by Ed McBain
“It might. It looks like snow.”
“Yes. We’d have to leave earlier if …”
“If it snows, yes. I’ll borrow Seth’s car. I’m sure …”
“No. Let’s leave Seth out of this. We’ll have to get a car elsewhere. I’ll rent one, if you like.”
“That might be best.”
“I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”
“What about after the bridge? Will you come back here?”
“No. The airport. Directly to the airport.”
“Do you have a ticket yet?”
“I can get one there, that’s no problem.”
“I’d rather you got one in advance, Arthur.”
“All right, I will.”
“There’s a travel agent in town. On Carter. Will you make a reservation tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“There are flights to New York all day long.”
“I know.”
“I’ll drive you directly to the airport afterward. After the bridge.”
“All right.”
“Now what about this party?”
“It’s a costume party, did I tell you that?”
“Ridiculous,” Sara whispers. “Where are we supposed to get costumes?”
“They can be simple.”
“Sure, like what?”
“I don’t know. It’s really not important, Sara. As long as Epstein’s unrecognizable.”
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, I see. That’s very clever, Arthur. Did you think of that?”
“Yes.”
“That’s very clever. But what shall I go as?”
“Anything you like.”
“I think I’ll go as a cheap whore.”
“Fine.”
“Or a pregnant college girl.”
“Anything you like.”
“Or maybe both. Which would you prefer, Arthur?”
“I prefer you.”
“You’ve got me.”
“Have I?”
“Can’t you tell?”
“I can tell.”
“Gloria disapproved of you at first. But I think she liked you by the end of the night.”
“I’m glad.”
“I am, too. I’m very fond of Gloria. She’s my closest friend, I tell her everything. I even told her …”
“Yes?”
“No, nothing.”
“What did you tell her?”
She hesitates a moment, and then says, “Only that I love you very much.”
I know this is not what she was about to say, but I can hardly quibble. “I love you, too, Sara,” I tell her.
“Very much?”
“Very much.”
“Yes, good.” She nods in the darkness, and is thoughtfully silent. After a while, she says, “There’s a thrift shop near the railroad station. I’ll stop there tomorrow after class and see if I can find something to wear. They have all kinds of junky, musty crap there. I’ll get something, don’t worry.”
“Epstein’s coming here at nine in the morning,” I tell her.
“Okay. Good night, Arthur,” she says, and sighs.
“Good night Sara.”
She sighs often during the night, and once she mumbles, “Oh, dear, dear, dear” in her sleep. Something is worrying her, and it worries me in turn. I circle back over our conversation, trying to discover the source of the uneasiness, but I cannot pinpoint the exact location, and I toss restlessly, unsettled.
I hold her close, and each time she sighs, her troubled breath shudders through me like my own.
I do love her very much indeed.
Friday, November 1
Weglowski has not taken the truck tonight, for fear it will be recognized. Instead, he is driving a nondescript, faded blue, 1968 Chevrolet sedan, the trunk of which is loaded with dynamite, blasting caps, coils of wire, friction tape, and tools. I notice that he drives with extreme caution, but I make no comment. He seems dour and uncommunicative, a trifle tense. When at last I ask him whether he is worried about setting the explosives, he answers that he is worried only about going to jail. I tell him, with what I consider to be a humorous edge, that I quite share his concern. He acknowledges my comment with a brief dismissive nod.
We park the car at the overlook, and hastily unload the trunk. He has packed the dynamite and blasting caps into two knapsacks, and we quickly strap these to our backs. There are several large coils of wire, and we loop these over our arms and shoulders. Weglowski shoves the roll of black tape into the pocket of his mackinaw and then straps on his tool belt. We cannot risk being seen on the highway this way, and so we take to the woods at once, stepping into knee-deep snow, and begin the half-mile trek back to the bridge.
I am worried about leaving footprints.
Weglowski tells me, in impeccable English and with a dryness indicating he caught my earlier jibe, that he quite shares my concern.
