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1957: The Dark Side of Paradise

Robert Buettner


On March 3, 1957, the sky was so clear that from fourteen miles high the pilot easily saw the Earth’s curvature. For the nine hours between takeoff and landing he was, and would remain, not just on top of the world but insulated from it, radio silent. He whistled to relieve the stillness, then quit when his breath fogged his helmet’s faceplate. He loved flying on such days, even though the plane was a bitch and the land below was deadly.

The plane was a bitch because if flown even a few knots too slow it would stall and if flown a few knots too fast it would shake its wings off. It was effectively a jet-powered glider, just light enough to fly higher than any other plane had ever flown and just strong enough to carry an aerial camera that brought objects below closer than any other camera had ever brought them.

The land was deadly because it was the Greater Third Reich, with which the United States had been uneasily at peace for years, even before the U.S. had sat out the Eurasian War. The part of the Reich that he now overflew had been the part of the Soviet Union until the Eurasian War ended in 1942, when the western Soviet Union officially became part of the Reich.

For the past two months he and the bitch had warmed up for today by bringing back images of low-value military installations located just inside the figurative Iron Curtain that defined the Greater Reich’s border. Before the war the lands he had overflown had been Norway, France, and Denmark.

During those overflights the Nazis had scrambled interceptors every time they realized the bitch was overhead. But the Nazis’ best jets had topped out at ten miles high, fully four miles beneath him, and the Nazis’ flak had exploded in harmless puffs six miles high, fully eight miles beneath him. Those warm-up overflights had been milk runs, and their objectives mundane.

But today was no milk run. His objectives were jealously guarded enigmas hidden deep inside the Reich.

Fifty miles west of Objective One he began running through his camera prep checklist.

It struck him that today the Nazis hadn’t yet even scrambled an interceptor. He shrugged inside his pressure suit. Maybe the Nazis were smarter than his spaniel. She had never learned that chasing cars was a waste of time.

He paused his work long enough to glance at the ground, then said aloud, “What the hell?”

A speck atop a white contrail climbed toward him, far faster than any interceptor, and blew through ten miles without slowing.

“Shit!”

The bitch depended for survival on altitude, not maneuverability or armament. She couldn’t dodge and she couldn’t fight, so he just watched the speck grow while his heart pounded.

The speck came up level with him and slowed, a quarter mile to his left front. It was a finned white rocket as long as a telephone pole and as sharp as a dagger. Its fuel exhausted, its tail flame faded to a smoke wisp.

The bitch was too frail to survive the warhead blast that would come in the next instant. Therefore he wouldn’t live to murder the briefing geniuses who had said the Nazis hadn’t deployed antiaircraft guided missiles yet.

He reached between his knees and grasped his seat’s ejection handles. He would be the first human being to eject at seventy thousand feet, but the same geniuses who had told him the Nazis had no missiles had told him he should be fine.

In a blink the distance between him and the spent missile had closed to fifty yards. For an instant it hung in the sky, as still as a snake awaiting a rabbit.

He passed the missile so closely that he could read the lettering stenciled on its access panels.

Then the missile tumbled tail-over-nose back toward the ground without exploding.

“Hah!” He released the ejection handles, punched the air so hard that his gloved fists thumped the canopy, then re-gripped the control yoke.

Ahead to the east, between him and Objective One, four white contrails curved up. More missiles rising to kill him when he arrived. He hadn’t even reached the first of three objectives but already he was alive only because some proximity fuse assembler had a bad day. Undoubtedly, more missiles guarded the objectives further east. Undoubtedly, most of their warheads would explode.

Behind his helmet’s faceplate he muttered, “Fuck this.”

He turned south as sharply as he could without tearing the bitch’s flimsy wings off.

✧ ✧ ✧

Ryan Clancy and Edwin Plimpton ran from a hangar alongside a runway in central Iran’s Dasht-e Kavir desert while they squinted at a speck dropping through the twilight sky.

The airstrip’s month-old asphalt stank. Ryan avoided the stink by breathing through his mouth. However, there was no avoiding that the airfield, and two American businessmen, wearing topcoats and fedoras, didn’t belong there.

But their business was spying so they were here whether they belonged or not. Ryan and Edwin were, respectively, the Director and Deputy Director of the obscure and understaffed United States Civilian Investigation/Operations Administration. It measured the approaching speck’s importance to their business that they were both onsite in Iran, leaving nobody senior minding the store back in Washington.

