Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (19 page)

Chapter 39

A
nd Robert Fay was still missing. When the mystery man with the stash of TNT had suddenly vanished from the New Jersey woods, Tom, pounding his desk like a drum in his fury, ordered all his available men into the field.

They were split into two teams. Under Barnitz’s steady command, one group staked out the boardinghouse on Fifth Street in Weehawken, where Fay and his friend Scholz lived. The other spread out along Park Place in lower Manhattan, their eyes focused on the front door of the Kienzle Clock Company, the offices of Dr. Herbert Kienzle, the elderly German clock maker who had originally ordered the dynamite for Fay.

Tom, the resolute commander, waited impatiently at his desk. So much, he felt, depended on their finding Fay. If Fay had made the surveillance team and bolted from the woods—and there was no reason to think that wasn’t the case—then Tom might never discover what the German intended to do with the explosives. Or whom he worked for. Of course, it was also possible that Fay was just one more cutout in the lengthy chain. He could already have passed on the TNT, and the next news would be the report of a ship on fire or a munitions factory going up in smoke.

Tom tried to persuade himself that his doubts had gotten the better of him. Wasn’t it just as reasonable to believe that Fay had strolled into the woods along one path and, on little more than a whim, simply taken another way out? But it wasn’t a very likely proposition, he had to concede. And the longer Tom stared at his silent phone, the smaller and smaller, he was forced to admit, the likelihood became.

When the phone finally rang, it was Barnitz, and his news was one more blow. An express wagon had pulled up to the boardinghouse, and a trunk had been loaded into the rear. A couple of detectives had gone off in pursuit, and when the driver stopped to make another pickup, one of the officers vaulted into the back. “There’s a plain calling-card on the trunk,” Barnitz reported. “It reads ‘Walter Scholz.’ ”

Immediately Tom’s low spirits sank deeper. Scholz was Fay’s roommate, the companion they had seen accompany him on two occasions into the woods. If Scholz was packing his belongings and getting ready to move on, then it seemed probable that Fay would be heading off, too. If he hadn’t already fled.

Tom asked where the trunk was delivered.

A storage warehouse in Weehawken, Barnitz said.

Tom had to make a decision. He could grab the trunk. It might, after all, contain a clue to where Fay had gone to ground. For that matter, the twenty-five pounds of TNT could be inside. That would be another reason to take possession; hesitate, and there was always the small chance that the warehouse could be reduced to a smoldering hole in the ground.

Tom told Barnitz that he wanted men outside the warehouse in case Scholz picked up his trunk. He also wanted the watch on the boardinghouse to continue. Round-the-clock, he ordered.

It was a cold, quiet afternoon in Weehawken, and Barnitz’s men cursed the icy weather and the tedium.

IN NEW YORK, THE OTHER
team was on the move.

When the clock maker left his office just before noon, he had headed out on a meandering route across lower Manhattan. Kienzle went into one downtown building after another, and two detectives, keeping a careful distance, went in after him each time. But it was all business; in one office, the clocks were running too fast, in another too slow. The old man made the necessary mechanical corrections and then continued on.

As Tom received this discouraging report, he began to wish that he could adjust time too. Instead, he continued to hear it ticking ominously away. How soon, he wondered, before the next fire broke out on a transport ship?

It was after five when the exhausted surveillance team trailed Kienzle into the lobby of the Equitable Building on lower Broadway. Bored after the long, uneventful day, they watched him head toward the elevators. No doubt he’d be going to another office to repair another clock, the team predicted as they waited by the front doors and made a big show of focusing their attention on the building directory.

Kienzle let one elevator pass without boarding. Then another. And in the next wonderful moment the watchers were all at once on full alert: Fay and Scholz, beaming smiles on their faces, had just bounded across the lobby to greet the clock maker.

There was a brief conversation that the detectives could only wish they could hear; and then Fay, after excusing himself, walked to the row of telephone booths on the other side of the lobby. When he closed the door to make a call, Detective Sterett hurried into the next booth.

The partition was thin, and the attentive detective could hear every word. Fay was talking to someone in the garage in Weehawken, asking if a package had been delivered. “It hasn’t, eh?” he heard Fay say before hanging up the receiver.

The next moment Fay was back with his two friends, and the trio went off to a noisy restaurant on Fulton Street for dinner. The detectives took a table far across the room. They watched enviously as plates heaped with steaks and chops were consumed all around them, but they knew Captain Tunney would have their heads if they dared to bill the department for a full dinner. Instead, they spent well over an hour nursing a single mug of beer apiece, at the same time dodging the withering glances the waiter was shooting at them.

