Manhattan Mayhem (48 page)

He told her about Kohl and the meeting.

“You trust him?”

“Yes,” Cracco said. “Geller vouches for him. And I asked certain questions that only the real Kohl would know the answers to.” A smile. “And he asked me questions, too. I passed the test. The dance of spies.” He thought, as he often did: Who would have guessed, when he came to America—to avoid the looming war, for the sake of his future children—that he would become a soldier, after all.

“I need to get the truck.”

He could have gone directly to the parking lot from lunch with Kohl, but he’d wanted to stop by the bakery. And see his wife.

She nodded.

Nothing more was said of the assignment. They both knew its danger, both knew there was a chance he might not be coming back this evening. He now stepped forward and kissed her quickly on the mouth and told her he loved her. Violetta would not acknowledge even this glancing sentiment and turned away. But then she stopped and spun around and hugged him hard. She went into the backroom quickly. He wondered if she was crying.

Cracco now walked out the door and, hands in pockets, turned and headed east to collect his bread delivery truck; you could spend an hour finding an empty place to park in this neighborhood, so he paid a warehouse $3 a month to leave the vehicle there. He maneuvered carefully as he walked; the streets and sidewalks here were not as meticulously cleared of ice and snow as the more elegant Upper East and Upper West Sides. And, as always, there was the obstacle course of people, all ages, bundled against the freezing air and hurrying on errands this way and that.

His walk took him through the complex panorama of Greenwich Village, a pocket of nearly 80,000 souls three miles north of Wall Street and three south of Midtown. Nearly half the inhabitants were immigrants of varying generations. In the west, where the Craccos lived, the majority was Italian. Whereas the family was lucky enough to have their own modest apartment, many residents lived in shared units, two or three families together. It was a bustling world of shops and coffeehouses and clubs from which jazz and swing music escaped into the streets though open windows on hot nights, blending into a hypnotic cacophony. In this area you would also find bohemians—and not necessarily real ones from Czechoslovakia. It was the term used to describe New York’s intelligentsia, painters, writers, socialists, and even a communist or two. The Village had become their home.

In the north—from Washington Square College of New York University and the park, which Cracco could now see on his left, to Fourteenth Street—were the elegant apartments of financiers and lawyers and heads of corporations. Some of those inhabitants earned as much as $7,000 a year!

The East Village, his destination now, was populated by Ukrainians and Poles and Jews and refugees from the Balkans. The men were largely laborers and tradesmen, the women wives and mothers and occasionally washerwomen and shop tenders. Their homes were tenements, tall and grim—outriders of the Lower East Side, to the south, where the early immigrants to New York had settled. The perfume of those streets was cabbage and garlic.

Soon, after only two near-misses on the ice, he arrived at the snow-filled parking lot near the Bowery. He climbed into his Chevrolet and after five minutes bullied and tricked the engine to life. The gears protested as he sought first, and, when they finally engaged, he pulled out of the lot and drove north.

At seven p.m., Cracco collected Heinrich Kohl in front of a flophouse in lower Hell’s Kitchen, west in the Thirties.

The man climbed into the passenger seat.

“Anyone follow?” the German asked.

“No. I’m sure.”

Amid the dense traffic, Cracco piloted his truck south and west until he hit Miller Highway, the main thoroughfare along the Hudson River shore.

He heard a snap of metal and looked to his right. The German’s deft hands were slipping cartridges into the cylinder of a revolver. He put it in his pocket and loaded another gun.

Cracco thought: War is raging on virtually every continent on earth, a thousand people at least have died in the time it took this truck to drive from the hotel to the highway, yet that horror was distant. More shocking was the pistol he was now staring at. Six small bullets. The baker wondered if he could actually point the weapon at another man and pull the trigger.

Then, he pictured his country being so savagely attacked and decided that, yes, he could.

The truck eased slowly along the highway, through the northern portion of the West Village. He could see, now dark, the famed West Washington and the Gansevoort farmers markets—the city’s main meat packers and produce venues. Mornings here were beyond chaos, with purveyors and restaurateurs and individual shoppers mobbing the stalls. By eight a.m. the cobblestones grew slick with blood and fat from the sides of beef, the split-open pigs, and racks of lamb hanging from hooks in the open air. Poultry could be bought here as well. Not much fish; that market was in the Bronx. And at the produce market, every vegetable, legume, and fruit God had created could be found.

Now, glancing to his right, Cracco noted the many piers and docks striking out into the Hudson. Another memory: he and his brother Vincenzo and dozens of other boys leaping off the docks in Gaeta, south of Rome, a beach town where the Cracco family would drive in their Fiat on summer days. That is, they would make the trip
if
the sputtering temperamental vehicle didn’t overheat—which both brothers prayed at Mass would not happen, Cracco suspecting it was a minor sin to bend His ear for something so selfish. (Though He seemed to grant the supplications with blessed frequency.)

Here, too, in the sweltering days of summer, boys—and the occasional girl—would launch themselves into the gray Hudson River, not the most aromatic or clean body of water. But what did youth care?

He realized that Kohl was speaking to him.

“
Si?
” Then corrected himself, angry at the slip. He was, after all, supposed to be a spy. “Yes?”

“There. That’s it.”

