TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  She led him off the walk, across a sandlot. This gave way to hard ground, and a narrow crack appeared between the buildings, with the dim lights of the street beyond it. “It’s not far now,” she said. “Just across der street and down der block.”

  She stopped. “You remember what you said, Chack? What you promise?”

  He had made two promises: that he’d never give her name to Hoover, no matter what, and that he’d give her a minute, when they got where they were going, to go in alone and talk with Peter. He didn’t like that but she said Peter had a gun, and if they should walk in together and surprise him, what might happen wouldn’t be her fault.

  Jesus, what a chance I’m taking, he thought. She confirmed this as if he’d said it aloud. “You know what you do, it’s not safe. You know how Peter is. So just do what you say. Just go in and give him der money, then take what he gives you and get der hell out. Don’t fuss witt him, don’t give him no guff. You don’t want to fool witt Peter.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Udderwise I think he is going to kill you. And this would make me sad, Chack, because I am comink to like you so much.”

  “This would make me sad too, Leta.”

  “Don’t make jokes now, this is not funny. Is no time for bullshit.”

  The word was startling: it was a military vulgarity; an old one, he thought, but still largely unknown outside the army. He had never heard it from a woman. So she knew some soldiers. Did that mean she was a spy?

  “Peter don’t want to kill you, Chack, but he will if you try something. So just give him der money.”

  “That’s what I came for.”

  “Just give him der gottdamn money, Chack, then get out of there. That’s all he wants, just der money, but if you cross him I don’t want to be there. I could tell you bad stuff on him.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Stuff I’m not supposed to know. It’s too dangerous to talk about and it’s got nothing to do witt me. But I got good ears. I know what they do.”

  “What who does?”

  “I shouldn’t tell you. It’s very dangerous, what I know.”

  “It won’t matter. Tomorrow Peter’ll be gone. He’ll have my money and be far away from here.”

  She said nothing.

  “It might give me an idea what I’m facing here.”

  “I tell you this much. I know a man was kilt in Pennsylvania.”

  His heart went up a notch. His mouth was dry. “Who was killed?”

  “Somebody. I heard Peter and George talking one time. Poor Georgie is so upset but Peter just laughs. This is what I’m saying, you can’t fool witt Peter. Sometimes I scream at him but I’m like everybody else. I get out of his way when he really gets pissed off.”

  There it is again, he thought. Army slang, latrine lingo as the dogface calls it. Words so rare in civilian conversation that the possibility she’d learned them by chance was like the snowball in hell. Maybe she worked the military at its weakest point, screwing her way up and down the chain of command and passing what she learned on to Berlin through the Schroeders.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. I do it for your own good and I could tell you plenty more. It wasn’t just der one in Pennsylvania. Anudder man was kilt down in New Chursey.”

  “What man? . . . When?”

  “A long time ago. Maybe last Christmas, around der new year.”

  “Who were these guys?”

  “People who knew stuff. I don’t know, I shouldn’t be talking about it. I heard some names but it’s hard to remember. Der one in Pennsylvania was Prindle, I think. I can’t remember der udder one.”

  “Carnahan,” he prompted.

  “I can’t remember. Anyways, it’s got nothing to do witt me. I’m just telling you so you know not to fool witt Peter. Just give him his money, Chack. Don’t piss him off. And get der hell out of there.”

  She pulled him on, into the street and across. The hotel was a grim relic of an older century, five stories high with a portal in the center and a dimly lit drugstore on the ground floor at the corner. Where a room could be had for an hour if that’s what you wanted, two bits up front, pay at the drugstore, no questions asked. A flophouse.

  She turned him into the dark entry and hustled him through a foyer that stank of urine; on through a second door, which creaked inward to a dismal hall and a set of stairs. Two men sprawled under the staircase, passed out with an empty bottle between them, and as the door swung shut something crawled across one man’s face and scurried away. “Rats,” she said with a shiver. “Christ, what a place.”

