Fear Itself Read online

  Looking both ways, he crossed the street and stopped behind the car, putting a shoe up on the chrome bumper to tie his laces. The licence plate was from Michigan. In the streetlamp’s semi-halo of light he could read its numbers. He was memorising them for the second time in his head when a voice said coldly, ‘You’re on my car, bud.’

  Nessheim put his foot down and stood up straight. Ten feet away a man in a long wool overcoat stood on the pavement. He was as tall as Nessheim and had both his hands in his coat’s pockets. The man stepped forward until Nessheim could see his face in the streetlamp’s light. His eyes were deep set, dark as raisins, and he had a tight, mean-looking mouth. But what Nessheim noticed most was the strawberry birthmark, stretching like an ink stain from just below his left eye to the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Just tying my shoe,’ said Nessheim. He pointed at the car’s bumper. ‘I didn’t scratch your chrome.’ He gave a witless smile.

  ‘So beat it, in case I decide to scratch yours.’

  Nessheim stiffened. There was nothing to worry about – he had a badge under his coat that should calm this man down, and if that didn’t do the job, he figured his .38 would. But the last thing he needed was an altercation: putting this guy in the local hoosegow would drag in higher-ups from the Bureau – he could hear Ferguson’s complaint already. He said with a feigned sense of hurt, ‘Okay, no need to get tough about it, pal.’

  ‘I’m not your pal. Like I said, beat it.’

  The man took a further, threatening step towards him. Nessheim backed out into the street, his hands up in surrender. ‘Take it easy, take it easy,’ he said, sounding as feeble as he could. He turned and walked away fast, looking back over his shoulder to make sure the man wasn’t following.

  As he headed back towards his own car, he wondered what the guy was doing here. And why had he moved his car until it sat directly across from Reno’s? Probably a coincidence, he told himself, then mentally recited the licence plate numbers again, since he’d decided he’d check them out after the weekend, back in Chicago. If they’d been Wisconsin plates he probably wouldn’t have bothered. Not that a Michigan car in Milwaukee was all that unusual.

  Unless you’d had another mention of the state already. What had Eddie Le Saux’s harbour friend said? Heydeman’s gone to Michigan. Too many Michigans for me, thought Nessheim.

  3

  JIMMY NESSHEIM WAS twenty-six years old and had been an agent in the Chicago Field Office of the FBI for two and a half years – by accident, as he remembered each day that he went to work. This morning he was dressed in his best suit, a three-piece grey worsted one from Brooks Brothers. It had cost more than his father made in a month, and Nessheim had bought it for days like this one, when he needed to look professional and experienced, since he knew his boyish face made people think he was younger than he was. It also meant they tended to underestimate him – not always wisely, for there was an inner steeliness in Nessheim of a kind usually found in older, jaded men. The hardness had been forged by a personal disappointment that he thought he had got over – he knew he was fortunate to have landed where he had. There weren’t many people who could say the same, not with so many lives damaged in the eight years since Wall Street committed suicide.

  He had stayed up late, writing up his notes, trying to summarise as tightly as possible his conversation with Eddie Le Saux. Concision was at a premium with Warner Ferguson, the Special Agent in Charge (SAC for short), who made a point of doing everything as differently as possible from his predecessor, the legendary and loquacious Melvin H. Purvis.

  Nessheim dropped the pool car he had taken to Milwaukee back at the Bureau’s garage on Wabash, across the street from the sludge-filled Chicago River. In the early sunshine, the air was gradually warming as Nessheim walked across the Loop to the FBI offices. They were curiously anonymous, an entire floor of a new building located on the corner of La Salle and Adams, in the heart of Chicago’s famous Loop, almost next door to the Board of Trade, where the agricultural futures of the country – corn and pigs and soy beans and wheat – were traded, these days still fetching prices lower than a decade before. Known as the Bankers Building, the forty-storey tower had been designed by the Burnham Brothers ten years ago, one of the skyscrapers for which both they and the city were now renowned.

