Unpunished

by William Peter Grasso

But O’Hara kept right on talking. “What makes you so sure he’ll get the nod, anyway, Tom? What about Nixon?”

  “That nutcase? He’s crazier than a shithouse rat. Just because he’s vice president don’t mean nobody in their right mind’s gonna nominate him. Who the fuck cares about VPs, anyway? Ain’t no real money on him.”

  “I don’t know, Tom…I think Nixon’s got a great shot.”

  “Fuck Nixon! Don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Besides, if the Dems put up that other little rich boy, Kennedy, we’re gonna need to cancel out all his war hero bullshit.”

  “Pilcher ain’t no war hero, Tom. Anything but. Surely you don’t expect me to…”

  “I expect you’ll do as you’re told, Freddy.” There was not a hint of a smile on Houlihan’s face or in his voice.

  O’Hara dropped back into his swivel chair, the knot in his stomach threatening to deposit the lunch he had just downed onto the solid oak desk. He dared not envision himself at some podium—bright lights blazing, cameras rolling, a phalanx of microphones before him—endorsing Leonard Pilcher. He would puke for sure, right there on national TV.

  “Tom, the last time I saw Pilcher was right before I bailed out of that plane. I swore that if I ever saw him again, I’d kill him.”

  Houlihan slowly rose to his feet, smoothing the fall of his expensive silk suit jacket over his abundant belly in the process. He shuffled behind O’Hara’s chair, massaged the younger man’s shoulders gently, then gave him a playful, yet firm, tap on the head. “The passion of youth, my boy…that’s all that was. You’re a growed-up political animal now. We’re all counting on you. You’re gonna do the right thing.”

  Do the right thing. Those words kept echoing in Fred O’Hara’s mind long after Houlihan had made his way out of the union hall, patting the backs and shaking the hands of thuggish functionaries that Fred knew damn well were still loyal to the old man. As Houlihan’s chauffeured limo disappeared into the rush-hour traffic, the right thing was painfully clear to Fred O’Hara—put a bullet in Leonard Pilcher’s brain at the earliest convenience. Do everyone a big favor. I should have done it a long time ago.

  Hell…maybe a bullet would do ol’ Tom Houlihan some good, too. With all his gambling debts, he’s ripe for a bribe. Old Man Pilcher must have figured that one out and swooped in for the kill. But Houlihan’s eighty-two, for Christ’s sake! Can’t the old bastard just do us all a favor and croak right now, before he sells us out any worse?

  O’Hara’s gut still reeled at the irony—after all these years of doing Tom Houlihan’s violent bidding to reach the pinnacle of union leadership, his first official act on the national stage was slated to be the political endorsement of a man he despised, a man he had once vowed to kill.

  Houlihan’s gone soft. Conflict…ain’t that what unions are about? None of these son-of-a-bitch mill owners ever gonna give you nothing for free…You gotta fight for it…even kill for it.

  Kill for it…the memory crept back into Fred O’Hara’s mind like a persistent stain. A blood stain. Scrub it as hard as you like; you think you have gotten rid of it. But when the rinse water dries, the stain—and the memory of Billy Murphy—is still there, maybe dulled a bit, but there nonetheless.

  Billy Murphy and Fred O’Hara had been friends since childhood in Pittsburgh. As teenagers, they fought side by side against the rival neighborhood gangs. Sticks and stones broke their bones, but they gave as good as they got. Always.

  Billy joined the Navy right after Pearl Harbor. A talented mechanic, he chose submarines, spending the next three years roaming the Pacific in the sweltering, airless hell that was a sub’s engine room. After VJ Day, the Navy wanted him to stay, offering him petty officer’s rank. He told them to shove their stripes—and their submariner’s dolphins—up their asses. He had had enough of the sea. He was going back to Pittsburgh. Back to the steel mills.

  Fred O’Hara was already home from the war, liberated from the Stalag Luft just before VE Day, when Billy Murphy returned to Pittsburgh. They saw little of each other, though; Billy hired on as a plant mechanic at a mill right away. Fred signed on as a pilot for a fledgling airline that promptly failed, then half a dozen more that folded within months of opening for business. Surplus transport planes were cheap, war-experienced pilots even cheaper. But the business acumen needed to turn a profit from the sky in those post-war years was neither cheap nor abundant.

