Desolation Flats

by Andrew Hunt

  Myron Adler walked out of the darkness, clutching his .38. He crouched near me, briefly glancing at the bullet wound in my shoulder, and somehow mustered a smile—which I thought he was incapable of—as he tucked his firearm into his shoulder holster.

  “Thank you,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  “I suspect there’s more to it than that,” I said. “Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?”

  Myron scanned his surroundings. “This is where those three charmers brought me five years ago, and beat me within an inch of my life. I suspected they’d do the same to Booker, so I came back to this dismal place. I’m sorry I got here too late for him.”

  A groan came from inside the hopper car. Myron rose to his feet, walked to the edge of the platform and looked down.

  “Goddamn Jew! I shoulda killed you when I had the chance! Fuck! I can’t move! Get me to a doctor! Now!”

  Myron walked over to a huge steel chute hovering above the hopper. It was connected to one of the salt silos. He reached up and pulled a dangling chain. A rumble shook the ground, followed by a massive tidal wave of salt that came pouring out of the chute. White crystals filled the air, spilling into the hopper like Niagara Falls, prompting Metzger to let out a banshee wail. He did his best to plead for his life above the din. But the steady whoosh of pouring salt continued long after Metzger stopped screaming. Myron came back over to me and knelt closer.

  “You look terrible,” he said.

  Outside, sirens approached. Never before had their wail sounded so sweet. “Sounds like the cavalry is coming. I wonder how they knew—”

  “I called for backup,” he said. “I was watching this place from behind one of those salt mountains. I saw Metzger and his thugs pull up, and that’s when I drove a couple miles to the nearest call box. I anticipated fireworks—maybe not quite like this, but Mama Adler didn’t raise a fool. I knew Metzger wasn’t going to surrender without a fight.”

  I smiled up at him. “Thanks. I owe you.”

  “Come back to Public Safety,” he said. “I’m begging you. You can’t just stick me with DeVoy Beckstead and then walk away.”

  I laughed, but then I winced in pain. “Ooo. That hurt.”

  “Well, then, don’t laugh,” said Myron. “And don’t do much else, for the time being.”

  He took off his hat, sat down on the ground by my side, and made sure I was as comfortable as I could be on the cold floor of an abandoned factory. The once-empty railroad hopper car was now halfway full of salt as the two of us waited together in silence for the police to arrive.

  Epilogue

  BONNEVILLE SPEEDWAY

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1939

  With a clipboard and pencil in hand, I walked out to the orange cone and stood near the photoelectric device, watching the red bulb blinking on and off atop the pole that held it in place. The engine’s wail rose, and Cousin Hank’s newest creation, a Duesenberg Special equipped with a V12 aircraft engine, came rocketing toward me. I raised the stubby pencil in place, prepared to record the stats of his latest feat. The vehicle shot past the speed sensor, blowing my hat off, and the numbers on the device began clicking away, settling on 294 MPH, with a time of 1:06.3. I put my hat back on and wrote the numbers on the form, which was robin’s egg blue this year, and carried it back in the tent. My cousin Murray was sitting on a folding chair inside, sipping a bottle of Nehi grape soda and staring glumly at the newspaper on the rickety card table. The all-caps headline, splashed across the length of the page, said it all: GERMAN TROOPS INVADE POLAND.

  “How’d he do?”

  “Two hundred and ninety-four, at a minute and six-point-three seconds,” I said, placing the clipboard on the table near the paper. “That V-12 is making a big difference.”

  “Do you know what Eyston’s Thunderbolt is up to? Five hundred and twenty-seven feet per second! Hank isn’t even up to five hundred, by my calculations.”

  “He’s getting better,” I said. “He was a lot slower this time last year. The important thing is that he’s making progress.”

  “Thank you, Pollyanna. By the way, the main run is in a half hour. Can you stick around for it?”

  “Sure. Clara and the kids are coming out to see it. I’ll catch a ride back to town with them.”