  In the lobby, a two-storeyed lavish galleria of marble and brass, he bought a copy of the Tribune from Leo, the one-armed owner of the news kiosk, then walked across the polished floor to the bank of elevators. He got in with several other early birds, and pressed the button for his floor – the building owners crowed about these automatic elevators, a heartless kind of boast when they could have filled each job of elevator operator a hundred times over. As the doors closed, their rubber edges met with a jolt, and Nessheim took a deep silent breath as the steel box started to rise with a gradual, growing whoosh. As always, it made him slightly dizzy, and triggered another mental replay of the moment his life had changed.

  They’d been Fourth and Six on the Michigan 42-yard line. Too far for a field goal, though Northwestern were behind by only two points. There were ninety seconds left, and in the huddle Beckerbaugh the quarterback told him to go long. Nessheim had lined up wide, on the far touchline, and with the hike he sprinted to the 25-yard line, planning to curl in for the pass. But the safety was slow to cover, so Nessheim kept going, turning his head on the 10-yard line to see the ball floating towards him, in one of Beckerbaugh’s wobbly spiral passes. He timed his leap and jumped with both hands fully extended, and as he felt the pigskin on his fingertips he knew the ball was his.

  Then the safety showed up.

  They told him later he’d landed directly on his head. He woke up in the locker room, with Coach Goetz looking on anxiously while a doctor, summoned over the PA system from the stands, stood over him.

  ‘What happened?’ Nessheim asked groggily.

  ‘You got decked,’ the doctor said, and Jimmy saw he was wearing a Northwestern scarf.

  ‘Did I hold onto the ball?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘I wish to hell you had – I had twenty bucks riding on you guys.’

  Nessheim had missed the last two games of the season, for his immediate concussion was followed by headaches so excruciating that he couldn’t walk more than a block at a time. After Christmas they receded, but then the dizzy spells began. They would attack him out of the blue, a vertiginous imbalance that made him fear he would fall down – once, buying gum in a Walgreen’s Drugstore, he actually did. When spring practice started he didn’t make it through the first day, and the coach had called him in.

  ‘You look kind of shaky.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ he’d insisted.

  ‘I want you to see the doctor before you come back to practice.’

  It was not a request. Dutifully he had gone down to Michael Reese Hospital on the near South Side to see a specialist, Dr Morris Abrams, a Northwestern graduate who waived his fees in return for season tickets. Abrams had given him a thorough physical, then asked a battery of short, penetrating questions. To his eternal regret Nessheim had answered them all truthfully, and four minutes later Dr Abrams had ended his football career.

  ‘Another knock could be fatal,’ he had declared. ‘You can’t take that risk.’

  He remembered the meeting that followed with Coach Goetz. It hadn’t lasted very long: Coach had said, his voice sympathetic but firm, If you can’t play, we can’t pay. Sorry, Jimmy.

  Now when the elevator in the Bankers Building opened on the nineteenth floor and Nessheim stepped out, it was just seven-thirty; only the night security man sat yawning at reception. Nessheim could see Ferguson’s office, down the hall at the front of the building, its door wide open. He walked down and snuck a look inside; it was empty, so he went and stood by the window, taking in the view of the lake, which spread like a blue tablecloth, unruffled and calm this sunny morning. He never got tired of this view, and he loved to look out across the high buildings of the Lo
op – until he’d come to Chicago, the highest man-made vantage point he’d known had been the bell tower in the Bremen Wisconsin Lutheran church. He pulled back from the window, remembering where he was. One day I’ll have an office like this, he told himself, half-defiant, half-joking. He returned to reception, then down the carpeted corridor that ran the other way along this floor. The small agent offices that lined one side of the corridor were empty; on the other side the fingerprint and forensic lab was still locked.

  He walked into the Bullpen, an open area of half a dozen desks. It was separated by a half-wood, half-glass partition from the typing pool, where a woman sat at one end, facing the small tables where the secretaries worked.

  ‘Morning,’ he said as he went to his desk.

  ‘Hi, kid,’ the woman said without turning her head.

