Early's Fall

by Jerry Peterson

  A half grin prodded at Early's mouth.

  “Yes. We were lovers.”

  “Really.”

  “War does that to men and women, when you doubt you will see the next day.”

  “So it wasn't serious?”

  “We thought it was at the time.” Stephanowitz shambled up to the broad sweep of steps that fronted the frieze. He dusted an area on one and sat down, the concrete warm, still holding a bit of heat from the day. The man from Israel glanced up at Early.

  “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “One night in a mortar attack on us, we lost our Land Rover. A direct hit. We saw the car go up in the biggest damn ball of flame.” Stephanowitz took a heavy drag on his cigarette. He blew the smoke away. “We had a plan. We all went to screaming like we had been hit, and, one by one, we went silent. . . . They did what we never would. After some time, they walked into our camp to survey their victory.”

  “And you slaughtered them,” Early said.

  Stephanowitz turned his cigarette up in his claw of a hand. He studied the glowing end in a manner that suggested it was something he'd never seen before. “They were the enemy,” he said and tapped ash away. “We disposed of them, threw their bodies in the fire. But here we were in the desert, not all that far from the Sea of Galilee and no car. We occasionally employed a scout—Mustafa. He told us where a British patrol was camped, where we might, um, liberate another Land Rover. Judith volunteered to go.”

  “Did you let her?”

  “Of course. She took two others and said she would meet us at a point some miles away, at a place called Hannah's Well, an hour before dawn.”

  Early settled next to Stephanowitz. He set his cattleman's hat on the step and finger-combed his hair. “She didn't show, did she?”

  “No.” Stephanowitz stubbed out his cigarette. “I never really liked Mustafa, so I questioned him . . . persuasively. . . . Had his hand strapped to a table and proceeded to cut off his fingers one joint at a time.”

  Early glanced away.

  “When he had only stumps and a thumb left,” Stephanowitz said, “he told us between soul-wrenching cries that he had sent ‘that woman’ into a trap, that the British camp was a Palestinian camp. They were waiting for her.” He shook another cigarette from his pack and lit it. “I slit his throat, and we went after Judith. Found her wandering alone not far from Hannah's Well.”

  Early turned back. With elbows on knees, he cast a sideward glance at Stephanowitz, wondering, then asked, “Was that the knife in the boot top?”

  “The one bit of truth we allowed Judith to put in a letter to home. Every parent needs to know his child is fearless. It is a fiction, but it is an important fiction.”

  Early tapped the claw that clutched the burning cigarette.

  “Yes,” Stephanowitz said, “everyone asks, and you I shall tell.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you've been a soldier at war.” He rose and went to the broad, waterfall-like fountain at the far end of the steps. Stephanowitz sloshed a hand in. He raked the water across his forehead and the back of his neck. “It's hot for nighttime. . . . I got a message to report to Haifa for a briefing of some kind. If you are a stranger in a strange land—”

  “It's safer to travel at night,” Early said, finishing Stephanowitz's words.

  “Yes. Somehow on the second night, I became lost, terribly lost. We Haganah did not have uniforms. We fought in civilian clothes, often in robes and head rags we stole from those we killed. It is better not to look out of place. I saw a light in this mud hut and took a chance.”

  “You told us you could speak Arabic.”

  Stephanowitz again dabbled his fingers in the water. He fractured the surface, half grinning. “I went to the door and said I was separated from my men and could they direct me to the Haifa road, said I was Abdul Saleem. There must have been magic to the name because the family welcomed me as if I were a lost cousin.”

  “Invited you in?”

  “And sat me down, and served me the strongest coffee ever and, before I could take a second sip, the woman put a knife to my throat. The robe I wore was her husband's, she said.” Stephanowitz took a last puff on his cigarette. He ground it out under his shoe and kicked the butt into the grass. “So the torture began—Who was I? Where was I from? Was I Haganah or Irgun? Her son, not ten years old as I am living, wielded a rock that he had to lift with both hands. With each question and a nod from his mother, he hammered my hand, starting at the tips of my fingers. I heard myself screaming as Mustafa had done, and, when the rock came down on the back of my hand, I heard myself blubbering out the most fantastic lies. . . . And I suppose God took mercy on me. I passed out.”

