The Scarlatti Inheritance Read online

  January, 1922

  My dear Kroeger:

  It is all so slow. So painfully slow when it could be different. The depression is unbelievable and getting worse. Trunkfuls of currency virtually worthless. Adolf Hitler has literally assumed the position of chairman of the party over Ludendorff. You recall I once said to you that there were names I could not speak of? Ludendorff was one. I do not trust Hitler. There is something cheap about him, something opportunistic.

  October, 1922

  Dear Strasser:

  It was a good summer and it’ll be a better fall and a great winter! This Prohibition was tailor-made! It’s madness! Have a little money up front and you’re in business!… And what business! My organization is growing. The machinery is just the way you’d like it—perfect.

  July, 1923

  My dear Kroeger:

  I am concerned. I have moved north and you can reach me at the address below. Hitler is a fool. The Ruhr take-over by Poincaré was his chance to unite all of Bavaria—politically. The people are ready. But they want order, not chaos. Instead, Hitler rants and raves and uses the old fool Ludendorff to give him stature. He will do something insane, I feel it. I wonder if there’s room in the party for both of us? There is great activity in the north. A Major Buchrucker has formed the Black Reichswehr, a large armed force that may find sympathy wtih our cause. I meet with Buchrucker shortly. We’ll see.

  September, 1923

  Dear Strasser:

  Since last October it’s been a better year than I ever thought possible! It’s funny—but a person can find something in his past, something he may hate—and realize it’s the best weapon he’s got. I have. I lead two lives and neither meets the other! It is a brilliant manipulation if I do say so myself! I think you would be pleased that you didn’t kill your friend Kroeger in France.

  December, 1923

  My dear Kroeger:

  I head south immediately! Munich was a disaster. I warned them not to attempt a forcible putsch. It has to be political—but they would not listen. Hitler will draw a long jail sentence, in spite of our “friends.” God knows what will happen to poor old Ludendorff. Buchrucker’s Black Reichswehr has been destroyed by von Seeckt. Why? We all want the same thing. The depression is nothing short of catastrophic now. Always it is the wrong people who fight each other. The Jews and the Communists enjoy it all, no doubt. It is an insane country.

  April, 1924

  Dear Strasser:

  I’ve had my first contact with any real difficulty—but it’s under control now. Remember, Strasser? Control.… The problem is a simple one—too many people are after the same thing. Everyone wants to be the big cheese! There’s plenty for everybody but no one believes that. It’s very much as you describe—the people who shouldn’t fight each other are doing just that. Nevertheless, I’ve nearly accomplished what I set out to do. Soon I’ll have a list of thousands! Thousands! Who’ll do as we want!

  January, 1925

  My dear Kroeger:

  This is my last letter. I write from Zurich. Since Herr Hitler’s release he has once again assumed leadership of the party and I confess there are deep divisions between us. Perhaps they will be resolved. I, too, have my followers. To the point. We are all of us under the strongest surveillance. The Weimar is frightened of us—as well it should be. I am convinced my mail, my telephone, my every action is scrutinized. No more chances. But the time approaches. A bold plan is being conceived and I have taken the liberty of suggesting Heinrich Kroeger’s inclusion. It is a master plan, a fantastic plan. You are to contact the Marquis Jacques Louis Bertholde of Bertholde et Fils, London. By mid-April. The only name he knows—as myself—is Heinrich Kroeger.

  A gray-haired man of sixty-three sat at his desk looking out the window over K Street in Washington. His name was Benjamin Reynolds and in two years he would retire. Until that time, however, he was responsible for the functions of an innocuous-sounding agency attached to the Department of the Interior. The agency was titled Field Services and Accounting. To less than five hundred people, it was known simply as Group Twenty.

  The agency got its shortened name from its origins: a group of twenty field accountants sent out by Interior to look into the growing conflicts of interest between those politicians allocating federal funds and those of the electorate receiving them.

  With America’s entry into the war and the overnight industrial expansion necessary to sustain the war effort, Group Twenty became an overworked unit. The awarding of munitions and armament contracts to businesses throughout the country demanded an around-the-clock scrutiny beyond the capabilities of the limited number of field accountants. However, rather than expand the silent agency, it was decided to use it only in the most sensitive—or embarrassing—areas. There were a sufficient number of these. And the field accountants were specialists.

  After the war there was talk of disbanding Group Twenty, but each time such action was considered problems arose that required its talents. Generally they were problems involving highly placed public servants who dipped a bit too greedily into the public jewel box. But in isolated cases Group Twenty assumed duties shunned by other departments for any number of reasons.

  Such as the Treasury Department’s reluctance to pursue a vapor called Scarlatti.

  “Why, Glover?” asked the gray-haired man. “The question is why? Assuming there’s an ounce of prosecutable proof, why?”

  “Why does anyone break a law?” A man roughly ten years younger than Reynolds answered him with another question. “For profit. And there’s a lot of profit in Prohibition.”

  “No! God damn it to hell, no!” Reynolds spun around in his chair and slammed his pipe on the desk blotter. “You’re wrong! This Scarlatti has more money than our combined imaginations can conceive of. It’s like saying the Mellons are going to open a bookmaking parlor in Philadelphia. It doesn’t make sense.… Join me in a drink?”

