He’d learned that sometimes a kind of half-conscious filtering process worked best for him. He could spend hours with a yellow legal pad and pencil, writing down the facts he knew, making links between them, trying to describe the motivations and intentions of the players he encountered – players being the apt word, since he always thought of complicated cases as taking place upon a playing field, or even a double-sized stage. But there were times when this detailed rational process only furthered his confusion, and this was one of them.
He walked back slowly to the Justice Department, his overcoat collar tipped up under his ears. The harsh westerlies blowing now weren’t bringing rain, just a bitter gusting cold that made him wish he’d been sensible enough to wear his old wool overcoat. Isabel wouldn’t have let him leave the house without it. Not for the first time, he missed her mothering of him, something she’d insisted on and he’d accepted, if only to balance the protective role he had assumed during the years of her illness. You’re on your own, he told himself, and though he felt readier for Tolson now, the words ran through his head like a dirge.
Tolson had recently moved office, and was now separated from the Director only by Mrs Gandy and the duo of girls she kept employed typing reports under her demanding spinster’s eye. Tolson’s new office was modest, the size of a travelling rep’s hotel room, and sparsely furnished with only a desk and chairs – for meetings Tolson used the conference room across the hall where the weekly Executives Conference was held. Unlike Hoover, Tolson had the drapes pulled back; a fresh-air fetishist, he kept the window open a good six inches even in November, which provided a chill counterpoint to the overheating radiators.
‘You been travelling?’ Tolson asked curtly. Guttman tried not to show his surprise; he had expected the usual enquiries after his health.
‘Just to New York. Family stuff.’
‘Anything new up there with Sebold?’
‘No. He’s still broadcasting, and the Nazis seem to be buying it.’
‘You ever think of sending him back in?’
‘How’s that?’
‘Like he was still operating as a spy. He could try and make contact with sympathisers. That sort of thing.’
‘How would that work?’ Tolson had spent about three weeks total in the field – in Buffalo, New York, a decade before. At times like this, his inexperience showed.
Tolson shrugged. ‘Undercover.’
‘We both know the Director’s view.’
‘That didn’t stop you before.’ He looked at Guttman with apparent sympathy.
‘Once bitten, twice shy. It worked that time – as you know. But I don’t think I’d want to try it again.’
‘Nessheim used a Kraut name, didn’t he? Ross-something.’
‘Rossbach,’ Guttman said flatly. He didn’t understand what Tolson was getting at, but he didn’t like it.
‘That’s right. How is our ballplayer these days?’
‘Beats me. Not playing ball, that’s for sure.’
Tolson pushed a paperweight along the desk with one hand, then back with the other. Guttman watched it dully; it was a winter scene, with a little church in the middle. As it moved along the desktop the snowflakes whirled, obscuring the steeple.
‘The reason I ask,’ said Tolson, his eyes on the paperweight, ‘is that if you don’t know what Nessheim’s up to, somebody else does. Otherwise, why is he back on the payroll?’
Guttman kicked himself. How stupid to fall into a classic Tolson trap. The benevolent pleasantry, the meandering comment, and then bam! – the trap closed tight, teeth sharp and lethal. That’s why people underestimated Tolson at their peril. Where Hoover sat remotely atop the organisation, protecting it from without, Tolson guarded the regime with assiduous viciousness from within. He possessed a hound’s fine nose for detecting any deviation from the company line, and with Tolson in place, there was never any credible chance of a coup.
Guttman sat silently for a minute, looking at the photographs Tolson kept on the top of a glass cabinet set against the side wall. When Tolson did this the trick was to stay calm; not to stutter or protest or too obviously prevaricate. So he stared at a picture of the young Tolson in football uniform – who looked singularly stupid with his leather helmet on, his uniform pristine.
‘That is down to me,’ Guttman said at last, turning his eyes to meet Tolson’s unbenevolent gaze. ‘Payroll messed up when Nessheim left – they owed him four weeks’ salary. I tried to sort it out, but half the bookkeepers seem to be signing up. Finally, I just threw up my hands, and put him back on payroll for a month. He’ll be off by Christmas.’
