The Letter Writer (29 page)

Everyone nodded or said yes, although to Cain's eye Gurfein and Hogan didn't look particularly comfortable about it. Whatever else he thought of the arrangement, Cain easily saw its logic. Truckers, fishermen, retailers, and shipping companies had long ago learned that if you wanted to do business on the waterfront, then you had to work with the mob. Perhaps it stood to reason that, with a war on, the government would be just as pragmatic. But at what price? Businessmen paid cash. He wondered what the government was offering. Legal considerations, perhaps, or why else would Hogan and Gurfein be involved?

“What do they get out of it?” Cain asked. “And did you plan on maybe letting the cops know?”

Haffenden frowned and hesitated. Hogan spoke up.

“I can answer part of that. Neither Mr. Luciano nor Mr. Lanza here have been given any special legal considerations whatsoever. Mr. Lanza remains under indictment by my office, and Mr. Luciano's prison sentence remains in force. Mr. Lansky will attest to that, I'm sure. He is currently acting as the liaison between Mr. Luciano and my office. And since you brought it up, Mr. Luciano's move to Great Meadows is a simple matter of convenience. Whenever we need to meet him—or rather, whenever Mr. Lansky needs to meet him on our behalf—he can now do so in roughly half the time. But we have made no promises of leniency, nor will we.”

“As for the police,” Haffenden said, “to this point we've kept Commissioner Valentine out of the loop for his own damn good. La Guardia as well. But apparently now we're going to have to tell them
something,
largely because of you.”

Cain had been debating whether to take his lesson quietly, or, since this might be his only opportunity, to try to get all the answers he could, even if it meant asking dangerous questions. He decided to opt for the latter, and his first question was a doozy.

“You say you've made no special considerations. Does that apply as well to the associates of these men who've been murdering German laborers? Three of them, so far, with the probable involvement of Albert Anastasia. Who, as far as I can tell, has been trying to cover up a plot to burn the
Normandie,
a plot which seems to have succeeded pretty damn well.”

Haffenden sighed and slowly shook his head, as if he'd just heard the ravings of a lunatic. Hogan's reaction was far more interesting: a startled glance at Gurfein, who frowned and spread his hands, pleading ignorance. Lansky looked down at the table, his expression stony.

Haffenden turned to Hogan.

“Frank, please tell Detective Cain the full results once again of the select investigation of the fire on the
Normandie,
will you?”

Hogan nodded solemnly and produced a thick file. He plucked a sheet from inside.

“It was an accident, open and shut. This is not merely my opinion, Mr. Cain. It's the firm conclusion of a panel of experts from several walks of life, convened especially for this purpose. Believe me, these were people who
wanted
to find evidence of espionage if there was any to be found. There's nothing we would have liked better than to pin this on some foreign bogeyman. If you need further convincing, I can arrange for your access to the entire file—every eyewitness account, every expert analysis. I might even be able to arrange for you to speak to the stupid and careless welder who started the whole thing, because God knows he won't be busy with gainful employment anytime soon.”

“No need,” Cain said. “But if that's true, why have three men been killed? And why is Anastasia involved?”

Hogan lowered his eyes. He looked uncomfortable, the way he probably looked in a courtroom when a defense attorney blindsided him with new information. He jabbed a finger at Cain and raised his voice.

“Mr. Anastasia has nothing to do with this arrangement. If he's a participant in any way, shape, or form, then it is certainly not under our auspices!”

A strong remark, but the lawyerly wording left the door open to complicity by others in the room. Haffenden scowled as if the whole thing were preposterous, or maybe he was upset because Cain had introduced a note of discord to his collegial atmosphere. Lansky continued to look down at the table, no longer smiling. Cain turned toward him.

“Mr. Lansky, is that your understanding as well?”

Lansky looked up abruptly, narrowing his eyes into a gaze so penetrating that Cain almost wished he hadn't asked.

“I concur with everything Mr. Hogan just said. And I'll have you know that I, too, am a patriot, sir, as is every man at this table.”

“Well spoken, Meyer,” Haffenden said, sounding entirely too chummy for Cain's taste. Hogan and Gurfein were both fiddling with papers.

Lansky, emboldened, continued. “As for whoever might be running around murdering scrappy little Germans with swastikas sewn into their underwear, well…?” He threw up his hands. “It's not as if those fellows get along all that well among themselves.”

