The Hunt (aka 27) Page 15

  "Take it easy . . ."

  "No, I won't take it easy. And you're right, this doesn't have anything to do with Reinhardt or my job. I asked a friend for a favor and he turned me down, that's what it's about."

  "One hell of a favor."

  "You would have been doing yourself a favor, too. You and a lot of other Americans think Hitler's a flash in the pan, but he's going to start gobbling up Europe and the only way we're going to stop him is to go to war again. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to be out of the country by six P.M. Deported, isn't that ironic? Thousands of people desperate to leave Germany and I'm being thrown out on my ass."

  Wallingford walked past Keegan to the doorway and summoned the Marine sergeant.

  "That's the last box, Jerry," he said.

  "Yes sir," the Marine answered, and carried it out. Wallingford looked around the office once more. It was stripped clean of everything personal. He started to leave and then turned back to Keegan.

  "You know, I hope I never see you again, Francis," Wallingford said, and there was a tone of sadness in his remark. "It will just remind me what a poor judge of character I am."

  He left Keegan standing alone in the empty office.

  The Imperial was the most elegant bar and restaurant in Berlin. Its domed ceiling towered two stories over the deco and bronze interior. Tall French doors separated the garden restaurant from the bar, where fresh flowers brightened every table and the waiters in their white, gold-trimmed uniforms hustled stoically about the room. The place was buzzing with activity when Keegan arrived, the crowd a strange mix of reporters in their blue suits and flowered ties, tourists in white, SS officers in black uniforms, and the usual smattering of Gestapo agents, easily identifiable in their drab gray suits, their impersonal eyes suspicious of everything and everybody.

  Rudman was sitting at a corner table, scratching out notes on the usual sheaf of curled and wrinkled note paper.

  "Why don't you get yourself a real notebook?" Keegan asked, joining him. "Looks like you retrieved that pile of scrap from a garbage pail."

  "Force of habit," Rudman answered. "Besides, notebooks are too organized. How's your girlfriend?" Keegan just nodded. "I did a little checking. Nice family background—if you like money."

  "That's enough," Keegan said.

  "Did you see Wally?"

  "Long enough to get insulted and say good-bye."

  "Good-bye?"

  "He's been recalled."

  "What?"

  "Forget where you heard what I'm going to tell you."

  "Naturally."

  "Wallingford set up Reinhardt's escape. A military attaché named Trace was driving him across the border and they got nailed by the Gestapo. The damn fool was in an embassy car. To avoid an international stink, Roosevelt has officially apologized to Hitler and Wally and Trace have been deported."

  A waiter appeared and Keegan ordered a double martini.

  "Jesus! How about Reinhardt?" Rudman pressed on eagerly.

  "The way I get it, the Gestapo tortured him for several hours, then forced battery acid down his throat. He's dead. It will probably be written off as a suicide."

  "Can I use this?"

  "You can do whatever you want with it, just don't mention my name. I don't want to join Wally and Trace on the boat home. Anyway, I'm sure Herr Goebbels will be over here gloating about it by the cocktail hour."

  "Poor old Wally. Everybody writes him off as an alarmist."

  "He is an alarmist."

  "He's a visionary, Francis. He sees it the way it's going to be."

  For the first time, Keegan didn't argue. He didn't feel he had the right to argue just then, not with Felix Reinhardt on his conscience.

  "Here comes the Bank of Massachusetts," Rudman said.

  Keegan turned to see Vanessa enter the Imperial. She spoke to the maître d', who led her toward their table.

  "She's leaving for Hamburg tomorrow," Keegan said. "Going back on the Bremen. "

  "What a shame."

  "Let's not talk politics in front of her, okay?"

  "I've got to file this piece," Rudman said. "And I need to get more background on this Trace fellow. You know anything about him?"

  "He's a major."

  "Everybody in the military over here seems to be a major."

  "It has a nice ring to it."

  "Good afternoon," Rudman said cheerily as Vanessa approached the table.

  She nodded at him politely, then smiled sweetly at Keegan.

  "How did it go at the embassy?" she asked.

  "Diplomacy is rampant over there," Keegan chuckled.

