Origins: The Reich (4 page)

“Then why are all of you sitting around this blasted table and not out in the world doing something about it?” the fifth and final attendee of the meeting asked in a half joking tone as he stepped onto the balcony.

Hastelloy glanced over to find Valnor looking like a malnourished stick figure wearing a tattered peasant overcoat.  He carried a small potato sack over his shoulder with the meager contents of an extra pair of shoes, one change of clothes, and a mostly eaten moldy loaf of bread.  Gallono was mired in the active fighting and as such, Hastelloy expected him to look the worst for wear, but Valnor took the prize hands down.

“My God, are things really that bad on the eastern front?” Hastelloy asked as he pointed up and down Valnor’s frail stature as evidence.

“Worse, but I’m not at the front any longer.  I’m back in Moscow where there simply isn’t enough of anything to keep people alive,” Valnor reported.  “When winter comes this year and there is no fuel oil for warmth or food, I see things ending very badly for the Tsar and his privileged elite.”

“That will shift a lot of German soldiers toward the western front to sandbag against the tidal wave of American’s you promised me earlier,” Gallono warned.

Hastelloy dismissed the notion with a grunt.  “The Russians aren’t firing many shots at this point anyway, and besides, it’ll take time and resources the Germans no longer have to move them.  No.  Barring something profound happening, the Great War will come to an end next year when the American forces arrive and tip the scales to the Allies favor. 

“The problem for the five of us, and by default the twenty million Novi soldiers still housed in the Nexus, and every human on this planet for that matter, is that this war will have happened without any significant technological advancement.  We need to reach the point where we can launch nuclear or fusion weapons at the Alpha base on Mars before they can visit the mischief upon us first.  After three years of global warfare, the only steps toward that goal are open-air bi-planes flying overhead with pilots dropping bombs by hand as a means for targeting.  I think the five of us can come up with a plan to do better than that.”

“In essence, we have less than fifty years to guide Sigma species in making a quantum leap forward in flight, rocketry, and physics to suit our needs.  I need suggestions on how to accomplish that, and at this point the gloves are completely off.  I want any ideas you have, no matter how conflicted they might be with our noninterference directive,” Hastelloy asked.

“We can always provoke another war,” Valnor suggested, which drew a sharp response from Hastelloy.

“No, there’s been enough bloodshed already!  I think we can draw countries and regions into a technology race without actual shots fired.  It will be a cold war between super powers.”

“The United Kingdom has to be one of them,” Valnor offered.  “They control half the planet already; the sun literally never sets on the British Empire.  Why don’t we assume power and use their might and resources?”

“They are spread too far, and their colonies are declaring independence by the dozens,” Gallono countered.  “They have lost so much in this war that they’ll never be able to hold it all together.  I’m afraid the sun has already set on the British Empire.”

“That leaves my Mother Russia,” Valnor suggested.  “They have vast amounts of land, people, and resources.

“However, as you pointed out, there is a very unpopular monarchy on the throne,” Hastelloy cautioned.  “You sure it can be stabilized?”

“I’m sure it can be overthrown,” Valnor countered.  “The Bolshevik Party is poised for a major revolution in the near future, and this concept of theirs, communism, has me intrigued.  It’s catching on like wildfire and winning over the hearts and minds of the Russian people.”

“Sharing all national resources among the citizens does indeed sound good in theory, but putting it into practice could be problematic,” Tonwen pondered.  “It should be an interesting social experiment to observe.”

Hastelloy stared at his hands resting on the table in silent contemplation.  He did not trust this pending change in Russia.  A certain portion of the population always wanted more and would do anything to get it.  There was also a much larger segment content to do nothing if the bare necessities were provided for them no matter what.  He could see the result being a profoundly corrupt and lazy society held under the thumb of a ruthless few.  However, they were running out of options.

Finally, Hastelloy nodded his head, “Do it.  Help this revolution and the resulting government however you can.”

“It goes without saying that the United States should be another of these superpowers,” Tonwen suggested.  “Their resources are almost endless.”

“Agreed.  Plus, I just graduated from George Washington University Law School and have been offered a job in the government’s new Bureau of Investigation,” Hastelloy said.  “The potential breadth of influence this organization could have will certainly yield opportunities to push that democratic government in the right direction.”

“Why are we debating the virtues of influencing individual nations?” Tomal interjected.  “There is a group of people who already more or less control most of the world through their stranglehold on banking, currency exchanges, and international commerce.”

“And who might that be?” Valnor asked in an overly polite tone, which broadcasted that he and everyone else in the room already knew the question’s answer.

