Fear Itself Page 24

  The next day his mother found him in the barn. ‘Jimmy! Come quick,’ she shouted. ‘There’s a man on the phone and he’s calling all the way from Washington.’

  Twenty-four hours later he was on a train, but heading east. The conversation he’d had with Guttman over the party line had been awkward, made uneasier by his awareness that the neighbouring farmers might be listening in as an assistant director of the FBI tried to persuade him to stay in his employ.

  ‘I told you, I don’t want your job,’ he remembered saying right away.

  ‘It’s not just a job,’ Guttman had said caustically. He’d continued, ‘I’m not trying to keep you in work for the sake of it. The bastards have murdered Bock.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said reflexively, wondering why the Bund had killed Bock.

  ‘Sorry schmorry. I need you back here.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  Guttman barked down the line, ‘What do you want me to say, Jimmy – that your country needs you? Okay, it does. Read the papers, you fathead, can’t you see there’s a war on?’

  And wisely Guttman had waited while Nessheim thought about this. Could he live with himself if he simply walked away? Guttman might be flattering him, Guttman might be full of baloney, but there was a core truth to the appeal he was making.

  ‘Okay,’ he said at last.

  Before Nessheim had the chance to change his mind, Guttman said quickly, ‘This time don’t cash your sleeper ticket in. You’re going to need all the rest you can get once I’ve got you started.’

  20

  THE WHITE HOUSE seemed surprisingly small – a compound, really, rather than the palace-sized building and grounds Nessheim had expected. Following Guttman’s instructions he went to the West Gate where a policeman checked his name on a clipboard, then phoned through. A young woman in a smart crepe suit, cinched in at the waist to accentuate her figure, and black high heels came out to escort him in.

  ‘I’m Dinah,’ she said confidently, leading him into the building. ‘It’s still a bit new here; the rebuild isn’t finished yet.’ Her voice sounded Southern. Nessheim had never thought of Washington as anything but a northern city, not since the Civil War. But the natives spoke in the soft tones of Virginia.

  Dinah opened a door and looked in. Over her shoulder he could see two rows of cubicles and a small sofa to one side.

  ‘The boys aren’t here,’ she said, and walked to the corner cubicle. ‘There’s your space.’ He’d been given a filing cabinet, a stack of yellow legal pads and a bunch of pencils, freshly sharpened. To Nessheim it said desk job, and his heart sank.

  ‘This should do you,’ the woman said.

  ‘I hadn’t realised the office wasn’t in the White House,’ he said. He felt like a kid on Christmas morning who finds his stocking empty.

  The woman gave him a look. ‘This is the White House.’

  ‘The President lives here?’ he said with disbelief.

  ‘No. His residence is in the main mansion next door. This is the Executive Wing. It’s where he works – most of the time anyway. His office is just down the hall. Speaking of which, are you ready?’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘To meet the President. He knows you’re here and wanted to say hello.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said levelly, making it clear she didn’t do jokes.

  ‘Can I have a minute?’ he asked, suddenly feeling panicky. Christ, was his tie straight? Should he comb his hair? He looked down at his shoes and wished he had polished them more carefully. And his suit, a blue cotton one he’d bought the summer before in Chicago, suddenly seemed dowdy.

  ‘The President’s waiting,’ Dinah said a little impatiently.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, and took a deep breath. He followed her out of the office, then around a corner. Ahead of them was a mahogany door with a brass handle – that must be it, he thought, wishing his heart would stop pounding.

  Dinah stopped by the door and turned to Nessheim. ‘Ready?’ she asked, which made him even more nervous. He gave a little nod and she rapped sharply, then to Nessheim’s surprise she opened the door without waiting for a call to come in.

  The room before him was very slightly oval-shaped, its sides two narrow ellipses, like the finest crescent moons. The walls were painted white, and light poured through three tall windows at the far end, behind a large desk. Next to it sat a wheelchair – a normal kitchen chair, Nessheim realised, with two small side wheels affixed.

