Night Watch

by David C. Taylor

  He found Rhonda’s story on page six.

  It was a ‘think piece’ and was set off from the hard news in a box with wavy black borders. The facts were few: Leon Dudek, a survivor of Auschwitz and the horrors of the Holocaust, had been stabbed to death in Central Park by parties unknown on a Tuesday morning sometime just after midnight. Two people had been involved, one who held him, and another who stabbed him in the base of the brain. No witnesses had yet come forward. Dudek’s wallet had been stolen, but that, the writer suggested, might have been a ruse to cover the real reason for the murder. Leon Dudek, she wrote, had lost his family to the Nazi death camp, and he used his free hours to search for former members of the Nazi Party who had managed to escape justice and who might have come to live in New York. She had statistical information on the membership rolls of the Nazi Party, more than eight million members at its peak, and quotes from historians at Columbia and NYU who claimed that most of those members survived, since few party members went to the front lines. She referred to a story in a Chicago newspaper from six years before that reported the arrest of a former SS officer who had been working in that city running a highly successful import–export under an alias. He had been unmasked by a former inmate of Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a commander of the SS contingent there. The article speculated that Dudek, too, might have run across one of his former persecutors. A source who preferred to remain unnamed, who worked with the US Government programs in Germany immediately after the war to recruit German scientists and technicians, indicated that a number of recruits had their war records whitewashed to meet the criteria for entrance to the States. This was confirmed in at least one instance by a story found in the Post archives from 1953 concerning a German rocket scientist who had been unmasked as a war criminal. Given the number of Party survivors and the chaos of the refugee resettlement programs after the war, it was likely, she concluded, that there were Nazis living among us as our neighbors and coworkers. It was possible that it was Leon Dudek’s bad luck that he confronted two of them. The New York Police, she wrote, had not ruled out that possibility.

  Magda Brandt had started to say something soon after Karl picked up the paper, but she saw that whatever story he was reading had his full attention. When he finished, he folded the paper so that the story was now the front page, tapped it with his forefinger and handed it to her. He said nothing while she read. When she finished, she folded the story back into the middle and put the paper on the chair next to her and looked around to see if anyone was within earshot.

  ‘Should we worry?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t see why. Did you notice the byline? Rhonda Raskin. Typical Jew provocation, a few facts held together with innuendo and unsupported supposition.’

  ‘It says the police are not ruling out a connection to someone like us.’

  ‘They did not rule out a connection to a Hottentot assassination squad either.’

  ‘Be serious, Karl.’

  ‘I am being serious. There were no witnesses. We left no physical evidence. How could anyone possibly connect us to a piece of trash like that?’

  ‘Someone else from the camp, from the medical compound?’

  ‘No. The experiments are dead. They were dead before we were evacuated from the camp. You know that. You watched it done.’

  The men and women lined up at the edge of the pit. The SS machine gun teams. The gunfire and the bodies toppling forward. The SS officers with pistols standing at the edge and firing down into the bodies.

  ‘Perhaps the clean-up squads were not as efficient as they should have been. It was a time of confusion. The Russians were close, hours away, as I remember. Perhaps one of them lived.’

  ‘Well, he’s dead now,’ Karl said.

  ‘Should we mention it to our employers?’

  He thought for a moment and then shook his head. ‘No. Let’s not disturb them. It would make them worry unnecessarily. They will protect us as long as our value to them is greater than the problems we cause. They have a lot to protect. It’s not just us, you know.’

  ‘If this Jew reporter were to die—’

  ‘It would only draw more interest in the story. Let’s wait and see. If there is no follow-up we can stop worrying.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ He left no room for discussion. ‘Ahh, lunch,’ he said, and smiled as waiters arrived bearing their first courses.

  Cassidy sat at a long wooden table across the squad room from the stairs. The wall above the table was covered with WANTED posters, and announcements of new departmental regulations that no one ever read. He had a stack of arrest records in manila folders on his left. He would pull one in front of him, glance at the crime, the name, the mug shot, close it, and pass it to the right. The pile on the left was much smaller than the one on the right, and he had not seen one person he thought might be his stalker.

  A phone rang in the squad room. Newly answered it. ‘Cassidy. A guy on line three for you.’

  Cassidy got up and went to his desk and picked up the receiver. ‘Cassidy here.’

  ‘You fucked me, Cassidy.’ Terry Mack’s voice, raw with rage. ‘They’re going to find me, and they’re going to take my license and Christ knows what else.’

  ‘Easy, Terry. Easy. What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about the story, you son of a bitch.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘The Post. Page eight.’

  ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ were Cassidy’s first words when Rhonda entered the apartment. ‘I said no story until I gave you the go-ahead.’ He came around the kitchen island and faced her.

  She looked at him without saying anything, her fingers working the buttons of her coat.

  ‘I got a call from my guy telling me I fucked him.’ His anger had been building since Terry Mack’s call. ‘I said you couldn’t use him.’

  ‘I said “a source.” I didn’t name him. I don’t have his name.’

  ‘I gave him my word.’

  She said nothing. Her fingers stopped undoing her coat buttons.

  ‘You agreed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘It was too important to sit on.’