The black jet touched down, then raced toward them on wheels that extended beneath the fuselage one behind the other, bicycle-style. The configuration required the pilot to keep the plane upright by using the aircraft’s immense wingspan like a tightrope walker used a balance pole.

A quarter mile short of Ryan and Edwin the plane stopped, then gently seesawed onto its left wingtip. Ground crewmen sprang from a chasing pickup truck, leveled the wings by attaching spindly auxiliary wheels beneath them, and the plane taxied to the hangar where the two men waited.

The pilot, in his ribbed, skintight pressure suit, stalked toward Ryan and Edwin, his helmet under one arm.

Ryan frowned. “Charlie, you’re two hours early. What happened?”

Tight lipped, the pilot handed Clancy a clipboard. “It’s all in my notes. So is my resignation.”

The pilot pushed between Ryan and Edwin and continued toward the hangar as they followed.

Edwin said, “Charlie, you can’t—”

“I can. I’m a civilian contractor. Personal services contracts aren’t specifically enforceable.”

Edwin shot Ryan a glance. “Is that true?”

Ryan nodded. “Every word.”

Edwin looked back toward the pilot. “Charlie, you’re the only pilot we have. What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

The pilot stopped, turned, and raked his salt-and-pepper crewcut with gloved fingers. “Look, I’m no coward. But I’m a test pilot, not a combat pilot. I know this job’s important. But now I know I’m not the right guy to do it.”

Edwin said, “Then who is?”

“First, find a pilot at least as good as I am.” Charlie peered at the misleadingly named Utility-2 as the ground crew wheeled it into the hangar and out of sight. “Because that bitch is the highest workload airplane God ever allowed to fly. But mostly find a pilot willing to die in a war that’s colder than the air at seventy thousand feet. Somebody who does his job because it’s the right thing to do. Not for groceries or for professional satisfaction.”

Again he turned back toward the hangar. “I’ll change, then hitch a ride up to Tehran with the off-shift mechanics.”

Ryan said, “We’ll phone ahead and arrange your ticket home.”

Charlie shook his head. “I’ll buy my own. I’ve already cost Uncle Sam more than I’ve earned from him.”

✧ ✧ ✧

The following afternoon Ryan and Edwin sat at a window table in a dusty Tehran café. The proprietor brought tea in dirty glasses and Ryan lifted his, sniffed, then set it back on the table.

The café had been packed when they entered but now cats prowled across the vacant tables’ tops. That spoke volumes about the kitchen’s rat count.

The other patrons had emptied onto the street to watch the ongoing fracas there. Ryan and Edwin’s wrecked taxi, and the wounded camel with which it had collided, blocked all traffic. The camel’s owner and the taxi driver, held apart by a frowning policeman, screamed at each other to be heard over the taxi’s horn, which was stuck. Goats jostling one another on the sidewalk peered in at Ryan while they licked the windowpane.

Ryan glanced at his watch.

Edwin said, “Ryan, our plane’s chartered. It’s not going anywhere without us.”

Ryan stared into his tea. “Without Charlie our other plane’s not going anywhere either.”

Edwin said, “True. But it could have been worse.”

“Worse? How?”

“Charlie’s notes are pure gold. If he’d been shot down we wouldn’t have known that the Nazis’ missiles are operational, at least around high-security installations. And accurate to seventy thousand feet. Which tells us their radar technology’s better than we thought. But maybe not good enough to distinguish their interceptors from an intruder, because they kept their planes grounded.

“Plus the Luftwaffe didn’t get wreckage that would have improved their intelligence. And Goebbels didn’t get a propaganda mallet to beat us with. Unless they shoot our plane down it’s too embarrassing for them to admit it’s up there.”

Ryan said, “All of which still leaves us with a dead aerial reconnaissance program.”

“No. It leaves us with a paused program that needs improvements and a live pilot.”

“Not just a live pilot. The President said U.S. military pilots, or U.S. military pilots whose backgrounds we whitewash, risk turning this cold war hot. And he’s still right.”

Edwin leaned toward Ryan to be heard over the ruckus outside. “So we need an elite pilot. Who can help figure out how to beat the Luftwaffe’s air defenses, because he’s already beaten them once with crappier resources. Who has Eagle Scout morals but a pickpocket’s street smarts. And who shot down four Messerschmitts but never served in the U.S. military.”

“Ritter? You’re saying Ritter is our best shot?” Ryan again stared out at the chaos beyond the window glass.

This had been Ryan’s first trip to Tehran. The city’s manicured gardens and lightly trafficked boulevards, where strollers showed off their western fashions, reminded him of Paris, but with the bonus of mountain views. The young Shah liked western style, so he liked trading favors with western intelligence agencies. Ryan had thought Tehran was paradise.