  Her name was Eloise Tate, but everyone knew her as Tatie. She was a slim woman with sharp features punctuated by a sliver of dimple in her chin, short black hair, and a tart mouth which spoke as if words were burning her tongue. She smoked any kind of cigarette that didn’t have a filter, and dressed in the dull uniform – white blouse, grey skirt, black heels – of a woman who made it clear she wasn’t going to push the boat out in an effort to impress you. With Tatie, you either took her as she was, or left her well alone. Attractive in a Girl Friday kind of way, she was probably in her early forties and definitely unmarried, and in the absence of a known boyfriend everyone assumed she’d stay that way. Some of the agents said she had to be a lezzy; others claimed she’d had a thing for Melvin Purvis when he’d been Chicago Special Agent in Charge. Either way, no one had the balls to try their luck.

  It was Purvis, the legendary G-Man, who had plucked Tatie out of the ranks. He made her head of the typing pool, but she did a lot more than hammer a keyboard – she’d already been in the bureau for a dozen years by the time Nessheim started, and she knew where the bodies were buried, and just as important, where the files were stored. Her formal rise through the organisation had reached the dead end imposed by her sex, but Purvis relied on her to handle most of his communications with HQ in D.C., and whenever a crisis arose – with Purvis that was at least once a month – it was no accident that Tatie was always around to help. For all the flamboyance that got him in the papers – this was the man who’d arrested Ma Barker – Purvis was careful, and he confided in no man. But Tatie wasn’t a man; though she could type 95 words a minute and take shorthand as fast anyone could talk, with Purvis her most important job had been to listen.

  Nessheim walked over to her now, holding the notes he’d written the night before. ‘You busy, Tatie?’

  She looked up at him sourly. ‘No, I’m here this early because I like the place so much. What do you want me to type?’ ‘This,’ he said, giving her the handwritten pages. ‘It’s important. It’s for the SAC.’

  ‘Everything’s important, kid. Even documents that never reach the eyes of Warner Ferguson.’ She turned back to her typewriter. As he walked away she called over her shoulder, ‘I’ll have it by noon, okay?’

  He stopped. ‘Have you heard from Mr P. lately?’

  ‘Postcard from Hollywood. It’s 78 degrees there. Lucky bastard.’

  He spent the morning writing up his other recent meetings with informants – Mike Louis, at the meat-processing factory, who claimed there was a plot by Trotskyites to take over the union, and asked for an extra ten bucks a month; ‘Domino’ Reading, a mulatto piano player who doubled as a Pullman waiter and kept tabs on political dissidents in the jazz world (this month Nessheim was glad to see there weren’t any); and Dankiewicz, first name unknown, who warned of trouble ahead with the steelworkers out in South Chicago.

  When he was through he checked with Tatie in the Bullpen and she handed over a sheaf of carbon typed pages with a shake of her head. ‘I’m flattered you asked me to do this – and I can see why you did. I just hope you know what you’re getting into.’

  ‘It’s just a proposal, Tatie,’ he said. ‘He can always say no.’

  ‘He’ll say no all right, believe you me. It’s what else Ferguson says that worries me.’

  ‘It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘Oh, kid, you’re green as chartreuse. This isn’t a football game, and if it was, you’d be on your own goal line.’

  ‘Thanks a lot. Listen, do you think I can get in there after lunch? I want to leave early because I’m driving up to my folks’ house in Wisconsin.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll see you as soon as he’s read your report. I wouldn’t worry about that. I’ll put it on the top of his stack for when he gets back from lunch.’

  And right after lunch Ferguson called him in. He was standing stork-like (for he was six foot three) at the window of his corner office, looking down at the small figures far below heading back to work on La Salle Street. He turned as Jimmy entered and signalled for him to sit down, then took his time before sitting down himself, pushing his chair back from his desk to give his legs room to extend.

  Where Purvis had been cock of the walk, Ferguson was strictly Sears and Roebuck, conventional, nothing flash – he wore a blue three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a tasteless brown striped tie. Purvis had commanded respect, in the words of one senior agent, ‘the way sand soaks up water’; by contrast, Ferguson was an ex-inspector of taxes who’d originally joined the Bureau out east. He had none of Purvis’s flair – he’d once barked at a hapless agent, ‘I like my men to do things by the book. That way we all know how the story’s going to end.’ Nessheim wished he still worked for Purvis, but Purvis was in Hollywood, capitalising on his newfound celebrity – he had become as famous as Hoover, and Hoover had not liked that at all.

