The Sandler Inquiry

by Noel Hynd

  They watched the deck. No reaction at all. The bullet had sailed into the gray expanses over everything. He lowered slightly and fired again on the next crest. Nothing. A third time. Nothing.

  Zenger stood, seeming to brush the dirt and water off himself, secure in the knowledge that the pursuing ship had run out of fuel and was stranded. Perhaps the submarine would wham it on the way home. Why not?

  Thomas lowered his sight dramatically, approaching desperation.

  He fired the first of the last three bullets in the magazine.

  The sailors on the deck and Zenger looked in his direction with suddenness. Perhaps theyd heard the rifle for the first time. The wind had shifted slightly. Instead of blowing from the side it now blew from behind the smaller boat.

  They could hear the noise. And they'd looked below them, hearing the sound of a steel bullet hit the seamless iron hull of the submarine.

  Thomas fired again. A second or two later a large yellow deck light several yards from Zenger seemed to burst and extinguish itself. Now the sailors began to scramble, back toward the hatch which would lead them down and under the deck to safety.

  Zenger stood alone on the deck, looking back as if to inquire indignantly as to who was shooting at him. Never imagining that another shot could come so close.

  A siren sounded on the submarine. A dive signal.

  "He's got us beat'" Leslie cursed.

  Thomas fired again. And missed.

  He felt a sickened sensation in his stomach.

  The siren on the submarine was still audible through the gray mist.

  Thomas glared through the sight at his tormentor. Almost instinctively, Zenger sensed that his opponents had thrown at him their last offensive weapon.

  The master spy stood calmly on the dleck, exhilarated at being shot at and missed, and grinned in their direction.

  Then, with the quintessence of the American gestures that he'd learned over thirty years, the spy raised two hands toward the small boat. Each hand's extremity was marked with a sole upraised center finger, the universal but particularly American gesture of ill will.

  "We're beaten" Thomas mumbled bitterly. He slapped the rifle in a fury.

  "We can't be" she snapped coldly.

  He looked at her in frustration and almost anger. What did she want him to?

  "Try another magazine" she said.

  And disbelievingly she 'held out another steel-cased magazine, six long bullets therein.

  He looked at her and looked at the weapon. He looked at the deck of the submarine.

  Zenger had turned. He walked defiantly and cockily toward the open hatch which would lead him on a fluorescent and air-purified trip to another world, one in which he would be a hero.

  "No way," Thomas Daniels said.

  "He's gone' ' She grabbed the rifle from his hands as an inspecting dill sergeant might. Quickly her hands had torn out the empty magazine, sent it overboard and slammed the full magazine into its place.

  The wind felt the same. The boat eased from its rocking for a few seconds. She braced herself against a cabin wall and held the rifle's butt against her shoulder, quickly bringing the weapon into a perfect firing position. Her movements were precise, practiced, and comfortable.

  Moments later she began firing, aiming not quite so high and not quite as left ward as Thomas had. She pulled the trigger quickly in a rapid succession, firing four, five, and then six shots, trying to spray the area where Zenger was.

  There was a delay of several seconds before any bullet sailed the distance between the rifle and the submarine. Thomas souinted and watched.

  He had no idea which bullet found its mark, whether it was the first or the final. But the fact remained that as Zenger stepped the last few yards to the hatch, the lower half of his skull exploded with the impact of a viciously tumbling bullet.

  The man's body went limp and fell immediately, the red explosion in the back of the head being instantly apparent even at that great distance.

  The gray rain continued to fall.

  Other sailors emerged from the watch, gawking, incredulous at first.

  Thomas and Leslie stared with their naked eyes as three sailors pulled the fallen body toward the hatch.

  Leslie set down the rifle. She had no quarrel with the Russian sailors. They had their duty just as she and Thomas had had their-S.

  The seamen reclaimed a body; Thomas and Leslie had reclaimed a soul, an identity. The body had always belonged to the Soviet Union. The identity? That had been borrowed.

