by Andrew Gross
The mob.
He wasn’t a Nazi-lover at heart. Far from it. Just someone who was willing to use the Nazis as a guard against the future. To battle the real enemy. Once America saw there was no purpose in fighting a war they were not prepared to fight and that they were best served by staying neutral, they would quickly sue for peace.
And then a unified Europe under Germany’s military might would be a true buffer against the Reds.
For the real war that was to come.
Fortunately there were many throughout the government who thought like him. The State Department. Clear thinkers. Not politicians. Students of history. He wasn’t alone.
But by 4 A.M., Latimer began to fear something had gone wrong. Willi and Trudi should have been back by now—he checked his clock—preparing to leave. He should have been called. He heard a rustling sound outside. Latimer pulled back the shades. Two black sedans were parked across the street. When had they come? A feeling of dread came over him. He knew those cars. From his desk drawer, he took out the envelope Trudi had given him. In case something went wrong. Two tablets. Dabbed in the very substance they were to put in the water supply. Better to take the honorable way out, he resolved, than face the mob. He always knew this might be a possibility. His choice.
Around 4:30, no one had come for him but Latimer knew it was over. The call he was awaiting never came. Sad, he thought, for me and for the world. He went to the bar and poured himself a rye. He heard a sound. A light went on outside. He peeked through the blinds again, and saw that four men had gotten out of the cars and were making their way across the street toward his house.
Too bad. It would have saved the country a lot of blood if they had only listened to him.
He clenched his robe and sat back down. He opened the envelope and took out the small, wrapped paper that contained two tiny pellets. So tiny he had to put his glasses on to even see them. He put one of the specks of white on the tip of his finger and put it to his tongue. He drank the last of his rye. Too bad, he thought. He heard the government men on his porch. Then he sat back.
“Warren Latimer,” one of them called from outside. “FBI.” There was knocking at his door.
He didn’t move. He felt a tightness grip his chest. An acrid burning in his lungs. The beginning.
Too bad. He closed his eyes. He could have been useful. They would need him.
In the next war.
46
ONE WEEK LATER
“Daddy, why did Uncle Willi and Aunt Trudi have to die?” Emma said sadly. She put down her coloring crayon and looked up at me.
It was my first time back at the apartment after three days in the hospital. They had removed a bullet from my shoulder and my arm was in a sling. And then two days of being interviewed and debriefed by the FBI and various other government agencies known only by letters I didn’t even know existed.
I let her have a few days with Liz.
“Because sometimes people who seem to be nice can do bad things,” I said. I looked at Liz for help, but even she seemed unable. “I wish I could give you a better answer, honey.”
After the nightmare with Mrs. Shearer at the camp, having the gun put to her head and watching her nanny be killed in front of her, Emma seemed to be okay. I knew one day it would be something she would have to deal with. Three people she had trusted like her own family had conspired to cause her harm. And they were dead now. “They did all love you though, Emma. They did.”
She nodded, though maybe not entirely convincingly. “I know.”
“They did, honey,” Liz said. She came over and put her arm on her shoulder. “But in the grown-up world, everything isn’t always clear.”
“C’mon, how ’bout we work on that puzzle,” I said, “in the time we have left.” This time it was a pictorial of Africa. Elephants, lions, and zebras in the wild.
“Okay.”
Liz—she hadn’t gone back to work yet, nor Emma back to school, of course—was getting her dinner ready.
We played until about a quarter to six. I noticed Liz had taken out three dinner plates. Maybe it was her fella. What was his name? Not wanting to overstay my welcome, I said, “Well, maybe it’s time I got going.”
I got up, took my jacket, and ran my hand affectionately along Emma’s hair. “I had fun, peach.”
I looked at Liz. “Will I see you Thursday?”
From the moment I’d brought Emma back early that morning, like I’d promised, and put her into Liz’s arms, safe, unharmed, I’d felt something different between us. She had come to the hospital without Emma, holding back a flood of things unsaid. But I could see it welling in her eyes. Taking shape. She even took hold of my hand to say goodbye and told me to get well as quickly as I could. The government men were making such a big deal of me, she barely could get more than a couple of minutes to even say something to me.
I said to Emma, “I’ll definitely see you Thursday, peach. Maybe we’ll go to the fudge shop and get something sinful we won’t tell your mother about.”
Emma giggled. “Yes, Daddy.” The light went back on in her eyes.
“Around three,” I said to Liz at the door, putting my arms through my jacket. “I’ll—”
“Charlie…,” Liz said. She looked at me and gave me a shrug. “Maybe you’d like to stay for dinner this time…? It’s only a rump roast and some boiled potatoes. But there’s enough. If that would be good…?”
I stared back, startled by the invitation. My heart jumped a beat with hope and I grinned. “A rump roast sounds like the Ritz to me. I’d love to stay, if you’d like me to.”
Liz looked at Emma and nodded. “We would.”