However here, just off the boulevards, Tehran was screaming pedestrians, slobbering goats, and air thick with dust and diesel soot. And tea that smelled like cat piss.

Tehran, like every urban paradise, turned out to have a dark side.

Edwin tapped his shoulder. “Ryan?”

Ryan started. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Ritter is exactly who we need. Except—”

“Except needing Ritter isn’t having Ritter. We should never have trusted Naval Intelligence to handle reception. If the Swabbies had gotten their arrogant heads out of their asses at LaGuardia three weeks ago we wouldn’t just need Ritter. We’d have him.”

Ryan had hoped the U-2 aerial reconnaissance program’s success would jump-start unification of the United States’ multiple rival intelligence programs, which too often worked together about as well as the mob outside the window did. At the moment his hope had dimmed.

Out in the street a turbaned man elbowed through the crowd toward the wounded camel. He pushed the muzzle of the flintlock rifle he carried against the bleating animal’s forehead, then blew its brains out.

Ryan grimaced. Then he said, “Which side of paradise do you think Ritter found in New York?”

✧ ✧ ✧

The chartered DC-6, inbound to New York after refueling in Newfoundland, banked left above the Statue of Liberty in an unorthodox but tourist-friendly approach to LaGuardia Airport.

The defecting German scientists and their families, whom Robby Ritter had flown out of Germany to Sweden, crowded the airliner’s left-side windows pointing, chattering, and applauding.

It was their first glimpse of the city that Americans called the shining capitol of the Free World, and the first moment of the defectors’ journey when they really seemed to believe that the whole thing wasn’t a Gestapo trap.

Two seat rows back Robby, unaccustomed to flying as a passenger, also gawked and grinned at the view. He had visited the U.S. east coast just once before, at thirteen, on a Boy Scout field trip that went only to Washington D.C. And he hadn’t seen the U.S. at all since he had left it seventeen years before, in 1940.

New York City was as novel to him as it was to the Germans.

Manhattan’s skyscrapers glittered in the afternoon sun as the airliner overflew them.

A pigtailed German girl, nose to her window, asked her mother, “Is this Oz?”

Her mother smiled. “No. But it may be paradise.”

✧ ✧ ✧

NYPD detective Frank Catalano’s previous time here at La Guardia had been brief but memorable. As a uniformed patrolman he had delivered triplets in a DC-3’s aisle and had coaxed an air-freighted gorilla bound for the Bronx Zoo back into its cage with a banana. He had also been wounded here while shooting it out with two Very Bad Guys, which had gotten him commended and them buried.

The powers that be had picked him for this job not because he could shoot and knew the territory but because for the last year he had accepted crap jobs that other detectives bitched about. He took crap jobs because any job was better than an apartment that now was home only to Edie’s ghost.

So far his return to LaGuardia had been brief but unmemorable. The Feds wanted the NYPD to keep nosy people away from a closed hangar where unspecified Feds were deplaning unspecified passengers who had arrived from an unspecified place. Frank hated working with the Feds because the Feds treated cops like the cops were working for them.

This hangar was to hell and gone away from the rest of LaGuardia, a fact that he could have told the Feds if they had asked him. Instead the only nosy person around here turned out to be him. Having nothing better to do Frank stood by the hangar’s open side door and did what detectives did, which was to notice things.

Plenty of passenger planes landed at LaGuardia. Most of their paint jobs advertised the airline that operated them, which hinted at their flights’ points of origin. The DC-6 in the hangar was bare aluminum except for its tail number. That was a different kind of hint.

Every passenger who climbed down the portable stairs was as white as Frank was. That scratched the Far East and Africa from the point-of-origin derby. They all lined up like good little soldiers without bitching, which told Frank they sure as hell weren’t Italian.

From where he stood he couldn’t make out the passengers’ precise words but he had asked enough questions in New York’s German neighborhoods to recognize Deutsch when he heard it.

That raised Frank’s eyebrows. Travel was rare in either direction across the Iron Curtain that had isolated most of Europe since the Nazis had won the war over there.

The passengers lined up at folding tables. Behind the tables stood fuzz-faced kids wearing identical ties, gray trousers, and white shirts with sleeves rolled to just below the elbow. Their fresh from J. C. Penney outfits pegged them as exactly the military people they were trying not to look like.

