by Ed McBain
“You taped a girl who …?”
“I’m a writer,” he says in explanation.
I do not know whether to hit him or laugh at him. The notion that he imagines himself free to tape the conversation of a girl who’s drunk, merely because he’s a writer, is ludicrous. And the reverse notion, that he imagines himself to be a writer, merely because he can tape a conversation, is equally ludicrous. But he has already brought out the machine, and he rewinds the tape now, locating the portion he wants me to hear.
I sit on the sofa before the poster of W. C. Fields and listen to the voices, one distinctly Sara’s, rambling and thick, the other Seth’s, gently probing.
SARA: It’s no use, I blew it.
SETH: What do you mean, honey?
SARA: He’s forty-two.…
SETH: Who is?
SARA: I blew it. So damn careful, and I blew it.
SETH: Honey, I don’t follow you.
SARA: What time is it?
SETH: Close to midnight.
SARA: Late.
SETH: It’s early yet, Sara.
SARA: No, no. Late. He’ll die.
SETH: Who’ll die?
SARA: Big jackass.
SETH: Who, honey?
SARA: On a stupid bridge.
SETH: Somebody you know going to jump off a bridge?
SARA: I circled it, you know. So damn careful.
SETH: The bridge?
SARA: Of course not the bridge. How can someone circle a bridge?
SETH: I don’t get you, Sara.
SARA: I don’t even know you.
SETH: You know me. This’s Seth here.
SARA: I mean, to tell you such personal things.
SETH: What’s so personal about a bridge?
SARA: Who’s talking about the bridge? That’s the second, plenty of time to worry about that.
SETH: What’s the first?
SARA: What?
SETH: The first, Sara.
SARA: It’s not a sequence.
SETH: Huh?
SARA: It’s a date, not a sequence. The second.
SETH: Huh?
SARA: Huh, huh? Saturday. The second. The second. Give me some more of this. Please.
SETH: What about Saturday?
SARA: Nothing.
SETH: You said …
SARA: You boring fucking nigger, what do you want from me?
SETH: I’m trying to help you.
SARA: My ass.
SETH: Sober you up, is all.
SARA: He says as he fills my glass.
SETH: You asked for another one.
SARA: Sober me up when he’s gone, why don’t you?
SETH: Who, Sara?
SARA: Nobody. Dead and gone on his stupid bridge.
SETH: Which bridge?
SARA: How many bridges are there around here?
SETH: Henderson?
SARA: Oh, smart.
SETH: The railroad trestle over Henderson Gap?
SARA: Oh, smart, smart.
SETH: Is somebody going to do something to it? On Saturday?
SARA: No.
SETH: Who’s going to do it, Sara?
SARA: Nobody.
SETH: Your forty-two-year-old friend?
SARA: Nobody.
SETH: Arthur Sachs?
SARA: Nobody.
Seth presses a button and the tape is abruptly silenced. He looks at me. My mouth is dry.
“So?” I ask him.
“So, Mr. Sachs?”
“So what?”
“So you are going to blow up the Peace Train, Mr. Sachs.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s why you’re here, Mr. Sachs. Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re doing a fine and noble thing.”
“Your admiration is misplaced. There’s nothing on that tape that would indicate …”
“I’m reading between the lines, Mr. Sachs. Sara’s very worried about something happening to somebody on the bridge over Henderson Gap come Saturday, November second. Now it may be sheer coincidence that the Peace Train’s coming over the bridge that day, but I don’t think so. You’re here to destroy that train. I applaud you for it.”
“Save your applause. You’re making a mistake.”
“I want in, Mr. Sachs.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to be there when you do it. I want to help you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m black.”
“So?”
“And being proud of George Washington Carver isn’t enough any more. Who cares if he invented the peanut?”
“He didn’t invent the peanut.”
“Or discovered it, or whatever he did with it. It’s time a black man made some genuine history in this country.”
“Then go write your novel.”
“This is better than a novel. This is real.”
