The cops had closed the door behind them. It was locked but with the lock of a cheap theater, a place that doesn’t try to keep people out, does its best to invite people in. I opened the door with half of a nail file I kept in my wallet, went in and felt my way up the stairs and across the theater lobby. I bumped into a few things and resisted the urge to turn on lights. My neck throbbed hot as the beat of a tango in my head. I groped my way along the wall and up the slight rise to the stage. It took me about thirty seconds to figure things out, but I made my way to the vase and reached in. No holster. No gun. I finished around some more—nothing. Then I calculated the distance from the door to the back of the stage. My neck hurt, my ribs were bruised from my best out of one with Povey, and my gun was gone. Something told me to get the hell out as fast as my legs could move, but before I could act on my instincts, the lights went on and a weary voice said, “Looking for this?”
I turned and looked into the audience area, where Spade and Archer sat on folding chairs watching my performance on stage. Spade held up my holster and pistol, the missing prop.
“Do Duke Mantee,” Spade said.
“Petrified Forest,” prompted Archer.
“I know,” I said, stepping off the platform and reaching for my holster and pistol. Spade held it out for me.
They both looked as if they had eaten something that disagreed with them. Spade, his dyed hair sleeked back, his false teeth a little too large even for his age, had a pained grin. Archer, the constipated stork, seemed to have a cold.
“You know where we want to be right now?” Spade asked as I took off my jacket and put on my holster.
“Back in Princeton, home, Florida?” I guessed.
“Even Jersey would be nice,” said Archer dyspeptically.
“Even Jersey,” agreed Spade. “You know where we don’t want to be?”
“Here?”
“Who says he’s not smart?” Spade said to Archer.
“Not me,” said Archer. “I said he was smart, put it right in our report.”
Spade got up, ran his hand over his knees to get rid of an imaginary crease, and looked at me as if I were his eldest son and a disappointment to the Spade family tree.
“We had a nice assignment,” sighed Archer. “Sit in that house, look out the window, listen to the telephone, have a sandwich or two, a nice assignment for a couple of ruptured ducks like us, And what happens?”
“Someone threatens Einstein?” I tried.
“Wrong. You happen,” said Spade, pacing back and forth, pausing to push an upturned chair out of the way. “You flush Povey. He starts shooting holes in hotels and police get involved. Then we get a quick reassignment because we talked to you. We have to come here and deal with people who shoot at each other, while two young …”
“… jerkos,” said Archer.
“Too mild,” said Spade.
“Assholes,” I tried.
“Too strong,” said Spade with a wave of his hand, dismissing both the suggestions. “Whatever, two young guys are back in that house in Princeton drinking tea and listening to ‘Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour’ on the radio. We’re now in a position where we can get shot, Peters.”
“It’s the job, fellas,” I said. “The FBI catches bad guys. Sometimes the bad guys shoot back.”
“But not at us, not anymore,” sighed Archer.
“What’s the use?” Spade said, turning to his partner. “It’s like talking to a mummy.” Then to me, “Peters, what can you tell us?”
“Joe DiMaggio’s only hitting two-thirteen but the season is young.”
“But we’re not,” countered Spade. “Tell us a story but no fairy tales. We’re too old for fairy tales.”
I told them and they listened, asking questions, Archer taking notes. When I was finished, they looked at each other. “I don’t know,” said Spade.
“Who does?” said Archer standing up. “Who does?”
I just stood waiting.
“Here’s how we’re going to do it now,” Spade said. “We’ll pick up on this Albanese story, try to find where that movie was faked, see if it can lead us to a nest of Nazi spies. We’ll try to track Povey, keep a closer eyes on him. You just stay with Einstein when he comes on Sunday.”
“What about Robeson?” I asked.
“Doesn’t sound to me like they want him, at least not yet,” said Spade. “We can ask the Bureau to put someone on him, but ask is all we can do. Truth is we’d be happy to give you a free ticket home if we thought you’d take it, but we know enough about you to know that you won’t, right?”
“We’ve been through this before,” I said.
“Can’t hurt to try again,” said Archer. “You want a ride back to the hotel?”
I took them up on the offer and we drove back in the drizzle. Archer drove. I sat in back with Spade. Archer hummed the Halo shampoo jingle two or three times, and then launched into something I didn’t know. It sounded like he made it up. When we pulled up in front of the Taft, I opened the door and Spade said, “Why don’t you at least send the dentist back home?”
“I’ll try,” I said. “But he had a convention in town and I don’t think he’ll go before it’s over. We’re talking about a dedicated man here.”
“We’re talking about a threat to human health who’s been on the brink of being declared a major disease,” said Archer without looking at me.
“Send him home,” said Spade, showing his store teeth.
“Hey, how do I reach you if something comes up?”
“Leave a message for us at the Princeton house or call the FBI number in the telephone book. Just give the operator your name, and tell her to have Craig or Parker get back to you.”
“Craig and Parker?” I asked, holding the door open as I stepped out onto Seventh Avenue.
“M. S. Craig,” Spade said, pointing to his partner, and then pointing to himself he added, “Percy Parker. But keep calling us Spade and Archer.”
