“Buddy,” the clerk said, “I don’t give a damn. No drinking in your room and be out by eight o’clock, or it’s another five bucks.”
8
It was almost nine o’clock in the morning. Rogers sat in his cold, blank office, listening to the telephone ring. After a time, he picked it up.
“Rogers.”
“This is Avery, sir. The subject is still in the hotel on Bleecker. He came down a little before eight, paid another day’s rent, and went back to his room.”
“Thank you. Stay on it.”
He pushed the receiver back on the cradle and bent until his face was almost touching the desk. He clasped his hands behind his neck.
The interoffice buzzer made him straighten up again. He moved the switch over. “Yes?”
“We have Miss DiFillipo here, sir.”
“Would you send her in, please.”
He waited until the girl came in, and then let his hand fall away from the switch. “Come in, please. Here’s — here’s a chair for you.”
Angela DiFillipo was an attractive young brunette, a trifle on the thin side. Rogers judged her to be about eighteen. She came in confidently, and sat down without any trace of nervousness. Rogers imagined that in ordinary circumstances, she was a calm, self-assured type, largely lacking in the little guilts that made even the most harmless people turn a bit nervous in this building.
“I’m Shawn Rogers,” he said, putting on a smile and holding out his hand.
She shook it firmly, almost mannishly, and smiled back without giving him the feeling that she was trying to make an impression on him. “Hello.”
“I know you have to get to work, so I won’t keep you here long.” He turned the recorder on. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions about last night.”
“I’ll be glad to help out.”
“Thank you. Now — your name is Angela DiFillipo, and you live at thirty-three MacDougal Street, here in New York, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Last night — that would be the twelfth — at about ten-thirty p.m., you were at the corner of MacDougal and an alley between Bleecker and Houston Streets. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me how you got there and what happened?”
“Well, I’d just left the house to go to the delicatessen for some milk. The alley’s right next to the door. I didn’t particularly notice anybody, but I did know somebody was coming up MacDougal, because I could hear his footsteps.”
“Coming toward Bleecker? On the west side of the street?”
“Yes.”
“Go on, Miss DiFillipo. I may interrupt you again, to clarify the record, but you’re doing fine.” And the record’s piling up, he thought. For all the good it does.
“Well, I knew somebody was coming, but I didn’t take any special notice of it, of course. I noticed he was walking fast. Then he changed direction, as if he was going to go into the alley. I looked at him then, because I wanted to get out of his way. There was a streetlight behind him, so all I could see was that it was a man — a big man-but I couldn’t see his face. From the way he was walking, I didn’t think he saw me at all. He was headed straight for me, though, and I guess I got a little tensed up.
“Anyhow, I took a short step back, and he just brushed my sleeve. That made him look up, and I saw there was something odd about his face.”
“How do you mean ‘odd,’ Miss DiFillipo?”
“Just odd. I didn’t see what it was, then. But I got the feeling it had something wrong with it. And I guess that made me a little bit more nervous.”
“I see.”
“Then I saw his face. He stopped, and he opened his mouth — well, his face was metal, like one of those robot things in the Sunday paper, and it was where a mouth would be — and he looked surprised. And he said, in a very peculiar voice, ‘Barbara — it’s I — the German.’ ”
Rogers leaned forward in surprise. “Barbara — it’s I — the German? Are you sure of that?”
“Yes, sir. He sounded very surprised, and — ”
“What is it, Miss DiFillipo?”
“I just realized what made me scream — I mean, what really did it.”
“Yes?”
“He said it in Italian.” She looked at Rogers with astonishment. “I just realized that.”
Rogers frowned. “He said it in Italian. And what he said was ‘Barbara — it’s I — the German.’ That doesn’t make sense, does it? Does it mean anything to you?”
The girl shook her head.
“Well.” Rogers looked down at the desk, where his hands were tapping a pencil on the blotter. “How good is your Italian, Miss DiFillipo?”
“I speak it at home all the time.”
Rogers nodded. Then something else occurred to him. “Tell me — I understand there are a number of regional Italian dialects. Could you tell which one he was using?”
“It sounded pretty usual. You might call it American Italian.”
“As if he’d been in the country a long time?”
“I guess so. He sounded pretty much like anybody around here. But I’m no expert. I just talk it.”
“I see. You don’t know anyone named Barbara? I mean — a Barbara who looks a little like you, say?”
“No…no, I’m sure I don’t.”
“All right, Miss DiFillipo. When he spoke to you, you screamed. Did anything else happen?”
“No. He turned around and ran into the alley. And then a car followed him in there. After that, one of you FBI men came up to me and asked if I was all right. I told him I was, and he took me home. I guess you know all that.”
“Yes. And thank you, Miss DiFillipo. You’ve been very helpful. I don’t think we’ll need you again, but if we do we’ll be in touch with you.”
“I’ll be glad to help if I can, Mr. Rogers. Goodbye.”
“Good-bye, Miss DiFillipo.” He shook her hand again, and watched her leave.
Damn, he thought, there’s a kind of girl who wouldn’t get upset if her man was in my kind of business.
Then he sat frowning. “Barbara — it’s I — the German.” Well, that was one more thing to check out.
He wondered how Martino was feeling, holed up in his room. And he wondered how soon-or long-it would be before they came upon the kind of evidence you could put on record and have stand up.
The interoffice buzzer broke in on him again.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Rogers? This is Reed. I’ve been running down some of the people on the Martino acquaintance list.”
“And?”
“This man, Francis Heywood, who was Lucas Martino’s roommate at MIT.”
“The one who got to be a big gun in the ANG Technical Personnel Allocations Bureau? He’s dead. Died in a plane crash. What about him?”
“The FBI just got a package on him. They pulled in a net of Soviet people in Washington. A really topnotch bunch, that’d been getting away with it for years. Sleepers, mostly. When Heywood was in Washington for the American government, he was one of them.”
“The same Francis Heywood?”
“Fingerprints and photos check with our file, sir.”
Rogers let the air seep out between his lips. “All right. Bring it here and let’s have a look at it.” He hung up slowly.
When the FBI file came in, the pattern it made was perfect, with no holes anyone couldn’t fill with a little experienced conjecture, if he wanted to.
Francis Heywood had attended MIT with Lucas Martino, sharing a room with him in one of the small dormitory apartments. Whether he was a Soviet sleeper even that far back was problematic. It made no significant difference. He was definite]y one of them by the time he was transferred out of the American government into the ANG. Working for the ANG he was hired to assign key technical personnel to the best working facilities for their specific purposes. He had been trained for this same kind of work in the American government, and was considered the best expert in the specialty. At some point near this period, he could have turned active. The natural conclusion was that he had been able to maneuver things so that the Soviets could get hold of Martino. Heywood, in effect, had been a talent scout.