The Hess Cross (26 page)

God, it sounded good. It was Flannery's dream—easy money for easy crime. He had been born for this. The sharp pain from his foot prompted him to ask, "I don't suppose I have much of a choice anyway, do I?"

He looked at the giant who had punctured his foot. Graf smiled chillingly and tapped the dagger's blade against his palm. That son of a bitch would just as soon me say no, so he can cut my throat, thought Flannery.

Without waiting for further answer, the Irishman volunteered, "No, I didn't think so."

He glanced briefly into the filthy mirror above his chest of drawers and ran his fingers through his oily black hair a few times. His ability with automobile windows and ignitions put him in temporary charge of these three men. He milked the moment for all it was worth by slowly buttoning his overcoat and needlessly checking his wallet. He took the cash-filled envelope into the bathroom, lifted the lid off the toilet's water closet, and inserted the envelope into a clip he had jerry-rigged on the front of the water closet above the waterline. Then from the closet he produced a coat hanger and with practiced hands unwound, straightened, and bent a small snag into one end of the wire. With a stage flourish he shoved the coat hanger up his coat sleeve.

"The tool of the trade," he said proudly.

Ten minutes later, as the four men strolled down North Avenue on Chicago's Northeast Side, Flannery asked von Stihl, "You ever heisted a car before?"

"I can't say that I have."

"Well, there's a lot more to it than first meets the eye. I been doin' it for years. You can't beat experience."

"I wouldn't think so," von Stihl said, wanting to subtly prod the mick into hurrying. The dynamite truck was scheduled to leave the powder company in thirty minutes.

"You gotta find a car that can be boosted without gettin' anyone's attention. More than once, one of my pals has been tinkerin' with the wiring of a car, only to have his head smashed by a cop who'd been watchin' him all the while. You got to find a car nobody's watchin'. That's harder'n it sounds, too."

Apparently it was, because they walked for ten more minutes without finding an automobile Flannery felt safe heisting. He noticed von Stihl was getting edgy, so he said, "Of course, there's another way. We steal a car no one thinks we'd have the balls to take."

"The what?" asked von Stihl.

"The balls. The guts."

The colonel nodded his understanding of the colloquialism and added, "Hurry, Flannery."

The Irishman stopped on the sidewalk near a three-story office building. He said, "You guys like Cadillacs?"

"Anything."

"You stay here. Too many people hangin' around that car would look funny. Besides, you guys look too much like bums to have anything ta do with a Caddy."

Flannery glanced casually both ways and walked purposefully toward the long black Cadillac parked against the building. The building had no windows facing the parking lot. A cinch.

A wood plaque with "Mr. Anderson" painted on it hung
on the building near the Cadillac's grille. He won't miss it, Flannery reasoned. Anyone who can afford one Caddy can afford another.

He reached for the door handle. Locked. For the benefit of any onlookers, he tapped his pants and overcoat pockets searching for a key. He found none and mouthed the word "Shit!" as he exasperatedly looked around for help. Von Stihl admired Flannery's interpretation of a man in a hurry who has lost his key.

Flannery bent to the ground and seemed to find a long piece of wire. With deft movements, he shoved the looped end of the coat hanger under the rubber weather stripping at the top of the driver-side window. When the loop caught the lock button, he jerked the wire up, and then, with the air of a longtime Cadillac owner, he opened the door of his new car.

He lay on the front seat so he could not be seen by passersby. Thirty seconds later the ignition was hot-wired. He sat up, pulled the choke button, and pressed the starter pedal. The Cadillac's smooth engine turned over. He carefully backed the car out of its owner's reserved spot. Flannery loved big Cads. Their flair was not matched by any other American car. It suited his style. He pulled alongside his three partners and leaned across the seat to unlock the doors.

As he climbed into the front seat of the car, von Stihl favored Flannery with a smile. "Well done, Irish."

Flannery painfully pressed on the accelerator. "Say," he said, trying to sound offhand, "you boys ain't Irish, are ya? I woulda seen ya around if ya were."

Von Stihl shook his head as he peered at the small houses they were passing.

"And you sure ain't Sicilian, not with your and the big guy's hair color." He inflected "big guy's" with as much friendliness as he could muster. "What are you, then?"