“It adds a touch of romance to our humdrum lives,” Archer said wryly.
I slammed the door and they drove off. The doorman nodded as I walked up the steps. The lobby was Carmichael-free as I headed for the house phones in the far corner. I weaved through night traffic, took an open phone, and asked for Room 1234.
The operator said, “Toby, is that you?”
“It’s me, Pauline,” I said. “How are you?”
“Distraught.”
I looked around the lobby for Carmichael. A soldier who looked about eleven stood under a painting of peasant women at a well. The soldier was carrying a bouquet of flowers and looking around for someone. Two men, both overweight, wearing suits, were arguing about “merchandise.”
“Distraught,” I repeated.
“Can I meet you in the bar?” she asked. “I can get Mona to relieve me.”
“I really …”
“Toby, please. I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Not the bar,” I said. “I’m in the room I was calling, twelve-thirty-four. Come up there.”
“Who were you calling up there?” she asked. “You have someone up there, some woman up there?”
“Just Shelly,” I said.
“Who is she?” Pauline asked, probably tying up phone calls that could mean the difference between Allied victory and defeat.
“He, Shelly’s a he, a dentist,” I explained.
“You travel with your own dentist?” she asked.
“Just connect me with the room. You can listen to the conversation if you don’t believe me.”
She connected me to the room and the phone rang. No answer. It rang again and again and again.
“She doesn’t answer,” Pauline said cattily.
“He,” I corrected, “he doesn’t answer, Pauline. Meet me in the room in one hour. One hour. Can I get to Bellevue Hospital and back in an hour?”
“Sure,” she said, “but why …”
I hung up and headed for the side entrance, resisting the impulse to check my old
man’s watch. Time was wasting and Einstein would be coming to town in less than two days. I hailed a cab and told him to get to Bellevue Hospital as fast as he could.
“What’s the hurry, someone dying or something?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered, rubbing my tender neck.
“Who?” asked the cabbie.
“Everybody,” I answered, sinking back in the seat.
“Ain’t that right,” the cabbie agreed and hit the gas. In spite of the weather and traffic, he got me to the hospital in less than twenty minutes. I paid him and went in.
The war had created a generation of cynics and unbelievers. Before the war you could wander into any hospital and make your way through the place until you found what or who you wanted, without people in white giving you suspicious looks or calling for uniformed guards to lead you to the emergency room exit. Now there were visiting hours and rules and safeguards and people like me to find ways around them. I came armed with scars and lumps and the look of a dazed refugee. When stopped, I was looking for Dr. Hodgdon, whom I was confident I would not run into, since he was busy at his practice almost three thousand miles away in Los Angeles. I took the professional precaution of calling the hospital switchboard from the lobby and asking what room Alex Albanese was in.
“No visitors,” the operator said, phones buzzing behind her.
“No visitors,” I agreed. “I want to send flowers.”
“Room eight-forty-eight,” she said. “But he’s just come back from surgery and will not be receiving visitors or flowers until Dr. Sanchez gives his approval.”
“I wouldn’t think of bothering him,” I said and hung up.
Three minutes later I was searching the corridors for 848 and putting on my dumb, pained act.
“Can I help you?” asked a nurse pushing a cart.
“Dr. Hodgdon,” I said. “I’m meeting Dr. Hodgdon.”
“I don’t know …” She was built like a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and no one to mess with.
“He works with Dr. Sanchez,” I said. I pulled out my father’s watch and ignored its misinformation. “I’m late. God, I’m late.”
I showed her my bruised neck.
The nurse’s face was pink, matching the little cups of pink pills on her cart. She shook her head and perambulated on.
I found 848 and had a story worked out for the FBI agent or two, or the New York Police Department cop I expected but there was no one at the door. Maybe he or they were inside. Walking toward the room, with my shoulder against the wall to keep from being seen too easily from the nurse’s station at the end of the corridor, I stopped in front of 848 and walked in, closing the door behind me. There was a single light in the room, a lamp on a small table near the bed, and a tiny white radio near the lamp. There was also a thermometer in a glass of nothing and a small white towel on the table. The walls were bare, expect for a third-rate reproduction of a painting of white flowers. Albanese lay there alone in the room, breathing loudly. A white blanket covered him up to the neck and something stuck out of his nose. His face was whiter than the blanket. I walked to the bed and stood over him, waiting, watching, wondering when someone would come in and find me and whether I had it in me to try to wake him. Waking him might kill him. Not waking him might kill Einstein and Robeson. I had come this far, certain that I had to get information from the third-rate actor who lay on the bed with his eyes closed and his mouth open. His teeth were neat, white, even, and real. He was young. He was stupid. He had no talent and probably wouldn’t do anything in his life, if he lived, to make the world a better place, but I found myself looking down at a kid. You could have a kid his age, I told myself. If I had a kid, he wouldn’t be as dumb and vulnerable as this one, I told the voice in my imagination, which sounded suspiciously like my older brother Phil, who was a police captain back in Los Angeles.
I could have kept up this conversation the way Donald Duck did with his conscience, but it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere. I’d find Povey and his pals some other way. Or maybe Spade and Archer and the FBI would find them. Maybe. I headed for the door and had my hand on the knob when Albanese said something. I moved back to the bed. His eyes fluttered and opened, but it took them a few seconds to put space and time together and a few more seconds to find me.
