January 1940
Washington D.C.
THE PHONE RANG three times in the dark before he could find it.
‘Guttman,’ he said, trying to sound awake.
‘It’s Kevin Reilly,’ said a raspy voice. ‘Sorry about the hour, Harry, but I’m pretty sure you’ll want in on this.’
‘What time is it?’ He couldn’t see the clock, a wind-up job he’d bought at Hecht’s, and he didn’t want to switch the lamp on and wake Isabel. Not that she was still asleep. This had better be good, he thought.
‘It’s three-fifteen, Harry, but I’ve got the coroner pushing me. Let me give you the address.’
Once he’d put down the phone, Guttman got out of bed, and taking his clothes from the bedroom chair went to dress in the bathroom. When he returned to fumble in the dresser drawer for his gun and holster, Isabel said, clear as a bell, ‘Will you be long?’
‘Hope not, sweetie. You go back to sleep.’
Outside it was well below freezing, and he winced as he felt his first breath of icy air fill his lungs. He swung open the garage door and climbed into his six-year-old Buick. In good weather, it still ran okay, but it was so cold out that he was relieved when the engine caught.
He drove carefully along the icy roads, wishing he had a stronger battery to power his headlights. As he moved onto the bridge over the iced-up Potomac, the car skidded slightly when he touched the brakes. He let the Buick coast the rest of the way across, holding his breath until he reached the Washington side.
Georgetown was asleep, and the houses stood like empty doll’s houses in the dark. The road was empty as he moved east on M Street, past blocks of restaurants and stores. The air was turning misty in his headlights and Guttman realised his tyres were a little soft, though that seemed to give them added traction on the packed ice and snow of the streets.
He had never known such a winter in Washington. Usually, snow fell and disappeared within a day; even the largest storms sweeping across the eastern seaboard only made their tail ends felt this far south. But the last snowfall, three days after New Year’s, had lasted, unable to melt in frigid air that never even came close to thawing point. He’d turned the heat up at home and instructed the gal who came in as helper to keep a hot-water bottle tucked under the blanket on his wife’s wheelchair. It was hard to believe that in ten weeks the cherry blossom would be out.
He turned now onto Pennsylvania Avenue, wide and eerily deserted. As he came to the Eclipse and drove by the White House he looked over at the country’s most famous mansion. In the living quarters upstairs the lights were all out – unsurprising at four in the morning. On the ground floor a corner office glowed from a ceiling light, and at the east entrance the portico was lit up, where he could see a policeman stamping his boots against the cold.
He had been inside recently, after Hoover had managed to persuade the President that the Bureau should help the Secret Service with its duties protecting him. A small team of Bureau agents had been installed in the Executive Wing, in two rooms at the end of the corridor down from the Oval office itself. They reported to Guttman, who had doubts about their mission since the White House was already teeming with Secret Service men.
Continuing along Pennsylvania Avenue now, he passed the Justice Department and his office. He knew Hoover wanted the Bureau to have its own building, but Guttman liked being there – rather than in some newly created monument to Hoover’s power. He slid through the intersection with Constitution Avenue, his brakes useless, and he wished that like Hoover he had Sidney Washington chauffeuring him. The Negro was back driving the Director, the latter man none the wiser about Sidney’s adventures during his secondment to Guttman’s department. Guttman was confident Sidney would never spill the beans about his time spent undercover. Without any words exchanged, the driver seemed to understand that if Hoover discovered what he’d been up to, it wouldn’t only be Guttman who’d lose his job.
It had been worth the risk, Guttman thought, taking satisfaction from the fact that the group Nessheim had infiltrated at Camp Schneider was now safely behind bars. They’d been there ever since their efforts to seize the Park Avenue Armory had been foiled in early September. Once Sidney had telephoned with Nessheim’s warning that the Armory was going to be hit, Guttman had put his preparations into effect, then waited nervously all weekend, praying that nothing would tip off Schultz that Nessheim had survived. The Germans themselves had alerted the Coast Guard late Saturday that ‘Rossbach’ had gone missing, but there was no danger in that, since there were no Rossbach relatives to contact, nothing real behind the bogus identity of Nessheim’s undercover life.
