The Hess Cross (29 page)

"What about the hood? Know anything about him?"

"Name was Patrick Kenney Flannery, known as Paddy. He's got a sheet on him two yards long, dating back to when he was fourteen. He's been charged with everything from burglary to whiskey running to extortion. Served a total of five years. When he was a kid, he was with the O'Banion gang, and as far as we can tell, after that he was associated with a series of small-timers. He was used mostly for muscle. Never aspired to anything else, at least not till now."

"Anything distinctive about him? Anything that would explain this?"

"The big thing is that he worked at the powder company."

"Everette told me about that. What about his background?" Crown asked. "His parents?"

"Irish as you can get."

"Any ties to Europe?"

Sullivan turned directly to Crown and spoke with the authority of two decades on the beat. "I know what that old lady said about their weapons with no wood stocks. Sure, that sounds mysterious and international, just like your and Smithson's business. But believe me, Crown, I know this type. Flannery was a scumbag from the word go. All he did was cause trouble all his life. Not even big trouble, just nickel-and-dime stuff. Shit, if he hadn't been hauled into police stations once a week, he wouldn't have known what to do with himself.

"So I'll tell you what happened here." Sullivan's voice rose. "He and a couple other losers scratched their heads and realized that if they didn't do something big, hit somebody hard for a big prize, they'd be punks all their lives. This results—a hairbrained scheme that got a lot of people
killed for nothing. Those gunsels have as much use for dynamite as I do for hair on my palm."

"Then how do you explain the foreign weapons?" Smithson asked. Crown wanted to drop the subject. The lieutenant would be of little help now that his mind was set.

"I figure that's what started this whole business, those guns. Flannery or one of the others came across a couple of heavy-duty submachine guns. Maybe bought them from a fence. Who knows? The guns started it, because it gave them big ideas. They were probably thinking of the St. Valentine's day massacre and the Hymie Weiss shooting. The big time. So they brewed up this scheme for nothing more than to get into the papers."

A uniformed motorcycle policeman trotted up to Sullivan and handed him three or four slips of paper. "From headquarters and the morgue, sir."

"Assholes," muttered Sullivan as he flipped through the sheets. "Wish the hell they'd get off my back and let me do my job. If the goddamn mayor wants to play cop, why doesn't he put on a badge and . . . " Sullivan stopped abruptly and screwed his eyebrows in concentration.

"What is it, Lieutenant?" Crown asked, suspecting Sullivan was confronted with evidence from the morgue that belied his theory.

"This doesn't make sense," he said after several seconds. "The Irishman was hit with the same type of bullets that killed the escort-car men. I thought Flannery had been shotgunned, but they pulled six slugs from him. No buckshot at all."

"What caliber?" Crown asked.

"It says here they're nine-double-M. What the hell's that?"

"It's the standard German caliber for service pistols and submachine guns. Any markings on the casings you found?"

"Yeah, a small K punched on the bottom of the shells," Sullivan answered, without looking up from the sheets, embarrassed by his lack of knowledge.

Crown said, "Krupp. The German munitions manufacturer."

"None of the powder-company people had submachine guns. So one of Flannery's own men killed him," the lieutenant said. "Figures. Goddamn bunch of lunatics." He paled, reached for his belt buckle, and bit his lower lip. A flaming peptic ulcer was his constant companion.

The courier-cop ran up again, out of breath and beaming. "Lieutenant, they've found the dynamite truck. At the corner of Pulaski and Fullerton."

"You still think there's something international about this, Crown?" Sullivan asked, the pain having subsided.

"I don't know." Like hell he didn't know. "I'd like to tag along awhile, though."

"Sure, sure. I figured as much. Let's go in my car. The truck isn't far from here. Inside our first goddamn ring of police." Sullivan took the street map from his back pocket, tore it in half, and threw it on the ground.

The truck was parked in an alley behind a two-story brick warehouse. By the time Sullivan's car arrived, the Dodge six-wheel two-tonner was already surrounded by policemen trying to keep the souvenir hunters from dismantling it.

Piles of garbage leaned against the warehouse. Curious onlookers waded through the mire to get a closer look. An enterprising
Tribune
photographer rapidly ascended a stagnant pile, precariously balanced himself atop an apple crate perched at the crest, and just as he snapped the photo, lost his footing and pitched sideways into the festering rubbish.

