The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  “Are you a friend of his?” She felt a delayed sense of fright.

  “A good friend, very close.”

  She glanced at the phone. He followed her eyes. “No need for that,” he said, and his smile grew wider, his red tongue poking for an instant over his teeth. “I’m not here to harm anyone.” He opened his hands wide. “See.”

  “Come closer,” she said, “and I’ll scream.”

  With a swift, instantaneous sweep of his hands, he covered her mouth and pinned her throat against the wall. “Now why would you do that? All we’re going to do is have a little fun, and then I’m going to leave a message for my friend, Fintan Dunne.” He held her legs down with his knee. “You’re trembling,” he said, his smile turning into a tight grin, as he spoke through clenched teeth: “You whore bitch.”

  Anderson seemed neither surprised nor disappointed by the lack of success in unearthing a single lead about Sparks’s whereabouts. He sat by the window, head resting on his palm, fuming pipe gripped between his teeth, and listened to the hurried, self-important commentary of H.V. Kaltenborn, the CBS commentator in New York, as he reported Chamberlain’s startling visit to Hitler at his mountain retreat. Twice, Anderson muttered to himself, “He doesn’t know what he’s dealing with.”

  When the station went back to its regular programming, Dunne switched off the radio. Anderson tilted his head back, his eyes directed out the window at the blue rectangle of sky atop the shaftway. “Since Sparks is officially dead, he can’t risk traveling on his passport. He must hide somewhere until he judges it sufficiently safe to travel.”

  “Somewhere could be anywhere.”

  “What about his chauffeur?”

  “Huber? He’s vanished without a trace. He could be with Sparks or maybe he’s on his own.”

  “He didn’t seem comfortable in the background. He had a public presence in the Bund, even led the attack on the meeting at which Dr. Ignatz was almost killed.”

  “He liked to swagger.” Dunne related sighting Huber at Yaphank among the Bundists from Camp Siegfried.

  “There may be a chance to unearth information. I have contacts who make it a habit of following the Bund’s activities.”

  “Contacts?”

  “To the Intelligence Service.”

  “Whose?”

  “His Majesty’s.”

  “What’ll it cost?”

  “Cost?”

  Dunne rubbed his thumb across the two opposing fingers. “How much?”

  “That’s not how gentlemen operate.”

  “I guess I haven’t dealt with many.”

  Anderson nodded, as though in agreement. “Well, they don’t betray confidences, that’s for certain. But there are those who are willing to put moral principles ahead of professional duties, and several share my conviction that the response of the Intelligence Service to the German menace, like that of the present British Government itself, is hopelessly inadequate.”

  “Give them a call.”

  “That would be unwise. I’ll see if I can arrange a meeting. Suppose we rendezvous near Rockefeller Center tomorrow afternoon. Pick a time and place.”

  “Three o’clock, at Schrafft’s, on the corner of Madison, across from St. Patrick’s.”

  “Schrafft’s it is.” Anderson nodded once more.

  “You’ll feel at home.” Dunne said. “All the help is Irish.”

  The petite, freckle-faced waitress in the black dress and white apron gave Dunne his check. He paid it and went out to the curb. He killed his cigarette on the top of a fireplug. Two priests walked hurriedly toward St. Patrick’s. The one closest, beefy and flat-footed, gave him a once-over worthy of a patrolman. Just as Dunne was about to hail a cab, Anderson came around the corner.

  “I was afraid you’d have already left,” he said.

  “I did. You’re an hour late. I’m on my way back to my office.”

  “My foray wasn’t entirely fruitless. They’ve got a bead on Huber. They’ve identified him as a German agent, although there’s some confusion about which branch of the Nazi government he works for.”

  “Don’t they only have one branch?”

  “Almost.”

  “No notion where he’s gone?”

  “Not much interest, either. Their minds are concentrated on the Czech situation.”

  Dunne watched over Anderson’s right shoulder as a patrol car pulled up at the curb. Bill Hanlon, the new Chief of Homicide, exited the passenger’s side. His head-down, hands-in-his-pockets stride ruled out that he was there by coincidence or on a social call. “Thought you’d have stopped tailing me by now,” Dunne said.

