CHAPTER 18

“You have no right to kidnap me,” I said.

The red-haired man sitting next to me smiled and looked at the driver. “Ever heard of a right to kidnap, Fred?”

“Nope. Kidnapping’s a crime, last I heard.”

They shared a laugh.

Wiseacres. “Now I know why Gallagher and Shean busted up,” I said. “They must’ve heard you two comedy geniuses were on the horizon.”

The red-headed one got a chuckle out of that. “Halloran and Luft—the great comic double act.”

“Oh, you have names?” I asked.

My neighbor in the backseat nodded. “I’m Operative Halloran, and my partner is Operative Luft.”

The driver looked back at me and smiled. As if we were all going on a picnic.

“Operatives?” I asked. “Don’t you have ranks in the Secret Service?”

“Only higher up.”

“Then how can I tell who’s the senior officer in charge?”

“I am,” they said in unison.

The car passed within a stone’s throw of the NYPD’s Centre Street Headquarters. “You can drop me off right there,” I said, nodding toward the building with its great domed clock tower. “Captain Percival Smith works there—he interviewed me for my position last year.”

“Captain Percival Smith,” Halloran repeated, though the car didn’t stop. Or even slow down. “Wonder what he’ll make of all this.”

I wondered too, and shuddered at the memory of the beak-nosed, irascible Captain Smith. Before getting the brass involved, it might be wise to ferret out how much trouble I was in. The car drove a dozen more blocks, to an office building on Chambers Street, not far from City Hall.

There, I was escorted to a room with shades drawn and left sitting on my own for an hour. I knew this tactic: letting the suspect stew alone in worry until they were ready to blurt out anything to regain their freedom. Though I understood what the Secret Service men were up to, the strategy was still effective. There was nothing in the room to focus on—just a picture of Woodrow Wilson hanging in the middle of an otherwise bare wall. I looked at the long, solemn face of the man who was pledging to keep us out of war. Nice thought, yet I had the unsettling feeling I was now under attack from my own country.

When next I saw Operative Halloran, I didn’t even wait till he was seated before asking, “Why would the Secret Service be interested in me? Isn’t your job to look into counterfeiters?”

“Usually,” he said.

“And to guard the president.” A terrible thought occurred to me. “Is someone at Das Auge planning to assassinate President Wilson?”

His eyes widened in alarm. “Are they?”

“I’m a police officer, not an expert on threats to the president. And the NYPD doesn’t look lightly on their officers being abducted off the streets.”

Halloran sat. Luft, joining us, remained silent and stayed on his feet, pacing from one side of the room to the other. I understood this, too, as an attempt to keep me off balance.

“The government of the United States of America doesn’t look lightly on its citizens colluding with foreigners we suspect of conspiring against our nation,” Halloran said.

My blood went cold. What he was describing sounded like treason. They executed traitors. “Y-you must be joking. I’ve done nothing except work for a day—not even an entire day—at a newspaper.”

A reddish-brown eyebrow jutted upward. “You said you were a police officer.”

I swallowed. “It’s a little hard to explain . . .”

Nevertheless, I tried to make the situation as clear as I could, starting back with the discovery of Ruthie’s body in the bathtub.

When I finished, the two men looked incredulous. “You took it upon yourself to investigate a man you believe—for reasons no one else credits—was responsible for the murder of a prostitute who actually committed suicide?” Luft asked.

“Allegedly committed suicide,” I corrected.

“So none of your colleagues knew what you intended to do today?”

“No, because I wasn’t sure it would amount to anything. I didn’t expect the man in the bratwurst line would take me into his confidence, much less give me a job. Would you?”

“No,” Halloran said, “but I don’t have your figure.”

Oh brother. “I didn’t even tell my roommate where I was going today,” I said, “and she’s my best friend.”

“Look here, Miss Faulk—”

“Officer Faulk,” I corrected, still holding out hope that a police officer stood a better chance of surviving whatever was happening to me than a mere civilian would.

“All right, Officer Faulk. We want to believe you’re not involved in any illegal activity. But you need to tell us what you know about the offices of Das Auge.”

“Is Johann Schmidt plotting against our government?” I asked, unable to swallow back my curiosity. “What made you watch him? He must have been acting suspiciously.”

“It’s actually the newspaper itself we’re curious about. We found a scrap of paper and the address of Das Auge on the person of a German sailor who was picked up with a forged document. We’ve been following Holger Neumann, the owner, until today, when we saw the two of you seemed to be meeting clandestinely.”

“I met him clandestinely, because of my suspicions about the matter I just told you about,” I said. “He knew nothing about me. He bought me lunch and offered me a job—he wanted me to keep an eye on Johann Schmidt, who works at Das Auge.”

I told them about the office, the locked drawer, and the furtive handovers of envelopes. “It might be Schmidt you should be watching. Even Neumann wants to keep an eye on him. For that matter, if you were curious, why didn’t you send someone undercover?”

A cloud traveled across Halloran’s expression. “We don’t have the personnel right now to cover every report of suspicious activity. Anyway, we had no way of knowing the newspaper was looking for help.”

“We’d only recently received information about Neumann,” Luft added.

“If you don’t have the men,” I asked, “who’s giving you information?”