‘Is he doing anything for the money?’
Guttman shook his head. ‘No, it’s due him, like I said. He’s in law school now. It’s what he always wanted.’
‘So you’ve seen the guy? He’s happy?’
‘He was here in the summer. That’s when he resigned.’ Guttman told himself this was the truth. Just not all of it. He needed a diversion fast; fortunately, Grant in Princeton could provide just that. ‘Listen, I’ve found something out that could be important.’
‘Yeah?’ Tolson’s interest was piqued.
Guttman decided to keep the late Arthur Perkins out of his account, since that would only lead back to Nessheim. He was thinking on his feet, wanting to divert Tolson with a spiel that would lead the man anywhere except Chicago and Nessheim. He took a deep breath and started talking fast. ‘You remember the State Department guy who was murdered in Rock Creek Park?’ Thornton Palmer, an improbable Communist – born to wealth, a graduate of Yale – who had come to Guttman out of a mix of guilt for betraying his country, and hope that Guttman could clear his name and protect him. Guttman had not been able to do either.
‘That was when you went hunting for spies all on your little lonesome,’ Tolson said sourly.
Guttman ignored this. ‘And Palmer led me to Sedgwick, that banker in New York who was channelling funds for the Russian Embassy.’
‘Sedgwick bumped himself off, if I remember.’
‘That’s right. The Boss thought I’d hounded him to death.’
‘You probably did. So what about it?’
‘Both Palmer and Sedgwick said there was a third guy they knew who had also been recruited. A scientist at Princeton.’
‘Yeah,’ said Tolson, pointedly non-committal.
‘Well, I may have found him.’
‘Oh?’ Tolson did not sound enthusiastic.
‘His name is Grant. He’s still at Princeton.’
‘And still a Red, I suppose?’
‘Who knows? But I intend to find out. It means we’ve identified the whole spy ring now. All three of them.’
Tolson shrugged. ‘Two of them are dead.’
‘Grant’s not.’
‘But you’re not sure he’s active any more. That means he’s never going to see the inside of a slammer.’
‘He should.’
‘What harm can he do now?’
This was truer than Tolson could know. On the other hand, if Grant had made it to Chicago … Guttman said spiritedly, ‘What harm does any spy do? He can pass any secret information he lays his hands on to the Russians, that’s what he can do.’
‘Our allies, you mean. What secrets would they like? It’s not as if we have a secret weapon at our disposal. I think everybody would be happy to give them “secrets” if it helped them push the Nazis back …’ Tolson scratched his forehead for a moment. ‘I don’t get you, Guttman. The Nazis are all over Europe, they’re slaughtering the Jews, and you’re hunting down some Red who’s teaching in the Ivy League. I don’t get it at all.’
Out of the blue, unbidden, and spoken before he knew what he was saying, Guttman said, ‘Ask T.A. – maybe he would understand.’
Tolson stared at him. When he spoke, his voice was cold, unrattled. ‘You want to explain yourself?’
‘T.A.’s a bright guy, that’s all.’ This sounded lame even to Guttman. ‘He majored in Political Sc
ience, I thought.’
‘Fine Arts, actually,’ Tolson said flatly. He stared at Guttman with bloodless eyes. ‘Anything else you got in that weird head of yours?’ When Guttman didn’t reply, Tolson said, ‘I didn’t think so. Meeting’s over.’
Back in his office there was no sign of Marie. Most of his own files were kept in her anteroom; the most confidential he kept in a two-drawer steel box behind his desk. He went to that now and took his key chain from his pocket, where the key he wanted now sat anonymously among those for his car, front door, back door, garage, and Maryland beach house which, since Isabel’s death, he no longer rented. He opened the top drawer, found a file, then wrote down the case number, which sat like damning evidence on the memo he had sent the Director two years before.
He had just grabbed his coat again when Marie came back. ‘I’ll be out for a bit,’ he told her. ‘Not sure when I’ll get back, so don’t stay on for me, okay?’
