Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  And then, with a kind of clumsy dignity, he got to his feet. His hands still rested on the table, and he stared out at nothing.

  “I gotta puke,” he said, growing visibly paler. Tiny beads of sweat were breaking out all over his gray face.

  Stafford never moved. He was transfixed, like a man who has been within sight of the divine. Kirchhof might have been the Messiah.

  “What did you say?” His voice, as he looked up at the slightly swaying figure above him, was hardly more than a strained whisper.

  “I said, I gotta puke.”

  Kirchhof lurched away, tangling a foot in the legs of his chair and nearly knocking it over as he tried to disengage himself. It was an open question whether he would make it as far as the Gentlemen’s before he reached his crisis. His jacket hung loosely on his thin back, as if it had been cut for a much larger man.

  I’m safe enough, Stafford thought to himself, watching the dismal figure of his friend as it stumbled out of the light. Tomorrow he won’t remember anything—or he’ll think it was all bullshit. What, after all, would have prepared Pete Kirchhof to believe there were people in the world like Joachim, Baron von Niehauser?

  “Fuck’m.” That was what he had said. “If he gets frisky, sell’m to the cops.” And for the first time in days, it occurred to Harry Stafford that there might, after all, be a way to safety.

  . . . . .

  It was four o’clock the next afternoon before he made the call. It was something he had to nerve himself up for.

  He had gone back to the apartment that night, getting in around three in the morning, and Niehauser had been sitting in a chair in the front room, waiting for him. As he watched the slow, tolerant smile forming on Niehauser’s lips, Stafford was glad not to have sobered up much on the taxi ride home. Niehauser seemed almost relieved, as if he found it easier to trust him when he was drunk. God, what a mistake it would have been to have spent another night out on the tiles!

  “I’m sorry,” Stafford murmured, trying to grin sheepishly. “Maybe I should have called. You weren’t worried, were you?”

  He sat down, sagging slightly at one end of the divan that their landlord had had brought up the day after they moved in—it was meant as a sort of housewarming present, apparently. Niehauser hardly moved. You could tell he was struggling not to betray anything like anger.

  “Perhaps you should have called.” He made a slight, dismissing gesture with his left hand. “I want you to relax and enjoy yourself—the journey here has been very long, but. . . well, one is subject to special anxieties on a mission like this. I like to know where you are.”

  He lapsed back into a granite calm, a stillness that would have been hard to manage with conscious effort. Perhaps he hadn’t been angry after all. Perhaps that, more than anything else, was what made Stafford so afraid of him. He could never guess what Niehauser was thinking.

  “You must be tired,” he said finally. “Go to bed, Harry. In any case, we will be leaving here in a few days.”

  Stafford undressed and went to bed and just lay there, conscious every minute that Niehauser was right across the hall. The sun was up before he could bring himself even to close his eyes.

  Was Niehauser asleep? Did that man ever really sleep? It was an open question. It was hard to imagine him the prey of such an ordinary human weakness.

  In any case, we will be leaving here in a few days. What the hell did that mean? It didn’t take much of a leap to imagine that, if they did leave, it might be in very different directions—Joachim von Niehauser out of town, and Harry Stafford out of this life.

  That Niehauser was planning to kill him had gradually hardened into something very like a working assumption. He was excess baggage—Niehauser didn’t really need any help. The baron spoke better English than most Americans; if anyone noticed his accent, they would probably just assume that he was English. He sounded English, and God knows the country was full enough of Englishmen just then. And he knew it, too. Niehauser wasn’t the least little bit shy anymore about talking to people. And what else could he need poor Harry Stafford for?

  At just a few minutes after noon, when for the fourth time Stafford had been awakened by the sound of the truck horns blaring down on Eighty-first Street, he gave up the fiction that he was resting and went into the bathroom to take a shower. When he was dressed and had decided that he needed some coffee and something to eat to steady his nerves, he found Niehauser waiting for him in the kitchen. It was rather like being startled by a spider.

