The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ Advice I’ve always followed, especially when it comes to souls.” Donovan pushed off from the desk and moved to the door, positioning himself to show Anderson out.

  Anderson slouched deeper in the seat. “Have you followed the Yezhovschina in the Soviet Union, the purges, confessions, executions? The latest estimates I’ve seen are that the number of executions is approaching a million, with another five million confined to labor camps.”

  “The Bolsheviks are barbarians,” Donovan said.

  “Quite the contrary. Barbarism is personal and inefficient. Stalin has created a highly oiled machine, the type only civilized men could create, men with the organizational skills required to carry out their plans efficiently.”

  “One man doesn’t make a system.”

  “That’s the point. In a henchman such as Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin has found a homicidal gnome who can read his master’s mind and anticipate his wishes without even being told. But it’s not the individual lackey who matters. Once the machine is in place, the parts are movable, thousands and thousands of apparatchiks who will perform their assigned roles as though working on an assembly line.”

  Donovan’s impatience had turned into annoyance. He gripped the doorknob. Anderson seemed to take the hint. He knocked the smoldering remnant from his pipe into the ashtray and stood. “I hope we can continue our conversation some other time,” he said. But instead of moving toward the door, he veered to the far wall and began to examine the bookshelves.

  “There’s nothing of interest there, only law books,” Donovan said.

  Anderson took a book from the shelf and paged through it idly. “I’ve sent you two books, Colonel. They should arrive soon. A present for your library. Something besides legal tomes to read in your spare time.”

  “Time is the one thing I can’t spare.”

  “And I’ve already taken too much of it.” Anderson snapped the book shut and returned it to the shelf. “The Germans have put in place even more efficient machinery than the Russians,” he said. “They have both the motive and the method.”

  “You spoke earlier about their military prowess, if you remember.”

  “I’m not speaking exclusively of the armed forces. Their ambitions go beyond the battlefield to a wider struggle against Lebensunwertes Lebens, ‘life unworthy of life,’ a radical cleansing of Germany, Europe, wherever the Reich can extend its influence.”

  Donovan’s secretary pushed the door open and was slightly startled to find him directly in front of her. “Colonel, you’re next appointment has been waiting.” She smiled at Anderson, apparently believing the grin on his face was for her.

  “You see,” Anderson said, “the combination of eugenic theory, industrial efficiency, and political tyranny endows Germany with a unique advantage when it comes to murder on a mass scale.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your discussion.” Minus her smile, she retreated into the outer office and pulled the door shut behind her.

  Donovan immediately opened it again. “Even the bitterest critics of Hitler and his regime haven’t leveled such a charge.”

  “I’m merely raising certain possibilities. Hear me out. Step A, let’s say, is the theoretical identification of ‘unworthy types’; both the categories of ‘degenerate individuals’—the feebleminded, retarded, insane, epileptics, cripples—and of ‘degenerate races,’ beginning of course with the Jews.”

  “No civilized person endorses the current treatment of the Jews in Germany.”

  “Yes, but few seem terribly interested in doing much to stop it. Step B is the legal isolation of these people, stripping them of their legal rights and exposing them to ‘treatments’ not applied to the general populace. This is a crucial step because it indicates the willingness of the citizenry to endorse, or at least not oppose, the application of medical theories on entire categories of people who are, by definition, lacking in human status. Step C entails following this course of treatment until the ‘diseased elements’ are eliminated. A trickier proposition.”

  “Eugenics is a medical question. My business is the law, and I’m afraid I can’t avoid attending to it any longer. We’ll continue these discussions some other time.” Donovan stepped into the outer office.

  “Quite right. I’ve been shamefully self-indulgent in taking up so much time.” As Anderson walked past, he muttered something that Donovan had trouble hearing. Anderson stopped and repeated it. “How,” he asked, “would you recognize a murderer?”

  Standing behind Anderson, Donovan’s secretary pointed her finger at her head and made wide circular motions.