  ‘More important than a murder investigation?’

  ‘People have a right to know that these people are out there among them.’

  ‘You don’t know that they’re out there. Leon Dudek accused people of being Nazis who’d never been out of New York.’

  ‘But what if he was right about others? Statistics are in his favor. We know that former Nazis have been caught in the States and sent back to Germany. We know the government recruited war criminals and changed their records.’

  ‘It’s not about Dudek being right. It’s about you getting a story. You getting a byline.’ His anger was pushing him out onto thin ice, but he could not stop the slide. ‘We had a deal.’

  ‘This was more important.’

  ‘More important than finding who killed Dudek?’

  ‘You said yourself that finding them was unlikely. No witnesses. No physical evidence.’

  ‘My case. My choice. Not yours.’ He stepped closer to her.

  She did not step back. ‘I’m sick and tired of waiting to get permission from men to do something I do well. Leon’s dead, and there are people in this city who may have killed tens of thousands more like him. People need to know it. That’s why I wrote it.’

  ‘Bullshit. You wrote it to get your name on a story that wasn’t about Mamie Eisenhower’s dresses or the Debutante of the Year.’

  For a moment, nothing, and then her hand moved fast and cracked across his face. She spun around and went out the door, leaving it to bang against the inner wall. He could hear her footsteps clatter fast down the stairs.

  FIFTEEN

  In the dream he ran down a corridor chased by something he could not see. The corridor was familiar but he did not know where he was. The doors had no knobs and co
uld not be opened. Every time he turned a corner in the corridor, what chased him was now in front of him, and he would turn and run in another direction. When he turned the next corner, the thing would be ahead of him again, and he would turn and run. At the end of the corridor was an open doorway framing darkness. If he could reach it, he’d be safe. The thing was closing in. Could he reach the safety of the doorway? The thing was closer. And then he was at the doorway. He hurled himself through it with relief.

  He began to fall and fall.

  He woke up gasping.

  The phone rang while Cassidy was eating breakfast standing at the kitchen counter. There was no one he wanted to talk to. It rang again. Rhonda calling? Unlikely. It rang again and again and again. He picked up the receiver. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Michael, it’s Marcy,’ his sister-in-law said.

  ‘Hi. What’s up?’

  ‘Have you heard from Brian?’

  ‘No. Should I have? What’s up?’ He finished the last of his coffee and lit a cigarette.

  ‘He’s in Washington. He’s been there a lot these last weeks. He went down again a couple of days ago, and I haven’t heard from him.’ He heard the worry in her voice.

  ‘He’s probably busy, Marcy. You know Brian. He gets focused on something, and he forgets to eat.’

  ‘He doesn’t forget to call home. Every evening when he’s away, every evening and every morning. He calls before the girls go to bed, and he calls before they go to school. It doesn’t matter where he is or what he’s doing.’

  ‘Is he staying at Aunt Kay’s?’

  ‘Yes. I was going to call her, but I thought I’d call you first.’

  ‘I’ll call her, and I’ll call you back.’ Brian thought being late for an appointment was a mortal sin, and if he said he would call you at a certain time, he would. Missing two calls to Marcy and the girls was way out of character.

  He found his address book, poured another cup of coffee, and called his Aunt Kay Lockridge in Georgetown. The phone was answered on the third ring by her butler, ‘Mrs Lockridge’s residence.’

  ‘Mr Farrington, it’s Michael Cassidy.’

  ‘Mr Cassidy, how nice to hear your voice.’

  ‘Is my aunt available?’

  ‘I’m sure she is for you. If you’ll hold for a moment, I will find her.’

  Cassidy drank coffee and lit another cigarette while he waited.

  ‘Michael, it’s Kay. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you. I just had a call from Marcy, who is worried that she hasn’t heard from Brian since he went down to DC yesterday.’

  ‘I’m a bit worried too. We were supposed to have dinner last night, but he never showed up, and he didn’t call. That’s very unlike him.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘No. Just that he had a couple of appointments. I think one of them was on the Hill, but I don’t know whom he was meeting. He didn’t come home last night.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I thought maybe he spent the night with a friend.’ There was a hesitation in her voice.

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not Brian, steadfast and true.’

  ‘You make that sound like a character fault. In a way I was hoping it might be a woman. It would be the least of many evils. He said something peculiar to me when he stopped by to drop off his bag.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He thought he might have been followed from the train station. He stopped along the way to do some errands, and he thought he saw the same man a couple of times when he came out of stores. Then he laughed it off. He said he was spending too much time with you, and the cop was rubbing off.’

  ‘A description of the man?’

  ‘No. And by the time he left the house he had me convinced that it was just a coincidence.’

  ‘Aunt Kay, I’m coming down. I can catch the two o’clock.’

  ‘Michael, now you’ve got me worried.’

  ‘No, no. I have a few days off. And if I come down, he’ll show up. That’s how it works.’

  ‘All right.’ She did not sound convinced.

  What if his stalker had decided to add Brian to his target list? That scared him.

