The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  The guards retreated just outside the open door. Grillo slumped in the chair, head down, hands in his lap. Dunne sensed the relaxed attitude of the guards had less to do with pity for a condemned man than with Grillo’s obvious passivity.

  “I’m Fintan Dunne, a private investigator.”

  “I know. Elba called. She thinks you’re Jesus Christ come to save me.” Grillo removed a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lit one, and tossed the pack on the table. “Funny, you don’t look like Jesus Christ.”

  “I don’t walk on water. But maybe I can save your life.”

  “Forget about this. That way you’ll save your time and Elba’s money.” Grillo blew a stream of smoke toward the light over the table. “The State of New York has promised to put me to death. A great state like this won’t go back on its word.”

  “We produce the right evidence it will.”

  “This isn’t about evidence. It’s about politics. There’s an election for governor in the first week of November. I’m scheduled to die on September twenty-first. Both the governor and his challenger will want to make sure I keep my date with the executioner.”

  “Your sister is convinced you’re innocent. Let’s say you play along, tell me what you know, and I’ll find out whatever I can. What’s the harm?”

  Grillo stared up at the light and the trail of smoke that crossed it. “I have accomplished two things in prison, Mr. Dunne. When I came here my English was inferior. I knew enough to get by, but it always struck me as a crude, clumsy tongue. I didn’t bother mastering it. Now I’ve come to enjoy and savor it. Also, I’ve made my peace with God. I never was a religious man. I’m still not what you’d call devout, but today I know that I’m a believer, which I’d never given much thought to before. I’m at peace. I’ve confessed my sins to a priest.”

  “In English or Spanish?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Did you confess in English or Spanish?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not. Rape and murder are rape and murder in any language.”

  Grillo sat up. He had the same brown eyes as Elba, alight with the same indignation. “I confessed my sins, not the lies told by the police and repeated by the prosecutor.”

  “Which lies?”

  “All of them.”

  “Name one.”

  “Ah, bravo, Mr. Dunne. You know how to prod a witness.” Grillo sank back in the chair. “You would make a good lawyer.”

  “Where were you the night of the murder?”

  “In the park, walking.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Neither did the jury.”

  “There’s nothing you can tell me about what happened that night? Give me something to go on, I promise I’ll do what I can to get you out of here.”

  “What it takes to get me out of here is down the hall, in the chamber that holds the electric chair. That’s how I’m destined to leave. It’s the wish of New York State. And God’s will.” Grillo stood. “Joe,” he called out. “I’m ready.”

  The guards re-entered. They flanked Grillo in an informal, familiar way.

  “And Roberta Dee, what can you tell me about her?”

  If the name meant anything to Grillo, he gave no sign. He shrugged and picked up his cigarettes. “Goodbye, Mr. Dunne. Give my love to Elba.” The guards walked out behind him. A gate shut with the uncompromising finality of steel against steel.

  WALL STREET, NEW YORK

  Donovan was late for lunch. The receptionist advised that Mr. Dulles was also running late but Mr. Dewey was already in the dining room. She buzzed and a formally attired attendant came to the front desk. He led Donovan down the heavily carpeted hallways. Except for occasional echoes of smothered shouting from behind heavy oak doors, a churchlike quiet prevailed. The pain had returned to his knee during his walk up Wall Street and was throbbing once more. He limped slightly entering the dining room.

  District Attorney Dewey studied the smoldering tip of his cigarette. He stood when Donovan came in. “Bill,” he said. “Glad you could make it.” Neither his enthusiastic handshake nor smile disguised the slow burn he’d been doing at being kept waiting. Two colored waiters in starched and spotless white jackets appeared and served them each a chilled glass of tomato juice. The chief attendant stayed in the corner until they’d been served. “Mr. Dulles apologizes for the delay,” he said. “He’s on an international call and will be with you shortly.”