After dinner, the clock maker said his good-byes, and the two young men went off for a night on the town. They wound up at the Grand Central Palace, a block-long fortress of a building on Lexington Avenue between Forty-Sixth and Forty-Seventh Streets that had been erected over the New York Central tracks leading into Grand Central Terminal.

The cavernous ground floor of the Palace was jumping; a bar stretched across one wall, and up front on the stage a band was playing. The handsome Fay quickly found a slinky blonde to dance with, and she waved to a friend who seemed happy to be with Scholz.

The detectives crowded around the bar, sticking to nickel beers and keeping their eyes fixed on the dance floor. Fay kept buying the women drinks, and the couples were getting friendly. In a sudden moment of panic, Sterett wondered what they should do if the two Germans split up, each going off with a woman. While the others kept vigil from their seats at the bar, he hurried off to call the captain.

“Fay!” Tom shouted, his voice exploding through the receiver and startling the detective. “He’s our man. You stick with him no matter what.” If they lost Fay again, Tom made it clear, heads would roll.

But it wasn’t long after midnight that both Fay and Scholz, looking a bit worse for wear and with no women in tow, were back at the Weehawken boardinghouse. Barnitz was parked down the block, and when he saw the two Germans going in the front door, he uttered a silent prayer of thanks. The case was finally back on track. Fay hadn’t gone to ground, and everything was once again possible. “I could’ve kissed them both,” he reported to Tom, who was feeling precisely the same way.

“POKING THE BEAR WITH A
stick” was what detectives called it. It meant taking the initiative, supplying the stimulus that could push a stalled case forward. If it worked, the suspects would be goaded into action, and then you’d have them cold.

It also was a tactic, Tom had learned firsthand, that had its risks. The “bear” could panic and run. Or, once provoked, he could turn mean, and when that happened there was no telling whom he’d lash out at. But a case where the poking would be done with a stick of TNT gave Tom a whole new set of powerful reasons for reconsidering this strategy.

Still, Fay’s abrupt disappearance had unnerved Tom, and the discovery of Scholz’s packed trunk had only made things worse. He was certain the two men were preparing to leave town. He was not willing to gamble that when they did, his men would be able to find them again. Better to force the issue, he decided, while we still have them close at hand.

Carl Wettig, the war supplies exporter whose conversation with the French military attaché had originally set the entire investigation in motion, was once again recruited to help. Following Tom’s earlier instructions, he had purchased the dynamite that was ultimately delivered to Fay’s boardinghouse. Now for an encore Tom wanted him to play the persistent, hustling businessman.

Wettig telephoned Fay and suggested that they go off together and test the dynamite. Reading the script Tom had written, he promised that if Fay was satisfied, he’d get him all he needed. And at a good price, too, he ad-libbed to Tom’s delight.

When Wettig arrived at the boardinghouse the next afternoon, Tom’s watchers were down the block in a parked sedan, silently cheering him on.

“He’s in,” Barnitz reported to Tom.

Tom said he wanted to be told the moment Wettig left, and then abruptly hung up the phone. He tried to stay calm, but he could not help feeling that it had been a mistake to throw Wettig back into the middle of the operation. This wasn’t a job for an amateur. He’d be skittish. They’d see through him. I should’ve used Barnitz, Tom chided himself.

As soon as he had the thought, Tom realized it was foolishness. One look, and they’d make Barnitz as a copper. Fay already knew Wettig. He trusted him. This will work, Tom decided, desperately trying to convince himself.

But now Wettig was inside the house, and anything could be happening. Tom waited, and waited. Then his phone rang: Fay and Scholz had walked out the front door, and Wettig was trailing right along. “One big happy family,” Barnitz reported gaily.

Fay led the way to the streetcar line. A car passed, but he didn’t signal for it to stop. Then another car, and still no signal.

He’s wary, Barnitz thought as he watched from his sedan. He suspects something.

A third car approached, and Fay gave a small wave of his hand and it stopped. He gestured for Scholz and Wettig to board first, and at the very last moment, as the doors were closing, he jumped inside.

Barnitz cursed. He had promised the captain they’d have a man with Wettig at all times, only he hadn’t counted on this.

Then he saw Detective Pat Walsh. He’d been in an alley behind the boardinghouse, covering a rear door, and he was sprinting up the block like a track star to the next streetcar stop. When the door opened, Walsh climbed aboard and took a seat right behind Wettig.