Then Emma looked up at her and then back at me with what seemed a sparkle of anticipation. “Is it time to give it to him, Mommy?”
I looked at them. “Give me what?”
“Emma made you a present,” Liz said. “I guess we both did.” She shrugged. “I think so, honey. Go on, get it.”
Emma ran into the bedroom and by the time I looked at Liz and said, “What’s going on?” she had run back out and held out her hand. “Here, Daddy!”
It was a tiny box with pretty wrapping on it and a purple bow. No larger than a box that might hold a ring. And as I took it, looking at both of them, as light as a feather.
“It’s not much,” Liz said, putting her wooden spoon down.
I undid the bow and laid it on the table. I took off the wrapping and opened the box. I joked, “You know my birthday’s not till March.…”
On a bed of tissue, there was a tiny piece of cardboard no more than an inch in length and a half inch high. The kind, I realized, you might affix next to the buzzer at the entrance to a building. And there was a single word written on it. In Emma’s distinctive cursive.
The word was MOSSMAN.
“No guarantees, Charlie…,” Liz said, her eyes brimming. She shrugged. “But we could give it a try, right…?”
Before I could even answer, I ran over and gave her a hug. Emma came over too. I picked her up. I had my arms around both of them, my face buried into them.
“It’s not much…?” I said, feeling everything I had lost in the last two years suddenly returned to me. “For me, it’s everything.”
EPILOGUE
NOVEMBER 1945
The war was finally over. At least in Europe.
Liz, Emma, and I were living in Brooklyn now. And two-year-old Gabrielle as well. The apartment in Yorkville was way too small for a growing family.
I was still working at the appliance store. Except that I was managing it now—and by that time it had doubled in size. The largest independent appliance store in New York City, our ads proclaimed. And we were opening a second one up on Fordham Road in the Bronx. With a million soldiers about to come home from the war and start families of their own, business was sure to boom.
Years back, Life magazine had done a spread on me. “The Hero Dad Who Saved His Family and Foiled a Nazi Plot.” That made me a celebrity for
a month or so. And because of it some teaching offers actually rolled in. At Boston University. And Ohio State University in Columbus. And even Columbia. Things had changed in the department once again. Rusk was out. But with a growing family, and another on the way, I decided maybe I would just stay where I was for a while. I discovered I had a knack for managing. The owner, Sol, whose own kids were in law and medical school, showed a lot of trust in me.
So I told them all I’d just think about it and get back to them.
And never did.
That nagging voice on my shoulder told me I was a fool, of course. But I hadn’t been listening to him for years now. I had a family to support. Funny how the paths in life unfold.
There was even a reward that came with what I had done. The government actually had a fund for the successful uncovering of foreign agents in the war. $10,000. I talked it over with Liz and we decided we’d keep half. Three thousand for us, and a thousand for each of the kids’ college funds. The rest we gave anonymously to a family in New Jersey who had lost their son six years before to a drunken punch thrown outside a bar in Hell’s Kitchen.
Anonymously, in the memory of Andrew J. McHurley.
It was rare now that I even thought about what happened back then. The Bauers, Mrs. Shearer, Latimer, they were all just memories to me now. Ones I had tried to forget.
And Noelle.
I rarely thought about her either, only how different my life might have been, our crossed paths, if I hadn’t walked into that room with the Bauers and Latimer in it and seen how she betrayed me. After the incident, there was no trace of her anywhere. The investigators looked through her apartment. There was no sign of her there. Anywhere. It was like she had simply disappeared. And with that, vanished from my mind as well. I always remembered how sad she had looked that night at the Bauers’ when it came out what she had done. I had no love for any of this, Charlie … And how Fiske had said that her parents were prisoners of the Nazis. How she was trapped into doing something she did not believe in, like me.
In war we all have to make choices.…
But one day that November, as I came home from a long day at work, I threw myself on the couch. The kids both wanted a piece of me before they went to bed. “Any mail?” I asked Liz.
“Just the usual,” she said, tossing me a pile of bills and notices, which I started to sort through. “Oh, and this…”
It was an envelope addressed to me that had been forwarded from the brownstone on Ninetieth Street, where we hadn’t lived in two years.
“Who do we know in France?” she asked, looking over my shoulder.
It was postmarked Rouen. To Charles Mossman. But there was no return address.
I opened it, shaking my head at her question. “Beats me.”
There was no note inside. I dug around the envelope to be sure. Only a single black-and-white photo. I took it out and stared at it, and at first, didn’t recognize a single person in it. “Who the hell…?” A woman in a dark hat in front of a fountain, standing next to an older woman and man. Gaunt, their clothes rumpled. Only the thinnest and most inscrutable of smiles. If I could put my finger on it, the only word that came to mind was “proud.” They just seemed proud to have taken the photo. To be alive. For a moment I thought maybe it had been sent to the wrong person and I checked the envelope again.
There was something beautiful about the woman in the hat. Then it hit me precisely who she was.
