The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  Dunne was through the fence when a hand took hold of his shoulders with the force of an iceman’s forceps, twirled him around, and tossed him against the wall of a darkened shack, his right arm twisted upward into the hollow between his shoulder blades. He tried to turn and look behind, but his arm was jerked higher. He yelped with pain. “Keep your trap shut,” a voice whispered in his ear. The sugary, chemical smell of cheap wine blew into his face. Another pair of hands patted him down from armpits to ankles and lifted his wallet from his back pocket. Suddenly, his arm was let go and a flashlight shone directly into his face.

  “This is private property, no trespassers allowed.”

  “I’m looking up a friend.” Dunne could make out two forms behind the light.

  “Who’d that be?”

  “Toby Butts.”

  “Toby Butts ain’t no friend of yours.” The flashlight turned upright, its beam giving Toby Butts’s lumpy, boiled-potato face a weird glow. “Figured you’d show here sooner instead of later. Ol’ Toby knows the way cops think. Rats with cheese. Once they get a smell, can’t stay away.”

  “Already told you, Toby. I’m not a cop.”

  “Then you was or maybe is plannin’ to be. Save your breath denyin’ it ’cause ol’ Toby ain’t gonna be convinced otherwise.”

  “Forty bucks in his wallet,” said a voice from behind Toby.

  “Here, gimme that.” Toby put the flashlight beneath his arm, held the wallet in front of him and removed four five-dollar bills. “A fine of twenty bucks for trespassin’ and wastin’ my precious time.” He handed Dunne back his wallet. “Now get lost before Jimmy here applies the battin’ style got him three seasons with the Cleveland Indians.”

  “Four seasons, Toby. Four.” Vaguely illuminated by the nearby beam of Toby’s flashlight, Jimmy crouched in a hitting stance and swung a nail-studded bat. “My best season, I hit .289.”

  Dunne took the remaining twenty out of the wallet and held it out. “Tell me what you know about Pat Lynch and you can have this too.”

  Butts chuckled. “Could have it anyways, without tellin’ you nothin’, if I wanted.”

  “I’m trying to help somebody been framed, probably with the help of some cops, so if you’re really interested in sticking it to ’em, tell me what you know.”

  The beam left Jimmy and encircled a small patch of ground strewn with bottle caps and cigarette butts. “Hell, you was a cop, you’d never come alone. Cops are like nuns. Always travel in pairs.” Butts turned off the flashlight. “All right, follow me.”

  Butts led Dunne into the camp, with Jimmy in the rear. At the end of a ramshackle lane of tarpapered shacks was a campfire, bean cans suspended above it from an iron spit. The men sitting around looked up but didn’t say anything. Toby stopped in front of a shack. He pulled back the blanket that served as a door. “Go on in,” he said.

  Dunne choked back the urge to gag at the warm, repellent scent of grease, sweat, cheap wine processed into piss. Butts lit a kerosene lamp and sat on a small stool. He pulled up a stool for Dunne. Jimmy sat on the floor.

  “Now let’s see Handy Andy’s happy face,” Butts said.

  Dunne handed him the twenty. Butts kissed General Jackson’s engraving. “This don’t change what I said. Pat Lynch left here without a word where he was headed.”

  “Say why?”

  Butts picked at his scalp with a cracked, blackened fingernail. “He didn’t have to. We all seen him get pinched on his way up to Holy Cross for a bowl of soup. Two squad cars. Woulda’ thought they was liftin’ Charlie Luciano instead poor ol’ Pat. Anyways, he didn’t come back till the next day, and it was obvious what the bulls done to him.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “He was missin’ a few more teeth.”

  “You wouldn’t have a cigarette?” Butts asked.

  Dunne found an unopened pack in his pocket that he’d forgotten was there. He tossed it to Butts. “Say why they’d brought him in?”

  “Nope.” Butts opened the pack, put a cigarette in his mouth, leaned over the lamp and lit it. “He didn’t say, we didn’t ask.” Butts tossed the pack to his companion. “That’s the way it works around here. Right, Jimmy?”

  “Right, Toby.” Jimmy lit his cigarette in the lamp, same as Butts.

  “We don’t stick our snouts in each other’s doin’s. Pat got knocked around by the cops. One time or another, happened to every man here. Then he came back, packed up and left without a word. We all done that, too. Could be I’ll run into him some day maybe up north or out west. It’s a big country. Most likely, I won’t.”

