TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

“Shut up. Do what I tell you.”

  “What’s the idea? I’m nobody special. I lost my girl down here and all I’m doing is looking for her.”

  “She’s not coming. She sent me instead. I know who you are, Dulaney, she told me all about you. Move on up to the car.”

  He groped along the causeway. Now he recognized the car, that ’35 Ford again, and he knew he was in deep, grave trouble.

  “Put your hands on the hood.”

  A flashlight beam danced around him and he heard footsteps on the planks. He felt the man’s free hand around his waist, slapping his pockets. Where was the gun? he wondered, but then the man stepped back and the chance was gone.

  “That wasn’t so smart, coming out here without a weapon. But I forgot, you were expecting Holly, weren’t you? That’s too bad— Holly doesn’t want to see you. She sent me out to tell you that. In fact, she wants you to leave town right now, tonight. Are you hearing me? You’re to leave now and never come back.”

  The voice sounded strongly German, the accent bumping over certain phrases. Again he said, “Are you hearing me, Dulaney?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yes? What does ‘Sure’ mean?”

  “Just that I’d like to hear it from her, that’s all.”

  The blow took him off guard, sprawling him onto the causeway. He rolled over on his back and saw the Woodsman standing over him, holding an evil-looking gun by the barrel.

  “Don’t sit up, Dulaney. Don’t do anything yet.”

  It was the first Woodsman, the jittery one he’d last seen running out of the fire door. The man leaned over him, switching the gun from the pistol whip to a more deadly grip. “I don’t like doing this. I don’t like hurting people, but I will. I’m at the end of my goddamn rope.”

  Dulaney shook his head and stared into the barrel.

  “I want you to understand something. When I tell you to leave town, you had better do what I say. Don’t say, ‘Sure,’ and think you can lie to me, because you know what? I’ve got to kill you if you do that.”

  The Woodsman prodded him. “Now you can get up.”

  Dulaney got up.

  “Now, what do you say?”

  “I guess I’ll leave town.”

  A long moment passed. “You’re lying,” the man said. “I can see it in your face. You say you’ll leave but you won’t.”

  His voice was suddenly unstable, trembly and nervous. “You’re lying,” he said again. “You won’t tell the truth about anything.”

  He’s going to kill me right here unless I can get some leverage, Dulaney thought. He grabbed at straws. “I’d like to level with you.”

  “Yes? What does that mean?”

  “You’re not making it easy for me to leave, you’re making it harder. I’d walk out of here tonight if she’d just talk to me.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Five minutes alone with her, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “Don’t you hear good? I said it’s not possible.”

  “Then at least tell me why.”

  “You forget who has the gun. I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  Dulaney groped for some logic that might appeal to the man. On a whim he said, “I don’t think you want to use that gun.”

  “It’s you that’s making me. You’re leaving me no choice.”

  “I’ll tell you something, friend. You sound like a man in trouble. I saw you this afternoon. Upstairs, at the radio station.”

  “Yes, I thought maybe you had.”

  “You looked like a man in trouble. Like maybe you’d come to tell me about it. Why don’t you tell me now?”

  “Oh yes, what a good idea. Then you can be a witness when they strap me in the electric chair.”

  Dulaney took a deep breath and a big risk. “Was it you who killed Kendall?”

  The man flinched. “Don’t you dare say that!”

  He cocked the gun. Dulaney tightened up all over.

  “Don’t you ever say that. Don’t you ever dare.”

  “Sure, pal,” Dulaney said numbly. “Consider it unsaid.”

  “I’ve had nightmares about that. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  “Hey, I believe you.”

  “I never killed anybody.”

  “That’s good. And you don’t want to start now, do you?”

  “You think I like this?”

  “I can see you don’t. That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  The Woodsman said nothing. The gun bobbed in and out of the light.

  “Was it the Irishman who killed Kendall?”

  “Christ, no. He’s just a mindless thug.”

  Another moment passed.