My heart surged. It was Noelle. After all these years. And the two others had to be her parents. Her parents who were in a Nazi prison camp.
There was a date written: July 1945. Two months after the end of the war in Europe.
They’d made it.
That’s what the smiles said: They’d survived.
And there was an inscription on the back, in English: None of our paths were straightforward, Charles.… But in the end, some led to good places. My hope is yours did too.
Suddenly something rose up in me and I felt tears burn in my eyes.
I fixed on their smiles.
And then I noticed one more line, at the bottom. One that, as I read it, sent my mind rocketing back in time and explained so many things.
I had another American friend, Charles, Noelle had written. His name was Fiske.
Fiske.
My God, I suddenly realized, she had been his source. That’s how he knew about Latimer. And that Emma had been taken. And about Prospero. But not what it was. And not the sub. In that moment I realized the path Noelle had truly taken. And just who had helped me get our baby back.
And why she was not to be found in the end.
“Who is this?” Liz asked, leaning over my shoulder.
“No one,” I said. But my eyes welled up with emotion. I looked back at the photo, Noelle. Those proud, determined eyes.
My journey here was not straightforward either, Charles.
No, it damn well wasn’t. I started to laugh out loud. Mixed with tears.
“Charlie, are you all right?” Liz asked. She saw the emotion on my face.
“Yes, I’m perfect, honey.” I put the photo back in the envelope, slid it among the mail to be thrown out, and tossed it on the table. “I’m perfect. Hey, Emma, come here and give your dad a hug, peach.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book came about as far back as research for The One Man, where I came across a marvelous book, Those Angry Days, by Lynne Olsen, which dealt with the divisive and turbulent times in the run-up to WWII as America wrestled with getting into the war, as well as the ideological differences of the two most admired figures of their time: aviator Charles Lindbergh and President Franklin Roosevelt.
It was a time that reflected much of the rancor and polarization that is a part of life today: an intensely divided Congress, “isolationist” Republicans versus “interventionist” Democrats who were eager to come to the defense of Britain; the political saber-rattling that an all-powerful, populist president was circumventing Congress for his “imperial” ends; the fear of immigrants—in this case, not from Central America, but mostly European Jews. Not to mention that the whole idea of a “fifth column”—foreigners deeply embedded in the fabric of our daily lives—who would emerge in war to perform acts of sabotage and espionage—surely has a whole new meaning in today’s reality.
The “fifth column,” in this book, the spy network of Willi and Trudi Bauer, is based on what was known as the Duquesne Spy Ring, thirty-three mostly American citizens placed in key roles in U.S. companies who passed proprietary information back to Nazi Germany, which was uncovered in 1941. All either pleaded guilty or were convicted. It remains the largest American espionage ring ever uncovered.
But the most interesting aspect of the times, for me, in the years leading up the war, was the widespread tolerance for the Nazi cause and its leaders, whether in Congress, the State Department, the America First Party, or openly in German-speaking neighborhoods in New York City. It is a fascinating and largely unreported part of those times, famously symbolized by the February 1939 gathering at Madison Square Garden when over 20,000 people waved Nazi flags and cheered brazen Nazi propagandists, the very night this book begins. Yes, it was before images of the Holocaust came out. And yes, some of it was just to keep America out of another war. But the persecution of the Jews in Germany was well known here and somehow accepted in the highest circles of our government. It took Pearl Harbor to wake us from our moral sleep. One wonders what would have happened if Hitler had not declared war on us, and made events play out as they did.
Several people had a hand, as always, in strengthening this novel: Roy Grossman, for his insightful reading, and Herbie Mueller with the German (and with help on the Swiss foods!). And thanks as always to my team at Minotaur: Kelley Ragland, Andrew Martin, Madeline Houpt, Hector DeJean, as well as the group at Writers House, Simon Lipskar and Celia Taylor Mobley.
And to my family—Lynn and my kids—who have been there and supported me through several incarnations in l
ife. My arms go around you. And to Martin and Louis, a new generation, who hopefully will have learned a little of whom they are in these books, and then carry it forward, which is the purpose, isn’t it?
ALSO BY ANDREW GROSS
Button Man
The Saboteur
The One Man
One Mile Under
Everything to Lose
No Way Back
15 Seconds
Eyes Wide Open
Reckless
Don’t Look Twice
The Dark Tide
The Blue Zone
Novels by Andrew Gross and James Patterson
Judge & Jury
Lifeguard
3rd Degree
The Jester
2nd Chance
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANDREW GROSS is the author of New York Times and international bestsellers The One Man, The Saboteur, The Blue Zone, Don’t Look Twice, and The Dark Tide, which was nominated for the Best Thriller of the Year award by the International Thriller Writers, He is also coauthor of five New York Times #1 bestsellers with James Patterson, including Judge & Jury and Lifeguard. Gross and his wife, Lynn, split their time between Florida and Westchester Country, New York. They have three grown children. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