“Up till now, our country hasn’t had much use for international espionage,” Halloran said. “The British, for instance, have more people in New York looking into suspicious activity among foreigners than we do.”

I was not only surprised by the information, but astonished that he was sharing it with me. Was that a strategy, too?

How could I be sure they were telling me the truth about anything?

He saw my skepticism. “The Europeans are accustomed to spying on each other. We Americans have some catching up to do.”

“What can you tell us about Schmidt?” Luft asked.

I relayed to him every detail I could remember from that day, right down to the bunny hug and the strange way Johann had reacted when I’d tried the wrong drawer to find the cookie tin. I again mentioned the envelope that had come from that door—the one he’d handed to the Skipper as “payment.”

Halloran’s eyes narrowed. “And that was the only drawer you came across that was locked?”

I nodded. “He could have anything in there. Dodgy financial records, or evidence of something else incriminating . . . or it might just be naughty pictures.”

“Might be.” Halloran stroked his chin.

His obvious suspicions stoked my own. Despite how nervous I was, it was almost a joy to finally come across someone who was taking this situation as seriously as I did, albeit for different reasons. They were looking into document forgery, but I was trying to find a connection between passports and a suspicious death. “You need to be careful,” I said, considering another angle. “Neumann wasn’t too specific about what his suspicions of Johann were. He might even think Johann’s working for you.”

Halloran looked doubtful. “Nothing we’ve done so far should have drawn anyone’s attention.”

“Then it would be unwise to take any action that would put them even more on guard.” At his questioning look, I elaborated. “For instance, if a woman who worked at the offices of Das Auge for a day were to suddenly disappear, wouldn’t that raise suspicions?”

* * *

By the time help arrived, I was fairly certain I’d won over Halloran. I at least felt the firing squad, electric chair, or hangman’s noose might be avoided. On the other hand, I had time to float plenty of doubts about my future in the NYPD. My outlook became even gloomier when the door opened and Captain Percival Smith appeared, looking more imperious and irritable than ever. I hadn’t seen him since my initial interview after passing the police exam. I shot to my feet.

Percival Smith was the tallest man in the room, slender and straight with an aristocratic way of carrying himself. His iron-gray hair was still thick, and he sported a full mustache under his beaky nose. Stopping just inside the door, he squinted at me for a moment.

“I remember you.” He pushed his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose. “You’re the one who got into that mess at the Woolworth Building last year.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, standing rigidly at attention. “Officer Louise Faulk.”

“I had my doubts about you—obviously I was right. Good policewomen don’t end up being hauled in by the Secret Service,” the captain said in clipped tones. “We’ve never even had a policeman brought here.” He narrowed his eyes on me. “You’d better have a good excuse for this.”

Halloran came forward. “Officer Faulk explained the circumstances to me, Captain, and if her story is all true, we think there is a way we could use her.”

My knees practically went noodly with relief, until Smith voiced his reply.

“That’s fortunate. Officer Faulk might soon be at liberty to work for you on a permanent basis.”

I winced . . . although the word might did allow for some hope. I started to speak, but Smith raised his hand, palm out, to stop me, like a traffic cop. “When I want to hear from you, Faulk, I’ll ask you a direct question.”

He then demanded Halloran go over the afternoon’s events—starting with the account of my day, my observations, right through to the moment they picked me up. I could have told him what he wanted to know much more succinctly, but Captain Smith was old-fashioned, and would always listen to a higher rank before a lower one, and to a man before a woman. And of course Operatives Halloran and Luft were no longer the flippant jokesters they’d been with me. I bit my tongue, seethed, and worried.

On one hand, things didn’t look good for me. But I felt energized by the fact that Halloran had said he could use me. How?

When Halloran was done, Smith finally turned back to me.

“So, Officer Faulk, you undertook this little investigation on your own, without telling any of your colleagues at your precinct.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t like independence in an officer.”

“It’s fortunate for us that she found trouble,” Halloran interrupted. “As long as she’s at Das Auge, what she discovers there might be of use to us. We would like someone to trace the people who come and go there, and see if there is a subversive group congregating at those offices, or if any codes are being worked into the paper. If we can keep her there with the NYPD’s blessing, so much the better.”

“How long would this operation last?” Captain Smith asked.

“With her watching from inside the newspaper, a week or less should be sufficient to let us know if there’s anything we should be concerned with.”

Smith frowned over steepled fingertips. “We’ll have to think of an excuse for taking her out of Thirtieth Street.”

I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. “I could be escorting a female prisoner to Albion Prison.” The fictional trip upstate would explain a few days’ absence.

Percival Smith’s bushy iron-gray brows climbed into his forehead, as if a chair had turned sentient and piped up with a suggestion. I worried I was about to be verbally slapped down, but he said, “Well, as long as you’re offering ideas out of turn, at least they’re sensible ones.”

The comment was as close to a compliment from him as I would likely ever receive.

The men conferred on strategy. If I hadn’t been so elated at the prospect of an interesting assignment before me, it would’ve been more irksome to hear myself talked about as if I were a piece on a chessboard. But I was too focused on the job ahead to get angry. In fact, it was hard not to fall to my knees in relief. Not only had I escaped a charge of treason, I was going to be placed into an official secret assignment. With the NYPD’s blessing.