"We're German."

"No shit?" Flannery asked as he negotiated a corner onto Ridgeland Street. "I know some damn good Germans. The Brauns. You ever heard of the Brauns? They live over on Kedzie Avenue."

"No. Never met them."

"Well, their grandparents came over on the boat forty or fifty years ago and settled in Chicago. A damn good bunch of krauts, too. No offense, o' course."

"No, of course."

"In fact, a couple o' Brauns are over fighting Hitler this very minute. Germans fighting Germans. Only in America," Flannery said as he checked a street sign. "When did you guys' families come over from the old country?"

"They didn't."

"Oh, yeah? You musta just come over."

"Yes."

"When?"

"A U-boat dropped us off the coast of Maine a week and a half ago."

"Oh, Jesus." Flannery gasped and would have taken his foot off the accelerator had not Hans Graf's knife pricked the back of his neck.

Ridgeland Street reflected a thousand other residential streets in Chicago that crisp Friday morning. It was a milky day, with yesterday's Thanksgiving smog still patrolling the neighborhood. The houses were simple wood and brick affairs meticulously cared for. A few had driveways and garages, the new status symbols of Chicago's working class. Most driveways were empty, the cars having transported their owners to work an hour before. Two or three prewar Buicks and Fords were parked against the curb. There was no moving traffic.

Black coal smoke poured from the chimneys and mixed
with the elms before being lost to the sky. Leaves rustled in the November wind and sprinkled lawns and sidewalks. The small lawns had softened their summer green in anticipation of a hard winter. Chicago's November was a transition month, a transition from harsh autumn to harsher winter.

Small picket fences or carefully manicured hedges divided the properties. A few yards were bordered by hurricane fencing to keep in wandering dogs. A patched inner tube hung by a rope from a tree branch in a yard at the end of the block. Grass under the tube had been scraped away by little feet.

It was garbage day. In front of every house, one or two drab green thirty-gallon cans stood on the parking strip. A few lids balanced precariously on the garbage, their owners unable to stomp the pile down farther and unwilling to pay the twenty-five cents extra for pickup of a third can. Next to one of the cans was a bright red wagon, which the garbage man would not mistake for garbage.

In the middle of the block an old lady wrapped in a knitted shawl opened her screen door and knelt for the milk bottle. A cat leaped out the door at her hanging shawl but hastily retreated into the house when it saw her lift the container. It always got the first milk of a new bottle. A dog across the street barked at his lifelong enemy.

A mailman hurried along his route. Years of experience had taught him which hedges he could jump, which dogs he could pat, and which elderly needed a few seconds of his conversation each day. The morning was brisk, and he kept his hands in his coat pockets when he was not digging into his bag and sorting letters. The Christmas rush had started. His bag was twice as heavy as it normally was. Two times a year were hard on the mailman—Christmas and the week the goddamn Sears Roebuck catalogs came out.

Two small children skipped along the sidewalk toward
their grade school. Each girl swung a Mickey Mouse lunch bucket. They kicked the crackling yellow leaves as they danced to class.

It was a scene repeated throughout Chicago that morning. With several foreboding exceptions. Parked in a driveway midway up the block was an elegantly conspicuous Cadillac. In a Ford neighborhood, it stood out like a diamond on jeweler's black velvet. Behind the wheel was a distraught, dry-mouthed Irishman who was going over his part in the upcoming play. To fail, he had been warned, would be terminal.

Kneeling behind a hedge near the Caddy was Willi Lange. He held his Schmeisser across his stomach with the barrel pointed at the thoroughly unhappy Irishman. Lange alternated his gaze from the Cadillac to the street. He breathed evenly and showed no signs of nervousness.

Across the street, Hans Graf had hidden himself behind the trunk of an elm tree. He was as wide as the trunk, so he stood sideways and occasionally peered around the tree down the street. Graf held his submachine gun in his cocked arm, with the weapon's barrel pointed to the sky. As always, he wore a sardonic grin, this time inflected with a twist of concentration.

