by Jay Lake
Hauptmann shook his head. “Truefield was tired, so he stopped for coffee just outside Wichita. When he got back to the cruiser, your dad was gone. He must have wandered off. We have the Wichita police and the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department out looking for him.”
I could barely contain my anger. “Coffee? I can’t believe Truefield stopped for coffee with an injured man in his car. What the heck is the matter with that idiot?”
Hauptmann frowned. “Vernon, I know you’re upset, but you’ll have to take it easy. I’ve already reprimanded Deputy Truefield for negligence, and we’ll find your dad. No one’s dropped him down a well.”
“You don’t know that. The fake Markowicz might have followed your precious Deputy and kidnapped Dad while Truefield was having his little cup of joe. Dad literally could be down a well right now. They already tried to kill him once. Abandoning a man whose life is clearly in danger isn’t negligence, it’s dereliction of duty.”
“Vern, son, you’d better go sit down. I know you’re under quite a strain what with your dad being attacked, then your house burning down, but you’re starting to say things you might come to regret. I’m doing the best I can, as are all my men, and I’ll thank you not to push me further on it. Now go get some rest. I will find you if I need you, or when we have news of your dad.”
Hauptmann shoved past me and walked toward the fire truck. As I watched him go I could see Floyd dragging a new hose across the street for the fire crew. Hauptmann stopped walking and stared at Floyd, then turned and looked back at me. I just stared the Sheriff down, keeping my face noncommittal.
There was something odd about the way he was handling all this. He wasn’t acting as I would have expected a cop to act — more defensive and secretive than anything else. The CID people must be making him keep a tight lid on things. I suddenly realized that Hauptmann had kept my notebook.
I walked back to the Cadillac, fishing in my pocket for the keys. I found the twisted silvery thing from the f-panzer instead. Even standing near the angry heat of the huge house fire, it still felt warm to my touch. I pulled it out as I sat down in the driver’s seat, and turned it over in my hands.
I pressed the buttons, one after another. The first two had no effect, but the third one made the thing tingle in my hands. It felt like a mild electric shock. I realized that I shouldn’t be fooling with the device out here in public, so I put the twisted thing back in my pocket, leaned on the steering wheel and watched the fire complete the destruction of my home.
The passenger door of the car opened, and the Cadillac shifted slightly on its springs. Without turning, I said “Hello, Mr. Bellamy.” I wondered what name he would call me now. Since he’d started getting sick, he had gone the past year without calling me “Vernon” once.
Then he kissed my ear.
“Yikes!” I jumped, then looked to my right. Lois smiled at me, pearly teeth like kernels of corn between her fresh, full lips.
I hadn’t seen her in weeks, not even to say “hi” to on the street.
“Hey, Vernon. How are you?” She glanced toward the fire then back at me, her eyes big and soft with determined compassion that melted my heart.
Lois wore one of her Sunday-go-to-church dresses, a green shirtwaist number with a pink sweater over it. She looked gorgeous. I’m a sucker for girls with dark hair in pink sweaters.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I wasn’t here when the fire started or anything, so I was never in any danger.”
“You look pretty upset,” she said. “You should be.”
I wondered what she wanted, but I wasn’t going to turn down the attention.
“It’s not good,” I sighed. I thought about telling her about Dad getting beaten half to death by the Nazis, while the CID chased them, and maybe me, around, but that didn’t seem to be a good idea. The less said about that stuff, the better. “Dad’s missing,” I finally said.
“Missing?” Her eyes were soft, drowning pools of memory. “Oh, Vernon, you know how he is. He’s just sleeping it off somewhere stupid, where nobody can find him.”
“No, I wish that was all there was to it. He was injured yesterday, took a bang on the head.” I edited down the real events — no need to tell Lois how angry I was at Sheriff Hauptmann and his Deputy, any more than talking about Nazis hiding in the Augusta library. “He wandered off when the person taking him to the hospital in Wichita stopped for an errand.”
“A head injury,” she said. “That’s the last thing he needed.”
