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  For Chris

  in the boat or on the trail,

  in crowded rooms or quarantine,

  after half a century

  the center that always holds

  PART ONE

  LOS ANGELES

  MONDAY,

  DECEMBER 8, 1941

  IT WAS THE LARGEST radio audience in history.

  On the cold coast of Maine, they were listening. Down on Wall Street, trading stopped so they could listen. On assembly lines in Detroit, they were taking long lunches so the autoworkers could listen. In Chicago, the butchers stopped slaughtering in the stockyards to listen. In Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa, where they grew corn and wheat enough to feed the world, now that the rains had returned and the dust had stopped blowing, the farmers were listening there, too.

  In all the places where the muscle and sinew of America bound one state or town or family to another, they were listening for the warm baritone and patrician inflections that somehow never sounded too upper-crusty coming out of the radio …

  … because America had awakened that morning to the cold reality of war, war in every time zone, war encircling the earth, war once more as the original human fact.

  In Hawaii, U.S. Navy battleships burned beneath great funerary clouds of black oil smoke. In the far Pacific, Japanese troops attacked along every line of latitude and longitude. In swirling blizzards of blood and snow, Russians and Germans slaughtered each other before Moscow. Across Europe, jackboots echoed and resistance guttered, while U-boats stalked freighters on the roiling gray Atlantic. But Americans were listening because Franklin Roosevelt was about to make sense of it all.

  In Washington, the CBS radio announcer was describing the packed House chamber, the tense atmosphere … when suddenly his voice rose: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, the president is appearing and moving toward the podium.”

  And from out of deep-bass consoles and tinny tabletop radios in every corner of the country, a roar exploded, something between a cheer and an angry shout, the harsh, hard, ferocious cry of Americans lifting themselves from shock and drawing strength from the president who’d lifted himself from a wheelchair and by remarkable force of will was appearing upright before them.

  When the roar receded, the Speaker announced, “Senators and Representatives, I have the distinguished honor of presenting the president of the United States.”

  More cheers and shouts, then Franklin Roosevelt’s voice rang out, firm, confident, indignant: “Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives: Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.…”

  In the West, radio stations had gone off the air the night before so that Japanese bombers couldn’t home in on the broadcasts.

  But now, Roosevelt’s voice rolled across deserts, up and over mountain ranges, and down into the warm green dream of Southern California, down along boulevards laid like gridwork atop lettuce fields and orange groves, down onto long, straight, relentless thoroughfares that ended where scrub-covered hillsides leaped up to define and divide the expanse of Los Angeles, down into offices and coffee shops and cars where people were listening, unaware that as Roosevelt spoke, a Nazi assassin was shooting at targets in a local canyon and planning the most daring act of the age, unaware also that before it was over, he would draw many of them into his dark orbit.

  * * *

  ONE OF THEM, A young man named Kevin Cusack, was listening in the Warner Bros. story department. He and his friends should have been working. They were the gang who read the plays and novels sent out from New York, then synopsized them and offered opinions. A pile of books and manuscripts lay on the table. But Jack L. Warner himself was probably listening, so why shouldn’t they?

  Kevin’s next assignment: a play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s. He didn’t hold much hope for it. All he needed to read was the story editor’s one-liner: “A love triangle set in wartime Casablanca.” He hated love triangles. But when you worked on the bottom rung in the story department for a buck twelve an hour, you took what they gave you.

  And the job was good cover, along with his Irish surname and dark Irish brow. His friends in the German American Bund loved that he worked by day in a “nest of Hollywood Jews,” then went down to Deutsches Haus, the Bund hall, to drink German beer and deliver the gossip every night. If they’d known that he was really a spy who passed information to the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, who then passed it to the FBI, those jolly Germans might have killed him.

  But he felt safe at the studio. When Roosevelt said, “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory,” Kevin cheered right along with those congressmen and senators back in Washington.

  So did all the others around the conference table. Jerry Sloane, an emotional kind of guy, wiped away a tear. Sally Drake, the only female in the room, the girl with the Vassar accent and Katharine Hepburn slacks, put her fingers in her mouth and gave out with a big ballpark whistle. Pretty good for a college girl.

  Kevin liked Sally. He liked her a lot. So did Jerry. And Jerry seemed to be winning. Maybe that was why Kevin hated love triangles.

  * * *

  OVER ON WEST OLIVE, Big Time Breakfast of Burbank was pumping out the all-American aromas of bacon and coffee. In some small ways, life went on as usual on the day after Pearl Harbor. People got hungry. People got thirsty. People dreamed of better days. But in the booths and at the counter, conversation and plate-scraping stopped as soon as the president’s voice came out of the radio. Now all the day players and studio hands were listening, except for one young woman in a yellow dress who sat at the end of the counter, sipped her coffee, and stared into space.