  Hanlon gave Anderson a sideways glance. “I need to talk to you, Fin. Alone.”

  “Anderson is my associate. Say it to me, say it to him.”

  “All right, come inside.” Hanlon led the way to the back of Schrafft’s. The same Irish waitress appeared. He ordered a butter-scotch sundae; Anderson ordered tea. She curtsied when she heard Anderson’s accent and returned quickly with the tea and sundae. Hanlon pushed the ice cream around the metal dish with his spoon.

  “It’s your nickel, Chief,” Dunne said.

  Expecting a lecture on why private investigators should stay out of the way of the homicide squad, Dunne was momentarily dazed by a blunt account of how the police had been summoned to his apartment, where they’d found Lina Linnet’s “butchered body.” Roberta Dee, who’d discovered it, was in protective custody. Hanlon wagged his spoon at Dunne. “Been nice you’d let us know Linnet was holed up in your place.”

  “She was fed up with cops.”

  “She’d be alive if she trusted me.”

  “You here to book me?”

  “You’re not a suspect. You’re a nuisance.”

  “Was the butchery similar to that inflicted on Miss Lynch?” Anderson asked.

  “Only an animal would do what was done to her.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Dunne said.

  “Very similar.” Hanlon stood the spoon in the ice cream and shunted the dish aside. He folded his arms on the table and bent toward Dunne. “I know what went on under Brannigan, and I’m goin’ see it don’t happen again. But I’m off to a bum start. The brass will be down my throat. The papers will say Linnet was killed to protect Brannigan. Their only question will be whether I’m a crook or an incompetent.”

  “There are witnesses galore against Brannigan.”

  “You got a theory who killed her?”

  “I prefer facts. They’re hard to come by but more useful.”

  “I figured you’d keep what you know to yourself. Solve the case on your own. That’s your business, Fin, I understand that. But I want an assist.”

  “What kind?”

  “Drop out of sight for a period. Let me get my footing and start this job without gettin’ beat over the head ’bout how the city would be better off with a private eye running the show instead of a cop.”

  “Roberta Dee comes with me.”

  “Sure.” Hanlon slid out of the booth and slapped a dollar on the table. “I owe you.” He nodded at the dish of ice cream. “Either of you want that sundae, feel free. I barely touched it.”

  “You were less than entirely truthful just then,” Anderson said as he filled his pipe, put a match to the bowl, and took several puffs. “You undoubtedly have the same theory I do. Huber committed this crime. He was hoping to find you but stumbled on poor Miss Linnet instead, which means he must still be in the vicinity. That place where you saw Huber, what was it?”

  “The Bund camp?”

  “Yes, where exactly?”

  “Yaphank, on Long Island, but Huber or Sparks would only go there if he was interested in being caught. It’s got lots of visitors, most of them in love with beer and speeches, and it’s a good bet the FBI has a close eye on the place.”

  “It can’t hurt to visit. Detective Hanlon would be grateful for your absence.”

  “How’d you propose we get there?”

>   “Didn’t you tell me you passed it on a train?”

  “It’s after Labor Day. Be one a day, if you’re lucky, and then you’ll have to take a taxi to get to the Camp. Might as well telegraph ahead to say you’re coming.”

  “We can drive.”

  “You know how?”

  “Surely you must. All Americans do.”

  “Can’t operate the shift, not with this.” Dunne held up his right hand in its plaster cast. “Even if I could, I don’t own a car. Most New Yorkers don’t.”

  “Who’s Roberta Dee? Is it possible she does?”

  September 20-21, 1938

  10

  The human and economic toll was measurable. The deepest impact of the hurricane [of 1938] was not. The swiftness and totality of the disaster were so stunning as to defy reason, logic, credulity. Social change evolves. Dunes and beaches and shorelines are shaped over a century of wind and wave. Lives and landscape require years of patient building, grain upon grain. They cannot be redrawn in two or three hours. On September 21, 1938, what couldn’t happen did, and even for those who had been cushioned from the ravages of the Depression, life seemed suddenly fragile.