She looked at him questioningly. ‘Everything okay, Harry? I mean, was it all right with Tolson?’
‘Same old stuff,’ he said dismissively. ‘Listen, my cousin’s in town. I need to see her before she goes back to New York. I don’t think she realises how sick my mother is.’
Marie nodded, and Guttman went out, satisfied she had bought his lie. He didn’t want Marie involved. If it all blew up, he didn’t know if he could save her from Tolson’s vengeance, but he’d do his best, including not compromising her now.
He went out of the building into a watery wintry light he usually associated with the dread months immediately following Christmas. Christmas: soon the lights would be up on the stores, and each night’s drive through Georgetown’s M Street would remind him of the holiday’s approach. Annie would be going to Vermont, she had said, a further stage in her reconciliation with her parents there. He doubted he would be bothered to cook a Christmas dinner for one.
On his way east, he passed the Capitol, without noting it. Usually he felt a persisting thrill to be working among the major monuments of his country, but today his sense of threat was starting to overwhelm him. To take on a case he wasn’t convinced was real was bad enough; to find it then leading to unexpected targets was worse. But he was making progress. Or doing a brilliant job of fooling himself.
18
ANTRIM WAS AN irreverent man in an organisation built upon reverence, a lover of crosswords who had a phenomenal memory, and was known to everyone as Ant. Out of curiosity Guttman had once consulted the Personnel file where he learned that Antrim’s first name was Reginald – but he wouldn’t have dreamed of using it. Antrim had clashed with Louis B. Nichols repeatedly over the years, and when Nichols had solidified his grip over the entire Records division once war broke out, he must have consigned Antrim to this semi-exile in the Armory.
‘Well, well,’ Ant said now, not unfriendly, ‘if it isn’t a big cheese. What can I do for you, Harry?’ He stood behind a counter that looked virtually identical to the one back at Justice, and he pushed the sign-in book towards Guttman.
Guttman ignored it and held up a slip of paper. ‘I got a couple of case numbers here – I wanted to have a look at the files.’
‘Do you mind giving me a few minutes? I’m on a job for the Director himself, and I’m short of staff today – Mary Ann has got flu.’
‘I’m a little pushed, Ant. What do you say I come through and get the boxes myself?’
‘You think you can find them?’ Antrim liked to think of himself as the sole master of the FBI’s Byzantine filing system.
‘I’ll manage. I’ve had lessons from the best, remember?’ said Guttman. Antrim made a show of scoffing, but Guttman could tell he was flattered.
‘Are they recent files?’
‘Within the last five years.’
‘Okay, be my guest then. Give a yell if you can’t find anything. The files from ’35 on start at about the forty-yard line.’
‘What?’
‘You’ll see.’ Antrim pointed to a door. ‘Through there.’
Guttman went through a pair of swing doors and found himself in one corner of the Armory’s enormous interior hall, the space of a football field with room for bleachers to boot. The ceiling was a good eighty feet above the ground, and lamps dangled down on cords from the exposed steel rafters, though natural light was also supplied through cathedral-style windows at the Armory’s far end.
This would have been the parade ground for the National Guard and any permanent military units stationed in the city. Now it had been given over to the Bureau. Roughly half the space was taken by row after row of drawer-filled wooden cabinets, the height of a grown man. The other half of the floor, closest to him, held rows of tables, with a desk lamp and metal office chair at every available space. Most were occupied, and here FBI technicians and clerks processed, filed and searched through the world’s largest collection of fingerprints.
He remembered Antrim’s directions, and figured if the fifty-yard line was halfway down, the forty-yard line would be two or three rows of carrels further along. Sure enough, he found the case files for the late 1930s beginning at Row C, and walked slowly along.
The files were held in Manila cardboard boxes, stored vertically with labels on their spines which showed the case number, case name (known as a Ghost) and the serial numbers of the documents held within. Complicated cases had more than one file box; Guttman remembered one investigation that claimed an entire shelf in the Justice Department building. Inside the boxes, stuck to the inner side of each cover, was a lined page held down by thick brown glue which had usually seeped out from the corners before drying. Anyone consulting the file was meant to sign this page, with their department and the date they looked at the file.
