The Little Tokyo Informant

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Only Isabel knew where he was going. Even the trusted Marie was in the dark; when he had told her he was taking a day off, she had raised an eyebrow, since Guttman never did that. Sure, he took his vacation – all two weeks of it – but otherwise attended to his job on a clockwork routine. He had ignored the eyebrow.

  New Haven looked grim on first view: an industrial shoreline of rusting tankers, oil depots and dilapidated factories. As the train pulled into the station Guttman got up, suppressing a yawn. He disembarked and walked through the citadel-like grandeur of the station. Funny how America had made such monuments of train depots – massive waiting rooms with high painted ceilings and marble floors. Did it cheer people up, he wondered? If you were starving would you rather go hungry in grand surroundings or drab ones?

  Out front there was a line at the cab stand and he doubled up with two students who were also heading for campus. They were in high spirits after a jaunt to New York, which they were discussing as the taxi set off. The cab drove them away from the harbour, through a neighbourhood of old brick tenements and dingy stores, then down a wider street with banks and an insurance building. The students were talking about their fancy dinner in a French restaurant, a play they’d seen which sounded like Lady in the Dark, and jazz they’d listened to at a club downtown in Greenwich Village.

  Two rich kids, then, in expensive blazers and striped shirts, having a heck of a time. Guttman didn’t resent them – they’d been polite enough to ask if he wanted to share the cab – but he did hope they knew how lucky they were. What a contrast with his own college days: he’d lived at home and attended CCNY, then shared rooms with two friends in Hell’s Kitchen, while he worked in a Midtown jewellery store and took law classes at night.

  By then he’d met Isabel. Although their meetings were furtively arranged (his parents would not have approved of their inter-faith romance), they had conducted their courting in public. They’d share a sandwich on a park bench by the New York Public Library or if they were feeling flush go to an automat – which seemed fitting, since they’d first met at the one on 42nd Street, where he’d bought a piece of cherry pie by mistake and Isabel had offered to swap her own slice of apple pie for his. Later she had liked to joke, We took a short-crust to matrimony. Her parents wouldn’t have been wild about these meetings either, but they’d been dead almost twenty years – leaving Isabel to be raised by nuns in a Polish Catholic orphanage on Long Island.

  Isabel had been such a live wire when they’d met. An only son, Guttman had been forced to shoulder adult responsibilities prematurely, but Isabel’s sheer enthusiasm for life had made him feel his own youth – he’d been like a reluctant bather at the beach, who shivers at the first tentative steps into the water, only to be collected by a sudden embracing wave. She knew how to tango, drove a car faster than he did and was the only girl he’d met who could ride a horse.

  He hadn’t hesitated two seconds about marrying outside the faith, not when it was his beloved Isabel he’d be marrying. If he and Isabel had had children, technically they wouldn’t have been Jews either – sometimes Guttman could picture the son he’d never had. Slender as Isabel, with skin the colour of milk and fair hair that hinted at his Polish antecedents. But still named Guttman and doubtless made to pay accordingly.

  He thought of Isabel again, now lying half-immobilised at home with creeping paralysis. He had known for ten years she was going to predecease him, but he remained terrified of her dying. He knew some people thought he would be unfettered then, even free. Sure, he thought grimly, free as a bird without a mate. There was something to be said about the certainty of a wife, especially when you loved her.

  The taxi went round the New Haven Green, a large common shaded by lines of tall elms and bisected by neat paths. Along the north side the driver pulled over at an entrance with high iron gates. ‘Old Campus,’ he announced and the two boys hopped out. One of them handed a dollar bill to Guttman. ‘That should cover us,’ he said, and Guttman thanked him.

  The driver went on down College Street, passing a Gothic building of grey stone with gargoyles and intricate scroll work around its thin mullioned windows. It looked like the refectory of a medieval monastery and Guttman thought wryly that it was almost as nice as the City College of New York.

  ‘What’s that?’ Guttman asked.

  ‘Calhoun.’ He saw Guttman’s puzzlement in his rear mirror. ‘One of the colleges.’

  ‘It looks older than the Mayflower.’

