TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  “Oh, Marty!” Dulaney fell to his knees and grabbed Kendall’s hand. It was stiff and cold. He sucked in his breath and trembled.

  Slowly his wits came back, pushing away the sickness.

  He looked in Kendall’s pocket and found a fat wallet. The mysteries began anew.

  Cash. Two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. Kendall had always claimed to be broke, yet he had left Dulaney a hundred-dollar bill, and here was three months’ pay in his billfold.

  Driver’s license. Issued last fall in Kendall’s name by the state of New Jersey, with a street address in a town called Regina Beach. New Jersey! Kendall had never said anything about New Jersey. He had been gone from the East for two years, he had said, and had lived in Connecticut when he’d worked in New York radio.

  Hot walker’s license and stable area pass from the California Horse Racing Board. Only the one track validation, Santa Anita, beginning last November. Kendall had said he’d come down from Bay Meadows.

  Dulaney took the money, the cards, the wallet, everything. Suddenly he knew he couldn’t leave anything here.

  God knew what he’d touched, going through the house yesterday. He had left his prints on everything.

  He manhandled the body down the stairs, across the basement to the crawl space. It was very stiff. Probably dead about eight hours, killed while I was out on my ass sleeping.

  His movements were now instinctive. He heaved Kendall up into the narrow crawl space: had to bend his arms down and force him in, then crawl in himself to push him back as far as he would go.

  Ten feet, fifteen. He wrestled the corpse through the earthy darkness. Then he found what he could—a pile of burlap sacks, an unused bag of fertilizer, and finally a fat roll of tar paper—and these he pushed into the crawl space to cover up the body.

  And he got the hell out of there.

  A stroke of good fortune—he passed the post office on the way out of town, otherwise he’d surely have forgotten. He slipped a note through the slot, asking that his papers be sent on.

  He had a destination now. Regina Beach, New Jersey.

  ( ( ( 12 ) ))

  HE walked east, into the coming night.

  In the morning he saw increasing signs of war fever. On a billboard in the middle of nowhere someone had plastered the words IF YOU SPREAD RUMORS, YOU’RE ONE OF HITLER’S BEST SOLDIERS. Still, people talked. They agreed that spreading rumors was un-American and then they spread them. He heard talk of spies everywhere.

  He crossed the Susquehanna at Harrisburg and pushed on toward Philadelphia. Bought a newspaper in Elizabethtown, startled to see a front-page story with a Regina Beach dateline. Yesterday, ten miles off the pier, a German torpedo boat had sunk an American tanker going south from New York. Bodies were washing up and a heavy black oil slick had covered the beach.

  He caught a good ride, which took him almost to the coast. Soon the taste of the sea was unmistakable and for the first time since California he saw antiaircraft guns on rooftops. He had hoped to reach the town before dark, but the rain had slowed him. Dusk found him trudging south on a narrow blacktop, somewhere near the coastal highway. The sunset was spectacular, with streaks of fire shooting through clouds over terrain that was quickly breaking into marshland.

  He had bought a flashlight and picked up a free map in a gas station, so he had a good sense of the town. It was on a long skinny island between New York and Atlantic City, five miles off the main highway on a two-lane paved road that cut through a thick woods. He saw no houses going in, no lights on either side. The land was deep and dark, the clouds were dense, and his vision was limited to the small arc of light that his flash threw before him.

  A fog closed in and the woods broke up in pockets of marsh. The air was salty and cold. Far ahead he heard a ship’s horn, and then he reached the bridge. It was an old narrow job of wooden planks with rusty steel supports. He could hear the surf as his feet clumped on the planks, and soon the road dead-ended into a north-south street. The sea was probably fifty yards away but the fog had locked in everything beyond the reach of his arm.

  Dunes appeared to his right, and he sensed a vast presence in the night beyond them. He felt suddenly dwarfed without knowing why.

