The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  ‘I suppose we should be getting on board.’ He glanced down at the cream-coloured canvas-covered suitcase in Barry’s hand. ‘Your only luggage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No evening clothes in there, I presume.’

  ‘I didn’t think they’d be necessary,’ Barry answered, evading the point, since the only evening clothes he’d ever worn had been rented to attend a friend’s wedding.

  ‘Never mind,’ Holland said. ‘We’ll make do.’ He took Barry by the arm. ‘Come along.’

  Holland led the way, pushing gently but firmly through the throngs of people, eventually reaching the cage elevators leading to the upper level. He stepped aboard one of the cages and gestured for Barry to join him. Together with half a dozen other passengers they slowly jerked their way upward. A few moments later they stepped out onto the airy second-level concourse, a broad, shaded breezeway that ran the length of the terminal building. Halfway along the concourse Barry could see the covered gangway spanning the chasm between the building and the ship, the huge vessel painted a brilliant white except for a thin line of royal blue around her hull at the Main Deck level and her buff-coloured funnels. The promenades on the upper two decks were already lined with passengers throwing streamers and calling out to friends. ‘Stunning,’ said Holland as they headed for the gangway. ‘We’ll be at war within a year and they’re all acting like it’s a bloody church fête.’

  ‘You sound very sure,’ said Barry.

  ‘Those aren’t toy soldiers Herr Hitler is playing with nor are those wind-up aeroplanes being flown about by Mr Goering. One doesn’t make weapons unless one intends to use them, Barry.’ They reached the gangway and Holland dug into the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a packet of ticket vouchers done up with a rubber band. ‘Believe me, there’ll be a war. He’s already been practising in Spain for the last three years or so.’ Barry followed his taller companion across the canvas- covered bridge that led into the ship, trying not to look down. A few days ago he’d flown in his first aircraft, now he was setting sail on his first ocean liner. They reached the far side of the gangway and stepped off into the first-class entrance hall, a dazzling confection of multihued wood veneers, cast aluminum and sandblasted glass. A broad set of carpeted stairs led upward from D to C deck.

  ‘Where are we?’ Barry asked.

  ‘B deck,’ Holland answered, pointing up the stairs. ‘The same as Miss Connelly.’

  ‘She’s travelling first class?’ said Barry, surprised. Holland nodded as they climbed the stairs, first to C deck, then upward to B. ‘All those shillings and pence gathered arduously from supporters of the “Cause” and one of their couriers spends it on having her linen changed once a day and her bed turned down each night.’ They reached B deck and Holland paused for a moment to catch his breath as other passengers ebbed and flowed around them. ‘Actually it makes sense. In tourist and third class you’re travelling with at least two other people, sometimes three, none of whom you’re likely to know. Miss Connelly has what they refer to as a Special Stateroom, designed for one person. Posh, but not as posh as a suite. She’ll have her privacy.’

  ‘I’m not sure why she’d need it,’ said Barry. ‘All she’s doing is carrying information to Russell, probably committed to memory.’

  ‘According to Hayes that’s all she’s doing. But who’s to say that he knows everything that’s going on?’ Holland pointed to a large club chair. ‘Wait here for a moment, would you?’ Barry dropped down into the chair while Holland crossed to a long counter facing the stairway. An illuminated sign above the counter read BUREAU. He spoke briefly to a uniformed officer, who then handed Holland a telephone handset. Holland dialled a number, listened for a moment, then hung up and returned to Barry. ‘She’s been on board for the better part of an hour and a half and she hasn’t set foot outside her stateroom. She came down from London on one of the buses provided by Canadian Pacific.’

  ‘You have people on board?’

  ‘Of course. Her cabin steward for one, a man in the purser’s office for another.’

  ‘What about her luggage?’

  ‘No special check at customs. Didn’t want to upset the woman this early in the game. You and I will attend to that later.’ Holland paused, smiling. ‘In the meantime why don’t we take your case down to our cabin and then go somewhere for a drink?’