Barnitz’s black sedan followed the streetcar. As it continued past the shops to the outskirts of town, Barnitz realized Fay was on his way to the now-familiar woods.

Barnitz hung back; there was no rush. He let three or four vehicles get between him and the streetcar.

He pulled up across from the woods just in time to see the three men walking through the underbrush and heading into the deep forest. This was how he’d lost Fay the last time, and Tom had given precise instructions so it wouldn’t happen again.

Barnitz ordered the team to move in. There were six detectives and two Weehawken cops. Cautiously, each step a careful, stealthy undertaking, the officers slowly spread out across the woods in a wide circle. The three Germans were trapped in the middle. Using the trees for cover, the officers held their positions.

Fay emerged from a ramshackle wooden shed. He had a package in one hand, and a hammer in the other. He took a short brown stick of TNT out of the package and broke off a small fragment, about the size of a coin, with his fingers. He placed the piece of explosive on the surface of a broad, flat rock.

“Let’s see what we got,” he said to the two other men. They immediately started backing away.

In one quick move, Fay raised the hammer high above his head and brought it crashing down against the tiny chunk of TNT.

Bang!
The noise echoed through the woods like a gunshot. The handle of the hammer snapped off in Fay’s hand.

Barnitz had seen enough. He charged out of the trees, his revolver raised. The other officers followed. “You’re under arrest!” Barnitz shouted.

“Who is in charge of you all?” Fay asked. He had recovered from the initial surprise with impressive speed.

“I am,” Barnitz answered.

“Well, I will tell you I am not going to be put under arrest,” Fay said defiantly.

Barnitz stared at him with stony indifference. He wanted to see where this would go.

“If I am, great people will suffer!” Fay insisted, his voice suddenly rising. “You will surely have war. It cannot be—it is impossible,” he announced with genuine indignation.

“I will give you any amount of money if you will let me go,” Fay continued. He spoke grudgingly, as if his offer were a great kindness.

“How much will you give me?” Barnitz asked. He was eager to play along. Up to now, they’d had a lot of suspicions but little hard evidence. And a shrewd lawyer could probably make the charge for illegal possession of explosives disappear.

“All you want—any amount!”

“Fifty thousand?”

“Yes, fifty thousand, if you want it.”

“Got it with you?” Barnitz challenged.

“No, I haven’t got it all, but I can get it. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars now as a guarantee, and I’ll give you the balance at noon tomorrow.”

Barnitz called over two of his detectives. He wanted witnesses.

“All right, where’s your money?” he demanded.

Fay took some bills from his pocket, counted out a hundred dollars, and handed the money to Barnitz.

Barnitz took the money, and made a big show of recounting it in front of the men. Then he put the bills in his suit pocket, and slapped handcuffs on Fay’s wrists.

Twenty minutes later, Fay was being booked at the Weehawken police station. The charge—attempted bribery.

Chapter 40

T
he interrogation room at headquarters had once been a subbasement supply closet, and the long walk downstairs felt like a descent into the dark depths of hell itself. Two officers led the handcuffed Fay down the flights of stairs and roughly seated him on a stool in the middle of the room. Then they left, slamming the steel door behind them.

Tom waited outside, purposely letting the minutes slowly pass. He wanted Fay to see the dried streaks of blood on the walls, and give them some thought. Threats weren’t always necessary; imagination, he had learned, could often be a much more persuasive weapon.

There were other, more tangible arguments available to Tom, too. In the days following the arrest for bribery, his men had searched Fay’s room at the boardinghouse and torn apart the garage.

In addition to Wettig’s TNT, they found another 25 sticks of the explosive, 450 pounds of chlorate of potash, 400 percussion caps, and 200 bomb cylinders. Nailed above Fay’s desk at the boardinghouse was a detailed chart of New York Harbor, and in the top drawer of his dresser were the ownership papers for a motorboat that they traced to a slip opposite West Forty-Second Street. Tom felt pretty sure he was finally on the right path. And the regulation German army pistol hidden beneath the bed had left Tom convinced he knew whom Fay was working for.

The contents of Robert Fay’s suitcases included two maps of the harbor, rudder bomb components, a wig, two false mustaches, and an atlas.

(Thomas J. Tunney,
Throttled!
)

But what tied all the evidence together into one tight, incriminating knot was the discovery of dozens of intricate mechanisms for bombs. The devices were unlike any Tom had ever seen. They were sophisticated pieces of engineering, significantly more advanced in both workmanship and design than the cigar bombs.

