“What the hell am I s’pposed to be doing in Iceland?”
“Who cares? Point is, Bureau can’t check to see if you’re actually there.”
“So when they see me at H & H, they’ll know me as Ted Barston. They dig into my background, I’ll still be Barston—as long as Seven-R did their job right.”
“Right.”
“They’re gonna go to my flat and talk to my landlord—he’s gonna tell—”
“We’re on it, don’t worry. Bright and early, before the Bureau can figure out who Ellis Voigt is, me and Paslett are gonna swing by and have a little chat with your landlord—what’s his name?”
“Kleist.”
“Kleist. He’s a Kraut, right?”
I nodded.
“By the time Paslett gets through with him, he’s not gonna dare breathe a word to the Bureau except to sing the song we give him about how you’re in Iceland.”
“Think it’ll work?” I asked, still doubtful.
“Abso-fucking-lutely, no doubt in my mind.” Terrance tossed his butt out the window. “Hey, what’d you get outta that receptionist you’re banging? You said something juicy, right?”
“Aw, it’s nothing,” I answered. “Just a rumor about Silva’s boyfriends—I gotta check it out before I report anything.”
CHAPTER 18
I DIDN’T TELL TERRANCE THAT LOGAN SKERRILL HAD DATED NADINE Silva not because I didn’t trust my partner, but because I didn’t want him to tell Paslett, not yet. I knew the commander, I knew he’d want to beat the Bureau at their own game by nabbing the cell at H & H first. He’d start bulldogging me, pushing me, damn the risks, to bring in evidence of espionage and how Skerrill had fit in.
Which raised an awfully important question: What, exactly, was Himmel’s cell up to? The F.B.I.’s monitoring of Silva confirmed the ranting of the malodorous Griffin Crieve that Himmel, a.k.a. Pavel Nevelskoi, was a Russian spy, aided by Greene and Silva. Crieve had disparaged Himmel, calling him an “ink-stained vulture” who had accomplished nothing. Yet Crieve had also told me he was surprised the Bureau hadn’t as yet swept up the Russian and his two lapdogs.
Why not? If the Bureau knew Nevelskoi was using an alias, agents could arrest him on trumped-up immigration charges and hold him indefinitely while they grilled him, pressing him to give up his co-conspirators and tell all. The Russian embassy would protest, but not too hard, because if Nevelskoi did crack, he’d have to be disowned. That toad Hoover loved getting headlines like Red Spy Ring Nabbed! So why hadn’t the Bureau made its move yet?
John Edgar must want to catch Himmel red-handed, I realized—to grab hard evidence of what Himmel’s ring was passing to the Russians. The Bureau didn’t know the details, but it knew Himmel’s cell was into something big and that time was running out to nail them. Agents were watching Silva, probably Greene and Himmel, too—zilch again. Now the Bureau knew O.N.I. had joined the fox hunt, and John Edgar would do everything he could—and I’d not as yet seen any limits on his everything—to throw us off the scent. But that was Paslett’s problem, not mine. I was in the cell, and the Bureau didn’t know that. If the commander and my partner’s plan worked, if they were able to “send” me to Iceland, then I could bore deeper into the cell, undetected.
At the Funhouse, we were trained to think about unknowns second—always start with what is known. Known facts, known facts, an officer had yelled at us, and we’d repeated the phrase in unison, like novitiates learning a sacrament. What you know will point you to what you need to know, he’d finished. To date, these were my known facts. One, Himmel’s cell was a spy ring. Two, Logan Skerrill had dated one of Himmel’s spies, Nadine Silva. Three, the Bureau knew about the spy ring, but it didn’t know what the espionage was. Four, Skerrill had been assigned to the Bermuda Special, the hush-hush trip made by one of our destroyers last fall. The possible connections between these four facts pointed me toward what I needed to know. If I learned what the Bermuda Special had done, and what Skerrill’s part had been; if I discovered how much Skerrill knew about Silva and what he’d told her, then I’d likely know why he’d been killed. And once I knew the why, I could figure out the who. I’d strung a lot of ifs from the tails of my known facts, but at least I now knew what I must do, as Ted Barston, in order to render all those ifs into facts. Starting with Nadine Silva, the Red Queen of K Street.
