IN THE MORNING the dining car was nearly empty – the soldiers were taking the rare opportunity to sleep in and there was no sign of the woman named Lois. Guttman returned to his compartment just as the train went through the Ivy City locomotive coach yard, full of dark Tuscan-red Pennsylvania Railroad coaches and, above them, a cat’s cradle of overhead wires for the new electric line between D.C. and New York. Ten minutes later they arrived at Union Station. On the platform he couldn’t see Lois either. Maybe she had got off in the early hours; he dimly remembered they had stopped at Harrisburg while it was still dark.
He went through the crowded hall, a blur of bustling khaki-clad soldiers, past the sign for the Servicemen’s Lounge and the long line at the ticket window, and got into one of the taxis waiting outside. He’d left his car at the Bureau, hoping no one would notice that it had been there since Sunday. The cab moved slowly towards the Capitol, the driver complaining that the war had brought too many people to town. When Guttman suggested that must help business, the driver said he’d gladly sacrifice the extra fares for lighter traffic.
Guttman got out discreetly at 12th Street and walked the long block to the Bureau. The temperature was in the mid-sixties, and chances were the coming winter would not be harsh – it very rarely was in what was essentially a southern city. A good thing, thought Guttman, since he hated snow – its association with a childhood spent struggling with hand-me-down galoshes and buckled rubber boots.
At the Bureau he found Marie behind her desk in the anteroom outside his office. There was a young agent standing by her desk. Probably a new recruit from one of the field offices, making the rounds. Guttman didn’t recognise him, though the way this guy was hanging around Marie was familiar enough. The field guys would hover in the little anteroom like bees around a honeypot, drawn to the mixed kind of attraction Marie exuded, part lustworthy, part maternal – most of the agents were younger than Marie, who Guttman figured was in her early forties (he could never bring himself to ask). She was a well-built redhead with a pleasant, lived-in face; attractive in a way that made even the ugliest rube feel it was not inconceivable he had a chance with her. She was welcoming, gemütlichkeit; to a raw-boned kid in from the Butte office for the first time she must have seemed soothing and redolent of home – like a reassuring malted milk at a soda fountain.
As Guttman came in, the young agent stopped talking.
‘Morning, Marie,’ Guttman said.
‘Morning, Mr Guttman.’ This was unusual – Marie only called him Mr in Tolson’s presence.
Guttman turned to the agent, who wore a dark blue suit, white shirt and a tie without discernible pattern. The young man stood there confidently, a good four inches taller than Guttman, and handsome in a Clark Kent kind of way.
‘You waiting to see me?’
‘No, sir. I was just dropping off a memo with Miss Boudreau from Mr Tolson. It’s to all the assistant directors.’
‘I see. Have you managed to do that now?’
‘Sir?’
Guttman nodded at the memo on Marie’s desk. ‘Message received, Mr …?
‘Adams, sir. Thomas Adams.’ He extended his hand and Guttman shook it grudgingly.
‘Was there anything else requiring your presence here, Mr Adams?’ Guttman said laboriously.
The young man blushed. ‘No, sir. I’m all through. Thanks, Marie,’ he said and scooted out of the room.
Marie looked knowingly at Guttman. ‘You’re in a good mood. Was your trip that bad?’
‘Don’t know yet. Who was that kid?’
‘T.A.?’
‘Is that what he’s called? They’re taking them young these days.’
‘You’re just feeling your age. You see the resemblance?’
‘To what? Of whom?’ Miss Lewalski from the sixth grade, strict with a ruler and a stickler for grammar, came flooding back.
‘Doesn’t he remind you of someone?’
‘My nephew Seymour?’
‘Go on, be serious. Can’t you see it?’
‘No, Marie, I can’t. Who does the young T.A. remind me of?’ He felt grumpy, and was getting grumpier.
‘Frank Sinatra.’
‘I think I’ve heard of him. Scrawny guy, yeah?’ But it was hard to put a face to the name; he thought of Sinatra as a syrupy voice on the radio.
Marie shook her head. ‘Sometimes, Harry … Even you know who Sinatra is. All the girls in the pool think so. Down to the Adam’s apple.’
‘Has our “Sinatra” finished high school yet?’
‘You sound jealous.’
This was true. Guttman had never looked as young as this guy. Even in his early twenties, Guttman’s hair had been deserting him. What remained were long strands, splayed across his pale-coloured pate like black threads on an ivory pillow. ‘I’ve seen the guy before, I think.’
‘Of course you have. He worked for Mr Tolson a few years back, then went to the Chicago Field Office.’