  Leslie picked up a floodlight from the small boaes cabin. The light could be flashed on and off. She blinked an internationally understandable cease-fire signal to them.

  The sailors stood on the deck, working nervously for a few seconds, hoisting the fallen, semi beheaded body by its red shoulders.

  They dragged it below.

  Minutes later the submarine began to move. Thomas and Leslie wondered if it would ram them or sink them; it easily could have.

  But, as if in reciprocation for the voluntary cease-fire and the surrender of the spy's body, the submarine turned east in the ocean. It began moving on the gray surface, pointing away from them, until it was lower on the horizon.

  Then only the periscope was visible, breaking through the waves.

  Then nothing. The ocean was vacant, except for two small pleasure craft, both adrift and powerless. For a moment it was as if the underwater goliath had never been there. Then they felt its wake, rippling from a mile away.

  Leslie sat on a cushioned seat within the cabin, her dark hair soaked and matted, an expression of exhaustion across her face. For her, the long intrigue with her father was over.

  For several seconds, neither spoke.

  Then,

  "Lucky shot" she offered.

  He looked at her, understanding.

  "No, it wasn't."

  There was a pause and he continued.

  "No one makes a shot like that on luck. No one guesses how to fire a rifle with accuracy like that" She nodded and a slight, unwilling smile crossed her face.

  "How long have you known?" she asked.

  "Known?"he answered.

  "For about two minutes. Suspected? For a long time. Ever since I learned you had gulled your own foster father, George McAdam, into thinking you were dead. Where'd you learn it all? From him?"

  She nodded.

  "Learn from the best' she said.

  "George McAdam was one of the best British agents of is day.- "And now I'll bet you're one of the best. But not British. American."

  She shrugged.

  "I try," she answered.

  "It's really the only thing I'm trained to do. Not much money in painting, you know."

  "Would you honor me with an honest answer or two?"

  "Of course."

  "Why me?" he asked.

  She almost laughed.

  "It's not obvious?"

  "Oh, I understand that part" he said.

  "My father was a double agent, recruiting for the Americans while all the time he was working for the Russians. And he headed a postwar network-" '-financed by counterfeit English and American banknotes she continued.

  "A,network which grew old but continued to compromise British and American Intelligence. When William Ward Daniels died, he was just about to be uncovered. He was lucky he died when he did ' "But then why'd you come to me?"he insisted.

  "Because the network was still working very well after his death' she explained.

  "From our perspective it was clear. He'd passed the leadership on to someone else. You."

  Thomas Daniels was without words. The final piece fit neatly into place. He knew the reason he'd been sucked into this treacherous vortex of events: He'd been under observation the entire time, by the American government and by the British government. He was a suspected spy, suspected of inheriting the position from his father. just as William Ward Daniels had probably intended.

  "Of course," she said cheerfully, 'we soo
n saw that we'd been wrong.

  You knew nothing. The ranking spy was someone else. We were totally baffled, but you solved it for us. You led us to Zenger."

  He considered it. The drizzle persisted.

  "What about the money?" he asked.

  "The Sandler estate?"

  "It's yours, isn't it?"

  She shrugged.

  "A fortune built on treason and counterfeiting? I can hardly ask my employer for that now, can I?"

  "No' he mumbled.

  "Of course not" Thoughtfully, he added,

  "So there's really just one final question."

  She knew what it was.

  "Montreal" she said.

  "That part's all true.

  I teach. I'm an artist. It's a fine cover. From time to time I disappear on an assignment, none ever as special as this, though."

  "And there's a man, isn't there?"

  She thought for a moment.

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  "I live with him.

  I love him" He would have said more, though he didn't know exactly what.

  But then suddenly she was looking past him, over his shoulder. She bolted upright and suddenly screamed,

  "Thomas! Jesus!.

  She pointed, her soft fatigued expression exploding into a look of wide-eyed terror.