I WOKE UP ON MY COT AT THE JEFFERSON CLUB FROM A FITFUL SLEEP, fraught with unsettling dreams, vividly remembered. Delphine watching me mutely from a tavern’s dim corner, F.B.I. agents hovering around me, Terrance laughing and drinking as I sat alone in a distant booth, Franklin D. pacing the table, mewling at me. I washed up in the stinking bathroom at the end of the hall, wondering why I was bothering, and walked to the Automat on F Street to get breakfast. Scrounging a few nickels from my pocket, I bought a Danish, an apple, and coffee. The place was packed, but I found a spot at a table with three construction workers wolfing down ham sandwiches and cherry pie. The chair’s last occupant had left behind that morning’s Times-Herald, so I caught up with all the news I’d missed the last few days. Easy to forget there was a war still on, Ted Barston took so much of my attention. The Seventh Army had taken Munich, the Navy was planning fresh operations close to the Jap home islands. Hirohito was still going ahead with a public appearance at a shrine for the war dead, or so the Japs were reporting. Plenty more to add to that shrine, I thought.
Philip Greene shot over as soon as I entered H & H, interrupting my Hiya, Miss Miriam!
“Barston, we need you to get going pronto this morning,” he huffed, thrusting the clipboard with the delivery manifest into my hands.
“Awright, awright, keep your pants on.” I winked at Miriam, who suppressed a giggle.
Need to do something special for her, I thought as I followed Greene to the storeroom. Buy her some cosmetics, to show I remembered her beauty-school dream? Not Barston’s style, though. He was more likely to filch flowers from a cemetery. One way or another, I needed to keep Miriam talking about Silva and Skerrill.
Greene pointed to a precipitously leaning stack of boxes. “Here’s today’s delivery,” he announced.
“All a’dat?”
“Yes, and everything needs to reach our clients by one, so get going. Make sure you distribute the weight evenly in the back seat and trunk, I just had the rear springs repaired last fall.”
“Maybe you oughta help me load up den, hey?”
“Oh no, I’m much too busy this morning. Besides, loading is the deliveryman’s job.”
It sure is, I thought as I roughly tossed the heavy boxes into the back of Greene’s car, noting with satisfaction the creaks and pops of the rear springs. Before I got going, I put my discharge certificate in Himmel’s inbox—if Silva wanted to see it, she could ask him.
The manifest spelled out the expected time of the deliveries, which were scattered all over town. To stay on schedule, I had to hustle. Went to a law office way up Connecticut Avenue, then to a hole-in-the-wall office in Southeast called the Anacostia Recording Company. Delivered two boxes to a Georgetown University sociology professor who kept me five minutes to complain about how the draft had taken his best graduate students.
How to get at Silva? I wondered as I yanked a parking ticket (second of the day) from underneath Greene’s windscreen wiper and tossed the citation into a curbside trash can. Any attempt to ask about her personal life would set off klaxons—she’d make me as a mole. I could only pump so much out of Miriam before that well went dry. Anyway, Silva didn’t like or trust Miriam, so I doubted she had ever confided in her about dating Skerrill. Had Silva kept a trinket of the relationship, had she failed to erase all traces of the late, not-so-great Logan Skerrill? Only one way to find out, I decided—I needed to toss Silva’s flat.
But the last delivery distracted me from planning my break-in. Joseph Charles was the recipient listed on the manifest, and Silva herself had written his name on the envelope; I recognized her stately cursive. An obvio
us pseudonym (two first names, very sloppy), but the address was even more suspicious. 2111 Florida Avenue NW turned out to be a Quaker church, or Friends Meeting House, as a modest sign in the tiny yard announced. With its gabled roof and flagstone walls, the meeting house looked more like a wealthy family’s residence than a place of worship—perhaps it once was. I walked in, feeling uncertain and conspicuous. Was I supposed to find the sexton and ask for Joseph Charles? Wait for someone to acknowledge me? The nave was airy and bright, sunlight streaming through paned windows. In an unusual arrangement, two sections of pews faced one another, separated by a wide aisle. I vaguely remembered that Quakers didn’t have preachers, that congregations sat in silence until an inner light or spirit moved them to speak. My inner light was flashing red—I might as well have come in with a bull’s-eye pinned to my shirt. The vast room was empty, every step I took creaked on the ancient wooden floorboards. In the rear, a staircase led to a mezzanine and tiered balconies with more pews, an ideal vantage from which to observe someone undetected. Was this the setup I’d feared on my first day as Ted Barston, deliveryman? I told myself that Himmel wouldn’t dare arrange a hit in a church—imagine the headlines!—but who knew, maybe the Reds had gotten to the Quakers, too.
