To be fair, though, it was no more than the natural reaction. One had to remember—Stafford was really still nothing but a civilian.
“What are we going to do?” he had gasped, leaning with both hands against the roof of the car, his head dropping down between his arms—anyone would have supposed he was exhausted. “What the hell are we going to do?”
It wasn’t a practical question, since they had already done almost everything that the situation demanded. Von Niehauser had driven the car far enough off the road so that it wouldn’t be noticed by any passing motorists, and then the two of them had carried its late driver’s corpse about thirty yards back into the woods and set it face down behind some bushes. There wasn’t even much blood, only a single dark patch on the asphalt that von Niehauser had been able to clean away nearly completely with a little snow and a tree branch.
“He won’t stay hidden very long,” he had said as they walked back to where the car was hidden. “A day or two, no more than that, and someone will find him. They’ll probably start looking as soon as they miss him.”
But his partner hardly seemed to hear. Stafford merely stumbled along beside him, breathing noisily, almost as if he were running. For him, apparently, the problem was not one of dealing with immediate contingencies. But von Niehauser had tried to be consoling.
“His name was Randall Tucker,” he went on, holding up a small, rectangular object. It was the boy’s wallet. “There are four dollars in here, enough to provide the police with a motive. We’ll drive the car a few miles and then abandon it, with the empty wallet on the front seat. That will seem to suggest a simple robbery; perhaps no one will think to look beyond that.”
Stafford hadn’t appeared very consoled. He glanced up, turning his head to the side so he could gaze blindly over his shoulder, and even in the dark it was impossible to overlook the terrible slack weariness in his face. It took some people like that—fear assuming the aspect of an almost physical prostration.
Von Niehauser had seen easily enough that now was not the time for explanations or bracing encouragements. For the moment at least, Stafford was beyond the reach of words.
“Get in,” he said, in a voice loud enough to break through this coma of dread. “Get in the car, Harry, it’s time to go.”
They had driven back the way they had been going, in the direction which, presumably, would take them to the nearest town.
“See if there is a map in the dash. No, leave your gloves on. Nothing is to be gained by providing the police with a set of fingerprints.”
Because by then, of course, Stafford had come a little way out of his trance. No one had need of any maps. Those had been furnished by the SS, to be memorized and left behind with the charts aboard the submarine, but it was just as well if he were provided with something to occupy his mind. He groped around, found a flashlight, turned it on, and reported that there were no maps.
“Why? Are we lost?”
Von Niehauser pointed to a road sign that was coming up on their right side: SULLIVAN—5, HANCOCK—9, ELLSWORTH—18.
“No. Since we have the car, I think we might as well drive straight on through to Ellsworth and leave it there. Bangor would have been even better, but I doubt if we have enough petrol—excuse me, gasoline—for that. The SS, in their wisdom, neglected to provide us with any ration coupons. At any rate, Ellsworth will do.”
The suggestion didn’t seem to excite much enthusiasm. Stafford’s eyes were glassy with fright. He had forgotten to turn off the flashlight.
“But, the police! This car. . .” He was panting so hard he couldn’t seem to finish a sentence. “What if they. . .”
“Calm yourself, Harry. The police will not be looking for anything for several more hours. No one but you and I have any idea that young Mr. Tucker isn’t safely home in bed, and Ellsworth is no more than thirty or forty minutes away. We will attract less attention in a larger town, and we can abandon the car where no one will notice it for some time. We should be on the bus and very probably out of the state before morning.”
“But if they catch us, they. . .”
“It will make remarkably little difference, my friend.” Von Niehauser turned to him, his lips parted in rather a cruel smile. “If they catch us at all, what difference do you imagine Mr. Tucker will make? We are spies, remember? And you are a traitor. In time of war, either of those is quite sufficient to put us in the condemned cells.”
They had already been together for weeks, through the journey and the training before that, but in an odd way that evening on a snow covered road in Maine they seemed finally to have discovered one another. It hadn’t been a very encouraging experience.
