Amerikan Eagle (23 page)

The phones were ringing at the main desk, as people started calling in, demanding rooms, demanding reservations, demanding everything and anything for the upcoming summit. As Sam took the carpeted stairs up to the first floor and Room Twelve, he still found it hard to get his mind around what had just happened. His hometown, his Portsmouth, was hosting a summit between the world’s two most powerful men, Long and Hitler. It was one thing to grow up with history about you—the royal governors, the John Paul Jones house, the revolutionaries—but it was something else to know that history was going to happen here in the next few days and that you were stuck in the middle of it.

At Room Twelve he knocked on the door. A male voice invited him in.

“Inspector,” said Jack LaCouture of the FBI, standing up from a cushioned chair. “So glad to see you again. You remember my German traveling companion, don’t you? Herr Groebke.”

Groebke didn’t bother standing up. He stared at Sam
through his cigarette smoke, his glasses obscuring his eyes. Both men wore white shirts. Both also wore holstered revolvers. Sam waited till LaCouture sat down, then sat and said, “So. How goes my homicide investigation?”

“Who cares?” LaCouture asked. “One dead guy here illegally. I only care if Hans here cares.” LaCouture said something in German and Groebke replied, and LaCouture said to Sam, “See? Hans said there are priorities, and the current number one priority is this summit meeting. So the dead guy will have to wait. You got a problem with that?”

Peter Wotan. The dead guy had a name. Peter Wotan, and I know that
, Sam thought.
I know that and you can’t stop me from finding out more
.

Aloud he said, “No, I don’t have a problem with that.”

“Your chief, he tell you why you’re here?”

“Marshal Hanson mentioned something about being a liaison with you. He didn’t say anything about the Gestapo.”

LaCouture frowned. “Sorry if working with the Germans pisses you off, but I really don’t give a crap. We’ve got about a month’s worth of work to do in seven days, and we need to do it right. I just got a phone call a bit ago from God Himself to make sure nothing gets screwed up.”

“President Long?”

“Hell, no. J. Edgar Hoover. Chances are, Long won’t be President forever, but I can tell you that Hoover intends to be FBI director until the sun burns out. A phone call from that bastard can send you to either D.C. or fucking
Boise, can make you or break you, and I’m not one to be broken. So let’s get to it.”

Sam was silent.

“Your boss probably told you boys in blue how important the next few days are going to be, a chance to do good, to shine, blah, blah, blah,” LaCouture continued. “Well, that’s just so much bullshit. The next few days belong to us and the Germans, the Secret Service and the navy. You Portsmouth guys are going to be controlling crowds and traffic. And you, my friend, you’re gonna go out now and get us info on traffic choke points, lists of restaurants and places that can maybe hold all the goddamn visitors that are going to be streamin’ in here. That’s it. Savvy?”

Sam watched Groebke stub out his cigarette, light another one. He thought of what he could be doing with the Peter Wotan case. Instead, he’d become a glorified errand boy. “Yeah, I savvy.”

“Super. Here’s something to hold on to.” LaCouture flipped over a white business card. It had the FBI seal and LaCouture’s name and a handwritten notation on the front with the Rockingham Hotel’s address of 401 State Street and phone number of 2400. On the back was another note:
Bearer of card detached to federal duty until 15 May
.

Sam looked up at LaCouture. “A get-out-of-jail card?”

The FBI man did not smile. “It’s a card that makes sure you don’t get your ass
into
jail. By nightfall this city is going to be cordoned off, there will be troops in the street, and I don’t need my liaison having to explain to some army captain why he needs to take a dump somewhere.”

“Look, I just want to—”

The phone rang. The FBI man swore and got up to answer it. “LaCouture. Hold on. Yeah. Yeah. Crap. All right, I’ll be right down.” He slammed the receiver down. “Having a problem with the manager about the number of rooms we need. Look. I’ll go straighten it out. You two can stay here and improve German-local relations or something.”

LaCouture grabbed his coat and left, slamming the door behind him. Sam sat still, the white business card pinched between his fingers. The Gestapo man stared at him, smoking. Sam thought about the stories in
Life
and
Look
and the newspapers, the radio shows and Hollywood movies. This was how it ended for so many people over in Europe. Alone in a room with a Gestapo agent. The German had no power over him, but a part of Sam felt paralyzed by that rattlesnake gaze, the cool stare of a man who had the power of life and death, didn’t mind using it, and rather enjoyed having it.