  There was only one light, a bare bulb dangling from a cord that cast the deeper hall in dusty shadow, like an old sepulchre lit by a torch. He saw the telephone on the wall to his left, its brassy coin box as out of place here as he was. “This is where you wait,” she said. “Don’t move till I come back for you.”

  He got over by the phone and stood there. If this implied a promise, he would let her think that. In his own mind all bets were off once she had gone alone into that room. “You be good now, Chack.” She kissed her fingers and touched his cheek. Such a good boy he was. A good big boy.

  Then she walked away. At the crossing corridor she stopped and looked back once and he had the strangest feeling, one of those premonitions that had happened only a few times in his life. She waved to him and turned the corner and he knew he’d never see her again.

  He hurried down the hall behind her. At the corner he heard her say, “Open der door, it’s me.” He made the turn and saw her leg disappear into a room halfway down the hall.

  He heard the click of the door closing. Heard her shout.

  She screamed and a gun went off. There was another shot, and another, as if a cannon had gone wild and begun blowing the building apart.

  He reached the door in a mindless flash of motion. He knew it was locked: even as he rattled the knob he was hauling back on his right leg to batter it down. The door blew out of its frame, exploding in pieces into the room. He rolled away from it, ready for more fire, flattening himself against the outer wall, tensing to attack anything that moved.

  He threw himself into the room and fell to the floor, rolling out of the light to the far wall. There he crouched, till a cooling breeze drew his eyes to the open window. Gone—out through the alley to the street. He groped at the wall and found the light, and there was the girl, pretty no more, sprawled in her blood, her one remaining eye fixed vacantly on the ceiling. What he hadn’t expected was Peter, hog-tied to a chair a few feet away.

  Peter. His fingers still twitched in death, and blood soaked through the gag in his mouth. It ran down his chin and dripped into his lap and was just beginning to pool on the floor under the chair.

  ( ( ( 29 ) ) )

  HE heard footsteps, voices in the hall, and he stepped through the open window into the small yard behind the building. The night was dark but he could see enough to know that it was a typical New York tenement yard: a small oblong square fenced on three sides to keep the people of the opposite houses out. Nowhere to go, except over that fence—a formidable climb on short notice. Dulaney flattened himself against the building, watching for movement. But he was gone, as if he’d taken wings and flown over the rooftops.

  Thats’ what he did, he thought: went up the back stairs and over the roof.

  He started up, and reached the rooftop a moment later. Nothing there. He pulled himself up and crossed from building to building until he came to the end of the row, and the fire escape that went down the front to the street.

  He came this way, he thought, and that’s when he decided to go back to the dead girl’s apartment.

  Down the fire escape to the second floor, then down the ladder to the street.

  He turned north, up Second to Eighty-fifth. His mind still bristled with crimson violence and he walked with care, far from the curb, in the shadows of the buildings to his left. He stopped at the corner and took a breath, and he knew the memory of that
crazy girl would be with him forever.

  In another minute he had reached the apartment. He went in through the fire escape and the place was still, beyond quiet, just as they’d left it. Now he felt his first real wave of jitters. Now that it was over.

  But of course nothing was over.

  He looked at himself in her bathroom mirror. Looked down at her diaphragm, then up again, meeting his own eyes in her glass.

  If it ended like this it wouldn’t ever be over.

  He came into the front room. Far away a siren wailed. In a while the cops would arrive. But it would take them some time to sort out who had been killed. Then they’d come over here and look at her stuff.

  But would they ever solve this case? Would the cops care about a couple of dead Germans who were probably spies for the Nazis? Would it matter about the letters she had saved telling of a cousin’s grief in Germany, or the newspaper accounts of Hoover’s raids in Yorkville? They were Nazis and the cops would say good riddance to both of them.

  There wasn’t much to decide: he was going to take the letters. But when he sat at her desk and opened the drawers, they were empty.

  He took a deep angry breath. “Son of a bitch.”

  Couldn’t have missed him by more than a few minutes.