  Somewhere turned out to be the Knickerbocker Bar on the Lounge Deck, a relatively small room with a horseshoe-shaped bar, the teal-blue walls covered with an original and characteristically bizarre Arthur Rackham mural depicting the discovery, pursuit and inevitable capture of a creature known as the Cocktail Bird. Even before sailing the bar was crowded so after being served the two men took their drinks around to the Writing Room on the other side of the funnel casing. The lonely other occupant of the library-style room was a middle-aged woman in tweeds who was working her way steadily through a pile of identical Canadian Pacific postcards, writing, addressing and stamping in a methodical series of movements that were almost hypnotic.

  ‘A schoolteacher,’ said Holland, taking a sip of his whiskey and soda. ‘Writing to her students. She’ll have them all done before we cast off and down at the purser’s before we reach the Solent.’ A crackling whistle came over the public address system and a nasal voice gave out the ‘all-ashore-that’s-going-ashore’ announcement. The woman writing postcards continued without pause. ‘Have you ever heard of a newspaper called the New Yorker Staats Zeitung und Herold?.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Barry, taking a swallow of his cold Canadian beer, feeling the icy bite of it against his teeth. What did they say about Canada? The land God gave to Cain. ‘Read it all the time. A favourite.’

  ‘It’s published by a man named Victor F. Ridder.’

  ‘A German?’

  ‘There you have the question,’ said Holland. ‘Technically he’s an American citizen, naturalised. Among other things he’s on the National Boy Scouts Committee, a member of the New York State Board of Charities and he was appointed a New York WPA administrator by Roosevelt himself.’

  ‘Salt of the earth then,’ said Barry, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  ‘In addition to being a Boy Scout, Herr Ridder has also met privately with the führer on a number of occasions over the past ten years, goes from New York to Berlin like other people go from London to Greenwich and according to reliable sources employs half a dozen people at his newspaper who don’t exist.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Dummy employees. He’s having monies funnelled to him to support what is euphemistically called German-American cooperation.’

  ‘I don’t quite see how this ties in with our Miss Connelly.’

  ‘Ridder has travelled to the Continent eleven times in the past five years. On two of those occasions he took the Hindenberg; on the other nine he took a variety of North German Lloyd ships out of Bremen or Hamburg. On none of those eleven trips did he ever set foot on British soil.’

  ‘He’s on board?’ said Barry.

  ‘Such an agile mind,’ said Holland with a pinched smile, taking another sip of his drink. Across the room the schoolteacher completed her task, tapped the stack of postcards into a neat pile and left the room. ‘Both Miss Connelly’s room and the one occupied by Ridder were booked through the same ticketing agent within twenty-four hours of each other. The ticket agent is the same one who has all of the German Embassy’s business in London.’

  ‘So we assume they know each other.’

  ‘At this point I think we assume nothing. Ridder is in stateroom B217. Miss Connelly is in B241. Mr Ridder has an unfortunate bone condition that requires the use of canes and sometimes a wheelchair. They may have been placed close together for ease of access.’

  ‘It strikes me as being a little naive of them,’ said Barry. ‘With a few simple checks you’ve connected them like dots on a child’s puzzle. If there is a relationship between them they’ve done nothing at all to hide it.’

  Hol
land finished his drink and stared into the bottom of the glass. Then he shrugged again and put the glass down on the writing table in front of him. Beneath their feet the plates of the decking began to shiver and the sound of the engines deepened. ‘You give them all too much credit, Barry. These aren’t master criminals. They’re not even very good spies. They’re amateurs. Worse than that, they’re true believers.’ The bald man shook his head. ‘The thing of it is, you see, a true believer will believe in anything given half a chance. Ridder thinks he and his Nazi friends in the United States are the advance guard of a new order in the world and Miss Connelly believes so deeply in the cause of a United Ireland that she and Russell and all the others like them will get into bed with the Germans and think they’ll be able to get out again with their virtue intact.’ He laughed and took off his glasses, polishing them on the sleeve of his overcoat, then pinched them back across his nose. ‘Hayes said it himself – a bunch of yobbos skulking about playing soldiers and silly buggers, drilling with broomsticks and waiting for action that never comes.’