For the Dreilander case, there were three boxes, although Guttman was confident that there were others, placed by Helen Gandy in Hoover’s personal archive. One of the trio he found now was subtitled ‘Rossbach’, and two people had signed the lined page inside. The first was Tolson – it read ‘C. A. TOLSON’ in block capitals, followed by the signature Guttman knew well: ‘Clyde Anderson Tolson’, written in a sweeping flourish. Tolson was proud of his middle name, and for a while Bureau smart alecs had called him ‘Andy’ behind his back.
Tolson had examined the file during the previous year; in fact, almost exactly eleven months before: ‘December 17, 1941’. Guttman remembered the chaos in the days after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Both Tolson and Hoover had ignored warnings that the Japanese would strike. Was this why Tolson had looked up the Rossbach file then – ten days after Pearl Harbor, when Nessheim was back in LA after actually witnessing the Hawaiian debacle from the cell of a navy stockade? Had Tolson been scrambling for any ammunition to excuse his and Hoover’s negligence? It seemed the likeliest explanation.
Guttman opened the box, dimly remembering its contents and expecting to find the summary he had written when the case was officially closed. That should be here, along with reports from Nessheim, and transcribed accounts of conversations with principals in the case – including Palmer, the dead diplomat, and Sedgwick, the dead banker. Guttman wondered what else he would find.
The answer was nothing. The box was empty; someone had scooped the contents clean. The second signatory? But the handwriting there was an indecipherable scrawl, as were the date and department.
He recrossed the floor and went through the little doorway into the atrium where Ant was still standing.
‘Thanks, Ant,’ Guttman called out with a wave.
‘You didn’t sign the book.’ Antrim looked at Guttman, with drawn eyes, and Guttman looked back at him neutrally.
‘I get it,’ Antrim declared at last. ‘Good to see you, Harry. Come see us in Butte any time.’
19
LUNCH HAD BEEN over for an hour, but the smell of deep-fried oysters and fried potatoes wafted through the bar. The proprietor was a beefy man with a wart on one cheek; it seemed to have grown since Guttman’s last visit. With a cloth rag in one hand and a fla
t tin in the other, he was working on the bar top, which was weathered to a deep glow by the rag-rubbed wax applied each day. Near the swing doors leading into the kitchen, a plump woman with curls the colour of a thin and artificial sun was drying glasses with a dish towel while the radio played ‘I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo’. Guttman ordered coffee, added cream in a sloppy slurp when the mug arrived, then took it to wait at a table at the back with a view of the front door.
He didn’t have long to wait. There was a payphone, a two-piece candlestick set positioned on the wall near Guttman. When it rang the owner gave a final rub with his cloth, then ambled down to the end of the bar and answered it. After a moment he looked around, saw Guttman, and put the receiver on the bar. ‘Call for you,’ he said and went back to his waxing.
Guttman stood, then went and picked up the phone. He said a tentative hello into the mouthpiece set into the wall.
‘It sounds pretty quiet, Harry.’ It was Stephenson. ‘The guy who answered the phone knew you right away. Is membership down over there? Maybe the dues are too high.’
‘Wait until the shift’s through next door. You wouldn’t find room to draw breath then.’
Stephenson said, ‘How are you fixed for time, Harry?’
Guttman looked at his watch. It wasn’t yet four o’clock and he wasn’t due for supper at Marie’s until six-thirty. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Why don’t you take a little drive? It’s only ten minutes away.’
‘Why am I doing that?’
‘You’d better come see for yourself. Let me give you directions.’
Sundown was still an hour away, but a low sky of charcoal cloud gave the sky the grey tint of dusk. Guttman put the Buick’s lights on and drove along the river, past warehouses and small factories, then turned north into a working-class neighbourhood of cheap apartments. The land here wasn’t reclaimed but looked it – flat and unattractive, with scrubby trees, and in summer the area was as hot as a malarial swamp. Though now it was cold enough for Guttman to put the heating on in his car.
The Accidental Agent Page 20
