Eric Norden - The Ultimate Solution

This was all going too fast for me.

“I don’t follow you. How…”

Kohler clutched my sleeve.

“Beck said we were working for von Leeb, and he was right. Well, von Leeb is dead, so we’re no longer working for him. It’ll be certified a natural death, don’t worry about that, there’s a half-dozen drugs they could’ve used, insulin o.d., massive dose of adrenalin, take your pick. So nobody’s going to raise a stink over that end of it. All we have to do now is fold our hands and sit tight and let the whole thing blow over. If the Japs or anybody else want this Jew, let them have him, they can make him Emperor for all I care, so long as he’s off our backs.”

“But Berlin, they sent von Leeb, they’ll send somebody else…”

Kohler shook his head.

“I doubt it, I doubt it very much. This was von Leeb’s baby, and he pushed it for all it was worth. Shit, he’s been killing Jews all his life and now there aren’t any more Jews left, he must have felt lost. They probably gave the assignment to him in the first place as some sort of occupational therapy. But do you think any of the big boys really care that much anymore? They’re on the verge of war with the Japanese Empire, that’s enough to keep them occupied.”

“I don’t know, maybe you’re right on that end of it. But the Japs, how can we be sure they’ll call things off when we do and not just keep on till they make a clean sweep of it? Of us .”

“They’re professionals, Bill, if we’re not a threat to them, they’re not a threat to us. Stop the investigation now and both of us are safe. Keep going and we’ll be in danger every minute of every day.”

I nodded, though reluctantly. Everything Kohler said was reasonable enough, but this whole business had very little to do with reason.

“Okay,” I said finally, “I guess we don’t have too many options. But how do we let the other side know we’re getting out of the game? Go up on the roof of Gestapo headquarters and wave a white flag?”

Kohler smiled, and some of the tension seemed to leave his face.

“That’s pretty much it.” He drained his coffee and got to his feet. “Get back to the precinct right away. Don’t worry about a tail, I’ll take you out through a special corridor we use for informers, it leads into the federal courthouse next door.” He looked at his watch. “An hour from now I’ll call you and we’ll do a little number about how relieved we are this thing is finally over with, now we can get back to normal work, you know what to say. They’ll have bugged our phones from the beginning, they’re too good not to, and we’ll give ’em an earfull. That’s our white flag.”

“What about our back-up teams?”

“I’ll have to send them back to Washington. If we’re kept under surveillance and they’re spotted, the Japs will know we’re not acting in good faith. It’s a gamble, but not a big one. The Japs won’t risk their lives nailing us unless we’re in their way. Once we quit the game they’ll forget all about us.”

It all figured, but somehow I didn’t feel any better. As I left Kohler at the courthouse entrance I wavered, and almost went back after him. But hell, what choice did either of us have? And if it didn’t work, we probably wouldn’t be around to complain.

I hailed a cab on Chambers Street and got back to the station in twenty minutes. Nygard was on the duty desk, and he called me over excitedly.

“Jeez, Lieutenant, where you been? I got a dozen messages for you, the Commissioner’s office called three times, Warren’s been trying to get hold of you, and Kearney stopped in from the lab, he says that place you wanted him to dust on Fifth, it’s no go, burned down last night. Nothin’ left, he said, the owner and a couple of guys next door went up too. And then Macri, he wants to know if you need any dupes on…”

I walked away, thinking of little dapper Leonard Pickett. No white flag for him. The bastard didn’t even know he needed one.

Kohler called dead on time, and we both did our best to convince our unseen audience that as far as we were concerned von Leeb’s death closed the investigation. They’d have missed their hit man by now, so I asked what he’d learned about the crazy Jap who’d tried to kill me, and Kohler smoothly said it must have been connected with my part in the Toronto cleanup, probably some fanatic nip Christie thirsting for revenge. So the books were closed on that one too. I ended the conversation by telling Kohler I was going to take a few days leave to recharge the batteries, and he said he’d probably do the same. Too bad about old von Leeb, but the thing had been a wild goose chase from the start anyway. And see you around. All in all, a pretty convincing act, I thought. I hoped.

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 mean t 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.