Hunter and the Trap

by Howard Fast

  Andy’s third wife’s father had established a family plot in an Episcopalian cemetery out in the Hamptons. Strangely, with all that great crowd at the cathedral, only a handful drove to the cemetery: his third wife, her mother, myself and some cameramen. It was a pleasant day, and the cemetery was on a high, pretty, windy knoll. Liz was going to go out with me, but at the last moment she developed a migraine headache and had to go to bed.

  The Trap

  Chapter One

  Bath, England

  October 12, 1945

  MRS. JEAN ARBALAID

  WASHINGTON, D. C.

  My dear Sister:

  I admit to lethargy and perhaps to a degree of indifference—although it is not indifference in your terms, not in the sense of ceasing to care. I care for you very much and think about you a good deal. After all, we have only each other, and apart from the two of us, our branch of the Feltons has ceased to exist. So in my failure to reply to three separate letters, there was no more than a sort of inadequacy. I had nothing to say because there was nothing that I wanted to say.

  You knew where I was, and I asked Sister Dorcas to write you a postcard or something to the effect that I had mended physically even if my brain was nothing to shout about. I have been rather depressed for the past two months—the doctors here call it melancholia, with their British propensity for Victorian nomenclature—but they tell me that I am now on the mend in that department as well. Apparently, the overt sign of increasing mental health is an interest in things. My writing to you, for example, and also the walks I have taken around the city. Bath is a fascinating town, and I am rather pleased that the rest home they sent me to is located here.

  They were terribly short of hospitals with all the bombing and with the casualties sent back here after the Normandy landing, but they have a great talent for making do. Here they took several of the great houses of the Beau Nash period and turned them into rest homes—and managed to make things very comfortable. Ours has a garden, and when a British garden is good, it has no equal anywhere else in the world. In fact, it spurred me to make some rather mawkish advances to Sister Dorcas one sunny day, and she absolutely destroyed my budding sexual desires with her damned understanding and patience. There is nothing as effective in cutting down a clean-cut American lad as a tall, peach-skinned, beautiful and competent British lady who is doubling as a nurse and has a high-bridged nose into the bargain.

  I have been ambulant lately, pottering around Bath and poking my nose into each and every corner. The doctor encourages me to walk for the circulation and final healing of my legs, and since Bath is built up and down, I take a good deal of exercise. I go to the old Roman baths frequently, being absolutely fascinated by them and by the whole complex that is built around the Pump Room—where Nash and his pals held forth. So much of Bath is a Georgian city, perhaps more perfect architecturally than any other town in England. But there are also the baths, the old baths of the Middle Ages, and then the Roman baths which date back before that. In fact, the doctors here have insisted that I and other circulatory-problem cases take the baths. I can’t see how it differs from an ordinary hot bath, but British physicians still believe in natural healing virtues and so forth.

  Why am I a circulatory problem, you are asking yourself; and just what is left of old Harry Felton and what has been shot away and how much of his brain is soggy as a bowl of farina? Yes, indeed—I do know you, my sister. May I say immediately that in my meanderings around the town, I am permitted to be alone; so apparently I am not considered to be the type of nut one locks away for the good of each and everyone.

  Oh, there are occasions when I will join up with some convalescent British serviceman for an amble, and sometimes I will have a chat with the locals in one of the pubs, and on three or four occasions I have wheedled Sister Dorcas into coming along and letting me hold her hand and make a sort of pass, just so I don’t forget how; but by and large, I am alone. You will remember that old Harry was always a sort of loner—so apparently the head is moderately dependable.

  It is now the next day, old Jean. October 13. I put the letter away for a day. Anyway, it is becoming a sort of epistle, isn’t it? The thing is that I funked it—notice the way I absorb the local slang—when it came down to being descriptive about myself, and I had a talk with Sister Dorcas, and she sent me to the psychiatrist for a listen. He listens and I talk. Then he pontificates.