  After little more than a year, Fred O’Hara came home to Pittsburgh with his new wife, gave up on his dream of commercial flying, and took a mill job. A veteran union organizer, a USW man by the name of Tom Houlihan, took a shine to this new face. He seemed a tad sharper, a bit more tenacious, and a whole lot more comfortable speaking his mind than the average new-hire. And he had to be tough as nails to have survived as a POW. Tom spent many hours listening—with rapt attention—as Fred told of evading capture in Germany. But he figured the part about the angelic blonde girl who tried to help them escape—and crawled into the sack with his buddy—had to be bullshit, just there to spice the tale up a bit.

  The United Steelworkers bosses were not a particularly scrupulous bunch. They declared their own lackeys as winners in the recent shop steward elections, even though a pitiful few of the rank-and-file claimed to have voted for them. Tom Houlihan had been a loyal USW man, but even he smelled the corruption and decay. He was leading the disenfranchised membership in a fight for a new union, the Amalgamated Steelworkers, to kick the USW out of this plant and any other plant where they could garner enough support. Fred O’Hara quickly became one of his trusted lieutenants.

  It did not take long before the two unions were engaged in violent confrontations—head-busting, they called it. Armed conflict came too easily to men who, less than two years ago, were making war against Germany and Japan. It was not too difficult to turn on your own countrymen if you thought it might result in adding another 10 cents to your hourly wage. Heads were indeed busted and worse: bodies pierced with bullets and knives, even makeshift weapons like sharpened screwdrivers and blunt hammers came into frequent play.

  Fred O’Hara adopted the practice of keeping a change of clothes in the shed behind his mother’s row house. He did not want his mother or his wife, pregnant with their first child, to see his blood-spattered garments, to know just how close he was to all this mayhem the newspapers featured endlessly, complete with gory black-and-white photos of blood-soaked union men littering the streets. The shed served another purpose: he could hide his pistol there.

  It was never meant to be a confrontation, just a few of Houlihan’s men sauntering into a dark and smoky bar, well into their cups already. A table of equally inebriated men—United Steelworkers men—sat far in the corner, anonymous and unnoticed. Their loud, boisterous comments—ugly words against the Amalgamated Steelworkers—were ignored at first. But the repetition of those comments raised the temperature of the room rapidly. Soon, they were met with angry challenges from Houlihan’s men. A chair was thrown, then a few punches. Someone cried, Look out, Freddy! He’s got a shiv! A gunshot, then deafening silence, with all the actors frozen on their marks.

  As he and his cohorts fled the bar, Fred O’Hara took one fleeting look at the face of the young man bleeding to death on the floor. Only then did he realize he had just shot Billy Murphy.

  I killed my enemy…I killed my friend.

  When the police finally arrived, none of the noncombatants in that bar would profess to having seen anything. Among the men Billy Murphy had been drinking with, none knew the identities of their assailants. The police ended their investigation right then and there.

  Fred O’Hara stored the memory of that murder as his darkest secret, to be spoken just once. He confessed the secret to his good friend, war buddy and fellow POW Lou DiNapoli.

  His secretary’s voice snapped him back to the present. “Are you okay, Mr. O’Hara?” she asked. Lost in his awful memory, Fred had no idea how long she had been standing in the office doorway, watching him.


  “Yeah, Marion, I’m fine. Just thinking about something.”

  “Gee, you seemed about a thousand miles away.”

  “That’s about where I was…See you in the morning, Marion.”

  She closed the door behind her, unconvinced of his sanity but glad to be going home. O’Hara turned back to gaze at the pictures on the wall once again. Of this he was sure: he had not clawed his way to union leadership to wear expensive suits, live in a house with servants, or hobnob with industrialists and their pampered offspring. He had done it for one reason and one reason only: to make sure the have-nots retained the power to impose consequences on the haves.

