The Accidental Agent Read online

  Nessheim thought briefly of turning around. He could go through the alley that led to the rear entrance to his apartment, where in his bedroom closet he still had his Bureau-issue .38. But if these guys had come to get him would they be waiting out in the open? To hell with it, he decided, moving forwards. He was just a student now.

  The sitting man spotted him, then stood up, leaving his hat on the brick pier. He was shorter than the army man, but heavyset, with a biggish soft-looking nose, dark strands of receding hair, and a wistful expression on his face. No one would mistake him for military – for one thing, his shoes could use a shine.

  ‘Hello, Harry,’ Nessheim called. ‘Been waiting long?’

  The man shook his head. ‘About twenty minutes, but it’s not that warm out.’

  ‘Give it a month and you’ll really feel the cold. We had snow back in September. This is summer compared to what’s to come.’

  The man named Harry said to the other man, ‘This is Special Agent Nessheim. Nessheim, this is General Groves.’ Groves nodded curtly.

  Nessheim said, ‘Unless it’s the Communist philosophy professor on the third floor, I reckon you’re here to see me.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Groves. His steel-blue eyes gave nothing away.

  ‘You’d better come upstairs then.’

  Nessheim led the way into the building, unlocking the inner door of the atrium. He went past the front door of the janitor’s basement apartment and up a carpeted staircase with a creaking mahogany banister. One flight up there was an apartment on either side of the landing. He opened the door to the left one, motioning Groves and Harry Guttman inside.

  They all stood for a moment in the small hallway, then Nessheim took their coats and hats and hung them up in the hall closet. He pointed to the living room at the front. It was glowing softly from the light of the lowering sun.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he said. There was an easy chair he’d plucked from a yard sale down the block, a long grey sofa the landlady had thrown in, and a wooden kitchen chair.

  Guttman took the sofa while Groves hesitated, then sat down as well, though he didn’t settle, perching uneasily on the easy chair’s front edge. Groves had a moustache that put Professor Fielding’s in the shade, and an imposing frame – he was maybe an inch or two shorter than Nessheim, but much heavier. He would have played tackle on his high-school football team.

  ‘Nice place,’ Groves said curtly, looking around as Nessheim sat down on the kitchen chair. ‘Tidy.’

  ‘He grew up on a farm,’ said Guttman.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ asked Nessheim. Guttman shrugged.

  Groves was examining the bookshelves, which were half full, mainly with novels. He said, ‘I don’t see any football trophies. Guttman says you were all-American. Why not put the certificate on the wall?’

  ‘There isn’t one – it’s just an invention of the sports writers. I was second team, anyway. That doesn’t seem worth a shrine.’ The only relics were a bunch of newspaper clippings he’d given his mother, which lay in an old shoebox under the stairs of her house in Wisconsin. His mother had never liked him playing.

  Silence filled the room awkwardly, like a semi-visible gas. What did these two want? Nessheim finally broke the silence. ‘I’ve got some cold beers in the icebox, and a warm bottle of Scotch.’

  Groves started to shake his head but Guttman said quickly, ‘I’ll take a beer, thanks. General?’

  Groves shrugged. ‘I’ll join you.’

  Nessheim nodded and walked down the hall to the small kitchen.

  He left the bottle of Scotch alone, figuring he’d need the drink after this conversation, not before. He grabbed two bottles of Blatz from the refrigerator and opened them with a church key he took from the drawer of the kitchen cabinet. It felt stuffy in the apartment, so he opened the outer back door, leaving the screen door on its hook. He heard a scraping sound from down the back staircase, then another; he stopped for a moment and listened, then realised it must be the janitor moving his garbage cans.

  Returning to the living room he found the two men sitting in silence again. He said, ‘What’s this about? My mother phoned me yesterday and my father’s long gone. So who’s swallowed a fork?’

  Groves took the beer from Nessheim and held it for a moment, his lips tight. ‘I’ll let Guttman begin.’

  Guttman was shaking his head. ‘Nobody’s dead, and nothing’s happened – yet. But we need your help.’