  It was after five and Group Twenty’s staff was gone for the day. Only the man named Glover and Ben Reynolds remained.

  “You shock me, Ben,” Glover said with a grin.

  “Then to hell with you. I’ll save it for myself.”

  “You do that and I’ll turn you in.… Good stuff?”

  “Right off the boat from old Blighty, they tell me.” Reynolds took a leather-bound flask out of his top drawer and two water glasses from a desk tray and poured.

  “If you rule out profits, what the devil have you got left, Ben?”

  “Damned if I know,” replied the older man, drinking.

  “What are you going to do? I gather no one else wants to do anything.”

  “Yes, siree! That is no, siree! Nobody wants to touch this.… Oh, they’ll go after Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones with a vengeance. They’ll prosecute the hell out of some poor slob in East Orange, New Jersey, with a case in his basement. But not this one!”

  “You lost me, Ben.”

  “This is the Scarlatti Industries! This is big, powerful friends on the Hill! Remember, Treasury needs money, too. It gets it up there.”

  “What do you want to do, Ben?”

  “I want to find out why the mammoth’s tusk is plunging into bird feed.”

  “How?”

  “With Canfield. He’s partial to bird feed himself, the poor son of a bitch.”

  “He’s a good man, Ben.” Glover did not like the sound of Reynold’s invective. He liked Matthew Canfield. He thought he was talented, quick. There but for the money to complete an education was a young man with a future. Too good for government service. A lot better than either of them.… Well, better than himself, better than a man named Glover who didn’t care anymore. There weren’t many people better than Reynolds.

  Benjamin Reynolds looked up at his subordinate. He seemed to be reading his thoughts. “Yes, he’s a good man.… He’s in Chicago. Go out and call him. His routing must be somewhere.”

  “I have it in my desk.”

  “Then get him in here by tomorrow night.”


  CHAPTER 6

  Matthew Canfield, field accountant, lay in his Pullman berth, and smoked the next to last thin cigar in his pack. They had no thin cigars on the New York–Chicago Limited and he inhaled each breath of smoke with a degree of sacrifice.

  In the early morning he would reach New York, transfer to the next train south, and be in Washington ahead of schedule. That would make a better impression on Reynolds than arriving in the evening. That would show that he, Canfield, could close a problem quickly, with no loose ends left dangling. Of course, with his current assignment it wasn’t difficult. He had completed it several days ago but had remained in Chicago as the guest of the senator he had been sent to confront about payroll allocations to nonexistent employees.

  He wondered why he had been called back to Washington. He always wondered why he was called back. Probably because he believed deeply that it was never just another job but, instead, that someday, somehow Washington would be on to him. Group Twenty would be on to him.

  They would confront him.

  With evidence.

  But it was unlikely. It hadn’t happened. Matthew Canfield was a professional—minor level, he granted to himself—but still a professional. And he had no regrets whatsoever. He was entitled to every wooden nickel he could dig up.

  Why not? He never took much. He and his mother deserved something. It had been a federal court in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which had pasted the sheriff’s notice on his father’s store. A federal judge who had rendered the determination—Involuntary Bankruptcy. The federal government hadn’t listened to any explanations other than the fact that his father no longer had the ability to pay his debts.

  For a quarter of a century a man could work, raise a family, get a son off to the state university—so many dreams fulfilled, only to be destroyed with the single banging of a wooden gavel upon a small marble plate in a courtroom.

  Canfield had no regrets.

  “You have a new occupation to get under your belt, Canfield. Simple procedures. Not difficult.”

  “Fine, Mr. Reynolds. Always ready.”

  “Yes. I know you are.… You start in three days at pier thirty-seven in New York City. Customs. I’ll fill you in as best I can.”

  But, of course, Benjamin Reynolds did not “fill in” Matthew Canfield as thoroughly as he might have. He wanted Canfield to “fill in” the spaces he, Reynolds, left blank. The Scarlatti padrone was operating out of the West Side piers—middle numbers—that much they knew. But someone had to see him. Someone had to identify him. Without being told.

  That was very important.

  And if anyone could do that it would be someone like Matthew Canfield, who seemed to gravitate to the nether world of the payoff, the bribe, the corrupt.

  He did.

  On the night shift of January 3, 1925.

  Matthew Canfield, customs inspector, checked the invoices of the steamer Genoa-Stella and waved to the shakeup foreman to start unloading hold one of its crates of Como wool.

  And then it happened.

  At first an argument. Then a hook fight.

  The Genoa-Stella crew would not tolerate a breach of unloading procedures. Their orders came from someone else. Certainly not from the American customs officials.

  Two crates plummeted down from the cranes, and underneath the straw packing the stench of uncut alcohol was unmistakable.

  The entire pier force froze. Several men then raced to phone booths and a hundred apelike bodies swarmed around the crates ready to fend off intruders with their hooks.

  The first argument was forgotten. The hook fight was forgotten.

  The contraband was their livelihood and they would die defending it.