  ‘You really do have a dark philosophy of life, don’t you?’

  ‘Developed in a number of dark and ghastly places,’ Holland responded. ‘Belfast and Belgrade not the least among them.’ He rubbed the top of his head lightly and smiled. ‘Let’s go out on deck, shall we? Bid the Old World goodbye and turn our faces towards the New.’ He smacked his lips happily. ‘Then another drink.’

  * * *

  Jane met Hat Rack Levine under the elevated station at Chatham Square. The ten-cent Venice Theater was showing a Randolph Scott double feature but no one seemed very interested at eleven o’clock in the morning and the only thing keeping the fat woman awake in her glass ticket booth was the roar and rattle of the trains overhead.

  Hat Rack was a schlepper for the unbroken line of women’s apparel stores that went south on Division Street from Eldridge to the Bowery, drawing and cajoling, often lying outright to get prospective customers into the stores. He also had some very good ear-to-the-ground sources of information about the Mob and its activities. The name Hat Rack came from his habit of constantly changing hats. Today it was a homburg set squarely on the tall man’s large, round head. When Jane came down the steps from the platform above, Hat Rack was leaning up against one of the el support girders, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. Jane could smell his breath from a yard away – nicotine, spearmint toothpaste and gin.

  ‘Hat Rack.’

  ‘Jane.’ The tall man levered himself away from the girder, folding the paper under his arm with a quick little snap. He looked around nervously as though he was worried that someone might be watching, which was nothing new. Hat Rack Levine always thought someone was watching him, as though he might have the secrets of the pyramids under his hat rather than a few dribs and drabs of information that trickled down to him through the schmata trade and the occasional overheard back-room conversation at the Old Sicily Club on Mulberry Street. ‘Let’s take a walk,’ said Hat Rack. He led the way out from under the shadows of the el tracks, criss-crossing over the square, down a block on New Bowery to a little triangular cemetery between James and Oliver Streets. As he pushed open the rusty gate he pulled off the homburg, revealing his large bald head, edged with a clown-fringe of curly black hair above his ears. Jane followed him into the cemetery, noting that each stone had a Star of David on it.

  ‘I didn’t know there was a Jewish cemetery here,’ she said.

  Hat Rack found a stone bench that stood in front of a tall, dark, red-granite monument and sat down. Jane joined him. ‘It’s the oldest Jewish cemetery in Manhattan,’ said Levine. ‘All Portuguese and Spanish, like this guy here.’ He pointed to the name on the monument in front of them across the little pea-gravel path. ‘Gersholm Mendez Seixis. I mean, what kind of a Jew name is that?’ He shrugged. ‘I think he was some kind of big- time rebbe or something back in 1776 or something.’ Hat Rack shook his head. ‘You never think of Spaniards and Italians being Jews but there must be some, I guess. Mostly you think of Krauts and Russians and Polacks like me.’ He laughed. ‘Maybe there’s even a Jig Jew or two out there, who knows.’

  ‘I never really thought about it,’ said Jane.

  There was a short silence between the two. Jane stared at the marker for Rabbi Gersholm Mendez Seixis. Finally Hat Rack spoke. ‘So you come down here to ask me the time of day or what?’

  ‘Howard Raines.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Junior lawyer at Fallon and McGee but a guy named Shalleck was paying his way.’

  ‘Shalleck’s big time. What’s this Raines character got to do with it?’

  ‘Raines wound up in a ditch in Jersey with three bullets in him.’

  ‘This the stiff they found out by the Rustic Cabin?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘I couldn’t put a name to it there for a second.’

  ‘He was an old friend of mine.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it. Friends are supposed to die peacefully in bed, maybe a year or so before you do, so you don’t have to mourn their passing too long.’ He shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t have friends who get whacked.’

