Apart from the Vice-President’s infuriating attempt to have him locked away in this glass and steel monstrosity of a building in downtown Philadelphia — in which and from it would be impossible to conduct ‘private’ and ‘confidential’ business with his friends in the House of Representatives — J. Edgar Hoover’s outlook was remarkably rosy. Immediately after the Battle of Washington he had been afraid he was going to be fired, dismissed in disgrace and most likely, publicly pilloried by the Administration as it frantically scrabbled to cover up its own shortcomings. Unaccountably, he and the FBI had been granted a second chance and as oddly, the last few weeks had been among the most exhilarating of his whole career. He and Clyde Tolson had traversed the country rallying the troops, and mounted a string of old-fashioned, classic gang-busting raids. The whole of the FBI had become energised without him having to lift a finger; every agent suddenly had the light of battle in his eyes. The success of the ‘California visit’ had simply been the icing on the cake.
To be back in ‘the office’, especially this new, soulless contemporary suite of ‘executive rooms’ in Philadelphia was something of a letdown; and he and Clyde had commiserated with each other about it on the way into work that morning. The post Battle of Washington furore, or as they frequently said, the ‘fight back’ had reminded them of their gang busting hey days in the thirties. Hunting down and confronting mobsters, shoot outs with Thompson sub-machine guns, firestorms of newspaper and radio coverage…
Those had been the days!
But for the situation surrounding his ‘new’ Headquarters — made doubly galling because his people had been the ones who first identified the empty Giraud Corn Exchange Trust Building as a suitably prestigious location for the Bureau before the Vice-President’s real estate sharks had muscled in on the deal — the legendarily mean-spirited and curmudgeonly Director of the FBI’s disposition might have been positively sunny that morning.
However, as he looked out over the city from his relatively lofty perch on the nineteenth floor it rankled that he had been bested by the Vice-President and he still coveted the great rotunda below his feet. That building would have been the perfect new home for the Federal Bureau of Investigation!
The one-time headquarters of the Giraud Corn Exchange Trust — situated a few hundred yards from City Hall, which was soon to be inaugurated as the home of the relocated House of Representatives — was superbly grand, it was built like a fortress and it had a huge vault, a likely bomb shelter in this troubled age — and a surfeit of office space within it. Designed by the architect Frank Furness in 1908 as a reproduction of the Pantheon in Rome; Furness had constructed the exterior structural fabric employing nine thousand tons of Georgia marble and the interior with Carerra marble quarried in Italy. A relief of Stephen Giraud, the bank’s founder was carved above the colonnaded entrance — a bust of J. Edgar Hoover’s own head would have fitted well in that space — and the oculus of the rotunda’s one hundred foot diameter dome was one hundred and forty feet above where — in an ideal, fairer and much more just world — the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have deigned to greet dignitaries visiting his domain…
But it was not to be.
There was a knock at the door and he turned around as Clyde Tolson walked into the office with a sheaf of files under his left arm. His friend and right hand man was a little breathless and had obviously been suppressing a broad smile for some minutes.
“Do you recollect I said the boys reported that there was something fishy about the shooting in Berkeley on the first night of the fighting in Washington, Chief?” He prefaced rhetorically, permitting his suppressed good humour to vent via an unusually toothy grin.
“Berkeley, yes,” Hoover acknowledged, his normally staccato delivery always softened in the presence of his closest associate in both life and in his work.
Of the two men Tolson was the younger, by five years, and the taller men; and his was the calmer temperament and the more meticulous mind. He was a man who preferred to stand back out of the photo line; he had enjoyed his share of the fame in the shoot outs of the thirties but cared little for the constant limelight that shone on his close friend and boss of well over thirty years. He was a practical man, never happier than when he was immersed in the minutiae of administering the great, complex workings of the nation’s one great Federal law enforcement organisation. However, if he was being honest with himself, in retrospect he realized he had been in a little bit of rut in recent years and the excitement of the last six weeks had shaken him out of the doldrums.
“Four agents gunned down,” Tolson reminded his friend, so enthused by the news he had brought to Hoover that the words tripped from his lips before he reminded himself that the Director was hardly likely to need to be reminded of the murder, or the circumstances of those murders, of four of their agents.
“There was a problem with the identification of one of the bodies?” J. Edgar Hoover queried as the two men naturally gravitated to comfortable chairs in front of the Director’s massive, uncluttered desk in the window. Any other man visiting Hoover would have been required to stand before that desk and recite his report from memory.
Clyde Tolson rifled the topmost case file.
“Christie, Dwight.”
“There was some mess up with the fingerprint report?”
“We now know the reason for the mismatch was that the man identified at the scene as Agent Christie could not have been Christie, Chief.”
Hoover scowled, said nothing.
“The fingerprints don’t match. And the dead man in Berkeley had had his appendix removed!”
“Why didn’t the people in California pick up on this before now?”
“Things were a mess out there, Chief,” Tolson observed, “and then we pulled everybody off what they were doing to focus on the Los Angeles operation.”
J. Edgar Hoover was still scowling. Normally his friend would not make allowances for oversights and the negligent conduct of his duties by any agent. It was symptomatic of the strange times in which they lived that he could not presently find it in his heart to take Tolson, albeit mildly, to task for his sentimentality.
“But even so,” his boss retorted as an afterthought.
“I will review the actions of our people in the normal way when things have quietened down, Chief,” he was assured. Clyde Tolson was FBI Associate Director responsible for the oversight of discipline within the Bureau and he took his duties very, very seriously.
“I know, I know.” Hoover’s curiosity about the other files his friend had brought to him was growing apace. “But Agent Christie’s gun was recovered from the scene?”
“Yes. Fragments of a round fired from his gun were discovered in the wall of one of the downstairs rooms, and, we think, from the unidentified body. The technical boys can’t be sure because they have been unable to reconstruct large enough pieces of either round. Both rounds were either hollow-point or soft-headed, or maybe scored, the way hunters sometimes tamper with their bullets. Both rounds disintegrated on impact with their target. But,” Tolson added, his tone that of a man about to pull a rabbit from a hat at a party, “several of the substantially intact rounds recovered at the scene were found not to match any of the guns of the dead agents. So,” he sucked in a gulp of air, “the labs started looking for matches and hey presto, the gun that fired at least four of the rounds in the Berkeley shootings was used in three separate killings between February and September last year.”