TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  “If anyone tampered with it, it was Mr. Ten Eyck himself.”

  “But why?”

  “You’ll have to ask him that. Excuse me now, I’m not up to this.”

  Rue came out. She and Becky stared at each other for a moment; then Rue said, “I think I am going to the Sandbar with some of the New York people and we are going to get very drunk together. You want to come?”

  “I’d love to come,” Becky said. “I’d better see if Kidd needs me. I’ll meet you there.”

  Now came a general exodus. He saw Maitland in the crowd, moving through the clusters of people to stand alone for a moment . . . then, with a last long look back into the studio, Maitland turned and went out.

  Dulaney slipped back along the hall to the fire door. Propped it open and went outside. He eased along the edge of the building, keeping in shadow, until he could see the cars in the south parking lot. Maitland came along the path. When he had reached his car, Dulaney called his name.

  Maitland came to the corner of the building, his face in the halflight from the parking lot. “Jordan?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  Dulaney sensed no rage in the old man, just a sad bewilderment. Maitland put his hand over his eyes. “For Christ’s sake, what went wrong in there?”

  “What went wrong went wrong a long time ago.”

  “But God damn it, man! . . . do you know what you’ve done to yourself?”

  “I imagine I know that better than anyone.”

  “You could have been . . . God knows what you could have been! And you throw it away.”

  “I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”

  Maitland shook his head. “I don’t understand you, Jordan.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. I just wanted to say good-bye. And thanks for all your help.”

  “Oh, please . . . somehow that makes me part of it, so please don’t thank me for anything. I’m too old to be an accomplice in anybody’s greater purpose, so kindly keep your thanks to yourself.”

  He turned and walked away.

  The building emptied quickly now, the crowd anxious to distance itself from the thing it had done. In ten minutes the musicians had packed their instruments and gone, the actors had gathered in the parking lot to wait for their last few drinking companions, and Palmer—having caught each of them in turn with nothing to show for it—stood alone under a light in a silver haze of tobacco smoke. The door clicked open and shut as the stragglers came out . . . Livia and Becky, to join the actors and drive away in separate cars . . . Barnet and Poindexter, turning away into the north lot. Palmer started after them and apparently thought better of it. At the edge of the building Poindexter said something and Barnet’s high-pitched laugh cut the evening like a knife. No unhappiness there, Dulaney thought. But he had not really expected any.

  Palmer stood alone, locked out of the building. A minute later he too was gone.

  Only a few cars left in the lot now. His own. Kidd’s. Harford’s Packard. Stoner’s truck. And a car that probably belonged to one of the engineers.

  Dulaney went inside, back through the fire door and down the dark hallway to Kidd’s office.

  • • •

  He heard their voices and saw the light from the open door.

  “I know you’re angry, Jethro,” Harford said. “But we’ve got to talk to the man so we can understand what happened.”

  “Angry doesn’t begin to describe what I am now,” Kidd said. “I don’t care what he says, there’s no excuse for what he did to us.”

  “Excuses don’t matter. What I want to know is the reason.”

  “I’ll tell you the reason. He’s a loose wire, that’s the reason. I never know what he’ll do next—if he’s not disappearing for days on end, he’s pulling some crazy goddamn stunt on the air. I know you love him because he gives you what you want. But what good is he if you can’t depend on him?”

  “All I’m telling you,” Harford said patiently, “is that I believe there’s a reason for all this, and I want him to stand in front of me and tell me what that is. Then we can decide.”

  “I’ve already decided. I’ll never trust him again.”

  “Don’t make things worse than they are. It’s only one show.”

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing from you. That Boer show was the whole reason for this series.”

  “In your mind, Jethro, not mine. I’ll always give up one broadcast to get four good ones . . . or maybe fifty down the road.”

  “You don’t even sound like yourself anymore. That was the one great script in our files that had never been done. From the moment I read it, years ago, I wanted it on the air.”