  “He was on the same call ten minutes ago.” Dewey rubbed out his cigarette in the saucer beneath the tomato juice. “I wish I’d been told ahead of time. I rushed through a review of one of our capital cases to get here. Thank God it was an open-and-shut case, the perpetrator caught red-handed. He’s set to be executed the twenty-first of September.”

  The phone on the sideboard rang softly. The attendant picked it up on the first ring, hung up without saying a word, and hurried to the door. John Foster Dulles entered a moment later, moving deliberately, like a prelate in a liturgical procession. He nodded toward Dewey and Donovan. He laid his hand on Dewey’s shoulder as he walked past to the far end of the table.

  “Gentlemen,” he said as he passed, “please accept my apologies for the delay. It was unavoidable.” The attendant stood ready to pull out Dulles’s chair but was waved away. Dulles stayed erect, holding the knobbed spires on the back of the chair, arms stiff, neck arched, face upturned.

  “Are you in pain, Foster?” Dewey asked.

  “My back. It will pass. These things always do.” Dulles reached behind and stuck his thumbs into the base of his spine. “I’m particularly grateful to you, Bill, for accepting this change in venue and making the necessary alterations in your schedule.”

  “I should thank you. You saved me a cab ride uptown.”

  Dulles bowed his head, as if about to pronounce a blessing on their meal. “I didn’t want to postpone this meeting because I believe there’s a growing urgency to events.” While he spoke, the waiters glided noiselessly around the room and served a lunch of chicken in cream sauce, salad, and ice tea.

  “Please, gentlemen, go on with your meal.” Dulles could have been addressing an audience or congregation of two hundred instead of two. “The bankruptcy of the current administration in Washington is self-evident. Having failed to return prosperity to the United States, with nine million people still out of work, it hopes to turn to foreign adventures to cover its domestic sins. It’s among the oldest ploys of demagogues, and few demagogues in history have been as utterly unscrupulous as the present occupant of the White House.”

  “Or as tolerant of corruption,” Dewey interjected.

  “Exactly, Tom. The New Deal has brought a new stench to the open sewers of corruption that disgrace so many of our cities.”

  “But we’re closing those sewers down here in New York, cleaning them up, showing the whole damn country how.” Dewey thumped the table for emphasis.

  Dulles’s contented smile was the kind a preacher might bestow on his brightest Sunday school pupil. “It is precisely such vigorous prosecution of wrongdoing that has led to Tom Dewey being the choice of an ever-growing number of Republicans for the upcoming presidential nomination.”

  “Have you seen the movie Racket Buster?” Dewey said. “I’m told it’s a hit.”

  “I thought George Brent was miscast,” Donovan said.

  “Yes, yes, all well and good.” Dulles was visibly displeased with the turn of the conversation. “But not really relevant to our discussion. As my grandfather John Foster was fond of saying, ‘Fame is ephemeral. It’s a man’s character that endures.’ Though grandfather never sought the presidency himself, his service as Secretary of State left him well-schooled in the requirements of national leadership.”

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves, don’t you think,” Donovan said.

  “You’re absolutely right, Bill.” Dulles put his hands together, in a small, silent mimic of applause. “That’s why I felt this meeting wa
s so urgent. While Tom’s success as a prosecutor has brought him national attention, he needs a higher platform from which to seek the presidency, an executive position, such as governor, in which his sterling leadership qualities will be fully displayed. But he’ll need a good deal of guidance in putting together a proper campaign that can unseat the incumbent.”

  “I lost for governor by more votes than any candidate in history,” Donovan said, “and against the current occupant.”

  “Nineteen thirty-two was an annus horribilis for Republicans. Besides, before running your own campaign for governor in ’32, you helped manage a presidential campaign in ’28, and won.”

  “Hoover won. I was a mere accessory.”

  “You’re too modest,” Dulles said.

  “Too honest, that’s all.”