  Now as Nessheim sat down stiffly, his legs uncrossed, Ferguson said neutrally, ‘We have a few things to discuss.’

  ‘Have you read my report?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve read the report all right.’

  ‘So you saw my proposal then?’ When Ferguson didn’t respond, Nessheim went on: ‘About putting me in undercover.’

  Ferguson shook his head. ‘The Director’s made it clear we’re not going to use our own agents undercover. And in this case,’ he pointed at the typed pages on his desk, ‘I don’t think it would be worth the effort.’

  ‘You don’t?’ asked Nessheim. He couldn’t have predicted Ferguson’s precise reaction, but he had certainly expected his recommendations to be taken seriously.

  ‘I think you’ve been taken for a ride, Nessheim. Le Saux’s a Party member, yet he never provides us with information of value. Why, he can’t even supply the minutes of the Party meetings.’

  ‘Okay,’ conceded Nessheim. ‘But what about the Bund?’

  ‘What about it? A few Krauts get together every once in a while to drink beer and sing folk songs and wear Lederhosen – I’m supposed to get excited? I’m supposed to put you undercover for that?’ His tone was acid.

  ‘They’re dangerous people,’ Nessheim said, but it sounded weak.

  Ferguson was already shaking his head. ‘Exactly what have you got? A Michigan licence plate – could be anybody’s who happened to drive round the lake. Christ, they might have even taken the car ferry. Then there’s a mysterious German who’s disappeared. And supposedly some tommy guns, which have also conveniently gone west – I’ll believe that one when my Aunt Minnie takes up bowling in the nude. Come on, this guy Le Saux is spinning you a yarn. Can’t you see that?’

  No, he couldn’t, because Nessheim trusted Eddie Le Saux. But this was not a reason he could offer to Ferguson – you were supposed to run your informants, not become their supporters. He said, ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ Contempt poured from the man. ‘To distract you from the true gen. He didn’t want to talk about the CP any more, I noticed.’

  ‘You mean about Spain? Why’s Spain so important?’

  ‘Why? Because these are American citizens trying to fight for a foreign government. That in my book is treason – what’s
it in yours? Just what hymn sheet are you singing from, Nessheim?’

  ‘The Bureau’s hymn sheet.’ There wasn’t anything else he thought it safe to say.

  Ferguson pursed his lips to show he wasn’t satisfied. ‘Sometimes I wonder.’ He clasped his hands and set them on his desk; not a good sign, in Nessheim’s experience. ‘Here’s the point. You’re way in left field on this one. I know you’re kind of green, but you should know better. Part of me feels maybe I should turn this over to another agent. Like Stapleton.’

  Stapleton was a clapped-out veteran, who drank his lunch in the Berghoff Bar most days, and was simply counting the time until he took his pension. He’d joined when J. Edgar Hoover was still in short pants and the Bureau had a different name; he would never have passed through in this day and age. If Ferguson was trying to insult Nessheim, he was doing a good job.

  Nessheim swallowed his anger and tried to sound levelheaded, saying, ‘I think you should keep me on Le Saux. Continuity’s important with an informant, and Le Saux doesn’t like change.’

  Ferguson nodded – he could not have expected Nessheim to agree to the switch. ‘Okay. But time for you to get back in the game. I want you to go see Le Saux next week and get these Party minutes. Understood? Tell him if you don’t have them by a week from today then …’ He paused.

  Then what? thought Nessheim. We won’t use Le Saux any more? We get to save a lousy hundred dollars a month and lose a Class A informant – he didn’t know of many other secretaries of CP branches on the Bureau payroll.

  Ferguson saw the dead end of his own argument. Annoyed, he thrust his jaw out like a real-life Dick Tracy, and barked, ‘Just get me the minutes.’

  4

  ON THE WAY north to his parents in Wisconsin, Nessheim stopped on the outskirts of Milwaukee to fill up with gas, pump the tyres, and check the oil and water. With Ferguson’s orders still ringing in his ears, he was tempted to go into the city and try to find Eddie Le Saux. But he didn’t even know where he lived, and besides, he wouldn’t get the minutes any faster that way.