Fear Itself Read online

  The back doors of the Chevy both opened. A tall man in a summer suit and a Panama hat stood on the pavement, brushing the shoulders of his jacket. This was McCosh. The other passenger walked around the back of the car, then stood next to him. He was medium height, black-suited, and wearing a grey homburg. Danny Ho. The two of them looked around carefully while Nessheim stuck his nose deeper into his newspaper.

  At last Simmons put his hoagie down and looked at Nessheim, who tossed his paper into a metal bin, and took a couple of casual strides, cutting across Montgomery Street. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Simmons poke Mueller, and a few seconds later they got out of their car. He figured they would be right behind him when he flashed his badge and pulled his gun.

  He was approaching the other side of the street when he spotted the trio of robbers mount the kerb and move along the pavement towards the bank entrance. Suddenly Danny Ho stopped and pointed to his right, then said something to his two companions. Nessheim looked across his shoulder and saw Simmons and Mueller standing still in the street, forced to wait for a cable car to pass. Mueller had his gun out. Idiot, thought Nessheim. He would have to make his move now – too early.

  ‘FBI!’ he shouted. Danny Ho immediately turned and took off west across Montgomery, just as Simmons and Mueller arrived at last on the east side of the street. McCosh and Arthur Lee stood for a moment, like deer in a headlight, then they also ran, following Ho.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Mueller, and lifted his gun.

  Nessheim punched his arm and Mueller lowered the gun. ‘Are you crazy? There’re people all over the place. Come on,’ Nessheim said, and ran into the street, dodging a cab, until he made it to the far corner. He saw the robbers running up Clay Street, Ho well in the lead. He sprinted after them on the bone-jarring concrete, and he cursed his stiff leather Florsheims as he ran.

  He was soon gaining on the second two, but when he reached the corner he saw that Danny Ho was a hundred yards ahead. Nessheim poured it on now and was only fifty feet or so behind Arthur Lee and McCosh when they got to Kearney Street. The lights were red and they kept running; he did, too, narrowly avoiding an old Model T which gave a squeaky outraged honk of its horn.

  He was only just behind them now, and getting ready to pull his gun, when at last they did what they should have done from the beginning – separate. McCosh zigged diagonally across the tree-lined plaza and the fat Arthur Lee cut sharply left. Nessheim hesitated, then decided to leave them both for Mueller and Simmons. It was Ho he really wanted, not these sidekicks, and Ho was running hard – he would be uncatchable if Nessheim stopped to nab either of the other two.

  So Nessheim took off up Clay, just in time to see Ho turn south into Chinatown. A labyrinthine network of shops and restaurants and tiny, dingy apartments, inhabited by foreign people speaking a foreign language. There were even tunnels: the whole neighbourhood was virtually replicated underground, in a parallel network of gambling rooms, opium dens, and subterranean bordellos.

  Nessheim turned at Grant Avenue and scanned the street. It ran slightly downhill, and several blocks along he could see the brown brick of the Episcopal church looming at the corner of California. Then halfway down the street he glimpsed a homburg.

  He knew the area only at night, when he and his colleague Devereux sometimes came to eat at the Golden Palace. Now the red-and-green painted wooden front to the restaurant seemed dimmer in the harsh sunlight. Smells of sizzling beef and fried rice filled the air. He swerved around a squat Chinese woman carrying a wicker basket in each hand and realised he had lost sight of the homburg.

  He slowed down. He was looking for anything out of the ordinary – hard to do when it all seemed so strange. A grocery store, unnameable vegetables in boxes out front; a takeaway restaurant – he could see the kitchen at its rear, two Chinamen in grease-stained T-shirts chopping away; a tourist shop, full of brass ashtrays and lamps with rice-paper surrounds; a fortune cookie factory he remembered from a post-Golden Palace walk with Devereux – he could see the old lady behind the table that held a complicated wire contraption.

  He stopped short of the church. Wait a minute. The fortune cookie factory – the woman there, spied through the open door. She had looked at him momentarily, then quickly looked away. Nothing probably, but the one sign of something awry.