“I know that, too.” I suddenly wished I had been a lot nicer to him all along. He needed me at least as much as I needed him. His leaving me for a bottle was no excuse for me to run away in turn. The smoke from the fire stung my eyes as I thought about him.
Lois touched my shoulder. “Does it have anything to do with that plate in his head?”
“He got hit right on the plate, actually. Doc Milliken sent him on to Wichita for X-rays. That’s when he disappeared, on that trip.”
“Oh, Vernon, this is so terrible.” Lois hugged me, tight. I could feel her bosoms pressing into my side. She wasn’t a very demonstrative girl, and we’d never been that close, so I must have been very obvious about needing a hug.
Heck, I hadn’t even told her about Doc Milliken’s hitching post and Mrs. Bellamy’s kitchen door.
After a minute Lois leaned over to whisper in my ear. That about made me jump out of the car, startled with a ticklish pleasure. “What are you doing in Doc Milliken’s car?”
“He loaned it to me,” I said. “I had a problem with the Hudson yesterday.”
“Think we could go for a ride?” She ran her hand across my shoulder. “I want to let you know in person how I glad I am that you’re safe and sound. And you had such a rough day yesterday.”
It was just liked I’d imagined. The convertible had an effect on Lois that my ratty, faded-black Hudson sedan had never managed. I looked at the fire. Sheriff Hauptmann was nowhere to be seen. Mr. Bellamy was chopping down a tree near the flames, looking quite spry for a man with a near-fatal chest condition. Amazing what stress could do. Floyd pulled yet another hose from somewhere down the street.
There was nothing for me except to be miserable and worry about Dad. Except go for a ride with Lois.
“Sure thing,” I said, starting the Cadillac. It was early enough in the day that I even if we did a little mugging I might get her back in time for church. Though probably not Sunday School. I drove down Broadway, away from the fire, a smile stealing across my face despite my woes.
A voice spoke in my ear. “Wer ist dort?”
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything,” said Lois, stroking my arm.
The voice spoke again. It was definitely masculine. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
Chapter Seven
I’ve had enough of you damned Germans!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. I slammed on the brakes, bringing the Cadillac to a screeching halt in the middle of Osage Street.
“Vernon, honey, are you okay?” Lois leaned across the big front seat to lay a hand on my shoulder.
There was no way I could answer her right then. My entire body twitched. I turned around and looked in the back. No Germans there, just an axe and a shovel. Mr. Bellamy was using the other axe on the willow tree, I remembered. I opened the door and got out, walking around the car to inspect it, careful as a pre-flight. I knew perfectly well there wasn’t anything to find, but I had to do it. Hidden loudspeakers. Trick wiring. Some bizarre practical joke on the part of Doc Milliken and maybe Sheriff Hauptmann.
Lois trailed behind me, arms folded across her chest and her face set.
With a grunt of frustration, I yanked open the trunk. Nothing there but a spare tire and some blankets. No bodies, thankfully. I stuck my head in anyway, studying the back of the trunk, where it met the rear seat of the car. Just some flecks of seat insulation. Pulling myself out of the trunk, I grabbed the bumper and used it to ease myself down to a kneeling position, weight on my g
ood leg. I bent my head to scan the underside of the car. Nothing under there either.
I hadn’t expected to find anything, but I really wanted to. Standing up, hands on my hips, I looked around the block of Osage where we were stopped. Not a soul in sight — everyone was down the street and around the corner at the fire. I put my hand in my pocket. The twisted thing I’d taken from the f-panzer was just as warm as it had been before. It hadn’t lost the static tingle that it had acquired after I started messing with the buttons.
Such a fool I had been to do that.
My stomach flopped, and my skin crawled, the scabs on the back my head from Mr. Bellamy’s birdshot itching terribly. I tugged the little piece of equipment out and studied it again. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen — too small, no power source — but this little doo-dad had to be a radio. The Nazi agents were talking to me over the aircraft’s own equipment. Of course they would know their own frequencies. They were tracing me.
