Nick stared out of his window across the street at the new FBI Headquarters, which had been completed in 1976, a great ugly monster with elevators that were larger than his office. He didn’t let it bother him. He’d reached Grade 18 in the service, and only the Director was paid more than he was. In any case, he was not going to sit behind a desk until they retired him with a pair of gold handcuffs. He wanted to be in constant touch with the agent in the street, feel the pulse of the Bureau. He would stay put at the Washington Field Office and die standing up, not sitting down. Once again, he touched the intercom. “Julie, I’m on my way home.”
Julie Bayers looked up and glanced at her watch as if it were lunchtime.
“Yes, sir,” she said, sounding disbelieving.
As he passed through the office he grinned at her. “Moussaka, rice pilaf, and the wife; don’t tell the Mafia.” Nick managed to get one foot out of the door before his private phone rang. One more step and he would have made it to the open lift, but Nick never could resist the ring of a phone. Julie rose and began to walk toward his office. As she did so Nick admired, as he always did, the quick flash of leg. “It’s all right, Julie. I’ll get it.” He strode back into his room and picked up the ringing telephone.
“Stames.”
“Good evening, sir. Lieutenant Blake, Metropolitan Police.”
“Hey, Dave, congratulations on your promotion. I haven’t seen you in...” he paused, “...it must be five years, you were only a sergeant. How are you?”
“Thank you, sir, I’m doing just fine.”
“Well, Lieutenant, moved into big-time crime, now have you? Picked up a fourteen-year-old stealing a pack of chewing gum and need my best men to find where the suspect has hidden the goods?”
Blake laughed. “Not quite that bad, Mr. Stames. I have a guy in Woodrow Wilson Medical Center who wants to meet the head of the FBI, says he has something vitally important to tell him.”
“I know the feeling, I’d love to meet him myself. Do you know whether he’s one of our usual informers, Dave?”
“No, sir.”
“What’s his name?”
“Angelo Casefikis.” Blake spelled out the name for Stames.
“Any description?” asked Stames.
“No. I only spoke to him on the phone. All he would say is it will be worse for America if the FBI doesn’t listen.”
“Did he now? Hold on while I check the name. He could be a nut.”
Nick Stames pressed a button to connect him with the Duty Officer. “Who’s on duty?”
“Paul Fredericks, boss.”
“Paul, get out the nut box.”
The nut box, as it was affectionately known in the Bureau, was a collection of white index cards containing the names of all the people who liked to call up in the middle of the night and claim that the Martians had landed in their back yards, or that they had discovered a CIA plot to take over the world.
Special Agent Fredericks was back on the line, the nut box in front of him.
“Right, boss. What’s his name?”
“Angelo Casefikis,” said Stames.
“A crazy Greek,” said Fredericks. “You never know with these foreigners.”
“Greeks aren’t foreigners,” snapped Stames. His name, before it was shortened, had been Nick Stamatakis. He never did forgive his father, God rest his soul, for anglicizing a magnificent Hellenic surname.
“Sorry, sir. No name like that in the nut box or the informants’ file. Did this guy mention any agent’s name that he knows?”
“No, he just wanted the head of the FBI.”
“Don’t we all?”
“No more cracks from you, Paul, or you’ll be on complaint duty for more than the statutory week.”
Each agent in the Field Office did one week a year on the nut box, answering the phone all night, fending off canny Martians, foiling dastardly CIA coups, and, above all, never embarrassing the Bureau. Every agent dreaded it. Paul Fredericks put the phone down quickly. Two weeks on this job and you could write out one of the little white cards with your own name on it.
“Well, have you formed any view?” said Stames to Blake as he wearily took a cigarette out of his left desk drawer. “How did he sound?”
“Frantic and incoherent. I sent one of my rookies to see him, but he couldn’t get anything out of him other than that America ought to listen to what he’s got to say. He seemed genuinely frightened. He’s got a gunshot wound in his leg and there may be complications. It’s infected; apparently he left it for some days before he went to the hospital.”
“How did he get himself shot?”
“Don’t know yet. We’re still trying to locate witnesses, but we haven’t come up with anything so far, and Casefikis won’t give us the time of day.”
“Wants the FBI, does he? Only the best, eh?” said Stames. He regretted the remark the moment he said it; but it was too late. He didn’t attempt to cover himself. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ll put someone on it immediately and brief you in the morning.” Stames put the telephone down. Six o’clock already — why had he turned back? Damn the phone. Grant Nanna would have handled the job just as well and he wouldn’t have made that thoughtless remark about wanting the best. There was enough friction between the FBI and the Metropolitan Police without his adding to it. Nick picked up his intercom phone and buzzed the head of the Criminal Section.
“Grant.”
“I thought you said you had to be home.”
“Come into my office for a moment, will you?”
“Sure, be right there, boss.”
Grant Nanna appeared a few seconds later along with his trademark cigar. He had put on his jacket which he only did when he saw Nick in his office.
Nanna’s career had a storybook quality. He was born in El Campo, Texas, and received a B.A. from Baylor. From there, he went on to get a law degree at SMU. As a young agent assigned to the Pittsburgh Field Office, Nanna met his future wife, Betty, an FBI stenographer. They had four sons, all of whom had attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute: two engineers, a doctor, and a dentist. Nanna had been an agent for over thirty years. Twelve more than Nick. In fact, Nick had been a rookie agent under him. Nanna held no grudge, since he was head of the Criminal Section, and greatly respected Nick — as he called him in private.
“What’s the problem, boss?”
Stames looked up as Nanna entered the office. He noted that his five-feet-nine, fifty-five-year-old, robust, cigar-chewing Criminal Coordinator was certainly not “desirable,” as Bureau weight requirements demanded. A man of five-feet-nine was required to keep his weight between a hundred and fifty-four and a hundred and sixty-one pounds. Nanna had always cringed when the quarterly weigh-in of all FBI agents came due. Many times he had been forced to purge his body of excess pounds for that most serious transgression of Bureau rules, especially during the Hoover era, when “desirability” meant lean and mean.
Who cares, thought Stames. Grant’s knowledge and experience were worth a dozen slender, young athletic agents who can be found in the Washington Field Office halls every day. As he had done a hundred times before, he told himself he would deal with Nanna’s weight problem another day.
Nick repeated the story of the strange Greek in Woodrow Wilson Medical Center as it had been relayed to him by Lieutenant Blake. “I want you to send down two men. Who’s on duty tonight?”
“Aspirin, but if you suspect it might be an informer, boss, I certainly can’t send him.”
“Aspirin” was the nickname of the oldest agent still employed in the WFO. After his early years under Hoover, he played everything by the book, which gave most people a headache. He was due to retire at the end of the year and exasperation was now being replaced by nostalgia.