  “Murderers here in New York are the concern of the district attorney,” Donovan said in a soft, reassuring voice. “Our present one, Mr. Dewey, has developed quite a reputation for not only identifying them, but bringing them to justice.”

  “What if the murderer doesn’t look like one of the villainous thugs Mr. Dewey and his fellow racket busters are continually bringing to justice?” Anderson asked. “What if he belongs to a group of professional men, reasonable, serious, intelligent? And what if he’s motivated to murder not by ordinary passions, greed, revenge, lust, but by cold, impersonal theories? Moreover, suppose he doesn’t think of himself as a murderer but as a scientist eliminating a threat to the future of the racially fit and wellborn. What would it take to see such a person for what he is?”

  “An interesting theory. You should write about it.”

  “There’s plenty written already. You can read for yourself in the books I’ve sent. Superstition dressed up as science and made a basis for murder. Better yet, I’ve some friends I’d like you to meet. They’ve recently arrived here from Germany. If I could bring them here to talk with you, I believe . . .”

  “The Colonel’s calendar is jam-packed for the immediate future,” Donovan’s secretary interrupted. It was obvious that if she still saw in Anderson a resemblance to a British actor, it was Boris Karloff, not Leslie Howard.

  “There are decent men within Germany, as there are here,” Anderson said. “But unless they act together to stop it, the world will be dragged into the abyss.”

  “I’ll have to check and see when I have some time available.”

  “I’m no longer at my previous location. I’m officially retired now and been tossed out of my office altogether. Soon as I’m resettled, I’ll call and let you know. Thanks for your time. Sorry to have imposed on your hospitality.”

  His secretary poked her head into the corridor outside her office, making sure their guest was truly gone. “What rock did he crawl from under?”

  “The worst wounds can be to a man’s mind. Some never heal.” She held the books Anderson had sent. “He’s not a Nazi, is he?”

  “Quite the opposite.”

  “I took a peek at these books. They belong in the garbage.”

  “I think I owe it to my guest to give them a look.”

  Donovan waited until after lunch to leaf through the smaller of the books Anderson had sent, the one he’d previously ignored, an English version of The Nazi Primer: Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth. He flipped to a section titled “Heredity and Race Fostering,” where Anderson had placed a bookmark. Several paragraphs were underlined. He glanced at one: “The more serious of the hereditary diseases, especially the mental diseases, make the carriers completely unworthy of living. Those so afflicted have neither the capacity to reason nor any feeling of responsibility. They contribute nothing. Yet these worthless ones are allowed to multiply without restraint and spread their sickness everywhere.” There was a special section devoted to the Jews, entitled “Not Different in Quality but Kind? Our Greatest Menace.”

  Donovan’s secretary brought him the file for his next appointment. He put the two books together and passed them to her.

  “Shall I put them on the shelves or file them away?”

  “File them.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever you wish.”<
br />
  “How about under A for Auf Wiedersehen?” She dropped them in the wastebasket beside the desk.

  Donovan made no protest, nor did he retrieve the books. Though he didn’t doubt Anderson’s sincerity, he hadn’t forgot the shameless exaggerations—often as effective as they were outrageous—with which the British had painted Germany during the last war, portraying the conflict as a struggle between light and dark, the defenders of civilization versus a horde of evil “huns.”

  In the spring of 1916, he’s in London as a neutral civilian on a humanitarian mission for the Rockefeller Foundation. An army officer with a thick Scottish accent strikes up a conversation in the lobby of their hotel. After some friendly banter, the Scot invites him to sit with him at dinner. By the time dessert arrives, he’s completed an impassioned catalogue of the depredations visited by the Germans on Belgium and on “us Catholics.”

  “All I ask,” he says, “is that as ye travel across the Belgian-German border put down a notation for every infantry unit and artillery piece. It’ll be a small but significant contribution to removing the heel of the Hun from the neck of the brave Belgians.”

  At the end of the war, in 1918, during an Anglo-American military reception in Paris, a circle of British and U.S. officers stands around bantering and laughing. Donovan has the feeling that he’s met one of the British officers before but can’t place where.

