Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  But Sheriff Ernest A. Bilson of Ellsworth, Maine, didn’t sound like a nut.

  “We have an unexplained homicide,” the cable read. “The victim, Randall S. Tucker, aged 18, was killed sometime after 10:30 P.M., Saturday, January 22. No leads on perpetrators, but tracks were found leading back from probable scene of crime to shore of Frenchman’s Bay. Circumstances suspicious. Additional information on request.”

  It seemed to strike a chord for some reason. George Havens searched through his memory and then through a folder he kept on embassy reports and military news, until he came up with the item he was looking for.

  It had arrived yesterday, a couple of lines about a Canadian freighter out of Halifax that had been attacked and sunk almost at dock’s edge a few minutes after sunset on the twenty-fourth. The freighter, poor old thing, had been taken completely by surprise—she hadn’t even made the rendezvous with her escort yet—and sank in about thirty minutes. The report assumed a submarine; maybe somebody had seen the wash from the torpedoes. They had sent out a couple of planes, which had dropped some depth charges, but they hadn’t scored. Probably the submarine had gone straight to the bottom to wait them out, and they never would have been able to find her in the darkness.

  There hadn’t been a German submarine sighted in North American waters since August, so this was an unusual enough occurrence to make itself noticed. The wolf packs were staying out in mid-Atlantic to avoid the shore patrols. The war had been going so badly for them that they couldn’t even expect to be refueled at sea—so what was a Jerry U-boat doing that far outside its normal patrol area?

  It was the conjunction of the two events that intrigued him. A couple of unknowns turn up in Maine—the sheriff had written “perpetrators, “ hadn’t he? yes—and some kid ends up the evening dead. Then, a little less than forty-eight hours later, an enemy submarine, way off its beat, kills a freighter just outside Halifax harbor. That was. . . how far?

  He took the road atlas from the bottom drawer of his desk and tried measuring it off with his thumb. Maybe three to three hundred and fifty miles, as the fish swims. The average German submarine probably did seven or eight knots submerged—and that close to an enemy landfall, it would want to run submerged—so in two days it could probably make such a distance with no trouble at all. As a matter of fact, the time and distance were just about right.

  It was still a few minutes before noon, so probably Sam Fraser wouldn’t have left for lunch yet. Havens picked up his telephone—these days you had to have a travel voucher for a trip to the men’s room.

  “Sam, I don’t know how to break this to you, but maybe you’d better not count on Myrtle Beach. . .”

  . . . . .

  “This is where we found the Tucker boy’s body.”

  Sheriff Bilson turned out to be a man in his late fifties with heavy black hair and a comfortable expanse of belly under his plaid hunting jacket. He had a habit of smiling absentmindedly as he thought his way through something, and his eyes would almost disappear into the deep creases in his face. He pushed back a clump of bushes with his arm and pointed down at a patch of bare earth. There was nothing to suggest that anything extraordinary had happened there.

  “The kid was frozen solid—they had to wait until he’d thawed out before they could do the autopsy, but anybody could see what’d happened. Somebody’d busted his windpipe, crushed it just as neat as you please.”

  He straightened up, allowing the bushes to close.

  “I’ll tell you somethin’, Mr. Havens,” he said, the edges of his mouth pulling back in a mirthless, unconscious smile. “I was a cop in Chicago for nine years before the wife talked me into movin’ back here, and I’ve seen a lot o’ dead guys. But I never seen a one of ’em that got it this way.” He touched his larynx with the tip of his little finger. “This was a real elegant number—he knew what he was doin’. Somebody who kills a kid to steal his car and four or five bucks out of his wallet ain’t gonna do such a lovely job.”

  “You found the car?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Sheriff Bilson nodded impassively, as if assenting to something perfectly obvious. “The next afternoon, in a parkin’ lot in Ellsworth. Not five blocks from my office. We got the crime lab people from Bangor goin’ over it for prints an’ stuff, but they won’t find nothin’.”