  I wandered out into the midmorning sunlight to savor one of the last hot days of summer. The place hummed with drivers trying to squeeze in their final runs before the end of the Labor Day weekend, the Speedway’s last hurrah before closing. It entranced me, watching cars and motorcycles race across the desert, leaving dust clouds in their wake. I stood in the same spot for a long while, with the sun beating down on me, as vehicle after vehicle zoomed past. At some point, I began walking south, past rows of tents, to the bleachers and huge loudspeaker attached to the top of a steel tower. I arrived at an empty spot in a clearing where Clive Underhill’s enormous Union Jack circus tent stood a year ago.

  I noticed a split-second gleam in the salt. Leaning down to pick it up, I stood and dusted it off with my index finger. A British flag lapel pin.

  The pin in my palm triggered a flashback of pulling Clive out of the fiery car crash last year. I had no way of knowing at the time that that incident would off a chain of events that would nearly kill me. At the end of it all, I barely made it out of Jericho Salt Works alive. An ambulance took me straight to the LDS Hospital with life-threatening injuries. I remained in critical condition for days. In the end, it took me months to fully recover from a fractured arm, a broken leg, and a couple of busted ribs.

  Only over time did I begin to fully grasp the bloody convergence of events in the summer of 1938.

  Even as Nigel Underhill’s life was being strangled out of him, his fellow Brit, Peter Insley—a carefully placed agent with British military intelligence secretly appointed to protect his brother, the famous motorist—was getting in touch with my brother Frank. When the Desert Lightning exploded due to the incendiary device that Julian Pangborn planted in it, that set Insley to request FBI protection for Clive Underhill. The shocking news of Nigel’s death only confirmed in Peter’s mind that he had done the right thing.

  Special Agent Frank Oveson ordered G-men under his command to stealthily relocate Clive Underhill to an undisclosed location. Not knowing whom to trust, Frank and Peter Insley agreed to keep their decision a secret, preferring to let the police, the press, the general public, and even the members of Clive’s own entourage speculate endlessly about his whereabouts.

  Clive stayed in hiding until the big day. When it finally arrived, he ended up withdrawing from the competition, and the world soon found out why. With the blessing of the Underhill family, the Salt Lake City Police Department announced that Nigel had been brutally murdered. Clive experienced a massive outpouring of sympathy in the form of huge bags of telegrams, and even though I never saw it, I heard his hotel room resembled a florist’s shop. With Metzger out of the way and Pangborn’s body discovered out in the West Desert, Clive came out of hiding and greeted a sympathetic press, putting on a brave face. But inside, he was devastated, and in no shape to race—mentally or physically.

  “There will be other competitions,” he told a room full of reporters in one of the ballrooms at the Hotel Utah. “Now is the time for me to mourn what I’ve lost, and I ask for your understanding in this difficult time.”

  Rudy Heinrich also pulled out of Saturday’s event. He never publicly stated why, but I knew at least one reason, possibly the only reason, which—due to my dismal driving—was lying in an upside-down heap of scorched steel and glass at the base of an embankment near the Great Salt Lake. I knew I had myself to blame for Heinrich missing out on the chance to break the land speed record.

  For the longest time, I was haunted by my decision to steal the P9 for my getaway. It really got to me, knowing I was the reason why Heinrich—an innocent Jewish man condemned to living in the giant open-air prison that was Nazi Germany—could not comp
ete. Guilt burned inside of me, turning my stomach, torturing me into wakefulness on many long nights. I often wondered what happened to Heinrich, and to the murderous Nazis surrounding him like the proverbial wolves guarding the sheep. While I was still floating in a morphine-induced high in my hospital bed, Heinrich and his small army of support personnel quietly slipped out of Salt Lake City on a flight to New York, where they boarded a Hamburg-American ship bound for Bremen. To my knowledge, Leni Riefenstahl never did complete her documentary film about Heinrich.

  No records were broken out at the Bonneville Speedway on August 13, 1938, but that did not stop Warner Bros. from staging a lavish press photo shoot out at the flats to publicize its upcoming Clive Underhill biopic, Desert Lightning, starring Errol Flynn, and directed by Michael Curtiz. On a huge white wedding cake–like platform, right out of a Busby Berkeley picture, with a brightly lit Warner Bros. logo suspended above it, Clive Underhill stood between Flynn and Curtiz, all smiles for the cameras. Clive did a yeoman’s job of hiding the misery he was feeling over the loss of his brother and the loss of one of his closest college chums, Vaughn Perry, allegedly of a heroin overdose.

