Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  “Get out of my way.”

  Schroeder stopped Eddie with his chest. “Your British interrogators will be here soon, tomorrow morning at the latest. You must listen now, if only for a few more minutes. Your decisions here will affect all those you care about.”

  Eddie tried to read the icy blue eyes. Somehow Standard Oil—a USA company—was partners here with Franco’s Fascist government, a government that was openly supported by the Nazis. If Eddie could see U-boats in the harbor on his third day at the office, pretty good chance Roosevelt and his agents could, too. What the fuck did that mean other than it was, in fact, okay with Roosevelt? How would D.J. explain that?

  Schroeder said, “All I wish is that you listen. Do nothing, just listen and look. And if you wish to discuss what you see, I will be pleased to explain. If not, well then, that is your choice, and I will honor it. Although it is my opinion that President Roosevelt requires your help.”

  Eddie started to speak and Schroeder stopped him. “Please. To show my good faith, I have already assisted your family in Oklahoma. A specialist visited your father”—Schroeder checked his watch—“twenty-five hours ago. The bank will not be a problem for this month or the next.” Schroeder showed his hands again. “You owe me nothing. Who you owe is Roosevelt. And to him I advise you, in the strongest possible terms, to be faithful.”

  Schroeder handed Eddie a card. “My number at the Hotel Mencey,” he said, and waved his men out of Eddie’s path.

  Eddie was running toward the refinery before the submariners had finished moving. His boss there had a special transmitter and radiotelephone that could make transatlantic calls; Eddie’d seen him do it. A transatlantic operator could route Eddie’s call direct to the farm—Except his parents no longer had access to a phone. Eddie kept running; he could call the federal bank in town; they worked late doing foreclosures. Or the Bryant Grocery on Main Street, they had a phone and would be open if they were still in business.

  Sweat-soaked, Eddie reached the refinery and the office trailer. The door was locked and wouldn’t budge. Lights were on, but the foreman’s assistant who had to be on duty was not. Eddie scrambled for the foreman’s two-room apartment and knocked on the door until his boss answered. The foreman was equal parts angry and nervous. Haifa wasn’t mentioned but it was right there between them. Eddie convinced his boss the phone call was an absolute emergency. The foreman told Eddie he would have to listen in, Eddie would have to pay, and it would be a day’s pay, or more, for a very few minutes.

  Eddie’s call to Oklahoma required three operators and finally got through to the store owner at Bryant’s Grocery. Elijah Bryant’s news wasn’t short-winded or good. Bryant reported that most of the Custer and Dewey County farmers had been tractored off by the bank. Cotton pretty much everywhere now was the bank’s answer. Eddie’s people hadn’t been set off yet, but Newt had been ambulanced to the St. John’s Hospital up there to Tulsa. A specialist come down all the way from Kansas City and looked in on your father yesterday noon. The family was gone on to Tulsa, too, just Old Tom staying back to hold down what the dust and goddamn tractor men hadn’t killed.

  Eddie said thanks, wished the Bryant family the best luck available, then called Tulsa. The last English-speaking operator said the wires were down outside Bixby and Oklahoma City—a tornado moving through northeastern Oklahoma, the dust clouds so thick not even the tumbleweeds could roll—please try again in twenty-four hours.

  Eddie hung up the radiophone. How could something this expensive not answer your questions? Eddie’s boss said, “Haifa will require answers in the morning. Get some sleep and prepare. Tomorrow, if you survive it, will be a long, trying day.”

  Eddie thanked his boss for the phone. For an hour, Eddie walked the fence line, Tom Mendelssohn’s papers sticky against his skin, the 9mm useless against the Haifa accusations and the wind and dust five thousand miles away in Oklahoma. Guards watched him. Workers eyed him. Eddie’s security man reappeared with two others.

  Protect the family, Eddie. Do something.

  Five soldiers and the captain of the guard surrounded Eddie at the fence. The captain apologized, then ordered two soldiers to disarm Eddie and search him for bombs or detonators. There was no fighting the search and Eddie didn’t. They found the papers taped to his back. The captain told Eddie to remove them.