I slipped into a pew beneath the mezzanine, so at least I couldn’t be seen from it, and stood stock-still. If I couldn’t move without making noise, then no one else present could, either. I scanned the balcony like a hawk, looking for a hidden figure. Nothing. The nave remained quiet, but I couldn’t stay in the shadows much longer without looking suspicious. Heart pounding, I stepped into the aisle and called out, “Hey, I got a delivery for Joseph Charles. Anybody here?”
No response. Could I just leave the envelope? I wondered. But every recipient had to sign the manifest. If I returned without Joseph Charles’s signature, Silva might fire me. Maybe she was setting me up, trying to get rid of me for botching a delivery. That didn’t seem right—too complicated. Just as I was about to call out again, a windowless door in the rear of the nave opened and a middle-aged man in a rumpled charcoal gray business suit strode out.
“Yes, yes, that’s for me, sorry to keep you waiting.” He tried a disarming smile, but it was ninety-eight percent nervous, a cat’s whisker away from twitching. He had soft features: round cheeks, indistinct chin, fleshy eyelids. His thinning brown hair was combed back from a broad forehead.
“Pastor Charles?” I asked.
“Oh no, I’m not the pastor here, I just—well, I help out the Friends now and then.”
Feigning boredom, I handed over the envelope and held out the clipboard, pointing at the signature line. He scribbled illegibly.
“Have a nice—”
“Oh wait, I have something for you,” he interrupted, reaching into the inside pocket of his suit coat. I thought I’d checked my flinch, but fright must have shown in my face, for his own eyes widened for an instant before he looked away. He’s just as afraid! I thought as he handed me an unmarked, sealed envelope. “That’s for Mister Himmel,” he said.
“I’ll make sure he gets it, sir. Have a nice day.”
“Yes, thank you, thanks very much. And, uh—you have a nice day, too!” With that, he turned and practically scurried to the door he’d come out of.
I left by the front and got into Greene’s Ford. Whoever Joseph Charles was, he wasn’t a friend of the Friends, otherwise he wouldn’t have said I’m not the pastor here. Yet he knew enough about the meeting house to know it would be empty at this time, just before one o’clock. That’s why the delivery times were spelled out on my manifest. But if Himmel had given the instructions, why had Charles been so nervous?
I nosed the Ford around the corner and watched Charles get into a late-thirties Plymouth parked behind the meeting house. He swung out onto S Street, going east. I let him get two blocks ahead, then fell in behind. Tailing him was a big risk, but I wanted to find out who Joseph Charles really was, and I wanted to take a peek at the envelope he’d given me. I needed to do both within the hour, because if I wasn’t back before two, Silva wouldn’t believe my lie that I’d taken a lunch break after the last delivery.
CHAPTER 19
CHARLES WAS EASY TO FOLLOW. HE HEADED NORTH ON CONNECTICUT Avenue and drove just under the speed limit, passing only a slow-moving truck, letting the traffic flow around him. I stayed several car-lengths behind, also leaving plenty of space between my car and other vehicles, so that I could make a sudden turn if needed. But I got lucky. A half block north of Tilden, Charles turned left into the National Bureau of Standards campus. I drove by and parked in the half-circle driveway of a towering apartment hotel for a few minutes, resisting the urge to open the envelope on the passenger seat. First Charles, then the goods, I told myself. I quick-dragged an Old Gold, tucked the envelope under the passenger seat, then pulled into the southbound lanes of Connecticut and made the same turn Charles had.
