Fear Itself Page 16

  The man in the fedora laughed, a disconcertingly happy chortle. ‘Christ, you gave me a scare,’ he said. ‘Guttman said you’d be waiting for me.’

  ‘What?’

  Nessheim must have looked as dumbfounded as he felt. The man said, ‘Yeah, Guttman. You think I get my orders from Hoover himself?’ He laughed again.

  ‘You’re with the Bureau?’ asked Nessheim weakly.

  ‘Well, I’m not with the Bund, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘But you were in Woodstock the other day.’

  ‘That’s right. I didn’t think you’d spot me – it’s a real pisser in these one-horse towns. You can’t tuck into a side street when there aren’t any.’

  ‘But what were you doing there?’

  ‘Watching your ass, pal. I’ve been doing it for four weeks.’

  ‘You have?’ The other man just shrugged, and Nessheim shook his head in wonder. ‘So what am I supposed to do now?’

  Fedora sighed. ‘I guess you haven’t talked to Guttman. There’s going to be a meeting at your camp. The hard guys are coming in tomorrow, and Schultz’s going to give them the word sometime after supper.’

  ‘What word?’

  Fedora looked at him as if he were an idiot. ‘That’s what you’re meant to find out, fellah.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  Fedora cupped a hand to one ear. Nessheim said, ‘You’ve tapped the camp’s phone?’

  ‘Sure. The Woodstock exchange have been very co-operative. They don’t seem too keen on all these Krauts, either.’

  ‘So what’s the gen?’

  ‘Beats me. Schultz phoned them yesterday in Burlington – they came in from New York State. I just know that Schultz said he’d talk to them all after supper. As well as some big shot he’d got coming in from outside.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Don’t know. But you’ve got to figure out where they’re going to speak.’

  ‘Why?’

  Fedora came to the back of the car and opened its trunk. Reaching down with both arms he lifted a large gun-metal box and set it on the ground, exhaling from the exertion. He stood up, puffing, and pointed to the box. ‘So you can use big Fred there.’

  ‘Where are you going to be?’ Nessheim asked, wondering why Fedora wasn’t going to do it.

  ‘I’ll be right here, pal, waiting for you to deliver the goods. If you can’t get it out tomorrow night, don’t worry – I’ll be here in the morning too.’ He gestured at the car with his head. ‘The back seat’s not too bad when you get used to it. Now let me show you how Fred works. You’re not gonna like it – the sonofabitch weighs a ton. And I hope you’re mechanical.’

  Half an hour later Nessheim moved back slowly towards Camp Schneider, weighed down by the metal box he was carrying (it weighed over 30 pounds, he reckoned). He stuck to the Forestry fire road, but when he had crossed Route 12, he carried ‘Fred’ off the gravel track, putting it deep in some brush. He would retrieve it under the cover of darkness that night.

  He was familiar with wiretaps. They were an increasing part of the Bureau’s armoury – Mueller had used them relentlessly to try and prove the longshoremen’s Union in San Francisco was full of paid Soviet surrogates. Nessheim had never tapped a phone himself, but he understood how the mechanics of it worked. It was easy enough to tap a line, on the target phone or on the actual phone line anywhere between the phone and the exchange.

  But the box Fedora had given him contained something altogether different. If you wanted to tape conversations in a room, a phone wiretap wasn’t any use. A radio frequency bug was best – they were tiny, small as a half-dollar, and could transmit to a receiver where the audio signal could then be recorded on tape. He considered where best to place the bugs. The meeting could only really be held in one place – the lodge. Schultz’s rented house had a minuscule living room, and besides there were the other counsellors living there. In the lodge there was ample space for a meeting, though Nessheim was glad he had two bugs – depending on the numbers, Schultz might opt for the rec room, or his office. The problem wasn’t placing the bugs – he was sure he could find two discreet places for the small transmitters. It was rather finding places for the receiver and the tank of a tape recorder.

