Truman looked satisfied. His man was getting the job done. “How’s it feel to be general contractor to the world’s most secret building project?” he asked.
Forrestal reflected on the question. “I once built a house in Westchester County. This project is somewhat less taxing.”
Truman’s face crinkled. “’Cause your wife’s not looking over your shoulder on this one, am I right?”
Forrestal answered without levity. “You are absolutely correct, sir.”
Truman leaned forward and lowered his voice a notch. “The British material. Still high and dry in Maryland?”
“It would be easier to get into Fort Knox.”
“How’re you going to move the goods across the country to Nevada?”
“Admiral Hillenkoetter and I are still in discussion regarding transport issues. I favor a convoy of trucks. He favors cargo planes. There are pros and cons to each approach.”
“Well, hell,” Truman piped up, “that’s up to you fellows. I’m not gonna manage you to death. Just one more thing. What are we going to call this base?”
“It’s official military cartographic designation is NTS 51, Mr. President. The Corps of Engineers has taken to calling it Area 51.”
On March 28, 1949, James Forrestal resigned as Secretary of Defense. Truman hadn’t spotted a problem until a week or so earlier when the man suddenly became unglued. His behavior began to be erratic, he looked ruffled and unkempt, he stopped eating and sleeping, and was clearly manifestly unfit for service. The word spread that he had suffered a full-blown mental breakdown from job-related stress, and the rumor was confirmed when he was checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Forrestal never left confinement. On May 22 his body was found, a suicide, a bloody rag doll sprawled on a third-floor roof under the sixteenth floor of his ward. He had managed to unlock a kitchen window opposite his room.
In his pajama pockets were two pieces of paper. One was a poem from Sophocles’s tragedy, Ajax, written in Forrestal’s shaky hand:
In the dark prospect of the yawning grave—
Woe to the mother in her close of day,
Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray,
When she shall hear
Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear!
“Woe, woe!” will be the cry—
No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail
Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale.
The other piece of paper contained a single penned line: Today is May 22, 1949, the day that I, James Vincent Forrestal, shall die.
JUNE 11, 2009
NEW YORK CITY
Though he lived in New York, Will was no New Yorker. He was stuck there like a Post-it note that could effortlessly be peeled off and pasted somewhere else. He didn’t get the place, didn’t connect to it. He didn’t feel its rhythm, possess its DNA. He was oblivious to all things new and fashionable—restaurants, galleries, exhibitions, shows, clubs. He was an outsider who didn’t want in. If there was a fabric to the city, he was a frayed end. He ate, drank, slept, worked, and occasionally copulated in New York, but beyond that he was a disinterested party. There was a favorite bar on Second Avenue, a good Greek diner on 23rd Street, a reliable Chinese take-away on 24th, a grocery and a friendly liquor store on Third Avenue. This was his microcosm, a nondescript square of asphalt with its own soundtrack—the constant wail of ambulances fighting traffic to get the flotsam of the city to Bellevue. In fourteen months he’d figure out where home was going to be, but he knew it wouldn’t be New York City.
It was no surprise that he was unaware that Hamilton Heights was an up-and-coming neighborhood.
“No shit,” he replied with disinterest. “In Harlem?”
“Yes! In Harlem,” Nancy explained. “A lot of professionals have moved uptown. They’ve got Starbucks.”
They were driving in a torpid rush-hour mess and she was talking a blue streak.
“City College of New York is up there,” she added enthusiastically. “There’re a lot of students and professionals, some great restaurants, things like that, and it’s a lot cheaper than most places in Manhattan.”
“You ever been there?”
She deflated a little. “Well, no.”
“So how are you so knowledgeable?”
“I read about it in, you know, New York magazine, the Times.”
In contrast to Will, Nancy loved the city. She’d grown up in suburban White Plains. Her grandparents still lived in Queens, off-the-boat Poles with thick accents and old-country ways. White Plains was home but the city had been her playpen, the place where she learned about music and art, where she had her first drink, where she lost her virginity in her dorm at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she passed the bar after graduating top of her class at Fordham Law, where she landed her first Bureau job after Quantico. She lacked the time or money to experience New York to its fullest, but she made it her business to keep a finger on the city’s pulse.
They crossed over the murky Harlem River and found their way to the corner of West 140th Street and Nicholas Avenue, where the twelve-story building complex was conveniently marked by a half-dozen squad cars from the Thirty-second Precinct, Manhattan North. St. Nicholas Avenue was wide and clean, bordered on the west by a thin strip of mint-green park, the buffer zone between the neighborhood and the CCNY campus. The area looked surprisingly prosperous. Nancy’s smug look said, I told you so.
Lucius Robertson’s apartment was parkside on the top floor. Its large windows captured St. Nicholas Park, the compact college campus, and beyond it the Hudson River and the heavily forested New Jersey Palisades. In the distance a brick-red cargo barge, the length of a football field, was steaming south under tug power. The sun glinted off an antique brass telescope standing on a tripod, and Will was drawn to it, seized by a boyish impulse to look through its eyepiece.