“Detective Cain,” Haffenden said, “if we haven't sufficiently satisfied your curiosity, then you had better speak up now, because the last thing we want is for you to leave this meeting thinking you can simply resume business as before.”

“You've answered some questions, obviously. But all of them? No.”

“In that case, I believe it's time for our other special guest.” He turned toward Gurfein. “Murray, bring him in.”

Gurfein returned seconds later with a stout fellow in a gray suit. Cain was guessing he was yet another government lawyer. The man stood behind Hogan's chair.

“Thank you, Murray.” Haffenden said. “This is Mr. Lawrence Albright, the U.S. Attorney for North Carolina. Mr. Albright, at taxpayer expense, has come all the way up here from Raleigh on an overnight train, and at very short notice. He tells us that he is in the process of deciding whether to take a new look at a case involving the shooting death of a former colleague of yours, Officer Robert Vance, due to certain irregularities that have come to light in recent weeks.”

“Irregularities?” Cain felt his voice fading even as the word left his mouth.

Albright turned to face him, somewhat awkwardly perhaps, although he managed to spout his few scripted lines as if he really believed them.

“Yes, sir. Irregularities. Due to new information, some of it from a member of Mr. Vance's family.”

“His brother James, you mean, who'd say or do anything to get back at me. I understand his grief, believe me. I share it. But he's become a bit unhinged, as you may have noticed.”

“Be that as it may…” Albright paused to clear his throat. “We're currently considering whether to reopen the investigation with regard to possible federal charges.”

“I see.”

“I'm sure you do,” Haffenden said. “And I'm sure you would prefer to put that matter to rest, just as we would prefer that your intrusive inquiry proceed no further. So do we have an understanding, Mr. Cain?”

He knew when he was whipped. “Yes. I believe we do.”

“Outstanding. And by the way, since you're not the only one who's been creating problems, it might behoove you to learn a little more about your co-conspirator, Mr. Danziger. Turns out there is all sorts of readily available information, most of which we were able to discover thanks to your own initial inquiry. So we do have you to thank for that, I suppose. Frank, could you please give him that last item?”

Hogan reached beneath the table and produced a fat, dog-eared folder. He slid it across the table, and Cain's heart sank as he saw the name on the outer edge: Dalitz, Alexander. It was the police file that he'd requested from the Hall of Records. The word “CLOSED” was stamped in red on the outer flap. Below was a handwritten notation in black ink:
“Subject deceased. File closed, Dec. 4, 1928.”

So here it was, then. Everything about Danziger's past, filed under his true identity. And now, thanks to his own curiosity, everyone in the room knew about Sascha Dalitz's disappearing act, and his subsequent resurrection. He'd given them Danziger, served him up as conveniently as a Thanksgiving turkey, and this was their way of letting him know it.

“We've made our own copies,” Haffenden said, “so feel free to keep that for as long as you like. As a bonus, we even threw in a nice little story, written long ago by America's favorite scribe of the streets. It's right there on the top.”

Cain opened the folder just long enough to see the pages of a magazine story from 1920, written by Damon Runyon. So it was true, then. Danziger had even briefly been famous, or perhaps notorious was the better word. And now maybe he was about to be notorious again, in a way he never would have wanted. Cain felt sick to his stomach.

“You're free to go,” Haffenden said.

He stood, saying nothing. He was a little weak in the knees, and he must have looked quite forlorn, because even in their moment of triumph none of the other men would look him in the eye. Except Lansky, who leaned toward him across the table, smiling enigmatically. He beckoned Cain closer, and Cain obliged. Lansky cupped a hand to his mouth and whispered, the words brushing Cain's ear like the wings of a moth: “Give my personal regards to Sascha. Tell him it has been far too long.”

Turning to face him, Cain barely controlled a shudder as Lansky smiled again. Then he left the room, passing through the outer office like a sleepwalker. No escorts followed him. He stepped down the hallway toward the front of the building. The doors of an elevator opened as if by request.

“Which way, sir?” a uniformed operator asked brightly.

“Down,” Cain said as he stepped aboard. “Ground floor. Straight to the bottom.”

ZHARKOV WAS WAITING FOR HIM
in the hotel lobby, hat in hand. He looked a bit sheepish.

“Thought you might need a ride back,” he said.

Cain considered walking past him without a word, but Zharkov looked so eager to make amends that he nodded and said, “Guess we're not going to Jersey, huh?”