  He slammed the drawers and jerked them open again, as if the papers could reappear like a magician’s trick.

  Then he noticed the pull-out writing board, flush against the right side of the desk. He pulled it out and found a single sheet of blank loose-leaf paper lying flat on the surface.

  As if she’d started to write a note, then got interrupted.

  And it wasn’t quite blank. She had written one word, which made no sense. The word was Whitemarsh.

  ( ( ( 30 ) ) )

  HE was able to get a train into Newark and south from there to Elizabeth. The train rocked through the Jersey suburbs and in a while he closed his eyes, as if he could push away the red horrors he had seen. But in the rosy darkness the girl’s face came back to him, and he found himself staring at the country whipping past with no idea how long his eyes had been open or what he’d just seen. The train rolled through a cheery-looking township, and his thoughts turned back to the papers in the desk. He could almost feel the despair of George Schroeder, the nightmares leading up to his suicide. George had been menaced by someone named Maynard, a name burned into Dulaney’s mind like Roosevelt’s day of infamy.

  He was somewhere on the outskirts of Elizabeth when he remembered the letter he had taken. He plucked the pages out of his back pocket. Again the opening paragraph gripped him as it had in the apartment. George had decided he wanted a record kept: some kind of document telling what had been done; something that would protect them because they both knew too much, they could never feel safe again, they must not make the mistake of thinking it was okay and they were all working for the same cause. They were not working for the same cause, never had been. The only cause we must worry about now is ourselves, body and soul.

  A chilling sentiment, Dulaney thought. In the second short paragraph Schroeder had warned her to put his letters in a safe place. There would be more later, he promised, but she must be careful with what he wrote; its purpose was to save them, but if handled carelessly it might only lead them both to more danger.

  And what had that crazy girl done with it? . . . Thrown it in a drawer and given it no more thought than she’d given Jack Dulaney’s warning about a killer coming to get her.

  But when he read the letter he was disappointed. The promise of that first paragraph dwindled and Schroeder seemed increasingly uncertain as he wrote his way into it. Schroeder knew this but he wasn’t sure what to do about it. He was suddenly hesitant to name names, and he fell into the use of initials to identify people. This of course defeated his purpose, but a start was a start. Perhaps finishing and sending it to her would fortify his purpose and give him new resolve for what must come later. He slipped into narrative, as if he were writing not to the girl but to some unknown readership. And by the end of it at least one thing was clear. Dulaney knew what Kendall had done and why.

  Much of it was easy to decipher if you knew the names. Kendall was K; Carnahan was C. But there were others who remained shrouded in murk. And some of the pieces weren’t here. Dulaney remembered the last moment of George Schroeder’s life and what had been said. They had gotten into Carnahan’s apartment: they had taken his key and gone to his place and found some stuff. Enough, whatever it was, to set them on Dulaney’s trail and trace him to Tropical Park. But by then he had moved on—where, they didn’t know.

  Hell, I didn’t know my own self, Dulaney thought.

  He had been at loose ends. Tom was gone in the navy, Holly was gone. Even in his mind Dulaney was drifting, as he drifted across the country.

  It wasn’t that difficult for them to find him. If he stayed with the horses they could follow his trail from Florida almost as if they’d had a map. Mix with the horsemen, ask their questions. Lacking anything definite, they could easily plot out where he must have gone. There were only so many racetracks in the United States with winter meets. The Fair Grounds in New Orleans (yes, he had been there, working for ten days before moving on). Hot Springs would be starting up but not until February. There would be short winter meets at Bowie, up in Maryland, and at Churchill Downs, in Kentucky. There was a bush league track in Phoenix, if he was truly on the move, and at some point it was suggested that he might even have gone to Tijuana for the racing at Agua Caliente. From there it wasn’t far up the coast into California, where the fall season was just ending at Tanforan and the winter was beginning at Santa Anita.

