LUNCH HAD BEEN over for an hour, but the smell of deep-fried oysters and fried potatoes wafted through the bar. The proprietor was a beefy man with a wart on one cheek; it seemed to have grown since Guttman’s last visit. With a cloth rag in one hand and a flat tin in the other, he was working on the bar top, which was weathered to a deep glow by the rag-rubbed wax applied each day. Near the swing doors leading into the kitchen, a plump woman with curls the colour of a thin and artificial sun was drying glasses with a dish towel while the radio played ‘I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo’. Guttman ordered coffee, added cream in a sloppy slurp when the mug arrived, then took it to wait at a table at the back with a view of the front door.
He didn’t have long to wait. There was a payphone, a two-piece candlestick set positioned on the wall near Guttman. When it rang the owner gave a final rub with his cloth, then ambled down to the end of the bar and answered it. After a moment he looked around, saw Guttman, and put the receiver on the bar. ‘Call for you,’ he said and went back to his waxing.
Guttman stood, then went and picked up the phone. He said a tentative hello into the mouthpiece set into the wall.
‘It sounds pretty quiet, Harry.’ It was Stephenson. ‘The guy who answered the phone knew you right away. Is membership down over there? Maybe the dues are too high.’
‘Wait until the shift’s through next door. You wouldn’t find room to draw breath then.’
Stephenson said, ‘How are you fixed for time, Harry?’
Guttman looked at his watch. It wasn’t yet four o’clock and he wasn’t due for supper at Marie’s until six-thirty. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Why don’t you take a little drive? It’s only ten minutes away.’
‘You’d better come see for yourself. Let me give you directions.’
Sundown was still an hour away, but a low sky of charcoal cloud gave the sky the grey tint of dusk. Guttman put the Buick’s lights on and drove along the river, past warehouses and small factories, then turned north into a working-class neighbourhood of cheap apartments. The land here wasn’t reclaimed but looked it – flat and unattractive, with scrubby trees, and in summer the area was as hot as a malarial swamp. Though now it was cold enough for Guttman to put the heating on in his car.
At the edge of the neighbourhood, where it was about to join the better parts of Georgetown, he came to a commercial stretch, the block filled with grocery stores, a hardware store, a diner that was empty inside, two corner bars, and finally, set back slightly from the street, a low row of units, built like a series of bungalows, which had a stand-alone neon sign that announced ‘The Winking Eye Motel’. The sign, almost inevitably, winked slowly on and off.
Across the street a stretch of barren ground served as an informal parking lot for half a dozen cars – residents of the apartments above the stores and shoppers who hadn’t found a space on the street. Guttman turned in and then pulled around on the bumpy gravel to park facing the motel across the street. He doused his lights after he saw Stephenson get out of his own car and gesture like a traffic cop for Guttman to stay put. The Canadian disappeared in the jumble of cars parked further along the lot, then reappeared suddenly by the passenger-side door and got in.
He was dressed impeccably, as always, unbuttoning a fine wool overcoat to reveal a dark suit with matching vest and a steel-blue tie. It was hard to say where the man looked more out of place – in Katz’s, the Jewish deli, on the Lower East Side, or here, across from a sleazy motel near the Potomac.
‘We found out why your friend is using bedbug joints. He’s got a regular visitor – or two. Ladies. No boarding house landlady’s going to put up with that.’ Stephenson, for all his worldliness, sounded as though he wouldn’t have put up with it either. ‘He’s in his room now, and not alone. It’s the one with the Oldsmobile right outside. If he stays true to form he’ll be out shortly – it seems he times these rendezvous to a T.’
A line of cars parked outside the rooms stretched along the walkway of the motel, but he saw the one Stephenson had referred to.
‘It could just be a meeting,’ said Guttman.
‘I don’t think so. Young Fletcher – he’s sitting in a car at the other end of the lot – is an enterprising fellow. He bribed a maid to let him into the room. He said the evidence was incontrovertible.’
Guttman said, ‘You said he had more than one visitor.’
‘That’s correct. Fletcher didn’t go quite so far with the other lady, but he didn’t need to. He walked by the room on the way to the soda machine. Fletcher said there was enough noise coming from inside the room to make it clear what was going on.’
‘Golly,’ said Guttman. ‘The boy’s got energy.’
‘You sound surprised.’ Stephenson laughed.
‘I am,’ Guttman admitted, wondering what Tolson would make of his protégé’s way of ending the day. But he was also wondering what the point of spying on this was. It smacked of voyeurism, and seemed faintly prurient. T.A. liked to shack up of an afternoon with some dollies – what of it?
Guttman glanced at Stephenson, who was looking around in every direction, but slowly, barely noticeably. For an amateur he was very careful. Guttman said, ‘When we met in New York you said there was a reason we were cutting off your information supply.’
‘Did I?’ Stephenson’s eyes grew watery, a habit they had when he didn’t like a question.
Stephenson said reluctantly, ‘We had a problem that your guys in the military found out about.’
‘Oh? What sort of problem?’
‘Some secrets travelled east from England. Scientific information – about the project we were all cooperating so nicely on.’
‘How far east?’
Stephenson said, ‘Well, it went past Berlin without stopping, if you get my drift.’
‘What’s wrong with that? They’re our allies now,’ he said, trying to parrot Tolson’s party line.
‘But not privy to the project. As you must know.’
‘So what’s the upshot?’
‘Groves learned about the leak. He managed to get an interdict on any further exchanges of technical information – there’s been a transatlantic working group. It seems a bit unfair, since we helped get your guys started in the first place.’
