The Accidental Agent

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Could be. I don’t want to say more than that right now – I could be dead wrong.’

  Tatie stubbed out her cigarette in the china ashtray. The last half-inch broke off and Nessheim watched as she chased the still-smoking end with the longer stub, stabbing it until it gave a last tiny exhalation and died. She said, ‘Okay, I’ll keep it on the QT. Give me a call when you’re ready and we can meet up again – here’s as good as any place. I’ll bring the book with me.’

  They kept talking, but it was hard-going, oddly formal. Nessheim said, ‘Tell me, have you heard from Mr Purvis?’

  ‘I had a card from him a few months ago. He’s left Hollywood. They’re making a movie of his experiences, though I don’t think the Bureau has done much to help.’

  ‘I bet not.’ Hoover’s animus towards Purvis was legendary within the FBI. The Director had never liked anyone else grabbing the limelight, and after Dillinger’s death in a shootout, Purvis had threatened to become equally famous – he’d even been put on Wheaties boxes for a time. But not for long, thanks to Hoover.

  Then Tatie asked him about law school and what he’d been up to; asked him about what car he was driving these days and where he was living; and, Nessheim felt sure, was about to ask after his mother when another voice said, ‘Hi, stranger.’

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up to find Stacey standing beside him. His heart went thump – because she looked so good, because he hadn’t expected her, and because he couldn’t believe she had shown up while he was talking to Tatie.

  ‘Hi,’ she said again, in the low breathless voice that made his back tingle. She didn’t even acknowledge Tatie, but then, she had never been a girls kind of girl. ‘I’ll be in the bar.’

  He was blushing when he turned back to Tatie. Her face was thunderous. She lifted her china teacup and finished her tea in one long draw. Putting the cup down sharply, she declared, ‘I’ve got to be going.’

  ‘Tatie, wait. Can’t you stay a while?’

  She stood up to leave. ‘I wouldn’t want to keep you from your meeting back in Hyde Park. Let me know when you need the mug book.’

  When she’d left he paid for the tea and went to the bar, feeling terrible. He should never have told Stacey he was meeting Tatie here; Stacey was too unpredictable. How like her to horn in, without so much as a by-your-leave to Tatie.

  He found her sitting on a bar stool, with her right leg crossed over her left knee. A Cuban-looking man at the far end of the bar was giving her the eye, while Stacey, fully aware of that, was chatting with the bartender. A pack of Pall Malls and a gold lighter sat on the bar top in front of her, next to a frothy drink in a frosted glass.

  He sidled on to the stool next to her, and Stacey said to the bartender, ‘Ask this good-looking guy what he’s drinking.’

  ‘Sir?’ the bartender asked uncertainly. Nessheim realised he couldn’t decide if Stacey and Nessheim knew each either.

  ‘I’m not having whatever she’s drinking,’ Nessheim declared. ‘Give me a bourbon on some cubes.’

  While the bartender fetched a bottle of Four Roses, Stacey said, ‘Who was that grim old bird?’

  ‘Someone I used to work with,’ he said neutrally.

  ‘I hope you’re not spending much time under her wing.’

  He didn’t reply; there was never any point remonstrating with Stacey.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ she said as the bartender set his drink down. Nessheim took a long sip, and felt Stacey’s hand on his arm. ‘So how’s Agent Nessheim tonight?’ she asked.

  The bartender was studiously drying glasses with a cotton dish towel, but Nessheim could tell he was listening. ‘Hurry up and guzzle that down,’ Stacey said.

  ‘What’s the rush?’ he asked. ‘The damage has been done.’

  ‘I’m starving. Should we eat at the doghouse I’m in?’

  He couldn’t help laughing. ‘How about the Berghof? I haven’t been there since I came back to Chicago.’ They had gone there often in the old days.

  ‘Once a Kraut, always a Kraut. If you can stick the Thüringer, so can I.’

  The usual line outside the Berghof moved fast on Adams Street, and soon they were sitting at a little table half-sheltered by the screen in front of the serving station, which Stacey commandeered over the captain’s objections. She took her coat off and stood for a moment, as if on display. There was a lot to look at: in her raspberry-red rib-hugging dress, Stacey and her honey-blonde hair caught the eye of every man and woman in the room.