  The vagaries of nature shook the status quo and weakened its underpinnings. On that rough September afternoon, wealth, social position, and property provided no buffer from the fury of wind and water. The comfort zone they had ensured would never seem quite as insular again. The hurricane has been called “a savage leveler.” Chaos blew in, and in some ways it stayed on after the hurricane left town. The well-ordered life with distinct rules and classes came to an end, replaced by a world with new rules, new liberties, new equalities, and a new tempo. Some line had been crossed . . . and nothing would ever be quite the same again.

  —R.A. SCOTTI, Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

  THE HACKETT BUILDING, NEW YORK

  ROBERTA HAD ALREADY LEFT police headquarters when Dunne arrived. He reached her at the number she’d left specifically for him. She was composed and unemotional. “Lina was murdered by the same person as Miss Lynch, wasn’t she?” she said.

  “That’s a good guess,” he said. He asked about the car. Elba, it turned out, had taken the train to Sing Sing to see Wilfredo, the first time she’d face him as her father. Roberta was watching the shop, but business was slow. There’d be no problem closing it for a day.

  He said he’d explain where they were going and why, “when you pick us up.”

  “Us?” she asked.

  “I can’t get into it on the phone.” He was sure Roberta was alert to the possibility that the FBI had taken the precaution of having Elba’s phone tapped in case she was somehow connected to the interstate prostitution ring they’d nailed Brannigan for.

  “Meet you same place as last time,” she said. “Noon. Don’t keep me waiting.”

  Anderson got in the back of Roberta’s car. Glancing up into the rearview mirror and seeing Anderson’s reflection, Roberta presumed his grin was for her. She grinned back. “Since Fin doesn’t have enough manners to introduce me, I’ll do it myself. I’m Roberta Dee.”

  Anderson removed his hat and lay it beside him on the seat. “I’m Ian Anderson. I’m most appreciative of the trouble you’re going to in order to transport us to . . .” He paused. “Where is it we’re going, Fin?”

  “Yaphank.”

  “Out in the boondocks of Long Island?”

  “Unless you know another Yaphank.” Dunne told her to turn onto Third Avenue and drive south.

  “It’ll take us half the day to get there.”

  “Yaphank,” Anderson said, “has a bit of an Indian ring, don’t you think?”

  “Yaphank is so far out in the sticks, the Indians may still be there.” Roberta raced through a light just before it changed red.

  “It’s not that out of the way,” Dunne said. “In the war, Yaphank held 40,000 recruits and even got a musical in its honor, ‘Yip, Yip, Yaphank.’ Ever hear ‘Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning’? That’s from the show.”

  “Of course I’ve heard it. Every Tommy did. The Yanks taught it to us during the war.”

  Anderson began to sing the lyrics in a soft baritone, hatred of getting up so early in the morning, love of staying in bed, maddening pester of the bugler’s call, that same insistent refrain, you’ve gotta get up, you’ve gotta get up, you’ve gotta get up in the morning.

  Dunne joined in the next chorus. Before they’d left for France, they’d sung it as a half-comic complaint, heart-felt urge to a happy case of homicide, mutilate and murder the bugler, amputate his reveille, stomp upon it heavily, and spend the rest of their lives in bed. After time in the trenches, they sang it slowly, more lament than complaint, a longing for solace of matresses to lie upon, soft pillows to dream upon, clean sheets made for sleep or love. Oh, how I’d love to remain in bed.

  “That’s just lovely,” Roberta said. “But if we’re going to Yaphank, how come you have me driving toward Staten Island?”

  “Think we’re being followed?” Anderson said.

  “Been known to happen,” Dunne said. “Make a right here.”

  Roberta drove west as far as Eighth Avenue, where Dunne told her to make another right. Back against the door, arm resting on the back of the front seat, he watched behind. They were quickly mired in a noontime traffic jam.

  “At this rate, we should be in Yaphank by sometime next Saturday. Mind telling me why we’re headed there?”

  “It’ll take a while.”

  “We’re not exactly in a rush.” Roberta nodded at the standstill in front of them.