  The driver laughed. ‘There’re ten colleges and believe it or not, every one was built in the last ten years. They had stonemasons come in from all over the world,’ he said proudly.

  They turned down another side street, signed Wall Street, and halfway along the block pulled over by a plaza, ringed on two sides by buildings. ‘That’s the university offices,’ the cabbie said, pointing to a colonial-style mansion. It could have been lifted straight out of Fifth Avenue, the house of a Morgan or Carnegie.

  Guttman paid the driver and entered the building, where a secretary directed him upstairs. It seemed eerily quiet, like a men’s club. As he climbed the stairs he looked at the portraits of past Yale presidents lining the wall and realised he was in a kind of men’s club. He found another woman sitting in an outer office and explained who he had come to see. She had him sit down while she went through a door into another room.

  ‘Mr Goodman?’ The man who came out through the same door was younger than Guttman had expected – mid-thirties, possibly forty.

  ‘It’s Guttman,’ he said, rising from his chair. Isabel had made him wear his best suit – from Hecht’s in D.C. – but looking at the spruce figure this man cut, Guttman wondered why he’d bothered. The man was about six feet, lean and loose-limbed with straight brown hair he had tried to comb back, but which fell in a soft comma across his forehead. He was dressed in a dark blue serge suit and a tie with an insignia on it – a Yale tie, Guttman figured.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Guttman. I’m Franklin Vail. How can I help you?’

  He handed his card to Vail. On the phone, the woman Guttman had spoken to had been less than helpful, even snooty once she’d heard the New York intonations of his voice – a drawbridge had gone up. He had felt like Popeye: Iyam what Iyam.

  He said now, ‘I was hoping you could give me some information.’

  Vail paused as he looked again at Guttman’s card. ‘My assistant told me you’d called the other day. Have you come all the way from Washington?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I hate to think you’ve made your trip for nothing, but I’m not sure I can be of any more help than my assistant.’ He said this politely but perfunctorily. Guttman sighed inwardly. It had been a gamble coming all this way. He felt cross, and was tempted to show it. But it wasn’t as if Guttman could call on Hoover to twist an arm or two. Not when he wasn’t even meant to be there.

  He sighed again, this time openly, while Vail waited impatiently. Guttman said, ‘I don’t need much of your time, Mr Vail.’

  ‘I’ve got to meet someone for lunch,’ Vail said, looking at his watch, an elegant number with a caramel leather band. But he seemed to understand that Guttman wasn’t trying to throw his weight around. ‘I’ve got a minute, I guess,’ he said reluctantly, and ushered Guttman into his office.

  It was a large high-ceilinged room with a view of the plaza. The walls were lined with prints of Yale from the last century and the shelves on the bookcase held bound volumes of the Yale Daily News. Out the window Guttman could see dozens of students walking towards a massive neo-classical building that ran along one end of the plaza.

  ‘Where are they all going?’ Guttman asked, pointing towards the students.

  ‘Lunch,’ Vail said pointedly.

  ‘I’ll get to the point. I’m here because I’m trying to identify someone and I haven’t the faintest idea how to go about it. I need your help.’ He put out both palms to show he came as supplicant not cop.

  Vail regarded him with a
first flicker of interest. ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘A Yale graduate.’

  ‘What class?’

  ‘Upper,’ said Guttman and Vail smiled for the first time. ‘Actually, I don’t know for sure. Nineteen thirty-five or thirty-six or thirty-seven. I don’t think it could be beyond that range. Certainly not any earlier.’

  Vail made a note on a lined yellow pad on his desk. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Ah, there’s the rub,’ said Guttman and Vail gave a token smile. ‘I don’t know.’

  Vail leant back in his chair. ‘A Yale graduating class has almost five hundred students, Mr Guttman. Do you have any more information than that?’

  ‘A bit. He was friends later on with someone from the class of 1934.’

  ‘You don’t know his name either, I take it?’

  ‘Oh, I know his name all right.’

  Vail gave him a look of patronising compassion. ‘Then I suggest, Mr Guttman, you ask him to tell you the name of the man you’re looking for.’