  Havens grinned at him, as much in admiration as anything else, and dug his hands into the pockets of his overcoat. He couldn’t understand how people kept from expiring from the cold up here—and the sheriff wasn’t even wearing a hat.

  “You sound pretty hopeless.”

  “Maybe—but, like I said, I been around. We had some pretty hard boys back in Chicago, and I know a pro when I see one. This guy was a pro.”

  “Show me the tracks.”

  “Sure.”

  The woods were even colder than the road, if that was possible. And snow laden tree limbs kept taking swipes at you, trying to drop their loads down the back of your neck. But Sheriff Bilson just went swinging right along in his heavy boots, not seeming to realize that he ought by rights to have been chilled to the bone.

  “This is where they must’ve come onto the road,” he said, pointing to a small clearing through which it was just possible to see the wet gleam of asphalt. Sure enough, looking down you could still see where the snow had been disturbed by several sets of footprints. The snow had thawed and refrozen once or twice, probably, but the weather had been clear that week and the characteristic marks of human passage had not yet been filled in.

  Two men—the sheriff had been right about that. And then, about five feet off to the side, running parallel to the others, a fresher set of tracks that were probably Bilson’s own.

  “Are you making inquiries?” Havens asked. “Has anyone reported seeing any strangers?”

  The sheriff nodded, not seeming to resent the question at all. “I got my two deputies on it. We don’t get a lot o’ pilgrims through here in the winter. If they stayed long enough to buy a meal or even just to light a cigarette, somebody’ll remember. Look—I figure one of ’em must’a tripped over the log there.”

  They stopped in front of a patch of ground that looked as if the snow had been gone over with a roller. Several twigs had been broken off a nearby bush, and you could see where a thin strip of snow had been scuffed away from the top of the log.

  Glancing around him, Havens reflected that even this brief little leg through the woods probably wouldn’t have been much of a treat in the middle of the night. It was brushy country and the ground was broken up with rocks and narrow fissures and was half buried under the snow. If the gentlemen in question had only taken one spill they had gotten off lucky. God knows, they must have had a hell of a good reason for being out here.

  The wind started to rise and all at once he could smell the ocean, a faint gritty dampness that inevitably suggested gray sand and tangled, rotting masses of seaweed and, somehow, a certain hopelessness. He couldn’t see anything through the trees, but the sense of being at the land’s edge was very strong.

  Havens turned up the collar of his overcoat and wished he were back in Washington. He was cold and he hated being cold, and the hissing of the wind through the treetops made him uneasy. He was a city boy. As a kid, growing up on the edge of Brooklyn, his idea of wilderness had been Central Park, and he felt himself at a disadvantage so far from the nearest telephone.

  “What do you do up here to keep from going crazy?” he heard himself asking as he stamped his feet to shake off the snow. He looked around at Sheriff Bilson and found that apparently he had said something funny.

  “Wait for spring.” The creases in the sheriff’s face widened as he smiled. “But it ain’t as cold as Chicago. You ever been to Chicago?”

  “Once. But that was in summer, and I was only there long enough to make a collar.”

  “Well—Chicago, now that’s cold. Sometimes I miss it, though.”

  He seemed on the verge of confiding something, some personal anecdote perha
ps, implying some personal weakness, however slight. Havens merely waited, trying to keep his face as unreadable as he could.

  “You know, my missus was born up here,” the sheriff began, hooking one gloved thumb over his belt and gazing down at the crusted, black edged snow. “She talked me into movin’ back because she said Chicago wasn’t no fit place to raise kids—well, hell, I’d seen enough walkin’ a beat on North Clark Street to think maybe she was right. And now this happens.”

  In the almost perfect silence around them, Havens at last was able to make out behind him the muffled sound of waves dying against a shingle beach. The sheriff, when at last he raised his eyes, seemed to be searching between the trees for some glimpse of water.

  “I sure hope you catch these guys. I got a son of my own just Randy Tucker’s age—they played on the high school baseball team together. This whole business hits a little too close to home.”