  Behind the desk a high-backed padded chair had been turned to face the windows. Nessheim almost jumped when the chair slowly started to swivel round. He took a deep breath, wondering if he should speak first or wait for his commander-in-chief to greet him.

  Gradually the man sitting in the chair came into view. He had big shoulders and a bald head and his face was familiar. But not from newspaper photographs or newsreels, Nessheim realised, just as the man raised one arm and pointed a long finger at him.

  ‘Bang!’ the man shouted, and this time Nessheim did jump.

  Behind him the woman burst out laughing and the man in the chair guffawed. It was Mueller.

  ‘Gotcha, Mr All-American,’ Mueller said with satisfaction. He was grinning, but it was not a friendly grin. ‘The President’s up in Hyde Park. He’ll be real upset to have missed you.’

  After that, Nessheim was known as the President’s Boy by the other FBI agents stationed in the White House. There were five of them in all, including Mueller. Other than his old enemy, they seemed a decent bunch; Nessheim accepted both the nickname and their mild ribbing with good humour.

  It was unclear, however, what the small contingent of FBI agents actually did, since the rival Secret Service, though stuck in a large office in the basement, were present in far greater numbers. Each time FDR left the White House, one of the Bureau agents tagged along, grudgingly tolerated by the Secret Service detail. The inevitable friction between the two competing agencies was aggravated by Mueller, who as head of the FBI contingent, didn’t conceal his disdain for what he called ‘Treasury gonads’ – the Secret Service remained part of the Treasury Department, an anachronism stemming from its nineteenth-century origins chasing counterfeiters.

  Nessheim wasn’t part of any of this – he had other duties, and he reported to Guttman. This annoyed Mueller. ‘Just what is it you’re supposed to be doing?’ he’d asked.

  The problem was, Nessheim couldn’t have told Mueller much about his work even if he had wanted to. As instructed by Guttman, he began reviewing the security arrangements around Roosevelt. The ground had been laid for his arrival: on his first day, the doorkeeper in the mansion showed him the log books for Presidential visitors – there was half a shelf of them, dating back to the first day of Roosevelt’s presidency in March 1933. Then Nessheim talked with a man named Hackmeister, who was in charge of the White House switchboard. Apparently, the President was virtually addicted to the instrument. ‘I bet half his day is on the phone,’ said Hackmeister.

  Finally, Nessheim met the President’s two full-time secretaries, a striking woman named Missy Le Hand, and a quieter one named Tully. The two kept their own records of the President’s visitors, though frequent ones to the Executive Wing weren’t always noted. ‘If I marked every time Mr Hopkins came to see the President,’ Le Hand explained with a laugh, ‘he’d have three volumes just by himself.’ It was odd to see iconic names recorded in such a humdrum way – Hopkins, Corcoran, Morgenthau. Hopkins even lived there in the White House, it turned out, and Felix Frankfurter had been resident for months a few years before.

  What most struck Nessheim, however, was the actual lack of real security around the President. This was not through Secret Service or FBI laxness, but due to FDR himself. He refused point blank to have guards stationed in his living quarters in the mansion; at night he would not allow guards inside the White House at all. Even more worrying from a security angle was Roosevelt’s delight in shaking off his s
ecurity men, especially in the afternoon when he liked to escape from his office and go for a drive. Although he always had a chauffeur, he often did the driving himself, using the retainer only to help haul him out of the modified driver’s seat.

  These escapades gave both his Secret Service and FBI minders absolute conniptions. Mueller’s views of what the President got up to during these afternoon jaunts were relentlessly salacious. ‘He’s got to be playing away,’ he would say. ‘Who wouldn’t with a wife like that? Those choppers – can you imagine how they’d feel on your dinga-ling?’

  Reuters, a young agent so green he made Nessheim feel like a seasoned veteran, piped up. ‘But Mule, he’s in a wheelchair, for Christ’s sake.’