  “It’s still a great script, that hasn’t changed. We can always come back and do it right later on. But it’s just one show. Compare that with what Jack Dulaney has given us this past month and, frankly, I get rather ambivalent about the Boers and their war. His Nisei script is just as powerful and it’s got far more relevance today.”

  Nothing was said for a moment.

  “I want to go ahead with the series,” Harford said. “Just as if nothing had happened. We do Andersonville tomorrow, just as we planned.”

  “What about Thursday? . . . Maitland will have to direct that, too. I won’t work with Dulaney again.”

  “Don’t say that, Jethro.” Harford had a sudden edge of warning in his voice. “Don’t lay down any ultimatums until we talk to the man.”

  “If it’s going to come down to him or me it might as well come now.”

  “Oh don’t be a fool. We were going to change the face of broadcasting in this country, remember? We’re going to take the air away from the hucksters and the sausage makers, challenge the censors, battle the Bible thumpers, as far as our signal will reach. Remember that, Jethro? Where the hell else are you going to go and find excitement like that? If you want to rock the boat, you’ve got to have people like Jack Dulaney. Wild people, hard to control, you can’t do it without ’em. And where are you going to find me another one?”

  Kidd said nothing.

  “We need to talk to the man,” Harford said. “Do you have any idea where he is now?”

  “His car’s still in the lot.”

  “Then let’s find him and hear what he’s got to say.”

  Dulaney backed away. He quickstepped to the stairs and started up.

  Twenty minutes later Kidd emerged out of the shadows, into the bullpen.

  “Jordan?”

  The floor creaked as he walked down the aisle to Jordan’s old desk.

  “Jordan? . . . where the hell are you, you bastard?”

  He walked up and down, looking in each cubicle.

  “You bastard. You son of a bitch, Jordan.”

  He walked out and Dulaney stepped from the pitch darkness of the interview room. Harford came past in the hall. “He’s not in his office. Or in the studio. Maybe he went to town, maybe he left with someone, maybe his car wouldn’t start.”

  “Maybe,” Kidd said.

  “We’ll find him in the morning.”

  Fifteen minutes later they left the building. Dulaney stood behind the drapes at a window and watched them drive away. He stood still for a long time, looking south across the dunes.

  A program of dance music was coming over the intercom as he came back through the building toward the studio. A syndicated show, he knew, music by transcription—not exactly what Kidd would have wanted for a late-night time slot on opening week, but he had holes to fill and only so many warm bodies to help fill them. In the studio Joe Carella sat alone, baby-sitting the transcription discs and talking his way through the station breaks with the continuity sheets before him. The clock over his head said eleven ten.

  “Where’s Gus?” Dulaney said.

  “Hi, Mr. Ten Eyck.” Joe looked up at the clock. “He’ll be along any minute now. I go off at eleven thirty.”

  Dulaney went downstairs and stood in the lobby waiting for something, he wasn’t sure what. He had a sudden f
eeling that he had miscalculated—nothing was going to happen—but this lasted only a minute. Something’s going to happen all right, he just hasn’t found me yet. And he wants to be alone when he does.

  All that hate couldn’t go to waste.

  He stepped outside, keeping to the shadows of the building. A heavy cloud bank had covered the sky, like that other night six years ago. A fog was coming in. He was drawn to the dunes, to that same trek March Flack had tried to make, and he opened his shirt as he walked and the gun was cold against his skin. Right about here it must’ve happened, out at the end of the yard where the dunes began. He looked back. The station was like some outpost in Antarctica, a circle of light with a fine mist billowing around it.

  He started across. It was very dark now and the fog was thicker with every step. He reached a point where nothing could be seen, neither the station behind him nor the town ahead. Then it broke and he saw the lights of the hotel where he’d stayed that first night. He stopped there and sat in the dunes watching the road. There was no traffic tonight as midnight approached. The lights began to go out in the hotel until only the room he had occupied was lit, which gave him the strange sensation of having stepped across time, to sit outside his body and look back upon himself.