  “What do you know about the Irishman?” the Woodsman said.

  “Nothing. Kendall said a mulligan roughed him up, that’s all.”

  “Forget him, he’s nothing. I wish I’d never seen his stupid face. Let’s shut up now. I’m tired of talking to you, you waste my time. Get moving.”

  They crossed the bridge, a slow surrealistic journey with mist swirling beneath them and the lighthouse now a soft, looping silver rope in the night sky. The Woodsman’s light led the way and their feet made thick clumping sounds on the planks.

  If there was any chance now, the slightest bobble with the gun, he had to go after it. His mind was focused on a single track, survival. He knew from the footsteps that the Woodsman was three paces behind him, eight feet back, still too far for a sudden rush. But time was running out: he had to try it, even if it looked like certain death. Wait till we get off this roadway, he thought. Give yourself the best chance, hope for a flesh wound and no broken bones. Be fast, he thought: fast and decisive. This seemed about the best he had going for him.

  They had crossed the mudflat and were heading into the woods. The causeway ended on a narrow dirt road, the ruts filling with water and disappearing into long stretches of slop. They walked along a grassy ridge and the trees grew taller and closer to the road. “Turn here,” the Woodsman said, and they hiked across a wet grassy meadow and down into a slough.

  “Stop.”

  He turned around. No chance, he was too far back. One last try to talk him out of it, then have a go at him no matter what.

  “Listen, pal . . . you can still talk to me.”

  The Woodsman laughed, a harsh, bitter sound. “What good will that do?”

  “I’ll try to help you. I can see you’re in trouble.”

  “What if that’s true? What do you think you can do for me?”

  “I don’t know yet, none of it makes any sense to me. I don’t know what you did or where you came from. I don’t even know how you found me.”

  “That doesn’t matter now, does it? Let’s just say your friend Carnahan told us. Let it go at that.”

  But almost at once he said, “No, that’s not true. Carnahan wouldn’t tell us anything, I’ll give you that. He was your friend and you should think well of him. A brave man. Far braver than me.”

  Dulaney could see that something had changed. The Woodsman had begun to tremble and the gun wobbled in his hand.

  “You can’t blame Carnahan,” he said again. “We took his key, after.”

  “After what?”

  “We went to his room and found some papers. A half-written postcard to his daughter. Some undeveloped film, some notes. A spool of recording wire, still on the machine. Enough to tell us who you were and that he had sent you the rest of it. To some goddamn racetrack in Florida.”

  “Tropical Park. I wasn’t there long.”

  A moment passed. “So don’t blame Carnahan,” the Woodsman said. “He was a good, brave man.”

  “Tell me something. Who are the others?”

  “I can’t say any more. I’ve got family in New York. They could be in terrible danger because of what I say.”

  Dulaney saw the gun move up. He braced for a charge. But then the Woodsman gave a long shivery sigh and said, “You’re right, Dulaney, I don’t want to kill you,” and
Dulaney let out a long breath.

  “When you feel trapped, there seems only one way out,” the Woodsman said. “Then you get down to it and you find out there isn’t any way.”

  Then he said: “You’re right, I don’t want to kill you.”

  Then he said: “Can’t.”

  He said: “Thought I could do it. Told myself I could.”

  He shrugged. “Can’t.”

  Then: “I’m sorry I hit you, Dulaney. I didn’t want to do that either.”

  Then he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His head exploded and the light flew off in the trees.

  ( ( ( · ) ) )

  AN OPEN-

  AND-SHUT

  CASE

  ( ( ( 1 ) ) )

  THERE was never any doubt about the dead man’s death. A clear case of suicide, said the coroner. Yes, there were mysteries, but all the facts leading to a suicide verdict were there.