  The waiter came up, pad and pencil in hand. He wore a long white apron, like the bartenders next door. ‘Can I get you folks a cocktail?’

  ‘A double Manhattan with an orange slice,’ said Stacey, and Nessheim ordered a large stein of the dark bock beer. Stacey reached across the table and put her hand on his. ‘Could you stand sharing the porterhouse for two? You can have your Kartelhosen another time.’

  ‘Kartoffeln, I think you mean. They’re potatoes and come with it.’

  ‘Whatever you say. That way we can both be happy.’

  When their drinks came the waiter also brought a basket of dark rye bread, and Nessheim took a piece, then gave their order. Stacey shook her head. ‘You do like the heavy German stuff, don’t you?’

  He nodded as he took a swallow of his beer. ‘Mother’s milk for me.’

  ‘My mother wouldn’t cook. Said she’d had enough of that in Dakota.’

  ‘Your mother’s from Dakota?’ He had never met the woman. From Stacey’s earlier accounts he would have expected New York or even Paris to be more likely candidates.

  ‘Yep, though she doesn’t like to admit it.’ She gestured towards the bar next door. ‘Do you go there sometimes?’

  ‘I used to when I worked downtown.’ It had a long slab of dark mahogany, with barmen who wore white aprons and kept their sleeves rolled up. The right mix of bustle and relaxation for a drink after work. At lunch a beer got you the makings of a free lunch laid out in little wooden bowls on the countertop – raw onions, pork crackling, tiny hot dogs with toothpicks and hot brown mustard on the side, and pickled pigs’ feet for the strong of heart.

  ‘I’d drink there,’ Stacey declared, ‘but they won’t let us girls in.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘My heart bleeds for you. What are you complaining about? You’ve got the vote.’

  Her nostrils flared momentarily, then she realised he was kidding. But she was not entirely appeased, and said seriously, ‘It’s not right. One day it’s got to change.’

  ‘Why not worry about bigger injustices? Like your coloured brethren and how they’re treated. Now that’s not fair.’

  ‘I know. Did you realise Hyde Park has restrictive covenants through the whole neighbourhood? You could be a doctor but if you’re also Negro you can’t even buy a railroad flat. The university has a lot to answer for.’

  This jarred with his view of the neighbourhood’s endemic progressivism. ‘I’m sure you’ll find plenty of law students ready to protest.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Your friend Winograd seems to think they’re all Reds.’

  ‘He’s not my friend.’ He had gone to a dreary party at Winograd’s place, a railroad flat above a radio repair place on 53rd Street, and in return had invited him over once to his own apartment, where Winograd had drunk all of the beers in the icebox.

  ‘He thinks he is. What do you know about him?’

  ‘Not a lot. He graduated a few years ago, but it’s never clear to me what he’s been doing. He’s 4-F obviously. He likes Billie Holiday, and that’s good enough for me.’

  ‘So you think his heart is in the right place?’

  ‘You mean the left place, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t, and certainly not for Winograd. But forget about him. Let’s not talk politics.’

  Really? It was as if Lindbergh had asked a dinner companion not to mention aviation.

  ‘Anyway
,’ said Stacey, ‘did you have a good meeting?’

  ‘It was going swell until you interrupted.’

  Stacey looked completely uncontrite. ‘That lady gives new meaning to the phrase “old flame”.’ She added loudly, ‘You must have been in short pants when she lost her cherry.’

  He saw a woman at a nearby table flinch. ‘Stacey,’ he said reprovingly.

  Stacey turned to the woman at the table. ‘Sorry,’ she said, looking no more apologetic than before, though Nessheim was impressed, since he’d never heard her apologise before. She turned back to him, and said more quietly, ‘But honestly, Nessheim, you can do better than that.’

  ‘I told you before – it was business.’

  ‘I thought you’d left the FBI, remember?’

  ‘I have. It was family stuff.’ He scrambled about mentally, trying to find a safe foothold. ‘To do with my father’s estate.’

  ‘Estate?’ She looked at him with disbelief. ‘I’m sorry about your father, but what’s a Wisconsin farm boy doing, seeing somebody in Chicago about his father’s will?’

  He shrugged but didn’t answer. She went on, ‘Something’s up. You can’t fool me.’