The patrol car was double-parked on Broadway, a brazen move which drew a few grumbles as they climbed in. Cain said nothing as Zharkov pulled away from the curb. He looked down at the folder in his lap. He opened it, glanced at the Damon Runyon story, and then turned to the pages below, a smattering of arrest reports and eyewitness accounts.

“What you got there?” Zharkov asked.

“The file for Sascha Dalitz.”

“So they know?” He sounded upset.

“So do you, from the sound of it.”

Zharkov shrugged. He didn't look happy.

Cain looked back at the file. The first thing that jumped out at him were the aliases—aka Sascha, Webster, The Dictionary. So, then. Even the thugs and mobsters had been impressed by his manner of speaking, or perhaps by his command of so many tongues.

Slowly and silently, Cain began to read, skimming pages while Zharkov sat quietly at the wheel, stalled in Broadway traffic. Not that either of them was in a hurry.

The documented crimes began early, at the age of sixteen, but they were petty and infrequent—minor involvement in sidewalk crap games, or running numbers. And as Danziger—or Dalitz—entered his twenties there was practically nothing more. The real news at this point in his life were peripheral mentions, copied into the file from witness statements and charging documents for other suspects charged in far more serious cases involving extortion, assault, murder—crimes for which Dalitz either had been questioned or had turned up as part of the scenery, the background noise. There were a few pages from the NYPD's “modus operandi” file as well, which, when combined with the rest, built a skeletal portrait of an ambitious young man up to his neck in the mobster lifestyle, a workaday regular in the entourage of the kingpin of his era, Arnold Rothstein, aka The Brain.

But it was the Runyon piece that gave the portrait its flesh and blood, albeit without once mentioning Dalitz by name. It was not a newspaper column, as Beryl's uncle Fedya had thought, but a short story from
Collier's
magazine, in which Runyon described a quiet young man on the cusp of thirty who was known to his fellows as The Dictionary. Runyon set the scene by describing the characters gathered at a Broadway restaurant called Mindy's, which of course was a stand-in for Lindy's. Rothstein appeared simply as The Brain.

One evening along about eight o'clock I am eating at Mindy's Restaurant when in walks The Brain and all his boys. It is that lonely hour when the hustlers and horseplayers have all gone home with their torn markers and glum faces, scuffling off into a night that is as cold as a blonde's heart.

One of Rothstein's “boys,” as it turned out, was The Dictionary. Runyon, the street poet who by all accounts was still hanging out with the likes of Jack Dempsey and Al Capone—or had been, until Capone went to prison—offered a brief close-up of The Dictionary, who he described as keeping to himself more than the others, even while attracting the attention of The Brain whenever an important question arose.

For even though the boys are chatty tonight, and their gab sounds very dreamy, sometimes very pipe-dreamy, the real action is playing out as if in a back room of some road house off the Pelham Parkway. I learn this just by sitting in my chair without once making it squeak, which allows me to watch the one boy among them who speaks like a man with an education, like even maybe he should be covered in Ivy. He measures his every word, and never acts at all giddy or excited even when he sees, as we all do, the Brain hand a C-note to Mindy.

The piece went on in that vein for a few paragraphs more, painting The Dictionary as a sort of oracle who The Brain consulted from time to time whenever the room got quiet. The story then veered off into a lengthy description of a colorful event in which two of The Brain's other minions played the most prominent roles. By the time you reached the meat of the action, Dalitz, or The Dictionary, had fallen by the wayside. In fact, he had exited Mindy's altogether, and for Cain the most intriguing sentence of the story was Runyon's passing description of The Dictionary's early departure.

The boys all smile because he leaves on the arm of a doll called Maria who is black haired and built well from the ground up, with one of those heartbreaker faces that says there will soon be tears. And you can bet five to six that they won't be hers, because if there is anything apt to cause trouble it is dolls.

Maria. Cain wondered if it was yet another pseudonym from Runyon, or the real thing? Maybe she had merely been a passing fancy. But the image stuck with him.

He put the story aside and thumbed back through the other pages toward the end. It was all disturbing, he supposed, although not as much of a punch to the gut as he would've guessed. What had Cain expected, after all? Something pretty much like this. For the moment he was far more troubled by having alerted everyone else, Lansky included, to Sascha's new existence as a harmless old letter writer named Danziger.

