Power, The

by Robinson, Frank M.

  He put his hand in his pocket and felt a small piece of paper. Sometime during the evening he had been jostled and somebody had put it there. He took it out and unfolded it.

  It read:

  How do you like the zoo?

  A neatly written signature that looked like copperplate:

  Adam Hart.

  Zoo? he thought.

  The room and its impressions suddenly whirled around him, as hard and clear as cut glass.

  A rock-and-roll tune blaring over the radio. A sudden suppressed giggle. The sound of liquid sloshing in a glass, a roar of animal laughter, the flushing of the water closet and water puddling in the sink, a woman’s voice, “Now, Charlie …,” somebody dropping a glass in the short hallway, the man on the bed waking up and vomiting over the side … .

  And inside his mind, defeat and sudden twisting laughter before Adam Hart withdrew.

  don’t feed the animals …

  14

  IT was seven-thirty in the morning and a little too early for the Loop to fill with people on their way to work. Trucks were busy making deliveries before the Loop got crowded and the newspaper wagons were dropping off stacks of the Tribune and the Times. A few baggy-eyed businessmen were trotting out of the subway entrances but the Loop was still the private reservation of the newsstand vendors and the deliverymen. It would be another hour before the counter at Walgreen’s became packed with secretaries drinking their breakfasts.

  The sun was up and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was hot already and Tanner knew the day was going to be another scorcher.

  He bought a paper and found himself an empty booth in a drugstore. He ordered coffee and rolls for breakfast and took another dextroamphetamine capsule to keep himself going through the day. He took half an hour killing the coffee and rolls and another ten minutes glancing at the paper. A senator had died, a prominent actress had become involved in a New York vice trial, a government official had resigned over charges of corruption. And the police were still looking for a university professor who was wanted for questioning in a murder case. Oddly enough, the paper didn’t run a mug shot of him. Thank God for small favors, he thought. It meant the police hadn’t located a picture of him so neither the run-of-the-mill cop nor the general public could be expected to recognize him on sight.

  He paid his bill and walked out to the now-crowded street.

  Eight o’clock in the morning and he had nothing to do until he saw Marge for breakfast at nine. An hour to waste—and why not get to Marge’s early? Spend some time talking about nothing at all, get his mind off his worries for once.

  At least for thirty minutes.

  He caught an El going north and was at her apartment by eight-twenty.

  But there wasn’t any Marge. He pressed the buzzer and could hear the faint ringing in the apartment but nobody came to answer the door. She might have gone out early, he thought, disappointed. And she might have forgotten about the breakfast date, which wasn’t a pleasant thought but a possible one anyway.

  He tried the knob from force of habit and the door swung quietly open. She must have forgotten to shut it all the way when she had left. Or else the lock had jammed and hadn’t locked automatically when she closed the door; it happened sometimes. Or maybe … ?

  Oh, God, no!

  “Marge!” He raced in, glancing at the living room and throwing open the closet door. Then into the bedroom and the kitchen and a quick look into the bathroom. She wasn’t there and he felt sick with relief, and then abruptly wondered just where she was. Stepped out just for a moment, probably … .

  It was quiet and warm in the apartment, the sunlight strong and bright through the chintz-curtained windows. The room smelled sweet. The faint odor of “Tweed,” he thought, Marge’s trademark; what she called a “sensible” perfume. The apartment was a better setup than Petey’s. A little larger, the carpeting not so worn, the wallpaper clean and modern.

  That was what set it off. A modern room. A lot of light from the windows at the end, modernistic limed-oak furniture, wrought-iron lamps and chair frames, and a fish mobile over the desk, the fins moving slightly in a breeze from a half-open window. A large bed in the bedroom with a bookrack headboard and thick, round pillows. He ran his hand lightly over the coverlet, then turned it back and looked at the sheets. Good honest cotton.

  He went back to the closet he had opened when he had first searched through for Marge. He hesitated, shrugged, and opened it up. Nothing but Marge’s suits and dresses and he could identify almost every one. There were no hidden gowns, no fancy wraps.

  The top of her dressing table was almost bare compared to Petey’s. The large bottle of “Tweed” perfume, powder, rouge, and lipsticks. A small box for hairpins and curlers. A large picture frame standing on top of the dresser, with no photograph in it. Probably a new frame she hadn’t had time to fit a photo for.

  He started for the door, thinking of waiting outside in the hallway, then paused halfway across the room, feeling vaguely unhappy about something. A nice, modern room, he thought. Neat, airy, attractive. But almost like a room in a hospital. It was designed not to be lived in but to suit somebody’s esthetic taste. And not Marge’s. Marge had always struck him as the type who would have her laundry in the bathroom sink, stockings drying on a towel on the radiator, and bobby pins scattered loose over the dressing table top.

  But there was something more specific, something that had struck him as a clue … .

  He slowly walked back to the center of the room, searching for the something that hadn’t fitted, the something that had stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. Not the mobile, not the clothes in the closet, not the dressing table.

  The dresser.

  The large frame on top of it that had no picture in it.