. . . . .
Von Niehauser decided to open the window. It had stopped snowing, and their living room was like an oven. He gulped down the cold air, leaning out over the roof of the next building, across which unused clotheslines were swaying heavily in a fitful, half-hearted wind. It was a few minutes after three, the slack middle of the afternoon when the sidewalks below were almost deserted and even the intersection, a piece of which was visible around the side of the next apartment house, seemed for the moment to be empty of traffic.
They had been in New York for nearly five days. That had been the plan from the beginning, to go to ground for a while somewhere, catch their breath, and make sure they hadn’t attracted any attention. It would have been pleasant enough, except for the feeling of nakedness that probably afflicted every agent in a hostile country. It was impossible to be comfortable when you wondered every moment who might be watching you and, as a result, von Niehauser tended to spend most of his time in their rooms. This narrow little view of Lexington Avenue had become one of the important pleasures of his life.
Of course, Stafford was not so handicapped. He was home, so there was no reason for him to be troubled by von Niehauser’s sense of strangeness. In fact, the apartment seemed to make him nervous.
This, however, was the longest he had yet stayed out of contact. There hadn’t been a word since yesterday morning.
Was that the problem—that Stafford was home? Perhaps it had been a mistake to stop in New York. Perhaps it would have been better to have kept him on a tighter rein.
Von Niehauser went into the kitchen and took a bottle of ginger ale out of the refrigerator. In England, during his youth, they had had something similar; he had been quite fond of it. But the American version turned out to be pale and rather insipid. He opened the bottle and, without tasting it, set it down on the kitchen table. He appeared to have forgotten its existence.
“Where the devil is he?” he whispered to himself, staring angrily at the half open cupboard that contained their meager supply of dishes. “What in God’s name can he be doing?”
5
He awoke with a start. Had he made a noise? Screamed? No. Well, thank God for that. And now he couldn’t even remember what he had been dreaming, except that it had scared the hell out of him. Maybe it had only been the sunshine, streaming in through the hotel window.
Stafford sat up in bed, sweating, waiting for his heart to quiet down. He was wide awake now—or would be, as soon as he could convince himself that the dream, whatever it had been, was gone. He was glad he hadn’t screamed.
His watch was lying on the night table. It was still a few minutes shy of seven, and the girl he must have picked up last night was lying with her face to the wall, quietly snoring. God, he couldn’t even remember her name. He couldn’t even remember where he had found her. Was she going to expect to be paid, or what? God, he was going to have to stop drinking so much. All he could remember of last night were little snatches.
He needed a drink of water. There was a thick film all over the inside of his mouth, and the taste was like something had crawled in there to die. As quietly as possible—he didn’t want to wake her, whoever she was; he didn’t want to have to talk to her, not yet—he put his legs over the side of the bed and padded into the bathroom. The floor was strewn with under
wear, and there was a brassiere draped over the arm of a chair. They must have had themselves quite a time at least.
He turned on the cold water and dabbed a little on his face. It made his eyes sting. In the mirror he looked terrible. His skin was as yellow as wax, and the flesh under his jaw seemed all bloated. He was going downhill almost from morning to morning.
And then he remembered Joachim von Niehauser, and the unfocused terror of his dream came back to him with sickening immediacy. The nightmare had been real.
That kid back in Maine, with the blood leaking out of the corner of his mouth—he had been real. How was it possible to kill someone like that, so that he hardly even made a sound?
In Europe, millions are dying. Whole nations. Don’t speak to me of your squeamishness over a little blood. Soon enough, and we will all be up to our necks in it.
Whatever Stafford had expected when he stepped off that merchant ship in Lisbon, it hadn’t been Niehauser. All he had wanted was a little German glory—to be a soldier, and wear a uniform, and fight—and, instead of that, here he was back in the States, not twenty miles from the place where he had been born, taking orders from this crazy man who didn’t even like Hitler and went around murdering people as calmly as anyone else would put out a cigarette.