  Eddie waved off any value to the captain. “Just my passport and personal papers; don’t want them stolen.”

  The captain wasn’t interested in papers that could not detonate the refinery. He kept the 9mm but allowed Eddie to go to his room. “Many are concerned. Do not give us a reason to shoot you, the PJs in particular.”

  Inside his room, Eddie locked the door, ripped Mendelssohn’s papers off his back, and looked for a place to hide them . . . that didn’t exist. Eddie dropped onto his cot, then rolled to his back. His head hit a lump under the pillow—a brown box of .45 shells and the Colt government .45 that had been in his briefcase since he’d arrived. And—wow—a note that had to be from D.J. Bennett. In pencil the note read, “Missed you at Doña Carmen’s. Things are popping; be back in forty-eight hours—keep your head down and don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers was crossed out and replaced with anybody underlined four times. “I hear you are with child. Stay ahead of wolves for forty-eight and I can take it from there.”

  “With child” had to mean D.J. knew Eddie had the Mendelssohn papers. Eddie jolted.

  Schroeder’s copy of the Daily Worker.

  It was back at the foreman’s office under the radiophone. A Communist newspaper in a facility protected by Fascists. The fast track to the PJs’ cage. Especially after Haifa. Eddie bolted off the cot—He’d need the office key that he’d returned to his boss. His boss’s trailer was a hike down the fences. The captain had been clear on what would happen if they found Eddie at the fences again. Eddie paced. He stuffed Tom Mendelssohn’s papers in his pants. Three hundred dead at Haifa. Eddie’s room shook him sideways. He steadied, grabbed D.J.’s .45—No way D.J. was a Communist; no way he did Haifa. D.J. had helped in Oklahoma; the letters from home said so.

  Yeah, but somehow home had gone all the way bad.

  CHAPTER 20

  October, 1938

  Nine hours ago at midnight, Saba’s chance to kill Erich Schroeder had come as hoped. Had her plan held together another four minutes, she would have cut his throat midstreet where he stood. At midnight, Santa Cruz de Tenerife’s cobbled Calle San Jose had been alive with soldiers and police, women and tobacco, men drunk with wine and beer and possibilities. Guitars played behind open windows and doors. Men shouted, “Flamenco!” as if it were their anthem. Saba tracked Erich Schroeder from behind. She would die on this street tonight but it would be with the Nazi’s blond, blue-eyed head in her hand. Saba gripped the straight-blade fighting knife under her beggar’s clothes. Her other hand gripped the cocked revolver. The Nazi wished to “prove the Arab’s long reach.” She would murder him here in the next few minutes and make his wishes fact. Others would see the symbolism as irony, but Palestine would see it as the truth of who had bombed Haifa, that the Nazis were merely another European invader, a competing colonial master who saw the Arab as fodder.

  Schroeder was alone, fifty feet ahead in the loud, crowded street. A man jostled him. Schroeder shoved the man away. Four bodyguards materialized on Schroeder’s perimeter, two ahead, two behind. The bodyguards were discreet, ordinary to the untrained eye. Saba hung back. She had anticipated one bodyguard, two at the most, not four. Four would be impossible to defeat and still kill the Nazi. A revolver bullet from outside Schroeder’s perimeter could not be trusted. Gun or knife, it had to be with her hands on him. There would be but the one chance.

  Schroeder continued up the narrow street. Saba allowed him to extend the distance between them. He passed the loud commotion and Nationalist soldiers and Armada police outside the Bar Atlántico, then stopped and spoke to a young man. Stoop-shouldered, Saba mooched through the crowd, her hand exten
ded, closed the distance, and glanced at Schroeder from behind.

  The young man facing him was Eddie Owen.

  She stumbled, stepping back. Eddie here was a complication, not an improvement. The Nazi and Eddie walked to a café across Calle San Jose. Saba found a beggar’s wall at the mouth of an alley opposite the café. She squatted there, unimportant and unwashed in the brown on brown, hands under her robe on her knife and revolver. Arab and European men passed her but said nothing.