  Donovan knew that he hadn’t been an accessory during the election of ’28. An upstate Irish Catholic, he helped manage the campaign of Herbert Hoover against Al Smith, another Catholic Irishman from New York. But he most certainly felt like one afterwards, when the electoral votes of five southern states, formerly firmly Democratic, went into the Republican column. The Rebels from the South joined with the Yankees from the North to ensure that the position of Attorney General didn’t go to Donovan, the man whom Hoover had promised it, a “mackerel snapper” from New York, but to a true-blue one-hundred-percent-loyal American Protestant. “It’s just politics, Bill,” said an emissary from the president-elect. “Don’t take it personally.” The problem is, if I take it professionally, it hurts even more.

  “The Republican Party is ready to stand behind me for governor. That’s already clear. They’re hungry for new blood, fresh ideas. Like every Democratic governor, Lehman is dependent on the big-city bosses, and the people are fed up, ready to throw them out, not just in New York but across the nation!” Dewey was red-faced when he finished.

  “There, there, Tom. ‘Elections are like wars,’ my uncle Robert Lansing used to say. ‘They are won not by speeches but by clear purpose harnessed to sound strategy.’” Dulles launched into a discussion of his uncle’s service during and after the war as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, a monologue that continued as the waiters cleared the table, including the plate he’d never touched. Finally, he sat. He turned toward Donovan. “We need men of stature and experience in this campaign. Men with national connections who know the New York electorate and aren’t afraid of a good fight.”

  “Fighting Irishmen like you, Bill.” Dewey dug into the vanilla ice cream the waiters had just delivered for dessert.

  Dulles winced, perhaps because of his back, more likely from the mention of the sort of ethnic appeals he despised, the age-old specialty of those who subverted the rule of men of true standing, those predestined by pedigree and education to stand above the passions of the mob and direct affairs of state. He resumed his monologue, steering it into a discussion of foreign policy, speaking with the tone of high certainty that Donovan imagined Dulles’s minister father must have used to lay down the Calvinist doctrine of justification to his congregation. The events in Europe were none of America’s business, Dulles said. They involved the eternal struggle between dynamic and static forces to find a proper balance, a natural balance, which could only be achieved if the U.S. kept its thumb off the scale. The right Republican in the White House, surrounded by responsible advisers, were the best guarantee of such an outcome.

  “What about those who argue that National Socialism is incapable of accommodation, that its motives and purpose must inevitably be directed toward conquest?” Donovan knew Dulles’s deep dislike for having his opinions questioned in any way. He hoped it might agitate him sufficiently to get to the point.

  “That’s the kind of alarmist poppycock the Democrats will use to retain the White House. It’s why they must be stopped and why we need men like you to help see to it.”

  “Yes, I’d welcome your advice.” Dewey extended his hand. “Too bad there’s not a photographer to get a shot of this,” Dewey said when Donovan shook it.

  Dulles stood, a signal the lunch was over. He put his palms on his lower back. “Are you all right, sir?” the attendant asked from behind the chair.

  “A cross to bear. We’re all given them.” He spoke directly to Donovan, as though he’d asked the question. “The country cries out for men willing to take up their crosses. I hope we can count on you, Bill.” Dulles’s shoes shuffled across the carpet in a short, slow Via Dolorosa.

  “I’m looking forward to the campaign,” Dewey said.

  “Then work on our friend here, Tom,” Dulles said as he left the room. “You’re the master of swaying the wavering juror.” He raised his hand in farewell, or benediction. Take up your cross and follow me.

  Donovan watched Dulles’s stooped figure move slowly down the hallway. When he’d turned down the ambassadorship offered by president-elect Hoover as a sop for not being named attorney general, he was told that Dulles had described his behavior as “childish petulance.” Donovan’s informant said that Dulles had declared, “The interests of our country must always come before pride or profit or any personal consideration.”