Then he turned to the final page, and there was the punch to the gut. It was an incident report for a murder, citing a body that had been pulled from the East River on a cold morning in late November of 1928. The naked corpse was bloated from its prolonged soak, and had been severely disfigured by deep knife wounds to the face and chest. Those circumstances made identification difficult, and the body sat for six days on a slab at the city mortuary before an enterprising young beat cop was able to make a positive identification, finally settling the matter to the satisfaction of the medical examiner and the principal investigator.

The dead man, the cop said, was Alexander “Sascha” Dalitz, age thirty-eight. The policeman attested to this fact in a sworn statement, which he signed with a flourish: Patrolman Yuri Zharkov, of the 7th precinct.

Cain was unable to withhold a gasp. He abruptly shut the file and looked out through the windshield. They were stopped at a red light at Broadway and 35th.

“So it was you,” he said to Zharkov.

“The guy who gave him his new skin?”

“Yeah.”

Zharkov nodded.

“Who was it really? The body, I mean.”

Zharkov shrugged. “Who knows? Some nobody. The gangs were going at each other pretty good right then. Everybody was fighting over Rothstein's old turf, so it wasn't exactly a big deal for some stiff to turn up nobody had ever heard of.”

“I suppose it was his idea. Danziger's, I mean.”

“It's a long story. I'm sure Sascha could tell it better.”

“Oh, I'm quite sure of that.” Cain's tone was sarcastic enough to draw a look from Zharkov, who then turned back toward the traffic.

“If you're waiting for me to act ashamed then you're going to be waiting a long damn time.”

“What did you get out of the deal?”

“A friend worth saving.”

“That's all?”

“Like I said. Ask Sascha. Or Danziger, or whatever the fuck you want to call him. But only if you're ready to be the guy who saves him this time around. If all those guys know, then he's pretty fucked. You're aware of that, I hope.”

“Well aware. Considering everything I just learned back at the Astor, I'm pretty sure me and him both are fucked. Especially as long as no one seems inclined to do anything about the Mad Hatter.”

Zharkov frowned darkly. His hands tightened on the steering wheel.

“Anastasia's involved in this?”

“Has been all along, apparently. Just not in any sort of officially sanctioned role.”

Zharkov whistled and shook his head. “Shit. Poor Sascha.”

“Yeah,” Cain said without much emotion. “Poor Sascha.”

He glanced down at the file, with all its evidence of Danziger's misspent youth and beyond, all the way up to age thirty-eight.

“How 'bout if you take me on home? Not sure I can stand another whole afternoon of Mulhearn.”

“I'll cover for you.”

“I'm sure you will. You're good at that.”

Zharkov might have winced, but he didn't speak. Cain entered his apartment building in a bit of a daze, which is probably why he didn't pick up on it right away when the day doorman, Tom, began to gush about how Cain must really be coming up in the world, a real man of means, based on the posh treatment his family was getting these days.

“Ain't that right, sir?”

Cain turned at the base of the stairwell. Tom was grinning ear to ear.

“What was that, Tom?”

“I mean, driving around in limos. Or practically limos, from what I could see. Living in the lap of luxury. At least, that's pretty much how everybody else on the block must have seen it.”

“Back up a second. Who are we talking about here?”

“Why, your little Olivia! And Miss Eileen. Less than an hour ago, climbing into that big black Packard like they owned half of Macy's or something.”

Cain's backbone went rigid.

“Say that again. Olivia got into a black Packard? Going where?”

“Straight to the Plaza for tea and crumpets for all I know, Mr. Cain. You mean to tell me you didn't know about this? We all figured you was putting on airs!”

“Who took them? Who made them get in?”

“Made them, sir?” Tom's smile disappeared.

“Did they get in on their own, or was somebody forcing them? Who the hell was in that car, Tom?”

Cain's fear was contagious. Tom was now blinking rapidly as he racked his brain for details of what he'd witnessed less than an hour ago.

“I dunno, sir. It all happened so fast, and so smooth. If I'd have thought something bad was going down I sure as hell would've done something. Do you think—?”

“I don't know what to think. But I need to find them.”

Cain pushed back through the door and onto the sidewalk. He ran toward the street, looking left and right for the patrol car so he could flag down Zharkov. But the patrol car was gone. Cain was in a panic, out of breath and out of ideas.

All he could think of was the black Packard that Gerhard had watched pulling up to the curb on Saratoga Avenue, just before Werner Hansch and Albert Anastasia climbed in.