The Accidental Agent

by Andrew Rosenheim

  He got up quietly and went out to the living room. Leaning against the waist-high bookshelf that ran against the wall beneath the large picture windows, he could see a few passing cars six storeys below, mainly Checker cabs, cream bodies with green checks. The window opened easily, sliding to the side, and he listened to the noise of breakers hitting the rocks at The Point on 55th Street. He knew he should be focused on the man in the Chesterfield and his odd rendezvous with Kalvin, and knew too that he should be calling Guttman right now, to hell with the hour, and trying to find out what was going on.

  But any urgency had been bushwhacked by the woman sleeping next door. What am I doing? he asked himself. It will end in tears, just like last time. My tears, thought Nessheim. It was so obvious that Stacey couldn’t stay still for more than a second or two – in her love life as well as in her choice of places to live. Nessheim had moved around himself, but for him it was enough to last a lifetime. He wanted to settle. This is not the way to go about it, he thought, closing the window with his palm, leaving a sweaty map of his fingers on the glass.

  8

  THEY GOT TO law school in time for Torts the next morning. This time Stacey drove. As they got in the car she said, ‘You look like the cat who’s got the cream.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure of yourself,’ he said, but this only made her laugh.

  ‘What are you doing tonight then?’ she asked.

  ‘Not what you think, that’s for sure. I’ve got to study, Stacey.’ He was already trying to think how he’d pass his mid-terms if he was going to spend time at Stagg Field and Eckhart Hall, much less a luxury apartment off South Shore Drive.

  ‘Let me come over.’ She saw his face. ‘Don’t worry, I have to study too. I’ll cook supper – I can get groceries on 57th Street.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’ He liked the idea, but he sensed he was supposed to like it. He wondered what was going on. Stacey didn’t pursue men; they pursued her. ‘I can get them on my way home.’

  ‘No, let me do it. I’ve got something special in mind.’

  ‘Well –’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be there about six.’

  ‘I may be out.’

  She was undeterred. ‘Then leave the kitchen door open. Or have you got a spare key?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He realised this was to argue the details; on the main point of her coming over he had given way without noticing.

  ‘Under the mat?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Why, you thought I’d find it?’ She was smiling but there was an edge to her voice.

  ‘Something like that.’ Since receiving the ‘Rossbach’ note he had moved the spare key from such an obvious hiding place and tucked it instead deep into a cranny on the underside of the wooden stairs at the rear of his apartment. No one could find it there without half an hour’s search. He told Stacey now exactly where it was.

  They walked together into Stuart Hall and Stacey came with him down the centre aisle, then sat down in the seat on his left. A moment later, Winograd arrived. He stood for a moment, looking stunned to find Stacey sitting there. He sat down as Fielding came in at the front and went to the podium. As Fielding gave a preliminary cough and started to speak, Winograd whispered, ‘That was fast work. How the hell did you manage that?’

  Nessheim opened his notebook, and shielding the page so Stacey couldn’t see, wrote rapidly, ‘She’s just using me to get to you.’

  Back at the apartment he phoned Guttman first. It rang twice and a woman answered. He realised it was Marie.

  ‘Hello there,’ she said when he asked for her boss. ‘He’s upstairs, duking it out with Tolson.’

  There was always something refreshing about Marie’s irreverence, which was not limited to commentary on Guttman’s idiosyncrasies. ‘When can I reach him, Marie?’

  ‘You an hour behind us?’ she asked, and he realised that was her discreet way of asking if he were in Chicago.

  ‘Yeah, and I’ll be here all day.’

  ‘He may want to call you from home, Jim.’

  That would be evening, with Stacey in attendance. No, thanks. Were things so fraught at HQ that Guttman thought his calls were being listened to? ‘I’ll be out tonight, Marie, but I need to talk to him.’

  ‘Sure thing. I’ll tell him it’s important.’