"Sergeant," Sullivan bellowed as he shouldered his way through the crowd, "get these people out of here."

Sullivan's reputation as an uncharitable boss must have been widespread, because the phalanx of bluecoats now moved with resolve, linking arms and pushing the throng back.

"Goddamn tourists," Sullivan said under his breath, swallowing rapidly in a ineffectual attempt to drown the stab of pain in his belly.

The curious were eventually restrained, but not before malodorous clumps of garbage had been strewn across the site. Crown lifted his feet carefully as he slowly circled the truck. He ran his hand over the ruptured sheet metal of the driver's-side door, through which a stream of Krupp products had poured.

"I think the doctors'll find that Patrolman Bates also has bits of metal in his chest from this door," Sullivan said.

"Fired from inside the cab?"

"Sure. The steel fragments are bent out. Bates never knew what hit him." Sullivan swung the truck's door open and squinted at the perforated door panel. He scraped a thin film of gray-brown particles from the remnants of the panel. "The man sitting in the middle or on the right fired, probably the middle man. He fired over the driver's lap. These powder burns are too wide to have been fired pointblank by the driver. The driver kept both his hands on the wheel so Bates wouldn't suspect he was in danger. And the driver had a hell of a lot of confidence in the gunner. The bullets went above the driver's thighs but below his elbows. Look at this, too. He must have fired ten or fifteen rounds through this door, yet the hole here is no bigger than my fist. Jesus," Sullivan exclaimed. "He's one steady son of a bitch."

"Unbelievable," wheezed Everette Smithson, on his tiptoes peering at the door.

"That's a warning to us, Crown, just as plain as if it were in print," Sullivan said. "The little one, the one the old lady said sat in the middle of the cab, is extremely dangerous. Deadly."

"A professional," Crown said in a voice inaudible to the surrounding policemen.

Sullivan hopped down from the running board and looked at Crown squarely, with his basketball stomach almost touching Crown's belt buckle. "You're pretty sure about that?" It was not a challenge. The lieutenant was not preparing a rebuttal. He wanted advice.

Crown nodded. "The old lady, Mrs. Falkenhausen, told us something you don't know. She's a German immigrant. She heard one of the men, apparently the leader, the one who drove the truck away, give a command in German. He slipped, because she also heard them speak English. Good English. Plus, the submachine gun used. They're not American-made. They sound like MP40's, called Schmeissers, made in Germany and used in all the German services. And now your conclusion about the man in the middle of the seat being extremely competent with the weapon. Now, I don't know much about your Chicago gangs, but this doesn't sound like a mob hijacking. Smithson and I agree. The three hijackers were German stormtroopers."

"What the hell are they doing in Chicago?" asked Sullivan, who believed every word Crown had said.

"If we can find that out, we can find them."

A young red-haired policeman Crown guessed had been on the force all of two weeks broke through the circle of policemen and ran up to Sullivan, losing his footing several times on the slippery refuse. He didn't wait to be addressed by his superior. "Lieutenant, we've got it."

"Got what?"

"A housewife across the street saw the men change trucks. She saw the dynamite truck drive up, and then she saw three men unload boxes and put them into a van."

"When?"

"About nine-thirty or quarter to ten."

"What kind of van?"

"She doesn't know the make or the plates, but it's light blue and has 'Bakery' printed on the side of it."

"What bakery?"

"She said the name of the bakery had been painted over or erased. All it said on the side was 'Bakery.' "

"Which way did it go?"

The red-haired cop pointed over Sullivan's shoulder. "They turned around and went north."

"What else did she see?" Sullivan asked.

"She doesn't remember anything else. We've checked the other houses along the block, and no one else saw anything."

Sullivan nodded his approval and dismissed the rookie. A tired man, one who had spent his week's energy that morning, stepped up to Sullivan. He was about sixty years old. A shock of white hair hung over his ears. He wore a thin black tie and a wool sweater. As if to contradict this office wear, his hands were callused and scarred. He was a man who was assigned a desk job but escaped to the plant floor, to the days of honest labor, as often as possible.

