NESSHEIM SPENT THE night in a hotel off the Tenderloin, kept awake by rowdy sailors, drinking and chasing whores, and by more than one police siren. Morgan had picked the place, telling him that no one would think to find him there.
Once Nessheim had explained where he was going next, Morgan had been helpful, though grudgingly. ‘I suppose you’ll want the use of a car. You’ll have to pay for the gas.’
Nessheim skipped breakfast and crossed the Bay Bridge by eight-thirty. Fog had swept in from the west side of the peninsula, but it lifted almost immediately once he reached the eastern side of the Bay. He took Route 50 south, skirting Oakland and touching the base of the foothills, where it was already warm, and summer had turned the meadow grass a gorgeous gold. Near Hayward he turned east and drove through the Castro Valley, then climbed a series of switchback roads. The little Dodge struggled a bit, and at the top Nessheim pulled into a cut-out and let the car cool down. A breeze off the Pacific reached him, unimpeded this high up, but the temperature was already in the seventies, and he remembered how quickly the heat came when you moved away from the ocean.
He rolled down the hills mostly in neutral, to keep from paying more of Morgan’s charge for gas. He had no clear plan in mind – how do you locate a foreigner who moved away over twenty years before? – but he knew where he would start.
Down in the flat, he stopped to check his oil and fill the radiator on the edges of Livermore, about ten miles further east. Here it was hotter, 85 degrees in the shade he guessed, and though not even summer the land was bone dry, the twisted trunks of the sycamores and oaks mimicking their roots straining for water underground.
He found the bar easily enough, spotting the lot out back where Mueller had parked his car. But the sign outside was gone, and two of the front windows were broken. He pushed at the old saloon door, but it was bolted from inside; when he peered through the glass, he saw dusty tables and several overturned chairs.
It had seemed his best bet, the watering hole for the local Bund meetings where Mueller had got drunk and a Jew’s application to join had been vetoed. He’d hoped that at the very least he could procure from the owner names of local German-Americans who might be able – and willing – to say they knew Kurt Jahnke all those years ago.
He wondered where to try next. Tax records? Would the clerk at the Town Hall let him see them? Probably, with a Bureau ID. But records might not go that far back, and the clerk might just say no. Nessheim didn’t have time for court orders, nor could he have got one without an authorisation that he didn’t dare seek. There was a safer bet, which would not involve his indicating what he was looking for.
The Livermore library was in a small adobe building sitting next to a branch bank. On a Tuesday at midday it was virtually deserted. Behind the front desk, a bored woman in her twenties directed him to shelves in a far corner. The phone books were low down; when he kneeled he saw they went back to 1910, and he felt more hopeful. With reason, for he found the 1913 edition had a K. Jahnke listed on 4th Street.
He went into a drugstore down the street, where he sat at the chrome-lined counter of its soda fountain and ate a hot dog and a pile of Jay’s potato chips, washed down by a Dr Pepper drawn from the soda fountain tap. A few locals sat in the booths – store owners, a trio of farmers in blue jean overalls, and two gossipy-sounding housewives. After an initial inspection of this stranger in their midst they barely looked at him again.
When he paid the bill he asked the soda jerk how to get to 4th Street, then went out into the hot midday sun and drove along the main drag for a quarter of a mile before turning down a quiet shady street – 4th. This must have been the oldest part of town, for the houses were Victorian, high-gabled constructs of thin white pine, painted pale colours to keep their insides cool.
The house he was looking for turned out to be the biggest on the block, with three storeys and a big porch that ran along its three front sides. But it was not in good shape: a missing rail in the porch’s balustrade had not been replaced, the daisy-filled grass in its yard needed cutting, and an apple tree had been allowed to grow its own way for years.
He walked up onto the porch and found lace curtains over the windows which made it difficult to see inside. As he moved towards the door, ready to knock, he looked behind the house, where the lot extended to a shaggy cedar border. A small vegetable plot sat in between with a scarecrow standing in the middle. Then the scarecrow moved.
It was a woman, raw-boned and skinny, probably in her late fifties. She wore a straw hat, a man’s long-sleeved shirt, and rubbed her back as she stood upright, a wooden trowel in one hand. ‘Help you?’ she called out to Nessheim.
He came off the porch. ‘I hope so.’ He walked to the edge of the square of overturned soil. ‘I’m looking for a man who used to live here years ago. I think he owned the house, but I’m not sure.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Jahnke. He’s German.’
‘You don’t say,’ she said, with a hint of dryness. She had hazel eyes and must once have been a pretty woman – good bones, as Nessheim’s mother liked to say – but years of sun meant cracks ran like railway lines across her face, and her hands were chafed the colour of strawberries.
‘Lot of German folks around here?’ he asked.
‘Too many for some,’ she said.
‘My name’s Nessheim,’ he said, thinking he had better get any awkwardness about that out of the way.
‘Mine’s Koehler,’ she said with half a smile. ‘This man you’re looking for, you say he lived here?’
‘I think so. It was a long time ago. I believe he left when the last war broke out.’
She wiped the sweat on her forehead with the back of her wrist. ‘I don’t know about you, mister, but I think it’s pretty darned hot. You want a glass of lemonade?’
Inside, the house was shabby but clean. The front parlour had been dusted to an inch of its life, but a floorboard was split and the skirting needed realignment. In the kitchen there was a coal stove, dormant this time of year, and a small electric hot plate. No fridge, but when she fetched a pitcher of lemonade from the larder and poured him a jelly glass full, it was refreshingly cool.
They stood in silence for a minute, drinking, the woman leaning with her back against the sink. ‘I’ve only been here eight years. Me and my husband had a place outside Dublin – apples and asparagus. But you know how it is: two bad years in a row and it’s gone. We came here, but my husband died.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply. He would have liked to hear her story, but there simply wasn’t time.