  That night he waited until midnight, when Kessler lay asleep, snoring lightly. He went out the cabin quietly, but not furtively – if you needed to take a leak at night you had to go outside, so his absence was explainable. He waited for his eyes to accustom to the dark, and then, helped by a faint trace of moonlight, moved around the lake and down the track to Fred’s hiding place in the woods.

  Adrenalin meant Fred felt lighter than earlier in the day, and Nessheim carried the box easily enough to the lodge. Smitty would be asleep next to the kitchen, but the staircase to its loft was outside, and Nessheim went up it quickly. Used now for storage, the attic was full of the suitcases and trunks the girls had brought to camp. It had electricity outlets at either end, but he hadn’t dared bring a lamp or flashlight in case the light showed outside. He had to feel his way around the luggage and he made a small passageway for himself between the trunks, then deposited Fred in one corner, where it would look indistinguishable from the other baggage. For insurance, he had written a big tag with the camper Adele Kugel’s name on it, and now tied that around the handle of the big box.

  Descending, he went into the rec room. Here enough moonlight came through the windows to let him get to work. There was a framed photograph of Coolidge Hill on the wall, and he thought for a moment of hiding the bug behind it, then decided it was too obvious. Instead, he felt behind the mahogany top of the upright piano, and placed one bug there, sticking it against the wooden back with tape from a roll of sticking plaster he had brought in his pocket.

  Inside Schultz’s office he stumbled over a wooden chair that had been placed by the door. He waited, listening, but there was only silence. A coffee table, crowded with magazines, sat next to a sofa, and he placed the other bug under its pine top, securely fastened with another strip of tape.

  When he got back to the cabin, Kessler was still asleep.

  In the morning no visitors arrived, though Heydeman didn’t show at swimming class. When Nessheim went up to the lodge for lunch he discovered the school bus was gone, along with Schultz and Beringer. As he served out the meat loaf at his table, Mrs Schultz came over.

  ‘Herr Rossbach,’ she said, always formal with the male counsellors, even Mr Grumholtz who was a neighbour in Manhattan. ‘Herr Schultz would like you to go to White River Junction this afternoon and pick up someone at the train station. He will not be back in time.’ She handed him a car key. ‘He said you should use our Chevrolet.’

  ‘Who am I picking up?’

  Mrs Schultz looked blank. ‘He didn’t tell me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’ll find them,’ said Nessheim, looking forward to driving Schultz’s car, which was new.

  The train was coming in from Boston, and Nessheim was late, since there had been a hold-up at Quechee Gorge, where a sightseer, stretching to see the famously deep ravine, had back-ended another car.

  At the station a solitary figure sat on a bench on the platform, hands clasped and head down. Nessheim rushed over. To his surprise, he saw the man was wearing a priest’s collar.

  ‘Excuse me, Father. Are you expected at Camp Schneider?’

  The man stood up and his shoulders suddenly seemed to widen. Nessheim realised the priest was big, six feet tall, athletic in build. The face, crinkling into a grin, the eyes lively behind a pair of round spectacles, gold-rimmed, and the hair still dark and combed back wet, suggested a vigorous man. And someone Nessheim was sure he had seen before.

  ‘I am,’ the priest said, clearing his throat. The voice wavered, oddly familiar.

  ‘Let me take your bag,’ Nessheim said, reaching down for it.

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ said the man, as Nessheim gripped the bag’s handle. ‘But most welcome. I’ve come a long way i
n twenty-four hours.’

  Suddenly Nessheim understood why he had encountered the face before – not in person, but on newsreels that trailed the feature movies in picture houses across the land, and in countless newspaper photographs. Nessheim was carrying the suitcase of the once famous, now infamous, Father Charles Edward Coughlin. Wouldn’t Uncle Eric have been thrilled?

  They walked through the small waiting room to the car outside. Nessheim lifted the trunk lid and placed the bag carefully down. Like someone used to chauffeurs, the priest had already got into the back seat.

  He looked tired from his trip, and sat with his eyes closed as Nessheim drove the Chevy west towards Woodstock and the camp. Soon the priest nodded off, until a bump on the road jolted the car and he woke with a start. His nap seemed to have perked him up. ‘Sorry to doze off like that.’ He pushed his window down. ‘This is lovely countryside. Do you hail from around here, young man?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What would your name be?’

