April 1938
San Francisco
SIMMONS AND MUELLER were sitting in the car this time; it was Nessheim’s turn to take the street. He stood against a lamppost, idly turning the pages of the early edition of the Herald, trying to look unconcerned while keeping a keen eye on the entrance to the Bank of America branch across the street.
They were waiting for Danny Ho, but with little confidence that he and his associates would show up. Ho was half-Chinese, a San Francisco native who had been a stand-out baseball player at St Ignatius High School. Smartly dressed, a careful planner, Ho might have become an insurance executive, or a stalwart of industry. Instead he had opted to make his living robbing banks, and had shot a bank guard dead only two weeks before in Petaluma; the month before, his sidekick McCosh had pistol-whipped an old lady who’d got in the way when they held up a bank across the Bay in Oakland – her skull had been fractured and she’d died the next day. Ho and his friend were armed and undeniably dangerous, and Nessheim was glad to have his .38 under his arm.
Nessheim had been on four stakeouts in the last week, none of them productive. Three teams of agents were assigned to the case, divvying up the bank branches in town, narrowing their selections to cover any given building only on collection day. Morgan, the San Francisco office’s Special Agent in Charge, had been adamant the gang would strike when money was being transferred from a bank’s vault to an armoured truck, since these days there was never enough cash in the tills to justify a stick-up.
They were in the downtown financial district, Nessheim’s least favourite part of San Francisco. The expanse of the city was lost here; it was a small area, just a few square blocks, but dominated by a dense higgledy-piggledy pattern of new skyscrapers which blocked out the city’s picturesque contours and panoramic views, an odd canyon in a city that had its own natural variety of height. After Chicago, this business district seemed both titchy to Nessheim, and also foolhardy – only three decades before, the earthquake of 1906 had levelled buildings without any regard to how tall they were.
He was living in a small rental apartment near West Portal, a new neighbourhood being developed five miles west, not far from the Pacific. He had it on a short-term lease, arranged that way on Guttman’s instructions so Nessheim could leave at a moment’s notice. From the corner nearest his building he could see the ocean, and on first arriving, he had wondered why the rich people of the city preferred to live east on Nob Hill when they could have erected mansions on an undeveloped coast. But he knew why now, for each day he rose and walked through the chilly fog to the West Portal station to take one of the trolley cars that trundled through the tunnel cut under Twin Peaks, then emerged five miles east into bright sunshine.
From San Francisco Nessheim wrote dutifully each week to his parents, and he heard twice a week from them – though there wasn’t much news from Bremen, except the startling revelation that not only had Trudy married Alex Burgmeister but she’d had a baby already. God damn, he thought, doing some counting, she must have been three months’ pregnant walking up the aisle. And there he’d been, patiently accepting her insistence that sex could not take place for a good German girl until she’d been wed in a holy Lutheran church. More fool me, he thought, and was glad to find he could laugh.
After six months in Fraud, Nessheim had been moved onto bank robberies, where Congress had changed the law to allow the Bureau to intervene even when no state line had been crossed, in recognition that something had to be done – villains were being turned into heroes, deified by the press, by books, and most of all by the movies. Dillinger, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde – these were names that resonated throughout the heartland, and Nessheim saw how fame cleansed even the dirtiest pair of hands.
The heartland – he had seen it now, after deciding to drive to San Francisco. His early progress through Iowa had seemed familiar, almost comfortable, dulling any sense of adventure. He’d crossed the Mississippi in Dubuque and stopped for lunch in a diner. Two pork chops, a mountain of fried potatoes, string beans, apple pie with ice cream – the bill had been 30 cents, and the waitress had been over the moon at the dime he’d left besides.
In western Nebraska he had got caught between towns, unused to the vast spaces of the American West. He thought he might have to spend the night in the car, which would be cold on the prairie, even in spring. But after three miles and a Burma Shave sign he saw a farmhouse ahead, set back from the highway a hundred yards or so. It had a slender windmill, its spokes lifeless as a dead flower’s petals. He pulled into the barnyard next to the two-storey farmhouse, which might have been painted once, but whose boards were now the colour of old silver. A dog lay by the front porch, tied by a chain; it was too tired to rouse itself when he got out of the car.
He looked around, thinking that though he’d seen a lot of hard-luck farms in recent years, this one took the biscuit. A few chickens squabbled in the dust yard behind the house, but there was no sign of other livestock, and the tractor parked in the open bay of the barn was missing its front tyre. Behind the house there was an acre-sized, knee-high patch of corn.