“You think so? This is fantasy, Seth, Sara’s little pipe dream, the result of too much booze. Forget it. There’s nothing here for you. Write your book. You’re both Immigrant and Wasp, remember? How can you miss?”
“Mr. Sachs, you’re not going to blow that bridge without me.”
“Nor with you, either. There is no bridge, it’s all imagi …”
“Either you do it with me, or I’ll make sure nobody does it!”
“Fine.”
“I’m warning you, Mr. Sachs …”
“You don’t scare me. I have no plans for destroying any damn bridge. Your threats are meaningless.”
“My time has come, Mr. Sachs. Our time has come.”
“Then go find your own bridge, okay? I’m taking Sara home.”
We argue about that for a while, too. In the end, I leave without her, promising to return at six o’clock.
I know I have lost both arguments.
I am becoming frightened.
HESTER ANNE PRATT
University professor. Born New York City, August 4, 1911. Daughter of Miles and Elizabeth (Holdsworth). A.B., Wellesley College, 1932; M.A., Columbia, 1935; Ph.D., 1942.
Tchr. high schs. NYC, 1936–38; instr. English, N.Y.U., 1939–41. Asst. Prof., West. Meth. U., 1946–48; Assoc. Prof., 1949–54; Prof. 1955 to present. Chairman dept. 1956 to present.
Recipient Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award, 1961. Member International Assn. U. Profs. of English, Modern Language Association of America, Phi Beta Kappa. Club: P.E.N. Served to captain, WAC, 1942–46. Author: The Salem Delusion (with R. J. Frame) 1949; Rebecca Nurse, Study in Courage, 1952; Mather, McCarthy and the Witches, 1958.
Hester Pratt lives year-round in a contemporary house ten blocks from center of town. Since arrival at Western Methodist University 1946, has employed as housekeeper black woman named Fanny Hollis. Mrs. Hollis lives with husband and son in Negro section near railroad tracks. Husband (Luther) is handyman at university. Son (David) was student, suspended in sophomore year, now works at Shell Station on Route 17. Mrs. Hollis has two married daughters, both living Burbank, California, husbands working at Lockheed Aircraft. Mrs. Hollis would answer no questions about employer although investigator assured her only soliciting information for local housing authority. Told him to come back and ask Miss Pratt personally for any information about herself.
Hester Pratt is sixty-three years old; many colleagues who taught with her in New York City have either retired or are dispersed around country. After obtaining Masters at Columbia, she taught Bronx Vocational High School and later Machine and Metal Trades. Administrative Assistant latter school remembers her well, says imbued fine sense of language in students primarily interested in learning trade. Pointed out specific case boy studying automotives, later wrote novel dedicated to her. (These Angry Streets, Juan Ricardo Guardabrazos, Simon & Schuster, 1944.) She attended Columbia nights for doctorate while teaching in city system and later N.Y.U. Received doctorate June 1942, spent summer in Salem, Beverly, Danvers, etc., gathering material for projected book about 1692 witchcraft trials, published seven years la
ter (with collaborator). Widowed mother Elizabeth, living with sister in England, killed air raid August 1942. Pratt did not return to teaching in the fall, enlisted in newly formed Women’s Army Corps September 1942, second lieutenant’s commission. Worked in Pentagon, Washington, D.C., until January 1943 when transferred London.
Whereas earlier report Cornelius Raines (July 28, 1974) suggested no relationship any other woman, information that both Pratt-Raines in London area during WW II indicated further investigation advisable. Discounting obvious dislike Pratt by colleagues and students questioned (all agree she wrote books on subject well-qualified to discuss: Witchcraft), it would nonetheless seem evident that Pratt-Raines relationship does date back to mid-1943 when Raines was Air Force colonel flying bombing missions from Norwich, two hours outside London. It appears certain, too, that relationship continued throughout war until time of Raines’s discharge December 1945 when he acquired assistant professorship Western Methodist U. where wife Charlotte already held teaching post. Pratt’s many enemies on campus insist she followed him there after her own discharge. Only one man, an associate professor Classics, suggests Raines sent for her. Fact remains Pratt arrived to begin teaching fall 1946, and Raines was married at time.