  "I hear you're leaving us," said Rudman to Vanessa.

  "Yes. My daddy has taken a cottage at Saratoga every year since I was born. He still thinks I'm ten years old and dying to go to the afternoon tea dances."

  "It'll be a nice place to dry out," Keegan said with a snicker.

  "I never liked the afternoon tea dances, even when I was ten. And I don't want to dry out."

  "Well, Berlin won't be the same without you," Rudman offered with a sincere smile.

  "What a sweet thing to say. Did you hear that, Frankie?"

  "I've been listening to his malarkey for years."

  "How can you stand him?" Rudman said, fishing for his wallet. "He's such a cynic."

  "It's all bluff," she said.

  "Put your wallet away," said Keegan. "I'll spring for your beer."

  "Bloody generous of you. I'm sure I'll be bumping into you in the next day or two. If not, maybe I'll swing over to Paris for the races, if you think that nag of yours really has a chance."

  "She'll run their legs off."

  "You have a racehorse?" Vanessa asked. "I didn't know that."

  "He's got half a dozen racehorses," Rudman said. "And I bet there's a lot you don't know about Mr. Keegan." He smiled, stood up, kissed her hand and left the table with a wave.

  "Have you two been friends long?" she asked.

  "Since the war," Keegan said. "He's a good guy, but he's going to get in a lot of trouble."

  "Why?"

  "He's obsessed with the whole Nazi thing. If he's not careful he'll end up like Reinhardt."

  "Oh no, the little man you were talking about this morning? What happened to him?"

  "He's dead," Keegan said, taking out his wallet and studying the check.

  "Did they . . . did they kill him?"

  Keegan looked around the crowded bar without answering her. "Let's get out of here. I don't like the company."

  "All right," she said. But she didn't move, she leaned back in her chair and studied his face. His expression scared her a little bit. And not much scared Vanessa Bromley. She took a long-stemmed rose from the tube vase in the middle of the table and stroked it slowly and gently down Keegan's cheek. "I have a wonderful idea."

  He looked up at her questioningly.

  "Dinner in the room. I'll charge it to the bank. I really don't feel like getting dressed again tonight. Besides, most of my things are packed."

  "I suppose you'll be wanting to borrow another bathrobe," he said softly.

  "The train doesn't leave until one tomorrow," she said.

  "I just happen to be free until one tomorrow." He took her hand. "Let's vamoose."

  He paid the check and they headed for the door. As they approached the revolving door leading to the street, a short, ferret-faced man in an SS uniform limped into the bar, accompanied by several officers. He stared at Vanessa for a moment, then nodded with a smile as they passed him.

  "That little man has a club foot," she whispered when they were outside.

  "That little man is Paul Joseph Goebbels," Keegan said. "Master liar of the master race."

  She shivered. "Are they all so . . ."

  "Ugly?" Keegan offered.

  "Yes, ugly."

  "Heart and soul," Keegan answered, hailing a cab.

  She cuddled against him and stroked his cheek with her fingertips. He could feel her relaxing as she had the
night before. And just before she went to sleep, she murmured, half under her breath, "I hope I haven't fallen in love with you, Frankie Kee."

  A moment later she was asleep.

  He lay there for several minutes, regaining his breath. He rolled her gently on her side and looked over at her, admiring her naked body. What a revelation she had turned out to be. Who would have expected such passionate abandon simmered inside that once-mischievous teenager? She was a remarkable sex partner. Totally inexperienced, she was unhampered by modesty and accepted each sexual discovery with a rare mixture of wonderment and joy. So why did he still feel a tinge of conscience? Was it because he had known Vanessa as a child? Or because her father was a friend of his? Was it because he still thought of her as thirteen (an embarrassing and uncomfortably erotic consideration)? Or was it just an unfortunate Catholic response—a sense of guilt because it felt so good.

  Or perhaps she had opened a window he thought had been shut forever.

  There would always be the rumors, of course. One could expect that. But rumors could be ignored, even turned to one's advantage. The most romantic story about Keegan, the one most often repeated, had him the only son of an Irish countess and a New York bartender who had parlayed his inheritance into a fortune on the stock market, had sold short and got out clean before the crash.

