11
McLEAN, VIRGINIA
The present
“EVER HEAR OF THE MEMORY HOLE?” Nick asked.
“Uh, from somewhere, yeah.”
“It’s from 1984 by George Orwell. The hero’s job is to rewrite the past. It’s a dictatorship, and the state motto is ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’ So this guy goes back into the London Times files and erases people who are now considered traitors. He rewrites the news articles without them, then drops the original in a ‘memory hole,’ where it’s incinerated. See, the memory hole is really the anti-memory hole.”
“Okay, I’m getting it.”
They were sitting in Nick’s den, near his glory wall displaying artifacts of what had been a stellar FBI career, his collection of John Wayne DVDs, his CDs of Shostakovich symphonies, and his library of American history books. The house was a big Colonial on a tree-shaded cul-de-sac in this D.C. bedroom community, his wife was off somewhere prosecuting someone, it was afternoon, and the two friends felt such comfort in each other’s presence, it was like old whiskey, which in fact Nick was drinking, if Bob was not.
“Look here,” said Nick, gesturing to his worktable.
Stacks and stacks of Xeroxes lay across it in piles, each with a yellow Post-it marking contents—John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Homer Van Meter, and on and on.
“Now,” said Nick, “I have gone through them very carefully. No mention of your grandfather. No Charles Swagger. He didn’t exist. He’s the man who never was, officially.”
“I’m with you,” said Bob. “But still—”
“Yes, there is a ‘But still,’ a giant ‘But still.’”
Bob took a sip on his warm Diet Coke; the ice had melted, degrading the taste significantly. It was like caramel cut by deer urine.
“Boy, I wish I could join you,” Nick said, hoisting a glass of Buffalo Trace on the rocks. “But, you know, doctor’s orders. What can I do?” He took a sip, enjoyed the smoothness all the way down.
“Damn, that stuff smells good,” said Bob.
“Brother, you should see how it tastes! Anyhow, back to the memory hole concept. Your grandfather, certain evidence suggests, was dumped into the memory hole and disappeared.”
“You have my attention,” said Bob.
Nick picked up his first exhibit, a page out of the Dillinger file. Bob could see that a few words had been magic-markered in translucent yellow. He looked hard at one, seeing a common word.
“Most of the typing in the Chicago Field Office was done by a very capable woman named Elaine Donovan, Purvis’s secretary,” Nick said. “She was an excellent, strong typist, no doubt about it, and a very hard worker, absolutely first-class. You see her initials EPD all over the place, on the other side of slash marks identifying the author, MP or HC or SC—Purvis, Clegg, or Cowley—the three kings of Orient. But about every fourth page in several of the files was typed by someone else. Same typewriter, same office, different typist. If you look carefully, you see that Mrs. Donovan’s left hand was very strong, and she really hit the Q, W, E keys hard. But whoever typed the odd pages wasn’t a lefty, and his Q, W, and E strikes are much weaker. Don’t get me wrong, he’s good, he doesn’t make mistakes, he’s a virtuoso on the board, but he lacks a certain strength in one of the strands of muscle in his left hand.”
Bob looked at the yellowed word and saw that it was so, the E’s especially, since there were so many of them, giving the game away. These E’s were at least a magnitude fainter, sometimes not being struck hard enough for the entire letter to print.
“And these were inserted in—”
“Yes, yes,” said Nick, “we’re not talking about extra pages added at the start or finish but contiguous pages—that is, in the body of the work, that read naturally from the page before to the page after. What I’m saying is, someone retyped those pages alone, threw out the originals, and slid the new ones in. What do the new pages have in common? Good question. Too bad you didn’t ask it.”
“What do the new pages have in common?” asked Bob.
“They’re all pages where an agent named Stephen T. Wharlis is cited.”
Bob looked at the document again, this time noting that this agent’s name was highlighted in red.
“All right,” said Bob, “never heard of him, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Nobody has ever heard of him. That does mean something. He’s in no memoirs, he’s not listed by the Bureau, or by the retired agents’ association, or in the index of any of the histories of the 1934 campaign against the gangsters.”