  “Of course,” he said to me, after I had talked for a while, “this unwillingness to discuss one’s horrors is sometimes worn like a bit of romantic ribbon. You know, old chap—a decoration.”

  “I find you irritating,” I said to him.

  “Of course you do. I am trying to irritate you.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose because you are an American and I have a snobbish dislike for Americans.”

  “Now you’re being tactful.”

  The psychiatrist laughed appreciatively and congratulated me on a sense of humor. He is a nice fellow, the psychiatrist, about forty, skinny, as so many British professionals are, long head, big nose, very civilized. To me, Jean, that is the very nice thing about the English—the sense of civilization you feel.

  “But I don’t want you to lose your irritation,” he added.

  “No danger.”

  “I mean if we get to liking and enjoying each other, we’ll simply cover things up. I want to root up a thing or two. You’re well enough to take it—and you’re a strong type, Felton. No schizoid tendencies—never did show any. Your state of depression was more of a reaction to your fear that you would never walk again, but you’re walking quite well now, aren’t you? Yet Sister Dorcas tells me you will not write a word to your family about what happened to you. Why not?”

  “My family is my sister. I don’t want to worry her, and Sister Dorcas has a big mouth.”

  “I’ll tell her that.”

  “And I’ll kill you.”

  “And as far as worrying your sister—my dear fellow, we all know who your sister is. She is a great scientist and a woman of courage and character. Nothing you can tell her would worry her, but your silence does.”

  “She thinks I’ve lost my marbles?”

  “You Americans are delightful when you talk the way you imagine we think you talk. No, she doesn’t think you’re dotty. Also, I wrote to her a good many months ago, telling her that you had been raked by machine-gun fire across both legs and describing the nature of your injuries.”

  “Then there it is.”

  “Of course not. It is very important for you to be able to discuss what happened to you. You suffered trauma and great pain. So did many of us.”

  “I choose not to talk about it,” I said. “Also, you are beginning to bore me.”

  “Good. Irritation and boredom. What else?”

  “You are a goddamn nosey Limey, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Never take No for an answer.”

  “I try not to.”

  “All right, doc—it is as simple as this. I do not choose to talk about what happened to me because I have come to dislike my race.”

  “Race? How do you mean, Felton—Americans? White race? Or what?”

  “The human race,” I said to him.

  “Oh, really? Why?”

  “Because they exist only to kill.”

  “Come on now—we do take a breather now and then.”

  “Intervals. The main purpose is killing.”

  “You know, you are simply feeding me non sequiturs. I ask you why you will not discuss the incident of your being wounded, and you reply that you have come to dislike the human race. Now and then I myself have found the human race a little less than overwhelmingly attractive, but that’s surely beside the point.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “Why don’t you drop dead?” I asked him.

  “Or why don’t you and I occupy ourselves with a small pamph
let on Americanisms—if only to enlighten poor devils like myself who have to treat the ill among you who inhabit our rest homes?”

  “The trouble is,” I said, “that you have become so bloody civilized that you have lost the ability to be properly nasty.”

  “Oh, come off it, Felton, and stop asking for attention like a seven-year-old. Why don’t you just tell me what happened—because you know, it’s you who are becoming the bore.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “Good. We’re getting to be honest with each other. I will tell you—properly and dramatically and then will you take your stinking psychiatric ass off my back?”

  “If you wish.”

  “Good. Not that it’s any great hotshot story for the books—it simply is what it is to me. I had a good solid infantry company, New York boys mostly; some Jews, some Negroes, five Puerto Ricans, a nice set of Italians and Irish, and the rest white Protestants of English, Scotch, North of Ireland and German descent. I specify, because we were all on the holy mission of killing our fellow man. The boys were well trained and they did their best, and we worked our way into Germany with no more casualties or stupidities than the next company; and then one of those gross and inevitable stupidities occurred. We came under enemy fire and we called our planes for support, and they bombed and strafed the hell out of us.”

  “Your planes?”