  Next up was Groves. Less urgent, perhaps, but it would at least show Nessheim was on the ball. A switchboard operator answered, and while he waited for the call to go through he tried to visualise where the large moustachioed figure of Groves was based – was it somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors of his new creation, the pentagonal behemoth on the Virginia side of the Potomac, or was he in the old quarters of the War Department on Massachusetts Avenue, not far from the White House? He wished they’d invent a phone that told you the location of the person you called.

  He was put through to one secretary, then another, and the second time he heard someone in the background say gruffly, ‘Put him through,’ and seconds later a voice said, ‘Groves.’

  ‘General, it’s Nessheim, checking in.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sounded impatient.

  ‘You may need to tighten up security some more at Stagg Field.’

  ‘Why? What’s the problem?’

  Groves listened in silence as Nessheim described the laxness he had found from the sentries. He felt a little sorry for the soldiers in question, who were about to get a dressing-down they’d always remember. But he didn’t feel he had a choice. When he’d finished Groves stayed silent for a moment, then said tersely, ‘I’ll see to it. Let me know right away if the situation doesn’t improve. We can’t have that.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No. I –’ but Groves had already hung up.

  When the phone rang an hour later he was expecting Guttman at the other end of the line. ‘Is that you, Jim?’ said a curt female voice, and it took him a second to recognise Tatie’s clipped tones.

  ‘Yes, it’s me, Tatie.’

  ‘I’ve got some stuff for you. You staying home for the next hour?’

  ‘I can do. Listen, about the other evening –’

  She cut him off. ‘Don’t go anywhere, okay? I can’t do this twice.’

  For forty-five minutes he sat in the living room trying to study but with half an eye on the clock. He was slightly nervous about seeing Tatie again, wondering how best to apologise for their aborted last encounter. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings and he could use her help, but he was no longer a young pup happy to take instruction.

  But when the buzzer went and he asked who it was, a young male voice replied. ‘It’s Pete. From the Field Office.’

  Nessheim buzzed him through, then opened the front door, watching as a fresh-faced young kid in a suit a size too big came up the stairs, carrying a Gladstone bag in one hand.

  Once in the living room, the kid named Pete sat down on the sofa, and declining anything to drink while calling Nessheim ‘sir’, opened the bag. Nessheim stood as Pete handed over an envelope, then lifted an oversized book out with both hands and put it on the coffee table. The mug book.

  Nessheim opened the envelope and read the note inside. It was from Tatie – he recognised the typewriter face – but wasn’t signed. It said:

  Local Bund membership once reached 500 in the Chicago area, but declined to 136 by 1941. Then, right after Germany’s declaration of war on the U.S., the organisation disbanded. We have no reports of any further activity in the Chicago area.

  No Beringer appears on the Chicago membership roster at any point, but inquiries with Bureau HQ indicate a Max Beringer was released from Ossining State Prison in October 1941 and deported to Mexico. The Milwaukee Field Office reports that Alex Burmeister was a member of the Wisconsin Bund (joined 1937), and President of the mid-Wisconsin chapter, but publicly disavowed the organisation in 1940. He is currently serving in the US Army in North Africa.

  He reached for the vast volume on the c
offee table; it was the dimensions of a wedding album. Sitting down across from Pete, he went through its stiff pages one by one. Each photograph was pasted on to thin board, then pasted down again on to the album’s pages. The photos were standard Bureau employee ID shots. Nessheim remembered his own being taken, in a brightly lit corner of the basement in the Justice Department building in D.C. There the lab photographer snapped all the new agents, one at a time, standing against a background cloth of brown.

  There were almost a hundred agents in the mug book, and Nessheim looked at them all. Several faces were familiar from his own time at the Field Office, which had ended only five years before, when Guttman had plucked him out for special duties elsewhere. Of the others, perhaps a dozen qualified as possibles – males under the age of thirty, dark-haired, sharp-featured – but none triggered even the remotest link to his visual memory of the Chesterfield man.

  Finished, Nessheim sighed and put the book back on the table. ‘You want to leave that with me?’ he asked, thinking maybe he would go through it again that evening just in case.

  Pete shook his head. ‘No can do, sir. More than my life’s worth. Miss Tate would flay me alive.’