A tall old man came out onto the porch. He was thin and unshaven, and wore faded overalls and a yellowed straw hat, with cracked leather boots on his feet. He stared at Nessheim.
‘Hi, I was wondering if I could maybe spend the night here.’
‘This ain’t no motel.’ There was a twang to the voice, like a country fiddle on the radio.
‘I’d pay whatever’s fair.’
The man studied Nessheim for a moment, then spat, just ahead of one boot, onto the rough planks of the porch. ‘Two bits and you can sleep in the hayloft. Four bits gets you the sofa.’
Nessheim looked over at the barn. A cocoon of flies hovered in its doorway. ‘I’ll take the sofa. Is there a bathtub I can use?’
‘Baths are Sunday,’ said the man dismissively. ‘There’s a horse trough half-full of water.’
When Nessheim looked doubtful, the old man gave a creaky laugh. ‘Ain’t no horses here no more, if that’s worrying you.’
‘Can I get some supper, too?’
‘That’ll make it a dollar then. Not that we got a whole hell of a lot to eat.’
Supper was beans with a few scattered chunks of fatback, served on tin plates by the man’s daughter. She looked in her twenties, but had prematurely greying hair to which the hot sun of the Great Plains had done no favours. As thin as her father, she had a hawk nose and gaunt, dried-out cheeks. She exuded a sense of inner exhaustion, which people with fewer chores to do might have called despair.
There was no sign of other family. Nessheim and the old man ate in silence in the bare picture-less dining room, while the daughter stayed out in the kitchen. The old man pushed his fork into his mouth without pause, and Nessheim struggled to keep up with the pace of his feeding.
‘That was real good,’ said Nessheim as the daughter came and took their plates away. The faintest flush surfaced on the woman’s wan cheeks, and her father scowled.
After supper the old man went into the parlour, starkly furnished with a rickety sideboard, several upright chairs, and a moth-eaten sofa which Nessheim just knew was going to keep him awake all night. The old man turned on an ancient radio, the tubes crackling as an announcer declared that the listeners to Cornbelt Broadcasting would be hearing waltz music live from the Lincoln City Auditorium. As the old man sat down, settling in for his concert, Nessheim wondered when he’d be able to go to bed.
‘Think I’ll have a little stroll,’ he said, and went out the front door. The sun had dipped below the horizon line, and ahead of him he could just see the highway demarcated by a sagging line of barbed-wire fence. He turned and headed toward the barn, and was having a peek inside when he heard steps behind him.
‘Never seen a barn before?’ Her voice was throaty, low; he realised he hadn’t heard her speak once during supper. He didn’t have any idea how to answer.
‘I reckon you’re allowed to look inside,’ she said, walking past him and entering the bay of the building.
He followed, and stood beside her on the rough dirt floor, which was littered with loose straw. Through the darkening gloom he saw stairs at one end that led through an open trapdoor to the loft.
‘We’re not on the electricity here,’ she said.
‘That’s okay,’ he said, and an awkward silence ensued.
Suddenly she asked, ‘Ain’t you gonna kiss me then?’
He was surprised, but complied out of politeness. Leaning forward to give her a peck on the cheek, he immediately felt her lips pressed like clamps on his, as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She hung on ferociously, until at last he managed to break his mouth away and breathe.
‘We could go upstairs,’ she said, her eyes lifting to indicate the loft above them. She paused. ‘If we do, will you promise to take me with you when you go?’
To his relief she didn’t seem surprised when he said no, as gently as he could. He realised this was not the first time she had made the offer.
In the morning he wasn’t given breakfast, and when he left the daughter stayed inside. The old man stood on the porch watching while Nessheim drove off, as if suspicious he might not be going after all.
He liked his colleagues in San Francisco well enough, except for one, Jake Mueller, who turned out to be the same man shunted out of the Chicago office by Melvin H. Purvis for being too eager to use his gun. Large and balding, Mueller was aggressive, quick to spot weakness, and an accomplished bully. He couldn’t have been much older than Nessheim, but he acted as if he had been an agent for years. He had played tackle both ways at the University of Southern California, and liked to boast that he could have played pro ball. He mocked Nessheim for having played a ‘sissy’ position, until someone told him that Nessheim had been second team all-American. This temporarily lifted Nessheim in Mueller’s estimation, and after they worked well together on one fraud case – breaking up a Chinese crime ring which bilked members of their own community, desperate to be buried back in China, into paying way over the odds to have their remains shipped home – Mueller even invited Nessheim to come along to a party east of the Bay one Saturday evening.