  To the Nazi’s left, a table of polished military men and attractive young European women enjoyed their night of finery and laughter. A strong young man, in denim pants and a white T-shirt, approached the Nazi’s table. The young man’s posture was military. He spoke. Schroeder made what appeared to be apologies to Eddie Owen, rose, and walked toward the waterfront. The Nazi’s four security men closed around him. Saba rose to follow. An Arab man interrupted her line of sight. He spoke to her in caustic Arabic, the dialect unknown. Saba squatted back to her original spot and did not answer. The man kicked dust on her robe, speaking louder. Two men stopped behind him. The Arab tired of her silence and moved on, as did the others.

  Across Calle San Jose, the café’s candles shimmered in the faces of the fortunate and their conversations. The guitars here were melodic and mixed with the sweet scent of lamb and spices that drifted beyond the flowered terrace. Without the Nazi present, Saba focused on Eddie Owen, her thoughts shifting from revenge for Haifa to . . . To what? She had no right to die in failure, distracted by a boy’s touch, his gentle hands, his words, his future in America. Her eyes cut to her stars and she promised this would not be so. She would retreat her alley as soon as she deemed it safe. Across the street, Eddie shared glances and flirtations with the attractive European women at the next table. Saba darkened, angered by his attentions, then by her reaction. Who was she to think these thoughts . . . of boys and America? But the thoughts did not stop and they saddened her for all that she and her people would never have in this life. What she had were weapons and the blood of many on her hands.

  And yet she had saved no one.

  Two of the polished military men rose from their chairs. Eddie Owen did the same. Another man came at Eddie’s back. Saba jumped to her feet. The man confronted the military men, not Eddie. A knife flashed, then another. Saba charged across the cobblestones. Eddie hit the military man just as she arrived, knocking him to the street and the knife from his hand. Whistles blew. Police shouted. Saba backed away to the beggar’s wall and shrank to her crouch. Eddie and the man who sided him ran toward the waterfront, away from the police. The police surrounded the military man on the ground, blew their whistles again, but did not chase Eddie into the dark.

  Saba’s shock was almost total. Only twice in seven years, and both times over the old women at Dhār el Baidar, had she reacted out of pure emotion. Eddie Owen was not the mission. She was not a girl—

  An Arab appeared at her feet. The Arab who had bothered her before. He demanded sex and threw a coin on her robe. Saba stayed within herself, disgraced. The man again kicked dust on her robe. She stood, hands under her robe on her weapons, looking past the man without moving her head. He pointed her to follow him deeper into the alley. The rage that burned in her face was not for this man; he was correct at his assessment of her value.

  In the dream, Eddie kept smelling the Moroccan mint teas and hearing the Arabian princess say, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” Eddie was at Newt’s funeral service holding hands with Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in a California migrant camp, and both his hands hurt. Eddie’s head began to pound. The pounding was the door to his room challenging its hinges. Eddie said, “Yeah?” and cringed at the sunlight filling his dirty four-pane window.

  A muffled Spanish accent said, “Please hurry, the door must be open.”

  Eddie stumbled to the door, opened it, and sat back on his cot. The foreman’s assistant was nervous, harried, flailing his hands as he spoke. His accent was Canarian and difficult to follow: Three out-of-uniform British military men were in the compound. The foreman, Eddie’s superior, had spoken on the transatlantic phone with the refinery’s owners. High government representatives were involved, ambassadors and others. Additional armed guards were now at all entrances—

  Eddie held up a hand to stop the torrent. “Which government’s representatives are we talking about?”

  This assistant did not know, but he did know that the PJs had escorted the British men into the refinery. The PJs were keeping an unusual distance by order of Madrid. But this would not last. The assistant flailed his hands again. It was nine o’clock a.m. and Eddie was two hours late to explain himself and all the tribulation. Eddie must hurry to the office, immediately, now, or sooner. Yes, and there was a call from a hospital in Oklahoma.

  Eddie exploded off the cot. “What?”

  The assistant fell backward avoiding the door. He answered in Spanish, caught his breath, and added in English. “I have the number is all I know.” The assistant pointed. “At the office where everyone waits.”