  It was a story Keegan liked. It had drama, it had romance, it had a touch of tragedy and a touch of mystery. There was also a semblance of truth to it, so he never disputed it. He never repeated the story as fact, either. Keegan never talked about himself at all, he let others do the talking.

  Then there was the other part of the story. That Keegan had made his fortune as a bootlegger while attending Boston College, dealing only with the families of rich college friends.

  Another rumor, also not without some merit.

  "But what does he do?" the proper Bostonians would be asked, and the answer was usually the same. "He's . . . rich."

  A perfectly respectable response. . . .

  Actually Rose Clarke was a countess and Clancy Keegan was a bartender. When they married, she bought the bar for him and when she died during the influenza epidemic of 1903, Keegan followed close behind, the victim of a broken heart, its shards awash in a sea of Irish whiskey.

  Francis, only five at the time, was reared by his trustee, his father's brother Ned, a sly entrepreneur who took his stewardship seriously and managed the bar into a classic East Side watering hole. Ned Keegan reasoned that a bar need only attract hearty drinkers to be a success and so he concentrated on the heaviest drinkers he knew, reporters and politicians. He pandered to them, providing extra phones for the reporters and a couple of nicely appointed rooms on the second floor for those times when they either couldn't make it home—or simply required a little privacy for a couple of hours. There was an unwritten rule that the second floor was a kind of neutral ground for both the politicians and the reporters, as if a papal decree had proclaimed it off limits to inquiring minds.

  Many a devious political plot was hatched in the scarred oaken booths of the Killarney Rose—to be unhatched just as quickly by eavesdropping journalists, yet the two sects kept coming back. Gossip and news was a commodity of the place, to be bartered, sold and traded between drinks, and so The Rose, as it was known to regulars, prospered. And while Ned Keegan tried to keep his young charge out of the place and under the watchful eye of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, his efforts failed. By the time he was fifteen, Francis was bussing tables. At sixteen he had graduated to tending bar.

  Like all good bartenders, Francis mastered the art of carrying on one conversation and listening to another at the same time. He never wrote anything down—but he had a long memory. It was at The Rose that he learned his most valuable lessons: never repeat anything he saw or heard; the quickest way to a politician's heart was through his wallet; bribery was only illegal if one got caught; all sin was relative. It quickly became patently clear to young Francis Keegan that one man's meat was indeed another man's poison.

  By the time he was twenty, Francis had fought as a doughboy in the trenches in Europe. When he returned in 1918, a hero from the war, Ned offered to buy The Rose from him.

  Half a million dollars.

  Not bad for a kid with only a couple of Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and two years of bartending to show for his twenty years.

  "Now what're ye gonna do?" Ned asked.

  "I'm going to get rich, but first I'm going to college, " Keegan answered. "Up in Boston. There's a lot of class in Boston and there's no such thing as a rich bum.

  He had been there less than a year when he called Jocko Nayles and invited him to lunch at The Rose. It had been two years since he had seen his wartime buddy. Nayles's clothes were neat but showing wear and he wore the mottled tan of a man who spends long, hard hours working in the sun.

  "What've you been up to?" Keegan asked him.

  "Y'know, kid, I'm on the docks. "

  "You like it?"

  "Nobody likes it, it's a living. "

  "I've got a better idea, Jocko. I've got an idea where we can make a couple of million dollars a year. "

  "Yeah, sure. What're we gonna do, rent out the White House?"

  "Jocko, I got half a million dollars. We buy a couple of fast boats. We make a trip to Scotland. We set up a deal, a thousand cases of scotch a month . . . "

  "That's bootlegging!"

  "Of course it's bootlegging. "

  "You wanna go to jail?"

  "Listen to me. Everybody drinks. I've got friends who buy booze by the case. Rich guys. Connected people. We keep our clientele very select. We make a run a month. I'll set up the sales, you handle distribution. The cut's fifty-fifty."

  Nayles looked at him for a very long time before he decided the kid was serious.