  He whirled. He saw it, the submarine, rising near them no less than a hundred yards across the water, streaking straight toward them. His mouth flew open, and like most instants of stark, heart stopping fear, the moment seemed frozen in unreality.

  The submarine was going to demolish them. Unmistakably.

  They would have jumped, but there was nowhere to jump to.

  They would have swum, but swimming was suicidal. The water was too cold, the current brutal, the waves enormous.

  The sub steamed in at them. Fifty yards. Thirty.

  Then it bore sharply left ward kicking up a gargantuan wake.

  Thomas realized, thinking, So that's it! Brilliant to the end! They won't smash us, theyt capsize us instead!

  No direct hit on an American ship, merely a deluge of water.

  The submarine, slashing through the surface of the ocean, passed within twenty-five yards and then began diving. A massive wave, followed by another and another, burst forth from the sub's wake and-rising thirty feet in the water-rolled violently toward the small Chris-craft.

  The first wave battered the small boat, the second threw it lopsided up upon its crest. The third wave hit it head-on, propelling it sideways through the water.

  Thomas and Leslie clung to the boat with all the strength they had. He remembered yelling "Hang on! Hang on!" and they did.

  But their boat was on its side now, and the frigid water was still rolling over it, rising steadily.

  Beneath the waves, Thomas thought. Zenger's words raced back.

  Slowly, but inexorably, as the sub dived from sight a final time, their small ship was going down.

  Part Nine

  Chapter 39

  All in all, Aram Shassad was pleased, as pleased as he could be under the circumstances. He and Hearn had made an important collar.

  The case dated back a while, almost a year in fact. Two holdup men had been working out of town, trying out their show in New Haven, when a ballistics test in a Connecticut liquor store linked them to a holdup slaying in Yorkville a year earlier.

  The New Haven police had a lead or two. One gunman's sister, it seemed, lived in New Haven with her three children. She and her kids were scared to death of him and his apparent partner. Some loose talk here and there, and on a warm day in early September 1976 Shassad, Hearn, and six other detectives and uniformed men closed in on an apartment in Brownsville. Months of detective work ended in a mad scramble for pants.

  Then there'd been that other case, the one which Shassad and Hearn had been reassigned to in the interim per io4 while the Yorkville liquor store trail had gone cold.

  The Ryder-Daniels case, as Shassad termed it generically. Shassad thought of it that first Monday after Labor Day when he by chance was driving alone across Eighty-ninth Street.

  He saw a solitary figure on the southeast corner, standing alone, apparently waiting, while a beehive of construction men and equipment surrounded the old Sandler mansion on the opposite corner.

  "Son of a bitch' thought Shassad, pulling his car to a halt alongside a fire hydrant.

  "Daniels' His curiosity overwhelmed him. He parked and stepped out.

  Ryder-Daniels had been one of the most perplexing cases. It was now damned to remain forever in limbo, solved but not really solved, closed but having never reached a satisfactory conclusion.

  Oh, there'd been the token explanation. But Shassad had never liked it all that much. Too pat. Too set. Too… too… Oh, hell.

  He'd put in a lot of hours. He deserved more than seeing two Federal agents one morning in his office way back during a cold stretch of March.

  Rota Films had been a front, they'd explained, as if he couldn't have told them that. A counterfeiting operation, using film cans to smuggle money and plates in and out of the United States. Well, he'd conceded, he'd known they were doing something. But he hadn't known what. As for Mark Ryder, the straying young husband who'd stepped out the wrong door at the wrong moment, the Feds had wrapped that one up for Shassad and Hearn, also. A bad case of a mistaken victim, they'd confirmed. And Shassad had already gotten that far, too.

  But as for the killers, they'd said, Shassad needn't bother anymore.

  The two men had been dealt with, one having been set afloat beneath the Manhattan Bridge, the other having taken a nasty tumble off a Nantucket ferry. All this in confidence, of course, the agents had told the city detectives. The case was all wrapped up and delivered, including that dark-haired young woman. Nothing further for Shassad to do.

  "What about that prick Daniels?" Shassad has asked.