We are spies, remember? And you are a traitor. In time of war, either of those is quite sufficient to put us in the condemned cells.
Ever since they had gotten to New York, and it had become possible to get away from Niehauser once in a while, Stafford had been living it up. Clothes, the best restaurants, the best liquor—whatever women he could get his hands on. If you work at it hard enough, he figured, it might be possible to forget for a while that you’ve been an accomplice to murder, and that Niehauser has as much as told you that you are next on the list. For a while.
He had to do something—that was all. He had to do something before he ended up in jail, or at the bottom of an air shaft somewhere with his neck broken. Niehauser scared the hell out of him.
He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, wishing he had a cup of coffee. The girl was still sleeping with her face to the wall; her back, where it was uncovered by the sheet, was pitted with acne scars. He was developing a headache. He wondered if it wouldn’t be possible to dress quickly and be gone before she woke up.
No, it wouldn’t. She rolled over toward him and smiled. It was a lazy, deliberately provocative smile, and she made not the slightest attempt to cover her breasts. Yes, she was going to expect to be paid.
“Morning, Harry,” she said. She had a wide, shiny face, and her black eyebrows grew together over the bridge of her nose. He must have been pretty drunk.
Good God, had he been drunk enough to tell her his real name?
He didn’t answer. Somehow he doubted that she’d take it very much amiss; she didn’t seem the type to view these matters personally. He started gathering up his clothes, keeping his back to her as much as he could. At the moment it seemed that the only worthwhile thing was to get out of there.
“What’s your hurry? Why don’t you come back to bed?” He turned around to look at her and found that she had drawn back the sheet for him, exposing herself all the way down to her knees. For the first time he noticed how old she was—she could have been in her middle thirties. There were stretch marks on her belly. “You want somethin’? Best way in the world to start the day. You’re a nice boy—an extra ten bucks and you can do anything you want with me.”
. . . . .
The subway out to Queens was crowded; there almost wasn’t room to raise your arm and grab hold of one of the straps. At that hour everyone was going home.
Stafford hung on to one of the polished steel poles next to the doorway, feeling curiously grateful for the anonymous crush. For a while, at least, he was just one more in a congregation of strangers, an object of interest to no one, unnoticed except as another body. He had returned to the confused boredom of everyday life. He was like everybody else.
Of course, it was going to end with the train ride. After the Jamaica station he would once more be the traitor and fugitive that Niehauser said he was. That was real—safety was the illusion. Still, he couldn’t quite see himself as a German spy. He had gotten into a hell of a fix, but all this business was just more than he could quite make himself believe.
“It would be better if you put all that out of your mind,” Niehauser had said. “Avoid places where you might be known, but, for the rest, try to imagine that you have just taken up your old life again. There is nothing which attracts notice so quickly as fear.”
Yes, well, maybe it was different with Niehauser. What on God’s earth should someone like Niehauser be afraid of?
Stafford waited for a moment at the mouth of the subway entrance, blinking stupidly. Jamaica’s main street was lined with buildings of only two or three stories, and they let in the cold, white winter sunshine that somehow, in Manhattan, never seemed quite to reach down to the sidewalk. Suddenly everything seemed to have gained a strange and painful reality, as if until that moment he had been feeling his way in the dark.
He had been given explicit instructions: two blocks east of Mayhew Drive, west on Eightieth Street, number 4257, the second store from the corner and right next to Floria’s dry cleaning, but it was only through an exercise of the will that he was able to convince himself to take the first few steps. It was like striding out into a wilderness.
It occurred to him that his presence here was as clear a demonstration as he could wish that he hadn’t exactly made much of a success of his life. After two years of college, a six-month tour with the Navy—his enlistment terminated “for the good of the service,” as they put it—and close to fourteen months in the Merchant Marine, Harry Stafford’s adult friendships had dwindled down to this one. There was literally no one else. His mother was probably hoping he had drowned or something, so curiosity about his movements was now largely restricted to the German Foreign Office, the police, and his draft board. And now, maybe, Pete Kirchhof.