Groebke stubbed the cigarette out in his ashtray and said, “You look … unsettled.”

“First time I’ve ever been alone with the Gestapo,” Sam said.

“Most of what we do … most of what I do … just like you,” Groebke said with a shrug. “A cop.” His English was impeccable but thickly accented.

“Maybe you think so. I find that hard to believe.”

Groebke stared at him.

“You don’t like Germans,” he said.

“Doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Groebke cocked his head like a hunting dog catching a far-off scent, a sound of something rustling in the grass
that must be chased and killed. “Have we hurt you in some way?”

“Yeah,” Sam replied, feeling his chest tighten. “You killed my father.”

The head moved again, slightly. “I think rather not. I have not had much experience with Americans. So I do not think I have killed your father.”

“Maybe not, but you and your people did.”

“Ah. The Great War, am I correct?”

“Yes, you are correct.”

“It was wartime,” the German said. “Such things happen during war.”

Sam thought,
Oh yeah, such things, and mostly from the Germans
. Flattening cities like Rotterdam or Coventry. Sinking passenger liners. Being the first to use poison gas. But this man was Gestapo, friends with the FBI and who knew whom. So Sam said, “Yeah. War. Not a good thing.”

“And your father,” Groebke persisted, apparently unoffended. “What happened to him?”

“He came home from the war, lungs scarred from German gas. Then he coughed his lungs out for another fifteen years before dying in the county home.”

“That was a long time ago, for which I am sorry. But what do you think of us now?”

Sam didn’t want to go any further with this German. “I’d rather not say. For reasons I’m sure you know.”

Groebke relaxed as if he knew he was winning this conversation. “I think I know Americans. You believe our leader is a dictator, a tyrant. Perhaps. But what of you? Hmm?”

Sam kept quiet. Wished LaCouture would hurry up and get back.

Groebke’s eyes narrowed. “Of you, I will say that your President is a fool and a drunkard. I will also say that my leader—he will be known as the greatest leader of this century. He took a country shattered by war, shattered by an economic depression, and brought it back in a brief time, to seize what was rightfully ours. Can you say that about your President? Your Depression still cripples you … your armed forces are an international joke … the Japanese are raping China and you stand by doing nothing … They are pushing you out of the Pacific by bribing you to abandon your bases, like the one at Guam … and you lifted not a finger when the Low Countries, France, and finally England itself fell into our laps.”

“You leader is a murdering bastard,” Sam said quietly.

Groebke was about to reply when LaCouture slammed in, banging the door behind him. “Nearly had to strangle the son of a bitch at the front desk, but it’s settled. Good. You guys okay up here?”

Groebke took his pale eyes from Sam and looked at the FBI man. “
Ja
. We are.”

“Good,” LaCouture said. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, Inspector …”

Sam got up and went to the door just as somebody knocked. LaCouture said, “Shit, see who it is, will ya, Miller?”

Sam opened the door, saw two Long’s Legionnaires standing there, cocky grins on their young faces. Carruthers and LeClerc, the ones who had come by his house last night. “Oh, it’s you,” LaCouture said. “Get your asses in here and let’s get to work.”

As he went past Sam, LeClerc bumped Sam with his shoulder, then laughed as Sam did nothing. Carruthers called out, “Oh, yeah, bud, we haven’t forgotten about that survey!”

Sam closed the door behind him, shutting out more Southern-tinged laughter.

Nine hours later, Sam was back at the Rockingham Hotel, his notebook filled with scribbled notations of what the FBI was looking for—traffic control spots, restaurants to feed the arriving masses of federal agents, and rooming houses to lodge them all—but to his surprise, LaCouture and Groebke were gone. At the front desk, the harried clerk—working on a switchboard that wouldn’t stop ringing—pulled out a note and said, “Oh, Inspector Miller. Agent LaCouture said to meet him … let’s see here, meet him by the hobo encampment off Maplewood. He said you’d know where that was.”

Ten minutes later, Sam was right back where this had all started, walking up the railroad track past the Fish Shanty, past the spot where his tattooed John Doe—no, Peter Wotan!—had been found, and up to the hobo camp, the place where Lou Purdue and the others lived, the place where—

Smoke was billowing up from where the camp had been.

