An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen

by Liz Freeland

  “I remember you.” He pushed his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose. “You’re the one who got into that mess at the Woolworth Building last year.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, standing rigidly at attention. “Officer Louise Faulk.”

  “I had my doubts about you—obviously I was right. Good policewomen don’t end up being hauled in by the Secret Service,” the captain said in clipped tones. “We’ve never even had a policeman brought here.” He narrowed his eyes on me. “You’d better have a good excuse for this.”

  Halloran came forward. “Officer Faulk explained the circumstances to me, Captain, and if her story is all true, we think there is a way we could use her.”

  My knees practically went noodly with relief, until Smith voiced his reply.

  “That’s fortunate. Officer Faulk might soon be at liberty to work for you on a permanent basis.”

  I winced . . . although the word might did allow for some hope. I started to speak, but Smith raised his hand, palm out, to stop me, like a traffic cop. “When I want to hear from you, Faulk, I’ll ask you a direct question.”

  He then demanded Halloran go over the afternoon’s events—starting with the account of my day, my observations, right through to the moment they picked me up. I could have told him what he wanted to know much more succinctly, but Captain Smith was old-fashioned, and would always listen to a higher rank before a lower one, and to a man before a woman. And of course Operatives Halloran and Luft were no longer the flippant jokesters they’d been with me. I bit my tongue, seethed, and worried.

  On one hand, things didn’t look good for me. But I felt energized by the fact that Halloran had said he could use me. How?

  When Halloran was done, Smith finally turned back to me.

  “So, Officer Faulk, you undertook this little investigation on your own, without telling any of your colleagues at your precinct.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t like independence in an officer.”

  “It’s fortunate for us that she found trouble,” Halloran interrupted. “As long as she’s at Das Auge, what she discovers there might be of use to us. We would like someone to trace the people who come and go there, and see if there is a subversive group congregating at those offices, or if any codes are being worked into the paper. If we can keep her there with the NYPD’s blessing, so much the better.”

  “How long would this operation last?” Captain Smith asked.

  “With her watching from inside the newspaper, a week or less should be sufficient to let us know if there’s anything we should be concerned with.”

  Smith frowned over steepled fingertips. “We’ll have to think of an excuse for taking her out of Thirtieth Street.”

  I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. “I could be escorting a female prisoner to Albion Prison.” The fictional trip upstate would explain a few days’ absence.

  Percival Smith’s bushy iron-gray brows climbed into his forehead, as if a chair had turned sentient and piped up with a suggestion. I worried I was about to be verbally slapped down, but he said, “Well, as long as you’re offering ideas out of turn, at least they’re sensible ones.”

  The comment was as close to a compliment from him as I would likely ever receive.

  The men conferred on strategy. If I hadn’t been so elated at the prospect of an interesting assignment before me, it would’ve been more irksome to hear myself talked about as if I were a piece on a chessboard. But I was too focused on the job ahead to get angry. In fact, it was hard not to fall to my knees in relief. Not only had I escaped a charge of treason, I was going to be placed into an official secret assignment. With the NYPD’s blessing.

  CHAPTER 19

  The next morning, a remade Johann greeted me with kuchen he’d bought at the bakery down the street. “To celebrate your second day.”

  The stark difference between Johann today and the Johann of yesterday? Grooming. His shirt and collar were white, relatively unstained, and stiff with starch, and his coat and pants appeared to have been pressed. A trip to the barber had also occurred since I’d seen him last. Gone was the whiskery shadow on his jaw and cheeks, and his hair was trimmed and slicked back. The pungent odor of witch hazel with an undercurrent of pine—that fresh-from-the-barber-chair olfactory hallmark—wafted my way when he moved closer.

  “You smell nice,” I said.

  He stuffed an oversized piece of kuchen into his mouth to cover his self-consciousness. His full cheeks made him look like a well-fed squirrel. “Passed by a barber’s this morning,” he said through his mouthful.

  Passed by a barber, passed by a bakery. This couldn’t be all a coincidence.

  I bit into a piece of the cake. Crumbly, buttery, and drizzled with sugar over the top. Not my usual breakfast, but who was complaining? “Delicious. Thank you.”

  Another difference was that Johann wasn’t quite as gregarious as he’d been the day before. I wondered if he’d simply run out of things to talk about and show me. I did my best to accomplish the tasks at hand. I typed, cleaned, rearranged piles of papers. Again, various people appeared, dropped off stories, and left, and I discreetly logged names, times, and descriptions. I kept my eyes open for anything shady going on, for money changing hands, and most of all, for the Skipper to come back. This evening I would copy my list of observations for Operative Halloran, whom I would meet the evenings following my every-other-morning tête-à-têtes with Holger Neumann.

  I paid close attention to the articles I was given to type. The intention of Das Auge was to digest the news, especially the European war news, down to nuggets of indignation and spit it out in headlines for their readership. Interspersed with OUTRAGES! happening on the European front and to German ships at sea were the INJUSTICES! taking place right here in New York. I skimmed recent issues to see if there was any mention of a German sailor held for forged documents. There wasn’t, but there was plenty of anger directed at the supposedly neutral Wilson, who evidently was hatching plans to funnel backdoor aid to the allies.