  “Did he mention a sister?”

  “Never mentioned nobody.”

  “Ever go off to visit somebody?”

  “Funny you say that ’cause that was somethin’ special about Pat.” Jimmy squatted next to Butts, beside the lamp. Dunne got his first full view of him. Except for a raw diagonal scar that crossed his nose and split his eyebrow, he had the square, handsome, athletic face seen in ads for cereal or cigarettes. “When he was flat broke and shakin’ so bad you’d think he was about to come apart, he’d disappear for a spell. Day or so later, when he comes back, he’s on his feet, and here’s the part what’s special, he spread what he got, stood us all to drinks, smokes, whatever.”

  “Pat was an old-school hobo, from the days when ’boes was ’boes,” Butts said. “Mighta’ been down on his luck but he weren’t no bum runnin’ Sterno through a sock to squeeze out the grain alcohol or, worse, hoardin’ the good stuff for his own use. No, with Pat it was share and share alike, which ain’t the way with the trash inhabits this place. Nowadays, it’s every man for hisself.”

  “Say where he got it?”

  “Look, pal, I already told you, he didn’t say nothin’.” Butts threw his cigarette on the dirt floor and stomped on it with his lace-less shoe. He pulled a dented metal flask from his pocket, twisted off the cap, and took a long swig. He handed it to Jimmy.

  “What’d he take with him?”

  “For somebody who ain’t a cop, you got a habit of sounding like one.” Butts took the flask back and had another long swig. He wiped the dribble off his chin with his sleeve. “Pat took what he had. What we all have. A gunnysack filled with clothes, a blanket, maybe an extra pair of shoes.”

  “Burned stuff, too,” Jimmy said. “Stuff he didn’t take, which was kinda’ peculiar. Insisted on lightin’ a fire right in the middle of this warm day and throwin’ paper on it. Poked ’em with a stick till they was nothin’ but ash.”

  “Any idea what they were?”

  “Never seen ’em before till he took ’em out to be burned.”

  “Nothin’ left to show.” Butts had another significant swallow from the flask.

  “Well, there’s one thing.” Jimmy went over to a corner of the shack and searched beneath a wooden crate. He came back with a square, cream-colored folder that he handed to Dunne.

  Butts had the flask to his mouth again. “Hey, Toby,” Jimmy piped. “Share and share alike, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Toby put the cap on the flask and gave it to Jimmy.

  Dunne opened the folder and held it beneath the lamp. Inside was a picture of a man in a sailor’s hat banging a plump, large-breasted woman. Underneath were more pictures of the same couple copulating in various poses.

  “This belong to Pat?” Dunne asked.

  “The pictures is Toby’s. Was the folder that was Pat’s.” Jimmy had a prolonged gulp from the flask.

  Butts grabbed the pictures from the folder with such force that he almost fell off his stool. “How’d they get there?”

  “Put ’em there for safekeeping,” Jimmy said. “I found the folder in Pat’s place after he went, when we was scourin’ for anythin’ useful he mighta’ left. Was stuck between a bench and the wall. Weren’t nothin’ in it. Whatever was musta got burned with the other stuff.”

  On the file tab that protruded from the folder’s edge was a neatly typed label: SEKTIONEN 1-30.6.37/1-10. “Any ide
a what this means?” Dunne said.

  “Got me,” Jimmy said.

  “Mind if I take this with me?”

  Butts wobbled slightly as he stood. “Lookin’ is free, takin’ ain’t.”

  “How much you want? I’ll come back tomorrow with what you ask.”

  “Tomorrow?” Butts roared with laughter. “Hear that, Jimmy? Tomorrow!”

  Jimmy smiled broadly. “Yeah, Toby, I heard.”

  “Tell you what, Mr. I-Ain’t-No-Cop. We’ll keep that file, and how about throwin’ in them shoes and that jacket. You know, as collateral.”

  Jimmy moved in front of the blanket that served as a door. He leaned lightly on the nail-studded bat. Somewhere nearby a freighter or passenger liner gave a blast of its horn, a thunderous jolt that seemed to make the tarpapered walls flinch. Dunne put his hands to his ears. Butts said something but a second blast drowned him out. Butts moved closer. Dunne leaned back, lifted his leg and slammed his foot into Butts’s groin. He sprang across the room headfirst into Jimmy, who went sprawling into the dirt lane, taking the blanket with him.