The campus, more than a hundred acres in size, was as crowded and cluttered as the patch of tempos on the Mall. Some of the buildings were several decades old, constructed of brick, with tall, airy windows; but the majority of the structures were made of wood and were clearly meant to be temporary, lacking basements and decorative features. Several laboratories seemed to be converted airplane hangars. Terrance and I had once come to the campus as part of an investigation of a crooked Navy Yard machinist who was substituting inferior lenses in binoculars so he could sell the real McCoy on the black market. Even though we were wearing uniforms, Terrance and I had been required to present our O.N.I. identification cards to an armed civilian guard. The National Bureau of Standards sounded like a snooze of a government agency, but its responsibilities included calibrating the ideal gram weight for gunpowder, determining the tensile strength of parachutes, and perfecting Kenotron rectifier tubes for radios. It wasn’t possible to count the number of military secrets locked away on this campus, there were so many. That’s why there were guards, that’s why Ted Barston wasn’t getting past the gate. But I didn’t need access—I just needed a name.
I braked to a stop next to the sentry box and rolled down my window. The guard started to address me but I cut him off.
“I gotta talk ta Joseph Charles—he works here.”
“Who?” His eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Fella in a Plymouth, he’s wearing a suit, he probably got here a little while ago? I made a delivery ta him but dare’s been some kinda screw-up, so I—”
He leaned over the sill. “Look, pal, you’ve made some kinda mistake.”
“S’my stupid boss who’s made da mistake. Look here”—I thrust the clipboard at him—“you see dat signature? Joseph Charles, it says. He was my last delivery, but my boss is saying I didn’t make it, dat I forged dat signature. So I gotta have dis Charles call my goddamned boss ta tell him he got da package.”
“How did you know this Charles was coming here?”
The guard was sharper than I’d expected. But in for a dime, in for a dollar.
“He told me! Said he was late for work here and it was my fault, even d’ough I got ta his place right when I was supposed ta.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to take it up with your boss,” he said firmly, watching me closely, waiting for me to ask to see his clipboard. If I did that, he’d call for more guards so I could be detained and questioned—ruses at the gate were old, old spy tricks.
“Look, can’t you just check ta see if anyone named Joseph Charles has come in here today?” Before he could say no, I added plaintively, “Look, chief, I can’t lose dis job—I got Four-F’d ’cause I got dis heart murmur—goddamned doctors won’t even clear me ta work in a factory or nuttin’. At least if you check, I can tell my boss I tried ta find da guy.”
“Awright, lemme look.”
As he turned to take his clipboard from a hook in the wall, I tilted the rearview mirror to catch the sill of the sentry box. Just as I’d hoped, he set the clipboard down as he scanned the names. I followed his gaze down to
the last entry, marked 1:11 P.M.
He looked up. “Nope, no Joseph Charles.”
I thanked him, cursed my imaginary boss one more time, and backed the Ford up. The guard had told the truth: no one named Joseph Charles had entered the National Bureau of Standards campus at 1:11. But Dr. Taylor Nagel had.
WITH NAGEL’S NAME, TERRANCE COULD NOW RUN A FULL BACKGROUND check. He was damned good at mining the files, directories, and records that bless each of us with official existence. Educational accomplishments, legal transgressions; licenses to drive, marry, and open a business; births and baptisms; debts, divorces, foreclosures: Dr. Taylor Nagel might be a spy, but he was a citizen, too, and the paper traces of a life lived so far had to be substantial.
I drove south on Connecticut and pulled into the National Zoo’s entrance to examine the envelope Nagel had given me. The driveway was expansive and lined by shade trees; as long as I stayed in the car, looking like a joe picking up his wife and kid, no one would bother me. The envelope was white, standard-sized, and free of all markings other than Charles’s hastily scribbled signature across the flap. I’d have no trouble buying an envelope exactly like it at a stationery store or druggist’s, no trouble forging the signature. Which meant it didn’t matter how I opened the envelope.
I tore off the flap and tapped out a sheet of pale blue graph paper folded in three. With the chatter of monkeys and the gleeful shouts of kids carrying from the primates’ enclosure, I stared at a perfectly ordinary picture that made no sense: in crisp, straight blue-pen lines, an outline of two one-room buildings with flat roofs and thick walls. Like a mirror image, the structures were side-by-side and exactly alike, except for the interiors. The first building contained a large square marked radio; the second, a rectangle labeled transmitter. Neither structure had windows, save for two small portals set into the facing exterior walls. A thick pencil circle around the portals was labeled sheathing. The only other marking was above the radio: 10/1m, it read, with three wavy lines floating above.
The Dead Don't Bleed: A Novel Page 15