“He’s a fraud?”
“Not just a fraud, a very specific fraud, a designer fraud. The name Stephen T. Wharlis has seven letters, a one-point-five-space middle initial, and seven more letters to the surname. The Christian and surnames have the same typeface space value as Charles F. Swagger, meaning that if the documents were retyped, the spacing would remain the same and not be thrown off. You could just retype the pages with Wharlis’s name and not have to retype the whole file.”
Bob let it sink in. Someone, not Elaine Donovan, had gone to a great deal of trouble to replace the pages with Charles’s name in them with pages where a fictitious agent was named. That is, if Charles’s name were in fact on the original pages.
“Why on earth would someone do that?”
“It means also the pay records were removed, the evaluation reports, all paper traces of Charles’s term with the Division. Or I should say it could mean that, as it’s not ipso facto evidentiary. But it could also hardly mean anything else. The chances of someone coming up with a name exactly the numeric space value by Underwood Office Typemaster Model 11-7B are highly unlikely.”
“I get the picture. He got very powerful people mad at him.”
“Madder than hell,” said Nick. “And he ended up in the memory hole.”
12
SOUTH BEND, INDIANA
June 30, 1934
JACK LOOKED NERVOUS. He lounged near the Merchants National’s prosaic entrance—it was no Deco/Egyptian temple to money but instead a mid-block storefront on Michigan Street under a jutting clock, between a jewelry store and a pawnshop. He smoked a cigar, his lips drawn, his face pale. He wore no overcoat because he carried no long gun.
But he gave them the nod, signifying that on schedule a postal inspector had arrived with all the loot from the Post Office. Though, indicating by finger, only one, not two.
“Okay,” said Johnny. “Money come in.”
“That boy’s going to shit up his pants like a drunk hobo locked in a boxcar,” said Homer, trying as always for the chuckle. None of the others in the boxy Hudson said a thing as Homer cruised along the street. They were nervous too, as no matter how professional you got, how much experience came into play, when the guns came out, when force was applied, when lead flew, it was a dangerous time.
Instead, harsh breathing, a kind of obsessive fondling and checking of the guns, a kind of willed relaxation meant to calm the heebie-jeebies that flew through the car like insects, threatening to land anywhere at any time. Only Johnny was completely relaxed.
“He’s fine, he’s fine,” he said after a bit. Then he added, “No parking yet. Go around the block again, will you, Homer?”
“Cock-a-doodle-I-will-do,” said Homer, driving, his eyes darting this way and that for signs of cop.
Meanwhile, Les, Thompson drum-charged with forty-nine .45s under his three-sizes-too-big suit coat (it hung down past his fingers, making him look childish, and the hat, too large, pulled too low, didn’t help: Mickey McGuire with machine gun), was thinking about killing Homer as a way of keeping his mind off the thirty pounds of steel bulletproof vest he wore under his shirt and the little ants of sweat tracking down his body.
“We’re in the money,” sang Homer.
&
nbsp; “Clamp it, vaudeville,” said Charlie Floyd. “Save them jokes for the showers when the niggers get you.”
It was like a family. Nobody liked anybody except all liked Johnny. He was the big brother.
Silently, Homer navigated the big Hudson, turning off Michigan to Wayne, then turning off Wayne to Main, Homer driving carefully because things could go wrong off a little bumper scrape or a cop seeing a stop sign or a yellow-light run. This block of small Indiana city on a sunny Saturday morning rotated past the right-side windows as Homer circled, yielding visions of American life that had no meaning to the car’s occupants for they had conspicuously chosen to live outside its neatness, its primness, its orderliness, its optimism, its regularity and consensus. What drove them collectively was not merely greed to have what wasn’t theirs but the need to be the outlaw, that figure who played by no rules, who was big by his own definition, who dared to flamboyantly grab, and though knowing doom was sure, would revel in reputation and respect until the last cop bullet found its mark and dumped each into the gutter to bleed out, waiting for an ambulance that nobody remembered to call.