  Stephanowitz again dabbled in the water. He flicked the cooling beads away from his fingertips. “When I woke, I found myself in some kind of dog pen, my good hand tied to a stake, the sun high in the sky.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “As you would say, the cavalry arrived. A Land Rover roared past with my second on the machine gun, firing, tearing up the camp. Judith vaulted the fence. She cut me loose. Two minutes, I swear, and we were gone.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Yes. My second was shot as we raced away. We buried him at Hannah's Well that night.”

  “And you?”

  “Desk job in Haifa.”

  “Judith?”

  “A month later, she came to see me, walked in when I was in what we shall call a compromising position with my male nurse. That was the last I saw of her. She left Haifa and Israel in such a hurry that she left behind her diaries.” Stephanowitz took a wrapped package from the pocket of his coat. “I give them to you. I do not think you will want to give them to Judith's parents. I certainly would not.”

  “Would it surprise you that you're in an entry in her last diary?” Early asked. “Oh, not by name, but as a man from Israel. You came to see her.”

  Stephanowitz's lips stretched tight across his front teeth.

  “You want to tell me about it?” Early asked.

  “I'm a diplomat now.”

  “Earlier, you said you were a soldier.”

  “I am that, too. But as a diplomat, I can courier money out of your country. . . . I had heard Judith was getting careless, reckless in her fund-raising, drawing attention to herself. So I went to see her, to caution her, and to apologize for our last time together.”

  “Three years later?”

  “What can I say? I am a man, and we men are sometimes slow in doing the proper thing. I sensed something was not right with Judith. She wouldn't tell me what it was.”

  “I gather you had your suspicions.”

  “And still do. That Gentile husband of hers.”

  “But he was nowhere around when Judith was killed.”

  “Have you not heard of friends lying for friends?”

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  September 16—Friday Morning

  The Man from Independence

  Early sat on a window ledge of sandstone on the Muehelbach Hotel's Twelfth Street side, one leg thrown over the other, studying the Kansas City Star's livestock market page. The long time between rains had dried pastures, and ranchers in the Flint Hills, those who couldn't lease pastures in Nebraska, were shipping their cattle to the stockyards. A glut of beef. Prices down for the sixth straight week. He turned to the sports pages, hoping for better news.

  A gaggle of men poured out of the lobby of the Muehelbach onto the sidewalk, led by one in a light gray suit—doublebreasted—and an equally light gray fedora, the brim shaped like a cattleman's hat, like Early's. The man, chuckling with the others, wore wire-rimmed glasses.

  Early glanced up as the group neared. He folded his paper and pushed off the ledge, taking a moment to brush grit from the seat of his pants. Then he swung in beside the man in the lead. “Mind if I join your Early Risers Walking Society, Mister Truman?” he asked.

  “If you can keep up,” the president said. “Most of
the boys are newsmen. You a newsman?”

  “County sheriff.”

  “Whoops, Harry,” one of the walkers called out, “you get yourself jammed up with the law?”

  Truman turned to the man, a muscular fellow in shirtsleeves and a duffer's cap. Truman showed him a long face before he swung about and continued on. “Am I in trouble?” he asked, laughing, the other walkers laughing with him.

  “Not at all,” Early said.

  “Sheriff, where?”

  “A bit west of here. Riley County, Kansas.”

  “Think I can count the number of votes I got there on one hand. Yours one of them?”

  “No, but my dad's was.”

  Truman, moving at a pace to do a ten-minute mile, aimed his cane to the left at the intersection and all did a “to the left march” onto the Wyandotte Avenue sidewalk. “We usually shoot the breeze on world events,” he said to Early. “You up for that?”

  “Could one of those be the poor treatment of a black man?”