On Labor Day Monday at exactly one p.m. a dozen of the Bund O.D., led by Schultz and armed with a motley collection of shotguns, pistols, and two deer rifles, entered the Armory building, overpowering the sole, senescent guard left in place, then moving rapidly across the interior parade ground towards the locked arms stores in the rear of the building. Halfway across the packed-dirt ground a voice had erupted through a bullhorn – it was an FBI agent, announcing to the O.D. men that they were surrounded. Immediately from both ends of the parade half a regiment of National Guardsmen emerged, loaded rifles at the ready and bayonets fixed. Unsurprisingly, in the face of such firepower, the O.D. rebels and their leader Schultz had surrendered without a fight.
Outside, Guttman had stationed a dozen agents armed with Thompson sub-machine guns in buildings within a hundred yards of the Armory. When two trucks had pulled up, waiting to be loaded with stolen weapons, the FBI agents had surrounded both vehicles, seized the drivers and carted them off to jail. Simultaneously, Beringer had been arrested on 2nd Avenue leaving Schultz’s house.
No one – from the Bund or the Bureau – had been hurt. As Guttman reflected on the events of 4 September, he realised that the only victim had been Jimmy Nessheim.
Plucked out of the water off Long Island by Sidney, he had at first seemed to have survived his immersion unscathed, and was keen to join the other agents when they busted Schultz on Monday. But by Sunday, the day before the assault on the Armory, Nessheim had complained of chills, and spiked a high fever. Occupied with planning the details of Monday’s operation, Guttman hadn’t paid much attention; when the kid’s temperature had reached 105, however, Guttman had phoned a doctor, who in turn promptly called an ambulance and had Nessheim taken to Lenox Hill Hospital. A good thing, too, since within twenty-four hours Nessheim had developed pneumonia.
It had been touch and go after that, the illness developing with an alacrity that made Guttman rue his previous inattention. There had been two days when Nessheim might have died, and it was on the first of them that Guttman had sent a telegram to Nessheim’s parents, summoning them east. He wasn’t sure whether he was asking them to come and watch their son recover, or to bury him. Nessheim did recover, thank God, and after a week his parents had gone back to Wisconsin, confident their boy was on the mend.
Then Nessheim had a fall. The nurse said he’d been walking the ward as instructed, gathering his strength, when for no apparent reason he’d keeled over. That’s when his history of dizziness had come out, admitted by Nessheim while he was still dazed. The hospital consultant insisted Guttman pull Nessheim’s medical file from the Bureau, and dissatisfied by its meagreness, the doc had checked out Nessheim’s medical history on his own – calling Northwestern University and speaking with the football coach, then contacting the doctor at Michael Rees Hospital in Chicago who’d seen Nessheim after his knock in a football game. None of this was in Nessheim’s file at the Bureau.
‘This guy should never have passed your medical,’ the New York doc had declared.
Guttman had had to break the news to Nessheim: the days of chasing Danny Ho, planting wiretaps in the attic of a Vermont camp lodge, and defying death in the ice-cold Atlantic were all over.
‘Look at it this way,’ he’d told Nessheim at his hospital bed. ‘You’ve seen more action in your twenties than most agents get to see in a thirty-year career. Why, I’ve known plenty of agents who’ve never pulled their gun except in front of the mirror.’
He offered Nessheim a desk job, saying he could put in a word at any field office the young agent fancied. Morgan in San Francisco was coming east soon (Guttman had wangled Morgan the SAC position in the Newark office) but Guttman was confident he could get Nessheim a position out there again.
Nessheim wasn’t interested. He’d gone home to Wisconsin before Christmas to recuperate, then wrote in January to say he was planning to head for California to pack up his belongings and drive his pickup truck back to the Midwest. He didn’t say what his future plans were, except that they didn’t include the FBI. And Nessheim’s termination papers were sitting on Guttman’s desk, awaiting his signature. One of these days Guttman would get around to signing them.