  Canfield, who had raced up the stairs to the glass-enclosed booth high above the pier, watched the angry crowd. A shouting match began between the men on the loading dock and the sailors of the Genoa-Stella. For fifteen minutes the opponents yelled at each other, accompanying their shouts with obscene gestures. But no one drew a weapon. No one threw a hook or knife. They were waiting.

  Canfield realized that no one in the customs office made any move to call the authorities. “For Christ’s sake! Someone get the police down!”

  There was silence from the four men in the room with Canfield.

  “Did you hear me? Call the police!”

  Still the silence of the frightened men wearing the uniforms of the Customs Service.

  Finally one man spoke. He stood by Matthew Canfield, looking out the glass partition at the gangster army below. “No one calls the police, young fella. Not if you want to show up at the docks tomorrow.”

  “Show up anywhere tomorrow,” added another man, who calmly sat down and picked up a newspaper from his tiny desk.

  “Why not? Somebody down there could get killed!”

  “They’ll settle it themselves,” said the older customs man.

  “What port did you come from again?… Erie?… You must have had different rules. Lake shipping has different rules.…”

  “That’s a lot of crap!”

  A third man wandered over to Canfield. “Look, hick, just mind your own business, all right?”

  “What the hell kind of talk is that? I mean, just what the hell kind of talk is that?”

  “C’mere, hick.” The third man, whose thin body and narrow face seemed lost in his loose-fitting uniform, took Canfield by the elbow and walked him to a corner. The others pretended not to notice but their eyes kept darting over to the two men. They were concerned, even worried. “You got a wife and kids?” the thin man asked quietly.

  “No.… So what?”

  “We do. That’s what.” The thin man put his hand into his pocket and withdrew several bills. “Here. Here’s sixty bucks.… Just don’t rock the boat, huh?… Calling the cops wouldn’t do no good, anyhow.… They’d rat on you.”

  “Jesus! Sixty dollars!”

  “Two weeks’ pay, kid. Have a party.”

  “Okay.… Okay, I will.”

  “Here they come, Jesse.” The older guard by the window spoke softly to the man next to Canfield.

  “C’mon, hick. Get an education,” said the man with the money, leading Canfield to the window overlooking the interior of the pier.

  Down at the street-loading entrance, Canfield saw that two large automobiles, one behind the other, had pulled up—the first car halfway into the building. Several men in dark overcoats had gotten out of the lead car and were walking toward the phalanx of dock workers surrounding the damaged crates.

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re the goons, kid,” answered the guard named Jesse. “They muscle.”

  “Muscle what?”

  “Hah!” came a guttural laugh from the man at the tiny desk with the newspaper.

  “They muscle what has to be put in line. No what—who!”

  The men in overcoats—five in all—began wandering up to the various stevedores and talking quietly. Cheek to cheek, thought Canfield. With a few, they shoved them humorously and patted their thick necks. They were like zoo keepers, pacifying their animals. Two of the men walked up the gangplank onto the ship. The head man, who wore a white felt fedora and was now the central figure of the remaining three on the pier, looked back toward the automobiles and then up at the glass-enclosed booth. He nodded his head and started toward the stairs. The guard, Jesse, spoke.

  “I’ll handle this. Everyone stay put.”

  He opened the door and waited on the steel platform for the man in the white fedora.

  Canfield could see the two men talking through the glass. The white fedora was smiling, even obsequious. But there was a hard look in his eyes, a serious look in his eyes. And then he seemed concerned, angry, and the two men looked into the office.

  They looked at Matthew Canfield.

  The door was opened by Jesse. “You. Cannon. Mitch Cannon, c’mere.”

  It was always easier to use a cover having one’s own initials. You never could tell who’d send you
a Christmas gift.

  Canfield walked out onto the steel platform as the man in the white fedora descended the stairs to the cement floor of the pier.

  “You go down and sign the search papers.”

  “The hell you say, buddy!”

  “I said go down and sign the papers! They want to know you’re clean.” And then Jesse smiled. “The big boys are here.… You’ll get another little dividend.… But I get fifty percent, understand?”

  “Yeah,” Canfield said reluctantly. “I understand.” He started down the steps looking at the man who waited for him.

  “New here, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where ya’ from?”

  “Lake Erie. Lot of action in Lake Erie.”

  “What d’ya work?”

  “Canadian stuff. What else?… Good hooch that Canadian stuff.”

  “We import wool! Como wool!”

  “Yeah, sure, friend. In Erie it’s Canadian pelts, fabric.…” Canfield winked at the waterfront subaltern. “Good soft packing, huh?”

  “Look, fella. Nobody needs a wise guy.”

  “Okay.… Like I said. Wool.”

  “Come over to the dispatchers.… You sign for the loads.”

  Canfield walked with the large man to the dispatcher’s booth where a second man thrust a clipboard filled with papers at him.

  “Write clear and mark the dates and times perfect!” ordered the man in the booth.

  After Canfield had complied, the first man spoke. “Okay.… C’mon with me.” He led Canfield over to the automobiles. The field accountant could see two men talking in the back seat of the second vehicle. No one but a driver remained in the first car. “Wait here.”