  ‘I would if I could. His name was Thornton Palmer and he was found shot dead in Rock Creek Park five days ago.’

  ‘I read about that!’ Vail exclaimed. ‘An alumnus.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Guttman said.

  ‘The Times made it sound like suicide. Yet you say “shot dead”.’

  ‘Officially, the cause of death is still unknown. I should have chosen my words more carefully.’

  He looked at Vail, who seemed to get the message, for the Yale man then said, ‘What’s this got to do with the man you’re looking for?’

  ‘He may be able to explain what happened to Thornton Palmer.’

  ‘I see. Do you know anything else about him?’

  ‘Yes. He was a Whiffenpoof.’

  Vail’s eyes widened and Guttman added, ‘I know that’s a singing group, but that’s about it.’

  Vail said, ‘There are about a dozen Whiffenpoofs every year. They’re all seniors – they start singing in other groups as freshmen and then, if they’re lucky, they get picked to be Whiffenpoofs in the spring of their junior year. It’s quite an honour.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced.’ Vail laughed. His tone had changed. He was cordial now. ‘Listen, I tell you what – I’m having lunch with a Professor at Mory’s.’ Guttman must have looked blank. Vail suddenly burst into song:

  To the tables down at Mory’s

  To the place where Louis dwells.

  Breaking off, Vail explained, ‘It’s a club, a kind of restaurant really, where the Whiffenpoofs sing every Monday night. On the walls they have photographs of the baseball and football teams, and if memory serves me right, of each year’s Whiffenpoofs. Let me have a look and if I find them I’ll write down the names. Would that help?’

  ‘It would,’ said Guttman, thinking he was going to see a little more of Yale than he’d planned.

  Guttman killed an hour, stopping on Chapel Street at a small restaurant where he had a pizza pie for the first time, served by the Italian owner. Its melted cheese was piping hot and the crust crispy and slightly burnt. He wolfed it down with a soda. He was worried about Isabel, but resisted the temptation to call home. Mrs Davis, Isabel’s helper, grew impatient with his concern, and lately she had seemed impatient about everything. He wondered how nice she was to his wife. Isabel said she was ‘fine’, but then Isabel knew how much he worried about her; she would have been loath to add to his list of anxieties.

  He strolled back to Vail’s office and this time he was ushered in right away. Vail was waiting for him with a list. A long list. ‘I took down the names for five years,’ he explained. ‘I think my lunch partner must have thought I was nuts.’

  ‘Or starting the Whiffenpoofs fan club,’ Guttman said. He looked at the names unhopefully. Now all he had to do was locate seventy addresses of Yale men and find all those who lived in New York.

  ‘Is that any use?’ asked Vail anxiously.

  ‘Thank you, it is. I’m just trying to figure out how I’m going to track these people down.’

  ‘I can help with that,’ Vail declared and Guttman could see his interest had been well and truly piqued. There was a little private eye in everybody, Guttman thought. Vail said, ‘The alumni association will have all their addresses – everybody gets a magazine sent to them once they’ve graduated. But it might help if we could narrow things down a bit. Do you know anything else about our mystery man?’

  ‘Yes I do. He lives in New York – or at least he works in the city. And he’s a banker. He must be an officer of the bank,’ he added, thinking of Palmer’s description of the transferred money. ‘I mean, he’s not a teller.’

  Vail snorted at the very idea. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said. Guttman could see that he now considered himself part of the investigation. ‘I’ll have names for you tomorrow.’

  ‘That would be great. You’ve been a big help, so I’m reluctant to ask for any more assistance. But I was wondering …’ he paused, like a fly fisherman mending his line.

  ‘Go on,’ said Vail cheerfully. This guy was well and truly hooked.

  ‘I wanted to know a bit more about Thornton Palmer, the dead man. A sense of who his college friends were and what his interests had been. Especially anything political.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Vail, obviously surprised. He must have thought Palmer and the mystery man had been involved in something else. What, wondered Guttman? Narcotics? Bank robberies? The white slave trade?