  Then he heard music, wafting out of the surf on the opposite side. He heard the sound of hoofbeats coming, and he stepped off the road and dropped into the sand as two horsemen came riding past on the edge of the road. In the glare of their lights he recognized the uniforms of the coast guard, but to him, now, they were just cops. He pushed on south. He could still hear that music, a clarinet wailing and a swing band driving the melody. The song galloped through the air—“The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” In the dunes a red light flashed, flashed again, again. From the beach the music came to a frantic climax with screaming applause. Then he saw what he was hearing, a small party of jitterbugs on the deck of a beach house, with a radio playing in an open window.

  “You are listening to WHAR, your Blue Network voice of the eastern seaboard. August Stoner speaking . . . correct eastern wartime is twelve o’clock.”

  The light across the road flashed again and the giant took shape in the fog. It was the radio station, with a tower so high it disappeared in the clouds.

  ( ( ( 13 ) ) )

  HE opened his eyes and in the half darkness saw the shape of books on a shelf across from the bed. Slowly he remembered where he was.

  A plain room in a hotel on the north side of town. He had signed in after midnight, scrawling his name illegibly in the register.

  He was on the second floor looking south from the east corner of the hotel. The road rolled out of his left elbow: beyond it, the beach was an impossible mix of reds and blues. The surf was rough. In the distance he could see the town, lit up like a sapphire in the last long moment before the sunrise.

  The hotel wasn’t bad for two bills. The bed was hard and the building was quiet and cool. The owner was considerate: the books on the shelf were cheap editions, throwaways, library discards, put here to help a sleepless traveler get through the night. START A BOOK, TAKE IT WITH YOU, said the sign thumbtacked to the wall. The authors were America’s writers: Hemingway and Caldwell, James Fenimore Cooper, Gene Stratton Porter, and Faith Baldwin. Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Marjorie Rawlings—something for everyone.

  Toss out the Baldwin and the Nancy Drew and he had read them all at some time in his life. Books had always given him a sense of destiny, of self. Maybe now they’d give him more than that.

  He would need a new name. It would be beyond stupidity to get caught now because of carelessness. He looked at the names on the spines.

  Hemingway spoke: first, of course, and loudest.

  Not Hemingway. Too famous, too literary. A name should attract nobody’s attention.

  He thought of the people they wrote about. Robert Jordan and the Spanish war. Jody Baxter of the Florida wetlands, and his brawling friends the Forresters. Old Grandma Hutto.

  What’s your name, boy?

  The voice in his head had a badge pinned to it.

  Jordan, he thought.

  He looked at the books and thought of their characters. Corny Littlepage from that dusty novel Cooper wrote that no one but himself had ever read. Corny and his Dutch pal Guert Ten Eyck.

  I’ll be Dutch, he thought. Not Old World Dutch—a family of transplants in teeming America. Now he could answer a cop’s question.

  My name is Jordan. Jordan Ten Eyck.

  The rest of it came in a flood.

  My parents were immigrants from Holland before the last war. They settled in the South. Not Charleston, not that close to the truth, but near enough to peddle this soft Southern accent.

  My family settled in Savannah. We still have relatives in the old country. I’ve got cousins and an uncle in the Dutch resistance.

  My father worked on the docks of the Savannah River. I had a brother but he died. My father insisted that we be raised in the customs and language of our new country. We never spoke
or learned Dutch in our house. I was given my first name from the last name of the first good friend my father had in America.

  Call me Jordan.

  ( ( ( · ) ) )

  ONE DAY

  IN THE

  LIFE OF

  JORDAN

  TEN EYCK

  ( ( ( 1 ) ))

  HE walked across the road as the sun floated over the sea and turned the sky pale. He could smell the oil from the torpedoed tanker and he saw dead fish coated with black scum. The sand ran clear for a stretch, then oily, and puddles of oil were trapped in the gullies as the tide went out.

  Teams of men were out in the water, rolling barbed wire and giving the town the look of a war zone. The coast guard again, keeping the Hun at bay. Or so they thought. What were they going to do, fence the whole East Coast, or would they finally have to face the obvious?—that if someone wanted to get into a country as big as the United States, he’d find a way.

