The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  THE JURY ROOM COCKTAIL LOUNGE, NEW YORK,

  “NO, FOR THE LAST goddamn time, I do not want a drink,” Doc Cropsey said.

  “Tryin’ to save you a trip, that’s all.” Corrigan started toward the bar.

  “Then get me a club soda,” Doc Cropsey shouted after him.

  The Professor ignored the squabbling and opened a copy of the Standard. He commenced reading aloud a story about Fred Wistow, a dentist who’d wounded his wife and killed the man he suspected of being her lover. Wistow shot them on Fordham Road, in the middle of the afternoon, and tried to flee by commandeering a cab. The cab driver deliberately crashed into one of the iron pillars of the Jerome Avenue El, ending the escape.

  “What a shame,” the Professor said. “In normal times, an outrage such as Wistow’s would have been front page. Today it ends up on page five without even a picture of a manacled perpetrator being taken away.” He shook his head and returned to the headline, which he held up for his tablemates to see. The story, datelined Prague, was written by John Mayhew Taylor. The Professor read aloud the opening paragraph. “The boy can write,” the Professor said.

  Corrigan returned with three glasses tightly clasped in his hands. “Gotta give it to him. He got where he wanted, right in the middle of that foreign stew. Good luck to him. Still, you ask me, he’s wastin’ his time. People in this country are more determined than ever not to get snookered into another foreign foofaraw.”

  Doc Cropsey turned over his hands and examined his palms with the furrowed concentration of a fortune teller pondering the mottled fleshscape of lines and creases for a clue to the future. “What this country needs is somebody competent enough to predict the goddamn weather correctly.”

  The Professor folded the newspaper, put it aside, and claimed his drink. “Six months later and you’re still lamenting the loss of that shack of yours?”

  “Maybe it was a shack, but it was my goddamn shack, and it got wrecked because those idiots in the Weather Bureau never uttered so much as a peep about the approach of a storm the size of Texas.”

  “Warnin’ or no warnin’, been wrecked either way. Storm like that will level everthin’ in its path,” Corrigan said.

  “Stick a sock in it, Corrigan,” Doc Cropsey barked. “You’re the last goddamn person I need to lecture me on the nature of hurricanes.”

  The young couple in the next booth looked over disapprovingly. The Professor recognized the man as Mike McCarthy, an up-and-coming assistant U.S. Attorney. The blonde he was with reached across and took his hand. They resumed talking.

  “Pipe down,” the Professor said. “You’re distracting Romeo from his wooing.”

  “Those pipsqueaks want to moon over one another, they should find a soda fountain,” Doc Cropsey said.

  “If Mike McGloin were still alive, God rest his soul, he’d have seen to it that those two knew they weren’t welcome.” The Professor lifted his glass in tribute to the deceased barkeep, whom he’d discovered slumped over a newspaper one night in late September. Given the late hour, the Professor had assumed McGloin was asleep but, after trying several times to rouse him, realized he was dead. The Professor penned a tribute that ran on the Standard’s obituary page. Since McGloin was a bachelor, without any close relatives, the Professor also arranged the funeral Mass at St. Agnes, on 43rd Street. Along with five other longtime patrons, he served as an honorary pallbearer.

  The next afternoon, out of the blue, the Professor received a call from Fintan Dunne. He was in a hospital in Southampton. He’d been caught in the hurricane and was lucky to be alive. He asked the Professor to bring him some clothes from his apartment and cash stowed in his refrigerator. Hubert Dixon, the janitor at the Hackett Building, had a key and had already been told it was all right to give it to the Professor.

  The train to Southampton halted at Riverhead. The track farther east was washed away in several places. A bus carried the handful of passengers the rest of the way, moving slowly through a wrecked countryside of uprooted elms and oaks. The leaves on the trees still standing had been turned brown by the salt-laced winds that had pushed the swollen ocean over the barrier dunes. Southampton had the stunned and battered look of a battle-scarred village. Dunne was sitting on the side of his bed, in a room in which four other patients were squeezed, his face drawn and gaunt. They went into the corridor for a smoke. The Professor noticed Dunne was limping. He offered no explanation of how or why he’d been caught in the hurricane.