  It was possible to feel sorry for him. The big city cop had lived in this peaceful backwater long enough to have lost a policeman’s natural cynicism, and now the casual murder of a teenager on a lonely road had stripped him of his last illusion.

  “Your boy plays baseball?” Havens asked, smiling, he imagined, somewhat fatuously—he was only trying to be kind. “What position?”

  “Third base. This’ll be his last season, though—I expect he’ll enlist as soon as he gets out of school.”

  The idea didn’t have a very cheering effect. After a moment the two men started walking again, following what was left of the tracks.

  They stopped just at the snowline, where high tide would have washed the stones clean. You walked down the narrow pebbled beach, and you found yourself at the water’s edge. Whoever had killed young Tucker that night obviously hadn’t come by cab.

  “How deep is the water out there?” Havens asked, looking around to where his guide was standing on a fallen log just at the top of the landfall. He found the sight of the slate gray waves strangely exciting, as if he had discovered something unexpected. In his mind’s eye, he could see the submarine, a black shape against the horizon as it nosed in toward the land.

  Sheriff Bilson merely shrugged. “How deep do you want it? Eighty, a hundred feet—deeper in places.”

  There wasn’t a doubt in George Havens’ mind. After the disastrous failure of the ‘42 mission, the Germans had licked their wounds for eighteen months and now they were landing another team of agents. All that way, just to put two men up on a beach in Maine—only the second attempted penetration of the whole war.

  “It makes you wonder,” he murmured to himself. “What they could be looking for that would make it worth their while.”

  3

  It took only forty minutes and two long distance calls between Maine and Washington, D.C., before George Havens had the permission he needed to go ahead. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if that was a new Bureau record.

  “We could track them right down to the water’s edge, Sam,” he said, sitting at one of the desks in Sheriff Bilson’s office and staring out through the window at Ellsworth’s main street. A storm had blown up while they were driving back from Frenchman’s Bay, and by late afternoon the passing cars were churning up great plumes of dirty snow. It was nice to be inside. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble about those two. I can’t imagine they’re just here as tourists.”

  He waited through the long silence at the other end of the line, wondering if the whole business wasn’t nonsense after all, wondering if this wouldn’t turn out to be another black mark against him in Mr. Hoover’s little book, another step toward that assignment polishing filing cabinets in Kansas City.

  “Have I got your number there?” Sam Fraser asked, and Havens repeated it for him. “Then sit tight and I’ll call you back in half an hour. I’ll have to check on this with the Director.”

  “I’m sorry about the vacation, Sam.”

  “Fine—then you can explain it to Ida.”

  Just as Havens hung up the phone, the door opened and Bilson came in, brushing the snow from the shoulders of his jacket. Apparently he had been home in the meanwhile, because he was wearing a red knitted ski cap that hadn’t been in evidence before. He whisked it off almost immediately and stuffed it into his pocket, as if he were ashamed of it.

  “We got somethin’ that might interest you,” he said, in the tone of a man catering to the whims of his guest. “A witness—waitress over at Cowper’s diner says she served dinner to a pair o’ strangers late Saturday night, says they asked about the bus to Portland. You want to talk to her?”

  “What do you think?” Havens was halfway into his coat before he remembered the telephone. Sam had said half an hour, but Sam might not be the one who called back. What if it were Mr. Hoover himself? That was possible, and he didn’t want Mr. Hoover getting angry and pulling him off just because he wasn’t there to pick up the phone—he did things like that.

  So he sat down again. The sheriff’s witness would have to wait. It was exactly twenty-eight minutes before the phone rang again, and it wasn’t Mr. Hoover after all—only Sam.

  “Follow it up, George. The Director says you can borrow whatever you need in the way of manpower from the local offices along the trail, but that he won’t be too surprised if your spies, when you find them, turn out to be a couple of weekend fishermen.”