  Vivian Hopewell didn’t have money for breakfast, not in a restaurant anyway. She barely had money for a bowl of cornflakes at home, if that’s what you could call a single in a crummy Glendale rooming house.

  Rattling around in her purse were three nickels, two dimes, and an envelope containing one glossy headshot. She always carried a headshot. A girl had to be ready. Now that there was a war on, maybe she’d catch a break. Folks back home always said she looked like a young Marlene Dietrich. Maybe that Germanic bone structure might appeal to some casting director who needed a Nazi villainess.

  But in the brown paper bag at her feet she carried a pair of white, rubber-soled flats and a gray uniform dress, to show that she knew how to wait tables, too, from back when she was just plain Kathy Schortmann of Annapolis, Maryland.

  The
owner had already given her the bad news: he’d hired somebody else. “She ain’t quite so pretty as you, so she ain’t likely to go runnin’ across the street if she gets a walk-on in some cheapo serial.”

  “Across the street” was Gate 4, a breach in the wall surrounding the Warner Bros. soundstages that were more beautiful to Vivian than the Taj Mahal … and just as remote. And it was true. If she ever got a role—good girl, bad girl, or background-broad bit part—she’d be gone from that breakfast counter before she untied her apron.

  So she finished her coffee and stepped out into the sunshine. At least there was always sunshine. It made the disappointment easier to take. She glanced again at Gate 4, then checked the bus schedule back to Glendale. Maybe she’d hitch a ride and save a nickel. Or maybe she’d walk. It was only six miles, and she had her waitress shoes.

  * * *

  FBI SPECIAL AGENT FRANK Carter was listening, too, until he heard a gunshot. He told his driver to turn down the radio. He was riding in the back seat of a government-issue Ford sedan with three other agents, all in dark Hoover-approved suits.

  They’d traveled out Sunset and taken the right opposite the Riviera Country Club, a high-hat address in an up-and-coming part of town. But in L.A., even the best street could dead-end against a scrubby hillside or lead into some wild canyon. So at the top, they’d headed onto the Sullivan Ridge Fire Road, with an LAPD patrol wagon close behind. This was a raid.

  To the left, the land dropped three hundred feet through gray-green chaparral and bay bush, down to a stream called Rustic Creek. Then it jumped up again, up into the sunshine, up to that ridgeline running away to the west and down to the sea.

  Carter told the driver to pull over.

  “Why here?” asked Agent Mike McDonald, who also sat in the back seat with a map on his knees. “This shows all the Nazi stuff down at the bottom.”

  “It also shows a fence and two flights of stairs. Cut the engine.” Carter got out, looked at the paddy wagon, and made a gesture with his hand. Turn it off. Then he stood for a moment and listened.

  No more gunshots. No shouts of alarm. Only the hum of a generator somewhere below and FDR’s voice riding the updraft like a whisper.

  So … down in their compound, the Nazis were listening, too.

  Carter studied the chain-link fence. One side descended into the canyon, and the other ran along the road on fresh concrete footings, cordoning off a property purchased from the enormous estate of cowboy comedian Will Rogers in 1933.

  “They fenced it all,” said McDonald. “Fifty-five acres. That’s a lot of fence. And the road. They paved the road. Who the hell paves a fire road on a ridgeline?”

  Carter didn’t answer. No need to answer. Not worth answering. In general, he followed the rule of the New York street: Never write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod, never nod when you can wink. It had served him well in the FBI, so well that he’d climbed all the way to second-in-command at the L.A. field office, which overnight had become the busiest place in town.

  Before the bombs had stopped falling in Hawaii, the teletype had begun clattering out the names of Japanese and German nationals, along with American citizens who displayed certain disloyal “tendencies.” Some were dangerous, some merely victims of their heritage. But by dawn, twenty-five FBI agents, supported by the LAPD, had fanned out across the city and grabbed two hundred and fifty Japanese. Now they were turning to the Germans, and there were a lot of Germans down in that canyon.

  The property was called the Murphy Ranch, but the real owners were named Stephens, mining millionaires and Nazi sympathizers, of which L.A. had more than its share: the German American Bund, the Silver Legion, the America Firsters, the Ku Klux Klan, and a lot more.

  And they’d all spent the last eight years warming up for der Tag, the day when they’d rise up, get rid of all the Jews, and give Hitler a great big happy-days-are-here-again Hollywood welcome. A true fifth column, right in the town where they brought the American dream to life on the silver screen … and a lot of folks lived it, too.

  That’s what Carter believed, anyway, thanks to a bunch of amateur spies known as the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, or LAJCC for short. While the FBI spent its time chasing Commies, these Jews and their friends had placed some pretty bold operatives in those pro-Nazi gangs. And Carter was glad of it.