  ‘I thought I was just a student now, Harry. I resigned, remember?’ He had made it clear he didn’t want a desk job at the Bureau’s Washington HQ.

  Groves said brusquely, ‘Guttman told me you never took a BA.’

  ‘That’s right. I lost my scholarship.’

  ‘What happened – you forget to go to class?’

  Nessheim said sharply, ‘I got hurt playing ball. You can’t keep your scholarship if you can’t play.’

  ‘So how’d you wangle your way into law school without a BA?’

  Guttman spoke for him. ‘Chicago lets you in if you’ve done three years of college.’

  ‘Is that so?’ asked Groves without any real interest. He turned back to Nessheim. ‘You’ve got to admit it’s a pretty irregular billet. How much is tuition?’

  ‘Three hundred seventy-five bucks a year.’

  ‘You got some dough socked away?’

  ‘Enough,’ said Nessheim truthfully. He’d been well paid as a Special Agent.

  ‘Sounds an easy life to me, even if the place is stinking with pinkos.’ Groves gave a snort, his nostrils dilating like rubber.

  ‘If you say so. I tried to enlist, twice in fact, but the army wouldn’t have me. Would they, Harry?’ he asked pointedly.

  Guttman didn’t reply. Groves took a deep breath and exhaled noisily, like a moose clearing its nose. ‘All right, let me explain. I’ve recently been appointed the head of a new military project. It’s based in locations across the country – one of them is in Illinois. I can’t go into details, it’s top secret, but the project involves the finest scientific talent in the world.’

  He paused – why? So Nessheim would nod, suitably impressed? When Nessheim failed to, Groves continued. ‘It’s all classified. Like this entire conversation. Is that understood?’

  Nessheim looked at Guttman, who was nodding thoughtfully in non-interventionist mode. ‘Sure,’ Nessheim said slowly, damned if he was going to say ‘sir’. ‘I’m all ears and no mouth.’

  ‘You know anything about physics?’

  ‘I had a year of it in college.’

  ‘How’d you do?’

  ‘I’d never make a scientist, but I know more about it than he does.’ He pointed at Guttman, who laughed: six months before, Guttman hadn’t been sure what a physicist was. ‘What is the project?’

  ‘You don’t need to know much about it. In fact, it’s probably better that you don’t. Leave it to the scientists.’

  Nessheim wasn’t a reader of comics, but you couldn’t help but be aware of Flash Gordon and his fantastic gizmos and space rockets. ‘Another secret weapon, huh?’ Groves flushed slightly, so Nessheim knew he’d hit home. He looked at Guttman. ‘Is it what that guy in California was talking about?’

  ‘What guy?’ Groves demanded.

  Nessheim kept looking at Guttman. ‘You know, Harry. The guy we saw last spring in Berkeley.’

  Guttman said to Groves, ‘Nessheim was with me when I saw Professor Oppenheimer on the Coast.’

  ‘Why did you take him along?’ Groves asked with obvious irritation.

  Guttman said mildly, ‘It’s a good thing I did. We don’t have to worry about his getting curious when he’s already got a good idea of what’s going on.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Groves said grudgingly. ‘Do you know the Argonne Forest?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s about fifteen miles west of here. We have an installation there. The work is at a critical stage, but we’ve got some labour problems. Not everybody se
ems willing to help the war effort,’ he added angrily. ‘So we’ve moved it here to the university.’ Groves took a swig of his beer. Despite his bull-like manners and appearance, he seemed uncertain what to say next. Nessheim saw no point prompting him. Either he had something to tell him or he didn’t.

  Guttman interjected, ‘This project of ours is of interest to the enemy. We think they’re running their own in parallel to ours.’

  ‘The Japs or the Germans?’

  ‘The Germans,’ Groves declared. ‘Your people.’

  ‘My people?’

  Groves ignored the sharpness in Nessheim’s reply. ‘Well, just how German are you?’

  Nessheim shrugged. ‘My parents were both born here. Their parents weren’t. I thought by now I was American.’

  ‘Guttman says you speak the language.’

