Fear Itself Read online

  An odd question perhaps, but Nessheim replied immediately. ‘FDR.’

  ‘Me too.’ Guttman’s mind was made up. He would take a chance with this kid. ‘Tell me, do you enjoy life out here?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s swell.’

  Guttman made a cricket noise with his tongue. ‘That’s too bad.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Only that it’s a shame you like it, because you won’t be here much longer. What do you think?’

  ‘I’m not paid to think, sir.’ He hesitated, seemingly unable to read Guttman’s expression. ‘I guess I’d like to know if it’s a promotion or I’m being kicked in the can.’

  Guttman shrugged a shoulder easily. ‘That depends on how you view working for me. I imagine there are some guys would give their eye teeth … not to. In your case, it should be interesting – I can guarantee you that. It’s conceivable it might also get you killed.’

  ‘That’s what they pay us for,’ said Nessheim with a breeziness he clearly didn’t feel. But there was eagerness as well as relief on his face now.

  ‘I’m thinking of having you go in. That is, if you’re willing.’

  ‘Go in?’

  Guttman paused, weighing his words carefully. ‘Go undercover. I want to place you in the ranks of the German-American Bund. You see, I think the Bund will do anything to keep us out of a war in Europe, and then when Hitler’s taken over that continent, he’ll turn his sights on America. It will be our turn to become part of the Great Fatherland. And that’s what the Bund wants.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘I sure do. Let me tell you how I got this far.’ And he explained how he’d received a report, alarming in itself, of a theft of guns from a US Army armoury in Detroit.

  ‘A few guns get pilfered in Detroit and you come all the way to see me?’

  Guttman looked at him sharply, but he saw Nessheim was genuinely puzzled. Guttman said, ‘At first I thought it could have been anybody – the Purple Gang, or Communists, or just plain thieves. But then I got another report – yours. Your source Eddie Le Saux bumps into a guy from Michigan. A guy who stores eight guns in Le Saux’s fishing shack without telling him. And a guy who we know is active in the Bund in Detroit.’

  He focused his deep dark eyes on Nessheim. ‘One coincidence I can live with; two might keep me awake at nights. Three gets me on a train.

  ‘I read your report,’ Guttman continued, ‘then I looked at your file. You’re young, and that will cover a multitude of sins. It’s also easier to create a dummy history for somebody when it’s not very long. You’re German-American obviously, which is a good start for someone infiltrating the Bund.’

  ‘I don’t speak German.’

  ‘I bet you understand it. Your folks spoke it, didn’t they?’

  Nessheim’s silence was tacit affirmation. Guttman said, ‘I want you listening anyway, not talking.’

  ‘What do you want me to find out?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ said Guttman, trying to sound unbothered.

  ‘Well then, where are you sending me in?’

  ‘I’m not sure of that either, or when it will happen – not for a year at least. You’ll have to be patient.’

  ‘What do I do in the meantime?’

  ‘I want you to go to San Francisco.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Nessheim in surprise. But he looked pleased.

  Guttman had his reasons for sending Nessheim there. Even if he helped Nessheim to escape the wholesale transfer of the Purvis-appointed agents (and Guttman doubted he could swing that), SAC Ferguson would never let Nessheim work high-profile cases. He’d sideline the agent, put him onto liaison with the Treasury agents working out here, or stick him with the bean counters down the hall. If he stayed in Chicago, Nessheim wouldn’t gain the experience Guttman wanted him to have.

  Whereas Morgan, the SAC in California (and an old acquaintance of Guttman) had agreed to throw the kid in at the deep end. It also helped that San Francisco was 2,500 miles from D.C., a world away from the suspicious eyes of Tolson and Hoover.

  ‘Better than Butte, heh?’ Guttman said.

  ‘I’ll say.’ Nessheim seemed to think of something. ‘Does SAC Ferguson know about this?’

  ‘No one knows. Except me.’ He paused. ‘And the Director.’

  ‘Mr Hoover?’

  ‘Yes, J. Edgar himself. This was his idea.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nessheim casually, but he looked impressed.