  People bought frames because they had pictures to go in them, he thought slowly. They didn’t buy the frames first and wait for the pictures to come later. At least, most people didn’t. And Marge had had a photograph to put in that frame, one he had given her the previous Christmas. One of himself.

  He took the frame down and looked at it closely. It wasn’t a new frame, there was a little tarnish around the edges. And there was a sheet of photo paper in it. A sheet of plain, white photo paper but with no picture on it.

  But Marge saw something when she looked at it, he thought. She saw a picture there.

  Adam Hart’s.

  Marge had been the Judas goat. Sure, have breakfast with her at nine—but she had never meant to be there. Somebody else would have been waiting for him. He would have had breakfast with Adam Hart instead, and that would have been the last breakfast he would ever have had.

  The night before, when he had been in the car, he thought suddenly. How odd that of all the hotels in the Loop, he and Marge should have hit the same one. And her date, the escort he had never quite seen. The tension had dropped off for a few minutes after Marge had left, and then it had come back—strong.

  Adam Hart had taken her home and then returned.

  And Tanner had believed everything that Marge had told him.

  The clock on the dresser chimed once. Eight-thirty. Time to get the hell out of there.

  He looked down at the frame he held, then broke it over his knee, shattering the glass and cutting his hand. He didn’t give a damn.

  He walked out and slammed the door behind him.

  Grossman was waiting for him at the library, nervously pacing back and forth in front of the information booth. He was making himself too obvious, Tanner thought. He should have been in the reading room, supposedly absorbed in a newspaper or book.

  The physicist saw him and hurried over. “What are we going to do today, William?”

  “Go right ahead with what we intended to do. Eliminate another committee member, somebody who might be useful to us.”

  Grossman wet his lips. “Which one? Professor Van Zandt? DeFalco?”

  “Neither. I was thinking of Arthur Nordlund.”

  “Why him?�
��

  “Why not? He’s a young man, a strong man. And one who has contacts that might do us some good—if he’s the McCoy and if we can convince him.”

  Grossman nodded. “All right. Then we shall lay a trap for Commander Nordlund.”

  Tanner looked around and spotted a pay phone in the hall just a short distance from the reading room. He took down the phone number. “I’ll be gone for a while, Karl. I’ll call you back here.”

  He left the library and turned south on State Street. There was a little print shop just south of the Loop that he had discovered when he had once audited an undergraduate criminology course. A shop that could fix him up with some kind of identification before he started looking into the background of

  Arthur Nordlund.

  He ticked off on his fingers what he knew about the man. Early thirties, though like most predominately thin men, he didn’t look that old. Hardly an athlete but not exactly soft either; a “stringy” build. An unfriendly personality that annoyed most people; he wasn’t pleasant to talk to, he wasn’t pleasant to be with. People would steer away from him. If he died tomorrow, it wouldn’t take long for most people to forget him.

  He stopped in a drugstore and thumbed through the phone book, then made a brief call, disguising his voice. Commander Nordlund wasn’t expected in until late afternoon, if then. Which meant there would be a clear field with the personnel in Nordlund’s office.

  There were other Navy officers in the building on Rush Street. Nordlund’s was at the end of the hallway, an unpretentious cubbyhole manned by a cute Wave and a plump first-class yeoman who was leaning comfortably back in his swivel chair, half asleep.

  He snapped wide awake when Tanner opened the door. “Yes, sir?”

  “Commander Nordlund in?”

  He wasn’t. The desk at the rear of the room even looked like it had dust on it. But the tone of Tanner’s voice let the yeoman know he hadn’t expected to find Nordlund in and, in fact, hadn’t wanted to. The official stamp.

  “No, sir. He probably won’t be here until afternoon—maybe not even then. Something I can do?”

  Tanner nodded towards the girl who had paused in her typing and was watching them. “I’d like to talk to you alone.”

  The yeoman fished a coin out of his watch pocket and flipped it to the girl. “Coffee, Sue. Cream and no sugar and don’t hurry back.” After she had gone, he asked: “What’s the pitch?”

  Tanner took the forged card out of his wallet and let it drop on the desk. “Naval Intelligence. Commander Haskell downstairs said I should talk to you. About the Commander.” He had picked Haskell’s name off the directory in the lobby.

  The yeoman moistened thick lips and Tanner could see him flipping through a mental card file of everything he knew about Nordlund, looking for anything that might be incriminating to himself.

  “Anything I can do to help, just ask me, sir. The Commander’s a fine man, sir, one of the finest officers I ever met in the Navy. I …”

  Tanner cut him off. “Maybe it would be better if I asked the questions. I don’t think it will take so long that way.”

  The yeoman froze in mid-sentence. “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve known Commander Nordlund for a long time?”

  “Yes, sir. We were stationed on the same destroyer during the Gulf War.”

  Tanner sat down in the chair the Wave had vacated and leaned comfortably back. “He had a pretty good record, didn’t he? We’ve got his service file, of course, but I mean unofficially.”

  “He had a fine record, sir. And I never saw him get shook once. Cool head, never got rattled. Good mind for decisions.”

  “Any unusual political views?” He could tell by the yeoman’s expression that the sailor thought this was the clutch question.

  “I don’t remember him having any political views at all, sir.”