"Officer . . . " He addressed Sullivan, but had decided Smithson and Crown were ranking police officers, so he joined their circle. "I'm Henry Harter, the manager of the Guy Fawkes Powder Company. This's my truck." Without further explanation he handed Sullivan a sheet of lined paper with figures running down one of the columns.

"What's this?"

"It's my inventory of the truck. It left the plant this morning with thirty crates of explosives. It still has twenty-eight crates. They took only two of them."

"How much dynamite in each crate?" Crown asked.

"The powder's in paraffin wrappers. Each crate has eight wrappers, and each wrapper weighs twenty pounds. So
we've got three hundred and twenty pounds of explosives missing." Harter sighed as if it were his life's last breath and returned to the rear of the truck.

Sullivan worked his throat as he stared at the inventory sheet. He shook his head. "I've got to report to the mayor and the chief that we've got three German stormtroopers walking around Chicago with three hundred and twenty pounds of explosives."

"Not quite," Smithson said, his breath hitting the cold air and curling around his fleshy jowls. "You can report three men and three hundred and twenty pounds of dynamite, but at least for the time being, the fact that they're Germans is to be our secret." He looked quickly at Crown for affirmance. Crown's chin dipped almost imperceptibly.

"No way," Sullivan said, stepping closer to Smithson. "I'm charged with giving a full report. If the chief found out I'd withheld the fact the hijackers are Germans, I'd be out. Booted off the force."

"Now, look, Lieutenant," Smithson said, his voice beginning to lose itself in a whine. "We've got to—"

"Look nothing. I've got my duties out here. I can't very well lie to the men who employ me."

When Smithson looked at him for help, Crown said, "We can compromise. The three of us'll visit the chief. He'll receive a phone call from Smithson's and my boss. I guarantee you, your chief will keep our secret when he hears from Washington."

Sullivan thought about the proposal for several seconds, then nodded. "Fair enough. As long as my ass is protected."

Crown continued, "Everette, I assume you have a list of the federal-government war installations in the Chicago area."

"Of course. That's my job."

"It only makes sense that the Germans will try to destroy one of these sites. They didn't come all the way from
Germany to hijack dynamite in Chicago to use it somewhere other than Chicago."

"You're right, John." Smithson's head bounced rapidly atop the folds of his double chin. "There're fourteen in Cook County. I'll prepare a list of addresses and give it to you, Lieutenant. They're all guarded by military personnel now, but we can set up advance warning circles around them. Watch them day and night."

The Fermi experiments would be exempt from police attention. It had sufficient guards to turn back any attempt. The early-warning ring of spotters had been in effect for months.

"We won't have any trouble getting volunteers for the job," Sullivan said. "There's a thousand Chicago cops who want in on this."

"One last thing, Lieutenant," Crown said. "I want to be the first to talk to those men when they're captured. We've got to find out their motive."

Sullivan smiled faintly. "Crown, you don't know shit about cops. You don't think all these bluecoats out here are biting at the bit to find those men so they can slap handcuffs on them, do you?"

"Those hijackers can't be killed."

"Then you'd better be the first to get to them. That's the only way. You ever hear of a cop killer being tried in a court? Hell no." Sullivan paused to look at both Smithson and Crown in turn. "That includes me. Like they say in the army, I'm not taking prisoners."

XV

I
N ONE MONTH ALONE,
June 1942, the ranks of the United States Navy swelled by almost ten percent. The deluge of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old inductees awash with war fever was unending and threatened to swamp the navy. New training centers were built at Farragut, Sampson, and Bainbridge. The bases at Newport and San Diego were expanded. The tide of recruits still pushed against the navy's bulkheads, so in that June, the Bureau of Yards and Docks instructed the commandant of the Ninth Naval District to expand the already huge Great Lakes Naval Training Center thirty miles north of Chicago.

Great Lakes occupies a mile of Lake Michigan's Illinois shoreline between Lake Forest and Waukegan. The base extends almost a mile inland to Sheridan Road, which parallels the beach. At the outbreak of the war, the navy had acquired a 685-acre site across Sheridan Road. Within a week after the bureau's June order, bulldozers and cranes were swarming over the new acreage.