  George’s absence from the station was explained away as a personal problem. His traveling partner was a man identified only as R, but this became clear almost at once. “That stinking Irishman,” George had called him at one point; “Christ, how I hate that stinking Irishman.” But he was relieved for a time when they were told to split up: George was to follow the southern route while the Irishman checked the racetracks in Maryland and Kentucky. All the work of a few days. I picked up his trail in New Orleans, George wrote. I found him in Los Angeles.

  Now that they had him, what would they do with him? Whatever Carnahan had sent him, it had not caught up with him yet. Otherwise we’d have heard by then.

  He’s a rolling stone. He’s probably careless about forwarding addresses. Godknows where it is now.

  They needed someone to get next to him. Someone American, of no particular nationality, someone he would never suspect. An actor who wouldn’t ask questions if he was paid enough to do it.

  At least, for a while, I was rid of R. Once we had Dulaney in our sights thathard Irish bastard drifted away and was gone for weeks. Fund-raising, he calledit, raising money along the coast and in other western cities. Places he might notget to again if war was to break out and travel get difficult. I didn’t see him againfor more than four months.

  There was only a single reference to the one who had sent them. He was called W.

  ( ( ( 31 ) ) )

  HE got off the train at Elizabeth. The last train south had long gone and the schedule showed nothing more until 5 A.M. But he got lucky: found a cabbie in a stand near the station who for $20 was willing to turn off the meter and take him the thirty-five miles to Pinewood. He paid with the last of Kendall’s money and most of what remained of this week’s pay. They stopped at a gas station at the edge of town and he bought a five-gallon can and filled it with water from a pump behind the outhouse. Then he slumped in the backseat, discouraging the cabbie’s attempts to talk, and the suburbs fell away and the big piney wilderness closed around them.

  The town, when they arrived, was as black as the forest: still no sign of life as the cab pulled into the lot beyond the depot. He filled his radiator in the glare of the cab’s headlights, then they went their separate ways and he was alone again.

  The ride over to the coast wasn’t bad: he could make it easy in thirty minutes at this time
of night if his car held up. But he was tense as he headed east on the narrow state blacktop. He turned on the radio and a startling thing happened . . . Holly was on the air, as if he had leaped ahead four days to Saturday in one violent night. Her voice filled the car and the crowd cheered as the clarinet pushed the rhythm to a hot finish. Suddenly he knew he was listening to a recording. He heard Stoner sigh into the pot-down, then speak as the crowd noise faded.

  “Man oh man, what a sound. Recorded four weeks ago this coming Saturday night. A great piece of popular music, a wonderful way to end the day.”

  Stoner took a long breath and let it tickle the microphone. It was a deliberate effect, done with the nostrils and a slight movement of his head, a thing Dulaney had heard him do with other artists he liked. Admire with a slender sound. Stoner was a master of dead air. He uses it all, Dulaney thought; he’s the only guy we’ve got who dares to think on the air because he knows there’s always something going on when the mike is open. You can almost see the wheels turning in his head: then, when he does speak, it’s like he’s gone into your own head, to think your thoughts. A sniff becomes a comment. If he moves his face you know it: if he scratches his cheek you can tell whether he needs a shave. Suddenly Dulaney loved radio, surrendered to it as Jordan Ten Eyck had already done. This is the most intimate medium that will ever be devised. It pulls people together, draws them into each other, makes them one.

  Stoner spoke. “I sit in shame. What a fine natural talent she is, and I never knew it until tonight.” He made a small sound in his throat, the quietest grunt to underscore his surprise. A man sitting across from him in the studio wouldn’t have heard that, but the microphone caught it and took it to air, to be heard for hundreds of miles.

  “I’m the one who makes these airchecks every Saturday night. Not that you care about that, but in this case it makes a point. How dense we can be sometimes. I’ve recorded that show for fifteen weeks, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard the lady sing. It’s always been just a job to me, just volume levels on a meter. A close eye on the wax to make sure the cutting head’s clear. In my mind she was just local talent. No big deal, so I never listened. Until tonight.”