  “I have some work to do at the library,” Niehauser said, smiling kindly. “Perhaps we could meet somewhere for dinner and then go to the cinema—it would be amusing to watch the newsreels.”

  He was dressed in his new suit—apparently dinner was to be something of a celebration—and he stood resting his back against the door frame, his arms crossed over his chest, looking for all the world like one of the clothing ads in the magazines. He reflected so completely the unconscious authority of the aristocrat by birth that it was impossible even to envy him. One could only admire. When it came to that, would even the police have the temerity to arrest him?

  Stafford swallowed hard and tried to keep from flushing. It was at moments like this that he realized just how completely he was in Niehauser’s hands. “Sure—why not?” He even managed a single noiseless syllable of laughter. “Where should we go?”

  “Anywhere—a bistro perhaps. Somewhere we can have onion soup and fish and a little white wine. Somewhere with music—real music. A violin perhaps. Are there such places in this country?”

  “I don’t know. There must be.”

  “Then we can find one.”

  All the rest of the afternoon, Stafford kept restlessly to the sidewalks. It was a cold, windy day, but he could no more have stayed in one place than he could have stopped breathing. He had never been so scared in his life. Niehauser had tried so hard to put him at his ease.

  He’ll kill me, he thought, staring at his own reflection in a plate glass shop window. There were pouches under his eyes and his skin looked gray, but that could have been nothing more than the cold. Niehauser is going to kill me. I could be dead by this time tomorrow.

  If he went back that evening, there was no way he would be able to get loose before the next morning. And there was no way he wasn’t going back—he wouldn’t have had the nerve to do anything else.

  We can meet somewhere. . . God, the man was letting him go, giving him five whole hours to taste the illusion of freedom, knowing perfectly well he would come back.

  Because it was one of the axioms of Harry Stafford’s new existence that he was Niehauser’s creature. If he strayed too far, Niehauser would find him. There was no safety until Niehauser was either dead or behind bars—until then, if he suspected that his poor puppet was getting ready to betray him, Stafford wouldn’t give a nickel for his life. It amounted to a superstition.

  So he would wait, and make his deal with the cops, and when Niehauser was theirs. . .

  Dinner was a nightmare. Von Niehauser took him to a restaurant down on Second Avenue that had a strolling gypsy violinist, complete with a gold ring in his ear, and then spent half the evening buying the guy drinks and trading jokes with him—Stafford couldn’t even tell what language they were speaking. He bought wine and talked about his school days in England and how wonderful life had been before the war. He was terrifyingly human. As they were leaving, he took Stafford by the elbow and told him in a low, confiding voice that he was sure he was a good fellow and everything would go very easily from that point on. Who wouldn’t be scared?

  Afterward, they went to a movie house on Fifty-second Street and saw I Married a Witch. Von Niehauser seemed to enjoy everything, even the news films of the American landings in Italy.

  “Wouldn’t you agree that Veronica Lake is a beautiful woman?” he asked as they walked back to their apartment; it was freezing, but von Niehauser didn’t seem to notice. “Not a very intelligent face perhaps, but striking.
”

  Stafford didn’t know what to answer, so he merely shrugged his shoulders, digging his hands further down into his overcoat pockets. Von Niehauser didn’t seem to be paying attention anyway.

  “I think she is beautiful,” he went on, his tone slightly offended. “She reminds me of a girl I knew when I was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She was studying the cello, and we met at a concert—Furtwängler was conducting the Brahms Double Concerto, and she told me during the intermission that she thought the soloists had played like pigs. ‘Like pigs’—that was just the way she phrased it. She was Norwegian, I think. God knows what must have become of her by now.”

  That night, von Niehauser stayed up until nearly three o’clock in the morning, just sitting in the front room listening to classical music on the radio. After a while Stafford couldn’t stand it anymore and went to bed. Not so much to sleep as merely to get away.

  The next morning, grateful simply to be waking up alive, he looked at his watch and discovered that it was a quarter after eight.

