Forgot about that…
He carefully reached the paddle out in front of him, toward shore, dipped the blade again, and brought the blade straight back toward him.
The rubber boat moved forward.
He pulled this way for about five minutes when he suddenly felt the boat moving far more quickly than he could possibly paddle it.
What the hell?
Then he remembered.
Backwash from the sub’s screws.
Thanks, guys!
He looked back, but the big boat was gone in the dark or the depths…or both.
And he suddenly felt very alone.
He rode the rush from the backwash. Then, when it had died out, he began paddling again.
Ten minutes later, he felt the rubber boat’s bottom hit sand.
[ TWO ]
Gramercy Park Hotel
2 Lexington Avenue
New York City, New York
1315 8 March 1943
When the taxicab pulled up outside the hotel, the driver saw that he was going to have to wake up the passenger in the backseat. The guy had fallen asleep almost as soon as he had gotten in at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-third Street.
“Hey, buddy!” the cabbie said, looking in his rearview mirror. “This is it.”
Eric Fulmar rubbed his eyes, opened them, and yawned.
“Great,” he said, and looked out the window. “Thanks.”
He paid the fare and got out and went through the revolving door of the hotel.
Heading for the elevator, he passed the front desk, then stopped and went back.
“Good morning,” he said to the desk clerk. “Any messages for suite six-oh-one?”
The clerk turned and checked one of the cubbyholes in the wooden honeycomb behind him and retrieved two yellow sheets.
He looked at them, then turned and held them out to Fulmar as he made an unpleasant face.
“A couple for you, Mr. Canidy,” he said curtly.
Fulmar nodded.
He didn’t think it was important to correct him.
And he was too tired to give a damn about whatever bug was up this guy’s ass.
“Thanks,” Fulmar said.
Fulmar read the messages as he took the elevator up.
One was from housekeeping, saying that they were sorry but that they were going to have to place an extra charge against the room for the cleaning of the “oily” towels.
That probably explains why the guy made a face.
But what do I care?
He grinned.
I’m “Mister Canidy.”
The other message had only a date and a time—it was from noon, just an hour ago—and a telephone number: WOrth 2-7625.
Fulmar opened the door to the suite.
He saw that it had been neatly made up. His luggage had been moved from the corner of the sitting room back into the bedroom. And there was a set of fresh clean towels hanging in the bathroom.
There was absolutely no sign that Major Richard Canidy, United States Army Air Forces, had been there.
I wonder what Dick did with my Johnny gun? Or did he take them both?
Fulmar looked around the suite for the Johnson LMG, first in the sitting room—under and behind and inside the Hide-A-Bed couch—and next in the bedroom—under the bed and between the mattress and box springs.
Then he went to the clothes closet. It wasn’t on the floor in there. But at the top of the closet was a deep, dark shelf that held extra comforters and pillows and he reached up and felt under the blankets.
Bingo.
Fulmar looked and saw that Canidy had rewrapped the boxes, both the heavy, cardboard one with the Johnny gun broken down inside and the other, metal one with the thirty-ought-six ammo, and hidden them well.
Thanks, pal. I may need this….
He covered the boxes back with the heavy blankets and pillows, then went to the phone and called the number that was written on the message.
When the call was answered, he recognized the voice of Joe “Socks” Lanza.
“Fulmar,” Fulmar said. “I got a message to call this number.”
“Yeah,” Lanza replied. “I asked around, like you wanted.”
“And?”
“You’re not going to find out anything where you were last night.”
What the hell?
“How do you know where I was last night?”
“How do you think? You were in a bar, no? Talking German to the bartender.”
When ONI—Naval intelligence—in New York City had been trying to think of ways of casting a wide net to spy on the German-American Bund in Yorkville, it had been Lanza’s idea to use William “Tough Willie” McCabe’s union guys who serviced the bar vending machines.
Lanza told them that the forty-seven-year-old McCabe had a small army of low-paid thugs from Harlem who ran numbers in the bars, then collected the money.
They were in every Yorkville bar every day—and they knew every bartender.
And what they learned, Lanza learned.
Fulmar thought, If you consider saying one word—Danke—talking German, then okay, Joe Socks, you got me.
But he’s on the money about it being a dead end.
Jesus! Does he know about Ingrid, too? And Hall, the FBI guy?
“Okay,” Fulmar said. “So if not there, where?”
“Take the cab out to Lodi.”
“Jersey?”
“Yeah. There’s a place on Route 17 called Lucky’s Pink Palace. Ask for Christopher. He’s expecting you.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Now?”
“Thought you were in a hurry. If you want to wait…”
What I want—thanks to Ingrid…oh boy, that Ingrid—is to fall on the bed here and take a long nap.
But that’s just not an option right now.
“Okay. When will the cab be here?”
“It’s there now.”
“It’s here now,” he repeated, incredulous.
He yawned.
“Okay. Thanks.”
Fulmar heard the connection go dead.