  That evening, in a restaurant off the main street, the Professor ran into Mayfield Close, an old colleague from the Standard who now worked for a New England newspaper and was writing a feature piece on the storm’s impact on communities from Long Island to Vermont. Close told the Professor that town and county officials had published lists of the dead and missing, but he didn’t put much store in them.

  “This is like a country caught by a surprise attack,” he said. “Confusion reigns.” Off the record, a sergeant in the State Police had confided to Close that a number of corpses couldn’t be accounted for. One was headless, another had been shot in the back several times.

  Close believed that the storm, already enjoying notoriety as “The Hurricane of ’38,” was an embarrassment as well as a tragedy for the towns it struck. “The businessmen are afraid it will do to tourism what the Hindenburg explosion did to airship travel,” he said. “The only blessing is that it happened off-season. Their aim now is to put the storm behind them and restore a degree of normality as quickly as possible.”

  The Professor inquired about Fintan Dunne. Close said that he’d tried to interview him but couldn’t get much out of him. “He was found along with a woman. Lashed to a scrap of wood that served as a raft, they were washed up north of Montauk Highway, at the farthest point of the water’s surge. The woman proved in better shape than Dunne, who’d been shot in the leg and lost a lot of blood. He claimed not to know how it happened. Any other time, the police would never settle for an answer like that, but in view of the present circumstances and what they have to deal with, they just hoped he’d leave as soon as possible and never come back.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “She left before I got a chance to talk to her,” Close said. “I bumped into Dunne a day or so later at the Westhampton school gym, which had been turned into a temporary morgue. He was looking for two people. I wrote down their names.” Close took out his notebook and paged through it quickly. “Yes, here they are: Mr. Sparks and Miss Loben. Loben was found; that is, what was left of her after the gulls had a chance to feast on the corpse. But Sparks, no. He’s apparently among the many who’ll never be found. Dunne was mum about his interest in the pair. All he’d say was that ‘they were acquaintances.’”

  The Professor spent the night in a rooming house that was still without electricity. He walked to the hospital in the morning. Dunne was waiting in the reception area, dressed in the suit the Professor had brought him the previous day. He paid his bill. They boarded the bus to Riverhead, where they caught the train to Manhattan.

  Dunne moved slowly, leaning heavily on a cane. His right hand, which he’d re-broken in a fall, was in a sling. He seemed in pain and sweated profusely on the short walk from the bus to the train. He hardly said a word on the trip back. The Professor recognized Dunne was still suffering from some form of shock from his ordeal and didn’t press him with questions or ask for an account of what had occurred. Some things, the Professor knew from decades spent covering murder and mayhem, were best forgotten and left behind. The surest remedy for most tragedies and traumas was as simple as it was old: Get on with life and its everyday routines.

  Six weeks after their return from Southampton, the day after a radio broadcast by The Mercury Theatre of the Air tricked half the country into believing that the Martians were taking over New Jersey, Dunne appeared in the Shack. News of the panic the broadcast caused was splashed all over the papers.

  “I don’t see what the fuss was about,” the Professor
said. “As far as I’m concerned, if the Martians want New Jersey, they can have it.”

  Dunne didn’t smile. “The threat isn’t from Mars. It’s already here.” He then inquired if the Standard had run any stories about an attack on two FBI agents at Camp Siegfried in September.

  The Professor eventually sent some clips to Dunne that reported an assault on two G-men that took place during a search of the Bund’s summer camp. Several Bund members were arrested for the crime and were awaiting trial in Brooklyn Federal Court. Although grateful for the information, Dunne never revealed the reason for his interest.

  The Professor saw Dunne for the last time in February 1939, late on a winter’s day, icy rain pelting from a formless sky. They met at Rostoff’s for a cup of coffee. In a corner, by himself, was Tommy Hines. He sat scanning the newspaper accounts of the conviction Tom Dewey had won in his successful retrial of Tommy’s uncle, Tammany leader Jimmy Hines.