Now he drove slowly around the Capitol and into the rising streets on the back side of the hill. The houses here were small and run-down, their front steps wobbly, the windows filled with tarpaulin rather than glass. When he reached the address Reilly had given him, however, Guttman found a large Victorian mansion, its wooden cladding painted dark green with black shutters on the windows. It had a rounded turret at one end like a French chateau, and a wide porch with a wooden balustrade and railing. A uniformed cop was standing in the doorway.
Guttman locked the car and went into the house, stamping the snow off his feet in the front hall. To one side a parlour ran towards the back of the house. It was a large room furnished by scarlet velvet-covered sofas and a couple of stuffed armchairs. A French painting of a reclining nude hung above the unused fireplace. Ashtrays and piles of magazines were neatly arranged on side tables around the room, presumably to help distract waiting customers from having second thoughts.
Kevin Reilly from the metropolitan police force came halfway down the stairs. He said, sounding tired, ‘Come on up, Harry.’
Guttman followed Reilly to the top of the house, then down a dark corridor to the back. Reilly opened the door, then stepped aside to let Guttman past. ‘Hold your nose,’ he said.
The stench was terrible, but Guttman forgot about it as soon as he stepped inside the room. Sprawled on the floor was the body of a young black man – he could not have been more than twenty years old. He was naked, save for a pair of white cotton underpants which hung, obscenely low, on his hips. There was blood on the youth’s chest and arms, and his head was thrown back, revealing a long deep gash at the base of his neck. Guttman noted the straight-handled razor lying on the floor, its blade extended and smeared with blood, now the colour of prunes.
This wasn’t all. On the far side of the room, an old wooden beam ran between the two walls of an alcove. From it a man in a black suit was hanging by a thick rope wrapped around his neck. The man’s tongue was sticking out like a defiant child’s, his lips contorted in a painful grimace. But it was his eyes Guttman was most struck by – they bulged as if straining to escape their sockets. About a yard from the body’s dangling feet a small wooden stool lay upended.
‘It’s Bock,’ Guttman said, stunned.
‘I know it’s Bock. That’s why I called you.’
‘Who found him?’ he asked.
‘One of the girls. She actually sleeps up here – the working rooms are down a flight.’
‘Is that the same kid as last time?’ He pointed at the dead Negro, noticing that blood had also spread in a coagulating pool onto the room’s cheap carpet.
‘None other.’ Reilly paused. ‘Let me get Ma.’ Reilly stuck his head out into the corridor and barked an order while Guttman tried to compose himself, and slow the thoughts that were racing through his head. What on earth had Bock been doing here? And why had he killed the kid? A moment of madness, violence fuelled by lust, followed by such remorse that he had hanged himself? It seemed the obvious scenario, but Guttman was mystified. He hadn’t read the man that way at all.
After a minute they could hear a slow tread coming up the stairs. Guttman found the stink in the room beginning to overwhelm him, a sickening mix of cigar smoke and faecal aroma. His gorge rose, and he struggled to control his growing nausea.
He said, ‘Bock didn’t smoke cigars.’
‘I do,’ said Reilly. ‘If you think it stinks now, you should have been here an hour ago.’
A creak on the floorboards announced the arrival of Ma Thornton. She was an immense white woman, barely 5 feet tall but looking close to 300 pounds. Her big doughy face was covered in powder, and she’d highlighted her eyes with mascara, her mouth with cherry-red lipstick. She wore a calico dress the size of a tent, and as she crossed her arms now and adopted a world-weary pout, Guttman realised that her biceps were bigger than his own.
‘Tell me what happened,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Beats the hell out of me, mister. I haven’t seen the Kraut for a couple of years.’ She turned to Reilly accusingly. ‘That was the night you rousted us.’
‘So what about tonight?’ Guttman asked.
She pointed towards the black youth without looking at him. ‘Anthony asked me if he could use the room up here. I like to keep his business separate – the other customers wouldn’t like it.’
‘Because he’s coloured?’
She looked at Guttman scornfully. ‘Half my girls are coloured, mister. No, it’s because he was a fairy. Anyway, I told him he could use it. But that was at eight o’clock; I had no idea he’d still be here …’
Neither did he, thought Guttman. He pointed to the hanging corpse. ‘What about this guy? When did he show up?’ he asked.