  The waiter came with their steak, still sizzling from the broiler. It was the size of a flattened catcher’s mitt. Balancing the plate carefully on a little stand he carried with his free hand, the waiter deftly carved the meat in two. He gave them each a plate of sliced pink beef, then set down dishes of hash browns, green beans and creamed spinach on the table.

  Stacey ate hungrily, snaring the lion’s share of the creamed spinach as well as most of the potatoes. ‘Very fine Kartelhosen,’ she said, chewing appreciatively. ‘But tell me, if Winograd’s not your friend, who is these days?’

  He thought for a moment. There had been Devereux in San Francisco, another Special Agent at the Bureau. His old pals at the Bureau here in Chicago had been dispersed in the mass cull initiated by Nelson, the SAC. His college friendships had withered after he’d left Northwestern early. He shrugged. ‘I keep myself to myself these days.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked surprised.

  He asked her about herself, but she wouldn’t play. ‘I haven’t done much of interest,’ she said bluntly. ‘Not like you.’

  She continued to deflect his questions about where she’d been with a laugh or by helping herself to more of the side dishes. ‘The food hasn’t changed,’ she said appreciatively. He learned only that her mother was still alive, and that law school seemed the best of a lot of bad options, but she was spare with other specifics of her recent past. Yes, she’d been in LA, she admitted, but not for long, and no, she hadn’t tried to get into the movies. Each of his questions seemed to lead to her asking her own, but he found it easy being with her, easy again to talk to her. He thought of Fielding, and that apprehensive look as the man tried to entertain her, but he didn’t feel similar pressure himself – this was her date, he figured; he hadn’t sought her out. He left out anything serious about his escapades, and she smiled at his account of the ludicrous antics at the Hollywood studio where he had been based for a year, then laughed out loud when he demonstrated how he’d shown a B-movie actor how to hold a gun.

  Finally, to change the subject he said, ‘I saw you the other day, you know.’ She was eating Apfelstrudel by now, while he sipped a mug of steaming black coffee.

  ‘Where was that?’ she asked between bites.

  ‘In the Quadrangle Club. You were lunching with Mr Torts himself.’

  For a split second Stacey’s eyes widened in surprise, like an innocent girl in a Mack Sennett movie. ‘How …?’

  ‘I was behind a pillar at the next table. Now that, my dear, was war,’ he said, imitating Fielding’s stentorian tones.

  Stacey grimaced. ‘I didn’t see you there. It was strictly a duty lunch.’

  ‘Sure it was.’

  ‘You sound jealous, Nessheim.’

  ‘Never,’ he said, then burnt his tongue with the coffee.

  She shook her head. ‘When I decided to go to law school, it turned out there was a professor who’d known my dad once. And the professor –’

  ‘Was Arthur Fielding?’ It seemed implausible that a manufacturing paper magnate had been pals with the Arthur McNeil Professor of Jurisprudence.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, Professor Fielding spoke very highly of you. He said you were one of the few able to distinguish between the illegal and the immoral. He wanted to know all about you.’

  ‘And you obliged?’

  ‘I said you were a closed book, an enigma to your fellow students.’ She laughed when she saw the incredulous look on his face. ‘Don’t worry – I don’t think he even knows what you look like. But he does think the world of your coursework.’ She laughed again before he could feel flattered. ‘Actually, I think he just wanted to know whether you and I were seeing each other.’

  ‘The old goat. How did your dad know him?’

  ‘It was during the last war. They were both in France in 1917.’

  ‘I bet Fielding gives a pretty good account of himself.’

  ‘Dad said Fielding never saw combat. He was a quartermaster, stuck in a tent behind the lines, counting cans of beans – or having someone else count them. My father was an officer. I learned later he’d done some serious fighting. But the only stories he ever told were funny ones – how his buddy got kicked by a horse, and what happened when his men got served snails in a bistro.’ She examined her nails, keeping her eyes on her hand. ‘I think you’re doing the same thing with me, Nessheim. You tell a good story – when you describe your time as a G-Man it’s one big laugh after another.’ She pointed her index finger at him, then cocked her thumb like a gun, and let her hand shake and flop all over the place.

  Nessheim laughed heartily.