  The only silver lining in the dark cloud of death that hung low over Utah that summer was that my close friend and former partner, Roscoe Lund, was cleared of involvement in Nigel Underhill’s murder. He followed the story in the Los Angeles Times, and decided it was safe to come home. Turns out he had been hiding in a beachside motor court in Santa Monica, California, searching for his missing daughter, Rose. He returned to Utah without her, but he clung tenaciously to hope that he might one day find her. He parked Clara’s automobile in our driveway with only a minor dent in the fender, which he agreed to pay to have repaired. It still hasn’t been fixed.

  Roscoe paid me a visit at the hospital. He’d lost a great deal of weight, and lines of anguish were carved into his face. His once bald noggin now sported a thin layer of dark brown fuzz. He cheered up when he told me that Millicent, his missing cat, had turned up on his doorstep. His felines were all present and accounted for. I assured him we would find his daughter.

  Roscoe asked me to team up with him, as partners in his struggling detective agency. I initially agreed. But when Buddy Hawkins visited me in the hospital a few days later and offered me my old job at the SLCPD back, I could not refuse. Alas, a steady paycheck won out over the uncertainties of being a private investigator. Roscoe understood and accepted my regrets with his usual charm and sense of humor. I sensed his disappointment, though. And, I guess, not so deep down, I yearned for the freedom that would come from running my own business. I refused to abandon the hope of one day partnering again with Roscoe.

  I once again assumed command of the Missing Persons Bureau, with Detectives DeVoy Beckstead and Myron Adler as my subordinates. The injuries I sustained in August left me incapacitated for a month, and when I did return to Public Safety, I resumed work slowly, on a part-time basis. As fate would have it, Clara had found work as a substitute teacher at a few local high schools that fall, including East High, where she used to work. Her disposition immediately brightened, sending her melancholy into retreat. What a joy to hear her laugh again, and see her smile.

  Seasons changed. The long, hot days of summer gave way to shorter, crisper fall ones. Across the valley, leaves on trees turned orange and yellow and red and fell to the earth. On the second Thursday in November, Myron had my family over to his house to sample Mama Adler’s shakshuka. Outside, the air was chilly and nighttime came early, but inside it was warm, and our families sat around the table talking and laughing and passing around a Jewish delicacy made of eggs poached in a sauce of tomatoes and onions and chili peppers.

  It was all good cheer until the music playing on the living room Zenith console stopped for a news bulletin. We all gathered around the glowing gold dial as Mama Adler shushed us and turned the volume high. “Eyewitness reports are coming in tonight of mobs charging through the streets of major German and Austrian cities, attacking Jewish-owned businesses and homes, setting fire to synagogues, and murdering prominent Jewish leaders. There are unconfirmed claims that the mobs are made up entirely of Nazi storm troopers disguised as civilians. Please stand by.” The radio announcer paused for a moment as a Teletype machine rattled in the background. “This just in. Dispatches from Vienna confirm that all twenty-one of the city’s synagogues have been partially or completely destroyed. At least twenty-two prominent Jews in Vienna have committed suicide so far during this latest wave of violence. According to the International News Service, the eerie glow of flames across Berlin can be seen from miles away.”

  Mama Adler reached over and squeezed my hand. She looked up at me with sad eyes and a long face. Gone was her beautiful smile.

  “This is only the beginning, Arthur,” she whispered. “Worse things are yet to come. I feel it in my bones.”

  Mama Adler was prescient. The situation continued to deteriorate overseas with each passing month. I had to hand it to my daughter, Sarah Jane, who went tirelessly from door to door collecting signatures and contributions for a New York–based group advocating the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Lower California. I was proud of her for caring so much. It left her discouraged, however, to discover that most people did not seem to care about Jews in Germany and Austria, and did not wish to sign her petition or donate to the cause. Still, she refused to succumb to pessimism, and she found scattered handfuls of signatories, and collected a jar of rattling coins. She continued clipping articles and writing letters to the president and members of Congress, asking them to help Jewish refugees. I made it a point to tell her repeatedly I was proud of her. “It could be our family over there suffering,” she said. “It’s not enough, you know—what I’m doing.”