There is no moon. The land slopes away before us, falling off toward the gap. A rabbit’s tracks hemstitch the snow, circle a tree, vanish. I am no longer fearful of rattlesnakes (it is my city belief that you do not find rattlesnakes in the snow), but now I am beginning to worry about wildcats or wolves or worse. I stay very close to Weglowski, who plows through the snow grunting and puffing, now and then muttering what I assume to be Polish swear words. Above us, on the highway, the headlights of an occasional automobile pierce the darkness, the clinking of tire chains merges with the brittle night.
The bridge is just ahead.
We hold a hurried consultation, our breaths billowing like comic strip balloons. Weglowski wants to know where I will do it, and at first I do not understand him.
“From where?” he whispers.
“What do you mean?”
“From where you blast?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Where do you think? I mean, where will it be safest for me?”
He looks around. The sloping ravine is barren of cover save for low outcroppings of rock and underbrush. There is, however, near the eastern end of the bridge, a huge boulder. Weglowski suggests that if I station myself on or behind that boulder, I will be safe from the blast and have a clear view of the bridge. I agree with him. We half slide, half run down the southern slope of the gap, and then begin climbing up to the boulder. It is not an easy climb. The northern side of the ravine is steep, and the snow has been blown off, leaving a treacherous escarpment of ice and rock. When we finally reach the boulder, my heart is pounding furiously, and I am covered with a cold sweat. But the boulder itself is a perfect observation platform, large enough for a man to lie prone on its flat top, commanding an unobstructed view of the bridge and its western approach.
As Weglowski starts across the tracks to the far end of the trestle, the knapsack full of dynamite on his back, I am certain he will lose his footing and tumble into the ravine below, setting off a blast that will demolish both himself and the scheme. But he is a sure-footed old goat, and I watch him as he nimbly picks his way over the ties until he is consumed by darkness and I can no longer see him.
I stretch out on the boulder, and peer into the blackness.
The night is still. It is fiercely cold, but there is no wind. From the other end of the bridge, I hear sounds I think I can identify, the small mechanical click of a pair of pliers, the rasp of tape being torn. On the highway, in the distance, there is the jangle of tire chains, the hum of an approaching automobile. Headlights flash around the bend in the road, illuminate the highway guard rail, and pass on. The night is still again. I can hear my watch ticking in the darkness. The time is nine-thirty. Professor Epstein, wearing the costume we decided upon this morning, will have picked up Sara at her apartment a half hour ago. The masquerade party at Hester’s house will be in full swing by now. If all goes well …
Weglowski is coming back toward the center of the bridge, paying out wire behind him. He reaches the apogee of the arch, climbs under the tracks, and disappears from sight. I can hear the clicking of pliers again, the tearing of tape.
He seems to be taking longer at the middle of the span than he did at the far end, and I assume it is because his hold is more tenuous there, suspended as he is above the deepest part of the gorge, and clinging to the girders for support. I look at the luminous dial of my watch. Thirty-five minutes have gone by since he left me here on the boulder, and twenty of those minutes have been spent at the keystone point. I wonder if he is having difficulty. There is the sound of another automobile in the distance, the metallic rattle of tire chains. I crane my neck for a view of the approaching car. As it rumbles past, I see the distinctive red dome light on its roof. The car does not stop, it does not even slacken its speed. But I keep watching until it disappears, and then I continue staring into the darkness, listening, wondering if it will stop at the overlook where the blue Chevrolet is parked.
“Weglowski!” I whisper.
He does not answer.
“Weglowski!”
“What?” he whispers back.
“Hurry! That was the police!”
“What?”
“The police, the police!”
“What? What?”
I hear him scrambling from beneath the arch and onto the tracks above.
“They’re gone now,” I whisper, “but for God’s sake, hurry!”
There is silence for a moment. Then Weglowski says, “Jackass,” and goes back to work.