  ‘Miss Tate?’ Nessheim asked drily.

  Pete blushed. ‘You know Tatie, sir?’

  ‘Sure. She’s a tough cookie. But with a big heart,’ he added.

  The kid blushed again. ‘Anyway,’ said Nessheim, ‘thank her for the info and for sending the book. Tell her I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Wilco,’ said Pete, and they both stood up. Pete must be a Tatie favourite, or she wouldn’t have trusted him with such an unorthodox errand. Why had the kid blushed when Nessheim had praised Tatie? Unless … For the first time in his life Nessheim saw exactly how age was going to start to creep up on him. In Tatie’s eyes, he realised, Pete was the Nessheim of ten years before, another kid she’d taken under her wing and possibly then some.

  When Pete had left, Nessheim contemplated what he’d just learned – or not learned. He wasn’t surprised Beringer was in Mexico; that had been the deal when the man had grudgingly supplied information about his fellow Germans operating in America before the war. Fair enough, thought Nessheim, but Alex Burmeister was something else. He’d married Nessheim’s old high-school sweetheart Trudy after he’d knocked her up, which had seemed unfortunate but forgivable. But he’d also given information to the Bund in New York that had got Nessheim in terrible trouble, and that was a score Nessheim hoped to settle one day. It pained him that a man of former Nazi sympathies got to serve, while Nessheim poked around the detritus of the Nazi-lover’s former organisation. But one thing was clear: neither Beringer nor Burmeister could have left the ‘Rossbach’ note by Nessheim’s back door.

  At three the phone rang again and this time it was Guttman. He sounded snappish.

  ‘Marie said you called me here. What’s the problem?’

  By now Nessheim had had time enough for his puzzlement about Kalvin to turn to anger. ‘You didn’t tell me that the Bureau had a source in Fermi’s unit, and you didn’t tell me this same source would be meeting up with a Special Agent right under my nose. How am I supposed to operate with some goon crawling all over my patch, talking with one of the lead scientists in the project?’

  There was a silence over the phone. Then Guttman said firmly, ‘Let’s start over. A – I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. B – which scientist met which agent? C – are you sure about this?’

  ‘You think I’ve gotten rusty? Hell, I followed the agent back to the Bankers Building. I don’t think he’s working for an ad agency.’

  ‘Well, kid, what can I say?’

  Kid. When was Guttman going to leave off with that? Nessheim was thirty years old, for God’s sake.

  Guttman went on. ‘Who was the scientist he was meeting?’

  ‘Kalvin.’

  ‘He’s one of the senior guys, isn’t he? A Polish Jew. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I. That’s why I called you. He’s an odd fish, Kalvin, and I was going to ask you to double-check his credentials. But if he’s being run by the Bureau, I’ll keep my distance. I just wish I’d been warned.’

  ‘He can’t be working for us. This is my patch – I’d know if this guy was ours. Let me check it out, and I’ll get back to you. So what else have you found out?’

  As if this weren’t enough. ‘Nothing,’ said Nessheim tetchily.

  ‘Have you heard from Groves?’

  ‘Yes. Though I called him. Security here is quite lax. A couple of dozy soldiers my grandmother could have hoodwinked. He’s on the case, thank God.’

  ‘This note you got – do you still think that it’s the Bund?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. Beringer has gone to Mexico, and the other candidate is in the army. The US Army. Some of the Bund members here might have heard about Rossbach, but I can’t see how they would link him to me, much less know I was here. It’s a mystery.’

  ‘Another one. Listen, I’ll do the rounds and make sure somebody hasn’t got some connection with Kalvin. But like I say, I doubt it. Let’s speak next week.’

  This time Nessheim hung up first, still annoyed. It was all very well for Guttman to pooh-pooh the idea that Kalvin was a Bureau informant, but what other explanation was there for the meeting Nessheim had witnessed? And come to think of it, how could Guttman be so confident about the goings-on in his ‘patch’? If Nessheim’s own work for Guttman was being kept secret from Tolson and Hoover, who was to say that two couldn’t play that game? Maybe this Chesterfield guy was working for Hoover.