  A gun had been recovered, easily established as having belonged to the deceased and positively identified as the weapon that had fired the bullet. Evidence of intent had gone well beyond the gun. A packet of cyanide had been found in the glove compartment of the ’35 Ford belonging to the dead man. This is not unusual in suicide deaths, said the coroner. A man despairs and decides to kill himself but he can’t decide how. Most people seek a painless exit: most but not all. Suicides have been known to chop off arms and legs, then sit calmly and bleed to death. Death defies easy answers.

  There was a catalogue of facts—where the gun was found, the absence of defense wounds, the powder burns on the hands and face—on and on, and all of it led to suicide.

  The dead man’s name was George Edward Schroeder, twenty-six, of second-generation German American stock. This made it news, for without the German angle it might have been reported as a mere incident, lost on an inside page. The newspaperman made some calls and quickly corroborated what the sheriff told him; the rest he filled in on a trip to New York, turning the death of a troubled young man into a first-rate piece of front-page propaganda. The headline was startling in the third week of May: THE LONG ARM OF ADOLF HITLER sold out the issue, and the piece was picked up by the Associated Press and carried verbatim, with the editor’s byline, to newspapers across the nation.

  Gunter and Hannah Schroeder had married in Bremen in 1912 and had immigrated to America two years later. They had settled in New York’s German community, that section of the East Eighties known as Yorkville. Gunter opened a bratwurst-and-sauerkraut eatery on Third Avenue, which he ran with his wife for twenty-five years. They had two children, but the daughter had married a German national and in 1935 had gone with him to live and raise their children in the old country. George, the son, had always been high-strung. He had few friends in his life and he worried about vast world problems, such as man’s brutality to his fellow men, until he grew despondent and sick of his own race. It was said in the neighborhood that his despair had begun with the loss of his older sister, Gerda Luise, who had confided deep doubts about the path she had chosen, even on her wedding day and right up until the hour of her departure for Germany.

  He took some solace in his work. He had been hired as an engineer at WQXR, New York’s classical music station, and at night he would sit alone in the dark production room off the main studio and listen to the melodies of the great German masters. “Georgie was a born technician,” said one man at the station who professed to know him well. “He could fix any transmitter problem, he had no peer at patch work, and so was one of those unsung heroes who quickly become indispensable. He could usually keep you on the air till a permanent repair could be made, and his greatest sense of accomplishment was that his work made it possible for people to hear this glorious music.”

  But his spirits sank again after the pilgrimage he made with his parents to Germany in 1939. “He came home brooding for his sister and her children,” said his unnamed radio friend. “He didn’t want to talk about it but one night we got drunk together and he told me what had happened. His sister, Gerda Luise, lived in Braunschweig, where her husband had been employed at Volkswagenwerk, the people’s automobile factory, but had recently lost his job. Soon after his arrival, George was picked up by the Gestapo, was put in a small room with a picture of Hitler on one wall, and there for twelve hours two interrogators questioned him sternly about his allegiances. Was he a German, or an American? And what was he going to do about it when the chips were down, was he going to deny his blood, and didn’t he realize what it meant to be alive and German in these exciting times? Even then, three years before the United States became their shooting enemy, they were looking for people to spy for them.”

  You’ve got to choose, they said: choose now, declare your loyalties, or have them declared for you and find yourself an enemy to both sides. Did you think you could hide forever in America, denying your heritage and cringing behind that paper they gave you? If you think that, my fine German friend, think again. We have people everywhere. We remember our friends and our enemies forever.

  Ask your sister. Ask her husband. He had his chance to join the Nazi Party three years ago and he refused. Well, now we refuse him!

  But perhaps you can help him redeem himself.

  (A carnivorous smile in the hazy light beyond the cigarette smoke.)

  Look at this as an opportunity, George. The chance of your life. How many people are ever given the chance to become national heroes?

  Back in America, a group of German American militants had risen in Yorkville, demanding German support of the Fatherland in its war with the hated British.

  There were visits in the night. Once he was seen being rough-housed by a gang leader who called him worthless. What have you ever done for Germany, Schroeder? Your whole family has betrayed its blood.