  The town was a typical Atlantic beachfront resort, with a boardwalk and amusement park. The pier jutted a quarter mile out to sea and had a pavilion the size of the Titanic. To the north, the radio tower seemed small now in the distant sunlight.

  In a beachfront diner he ate breakfast and read yesterday’s P.M. daily from Newark. A boxed sidebar told of operations at Regina Beach to contain the oil slick, but Jersey had been lucky. Most of the oil had been unloaded in New York and the tanks had been less than 10 percent full. But the town’s Festival of the Sun might be shut down for the first time in its eighty-year history.

  He talked to the waitress, a woman in her fifties with a tired face. He showed her Holly’s picture but she shook her head. Her world was this diner, this counter, that kitchen, and a small flat off the beach. She had two sons in the service and on Sundays she rolled bandages for the Red Cross. “I’ll bet ten thousand women like that come through this beach every summer.” She wished him luck and he hit the boardwalk.

  He hit the pier, the beach, the streets. He looked in every face and said her name to everyone he met, and he showed her picture everywhere.

  He was stopped on the beach by the mounties, who were courteous but inquisitive. Where had he come from? What had he been doing there? What did Dick Tracy do yesterday? No offense, but it was wartime and they were asking these questions of many new people on the beach. They asked his name and he looked in the man’s eyes. “My name’s Jordan. Jordan Ten Eyck.”

  He moved on, climbing to the sidewalk that led into town. Nothing was open yet. He passed some people and showed them Holly’s picture.

  He was crossing the street when he saw a car pull into a parking lot. The car got his attention, then the man, then the building. It was a twelve-cylinder Packard, a seven-thousand-dollar automobile. The building was five stories high, unusual in a beach town of this size. His eyes scanned the building’s facade and a shock went through him. The legend over the door said HARFORD 1937.

  Harford, not Hartford.

  Not a city. A building.

  And the man wore dark glasses, and looked like a blind man.

  ( ( ( 2 ) ))

  SOMETHING moved on the southwest corner of the rooftop, and Jordan stood still and watched. There seemed to be a utility room, a tin shed at the far edge. Telephone wires crisscrossed above it, and suddenly a man appeared near the edge, there only for a moment at the eastern rim.

  Jordan moved on past. Judgment warned him to tread softly until he found Holly.

  The sound of a small jazz band pulled him into a one-block court, packed with bars and swing joints on both sides of the street. The sign said Chicago Avenue, and his heart quickened with the certainty that she would come here. He followed the music into a room where daylight never came and saw a small swing combo jamming away. They were playing a head arrangement, with clear touches of “Somebody Stole My Gal” rippling in the riffs. It was the kind of red-hot number that wrapped up a set, bringing a crowd to its feet as the clarinet locked horns with the tenor and dueled him to a raging finish.

  But it ended in silence. There were a few scattered coughs from the bandstand and a laugh from the clarinet at the expense of the trombone. Jordan could see the stage and the empty tables around it and the bar across the room with its row of stools, also empty. The men were bathed in a ghostly velvet light, cool looking now that the spotlight was off. The trumpet called for “After You’ve Gone,” with something new from everybody, and they exploded into it, infusing it with tradition and an occasional shot at the moon.

  When it ended, the silence again was sudden and deep. It was so quiet that the voice in the dark place just inside the door seemed amplified.

  “We’re closed, pal.”

  Jordan didn’t need an introduction: he had seen enough bouncers. A wiry fellow, young, with muscles.

  “I’m looking for somebody.”

  “You won’t find him in here. We’re closed till three.”

  “This would be a young woman, possibly a regular. Twenty-six, pretty, with long honey-colored hair, sometimes tied back.” He took out the picture and held it into the light. “She might’ve gotten to town in February, or anytime since then. Her name’s Holly Carnahan.”