‘Did he now?’ Tolson specialised in young male assistants. Clean-cut individuals, usually former athletes, as Tolson liked to pretend he was as well.
‘Yeah,’ said Marie, ‘I think he was out on the Coast for a while too. But I guess Mr Tolson thought he was wasted out there, and brought him back to work for him again.’ Marie played it straight, but her eyes were mischievous.
‘Other than the arrival of young Sinatra in your life, did I miss anything yesterday?’
Marie shook her head. ‘Don’t think so. The mail is on your desk. You’ve got the Executives Conference at ten-thirty. Otherwise your day is clear.’ He started to move through the doorway to his office when she added, ‘Oh,’ and he noticed her voice had lowered. ‘There was a call for you. I didn’t want to leave the message on your desk.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Your Canadian friend.’
It had taken J. Edgar Hoover over fifteen years to recognise the importance of counter-espionage and to accept that operating within America’s borders were foreign agents who the FBI needed to do something about. Through the Depression of the thirties, Hoover would not countenance the idea. His objectives were combating conventional crime (especially bank robberies) and accruing power for the organisation he ran.
When war broke out in Europe in 1939, however, Hoover had created a new division, separate from the all-encompassing General Intelligence Division. It was named Division Five and was run by Edward Tamm, a trusted Hoover lieutenant. Div 5 comprised four sections, and Guttman ran the one devoted to counter-espionage. Yet he still reported to Tolson, not Tamm – which Tamm resented.
Guttman’s anomalous status had come after intense negotiations in the spring of 1942 with Hoover himself, when Guttman’s priority had been to arrange his own transfer from running the Strategic Intelligence Service, or SIS, another new division created after America’s entry into the war to track German activities in Latin America. With an invalid wife back then, the last thing Guttman had wanted was to traipse around Caracas or Santiago looking for Nazis. He was in any case more comfortable fighting the enemy at home. In his own way, he supposed, he was an Isolationist himself.
At 10.30 he went upstairs for the weekly Executives Conference. It was chaired by Clyde Tolson and was held in a meeting room down the corridor from the Director’s quarters, a suite of rooms that included Tolson’s own office. The meeting was attended by all the assistant directors and a few other senior Bureau officials. The only junior person usually present was Miss Caccioppo, a legendary stenographer said to hold the unofficial world record for shorthand speed, so Guttman was surprised to see Tolson’s new assistant there, the kid T.A.
The rest were all familiar faces, and most of them had been at the meeting every week for the last ten years. Only Pop Nathan was missing from the old days; he was in San Diego, where he’d gone to be Special Agent in Charge. An early Hoover appointment, he had been the only other senior Jew at the Bureau, but Guttman didn’t miss him much, since Nathan had always displayed a loyalty to Director Hoover which was both blind and impermeable.
Tolson began with a summary of the field office reports, focusing on crime trends. The most recent ones were a surge in war-related fraud, including a rash of scams in which phoney life-insurance policies were sold to newly drafted soldiers.
Then each of the assistant directors reported on their own bailiwicks. Normally Guttman’s attention would have wandered by now, but he found himself studying the faces round the table, as old hands like Glavin from personnel and Louis B. Nichols, the Bureau’s head PR man, gave their reports. Did Guttman really know these old familiars as well as he thought? Could not one of them have some terrible secret? Not the usual kind of secret – the hidden liking for a morning whisky; a fondness for other men’s wives, or for teenage basketball players; even an undeclared conviction for petty theft – but something on an incalculably larger scale.
Why not? The Bureau itself had changed incalculably, with a wider remit, a bigger role not just in the country but the world as well. Despite Glavin’s moaning, the Bureau had expanded fourfold in less than four years, and there were now over 3,000 Special Agents. Even so, the old guard still held sway, and it seemed incredible that one of these staid, white-shirted, white-skinned, old-school agents would so fundamentally betray the country they were paid to protect. He couldn’t believe it of any of them.
It was Tamm’s turn next. Guttman could never really figure him out. Tamm made it no secret that he couldn’t stand Tolson, which might have made him an ally. But Guttman knew that in a pinch Tamm would always do Hoover’s bidding, hoping to be restored as the heir presumptive – and he knew too that Tamm had checked up on him more than once in the past at Hoover’s behest. Recently it was rumoured that Tamm nursed secret ambitions of becoming a judge; he was said to be building relationships at the Justice Department upstairs, and had been spotted coming out of Attorney General Biddle’s eyrie, high in one corner of the building.