The passengers were mostly family groups, the wives and kids blonde, the husbands pipe smokers who read books while they stood in line. When instructed, the men removed their suit coats or jackets. Everyone emptied out their pockets and purses, and they all got interrogated, photographed, fingerprinted, stethoscoped, then finally checked off on the Feds’ clipboard lists.

Thin leather holsters hung from some of the men’s belts. He had worked Morningside Heights, which bordered Columbia University, enough that he recognized slide rules when he saw them.

So these guys were engineers and other assorted eggheads. People said Germany had more of those than we did. Frank smiled. As of today maybe Germany had a few less.

Only one guy didn’t fit. Good looking. Built like a halfback and moved like one too. Slacks, sport coat, and shoes, all expensive but not flashy. Everybody else had piled their luggage for inspection before they lined up. He carried all of his, which consisted of one leather piece the size of a gym bag.

He was the last one through the line and hadn’t even gotten to the first station when a skinny young Fed pulled him aside. Words were exchanged. Arms waved.

An older Fed, who wore spotless all-white oxfords, strutted over, chest out, gut in, and took charge of the arm-waving while the skinny kid straightened up and clammed up.

Frank rolled his eyes.

Only nurses, pimps, and the Navy wore white shoes. If this was an example of the Feds’ mastery of disguise America was going to lose the Cold War before Easter.

After a minute White Shoes looked around, saw Frank, and motioned him to join him and the halfback in an office at the hangar’s rear.

In the office Frank said, “What’s up?”

The Fed pointed at the halfback. “This man isn’t on our list, Officer.”

“It’s not our list. It’s your list. And it’s Detective. Detective Catalano. Who might you be?”

“I might be the person in charge of this operation.”

“Ah. Then it’s definitely your list. What do you expect the NYPD to do about it?”

“I expect you to take charge of this unauthorized individual.”

“I need a reason.”

White Shoes pointed through the window and across the hangar to where the Krauts were boarding a bus. “Reason? Because we need to move these people immediately. And we can’t take him where we’re taking them.”

The halfback raised his hand. “I think I can explain.”

Frank raised his eyebrows. “Well. The unauthorized individual speaks American.”

The halfback grinned. “Like a native.”

“Then welcome home, Mr.—”

“Ritter. Robert Ritter.”

The bus horn echoed through the hangar.

White Shoes said, “Officer, forget everything you saw and heard here.”

“I can’t forget this guy.”

“He’s no longer my problem.” White Shoes spun on his heel, then walked out the door and closed it behind himself.

Frank said to the closed door, “And fuck you too.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Robby Ritter set his bag on top of the office’s table as the big cop turned back to him.

Catalano wore a wrinkled plaid jacket that didn’t cover his belly and his too-wide striped tie was knotted below his unbuttoned collar. His complexion was Mediterranean and his curly hair was as black as Sicilian olives.

He said to Robby, “I guess now you’re my problem, Mr. Ritter.”

Robby said, “I’m not a problem.”

“Admiral White Shoes seemed to think you are. How do you fit into this deal?”

“I’d prefer not to say.”

“Aha. Well can you at least tell me what this deal is?”

“Not really.”

Catalano pulled a pack of cigarettes from a trouser pocket. The deliberate movement pulled back his jacket, which exposed a policeman’s badge and, more to the point, a holstered pistol, both on his belt.

Robby didn’t understand why the policeman was here, or what authority he had. But Catalano had just purposely clarified that he had enough authority to control what happened in this room.

Catalano tapped a cigarette from his pack then offered the pack to Robby.

Robby shook his head.

Catalano nodded, opened his palm toward a chair at the table, then pulled out the chair opposite. “Take a seat, Mr. Ritter, and let’s visit.”

They sat.

“Sir, whereabouts in the States are you from?”

“Indiana.”

“That an Indiana accent?”

Robby smiled. “Didn’t realize I’d picked one up. I left the States seventeen years ago.” He shifted in his chair.

“Anxious to see your family and friends again?”

Robby shook his head. “I was an only child. I learned five years ago that my parents had died. Lost touch with my friends back home years ago.”

“Unfortunate. Makes it tough to verify a person’s identity. Unless the person doesn’t want to be identified. In which case it’s terrific for the person.”

“Detective, clearly you’ve been roped into something that shouldn’t be the New York Police Department’s problem. Or yours. Can I just be on my way?”

Catalano waved his hand and smiled. “Sir, easing a fellow American’s return to the States is hardly something the NYPD thinks is a problem. Let me just give you a lift over to immigration and passport control at the main terminal. Once they’ve determined that your passport and other documents are in order you’ll be on your way in two shakes.” He paused. “Wait. You do have a passport?”