  For Dewey, it was a milestone in his crusade to clean up the city. Equally, it was sweet revenge for the narrow defeat he suffered in November at the hands of Governor Lehman. The D.A.’s name was back in the headlines. The national press took notice. From where Dunne and the Professor sat, they couldn’t tell if Tommy Hines was weeping as he read the articles or the rain was dripping from his hair onto his face.

  Dunne appeared to the Professor to be fully recovered. He said that he was leaving in a few days for Miami. He planned to stay with a lady friend whose daughter had opened a dress shop there. It was going to be an indefinite stay, he said. He’d given up his office in the Hackett Building and sublet his apartment to Doc Cropsey, who’d surrendered the lease to his own flat in expectation of retiring to Southold. (A plan he’d had to put off until his new cottage was built, this time at a good remove from the water.)

  Dunne made no mention of the hurricane, which the Professor interpreted as a sign of psychological recovery. When they were about to leave, Dunne produced a business card with someone else’s name on it and a biblical quote printed on the other side.

  The Professor was puzzled. “Should I keep this for you until you come back?”

  “It’s for you. I thought a literary man like you might appreciate it.”

  Corrigan went back to the bar. He squinted at the price list of mixed cocktails posted by the cash register. The subdued light from the wall fixtures that had replaced the garish intensity of McGloin’s ceiling lamps made it difficult to see. The bartender wore a black bowtie and a short red jacket. His breast pocket was embossed with the symbol of a cocktail shaker and surrounded by the name the new owner had given McGloin’s: THE JURY ROOM COCKTAIL LOUNGE.

  “We have waitress service at the tables, sir,” the bartender said.

  “Tell that to the waitress,” Corrigan replied. When he got back to the table with another round, the Professor and Doc Cropsey were engaged in an argument.

  “The Nazi campaign against the Jews is no different from the pogroms and persecutions in the past,” Doc Cropsey said. “The Germans will come to their senses. The Jews will keep their heads down until they do. That’s the way it’s always been.”

  The Professor shook his head. “You’re wrong,” he said. “The ancient bloodlust that’s been with us since the time of Homer and before, the feverish desire for revenge and conquest, is being replaced by something more scientific and invidious.”

  “Here we go.” Corrigan put down the drinks. “Yesterday, he went on for almost an hour about the fight ’tween Armageddon and Imogene.”

  “Their names were Agamemnon and Iphidamas,” the Professor said. “My point is that we seem to be transgressing beyond the ordinary limits of face-to-face cruelty that our species has traditionally excelled in. The hope that human behavior and morality progress pari passu with the increasing power of our machines or the sophistication of our culture seems about to blow up in our faces.”

  The assistant U.S. attorney stood. He gave his hand to his companion as she shifted across her seat and exited the booth. They went to the jukebox and examined the selection of songs. The electric arch atop it bathed their faces in a rainbow glow. A coin dropped. The machine began to whirr.

  “Anything should be blown up, it’s that contraption.” Doc Cropsey nodded toward the newly introduced music player—“the jukebox”—that began to play.

  “Maybe somebody should put this to music,” the Professor said. In a voice strong enough to be heard over the music, he read from a card in his hand:“We looked for peace,

  But no good came:

  For a time of healing,

  But behold, terror.”

  ABWEHR HEADQUARTERS, BERLIN

  Oster maneuvered around the flanks of the bent, kneeling washerwomen who kept scrubbing as he went down the hallway they had just cleaned. He muttered an apology and quickened his step, as if that might undo the damage. The offices were all closed. The door to Canaris’s office was opened but, seeing no light, Oster continued past. Several doors down, he came upon Corporal Gresser, who was working in the filing room. “What are you doing here so late, Corporal?” Oster said.

  “The Admiral is still in his office,” Gresser said.

  “Napping?”

  “The last time I saw him he was looking out the window.” Gresser pushed the file drawer shut. “When I offered to order him some dinner, he said only that he wished not to be disturbed. I decided it would be wise if I remain until he leaves.”