Guttman wouldn’t have been able to tell either way. Stephenson went on, ‘We raised it eventually with Churchill himself. He took it up with the White House.’
‘I thought he and Roosevelt get on like a house on fire.’
‘They do, but your President knows he’s holding all the valuable cards. We figured he wouldn’t directly override his Military Intelligence people’s recommendations – or Groves’s – unless he had other advisers telling him to.’
‘Which ones?’ Guttman asked. During the New Deal, FDR’s kitchen cabinet had been famous – or notorious, depending on one’s view. Tommy the Cork, Ben Cohen, and such a slew of Frankfurter acolytes that they were known as the ‘hot-dog’ boys, in vernacular recognition of their patron’s surname. But by now many had either left government or taken senior positions in the administration outside the White House. According to Annie, Frankfurter had recently been lamenting his loss of a coterie around the President.
Stephenson said, ‘Harry Hopkins visited London last winter.’
‘I remember.’ He had praised the pluck of the English loudly at the time. ‘He loves you Brits.’
‘Maybe,’ said Stephenson cryptically. Guttman couldn’t read his expression. Stephenson said, ‘In any case, he’s helped try to overturn the edict. We’re hoping normal practice will resume early in the New Year. By that time, the project should be based in one place.’
‘Really?’
Stephenson said flatly, ‘They can’t exactly keep it on the South Side of Chicago.’
Guttman was dismayed that Stephenson knew so much more about it than he did. He consoled himself that Hoover knew even less. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re right – the Germans don’t have anyone in Chicago. Or anywhere else for that matter. Though I still worry about that note Nessheim received.’
‘It could be a stray thing – some hangover from his work undercover in the Bund. You said so yourself.’
‘I still think something’s not right in Chicago.’ He took a deep breath and then told Stephenson about his two visits to the Upper West Side building where Arthur Perkins had died. ‘If Perkins was murdered, I decided it was to let someone take his place. I thought I’d found the substitute – his name is Grant, and he’s a Professor of Physics at Princeton. There’s just one problem – he’s still in Princeton.’
‘Who would have been trying to get him into the Chicago lab?’
This sounded oddly naive of Stephenson, and Guttman looked at him disbelievingly. ‘The same people who received your classified info. As I think you know already. In fact, I think you’ve known all along.’
The ensuing silence was so suffocating that Guttman wanted to get out of the car. But he needed to hear Stephenson first.
The Canadian exhaled a long spiral of air, his breath misting on the windscreen. ‘I tried to tell you – when we talked on the phone here and then in New York. If you look back I think you’d have to admit that. If I was a bit elusive, understand that I was – I am – in a difficult position. Here were your guys in Military Intelligence ordering the head of the project to cut off all ties with us – because they think we’re a leaky sieve. So if we said you were leaky too, they’d just think we were trying to get our own back. And since the Bureau doesn’t even know about the project, I couldn’t express my concerns to you. You can see that.’
Guttman grunted sceptically. ‘But you talked to me before.’ After the debacle of Pearl Harbor, Stephenson had done more than talk – he had helped spirit Nessheim away from the military authorities when they’d decided the younger agent was a spy.
‘Sure I did. But you’re out in left field, Harry – sometimes I think you live there. It’s not a question of trust – I trust you plenty. But from what I know of the man, Hoover will be gunning for you. You know too much. I hate to be so blunt, but I have to figure that one of these days you’ll be out on your ear.’
Guttman felt a crushing sense of disappointment, though he wasn’t sure why – nothing Stephenson had said was unreasonable. In the past Guttman wouldn’t have minded Stephenson’s candour, yet here he was dismayed that Stephenson felt forced to hedge his bets. Was Guttman going soft? He had never needed allies at work, except for tactical reasons. Isabel had been his ally through everything: work, money, their joint childlessness, all the problems of life. He must have got needy, he decided, living on his own. How pathetic.
‘There’s another thing,’ said Stephenson, perhaps sensing Guttman’s introspective gloom. ‘It’s the other problem we talked about. In the Bureau. I can’t move on that – only you can, Harry. And for a while I wasn’t sure you could be bothered.’ He added gently, ‘After Isabel died.’
Guttman didn’t respond. There was nothing to contest. He knew he had been out of touch; he knew he had stopped following the trail.
‘Hang on!’ Stephenson said, and he pointed through the windshield towards the motel. A man had come out of a room, but instead of closing the door he stood holding it open. After a moment a woman also came out, hastily buttoning up her overcoat. They moved off along the walkway, the man striding fast, until he stopped to wait for his companion, gesturing for her to get a move on. They were hard to see as dusk began to darken the scene, but then they passed through a disc of light cast by an overhead bulb.
‘What’s the matter?’ Stephenson demanded, and Guttman realised he had gasped involuntarily. ‘Don’t tell me we’ve got the wrong guy.’
‘No, it’s him all right.’ T.A. from the Bureau, as he had guessed long before. The only surprise was that T.A. liked humping girls, when Guttman had taken him for Tolson’s protégé in more than strictly professional ways.
That wasn’t what had made him start, though he wanted another look to be sure. By now the couple had reached the motel office at the walkway’s end. T.A. went inside – to lodge his key or ask for change or maybe even check out – and the woman remained standing outside, motionless in the yellow light of the outside lamp.
She moved her head to throw her hair back, and Guttman remembered when he’d seen her last. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. And as T.A. came out of the motel office and took the woman’s arm, Guttman wondered how the Tolson protégé had come to know the black-haired temptress from the train.