Catalano slapped his forehead. “No. Of course you don’t have a passport! After seventeen years it expired. But I guess you could have gotten it renewed at the U.S. Embassy in— Where did you say you’ve been?”

Robby said, “I didn’t say. I’ve been in Germany.”

He stared at the detective. By reputation New York’s Finest were skeptical and sarcastic. The mean streets they policed may have bred their attitude, but Americans didn’t like it.

Americans had no idea how good they had it. Germans, even local cops like Catalano, lived with the fear that the Gestapo might arrest them for whatever, imprison them until whenever, and beat, burn, and electrocute them until they confessed to whatever the Gestapo wanted to hear. Ordinary Germans’ least worries were snarky policemen.

Catalano raised bushy eyebrows. “Germany! Sir, was that a rough seventeen years? Because I hear the Nazis don’t like Americans. Except Americans who like them.”

Robby rolled his eyes. “Detective, I’m the furthest thing from a Nazi spy that you can imagine.”

“I imagine pretty good. Try me.”

“Look, what happened is I was asked to fly those people in the hangar out of Berlin. Treetop high in the dark, then across the Baltic. Then land them on a beach in Sweden. We rendezvoused there with an American submarine. The sub offloaded us in Ireland. Then the DC-6 out in the hangar flew us all from there to here.”

Catalano raised his eyebrows as he leaned back in his chair. “Wow! I guess that makes you a hero, sir.” He paused, then cocked his head. “Admiral White Shoes seems the type who’d be partial to American heroes. So if you did all that great shit why weren’t you on his list?”

“Look, I don’t know about him or his list. I just flew the plane. Somebody who was supposed to fly out with the rest of us was going to vouch for me.”

“Somebody?”

“But at the last minute she didn’t get on the plane.”

“She? This gets better and better. Can we call her? Then she can vouch over the phone.”

“No.”

“Let me guess why not. She’s a spy and calling her could propel her into the clutches of the dreaded Gestapo.”

Robby narrowed his eyes. “You have no idea who or what you’re talking about. Mention her again and I’ll beat the shit out of you, gun or no gun, badge or no badge.”

Catalano stared into Robby’s eyes for what seemed like minutes.

Then Frank said, “We don’t call it a badge. We call it a shield. Because what the NYPD does is shield good people from bad people. I got no reason to think your lady spy is anything but good, so take it easy. But she’s gotta report her secrets to somebody here in the States. Let’s call whoever she works for and we’ll straighten this out.”

“She wouldn’t tell me who she works for. Because what I didn’t know the Gestapo couldn’t beat out of me if I got caught.”

“Okay. What about Admiral White Shoes’ gang? Can we call them?”

“I don’t know who they are. I don’t know where they took those defectors either.”

Catalano sighed. “Mr. Ritter, I listen to liars every day.”

“I’m not lying!”

“Let me finish. And even the crappiest liars always come up with lies more plausible than you just told me. Except everything I’ve seen here tonight corroborates your story.”

“So—?”

“So I believe you.”

Robby said, “Then can I go?”

“Depends on how you answer my next question. Spy shit aside, there are laws about what stuff folks can bring into the United States. And into New York.” Catalano laid a big hand on Robby’s bag. “Mind if I look inside this?”

“What if I mind?”

“Then eventually somebody else will look. Choose the devil who believes you or the devil who might not.”

“Then take a look.”

Catalano unzipped the bag then turned its contents onto the table. The Luger thumped the tabletop. The fat packets of Reichsmarks splashed out around it.

Robby winced, then he said, “Well?”

Catalano sighed again. “Well, it’s not heroin. That’s a plus. But if by the ‘Well’ question you mean can you buy me off with this funny money, or any other kind of money? No. If I was that kind of cop I would’ve shaken you down already. But letting you bring in this much undeclared currency means me letting you break laws that exist for good reasons. I’m not that kind of cop either.”

Catalano lifted the pistol, holding the butt between thumb and forefinger. “The money’s a problem. But this is a huge problem. The Sullivan Act is the strictest state gun law in the U.S. And New York City piles permit laws, that are even tougher, on top of the state law.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t get me wrong. If I had the Gestapo up my ass, or if I was traveling with this much cash, I’d pack a piece too.

“But the law’s the law. The funny money aside, on the gun charge you could be looking at five years. Now, I think you got good arguments.