  Nowhere could I detect a coded message. But how would I? I had no background in that type of investigation. In this, I was out of my depth.

  The few times I found myself alone in the office; those moments when Johann left for any reason, I hurried to the locked drawer. It remained locked, always. I searched everywhere for a key, but Johann must have kept it on his person. Why hadn’t I paid more attention when the pickpockets and lock pickers in my jail talked about their trade? Without those skills, the best I could hope for would be to pry the drawer open.

  Once, while rifling through the top drawer of Johann’s desk, I ran across a hefty brass letter opener that would work very well as a lever. I needed to find a stretch of time when I could be certain of having the office to myself. A busted lock would be hard to disguise, but if I found vital evidence in the drawer, at that point I could walk out of Das Auge and never return.

  On the other hand, if I didn’t find evidence, that would put me in a tricky spot. I doubted my Secret Service overseers would want me to abandon my post with nothing to show for myself, especially if I was going to leave anything suspicious in my wake, like a drawer that had been pried open. Times like these, I wished for a partner in spying, or even someone to confide in, as I used to confide in Muldoon . . . before he’d insulted me and Callie. The memory of that encounter still stung. I felt very much on my own.

  Holger didn’t come by the Das Auge offices. His absence fueled my suspicion that Johann was actually at the bottom of whatever subversive activity the Secret Service suspected was taking place at the newspaper.

  I lured Johann out to lunch at the local German eatery, a low-ceilinged room with timbered rafters, heavily textured plaster walls, and amber lighting to finish off the Olde World effect. The menu was suitably heavy on spaetzle, schnitzel, and cabbage. “This reminds me of my Aunt Sonja’s,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It’s almost enough to make me homesick.”

  “I’m never homesic
k.” He spoke so adamantly that it made me doubt him. “I have a good life here.”

  “You must have fallen into happy circumstances. Do you have a girlfriend?”

  He blinked. “No. I thought you knew that.”

  “I just assume every man in this city is living the life of Don Juan. I read so many stories in the papers.”

  “And you believe them?” He laughed. “You’ve seen now who writes for the papers.”

  “Such interesting characters.”

  He took a drink of beer. “Not particularly. Just people who understand how to write what we’ll print.”

  “What about the Skipper?” I asked.

  “He’s the least interesting of all.”

  He looked more interested in the bread and butter than talking about Das Auge’s contributors, so I asked, “What do you do in your free time?”

  He considered the question longer than necessary, as if weighing how truthfully to answer. “I draw.”

  I hadn’t expected this. “You’re an artist?”

  “Not a serious one.”

  “Do you do portraits?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Could you draw one of me?” I asked. “I’d love to have a picture to send to my cousins. Maybe I could visit your rooms sometime.”

  Interest and anxiety filled his eyes. “Truly?”

  “Of course.”

  By the time we’d devoured the food on our plates, I’d made a date to meet him at his flat the following evening. I had to invent an excuse why I couldn’t simply accompany him home directly from work, since I was supposed to meet with Operative Halloran at that time. Johann seemed pleased, and made so bold as to take my arm as we hurried back to the office. A peek into Johann’s home life would be invaluable. A man could hide a great deal at the office, but at home a person tended to relax his guard.

  The next morning I left home early and was outside Pennsylvania Station a good ten minutes before Holger’s car drew up to the curb. He beckoned me inside. “I will drive you uptown. That way we can talk.”

  I stepped into the car and settled on the velvet upholstery. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything much to report.” His initial frown of displeasure disappeared as I gave him my list of people who had been to the office, how long they had stayed, and what had passed between them and Johann. My list might have lacked anything noteworthy, but it was exhaustive.

  “The only suspicious thing I’ve seen is whatever passed between Johann and the man called the Skipper,” I said.

  Holger sniffed as if a bad odor had wafted in. “I wouldn’t worry too much about him.”

  “Don’t you want to know what was in the envelope?”

  “I have a strong guess,” he said.

  “Money?” I asked.

  He smiled patiently at me. “Just keep watching, fräulein. You are doing very well.”

  “Johann seems nice. I don’t want to get him in trouble, but why not just fire him if you suspect him of something underhanded? There are lots of young men in this city who could do his job, aren’t there?”

  “Johann cares about our cause.”

  Did he? I hadn’t seen much evidence of that.

  Holger continued, “He also knows . . . a great deal.”

  “About the office, you mean?”

  “Yes. Exactly. But I have put much faith in one man at Das Auge. I want to make certain that faith is not being exploited.” We pulled up to the curb a block from the offices. “I will let you out here.”

  I understood his intention in letting me off out of sight of the Das Auge offices. He didn’t want Johann to see him dropping me off at the office, early in the morning.

  The moment I walked into the offices, it was clear the atmosphere had shifted. I shook some flurries off my hat and coat and hung them up, then looked over at Johann, who was immersed in that morning’s copy of The Sun.

  “Anything happening?” I asked.