It had not been a party per se, as Nessheim discovered after Mueller had driven him in his old jalopy over the new Bay Bridge, then across Oakland and into the hills rising east of there, until after almost two hours’ drive they descended into arid valley land and reached the outskirts of the town of Livermore. Here they stopped outside a saloon, fronted by a large wooden sign that said Plumholtz’s. They went inside, into a large high-ceilinged bar room, where only a couple of dusty-looking farmers sat drinking steins of beer. In a back room they found more people – all men, Nessheim realised, wondering where the girls were. Chairs were lined up in four rows at one end of the room and a flag hung on the wall which he recognised as an emblem Uncle Eric also had hanging from his porch in Wisconsin. He suddenly realised he was present at a meeting of the German-American Bund.
His face must have shown his surprise, for Mueller suddenly grinned and slapped him on the back. ‘Cheer up. The formalities never last long. Then we can get good and schnockered.’
A thin man with a goitre and a string tie stood up and convened the meeting. Mueller was right: the proceedings were peremptory – minutes approved, officers elected, dues set for the following year, and an application from a local Jewish storekeeper unanimously turned down. The meeting was then adjourned and the boozing began.
Four hours later, after too many German drinking songs and too many toasts, a remarkably sober Nessheim piled a semi-comatose Mueller into the back seat of the jalopy, then somehow drove them both west over the foothills, the way lit by a gibbous moon that threw out about as much illumination as Mueller’s headlights.
On Monday at work, far from being embarrassed, Mueller acted as if Nessheim had let the side down by staying relatively sober, and Nessheim’s subsequent unwillingness to attend any further Bund get-togethers soured things between them again. They still worked together and both were transferred at the same time to bank robberies, but Mueller was now barely civil. When one night after work, Mueller had started badmouthing Purvis to a bunch of other agents, Nessheim had felt obliged to defend his old boss, who had given him his big break. The argument grew heated, and other agents had intervened to calm things down – to Nessheim’s relief, since he didn’t fancy a fistfight with a former lineman. After that Mueller made it clear he was Nessheim’s enemy, an unnerving proposition since Nessheim was not the sort of guy who had them.
Nessheim noticed the car because it was slowing down, looking for a parking place. A Chevy Olympus, four-door, with a powerful engine. They came in all colours, but this one was black – the inconspicuous choice. The car slanted over to the kerb and stopped. After a moment the driver got out – a fireplug figure of a man, hatless in a charcoal suit with thin white pinstripe. This must be Arthur Lee.
Nessheim looked across the street to the car where Simmons and Mueller were sitting. To his consternation neither noticed him: Mueller was fiddling with the radio and Simmons was working on a hoagie – Nessheim could see the lettuce spilling out of one end. Look up, he commanded, but telepathy didn’t work.
The back doors of the Chevy both opened. A tall man in a summer suit and a Panama hat stood on the pavement, brushing the shoulders of his jacket. This was McCosh. The other passenger walked around the back of the car, then stood next to him. He was medium height, black-suited, and wearing a grey homburg. Danny Ho. The two of them looked around carefully while Nessheim stuck his nose deeper into his newspaper.
At last Simmons put his hoagie down and looked at Nessheim, who tossed his paper into a metal bin, and took a couple of casual strides, cutting across Montgomery Street. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Simmons poke Mueller, and a few seconds later they got out of their car. He figured they would be right behind him when he flashed his badge and pulled his gun.
He was approaching the other side of the street when he spotted the trio of robbers mount the kerb and move along the pavement towards the bank entrance. Suddenly Danny Ho stopped and pointed to his right, then said something to his two companions. Nessheim looked across his shoulder and saw Simmons and Mueller standing still in the street, forced to wait for a cable car to pass. Mueller had his gun out. Idiot, thought Nessheim. He would have to make his move now – too early.
‘FBI!’ he shouted. Danny Ho immediately turned and took off west across Montgomery, just as Simmons and Mueller arrived at last on the east side of the street. McCosh and Arthur Lee stood for a moment, like deer in a headlight, then they also ran, following Ho.
‘Stop!’ shouted Mueller, and lifted his gun.
Nessheim punched his arm and Mueller lowered the gun. ‘Are you crazy? There’re people all over the place. Come on,’ Nessheim said, and ran into the street, dodging a cab, until he made it to the far corner. He saw the robbers running up Clay Street, Ho well in the lead. He sprinted after them on the bone-jarring concrete, and he cursed his stiff leather Florsheims as he ran.
