TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  “It’s okay. But I’m not so pretty anymore.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “Then let’s not talk about it. I’ve got other things to tell you.”

  They found a bench, quiet and dark. She was a shape beside him, her voice coming up from nowhere, like that first day in the bar.

  A moment passed before she spoke again. “Our time is up, Jack.”

  The seconds ticked away in his head.

  “We knew this day would come.”

  He heard what she said but it had no meaning. Whatever she was thinking, he would talk her out of it. He would tell her how close he was to knowing everything and she would see what they had to do. But when she spoke again he felt this certainty slipping away from him.

  “I’ve reached the end of my rope.”

  He saw a blurred movement as she touched her face. “When it was just me alone I was fine. I really don’t care what they do to me, they can’t hurt me at all. But now you’re here and they are going to kill you. Don’t argue with me, please, I can feel it. It’s the one thing I know, and I know it more every day.”

  Her voice quaked slightly. “I open my eyes and it’s there. Today they will kill him. Today he will die. I look at you across my table and I see you dead, under the ground like my father. I see that grave and it’s you buried there and I think such awful things. Don’t let it be Jack, let it be Daddy again, not Jack there in the ground. I hate myself when I think that but I can’t stop it, it comes to me a hundred times a day. When I come home and can’t sleep, this is why, because I’m full of dark thoughts. I was certain I could get through it but I can’t.”

  “Tell me what to do,” he said. “We’ll do whatever you want, whatever makes you happy.”

  “What is ‘happy’? I don’t know what that means.”

  “I’ll help you find out.”

  “How can you do that when you’re the cause of it? You’ve made me vulnerable again, I told you you would. Stay with me and you’re a marked man, Dulaney.”

  “Oh, Holly, that is such crap. You’re way too smart to believe that.”

  “Maybe I’m not as smart as you think. All I know is, I need to be somewhere else. A place where I know nobody and nobody knows me. Seattle maybe, or western Canada. I’ve been thinking I might go to Europe after the war. American swing was a big rage in France before Hitler came. Maybe it will be again. Whatever I do, I need to be away from here. And you, Jack, you may not know it yet, but you need me to be away as well.”

  “I’ll never believe that.”

  Somehow he had to tell her what he did believe, what he knew. But his words sounded stiff when he said them. “I know how to end this. I can get this guy now. That’s where your salvation is. It’s not in Canada . . . not in France.”

  She sighed. “You can’t let it go, can you? You’re just like I was, you can’t let it go.”

  “I can do anything if I know it’s right.” “

  Then do this. Walk away from it. A year from now you’ll see how right it was.”

  “Damn a year from now. I don’t care about a year from now.”

  “Poor sweetheart. This is such a dirty trick, I know how you hate it. But you’ll do it, because I need you to. This is the best gift you could ever give me, Jack. Peace for a couple of words.”

  His mind picked at straws. How could he buy some time? . . . change her mind? . . . or much more than that, how could he fix her ailing heart in the few seconds before she sent him away from her? How could he tell her that a year or a lifetime of years could not make a dent in his own desolation if she left him now? . . . that he had been a shadow of himself all those years on the road without her? He had no answers: a pact was the best he could hope for. He would agree to anything if she would stay in touch in some minimal way . . . a letter once a year to some cold and distant general delivery. People change in a year, and anything was better than the dreadful void without her. But when he said this he met a wall of silence.

  “You still don’t understand,” she said after a while. “I’ve got to start over. If there’s anything left for me on this earth, I’ve got to find it in myself. I can’t be tied to anyone.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I don’t know, Jack, I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “Well, I told you . . . whatever you want, that’s what we’ll do.” He sat back against the bench. “I guess I just can’t bring myself to say it.”

  “Oh, sweetheart. Just forgive an old friend and try to think well of her. Disappear into some horse farm. Write your book, do something you love. Only promise me you will never go back to that town again, and never touch this thing after today.”

  Then she told him what had happened, a shaky narrative of her two days with the Irish Republican Army. Suddenly she was back on the roof with Riordan . . . coaxed there, sweet-talked, gripped in his steely hands, and pushed back over the edge . . . hanging there, her legs still curled around the coping, his face so close she could feel his breath and smell it.

  Who sent you here, Brigit? Better tell me now, darlin’, before there’s a tragic happening.

  She tried not to panic. Thought of her father and smiled sweetly.

  You’re so smart, Johnny, you figure it out.

  I am dead, she thought. If he released her now, with a little push, she would fall headfirst into the street. But his hands gripped her tighter and then he was pulling her back over the coping. His face was red with sudden fury.

  You dare come into my house. Lie to me. Spy on us. And all I ever wanted to do was love you.

  He slapped her.

  Now you will tell.

  He slapped her a dozen times.

  God damn you, little bitch hussy! Tell me or I’ll break your neck!

  He came at her with his fists. She didn’t remember going for the razor but saw him recoil in a gush of red. He spun in a tortured little dance and stumbled. She pushed him away and he went screaming over the edge.