  Dunne leaped over Jimmy, who lay stunned on the ground. The faces around the campfire barely looked up as he ran by. He scaled the sagging wire fence and bolted across Twelfth Avenue, falling once on the slippery cobblestones. He didn’t stop running until he reached Ninth. He leaned against a lamppost to catch his breath. He’d lost his hat. He ran his hand through his hair and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He turned to see if there was any sign of Butts or Jimmy. There wasn’t.

  “Where’s the fire?” The girl in the red dress was having another cigarette in the entrance of the dance hall.

  Dunne fanned himself with the folder. “Out for a stroll, that’s all.”

  “Come upstairs,” she said. “Give you all the exercise you want and you’ll never break a sweat. Guaranteed or your money back.”

  “Sorry, just spent my last dime.”

  “Tell you what, you’re good looking enough to get a free spin. Like what you feel, you can come back tomorrow and pay for it.”

  “Some other time.”

  “Yeah, sure.” She walked inside. Her skin faded to gray beneath the feeble hallway light. She swiveled on the stairs. “That’s what all the fairies say.”

  5

  Sometimes dreams are pure fantasies. More often, they are realities viewed through the lens of the subconscious. Occasionally, they are prophecies.

  —MANFRED STERN, Landscapes of the Imagination

  ABWEHR HEADQUARTERS, BERLIN

  OSTER WATCHED AS CANARIS read the copy of the memorandum. Over several days, Oster had worked with General Beck to get the words right. Beck’s instinct was to indirection and nuance. Oster kept stripping away the verbiage, sharpening what Beck left vague. By now, he knew the text practically by heart. History will indict these commanders of blood guilt if, in the light of their professional and political knowledge, they do not obey the dictates of their conscience. He guessed from a sudden arch of Canaris’s eyebrows that he had reached the gist of Beck’s appeal. The soldier’s duty to obey ceases when his knowledge, his conscience, and his sense of responsibility forbid him to carry out a certain order.

  Canaris removed his glasses. “Has he sent it to anyone?”

  “To General Brauchitsch.”

  “Brauschitsch concurred?”

  “He’s sympathetic.”

  “‘Sympathetic’? That’s a woman’s word, not a soldier’s.”

  “He said he’d share it with officers he felt he could trust.”

  “This is beginning to sound more like a sewing circle than a conspiracy. So far it seems to me that Beck stands alone. If he refuses to carry out his orders as chief of the General Staff, the Führer will find someone who will, and if Brauchitsch decides that, as commander of the army, he stands with Beck, he’ll be replaced too. That’s if he’s lucky and the Führer doesn’t smell a plot and sic Himmler and the SS on them.”

  “Beck is trying to build a consensus among the senior commanders to refuse to carry out an order for an attack on Czechoslovakia.”

  “A mutiny?”

  “A strike.”

  “Oster, be serious. The generals have stood by as the high command has been emasculated and now, suddenly, you think they’ll band together to defy the Führer? On what grounds?”

  “Because Hitler will not be deterred by rational argument. He is determined to plunge Germany into a war we can’t win.”

  “They’ve known his intent for almost a year.” Canaris excused himself and went into the bathroom. He poured a packet of headache powder in a glass, filled it with water, and drank the mixture. The froth left him with a white, Führer-like mustache. Looking in the mirror, he wiped it away. He sat on the toilet and massaged his forehead with his fingertips. The hangover he was suffering from was the result of too much wine, which followed an argument with Erika. Oster had made it worse. It was one thing to grumble and grouse in private about the regime. There was a lot of that, especially when it involved the arrogance and lavish excesses of high-ranking Nazis. But to propose in writing a military defection, a strike, an open refusal to carry out an order, was treason.

  Exiting the bathroom, Canaris hoped Oster would be gone, but he was still there, in the same chair. “Beck will not be cowed.”