  He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Most people loved the perpetual springtime of Southern California. But Carter was an East Coast guy. To him, seventy degrees in December was just … strange. Every morning, he told himself that if he did his job, he’d get back to New York or Washington, and sooner rather than later.

  On the other side of the fence, a long flight of concrete steps dropped past a massive steel tank and disappeared into tree cover below.

  How well these Nazi lovers were building, he thought. They’d even hired a big L.A. architecture firm to design a forty-room mansion, supposedly as Hitler’s California hideaway. There wasn’t any sign of it yet, but the owners had spent millions on the roads, the fences, a power station, terraced gardens for food, a motor pool, even a stable.

  “That’s some tank,” said McDonald.

  “That’s for water,” said Carter. “Gas for the generators is farther down.”

  Two guards in shiny silver-gray shirts, blue jodhpurs, and blue field caps—privates in the Silver Legion—came huffing and puffing up the long flight of concrete steps, rifles at the ready.

  Before they caught their breath, Carter ordered them to open the gate.

  “We can’t do that, sir. Private property,” said one of them.

  Carter flipped his badge. “FBI. Put down the guns and open the goddamn gate.” When they hesitated, he gestured to Agent Doane, who raised his tommy gun.

  A moment later, the lock popped. The chain-link swung open.

  Carter told the cops to arrest the Silver Legion lackeys. Then he told Doane, “Cover the steps, shoot anything that moves, and no smoking.” Then he headed back to the car.

  McDonald hustled after him, saying, “Doanie gets the jitters without a smoke. And he’s trigger-happy enough already.”

  “Today, we’re all trigger-happy. Trigger-happy is good.” Carter turned to the paddy wagon and spun his finger in the air. Start the siren.

  * * *

  DEEP IN THE CANYON, German agent Martin Browning had been tracking the engine noise. When it stopped, he’d told the others that target practice was over. Then he’d begun detaching his Mauser C96 pistol from its shoulder stock.

  But Fritz Kessler had squeezed off one last round, just to show who was boss of their little cell. At least skinny Tom Stengle did as he was told.

  Martin Browning had been reluctant to join them that morning, but Kessler had insisted, because doing things out of the ordinary attracted attention. And on Mondays they shot targets at the Murphy Ranch. Martin knew that this Monday would be different. But agents hiding in plain sight should keep to routines. Besides, there might be news from Berlin, picked up on the shortwave in the powerhouse. This might be his last chance to practice the killing shot. So here he was.

  Martin Browning preferred to work alone. But he needed a target range, and he needed money, because money let him maintain multiple identities, go by many names, keep numerous addresses.

  As far as his family knew, he was still studying in Germany. But Martin Browning—born Martin Bruning, 1911, in Koblenz am Rhein, raised from the age of eleven in Flatbush, Brooklyn, educated at Heidelberg, recruited into Section 6, the foreign intelligence division of the Reich Security Office—had slipped back into the States two years earlier aboard a German ship that docked at Long Beach, a favorite Nazi port of entry, since the FBI paid a lot less attention to Germans in California than in New York, and certain elements of the LAPD were downright friendly.

  Martin Browning had connected with L.A. Bund leader Hermann Schwinn, who met every German ship, conferred with Gestapo agents who were always aboard, and
returned to Deutsches Haus with orders, propaganda, and American cash to fund operations on the West Coast. When Schwinn asked Martin to join the Bund, Martin decided it would be the best way to stay in Schwinn’s good graces, which would be the best way to maintain his flow of Nazi cash, which he needed more than anyone’s good graces.

  The sirens were moving now, down the fire road toward the compound gate. Martin Browning slipped his Mauser into its wooden holster and slipped the holster into a leather satchel. Then he told the others it was time to go.

  “Let’s run for the stables,” said Stengle. “Get horses and ride out to the north … up Mandeville Canyon, up to Mulholland—”

  “The feds are too close,” said Martin Browning. “You’ll never get past.”

  Stengle’s voice quavered. “I … I don’t want to get caught.”

  Browning shifted his eyes to Kessler. “Do you have a plan?”

  “We parked out on the street for the quick escape.” Kessler tapped his temple, the brains of the operation. “So we go up the concrete stairs. We go up while the FBI is down here arresting Silver Shirts. We go up, get in our car, and get away.”

  A dozen or more members of the Silver Legion were always patrolling the property, drilling, practicing street-fighting tactics, pretending to be real soldiers. Martin Browning didn’t give them much thought, although pretending was the first step to becoming. Hitler and his Brownshirts had proven that.

  Kessler wiped sweat from his hairline and fumbled for a cigarette.

  Martin Browning knew that the big German blowhard, a waiter and bouncer at the Gaststube, the Bund hall restaurant, was doing his best to keep calm. Martin considered Kessler a fool, and the worst kind, who believed he understood life in all its small details and grand strategies, all because he’d spent time in a trench on the Western Front in 1918.