He was soon gaining on the second two, but when he reached the corner he saw that Danny Ho was a hundred yards ahead. Nessheim poured it on now and was only fifty feet or so behind Arthur Lee and McCosh when they got to Kearney Street. The lights were red and they kept running; he did, too, narrowly avoiding an old Model T which gave a squeaky outraged honk of its horn.
He was only just behind them now, and getting ready to pull his gun, when at last they did what they should have done from the beginning – separate. McCosh zigged diagonally across the tree-lined plaza and the fat Arthur Lee cut sharply left. Nessheim hesitated, then decided to leave them both for Mueller and Simmons. It was Ho he really wanted, not these sidekicks, and Ho was running hard – he would be uncatchable if Nessheim stopped to nab either of the other two.
So Nessheim took off up Clay, just in time to see Ho turn south into Chinatown. A labyrinthine network of shops and restaurants and tiny, dingy apartments, inhabited by foreign people speaking a foreign language. There were even tunnels: the whole neighbourhood was virtually replicated underground, in a parallel network of gambling rooms, opium dens, and subterranean bordellos.
Nessheim turned at Grant Avenue and scanned the street. It ran slightly downhill, and several blocks along he could see the brown brick of the Episcopal church looming at the corner of California. Then halfway down the street he glimpsed a homburg.
He knew the area only at night, when he and his colleague Devereux sometimes came to eat at the Golden Palace. Now the red-and-green painted wooden front to the restaurant seemed dimmer in the harsh sunlight. Smells of sizzling beef and fried rice filled the air. He swerved around a squat Chinese woman carrying a wicker basket in each hand and realised he had lost sight of the homburg.
He slowed down. He was looking for anything out of the ordinary – hard to do when it all seemed so strange. A grocery store, unnameable vegetables in boxes out front; a takeaway restaurant – he could see the kitchen at its rear, two Chinamen in grease-stained T-shirts chopping away; a tourist shop, full of brass ashtrays and lamps with rice-paper surrounds; a fortune cookie factory he remembered from a post-Golden Palace walk with Devereux – he could see the old lady behind the table that held a complicated wire contraption.
He stopped short of the church. Wait a minute. The fortune cookie factory – the woman there, spied through the open door. She had looked at him momentarily, then quickly looked away. Nothing probably, but the one sign of something awry.
He walked up the street to the doorway of the small factory – which was actually one big room. This time the woman behind the table didn’t even look up, attending to the thin wire that ran in a loop between two metal boxes at either end of her table. On the wire hung spaced strips of warm dough. Across from her two Chinese girls were packing cookies into cardboard boxes. Behind them, another woman stood holding a pair of scissors, reaching out with a metronomic rhythm to snip individual segments from an endless stream of white tape – the ‘fortunes’.
He entered the shop, squinting as the bright daylight of Grant Avenue gave way to the half-darkness inside. A sickly smell of sweet dough filled the room. The women ignored him.
A man bustled forward from the rear, Chinese with a pockmarked face, in an open-necked white shirt and black cotton trousers.
‘What you want?’ he demanded, blocking Nessheim’s path.
‘I’m looking for somebody,’ said Nessheim, deciding not to show his badge. He pointed to one of the girls at his left, packing boxes. When the man turned to look, Nessheim brushed by him, heading for the back of the building.
‘Hey!’ the man shouted, but Nessheim didn’t stop. He swept aside the curtain covering the rear doorway and found himself in a short corridor.
He drew his gun. Yanking open the door on the left, he found a toilet and a sink – both filthy. On the other side of the corridor there was a tiny kitchen, with a hot plate and a tall cabinet with a saucepan on a shelf that held ancient chicken necks in putrid water. Nessheim gagged slightly at the sudden stench and closed the cabinet door.
He tried the back door, and found it led to a small brick courtyard, no bigger than a swimming pool. A door in the far corner opened into the back yard of another building. If Ho had come this way, he would be long gone.
Damn it, he thought with a sinking feeling. He turned, expecting the Chinese owner to have shown up, angry at this intrusion. Why hadn’t he? He turned back quickly into the factory building.
As he went through the curtain, pushing it brusquely aside, he saw Simmons standing in the front doorway. Nessheim raised a hand but Simmons was staring at someone else. A man in a black suit and homburg, standing by the table where the old lady had been stationed. There was no sign of her, or of the girls, or of the owner.
