Page 10

Chapter Ten

Just a few rooms away, Agent Tucker Rye Minnick was surrounded by Nazi underwear. Bullet bras suggesting breasts that pointed true north, garter belts that went places hands seldom followed, stockings slinky as youthful promises. Longline bras that armored rib cages as well as busts, rubber girdles with breathing holes, can-do garments designed for industry, not for admiration. Delicate bandeaus, voluminous bloomers, cotton-knit step-in panties that went from imagined belly buttons to midthigh, silk and rayon slips that made Tucker think of how long it had been since he had touched a woman. Full-length winter-weight underwear, shaped like its owner had pulled off her skin and tucked it into a case for travel. Corsets, smelling of musty roses, with boning. Did women still wear these? They must, they were packed neatly into the suitcases filling the first-floor luggage storage room of the Avallon.

Turned out the Axis wanted to strap things down and haul them up in much the same way as the Allied. Technology seemed to have taken a leap forward since the last time he’d seen these things in action.

Tucker and his fellow agent Hugh Calloway had spent the first hours of the diplomats’ detention searching their luggage. The storage room must have been quite pleasing to look at in other circumstances, not unlike the underwear. Two skylights allowed bright shafts of winter sun to glow across a wall of safe-deposit boxes, all identically decorated with artful brass detail. The ceiling featured a mural of hunting horses; currently, the painted horses leapt directly into the mismatched cases stacked high as a man. Although this room, like everything at the Avallon, was enormous, it had not been designed to hold every guest’s luggage at once.

Hugh asked, “You ever think about what we’d be doing if we weren’t here?”

“No,” Tucker replied.

“We’d be drafted. You’re a good-looking White fella so you’d probably be in the back of the pack, but fellows like me are cannon fodder. They stack us this way and that so you guys can crawl over puddles with dry feet.”

Tucker squinted at a small booklet that turned out to be a calorie-counting guide. Could it hide code? Better safe than sorry; it joined the other confiscated material, destined for the hotel’s own large safe in the basement until the detention was over. “You think I’m good-looking?”

“In low light. I got an offer to get out, you know. The last factory I was investigating, they offered me head of security. Wad of George Washingtons attached, too. And no more moving around.”

Tucker already knew about the offer; he’d read Hugh’s file before arriving, wanting to see what he’d been up to since their shared time in the academy. Hugh had been posted in Los Angeles (where he’d been stabbed), Minneapolis (where he’d met his fiancée), Cleveland (where he got married and welcomed his first child), and Chicago (where he’d had his second child, and TaylorRight Trucking Company had offered him twice his current Bureau salary to become their new director of security). Tucker suspected this disloyalty was Hugh’s sin; that was why he was here, under Tucker, at a mission the Bureau clearly regarded as something between babysitting and due diligence. Whatever had brought the lanky agent to Tucker’s case, he was glad of it. Imagine doing this with a complete stranger. Imagine doing it with two Pony Harrises. Tucker had already caught Pony soliciting a hello girl that morning, and had taken him aside to explain that the behavior of each agent represented the Bureau and that it seemed inappropriate for the Bureau to say God-knew-what to girls in order to get them into bed. Pony had nodded and agreed, but after only a week and a half in his company, Tucker had the certainty of a weary priest that he’d catch him at it again. If the FBI had been any other kind of outfit, he would have assumed nepotism had gotten Pony his position. But Hoover had crafted his Bureau because of the nepotism and corruption of local organizations. At some point, Pony Harris had earned his way into the job.

Tucker realized he hadn’t replied to Hugh. He wasn’t gifted at conversation, but he wanted Hugh to like him, to remember he liked Tucker. It had been years, but they’d been easy together at the academy. “But you’d have to get shot at first.”

“I get shot at as it is. It’s the traveling I object to. Never cared to see France.” Hugh unzipped a toiletry kit, examined its contents, found it uneventful. “But maybe I will. Just maybe I will. You and I are old, Tuck, old school. The Bureau ain’t the same. Last time I saw my SAC, I thought, might as well be facing Jerry.”