  Mueller shrugged. ‘From what I hear, that doesn’t stop the guy. Something’s still working down there.’

  Mueller’s disdain for Roosevelt was not singular; even as his second term was coming to a close, the President attracted abuse from many of America’s citizens. There were sackloads of hate mail, full of anonymous death threats, though their sheer volume stripped them of the urgency they were intended to inspire. The critics were not all Americans: Mueller had come in one morning, talking about a radio programme he’d listened to the night before. ‘You should have heard this guy in Germany last night going on about the President. I heard him on short wave. He sounds like a Limey.’

  ‘What was he saying?’ asked Reuters.

  ‘Nothing nice, believe me. He calls the President Rosenfeld.’ Nothing new there, thought Nessheim. Uncle Eric had done the same.

  But Mueller aside, Nessheim’s job soon assumed a pedestrian normality which he wouldn’t have believed possible – not for someone working in the White House. After a week, his work had settled into a routine of reviewing the files and meeting with the President’s administrative staff. At lunch he ate in the local coffee shops with the other FBI agents; none of them mingled with the agents from the Secret Service. Nessheim didn’t ever meet the President, who was often away, and his acquaintance with the man he was supposed to help protect was confined to a couple of sightings from behind, as FDR was pushed in his bespoke wheelchair along the portico that linked the Executive Wing to the mansion. The ‘glamour’ of working in the White House had worn off swiftly, and not for the first time Nessheim wondered what Guttman really had in mind for him.

  21

  TWO WEEKS AFTER starting at the White House, Nessheim took a trolley car one Thursday after lunch to Washington Circle. It took forever; when he got off and followed the conductor’s directions to Dumbarton Avenue he had to run, straight into a harsh western wind that was keeping winter alive. Even so he was late, and found Guttman pacing impatiently on the cobblestoned sidewalk. It was a narrow street, shaded by lines of mid-sized maple trees.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nessheim panted. He realised he was getting out of shape.

  ‘I’d better assign you one of the pool cars. You’re going to be moving around too much to rely on the trolleys.’ Guttman gestured to one of the townhouses set back from the sidewalk. ‘Let’s go in.’

  The house was tall and thin, its brick painted a milky yellow, with dark blue shutters on its windows. The ground level was occupied by a garage, with an adjacent flight of steps that ran up to the front door. They climbed them and Guttman knocked.

  A young woman answered the door. She was dressed for business, in a short wool jacket and a calf-length skirt. Her face was striking rather than pretty, with deep-set eyes but a small crooked nose, and her dark straight hair was cut in a forbidding bob. But she smiled politely enough, and led them through to a sitting room, where a small wood fire was burning on an iron grate. A door at the far end was half-open, revealing a book-lined study.

  The woman said to Guttman, ‘Justice Frankfurter is waiting for you in there.’

  ‘Take a seat,’ Guttman said to Nessheim, pointing to a stuffed armchair by the fire. ‘I won’t be long.’ He went into the study and closed the door behind him.

  Nessheim sat down awkwardly, then saw the woman had stayed in the room. She was quite tall, he realised, thin, almost wiry. Now she sat down behind a small desk by the room’s front window.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘We’re a little short of room, so I have to make do with this for my office.’

  He nodded, but inwardly he was annoyed. Why had he been brought along if he was being excluded from the meeting?

  The fire crackled, and an ember suddenly shot out above the guard, landing on the carpet. He reached down and flicked it back towards the hearth, then looking up saw the woman staring at him.

  ‘Your nose looks out of joint,’ she declared, eyeing him carefully.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He leaned back in his chair and stared at her.

  ‘Just what I said.’ She gestured at the closed door. ‘Were you expecting to be in there?’

  ‘I don’t expect. I’m just the bottle washer.’

  ‘Oh, I thought maybe you were the bodyguard,’ she said tartly.

  ‘G-men don’t need bodyguards,’ he said, trying not to smile.

  ‘Of course not. How dense of me. So what are you here for?’