Danny Ho’s back was to Nessheim, his arm extended straight towards Simmons, pointing a pistol.
Nessheim stopped and slowly started to raise his own weapon. Something in Simmons’s face must have given him away, for before he could fire Danny Ho announced, without glancing back, ‘You shoot and this guy’s had it.’ He gave a faint jiggle to his gun, but kept it levelled at Simmons’s chest.
Nessheim took a silent step forward.
‘Do you hear me, Mr G-Man?’ Ho’s voice was flat and accentless, nothing like the singsong caricature of Chinamen you heard on the radio. ‘I know you’re there; I saw you come in.’
He must have been hiding under the table. Nessheim cursed himself for not stopping to check.
He took another step forward, keeping his gun aimed directly at Ho’s back – it was too far for a head shot. The problem was that if he fired Ho might himself fire reflexively; at such close range he couldn’t fail to hit Simmons, who had both hands raised, his arms quivering like half-set gelatine, his eyes fixed fearfully on Ho, like a man who’d encountered a cobra.
Nessheim tried to assess the situation calmly, but his mind was blank. He could only take in what he saw: the grey-suited Ho nearest to him; Simmons sweating tensely in the background. Then out of nowhere an internal voice whispered, Never let the criminal take charge. He recognised the words from his training.
Before Ho could speak again, Nessheim declared in as firm a voice as he could manage, ‘You plug him, Ho, and you’re a dead man. I think you know that. Put the gun down now and you’ll live.’
Silence at first, except for a faint wheezing sound from Simmons. Then Ho said, ‘Sure I’ll live – in Alcatraz, if you call that living.’ He paused. ‘Can’t see it myself.’
There was a small splat, like bird guano hitting a windscreen, and Nessheim realised Ho had spat on the floor without moving his head.
Ho said, ‘I tell you what – you put down your gun and this sucker lives. I want a car, and he comes with me. But nobody gets hurt.’
It almost sounded appealing; Nessheim realised there was nothing he would rather do than put his gun down and wash his hands of the whole thing, leave Ho to his own devices. Only the sight of Simmons, petrified and helpless, kept him from considering this. Don’t be lulled – another training precept.
He took another small, silent step, and it was then that he felt a slight sense of imbalance, which didn’t go away even when his shoe felt rock-solid on the floor. Oh no, he thought. He blinked, and blinked again, but his eyes were teary, moistening perversely, letting him down when he needed them most.
He realised that Ho had moved a foot or two towards the wall to Nessheim’s left. Why was he doing that? And why couldn’t Nessheim see him clearly? He started to inch forward again, but stopped when Ho barked, ‘One more step, G-Man, and your friend’s a goner. I’m not bluffing.’
Nessheim tried desperately to pull himself together. He could make out that Ho had moved some more – until he was close to the wall. Nessheim knew he should shout at Ho to stand still, but the dizziness was taking him over now. He felt his legs quivering; his raised arm felt unattached to the rest of his body; an aura of fuzzy lilac blue was starting to colour the scene before him. He struggled against feeling that he was about to faint.
‘Jimmy!’ he heard Simmons shout, and in a split second he realised Danny Ho’s arm was turning, and he could see the gun now that had been shielded by Ho’s back. As it moved around in a sweeping arc in his direction, he heard an enormous bang.
Am I dead? That was his first thought as he lurched back a step, barely managing to hold onto his gun. In the doorway he saw Simmons stagger forward and he wondered if he’d been hit. The door swung open behind Simmons and two men rushed in from the pavement outside: Mueller and a uniformed cop. Both had their weapons drawn.
He saw Ho, his face creased with surprise as he sagged back against the wall, still standing, his arm down, though he had dropped his gun. Blood was spreading like water squeezed from a sponge across the front of his shirt, and his eyes went vacant with the onset of death.
It was only then that Nessheim realised he had just killed Danny Ho.
The next day SAC Morgan himself interviewed Nessheim, then told him to take a couple of days off. He tried, spending a day reading in Golden Gate Park and walking along the beach on the Sunset side of the city, searching the onrushing breakers and wondering if this was going to change him. He had killed a man, but he still ate breakfast, read the San Francisco Chronicle (which to his relief didn’t mention his name in its account), and thought about how to get a girlfriend. He even slept just fine, and wondered if this meant something was wrong with him.