  He walked up the street to the doorway of the small factory – which was actually one big room. This time the woman behind the table didn’t even look up, attending to the thin wire that ran in a loop between two metal boxes at either end of her table. On the wire hung spaced strips of warm dough. Across from her two Chinese girls were packing cookies into cardboard boxes. Behind them, another woman stood holding a pair of scissors, reaching out with a metronomic rhythm to snip individual segments from an endless stream of white tape – the ‘fortunes’.

  He entered the shop, squinting as the bright daylight of Grant Avenue gave way to the half-darkness inside. A sickly smell of sweet dough filled the room. The women ignored him.

  A man bustled forward from the rear, Chinese with a pockmarked face, in an open-necked white shirt and black cotton trousers.

  ‘What you want?’ he demanded, blocking Nessheim’s path.

  ‘I’m looking for somebody,’ said Nessheim, deciding not to show his badge. He pointed to one of the girls at his left, packing boxes. When the man turned to look, Nessheim brushed by him, heading for the back of the building.

  ‘Hey!’ the man shouted, but Nessheim didn’t stop. He swept aside the curtain covering the rear doorway and found himself in a short corridor.

  He drew his gun. Yanking open the door on the left, he found a toilet and a sink – both filthy. On the other side of the corridor there was a tiny kitchen, with a hot plate and a tall cabinet with a saucepan on a shelf that held ancient chicken necks in putrid water. Nessheim gagged slightly at the sudden stench and closed the cabinet door.

  He tried the back door, and found it led to a small brick courtyard, no bigger than a swimming pool. A door in the far corner opened into the back yard of another building. If Ho had come this way, he would be long gone.

  Damn it, he thought with a sinking feeling. He turned, expecting the Chinese owner to have shown up, angry at this intrusion. Why hadn’t he? He turned back quickly into the factory building.

  As he went through the curtain, pushing it brusquely aside, he saw Simmons standing in the front doorway. Nessheim raised a hand but Simmons was staring at someone else. A man in a black suit and homburg, standing by the table where the old lady had been stationed. There was no sign of her, or of the girls, or of the owner.

  Danny Ho’s back was to Nessheim, his arm extended straight towards Simmons, pointing a pistol.

  Nessheim stopped and slowly started to raise his own weapon. Something in Simmons’s face must have given him away, for before he could fire Danny Ho announced, without glancing back, ‘You shoot and this guy’s had it.’ He gave a faint jiggle to his gun, but kept it levelled at Simmons’s chest.

  Nessheim took a silent step forward.

  ‘Do you hear me, Mr G-Man?’ Ho’s voice was flat and accentless, nothing like the singsong caricature of Chinamen you heard on the radio. ‘I know you’re there; I saw you come in.’

  He must have been hiding under the table. Nessheim cursed himself for not stopping to check.

  He took another step forward, keeping his gun aimed directly at Ho’s back – it was too far for a head shot. The problem was that if he fired Ho might himself fire reflexively; at such close range he couldn’t fail to hit Simmons, who had both hands raised, his arms quivering like half-set gelatine, his eyes fixed fearfully on Ho, like a man who’d encountered a cobra.

  Nessheim tried to assess the situation calmly, but his mind was blank. He could only take in what he saw: the grey-suited Ho nearest to him; Simmons sweating tensely in the background. Then out of nowhere an internal voice whispered, Never let the criminal take charge. He recognised the words from his training.

&n
bsp; Before Ho could speak again, Nessheim declared in as firm a voice as he could manage, ‘You plug him, Ho, and you’re a dead man. I think you know that. Put the gun down now and you’ll live.’

  Silence at first, except for a faint wheezing sound from Simmons. Then Ho said, ‘Sure I’ll live – in Alcatraz, if you call that living.’ He paused. ‘Can’t see it myself.’

  There was a small splat, like bird guano hitting a windscreen, and Nessheim realised Ho had spat on the floor without moving his head.

  Ho said, ‘I tell you what – you put down your gun and this sucker lives. I want a car, and he comes with me. But nobody gets hurt.’

  It almost sounded appealing; Nessheim realised there was nothing he would rather do than put his gun down and wash his hands of the whole thing, leave Ho to his own devices. Only the sight of Simmons, petrified and helpless, kept him from considering this. Don’t be lulled – another training precept.