  “Possibly. Here at home last year I ordered the Army to integrate.”

  “That was the right thing to do, sir,” Early said, the fast walk nagging at his leg of shrapnel.

  “You been in the Army?” Truman asked.

  “The Big Red One.”

  “Damn fine division.”

  “About this ill treatment, sir—”

  “I get the feeling this is going to be close to home or you wouldn't be talking to me.”

  “Yessir. One of your Secret Service detail.”

  Truman's smile fled. He turned to the other walkers. “Boys, why don't you go back to the hotel and have breakfast. Tell 'em I'm buying.”

  One in the middle of the pack waved a notebook. “But, we gotta find out what you're gonna do if there's a steel strike.”

  “Same thing I did when there was a coal strike, bust it. Steel's too important to the country.”

  “Can we quote you?”

  “Hell no. Now get along. This fella and I have to talk private, soldier to soldier.”

  “And you're buyin' breakfast?” a man with a camera asked.

  “Didn't I say so, Johnny?”

  “Just checkin'.”

  The group turned and mumbled away. One swung back. “Harry?” he called out.

  “Yeah, Ted?”

  “Can we ask about this conversation?”

  “You can ask. Probably won't tell you anything.”

  Truman set off once more toward the levy district at his ten-minute mile clip. One of those among the Early Risers, a man in a white summer suit, broke away from the others. He fell in some twenty paces behind Truman and Early.

  A Checker taxi swung over. It idled alongside the president, the driver tapping his horn.

  Truman waved his cane, and the driver grinned. “Give 'em hell, Harry.”

  “Did last night. Told those steel men where to get off.”

  “Attaboy. You got my vote if you want to run again.”

  “I'll remember that.”

  The driver, his grin bringing light to the canyon that was Wyandotte Avenue, waved and wheeled his taxi back into the proper lane. He drove on.

  “Anybody you don't talk to?” Early asked.

  “Give me two minutes with that man and I'll know more about what concerns this country than talking all day to the United States Senate.”

  “But you were a senator.”

  “And one of the few who never forgot who sent us there, who we were working for.”

  The light changed from green to red, and Truman stopped at the intersection. He tapped a staccato beat with his cane on the curb while he glanced one way, then the other. “No traffic,” he said. “Dammit, let's go.”

  Early stepped out fast to catch up with Truman already at the middle of the crosswalk. “You should have waited.”

  “I'm out to walk, not stand around. So what's this thing eating at you?”

  Once more in lockstep, the men hopped the curb and continued on, a towering bank building to the right, blocking the morning sun, and Bernard's Department Store to the left, neither yet open.

  “At the train station yesterday afternoon,” Early said, “one of your Secret Service men knocked down a black man. Called him a nigger and refused to apologize.”

  Truman glanced at his fellow walker. “You know this how?”

  “I was there with Mister Haskins, the black man. We were talking when it happened. I ran your man down and he showed me his badge.”

  “What's his name?”

  “He didn't say.”

  “That's not very helpful, sheriff. Anyone see this?”

  The man trailing behind quick-stepped up to flank Truman. “I did,” he said.

  “Saw you back there,” Truman said without slowing. “Wondered who you might be.”

  “Isaac Stephanowitz—Israel, diplomat.”

  “And I'm supposed to know you?”

  “No sir. Very minor functionary, but an able pickpocket.” Stephanowitz brought out a wallet. He let it fall open to a gold shield. “Your man never missed it. It's yours.”

  Truman stopped at the next traffic light. He took the wallet and opened it to a driver's license. “Wally Andrews,” he said, reading the name. “Works the graveyard shift. Saw him when I came out of my room this morning. Pretty good man. . . . None of this convinces me.”

  “But sir,” Early said.

  Truman gave him a fish-eyed stare. “I'm not saying you're not telling the truth. I'm just saying the word of a pickpocket isn't worth much for support.”

  “Would pictures help?” Stephanowitz asked.

  Truman turned to him.