‘Me too,’ she said flatly, then drained her glass. Putting it in the sink she said, ‘I think I heard about this fellah you’re looking for.’
‘Really?’
‘I didn’t know him, but the people here before me bought the house from him – I don’t own it, you see. I just rent it from them. They said he’d fixed the place up like a palace. Had a player piano in the parlour, and Tiffany glass in the lamps that came all the way from New York. He was the first one in town to have an automobile.’
‘Did these people know him well?’
‘They must have. They had twin boys of their own, but then they raised the other one too.’
‘What other one?’ he asked.
She looked at him patiently. ‘They adopted Jahnke’s boy when he had to leave.’
Nessheim almost dropped his glass. ‘Did Jahnke ever come back to see his boy?’ He tried not to sound too interested.
She grimaced. ‘I’m not sure. All the boys moved away after their parents died. They were strange people – more German than American, if you ask me. We had a strong chapter of the Bund around here, and the old man was one of its leaders. Swastikas, Nazi salutes – the whole shebang. He liked to boast that one of his cousins in Germany was the head of their secret police.’
‘The Gestapo?’
‘Yeah, that’s right – I forgot the name.’
‘Are the sons like their old man?’
She nodded grimly. ‘Worse by all accounts. One of them’s living over in Yosemite Lakes; I haven’t seen him in five years. I don’t know where his twin is. They make sure I pay the rent, but they send Ed Heiserman to come collect it.’
‘What happened to the adopted one?’
‘I don’t know. Ed said he was in San Francisco, but Ed’s seventy-three next week, so who knows?’ She took his glass and placed it next to hers in the sink. ‘I better check my lettuces now. Hope I’ve been some help.’
Out on the porch he thanked her for the lemonade. ‘What’s the name of these people?’ He tried to sound offhand, but one of his knees was trembling.
‘It’s German too, naturally.’ She chuckled. ‘They’re called Mueller.’
He was relieved to know the truth at last, but also frightened – very frightened, and not just for himself. He was carrying a secret which he could trust no one with except Guttman, who was almost 3,000 miles away. If anything happened to Nessheim now the secret would be lost, and the world would be changed. He had seen a newspaper at the hotel that morning. The British Army had been crushed in France, and now huddled forlornly on the beaches of Picardy and Pas-de-Calais. It was hard to see how Britain could stave off the Wehrmacht if it lost half its soldiers. The pressure on the new Prime Minister, Churchill, to negotiate with the Germans would be immense, and if something happened to his one remaining ally – Roosevelt – it would surely be impossible for the British to fight on.
As he drove back into the main street of Livermore, he tried not to look over his shoulder every other second. He told himself he couldn’t have been followed here; if he started worrying about that, his fears would overwhelm him. He parked outside the drugstore where he’d had lunch, and located a phone booth at the back of the store, near the shelves of Epsom salts, Pepto-Bismol, and other mild medicaments. Shoving a nickel in the slot, he got an operator right away, and waited impatiently as she took her time placing his call.
There was no answer at the Virginia end. It was late morning on the Eastern Seaboard, and Guttman wasn’t going to work these days, so where was the man?
Nessheim waited half an hour, buying a pack of Juicy Fruit gum in the store and walking the length of the old-fashioned boardwalk along the main street’s storefronts. When he tried phoning again, he heard the local operator speak and an unfamiliar female voice reply 3,000 miles away.
The operator came back to Nessheim. ‘They said no.’
‘What?’
‘They won’t accept the call.’ Her voice was infuriatingly prim.
‘Make it station to station. Tell them it’s urgent.’
He heard the operator try again; it sounded half-hearted. ‘Sorry,’ she reported back to Nessheim. ‘Still no go.’
‘What the hell is going on?’ he said.
‘You don’t need to cuss,’ the operator said, and cut off the connection.
Nessheim felt panicky and isolated, like a man visiting a deserted island whose dinghy has been washed away. Then he thought of Morgan. He wasn’t going to risk another collect call, but he had just enough change for three minutes.
Fortunately he got the SAC right away.
‘Where are you?’ Morgan asked.
Nessheim ducked the question; he knew too much right now to trust anybody. ‘Coming back to town. Listen, can you send a message to Guttman? Marie, his secretary, can get hold of him.’
‘I’ve already had a message from him,’ said Morgan. ‘Harry says Stephenson’s struck gold, whatever that means, and you’re to return to Washington right away. But you’re not to go back the way you came out.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Otherwise you’ll be greeted in Chicago.’
‘What’s happened?’
He could hear Morgan take a deep breath. ‘They’re on to you, pal. Somehow they know you’re out here.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Whoever’s out to get you. I don’t know more than that, and I’m not sure Harry does either.’
‘Listen, can you please call Harry and tell him—’
Morgan interrupted him immediately. ‘Not on your life. I took Harry’s call, and now I’ve taken yours. That’s all I can do.’ He waited a second for this to sink in, then added, ‘Tolson also called. He wanted to know where you were. I said I hadn’t seen you – in fact, I barely remembered you ever worked in the Bureau here. I can’t do more than that.’
‘But I know who—’ he said, trying again.
‘Save it for Guttman,’ ordered Morgan. ‘I can’t do anything more. You understand?’
‘Sure,’ he said bitterly.
‘Harry expects to see you tomorrow.’
It was the 28th of May. If he caught that evening’s train it wouldn’t get in until the 30th – Decoration Day. And since he couldn’t go via Chicago he might not get back until the 31st.
Nessheim said, ‘Sure he does. And pigs will fly.’
There was a long pause, then Morgan said, ‘People already do.’