A listing freighter was docking beside a pier, the structure and the ship equally dilapidated. The docks in Greenwich Village were not like those in Brooklyn or New Jersey, where the big cargo ships offloaded their valuable goods. Smaller ships plied these waters, like the hundred-footer that had carried their precious cargo into the country from Europe.

Cracco recalled the family’s voyage here from Genoa in a state-room—an elegant but deceptive term for a three-meter-square chamber with one bare light and no windows. The only passenger in the family
untroubled by seasickness was Beppe, yet unborn, and sleeping without care in the warmth of his own private ocean.

The men looked around carefully. The highway was crowded with traffic but the pier was hidden from view by a half dozen boxcars on a siding. No pedestrians here; there were no walkways and all the businesses nearby were closed for the night. Cracco noted boat traffic on the Hudson, of course, the hulls largely invisible in the dark but their running lights bright and festive. The massive black expanse of river was dominated by the huge Maxwell House coffee sign, with its forty-five-foot cup, tilted and empty (the company’s slogan: “Good to the last drop”). It glowed brightly. Cracco believed there’d been a time when it had been shut off in the evenings—not to save money but so that it wouldn’t serve as a beacon to enemy bombers. Now it was lit again, the country apparently no longer believing that the enemy would bring the war to its home shores. Erroneously, of course.

He pulled the truck up alongside the ship. Kohl handed the pistol to Cracco. It seemed hot, though that would be impossible on a night like this. He looked at it once, then put the weapon in his pocket as well.

“Are you ready?” Kohl asked.

For a moment, he wasn’t. Not at all. He wanted to hurry back home. But then he thought again:
Payback.

And Luca Cracco nodded.

They stepped out into the cutting wind and walked to the edge of the pier, watching the crews secure the ship with ropes. A few minutes later the captain hobbled down the gangway.

“
Bonsoir!
” he called.

As it turned out, the guns were unnecessary. The captain, a grizzled fellow, wrapped in scarves and two jackets and chewing on a pipe, didn’t seem the least suspicious that a man who looked Italian and one who looked German were picking up cargo from war-ravaged Europe. And to the crew, these were just harried workers collecting a mundane shipment for their business.

Cracco spoke only marginal French, so it was Kohl who conversed
with the man and pointed to Cracco, the consignee. Stomping his feet against the cold, the captain offered the bill of lading. The baker scrawled his name and took a carbon copy. Kohl paid the man in cash.

Five minutes later, seamen winched a one-by-one-meter crate to the pier and then muscled it into the back of the truck. Kohl tipped them and they hurried back to the warmth of the vessel.

Inside the bread truck, Kohl clicked on a flashlight and the two men examined the crate marked with
Etienne et Fils Fabrication
on the side. The German said, “Port of entry was New Jersey. Customs cleared it there.”

Cracco imagined a lethargic civil servant glancing into the packing crate at the device and not bothering to inspect further. Perhaps he hadn’t bothered even to look inside. Kohl pried the top off and they looked down at the small bakery oven, painted green. The only difference between this and a real oven was that the one they now examined included a large metal tank, as if for gas, to fire the burners.

Cracco whispered, “That’s it?”

Kohl said nothing but nodded, and his eyes shone as if he were proud of what was contained in the canister. As surely he was.

“I would have expected bigger,” Cracco said.

“Yes, yes. That’s the point, now, isn’t it? Let’s get back. We’ve been here too long as it is.”

Jack Murphy was deciding that shivers were creatures unto themselves. He couldn’t stop them. They roamed his body, from neck to calf. Some playful, some downright sadistic.

His teeth chattered, too.

The OSS agent was hiding behind the switching station where an old Hudson and Manhattan R. R. track split off from the New York Central main line. The spur ended on a shabby pier, about fifty yards south from where the two spies were taking delivery of the shipment that one of his better intelligence contacts had alerted him to. Murphy
had been staking out the place since he’d left OSS headquarters that afternoon, battling the tear-inducing cold.

His contact had told him that the shipment was arriving on this dock on this vessel today, the only delivery in Manhattan, but had said nothing more. Hence his long and arduous vigil. Finally, to his relief, he’d watched the bakery truck come into view along Miller Highway and then turn onto the service road and ease carefully over the icy ground to the pier.

Bakery truck, of course; because the shipment was an oven.

A New York Central locomotive, towing passengers headed home from the day’s work in Lower Manhattan, had just left the Spring Street terminal, south, to his left, and now passed by. The thick perfume of diesel fumes filled the air in its wake.

More shivers, which replicated and sent their brood to muscles he didn’t know he had.

Thunder and lightning,
Murphy thought in Gaelic, rocking on his numb feet, clapping his hands together.
Let’s get on with it, you damn spies!

How he wanted nothing more than to be back in his two-bedroom apartment on the East Side with his wife, Megan, and son, Padraig. Sitting before the fireplace. Sipping a whisky. And reading the book he’d started last night. A murder mystery—he loved them. It was
The Moving Finger
by Agatha Christie. Murphy was determined to figure out the villain’s identity before the detective.

His hands grew even more numb. If it came down to it—and he knew it would—could he pull out the .45 and shoot accurately? Yeah, he could. He’d master any muscle spasms. Traitors to their country had to pay.