  ‘It’s James Rossbach, Father.’

  Coughlin said cheerily, ‘You must be one of Max Schultz’s fellows then. I wasn’t sure if he’d sent one of the local taxi services to collect me.’

  ‘No, this is his car.’

  ‘And a fine piece of machinery it is, too. I take it you’re a member of the Bund.’

  ‘A fully paid-up one,’ said Nessheim.

  Coughlin laughed. ‘And a good Catholic to boot?’

  ‘I was raised a Lutheran, Father.’

  ‘Still a Christian in the eyes of our Lord. That’s what matters. To maintain a united Christian front.’

  ‘Have you come all the way from Detroit, Father?’

  Coughlin looked pleased that Nessheim knew who he was. ‘I went to Washington first. That hellhole. One hundred degrees in the supposed cradle of democracy.’

  Nessheim laughed, but there was a venomous note in Coughlin’s voice.

  ‘Tell me, my young friend, how is Max Schultz taking the news?’

  ‘What news is that?’

  ‘You mean you haven’t heard.’ A newspaper was thrust over Nessheim’s shoulder, which he took with one hand. A herd of Holsteins was being led across at the bottom of a hill, and when he stopped to wait for them he unfolded the paper, a copy of the Boston Herald. The headline read: Reich–Moscow Pact Stuns World.

  Disbelieving, he scanned the rest of the article. It was true: Ribbentrop was flying to Moscow to formalise a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.

  The cows had gone. Handing the paper back to Coughlin, he said, ‘Amazing.’

  Coughlin laughed. ‘It’s stunning news, I’ll grant you that. Some might call it a pact with the Devil, but I think the Lord himself understands that sometimes you have to do business with the enemy. And we in the Christian West have no one to blame but ourselves. We’ve driven Hitler to it; not you and me, but the British with all their posturing, the Jews with their machinations, and Roosevelt.’ He pronounced the President’s name with a magnificent rolling R. ‘He should have kept a million miles away from the English.’

  ‘Well, that will change in a year.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ demanded Coughlin. He was leaning forward now, to hear Nessheim over the noise from the open windows. They were nearing Woodstock.

  Nessheim said, ‘Well, the new President is likely to hold different views about things, don’t you think? None of the candidates you read about seem half as pro-English as FDR.’

  ‘They’re not – they’re sane men. But who’s to say Roosevelt won’t still be our President?’

  They were in town now and Nessheim turned up Pleasant Street, lined by Federalist houses, then drove through the delicate covered bridge at the end of the street. But Coughlin was paying no attention to his surroundings now.

  Nessheim started to say, ‘I thought the Constitution—’

  ‘The Constitution says nothing about it.’ Coughlin spat out his words angrily. ‘It’s only tradition that keeps a President from serving more than eight years. That and a sense of restraint. But that’s not a word I’d put in the same sentence with the man Roosevelt. He’s a menace. Mark my words: he wants a war, and if he has to run again to get his war, he will.’

  When they came to Camp Schneider, Schultz and his wife were waiting in front of the farmhouse, dressed formally in honour of their visitor, as if for church. While Nessheim took Coughlin’s suitcase out of the car, they led the priest inside. Depositing the bag on the porch, Nessheim walked the few hundred yards to the camp.

  He heard the firing from the upper farm field before he got to the lodge. Repeated rifle shots, stinging flat cracks in the air.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked Smitty, who was standing outside the kitchens in his white apron, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know. The school bus done come back full of these fellahs. Then they all went up to the field with Mr Heydeman.’

  ‘What are they doing up there?’

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s not my business. Though that ain’t corn popping I hear.’ He tossed his butt down and ground it out with his heel. ‘They gonna come down for lunch, so you can see for yourself then, but they looks to me like they mean business. And they got a dog – nasty one too, or else maybe it just don’t like coloured people. German Shepherd sure didn’t like me.’

