Beneath Gray Skies

by Hugh Ashton

  “Then you’d better move as fast as possible,” remarked Dowling. “Believe me, in cases like this, you don’t want to let the grass grow under your feet.”

  Gatt pressed a bell on his desk, and Christopher entered the office.

  “Oh, I didn’t realize you were going to be in the office today, Chris,” said Gatt. Since joining the American side, Christopher had become “Chris”. “I thought you were going over to Foggy Bottom to talk to the State Department.”

  “I was going to go there, but John Summers told me he was going instead of me. Is that a problem?”

  Gatt and Dowling looked at each other. “No problem,” said Gatt. “Chris, call up the State Department and get them to send John back here at once. Something’s come up that needs him here right now.”

  “Certainly.” Christopher left the room.

  “That’s odd,” said Gatt to Dowling. “There’s no reason for John to have gone over there. Chris is perfectly capable of handling that meeting on his own.”

  “Could he know that you were investigating him?” asked Dowling.

  “No, certainly not, unless he was told by his banks or someone else we talked to.”

  Christopher re-entered the room. “Sorry, sir,” he said to Gatt. “They haven’t seen him at State, and he left here an hour ago. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Call up the police and see if there have been any accidents, or if John’s been found anywhere on the way between here and Foggy Bottom would you, Christopher?” suggested Dowling.

  “What are you thinking. Henry?” asked Gatt.

  “I’m trying not to think of anything right now, Vernon,” replied Dowling. “But I have dark premonitions. Put it down to my Scottish blood.”

  “Well, I don’t have any Scottish blood,” replied Gatt, “and I feel something odd is going on, too. Darn it!” he exclaimed and got up from his desk and stared out of the window. “I don’t like this at all. Too much of a coincidence that he goes missing for the first time I can remember, the day after we pull in his bank records.”

  “Something for you to do, Vernon,” suggested Dowling. “Get in contact with the people you asked yesterday to give you all this,” waving at the pile of paper, “and ask them straight out if they told John about it.”

  “That’s accusing them of aiding and abetting a suspected traitor,” protested Gatt.

  “No it’s not,” objected Dowling. “You never asked them why you needed John’s bank records, did you?”

  “You’ve done this before, I can tell,” remarked Gatt sadly, reaching for the telephone.

  “I’ll be in my office if you need me,” said Dowling, leaving the room and closing the door behind him.

  A few minutes later, Gatt strode into Dowling’s office, somewhat red-faced and breathless. “All it took was two telephone calls, darn you. Yes, his stockbroker was at Yale with him. Good buddies. Told him last night over drinks at the club that I was looking into his financial records. Why don’t people keep their mouths shut?”

  Dowling was just about to give some sort of answer to this rhetorical question when Christopher burst into the room without knocking.

  “Sorry, sir,” he panted. “You were not in your office. I think we all have to go down to the Francis Scott Key bridge and make sure John is safe. The police say there’s a man who sounds from the description just like John, and he’s going to shoot himself and jump off the bridge into the river.”

  “Let the bugger do it,” growled Dowling, almost, but not quite, sotto voce. Christopher looked at him, surprised.

  “No, Henry,” said Gatt. “We go there. I want to talk to the sonofabitch.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever really heard Vernon swear,” remarked Christopher, with something approaching respect, as he and Dowling followed Vernon Gatt out of the room.

  -o-

  At the bridge, police were holding back a crowd of onlookers, both black and white, who were chatting excitedly and pointing to something that was invisible from the roadway. An ambulance was standing by—in case the crazy fool does something, Dowling thought to himself. Vernon Gatt talked to the officer in charge, and got himself through the cordon while Henry and Christopher waited at a distance. Sure enough, it was John Summers standing on the parapet of the bridge, clutching a nearly empty bottle in one hand and an automatic pistol in the other. He was obviously drunk, but not totally incapable. He was dressed in evening clothes. Never went home last night, thought Dowling to himself.

  “Stand back, Christopher,” said Dowling, trying to keep himself out of Summers’s sight. “I have a feeling you and I are partly the cause of all this.”

  Christopher looked at him in surprise. “It will all come out later,” replied Dowling. “For now, just keep quiet.”

  Summers was swaying now, and shouting. “Bloody Limeys come over here and take our jobs.”

  “That’s me,” said Dowling.

  “And,” continued the red-faced Summers, “the coloreds are coming up from the South and taking our women!”

  “That’s you,” explained Dowling to Christopher.

  Christopher shuffled his feet. “I kind of had a feeling that there was something like that going on. Virginia never said anything to me about it, but it made me wonder sometimes, the way he kept looking at me.”

  “Not your fault,” Dowling reassured him. “You never forced Virginia into anything. It was her choice, and the better man won.” He clapped Christopher on the shoulder.