  Leonard Pilcher definitely had some consequences coming that were long overdue. If Tom Houlihan could not see that, well…maybe he would have to go, too.

  No fucking way this union ever endorses that son of a bitch.

  He spun the rolodex. Sticking a pencil in the phone, he dialed “O.” “Yeah, Operator,” he said, “long distance. I’m calling New York City…”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The New England winter of 1959-1960 had been unusually warm, threatening to make spring’s arrival nothing more than a turn of a calendar’s page. The air in the classroom was thick and uncomfortable as the radiators continued to produce the heat a Cambridge winter usually required. The solitary co-ed, Meredith Salinger, had already complained the room was stuffy. Assistant Professor Joseph Gelardi busied himself opening the windows wide as his students—MIT freshmen—pondered another problem of the Calculus. A pop quiz, they called it.

  As his students labored in silence, Joe Gelardi’s mind drifted elsewhere, to another time, another place. A simple conclusion haunted him, one he had confessed to no one but himself a thousand times before:

  I failed you, David Linker.

  He was not sure what triggered the crushing guilt this time; he could never be sure. Was it the sound of Meredith Salinger’s solitary female voice in a sea of male voices, much like Pola’s voice had sounded amidst those of The Lady M’s crew? Or was it the sounds the open windows allowed inside—the deep rumble of piston-engined airplanes as they plied their way to and from Logan Airport, their sound still far more prevalent than the ear-shattering whine of the new jet airliners?

  Or was it seeing the face of Leonard Pilcher once again, smirking like some sadistic, grayscale demon from a black and white television screen, ripping open an unhealed wound?

  Pilcher: that murderer. I could have stopped him in Sweden a long time ago. The Swedish government would have been more than glad to repatriate an interned murderer to face a court martial…and maybe a firing squad. But I didn’t. Protecting Pola seemed so much more important.

  What perverse god smiles on a man such as Leonard Pilcher? How many lives have been ruined by his very being, yet his arc of privilege never seems to falter from its upward path? President of the United States: could it be possible that someone as despicable and undeserving as Leonard Pilcher could achieve that office?

  Sure it was. Anything can be bought. Price was no obstacle to the Pilcher family.

  Do I still feel that way about Pola? After all these years, having never again seen or spoken another word to her? Would she still hold that power over me were she suddenly to appear?

  Then the shame of his inaction—and the injustice it had allowed—washed over him once again. He knew that there was nothing he could have done to prevent David Linker’s murder, save some quirk of fate that would have placed him close enough to stop it, somewhere other than the grandstand seat he had shared with Pola. That was not the issue. It was simply this: driven solely by loyalty born of love and lust, he let the murderer walk away. Rare was the day that some random incident would not trigger memories of David. It never took much: a male student in energetic, intellectual discourse, another putting his arm around a friend in a display of comradeship, or—and this was the most horrific one—simply watching something fall.

  A few weeks before, he had been on the street when the rope hoisting a piano to an upper floor had parted, sending the piano plummeting in silence downward until it struck the pavement and shrieked its final, chaotic discord. While in no danger from the accident, afterward it had taken Joe hours to pull himself together.

  The sound of a student’s pencil plunking down dragged Joe Gelardi back to the present. The student, finished with the quiz, stretched at his desk, arms over head, a look of relief on his face. The pop quiz—that unexpected challenge to the young man’s mastery of the Calculus—had been faced down and bested once again.

  Joe checked the clock on the classroom wall. “Five more minutes, people,” he announced to the class, and slipped back to his reverie.

  It had been nearly 16 years since that fateful autumn day of David Linker’s murder. After Pola banished Joe from Malmö—and her life—he completed his internment in a military camp outside Stockholm. The bleakness of that bitter cold winter seemed an all-too-appropriate host for his guilt-ravaged soul. The loneliness of that camp, far from the city life and a lover’s ministrations to which he had become accustomed, became unspeakable. The only vestige of life in Malmö that remained was the pain of David Linker’s murder. Incapable of bonding with his fellow internees at the new camp, he withdrew into himself.