  ‘See what I mean?’ she said, and she was serious again.

  When they finished dinner, Nessheim paid and they went out on to Adams Street.

  ‘Where are you parked?’ Stacey asked.

  ‘I’m not. I took the IC.’

  ‘Oh, good, you can be chauffeur then,’ she said happily, and handed him her keys. An L train clattered overhead behind them as they walked towards Michigan Avenue, and Stacey took Nessheim’s arm. Ahead to the east the neo-classical Art Institute stood like a bulwark between them and the Lake. ‘You still in Lincoln Park?’ he asked as he unlocked the passenger-side door and held it open for her. He wondered how he was going to get home.

  ‘No. I’ve moved south for the duration. Hyde Park.’

  ‘Must be a big sacrifice.’ He remembered the glamour of her previous place. Two bedrooms and a living room fronted by glass with a magnificent view along the beach all the way to the Palmolive Building where the Lake bent out in a large bow.

  ‘Not really. It’s three minutes to class instead of thirty-five. Worth slumming for.’ In the car Stacey was quiet as Nessheim joined the Drive at the south end of the Loop. It was too cold to put the top down, but the Packard purred contentedly, cat-like, as Nessheim worked through its gears and moved over to the fast lane. Ahead of them, the Field Museum and Planetarium loomed like colossal monuments in the dark, unlit in token obeisance to the blackouts diligently obeyed on the country’s coasts.

  They were moving fast past the 23rd Street exit when Stacey spoke up. ‘Nessheim, why aren’t you in uniform?’

  ‘I couldn’t find one that fit.’

  ‘Seriously, it’s not what I’d expect. Don’t you want to be at war?!’

  Once there was nothing he wanted more. He exhaled slowly. ‘Believe me, I tried.’ He didn’t want to explain any further. Fortunately she reached for the radio, then leaned back in her seat as ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ filled the car.

  He left the Drive at 51st and drove, at her direction, south on South Shore Drive towards her apartment building. It was a handsome tower of cream-coloured brick, just down from the Shoreland Hotel.

  ‘There you go ma’am,’ he said. ‘Door-to-door service.’
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  ‘I haven’t got the fare. You’d better come up while I find my purse.’

  He shook his head. ‘Pay me next time. Where should I park this baby?’ He could walk home in ten minutes.

  ‘I need my first tutorial, Nessheim. We’ve got Torts in two days and I’m floundering. Mid-terms are only ten days away.’

  ‘You can wait a day or two.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Says your tutor.’

  She gave a perfunctory nod. ‘I understand that, and I recognise that Torts and Malfeasance may not be enough to lure you upstairs. What if I said I just wanted to talk to you?’

  ‘I’d say it’s so much phooey.’

  She nodded again, sympathetic but unconvinced, like a psychiatrist listening to a patient. Nessheim leaned forward and turned his head sideways towards her, until his cheek rested on the steering wheel. He felt quite helpless.

  ‘Okay,’ Stacey declared, ‘let’s cut to the chase. Would it help if I said I want you to come upstairs so you can take all my clothes off?’ She suddenly looked away, as if the brashness of the words came as a surprise even to herself.

  No, Nessheim told himself. No, he thought again; don’t give in. Then he lifted his head from the steering wheel, reached for the handle and opened the door. ‘Now you’re talking,’ he said.

  Her apartment was on the sixth floor, and they took the elevator up. She said it had an operator during the day but at night it was automatic, and as soon as its gold-framed doors slid shut, she put her arms around Nessheim, a hand behind his neck, and brought his lips down hard on to hers. It was a slow ride up and she used every moment of it to arouse him; another two floors and he would have had his clothes off.

  Stumbling out, they disengaged long enough for Stacey to find her keys and open the door. Once inside, he barely noticed the Lake-front view from the living room, as they clung to each other like a pair of marathon dancers, holding on for dear life as they moved along the parquet floor to the bedroom. They fell on each other like little kids on Christmas morning, ripping the wrapping off their presents.

  Later, he woke in the middle of the night, drowsy but happy as he made out the sleeping form of Stacey next to him. She wore a silk slip that was pushed halfway up her hips, and her hair, golden in the faint light from the bathroom, lay splayed either side of her face on the pillow.