  “I think I’ll have breakfast out. I feel like French toast,” he said, smiling and trying not to sweat. Von Niehauser, who—thank God—had already eaten, merely stared at him for a moment.

  “As you wish. Don’t be gone too long; we’ll be leaving this evening.”

  He stumbled along Lexington Avenue, almost blind to the other people on the sidewalk, looking for a telephone booth. Then he discovered that he couldn’t remember the number and turned into a drugstore.

  “Have you got a phone book?”

  The man behind the counter, who was at least two hundred years old, scratched his Adam’s apple as, apparently, he considered the matter and then pointed toward a small wooden table in one corner, on which rested an ancient telephone and, underneath that, the Manhattan directory.

  “You want to use the phone? It’ll cost you a nickel if you want to use the phone—this is a business we’re runnin’ here.”

  Stafford only smiled and shook his head. The old man scowled at him, as if the matter constituted a personal and longstanding grievance.

  The number was located under F in the United States Government listings, and this time, just to be on the safe side, Stafford hunted through his pockets until he found a piece of paper on which to copy it out. Then he would find himself somewhere a little more private to see what kind of a deal he could expect.

  Somewhere more private turned out to be one of the vast, crowded corridors of Rockefeller Center. He climbed into a booth, dialed, and waited.

  “I’d like to speak to Inspector Havens, please. . .”

  When he hung up, not more than five or six minutes later, he felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. In just a few hours he would be safe. He balled up his slip of paper, dropped it into a cigarette canister—it wasn’t the sort of thing he would feel right about carrying around with him—and headed back outside to get a cab. Niehauser would be out on business most of the day, so the apartment would be the safest place to wait. He would go there.

  God, he felt like a new man. Maybe the Feds would even offer him a reward. As he walked along through the lobby the heels of his shoes clicked against the stone floor; it was a sound repeated over and over in that sea of movement. The offices and shops were just beginning to open up, and the tempo of a thousand footsteps echoed faintly from the walls.

  . . . . .

  Von Niehauser waited, shielded behind the rushing, purposeful crowd. It was easy to lose oneself in New York, easy to keep from being seen. But an idiot painted yellow could have followed Stafford—the poor booby had never even turned around.

  In a moment, when he was sure Stafford was safely outside, he walked over to the cigarette canister and, feeling around for a moment in the sand, produced the small, tightly wadded piece of paper that Stafford had been at such pains to be rid of. It was a telephone number, naturally enough. It was all so obvious that von Niehauser actually felt a twinge of disappointment.

  He would call, and see who answered. But life really held very few surprises, and who would Harry Stafford have to call in such secrecy except the police? It was all so pathetically like him. He would have been safe enough if he had simply managed to keep a grip on his fear. He had given himself away with every gesture, with every word that he spoke. The poor fool.

  Everything now would take on its own logic. It was useless to wish that their journey could have ended some other way, because events had resolved themselves down to the workings of personality and, whether they liked it or not, each of them had chosen his own fate. Von Niehauser could only feel his powerlessness, and his shame.

  6

  An oily film had formed over the surface of his coffee, which by then was stone cold, and the guy behind the counter was beginning to treat him to funny looks. It was difficult to figure why, since there wasn’t another patron in the place and you would have thought he’d be glad of the company. It was a quarter after two on the big wall clock over the door, and this guy Stafford hadn’t shown up yet. That wasn’t a terribly promising sign.

  Havens had a seat near the window, where he could be seen and where he could keep a casual watch on both sides of the street for anybody who could possibly be his man. Sometimes they were like that; they would hang around in the neighborhood, pacing off the sidewalks for a couple of blocks in every direction, waiting to see if maybe there were more cops around and they were walking into a trap, or maybe just screwing up their courage to risk everything and come inside.

  But why did they always have to pick a lunchroom? Why couldn’t it ever be the bar at the St. Regis or a nice table for two at Delmonico’s? Why did it always have to be coffee and a fucking sweet roll?