  “So what we have to do,” Summers concluded his address to the onlookers, “is help our Southern brothers keep the coloreds in their place, and help them make friends with the Germans so they can keep the Limeys away from us and away from our women.” He took a long pull at the bottle in his hand. “And that’s why I’m going to use this,” brandishing the pistol in the other hand. “Amen, brothers and sisters. Amen to that. Let me see you all put your hands in the air and let me hear you all say ‘Amen’, ” parodying an evangelical preacher. There was silence from the crowd.

  A policeman standing next to Dowling turned to him and said, “He keeps saying that. It must be the fifth time I’ve heard him say that about the damn’ Limeys and them Seceshers.”

  Dowling grunted. He hoped his grunt didn’t have a British accent to it.

  Another policeman took a step closer to Summers, but he was waved away with the pistol. “Oh no you don’t,” said Summers. “My hand may not be that steady right now, but this little baby has nine bullets in her. I reckon I can hit you with one of the first eight and still have one left for me.” He fired the pistol into the air, and a woman screamed. Summers grinned insanely. “Just evening up the odds a little.”

  The policeman took a step back.

  “He’s crazy as a bedbug,” said the policeman next to Dowling. “And so is that guy there,” he added, pointing to Gatt, who was walking out of the crowd towards the parapet.

  “Listen to me, John,” called Gatt. “Come down off there and don’t be so dumb.”

  “You?” called out Summers. “What are you doing here, and what the hell can you do for me now?”

  “A fair trial, for a start,” said Gatt.

  “Oh God,” said Dowling to himself and hid his face in his hands. “An open court case is the last thing we need.”

  Summers laughed. “Fair? You think anyone’s going to listen to my side of the story? Oh no.” He turned away from the crowd, and with one heroic swig, emptied the bottle before hurling it away from him into the river. As the missile traced its trajectory downwards, Summers bent over to follow its path into the water.

  Seemingly fearing that Summers would fall, Gatt moved forward. “John! Come back here!” shouted.

  Summers turned to face him. His mouth hung open and his eyes gaped wildly.

  “You … you … you rotten bastards!” he shrieked in a voice that seemed hardly human. He raised his hand to his head, and there was a sharp crack and a puff of smoke as he slumped to the ground, f
alling away from the river onto the roadway on the bridge.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Christopher. “He’s dead.”

  Dowling moved toward the prone figure, but was stopped by the ring of police.

  “It’s okay,” Gatt said to the officer who seemed to be in charge. “Let him through.”

  “Are you a doctor?” asked one of the police to Dowling as he squatted down and felt for a pulse in Summers’s neck.

  “No, but then again, I’ve probably seen more gunshot wounds than you have,” Dowling replied, enigmatically. He examined Summers, running his hands over the man’s bleeding neck. “He’s still alive, Vernon, despite that damn’ great hole in the back of his head. Get a stretcher here on the double!” he called out. A stretcher team from the ambulance made its way to Summers. “Stop the bleeding first, and then lift him carefully. His spine might be broken.” He turned back to Gatt. “Why couldn’t the bloody fool have done it properly? This way is messy and inconvenient for us all.” He watched the ambulancemen at their work, and turned away angrily.

  “Excuse me, are you a friend of the man who just shot himself?” asked a reporter, notebook at the ready.

  “No, I don’t think that would be an accurate description,” replied Dowling curtly, and strode off in the general direction of Georgetown. Gatt and Christopher looked at each other and shrugged.

  “I’d better get along to the hospital,” said Gatt. “You get back to the office and hold the fort until I come back.”

  -o-

  By the time Gatt arrived at the hospital, Summers was already in the operating room. Gatt took a seat outside and waited. After about fifteen minutes, he noticed someone sitting down beside him. When he turned to look, he saw Henry Dowling.

  “What the heck are you doing here?”

  “The same as you,” replied Dowling, shortly.

  “Waiting.”

  “Are we waiting for the same thing?”

  “I’m waiting for the bastard to die,” replied Dowling. “Here, want to have a look at this?”

  ‘This’ turned out to be Summers’s billfold.

  “How did you get hold of this?” asked Gatt, opening it, examining it briefly, and passing it back to Dowling.

  “The same way that I got hold of these,” waving Gatt’s keys in front of his nose. “I removed it from his pocket, just as I removed these from your pocket just now. I have a minor talent for this kind of thing,” he explained simply.

  “Give me those!” exclaimed Gatt angrily. “Goddamn it, Henry. Cut it out.”

  “Fine,” replied Dowling, handing the keys back. “I hope you appreciate my also making you a present of the billfold before the police start wondering where it is. When you’ve taken out the list of all of the Confederate agents in Washington, together with their telephone numbers and their recognition signals, you can give it back to the police.”

  Gatt snatched at the billfold, removed a piece of paper, and perused it in near silence. “Did you read that list?” he asked Dowling. “Do you realize the importance of some of the names on there?”

  “Yes, I did and I do. That’s why I gave it to you. I could have kept it and quietly blackmailed them, you know.”

  “All right,” admitted Gatt grudgingly. “You’ve done a good thing. This is information that we’ve wanted for years. But you’re too sneaky for your own good, you know that?”