“Why don’t you ask the captain?” Tomal volleyed back.  “He led them out of the desert and set them up as masters of all things business and currency related.  Why not use that to the advantage of our mission now?”

All Hastelloy could do was draw a deep breath and let it out slowly to ease his frustration, but it didn’t help much.  “This again?  You made your disdain for the Jewish people abundantly clear in your later writings as Martin Luther. I told you back then, and I am telling you now some four hundred years later, there is no Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.  Now, I hereby order you once and for all to drop the vile subject.  Do I make myself clear?”

“Abundantly so,” Tomal responded and continued after a brief, contemplative pause.  “In that case, I submit that Europe is a third option for us.  If united in a common goal, it could surpass both the United States and Russia in resources and technical knowhow.”

“It is going to be a war ravaged and fractured place with hard feelings between nations for many generations to come,” Hastelloy cautioned.

“Gallono is already well placed in the German army, and I’m making good contacts with scholars and politicians at the university.  Together we can do this,” Tomal declared with unwavering confidence.

Anything to keep Tomal busy and out of the way with Gallono nearby to handle any incidents was fine with Hastelloy.  “Agreed.”

“What about me?” Tonwen asked.

“I understand you were recently accepted to study theoretical physics at Cambridge,” Hastelloy pointed out.  “Shine.  Publish groundbreaking discoveries, develop relationships with the brightest minds and be ready to bring them all over to the nation we move along the quickest.”

“M
ö
chtenSie schon beskellen?” a polite male voice asked from over Hastelloy’s shoulder.

“
Yes we’re ready to order,”
Hastelloy answered in German. 
“Let’s start with some wine.”

“You had better enjoy that ‘sinful’ beverage while you still can,” Tomal teased in their native Novi language.  “I hear the conservative factions of the American electorate are pushing hard to ban alcohol.  It may be a completely dry nation in the next few years.”

“Law or not, the people will still want their alcohol,” Gallono countered.

“Yes they will,” Hastelloy agreed with a mischievous twinkle touching the corner of his eyes.  “They most certainly will, and that presents an intriguing opportunity for us.”

Hastelloy watched through
a set of prism binoculars as yet another group of men opened the front door to the single story community center and stepped inside.  He lowered the lens, moved back into the dark alleyway, and turned to address his men.  “That makes over a hundred in there now.  You’re going to need to be fast and authoritative.  If anyone gets in your way or gives you any lip, you crack him right upside the head and keep moving to your assigned perimeter position.”

“Once we have control of the room, the regular black and whites will handle cuffing and placing them under arrest,” Hastelloy went on.  He was about to give the go order when he felt the need to clarify one last point.  “No one, and I do mean no one, shoots unless they shoot first.  Even in that instance, you will only fire into the air.  The last thing we need is the picture of a dead man in cuffs on the front page of tomorrow’s paper.”

“Better dead than red,” one of his men said under his breath to a chorus of chuckles.

“Better arrested and silenced than a propaganda tool for Lenin, Stalin, or any of those other pinko bastards,” Hastelloy responded.  “Now load up.  We go in one minute.”

The sound of a dozen Thompson machine gun bolts pulled back to chamber a round was music to his ears.  A moment later the suspension bars of both model A cars groaned under the weight of three men to a side stepping up onto the running boards while holding on under the open window with their free hand.

“Go,” Hastelloy ordered with an emphatic wave of his hand.  As both vehicles roared past him in a swirl of black exhaust, accompanied by the shrill pitch of whistles blowing, they converged on the community center from all directions.  At the entrance, two dozen cars loaded with bureau agents arrived in unison to storm the building.

He could not see them, but the sound of engines, whistles, and shouting from behind the community center let Hastelloy know his men had successfully secured the back alley as well.  That gave him leave to begin jogging toward the building on foot.

Ahead, through the growing darkness of early evening, he watched twenty men storm through the front door en masse.  The wave of aggressive agents overtook the two door watchers and battered them to the ground where they remained curled into the fetal position in an attempt to protect themselves.

The army of agents passed from his view, but the crashing sound of tables overturning and incoherent shouts gave a good account of their whereabouts.  A handful of attendees attempted to flee out the front doors, and a slippery pair even tried climbing out a bathroom window, but the agents apprehended all of them.

A few minutes later, the police paddy wagons arrived along with the police chief who made a straight-line path for Hastelloy.  He addressed him in a gruff tone over a chorus of protests spoken in both English and Russian from cuffed men being ushered from the meeting into the wagons.  “Director, serving a warrant for illegal assembly is a little below your pay grade don’t you think?”