  “I’ll meet you at Charlie’s,” he had said. “I have breakfast there a lot, so I know the layout—it’s on Lex and Seventy-seventh. One-fifteen. You know I’m the genuine article, but I don’t sell you Niehauser over the phone. He’s a big ticket item.”

  Well—at least now they had names. That was something.

  There hadn’t been time for a background check, not that it mattered. Maybe Stafford had planned it that way, but Havens didn’t think so; the guy hadn’t impressed him as clever enough for that. He was strictly minor league. Havens had seen a million just like him. He had something to trade and he wanted to trade it for his life.

  You had the distinct feeling he was more afraid of his partner than he was of the law, that he would cut the best deal he could and be grateful just to keep breathing. Joachim von Niehauser must be quite a customer.

  “You’ve gotta grab him first. There’s a lot I can tell you, but I don’t want him walking around loose. And I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I’m not gonna be bait in anybody’s trap. You get the baron on your own.”

  The baron? Good God, the joker seemed to think he had a bit part in a Flash Gordon serial. Havens had to force himself to keep from laughing over the phone.

  “Okay, but we’d better talk first.”

  “Then we’ll talk—I told you where.”

  And then the line had gone dead and Havens had been left to consider the frailty of all human endeavor. Here the Germans had gone to all that trouble—submarines, secret landings, so much razzle-dazzle to cover their tracks—and now it was all going to go pop because somebody in Berlin had made a mistake and picked a gutless wonder to act as tour guide. It made you feel almost sorry for them.

  Havens took another sip of his coffee, which was terrible, and glanced up at the wall clock again, which said it was twenty after. He wondered what had gone wrong, or if Stafford was just trying to be cagey. Maybe it wasn’t all going to be as easy as he had thought.

  “You want some more coffee?”

  The counterman was frowning at him, holding the pot in his hand as if he were trying to decide how much it weighed. He was bald and didn’t seem to have any eyebrows and looked as if his last job had been on the mat at Madison Square Garden.

  “What would I wa
nt with more coffee?” Havens grinned rattily, folding his hands over his left knee as he turned from the window.

  “I wouldn’t know, since you haven’t drunk the cup you’ve got. What should I do, start chargin’ you rent?”

  “You could try, but I wouldn’t fancy your chances.”

  Havens turned back to his survey of the traffic—he had lost interest in the conversation. He preferred to worry. The wall clock said twenty-five minutes after two, and still he was sitting alone at his table at Charlie’s.

  Stafford wasn’t going to show up. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but nevertheless he knew. He could wait there until Labor Day, but Stafford wasn’t going to show up.

  “Have you got a pay phone?”

  “A pay phone?” The counterman’s nonexistent eyebrows shot up, wrinkling his forehead—that was absolutely the only way you would have known—and he wiped his hands with a dish towel in a manner suggestive of the most extreme astonishment. “You sure you want a pay phone?” Everybody, it seemed, was an ironist.

  Yes, it was finally established, there was a pay phone back by the toilet, and Havens called his office on the off chance that Stafford might have tried to get a message to him. There was nothing, of course. He had half the New York Bureau waiting around on standby, and Stafford hadn’t shown himself. It was the bottom of the ninth, and the home team was two down. Mr. Hoover wasn’t going to be at all pleased.

  Walking back toward Eighty-fourth Street, where he had left his car parked—one didn’t like to be obvious about these things—Havens did the best he could to talk himself out of the notion that Stafford’s calls might have been nothing more than an attempt to draw official attention away while he and von Niehauser made good their escape. Had Stafford played him for a sucker? It was the sort of question that made him profoundly uncomfortable.

  It didn’t seem likely, however. For one thing, Stafford had no real reason to suppose that he was blown, let alone that he had been traced to New York. Indeed, the main effect of Stafford’s making contact had been to confirm his presence in the city. The Bureau had made arrangements to have the call traced, and he had stayed on the line long enough for them to establish that he had been phoning from somewhere in the midtown exchange.