  “That’s right. It happened a lot more often than anyone gave out, and it was a wonder it didn’t happen twice as much. How the hell do you know, when you’re way up there and moving at that speed? How do you know which is which, when one and all are trying to cuddle into the ground? So it happened. There was an open farm shed, and one of my riflemen and I dived in there and took cover behind a woodpile. And that was where I found this little German kid, about three years old, frightened, almost catatonic with fear—and just a beautiful kid.”

  I must have stopped there. He prodded me, and pointed out that the war had drawn small distinction between children and adults, and even less distinction between more beautiful and less beautiful children.

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to provide cover for the child,” I explained patiently. “I put her in my arms and held my body over her. A bomb hit the shed. I wasn’t hurt, but the rifleman there with me—his name was Ruckerman—he was killed. I came out into the open with the kid in my arms, warm and safe. Only the top of her head was gone. A freak hit. I suppose a bomb fragment sheared it clean off, and I stood there with the little girl’s brains dripping down on my shoulder. Then I was hit by the German machine-gun burst.”

  “I see,” the psychiatrist said.

  “You have imagination then.”

  “You tell it well,” he said. “Feel any better?”

  “No.”

  “Mind a few more questions, Felton? I am keeping my promise to take my ass off your back, so just say No, if you wish.”

  “You’re very patient with me.”

  He was. He had put up with my surliness and depression for weeks. Never lost his temper, which was the principal reason why he irritated me so.

  “All right. Question away.”

  “Now that you’ve told this to me, do you feel any different?”

  “No.”

  “Any better?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Why is it good?” I asked him.

  “Well, you see—the incident outraged you, but not in a traumatic sense. Apparently it doesn’t hurt or help very much to recall it.”

  “It’s not blocked, if you mean that. I can think about it whenever I wish to. It disgusts me.”

  “Certainly. As I said, I believe your depression was entirely due to the condition of your legs. When you began to walk, the depression started to lift, and they tell me that in another few weeks your legs will be as good as ever. Well, not for mountain climbing—but short of that, good enough. Tell me, Felton, why were you so insistent upon remaining in England for your convalescence? You pulled a good many strings. You could have been flown home, and the care stateside is better than here. They have all sorts of things and conveniences that we don’t have.”

  “I like England.”

  “Do you? No girl awaited you here—what do you like about us?”

  “There you go with your goddamn, nosey professional touch.”

  “Yes, of course. But, you see, Captain, you made your indictment universal. Man is a bloody horror. Quite so. Here, too. Isn’t he?”

  “Oh, do get off my back,” I said to him, and that ended the interview; but by putting it down, “he said,” “I said,” etc., I am able, my dear Jean, to convey the facts to you.

  You ask whether I want to come home. The answer is, No. Not now, not in the foreseeable future. Perhaps never, but never is a hairy word, and who can tell?

  You say that my share of mother’s estate brings me over a hundred dollars a week. I have no way to spend any of it, so let the lawyers piddle with it just as they have been doing. I have my own dole, my accumulated pay and a few hundred dollars I won playing bridge. Ample. As I said, I have nothing to spend it on.

  As to what I desire—very little indeed. I have no intentions of resuming the practice of corporate law. The first two years of it bored me, but at least I brought to them a modicum of ambition. Now the ambition is gone, and the only thing that replaces it is distaste. No matter what direction my thinking takes, I always return to the fact that the human race is a rather dreadful thing. That is, my dear, with the exception of yourself and your brilliant husband.

  I am better able to write now, so if you write to me and tell me what brilliance and benevolence you and your husband are up to now, I shall certainly answer your letter.

  Thank you for bearing with me through my boorish months.

  Harry.

  Chapter Two

  Washington, D. C.