“A communist party gathering in our nation’s capital is serious business.   Internal subterfuge is the greatest risk our nation has ever faced; more dangerous than even The Great War.  These glowing embers of radicalism must be stamped out before they can catch fire,” Hastelloy answered with a sideways glare toward the police chief, which was met by a loud pop that washed his vision out in pure white.  The temporary blindness eventually subsided to reveal a newspaper photographer unscrewing the spent bulb of his flash to take another shot.

“Be sure your officers perp. walk enough of them past the press.  I’d hate for any major paper to settle for an out of focus shot on their front page spread,” Hastelloy ordered, only half joking.  He then gestured for the police chief to lead the way into the building.

“Ah no wonder, it’s a press raid,” the gray-haired police chief sighed while holding the front door open for Hastelloy to enter.  “Got to show the people the rise of communism is being kept in check here at home by our brave Bureau of Investigation.  You know only one or two of these arrests are going to stick right?  You fellas in suits already tried this garbage ten years ago with the Palmer Raids.  You couldn’t deport any of them then, and you darn sure won’t now.”

Hastelloy stepped into the central gathering room of the community center and took in the intimidating presence.  Staggered every ten feet around the perimeter of the rectangular room stood an agent holding his disk fed Thompson machine gun pointing toward the ceiling.  The stout, militant presence was unmistakable and the faint aroma of urine in the air let him know more than a few men attending the disrupted meeting had the piss scared out of them.

“Permanent imprisonment isn’t really the objective,” Hastelloy countered.  “Disruption, intimidation, and publicity do much better.”

“Your personal publicity or the Bureau’s?” the police chief asked.  “The cameras would have caught this with or without you here.”

Hastelloy stopped on his path toward the facility’s backdoor to look upon the police chief with amusement.  “Being appointed by the President to head his new Bureau of Investigation at the ripe age of twenty-seven does take a certain amount of showmanship along with ability.  Anyone can smile for the cameras, a special few can actually do the job, but only a true genius finds win-win opportunities to do both.”

The police chief moved his eyes down to look at a puddle of fresh blood a few inches in diameter on the floor. “Bludgeoning men who are only attempting to exercise their rights to free speech and assembly guaranteed under the constitution will eventually catch up to you.”

“Careful there Chief, you’re starting to sound like a commie sympathizer.  These days even a rumor of such political leaning could get you into trouble,” Hastelloy cautioned.

The aging police chief looked up again to stare down the man before him who was less than half his age.  “Translation: is that some kinda threat?”

Hastelloy held the fiery stare for several seconds before taking a long and noisy sniff of the air between them.  “You smell that?”

“You mean something besides the dirty diaper of this little child standing in front of me?”

“Yes, besides that.  I smell a still simmering nearby,” Hastelloy said with a growing smile.  “How in the world does a city so dedicated to the tenets of prohibition that it passed a constitutional amendment banning the sale or manufacturing of alcohol have an active distillery?  Does anybody else smell that?  I’m pretty sure it’s coming from the back alley.”

“I don’t smell anything,” the police chief declared along with a chorus of Hastelloy’s men giving a similar response.

“You four come with me,” Hastelloy ordered on his way out the back door with the police chief and a pair of his officers in tow.  He stopped in the middle of the alleyway, turned his nose up into the air and gave both directions a long sniff.  “That way,” he said pointing to the right. 

After the group walked nearly a hundred yards down the shadowy corridor lit every fifty feet by a streetlamp, Hastelloy heard one of his men comment, “Boss you’ve got a nose like a bloodhound.  I definitely smell something now coming from that warehouse on the left up ahead; the one with a truck idling at the back loading dock.”

“Looks like we have ourselves a doubleheader tonight boys,” the police chief declared.  It was obvious he could not wait to get his men in there with the cameras watching his heroic moment.

“You don’t have a warrant to search that building, and we both know that probable cause after the fact is nearly impossible to prove these days,” Hastelloy cautioned.  “Any evidence gathered won’t be admissible in court.”

“Neither will all those arrests you made back there, but like you said, sometimes it’s not about making the arrests stick.  Sometimes it’s about sending a message and instilling fear in the enemy,” the chief countered and physically turned Hastelloy around to face him.  “You bureau boys have no jurisdiction over this.  This will be my men taking these bootleggers down.  You understand me?”