Fulmar went out the revolving door of the Gramercy and saw what he thought was Lanza’s taxicab waiting at the corner.
He started walking toward it. The cab’s engine started and then the car began rolling toward him.
For a moment, Fulmar thought that he might be mistaken—the monster fishmonger was not behind the wheel—but then the car stopped when its back door was even with him.
He opened the door and asked the driver, “This Joe Socks’s?”
“Yeah,” the driver said.
Fulmar saw that the driver was a tiny guy, maybe five-two, one-ten—probably has to jump around in the shower just to get wet—and about age thirty. He had a two-day growth of black, stubby beard and wore a dark work shirt, corduroy pants, and a black leather Great Gatsby driving cap.
Fulmar got in the backseat.
“Where’s the big guy?”
“What big guy?”
Fulmar shook his head.
He looked out the window and yawned.
“Never mind,” he said and settled in for a nap.
A jarring sensation abruptly awoke Fulmar from his deep sleep.
At first it felt like the taxi had hit a wall or something. But when he looked out the window and back to where they’d just been—down what he guessed was Route 17—he saw that the cabbie had just jumped a curb to reach a parking lot.
This part of Route 17 was a hellish-looking thoroughfare through a rough part of town. It had two lanes in each direction—with vehicles bumper-to-bumper—and traffic lights as far as the eye could see. It was lined with cheap used-car lots, greasy burger and fried chicken joints…and strip clubs.
Fulmar looked out the front windshield.
In front of the car was a two-story building almost the size of a high school gymnasium. It was built of cinder blocks and had been painted completely hot pink. It had a flat r
oof and no windows. The front wall had two steel doors at street level, one labeled ENTRANCE and one labeled EXIT.
Painted on at least three sides, as well as illuminated on the pink neon sign atop the twenty-foot-tall steel pole near the curb, was LUCKY’S PINK PALACE.
The very top edge of the walls, just below the lip of the rooftop, had GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! repeated over and over in lettering three feet tall.
Fulmar noted that the parking lot was packed and that the crowd had a disproportionate number of work trucks.
“Looks like the place,” he said.
The driver grunted, then drove around to the back side of the building.
There were two steel doors in the back wall, one at ground level and one on the second floor, at the top of a set of rusty steps that served as a fire escape. The lower door read: NO DELIVERIES 11A.M.–2P.M. The upper door: NO ADMITTANCE! FIRE EXIT! KEEP CLEAR!
When the cabbie nosed the car into a parking place, the car’s bumper tapped the bumper of the one parked in front of it.
He shut off the engine.
“I’ll wait here for you.” He pointed to the top door. “Just knock on the office door up there.”
As the cabbie tuned the dash radio and adjusted the volume, Fulmar opened the back door, got out, and walked toward the steel steps. He could hear loud music coming from the inside of the building.
At the top of the stairs, he looked at the steel door. It had three industrial locks and one peephole.
They don’t want anyone getting in this way….
He knocked. There was no reply for a moment, then he heard one of the locks open, then a second, then the third.
The door opened a crack and a thick Italian accent said, “Yeah?”
“I’m looking for Christopher,” Fulmar said. “Joe Socks says he’s expecting me.”
After a moment, the door opened just enough for Fulmar to squeeze through.
Once inside, he saw the guy who had opened it—a really fat guy, easily two-forty, probably two-sixty, in baggy slacks and a dark shirt, its tail untucked—slam the door shut, then start throwing the dead bolt locks.
There was nothing at all exceptional about the office. It had two standard gray steel desks with wooden swivel chairs on casters, half a dozen regular wooden chairs scattered around the room, a couple of pictures of the Jersey shore on one wall, a large four-by-four calendar for the year 1943, with the days to date crossed out, on another. There was a dartboard hung on a wooden interior door. And one tall tin trash can, overflowing with old discolored newspapers.
A big, hairy guy sat behind one of the desks and a thin, dark-skinned guy with a thin mustache was behind the other.
The fat guy stared at him.
The thin guy got up and came out from behind his desk.
“You Fulmar?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Christopher,” he said, his tone of voice flat.
He offered his right hand.
Fulmar shook it and was impressed by the strong grip.
“Why don’t you give us ten minutes?” Christopher said to the really fat guy.
“Whatever you say, Christopher,” the obese guy said and started opening the dead bolts again.
When the obese guy was gone, and Christopher had locked the door, the hairy guy behind the desk said, “Joe Socks says you’re looking for something?”
“Someone,” Fulmar said. “I’m sorry, but you are—?”
“In charge.”
He smirked.
Fulmar looked at him.
Okay, have it your way…
“Okay. Short version. Lanza has agreed to help me find the German agents who are setting off bombs in the U.S.”
Neither responded to that.
Fulmar looked at Christopher, then back at the hairy guy.
“And,” Fulmar went on, “Lanza said you guys knew something that would help.”
After a moment, the hairy guy nodded.
“Keep this in mind: I’m only doing this because Joe Socks said to.”
Fulmar nodded. “I understand.”
