. “We’ll eat here. I’ll cook dinner.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll set the table.”

  He handed her a glass of champagne, then reached in the drawer of the night table and took out a small box wrapped in silver and bound in black ribbon.

  “Happy birthday,” he said.

  “Oh, Kee, thank you!” she cried with delight.

  The card read:

  To Vanessa, who restored my faith in the luck of the Irish. Sharing it—with all my love

  Kee

  Aug. 10, 1939

  She unwrapped it slowly. It was a small but elegant brooch in the shape of a shamrock, the four leaves made of emeralds outlined in diamonds with a cluster of diamonds at the stem.

  “Oh, God, Kee, it’s absolutely gorgeous.”

  “Too bad you can’t try it on,” he said with a grin and putting his arms around her, he fell backward on the bed with her on top. The phone rang.

  “Ignore it,” he whispere
d.

  But it persisted. Finally Vanessa reached over, lifted the receiver and held it against his ear.

  “Hello?” he said, trying to sound sleepy.

  “Mr. Keegan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Mr. Smith.”

  “I recognize the voice,” Keegan said.

  “Have you been listening to the radio?”

  “It’s the middle of the night, Mr. Smith. No, I’m not listening to the radio.”

  “Maybe you better,” Smith said. “The Germans are mobilizing along the Polish border. If they invade Poland, England and France will declare war immediately. If you expect to find this Twenty-seven, you better hurry. I don’t think we can keep the FBI out of the case much longer.

  “We’re almost through all the case records,” Keegan said forlornly. “Give me another couple of days. If that doesn’t work, I’m out of ideas anyway.”

  He hung up.

  “Who is Mr. Smith?” she asked.

  “The world’s greatest dog robber,” he said.

  “The what!”

  “Just joking,” he said, but there was little humor in his tone. “I’m going to have to go back to Washington tomorrow,” he went on. “But I don’t think I’ll be gone much longer.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about it,” she said.

  “I made a promise to somebody,” said Keegan. “Now it looks like I can’t keep it.”

  “Did you try?”

  “I did the best I could,” he said.

  “Then God will forgive you,” she said softly.

  “I didn’t know there were this many crooks in the world,” Dry- man groaned as the hours got later and the days dragged on. Kirbo helped when he could, a methodical man who worked slowly and overlooked nothing. Their attention span and energy level began to fall rapidly. Keegan began to wonder whether checking the records was ever a good idea. But they did not have an alternative. They made jokes to kill the deadly boredom, sometimes got hooked on a case that was unusual and spent hours poring over the ancillary reports.