  “Maybe this will help,” the officer says. He cocks his head to the side, closes one eye and says in a chanting burr, “’Tis guid to be merry and wise. ’Tis guid to be honest and true. ’Tis guid to support Caledonia’s course. And bide by the buff and the blue! Do ye no remember me, laddie?” The British officer resumes his normal English tone. “You were easier to seduce than I imagined. I was hopeful a Yank would be softened by the sweet words of a Scotsman, and an Irish Yank by that Jacobite twaddle about ‘us Catholics.’ And it worked, didn’t it! Did as you were asked, my fine bonnie lad!” The officers throw back their heads and have a good laugh.

  Donovan doesn’t join in.

  THE UPPER EAST SIDE, NEW YORK

  The morning after his encounter with Brannigan, Dunne had come to with a fuzzy recollection of crawling out of the bathroom and lifting himself into bed. He attempted to stand but his head ached so badly he fell back on the pillow and stopped trying. He slept a long time. Finally able to get up, he showered, changed, and forced himself across the street to Doctor Finkelstein’s office.

  The old man gently poked at Dunne’s head with his fingers. “What the hell happened to you?”

  In the mirror above the Doctor’s sink, a raccoonlike face, puffy with two black eyes, stared back at Dunne. “The moon fell on me.”

  “Must have been a full one.” The Doctor sutured a line of black stitches into Dunne’s head. “Probably got a concussion,” he said. He gave Dunne a prescription and told him to stay in bed with his eyes closed.

  Back home, Dunne took the phone off the hook and crawled under the covers. He woke up sweating the next morning. It was going to be a scorcher. He phoned the Medical Examiner’s and asked to speak with Doc Cropsey. “Hang on,” a voice said. A moment later, the voice came back on. “He wants to know who’s calling.”

  “His mother.”

  There was another pause. “He says he doesn’t have a mother.”

  “He does now.”

  Doc Cropsey came on the line, gruff and annoyed, but amused when he discovered it was Dunne taking him up on the offer to stay at his place in Southold.

  Dunne mopped up the blood and threw out the bloody towel, sheets, and pillowcases. He looked through his suit for the envelope Elba had given him. Brannigan had performed his magic. Abracadabra: it had disappeared. He took the coffee can out of the refrigerator and removed the bulk of the money he’d stashed there. He threw some clothes in a canvas grip and was about to leave for Penn Station when the phone rang.

  “May I please speak to Mr. Fintan Dunne.” A woman’s voice.

  He thought he recognized the honeydew tone. “Depends who this is.”

  “It’s Doctor Sparks’s office, Mr. Dunne. Please hold a moment.”

  Sparks came on. “You’re a hard man to reach, Mr. Dunne.”

  “Now I’m not.”

  Sparks paused. “This is difficult for me, but I need to see you on a matter I’m not comfortable discussing on the phone. Could you come to my office?”

  “Who said I make house calls?”

  “Please, Mr. Dunne. I’ll reimburse any expenses you might incur.”

  “Cab fare?”

  “Certainly. This won’t take long. I promise.”

  Sparks’s secretary was stouter and older than the slither-hither quality of her voice suggested. Her immaculate white dress was crisp and freshly pressed. The knot at the back of her head held her hair in tight, stringent order. She directed Dunne through a waiting room across a thick, richly textured Persian rug into Dr. Sparks’s office.

  Sparks didn’t get up. He indicated the chair next to the desk. “Please, Mr. Dunne, have a seat.” He wore a yellow linen jacket and a green silk ascot, the same color as his pants. If he owned one of those white coats beloved of meat cutters and medical men, it was nowhere in sight. “You look as though you’ve had a rather bad accident.”

  “Jack fell down and broke his crown.”

  “Head injuries should never be made light of. It’s important to rest.”

  “I’m on furlough soon as I leave here.”

  “I like your style, Mr. Dunne. Very direct.”

  “You’re in a distinct minority.”

  “Today’s minority is tomorrow’s majority. Isn’t that what history teaches?”

  “The Republicans hope so.”