  As she spoke those words, I thought of what Clive Underhill cried out after he left the Coconut Grove. “It’s not enough!” I’m still not sure why he shouted it. I wondered if maybe he was haunted by his past flirtation with fascism, and regarded his efforts to distance himself from it and help Rudy Heinrich escape its evil tentacles as insufficient. I realized I’d never know the answer. In the end, Clive remained an enigma to me—an intriguing man, equal parts charismatic and lonely, and I knew that night I spent with him at the Coconut Grove and on the drive back to the Hotel Utah afterward was the closest I was ever going to get to him. I continued to follow his career from afar, and hoped that—in the end—he would find the peace that seemed to elude him in the face of stardom.

  If the turbulence of that summer brought me closer to my daughter, it had the opposite effect on my relationship with Frank, my older brother. From the outset, Frank had tried to sabotage my friendship with Roscoe, all the while willing to sacrifice him as a fall guy for Nigel’s murder without conducting a proper homicide investigation. This infuriated me and alienated me from Frank. I quit attending Sunday dinners at his house, opting instead to deliver homemade meals with my immediate family to my mother’s homestead in American Fork. Each Thursday night, we all gathered around the long table and prayed and then passed around food Clara had cooked in the late afternoon. Mom accepted my estrangement from Frank with a certain resignation. I cannot say I missed him. Frank had always been overbearing, and it pleased me to put some distance between us.

  The coming of spring the following year raised hopes along with temperatures. A full-time teaching job in English had opened up at South High. The principal, Mr. Carlson, asked Clara to drop by for an interview in March, and he hired her on the spot to start teaching in the fall. To celebrate, we splurged and bought tickets on a cruise from New York to Havana. We chose late May and early June to travel, before the weather turned too hot. Clara’s parents had offered to watch our children while we were gone. We took them up on it.

  Aboard the ocean liner SS Oriente, Clara and I loved our enchanting time at sea, precisely what we needed after a long drought in our marriage. We ballroom danced until the wee hours of the morning to the swinging sounds of the Nat Harris Embas
sy Orchestra, held hands under the stars and watched the moon’s reflection in the water, spent our afternoons taking dips in one of the outdoor tiled swimming pools, and made love with renewed passion whenever we were alone.

  When the ship steamed into Havana Harbor, June 2, 1939, an ominous black rainstorm swirled low in the sky, with occasional flashes of lightning over choppy, whitecapped waters. The cruise ship director advised passengers to stay inside. The weather forecast called for heavy rains over Cuba, he said. Clara and I dined at a breakfast smorgasbord in a cavernous room full of tables draped with bleached white linen, lit brightly by chandeliers and natural light from tall windows. Halfway through a plate of scrambled eggs and fruit, I felt a strange sensation, as if something was terribly wrong. Sipping orange juice, I suddenly began to pick up on snippets of conversations at other tables.

  “They say all of the passengers are Jews.”

  “Downright shame, in this day and age—all those refugees with no place to go.”

  “You see the headline in this morning’s paper? ‘Ship Turned Away at Havana.’”

  “‘Voyage of the Damned,’ they’re calling it. Sounds like the name of a novel.”

  “Canada and the United States won’t let ’em in either, according to the Herald.”

  I pushed my scrambled eggs aside. I’d suddenly lost my appetite. I raised my hand and signaled the waiter, a dark-haired young man in a white tuxedo with alert eyes and a receding chin. He hurried over, and Clara shot a quizzical glance my way.

  “What’s this about a ship?” I asked.

  “It’s the St. Louis,” he said. “It’s full of Jewish refugees from Europe with nowhere to go. We’re going to pass it soon, off to the port side.”

  “Thanks.”

  The waiter left, heading toward a pair of swinging doors. I tossed my napkin next to my half-empty plate. Clara watched me rise from my chair and take a sip of ice water before leaving the table.