Taunting me.
Threatening.
I was certain that I hadn’t turned on any of the electronic equipment in the f-panzer. I wondered if Floyd had done so, if they had gotten to me through him.
“Vernon?” Lois’ voice interrupted my paranoid line of reasoning as she hit a rising pitch — a bad sign, with women. The loving concern of a few minutes earlier had evaporated. “Vernon Dunham, you are acting like a crazy person.” She grabbed my elbow, yanking me off balance.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I caught myself against the raised trunk lid of the Cadillac. “It’s just that I thought—”
“I don’t care what you thought.” She was all the way into shrill now, shouting, her face flushed under her makeup. “Either you’re too upset to be out driving around, or you are inexcusably rude. Now which is it?” She tapped her foot, the very picture of a Woman Waiting for an Answer.
And this was one of those female questions to which a mere man like me had no correct response.
“Was geschieht?” said the masculine voice in my ear. He was definitely speaking German.
“Shut up!” I yelled.
“Don’t you tell me to shut up, Vernon Dunham.”
Lois had gone from shrill and angry to hard and quiet. I was really in the soup now. I stared at my feet as Lois continued to yell at me.
“I don’t have to take that from you or anybody else. I don’t care what kind of fancy car you swiped.” She kicked the fender of Doc Milliken’s Cadillac.
“Was ist die Bedeutung von ‘shut up’?” asked the voice.
I pled my case, reaching to take Lois’ hands in mine, but she shrugged me off. “Honey, you don’t understand. I’m not trying to shut you up. This is so much more complicated, about my dad and everything else that’s been happening.” The airplane, it was the airplane that stood between us.
Lois turned on her heel and walked away, tossing her hair.
“Lois,” I called after her. “Please.”
She stopped and glared at me over her shoulder. “You are obviously very distressed right now. I will make a point of forgetting what happened this morning. But the next time you call for me, Vernon Dunham, there had best be a dozen roses and an extremely sweet apology or that will be the end of that.”
She walked up Osage toward Broadway without looking back again. I sat down on the rim of the open trunk of the Cadillac.
“Wer sind Sie?” asked the voice.
Where are you? Who are you? My college German refused to be dredged up sufficiently to remember the list of question words. And this was an awfully retarded Nazi agent, I thought, to be in the middle of America and babbling away in German. The old bat down at the library would have understood, I was sure, but not me.
“Speak English!” I yelled into the thin air. “If you’re going to ruin my life, at least let me understand you while you’re doing it.”
“Englisch?”
“English.”
“Sie sind Engländer?”
Well, that was clear enough. “Red-blooded American, by God.” Like most guys, my language got worse as I got more and more angry. It was probably just as well that Lois had left. Just one more thing she’d hold against me, otherwise.
“Amerikaner?”
“Damned straight. From right here in Kansas.”
“Wo ist ‘Kansas’?”
I shut the trunk and got back in the car without answering further. This had become ridiculous. I restarted the Cadillac and pulled over to the side of the road before someone came along and asked me what I was doing. I wanted to keep driving away from the fire, from Lois’ anger, from the voice, but I didn’t know where to go next.
I had a feeling it wouldn’t be long before Sheriff Hauptmann had me tailed on a full-time basis. I obviously needed the protection, with everything happening around me. He seemed suspicious of me, as well, so maybe I was lucky he hadn’t taken me in after all.
Heck, at this point I’d be suspicious of me. No matter what I did now, it looked bad. Including standing in the middle of Osage Street arguing with invisible Nazis. Lois was a good enough egg, even if she was never quite my girl. I could hope she’d write that off to an episode of shell shock, so to speak, and not go blabbing to Doc Milliken out of concern for my sanity.
But the question of what to do next deviled me. I didn’t feel like seeking out the voice, which had fallen mercifully silent. That thought reminded me of the metal thing from the f-panzer, which lay heavy in my pocket. I drew it back out and looked at it again.