  "Make it sixty you, forty me, " he said finally. "You're footin' the bills. "

  Keegan smiled. "Quit your job, " he said, "we just went into business. "

  In the next few years, Francis Scott Keegan, the proper Bostonian college student, split his studies between business and the arts. He read voraciously and listened to music constantly. During the same time, he also was known variously as Frank the K, Scotch Frank, and Frankie Kee, a nickname whose subtle patriotic reference was lost to most of Keegan's business competitors. Keegan had studied how territories were divided among the more noted gangland mobs of the day: Alfonse in Chicago, Louis the Lep in Brooklyn, Dutch Shultz and Frankie C in Manhattan, Willie Knucks in Philly, Legs in upstate New York, Nukey Johnson in Jersey and of course Luciano, Charley Lucky, who called all the shots. Boston was wide open, nothing but nickel rollers there. Nobody in the mobs paid much attention to him. Unlike his competitors, who bought scotch from offshore freighters for four dollars a bottle, cut it three or four times and sold it for eighteen dollars a fifth, Keegan paid three-fifty a quart and sold it to his customers uncut for fifteen dollars a bottle.

  The fact is, Keegan liked to think of himself as a connoisseur of good liquor, a booze steward to the very rich. He never thought of himself as a bootlegger. Hell, everybody he knew drank. Keegan just didn't like the sound of the word. Besides, he really wasn't in the shabby end of the business. No bathtub gin, no homemade poison. His specialty was Scotch whisky imported straight from Edinburgh, perfectly aged and light as mist.

  His circle of friends at Boston College were all rich or near rich, a snobbish set which suited Keegan just fine. They were all potential customers—and they all had friends who were potential customers.

  "I know this wonderful bootlegger but he's shy, "Keegan would tell them. "I'll put the order in for you. "And the goods were delivered like milk to the back door. His was definitely a select clientele: two governors, half a dozen senators, one of Broadway's brightest comedy stars, half a dozen Catholic bishops spread from Jersey to Connecticut to New York to Massachusetts, and one future president of the United States. He performed a service, got rich and everybody was happy. Well, almost ever
ybody.

  When the word got around, Arthur Flegenheimer, who had adopted the name Dutch Shultz so it would fit into newspaper headlines, blew up and went to the big man himself.

  "Lookit here, Lucky, " Schultz told Luciano, "we got this Irish asshole, this Frankie Kee, he's sellin' uncut scotch less'n we're gettin'. Uncut. The word gets around, it ain't good for business. It's unfair competition, I say, and I say we burn the little shit and be done with it. An object lesson. "

  "So da it, " Luciano answered around a mouthful of pasta. "Why the hell you askin' me for? It ain't like you're gonna bump off Calvin Coolidge. "

  Keegan fit comfortably into the schizophrenic life-style he had adopted. He read six newspapers a day, everything from The New York Times to the Boston Globe to the New York News and Mirror to the Racing Form. He studied everything from the stock market to the morning lineup at Hialeah. And he had a way with language. He could turn his Irish brogue on and off at will, and had a keen perception of the differences in cadence and vernacular between the two worlds he had chosen, the social world of Boston and the underworld of the East Coast. He was as comfortable being Francis Keegan, discussing a fluctuation in the stock market with a Boston banker, as he was being Frankie Kee, discussing the pros and cons of a gangland rub-out with a Sicilian mobster. It was one of many lessons he had learned tending bar in the Killarney Rose saloon. When in Rome, talk like the Romans, when in Boston, speak as a proper Bostonian.

  The Boston Ambush, as he would refer to it later in life, was a particularly cowardly act, the first perpetrated by Shultz. Keegan had been to the theater. As he got out of his car, a black Ford squealed around the corner and he heard someone yelling, "Shoot, shoot. "He dove behind the car as a half dozen shots rang out. He felt the ping in his side, then the burning, deep in his back, and he knew he had been shot. The shooter, a Philadelphia gunsel named Harvey Fusco, never made it back to Philadelphia to spend the ten thousand he was paid to do the job. When the Manhattan Limited pulled into Broad Street station, Fusco was found sitting in his compartment, the New York Daily Mirror in his lap, his eyes crossed and staring up at the bridge of his nose at the single .45-caliber bullet hole there.