He resisted and flashed his badge, prompting, “The cavalry’s here!” from a precinct lieutenant, a hefty African-American who could hardly wait to take off. The uniformed cops and detectives were also relieved. Their shifts had been stretched and they aspired to make better use of their precious summer evening. Cold beer and barbecues were higher on their agendas than babysitting.
Will asked the lieutenant, “Where’s our guy?”
“In the bedroom, lying down. We checked the apartment out. Even had a dog in. It’s clean.”
“You got the postcard?”
It was bagged and tagged. Lucius Jefferson Robertson, 384 West 140th Street, New York, NY 10030. On the flip side: the little coffin and June 11, 2009.
Will passed it to Nancy and checked out the place. The furniture was modern, expensive, a couple of nice Orientals, eggshell walls plastered with gallery quality twentieth century oils. An entire expanse of wall hung with framed vinyl records and CDs. Next to the kitchen a Steinway grand with sheet music stacked high on the closed top. A wall unit crammed with a high-end stereo system and hundreds of CDs.
“What is this guy, a musician?” Will asked.
The lieutenant nodded. “Jazz. I never heard of him but Monroe says he’s famous.”
A skinny white cop said on cue: “Yeah, he’s famous.”
After a brief discussion, it was agreed that this situation belonged to the FBI now. The precinct would cover the front and rear of the building through the night but the FBI would take “custody” of Mr. Robertson and watch him as long as they liked. All that was left was to meet their charge. The lieutenant called through the bedroom door, “Mr. Robertson, could you come out, sir? We got the FBI here to see you.”
Through the door: “All right, I’m coming.”
Robertson looked like a weary traveler, thin and stooped, shuffling out from his bedroom in slippers, loose trousers, Chambray shirt and a thin yellow cardigan. He was an old-looking sixty-six. The lines on his face were so deep you could lose a dime in a fold. His skin tones were pure black without a hint of brown except on the palms of his long-fingered hands, whi
ch were pale, café-au-lait. His hair and beard were close-cropped, more salt than pepper.
He spotted the new faces. “How do you do?” he said to Will and Nancy. “I’m sorry to cause so much fuss.”
Will and Nancy formally introduced themselves.
“Please don’t call me Mr. Robertson,” the man protested. “My friends call me Clive.”
Before long the police cleared out. The sun was low over the Hudson and began deepening and expanding like a fat blood orange. Will closed the curtains in the living room and pulled the blinds in Clive’s bedroom. There hadn’t been a sniper shooting yet but the Doomsday killer was mixing things up. He and Nancy reinspected every inch of the apartment, and while she remained with Clive, Will swept the hallway and stairwell.
The formal interview was straightforward—there wasn’t much to tell. Clive had gotten back into town mid-afternoon from a three-city tour with his quintet. No one had a key to his apartment and to the best of his knowledge nothing had been disturbed in his absence. After an uneventful flight from Chicago, he took a yellow cab directly from the airport to his building, where he found the postcard buried in a week’s accumulation of mail. He immediately recognized it for what it was, called 911, and that was that.
Nancy walked him through the names and addresses of the Doomsday victims but Clive shook his head sadly at each mention. He didn’t know any of them. “Why would this fellow want to harm me?” he lamented in his gravelly drawl. “I’m just a piano player.”
Nancy shut her notebook and Will shrugged. They were done. It was almost eight o’clock. Four hours to go before Doomsday was up.
“My refrigerator’s empty ’cause I been away. Otherwise I’d offer you two somethin’ to eat.”
“We’ll order out,” Will said. “What’s good around here?” Then quickly, “It’s on the government.”
Clive suggested the ribs from Charley’s on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, got on the phone and painstakingly placed a complicated order with five different sides. “Use my name,” Will whispered, writing it out for Clive in block letters.
While they waited, they agreed on a plan. Clive wouldn’t leave their sight till midnight. He wouldn’t answer the phone. While he slept, they would keep vigil in the living room, and come morning they’d reevaluate the threat level and work out a new protection scheme.
Then they sat in silence, Clive fidgeting in his favorite armchair, frowning, scratching at his beard. He wasn’t comfortable with visitors, especially straitlaced FBI agents who might as well have beamed into his living room from another planet.
Nancy craned her neck and studied his paintings until her eyebrows suddenly rose and she exclaimed, “Is that a de Kooning?” She was pointing at a large canvas with abstract bursts and smudges of primary colors.
“Very good, young lady, that’s exactly what that is. You know your art.”
“It’s amazing,” she gushed. “It must be worth a fortune.”
Will squinted at it. To his eye, it looked like the kind of thing a kid brought home to stick on the refrigerator.
“It is very valuable,” Clive said. “Willem gave it to me many years ago. I named a piece of music after him so we were all square, but I think I got the better deal.”
That set the two of them off, jabbering about modern art, a subject about which Nancy seemed quite knowledgeable. Will loosened his tie, checked his watch, and listened to his belly rumbling. It had already been a long day. If not for Mueller’s hole in the heart, he’d be on his sofa now, watching TV, swigging scotch. He hated him more and more.
Knuckles were rapping against the front door. Will drew his Glock. “Take him to the bedroom.” Nancy wrapped her arm around Clive’s waist and hurried him away while Will peeked through the peephole.