“But the book says weighing arguments isn’t my job. My job is to arrest you because I have probable cause to believe you’ve committed a crime. A couple in fact. Post-arrest you’ll be detained pending arraignment. And after that you may be detained pending trial. The book says those detentions should be brief. But in New York brief is a relative term. Pre-proceeding detainment is in a place called Rikers Island. Rikers is an island but it’s no Caribbean vacation. And it’s definitely not a place from which a detainee can look up a spy’s employer.”

Robby said, “Oh.”

Catalano stared at the ceiling.

Then he said, “Here’s what’s gonna happen.” He pointed at the door. “I’m gonna leave here to take a leak, and I’m taking your stuff with me. When I come back you’re gonna be gone. I don’t know where and I don’t want to know. I’ll check the bag with your stuff in it into my precinct’s evidence locker. Found property. Beyond that, as far as I know, and as far as you know, you and Frank Catalano never met.”

“But—”

“You go and get yourself right with Uncle Sam, or with whoever you need to get right with. When you do, come find me. You’ll get your bag and your cash back. Every penny, no questions asked. But the gun, no.”

Catalano swallowed and looked away. Then he said, “Guns have put down too many people in this town. People who New York’s Finest should have protected. I’ve put down a couple people myself. New York’s got too many guns already. You only get your pistol back if and when you get a permit.”

“I understand.”

“Also understand this.” Catalano raised his index finger. “I’m betting you’re the good guy you seem to be. But don’t get arrested. Not for so much as shoplifting cannoli. Because if you do then eventually the whole story, about your gun and your funny money and the break I cut you that I shouldn’t have cut you, maybe even about what’s going on in Germany, could come out. Then everybody’s screwed.”

“I’ll be good.”

Catalano raked the Reichsmark packets back into Robby’s bag, dropped the Luger on top of them, then carried the bag to the office door.

Robby said, “Frank, why are you doing this?”

The big man shrugged. “Because I believe you, sir.”

“My friends call me Robby.”

“And because your girl seems special, Robby.”

“I barely mentioned her.”

“I heard it in your voice. Once I had a girl like that.” Then Catalano frowned. “Robby, whichever way things go after this I’ll pray for you both. My sister will too.”

“Thanks, Frank.”

“She’s a nun. It could help.”

Then he was gone.

✧ ✧ ✧

Robby Ritter stood alone and handcuffed in a NYPD interrogation room. Three weeks had passed since he had assured Frank Catalano that he wouldn’t get arrested.

American immigrants were often said to arrive in New York with nothing but the shirts on their backs. Only after Robby had left LaGuardia, and huddled, shivering, in a dark New York alley did he realize that for him it wasn’t a figure of speech.

In the LaGuardia hangar he had emptied his pockets and removed his jacket as instructed. But when things had gone off track he hadn’t recovered his jacket, wallet, watch, or even his pocket change.

For practical purposes he had become a nameless bum.

During the ensuing three weeks he had learned how much New York disfavored bums.

Churches tolerated bums and didn’t test them for piety. So he had slept undisturbed in pews. Subway stations made warmer bedrooms than churches, but in the subway New York’s Finest would move you along with a nightstick rapped against your shoe sole. Five times church kitchens had fed him and his fellow bums, which made him reconsider his agnosticism.

He had spent his days trying to contact Peggy’s employer.

He had salvaged a discarded New York City tourist map, but without so much as a subway token he was stuck in the Borough of Queens, where LaGuardia was. Tourists visited New York to see many wonders. None of them were in Queens. But he could walk to the Queens Public Library, which had phone books for Washington D.C. and its suburbs. The library also had decent restrooms.

As a potential U.S. taxpayer Robby was bothered by the large number of U.S. government agencies that were, or might have been, employers of spies. He was more bothered by the difficulty of telephoning them.

Deep in a trouser pocket he had found a five Reichspfennig coin. It was about as big as an American nickel and about as worthless. He had fed it into a pay phone that shat it out like bad fish. On the second try the phone kept the coin but didn’t reward him with a dial tone.

Hotels had lobby phones, in booths or on tables, from which one could place collect long-distance calls through the hotel switchboard. Hotels also had house detectives who moved bums along as vigorously as New York’s Finest booted them from the subways. He had averaged three calls per hotel. That would have been enough, but he never reached any agency that accepted collect calls.

He stared at his reflection in the interrogation room’s mirror window. On the window’s opposite side somebody might have been looking back at him. If so they probably didn’t like what they saw.

He still wore the same shirt. It hung on his now thinner shoulders and it looked and stunk like hell, no matter how often he washed it, and himself, in public restroom sinks. His cheeks were hollow and stubbled and he had broken a tooth biting something he had wrongly assumed was a discarded bread crust.