  “That, if I remember correctly, is what you said about General von Blomberg.” Canaris opened a file on his desk and pretended to read. He didn’t say anything when Oster got up and left. He sensed Oster had been momentarily deflated by the reminder of the speed and ease with which the Führer had turned his would-be puppeteers into puppets. Tall, cultivated, sure of his abilities, Blomberg had exuded the army’s confidence that it held final say on Germany’s future. “Why quibble over political details when the appropriations for the armed forces outpace our ability to spend them?” he asked Beck. He raised no objection when the soldiers’ oath was altered from loyalty to “people and fatherland” to “the Führer and the people.” He took it upon himself to stop referring to “Herr Hitler” and address the Chancellor as “My Führer.”

  It wasn’t until the previous November, in 1937, when Blomberg returned from a conference summoned by the Führer at the Reichschancellery, that Canaris saw the first cracks in the War Minister’s façade of confidence. Blomberg attended along with the service chiefs and Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath. Two days later, he gathered his senior commanders and intelligence chiefs to report on the meeting with the Führer. Eyes fixed on the tabletop, Blomberg recounted the monologue with which the Führer had harangued the military chiefs and Neurath. The time had come for military action, the Führer declared. Within a few years, England and France would be rearmed and ready to fight. Austria and Czechoslovakia must be seized as soon as possible, before the Allies even knew what happened. The Polish question would be resolved soon afterwards. The Soviets were a tiger without teeth. There was no danger of a two-front war.

  “Obviously, gentlemen,” Blomberg said, “the Führer is the final arbiter of Germany’s diplomatic goals, and no one here would argue with him.” Behind Blomberg, stretched across the wall, was a large map of Europe. The room’s shadows made the vast pink-colored splotch of the Soviet Union appear almost purple. “But there are tactical questions that can’t be answered by constantly invoking the word destiny.”

  Beck marched to the center of the map and swept his hand eastward, over Czechoslovakia. “Germany is not in a position to run the risks involved in seizing Austria and Czechoslovakia. A further pursuit of this idea on the part of the army cannot be justified. Told of the Führer’s speech, Oster flew into one of his tirades, denouncing the “cowards and toadies” who would drag Germany to ruin out of fear of spoiling their own careers. Canaris busied himself with paperwork, looking up only once to find Oster staring at him with a look that reminded him of Heydrich’s inquisitive expression.

  What is it they are looking for?

  As it turned out, General Blomberg’s duty
to advise on military matters was soon ended. He fell in love with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Oster observed them dancing in the Kadaker Cabaret to the American song “O You Doll.” Buxom, long-legged, and blonde, she was an irresistible target for the general who won her affections and rushed her to the altar, unaware of her professional credentials as a former whore. The SS and Gestapo couldn’t hide their glee when he was forced to resign in disgrace. General von Fritsch, the next highest soldier, soon followed. Confronted with a trumped-up charge of homosexuality, cleverly framed by the SS, the general wavered between challenging Himmler to a duel and asking the army for its support. In the end, embarrassed and broken, he resigned.

  Blomberg and Fritsch out of the way, the military command in disarray, Hitler used the opportunity to step in and take direct and personal control of the armed forces. The ministry of defense was abolished and replaced by the high command of the armed forces. The hapless, talentless General Wihelm Keitel was made its chief.

  Sitting beside Canaris at an official rescreening of the newsreels of the Führer’s triumphal entry into Vienna, Oster pointed out Keitel in the car behind Hitler’s. Like the SS men and regular soldiers around him, like the crowds in Vienna and the millions throughout the Reich, Keitel beamed with satisfaction.

  Canaris leaned close and whispered, “I’m told the Führer regards Keitel as endowed with ‘the brains of a movie usher.’”

  “The Führer insults the Reich’s movie ushers,” Oster whispered back.

  The headache powder hadn’t helped. Oster’s wistful thinking in the face of the generals’ previous inertia only added to the lingering anger Canaris felt toward Erika. It had been simmering all week, since Sunday, when Erika talked him into accompanying her to church. On the way out, still groggy from having napped through much of the service, he was greeted by a woman who acted as though they’d met before. He thought perhaps he recognized her attractive, middle-aged face and exchanged a few pleasantries. Before she walked away, she slipped a pamphlet in his hand, which he presumed to be some pious religious tract until he threw it on his desk at home and saw the title: Concerning the Situation of the German Non-Aryans. It was a mass-produced version of the memorandum of the Confessing Church, an indictment of all those who participated in the persecution of the Jews, as well as those who condoned it or were silent. Penciled in the margin was a question: “Admiral, are you one of these?”