A Pure Double Cross (4 page)

I hid in a doorway across the street just in case.

The deli went dark promptly at nine. I crossed the street and waited two doors down. I unzipped the pack of Camels and parked one in my mush. My heart was pounding. The spark was still there, I'd felt it the second I saw her. Had Jeannie? That's what I was huddled in this dark doorway to find out.

Where was she? Had she gone out the back?

No, the red OPEN sign was still in the window. Maybe she forgot to turn it over? I went to peer through the window and almost knocked Jeannie down as she stepped through the door.

“Hal?”

“Dammit Jeannie, you've ruined everything.”

“What do you…I don't…”

“Don't look at me,” I said. “Just go back inside, count to three and come out again.”

“Hal, what the…”

“Please.”

Jeannie blew out a breath and did as I requested. I lipped a fresh butt, pulled a hank of hair across my forehead and leaned a shoulder against the doorway. Jeannie walked out. “Hey there, beautiful,” I said. “Got a match?”

Jeannie looked me over coolly. “Your face and a donkey's bum.”

We cracked up, just like always.

“It's good to see you.”

“You too. What in the world are you doing here? In Cleveland? With that awful man?”

“It's complicated.”

“I'm listening.”

“Aww, shit, Jeannie I can't tell you. Not yet.”

I expected to get her rubber-lipped eye-rolling look. Jeannie had more facial expressions than a rhesus monkey. But she regarded me with a plain sad face.

“Hal, I thought you were dead.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Gee whiz, I wonder?”

“I know your girlfriends got letters once a month…”

“Once a week sometimes.”

“I was
behind
enemy lines.”

“Hal, you were a wireless agent, isn't that right? Your job was to send messages, isn't that right?”

“Sure, but personal stuff was strictly forbidden.”

“Dammit Hal, you could at least have
tried.
”

“I suppose. I didn't…”

Jeannie pressed her strong dainty finger to my lips. It smelled of mustard.

“It doesn't matter,” she said, her eyes saying just the opposite.

I bent to kiss her. “Not here,” she said, twisting away.

“Where then?”

She looked at me for a long time. “I'm a married woman now.”

I watched her walk down the sidewalk, hugging herself for warmth, and enter her walk-up above the store. I trudged back toward Mrs. B's and thought things over. I didn't feel the cold.

Jeannie had a lot of questions she wanted answered and so did I. But she was right. It didn't matter now.

I approached Kiefer's German-American Tavern at the corner of Detroit and 25
^th
. Rosy-cheeked couples spilled out onto the sidewalk, arm in arm. I wove my way through them. They looked sublimely happy and content.

The sons of bitches.

This is the best part of being a double agent I thought as I climbed the stone stairs to the Standard Building the next day. As a spy I risked my neck every time I wirelessed my case officer. The SD, Himmler's spy hunters, had high-frequency direction-finding receivers mounted on trucks. ‘Huff Duffs' we called them. They drove around sounding the sky, trying to triangulate the location of covert transmitters. I had to keep it short, and never the same place twice. But now, look at me, walking up the front steps of FBI headquarters at high noon!

That's the best part. The worst part is the mission.

The mission of a spy is simple, gather information. The mission of a double agent is to gather information while sowing disinformation. Meaning you've got to lie your ass off in a convincing way. I could do that with the FBI. Problem was I hadn't stayed above the fray, I had come to the rescue of Jeannie's husband and humiliated Jimmy in front of a paying customer. Jimmy was now cheesed off. That was exceptionally stupid on my part because Jimmy had superior knowledge. One call to the feds and my cook was goosed.

Which is where the mission got complicated. I was going to have to turn the setup once more so that I, not Jimmy, had superior knowledge. And the feds weren't going to like it.

The receptionist escorted me through the maze of corridors to my twelve o'clock with Agent Schram. She tapped on his door and announced me.

“Come in,” said Schram gruffly a short time later. He looked odd, standing behind his desk, his face flushed and covered with a scrim of sweat. I looked around. Had Assistant Special Agent Richard Schram been enjoying a nooner?

