CHAPTER TWELVE
Mrs. Goudeket caught up with Polly and Groff. “So long I slept,” she said, panting. “They wouldn’t wake me up. How’s Mr. Starkman?’
‘
“They think he’ll be all right for a while, anyway,” said Mickey Groff. “There’s a whole field hospital coming in, somebody said. If he holds out until then he’s got a good chance.”
“Thank God,” said Mrs. Goudeket, beaming. “And Mr. Chesbro?”
Polly Chesbro said cheerfully, “I haven’t seen him all day.”
Mrs. Goudeket looked at her appraisingly. All she said was, “I guess he’s pretty busy.”
Mickey Groff coughed. “Uh, the diner up the hill is in business, Mrs. Goudeket. We were just about to go up and get something to eat. Would you like to come along?”
“Why not? Then I got to find a car to get back to the hotel. Imagine.” she laughed. “One hundred and sixty guests, and the only one there to keep an eye on them is Dave Wax. Believe me, Goudeket’s Green Acres is one place they’ll never come back to again!” She was very gay about it, Groff thought…If you didn’t look too closely. He had a sudden picture in his mind of what the last twenty-four hours meant to Goudeket’s Green Acres and to Mrs. Goudeket herself. One hundred and sixty guests. At, say, five dollars per day per head. Over eight hundred dollars a day; and out of that you could pay for the putting green and the swimming pool, pay the salaries of the cooks, trumpet player and chambermaids and busboys, pay the installments on the mortgage and the electric bill. And squeeze out a profit; enough to keep you for a year on what you made in a summer. But, although your one hundred and sixty guests could cancel themselves out overnight, reservations or no reservations, you couldn’t cancel the trumpet player or the mortgage or the putting green…
They had to wait in line, but they finally got a booth in the diner. The menu was soup, sandwiches, and stew—apparently slapped together in a hurry out of what would otherwise have spoiled in the refrigerator. There still was no power; evidently the diner was operating its stoves on bottled gas.
But it tasted good to all three of them. Outside the diner again, with coffee in cartons for Groff and Polly Chesbro for them to drink at their leisure, Mrs. Goudeket said, “Listen, what are you going to do now? You still have business here, Mickey?”
Groff shrugged. “That’s what I came up for. But I doubt I can do anything about it today.”
“So stay overnight at Goudeket’s Green Acres,” she said hospitably.
“You think we can get back there?”
“Must be somebody with a car. I can pay.”
Groff looked around. There were a lot of cars, and not many of them were going. As he watched, a big sedan chugging down the road with a load of dirty-faced children coughed and stopped. A man in a Legion cap, redeyed and bearded, got out and wearily opened the door for the kids. They apathetically began to trudge down the hill to the temporary hospital.
“Out of gas,” Groff said. “They’re all running out of gas.
And then one car that was not out of gas, a low-slung sports job, came rocketing along the road, took a turn too fast and skidded on the mud-slick street. Its fishtail swerved left into a fire hydrant with a crash that made the dishes behind the diner counter rattle. On the rebound the car’s remaining energy sent it nosing to the right through the plate window of a clothing store. By then it was burning fiercely from the tail. Two figures, dark in the glare of burning gas, spilled frantically from the bucket seats and flailed their way through the smoke and jagged glass.
“Come on!” Groff yelled, a general invitation to perhaps half a dozen weary, redeyed men standing about with coffee cartons of their own. They ran for the smoky blaze; it beat fiercely against Groff’s forehead and cheeks. He found himself almost racing crazily into the flames before he stopped. Groff peered into the holocaust and saw nothing.
A man tugged his arm, drawing him back a couple of yards. The man said, preoccupied: “That was Ed von Lutz’s little car. A Porsche. Ed’s got a garage, he had that thing for advertising.’
‘
Groff said, watching two people die, “Why’s he racing it around town?*’
“Oh, that wasn’t Ed,’
’ the man told him. “Ed got killed in his garage hours ago. Water undermined the sills and footing, he was in there trying to straighten up and then the floor gave way and his air-compressor storage tank rolled over him. That wasn’t Ed. That must of been some crazy kid that’s been hanging around thinking about the little sports car ever since he got it in, and he thought this was his chance for a free ride. I guess that was his girl with him.”
The quick, fierce gasoline flame was burning itself out; now the blaze had passed to the clothes on display, the fixtures, the shelves. The building was a long brick row, not battered by the worst of the current but horribly soiled. The clothing store was the central one of seven shops; there were apartments upstairs.
“Let’s get the burning stuff out before it spreads,” Groff said grimly. He walked into the smoke and, holding his breath, came out with a smoldering armful of suits off a rack. He dumped them in the gutter, where they charred and stank.
“Axes.” a man sighed. “Hardware store around the corner .”
“I’ll get ‘em,” shouted Mrs. Goudeket, trotting off. “Save the man’s stock. Don’t let the fire spread.”