The interrogation room door’s lock rattled. Then a skinny redheaded guy, with a shield like Frank Catalano’s clipped to his belt, came in with a manila folder in one hand.

He sat, flipped the folder open, then without looking up said, “Take a seat, Mr. Ritter.”

Robby sat.

The redhead looked up and stretched a smile. “I’m Detective Kelly. Your statement says this is your first visit to New York.”

“Yep.”

“I take it you’re not enjoying the city.”

“I chased that guy down because he knocked that woman cold when he snatched her purse. But I’m the one in jail?”

“He’s in jail too. A public fistfight’s a public fistfight. And neither of you had ID so you both got fingerprinted and photographed.”

“How is she?”

“Mrs. Schwartz is fine. And she’s corroborated your statement. So exactly because you’re a Good Samaritan and he’s a creep with outstanding arrest warrants you’ve been over in our precinct holding cell until now, not the crummy actual jail he’s in. Frankly, sir, it seems to me that our precinct holding cell is the nicest accommodation you’ve enjoyed since you arrived in New York.”

“The sandwich was good. Thanks. How much longer do I have to stay here?”

“Just ’til we confirm a few more things. Could be just hours. Your lack of ID isn’t speeding things up. Anything you’d like to add that might help with that?”

Robby considered dropping Catalano’s name. But as Frank had explained that would end up screwing them both, and maybe Peggy too. What he needed to do was find Peggy’s employer and he couldn’t do that from jail.

The redheaded detective closed the file, then reached across the table and removed Robby’s cuffs. “Sorry about those. Procedure. Another sandwich?”

“Great.”

“Here or in the cell?”

“Privacy’s better here. But it’ll be great to have all this behind me.” Robby smiled a little. Things were looking up.

Four hours later the door opened again.

The guy who came in this time was bald, jowly, and didn’t introduce himself.

He said, “Robert Ritter?”

Robby nodded. “Am I being released?”

“Depends. Robert Ritter? Maybe. Robert Roark? No.”

“What?”

“Seems the prints we took when you were booked in here match a set belonging to a Robert Roark. The FBI took them in 1932.”

Robby’s jaw dropped and he closed his eyes. Then he nodded. “I remember now. This is kind of funny, really.”

The jowly man didn’t smile.

Robby said, “When I was thirteen my Boy Scout troop toured the FBI offices at the Department of Justice in Washington. I got chosen to have my prints taken. My friends were jealous.”

“So you are Robert Roark?”

“I haven’t gone by that name since 1940. But yes, I’m Robert Roark. Does New York have a problem with that?”

The jowly man shrugged. “Maybe eventually. You signed official documents in New York with a false name. But at the moment the state that has a problem with you is Indiana. In 1940 you registered for the draft there. But when your induction notice issued you failed to report. An arrest warrant was issued back then on behalf of your local draft board. It’s still active.”

“I’m wanted for dodging the draft seventeen years ago? To avoid serving in a war the United States never even fought?” Robby threw up his hands and stared at the ceiling. “The irony of this is incomprehensible!”

The jowly man shrugged again. “I’m no lawyer. But irony isn’t a legally sufficient defense.”

“I’m no lawyer either. I’m just telling you the truth. Of course I registered for the draft. I was ready to go and fight as soon as the U.S. entered the war. But when we didn’t I went to Canada. So I could join the RAF and fight the Nazis that way. My induction notice must’ve arrived after I left.”

“You ran to Canada?”

“I didn’t run.”

“Probably looked like you ran. That’s willful evasion. Willful evasion’s a felony. Felony warrants never expire.”

“I thought you weren’t a lawyer.”

“I’m not. But maybe you should get one.”

“Fine. How do I do that?”

“Assuming you can’t afford one—”

“Do I look like a Rockefeller to you?”

“You do not, sir. But you still have to demonstrate to a court that you’re entitled to have a lawyer appointed.”

“How do I do that?”

“You probably should ask a lawyer that question.”

“Jesus Christ!” Robby pressed his palms to his forehead. “What happens to me in the meantime?”

“Well, given that you admit having fled the country once before—”

“I didn’t flee.”

“—and you can’t afford to post bail you’ll probably be detained pending court proceedings.”

“Detained? In the place that’s not a resort?”