  “The Russians are retreating toward Moscow.”

  It took me a moment too long to remember how Leisl Frobisher would react. “More good news. Will you write that story?”

  He ate a chunk of kuchen. He had two pieces, but this morning he wasn’t sharing. “Probably,” he said in a clipped, resentful voice. “I do work very hard here, you know.”

  “Of course.” I sat down at my desk and began typing an article. “German Navy Victorious in North Atlantic!” My stomach felt queasy as I pecked out the feverish excitement over one hundred and thirty-seven Allied sailors meeting their deaths in the frigid waters. Of course, the Germans would suffer the same fate if they lost these battles, but . . .

  Maybe Holger and Johann were wrong about Das Auge. The more exposure I had to their propaganda, the more I sympathized with the other side.

  The morning dragged. Tension radiated from Johann’s desk, and I couldn’t account for it.

  At eleven o’clock I looked up as Johann put on his coat and then twined a long scarf around his neck. Flurries floated through the air outside our window. “I think I’ll go to the Hofbräuhaus. I have a few friends who often meet me there.”

  No invitation was extended to me.

  He donned his hat and was out the door. As soon as he disappeared from sight, I hopped out of my chair and hurried over to his desk. The top drawer, at least, was still unlocked. I seized the letter opener and began to work on the locked drawer on the right. There was barely enough room for me to wedge the tip of the letter opener between the sliver of space where the top of the drawer met the desktop. I needed to work the brass shiv in farther to give myself more leverage. I pushed, moving the letter opener back and forth, hoping to force it in so I could pry the lock open.

  My progress was slow. I didn’t want to damage the wood so obviously that Johann would guess what I’d been up to. Finally, I was able to work the letter opener in about half its length. Now all I had to do was keep tugging on the opener’s handle and hope the movement forced the locking mechanism to give. I sent up a prayer that I’d find something in that drawer. Because the more I worked the letter opener back and forth, the more obvious it became that someone had been tampering with the wood above the lock, which was indented and chipped.

  Though the office was kept chilly, I was sweating from both effort and nerves. Pushing gently wasn’t getting me very far. I decided to really throw some force behind it and pushed hard. Finally, something happened: The letter opener bent from the fulcrum into a perfect V. A victory of oak over brass.

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  And that was before I heard the building’s front door open and close.

  My heart pounded so hard it almost made me feel as if I were vibrating. Footsteps came down the hall toward our door as I yanked frantically to free the letter opener from its trapped position. Johann whistled tunelessly out in the hallway as I gave a last mighty tug. When the letter opener popped free, I was launched onto my backside, on the floor.

  The door opened.

  I thrust the opener into the nearest wastebasket. It hadn’t been emptied recently, so I was relieved the brass sank into the mound of wadded paper. I’d have to retrieve it later. For now, my problem was explaining why I was on the floor to Johann, who crossed the threshold and gaped at me sprawled there.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  “I . . . slipped.”

  He surveyed my surroundings for any object I might have fallen over. “Did you trip over your own feet?”

  “Are you going to make me go through the humiliation of explaining?” I asked as I accepted his offer of a hand up. “I was practicing the steps of that silly dance you taught me.”

  “You mean you were bunny hugging in here all on your ownsome?” To my relief, he laughed.

  “ ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound.’ My shoes are almost new, and the soles are still slick.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t check on that last detail too closely, and heavens be praised, he didn’t. He was all concern. “You didn’t h
urt yourself, did you?” he asked, still holding on to my hand.

  “Just my pride,” I said, smiling at him.

  For a second, he smiled back, but then he dropped my hand and backed up a step. “I’m apt to trip over my own feet, too. Nothing to be embarrassed about—at least not with me.”

  “Didn’t you find any of your friends?” I asked, tugging my hand away from his.

  “No, I just got a sausage on a roll and came back.” He took off his coat and tossed it on his chair. Then he hiked his hip onto his desktop—just above the place where the letter opener had damaged the desk drawer, I was happy to see. Unwrapping his lunch, he said, “You don’t expect Holger to bunny hug with you, do you?”

  It was a startling question, especially when I tried to envision the high-collared, unsmiling German giving in to the latest dance craze. “No. Why would I?”

  “You don’t have to lie to me, Leisl. I saw you with him.”

  “With Holger? When?”

  “This morning. Early. Getting out of his car.” He put heavy, equal emphasis on each bit of evidence, and I could tell at once the sordid impression he’d received. So that accounted for his strange behavior this morning.

  “He saw me walking and offered me a ride,” I explained.

  “And let you out a block from work?” He shook his head in disbelief. “I know it’s not my business, Leisl, but you can’t say that you really care for him.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” I insisted. “But why couldn’t a woman care for him? He’s been generous with me. Not to mention, he’s handsome.”

  The response caused him to put his wax-paper wrapped food aside. “Handsome, with a rancid heart.”

  His bitter words took me aback. But emotion was a good thing if it made him reveal a little of his feelings about what went on here.

  “I haven’t seen anything rancid about him.”

  “He’s . . .” He looked at me directly. “He’s not kind, Leisl.”