His next call was at an address near Madison Square Garden in an alley off 31st Street. It was a narrow-fronted shop with a sign that said, “Martin Electrics.” The dusty windows showed rows of valves, condensers, knobs and switches that made the place look more like a junk shop than an electrics store. He pushed open the door and a man came out from a backroom wearing a grubby singlet and brown chinos. He was in his forties with a pale face and a pair of wire-frame spectacles pushed up onto his forehead.
“Are you the guy asking on the phone about rectifiers?”
Aarons shook his head and gave him the password. For a moment the man looked as if he didn’t recognise the question but Aarons saw the recognition dawning on the man’s face and then he gave the response. Then the man held out his hand, “Cowley. Roger Cowley. You’d better come in the back.”
The room he was taken into was as untidy as the shop-window but on a shelf above the work-bench was a row of measuring meters and a board with screwdrivers, pliers and boxes of screws neatly set out in rows.
Cowley cleared a pile of tattered instruction books from a chair and waved for Aarons to sit down.
“You know anything about radio, friend?”
“No. I had some basic training but it was only on how to use a short-wave receiver.”
“I show you something. Come with me.”
Aarons followed him up a wooden stairway to an upstairs landing where Cowley turned left, unlocked a door and waved Aarons inside. The room was small but unlike the workshop below it was spotlessly clean. There was a long working surface along one wall and an array of radio sets with metal cases. Cowley pointed to one of them. “That’s the one I’ll be using for you, mister. The US Navy’s top set. A real beauty.” He pointed at various other sets. “The FBI use that one for communications with Washington. It’s not bad. That small one is US Air Force air to ground. The green one is used by special squads of the NYPD for emergencies and that Eddystone set’s used by most embassies all over the world.”
“How did you get them?”
Cowley smiled. “Being in short-wave radio’s like being in a club. You can get anything if you’ll pay the right price. I do repairs for the Navy and for the local FBI guys. The services have collared all the best radio mechanics. I can do overnight what’d take them a week or ten days.” He pointed up at the ceiling. “I got four different antennas up on the roof. Gets me anywhere in the world.” He smiled. “And I don’t even have to hide the set I’ll be using for you.” He waved his hand at the line of radios. “Just one among many.”
Aarons took a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket and handed it to Cowley. “They said you’d need this.”
Cowley opened the sheet and read it carefully before he looked up at Aarons. “This is OK. Both those frequencies will work but they’ll have to come down a bit in the winter months. But we can talk about that. I’ll want you to keep your stuff down to no more than two hundred characters, outside two fifty.” He looked at Aarons. “You’ll have encoded them before you hand them over, yes?”
“Yes. And what you get back will be encoded.”
“And two hundred bucks a month for two timed schedules a week and one emergency any time. That OK?”
“Yes.” Aarons paused. “These other radios. Do they mean you can listen in to the Navy and the FBI and the others?”
“Sure. So long as it’s voice and not coded Morse.”
“Could you do that for me and give me reports? I could pay you extra. An hourly rate perhaps.”
“OK. How about five bucks an hour but I get paid even if there’s no traffic. We can do it on a random basis for a month and then if you want to specify the source you can do so.”
Aarons nodded. “I’ll pay you four hundred now on account. When can you start?”
“Any time you want.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow with a message to let them know we’re available and warn them to start monitoring.”
“OK. Evening if you can.”
In the next ten days Aarons had contacted a diamond merchant on West 47th Street, a Czech photographer, a professor of physics at the University, an official of the longshoremen’s union, a woman who lectured on Psychology at Brooklyn College, a waiter at the Waldorf-Astoria and a free-lance journalist who covered defence and the war in Europe.
They seemed a strange group of people that he had inherited from whoever his predecessor had been. And they in turn had their own networks of informants and cut-outs. He had been given no background information on any of them and he had no idea of what their motivation might be.
The only obvious one was the diamond merchant, Moshi Wald, a Jew from Kiev, half-Russian, half-Polish who still had a love for Russia that grew on his homesickness. That and an easy profit from his commission on selling the diamonds that were part of Aarons’ funds. And that was his only service to the cause. That and his silence. He asked no questions and gave honest evaluations of the stones, ready to pay cash on presentation even before he had sold