  The pause was long enough: she had been here but the bouncer wasn’t telling. “Come back at three and we’ll be glad to serve you a drink. But listen to what I’m saying, Kilroy. Don’t come in here pestering customers with a bunch of questions, or else you’ll be talking to me again.”

  “My friend’s name is Holly,” Jordan said.

  “I heard you the first time. Look, the boys’ve had a long night. They just want to jam a little and let their hair down. Now, you look like a smart customer. I don’t need to draw you a picture.”

  He reached out as if to grab Jordan’s arm. “I wouldn’t do that,” Jordan said, and something in his voice made the bouncer hang back. He leaned into the light so the kid could see his eyes. “I’m an easygoing fellow, but I don’t push easy. The good part is, we don’t need to push at all. You could answer a civil question and I’d go on about my business.”

  The bouncer made a show of making up his mind. “This woman . . . you say you’re a friend of hers?”

  “I may be the only one she’s got.”

  “Maybe I’d be her friend too if she’d let me. I see a lot of women in here, but she’s really something. The caterpillar’s kimono.”

  “I’ll tell her you said that. She can be a little slow warming up to people but she’s worth the trouble.”

  Jordan leaned back in the dark and waited. The rest of it was coming now. The bouncer said, “Yeah, there’s a woman like that on the beach. The name she goes by is Holly O’Hara, but she’s the one you want. Loneliest goddamn eyes I ever saw. I bought her a drink when she first came around but I never could get her to sit still for a repeat performance.”

  The kid coughed. “She’s got something else you didn’t mention—a voice that’ll stop time dead. She’s a singer in a joint up the street. Place called the Magic Carpet, halfway down on the other side.”

  ( ( ( 3 ) ) )

  THE Magic Carpet was locked and dark in the early morning. It didn’t seem to matter now. She was here. She was safe. He would see her.

  From a sign in the window he learned that she sang here weeknights with a group called the Windy City Seven. On Saturdays they could be heard from eleven thirty till midnight on WHAR, the local radio outlet.

  He decided to approach her cautiously, choose his time with care, contact her quietly, and then let her come to him.

  He didn’t like this decision much. Something told him to find her now, with no more delays, and it was only calm judgment that held him back.

  In the department store he bought some clothes: jeans and shirts, shoes, socks, underwear. He stopped for a respectable haircut and in a pharmacy bought a razor, lather brush, toothbrush, and shoe polish.

  He checked into the same hotel and rented the room for a week. Told the old man he’d be needing a radio and got the one behind the c
ounter, four bits for the week.

  His room faced north, on the opposite end from where he’d been last night. The window gave him a clear view of the road and the radio tower looming over the dunes. He plugged the radio into a wall outlet and listened to what came out of it—some fellow in Washington talking about sugar rationing and the fuel cutbacks scheduled to begin in a few days. Now everyone would need a ration card to buy gasoline. Even Mrs. Roosevelt was learning to ride a bicycle and would get by on her three gallons a week.

  He sat at the open window and tried to curb his uneasiness until tonight. He had deliberately not thought of Kendall but now he did, and he faced his conscience as he thought back over what he had done. It was too late for that now, but he would think about it in times to come. Until I put it to rest, he thought. Until I find out who did that thing and why.

  He told himself he was doing right by waiting. It made no sense to stir up the town looking for her now. He opened Holly’s Emily Dickinson and sat staring at her picture and, beside it, that scrap of newspaper headline. March Flack, British radio actor, missing since 1936. Suddenly it all seemed to jumble—Holly, Kendall, Harford, Carnahan, March Flack—and the day seemed endless.

  In the bathroom at the end of the hall he shaved and took another shower. Now his room seemed different, as if someone had been in here. He had been foolish, given all that had happened, to leave his door unlocked. It was a habit that came from living in tack rooms, which were never locked, and he stood for a moment wondering if he had imagined some intruder out of his own immediate past. Then he realized what was different. It was the radio . . . someone with two good ears had turned the volume down, not by much, but the sound had been part of the room and it had changed. He cocked his head and listened, then slowly turned up the volume until the room felt right again.