  “I didn’t look down. I knew he was dead. I had an omen just before it happened. When he said he wanted to love me.”

  ( ( ( 4 ) ) )

  AFTER she left he felt a numbness in his spirit, like a sudden paralysis to the body after a fall. He drifted along the streets, walked back into the old neighborhood and back again to sit on the bench, as if she might come along and have a sudden change of heart. But sometime after midnight he had to give it up. He walked across the park and came out on the east end, turned south and drifted, apparently without direction. The city seemed immense. Two people could spend their lives here and never cross paths, and tomorrow she would be gone into the infinite, God knew where.

  He sat on benches and stood under the Third Avenue El, watched the lights of trains flicker by, saw bars go dark, and walked endlessly.

  A thought kept plaguing him, that if he could find her now she would change her mind and go with him somewhere, to tempt fate one more time. He had never been at such loose ends . . . she had taken not only herself away from him, she had also taken away his purpose.

  In the deadest part of the night he found himself in Yorkville. He stood outside the apartment house where the German girl had lived, then he walked around the block to the ramshackle hotel where she and Peter had died. A quick walk, no more than a couple of minutes. How far to the Riordan house? . . . thirty blocks? . . . forty? A different world, yet in the city’s universe still just a brisk walk away. Suddenly he saw what might have happened that night, and how. For all his care, Peter had been careless: coming and going for days before settling into this seedy hotel. Plenty of time for him to be picked up and watched by Irish eyes, as a favor to an old Boer friend. Left alone as long as he stayed harmless: never killed if he hadn’t been greedy. If he had left the country and never made that phone call he’d be in Germany now, and the German girl would still be practicing her madness a block away. But the man he feared the most knew where he was all along.

  Dulaney now walked it himself, as if to confirm
what he knew. Well within the hour he stood on West Fifty-sixth Street, and for a time he watched from the doorway of the dark café across from the Riordan house.

  Dawn found him walking again, across Times Square, where the only people on a Sunday morning were a few aimless drifters like himself and a whore who stepped from subway darkness and smiled when he walked past her.

  As the city came to life he felt ever more isolated and aimless among the swarming strangers. He stopped at a hash house but had no stomach for breakfast. He sipped his coffee and imagined Holly walking in, defying all odds, and in that moment he knew he had lied to her.

  Somehow he would find her, and the gift he would give her was the man who had killed her father.

  He called Becky Hart. Two hours later he was back on the beach.

  ( ( ( 5 ) ) )

  HE slept soundly and was up in the late afternoon, poring over his work at the open kitchen door. The work diminished the emptiness of the house, and soon the Japanese script that had given him such trouble bristled with life. The power of it thrilled him: the story and its people had been there all along but his mind had been too busy with other things to see it. Now there were no other things. The strength of the story had been hidden in the unwritten flashback, and now his characters relived a life they would never know again. Their home had been intimate and warm, filled with laughter and boundless hope. All the promise of America, vanished in the bombs of a Sunday morning. The story took away the caricature—the cold icy Jap, the snarling cruel and yellow Jap—and made him a man.

  In the end Danny Sakamoto is sent to a real prison. There he will meet a brutal guard who carries a full load of hatred for all Japs everywhere. The outlook is bleak, the implication clear: Danny will not survive to see his family again. His wife faces a shaky future with two small children, everything she thought they owned is gone, and a thousand red-blooded Americans, still seething over Pearl Harbor, will stand and cheer at her fate. But there will be others who will think about it and feel shame, and believe that somehow, even in wartime, we should have been better than this.

  So much for the artistic purpose. His real objective was to get the Boers on the air, and these Nisei were just part of the smoke screen that would help him do that. It would be the second show in a series of five, with the Boers coming on the third night. Jordan himself would bring only three of them to air—win or lose, he would be gone on Thursday. But he knew he had to write them all; the package must be complete before Kidd would consider scheduling any of it. This one was now ready for mimeo, lacking only Kidd’s approval.

  He read it over and for the first time was a little afraid of its power. Kidd might balk if he had gone too far, and then he’d have to count on Harford to stand up for it. This was exactly what Harford said he wanted, it had truth shot all through it. Jordan believed in what he had written: he had focused on the heart, not culture, and the heart was where people were always the same.

  Now he had to believe that Harford would veto all caution and run it. It’s got to be next week, he thought: it’s got to be finished and on the air, and can’t be allowed to drag on beyond that. This meant he had to wrap up his piece on Andersonville and write two more fullhour shows in two days, then convince Kidd that all must be produced like a bat out of hell, with the same hurried passion of the writing. The shows must run on consecutive nights . . . a weekly series would push it almost to October before the Boers could get on and give him his chance. But as he thought all these things he realized that scheduling was going to be the least of his problems. Kidd would be heading into his first full week without the network. He would be desperate for something smashing and would pull out all the stops to get it on. And Kidd had enough dramatic sense to know that a weekly schedule would fatally diminish the artistic purpose and water down the impact of the series as a whole.

  The timing was perfect. Five shows in five nights, with the main event a week from Wednesday.