  “The Admiral has his moods. We all know that. I’ll see to it he gets home.”

  Oster removed his overcoat and put it with his briefcase in the closet behind Gresser’s desk. He stepped over the threshold, into the shadowy interior of Canaris’s office, treading softly in case the Admiral was asleep. The room was illuminated by ash-colored moonlight. Canaris was near where Gresser had last seen him, between the window and the desk, a one-dimensional cutout of gray and black. He looked at Oster but did not speak.

  “I was on my way home when I encountered Gresser. He told me you were still here.” Oster walked over and stood beside Canaris.

  “I had a meeting with the Führer today,” Canaris said softly, almost in a whisper. “I was summoned to report on the rearmament efforts of the British and French. In the middle of my presentation, he was informed the British had issued a non-negotiable guarantee of Poland’s territorial integrity.”

  “At last they’re showing some backbone. They’ve learned the hard way that the man’s promises are utterly worthless.” Oster was about to put a cigarette between his lips when Canaris suddenly shouted, “He’s mad, Hans, mad beyond a doubt!”

  Oster felt the hot, stale rush of his breath, the fine spray of his speech. The cigarette fell from Oster’s mouth. He took a step back.

  “I still can’t take it all in!” Canaris said, his voice loud and anguished. “One minute he was talking calmly, the next ranting like the inmate of an insane asylum. He’ll drown his enemies in their own blood, he said. Millions will die, but that’s the price which must be paid if his destiny is to be fulfilled. He raved for so long that Ribbentrop had to fetch him a handkerchief to wipe the froth from his mouth.”

  Canaris bent down and retrieved Oster’s cigarette. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, regaining a measure of calm. “But the behavior I witnessed has left me shaken.” Fetching the lighter from his desk, Canaris flicked the wheel. Oster concentrated on putting the cigarette in the middle of the trembling flame.

  “Destiny, that’s the word he keeps coming back to,” Canaris said. “He believes he’s its agent. The Czech crisis absolutely confirmed his belief. It’s almost as if he knows that, as well as cowing the English and French, he exploded the hopes of those deluded enough to imagine they could depose him.”

  He recalled to himself a phrase that Heydrich had used: Facts are paltry things in the face of destiny. He realized for the first time that Heydrich had been undoubtedly quoting the Führer. The resolution of the Czech crisis, it seemed, had turned that wishful aphorism into
actuality. Germany was under his sway now, completely. There were no more barriers. There would be no turning back.

  Above, in what had become a nightly occurrence, a formation of army transport planes lumbered toward Templehof Airport. The heavy and familiar drone of their motors rattled against the windows. “They’re returning from Prague, I suppose,” Canaris said. “His supposed downfall turns out to be another bloodless triumph.”

  Twice the conspirators are ready to carry out the coup. Their initial plans are derailed by Prime Minister Chamberlain’s peace mission to the Führer’s alpine retreat at Berchtesgarden. But, within a week, Hilter goes back on his promises. Meeting Chamberlain for a second time at Bad Godesburg, in the Rhineland, on September 22, he announces that he won’t wait on plebiscites or timetables but will move on the Sudetenland immediately.

  When it’s clear that Hitler wants war and that no concessions will deter him, the conspiracy instantly revives. Oster oversees the preparation of the raiding party. Arms, ammunition, and hand grenades are distributed; maps of the interior of the Reich Chancellery studied and reviewed; the timing made certain. The moment the armed forces are mobilized, the Twenty-third division will move from Potsdam and, instead of heading south toward the Czech border, enter the capital and secure the government quarter. Himmler and Göbbels will be arrested.

  Oster meets several times with Captain Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, who’s in charge of the main raiding party. They go over the plan. Heinz and his men are familiar to the sentries at 78 Wilhelm-strasse, the main entrance to the Reichchancellery, and will approach them as though on official business. Once the sentries are overpowered, the entrance will be secured and Heinz will lead a smaller group to take custody of the Führer. They know from careful observation that he is more lightly guarded than outsiders think.