  It’s hard being a good American when windows are smashed and fires are started in the night, when the business you’ve built for half a lifetime dries up in a month. We tried, said old Schroeder, but no one came to eat with us anymore.

  He closed his café and moved to the midtown West Side: found work in a Horn and Hardart Automat, clearing tables and washing dishes. His wife mopped floors and emptied wastebaskets in an office building. But the bund found them, and George quit his job at QXR and left the city.

  “I was glad to hear he had found the job in Jersey,” said his friend. “George was a born radio man.”

  “He was a good American,” said his father to the newspaperman. “We don’t have nothing to do with that bund business and I don’t let nobody say nothing bad against my boy. He’s dead now. For God’s sake, can’t you leave him alone? He was a good American.”

  “He was a good guy,” said Rue Nicholas, an actress who became his friend. “Maybe it’s not smart to admit being friends with a German boy, but I liked him. We were both insomniacs. Once we sat up all night on the pier, listening to the music and talking about what a sad, wonderful place the world is.”

  “He was high-strung, that’s for sure,” said August Stoner, his immediate supervisor at WHAR. “But he did his job and did it well. He was a real good kid. When I told him to do something, he did it right.”

  George Edward Schroeder was buried in a family plot bought by his father twenty years ago. Stoner, Miss Nicholas, and a few people from the station went up for the funeral.

  The facts continued to beg the question: Did the long arm of Adolf Hitler reach across the sea and into this noisy little American beach town? Had the Nazis hounded this troubled American of German blood until he’d finally put a bullet through his head?

  “You’ll have to ask Hitler when you see him,” said the sheriff. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s an open-and-shut case.”

  But there are still those mysteries. Why would Schroeder drive his car over the beach, leave it, then walk back a mile and kill himself in the woods? Who was the caller who had found the body? Why would he not give his name, and what was he doing walking in the deep woods on a pitch-dark and rainy morning in May?


  “It doesn’t matter,” said the sheriff. “It’s an open-and-shut case. The kid killed himself.”

  ( ( ( 2 ) ) )

  THE kid killed himself. Jordan had seen it, there was no doubt of suicide, it was open-and-shut.

  If the sheriff wanted to close the book on it, if the only real link to Hitler was the wishful thinking of a newspaperman, this whole incident would soon fade away from lack of interest. In the absence of fact, there was still no mystery, only the last tragic moments of a foolish and troubled young man.

  But there were questions that the newspaperman could not ask. What Jordan knew would cast this halfhearted investigation into a darker light, suddenly more sinister and far more difficult to dismiss. Knowing that Marty Kendall had something to do with it, the sheriff might wonder why Kendall had disappeared, turned up in California, and then got killed in Pennsylvania. Hearing the true story of Holly O’Hara, the sheriff would certainly be interested in the fears of a child in that same Pennsylvania town. Then, because no lawman likes coincidence with his murder, he might reopen the file on another disappearance, now six years old. This would seem to undermine the newspaperman’s German angle, for there was no war in 1936 when actor March Flack disappeared coming home from a broadcast. Eventually it would lead back to here and now, and the sheriff would have another German to find—Peter Schroeder, cousin of the deceased, who walked away in the smoke that night and has not been seen since.

  Jordan had seen him vanish—one minute there at the volleyball net, the next gone without a trace. The German angle again, but it lost its sex appeal if he picked at it. One of the Schroeder boys might only be tied to the others by family, not by any activity in cloak-and-dagger. But what could he do?—one wrong word would send him back to California handcuffed to a deputy, to go quietly crazy in a jail cell. Holly was maddening. Three times they had come within speaking distance on the boardwalk and she had given him nothing—not a hint that she wanted him here or had any idea who he was. Of all the possible things he could have imagined, this did not even make the list. He was so certain she’d have found some way to talk to him, but she never did—not a gesture, not a cough or a lingering look. She kept him a stranger and this forced him to act like one. And as time went on his fear deepened. He waited and watched.