  ‘Now why don’t we get started.’ Guttman pushed the file to one side of the desk to show he was done with questioning him. He looked at Nessheim and gave another half-smile. ‘We’ve got a lot to go through, and I’m leaving in the morning. Let’s start with the death of Eddie Le Saux. I don’t think it was an accident, either.’

  8

  April 1938

  San Francisco

  SIMMONS AND MUELLER were sitting in the car this time; it was Nessheim’s turn to take the street. He stood against a lamppost, idly turning the pages of the early edition of the Herald, trying to look unconcerned while keeping a keen eye on the entrance to the Bank of America branch across the street.

  They were waiting for Danny Ho, but with little confidence that he and his associates would show up. Ho was half-Chinese, a San Francisco native who had been a stand-out baseball player at St Ignatius High School. Smartly dressed, a careful planner, Ho might have become an insurance executive, or a stalwart of industry. Instead he had opted to make his living robbing banks, and had shot a bank guard dead only two weeks before in Petaluma; the month before, his sidekick McCosh had pistol-whipped an old lady who’d got in the way when they held up a bank across the Bay in Oakland – her skull had been fractured and she’d died the next day. Ho and his friend were armed and undeniably dangerous, and Nessheim was glad to have his .38 under his arm.

  Nessheim had been on four stakeouts in the last week, none of them productive. Three teams of agents were assigned to the case, divvying up the bank branches in town, narrowing their selections to cover any given building only on collection day. Morgan, the San Francisco office’s Special Agent in Charge, had been adamant the gang would strike when money was being transferred from a bank’s vault to an armoured truck, since these days there was never enough cash in the tills to justify a stick-up.

  They were in the downtown financial district, Nessheim’s least favourite part of San Francisco. The expanse of the city was lost here; it was a small area, just a few square blocks, but dominated by a dense higgledy-piggledy pattern of new skyscrapers which blocked out the city’s picturesque contours and panoramic views, an odd canyon in a city that had its own natural variety of height. After Chicago, this business district seemed both titchy to Nessheim, and also foolhardy – only three decades before, the earthquake of 1906 had levelled buildings without any regard to how tall they were.

  He was living in a small rental apartment near West Portal, a new neighbourhood being developed five miles west, not far from the Pacific. He had it on a short-term lease, arranged that way on Guttman’s instructions so Nessheim could leave at a moment’s notice. From the corner nearest his building he could see the ocean, and on first arriving, he had wondered why the rich people of the city preferred to live east on Nob Hill when they could have erected mansions on an undeveloped coast. But he knew why now, for each day he rose and walked through the chilly fog to the West Portal station to take one of the trolley cars that trundled through the tunnel cut under Twin Peaks, then emerged five miles east into bright sunshine.

  From San Francisco Nessheim wrote dutifully each week to his parents, and he heard twice a week from them – though there wasn’t much news from Bremen, except the startling revelation that not only had Trudy married Alex Burgmeister but she’d had a baby already. God damn, he thought, doing some counting, she must have been three months’ pregnant walking up the aisle. And there he’d been, patiently accepting her insistence that sex could not take place for a good German girl un
til she’d been wed in a holy Lutheran church. More fool me, he thought, and was glad to find he could laugh.

  After six months in Fraud, Nessheim had been moved onto bank robberies, where Congress had changed the law to allow the Bureau to intervene even when no state line had been crossed, in recognition that something had to be done – villains were being turned into heroes, deified by the press, by books, and most of all by the movies. Dillinger, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde – these were names that resonated throughout the heartland, and Nessheim saw how fame cleansed even the dirtiest pair of hands.

  The heartland – he had seen it now, after deciding to drive to San Francisco. His early progress through Iowa had seemed familiar, almost comfortable, dulling any sense of adventure. He’d crossed the Mississippi in Dubuque and stopped for lunch in a diner. Two pork chops, a mountain of fried potatoes, string beans, apple pie with ice cream – the bill had been 30 cents, and the waitress had been over the moon at the dime he’d left besides.