  He took another small, silent step, and it was then that he felt a slight sense of imbalance, which didn’t go away even when his shoe felt rock-solid on the floor. Oh no, he thought. He blinked, and blinked again, but his eyes were teary, moistening perversely, letting him down when he needed them most.

  He realised that Ho had moved a foot or two towards the wall to Nessheim’s left. Why was he doing that? And why couldn’t Nessheim see him clearly? He started to inch forward again, but stopped when Ho barked, ‘One more step, G-Man, and your friend’s a goner. I’m not bluffing.’

  Nessheim tried desperately to pull himself together. He could make out that Ho had moved some more – until he was close to the wall. Nessheim knew he should shout at Ho to stand still, but the dizziness was taking him over now. He felt his legs quivering; his raised arm felt unattached to the rest of his body; an aura of fuzzy lilac blue was starting to colour the scene before him. He struggled against feeling that he was about to faint.

  ‘Jimmy!’ he heard Simmons shout, and in a split second he realised Danny Ho’s arm was turning, and he could see the gun now that had been shielded by Ho’s back. As it moved around in a sweeping arc in his direction, he heard an enormous bang.

  Am I dead? That was his first thought as he lurched back a step, barely managing to hold onto his gun. In the doorway he saw Simmons stagger forward and he wondered if he’d been hit. The door swung open behind Simmons and two men rushed in from the pavement outside: Mueller and a uniformed cop. Both had their weapons drawn.

  He saw Ho, his face creased with surprise as he sagged back against the wall, still standing, his arm down, though he had dropped his gun. Blood was spreading like water squeezed from a sponge across the front of his shirt, and his eyes went vacant with the onset of death.

  It was only then that Nessheim realised he had just killed Danny Ho.

  The next day SAC Morgan himself interviewed Nessheim, then told him to take a couple of days off. He tried, spending a day reading in Golden Gate Park and walking along the beach on the Sunset side of the city, searching the onrushing breakers and wondering if this was going to change him. He had killed a man, but he still ate breakfast, read the San Francisco Chronicle (which to his relief didn’t mention his name in its account), and thought about how to get a girlfriend. He even slept just fine, and wondered if this meant something was wrong with him.

  That night he drove down to the Embarcadero, to a bar tucked away on Lombard Street, where agents often gathered after work. Sure enough, he found half a dozen of them sitting at a long table, drinking pitchers of beer. Their greeting was friendly enough, and even Mueller nodded, but he sensed an unease, the way people treated a colleague after a family bereavement. After a while, he got up and took an empty pitcher back to the bar for a refill.

  He could hear Mueller’s voice now, lowered but still resonant. There was an awkward laugh that made Nessheim turn around, and he saw that Mueller was standing up now, acting out some scene. He had his hand out and then put the other hand on top of it, mimicking a man with a pistol. His hand started stuttering, then shook openly until Mueller, in a parody of fear, shouted’ ‘Bang!’ in a booming voice and staggered backwards. The others laughed, but hesitantly, and Nessheim turned around to spare them the embarrassment of knowing he had watched.

  Nessheim took the pitcher, brimming with cold beer, back to the table, which went quiet as he approached. He put the glass pitcher down in the middle of the table, and stood behind Mueller.

  Nessheim put his hand on the big man’s shoulder, and said in a loud voice, ‘At least I didn’t shoot him in the back, Jake.’

  Mueller flushed, and Nessheim flipped a folded ten-dollar bill onto the table. ‘Here’s a sawbuck,’ he said. ‘Beer’s on me.’ Then he walked out of the bar.

  Nessheim returned to work the next day, and found himself taken off bank robberies. He hoped he might be assigned at last to the counter-subversion team, where even if he’d spend most of his time chasing Communist longshoremen, he might also get to investigate the local Bund. Natural preparation for what Guttman said he had in mind.

  But instead he was assigned to join the accountants working with the Treasury Department on counterfeit currency. He didn’t like it: desk-bound phone calls, and the only field work was collecting the bogus bills passed in stores and banks. He missed the possibility of action. It wasn’t that after shooting Danny Ho he was eager to shoot anybody else, but not even remotely needing a firearm in the course of his work was stultifying. The only good news that came through was that Mueller was being transferred to the Washington Bureau.

