The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  —IAN ANDERSON,

  “New York, Home to the Next World’s Fair,”

  World Traveler Magazine

  UPPER EAST SIDE, NEW YORK

  DUNNE LAY LOW before he made a sortie to Cassidy’s. There was an old message waiting from Roberta: the Feds had let her go. He knew they had. There’d been nothing in the papers. Besides, the fish they wanted was Jerroff. Roberta was an incidental catch that could be thrown back at only a small loss or put on ice for future use. He dropped one of Hubert’s slugs to call her back. No answer. He waited until Red Doyle and his cadre of transit workers were through with their meeting, then went back and spent the night at Cassidy’s. Time was running out for Wilfredo. The outcome was guaranteed by New York State. Next morning, after going home to shower and change, he headed to Dr. Sparks’s office. He stayed across the street until the car with Bill Huber at the wheel picked up Sparks for his tennis match. There was a different doorman on duty, older and stouter, a Santa Claus build, topped by a round, florid, clean-shaven face.

  Dunne went over to him as soon as Sparks’s car was out of sight. “Excuse me,” he said, “has Dr. Sparks left yet?”

  “Just miss him.”

  “His office still open?”

  “Closed too.” The doorman’s manner matched his jovial, open face. He lacked the guard-dog ardor of the area’s native-born knob-pushers; also, his hand wasn’t out.

  Dunne thought he detected an accent. German, maybe. “Can I leave a message?”

  “For sure.”

  “It’s for his chauffeur, Bill Huber.”

  “You’re friend of Huber?” The doorman scrutinized Dunne, displaying the suspicion he hadn’t exhibited earlier.

  “Didn’t know he had any friends?”

  “Ja! That the truth.”

  “I’m with the Health Department. I’ve been sent to check why Mr. Huber has stopped his syphilis treatments.”

  “Syphilis! Didn’t I know that lug be the one to spread it!”

  “You must know him pretty well.”

  “Don’t know him hardly at all. I’m Bohemian, mister, a Czech. The less I have to do with Huber and them Nazi bastards, the happier I am!”

  A maid exited the building carrying a tiny white poodle that looked as if it had been coifed and primped at the beauty salon in the Savoy Plaza. “Better watch the language, Jan. Get yourself fired if you’re not careful.” She put the dog on the ground.

  Jan glared at her as she moved down the block with the dog in tow. “Busybodies. Maids is all busybodies, every one the same.”

  “He tell you he was a Nazi?”

  “Did who tell me?”

  “Huber.”

  “He don’t tell me nothin’. I see for myself.” Jan turned his attention back to Dunne. “When Hitler started trouble over Sudetenland, the Bund march to Bohemian National Hall, break windows, shout and yell. The people inside, at a dance, are made to feel terror what might come next. Next night we Bohemians march on Yorkville Casino, and the Bund bastards are there in their Sturmabteilung uniforms waitin’ for us. Before fight begin, the police show up and put themselves between us. And who I see with those Nazi bastards? Huber!”

  “What time you expect Huber to bring the Doctor back?”

  “No time soon. After the tennis, Huber usually drops Doctor at asylum and somebody drives him back later. But I tell you, mister, you want to see Huber tonight, try the Yorkville Casino. A big Bund rally is there this evening. We Czechs will be outside. Go up to that Huber in front of all them Nazi bastards and remind him about his syphilis! Ha!”

  “See what I can do. Tell me, if I also had a message for Doctor Sparks, what asylum could I find him at?”

  “His sanatorium, the one he runs. You tell him about Huber’s syphilis, no?”

  “I guess it wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Stay one minute.” Jan went into the vestibule and came back with a small package. He put on his glasses. “Look here.” He pointed at the return label. “This is the place you find him.” He read the address aloud: “Hermes Sanatorium, East Tremont Avenue, Bronx, New York.”

  “A hospital?”

  “A home the Doctor runs, an asylum. He’s quiet about it. He don’t want attention.”

  “There a street number?”

  “You know the Bronx?”