  ‘Not really. My parents spoke to each other in German, especially when they didn’t want my sister or me to understand. Naturally I picked some up. But I understand it better than I speak it – my father discouraged that.’ Nessheim’s father had been eager to have his son assimilate in a way he never could.

  ‘Were your parents Catholics?’

  ‘No, Lutheran.’

  ‘The scientists I mentioned – many of them come from Europe, and almost all of those are Jews. Have you got any Jewish blood?’ Groves sounded a little anxious.

  ‘Not that I know of.’ He glanced at Guttman, who looked as if he was trying not to laugh. ‘I’ll keep looking, though, and let you know.’

  Guttman said, ‘We believe the Nazis may have infiltrated the Argonne project, and that most likely it would be someone masquerading as a refugee. Probably pretending to be a Jew – there couldn’t be better cover for a Nazi.’

  Nessheim decided this was going nowhere fast. He said impatiently, ‘I’ve got mid-terms coming soon and lots of studying to do, so are you going to tell me what all this has got to do with me?’

  Groves said, ‘We need to find this guy if he’s there.’

  ‘Don’t look at me. I’m no physicist.’

  ‘Yeah, but you were FBI, you’re experienced, and we’re moving the project about three blocks from here.’ Groves went on, ‘I gather you were undercover once.’

  Nessheim tried not to look at Guttman. Hoover hated agents going undercover; Nessheim’s time spent doing just that had been entirely unauthorised – he’d been an undercover “undercover agent”.

  ‘That’s right,’ Nessheim said quietly.

  ‘Infiltrating the Bund.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did you use a different name?’

  ‘You mean an alias?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’

  ‘It was Rossbach.’

  ‘Why aren’t you using it now?’

  ‘Why should I? I’m not undercover; I’m not even over cover. I’m in law school.’

  Groves ignored this. It was clear that he had already decided what Nessheim was going to do, even if Nessheim himself didn’t appreciate that. ‘Could you use it again?’

  Nessheim considered this, then shook his head. ‘Not in Chicago. I know people from before.’

  ‘Ah. The famous football star.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. There are people who will have heard of Rossbach. I wouldn’t want to run into them using that name.’

  ‘Former Bund members?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The German-American Bund had disbanded when war was declared; that didn’t mean the former members had abandoned their allegiance to the Führer.

  Groves suddenly thumped the chair. He had come to a decision, which seemed to mean they had all come to one. ‘Then Nessheim it’s got to be. No big deal. Hopefully it’s never going to matter either way. Not if you succeed.’

  Nessheim looked at Guttman, but his old boss retreated to pursed-lips mode, his eyes fixed on the far wall. ‘Succeed at what?’ asked Nessheim.

  ‘Deciding if there is a spy inside the project here and then finding him.’

  ‘Who says I’m going to try? I’ve told you, I’m no longer with the Bureau.’

  ‘Don’t you want to help your country?’

  ‘I tried enlisting – “my country” didn’t want to know.’

  ‘We can’t all be heroes. Look at me – I thought I was getting a military posting, and instead …’

  Instead I’m talking to a nincompoop like you – this seemed to be the implication. Nessheim said, ‘I think you’ll find if you ask Harry here that I’ve done my bit and then some. And I won’t work for Hoover again.’

  Groves stared angrily at Nessheim. His cheeks had puffed out like muffins, and his mouth was as contorted as a corkscrew; he seemed half a second away from an explosion. But when he spoke his voice was measured. ‘I report direct to the White House about this.’ Groves pointed at Guttman and added, ‘And so does he.’

  So the Bureau wasn’t telling Groves or Guttman what to do. The President was. Which meant forget Hoover; forget his sidekick Tolson for that matter. Neither was part of this. ‘And I would report to …?’ asked Nessheim, telling himself it was only a theoretical interest.

  Guttman cut in quickly. ‘Me,’ he said. ‘But you’re used to that.’

  ‘And you don’t talk to anyone else about this, got that?’ said Groves, waving his forefinger like a baton. ‘Except for the head of the project. We’ve just seen him. He’s an Eye-talian, a physicist named Enrico Fermi – he won the Nobel Prize. But not another soul.’