He nodded. “Correct. Rikers Island is not a resort.” He sighed. “Look, I’m really not the guy you want to talk to. Maybe I can find a public defender someplace in the building. They’re not as sharp as appointed counsel but they’ll talk to people for free. I’ll try to get one to come by here.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Robby woke, still seated at the interrogation room table. His head rested on his forearms and he had drooled a puddle onto the tabletop.

He rubbed crud out of his eyes and focused on the ticking wall clock.

The jowly man had left three hours before.

No public defender.

No way out. Except by saying things he wouldn’t say if his life depended on it. Because Peggy’s life did depend on it. And her life mattered more than his ever would.

The room door’s lock was rattling and Robby realized that the noise had awakened him.

Were things about to get worse? Was getting worse even possible?

A uniformed cop swung the door open, then stepped aside so a balding man who wore thick glasses could enter.

The man looked to be about sixty and his drooping mustache made him look like a nearsighted walrus. He carried a fedora, and a topcoat hung over his right forearm.

The Walrus nodded to the uniformed cop, who stepped out, pulled the door shut, and left them alone.

Robby said, “Are you my public defender?”

The Walrus smiled. “On some level I suppose that’s an accurate description. You look like you could use some defending. Mr. Ritter, my name is Edwin Plimpton. Peggy Kohl works for me.”

Robby’s heart skipped and his jaw dropped. “Peggy? You—is she—?”

The Walrus smiled again. “Still in place and hard at work, so far as we know. Communication is imperfect in our business. As your recent experience with the intelligence community has shown you.”

Robby jerked his thumb at the mirror behind him. “You know that mirror—”

Plimpton smiled again. “The only person behind that mirror at the moment also works for me. You and I can speak freely.”

“How did you find me?”

Plimpton said, “Edgar Hoover’s not my favorite member of the U.S. intelligence community, but the Bureau’s fingerprint identification system is superb. We’ve been looking for you since the goat screw at LaGuardia. I apologize on behalf of all of the intelligence community for that. If we were a more functional community you wouldn’t be in this room now. It pleasantly surprised us, though not you obviously, when you got arrested over that purse snatching, because your prints got into the system. The arrest isn’t a serious problem.”

“It’s not my only problem. Did anybody tell you the rest of the mess I’m in?”

Plimpton said, “It’s being taken care of. All of it.”

“Just like that?” Robby shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

“Mr. Ritter, after seventeen years behind the Iron Curtain I think you may not understand any longer.

“I was stationed in Berlin in 1939. Even before the war started ordinary Germans cringed at every door knock or phone call. But Americans trust their national government to work for them, not the other way around. They just don’t think that we work for them very well. They’re right on both counts. But an American citizen still gives Washington the benefit of the doubt when the phone rings. Especially if the citizen has his sights set on the White House. Like both the mayor of New York City and the governor of Indiana have.”

Robby said, “So what next?”

Plimpton said, “First we spring you from here. Then we get you fed and rested. Then, if you’re willing to hear us out, we’ll present you some options for your future. I think you may be interested.”

There was a knock at the door, then a handsome kid wearing a three-piece suit, whom Robbie hadn’t seen before, entered.

He handed Plimpton a fat file and said, “I think this ties everything up with a bow, sir.”

Plimpton patted the kid’s shoulder. “Thank you, son. My best to His Honor.”

The kid beamed. “New York is always glad to do Washington a favor.” He pointed at Robby. “This is the gentleman in question?”

Plimpton nodded.

The kid dipped his head. “The mayor has asked me to apologize for the misunderstanding, sir. Any additional questions or concerns I may be able to help with?”

Robby said, “Do you know how I could contact a detective named Catalano?”

“Catalano?” The kid paused longer than he should have.

Robby clenched his teeth. Dammit! Shouldn’t have brought it up.

The kid said, “It’s a common name in New York, sir. Did you . . . know him?”

“Did?”

“An NYPD detective named Frank Catalano was buried four days ago.”

Robby shook his head. “That can’t be.”

“I attended his funeral myself. Along with the mayor and every member of the New York Police Department not on duty.”

Robby swallowed. Finally he said, “How did he die?”

“Last week he was filling in for another detective when he happened onto an armed robbery in progress. He shielded a bystander and a bullet penetrated his heart.”

Robby blinked back tears.

The kid said, “Ironically, last year Detective Catalano’s wife was a bystander shot and killed during an armed robbery. Apparently, her death hit him so hard that, to fill the hole in his life, he took on every dull or rotten job that New York’s dark side served up.”

“I had no idea.”

“Were you fortunate enough to know him well, sir?”

“Fortunate? Immeasurably. Well enough? Never.”


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Framed