Keller turned his back on her, put in a dime and dialed Eva’s number.
When the Polish maid answered the phone, he insisted that he must talk to Eva now. A moment later he heard her accented greeting.
“Hello, darling!”
Eva’s voice was enough to reassure him. The noisy train station made it difficult to hear; Keller stabbed a finger into his free ear. “Listen carefully,” he said, discovering that he had formed a plan. Had it come on the spur of the moment from some half-forgotten detective movie? He looked around for a landmark, saw that he was near a row of stands selling newspapers, gum, cigarettes. “I am leaving you something at Union Station. The middle phone near the newsstand. Look in the phone book.”
“What is going on?”
“I’m being followed, Eva.”
“Das ist wirklich schlimm!” More curse than fearful. This is awful.
“The middle phone book,” he repeated. Then, hesitantly, he added, “I love you, Eva.”
And hung up.
The Washington, D.C., telephone directory was encased in a hardboard cover designed to keep it safe from moisture and theft. A steel cable tethered it to the phone itself. Keller took the packet from his coat pocket, removed some of the outer pages, and then shoved the rest into the middle of the phone directory, deep enough so that the spine of the book gripped the pages and they would not fall out. He put the rest of the pages back in his pocket. When he turned around, the girl with the cheap coat and the bright lipstick was still waiting, giving him a look like something she might have found on the bottom of her shoe back home in West Virginia. “Honestly!” He ducked under her glare as she grabbed for the phone.
With luck, his pursuers had not seen him making the call. But now what? He couldn’t go to Eva’s but he couldn’t go home, either. Then again, if they knew he worked at the War Department he was sure they already knew where he lived. He suspected that they were following him so that he could lead them somewhere. Keller found that he was shaking. The frenzy of the evening rush was making him dizzy. He went into the men’s room, took off his hat, and splashed water on his face, trying not to get water spots on his new tie.
Someone came in behind him. Keller glanced in the mirror and saw a charcoal coat. The face under the matching charcoal hat was meaty and red as a ham, as if the fellow had been running. But he didn’t seem to be in a hurry now. He leaned against the tiled wall, not looking away when Keller’s eyes met his in the mirror. A second man came in, the one with the acne scars and the heavy shoulders. He stood just inside the doorway. Someone tried to walk into the bathroom and he put out an arm to stop him. “John’s closed, buddy. Take a leak somewhere else.”
The man in the charcoal coat walked over to the sinks and stood just behind Keller. They watched each other in the mirror. Then the man punched Keller in the small of the back, just above the hip.
Keller felt like a cannonball had hit him in the kidneys. The next thing he knew he was on his knees, the grimy slush on the men’s room floor soaking through his trousers. He gasped for breath. Somebody mashed his hat down on his head. “Hard to run with a busted kidney,” the man said. “It’s better than handcuffs. Now get on your feet and come with us.”
“I haven’t done anything,” Keller managed to gasp.
The FBI agent — if that’s what he was — roughly shoved his hands into Keller’s coat pockets. Almost at once he came out with the few sheets that Keller had made a point of not hiding in the telephone book. “Then what do you call this?” the big man asked in the world-weary tone of someone who had heard it all before, from the bank robbery suspect caught with a bag of money to the murderer gripping a smoking gun. For good measure, he punched Keller in the kidneys again.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Chapter 22
They put Keller in the back of a car and he was surprised when they pulled up in front of the National Institutes of Health Building. Keller recognized the building and felt a sense of relief at the thought that maybe this had all been some mistake, but changed his mind when the big man dragged him out of the car and pushed him toward a side entrance. The other man knocked on the windowless steel door, it opened from within, and they were inside a dimly lit hallway covered with yellowing Linoleum tiles. Keller found himself shoved again, this time into a cramped room. The two men pointed him to a wooden chair pulled up in front of a long table, with a pair of empty chairs facing him in the other direction. Then the two thugs stood against the wall, arms crossed on thick chests. One shook out a Lucky Strike and lit it; the other unwrapped a stick of Wrigley’s spearmint gum and chewed noisily, snapping the gum between his teeth.
After half an hour, two men came into the room. The thugs who had picked him up at Union Station walked out without so much as a backwards glance, leaving Keller alone with the newcomers. One of the men wore a gray suit to match his gray hair and had the kindly look of a long-dead uncle Keller had known. He actually gave Keller an apologetic smile. The other man was shorter and younger, with shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal hairy forearms. He wore a sour look. Keller knew what this was. Good cop, bad cop. He had seen it before in the movies. Neither of the men made any effort to introduce themselves as they settled into the chairs opposite him.
“What’s going on?” Keller asked, focusing on the avuncular one. “I demand to know.”
“Shut up,” the younger man said. “You’re not in a position to demand anything, you fucking Nazi.”
Keller blinked; the words fucking Nazi hit him as hard as one of those kidney punches. The man had spoken it with such blatant hatred and disdain. Keller was surprised to find it made him angry.
“Go to hell.”
The two interrogators looked at each other, seeming to exchange a silent communication that this wasn’t going to be as easy as they thought.
“What my colleague means is that this was found on you,” the gray-haired one said, taking the sheets of paper that had been found in Keller’s pocket and putting them on the table. He smoothed out the wrinkles; he had very pink and soft hands.
Keller noticed that he had not produced the papers tucked into the telephone book. A sense of relief washed over him. Whatever happened to him now, he didn’t care. The information that really mattered was likely being retrieved at that very moment by Eva. Beautiful Eva. They would have to kill him before he gave her up.
“I needed something to write my shopping list on,” Keller said.
The older man sat back, blinking at him. The younger one reached across the table and grabbed Keller by the shirt collar. He tried to pull the man’s wrists away but they gripped like iron. “You think this is funny, Herr Keller?” the man demanded, so angry that spittle flew from the corners of his mouth. “Since when is it funny to steal national secrets from the War Department?”
“I’m sure Mr. Keller has a perfectly good explanation,” the older man said. He leaned across the table. “Don’t you, Mr. Keller?”
The door opened. The colonel who walked in was tall and raven-haired, with the sort of sharp features that made him resemble Clark Gable. At his appearance, the other two men subsided their questioning and returned to their chairs like the tide going out. Keller had the distinct impression that they were disappointed. The colonel’s arrival had cut short their fun.