Von Stihl sat in the front seat of a Buick parked along the curb fifty feet north of the Cadillac. He had found the door unlocked. The Buick made a perfect observation post. He was slumped down so that only the top of his head was visible. Through the gap between the dashboard and the steering wheel, he surveyed the street. A strange route for a dynamite delivery, he thought, but then, who would ever think a truck laden with explosives would travel on a quiet residential avenue? Von Stihl's knees reflexively hit together. Why did he always have to urinate at times like this? He lifted the Luger from his lap to relieve pressure. With his left hand he gripped the car's door handle.

The scene was not unobserved. The elderly cat owner had spotted the Cadillac as she stooped for her milk. Automobiles like that belonged downtown and along the North Shore, not here. The sleek black car was sorely out of place. The old busybody petted her cat for a few moments while deciding, then did what she did almost weekly when something in her neighborhood was awry. She called the police.

Two blocks north, a 1935 Chevrolet turned onto Ridgeland Street. It was traveling slowly, as if in a parade. A few seconds behind the Chevy, a tan Dodge six-wheel truck rounded the corner and accelerated slightly to catch up to its escort car. The truck was unmarked. It carried two and a half tons of dynamite.

From his spotter's position, von Stihl saw the approaching truck and car. They were framed by overhanging elms and kicked up street leaves as they came. The colonel quickly opened and closed the car door.

Paddy Flannery tightly gripped the Cadillac's steering wheel. Acute nervousness had loosened his bowels, just like his visits to the nitro hut. He was trapped, with no way out. These were German soldiers, saboteurs. If caught, they would be hanged. Flannery was their accomplice, whose penalty would be the same. As the curly-headed one, the leader, had carefully explained during the last few blocks of their trip to this street, Flannery was in it, whether he liked it or not. There was no way out. After the hijacking, the feds would comb the powder company looking for clues. It would take them all of ten minutes to discover how Flannery had stolen the schedule, and another sixty minutes to track him down. He would hang. He could quit now, drive the Caddy away, run from these Nazis. But the little German holding the submachine gun five yards away knew his job if Flannery tried to flee.

Lange was what Flannery called a wimp—a frail, cave-chested man who spent his entire life on the bottom of the
pecking order. He would have lasted two days in Flannery's street gang. But Willi Lange unnerved the Irishman. The German was icily competent. On the trip to Ridgeland Street, Flannery had caught Lange in the rearview mirror assembling his Schmeisser. He did it with the precision of a watch repairman. Flannery surmised the little kraut could use the weapon with equivalent skill.

Von Stihl's slamming door snapped Flannery from his speculation. Oh, God, the truck was coming. Flannery started the Cadillac and released the emergency brake. His course was irrevocable. He turned off his mind and waited for the procession.

The escort car preceded the truck with a solemn grace. Headlights were on. Von Stihl was reminded of a funeral. As they approached, the colonel noted there were three men in the car, two in the front seat and one in the back. Two men were in the truck's cab. They would be armed. At least one would be cradling a shotgun.

Motorcycle patrolman Frank Bates, a four-year veteran on the force, was routinely contacting precinct headquarters on a corner call box when the dispatcher told him to check out a suspicious automobile parked in a driveway on Ridgeland Street. Probably a rich relative visiting the old neighborhood, thought Bates as he climbed onto his Harley-Davidson and headed for Ridgeland, two blocks away.

The escort car crossed the intersection north of the ambush as it drew closer. Von Stihl could now make out the features of the two men in the front seat of the Chevy. The driver exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke and said something that made the passenger laugh abruptly. The passenger looked over his shoulder out the window. Nothing was amiss. He spoke to the driver, who laughed in turn. Behind them, the driver of the truck had a cigar clamped between his teeth and appeared to be snarling. His partner in the truck was bald.

Von Stihl sank deeper in his seat as the black escort car rolled by him. It was traveling perhaps twenty miles an hour. As the deep rumble of the truck exhaust passed, he prayed the dim-witted Irishman did his part. Von Stihl's hand tensed around the Luger's grip. He braced his foot on the drive-train hump. He was coiled like a spring pushed back to its limit.

Flannery was no longer thinking. He was a machine set to turn on in three seconds. Three timeless seconds in which a faint, tinny buzz in the front of Flannery's head told him he would not survive the hour. A wave of melancholy washed over him. He had no time to savor it. The escort car reached the hedge.