In a little while, he comes into view again, paying his wire out behind him toward my end of the bridge. He climbs onto the boulder, takes the second knapsack of dynamite without saying a word to me, and then goes down to where the end of the arch is embedded in concrete below. He is at work for perhaps an additional fifteen minutes. When he climbs up to the boulder again, he is holding two strands of wire in his hands.
“These you connect to the box tomorrow morning,” he tells me.
In the basement of his house, I apologize for having alarmed him, explaining that I was frightened all along that he might tumble into the ravine and blow himself up. He is still miffed, and he tells me in his broken English that the whole point of Nobel’s invention was to combine nitroglycerin (“Volatile, extremely volatile,” Epstein has said) with various inert porous substances in order to reduce its sensitivity to shock and avoid accidental explosion. In other words, he could have fallen off that bridge with the knapsack full of dynamite on his back and suffered nothing more serious than a broken leg, do I understand?
I do not understand completely, but I would never admit it to him now. Besides, I am anxious to get on with this. It is twenty minutes to eleven, and I must get to Hester’s house before midnight. I nod solemnly.
“That’s why the box,” he says.
“The box,” I repeat.
“For spark,” he says, “for explode,” and then goes on to explain what he has done. The bridge is now wired with three fifty-pound charges of dynamite, one at each end and one in the middle. He has used five-pound sticks, tied together and then taped to the girders. At each end, he has placed his charge behind the footing even though he would have preferred setting the dynamite into a hole drilled in the concrete. He is certain he can blow out the footings this way, but he admits the other way would have been better. It is a matter of time and equipment, however; drilling into concrete is not a simple matter. He tells me again that he is sure the footings can be blown out this way, but I am beginning to think he doth protest, and he is making me slightly nervous. He speculates that the fifty-pound charge in the center of the span might be enough to knock down the bridge unassisted by the other two charges—but again he sounds dubious, and I cannot dismiss the feeling that he is not too certain about any of this.
He has wired the blasting caps in series, using a number-20 wire to connect the first charge to the second to the third, and then running his lead wires from the first charge and the third back to the boulder, where I am to connect them to the detonator tomorrow morning. He shows me the detonator now. He refers to it as “the box,” which is exactly what it is, a wooden box perhaps a foot high and six inches square. A metal plate is fastened to the box, giving the manufacturer’s name, and the serial number, and the model number, and an official title as well: BLASTING MACHINE. I find that comical. It is a blasting machine; it looks exactly like all the blasting machines I have ever seen in movies from the time I was six years old, with a metal plunger sticking up out of its middle, and with two big brass screws and wing nuts around and under which I am to secure the lead wires tomorrow morning. Then all I have to do is push the plunger down (the last two inches are the only ones that count, Weglowski explains) and because the charges are wired in series, the electric current will hit the three blasting caps buried in dynamite sticks at precisely the same moment, and the footings and keystone will go together, the bridge will tumble into the ravine carrying the train with it.
It is all very simple.
All I have to do is do it.
There is a leather carrying handle on the box, but Weglowski does not think (and again here, I detect a dry sense of humor) I should walk through the hotel lobby carrying a blasting machine on a strap. He puts it into a brown paper bag instead. I am carrying the future of the nation in a brown paper bag.
Outside the hotel, Weglowski asks, “When I get my money?”
“I have nothing to do with the money arrangements,” I answer.
“I want before the train.”
“Of course.”
“You tell them. Tell them Weglowski wants his money early tomorrow, before the train. Otherwise, maybe no explosion.”
“What does that mean?”
“You tell them,” he says.
It is eleven-thirty when the taxi drops me off at Hester’s house.
I have deposited the blasting machine in my room, and quickly changed into my brown suit, entering and leaving the hotel through the side entrance as I did earlier tonight when meeting Weglowski. The brown suit is hardly inspired. But it is the only one I have with me, and Epstein possesses one as well, and he is at this moment wearing it under his costume and waiting for me in Hester’s garage (I hope). The costume, such as it is, still bothers me. A man has a distinctive gait, a personal way of holding himself, clearly recognizable unless he is disguised from head to toe. A gorilla suit would have been perfect, a shambling dancing bear, something of the sort, but try to find such stuff in a small university town. We have done the best we might have under the circumstances, but our solution still troubles me, still seems as makeshift as our entire endeavor (which may be significant, who knows?).