But portrait Pratt as femme fatale determined to break up marriage seems ludicrous in light of facts. It was Epstein, not Raines, who accompanied Pratt on brief trip to Denmark (they were gone only one week) in 1948, yet no one suggests romantic involvement with him. Granted gossip of campus affairs runs rife most universities, allegation here would seem slanderous and provoked entirely by dislike of a woman who possesses a somewhat unfortunate manner.
Evidence of colleagues’ animosity Pratt surfaced April 1973, just prior university’s spring break. David Hollis was English major sophomore at time, organizer of the Impeachment March. In campus violence following sacking Administration Building and burning R.O.T.C. records, Hollis struck National Guardsman with souvenir Civil War saber. Guardsman, like Hollis, was black, claimed sword had been unsheathed. Encouraged by troop commander, guardsman brought charge attempted murder against Hollis, who maintained saber was in scabbard and that he struck guardsman only in self-defense. This was five months before Harvard Riots. Still conceivable university instructors and students might have rallied to Hollis’s cause had not Hester Pratt taken it upon self to become his spokesman. All but Raines, Epstein, and handful of students flatly refused to join her in his defense. (Whether this was because the Murdock-Abelson Bill had already passed House and seemed certain of passage in Senate is debatable; fact remains they refused to help, and Pratt-Epstein-Raines were forced to spearhead challenge virtually alone.) Because their efforts, attempted murder charge was reduced to assault/second and finally dismissed altogether. But following passage of Murdock-Abelson Critical Revision Act (June 1973), David Hollis was summarily suspended from school. Three months after that, the Harvard Riots took place.
Hester’s detractors say she got on broom and flew to Cambridge to provoke them, but no evidence she was anywhere near Massachusetts that tragic week.
I have read these reports over and over again, trying to find in them some reassurance that I will come out of this alive. I have grown accustomed to the investigator’s terse style, in some ways superior to my own when writing a brief or a contract. I have begun to admire his sense of current history, his occasional glints of humor. I have even become fascinated by his obstinate refusal to accept bonds that seem obvious to me. But I find in his abbreviated typewritten biographies neither solace nor salvation.
I try to tell myself that the people with whom I am involved are truly dedicated to a cause which, while it may not be identical to my own, is equally valid. But I cannot muster faith in motives that can be understood only in terms of relationships that appear so intensely personal. Are these three really concerned with violent change, or is this concerted act of murder merely an expression of solidarity from a volatile mènage à trots doggedly maintained over the years? There are too many unanswered questions, and I have become weary tracking down the answers.
Is there any certain evidence that Raines knew Hester in London, or that the Rouen resistance group who led him to Spain and safety (Sud aux Pyrénées, the title sticks in my mind) was indeed the same group to which Epstein had been attached? It there anything to indicate without doubt that Epstein’s “Mademoiselle” was the Germans’ “Fräulein,” or that he even knew Josette Rivière? Or saw her again in Paris after the war? Or fled to the university here after her death, in an attempt to recapture … what? Something he had known in 1944? In the cellar of a French farmhouse? With this woman and a wounded pilot named Cornelius Raines?
Is there anything at all, any shred of proof to support the theory that Raines-Pratt-Epstein are a figurative reincarnation of Raines-Rivière-Epstein, the trio who worked side by side in those good old days fraught with danger and suspense, south to the goddamn Pyrenees! (Is the bridge over Henderson Gap only a replay of those childhood wartime adventures? Oh, Jesus, is violence as exciting to them as it is to most Americans? But where the hell is the evidence for such a dark surmise?)
