Amerikan Eagle

by Alan Glenn

  “Hey, Sam, just a joke. That’s all. Don’t you know how to take a joke?”

  “Sure, Leo. I’m an inspector. I know a lot of things. Know how to question people. How to look at a crime scene. And how to recognize jerks when I meet them.”

  Frank started to say something, but Sam turned away. “Party or no Party, brother or no brother, you’re both still beat cops, and I’m an inspector. In a couple of minutes, I’m going to be nice and dry, and you’re still going to be out here in this shitty rain, doing what I told you to do. That’s what I know. Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “Now I wish this fucking guy had been a political. At least we could get out of the rain sooner.”

  “We all have wishes, don’t we, Frank,” Sam said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ten minutes later, Sam sat in the warmth of the Fish Shanty, writing up his notes while trying to ignore the smell of fried seafood, mixed in with the smoke from cheap cigarettes and cigars. Sarah was waiting at home with his supper, and woe be to him if he went home without an appetite.

  He sat on a stool at the lunch counter, and off to both sides, booths filled up with shipyard workers, a scattering of locals, and sailors getting a fast meal into them before heading out for a night of whoring and drinking.

  Unbidden, an empty white coffee cup was placed on the counter, and Sam looked up from his notes to see a smiling red-haired waitress wearing a black and white uniform that was just a tad too tight. Donna Fitzgerald, a few years younger than Sam, a local girl who had hung out with him and other kids years ago, having fun, raising hell, until high school and the Depression had scattered them. He smiled back.

  “Having a busy night, Sam?”

  “Just working a case. How are you doing, Donna?”

  “Doing okay. Last night here at the Shanty, thank God.” Her smile broadened, displaying the dimple on her left cheek.

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, filling up his cup from a dented metal coffeepot. “I start tomorrow at the Rusty Hammer, in town. Oh, it’s still waitressing, but you get a good lunch crowd with the businessmen, with better tips. Here, well, most of the customers are tight with their money, saving it for … other things.” She winked and put a freckled hand on top of his. “Now, Sam, how come you never asked me out when we were in school together?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Donna. The age difference, I guess. Being in different classes.”

  “Age doesn’t make much of a difference now, does it?” Her hand was still on his.

  He smiled. “Guess it doesn’t.”

  There was a shout from the kitchen; she took her hand away. “Time to get back to work. Good to see you, Sam … And did you hear? My man Larry is getting released from the camps in Utah. He should be back here in Portsmouth by the end of the week.”

  “That’s … that’s good news, Donna.” For the briefest of moments, when her hand had touched his, there had been a little spark, a jolt.

  She winked at him, and he remembered how pretty she’d been at fifteen. “Certainly is. You take care, Sam, okay?”

  “I will,” he promised, and he watched her walk away, admiring the way the uniform hugged her hips and her other curves. He saw at the far end of the counter, sitting by themselves, a man and woman and small boy. They sat with cups of tea before them and nearly empty plates, a paper check on the countertop near the man’s elbow. They were well dressed and quiet. He knew the look. Refugees. French, Dutch, Brits, or Jews from everywhere else in Europe. Like lots of port cities up and down the Atlantic Coast, his hometown was bursting with refugees. The family had probably come here for a hot meal, and they were stretching out the comfort of food and being warm and dry. Sam knew they were here illegally. He didn’t care. It was somebody else’s problem, not his.

  He looked down at his notes again, trying to get Donna out of his mind. Not much in his notes. Dead man, no identification, nice clothes, and a tattoo: 9 1 1 2 8 3. What the hell did that mean? A series of numbers so important they couldn’t be forgotten? Like what? A bank account? A phone number? Or if they were added in some sort of combination—or did they stand for letters? He did some scribbling on his pad, substituting each number with the corresponding letter in the alphabet, and came up with IAABHC. He tried rearranging those letters and came up with nothing. So maybe it was just the numbers.

  But why go to the trouble of having them tattooed?