  9

  ‘IT SAYS HERE, “Intention is not a criterion for determining a Tort.” Why not?’

  Stacey lay on the living-room sofa, a glass of soda on the floor within arm’s reach. Nessheim was in the soft chair, going through his class notes in preparation for the mid-term exam.

  Nessheim said, ‘Intention isn’t always relevant – only the actual action is. You didn’t mean to forget to pay the rent, but that’s not going to wash with the landlord, or with the judge.’

  ‘But it’s relevant in other parts of the law. If I kill you accidentally, I get charged with manslaughter. If I meant to do it, I’m for the chair.’

  ‘Think of Torts as a magnificent exception.’

  Stacey snorted. ‘Some exception. It’s got to be the most boring part of the law.’

  ‘What are you finding interesting?’ he asked, genuinely curious. She wasn’t in any of his other classes, which were required ones, and she hadn’t talked about her other courses either.

  She shrugged.

  ‘Just what else are you taking, Stacey?’

  ‘Military law. Wages and prices regulation.’

  New courses had been rushed in after the war broke out, and were not respected; most of the faculty resented their presence on the curriculum and saw them as a cynical pandering to the government. Nessheim looked at her and shook his head. ‘That’s it? No Jurisprudence. No Constitutional Law? Not even Corporate Organisational?’

  ‘The teachers said I’m doing really well,’ she protested. ‘I’ve caught up all the weeks I missed already. I’ll do okay.’

  ‘I bet you will. Mickey Mouse could pass most of them magna cum laude.’ He regretted this as soon as he’d said it, and watched as her mouth closed, almost protectively, taking the hit of his words. ‘I’m sorry, Stacey. It was a rotten thing to say. I guess mid-terms are getting to me.’

  She nodded, but he sensed he’d hit home. Why was she taking this cockamamie brew of stuff? He wanted to apologise again, but sensed this would only compound the offence.

  She said quietly, ‘Check the chilli, will you?’

  He went back to the kitchen and looked at the stove top. Stacey had commandeered his biggest pot, and after a quick half-hour’s preparation its contents were bubbling nicely: chuck steak, cut in thin strips and first browned in a skillet, tomatoes slowly melting in the heat of their simmering juice, and mar
oon pinto beans. As well as enough chilli powder to rip the lining off a man’s throat.

  Fortunately, Stacey had lugged eight bottles of beer back with her, and he took two out of the fridge now, opened them both and went back into the living room. He put on Ella Fitzgerald and Stacey put her textbook down and they both listened to the record. Then they ate the chilli in the dining room, Nessheim drinking two more beers to dampen the fire raging in his mouth after every forkful. Noticing this, Stacey said lightly, ‘You get used to it, Nessheim. I promise. But next time I’ll tone it down a bit.’

  After dinner he was surprised to find Stacey intent on studying some more. She was deep in the Military Law manual, or so he thought, for without lifting her eyes from the page she said, ‘Nessheim, why is there a gun in your clothes closet?’

  ‘It’s a souvenir from the Bureau.’

  She digested this for a minute. ‘You’re still doing stuff for them, aren’t you?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m a law student, remember? We don’t have enough time to moonlight.’

  She said, ‘Let me know when you want to tell me the truth.’ And she started reading again.

  At eleven they looked at each other, and by silent agreement decided to go to bed. When she joined him there in the dark she was naked, and soon made sure he was too. They made love less frantically than the night before, which reassured him somehow, making him feel that this time was as much about emotion as simple lust. She fell asleep in his arms, and when he tried to disengage she stirred. ‘What?’ she asked sleepily.

  ‘I didn’t mean to wake you up.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said, putting her hand on his chest. He had his own hand under the bedclothes and lay it on her thigh. Her skin was at once so soft yet taut. He knew that she sailed and played tennis and rode bikes and swam.

  ‘Are you always like this these days?’ she asked, but without any hint of complaint. She sounded wide awake now. ‘You’re a parched man who’s found a well. How long has it been?’