  “Any hobbies, did he play cards much, gamble?”

  “I don’t remember, sir.”

  “You said you knew him pretty well.”

  “That was a while back, sir.”

  “This is just routine check,” Tanner said carefully. “We’re not trying to get something on the Commander and so far as we know, he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  Some of the careful reserve vanished. “He gambled a little. Not much, but a little.”

  “How is he with the women?”

  “He doesn’t get around much, sir. He’s not the type. Oh, he has his girl friends but he isn’t the ladykiller kind, if you follow me.”

  “I follow you. You don’t know if he’s ever dated a girl named Patricia Olson, do you?” He pretended to consult a folded sheet of paper he took out of his pocket. “She’s the secretary for the human research project over at the university.”

  A fleeting look of surprise. “Hell no, sir. I’ve seen her around—he’s got better taste than that.”

  Tanner leaned forward and smiled confidentially “Just between you and me, what do you think of the Commander?”

  The yeoman didn’t take the bait. “I think he’s an excellent officer, sir. Maybe not the friendliest in the world but he knows what he’s doing and that’s more than you can say for some of them.”

  Which about wound it up except for one small point. Something he had remembered from his trip to Brockton and that he had seen an example of in Marge’s apartment.

  “You don’t have a recent photograph of the Commander around the office, do you? I remember seeing him once several years ago and of course we have photos in the files, but they’re not recent.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t remember his ever having one around. We could have one made up if you wanted it … .”

  Tanner stood up. “That’s all right. Incidentally, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell the Commander I was here. We’re not through yet and we want an unbiased check.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  Tanner was almost out the door when the yeoman said, “Say, wait a minute!” He waddled over to a filing cabinet and pawed among the papers for a moment. He finally came back with a form with a small photograph attached to the upper right-hand corner. “The Commander filled out this form and was going to send it in to Bupers about six months ago but the form’s obsolete now. Maybe this photo would help.”

  Tanner glanced at it. “No, I don’t think so. It’s a little small for what I would like.”

  The photograph was blurred and fuzzy, it could have been a picture of any Navy officer.

  Which meant that Arthur Nordlund had suddenly been promoted to a red-hot prospect … .

  Smile at the Wave at the information desk on your way out. Find out from her that the Commander almost always gets in late, that he lives in an apartment hotel just off Diversey Parkway and takes his breakfast in a little coffee shop just around the corner.

  And don’t embarrass her about how she knows all this. The Commander is no lady-killer but it’s only natural that a pretty Wave who works in the same building should know him rather well … .

  Take the El north and stroll past the coffee shop and casually glance in. The Commander is sitting at a table in the rear, toying with grapefruit and burnt toast. His face is just a shade worn this morning, the faint traces of fatigue beneath his eyes.

  Just a healthy good time the night before?

  Or did he ever go to bed at all? Did he spend the evening in a hotel room at a cheap convention party watching a harried anthropology professor trying to keep alive during the long night?

  Possibly, but don’t think about it and don’t watch too long. A quick look and keep on walking so he can’t pick up your thoughts. It wouldn’t pay to tip your hand now.

  And then there’s the possibility that you’re mistaken and Adam Hart is actually watching you watching Nordlund and laughing to beat the band. This is a watchbird watching you … .

  Buy the paper on the corner and have a Coke in the drugstore kitty-corner from the coffee shop. You finish it in a hurry when Nordlund suddenly gets up and
pays his bill and strolls outside. You’re at the cash register when you see him flag a cab and you don’t even wait for your change. There’s another taxi outside and you catch that and tell the driver to follow Nordlund’s cab. It’s hard to tell when you’re being tailed down Michigan Boulevard. There are so many cars. And besides, Nordlund isn’t expecting this and won’t be looking for it.

  Or will he?

  Nordlund’s cab stopped at the athletic club. Tanner drove up a block and got out, swearing to himself. The club was for members only; he couldn’t get in. And there was no telling how long Nordlund would be there.

  He walked across the Drive to a park bench on the lake front and sat down and unfolded his paper. No matter how long the Commander stayed, he was going to wait him out.

  He had been waiting a bare half hour before the Navy man came out, dressed in white ducks and T shirt and with a rolled-up towel under his arm. Probably going swimming at a nearby beach …

  On the sidewalk, Nordlund lit a cigarette and leaned against the building, watching the passers-by. Tanner hid behind the paper. Nordlund was waiting for somebody … .

  Two cigarettes later, a girl in tennis shorts ran up to Nordlund, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and they stood on the walk and talked for a while. The date, Tanner thought. While he was watching, the girl suddenly frowned and pointed to Nordlund’s towel. The Commander snapped his fingers and made a face, then gestured down the street towards the beach. The girl started walking, turned, waved once, and went on.

  Nordlund walked to the street and hailed a cab. Tanner caught one right behind him and trailed him back to his apartment on Diversey Parkway. He parked while Nordlund ran into the building.

  The girl had gone on ahead, he thought, while Nordlund had driven back to the apartment. Why? Because he had forgotten something? Maybe a blanket, maybe a portable radio?

  The cab driver drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “Why so interested in him, Mac? You got somethin’ on him?”