  “I don’t think so, not these jokers. Don’t you worry, Sam. When we pull in this catch we won’t have any trouble squaring things with Mr. Hoover.”

  “It’s not Hoover I’m worried about. It’s Ida.”

  Havens grinned as he sat there listening to the buzz from the broken connection. He felt like a man reprieved from death.

  “Let’s go visit your waitress,” he said to Bilson, who was leaning against the door frame, studiously investigating his fingernails. “I’ll even buy you dinner, courtesy of the FBI.”

  At five fifteen in the afternoon Cowper’s diner was already about half full, which meant that either Friday nights started early in Ellsworth or the food was good. There was a counter, where most of the stools were occupied by solitary men in overalls hunched over their coffee cups like misers, and there were booths around three walls. Havens opted for a booth.

  The two policemen sat down on opposite sides of the dark wooden table that carried the scars from generations of water glasses and hot plates and little boys who wanted to purchase immortality at the price of a few scratches with a dinner fork. Bilson sighed heavily and took a cigarette from his shirt pocket; it was the first time Havens had seen him smoke, so maybe it was a little ritual associated with being off duty. From here on, this was to be Havens’ caper. The sheriff crooked his finger to summon a waitress—presumably the waitress—but after that, he seemed to imply, his part was over.

  “Sure—two guys, right?” She handed them a couple of menu cards, written out in a peculiar greenish ink, and while she waited for Havens to respond, or maybe just to make up his mind about the meatloaf and mashed potatoes that were the special of the day, she used the eraser end of her order pencil to scratch just behind her right ear, all the time staring vacantly out through the big plate glass window at the street, where it was only a few degrees above zero and nothing moved. “They closed the place up last Saturday—asked about the bus to Portland. We don’t get that many strangers this time of year.”

  She favored him with a tentative smile that suggested that under the right circumstances she might look with kindness on a stranger. She was probably about twenty-three and not bad at all if you liked them with straw-colored hair that came straight out of a bottle, but Havens much preferred her as an eyewitness. He took out his badge and showed it to her, and the smile just withered away.

  “Sit down, miss, and tell me all about them. Did they say specifically that they were going to Portland?”

  “No, but that’s where it goes.” The sheriff made room for her and she slithered onto the bench and leaned forward on her elbows. “Hey, what is this anyway? Who were they�
��crooks or somethin’?”

  “We just want to ask them a couple of questions. Could you describe them for me?”

  Oh, yes, she could describe them. Especially the older one, who seemed to have made something of an impression.

  “Like a movie star—you know what I mean? The whole number—tall, dark, and handsome. He reminded me a little of Tyrone Power—have you seen The Black Swan yet? Dreamy. A nice smile when he took the trouble, but most of the time you could have thought he was alone in the place. Never said a word, not one—at least not to me. Like ice. Still, I wouldn’t have minded. . .”

  “And the other one? What was he like?”

  “Oh, him.” The waitress raised her upper lip in distaste. She didn’t care for younger men, apparently. “All he wanted to do was get a peek down the front of my blouse—fat chance of that.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Havens smiled tolerantly, thinking he wouldn’t have minded a peek in that direction himself, and the waitress raised her frizzy brown eyebrows and sniffed. She seemed rather to resent the suggestion that she might have noticed.

  “Blond hair, kind of thick through the face. . . He had little tiny eyes, and he blinked a lot—what can I tell you?”

  “Who paid the tab?”

  “The older one.”

  “Dreamboat?”

  “That’s right, smart guy—the good looking one.”

  “And you never heard his voice?”

  The waitress shook her head. “No, never.”

  Well, that was interesting—a suggestion, just a suggestion, that the older one was running the show. You would expect that, of course. And, for whatever reason, he preferred not to speak.

  “Blondie—you heard him, though. What did he sound like?”

  “Sound like?” She shrugged her shoulders, and the eyebrows once more crept up her forehead. “I don’t know—what does anybody sound like?”

  “So he didn’t have an accent?”