Tucker felt uneasy criticizing the Bureau, even here in this luggage storeroom, even in a joking tone. “Jerry doesn’t come with a company car.”

“You haven’t changed a bit.” Hugh’s expression was knowing. In a low, radio voice, he said, “Meet Mr. Minnick, the Bureau’s most loyal soldier.”

Tucker had once gotten a letter from J. Edgar Hoover himself. The director of the FBI sent the letter of commendation for Tucker’s part in stopping E. R. R. Dixon, a bank robber. Tucker’s part was this: shooting E. R. R. Dixon, an act he remained somewhat haunted by, on account of E. R. R. Dixon’s last words (“But what about Barbara Jo?”). Hoover’s letter concluded: We are very proud of you!!! You are Bureau-minded. The three exclamation points had surprised Tucker; he hadn’t thought Hoover was the type.

Bureau-minded, though, that was high praise. J. Edgar Hoover’s new army, made up of ex-lawyers and ex–police chiefs, had to be the best in all things. Whatever the enemies of the Bureau could do, the Bureau men had to do better. If the villains could exist in rudimentary West Texas cabins, free of running water, so could the Bureau agents, staked out in the dusty brush without a change of clothing. If the villains could shoot tommy guns upside down from a moving train window, so must the Bureau agents, training on base alongside army men. If the villains could investigate everyone’s childhood to discover their secret weaknesses, so could the Bureau agents, amassing enormous files on everyone they met.

But Bureau-minded meant more than excellence. It meant you did what your special agent in charge ordered, even if you didn’t fully understand why you were doing it. You stayed until the job got done, even as other men donned their hats at five p.m. You avoided the temptation to make allies among your peers. You stayed single, or, if you got married, gratefully accepted three hours off on a slow afternoon for the honeymoon. You wanted nothing more than to be a useful cog in that glorious and intentional machine, fighting corruption until your last breath.

Tucker was as Bureau-minded as they came.

No, he hadn’t changed a bit.

“Still not much of a talker, either,” Hugh said.

“I said something, didn’t I?” Tucker tried to remember if he had.

The other agent had a laugh like a rooster cut off midcry; he crowed now. He held up a girdle and panty combination, clipped and strapped together so that, even empty, it provided a compelling portrait of its owner. Hugh said, “How about that GM, by the way?”

June Hudson. Tucker wondered which of these undergarments she wore. Something that did what she told it to do, no doubt. Tossing a fish-shaped cigarette lighter back into a suitcase, he looked up to see Hugh regarding him slyly. “Put that face away, Calloway.”

“What would J. Edgar think?”

“He’d think you should get back to that pile of cases behind you so you can finally get your ass to the post office.”

“Did you know she’s set to inherit? The old man, the Gilfoyle who just died, he left her one of the houses here.” When Tucker raised an eyebrow, Hugh went on. “Yeah, the postmaster was telling me. The Lily House. That big ol’ dame right by the hotel, looks halfway to a mansion itself.”

“Why?”

“She deserves it, maybe.”

Tucker gave him a look. People like the Gilfoyles didn’t split up their properties for the help. He thought it probably had more to do with the intimate hostility between the GM and Edgar Gilfoyle at the initial meeting. An affair, then. With him? With his father? A house for the mistress. But that didn’t sit quite right. On paper, maybe. But in person, it seemed more complicated. He paused. “Whose suitcase is this?”

The case in front of him, a large, hard-sided green one, had no name tag, and no identifying marks on any of its sides. The contents were likewise anonymous. Some men’s trousers, a sweater, suspenders, toiletries kit. An extra bar of soap.

Hugh knew his business; wordlessly, he stood, unfolding like a crane standing, to search the rest of the luggage for a matching piece. While he did, Tucker retrieved the shipping manifest, comparing the list of human cargo and luggage with what was before them. When the case’s owner did not immediately declare itself, Tucker did a quick, cursory look through the German legation’s luggage, looking for any suitcase containing men’s clothing but no toiletries case. Ah. Success. He said, “Get me that Gestapo man.”