  Eddie bolted. Halfway to the office, Eddie slowed. Would his boss allow the British interrogators to pull whatever bullshit they intended to pull? Before a call to the hospital? The assistant caught up. Eddie stopped. He told the assistant, “Have the Brits meet me at the canteen. I’m having breakfast.”

  “No, no. You must be at work.” The assistant tapped his watch. “There is much trouble.”

  Eddie patted his stomach and turned toward the canteen. The assistant swore and fast-walked for the office trailer. Eddie stepped out of sight and sprinted, circling back near the backside of the office to watch the assistant arrive. The Brits left with him to find the canteen, big fellas all three of them. Three PJs materialized and followed at a distance. Eddie ran for the office trailer door.

  Inside, Eddie apologized to his boss, said he would explain what he could after he called the hospital in Tulsa. His boss pointed at the Daily Worker on his desk. “Eddie, you better have a first-class explanation for a Communist paper. Men were dying in Spain fighting against the Communists and we’re standing on Spanish ground. The PJs will not be gentle.” The foreman leaned closer. “This refinery, Eddie, is not going to blow like your last two.”

  The transatlantic operator said she could make the connection to Tulsa and would call back. Eddie’s boss tapped the Daily Worker. “You don’t seem to get it. This refinery, my refinery, is owned by men who are mortal enemies of the Communists. I will not allow you to remain on premise another hour, no matter how vital your skills, if you harbor sympathies that jeopardize this enterprise and the people who staff it.”

  “Honest, Mr. Paulsen, I—”

  “The PJs will kill you, Eddie. There won’t be a trial. There’ll be a cage.”

  “I’m trying to do my job in . . . in a universe that changes every damn day. I don’t know whose side anyone is on. And I’m not real sure any of them know, either.”

  The foreman started to bark, exhaled instead, then said, “England may side with the Russians against Germany or she may do the exact opposite. It’s fifty-fifty no matter what you hear. And whichever way England goes, so goes America. But none of that matters to you where you’re standing. Understand? None of it. You’ll be dead before the story’s written.”

  “What I heard was that England will follow America’s lead. You work for Standard Oil and the Texas Company, right?”

  “For thirty years.”

  “And you can see those Nazi submarines laying off our fuel dock.”

  The foreman waved off the question. “You better have answers for Haifa. The damage was substantial and costly. The British are blaming Arab Nationalists—a terrorist they say you know, the Raven of Palestine. The Arabs blame the Zionists. The Zionists blame the Nazis. The Nazis blame the Communists and the Zionists as a singular cancerous entity. Get it, Eddie? Communists, the mortal enemy of the Fascists, our government protection here and the mortal enemy of our President Roosevel
t if he’d wake up . . . completely. You cannot be seen as a Communist and survive.”

  The office phone rang. Eddie answered while his boss was still talking. The doctor in Tulsa spoke in a calm voice. Each sentence shrunk Eddie deeper into the desk’s chair, all of him heavier with each pronouncement. Eddie asked his last three questions, then set the phone in the cradle and exhaled. He glanced to his boss.

  Three British men had replaced him. Eddie had been so intent on the call to the hospital that he’d missed their entry. The nearest Brit barked: “Edward Fred Owen?”

  Eddie’s eyes were wet. Fred was Eddie’s dad’s name. Mom and his friends called him “Newt.” A quiet tear dribbled down Eddie’s cheek. Newt had stood up to everything God and man could throw, all with a quiet kindness that had absolutely no right to kill him now.

  The Brit laughed rough and sarcastic. “Tears from a fifth-column bastard.” The Brit’s pie-face was hard, red, and angry. The other two faces were the same.

  Eddie wiped his cheek and stood into what little space the Brits allowed. “Be with you fellas in a minute; have to talk to my boss first, in private.” Eddie angled his head at the cradled phone.

  Eddie’s foreman told the Brits, “Make yourselves comfortable outside. We’ll be just a minute.” The Brits took Eddie’s measure, then the trailer door outside.

  Eddie told his boss, “My dad, back in Oklahoma. The doctors don’t think he’ll make it. There’s a slim chance, though—lung surgery, a new procedure. I need a two-thousand-dollar advance right now and a telegram guaranteeing the money’s arrival in Tulsa.”