  The question had been met with shrugs.

  "Forget him they'd said.

  "He's in bad shape, anyway."

  And Shassad hadn't seen him again, much less bothered to do anything more than think of him occasionally Not again, that is, until this warm, open morning in September.

  "Hello, Daniels" said Shassad, walking amiably and casually to the man standing alone on the corner.

  "Nothing quite like an old familiar face, is there?"

  Thomas turned toward the voice and saw the detective approaching. For a moment he didn't recognize him. Then he did.

  "Hello, officer," he answered without acrimony.

  Daniels looked back to the house. He watched. Shassad stood next to him and eyed the large crane in place beside the old structure across the street.

  "I know it's not important anymore' Shassad tried cautiously, 'but I'm a curious sort of guy.

  "What's that mean?"

  "It means I never really got more than half a story. You. Some girl.

  The Sandlers. A boat." He paused, hoping Thomas would expand on it.

  When Daniels didn't,. Shassad tried,

  "I'd be grateful for whatever you could tell me. Hell. I'd just like to know. To scratch my own itch."

  Thomas could feel the sun's warmth. It was going to be a hot day, he could tell already, one of those misplaced summer days which arrive too late each year. One breeze did sweep across Eighty-ninth, rustling a few leaves which had prematurely fallen.

  "Well?" Shassad asked.

  "Come on. Give me a break There was so much, really, and it was all shooting through Daniels's mind. Primarily there had been the frigid water, that's what he was thinking of now. There had been the titanic wake from the submarine, the swamping of their small craft and his own mad flailing and floundering through the turbulent, freezing water toward the only thing afloat Zenger's boat, the one he'd rode in out to his rendezvous point.

  He remembered the panic as he looked through the waves, losing sight of Leslie.

  Then, as his arms and legs started going numb from the cold, he'd reach
ed Zenger's abandoned boat and -shivering and chattering his teeth -had blasted the boat horn to attract her, wherever she was. And just a few seconds later, he remembered, he was buckling to the floorboards, exhausted and overexposed, shivering in what was the advent of a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. Moments later, attracted by the horn, she'd climbed aboard beside him, and had collapsed to the floor with him.

  An hour afterward a Coast Guard cutter-attracted by something large and unidentifiable on its radar screen -had come upon them in the drifting boat. He'd been in no condition to explain anything. Not for a while.

  Leslie was whisked away by a man named Lassiter from Washington. Thomas hadn't seen her again.

  Shassad sighed and was almost about to leave.

  "Okay, Daniels," he said.

  "Have it your way. Don't tell me" There was movement on the crane across the street. The yellow sun glistened off its metal.

  "It all revolved around the girl Daniels said. Shassad froze, knowing when to listen. "A girl in the Sandler family. Sort of."

  Daniels glanced at the detective as if he hardly cared whether Shassad knew or not. He was speaking out of a therapeutic need to talk.

  Nothing more. Shassad knew it and listened.

  "A remarkable woman" Daniels said.

  "Bright. Perceptive. Educated. Could be ruthless, "could be sensitive. She could do a lot of things" He thought.

  "Know what she would do best?"

  "What?"

  "Teach. She taught me that I should get out of law."

  "Oh, yeah?" pondered Shassad.

  "What're you going to do instead?"

  "Who knows?" Thomas Daniels answered. Then he exclaimed, "Look!"

  Daniels gazed across the street and so did Shassad. The towering crane was moving now, and suspended from the tallest extremity was the bulbous iron wrecking ball.

  The ball crashed into the wall of the mansion, hitting it solidly on the cross town side and caving in the old walls as a gingerbread cake would crumble to a little girl's hands.

  The ball swung away and a gaping wound was evident in the side of the house. Girders and rusting pipes were revealed and seemed like a skeleton beneath the mansion's flesh. Then the ball swung again, hit, and swung countless times more. No one bled much for an old building on a prime corner lot; not when a white-faced luxury high rise could soon be erected in its place.