The car turned right again on Jefferson, then eased around the last corner and back onto Michigan Street, and since nobody had bothered to pull out, Homer came to a halt in the traffic lane and double-parked. And why not? It was going to be a quick in-out against rubes and hicks.
“Gee,” said Homer, “we might get a parking ticket.”
He left the car running, set the parking brake, and pressed his .351 Winchester tight against the denim leg of his sloppy overalls, as he had dressed country so they didn’t look like a team.
A last check with Jack, who fed them another nod, this to indicate no cops inside, none on the street, nobody suspicious hanging around.
It was time to go to work.
“We’re in the money,” said Homer, tracing the idiot rhythm of the picture-show song, “we’re in the money.”
—
AS DESIGNATED BARKER, it was Charlie’s call. He hit the double doors hard, stepped up into a not-as-fancy-as-some-banks-he’d-seen interior, and let Johnny slide to the gate that led to the tellers’ cages from behind, and then pulled his big, brutish Thompson out, waved it dramatically like in a picture show, and shouted, “Everybody on the floor!”
Nobody went to the floor. Nobody even noticed. The place was crowded with customers, all, it seemed, with urgent financial issues and all, therefore, bent over their little account books with rapt concentration, or standing next to the ornate high tables and diddling with checkbook mechanics, because of course none trusted the banks, these being Midwesterners, and so they would calculate their interest to the penny, in fountain pen.
Charlie had a moment not of panic but utter frustration. What was wrong with these idiots? He shot a look to Johnny, whose hand had slipped inside his jacket to rip out his .45. As bagman, he couldn’t have a long gun.
Johnny shot him a what-the-hell look and a nod, and Charlie raised the muzzle of the unnoticed Thompson to the ceiling, thumbing the safety lever down, making it hot, continued to raise it, and when it was adequately skyward, he pressed the trigger.
—
LES NEVER ENTERED. His job was to slide down the block and station himself at the corner of Michigan and Wayne, since any big cop action would come hauling ass down Main and it was his job to persuade them to seek other objectives with a few T-gun bursts that would send them crashing onto curbs or into parked cars. He sort of hoped it would happen. There was nothing he loved more than the hydraulic surge of the gun’s recoil, the spew of spent shells, spurting gases, a radiance like a sustained photo flash from his muzzle, and above that wonderful drama, a vision of the world gone to chaos and anarchy, as his bursts ripped anything they touched.
Then he heard the burst from inside the bank.
Oh, boy, he thought, this is going to be fun.
Then he heard a shot from the bank entrance, where Homer patrolled with his long rifle.
—
HOMER SAW THE COP before the cop saw him. Homer had no joke for the cop, since all humorous impulses had left him and now he was down to business, to his own personality, which consisted of little other than the willingness to use force and the hunger to succeed as a bank robber. The money wasn’t even the important part. His bad jokes hid an ambition to be good at his job. It got him nice clothes, late-model cars, and hot women like Mickey Conforti who knew stuff he didn’t even realize existed.
But even though images of Mickey’s creamy thighs were never far from his mind, when he heard the Thompson burst from inside, knew it was loud enough to rattle teacups and window frames and policemen, he knew instantly that everything had changed, that what was to be a quick in-out would now be a crazed gun battle, and if you didn’t push the attack, you ended up caught in an alley.
At the same time, he immediately found the cop, who had been directing traffic in an intersection, approaching with caution, a kind of low infantryman’s jog, unsure, wary, but his revolver in his hand. Homer didn’t wait a second. The .351 went smoothly to shoulder exactly as the finger found the trigger and the muscles locked the gun tight against the body and the dominant eye found the bead sight, brought it into focus, while behind it the blue tunic of the officer seventy-five yards out was fuzzy. His finger, educated in trigger craft, pressed nicely and the rifle fired, much of its recoil absorbed by the mechanics of the automatic function, ejecting an empty, admitting a new round to chamber, locking it in, resetting the trigger. The cop seemed to elongate under the impact of the center-chest hit, then lost all energy, tried to keep upright with compensatory leg action but instead twisted, turned, and went hard to street, where he lay, flattened and splayed. But then there was nothing else to shoot at, as it seemed the crowds on the street had panicked and people were racing crazily to get out of the fire zone. Homer hunted for targets in blue.