  In western Nebraska he had got caught between towns, unused to the vast spaces of the American West. He thought he might have to spend the night in the car, which would be cold on the prairie, even in spring. But after three miles and a Burma Shave sign he saw a farmhouse ahead, set back from the highway a hundred yards or so. It had a slender windmill, its spokes lifeless as a dead flower’s petals. He pulled into the barnyard next to the two-storey farmhouse, which might have been painted once, but whose boards were now the colour of old silver. A dog lay by the front porch, tied by a chain; it was too tired to rouse itself when he got out of the car.

  He looked around, thinking that though he’d seen a lot of hard-luck farms in recent years, this one took the biscuit. A few chickens squabbled in the dust yard behind the house, but there was no sign of other livestock, and the tractor parked in the open bay of the barn was missing its front tyre. Behind the house there was an acre-sized, knee-high patch of corn.

  A tall old man came out onto the porch. He was thin and unshaven, and wore faded overalls and a yellowed straw hat, with cracked leather boots on his feet. He stared at Nessheim.

  ‘Hi, I was wondering if I could maybe spend the night here.’

  ‘This ain’t no motel.’ There was a twang to the voice, like a country fiddle on the radio.

  ‘I’d pay whatever’s fair.’

  The man studied Nessheim for a moment, then spat, just ahead of one boot, onto the rough planks of the porch. ‘Two bits and you can sleep in the hayloft. Four bits gets you the sofa.’

  Nessheim looked over at the barn. A cocoon of flies hovered in its doorway. ‘I’ll take the sofa. Is there a bathtub I can use?’

  ‘Baths are Sunday,’ said the man dismissively. ‘There’s a horse trough half-full of water.’

  When Nessheim looked doubtful, the old man gave a creaky laugh. ‘Ain’t no horses here no more, if that’s worrying you.’

  ‘Can I get some supper, too?’

  ‘That’ll make it a dollar then. Not that we got a whole hell of a lot to eat.’

  Supper was beans with a few scattered chunks of fatback, served on tin plates by the man’s daughter. She looked in her twenties, but had prematurely greying hair to which the hot sun of the Great Plains had done no favours. As thin as her father, she had a hawk nose and gaunt, dried-out cheeks. She exuded a sense of inner exhaustion, which people with fewer chores to do might have called despair.

  There was no sign of other family. Nessheim and the old man ate in silence in the bare picture-less dining room, while the daughter stayed out in the kitchen. The old man pushed his fork into his mouth without pause, and Nessheim struggled to keep up with the pace of his feeding.

  ‘That was real good,’ said Nessheim as the daughter came and took their plates away. The faintest flush surfaced on the woman’s wan cheeks, and her father scowled.

  After supper the old man went into the parlour, starkly furnished with a rickety sideboard, several upright chairs, and a moth-eaten sofa which Nessheim just knew was going to keep him awake all night. The old man turned on an ancient radio, the tubes crackling as an announcer declared that the listeners to Cornbelt Broadcasting would be hearing waltz music live from the Lincoln City Auditorium. As the old man sat down, settling in for his concert, Nessheim wondered when he’d be able to go to bed.

  ‘Think I’ll have a little stroll,’ he said, and went out the front door. The sun had dipped below the horizon line, and ahead of him he could just see the highway demarcated by a sagging line of barbed-wire fence. He turned and headed toward the barn, and was having a peek inside when he heard steps behind him.

  ‘Never seen a barn before?’ Her voice was throaty, low; he realised he hadn’t heard her speak once during supper. He didn’t have any idea how to answer.

  ‘I reckon you’re allowed to look inside,’ she said, walking past him and entering the bay of the building.

  He followed, and stood beside her on the rough dirt floor, which was littered with loose straw. Through the darkening gloom he saw stairs at one end that led through an open trapdoor to the loft.

  ‘We’re not on the electricity here,’ she said.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said, and an awkward silence ensued.

  Suddenly she asked, ‘Ain’t you gonna kiss me then?’

  He was surprised, but complied out of politeness. Leaning forward to give her a peck on the cheek, he immediately felt her lips pressed like clamps on his, as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She hung on ferociously, until at last he managed to break his mouth away and breathe.