“Push ups,” said Schram off my look. “I do fifty three times a day.”

“Yes sir.”

Schram dried off with a hand towel and tossed it to the receptionist. She held it between thumb and forefinger and left the office, closing the door behind her. “What do you have for me?”

I stuck out my chest, put my hands behind my back. “A positive report sir. I was able to penetrate the Fulton Road Mob using the bait money from the bank robbery. I met with the man they call The Schooler and presented my - our - heist plans and he carried them upstairs to Mr. Big. They're interested.”

Agent Schram was rolling his head on his neck, all the way to the left, all the way to the right.

“They're waiting for the results of this meeting,” I said. “For the detailed heist plan before they agree to proceed.”

Agent Schram stopped his head in mid-roll and regarded me at a 45 degree angle. He licked his lips. “This meeting. You said
this meeting.
”

“Yes sir.”

“How do they know about this meeting?”

I hadn't said they did. But never underestimate the intuitive powers of a paranoid. “They don't sir. Not from me.”

Schram leaned on his desk and mouthed the words ‘Who then?'

“Sir to my knowledge the Fulton Road Mob
doesn't know
about this meeting.”

Schram licked his lips in anticipation. I cleared my throat. What was it about this guy that made me so twitchy? “I
did
tell The Schooler I was working for the FBI.”

Agent Schram liked this for about two seconds. He was right! Then he thrust out his canines and bit his lips white.

“I had no choice sir. I ran into someone, a classmate from Youngstown, who can make me.”

Agent Schram charged around from behind his desk. “Make you as what?” he sputtered. “A
traitor
?”

I wiped his spray from my face, I kept a calm and confident demeanor. “Sir, the Fulton Road Mob thinks I'm working for them. I'm not. I'm working for you.”

“You
say.
”

“Agent Schram, if I was a turncoat...”

Schram jumped ahead. “You wouldn't have told me what you just told me.
Unless
…” He waited for me to complete the sentence.

I looked confused, took my time, Schram's watery blue eyes eating a hole in my forehead. “Unless I told you that I told the mob that I was working for the FBI in order to…what? Cover my ass in case you had another source inside the gang? Someone who could keep an eye on me?” I wiped my brow. “Whew. That's more thinking than I've done in a month.”

I paused to see how my act was going over but it was hard to tell. Schram's watery blue eyes had gone glassy. “Sir?”

Schram came to. “How are you going to work your way up to Mr. Big if they know that's why we sent you?”

“I'll make myself indispensable. Mr. Big will come to me.”

Agent Schram turned back to his desk and keyed the intercom. “Get Gilliam,” he barked. “
With
the plans.”

Schram sat down and shuffled through papers. This was it? The green light? At the very least I had expected to be braced by Chester Halladay about my unauthorized change in strategy. Not to mention the twelve grand I had left over after I bought myself a meeting with The Schooler.

Joe Gilliam announced himself from the other side of the door. I opened it on a corn-fed linebacker with a boyish face and thick reddish-blonde hair that came to a peak halfway down his forehead.

“Meet Harold Schroeder,” said Schram from behind his desk. Gilliam's mitt swallowed mine whole. “Lay it out.”

Agent Gilliam pulled diagrams and timetables from his briefcase and spread them out on a glass drafting table against the far wall. He turned a switch, the table lit up. Gilliam ran it down. The job was an armored car robbery, and not just any armored car, the armored car that collected citizen donations to the city's Help the Needy Christmas Fund!

“That ought to get the attention of the
Press
and
Plain-Dealer,
” said Gilliam. Schram grunted from his desk.

Good Lord. My suspicion that the higher ups at the Cleveland District Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had bats in their belfry was, officially, confirmed. They wanted to conduct an undercover sting operation that garnered maximum publicity.

I should have walked out there and then. I didn't. Too stupid, too stubborn. I examined the documents on the light board instead. Someone had a done a lot of work. The diagrams were precisely drawn. But they ignored a key concern.

“And federal agents will be posing as the armored car guards?” I said to Gilliam.