  Sam looked up from his notebook and watched the boy at the other end of the counter whisper something to his mother. She pointed to the rear of the diner. The boy slid off his stool, then walked away from the counter, toward the bathroom. The boy was about Toby’s age. Sam wondered what it must be like to be that young and torn from your home, to live in a strange land where sometimes the people treated you nice and other times they arrested you and put you in a camp.

  He took his wallet out, looked inside. Sighed. Being a cop meant a paycheck, but not much of one. Still …

  For the second time this night, Sam slid out a dollar bill. He waited until the boy came back out, then let the bill fall to the linoleum. As the boy went by—Sam noted the sharp whiff of mothballs from the boy’s coat, probably a castoff from the Salvation Army—he reached out and caught his elbow. “Hey, hold on.” The child froze, and Sam felt the sudden trembling of the thin arm.

  “Sir?” the boy said.

  Sam pointed to the floor. “You dropped this on the way over.”

  The boy—brown-eyed with olive-colored skin—shook his head gravely. Sam reached to the dirty floor, picked up the dollar bill, and pressed it into the boy’s palm. “Yes, I saw you drop it. It belongs to you.”

  The boy stared, looked at Sam. Then his fingers curled around the bill and he ran back to his parents. The father started whispering furiously to the mother, but she shook her head and took the dollar bill from her boy. She picked up the check and nodded at the Shanty’s owner, Jack Tinios, who had just ambled out of the kitchen. He pocketed both the check and dollar bill, then came over to Sam, wiping his hands on a threadbare towel.

  Like most of the restaurant owners in this stretch of New Hampshire, Tinios was from Greece but had moved here before the Nazis overran his country back in ’41. His real first name began with the letter J and had about a dozen syllables; he and everyone else made it easier by calling him Jack. His face was florid, his mustache damp with perspiration, and his arms and hands were thick and beefy. He had on a T-shirt and stained gray slacks, an apron around his sagging middle.

  “Found a body on the tracks a hundred yards or so away,” Sam said.

  Jack grunted. “So I hear.”

  “Guy in his sixties, maybe a little younger. Thin blond hair, wearing a white shirt, black suit, no necktie. He come in here today?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Guys in suits come in here, I notice. I don’t notice no guy in a suit.”

  “Okay, then,” Sam said. “Another guy came in here about two hours ago, wanting to use the phone to call the cops. He didn’t have a suit. You notice him?”

  “Sure. Bearded guy, long coat. Told ’im to beat it.”

  “You wouldn’t even let him use the pay phone?”

  “Bum wanted a nickel. You know what happen, I give ’im a nickel to make a phone call? He runs out. I never see him, never see nickel again.”

  “You might have impeded an investigation, Jack. We might have gotten here earlier if you’d let him make that call.”

  “Hell with that. One dead man, what do I care? What I do care is those bums down the tracks, living like animals, pissing and shitting in the woods, always breakin’ in my place, goin’ through my trash, lookin’ for scraps to eat, dumpin’ it all on the ground. Why don’t they get cleaned out? Huh? I’m a taxpayer. Why don’t they get cleaned out?”

  Sam dropped two quarters on the counter. “Priorities, Jack, priorities. One of these days …”

  Jack said something in Greek and palmed the c
oins. “You sound like the President. One of these days. Every man a king. One of these days.”

  “Sure,” Sam said, “and make sure Donna gets that tip, okay?”

  “Yeah, I make sure.”

  The door opened and another Portsmouth cop came in, his slicker glossy with rain. He held his uniform cap in one hand, shaking off the water to the wet floor. Rudy Jenness was one of the oldest cops on the force and the laziest, but because his brother ran the city’s public works, he was safe in his job as shift sergeant. He walked over, his face splotchy red and white. “Sam, glad I saw your car parked out there.” Without a word, Jack pressed a cup of coffee into Rudy’s palm.

  “Yeah, lucky me, what’s up?” Sam said.

  “Marshal Hanson, he wants to see you. Like now.”

  “He say why?”

  Rudy noisily drained the cup and then slapped it on the counter. “Shit, you got a dead son of a bitch, right? Hanson wants to chat you up about it.”