The hairy guy opened the top drawer of his desk, removed a pistol, and held it out.
Fulmar took it, checked to see if it was loaded—it was—then said, “It’s a Walther.”
“It’s what we took off the guy who didn’t pay his bills.”
“Okay…” Fulmar said.
He made a motion with his right hand that said, Give me more.
“Story we got was that he’d been boasting that he’d been doing the bombings.”
“Was he?”
The hairy guy shrugged.
“Where is he?” Fulmar quickly said.
“Gone.”
“Where?”
“Gone.”
“Look,” Fulmar said. “I’ve got to have more to go on than that. ‘Some nameless guy at a Jersey strip club says the bomber is quote gone unquote.’ I’d deserve to have my head handed to me if I reported back with just that.”
The hairy guy stared back at him.
“Okay,” he said after a moment, “that horny Kraut told my hooker that he and his partner had been doing the bombing on the East Coast and that there was another team in Arizona—”
“Texas?” Fulmar said.
“Yeah, Texas. Whatever. I was damned if I was gonna give the guy up to the fucking FBI, dead or alive. He owed me for my hooker. So we went to squeeze him—nobody cheats me, ever—and his Kraut buddy starts a fucking shoot-out.”
He paused, then went on:
“They lost. And now the sonsofbitches are fish food.”
He made a thin smile.
“That enough ‘to go on’?”
Fulmar thought for a moment.
“Is this pistol all you found? No wallets? No IDs?”
The fat guy glanced at Christopher and jerked his head to say, Give it to him.
Fulmar turned and saw Christopher holding out what looked like a pen.
“Found this in a duffel in their room. Maybe you can make something of it.”
Fulmar took it and looked at it closely.
It’s an acid fuse disguised as an ink pen.
And where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Or maybe explosives…
“There wasn’t anything else in the bag?”
The hairy guy looked at him with a blank face.
“Nope.”
My ass. Of course there was.
But…okay…I’m not going to get anywhere with this.
You keep whatever you got.
“I need to use your phone,” Fulmar said.
“Help yourself,” the hairy guy said, motioning to the black one on his desk.
Fulmar gave a number to the operator.
“Switchboard oh-five,” a woman’s monotone voice answered.
“Fulmar for Chief Ellis.”
“Hold one.”
There was a clicking sound, then a familiar voice.
“Ellis.”
“Got a pencil handy?”
“Huh?” Ellis said, then recognized Fulmar’s voice. “Uh, yeah…okay, go.”
“Message for the boss: ‘Fire out. No trace.’”
“‘Fire out. No trace.’ Got it. Congratulations. And interesting timing.”
“How’s that?”
“The other guys report the other fire is out. It’s on the news.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You coming home now?”
“See you soon,” Fulmar said and hung up the phone.
All the way back to Manhattan, with the Walther and acid-fuse pen in his pockets, Fulmar tried to find holes in what just happened.
There really isn’t any way to absolutely know if all the fires are out.
Maybe all the agents aren’t dead.
Maybe others are laying low.
Then again, maybe there aren’t any others.
The only way to find out for sure is to wait and see if there are any more bombings, while keeping the intel l
ines open.
Which I can do from Washington while working on something else.
Like going to work with Canidy.
He sighed.
But all that can wait till after I see Ingrid again.
The cabbie tuned the radio in the dash to a new station. The programming was going to a commercial break.
The announcer said, “The news is next after this message from one of our sponsors.”
An obnoxious advertisement, sponsored by the Tri-State Ford Dealers, came and went, and then the announcer’s voice came back on again.
“And now for today’s breaking news,” he said. “In a press conference in Washington, D.C., a half hour ago, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—”
Fulmar said, “Turn that up, will you?”
The driver did, and they both listened as Hoover said, “I repeat, we have found no evidence to suggest that this train wreck in Oklahoma was anything more than a very tragic event involving a gas leak….”
Say it often enough, Fulmar thought, it becomes the truth.
Fulmar said to the driver, “That’s all I needed to hear. You can turn it down or change the station.”
He looked out the window and wondered what Ingrid was doing right now.
[ THREE ]
Palermo, Sicily
2240 19 March 1943
First impressions were important, Major Richard M. Canidy, USAAF, knew, and the thing that most impressed him about Sicily was how it appeared utterly unaffected by the fact that there was a war going on.
Although he had taken great care to evade any German or Italian coast watchers when he had landed just up the beach from Mondello, and when he had deflated the rubber boat and buried it, and then when he had passed through the tiny seaside town, his efforts seemed misspent.
He had not seen a single soul.
There had of course been a dog, and a slew of damned feral cats—but not a single human being.
Mondello may as well have had its sidewalks rolled up.
It was only now, as Canidy continued to walk the ten-plus kilometers to Palermo, paralleling a two-lane macadam road but staying far off it, that he finally saw someone.
It was a man, and he was inside a small stone house off in the distance.
Canidy saw him through the window and watched as he walked across the room—and blew out the candles for the night.
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