  He sat there for a while. Until the car came.

  One car, going like a bat out of hell up the shore road north. Somebody in a helluva big hurry, either to get out of town or to get back to the station.

  He scrambled to his feet and backtracked across the dunes. Again the fog swallowed him and he went slowly. He had to be careful now . . . someone could be hiding anywhere out here. He picked his way along and ten minutes later he reached the edge of the yard. The building looked empty . . . Carella’s car was gone, even Stoner’s truck had been moved somewhere, and his own car was the only one left in the south lot. He circled and came in from the north, and there, just as he’d thought, was a car parked in the dark against the building on the north side. He knew he had seen it before but he couldn’t place it now. He hugged the building and as he came past it he ran a hand over the hood. It was hot.

  This time he used his key to get in. Stoner’s voice on the intercom sounded faint and far away as he stalked his way across the lobby. It was five after twelve, and Stoner’s show was just getting under way. Dulaney opened the studio door and stood behind it, looking down the dark hall. Nothing there: not a sound, except Stoner’s voice, as he moved inside and on down to the circular stair. The staircase creaked under his weight; the floor creaked as he reached the top. He stood up straight and walked against the wall, past his office to the studio.

  Nobody there.

  At once he had two radically different thoughts: the first, that Stoner was broadcasting from the production room near the open balcony around the corner; the second, that Stoner wasn’t broadcasting at all.

  The second thought gripped him and held. Stoner wasn’t here.

  He opened the soundproof door. The studio monitor was turned up loud and he could hear Stoner breathing. He heard the chair creak and he knew then what he should have known long ago.

  There was no squeaking chair in this studio.

  But there was one downstairs . . . in the control booth in Studio A.

  And another in Stoner’s shack on the roof of the Harford building.

  He took the gun out of his belt and stepped inside. Stoner’s voice droned on, his hypnotic resonance filling the room. He was reading a poem, something from Whitman, Dulaney thought. His reading was flawless and brisk. Dulaney moved around the table and looked into the empty slot, where a record was spinning on the deck.

  Stoner, by transcription.

  A little audio magic. Record the voice part of the show on the rooftop . . . do up several segments ahead of time . . . short pieces, long ones . . . whatever he needed or thought he might need, and he could seem to be here when actually he was somewhere else.

  In Pennsylvania, strangling Kendall.

  In Yorkville, killing Peter and the girl.

  All he needed was an accomplice who was willing to play the records.

  Dulaney remembered the night he and Stoner had met. That trip to the dump . . . those barrels of trash . . . old sound records, Stoner had said, sound effects gone scratchy. We’ll be getting some new ones in a couple of days, Stoner had said. But they weren’t sound effects records at all, were they, Gus? . . . it was weeks later, as Livia was showing off the new sound room, when the station finally got around to ordering new sound records from the city. No, those were your records, covering at least two full shows while you were away in Pennsylvania.

  When killing needs to be done, a man’s got to do it himself.

  He lifted the needle. Stoner’s voice stopped and the room was dreadfully still. He dropped the needle on the record and Stoner was talking again. He bumped the record with his finger and Stoner skipped a groove. That’ll play hell with your sound on the air, Gus, he thought. Maybe the boss is listening.

  He thumped the stylus with his finger and it zipped across the grooves. Suddenly Stoner was reading Whitman again. Then he heard another thump, somewhere beyond the studio, and he moved quickly, past the empty chair and around the corner.

  A door opened: he could see it through the glass, across the room where the studio rest rooms were. Someone coming . . . the ladies’ door swished open and shut.

  The ladies’ room.

  Hazel came into the studio. She stopped for a moment, her eyes wide as if some omen had touched her. Then she shook her head and sat in the slot watching the spinning disc. Waiting for her cue.