Were the new devices to be used by the same group that had planted the bombs on the
Kirkoswald
? Or were they the weapons of a separate network planning its own, independent attacks? And how did they plan to smuggle them onto the targeted boats? No less a puzzle, how did the bombs even work? Tom had studied the mechanisms for hours and still could not figure out how the explosive charge would be detonated.

He had many questions, and after giving Fay some time alone with his thoughts, he entered the interrogation room. Tom loomed above Fay like a colossus; and the resigned look set firmly on his face announced that he was determined to get the answers he wanted, one way or another.

THE THIRD DEGREE WAS NOT
necessary. Tom asked one question, and Fay’s confession came pouring out. He spoke as easily as if he were sharing the story of his life with a stranger he’d just met in a bar.

A year ago, Fay began, he’d been a German army lieutenant fighting in the muddy trenches in France when he had an epiphany. What if, it occurred to him as shells rained down, the French seventy-fives and the British eighteen-pounders ran out of ammunition? What if the enemy artillery batteries couldn’t obtain more shells from America? What if the flotilla of munitions boats heading out from New York never arrived in France?

Once these sudden, unexpected speculations had popped into his head, he found he couldn’t let them go. Before the war, he had been an engineer. A rather accomplished one, he told Tom as if simply stating a fact. He’d always loved tinkering, coming up with new inventions. Now, he realized, he needed to invent a machine that could save his life. He was in the middle of a roaring battlefield, yet he knew his future, his very survival, depended upon his immersing himself in the task. He went to work.

Fay’s commander was impressed enough with the drawings he made to summon the battalion intelligence officer. When this officer learned that Fay had lived in America before the war and spoke fluent English, he sent a cable to the headquarters on Königsplatz.

A week later, Fay was in Berlin. One team of Abteilung IIIB officers studied his drawings, while another, English-speaking contingent tried to trip him up with questions about finding certain addresses in New York and whether he could name the branches of the federal government.

When the spymasters were satisfied, Fay joked to Tom, “they told me to ‘Go west, young man.’ ” A boat from Norway, a phony passport stamped by the U.S. immigration authorities, and Fay was walking the streets of New York, rejoicing that he’d outsmarted fate. His life would never be crushed out by an Allied shell. He’d escaped the front line and become a spy.

His first operational decision was to recruit his brother-in-law. Walter Scholz had been working as a gardener on a Connecticut estate, and after Fay flashed the thick roll of dollars they’d given him in Berlin, it didn’t take much discussion to persuade Scholz that planting bombs was a lot more lucrative than planting flowers.

As for Dr. Kienzle, at the start of the war the clock maker had written to the Foreign Office to volunteer his services in America. Before Fay had left Berlin, his Abteilung IIIB handlers had provided the old man’s name as a reliable contact.

When Fay informed Kienzle at their initial meeting that he needed explosives, the clock maker started making inquiries. He first approached his friend Max Breitung, and from there the request for dynamite was passed dutifully along among a shady entourage of German sympathizers until it finally reached Wettig.

“The next thing I knew,” a crestfallen Fay concluded his tale, “I was standing in the woods and an army of detectives came charging from out of nowhere, waving their revolvers, and shouting that I was under arrest.”

BUT IT WAS A DIFFERENT
Fay who told Tom about his invention. He was proud of his work, and he spoke with the confident authority of a man who knew he’d created a unique and effective weapon.

The core of the bomb, he said, was a clockwork mechanism designed to fire two rifle cartridges into a chamber filled with ninety pounds of TNT.

As for getting it on board, that wasn’t a problem: there was no need to smuggle the bomb into the cargo hold. The device would be attached underwater to the rudderpost of the ship as it lay in the harbor.

But its most ingenious aspect, Fay revealed with undisguised enthusiasm, was its detonation. The bomb’s clockwork heart would be connected to a wire attached to the rudder. As the helmsman steered his boat, each turn of the rudder would wind up the mechanism tighter and tighter until it fired the cartridges into the TNT.

A ninety-pound blast, Fay boasted, would tear the rudder off like a toothpick, and leave a hole in the hull big enough to drive a car through. And it’d be the helmsman, he declared with a mischievous schoolboy’s grin, who’d be responsible for setting off the explosion that wrecked his own ship.

It was a foolproof plan, Fay said with pride. Along with Scholz, he had spent hours in the motorboat, ostensibly fishing, but in reality exploring the harbor. There was not a single obstacle, he’d learned, to prevent a fisherman from guiding his little motorboat up close to a munitions ship.