“Why on earth are you jutting out of the wall?” he croaked.
“I’m not jutting out of the wall,” I said. “You’re lying down. You’re in bed, in a hospital. You’ve been shot.”
“Shot,” he repeated, as if it were a foreign word. “Shot,” he said as if the word had no meaning. “With a gun?”
“A gun,” I acknowledged.
His eyes closed as if he were satisfied and then opened again and found me. “Why did you shoot me?” he asked. “I’m quite parched. Might I have some water, do you think?”
“Better not till you ask a doctor or nurse,” I said. “I didn’t shoot you. Povey shot you.”
“Directors don’t shoot actors for poor performances,” Alex said, his voice trailing off toward sleep.
Something moved outside the door. Voices. Someone said, “I’ll check this side. You go with the post-ops.”
“I’ll be late for rehearsal,” Alex suddenly said in panic, his eyes open wide. He looked as if he were about to sit up. “I’m a soldier now.”
I held out my hands to ease him back. “Rehearsal is tomorrow,” I said gently. “Your job is safe. A good soldier is hard to find.”
His eyes were closed now and his voice low. I leaned over to hear him.
“Don’t suppose I’m going to die or anything like that,” he said.
“Not a chance,” I assured him. “Doctors say you’re going to be fine.”
His head shook no and he smiled knowingly. “You don’t survive a bullet in the brain,” he said wisely.
“You weren’t shot in the brain. You were shot in the heart.”
“The Tin Man didn’t have a heart and he lived,” Albanese said knowingly as he started to fade out.
“The Wizard gave him one,” I reminded him.
“And then he wept and felt pain. Is that a blessing?”
“I don’t know. Alex, where was that warehouse where you did the movie, Axes to the Axis, Columbia? Povey directed. It’s time. I’ve got lives to save. Describe the men who worked with him. Give me something.”
“Pink gardenias under us,” he said, grinning and looking at the painting on the wall across from him. The flowers weren’t pink and they weren’t gardenias. “We walked on pink gardenias,” he muttered on. “Augustus Mutt and Jeff and Povey and I and we made a movie. Not a masterpiece, mind you, but a start. I’d really like to see that movie. But more than that, I’d like a drink of …”
And then he fell asleep. The door behind me started to open and I grabbed the towel from the table.
“What are you doing in here?” said a woman behind me.
“Laundry service,” I said, pulling my notebook out, looking at the towel, and making a squiggle of gibberish in the spiral-bound ragged-edged notebook that had only a dozen pages left. “Lots of complaints from day shift about the condition of towels, bedding, you name it.” I turned to face the woman. She was a nurse, blonde, hair up, all in white, young, pretty, and disbelieving.
“Laundry,” she said. “What laundry?”
“Hospital laundry,” I said, holding up the towel. “Look at this. Holes, fringes that look like Christmas scarves. No wonder the day shift complained, but look at it from our side. Materials hard to get with everything going to the military. Good help hard to get. Trucks break down and are there parts, even service personnel?”
The nurse walked past me to Albanese, leaned over him, checked his pulse, felt his head, listened to his heart with a stethoscope, and turned to me. “I don’t know how you got in here but this man is very ill. He just came up from surgery,” she said, taking my arm and leading me to the door, towel still in my hand.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Doctor Hod
gdson said it would be all right to do my survey quietly.”
We moved into the hall and she looked in both directions for help. She wasn’t buying my laundry tale. I tried another one. I dropped my voice and reached into my pocket for my wallet, letting my holster show.
“Nurse, you’re drawing attention to us and I’d rather you not do that. I’m Agent Archer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The man in there, Mr. Albanese, has been shot, possibly by a representative of the German government. My job is to keep a discreet eye on him.” I flashed my Dick Tracy badge, the one my nephew Nate had given me and which I kept pinned inside my limp wallet. I didn’t let her get a good look at it before I stuffed it back in my pocket and looked both ways to emphasize the importance of secrecy and my mission.
“Just come with me,” she said.
Normally, I would have been happy to. Her skin was clear, her eyes a deep, dark brown, and the scent of something sweet fought to overcome hospital antiseptic and iodine.
“I’d rather not …” I began, and then was saved by a quivering voice from a nearby room, the door of which was partly open.
“Bedpan,” the voice, male or female, I couldn’t tell which, croaked out in urgency. “Quick. Bedpan,” the voice repeated.
“Bedpan,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”
The unnamed nurse with the strong grip and smooth skin let me go and hurried toward the open door. As soon as she entered, I tore down the hall to the first door marked EXIT. I was back on the street a few minutes later, massaging my neck, which was getting more sore by the minute, reminding me of Povey. I hailed a cab in front of the hospital and got in. “Taft Hotel,” I said, “and I’ve got two questions.”
The cabbie pulled into traffic. But it was late and there wasn’t much in the way of traffic
“Ask away,” the cabbie said, tilting his cap back, ready to give out with New York wisdom.
“What time is it?” I asked.
Smart Moves Page 9