Page 26 of Shadow Ticket
“I hear things. Sometimes I pass it on, sometimes I don’t.”
“Like what else?”
“They’re trying to hang the Stuffy Keegan bomb on you.”
“Me?” Half a beat, “They?”
“Mein kleiner Neffe, even downtown you are on a seriously short list of reasonable patsies to pin it on. Listen. Uncle on the job or whatever, city cops can be stupid, overweight, and corrupt as they come, but we’re still dangerous, there’s only so far you can take liberties with the wise remarks and so on, before it’s time to seek help at higher levels of enforcement.”
“This is also copasetic with your pals out at Nuremberg Lanes?”
“Someday we’ll have a nice long discussion about that. Use the entrance on Michigan. Mornings would be best.”
11
On days of low winter light the federal courthouse can take on a sinister look, a setting for a story best not told at bedtime, the jagged profile of an evil castle against pale light reflected off the Lake, bell tower, archways, gargoyles, haunted shadows, Halloween all year long. Or as some like to think of it, Richardsonian Romanesque. Heavy icicles all along the overhangs, waiting to let loose and pierce your skull, with no safety hat on the market known to be of any help.
Inside, today, the place is a wreck. Smells like sizing and paint not yet dry, sawdust, solvents, joint compound, soldering smoke, sanding, ozone from arc welding. Riveting, hammering, hollering in German and Polish as well as less familiar tongues. A maze of interior renovation, with not always helpful signs tacked up on the new partition walls.
Hicks is never too comfortable talking directly to any level of cop, even what starts out as a friendly chat having a way no more than a couple smokes later of him ending up inside looking out. Though he wouldn’t call it a full-scale attack of the Fee Bee jeebies, what gets him especially nervous about this newer type of federals is that nobody knows yet exactly how bad they can be.
Today’s unknown quantity, Assistant Special Agent in Charge T. P. O’Grizbee, occupies a desk in a surprisingly tidy office suite, given the chaotic surroundings. Everybody pretending all this is is just another workday office, except for whatever else it is that’s really going on. All the correctelements are in place, steno girls carrying steno pads, gossiping around the bubbler, bells and clatter from the typing pool, updates thumping in and whizzing out by pneumatic tube, middle management yelling into at least two telephones at once, office aromas of coffee percolating, hair pomade, and typewriter-ribbon ink blended with a perfume-maker’s care, everybody looking like actors in a show that’s run long enough by now for each to be comfortable in their roles. Plus, as any P.I. might add, that feeling that close by, just outside of sight, hearing, and the bounds of etiquette, at least one supply-room quickie is in progress.
“They tell me you gents are opening up shop again in M’waukee. Nice to be back in the big time, we were startin to feel neglected.”
“Milwaukee’s always on our map, Mr. McTaggart, more Germans than you can wave a knockwurst at, and Germans, especially of the Nazi persuasion, will bring our fellows to town sure as beer’ll bring the prohis.”
“In the present matter,” adds a sidekick, “if it wasn’t for this Nazi angle we’d’ve been happier leaving it to your local MPD. But as you seem to be one of the last to have spoken with Mr. Keegan—”
“This is about Stuffy?”
“His disappearance. In particular what part Nazis, foreign and domestic, might’ve played.”
“He was pretty desperate to skip town. Seemed like somebody could’ve been after him. What for, he didn’t say.”
“Maybe he saw something, maybe he doesn’t know what he saw. Knows enough not to talk but not exactly what he shouldn’t be talking about. Or who to. Which makes him dangerous, putting forces he never knew existed to the trouble of setting things right again.”
“And it’s big enough you think that somebody might want to shut him up about it permanently?”
“There’s also the matter of something that showed up out in the harbor that same night, believed to be a rogue Austro-Hungarian U-boat that refused to surrender, making it more than just a submarine but also an outward and visible expression of paths not taken, personal and historical—would that about sum it up?”
“Sure, if I knew what that’s supposed to mean.”
“Just as well you don’t. Espionage Act and all…What I can tell you is that deep in our archives, in a highly secret vault whose location I can’t divulge, are several combination safes’ worth of Anecdotal Field Reports, sightings of unconventional vehicles undersea and airborne as well, witnesses ranging from the usual barking and drooling to senior officers who wouldn’t care to jeopardize their pensions by testifying to anything that isn’t there, including it seems this same Austro-Hungarian submarine…” pretending to consult a file, “U-13. Built in sections at Budapest, assembled at Fiume and the Imperial naval arsenal at Pola, making it both Hungarian and Austrian. Regardless of which, supposed to’ve been scuttled, scrapped, or handed over after the War, in accordance with the treaties of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Articles 136 and 138, and Trianon, Article 122.”
“But…”
“It wasn’t. Officially there never even was a U-l3, skips directly from 12 to 14, like the thirteenth floor in a skyscraper. Our information is that you actually witnessed its arrival in Milwaukee.”
“Don’t know. Saw something. Lights under the ice. Could’ve been a sub, I guess.”
“We have a statement from a minor, one Floyd Francis Wheeler, known informally as Skeet.”
“Oh come on, I hope you birds ain’t after Skeet, he’s just a kid.”
“Cigarette taxes, assorted U.S. code violations plus Federal Radio Commission General Order 84, if you’re familiar—”
“Keep a copy handy at all times, right next to the fan magazines.”