  Stephanowitz held out a camera only slightly larger than a package of chewing gum. “It's a Leika, German-made. I have three pictures of the incident in here and three more of the sheriff and your Mister Andrews arguing.”

  “Mind?” Truman asked as he took the camera. “Never saw one this small.”

  “There aren't many around.”

  “So if I have this film developed?”

  “It will show you what Mister Early told you.”

  “Sonuvabitch.” Truman slipped the camera into his side pocket. He turned back toward the hotel and again set off at a ten-minute mile pace. “I'll call Wally in. If he says he did what you say he did and what this film is supposed to support, he's on the street. I'll not have that attitude in any of the people who work for me. . . . A diplomat, huh?” Truman asked Stephanowitz. “What were you doing at Union Station?”

  “Observing the sheriff before our meeting last night.”

  “Perhaps I should know why.”

  “Let me just say it is a security matter for the new nation of Israel.”

  “In Kansas City?”

  “Do you know Mishka and Ethel Silverberg?”

  “They've captained one of my wards since I was elected to the Senate.”

  “They can tell you.”

  Truman, with a studied glance, once more took the measure of Stephanowitz. “You registered with your embassy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “So they can track you down, get this camera back to you?”

  “I would appreciate that. It was hard to come by.”

  “How so?”

  “I had to kill a man for it. . . . It was in the war, sir.”

  Truman peered at Early as the trio stepped off the curb at the next intersection. “And the man at the center of all this, he a good man?”

  “Yessir, waiter on a Union-Pacific dining car. Before that, a steward on the battleship Missouri.”

  “Well, now that's impressive,” Truman said. “And should I want to get in touch with this Mister Haskins?”

  Early stopped. He took a small notepad and a pencil from his shirt pocket and scribbled. When he finished, he tore out the page and handed it to Truman. “Full name. Lives in Chicago. I don't have that address, but on the note, that's the address of his sister in Kansas City.”

  “Missouri?”

  “Kansa
s.”

  “That's almost as good.”

  “Some of us would say it's a mite better, Mister Truman.”

  “By ‘us,’ you mean sheriffs from Kansas?”

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  September 16—Friday Afternoon

  Home Again

  Early drove absently through the Wildcat Valley, toward Keats, toward home, wondering whether anyone would believe him if he said he had talked to the president, got him maybe to fix a problem. At best, he thought, the response would be what's a good Republican like you doing talking to a damn Democrat?

  He slowed for half a dozen dairy cows ambling along in the borrow ditch and waved to the boy herding them toward their home and milking time. He chuckled. Not every cattle drive is a massive thing. Early drove out of the shadows cast by a patch of hickory trees, squinting when the late afternoon sun, low in the sky, smacked him in the face, a squint he held until he came up on Keats and drove into new shadows from the hackberry trees on his lot.

  Early wheeled his Jeep about, into the driveway, surprised that two cars were there, an Oldsmobile, parked square in the drive near the kitchen, a car that looked like Gladys Morton's—it was, he was sure of it, he remembered the dent in the rear fender—and a Cadillac, crosswise in the front yard, Doc Grafton's Cadillac.

  Screams ripped from his house as he cut the Jeep's engine.

  Early bailed out. He raced for the back porch and the screen, whipped it open and plunged inside. Thelma, in her nightgown, barefoot, her hair unkempt and wild, slashed out with a butcher knife at a blue-haired woman—Gladys, Early's secretary—crouching at the far side of the table.

  Thelma slashed again, screaming, “You'll never kill me!” She sliced through Gladys's upper sleeve, and the woman yelped.

  Gladys grabbed for her arm. “Sheriff, she's crazy!”

  Thelma turned, her knife in front of her, her eyes filled with terror and confusion. “Jimmy? Jimmy? They said they'd killed you. They said you were dead.”

  She rushed to him, threw herself at him, sobbing. Early caught her and her wrist, held the butcher knife up, away from himself.

  Grafton, harried and hurrying in from the front room, syringe in hand, plunged the needle into Thelma's shoulder.