  After this exchange, the two sat side by side in silence for some time. After about thirty minutes, a doctor in a blood-spattered white coat came out of the operating room, peeling off his gloves. His face was sad.

  “Are you relatives, or friends?” he asked them.

  “Colleagues,” said Gatt quickly, before Dowling could say anything.

  “Well, I’m very sorry. We tried everything, but he died from shock due to loss of blood.”

  “So perish all traitors,” muttered Dowling, not quite under his breath. Gatt shot him a foul look.

  As the doctor left them, Dowling said to Gatt. “Look, I know you think I’m a boor and a bastard and a shit for this. I try to remember that he was your friend, but then I remember that one of my friends is probably very painfully dead as a result of the greed of this man. Don’t expect me to even put on the appearance of grief or attend his funeral.”

  “I won’t,” replied Gatt. “Truth to tell, I feel much the same way myself, but I suppose it’s my good manners or something that prevent me from showing it.”

  “Sod good manners,” said Dowling crudely. “You’re well rid of him.”

  “I suppose I’ll come to see it that way in time.”

  Dowling did not bother to reply, but continued to glare fixedly in the general direction of the door behind which lay Summers’s dead body.

  Chapter 38: In the control car of Bismarck, about 2000 feet above the ground, some 90 minutes out of Cordele, Georgia, Confederate States of America

  He could feel the wrist slipping through his fingers, and hear a desperate wail, and then—nothing.

  Goering stood behind Hugo Eckener and a little to his left.

  “I must congratulate you, Herr Doktor, on a most successful and enjoyable flight. I must confess to you that as a former airplane pilot, my sympathies were not always with the gasbags, but as a passenger, I vastly prefer the comfort of an airship to the noise and vibration of an airplane.”

  “Good of you to say so, Herr Minister.” In honor of the flight, Goering had persuaded Hitler to name him head of the new Air Ministry. He had spent much of the flight in his present position in the control car, keeping, thought Eckener to himself, mercifully quiet, and watching the flight operations with keen interest. Most of his questions had been intelligent ones, and showed that he understood the basic principles of the Zeppelin and its operation. The same standards of behavior could not be said to hold good as far as the other Nazi passengers were concerned. In fact, Eckener had been compelled to ask Ernst Röhm to leave the control car one day, on account of his raucous behavior during an official tour of the workings of the airship. Eckener also suspected Röhm of attempting to seduce the elevator helmsman on duty that day, but he had no proof, as the boy blushingly denied any such thing.

  “My only complaint,” smiled Goering, “is regarding the diet we have been compelled to adopt.” As well as being a near-teetotaler, Hitler was vegetarian, and permitted no meat to be served at his table. Accordingly, all the Nazis had subsisted on spicy vegetable soups and salads, with the Führer’s favorite cream cakes as dessert. The crew, eating separately, were under no such restrictions.

  “Not that I mind too much as far as my not eating meat is concerned,” Goering went on, “but such a diet makes some of us fart like pigs. My berth is next to that of Hess, and I swear to you, Herr Doktor, I had hardly closed my eyes when he started up and never stopped until morning.” Goering laughed. “Can we not turn this human gas factory to good use inside a Zeppelin, Dr. Eckener?”

  Eckener laughed sympathetically. Goering, when he chose to show it, was capable of exercising great charm and it was easy to like the man, while hating his politics.

  The speaking-tube from the radio room whistled. “Dr. Eckener,” came the voice from the other end. “Please come to the radio room immediately.”

  “Excuse me,” Eckener said to Goering. “Leutnant Müller, you have the conn.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. I have the conn,” as Müller stepped into Eckener’s vacated position.

  Eckener hauled himself up the ladder into the main hull of the airship, and made his way aft along the catwalk between the gasbags, gripping the guide ropes on both sides. Bismarck rolled slightly in the thermals coming up from the ground below. It was an easy, comforting motion, and most people seemed to enjoy the dirigible’s unique flying characteristics. On this trip, Eckener had yet to hear of any of his passengers complain of airsickness.

  The radio car was located close to the forward engine nacelle pair, shortening the length of the electrical wiring from the generators and reducing the
risk of electrical sparks from the radio apparatus igniting the airship’s hydrogen. The ladder connecting the radio car to the hull was surrounded by hoops to prevent Eckener from falling away from the ladder, but his heart still raced unnaturally fast as he clambered down the ladder, 2000 feet up in the air, with the airship speeding at 50 knots and the slipstream tearing at his clothes. I’m getting too old for this, he thought to himself.

  Once he was safely through the hatch and his feet on the floor of the radio car, the signalman saluted and handed him a message form. “I don’t know what to make of this that’s just come in from Cordele, sir,” he said with a puzzled frown. “It came through using the Wehrmacht cipher on the Cordele Army frequency we’re monitoring. I didn’t want to read it over the tube to you, because I didn’t know who was in there with you.”