Part 45

“Of course I’ll see him,” Duncan said.

“He’ll be at the Henry Hudson Hotel in one hour,” the Sabena representative said. “Room 301. He’s one of our radio operators.”

Duncan went to the hotel with Agent Harold Smith, another veteran investigator with whom he had worked on scores of cases. The Sabena radio operator was waiting for them in his room.

“You have some information for us?” Duncan asked.

“I think so,” the operator said. “I want you to understand why I’m giving you this information. I’m damned tired of being under suspicion every time I come into New York. I’m fed up with being searched and questioned and delayed. I want to see this thing cleared up.”

“We don’t like it any more than you do,” Duncan said. “We’ll let up on the pressure as soon as we can.”

The operator said that earlier in the year he had been approached in Belgium by a pilot with whom he had flown as a member of the Belgian air force. This man had told him he could earn a large sum of money if he would merely wear a pair of specially made shoes into the United States and then turn the shoes over to a man who would call for them. It was obvious to the operator that he was being asked to smuggle diamonds into the United States.

“I turned them down,” he said to Duncan. “I didn’t want to get mixed up in anything like that.”

“Do you know anyone who is carrying diamonds?” Duncan asked.

“No,” the operator said, “I don’t. But I presume the same offer was made to someone else. Probably another Sabena crew member with whom this man had flown in the past.” He gave them the pilot’s name.

The conversation tended to support Duncan’s suspicion that the smuggling was being done by a person connected with Sabena. He sent a cable to the Treasury representative in Antwerp, Bill Beers, a gregarious, bilingual agent with a remarkable talent for cultivating sources of information in Europe. He asked Beers to furnish a list of the names of Sabena employees who once had been fliers in the Belgian air force. He got the list, but at the time it wasn’t much help, even though one of the names was Robert Edmund Deppe.

When the search of Deppe’s luggage was completed at the airport, an agent said, “That’s all. You may go now.”

Deppe collected his luggage and walked outside to hail a cab. He was driven to the Henry Hudson Hotel on 57th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, where Sabena Airlines personnel were quartered on their stopovers in New York.

When he reached his room, he tried to make a phone call, but no one answered. For the next few hours, he tried again and again to get an answer from the number. At last he took a shower, changed into light sports clothes and left the hotel to get a late dinner.

The telephone which Deppe heard ringing was in the apartment of Julius Falkenstein at 58 West 72nd St. The reason Falkenstein didn’t answer at the time was that he and his wife were being detained and searched by Customs agents at the Canadian border.

As far as Falkenstein’s friends knew, he was merely a hard-working employee of a New York furrier whose place of business was in the Manhattan garment district. He was a quiet chap who minded his own business. Customs agents had never heard his name until Friday, July 10--two days before Deppe’s plane landed at Idlewild--when Duncan received an urgent trans-Atlantic call from Beers in Antwerp.

“Tom,” Beers said, “I’ve got a good line on a smuggling ring. My informant here tells me that their New York contact is Julius Falkenstein. He has a brother in the business in Antwerp.”

“Maybe this is what we’ve been looking for,” Duncan said. “We’ll get right on it.”

Two agents called at the furrier’s shop where Falkenstein worked but were told that he had left for the weekend. This news was relayed to Agents Harold F. Smith and John Moseley, who had been sent by Duncan to watch the Falkenstein apartment building. The agents had obtained a description of their man from an apartment employee.

At 6 P.M. on that muggy afternoon, Falkenstein and his wife Ann came out of the building carrying suitcases. They walked around the corner and climbed into a car. Then they headed across town to the elevated West Side Highway and turned north. The agents followed them for several miles but finally lost them in the heavy weekend traffic. When the agents reported by radio to Duncan that they had lost contact, Duncan said, “Let ’em go. They are probably headed for the Catskills. We’ll pick them up again Monday.”

That night Duncan had another call from Antwerp. He was told that an informant had reported two shipments of diamonds were enroute to New York, one by way of Canada.

Duncan played a hunch. He called Agent Abe Eisenberg, the Customs’ representative in Montreal. Eisenberg was about sixty years old, a chunky man with graying hair who had been matching wits with smugglers for almost forty years. He was one of the best undercover men in the Service; he had an actor’s ability to look like a dignified banker or a bum. A man of meticulous honesty, he had one obsession: he hated crooked Jews. Being Jewish himself, he regarded every dishonest Jew as a disgrace to his race.

When Eisenberg answered the call, Duncan told him of the tip from Antwerp and the suspicion that Falkenstein was involved. He explained that the Falkensteins had left Manhattan that afternoon and had headed north.

“Keep a check on the hotels, Abe,” Duncan said. “They may be headed your way to pick up the diamonds.”

“Remember, I’m up here all alone,” Eisenberg said. “I can’t do my job and watch them too.”

Duncan laughed. “Don’t worry. You’ll get reinforcements. I’ll send Harold Smith up on the next plane. Julius Zamosky and I will come up by car. We may need the car to tail them when they start back this way.”

Duncan called Smith and told him to get to Montreal by plane as quickly as possible to give Eisenberg a helping hand. Then he called Zamosky, another of the veterans on the Racket Squad, and at dawn they were headed out of Manhattan for the Canadian border.

All day Saturday and Saturday night the agents, working with Canadian police, kept Falkenstein and his wife under surveillance. Falkenstein made several telephone calls to friends and visited them in their offices. Then at 9 A.M. on Sunday, he and his wife checked out of the hotel. They stowed their luggage in the car trunk and headed south.