  “Enough.”

  “It’s east of Westchester Square, some blocks east. I asked him about it once. He say only it’s for them defective or sick in the head.”

  Dunne tried to slip a bill into Jan’s hand, but he pushed it away. “Get rid of that Huber and be me who pay you! Doctor Sparks is a German too, but a generous one. Twenty-five dollar he tip every Christmas! The reason he have a swine like Huber around, I never understand!”

  “No accounting for taste.”

  “But such rotten taste in such a fine gentleman!”

  A handful of people were on the subway platform. Dunne bought the papers at the newsstand. He put a penny in a gum machine bolted to an iron pillar. The machine swallowed the penny but didn’t dispense any gum. He gave it several hard bangs with the heel of his hand, but still no gum. He got on the first train that pulled in and jumped off as the doors closed. No one else did. It didn’t seem he was being tailed.

  The next train was crowded. After several stops he got a seat, buried himself in the newspapers, and didn’t look up again until 138th Street, in the Bronx. Directly across the car was a woman in a cheap housedress and a small red hat. She had a kid on either side. The smaller one, who looked about six or seven, rested his head in her lap. The other, a gangly, skinny teenager, stared at his shoes. Both boys wore yarmulkes. The woman had a tired face, not old, not homely, just tired.

  She caught Dunne looking at them. He went back to the papers, skimming pages he’d already read. The train idled in the station. The lights dimmed. There were places in the city where the Depression mood was lifting. A World’s Fair in Flushing, new roads and housing being built, a revived sense of hope, the promise of change, any change. But not in the subway. Here, the accumulated pain and despair of the past decade had been sucked down with the exhaust from the streets. Broken dreams and discarded ambitions mingled with the debris of candy wrappers, apple cores, and half-chewed pretzels rotting in the filthy, stagnant water in the troughs between the tracks. The lights went out completely, then came on again.

  The woman across the way rested the back of her head against the green metal wall of the car. She appeared to Dunne to be asleep. Sweet dreams, lady: a momentary respite from a lifetime of pennies put away with no effect, gobbled up by the machinery of history, by high-sounding theories that couldn’t erase the ordinary miseries of lost jobs, savings, aspirations, an unemployed husband who sat around the house for years until one day he put on his hat and coat, went out the door, and never came back. Sleep was the cheapest escape of all, as long as your dreams took you to a better place. The train left the tunnel at Whitlock Avenue and rattled on elevated tracks high across the Bronx River. The woman woke and gently nudged the sleeping child on her lap. She and the two boys got off at Elder Avenue.

  The train was almost empty when it pulled into the Hugh Grant Circle station. It idled once more. Dunne got up and stretched. The Catholic Protectory, which used to be clearly visible from the station’s height, was gone. So, too, were the thick forest that bordered it on the east and the pond where the Protectory boys swam. A fleet of bulldozers was busy leveling the ground. Great clouds of dust swirled around them. New streets were being carved out. A parade of tall redbrick apartment buildings marched off into the distance.

  To the right, two bulldozers were flattening the hill above where Brother Flavian’s garden had been. They went back and forth, erasing the spot where he fell asleep each day after lunch. Chair turned south, toward the sun, he’d sit slack and still, except for the one time he rose from his chair, shielding his eyes, shouting something in French that the boys didn’t understand. He gathered his cassock in his hand and ran i
n the direction of Walker Avenue and the Morris Park Racecourse. They dropped their hoes and rakes and called after him, but he kept running until he reached the crest of the hill. He pointed at the sky and shouted, Voila! Voila! Then they saw it too, a speck that rapidly grew larger as it approached. It circled above, drew near, and came so close they could make out the bushy mustache, goggles, and high-laced boots of the man at the controls. Round and round he went. The uproar of the engine that drove the propellers on his double-winged aeroplane drowned their cries and cheers.