What about that trip to Denmark in 1948? One week? Was the nature of that trip really as obvious as it would appear? What else could Epstein have been doing but escorting the damsel in distress, performing another small service for his old comrade in arms, Cornelius Raines, whose indiscretion was about to become apparent? I cannot be sure. I’m a lawyer, I’m concerned with evidence, but there’s only supposition between the lines of these reports, and supposition doesn’t inspire blind faith. I’m the instrument of their deliverance, Raines has told me. But deliverance from what? I don’t know, and maybe I don’t have to know. Maybe, as with the details of wiring a bridge, it’s not necessary for me to understand all of it. I know only that I will not read these reports again. I have learned all I hope to learn about the pasts of my co-conspirators. Whatever else there is to know must be gathered from the present.
They are here, the three of them. From somewhere out of the strength of their relationship, one to the other, all to the three, they’ve provided me with an opportunity for revenge. In that respect, they are the collective instrument of my deliverance, and for that I’m grateful.
The rest means nothing.
I do not care.
Weglowski calls the hotel at four P.M. He is a careful man, this Pole. He will discuss nothing on the telephone. He asks me to join him downstairs in the lobby, and when I do, we shake hands briefly and walk to where he has parked his pickup truck. Sitting in the cab, the engine running so that we will have some heat, he tells me he has driven sixty miles through the mountains to the next town where he has purchased the hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite we will need for the bridge. I tell him he has bought enough to blow up the entire state, but he assures me it is only sufficient to do the job properly. He then asks if I can meet him tomorrow night at nine, at which time we will drive out to Henderson Gap to wire the bridge.
“Why tomorrow night?” I ask. “Why must we wire it so far in advance?”
“Better,” he says.
“Why?”
“When you like to do?”
“Friday night.”
“Better tomorrow,” he says.
He has not yet explained why, and so I persist. Isn’t there a greater chance of discovery if we leave all that dynamite just hanging on the bridge for two days in plain sight of anyone who cares to go looking for it? Wouldn’t it be better to wait until Friday night when …
“Who go looking?” Weglowski asks.
“Any number of people might go looking,” I tell him. “I’ve heard that official trains are usually preceded by track walkers.…”
“Walkers?”
“Yes, who search the rails for signs of sabotage. If they come looking, as they well might …”
“Can look Friday, too, no?”
“Yes, but that’s only the night before. It seems to me the chances are less likely.…”
“Cannot do Friday,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Daughter’s birthday Friday, Big party.”
For the next few moments, the conversation takes a ridiculous turn, as though the concept of an assassination having to wait upon a birthday party is too absurdly monumental for me to grasp. I hear myself asking him how old his daughter will be, and he replies she will be twenty, and I say, “Oh, that’s nice, I have a twenty-year-old son,” and he says, “Me, five sons—forty-one, thirty-eight, twenty-six, twenty-two, and seventeen,” and finally I say, “Listen, Weglowski, this bridge is more important than your daughter’s damn birthday party.”
“To who?” he asks.
“To me.”
“Then you do wire job, okay?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Okay. Then we do tomorrow night. No difference tomorrow night or Friday night.”
His logic is irrefutable. If the dynamite is to be discovered, it can just as easily be discovered tomorrow or Friday or indeed ten minutes before the train is due. And yet I am vaguely uneasy as I agree to meet him tomorrow at nine. Is it because the actual wiring will bring me closer to the final act itself? Postpone it to Friday, and I will be one step further away from the reality of detonating the charges and watching the train plunge into the ravine below. Wiring the bridge will lend credence to something I have thus far only distantly perceived. The reality of it frightens me. I prefer the fantasy that is Sara. And yet, even that frightens me. They are both real, I know, Sara and the bridge—and both inextricably linked.
I take her back to the hotel at six o’clock.
I undress her, put her to bed, and then go downstairs for something to eat.
There are two federal agents in the lobby.
I do not know who they are, but I know immediately what they are; I have entertained visits from their colleagues often enough, first when I was preparing the defense for the Baltimore draft resisters, and later when I was working on the Hoffstadter brief. They are instantly recognizable, both wearing dark overcoats and gray fedoras, enormous men who stand at the desk in quiet conversation with the girl who relieved Ralph. The redhead blinks up at them from behind her eyeglasses. I move silently past them, through the lobby and into the coffee shop.