9.1 Dead Drops

Saturday morning, after the Mevarchim mass, he took a walk to the Dumbo Market. Emmon always walked this way passing Water Street towards the anchorage wall of the Manhattan Bridge looming between the red brick walls of the buildings. As usual, this road remained quiet and empty, shadows of the buildings cast within a width from the foot on the left side. As he passed the tiny door of Turner & Sons, he found it slightly ajar. Howard would be in at his office.

Emmon opened the door and stepped in to greet him perhaps in the wake of a new month. He crossed the hall stuffed with leather goods and reached the door that led to the inner office.

To his disbelief, he found Howard Turner lying back in his chair, shot in the chest three times. He picked the phone and dialled 440 1234.

The NYPD arrived and began an investigation to question a terrified Emmon. He was a thirty-two-year-old single male who maintained a singular lifestyle besides visiting his own people. He had not gone anywhere out of the Dumbo. He was simply a tailor and strictly no sewing today.

Police found no sign of theft or vandalism, likely not suicide but a homicide. The biggest mystery was that no one could tell who Howard Turner was. Emmon said that he was his employer he met five years ago in Dumbo. His landlord who lived in Farmingdale said that Turner had been paying rent for twenty-five years. NYPD called FBI to find who Howard Turner was. Police worked in the stinky room collecting forensic evidence, photographed the scene and took measurements, searched for hairs and fingerprints, traces of gunpowder, bullet fragments and cartridge cases. They turned the place upside down and Emmon was taken for further questioning. The body was taken away in an ambulance for a postmortem and likely to remove the bullets.

It was by no coincidence that John Adams was in town. He took the week off to visit those two addresses in New York and Connecticut. Lieutenant Colonel Rolnik shared a little secret before parting Friday afternoon, “FBI has discontinued wiretapping King’s telephone line after a year and a half since he moved to Atlanta.”

Adams frowned not to say a word.

“What do you think about this guy?”

“Friesen’s articles narrate a lot about USSR but it does not resonate a tone of Marxism,” replied Adams, “He can’t be both. He must be a spy.”

“He’s a traitor,” agreed his boss, “Good luck with it and keep me informed.”

Adams flew to La Guardia on Saturday on a TWA in order to catch the first flight out and climbed a taxi to Time Square. As he checked in at Hotel Astor, the lady at the reception passed a message to call a Morgen Feldman urgently. This FBI agent at the scene on Water Street was saying, “You need to see this. Come to the Dumbo.”

John Adams rushed to Water Street in a cab. He could see the arch wall as the vehicle rolled towards west. There were two green and white police Plymouths parked outside and nobody in sight. As Adams climbed down the yellow cab, a guy in a trench coat appeared from a door on the red brick wall holding a handkerchief to his nose.

“Is it decomposed?” asked John Adams.

“No, no, it is the smell in there of chemicals and dyes. The body is taken away,” rubbed his fingers on the handkerchief and shoved his hand, “Morgen.”

“John Adams. What is it, Mr Morgen?”

“You were looking for a Tyler Friesen. Come and take a look!”

When he entered the narrow door, he saw those red cones marking a trail towards the office. “Footprints,” explained Morgen, “a pretty large pair of high heels.”

“What else did you find?”

“A couple of blonde hairs. Emmon could think of no stranger passing this door.”

In the third drawer on the righthand side of the desk where Howard Turner sat while he was killed, they discovered a black binder that contained the typewritten manuscript of ‘Lodestar’ with his name and address on its spine written in blue ink – Tyler Friesen’s unpublished novel.

Anne Seilwinde’s phone number was lying under the glass sheet on Turner’s desk among hundreds of bits and pieces, more on its wooden surface and the walls.

John Adams sat down with Assistant Director J F Maelon at 26 Federal Plaza on the 23^rd Floor, FBI Field Office in New York. In fact, this place was getting refitted by a crime lab, a photo lab and a sound movie studio for sobriety testing.

“What have you found?” asked the director.

“Its entire script in 540 pages is about the Berlin Airlift. There is not a trace of espionage.”

“It is there,” said Maelon, “it’s on the table where Turner was shot. It is under your very nose. You must be very patient and go through every bit of paper and phone number you find there. He’s a Russian spy. He’s killed by Russian agents to stop him from talking.”

“How can you say he’s killed by Russian agents?”