  Stoner stopped speaking and she potted down the record and brought up some music from the opposite turntable. Dulaney came back around the corner and stood a few feet behind her.

  “Very good, Hazel,” he said. “You’re really an expert.”

  She jerked around in her chair and fell. The chair clattered against the table and she lay sprawled on the floor.

  “Jordan! . . . Christ, you scared the shit out of me! What are you doing here?”

  She pulled herself up. Took a step back, away from him. She was trembling now, her eyes wide with fright.

  “Where’s Gus?” he said.

  “He’s here.” A ridiculous lie and she knew it at once. “He had to leave for just a minute. He’ll be back.”

  “That’s good. I’ve got some things to ask him about.”

  “What things?” She moved unsteadily to the edge of the table and put her hand on it for support. “What things?” she said again.

  “For one thing, what he was doing with those Germans late at night.”

  She clutched at her breast and her knees buckled. She looked around for a chair, didn’t seem to see that she had knocked it over. Dulaney picked it up for her and she saw the gun in his belt.

  “What’re you doing with that?”

  He didn’t say anything, just moved back away from her. The music transcription had come to an end and the needle was swishing around the spindle. He said, “Record’s done, Hazel,” and she scrambled for the next talking disc, couldn’t find the hole with her trembling fingers, and finally he took it from her and slid it down on the spindle. He picked up the stylus and dropped the needle at random. There was Stoner again, talking out of context, starting with a blip in the middle of a sentence.

  “It’s the wrong cut!” she screamed. “Goddammit, what’s wrong with you, you’ve put it on the wrong cut!”

  “That doesn’t matter much now, does it?”

  She stared at the transcription and let it run. Her panic seemed to ebb as she thought about what to do next; then, like a vat filling up, it came back again.

  “I swear we didn’t do it. You’ve got to believe that, Jordan, we’d never do anything against our country. This was Peter’s fault. Peter and George were the ones doing it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “They were spies, of course. We were duping them. Pretending to be their friends so we could get evidence again
st them.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Oh, don’t act foolish, I know you’re smarter than that. The Nazis were going to land saboteurs here on the coast. Just like in New York and Florida. They were going to come in from a submarine on a rubber raft . . .”

  She had lost her breath. She doubled over and breathed into her hands.

  “It’s all right, Hazel,” he said softly. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “Of course I do. How else are you going to tell the police how it was with us? I need you to tell them, Jordan. How it was Peter who was doing it.”

  “Then tell me about it. What was Peter doing?”

  “He was going to talk them ashore and then help them hide their stuff. They would have bombs, poison, nitroglycerin . . . and lots of money. Lots and lots of U.S. cash. We heard they were going to bring in fifty thousand dollars with them. And they’d need a place to hide . . . until they could get inland, where it would be safer.”

  She looked faint, like the poor dead German girl. He could see the blood pounding in her neck.

  “Oh, I can tell you so much. Then you’ll know what we’ve been through. What heroes we are. This was just the first stop. The Nazis have got a whole chain of safe houses all over the country. Once they got ashore, God knows where they’d go. And Peter was going to talk them in.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It was all in the station breaks. If the coast guard was out he would say, ‘Correct eastern wartime is twelve thirty’ . . . whatever time it was. If the coast was clear he’d say it the other way. ‘It’s twelve thirty, eastern wartime.’ Vary it from week to week so it wouldn’t be obvious.”

  “And the skipper of a jerry sub could pick up the signal a hundred miles out at sea.”

  She had begun to cry again. “We were going to report them. I swear to you, Jordan, you’ve got to believe that.”

  “Sure,” he said. “There’s only one thing wrong with that, Hazel. It wasn’t Peter who was on the air. It was Gus.”

  She shook her head.

  “It was Gus. He’s a killer. He kills anything that moves if it gets in his way. He killed Carnahan and Kendall, Peter and the German girl. And you knew that. You had to have known it. Jesus Christ, Hazel, do you love him that much?”