This was how Tucker, Hugh, and Lothar Liebe came to be standing over a suitcase with a snub-nosed machine gun sewn into a hidden panel beneath the clothing compartment. An MP40, to be precise, a weapon that could only belong to one of the Germans.

Lothar Liebe, who had snazzy looks to match his snazzy name, his hair sleek and aerodynamic, blue eyes asmolder, and rosebud mouth for either pouting or cigarettes, opted for the latter as he blew smoke up at the hunting horses. He shrugged. “I had to try.”

Tucker asked, “Why didn’t you declare it?”

“Would you have let me keep it?”

“Possibly. But now I know you are the kind of man who sews weapons into luggage.”

Liebe gave him an amused look. “Genau. It is not mine, anyway. It is Friedrich’s.”

“Wolfe? Why did he bring a machine gun to the States?”

“It has personal value. You’d have to ask him for the stories.”

Tucker and Hugh exchanged a glance; they didn’t want these stories. Tucker said, “I still don’t understand why he brought a gun like this to America.”

“I don’t think he expected to be hurriedly collected by the United States government when he brought it over in the first place, and”—Liebe lit a second cigarette with the stub of the one he’d come with—“I don’t really believe he thought he would be going back.”

Tucker had a feeling this information was transactional; later in the conversation, he assumed Liebe would expect a trade for something else. “Why were you the one smuggling it back?”

“He was just going to leave it at the embassy; he’s distressingly honest. We have been friends since we were boys. What wouldn’t we do for each other? Tell me something, have the Swiss arrived yet? I would like to speak to them before anyone else.”

And there it was. Tucker said, “A bold request from a man caught with a weapon.”

“Ah, what did you think we would do with it anyway? Shoot our way out of here? Did you notice there was no ammunition?”

“I haven’t yet looked in the lining of your other case. Or Friedrich Wolfe’s, now that I know of your friendship.”

“What a full and meaningless day you have ahead of you,” Liebe said. He gestured to them both with the cigarette. “Did you choose this boring post, Agents? Somewhere far away from the action? Or were you sent here so that other men could have their time in the sun? Why are you even here? We are just waiting to go home. I see you writing in your little book, but you and I are the same person, we do the same thing; I know you have nothing to write there. Lothar Liebe, brought a gun without bullets, presented no argument. Schaumschl?ger , that’s what we call it when someone is filling pages with meaningless information. Hot-air merchant.”

Tucker merely handed him a receipt with a description of his suitcase written on it. “Good day, Mr. Liebe.”

···

Once Tucker had talked to Lothar Liebe’s face, it was time to listen to him behind his back. Time to listen to all the Germans, actually—indeed all the members of the legations deemed most likely to discuss information useful to the United States government. After the luggage was sorted, Hugh disappeared to the Glass Studio to conduct more staff interviews, and Tucker folded himself into a blue satin chair in a small closet, his knees pressed against the door, his ears sweating inside a heavy headset. A few inches away, a recording device turn-turn-turned, winding up sounds from the Portrait Gallery on the other side of the wall. He’d placed the microphones and recording devices the day before, guessing where the new guests might congregate to discuss sensitive politics.

“Die sind mit dem Hund draussen,” he heard in his ear.

Tucker didn’t speak a lick of German, of course, or Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, so on. In an ideal world, the Bureau would have populated the hotels with agents who did, but in the real world, they didn’t have the manpower. Each hotel got three agents equipped with their service weapons, a handful of dubiously legal listening devices, and their own common sense. This was typical, though. One of the things Tucker liked about the job. G-men were expected to operate with both extreme paucity and extreme autonomy. He was proud of his ability to cobble together a plan from just a location and a vague assignment.