Ma stared at him. ‘How should I know? I didn’t see him. Nobody did – like I keep telling your dick friend here.’
‘Mind your mouth,’ said Reilly.
Guttman said, ‘You mean the first time anybody saw him he was hanging like this?’
‘That’s right. You see, this is Shelley’s room. She said she wasn’t feeling good, so I sent her up to bed. I’m nice that way – she’s a five-dollar girl. And I didn’t want her sitting around in the parlour, in case one of the Joes wanted to go with her. It’s not fair on a customer to put your goods in the store window, then say they’re not for sale. Sort of defeats the whole purpose, if you know what I mean.’
‘Let’s skip the philosophy of business. So she came up here?’
‘That’s right. It was after eleven. Anthony should have been long gone by then. But suddenly Shelley screams the frigging house down, pardon my French, and I came running up and found Anthony lying over there and the stiff hanging here.’
‘And no one had seen this guy until then?’ Guttman couldn’t hide his scepticism.
‘Not a dicky bird. I swear. He must have come through the back door, up the rear stairs to the second floor, then on up here. Unless one of the girls happened to come out of a room as he was moving along, nobody would have seen him.’
Guttman was trying to take this all in. ‘Where’s Shelley now?’
‘Back to work. She’s downstairs in one of the rooms with Mr Huckleby. He’s a regular and she didn’t want to disappoint him. I could send her up if you’re willing to wait a bit – Mr Huckleby can be a little while.’
‘That’s okay. Tell Mr Huckleby to take his time. You can go now.’
Big Ma Thornton looked at Reilly, who nodded, and she shuffled out of the room.
Guttman pointed to the bureau, where a watch and a small pile of loose change sat on top. ‘Those are his?’
‘Guess so. He must have emptied his pockets when he got up there.’
‘Where’s his wallet then?’
Reilly didn’t answer. Guttman walked over to the body. Reaching up, he patted the front of Bock’s suit jacket, averting his eyes, and avoiding a long thin streak of blood. He felt something, so there was nothing for it – he took a deep breath and reached inside the jacket. As his hand brushed against the white dress shirt he could feel the dead man’s flesh, and he realised it was starting to stiffen. At last his fingers reached the wallet in the inside pocket of Bock’s jacket and he brought it out gingerly.
Then something else caught his attention. ‘Look at this,’ he said with unconcealed astonishment. With his free hand, he held back the jacket on Bock’s left side to reveal a holster and handgun. Handing the wallet to Reilly, he said, ‘You got any gloves?’
‘Yeah. The coroner lent me a pair.’
Putting on a pair of cotton fingerlets, Guttman reached in and extracted the pistol from the holster, then let the suit jacket flap back into place as he moved well away from the corpse. He checked the chamber, and sniffed the barrel. ‘It’s loaded, but hasn’t been fired. What do you think?’
‘It’s a lady’s gun, isn’t it? I don’t know too many stiffs carrying something that weak. A .22 maybe if they’re out to ice somebody, single shot-like. Not a .25.’ Reilly shrugged. ‘But then, the guy was a fem, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s not my point.’ Guttman was staring at Bock now, curiosity overcoming any revulsion. ‘Think for a minute. The guy decides to kill Anthony. So why not shoot him? Less mess. How he managed not to get blood all over himself is beyond me – there’s only a little bit on his jacket.’
He turned and looked at Reilly. ‘But let’s suppose he has killed the kid with that razor, and then feels so bad about it that he decides to kill himself. Why noose yourself when you’re packing a rod? That would have done it quicker and a lot less painfully.’
‘Maybe he really wanted to punish himself.’
Guttman nodded. ‘Okay, but I’m not through yet. He gets up on the stool, but only after emptying his pockets first. How tidy of the guy.’ He paused. ‘But then why doesn’t he also take out his wallet and take off his holster?’
‘Jesus, Harry, how should I know?’ Reilly looked bewildered. ‘You might as well ask why he wanted to bump himself off. And why did he kill the shine in the first place?’
Guttman shook his head. ‘I don’t think he did.’