—
WITH THE SHOT, Les abandoned all pretext of being man hiding machine gun and became man holding machine gun. It came out from under, and he felt a surge of love for the big thing, true beauty in his eyes, feeling his fingers clutch hard into the front grip, clutch hard into the pistol grip (no need for safety switch off, because he didn’t believe in safeties and went everywhere with his guns hot), buttstock wedged between his arm and pressing ribs.
The image alone—gangster man, heavily armed, pivoting and swinging the muzzle of the Thompson, face grim and merciless, jaw clenched, fedora low, from half a hundred picture shows—drove the masses at his end of the street into panic, and he watched—it was almost funny, people dropping their bags, moms snatching up babies, dads putting themselves between the gunman and their kids—as all seemed to go into spasms and lurches, all thoughts of dignity gone, running wildly, some tripping, sprawling, picking themselves up. They looked like clowns! This was fun!
Then he got shot.
—
PLASTER FELL from the ceiling where Charlie’s shots had torn it up. As expected, all customers went into paralysis, then, on Charlie’s second order, fell to the ground in sloppy, demeaning fear. Johnny busted through the gate, holding his .45 and yelling, “Tellers, hands up, don’t be no hero, the bank don’t care.”
Fast and professionally, Johnny scooted down the aisle, pulling out a clutch of flour bags tucked into his pants under his coat and flipping one to each teller.
“You throw the big bills in, take as many of the small ones as you can get into your pockets, cinch up the bag, and hold it out for me. That means you too, sister,” putting the .45 close to the head of an older woman, who had momentarily frozen.
She swallowed and unfroze.
“Attagirl,” he said, “knew you wouldn’t let me down.” He threw her a wink.
He moved down the aisle until he’d passed out six bags, moved back, picked each one up, felt each heavy with wads of cash. But that wasn’t the big money. With the si
x bags looped over his left arm, he kicked in the door to the administrative office, where men in suits stood, gray-faced, in a nest of desks and adding machines.
“I am John Dillinger,” he said, “and you know why I am here. Where’s the postal money? You, pops, you look important, where is it?”
He had chosen wisely. The old man had no need to defy him, no urge for heroics, no desire for trouble or pain, and weakly gestured to the two canvas sacks, secured by padlocks, on the desk, U.S. MAIL, in official typeface, emblazoned hugely on the outside.
“That’s what we came for, pops, you’re a peach!” Johnny said, and as a strong fellow had no trouble scooping up the two bags in his left hand while keeping the .45 in motion, sweeping the rigid managers and vice presidents.
“Nice doing business with you folks,” he said, smiling in his charming way, then turning to join Charlie, and as they turned to leave, at that moment it seemed that the Great War had come back to the earth again and landed square on Michigan Street, U.S.A.
—
IT OCCURRED TO LES he wasn’t going to die, though it felt like someone had kicked him in the center of the chest. He fogged a second, then remembered: bulletproof vest! What a smart move that had been. But in the next instant rage flashed hot and white and spastically, and he turned, seeing no shooter, and decided, what the hell, this’ll get their heads down.
He squeezed off a long burst in the general direction of everywhere, and his bullets danced everywhere, and everywhere they shattered storefront windows in cascades of sleet, pulled hurricanes of debris up from the street, or whanged hard with thrumming vibration as they drilled half-inch blisters into fenders and hoods of abandoned cars.
That was so much fun.
And then—what is it with these people, first he gets shot, then this!—some monkey lit on his back and began smacking at his arms, as if he was trying to get him to drop the gun.
You sonovabitch, thought Les, and he drove himself hard backwards against the wall, felt the man on his back flatten with the impact, wriggled an arm free from the pinioning arms engulfing him, and managed to drive three or four hard elbows into the monkey’s rib cage. Then he rammed the cargo against the wall again, heard the creature grunt in pain, all the while Les twisting energetically to break the grip.