  ‘We could go upstairs,’ she said, her eyes lifting to indicate the loft above them. She paused. ‘If we do, will you promise to take me with you when you go?’

  To his relief she didn’t seem surprised when he said no, as gently as he could. He realised this was not the first time she had made the offer.

  In the morning he wasn’t given breakfast, and when he left the daughter stayed inside. The old man stood on the porch watching while Nessheim drove off, as if suspicious he might not be going after all.

  He liked his colleagues in San Francisco well enough, except for one, Jake Mueller, who turned out to be the same man shunted out of the Chicago office by Melvin H. Purvis for being too eager to use his gun. Large and balding, Mueller was aggressive, quick to spot weakness, and an accomplished bully. He couldn’t have been much older than Nessheim, but he acted as if he had been an agent for years. He had played tackle both ways at the University of Southern California, and liked to boast that he could have played pro ball. He mocked Nessheim for having played a ‘sissy’ position, until someone told him that Nessheim had been second team all-American. This temporarily lifted Nessheim in Mueller’s estimation, and after they worked well together on one fraud case – breaking up a Chinese crime ring which bilked members of their own community, desperate to be buried back in China, into paying way over the odds to have their remains shipped home – Mueller even invited Nessheim to come along to a party east of the Bay one Saturday evening.

  It had not been a party per se, as Nessheim discovered after Mueller had driven him in his old jalopy over the new Bay Bridge, then across Oakland and into the hills rising east of there, until after almost two hours’ drive they descended into arid valley land and reached the outskirts of the town of Livermore. Here they stopped outside a saloon, fronted by a large wooden sign that said Plumholtz’s. They went inside, into a large high-ceilinged bar room, where only a couple of dusty-looking farmers sat drinking steins of beer. In a back room they found more people – all men, Nessheim realised, wondering where the girls were. Chairs were lined up in four rows at one end of the room and a flag hung on the wall which he recognised as an emblem Uncle Eric also had hanging from his porch in Wisconsin. He suddenly realised he was present at a meeting of the German-American Bund.

  His face must have shown his surprise, for Mueller suddenly grinned and slapped him on the back. ‘Cheer up. The formalities never last long. Then we can get good and schn
ockered.’

  A thin man with a goitre and a string tie stood up and convened the meeting. Mueller was right: the proceedings were peremptory – minutes approved, officers elected, dues set for the following year, and an application from a local Jewish storekeeper unanimously turned down. The meeting was then adjourned and the boozing began.

  Four hours later, after too many German drinking songs and too many toasts, a remarkably sober Nessheim piled a semi-comatose Mueller into the back seat of the jalopy, then somehow drove them both west over the foothills, the way lit by a gibbous moon that threw out about as much illumination as Mueller’s headlights.

  On Monday at work, far from being embarrassed, Mueller acted as if Nessheim had let the side down by staying relatively sober, and Nessheim’s subsequent unwillingness to attend any further Bund get-togethers soured things between them again. They still worked together and both were transferred at the same time to bank robberies, but Mueller was now barely civil. When one night after work, Mueller had started badmouthing Purvis to a bunch of other agents, Nessheim had felt obliged to defend his old boss, who had given him his big break. The argument grew heated, and other agents had intervened to calm things down – to Nessheim’s relief, since he didn’t fancy a fistfight with a former lineman. After that Mueller made it clear he was Nessheim’s enemy, an unnerving proposition since Nessheim was not the sort of guy who had them.

  Nessheim noticed the car because it was slowing down, looking for a parking place. A Chevy Olympus, four-door, with a powerful engine. They came in all colours, but this one was black – the inconspicuous choice. The car slanted over to the kerb and stopped. After a moment the driver got out – a fireplug figure of a man, hatless in a charcoal suit with thin white pinstripe. This must be Arthur Lee.

  Nessheim looked across the street to the car where Simmons and Mueller were sitting. To his consternation neither noticed him: Mueller was fiddling with the radio and Simmons was working on a hoagie – Nessheim could see the lettuce spilling out of one end. Look up, he commanded, but telepathy didn’t work.