  ‘Not even –’

  ‘Not even anybody, unless the President himself shows up here in his wheelchair. You can forget the normal chain of command.’ He paused, then added, ‘Harry can give you the dossier we’ve prepared.’

  Nessheim shook his head. There was no point misleading the guy, even if he was annoying. ‘You don’t get it. I’m not an agent now, I’m a student.’

  ‘For Christ’s sakes,’ said Groves, exasperated, though even now he didn’t raise his voice. ‘You can be a frigging law student any old time.’ His voice softened just a touch. ‘We’re not asking for a lot. Just an hour or two each day to keep an eye on things. You can still go to class.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that and you know it.’

  Guttman added, ‘It should be over by Christmas. We’re talking two months maximum.’

  ‘And what if it isn’t?’

  Groves threw up his hands in frustration. ‘Where’s the can?’ he demanded, standing up quickly. Big as he was, there was a lithe, cat-like quality to the man.

  ‘Down the hall on the left.’

  Nessheim waited until he heard Groves stride down the hall and shut the bathroom door. ‘Harry, I just want to say how sorry I was about Isabel.’

  ‘I got your letter. Thanks for it.’

  Nessheim had spent hours composing the simple sentences, ripping up draft after draft in case he sounded too formal or too mawkish or somehow insincere.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

  Guttman nodded slowly. ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’ He added flatly, ‘Life’s just kind of different now.’ He could have been talking to himself, thought Nessheim, feeling the man’s loneliness. But he also sensed Guttman didn’t want any more condolences about his wife. He nodded towards the bathroom and said, ‘What’s this all about?’

  Guttman replied without inflection. ‘What it sounds like.’

  ‘You trust this guy?’ asked Nessheim, his own scepticism undisguised.

  Guttman smiled wanly. ‘There isn’t much choice. The President thinks he cuts the mustard – that’s what matters.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem wild about me.’

  Guttman shrugged. ‘Probably because you’re not his idea. I don’t think he believes we’ve got a problem – he’s got Military Intelligence crawling all over the place.’

  ‘Do you think there’s a problem?’

  Guttman looked him in the eye, which Nessheim knew was a good but not infallible indicator that he was telling it to you straight. ‘I j
ust don’t know. Odds are not, but it’s a risk we can’t afford to take.’

  ‘And this project – you’re telling me that Director Hoover doesn’t even know it exists?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Guttman said, looking slightly ill at ease. He added defensively, ‘It’s not as weird as it sounds. Everything’s being run under the military’s control. Military Intelligence has always been stand-offish – the Bureau never gets a look-in, no matter how hard Hoover tries. We got South America as a sop for that.’

  Nessheim nodded reluctantly. ‘All right. But are you going to tell me what I would be supposed to do? Stand around waiting for an egghead to say “Heil Hitler”? It’s not like I can pretend to be a scientist – I’d stick out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘Fermi’s got some ideas for that. He’ll tell you, and I’ll leave it to you to use your judgement.’ Guttman shifted uneasily on his seat. ‘We’re not asking a lot, you know. Just a couple of hours a day, like the General said. Chances are there’s nothing to be found, but I’ll feel a lot better if I know you’ve had a look. I’d want you to trust your instincts – I do.’

  Nessheim said nothing, refusing to be flattered.

  Guttman reached down and opened his briefcase, then took out a black box file. ‘This will get you started. It’s got the relevant background info, including the personnel files. Fermi’s team isn’t that big, maybe a dozen scientists who know enough to do it damage. The rest are minor players, though there’re a lot of them.’

  ‘And the Bureau isn’t involved?’ When Guttman gave a slight nod, Nessheim said, ‘I’d be on my own?’

  Guttman paused. ‘I’ve got you local support at the Field Office here, but the SAC doesn’t know about it.’

  Nessheim asked, ‘What’s the support then?’ He realised he was being drawn into the details of how he’d be operating, but decided he might as well humour his old boss.

  ‘Tatie.’

  ‘I thought she’d transferred to D.C.’ Along with a million other single women, seizing the opportunities provided by the war.

  ‘Nope. Maybe she heard you were here.’