“Have it your way, just don’t forget to smile for the cameras,” Hastelloy said with his hands raised past his shoulders in surrender.  He motioned with his head for his four agents to start walking back to the community center and fell in step behind them.  Hastelloy shouted over his shoulder back to the police chief and his men, “Just be sure to do it right.  If you can’t confiscate their equipment, at least make sure it will never function again before leaving.”

Hastelloy allowed his men to get about fifty feet ahead before he called out to them, “Go ahead and wrap things up in there.  I’ll be along shortly.”

After a few more steps, he came out from under the illuminated circle cast upon the alleyway by the overhead streetlight.  Now shrouded in shadows he dashed to the side.  There, against an otherwise solid brick wall, his hands found a doorknob, which he tested to verify that it was indeed unlocked.  He quietly opened the door and stepped into the back room of a two-story structure that stood adjacent to the soon to be raided warehouse.  

He closed the door without a sound and let his eyes adjust to the lack of light before making another move.  The faint outlines of a commercial kitchen materialized through the darkness.  Eventually he saw a clear path leading to a closed door backlit by a lighted room on the other side of the barrier.

Hastelloy made his way to the door and opened it with a calm, even pace so as not to startle the other room’s occupants.  He again paused before moving to let his eyes adjust to the lighting difference.  When the whitewash faded into clear vision once more, Hastelloy found himself staring down the barrel of a handgun.  The weapon was wielded by a man easily twice his size with no body fat.  Even if there were, he was not about to point it out to the brawny individual.

The mountain of a man was all business as he held the gun steady in Hastelloy’s face while patting him down for weapons with his free hand.

“He’s clean,” an appropriately baritone voice declared.  He then stepped aside to grant Hastelloy entry into a quaint little Italian restaurant.  The front curtains were drawn tight with a sign that read closed hanging from the front door.

Two men sat around a small table with an open bottle of red wine between them.  The gentleman on the left sported the receding hairline of a forty-year old and wore a midnight black suit.  The other was at most twenty-five and donned a much flashier charcoal gray double-breasted suit along with a white fedora.  The elder was the first to speak.

“J. Edgar Hoover, the famed director of the Bureau of Investigation.  This young hotshot has cost you and me more money than any other man alive,” the elder said to the younger with a playful flippancy.  “Is that your boys I hear tossing my warehouse next door?”

“No, Don Maranzano, it’s the police chief and his men this time,” Hastelloy said on his way to the empty chair positioned across from the other two individuals.  “I practically had to kick in the door myself before the old timer finally caught on.  Even when we want them to bust an operation of yours, they can barely get it done.”

“Letting one of your joints be taken don’t seem like no way to run things,” the younger man interrupted.

“Director Hoover, this is my associate, Al.  He’s visiting from Chicago to see how things ought to operate,” Maranzano said as an introduction.

“If we bust too many of Joe Maseria’s places without taking down a few of yours, then our arrangement begins to look suspicious.  I can’t be seen as playing favorites,” Hastelloy instructed the younger man, but turned his attention to Maranzano with a question.  “You did manage to get most of your inventory and workers out of there before tonight, right?”

“Of course,” the Don replied and began pouring himself and Hastelloy a glass of wine.  “I even managed to have a few boys I suspect were on Joe’s payroll working the dock this fine evening.”

Hastelloy raised his glass in salute to a job well done and continued the tutorial.  “Plus, a bust like this with all the reporters and photographers around is worth at least twenty with no one looking.  Pretty soon Don Maranzano will have the entire eastern seaboard to himself so long as he sticks to the vice rackets of alcohol, prostitution and gambling.”

“What about other things like skimmin’ union dues, jackin’ delivery trucks, or puttin’ troublemakers six feet under?  That kind of thing pays way better than bootleggin’ and sellin’ tail,” Al countered.  “Besides, the politicians will come to their senses sooner or later and end the prohibition laws.  We need to branch out and be ready.”

  “People actually want alcohol, gambling and working girls.  That’s why the Bureau and I have no problem looking the other way.  When an organized crime ring branches into robbing banks, extortion and murder…?  Well, then public outcry demands that I take action, and that can get very expensive for men like you.  Just ask Joe Maseria.”

“So that’s it.  We cooperate and let you have a flashy bust every now and then, and you leave us be the rest of the time?” Al asked, his voice dripping with skepticism.

“Nothing is ever that simple,” Hastelloy countered.  “The Bureau’s cooperation does not come so cheap.  Speaking of that, Don Maranzano, I believe you have some folders for me.”

“I do indeed,” the Don confirmed motioning with his free hand for his bulky associate to bring a briefcase over to the table.  The hired muscle worked the combination, opened the lid, and placed it in front of Hastelloy for his inspection.