Tamm started by reporting on the growing evidence of Communist influence in industrial disputes, long a Hoover preoccupation, and he cited continuing trouble with the miners’ union, whose leader John L. Lewis was a particular Bureau bête noire. Guttman, who was claustrophobic in his own basement, let alone hundreds of feet underground, found himself secretly sympathising with the miners. Tolson asked Tamm about RACON, the programme launched by Hoover himself earlier that summer to investigate agitation among Negroes, especially those involved in the March on Washington Movement. Although President Roosevelt himself had met in a spirit of conciliation with the movement’s head, A. Philip Randolph, this had cut no ice with Hoover – who claimed Randolph was a mere figurehead, and that the real levers of Negro power were controlled by James W. Ford, a member of the American Communist Party, who’d had the temerity to run for Vice President on the CP ticket. Tamm reported that wiretaps had been installed in Ford’s office and home; at this, Tolson nodded meaningfully at Miss Caccioppo, who stopped writing until Tamm was finished. Not for the first time, Guttman was glad he wasn’t running Div 5.
At last it was Guttman’s turn. He had hastily cobbled together notes from his own field reports in the hour he’d had at his desk since returning from Chicago. He began with the Nazis. He’d personally turned another Nazi agent named Sebold two months before, and persuaded him to send misleading transmissions for well over a year to the German High Command. Sebold had led the Bureau to the other members of his network, which had just been rolled up – unbeknownst to their German masters. Tolson was nodding approvingly as Guttman turned to the Hawaii Territory, where the SAC, a straight shooter named Shivers, had forcefully argued against extending the internment of Japanese-Americans. Hoover, in an atypical display of liberalism, had agreed, and persuaded the President to exempt Hawaii from his Executive Order. There had been howls from xenophobic elements of the West Coast press, so it was gratifying to hear from Shivers now that there had been no evidence of espionage activity in the Islands. Finally, Guttman mentioned a case in Milwaukee, where a former Bund member had been found in possession of an arsenal – though Guttman omitted the fact that this ‘arsenal’ had only consisted of five shotguns.
Tolson asked, ‘Nothing further on Dasch?’
‘No. I’m confident we got them all.’ Dasch was a spy who’d landed on Long Island in June, courtesy of a U-boat, but within a week of his arrival he and seven co-conspirators had been arrested. The case had been a sensation in the press and a major public-relations triumph for the FBI. The trial of the saboteurs had ended two months before in early August.
‘Dasch is lucky to be alive,’ interjected Tamm. ‘If you hadn’t written to the judge he wouldn’t be.’
That was true, and Dasch’s reprieve had caused outrage. What the public didn’t know was that Dasch had not only given himself up, but had also led the Bureau to his co-conspirators, including four Germans who had landed in Florida. Without Dasch’s help it might have taken months to catch them all, giving the others time to wreak havoc along the eastern seaboard. Considering the value of Dasch’s crucial assistance, Guttman had been perfectly happy to write to the judge asking for clemency on his behalf. Looking now at Tamm he felt a sudden surge of anger. ‘They executed six of the eight. That’s a pretty good batting average, even for a hanging judge.’
Tamm’s cheeks flushed. He looked about to reply when Tolson cut in: ‘Okay, let’s move on.’
‘That’s all from me,’ said Guttman.
Reports done, Tolson took over; he liked to finish the meeting with a short sermon of his own. Guttman never understood the point of it. Half-homily, half-directive, the little talks were unpredictable in their choice of topics. One week Tolson might inveigh against the perfidy of the American Federation of Labor or, as he did the week before, speak scornfully about Charlie Chaplin’s Communist associations and predilection for underage girls (to Tolson’s annoyance, Tamm had asked if the girls were also Communists).
This week Tolson’s target was conscientious objectors. There weren’t very many of them (the last figure for those registered by the Selective Service was 12,000), and to Guttman they seemed by definition not to pose a threat to peace. Tolson saw things differently, and now ordered that instructions be relayed to field offices to increase surveillance of COs. Guttman wanted to sigh out loud. Most COs were either in prison or doing alternative service, so this seemed a more than usually pointless exercise. Guttman might have said as much if he’d felt Tamm would support him, but their spat had put paid to that.
The meeting ended and Guttman was getting up to leave when Tolson called out – ‘Harry.’
‘Harry’ was as rare as Marie calling him ‘Mr Guttman’. Guttman waited warily as the others left. The kid T.A. was collecting the press clippings from the table and Guttman expected Tolson to wait for him to leave too, but he didn’t.
Tolson said, ‘How are you doing?’
‘Okay,’ Guttman said cautiously. Tolson was not one for personal concern.
‘Must be tough being on your own,’ said Tolson. Guttman shrugged. He was embarrassed to have this exchange in front of T.A.