  October 16, 1945

  CAPTAIN HARRY FELTON

  BATH, ENGLAND

  My dear Harry:

  I will not try to tell you how good it was to hear from you. I never was terribly good at putting my feelings down on paper, but believe me I have read and reread your letter, oh, I should say, at least half a dozen times, and I have done little but think of you and what you have been through and your situation at this moment. I am sure you realize, Harry, better than anyone else, that this is not a time for bright words and happy clichés. Nothing I say at this moment is going to make very much difference to you or to your state of mind or, of course, to your state of health. And nothing I offer at this moment in the way of philosophical argument is going to change any of your attitudes. On my part, I am not sure that changing them at this moment is very important. Far more important is Harry Felton, his life and his future.

  I have been talking about that to Mark and thinking about it a great deal myself. Harry, we’re both of us engaged on a most exciting project which, for the moment, must remain surrounded with all the silly United States Army attitudes of secrecy and classification. Actually, our project is not military and there are no military secrets concerned with it. But at the moment we are operating with Army money and therefore we are surrounded with all sorts of taboos and rules and regulations. Nevertheless, Harry, rest assured that the project is fascinating, important and, quite naturally, difficult. We need help —I think specifically the kind of help you might provide. And at the same time, I think we can give you what you need most at this moment of your life—a purpose. We cannot give you a profession, and, when you come right down to it, we cannot ask you to be much more than an exalted messenger-boy—reporter. However, the combination of the two will give you a chance to travel, perhaps to see some of the world that you have not yet seen, and, we think, to ask some interesting questions.

  Truthfully, our mission requires a very intelligent man. I am not apple-polishing or trying to cheer you with compliments. I am simply stating that we can make you a fairly decent offer that will take your mind off your present situation an
d at least give you an interest in geography.

  At the moment we can pay you only a pittance, but you say in your letter that you are not particularly concerned with money. We will pay all expenses, of course, and you may stay at the best places if you wish.

  Just as an indication of the kind of wheels we presently are and the kind of weight we can throw around, Mark has completed your discharge in England; your passport is on its way via diplomatic pouch, and it will be handed to you personally either before this letter arrives or no more than a day later.

  The bit in your letter about your legs was reassuring, and I am sure by now you are even further improved. What I would like you to do, at our expense, is to pick up a civilian outfit. If you can buy the clothes you need in Bath, good; if not, you’d better run up to London and buy them there. You will want, for the most part, tropical, lightweight stuff since the wind is up for us in the Far East. Though you will travel as a civilian, we are able to offer you a sort of quasi-diplomatic status, and some very good-looking papers and cards that will clear your way whenever there is a difficulty about priorities. I’m afraid that priorities will remain very much in the picture for the next six months or so. We are short of air-travel space as well as of a number of other things. But, as I said before, we are very large wheels indeed, and we envisage no trouble in moving you wherever we desire to. That’s a dreadful thing to say, isn’t it, and it almost places you outside of the picture as a human being with any volition of your own. Believe me, Harry, like your charming British psychiatrist, I am combining irritation with love. No, I know how easy it would be for you to say No, and I also know that a sharp negative will be absolutely your first and instinctive reaction. By now, of course, simply reading my letter you have said No half a dozen times, and you have also asked yourself just who the devil your sister thinks she is. My dear, dear Harry, she is a person who loves you very much. How easy it would be for me to say to you, “Harry, please come home immediately to the warmth of our hearts and to the welcome of our open arms.” All too easy, Harry, and as far as I can tell, thinking the matter through, it would do you absolutely no good. Even if we could persuade you to come back stateside, I am afraid that you would be bored to tears and frustrated beyond belief. I think that I can understand why you do not want to come home, and I think that at this moment in your existence, it is a very proper decision for you to make. That is to say, I agree with you: you should not come home; but, at the same time, you must have something to do. You may feel, Harry, that this messenger-boy business is not the most creative thing in the world, but I think that rather than attempt to explain to you in advance what we are up to and what you will encounter, you should allow yourself to be drawn into it. You need make no absolute commitments. You will see and you will understand more and more, and at any point along the way you are free to quit, to tell us to go to the devil—or to continue. The choice is always yours; you have no obligation and you are not tied down.