  ‘So what can you tell me?’

  ‘About your friend? Nothing. But I can tell you why he was dumped there.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The Rustic Cabin’s all on its own, not part of Willy’s organisation.’ Willy being Willy Moretti, the one-time enforcer for Abe Zwillman who now owned all the gambling concessions in New Jersey and half the ones in Manhattan in conjunction with Frank Costello.

  ‘What’s Moretti got to do with my friend Howie?’

  ‘Probably nothing except to make the owner of the Rustic Cabin look bad. There’s a singer there Will likes. He wants to make him big time but the kid’s got a contract.’

  ‘This Frankie Sinatra guy?’

  ‘I heard it was Frankie Silk.’

  ‘Same difference. Skinny kid in expensive clothes.’

  ‘Never met him. Anyway, Moretti thinks he can go places. Maybe figures a corpse next door to the Rustic Cabin will make the owner think twice about trying to hold on to the Frankie Silk contract.’

  ‘You think the singer knows anything?’

  ‘Maybe. I mean, he must know Moretti. No one dumps a stiff in Jersey without Moretti knowing about it, so go figure.’

  ‘Can I approach this singer kid without losing some part of my anatomy?’ Moretti had a reputation for being savagely protective of his ‘assets’ and Jane didn’t want to wind up in a ditch like poor old Howard.

  ‘You got such nice anatomy too.’ Hat Rack grinned.

  ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘I’ll set it up for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Hat Rack. You’re a pal. Can you get me some background on the kid, maybe something I can work with?’

  ‘Cost you twenty and a big, wet kiss, sweetheart. I’ll be in touch.’ Hat Rack gave Jane a wave then headed out of the cemetery, leaving her still sitting on the bench. A Second Avenue express came scratching and screeching along above the street, spitting sparks and groaning like an old ghost. Jane stared at the tombstone of Gersholm Mendez Seixis and wondered how at peace the old rebbe was resting, being shaken around in his coffin every few minutes by the gigantic city that had grown up around his grave. Howard Raines was probably faring a little better in the meat locker in the Bellevue Morgue, except for the fact that he’d be blue with cold. Jane got up and followed the path between the stones towards the exit. When you got right down to it the best kind of death was to be like her sister, Annie, alive but not knowing it.

  She used a nickel to make a call in the booth at the foot of the el steps then hopped on an uptown Third Avenue local to the Plaza. Her friend Noel Busch was already waiting for her in the Oak Room when she arrived, sitting at one of the prestigious niche tables in the gloomy old panelled room, a smoke-stained mural of what was supposed to be a romantic castle on the Rhine looming above him. As usual, the
magazine writer was dressed to the nines. Today it was a double-breasted blazer with silver buttons and white flannels – probably from Arnold Constable and certainly not from off-the-rack at Gimbels – the richly polished shoes from Rogers- Peet, a custom-made white silk shirt from some poor benighted genius of a Chinese tailor on Mott Street, all of it topped off by a demure University Club tie.

  The tall, elegant Princeton graduate had once worked for the Daily News and the New Yorker, followed by a stint as the movie and theatre critic for Time and was now a feature writer for Life magazine. Jane had supplied pictures for Busch at Newsweek and less often at Life, where you had to go through half a dozen pipe-smoking picture editors before your shot ever saw ink.

  Busch was drinking a gimlet and smoking a cigarette as Jane sat down opposite him.

  ‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘Margaret Bourke White in a skirt. How’s the lady photographer today?’

  ‘Don’t give me a hard time, Bushy. I’m not in the mood. That time of the month, you know.’ It wasn’t, but she liked to see him blush. ‘Not to mention the fact that my first love is cooling off on a slab at the Bellevue Morgue.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it,’ said Busch. ‘Have a martini and tell me your troubles.’

  A waiter shimmied up, took Jane’s order for coffee and shimmied away again. Jane looked at her watch. It was just past noon and they were the only people in the room, which wasn’t surprising. The place didn’t really do much business until the sun went down.