I hear party noises as I walk around to the side of the house, music, laughter, the same party noises that are probably being heard all over America on this Friday night following Halloween, but here they are sham, here they have been created only for cover, an assassin’s alibi. I barely avoid discovery by a costumed couple necking in the shadows near the chimney wall on the western end of the house. The garage door is open. There is no light. I enter, and wonder if I dare whisper Epstein’s name.
A hand touches my shoulder.
I come close to screaming.
He materializes in the darkness before me. We stand toe to toe, neither of us speaking. His eyes are already accustomed to the gloom, but it is some time before mine adjust and before I can see him however dimly. He is, to be truthful, quite unrecognizable. He is wearing over the brown suit a raccoon coat borrowed from one of the medical students in Sara’s building. Around his throat, he has wrapped the long blue-and-white striped muffler Hester wore on her unannounced visit to my hotel room Monday night. He is also wearing blue mittens, and a porkpie hat, and he is carrying in his left hand a W.M.U. pennant on a stick. A button pinned to the collar of the raccoon coat reads “Class of ’29,” and the rubber mask he has pulled over his head is apple-cheeked and bulbous-nosed, grinning, the face of an old fart back for the big game with the school’s traditional enemy. We shopped three five-and-dimes before finding that mask. I wonder now if my mustache will cause me to suffocate inside it I also w
onder whether anyone at the party will notice that the old grad’s shoes have miraculously changed from the brown Oxfords Epstein is wearing to the brown loafers I am wearing.
“What’s your shoe size?” I whisper.
“What?”
“Your shoe. The size.”
“8½ B. Why?”
“Forget it,” I whisper.
Epstein begins taking clothes off, and I begin putting them on. “Time did not mention the exact length of the train,” he whispers. “But it did say there would be a locomotive and four cars.”
“Um-huh.” I have already put on the raccoon coat, and am now wrapping Hester’s muffler around my throat. It smells faintly of Muguet du Bois.
“It’s my educated guess,” Epstein whispers, “that if you detonated your blast when the second car is in the middle of the bridge, you’ll get the whole train with plenty of yardage to spare. Do you agree?”
“Yes, I guess so.” I put on the mittens. They are sticky and hot.
“Did you wire the bridge?”
“Yes.”
He hands me the rubber mask, and I pull it on over my head. It is even stickier and hotter than the mittens, and it reeks of Epstein’s aftershave lotion.
“Good luck,” he whispers. “Sara’s waiting for you.”
“Did you talk to anyone?” I ask.
“What?”
“Your voice, your voice.”
“I slurred my words. Like a drunk. Returning graduates usually …”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Good luck,” he says again.
I move out of the garage and walk swiftly to the back of the house. The sounds of the party are closer now. I open the kitchen door. Hester’s black housekeeper (Mrs. Hollis, I presume) looks at me and says nothing. I take a deep breath and walk through the kitchen and into the living room.
It is fifteen minutes to midnight.
They are all masked, and I do not know who they are. There is music floating from a phonograph and they flit past me in glittering costumes and I have no clues to their separate hidden identities as they go by.
A tall skeleton, white bones against black cloth, grinning skull mask and black eyes burning in hole sockets bends over me as I mix myself a drink, and says, “Who are you, mister?” and I say, “Guess,” and he dances away, showing me his back and the gaps where the snappers on his costume are imperfectly fastened. There is a woman, I think she is a woman, a matriarch in long peach gown and wide-brimmed hat, parasol slung over her arm, chalk-white face and brilliantly rouged lips. She stalks me relentlessly about the room as I wander from group to group hoping to recognize, and at last her dowager’s limping gait brings her to my side and she leans into my ear and whispers, “Did it go well?” and I answer, “Yes,” and move away waving my W.M.U. pennant.