  Here, of course, Donovan came to realize, was Foster’s genius. He did his business atop Mount Sinai, untainted by base desires, successfully erasing in his own mind any difference between his best interests and those not only of the nation and the world but also of the Godhead. He spoke from the heights, seemingly apart from the travails and concerns of those enmeshed in the fleshpots of Egypt. The connections of his firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, extended past Wall Street to the entire international business community. The firm had overseen the investment of $10 billion in foreign securities that had been battered by almost ten years of Depression and defaults, and it fell on Foster Dulles’s shoulders to act as a human flying buttress, doing his best to prop up the cracked and weakened structure of global finance. So many burdens at one time: ensuring that the beleaguered republican government of Spain couldn’t raid that nation’s banks and sell the assets abroad to finance its war against the surging forces of General Franco; protecting General Aniline & Film Corporation, the largest North American subsidiary of I.G. Farben, the German chemical cartel, so that if the unthinkable happened, if America was dragged into war, its operations would be safe from confiscation; running the board of the International Nickel Company, Inco, in a reasoned, calm way that didn’t take the bait of the scaremongers who railed against its extensive contracts with the German arms industry. Business was business, yet with Foster Dulles the motive was never for personal profit or gain, though such rewards might result. Dulles’s motives were higher, purer—world order, peace, the inexorable unfolding of God’s designs as carried out by His predestined designees.

  On the way down in the elevator, Dewey told Donovan that while he was sure he could win the gubernatorial nomination at the Republican state convention in September, in Saratoga, it would be hard to defeat Lehman in November. “In a close election, the Democrats are still in control of the political machines. In places like Albany and the Bronx, the bosses will steal whatever votes they need to win.”

  “If you make it close enough, it’ll be the same as a victory, at least on the national level.” Donovan stopped short of making the commitment that Dewey and Dulles both sought. He’d become an observer of politics rather than a player. Disappointment was part of it, but there was something else as well.

  At the last meeting he’d ever had with Herbert Hoover, the president-elect squeezed his arm, an imitation hug accompanied by a frozen smile. “Bill,” he said, “you know from your football days that not everyone who tries out for the team gets to play.” The round, blank face above the stiff collar had the appearance of a boiled egg in its cup. Try as he did, Hoover couldn’t forge the unspoken bond of human empathy that gave the impression he knew what others felt and felt it himself. The ability to forge that bond—or at least to give the appearance of doing so—was a gift, like grace, randomly bestowed. Men like Dulle
s rejected it. Others, like Dewey, craved it but were passed over.

  Despite the close ties he could make with individuals, even with groups as large as the regiment he’d taken to France, Donovan knew it was a skill that failed him in the open arena of politics. He knew it for certain at the end of his campaign for governor, when it was clear not only that Lehman would swamp him but that then-Governor Franklin Roosevelt would evict Hoover from the White House. In the last week before the ’32 election, Roosevelt serendipitously appeared in the lobby of the Ten Eyck Hotel in Albany. He leaned on his son’s arm waiting for his official limousine, a cane in the other hand. Seeing the Republican candidate for governor coming toward him, Roosevelt beamed a broad smile and, unsatisfied with a handshake, gracefully hung the cane on his son’s wrist and put his hand on Donovan’s shoulder.

  “Now, Jim,” Roosevelt said to his son, “I want you to shake hands with one of nature’s rarest creatures, Bill Donovan, an Irish Catholic Republican.” Roosevelt gleefully observed his son’s discomfort at this chance encounter with the opponent of his father’s handpicked successor. Throwing his head back, Roosevelt laughed loudly. “It’s okay, Jim, back in our school days, before his apostasy from the Democratic Party, Bill and I forged a lasting friendship based on our mutual love of football.”

  It was an utter fabrication. Roosevelt had been an undergraduate at Harvard and a pampered student at Columbia Law School, treated with deference by professors in awe of his name and social standing. He’d never appeared anywhere near a football field. He and Donovan were never more than passing acquaintances. But Roosevelt told the story with such good-natured certainty that Donovan found himself nodding in agreement and joining in the laughter, unbothered by the lie or the patrician accent that, in another man’s voice, might have had an edge of condescension.