  That night, in their dreams, instead of sex with naked, willing girls, there was the sensation of hovering above the earth, soaring above the clouds and leaving the Protectory forever. Day after day, they searched the sky for that aeroplane. Vinnie Coll swore he’d find where it was kept, steal it, fly out west, and start a gang. “Swoop in and out in my aeroplane,” he bragged. “Them hicks will never know what hit ’em.”

  Not long after, the New York Aeronautic Society rented the abandoned racecourse at Morris Park for the city’s first “air show.” More than 20,000 people attended. Biplanes and triplanes filled the sky above the Protectory. The smell of gasoline was everywhere. A plane was forced to make an emergency landing and ran over Brother Flavian’s prized roses. “No good will come of such machines,” he fumed. “They are the devil’s invention!” By the time the air show was over, they barely looked up when an aeroplane passed over. Didn’t take much notice again until France and the Argonne offensive. The German planes spit bullets everywhere. American and British planes counterattacked, and the sky was smudged with the black smoke of wounded and dying aircraft. The devil’s work. In the trenches below, there were no more dreams of flying but of sex with naked, willing French girls between clean, dry sheets.

  Dunne descended from the El at Westchester Square. He thought there might be a cab waiting but there wasn’t. Behind the fountain in the drugstore on the corner, a fat, pockmarked teenager in a paper service hat didn’t look up from his comic book when Dunne asked about a cab.

  “Won’t be none till after five, when people come home from work.”

  “What about the trolley?”

  “Comes every forty minutes, except when it don’t.” He wet his index finger and turned the page.

  “When was the last one by?”

  “’Bout two hours ago.”

  Dunne ordered a Coke. “Ever hear of the Hermes Sanatorium?”

  “Yup.” The kid kept reading as he jerked the soda.

  “Is it within walking distance?”

  “Depends on who’s walkin’.” The kid held up his comic book. Underneath the title, Visitors from Outer Space, was a creature with a half dozen eyes and a matching number of legs. “Two legs gets you there in about twenty minutes. Six legs, you’d be there a whole lot faster.” He chuckled and buried himself back in the comic.

  Dunne slung his suit jacket over his shoulder and started walking. The area east of the El was flat and sparsely populated, the sun strong and relentless. He shielded his eyes. Way off, beyond St. Raymond’s Cemetery, an aircraft climbed into the sky. According to John Mayhew Taylor, the Professor’s understudy, it wouldn’t be long before the Germans or Japs could attack America’s coasts. As the plane circled over the Sound and headed out to sea, another appeared and flew off in the same direction. The air traffic, Dunne realized, was part of the growing fleet of planes coming in and out of the North Beach Airport. Their mission wasn’t military but commercial and recreational. They were carrying businessmen and wealthy vacationers to California and the Orient, whisking them in a day to places that had once taken weeks or months to reach.

  At almost the same moment Dunne reached the pitted, crumbling sidewalk in front of the Hermes Sanatorium, the Tremont Avenue trolley rumbled past. There was no sign on the surrounding wall, but it was the only structure on the entire block. A towering Victorian pile of turrets and dormers, it had obviously been built in the days when this section of the Bronx was still part of Westchester and its fringes—hinterlands once deemed as distant from the metropolis as the Indian territories out West.

  The latch on the wrought-iron gate lifted easily. He donned his jacket and walked leisurely up the gravel driveway that curved across a well manicured lawn. The slight movement of the lace curtain next to the front door alerted him that his arrival was being watched. The door opened as soon as he set foot on the porch. A trim, youthful man emerged in white tennis shoes, white pants, and a collarless white shirt tight enough to show off his rock-hard build. He grasped Dunne’s hand. “I’m Louis, Mr. Waldruff. We spoke on the phone. Dr. Sparks told us you’d be driving up.”

  “I took the train. It seemed easier,” Dunne said. Obviously mistaken for someone else, he decided to play along and use the opportunity.

  “Miss Loben is expecting you.” Louis led him into the foyer. It was far cooler inside. He put Dunne’s hat in a closet beneath the stairway. Dunne craned his neck and looked up. The walls were painted the same sky blue as those on the first floor. A cascade of sunlight poured through an arched window at the top of the stairs.