For a brief space they had been roommates at Rochester Tech, until Stafford had pledged a fraternity and then, almost immediately, dropped out of school. It had been Kirchhof who had gotten him started on the glories of the German Wehrmacht. Kirchhof’s father had been in the first war, fighting for the Kaiser and the Fatherland, and the son seemed to think that cast a glow over the whole family. All that had been in 1941, when an admiration for the Nazis hadn’t yet taken on the scent of treason, but it hadn’t made Kirchhof any more popular. Like Stafford, he hadn’t graduated, and he had returned to Queens to work in an uncle’s appliance store. Apparently the armed forces hadn’t wanted him either.
“Come after five,” he had said. “The old fart always leaves me to close up.”
It didn’t look like a very prosperous business—there was dust inside the display window, and the store itself seemed gloomily vacant, as if no one had bought so much as a vacuum cleaner bag in months. Stafford peered in through the weather streaked pane of glass that occupied the upper third of the front door and saw a dim little figure in an apron and a white shirt, waving a bony arm at him like someone trying to frighten away a mosquito.
Three hours later, after dinner and a fruitless search for a brothel that was reputed to be just off Kissena Boulevard, they were in a very noisy bar in Flushing, and Stafford was trying to explain, yet once more, about von Niehauser. It wasn’t easy because Pete Kirchhof kept breaking into a drunken giggle and laying his head down on the table in a puddle of beer.
“I don’ believe the part about him bein’ a baron—hee hee hee! Jesus, I don’ believe a fuckin’ word. You made it up, di’nt you. Di’nt you, Harry? You made up the whole fuckin’ thing—hee hee hee!”
They were at a table in the back, conveniently close to the men’s room. There seemed to be about five parties going on simultaneously, and just half an hour earlier there had been a short but furious fistfight; so the place offered plenty of dis
traction. You could have plotted the bombing of the Manhattan sewer system in there, with the diagrams spread out all over your table, and no one would have noticed. It was that kind of establishment.
Which was just as well, because anywhere else Pete Kirchhof would have been the center of interest. He was a skinny little creature who gave the impression he was merely inhabiting his clothes—the dark gray suit he wore didn’t seem to be in contact with his body anywhere. His face was as narrow as an ax head, which somehow had the effect of making him appear slightly cross eyed. It was only when he was drunk that he attracted much in the way of attention to himself—he wasn’t a decorous boozer.
Mercifully, so far this evening he had refrained from throwing up, but such luck couldn’t hold forever; in college it had been a fairly regular event. About four hours into the party he would start staggering toward the bathroom, green and bewildered. It was perfectly possible that in college that had been held against him even more than his sympathy with Hitler.
Stafford watched him with growing uneasiness. Lately, for some reason, drunkenness only made him warier. It was doubtful he would have told Kirchhof anything about his association with German intelligence if he hadn’t been cold sober at the time, and now, as he could feel his head beginning to buzz, he had almost come to the conclusion that he had committed a terrible mistake. Kirchhof, he had decided, was not someone he felt comfortable trusting with his life.
“Come on, Harry, you c’n tell me. He can’t really be no fuckin’ baron, can he? Hee hee hee!”
“Oh yes he is, pal,” Stafford said quietly, almost to himself. In fact, he was reasonably sure that nothing that wasn’t actually shouted could be heard anywhere in that room, even across the length of a table. And, besides, Pete Kirchhof didn’t give the impression he was listening very closely. “He is, every bit of it. And I think he’s probably going to kill me.”
“Fuck’m.” Kirchhof leaned forward on the table, supporting himself with his hands. He looked half blind, and his speech was badly slurred. “Fuck’m, the son of a bitch. If he gets frisky, sell’m to the cops.”
Chain Reaction Page 6