Tolson went on, ‘The boss is pleased about your handling of this Dasch business.’
‘Is he? I haven’t had a blue page.’ Hoover communicated congratulations to senior members of the Bureau on blue-tinted paper.
‘He wouldn’t want it to go to your head,’ Tolson said edgily. ‘And he doesn’t want you to take your eye off the ball.’
‘I’m not.’ It was important to sound emphatic. You didn’t just toe the line; you had to hug the goddamned thing.
‘Good to hear. I had a feeling something else was bothering you.’
‘Who, me?’ All innocence.
‘Yeah, in the meeting.’
‘No. Not at all. I’ve just got my hands full at the minute.’ Then, in case it sounded as if he were complaining, he added, ‘Like everybody else.’
Tolson said, ‘Well, like I say, the boss is pleased. And it seems you’ve also got a fan at the Court.’
‘Oh?’ Guttman wondered what Tolson meant. Hoover’s court? Not likely.
‘The boss was leaving the White House the other day and ran into Justice Frankfurter.’ Tolson chuckled. ‘I guess the separation of powers doesn’t extend to FDR’s cocktail hour. Frankfurter was full of praise for you. He told the Boss you were a “stellar G-Man”. Ha!’
‘Nice of him,’ Guttman said dutifully.
‘Sure it was,’ said Tolson. His speech was speeding up – never a good sign. ‘Thing is, when the Boss mentioned this to me, I couldn’t help thinking, how does Frankfurter know whether you’re good at your job?’
It had been cool in the room during the Executives Conference, but Guttman felt he was breaking into a sweat. He threw his hands out, like an Italian. ‘He doesn’t, Clyde. We know each other from other stuff. You know, Jewish fundraisers.’
Tolson nodded neutrally; it was impossible to tell if he bought this. ‘You people do stick together. Still, it doesn’t hurt to have an ally at the Court.’
Downstairs, he walked towards his end of the corridor and the small bunch of offices which Tolson, in a moment of dubious comic inspiration, had nicknamed Guttman’s Ghetto. Coming through the open door to Marie’s anteroom, he found her on the phone. ‘Have a good trip,’ she quickly said into the mouthpiece, then put it down, looking flustered. He wondered if she’d found a fellow. She deserved to.
‘Marie, wasn’t Powderman supposed to come see me?’ The new New York SAC.
‘He came by yesterday. I explained you were sick,’ she said, raising an eyebrow. ‘He went back to New York last night.’
He nodded but looked at her sharply. ‘Are you okay, Marie?’ It wasn’t like her to forget things.
‘Of course I am. But what about you? You’ve lost weight, Harry.’
‘Have I?’ No one had ever said this to him since … He thought hard. Actually, no one had ever said this to him before. He flexed his shoulders. It was true; his suit jacket felt looser than normal.
‘It’s not good,’ Marie said.
‘Why not?’ He’d always wanted to lose weight.
‘It doesn’t suit you. You’re a big man – you don’t want to shrink all of a sudden.’
‘Okay,’ he said, a little flustered now himself.
‘You need feeding up. I bet you’re living on leftovers.’
‘Well,’ he said hesitantly. On his way home he would have so many work things on his mind that he never remembered to shop. On the days Annie Ryerson came in to help out she usually left supper, so twice a week he had a proper evening meal. Other nights he usually ended up eating a bowl of cereal.
‘Come to dinner one night, Harry. I’ll cook you a proper meal.’
‘You don’t have to do that, Marie.’
‘I’d like to. And little Jack is dying to meet you.’
Big Jack had departed some time before Marie had come to work at the Bureau. Guttman had no doubt her abandoned son could use a father figure, but Guttman already had his hands full with Jeff, Annie’s little boy, who had taken to coming over at weekends to play.
‘I’ll give you a date,’ said Marie.
He nodded unenthusiastically. ‘Hold my calls, will you?’ he said and went into his office, closing the door behind him. Lifting the phone on his desk he gave the switchboard a number in New York.
After a minute a female voice answered the phone. ‘British Passport Control Office.’ This was the cover name for the British Security Coordination Office, where a Canadian, William Stephenson, was in charge. A former pilot in the Great War, Stephenson was a self-made businessman who had volunteered to help the British lobby for support during the two years when Britain was at war and America was on the sidelines.
‘Hi, Katie, it’s Harry Guttman. Is your uncle in?’
‘Oh, Mr Guttman, you’ve missed him. He may be back this afternoon.’
‘I thought you’d transferred to Bermuda.’
‘No such luck. Uncle Bill won’t let me go. Do you want me to leave him a message?’
‘Just tell him I returned his call.’