The Saboteurs (Men at War 5)
Fulmar broke the silence.
“So, you said you needed some help?”
“I wanted to ask Donovan to let you work with me.”
“I would—and maybe can—but not until I get a handle on these Abwehr bombings…or the FBI does.”
“These bombings in the States?”
Fulmar nodded.
“Jesus. That must
make Hoover happy.”
Fulmar shrugged.
“All I know,” he said, “is that Roosevelt told Donovan to take care of it quote quickly and quietly unquote. And here I am.”
“You said you had a lead to follow?”
“In the files the FBI gave me—the ones that Donovan and Douglass told me quote not to take at face value unquote because they were nothing more than what Hoover wanted the OSS to have—”
“No surprise, with you encroaching on Hoover’s territory.”
“Yeah. Anyway, in there was information suggesting Fritz Kuhn and his American Nazi Party may be connected with the agents. The FBI gave them a once-over, came up with nothing. But I’m going to shake that tree, too, and see what falls out. Midnight tonight I have a date—more like a meeting—over on the Upper East Side. Remember Ingrid Müller?”
Canidy’s face brightened considerably.
“Who the hell could forget her?” he said, grinning.
Ingrid Müller—tall, tanned, and white blonde—had been a sixteen-year-old sex kitten when she appeared in Monkeying Around, a 1933 comedy that starred Fulmar’s mother, Monica Carlisle. Every red-blooded American male—and certainly the boys of St. Paul’s Episcopal Preparatory School, Cedar Rapids, Iowa—went ape-shit over Ingrid. Fulmar and Canidy had tried every way they thought possible to get her to visit Iowa, including sending letter after letter to Fulmar’s mother that contained everything from promises that sensible people would see as impossible to keep to outright begging.
Months passed without a single response—not at all unusual behavior for the “childless” Monica Carlisle—and the boys had given up.
Then the star’s legal counsel—a young Hollywood hotshot in his twenties by the name of Stanley S. Fine, Esquire—showed up.
Fulmar and Canidy were convinced that Fulmar’s mother had again sent him to put out yet another fire (if nothing else, to make them cease and desist from writing annoying letters to her) when they noticed a familiar female in his company.
It was indeed the teen starlet Miss Müller. She had been scouting locations for background on her next movie—one set at a boarding school for boys—and she said that Mr. Fine, Esq., had suggested St. Paul’s (“simply as an idea, something to use as a reference without having to fly all the way to the East Coast”), and, as student escorts, he thought that one Dick Canidy, son of the headmaster, and one Eric Fulmar would serve her well.
Fine ensured, despite the best attempts of Canidy and Fulmar during her two-day visit, that neither had an opportunity to get in any trouble with Miss Ingrid Müller.
Thus, the short-term result had been that the boys were instant heroes among their classmates. And, long term, Fulmar had found himself exchanging an occasional letter with her—his being far more frequent than hers.
“I vowed never to forget her,” Fulmar said.
“I remember. I also remember that you vowed to bag her. So you’re batting .500.”
“Maybe my luck changes tonight. She will be very pleased to know that I am seriously considering joining the American Nazi Party—”
“Of which I presume she is a member?”
Fulmar nodded.
“That’s what she tells me in her letters.” He paused. “And she’ll be pleased I am considering joining her and the party because I believe, as a Good German, that we must win this war in any way possible. Oh, and how could I go about contributing to these German agents that the newspapers say are bombing the States?”
Canidy smiled.