I sat there for a few minutes after the call, willing my hands steady, then glanced at my watch. Almost noon. Even if this all worked out as planned, there’d have to be some kind of time lag before the tappers could report our conversation back to whoever ran their show, so I decided to sit tight in the precinct house for the rest of the afternoon. I ordered some lunch sent in from Sweeney’s, told the switchboard I wasn’t taking any incoming calls unless it was the Gestapo, and opened a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch I’d been saving for a special occasion. Like now. I’d have to call the Commissioner if I wanted to keep my job, but he could wait till tomorrow. It was unlikely Centre Street knew about von Leeb’s death yet, and anyway I still had the letter from Berlin, so for a little while longer I could pull rank on Gunther. A week ago the idea would have made me come in my pants, but I can’t say it did much for me now. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Kohler’s ploy to get us off the hook was too neat, too easy, and I still had a prickling sensation on the back of my neck, as if somebody was lining me up in the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. Come to think of it, they might very well be doing just that. I got up and pulled the shades on both windows.
With a rubbery hamburger and three shots of silken Scotch under my belt I felt a little more optimistic, but not much. Shit, I’d be lucky if I came out of this without an ulcer. On second thought, I’d be lucky if that’s all I came out of it with. I lit a cigarette and leaned back in the swivel chair, enviously contemplating the life of a plumber.
After a few more Scotches the combination of exhaustion and nervous tension began to catch up with me, so I took one more stiff drink, locked the door and sprawled out on the couch. But wiped out as I was, sleep still wouldn’t come. I kept running the whole thing over and over in my mind, trying to find the fatal flaw in Kohler’s plan. The phones had to be tapped, and our little duet was bound to call off the hounds. And yet… I finally forced myself to think of something else, but when I eventually drifted off it was just a replay of the night before, a smiling skull beneath the mask, a grave-strewn park, the words of warning whispering on the fringes of my consciousness, the rotting bodies dug up one by one. Men I’d never seen in life but knew now, Fiske, Junger, and then the fresh graves, today’s graves, von Leeb, the Jap, Connor, Pickett. Pickett, shriveled into an anonymous hunk of carbon by the flames, as black and dead as the big buck in the Garden ring. Pickett…
I broke out of sleep in a cold sweat and sat bolt upright on the couch. Pickett. It was Pickett who was all wrong, who’d been gnawing away at the back of my head ever since Nygard told me. Fisk, Grauber, even von Leeb, they’d all been killed to stop our investigation, to let the Japs beat us to the Jew. Or so we’d thought. But Pickett had already told me all he knew when they burned him to death, he wasn’t an obstacle or a threat anymore. Sweet Freya, Pickett wasn’t killed because of what he could do, but for what he knew. The Japs weren’t preventing, they were silencing. Pickett was silenced, they all were silenced, anybody who knew anything about the case, from a nothing like Fiske right on up to von Leeb himself. Which meant that Kohler was wrong, we couldn’t buy immunity with that phone call, because on or off the case we still knew too much. And for some crazy reason, the Japs had decided the price of that knowledge was death.
I lurched to the desk and called Kohler’s office number at Gestapo headquarters, but there was no answer. I glanced at my watch. It was almost eight-thirty, I’d slept longer than I’d thought. I tried Beck’s extension with no more luck, then rang the duty officer. I got the same guy who’d checked me in last night, which helped, but it still took me five minutes of wheedling to get Kohler’s home number and address. He should be there by now, he had to be. Our one chance was to follow our original plan and let the whole goddamn Gestapo in on this. If that didn’t buy us immunity, nothing would.
I’d already dialed the first five digits when I realized his private number would be under Komeito surveillance too. Shit, I might as well call up the Imperial Mission. Kohler lived way out in Brooklyn, Bay Ridge, but I could get there in an hour and with any luck he could alert a dozen sub-agents tonight and rope the rest in first thing tomorrow. I felt a little stirring of hope, but not much. Things were spinning out of control, badly out of control.
I checked the Schmeisser’s action, slipped an extra clip into my side pocket, and went down to the squad room. Touhy and Henderson were playing cards and swilling beer, both of them far too short. A patrolman I knew by sight was filling out his duty roster in the corner, a shade taller than me but he’d have to do. I ordered him to strip, and Touhy and Henderson stared at me like I’d gone freudy. But Callender had spread the word about my authorization so neither of them said anything, and when the bewildered rookie tried to put up an argument I just pulled rank fast and hard. Ten minutes later I left the precinct swinging my nightstick, cap pulled down as far over my forehead as it would go, just another uniformed cop changing shifts. At least, I hoped that was the way it looked to whoever was watching for a plainclothes detective named Bill Haider.
The minute I reached Fifth I hailed a cruising cab, hoping for the best, I’d told the desk to dispatch an unmarked car to the corner of Eighty-fifth and First and just to be on the safe side I changed cabs twice on the way, leaving the first one at Amsterdam and Sixty-ninth, then ducking in and out of the Seventy-second Street subway station and grabbing another by the Seventy-third Street exit. When I took over the plain blue Porsche from Tolloffson I was sure I’d managed to shake any tail, but as an added precaution I took evasive maneuvers along a half-dozen nearly deserted East Side streets. Nobody stayed even close. For the first time in two days I could be sure I was on my own. It was a good feeling.
I took the Horst Wessel Drive down to the bridge, still clogged with homebound traffic, and crawled across to Brooklyn. The sun was going down over Jersey, shrouded in a murky haze of pollution, and it was as muggy as ever. A few fat raindrops dribbled sluggishly from the overcast sky, and there were angry thunderclouds rolling to the west. The weather suited my mood, if nothing else.
On Flatbush I pulled up next to a cabbie and got directions to Bay Ridge, out through Prospect Park and across Ocean Avenue into the Himmler Parkway. It took me less than twenty minutes but then I made the wrong turnoff and got screwed up around Dykjer Heights, which cost me another half hour, and by the time I pulled up around the corner from Kohler’s tree-lined residential street it was almost ten. The rain had started to fall in earnest, which didn’t help any, and I had to walk two blocks to find a pay phone. As I searched through my water-logged pockets for a five-pfennig piece, I prayed Kohler was in. He wasn’t.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t expect him back for a while yet.” Her voice was high, a bit nasal. “Who did you say this was?”
I hadn’t, but somewhere a little monkey-faced Jap with earphones would be anxious to know.
“Beck, Pete Beck, Mrs. Kohler,” I lied, hoping she didn’t know his voice. “I’m calling from headquarters. Ed and I are working on a case together and I need to check something out with him…”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Beck, my husband has spoken of you. Well, he should be home in an hour or so, but if it’s important you could ring him at Ernie’s, that’s a little bar here in the neighborhood, he went over about nine for a few drinks.” Her voice grew querulous. “I do wish you people wouldn’t work him so hard, Mr. Beck, I’ve really never seen Edward so tired, and edgy at the same time…”