“Of course. Didn't I make that clear?”

“Sure you did Joe, it's just this.” I looked the question to Schram. He nodded curtly. “I told the mob I was working for the FBI.” Joe Gilliam's bovine face froze in mid-grin. “It's okay, we're still in the driver's seat, but it gets complicated.”

“How's that?”

“Well, on the face of it this armored car job should be a cakewalk. The crooks know the heist is FBI-approved, the FBI now knows that the crooks know. But - and here's the tricky part - the crooks
don't
know that the
FBI knows
that they know. The mob will think they have the advantage, but it's your agents who will have superior knowledge.”

Joe Gilliam's eyeballs ping-ponged around the room, looking for answers. Agent Schram, who was busy wrestling a sprung paper clip back into proper alignment, ignored him.

“And I'm supposed to do what?” said Gilliam.

“Convince your guys to sell their roles,” I said, patting his lamb shank forearm. “Because once they know that the
crooks
know that this heist is just a charade, your guys will want to leer at them, taunt them, pinch their cheeks. And then all hell will break loose.” I patted Agent Gilliam again. “Got that?”

“Uh huh.”

I unwound the maze of corridors, rode the lift to the lobby and walked down the stone steps of the Standard Building with a queasy feeling. Joe Gilliam was a good egg, he would do his best. It wasn't that.

My foot gave way on a patch of ice and I rode my duff down the final four steps to the plaza.

Ow.

I sat there a moment, contemplating the fates and rubbing my tailbone. It wasn't Joe Gilliam I was queasy about. The feds' misunderstanding of the nature of covert operations was troubling, but it was the quick, almost offhanded go-ahead I received from Agent Schram that was giving me the wim wams.

I'd lied to Assistant Special Agent Richard Schram, the Fulton Road Mob knew about my meeting with him. The Schooler was waiting at an undisclosed location to see the plans. I was to walk eight blocks to the corner of St. Clair and East 17
^th
. If the coast was clear someone would pick me up. And I had a good idea who that someone would be.

The wind whipped down the concrete canyon of St. Clair Avenue, frosting my eyebrows. The women I passed wore fur hats. The younger ones, rabbit or beaver, the matrons, mink or sable. All the men wore felt fedoras, brims snapped low against the wind.

I must have looked like the Nickel Plate pulling into Union Terminal with the geyser of steam pouring off my dome. I have never gotten along with hats, was forever leaving them behind or chasing them down the sidewalk. But maybe it was time to buy a lid.

The street changed once I passed East 9
^th
. Got colder too, if that's possible. The skyscrapers gave way to soot darkened brick buildings the color of dried blood. Lunch bucket guys in Elmer Fudd caps took the place of swanky dames in fur hats.

I cut across St. Clair, ducked down an alley behind a block long building that hummed with turbines and muffled shouts and hid behind a dumpster at the far end and waited. No one followed. Apparently Agent Schram had bought my story.

I went to the anointed corner and listened to my teeth chatter for ten minutes. Skimmer, hell, I was going to have to buy some long johns.

Jimmy's Buick pulled up a short time later. I climbed in and said, “You're late.” Jimmy did not reply. “It's not that I mind
freezing my yobs off in subzero temperatures you understand, nothing like that. It's just I felt a wee bit…
conspicuous
standing out there on the street corner.”

Jimmy turned left on East 20
^th
. “Hadda make sure you weren't tailed.”

I removed my gloves and tried to rub some feeling back into my fingers.
No, you beak-nosed prick, you knew I had already made sure of that. What you wanted was for me to shiver on that street corner till the FBI tail car you expected after your anonymous ratting-me-out-to-the-feds phone call had tracked me down.

That's what I wanted to say. What I did say was, “Sure.” I had some fence-mending to do.

The Buick crossed the train tracks and turned west on Shoreway. The lake was a block of ice. We motored down the highway. The sky went dark in the shadow of Municipal Stadium, returned to dim winter light on the other side. Did I know for a fact that Jimmy had called the feds and peached me out?