  And at lunch Nessheim saw what Smitty meant. Schultz wasn’t there – presumably he and Frau Schultz were feeding Father Coughlin in style up at the farmhouse – when roughly thirty men trooped into the dining hall after the campers had sat down for lunch. Nessheim noticed the visitors were dressed in uniforms of brown T-shirts, grey cotton trousers, and canvas sneakers. They all looked in good physical shape, with cropped hair and arms tanned from hours in the sun. Like tough, experienced soldiers, Nessheim thought. Most were young, younger than he was, but there was none of the horseplay one would expect from males their age. They stood patiently in line for their food, then sat by themselves at trencher tables that had been set up at the far end of the dining hall. They ate quietly, as if even lunch was a matter of discipline rather than enjoyment. These men were from the Ordnungsdienst – the Order Division, or O.D. for short. The hard men of the movement.

  After lunch the visitor platoon went back up to the far field, out of sight from the rest of the camp. At hike time, Nessheim tried to lead his pack of girls in their direction, for there had been no more gunfire, but halfway up the slope Beringer called out to him. ‘Not that way, Jimmy.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘There is no problem,’ said Beringer. ‘Just take them in another direction, please.’

  At supper there was still no sign of Schultz, or Coughlin. The visitors had stayed up in the far field for supper, grilling meat – the smell of barbecue wafted down the hill as Nessheim came into the lodge.

  He wished he could have placed a bug in the farmhouse, but the receiver’s reach was under 75 yards, and there would have been no safe place to tape-record the conversations between Coughlin and Schultz. He could only hope that there would be something of substance to record in the lodge. He knew now that there would be a meeting, for Beringer had circulated among the tables during supper, explaining to all the counsellors that the staffroom would not be available that evening. The rec room would be occupied after nine o’clock.

  Nessheim killed time after supper, playing tag with the girls on the grassy slope in front of the lodge. At lights out he helped Frances check on each cabin, extinguishing their kerosene lamps and saying goodnight to the campers. When he went back to his cabin Kessler was reading by lamplight.

  Nessheim said, ‘One of the girls isn’t feeling well. I may need to fetch the doctor. I’ll try not to wake you when I come in.’

  Kessler nodded absent-mindedly, caught up in his book.

  It was starting to rain as Nessheim circled the lake and went up the sloping lawn. The lodge was lit and as he approached he could see the Ordnungsdienst men in
the rec room, drinking mugs of coffee from two vast canisters Smitty had brought out from the kitchen. Nessheim kept his distance from the lit-up windows and turned towards the end of the building. As he was about to leave the safety of the shadows, Coughlin, Schultz and Heydeman walked by, less than 20 yards from him. He froze, but none of them looked around, their faces down against the rain.

  He waited a full minute to be sure they had gone into the lodge, then quickly crossed and went up the steps on tiptoe in the pair of old sneakers he had put on.

  The loft was pitch black, but he didn’t dare use a flashlight. He knew where he had put ‘Fred’, and could feel his way there, but suddenly realised in such darkness he wouldn’t be able to tell if he had pushed the right switch to operate the machine. He’d probably end up erasing instead of recording.

  He needed some kind of light, but it would have to be natural not to be seen outside. At his end of the loft there was a large opening, originally designed for bringing up hay bales on a pulley system – the old wheel sat ten foot in from the wall on the floor, its ropes tangled in a knotted heap. When not in use an immense square of oak slats filled the opening, with a surrounding plywood frame. It opened inwards, but was much too heavy for him to lift, so he worked the big panel out of its frame and let it fall on his extended upraised hands, then slowly brought it down silently onto the loft floor. From the rainy, cloud-filled sky a dark grey layer of light suffused his end of the loft. It would have to do.

  He found ‘Fred’, and opened the box, then carefully lifted out the tape machine. It was heavy, steel-framed with metal components. He set it down near the door, then went back and took the receiver from the metal box. It was about the size of a small desktop radio. He set it on the floor next to the tape machine and unravelled the receiver’s cord. Feeling his way, he found the electrical outlet near the staircase door, and after several efforts, and a risky probe with his fingers, managed to fit the two prongs in.