  The other internees were suspicious of him for entirely the wrong reason, convinced as they were that anyone as closed-in and self-absorbed as Joe Gelardi must have come to Sweden through a thinly veiled act of desertion and was crumbling under that shame. This particular group had long ago decided they were righteous warriors, spoiling to get back into the fight, who had been bravely doing their duty but were forced to crash-land their devastated aircraft in this strange, indifferent land through no fault of their own. Joe’s isolation became self-reinforcing and absolute. He could not reach out to them; they shunned him.

  As that winter turned to spring, the Allied pincers squeezing on Germany from east and west made the eventual victors of the war a certainty. The maintenance of neutrality became an expensive and politically unnecessary inconvenience for the Swedish, and they began repatriating their interned Allied airmen in droves. By mid-April 1945, Lieutenant Joe Gelardi found himself back at Eighth Air Force Headquarters in England.

  The debriefing on his return had been perfunctory, much to his surprise. Gelardi had expected a court of inquiry, a first-class grilling by a panel of flying officers as to why their bomber had absented herself from the war, why three of her crew had bailed out, how two more had come to unlikely deaths in Sweden. But the solitary officer conducting the debriefing, a balding, porcine lieutenant colonel, seemed bored with the whole affair as he plodded through routine questions in the semi-circular gloom of the Quonset Hut’s arches, without so much as an enlisted man to assist him. He spoke no more than necessary, but when he did, it was in that annoying, muted twang—that perverted melding of dialects of the American Midwest and South—which had become the standard accent of those overly enamored with military life. That twang tended to emphasize the first syllable of a multi-syllable word whether or not that was the word’s proper pronunciation. Worse, this colonel lacked aviator’s wings. Gelardi was certain this groundling officer—too fat to fit in the cramped confines of a combat aircraft—could not possibly understand or appreciate the travails of those who risked their lives in the air, despite the Eighth Air Force patch sewn to his sleeve. He was just another clerk, important only to himself, assigned by chance to the part of the Army that flew rather than the part that slogged. This debriefing would be nothing more than tying up a few loose ends to satisfy some artificial requirements of the military bureaucracy. The questions had been programmed to avoid unpleasant, inconvenient answers, for the war would be over soon. It was time to sugarcoat the past and move on. American airmen would never shirk their duty; Eighth Air Force would get the statements to prove it, by God. Joe Gelardi was not even told to sit down.

  Captain Leonard Pilcher had arrived in England many months earlier,
only to be quickly shipped back to the States. The colonel produced Pilcher’s repatriation debriefing statement with little fanfare. In Pilcher’s words, The Lady M received significant battle damage from fighter attacks over northern Germany on 17 August 1944, resulting in one crew member MIA—presumed KIA—and another badly wounded. The battle damage proved so severe that completing the mission, or returning to base in England, was not possible. In the ensuing confusion of combat, three members of the crew bailed out over northern Germany. A normal landing was too risky to the remaining crew members. The aircraft was destroyed by fire after I, as pilot in command, executed a successful belly landing on Swedish soil, which all remaining crew members survived without further injury.

  The colonel asked, in that irritating twang, “Does your REC-ollection of E-vents differ from Captain Pilcher’s statement?”

  For a moment, Joe questioned himself: Had the battle damage really been severe? But he was no surer now than then. He was only the navigator. He did not fly the old girl; he just did the math. Judgment as to the airworthiness of The Lady M was not his to make.

  The urge to refute Pilcher’s statement was strong. The rationalization not to was stronger. What does it matter? This is just a formality, anyway. That’s what they want to hear.

  “My recollection of the events on that day does not differ from that of Captain Pilcher,” Joe said.

  The colonel droned on to his next question without so much as a glance at the uneasy lieutenant standing before him. “Do you A-ttest that your IN-ternment in Sweden was due to your aircraft’s IN-ability to RE-turn to base?”

  The colonel’s articulation was like nails on a blackboard, sounding officious yet illiterate at the same time.

  Joe Gelardi said, “Yes, I do.”

  He felt no further remorse for saying those words. As far as he was concerned, it was just the severe battle damage question all over again.