  Dunne told her for the first time about his visit to the Hermes Sanatorium, the fire that followed, and the supposed death of Sparks. In imminent danger of being implicated in the murder of Miss Lynch, Sparks and his henchman Huber had torched the place and staged their deaths. Huber, he speculated, had come looking for him and, finding Lina in his apartment, killed her instead, in the same way he’d killed Lynch. Huber was the reason they were headed to Yaphank.

  “It all sounds so weird.”

  “Ah, Miss Dee,” Anderson said, “you’ve gone to the root of the dilemma. The Saxon word for fate was wyrd, from which our word ‘weird’ is taken. Certainly, in the modern sense, there is a weirdness to the detached homicidal objectivity of a man like Sparks, more so than the traditional savagery of a thug like Huber. But when such weirdness is institutionalized, when it’s accepted as truth by supposedly reputable scientists and medical men, when it’s advocated as a political program and turned into a policy of state, such a concept approaches the meaning of wyrd in the ancient sense: a destiny we cannot avoid, a fate we won’t or can’t resist.”

  Roberta looked again in the rearview mirror. Anderson’s grin made her unsure if he was joking or not. The traffic gradually thinned as they went north. They turned east on 125th Street and drove past the Apollo Theater, where a line of well-dressed Negroes waited to be admitted to a matinee. Once on the other side of the Triborough Bridge, they exited onto Astoria Avenue, in Queens, and followed it to Northern Boulevard.

  It was almost two-thirty by the time they reached the uncluttered, open lanes of the Northern State Parkway. Roberta turned on the radio. H.V. Kaltenborn was reporting on the previous evening’s joint British-French communiqué announcing that the two nations would accept Hitler’s demands and insist that the Czechs return the Sudetenland to Germany. Prime Minister Chamberlain would soon depart for Bad Godesberg, in the Rhineland, for his second meeting with Hitler, at which the deal would be concluded and an orderly transfer arranged. “So far,” Kaltenborn concluded, “mighty America refuses to speak. She seems primarily concerned with keeping out of war.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind turning off the radio, I’d be most appreciative.” Closing his eyes, Anderson fell asleep instantly. When they reached the end of the Northern State, the country opened into a flat vista of cultivated fields occasionally interrupted by single farmhouses and clusters of the weathered, tumbledown shacks u
sed by migrant laborers. The air was seasoned with the sharp, rancid odor of duck farms, fertilizer and brine from the adjacent but invisible sea baked together through the long summer season.

  Roberta rolled up her window. “Who says the city smells? Give me Fifth Avenue any day.” They were a short distance beyond Smithtown when Roberta pulled over at a roadside beer garden. “Time for a break,” she said.

  They sat in a small grove beneath a latticed canopy. Dunne ordered hot dogs and beer for the table. Roberta asked for a root beer.

  “What’s the plan?” Roberta asked.

  “Ask the general,” Dunne said. “It’s his expedition.”

  Anderson either ignored or didn’t hear Dunne’s comment. A cluster of brown and yellow leaves on the tree above were beginning to glide down one by one. He studied them, as if something significant was being revealed.

  “Anybody know exactly where we go from here?” Roberta said.

  “At this moment that’s the general condition of humanity, isn’t it?”

  “I asked where we’re going, not the world.”

  “Either case, the answer is, ‘I am not sure.’ I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

  “Would you mind telling me what’s your interest in all this?” Roberta said. She lit a cigarette. The day had turned sultry and close. The Englishman’s philosophical air had begun to annoy her, and so had his grin.

  “My interest is in seeing Sparks brought to trial. A proper exposé of his program of medical murder and its relationship to the greater ambitions of the Nazi Reich might help wake Americans from their sleep and stiffen their will to resist.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Who pays me?”

  “Last I heard, the two were related.”

  “I pay myself.”

  After only a puff, Roberta dropped her cigarette on the ground. “Let’s not waste any more time. At this rate, we won’t get back to the city before midnight.”

  The rest of the way, Roberta kept fiddling with the radio dial to find music and avoid the news bulletins. It was dark when they reached Yaphank. They stopped at a small grocery. Dunne came out with six bottles of beer and directions to the camp. “It’s directly up the road. Turn left at the top of the hill. There’s a dirt road that leads to it. Guy behind the counter says it’s been pretty much deserted since Labor Day.”