  Sam felt a voice inside saying, Not fair, dammit, not fair, this case is less than a half hour old, I don’t know enough to brief my boss. Rudy added, “Nice job you got there, Sam. Being warm and all. Me, I’m back on the streets for another three hours.”

  Sam said, “Good place for you, don’t you think?”

  Rudy smiled, and Sam saw a patch of stubble on his chin where the razor had missed shaving. “You can have your inspector job. Lots of bullshit a guy like me don’t have to worry about, and I’ll be getting mine when I retire. See you in the funny papers, Sam. Thanks for the coffee, Jack.”

  After Rudy left, Sam folded his notebook shut, put it inside his coat, and got up from his stool. The door banged open and two young men stumbled in, noisy, already drunk, swaying. Their cropped hair was wet from the rain, and they were dressed almost identically, in leather boots, dark blue corduroy pants, and leather coats. On the lapel of each coat was a small Confederate-flag pin, and Sam stood still, watching them stumble by and sit down at the counter.

  The two jokingly passed a menu between them, and Sam started to the door, just as one of the men yelled out to Jack Tinios, “Hey, you old bastard, get over here and take our order! What the hell are you, a lazy Jew or something?”

  The coffee shop fell silent. One of the sailors set his fork down. Sam looked to Jack, who looked back at him, eyes sharp. No one dared look at the two men who had just slammed in. Donna stood by the kitchen doors. She had a plate of food in her hand, and even at this distance, Sam saw her eyes tear up. In the restaurant window was a faded sign: WE SUPPORT SHARE THE WEALTH. One of the ways to get along, not to make waves, even though Sam knew Jack detested the President.

  The rain was pelting down, but Sam took his time after he went outside. He looked at each of the cars parked in the dirt lot until he found the one he was looking for, a ’42 Plymouth with Louisiana license plates, a pelican in the center of the plate. The front fenders and windshield were speckled with insect carcasses from the long drive north. Two members of the President’s party—Long’s Legionnaires, they were called in some of the braver newspapers—sent north as reverse carpetbaggers, to install Party discipline with a fierce loyalty for their Kingfish. Up till recently, Portsmouth had been spared such visitors, but in the past few weeks they’d been here, setting up shop, doing their bit to extend their President’s control.

  Sam looked back at the rain-streaked windows of the small restaurant, saw the two young men sitting there, laughing. Then he knelt down, took out his pocketknife, and gently slit the two rear tires.

  INTERLUDE I

  With Vermont behind him, it took him nearly a week, but he finally made it to this isolated farmhouse on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River. Standing in the trees at dusk, he had watched the place for almost an hour before reaching a decision. Sweet wood smoke rose and eddied up from a metal smokestack set in the sagging roof of the one-story home next to an empty barn. He rubbed his hands. It was probably warm in that snug old farmhouse. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d last been warm. Only when it was dark, and someone lit a kerosene lamp from inside, did he make his move.

  He walked up to the rear door, going as fast as he could, limping from last winter’s injury, when a pine tree he’d cut down had fallen the wrong way. When he got to the door, he gave it a good thump with his fist.

  No answer.

  His breath snagged as he thought, A trap? When he thumped again, the door creaked open an inch.

  “Yeah?” came a voice from inside.

  “Just passing through,” he said.

  “So?”

  He hesitated, knowing it would sound silly, but still, it had to be said. “Give me liberty …” He waited for the countersign, wondering if he could run fast enough back to the woods if it went wrong.

  The man on the other side of the door replied, “Or give me liberty.”

  His tight chest relaxed. Only someone he could trust would have the correct countersign. Only then did he recognize how tense he had been. There were two men inside, the one answering the door, another sitting at a wooden table, where the kerosene lamp flickered. Both wore faded flannel shirts and denim overalls grubby with grease and dirt. The man at the table held a sawed-off shotgun pointing at his gut. He stopped on the threshold, and the man put the shotgun down on the table. The armed man was in his thirties, the other man—who walked over to an icebox, opened it, and came back holding a plate with two chicken legs and a mug of milk—was in his fifties. His face was scarred on the right, and the eye on that side drooped. A lit woodstove in the other corner warmed the small room.