Sam quickened his pace, heard the low growl of diesel engines, saw black clouds billowing up. Two bulldozers from the Portsmouth Public Works Department scraped the charred ground into a burning pile, moving the crumpled boards and shingles of what been people’s homes. LaCouture was standing by a polished black Pierce-Arrow, watching the action. Groebke stood closer to the flames, talking to a Long’s Legionnaire.

LaCouture turned to Sam, looking satisfied underneath the brim of his wide black hat. His pin-striped suit was immaculate, as always. Even his shoes were unscathed. “Inspector. So glad you could join us.”

“What’s going on?”

“A little cleanup, what do you think?”

The bulldozers growled, and he watched a bureau, a chair, a child’s doll get shoved into the flames. Smoke kept billowing up, oily and stinking. “What’s the point?”

LaCouture laughed. “What the hell do you think, boy? In a week, the President hisself is going to be coming up these railroad tracks. Do you really think we’re gonna want him and the press to see a bunch of bums and their filthy shacks?”

Sam watched the orange flames do their work. A bulldozer grumbled by, scooping up trash, some dirt. Riding the top of the dirt was a Roadmaster bicycle, just like the one Toby had. Sam stared at the bicycle, willed it to fall to the side, safe, unharmed, but then the bulldozer bucked and the bicycle fell under the treads, was crumpled, chewed up, destroyed. His chest ached. What kind of place was he living in?

“There’s not enough bulldozers in this country to clean up all the places like this,” he said.

“Don’t matter none,” LaCouture said. “So long as it’s clean around here, that’s all I care about.”

“What about the people? What happened to them?”

“Trespassers all,” LaCouture said. “Those Long boys took care of ’em. Sent off to some transit camps, far away from the newsreel boys come summit day.”

Sam’s witness, Lou Purdue, had lived here, but he knew that wouldn’t get any sympathy from LaCouture. To the FBI, that matter was done.

LaCouture said, “All right, then, tell me what you got for me today.”

Sam took out his notebook, flipped through the pages, started telling LaCouture what he had learned. After a minute, LaCouture held up a hand and said, “All right, all right, type up your notes and pass it along. We’ll deal with it later.”

Sam closed the notebook. The smoke and the flames were finally dying down. The bulldozers and their operators had moved off to the side, the diesel engines softly rumbling. Talking with the Long’s Legionnaire, Groebke laughed, tossed his cigarette into the smoldering embers.

LaCouture leaned back on the fender. “You don’t like me, do you, Miller?”

“I don’t know about that,” Sam said. “You’re here, I’m working for you. Why don’t we leave it at that?”

“You know, I don’t give a bird’s fart if you didn’t vote for the Kingfish, but he is my President and yours, too, no matter if you don’t like him or me. Just so you know, I grew up in Winn Parish, down in Louisiana. You know Winn Parish?”

“That’s where Long came from.”

“Yep,” the FBI agent said. “That’s where he came
from, and man, he never forgets that. I grew up in Winn Parish, too, barefoot, poor, Momma dead, and Daddy, he never finished grammar school. Could barely read and write. Worked as a sharecropper, barely makin’ it year to year. And that was gonna be my life, Inspector, until the Kingfish came to power.”

“You were lucky, then.”

“Yeah, you can call it luck if you’d like, but when Long became governor, he started taxin’ Standard Oil and the other fat cat companies, and he got me and my brothers free schoolbooks, built hospitals and roads. You got good roads up here. Down home, it was dirt tracks that became mud troughs every time it rained. When the Kingfish became our governor, there weren’t more than three hundred miles of paved road in the entire state, and when he became senator, that had changed to more than two thousand miles. He took care of his folks in Winn Parish, he took care of the great state of Louisiana, and believe you me, he’s takin’ care of this great country.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “Lots of new roads, lots of new labor camps, and lots of new railway lines to help fill ’em up.”

LaCouture’s eyes flashed at him. “The voters here wanted change. They wanted to make things better. If that means some losers get put away, that’s the way it’s gonna be. And for those of us he helped, those of us who got an education and got to be somebody, there’s nothin’ the Kingfish can do wrong. Maybe I serve two masters, Long and Hoover, but they both are doin’ what’s right for this country. Don’t you forget that.”