  “Let me get to the point. I want to hire your services.”

  “I’m booked.”

  “Last time we talked, Mr. Dunne, you seemed eager for work. ‘Whatever it takes to stay afloat’ was, I believe, the phrase you used.”

  “My ship came in.”

  “At the risk of sounding unduly skeptical, I can’t imagine a cut-and-dried case like the Lynch murder could have occupied much of your time.”

  “Things aren’t always as cut-and-dried as they first appear.”

  “The police thought they were, and the judge and jury, and the Court of Appeals.”

  “Grillo won’t be the first innocent man to go to the electric chair.”

  “There’s another thing I like about you, Mr. Dunne, your persistence. In difficult situations, when it appears there’s little chance of success, the instinct of the intellectual is to give up. But men like you pursue what they want, no matter the odds or opposing forces, and more often than not it’s their will that triumphs.”

  “I work on a per diem. Don’t persist, don’t get paid.”

  “If you persist on my behalf, you’ll be paid promptly and well.” Sparks opened a leather-bound register and lifted a pen from the marble stand on his desk. He poised the pen above a page of corn-colored bank checks. “What do you require as a retainer?”

  “What makes you think you need a private detective? Most times what people need is a lawyer, not a snoop.”

  “I’m being blackmailed.”

  “Then you need the cops.”

  “I can’t risk the publicity. For a physician, reputation is everything. I need someone trustworthy and discreet who can deliver my message in person; someone whose whole demeanor conveys how serious I am and how final my answer.”

  “If you need a goon, your chauffeur, Bill What’s-his-name, seems a natural.”

  “Bill Huber? Reliable in his own way, but he lacks discretion.”

  “That’s not all he lacks.”

  “This has been a difficult time for me: a woman who worked for me is savagely murdered. Along with my name, one of those vile newspapers even published my picture. As a result, I’m approached by blackmailers who threaten to expose an embarrassing incident from my youth. My sense of security has been badly shaken, so
if Bill on occasion acts in an overprotective way, I apologize. I feel required to have someone like him around. Unfortunately, I can’t trust him with an assignment like this. He has no capacity for subtlety.”

  Sparks scratched the pen across the open page of checks. He pressed a blotter on it that was encased in the same leather as the register and detached the check along its perforated edges. “I suppose a retainer of a thousand dollars might suffice.” He laid the check directly in front of Dunne.

  Pay to the Order of Fintan Dunne. Drawn on the Corn Exchange Bank, its three zeroes were aligned in happy sequence, like the cherries on a slot. Sparks’s florid but legible handwriting spilled across the face of the check and helped give it the same impressive feel as the framed diplomas and certificates on the walls, a document to be preserved and enshrined instead of cashed. We hold these truths.

  “I didn’t know a doctor’s hand could be so clear.”

  “I despise sloppiness in all its forms.”

  “You might not like my style as much as you think.”

  Sparks pushed the check closer to Dunne. “Aren’t you interested in why I’m being blackmailed?”

  “If it involves a criminal matter, I’d prefer not to know. That way, there’s no chance the cops can get it out of me.”

  “It’s personal, not criminal, but could be used to hurt my practice. I made a payment with the understanding that would be the end of it and the blackmailers would go away. Now they’re back and want more.”

  “That’s the way the game is played.”

  “I’m willing to make one more payment but no more after that. I need to locate where these bloodsuckers are hiding and have my decision delivered in a calm and convincing manner.”

  “Sorry, I got a train to catch.” Those zeroes: no small-time tip, two-bit exchange, the New York version of hello. But real money.

  “What about when you return?”

  “I don’t play with blackmailers. Either you go to the cops or they’ll keep coming back. It’s that simple.” Dunne slid the check toward Sparks. He remembered his father’s refrain, while he was still Big Mike, before he shriveled into a wizened, exhausted wreck: Learn the difference between being paid and being owned. A slave is bought. So is a scab. A taint no bath or shower could remove. On the way out, the secretary handed him an envelope. “This is for today’s expenses,” she said. “I trust we’ll see you again soon.”