  At six o’clock he began working on the Hitler show that would open the run. The stories that were coming out of Poland had all the characteristics of a horror show and that’s how he would write it, as the kind of raw horror that had never been heard on American radio. Children murdered in present tense, live, on-mike. A young woman brutalized again and again by monsters from some primordial slime. It didn’t matter that he had no actual prototype . . . if the Nazis could commit mass murder in one village, they were capable of anything he could imagine . . . if they could gun down children or put them in gas chambers, a humble writer could hardly do them any injustice. But larger questions rose up to confront him—how did the Nazis affect his belief that people are basically the same? . . . Was there something in the German character that compelled them to follow madmen and become worse than animals?—and he sat for a time with his pen held still and his mind clouded with trouble. Then a vision of the Sand Creek Massacre crossed his mind and he shivered.

  Suddenly he had an almost uncontrollable need to add a sixth show. He knew this was insane, for where would he put it and how could it help his real purpose and how would it fit the theme as a prison camp story? His writer’s mind made its own logic—it was certainly a prison camp if the point could be stretched; those two hundred Indian women and children were supposedly in the custody of the United States Army. In the custody and under the protection, until a band of soldiers led by a bloodthirsty fanatic slaughtered them all, took their scalps, cut out their genitals, and wrote its own day of infamy. Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist minister in civilian life, had given the order. Praise the Lord and take no prisoners.

  For an hour he noodled it back and forth and at last he gave it up: nothing could come of it without much more work, and the result would likely be no better than what he had. For Kidd’s purpose and his own, he would stick to the plan. By seven thirty he had roughed out a tale so savage that it shook him to imagine it set to sound. His heroine was a young woman named Bela: older than Margaret of the Boer War, much wiser, and with a vastly greater heart. Bela was twenty-three with a husband dead in the war and a small child to somehow protect on her own. He knew at once that she was going to be a magnificent character, one who takes over a story and leaves the writer hurrying to catch up. Her courage should touch every listener, and it should tear at their hearts when she is lost at the end.

  This would not be an easy story to hear but it would be almost impossible to turn off. It was a murder story . . . the Nazi kills her tiny son and she finds a surprising way to kill that Nazi and then the Nazis kill her. What it says about the enemy will serve Kidd’s purpose, and it will get us off on a grimly patriotic note.

  He switched to the portable typewriter and began to write. It was dark outside when he heard the footsteps. Someone had come up from the beach to the deck. Footsteps came across the pine floor.

  Pauline Flack peeped around the edge of the open door.

  “Jordan . . . I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I’ve been here working.”

  “I see you have. I tried your apartment downtown. Went out to the station. Called Becky but she wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “She’s become very protective. But I’m always glad to see you.”

  “I won’t bother you long. May I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  He swept up his loose pages and turned them down on the table. “Can I get you something? I think there are some Dopes in the icebox.”

  “It’s good of you to remember a lady’s addiction.”

  He brought the Cokes and sat looking at her over the typewriter. “I can guess why you’re here.”

  “I’m sure you can. I was shocked when I heard about Tom.”

  “I don’t know what more I can tell you. I don’t know any more than you do.”

  “Forgive me, but I doubt that. You must know why Miss O’Hara went out to see Tom in the first place.”

  He shrugged. “I’d ask her if I could, but she’s gone.”

  “You mean she’s le
ft you?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “And you have no idea . . . ?”

  She looked suddenly agitated. “But how can you have no idea? How can you not know? This whole thing is preposterous. Tom didn’t kill March.”

  “He says he did.”

  “I don’t care what he says. He’s obviously trying to protect me.”

  “Protect you from what?”

  “Somehow he must think I shot March.”

  “Why would he think that?”

  “I was up to here with March and his women. I won’t deny I was angry enough. I told you about the screaming row we’d had that day, and there were plenty of witnesses. It was no secret. And what else makes sense?”

  “That he killed March himself, for the same reason.”

  He saw the anger in her eyes. “I didn’t say I believe that. But it certainly is the most obvious answer.”

  She finished her drink and seemed to be on the verge of tears. “Tell me the truth, Jordan. Damn it, man, you know Tom didn’t kill March. Why won’t you say it?”

  “All right. No, I don’t believe he did it.”

  “I knew it. I knew it.”

  “But what I think isn’t evidence. The evidence is in the ground. We’ll know more when they dig out that foundation.”

  “And if they find nothing . . .”

  “Then Griffin goes free. It won’t matter what he said, if they’ve still got no body it’ll just be the ramblings of a crazy old man. No offense.”

  She said nothing. Seemed lost in thought.

  “Are you worried about what’s down there?”

  “Of course not.” She sniffed. “Yes, a little.”

  She took a long breath. “March has been missing so long I’ve come to terms with it. I’m bound to be nervous when they start digging things up.”

  “I understand,” he said softly. “I can imagine how you must feel.”

  She reached for his hand. “Then go see Tom for me . . . get him to talk to me, please! I can’t help him if he won’t talk to me.”