“Perhaps you’re new to this, John,” said Maelon, “The fact is that we can’t trace this guy. You heard about the Duquesne Spy Ring! When William Sebold acted as a double agent and cracked this ring at a makeshift office rigged for him by the FBI with microphones and two-way mirrors, nicknamed ‘Harry’, before we joined the war, we were able to receive hundreds of messages from the Nazi Germany, document extensive surveillance footage of the agents in this staged setting. The level of advancement in using cyphers and microphotography was unthinkable at the time. Thirty-three members of the Nazi spy ring were charged with espionage and they were mostly naturalised citizens working in ordinary jobs.

“And John, we need facts and evidence. Nothing can be based on statements. I can search that address in Westchester but we need more evidence. FBI has already gone there with a search warrant.”

“Tyler Friesen is a fugitive and he must be in the Interpol Red Notice,” suggested Adams.

“No,” said the chief, “we don’t want to spark unnecessary alarms, do we! They are watching closely as we speak. Take a field car and go to those addresses. Interview folks. My department will trace Howard Turner and the killer.”

“What do I look for?”

“Have you heard about the Hollow Nickel case?” asked the boss, “You need to look everywhere and these things take time to surface. New York is the hub for spies. Jimmy boy, a delivery boy for the Brooklyn Eagle, found a hollow nickel coin. Inside was a tiny print, a picture of a series of numbers, ten columns of typewritten numbers and nothing else. In 1953, we had to send it to Washington DC. The face of the coin was a Jefferson and the ‘R’ of the word ‘TRUST’ had a hole obviously drilled so that a fine needle could be inserted to flick it open.

“Then in May 1957, a Lieutenant Colonel of the KGB defected and submitted himself to the United States Embassy in Paris for an interview. He was called to return to Moscow after five years in the States. Reino Häyhänen worked for the NKVD until 1948, when he was recruited by the KGB and in the summer of 1949, he entered Finland as an American-born person by the name of Eugene Nicolai Maki from Idaho.

“There actually was a Eugene Nicolai Maki born in Enaville, Idaho, and this family sold everything and left for ‘New Russia’ in the mid-1920s. They settled in Estonia and continued to send letters to their former neighbours and often expressed how much they missed America. As years passed, they were forgotten.

“And then the Soviet-impersonated Maki arrived in Helsinki with a birth certificate from Idaho and a story that his family moved to Estonia when he was eight. This Maki was even married to a Finnish girl who knew him as Eugene Maki.

“Weeks before he departed for America, he was recalled to Moscow where he met a Soviet agent ‘Mikhail’, not his real name, and given instruction how to meet him in the States. He was told to go to Tavern on the Green in Central Park and place a red thumbtack on a post marked ‘Horse Cart’. If he was followed, he should place a white thumbtack on the signpost.

“From 1952 until 1954, Mikhail served as Maki’s espionage chief meeting at ‘dead drops’ in the New York area. They used hollowed-out bolts, batteries, coins and pens, toss them on the ground. When it comes to Russian espionage, they use very tricky, equally silly tactics rather than technology. Mikhail disappeared and in 1954 Maki was introduced to a ‘Mark’. There were other important spies this Maki identified like ‘Quebec’ who happened to be an Army sergeant working for the Russians.

“Maki said Mark was a fifty-year-old man and he took him once to a storage room at 252 Fulton Street. One of the tenants was an Emil Goldfus who resembled Mark’s description. They followed him to the ‘dead drop’ points now known to FBI. They followed Mark to Hotel Latham where he was registered under another name. They took a photograph with a hidden camera and showed to Maki who said that was him. This Mark was a KGB colonel and his real name is Rudolf Ivanovich Abel. He was indicted as a spy and tried in court in nineteen fifty-seven. Among the government witnesses to testify against this KGB spy was Lieutenant Colonel Reino Häyhänen.

“The numbers in the microphotograph from the Jefferson nickel was deciphered by the FBI lab based on information provided by Häyhänen and it was a message intended for him sent from the Soviet Union shortly after his arrival in the States.

“So, you need to look for Turner’s connections with workshops, lathe shops to electronics, photography studios, unlikely contacts and ‘dead drops’, they usually meet at public places. And wait for something to stir up. That guy working at Turner & Sons would know who he met. Well, John, you are unravelling a new spy ring.”

“What happened to Mikhail?”

“He slipped away back to the USSR.”