It was just as small and twisted as ever. Just like the aircraft, it had the unmistakable look of having been designed that way. By someone who didn’t think like I did. I turned it over. No seams, no access doors — although something like that could easily have been concealed in the visual complexity of the design.
Yes, this had to be a radio set. Somehow, this was the device the German was using to talk to me. I didn’t understand how it spoke in my ear without Lois hearing it, but that was just engineering as far as I was concerned. Like the questions I could ask about its miraculously small size, the lack of a power source, absence of an antenna — there must be hundred of those little problems. Regardless, this was a handset for talking to the aircraft.
Satisfied that I had understood the answer to one small conundrum of so many, I shoved the Nazi radio back in my pocket and drove over to the State Street Lounge. I needed a drink, something I never did.
I knew I was just a pale echo of my father.
Even though it was Sunday morning and the parking lot was empty, I knew from listening to Floyd chatter that the place would probably be open. The lighted sign in the window said “CLOSED,” just as the law required for the Lord’s Day, but the door was unlocked.
When I went inside, I found Midge wiping down tables. She was a small-boned woman, almost girlish, with black hair and big mole on one cheek. She looked like a three-quarter scale model of a Hollywood pin-up girl, especially in the red-trimmed white dress she was wearing instead of a uniform. I could see what Floyd liked about her.
“Oh, hey,” she said, flipping the grubby towel over her shoulder. The place was empty except for the two of us. “You’re Floyd’s friend, right?”
“Yes.” I had my hands in my pocket, feeling foolish and nervous. “Vernon Dunham.”
Midge popped her gum at me. “What can I do for you, Vernon Dunham?”
I had the sudden wish that she’d kiss me the way she kissed Floyd. It was the same wish I’d had for years, that the world would love me the way it loved him. He had two good legs, service medals, and a personality the girls went gaga over. Me, I limped, was too smart for my own good, and never seemed to say the right thing to anyone.
“I want a drink.” I’d said. Somewhere deep inside my heart, I apologized to Mom.
Pop went the gum. “We’re not open Sundays. Against the law to serve liquor, wine or beer.”
“I heard if I tipped big enough you’d give it to me.”
She smiled, lipstick as
pink as her gum. It clashed terribly with the red trim of her dress. “Tip big enough, a fellow could get a lot of stuff around here.” Midge ran one tiny hand along the hem of the v-neck of her dress, flipping the fabric back just slightly.
It could have been a casual gesture, but it wasn’t. Despite myself, I felt a firm, hard rush to my groin, and my breathing got faster.
I was a virgin. I’d never gone with a girl who went for those games. I’d never seen Lois in less than a bathing suit, and didn’t expect to unless we got married. Which had never seemed likely.
Now, this little dark-haired woman was offering me something I’d dreamed about since junior high school, for just a bit of money. I probably had enough cash.
My hand drifted to my back pocket as Midge smiled at me.
Oh God, I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t talk dirty with a girl like this, even though I knew exactly what she meant, exactly what I wanted. I could buy those kisses I’d longed for, and as much more as I could afford, just like I could buy that drink I’d longed for.
Then I’d be like Floyd and Dad. No one else might ever know, but I would. It wasn’t any big deal to Floyd, and with Dad, well, who could tell, but I would feel different, crossing a line I could never come back from.
Even worse, what if she was teasing me? It wouldn’t be the first time a girl had gotten my goat, just to laugh about it later.
“I, I...no thanks,” I blurted, my face red and hot.
She leaned forward and blew me a kiss, flipping her dress open far enough to show me the edges of a lacy white brassiere. “Your loss, honey.”
Face hot, breath heaving, groin aching, I stumbled through the door. Behind me, Midge laughed, her voice pealing like little silver bells.
In the parking lot, I banged my head against the steering wheel of the Cadillac until most of the pressure in my sinuses went away. Not to mention the pressure elsewhere. What did I stand for? What did I want? I had been ready to do one stupid thing, trying to drink away my troubles. It took the offer of another stupid thing to wake me up. I felt like I’d walked to the edge of the bridge and thought about jumping.