  ‘Yes, I’d be interested in knowing if he’d joined any organisations or agitated about political stuff. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, the biggest organisation on campus nowadays is the America First Committee. But Palmer was here well before any of that started. I’ll see what I can find out.’

  ‘Great,’ said Guttman. It seemed the likes of Franklin Vail couldn’t conceive that a Yale man might have had progressive sentiments.

  10

  THIS TIME GUTTMAN used his mother as an excuse. He told Marie she was failing badly and that he would be gone for at least a day on compassionate leave. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Marie, he just didn’t want her to get caught up in his subterfuge. If he ran afoul of the Director, Hoover would take no prisoners and Marie would lose her job as well. With a child to raise and no husband any longer, she needed the job.

  Vail had called him the day before, excited as a kid. He had come up with the names of five Whiffenpoofs living in or around New York. The first on the list had a home address in Queens, which ruled him out – Guttman was confident a Yale-educated banker wouldn’t be living off Astoria Boulevard. The second had graduated from Columbia’s medical school and was an intern at Mount Sinai; a third had been drafted the year before and was currently stationed at Fort Sheridan in Illinois. That left two names and both had connections with the banking business, though the one named Oliver Mason at J. P. Morgan had gone on sick leave four months before and had yet to come back. Given Palmer’s time frame for the money transfer that seemed to rule him out as well, and left only Roger Sedgwick, class of ’35, who worked in midtown at the Manhattan Savings Association. He lived in Westchester County in a town called Brewster, but Guttman wanted to confront him in his work environment. He had found that people felt more vulnerable there.

  About Thornton Palmer, Vail had less useful news. He had spoken with the Dean of Palmer’s old residential college, Jonathan Edwards, and learned that Palmer had been a solid but unremarkable presence. He’d played intramural football, sung for a year in the Glee Club, dated a girl from Smith College and achieved an academic record notable only for the strict uniformity of his grades – straight Bs. Vail’s questions about any political activity had been greeted with disbelieving laughter by the Dean, followed by an emphatic no.

  So much for the upper-class radical. It would certainly make Guttman’s life simpler if all of this led nowhere, he thought, remembering the memorandum he had found on his desk when he’d returned from
New Haven:

  To: Assistant Director Guttman (SIS)

  From: The Director

  I wanted to speak with you in person but learned you were taking the day off.

  Mr Tolson has spoken to me about your recent meeting. I have since talked with Secretary of State Hull who informs me that Thornton Palmer had a history of medical problems and difficulties with alcohol. The Secretary also reports that Palmer’s superior considered him unreliable and prone to self-aggrandisement.

  Given this information, I have instructed Special Agent Tamm to refile your note and to consider the matter closed, barring any further disclosures. As Mr Tolson instructed, you should transfer any information you have forthwith to Mr Tamm.

  I hope you had an enjoyable vacation.

  JEH

  Guttman got into Penn Station before noon and took the 7th Avenue line one stop to Times Square. He was in a hurry, determined to see Sedgwick, then scoot back to Penn Station and head for home. Mrs Davis had complained. ‘That’s twice in one week, Mr Guttman. It’s a lot to ask.’ He had given her an extra ten dollars.

  He took the shuttle over to Grand Central and ascended into the grand concourse of the station – another railway monument with a high vaulted ceiling. Through the cathedral-like windows light streamed in attenuated trails, illuminating motes of dust like snowflakes.

  Outside on 42nd Street it was cooler than in Washington, and when passing cloud obscured the sun he was glad he’d brought his raincoat. The sidewalks were crowded: women in neat two-piece suits, hats tilted at an angle, men in grey fedoras, hurrying along. He had forgotten the sheer bustle of his native city, where no one ever seemed to stand still. Even the architecture here seemed to be in transit, the equivalent of a hundred Washington Memorials soaring skyward, their thrust modulated by the mount backs that seemed the builders’ new rage. By contrast Washington was a city of neo-classical buildings, immobile as statues, a place so intent on dignitas that it seemed to slow your breathing down. Where New York was unfettered by any pretence to a federalist gloss and proud of its brutal competitive air, Washington seemed a smaller, more private kind of theatre, full of cautious collaborations and conspiracies.