  ‘To protect you, of course.’

  She laughed and her face broke into a smile, surprising because up to now her countenance had been severe. She said teasingly ‘Do you really need to carry a gun in your line of work?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  You couldn’t brush this woman off, he realised. ‘On whether you need one.’

  ‘You’re ducking the question,’ she said confidently. He shrugged, thinking of Danny Ho. Suddenly she seemed to realise why he might not want to answer. She said, ‘I’m being tactless aren’t I? Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Most agents never have to fire their weapon. It’s just the luck of the draw.’

  ‘So to speak,’ she said. When he grinned, she seemed to regain her confidence. ‘I know your name’s Nessheim, but do you have another one?’

  ‘Jimmy,’ he said. ‘And yours?’

  ‘I’m Annie Ryerson.’

  ‘Are you from around here?’

  ‘Is anybody? I’ve been here two years – I started for the Justice last winter after his appointment was confirmed. You don’t sound very local yourself.’

  ‘Small-town Wisconsin,’ he said.

  ‘Me too. Small-town, that is.’

  ‘So what brings a country girl to Washington?’ He was making conversation, but he found himself interested, and she looked like she was enjoying herself.

  ‘Small-town, not country. I grew up in New England.’

  ‘I’ve been there.’

  ‘To see the colours in autumn?’ she asked. There was a hint of gentle mockery.

  ‘Nope. I was working in Vermont.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, but her tone was chilly enough that he wondered if he’d said something wrong.

  ‘You know it there?’ he added mildly.

  ‘It’s where I grew up. So, where were you at law school?’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Aren’t all FBI men lawyers?’

  ‘Not all.’

  ‘Where’d you go to college then?’

  ‘Northwestern. But I didn’t finish.’ He felt he was being checked out by an examiner. He said sharply, ‘They taught me to read but I had to leave before they let me put it into practice.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to be nosey.’

  ‘Sure. Where did you go?’ Somewhere snooty, he decided. Vassar, or Bryn Mawr. He felt slightly disappointed.

  ‘I didn’t go to college,’ she said coolly. ‘Things got in the way.’

  ‘Money things?’ he said.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Me too. Dad owned a store. He lost it in my junior year,’ he confessed.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ It sounded genuine. ‘Mine’s hanging on. Just.’

  He was surprised, and realised he had pegged her wrong. ‘General store?’
/>   She nodded. ‘There used to be six in town. Now there’s only three.’

  It seemed incongruous, sitting in this fancy sitting room, to be talking about small-town storekeeping. But as their conversation continued, Nessheim found it completely natural. Something about this woman attracted him. She wasn’t obviously sexy, some men wouldn’t even have found her pretty, but he found himself wanting her to like him. He told her the story of his father’s financial decline, and he liked how she listened sympathetically but without a trace of pity. When she talked in turn it was clear she knew the same territory of near-despair, but she didn’t harp on the hard times, and made him laugh describing her father, whose Yankee parsimony she sketched in simple, devastating tones. Then she changed the subject.

  ‘Where in Vermont were you working?’ she asked.

  ‘Near Woodstock,’ he said, and she looked startled.

  The door of the study opened, and Guttman and the Justice emerged. Nessheim got to his feet. Glancing at his watch, he was astonished to find an hour had passed.

  Guttman spoke first. ‘Agent Nessheim, this is Justice Frankfurter.’

  A little man, not much more than five feet tall, stepped forward. He said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ then vigorously shook Nessheim’s hand. The voice was warm, with a hint of New York. His grey hair was combed straight back, revealing a broad forehead, beneath which jutted a wrinkled, prominent nose. He wore spectacles, but behind them he had deep thoughtful blue eyes that also managed to sparkle, as if life sobered and amused him in equal measure. His elfin stature belied an obvious energy that made Nessheim feel he had suddenly been thrust into a more active orbit.

  Frankfurter said, ‘Nessheim, eh? A German name.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nessheim.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Wisconsin.’