In his ear, a barely audible conversation droned on, mostly in German, then briefly in English. He thought a staff member had come in. Did they want drinks? Was that the question? The microphone was placed badly; he’d need to get in there after curfew and move it. The one in the pub, though—he was proud of that one. He’d come up from the floor below to place the microphone right underneath the bar. The sound was perfect. How long would it take to translate the recordings? Ordinarily, it could take weeks for the lab to process evidence, but this was wartime; he didn’t know what to expect. These war assignments were new ground for the Bureau. Washington had long squabbled over which federal agency handled which crime, but when the war broke out, the answer became obvious: all hands on deck. Agents were called in from the field, given fresh background checks, then pushed through training in the latest intelligence techniques. Tucker had spent the days after Pearl Harbor studying harder than he had in law school. Invisible inks. Secret codes. Microdots. Dead drops.

But this part, mechanical surveillance, was the same old, same old. Where there was a wall, there was a G-man with an ear pressed up against it. How many closets, motel bathrooms, and crawl spaces had Tucker folded himself into on behalf of the Bureau?

German faded in and out, in and out. They were leaving, making a lot of noise. A final snatch of German came to him. “…guck mal, das…”

Tucker had immediately disliked the language barrier. Although the Bureau was satisfied to simply collect intel, not caring whether the heads containing that intel were already back in Germany by the time it was translated, it made Tucker feel like he was just a recording device himself. This was what Lothar had been talking about. But he didn’t know Tucker, that inventive Schaumschl?ger. There was a reason Hoover hadn’t just fired him outright; he had all kinds of tricks up his sleeve.

There was no sound in the closet but Tucker’s breathing, close against the unseen walls. Now that the Germans had left, perhaps he could risk adjusting the Portrait Gallery microphones instead of after curfew. But he knew he was simply trying to justify avoiding moving around the hotel at night, when the smell of the sweetwater on every single floor turned the hallways into subterranean tunnels. The secretive animal-headed fonts dared him to accidentally dip his fingers into their basins while reaching for light switches. And oh, Lord, the stairway that led down to the swimming pools. Tucker had unknowingly stepped in there earlier that day and—the scent. The humidity. Suffocation pressed down his throat; for a full minute, he was overcome by the mindless insect panic of drowning. The worst part had been the sense of being perceived . The water tensely exploring his exterior, testing him for familiarity, unfooled by everything he’d done for two decades—

Tucker heard a laugh.

He froze. He couldn’t be sure if he’d heard it with his own ears, in the room outside the closet, or if he had heard it in his headphones, from the Portrait Gallery. He also wasn’t entirely sure, now that it was silent once more, that it had been a laugh. It could have been a sob. That was the sound E. R. R. Dixon, the bank robber, had made when Tucker shot him. Tucker recalled it with razor-sharp clarity; he couldn’t forget how pain and humor were so tightly aligned that, in a moment of mortal revelation, they were indistinguishable.

The laugh came again.

This time he reeled back. He would have keeled right over in his chair had there been room enough. Instead, the chair wedged against the doorjamb, front legs askance, Tucker flailing—first to catch himself, second to stop the chair from making an audible sound as it fell with him in it. Secrecy was instinctual.

The laugh had sounded directly into the microphone. A warm, inclusive laugh, deeply amused.

There was no other noise. No footsteps. No door closing. No breathing. If someone had remained behind in the Portrait Gallery, they were being as silent as Tucker, apart from the laugh.

It couldn’t have been a German.

The microphone was hidden in a light fixture twelve feet off the ground.

Slowly, Tucker removed the headset. He stopped the recording device. He gently braced his hands against the wall to set the chair upright. His heart was slamming in his ears. That stink. The sweetwater.

He pushed open the closet door, half-afraid something would be standing on the other side. But of course it was simply an empty sitting room, vaguely stale-scented from being shut away from guests for the winter.

Tucker hated this place; he hated the water, he hated feeling this sliding sense that the water was getting inside him, infecting his thoughts, making him reckless, making him uncontrollable, after all these years.

Get in, get out, get the job done.