Robert Fay’s rudder bomb.

(Thomas J. Tunney,
Throttled!
)

During the course of one single dark night, he could sidle up to as many as ten ships getting ready to sail to England and France. Diving suit on, he’d slip noiselessly into the water and within minutes attach his device to the rudder.

“Ten ships, ten explosions,” Fay said matter-of-factly. And ten shipments of shells and bullets that would never kill German soldiers.

TOM HAD HEARD ENOUGH. FAY
had told him, he realized, a deliberately edited story. His pretense of candor was all artifice. The spy hadn’t lied, but at the same careful time he had not revealed the larger, more consequential secrets that surrounded his mission. With a sense that his long investigative journey could soon be coming to an end, Tom took control of the interrogation.

“What ships have you blown up?” he asked.

“None.” Fay insisted that he’d been finalizing his plans when the detectives pounced.

Tom felt Fay was not telling the truth, but he was willing to let the lie go unchallenged for the moment. This was their first talk, and already there was sufficient evidence to build a daunting case against the German agent. A few more sessions, and Fay’s predicament would sink in. When the district attorney dangled a sentencing deal, Fay would cave. He’d give up all his secrets. Time, Tom was confident, was on his side.

“Were you responsible for the five fires in the hold of the
Craigside
?” he tried.

“No.”

“Did you make the bombs that were found on the
Arabic
?”

“No.”

Tom reeled off the names of four more ships that had caught fire since the agent’s arrival in New York. And again Fay insisted that he knew nothing about any of the disasters.

Tom tried a different tack. He reached into his pocket and removed the cigar bomb casing that had been found on the
Kirkoswald
. He handed it to Fay. “Did you ever see that?” he asked.

“No.”

“Didn’t you make that?” Tom suggested.

Fay let out a small laugh. “I did not,” he said, enjoying the moment. “That’s a joke.” He studied the device with more attention. “I see now why they sent me over to this country,” he said as he returned the small steel cylinder to Tom. “They wanted someone to make bombs that would do some damage. That’s crude work.”

“You’re right,” Tom agreed truthfully. And at the same time he hoped a bit of flattery would encourage Fay to answer the one big question that had been at the center of his thoughts since the moment of the spy’s arrest.

When Barnitz had jumped out of the Jersey woods, Fay had dogmatically insisted that he could not allow himself to be arrested. “If I am,” he had pleaded, “great people will suffer.” Tom wanted to know the names of the “great people.” He wanted to know who was giving Fay orders. He wanted to know who was running the German spy network in America.

Fay refused to answer. He said Tom could beat him, do whatever he wanted, but he was not talking. He said he had family in Germany. If he gave up his superiors, they’d never survive.

Tom clenched his fists. He had no qualms about methodically hammering away at Fay until the German agent changed his mind. This was war.

But he hesitated; and in the long, pregnant moment, he managed to rein in his frustration. His perspective shifted, too.

Bang him around enough, and sure, Fay would eventually give him names, Tom thought. Every man has his breaking point. But there’d be no guarantee that the spy wasn’t dissembling, throwing out false leads simply to stop the punishment. Coerced confessions, Tom knew, were rarely satisfying, rarely effective. They didn’t reveal the truth, only another version of the old lies.

Tom unclenched his fists and called for the guards. Take him back to his cell, he ordered. This was only the first session. There would be others, Tom assured himself. He’d get the names of the “great people.”

TOM WAS WRONG. THE NEXT
day the feds arrived and took over the case. The unforgiving Robert Lansing had replaced the fidgety, peace-loving Bryan as secretary of state, and the mood in Washington had begun to change, too. The Justice Department had been ordered to grab control of select “showcase” espionage trials in the hope that the publicity would help to persuade the nation—as well as a still very reluctant president—that war with Germany was inevitable. A year later Fay would confess and, after being convicted of violating piracy statutes for his role in conspiring to blow up munitions ships, be sentenced to eight years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

Tom never had an opportunity to interview Fay again. The haughty Justice Department, unwilling to cooperate with the New York Police Department, rejected all his requests.

And despite Fay’s arrest, the fires continued. The day after Fay was caught in the woods, a blaze raced through the
Rio Lages
as the steamer crossed the Atlantic. A week later a fire started in the hold of the
Euterpe
. The next victim was the
Rochambeau
, followed by the
Ancona
, and then the
Tyningham
. “Never in the history of the port,” Tom would remember, “had so many fires occurred in a single year.”