It was a police officer holding a huge paper sack. “I got your ribs,” the patrolman called out. “If you don’t want ’em, me and the guys’ll have ’em.”
The ribs were good—no, great. The three of them sat in a civilized circle around Clive’s small dining room table and ate greedily, scooping up sides of mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, sweet corn, rice and beans and collard greens, chewing and swallowing in quiet, the food too delicious to be spoiled by small talk. Clive finished first, then Will, both of them cross-eyed full.
Nancy kept going for another five minutes, keeping the forkfuls coming. Both men watched with a kind of grudging admiration, politely killing some time by tearing open packets of moist towelettes and fussily cleaning barbecue sauce off each finger.
In high school Nancy had been petite and athletic. She played second base on the softball team and was a winger in varsity soccer. During her first year away from home she started gaining weight, succumbing to freshman syndrome. She packed on pounds in college, and more in law school, and became positively dumpy. Midway through her second year at Fordham she decided she wanted to join the FBI, but her career advisor told her she’d have to get in shape first. So, with crazed determination, she blitz-dieted and jogged herself down to 120.
Assignment to the New York Office was a good news/bad news story. The good news: New York. The bad news: New York. Her GS-10 grade carried a base salary of about $38,000 with a Law Enforcement Availability Pay kicker of another $9,500. Where were you going to live in New York making under fifty grand? For her, the answer was back home in White Plains, where she got her old room back bundled with mama’s cooking and special bag lunches. She worked long hours and never saw the inside of a gym. In three years her weight steadily escalated again, padding her small frame.
Will and Clive were watching her like she was a contestant at a hot-dog-eating contest. Mortified, she blushed and laid down her utensils.
They cleared the table and washed up like a little family. It was nearly ten.
Will parted the curtains a few inches with his finger. It was inky dark. Tiptoed, he looked straight down and saw two cruisers at the curb, where they were supposed to be. He let the curtains close and checked the dead bolt on the front door. How determined was this killer? With a police cordon, what would his move be? Would he back off and accept defeat? After all, he’d already murdered an old lady less than twenty-four hours ago. Serial killers weren’t typically high-energy types but this guy was killing in bunches. Would he come crashing through the wall of the adjacent apartment? Rappel down from the roof and blast through a window? Blow up the whole damn building to get his victim? Will didn’t have a feel for the perp but he was an outlier and the lack of predictability made him very uneasy.
Clive was back in his favorite chair trying to convince himself that time was his friend. He was bonding with Nancy, who seemed entranced by the slow precise cadence of his voice. The two of them were talking about music. It sounded to Will like she knew a fair bit about that subject too.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “You played with Miles?”
“Oh yeah, I played with them all. I played with Herbie, I played with Dizzy and Sonny and Ornette. I been blessed.”
“Who was your favorite?”
“Well, that would have to be Miles, young lady. Not necessarily as a human being, if you know what I’m sayin’, but as a musician, my my! That was not a trumpet in his hands, that was a horn he got straight from God. Oh no, that weren’t no mortal thing. He didn’t make music, he made magic. When I played with him, I thought the heavens was going to open up and angels was going to pour on out. You want me to put on some Miles right now so I can show you what I mean?”
“I’d rather hear some of your music,” she replied.
“You are trying to charm me, young Miss FBI! And you are being successful.” He said to Will, “You know your colleague here is a charmer?”
“This is our first day together.”
“She’s got a personality. You can go far with that.” He pushed himself up from the chair and made his way to the piano, sat on the stool and made a few fists to loosen his joints. “I got to play soft now, on account of the neighbors, you see.” He
began to play. Slow, cool music, obliquely tender, with haunting hints of melodies that disappeared into the mist to return anew down the line. He played for a good long time with his eyes closed, occasionally humming a few bars of accompaniment. Nancy was mesmerized but Will kept up his guard, checking his watch, listening through the notes for taps or scratches or thumps in the night.
When Clive finished, when the last note faded to nothingness, Nancy said, “Oh my God, that was beautiful. Thank you so much.”
“No, thank you for listening and for watching over me tonight.” He sank back into his easy chair. “Thanks to both of you. You’re making me feel real safe and I appreciate that. Say, chief,” he said to Will, “am I allowed to have a nightcap?”
“What do you want? I’ll get it for you.”
“Over in the kitchen cupboard to the right of the sink, I got a nice bottle of Jack. Don’t you go puttin’ no ice in it.”
Will found the bottle, half full. He unscrewed the top and sniffed. Could someone have poisoned it? Is that how this was supposed to go down? Then, an inspired thought: I need to protect this man and I could use a drink. He poured himself two fingers and downed it fast. Tasted like bourbon. A nice little buzz started. I’ll wait for half a minute to see if I die, if not, the man gets his nightcap, he thought, impressed with his own logic.
“Find it, chief?” Clive called out from the other room.
“Yeah. Be right there.”
Since he’d survived, he brought out a glass and handed it to Clive, who sniffed his breath and remarked, “Glad to see you helped yourself, my man.”
Nancy glared at him.
“Quality control, like a Roman food taster,” Will said, but Nancy looked horrified.
Secret of the Seventh Sons Page 6