That night he drove down to the Embarcadero, to a bar tucked away on Lombard Street, where agents often gathered after work. Sure enough, he found half a dozen of them sitting at a long table, drinking pitchers of beer. Their greeting was friendly enough, and even Mueller nodded, but he sensed an unease, the way people treated a colleague after a family bereavement. After a while, he got up and took an empty pitcher back to the bar for a refill.
He could hear Mueller’s voice now, lowered but still resonant. There was an awkward laugh that made Nessheim turn around, and he saw that Mueller was standing up now, acting out some scene. He had his hand out and then put the other hand on top of it, mimicking a man with a pistol. His hand started stuttering, then shook openly until Mueller, in a parody of fear, shouted’ ‘Bang!’ in a booming voice and staggered backwards. The others laughed, but hesitantly, and Nessheim turned around to spare them the embarrassment of knowing he had watched.
Nessheim took the pitcher, brimming with cold beer, back to the table, which went quiet as he approached. He put the glass pitcher down in the middle of the table, and stood behind Mueller.
Nessheim put his hand on the big man’s shoulder, and said in a loud voice, ‘At least I didn’t shoot him in the back, Jake.’
Mueller flushed, and Nessheim flipped a folded ten-dollar bill onto the table. ‘Here’s a sawbuck,’ he said. ‘Beer’s on me.’ Then he walked out of the bar.
Nessheim returned to work the next day, and found himself taken off bank robberies. He hoped he might be assigned at last to the counter-subversion team, where even if he’d spend most of his time chasing Communist longshoremen, he might also get to investigate the local Bund. Natural preparation for what Guttman said he had in mind.
But instead he was assigned to join the accountants working with the Treasury Department on counterfeit currency. He didn’t like it: desk-bound phone calls, and the only field work was collecting the bogus bills passed in stores and banks. He missed the possibility of action. It wasn’t that after shooting Danny Ho he was eager to shoot anybody else, but not even remotely needing a firearm in the course of his work was stultifying. The only good news that came through was that Mueller was being transferred to the Washington Bureau.
Two months later Nessheim was assigned to Fraud again; mail fraud this time, which meant he spent most of his time interviewing people – both victims and suspected conmen. Sometimes the victims were conmen too, lying about the amounts they’d been swindled out of when insurance claims were involved. After five months of this, Nessheim prided himself on his ability to spot liars before they even opened their mouths – there were body-language telltales which, like an expert poker player reading faces round a table, Nessheim had come to recognise. He became skilled at interviews as well, finding that he could draw out confidences from even the most taciturn types, and spot the holes in any shaky story.
But all the while he was conscious that this was tempor-ary work, and the longer he waited for Guttman to summon him the more impatient he grew. By Thanksgiving he felt at the end of his tether; he’d even tried to sound out his SAC, David Morgan, though he got nowhere. ‘Just do your job, Nessheim. I’ll let you know if any new orders come in.’ Morgan was old school and didn’t look happy himself with the situation.
Spring came, with the lilacs out in West Portal and the fruit trees all in blossom, and Nessheim started to lose any confidence that he would ever hear from Guttman again. It had been nearly eighteen months since he’d met the man. So when he came back from lunch one day to find a message to see Morgan right away, he assumed it was about his latest fraud case, which included the Mayor’s sister among its victims.
‘Where you been?’ Morgan growled as Nessheim came into his office. Before Nessheim could reply, Morgan said, ‘I’ve got marching orders for you, kid.’ He flipped a folder at Nessheim.
‘Your ticket’s in there – you catch the City of San Francisco tomorrow afternoon. Make sure you’re on it. You are under strict orders not to break your journey in any way, is that understood? No calls either, no telegrams, don’t even post a letter. And I’ll need your gun.’
‘My gun?’ He felt suddenly proprietary about his weapon.
‘Don’t ask me. It’s orders.’
‘Guttman’s?’
Morgan looked at him stonily. ‘Who else? If you got a problem with it, you can always miss the train. Though I have to say you’ll lose a lot more than your gun if you do.’
‘Okay,’ said Nessheim, acknowledging defeat. He took his holster off his shoulder and handed it over.
‘One more thing. Guttman wants to know your mother’s maiden name.’
No gun, no calls, his mother’s maiden name. What was going on? He realised Morgan was waiting for an answer. ‘It’s Rossbach.’
Morgan nodded and stared pointedly down at his desk. Nessheim stood there bemused. The SAC looked up irritably from his desk. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he snapped.
‘Nothing, sir.’
As he turned to go, Morgan said more softly, ‘Nessheim, look out for yourself.’