  Kay Lockridge’s house in Georgetown was a big, brick Federal set back from a street lined with mature shade trees still in full foliage. Apparently, Aunt Kay had not yet given the leaves permission to fall. Limousines crowded the semicircular drive and street curbs. Cassidy’s cab left him at the front door. He rang the bell, and moments later the door was opened by a portly, round-faced Negro in a black suit, white shirt, black bowtie, and white cotton gloves. His neutral servant’s expression lightened when he recognized Cassidy.

  ‘Detective Cassidy, welcome. How nice to see you.’ His voice sang with a Jamaican lilt.

  ‘How are you Mr Farrington?’

  ‘I’m fine, sir. Thank you for asking.’ He held the door wide to let Cassidy into the coolness of the front hall with its black-and-white marble floor and the grand staircase that curved up to the second floor. The big living room beyond was full of people, and the murmur of their cocktail party chatter, the clink of ice in glasses, occasional bursts of laughter came out to the hall.

  ‘Has my brother shown up?’

  ‘No, sir. We haven’t seen him since yesterday. Mrs Lockridge put you in the blue room as usual. Shall I take you up?’ He reached for Cassidy’s overnight bag.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll find my way.’

  ‘As you wish, sir. Please ring if you need anything.’ His shoes made little sound on the marble floor as he went off toward the kitchen area. Sam Farrington had run Kay Lockridge’s houses in Washington, Maine, Colorado, and London for thirty years with a perfect blend of deference, taste, and iron will.

  Kay was Cassidy’s mother’s older sister. She had been married for fifteen years to Frank Lockridge, a two-term senator from Montana who had been Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Siam, and his personal envoy to China and Japan before the war. Lockridge had died in a plane crash in England during the war while on a diplomatic mission for the president. He left Kay his mining fortune, which made her, rumor had it, the richest women in Washington. She had beauty, money, and brains. That combination and a deep interest in how the machinery of government worked had made her, over the years, a powerful force behind the scenes in the capitol. Parties at her house in Georgetown were the most sought-after invitations in the city. She knew where the bodies were buried and who dug the holes. She gave money to both parties and refused to swear loyalty to either. There were those who said that if she had been a man, she would have made a fine president.

  Cassidy carried his bag up two flights to the room he used when he came to visit Aunt Kay. He unpacked the few things he had brought. He washed his hands of train grime in the bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. Washington was a formal town, and he had dressed accordingly in a charcoal gray J. Press suit with a faint red pinstripe, a blue buttoned-down shirt, and a dark paisley tie. He would blend in with the people downstairs if he remembered to hold his tongue.

  Cassidy went down to his brother’s room on the second floor. Afternoon light slanted in through the big windows and threw long shadows on the thick rug. The room was neat. The bed was made. The closet door was closed. The desk chair was pushed in tight. Brian habitually scattered change on the bureau when he undressed for the night and usually forgot to put it back in his pocket in the morning. It had been gathered into a small brass bowl. The ashtrays and wastebasket were empty. The pad on the desk was squared in the middle of the leather edge blotter below a narrow silver tray that held two fountain pens and two sharp pencils. A maid would have cleaned the room soon after Brian went out. She had left it neat and orderly for his return.

  Why did the stillness and order of the room put Cassidy on edge?

  He used the phone on the desk to call Brian’s secretary, Claire, at ABC in New York and caught her as she was about to l
eave for the day.

  ‘No, Mr Cassidy, he hasn’t called. He said he’d be back in the office on Monday. Is there anything I can help you with?’

  ‘Do you know who he was seeing in Washington?’

  ‘I don’t. He made his own appointments for the trip. He likes to do that when he’s unsure of his schedule. That way he can change things on the fly if he needs to without going through me.’

  ‘Is there anything on his desk calendar?’

  ‘Let me look. Could you hold a minute?’ The phone went dead for a minute until she came back on. ‘Mr Cassidy?’

  ‘Yes, Claire.’

  ‘There’s nothing on the calendar for this week, just his train down and back on Friday.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes. Everything’s fine.’ He hung up and lit a cigarette. If everything was so fine, why was his skin so fucking tight?

  He went downstairs to the party.

  An election year drives the losers from the halls of power and the winners take their places. But an election year makes little difference to the power brokers and insiders who make up a small, permanent class of Washington Mandarins whose influence is constant no matter which party was on top. They are the pundits, the super lawyers, the influence peddlers, the strategists, people with the money, or connections who could bend legislation or policy. Many of them were in Kay Lockridge’s living room drinking her booze, grazing through her hors d’oeuvres, and basking in the glow of power and privilege that reached critical mass in gatherings like this.

  Cassidy got a martini from a bar near the door and moved into the crowd looking for his aunt. It was a large, light-filled room that looked out through French doors to a wide porch and a well-tended formal garden. The furniture was expensive, solid, and comfortable. A brightly colored Joan Miró painting shared a wall with a still life by Marc Chagall. On the opposite wall was a large abstract by Jackson Pollock, who had died the past summer in a car accident on Long Island just as his reputation as an artist soared. Antique tables held silver-framed portraits of family members, but there were none of the vanity photographs so popular in Washington houses showing the owner with men of power. Kay Lockridge did not need to remind people who she was.