  “Thanks,” he said, sitting down, picking up a chicken leg and starting to eat. “Been a long time.”

  The older man sat across from to him. “You can spend the night, but Zach here”—he gestured in the armed man’s direction—“will get you into Keene tomorrow. From there, someone will get you to the coast.”

  Amazing how quick it was to finish off one chicken leg, and it seemed he was even hungrier when he picked up the other. “Fair enough.”

  Zach asked, “How’s things where you came from?”

  “Tough,” he replied. “How’s things here?”

  Zach laughed. “Used to have the best dairy herd in this county before milk prices turned to shit. Lost money on each gallon of milk I sold, so I slaughtered my herd and make do where I can. Still, not as bad as Phil here.”

  “True?” he asked Phil.

  Phil rubbed at stubble on his chin. “I went out to the Midwest back in ’28, got a job at Republic Steel. A tough place. Management treated us like shit, got worse after the Crash. Then we went on strike in ’37.”

  He nodded, remembering. “Yeah. The Memorial Day massacre. You were there?”

  “Sure was. Hundreds of us strikers marching peacefully, lookin’ for better conditions and wages, then reachin’ a line of Chicago cops. More than twenty were shot dead by those bastards, whole bunch of others were wounded, the rest got gassed. I got hit in the face by a tear gas canister. My wife … didn’t make it. So I came back here … found … something else to do.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He finished his milk. Phil studied him and said, “You know what you got ahold of, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “You’re settin’ to kill one of the most guarded men in the world. You think you can do it?”

  “I wasn’t picked for my damn charming personality, was I?”

  Zach laughed again, softly, but Phil didn’t. “Understand you might got family issues. That going to be a problem?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’ll all work out.”

  “It better.”

  Outside, he thought he saw a light flicker, and his hands tensed on the mug. He said, “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  Zach was silent and so was Phil. A floorboard creaked. Phil said, “Not sure if you’re goin’ to be tough enough to do what has to be done. I know you heard all the plans. Most likely, damn thing is goin’ to be a suicide m
ission when it all gets wrapped up and the shootin’ stops. So. I got to know. Are you tough enough?”

  Another flicker of light. He leaped up, grabbed the shotgun from the table, and burst out the rear door, with shouts and the sounds of chairs being upended behind him. Even with his bum leg, he could move quick, and he was around the other side of the farmhouse, yelling out, “Don’t you move again, you son of a bitch!”

  The light jiggled and someone was crashing through the brush. He raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger. There was a loud boom that tore at his ears, a kick to his right shoulder, a flare of light, and a scream. Zach and Phil were behind him, Zach holding up the kerosene lamp. The three of them tore through the underbrush. A man lay on his back near the trunk of a pine tree, moaning, his pant legs torn from the shotgun pellets.

  He went up to the man, kicked at his torn legs. Blood was oozing through the shredded dungarees, and the man jerked. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?”

  From the yellow light of the lamp Zach held, he saw that the injured man was clean-shaven and young, wearing a brown jacket over a buttoned white shirt. He looked up, eyes brittle as glass, and said, “Screw you.”

  “Bring the lamp down here,” he said, and Zach reached down. Hidden behind the lapel was a Confederate-flag pin.

  “I’ll be damned,” Phil whispered.

  He stood up, shotgun firm in both hands, and in three sudden, hard, vicious jabs, brought the stock of the gun down against the man’s throat, crushing it. The man spasmed, then was still.

  Breathing hard, he passed the emptied shotgun with the bloodied stock over to Phil. “You were saying something about how tough I was?”

  Phil took the shotgun, looked to the other man. “All right, then. Everything gets moved up. Zach, get the truck. Our man goes to Keene now. And take a good last look about this place. Me and you, we can’t come back.”

  “Won’t miss it much,” Zach said.

  Phil looked down at the murdered man, then at him. “Sorry about what I said back there. You got a tough job ahead of you, sure enough.”