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But what do I care?
He grinned.
I’m “Mister Canidy.”
The other message had only a date and a time—it was from noon, just an hour ago—and a telephone number: WOrth 2-7625.
Fulmar opened the door to the suite.
He saw that it had been neatly made up. His luggage had been moved from the corner of the sitting room back into the bedroom. And there was a set of fresh clean towels hanging in the bathroom.
There was absolutely no sign that Major Richard Canidy, United States Army Air Forces, had been there.
I wonder what Dick did with my Johnny gun? Or did he take them both?
Fulmar looked around the suite for the Johnson LMG, first in the sitting room—under and behind and inside the Hide-A-Bed couch—and next in the bedroom—under the bed and between the mattress and box springs.
Then he went to the clothes closet. It wasn’t on the floor in there. But at the top of the closet was a deep, dark shelf that held extra comforters and pillows and he reached up and felt under the blankets.
Bingo.
Fulmar looked and saw that Canidy had rewrapped the boxes, both the heavy, cardboard one with the Johnny gun broken down inside and the other, metal one with the thirty-ought-six ammo, and hidden them well.
Thanks, pal. I may need this….
He covered the boxes back with the heavy blankets and pillows, then went to the phone and called the number that was written on the message.
When the call was answered, he recognized the voice of Joe “Socks” Lanza.
“Fulmar,” Fulmar said. “I got a message to call this number.”
“Yeah,” Lanza replied. “I asked around, like you wanted.”
“And?”
“You’re not going to find out anything where you were last night.”
What the hell?
“How do you know where I was last night?”
“How do you think? You were in a bar, no? Talking German to the bartender.”
When ONI—Naval intelligence—in New York City had been trying to think of ways of casting a wide net to spy on the German-American Bund in Yorkville, it had been Lanza’s idea to use William “Tough Willie” McCabe’s union guys who serviced the bar vending machines.
Lanza told them that the forty-seven-year-old McCabe had a small army of low-paid thugs from Harlem who ran numbers in the bars, then collected the money.
They were in every Yorkville bar every day—and they knew every bartender.
And what they learned, Lanza learned.
Fulmar thought, If you consider saying one word—Danke—talking German, then okay, Joe Socks, you got me.
But he’s on the money about it being a dead end.
Jesus! Does he know about Ingrid, too? And Hall, the FBI guy?
“Okay,” Fulmar said. “So if not there, where?”