  Two months later Nessheim was assigned to Fraud again; mail fraud this time, which meant he spent most of his time interviewing people – both victims and suspected conmen. Sometimes the victims were conmen too, lying about the amounts they’d been swindled out of when insurance claims were involved. After five months of this, Nessheim prided himself on his ability to spot liars before they even opened their mouths – there were body-language telltales which, like an expert poker player reading faces round a table, Nessheim had come to recognise. He became skilled at interviews as well, finding that he could draw out confidences from even the most taciturn types, and spot the holes in any shaky story.

  But all the while he was conscious that this was tempor-ary work, and the longer he waited for Guttman to summon him the more impatient he grew. By Thanksgiving he felt at the end of his tether; he’d even tried to sound out his SAC, David Morgan, though he got nowhere. ‘Just do your job, Nessheim. I’ll let you know if any new orders come in.’ Morgan was old school and didn’t look happy himself with the situation.

  Spring came, with the lilacs out in West Portal and the fruit trees all in blossom, and Nessheim started to lose any confidence that he would ever hear from Guttman again. It had been nearly eighteen months since he’d met the man. So when he came back from lunch one day to find a message to see Morgan right away, he assumed it was about his latest fraud case, which included the Mayor’s sister among its victims.

  ‘Where you been?’ Morgan growled as Nessheim came into his office. Before Nessheim could reply, Morgan said, ‘I’ve got marching orders for you, kid.’ He flipped a folder at Nessheim.

  ‘Your ticket’s in there – you catch the City of San Francisco tomorrow afternoon. Make sure you’re on it. You are under strict orders not to break your journey in any way, is that understood? No calls either, no telegrams, don’t even post a letter. And I’ll need your gun.’

  ‘My gun?’ He felt suddenly proprietary about his weapon.

  ‘Don’t ask me. It’s orders.’

  ‘Guttman’s?’

  Morgan looked at him stonily. ‘Who else? If you got a problem with it, you can always miss the train. Though I have to say you’ll lose a lot more than your gun if you do.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Nessheim, acknowledging defeat. He took his holster off his shoulder and handed it over.

  ‘One more thing. Guttman wants to know your mother’s maiden name.’

  No gun, no calls, his mother’
s maiden name. What was going on? He realised Morgan was waiting for an answer. ‘It’s Rossbach.’

  Morgan nodded and stared pointedly down at his desk. Nessheim stood there bemused. The SAC looked up irritably from his desk. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he snapped.

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  As he turned to go, Morgan said more softly, ‘Nessheim, look out for yourself.’

  Part Two

  1939

  9

  May 1939

  Berlin

  THE CAFÉ AT the corner of Friedrichstrasse was filling up. Schellenberg sat at a table for two under the awning outside, enjoying the coolness of the evening after a hot day – unseasonably hot for springtime Berlin. On the Unter den Linden, the pavement was a moving tableau of couples out for a stroll after dinner, local residents walking their dogs, and the odd poule de luxe looking for custom.

  Schellenberg wondered if these happy Berliners had any sense of what would happen next. So far the search for greater Lebensraum had progressed without a shot being fired: Austria had been happy to succumb to the Anschluss, and Czechoslovakia, so recently annexed, had conceded without a fight. But did people really think the Führer would be satisfied with the annexations of minor neighbours?

  The future made Schellenberg nervous, far more than he would be prepared to admit, even to his fiancée Irene. He knew that the world thought the Germans ran things with impressive machine-like efficiency. Yet the scales would have fallen from their eyes had they seen the inner workings of the Reich: the remorseless jousting among even the most senior men for Hitler’s favour, the cliques that made personal favour the chief criterion for advancement, the bullying and duplicity and toadying. It took all his competence and all his wiles to stay afloat in such a cesspool’s maelstrom.

  He had been waiting half an hour. Realising it might be an hour more he lifted an arm for a waiter. One of them, moustachioed and wearing a black jacket with a white apron tied around the waist, swooped balletically through the nearby tables and stood before him expectantly. ‘Bitte schön?’