HEART: Strong, with occasional murmurs.
GENITALIA: Negative for penile scars, discharge.
RECTUM: Negative for hemorrhoids.
PULSE: 75 resting, 95 after mild exercise, 77 after 2 minutes rest.
BLOOD PRESSURE: 125/85.
HEIGHT: 5-8.
WEIGHT: 158.
WASSERMANN: Negative.
NOTE: Due to the existence of heart murmurs, it is this physician’s opinion that the inmate NOT be assigned duties that are arduous (i.e., laundry work).
Signed this 12th Day of May 1942
L A Thume MD
Leo A. Thume, M.D.
* * *
Canidy’s eye paused on the line noting the results of the Wassermann test—the German bacteriologist August von Wassermann in 1906 designed it as the definitive diagnosis for the sexually transmitted disease of syphilis—and it brought to mind the other wild information on the mobster that Murray Gurfein had supplied in detail at dinner the previous night, including that in the course of running prostitution rackets Luciano had sampled his own product—just as he’d sampled the heroin he ran—enough to contract syphilis once and gonorrhea eight times.
The train came to a complete stop, and Canidy slipped the page back into the folder and then the folder into his leather attaché case—being careful to keep it clear of the Colt Model 1911 .45 ACP semiautomatic—as he and the other passengers on the packed train gathered their belongings to disembark.
The door at the end of the car opened and two New York City transit cops came through. Canidy noted that the policemen were making a fairly thorough visual inspection of the passengers as they passed.
He didn’t think anything more of it until he was walking through Penn Station, en route to the cabstand, when he noticed what appeared to be a heavier-than-normal presence of cops. Then he seemed to remember that there had been quite a few D.C. cops in Union Station.
It struck him as odd that he was just now noticing it—I’m supposed to be more situationally aware than most people—but then he recalled that that famous sociologist, Dr. Whatshisface, found that everyone allowed people in uniform to be invisible to them.
It was a fact not lost on criminals, who commonly put on, say, a postman’s uniform to get an edge when committing a crime. When it came time for witnesses to be interviewed by police investigators, the witnesses would not remember seeing a face—“Just a mailman.”
Still, I need to pay better attention, Canidy thought.
The cabstand had a long line of people waiting.
Canidy walked past it, headed east on Thirty-second Street. Two blocks later, he was able to hail a cab from the corner of Broadway.
He got in the backseat, gave the driver the address—117 South Street—and the car shot south down Broadway.
Someone had left a copy of the New York World-Telegram on the seat and he picked it up and scanned the headlines. One was about FDR—what had become the World’s usual daily headline taking the President to task on what he had said—or not said—the previous day about the war, or the economy…or the price of blue cheese.
Another headline announced a story on Lieutenant General George Kenney’s Fifth Air Force attack on a Japanese convoy in the Bismarck Sea that sank four of its destroyers and all eight of its transports—with half of the seven thousand Japanese troops lost.
And yet another led into an article that carried newly released details on the Allied convoy ON-166, which had fourteen ships sunk by U-boats in the Atlantic in late February.
Then there was one, and the short piece beneath it, that caught his attention:
* * *
DEATH TOLLS RISE IN GEORGIA & FLORIDA
10 Dead After Explosions in Train Stations Official: “No Connection Between Blasts”