  The house was airy, cheery, bright, the opposite of how it appeared on the outside. Flanking the stairs were two large, gold-framed watercolors of blossoming plants, yellow nasturtiums, blue larkspur, and a cluster of red bleeding hearts. “I’ll let Miss Loben know you’re here.” Louis went down a corridor to the right, his rubber-soled shoes moving noiselessly across the thickly carpeted floors, and disappeared.

  The soft click-clack, click-clack, click-clack of the ceiling fan slowly revolving above Dunne’s head was the only noise. He listened for voices, footsteps, any sound of movement. Nothing. The place felt more like a funeral home than a refuge for those whose minds were feeble or disturbed.

  Louis returned and said Miss Loben was ready to see him. Dunne asked to use a bathroom first. Louis’s smile instantly soured. “Miss Loben doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “I think I’d rather be late than have an accident in her office.”

  “All right.” Louis directed Dunne to a door close to the stairway. “I’ll let her know you’re delayed a minute.” Louis went off in the same direction as before.

  Dunne examined the inside lock on the bathroom door. He cracked the door open, reached outside, and removed the key. The door could only be locked or unlocked from outside, a precaution, Dunne supposed, to prevent the inmates from locking themselves inside. He took the change from his pocket, picking through it until he found a coin that fit into the keyhole. It turned out to be the last of Hubert’s slugs. He flushed the toilet and stepped out into the empty hallway. He locked the door, removed the key, and stuck the slug in the hole. He buried the key in the dirt of the potted palm next to the door.

  “Welcome.” A blonde woman, short but well proportioned, approached. Louis was directly behind her.

  “I’m Irene Loben.” She took her hand from the pocket of the yellow smock she was wearing and extended it to Dunne. “Louis told me you were driving up. Now he tells me you came by train.”

  “That’s what Dr. Sparks’s office told me,” Louis said.

  “Mr. Waldruff, I apologize that no one was at Westchester Square to meet you, and I appreciate your arriving exactly at the appointed time. If only the whole country were run that way, we’d all be better off.”

  Louis had an unhappy look on his face, like a dog who’d just been scolded. “But Miss Loben, it wasn’t my fault. That’s what Dr. Sparks’s office . . .”

  “Not now, Louis,” Miss Loben snapped. “We’ll settle this later.”

  “Actually, I enjoyed the exercise,” Dunne said.

  “I’m glad to hear it. But be assured that Louis will drive you back to the train.” Miss Loben dismissed Louis with a few curt words and guided Dunne to a sunny corner office that had her name on the door. A large desk was catty-cornered between two casement windows that looked out on a playground, which contained a slide and a set of bars for climbing and swinging. The ground b
eneath was covered with what appeared to be a mixture of sand and ash, meticulously raked, no sign of any footprints. To the rear, the high weeds of the Bronx swamplands stretched off toward Long Island Sound.

  Miss Loben sat behind the desk, Dunne in the chair directly in front of her. She lifted a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from the breast pocket of her smock and removed a crystal paperweight from atop the lone file on the empty expanse of the desk. “The paperwork is all complete. We just need your signature.” Her stare was made more severe by the glasses.

  Dunne gestured at the window behind her, where another plane could be seen ascending. “It must be nice to be on one of those planes headed to some lush resort.”

  “I suppose.” Miss Loben didn’t bother to look. “But our work doesn’t permit such frivolity.” She turned the paperweight to face him, as though she wanted him to read the motto incised on it:STRENGTH IS THE HIGHEST WISDOM

  “Of course.” Whoever Miss Loben thought he was, he didn’t want to say anything that might tip her off he wasn’t.

  “Dr. Sparks has undoubtedly covered most of the particulars with you.”

  “He was pressed for time, a tennis match on Long Island that he was late for.”

  “Yes, the doctor takes his tennis quite seriously.”

  “He said you’d go over everything.”

  Her eyebrows lifted above the wire rims. “Everything?”