The next half hour was a nightmare of chopping and prying at burning wood, dashing out for smokefree air when you had got a little ahead of the flames. Groff burned his left forearm when he brushed once against the still-blistering frame of the car. Midway through the job somebody covered the two charred figures from the car with a pair of topcoats each and they carried them out and laid them on the curb. Later they were gone; somebody, Groff never knew who, had taken them to the temporary morgue in the M.E. church basement.
He woke once from his daze of chopping and prying to find Polly Chesbro pulling on him. “They’re stealing everything, Mickey,” she said insistently. “Can’t you stop them?”
Groff looked around. The store was gutted, the fire only an evil smoulder here and there. He coughed and walked out, sidling around the twisted, blackened little car with the bashed-in tail. He breathed fresh air outside; to his surprise it was late afternoon.
The pile of clothes from the store was dwindling before his eyes. People were picking it over and grabbing; Mrs. Goudeket was screaming at them: “Leave the man’s stock alone! I’ll—I’ll—*’ She took an axe and made a feeble pass at a man in mechanic’s coveralls. He shoved her hard and sent her sprawling. Polly Chesbro began to curse the man fluently; he ignored her as if she were a buzzing fly. Groff went and picked up the gasping old woman. “You hurt?” he asked.
She rubbed her behind and shook her head, glaring murderously. “Loafers,” she said. “Bums without brains to run a business themselves. Look at them!”
Groff looked at them. From the wrong side of the tracks—river in this town. Sick, neurotic faces, shrill neurotic voices as they squabbled over tidbits like carrion crows. Feeble slum types, most of them, but a few of the gorillas that every slum produces in defiance of malnutrition. Men, women and gorillas, there were about a dozen of them. This was his cue to deliver a ringing oration on the rights of property and shame them away from the only chance most of them would ever have at an eighty-five dollar suit or topcoat.
He took up Mrs. Goudeket’s axe and walked purposefully toward the carrion crows. “Break it up!” he yelled hoarsely. “If you can’t do anything useful you can go home and not make any more trouble.”
The gorilla who had shoved Mrs. Goudeket looked at him appraisingly, picked up the bundle of clothes he had neatly laid aside and walked off with them in his arms. There was a nice charcoal-gray single-breasted suit on top.
“Put those down!” Groff snarled. The man just kept walking. There was a crackle of laughter from the others around the pile. Where were the decent people, Groff wondered angrily. They were o
n the fringes and they were waiting. Their world was balanced on a razor’s edge, and they dared not breathe. Let it tip one way and looting would tilt again to law and order; let it tip the other and looting would tilt over into murder.
Groff balanced the doubled-bitted axe in his right hand and hurled it at the departing gorilla. It flew like an arrow; its flat top thudded into the small of the man’s back. He fell, howling, on the soft bundle of clothes he embraced. Groff walked up to him and rolled him over with his foot. The man cursed him and Groff drew back his foot for a kick at his bullet head. The man stopped instantly, glaring. “Go home,” Groff told him.
The decent people on the fringes had come to life. They cried to the carrion crows: “Go home. Leave the man’s stock where it is. Get back where you belong.”
And it worked, because it was still daylight.
On the way back to the school, the GHQ of the town, Groff and Polly Chesbro and Mrs. Goudeket saw again the ruin and the despair, and something new: hatred. A couple railed at a man standing on his porch that he had plenty of room, that they had to have a place to sleep, they knew he had plenty of room—but the man grinned hatred at them and calmly shook his head.
“That,” said Polly Chesbro in a low voice, “could be the paying off of an ancient score. The couple in the mud could be Mr. and Mrs. Town Banker, suddenly poor because they haven’t a bed, and the man on the porch could be the village bum, owes everybody in town, brink of financial disaster, but suddenly rich because he has a bed. This is the day of jubilee, Groff, the day of leveling.”
They passed a house canted off its foundations; they saw a man calmly building a rubbish fire against one corner of it and almost went on, so natural did it seem. His eyes were bright when he looked up, and he seemed only a little offended when they kicked his fire apart.
“It’s the insurance,” he explained. “Twelve thousand dollars, fire with extended coverage. You know what it’ll cost me to get this straightened up? Rent a crane, a big gang of men with hydraulic jacks, a week’s work easing the house back on the footings, and then everything will be sprung, the whole house’ll have to be replastered. Five thousand dollars, easy, and I haven’t got it. So I figured, we’re covered for fire, make a clean start, the kids are grown now and we don’t need a place this size—” Of the adjoining houses he had not thought at all.
They walked him down to the school; he chattered volubly all the way, quite unhinged. Polly efficiently vanished in search of a doctor with a needleful of morphine, and eventually she led one of the army medics toward them.
The arsonist snapped to and said crisply, “Sir, these civilians tried to prevent me from carrying out my mission. If you ask me, they’re Krauts.”
The medic led him away, protesting.
Artie Chesbro said worriedly, “Sharon, are you sure Akslund’s coming here? None of these dopes seem to know anything.”
Sharon Froman said, “Positive. This is the only road in from the north. He’ll have to stop at the check point even if he is a congressman.” She paused, added, “The captain wh^ told me was the detachment communications officer. He got it right off the radio himself.” She gave Chesbro a smile of good fellowship. It never hurt to remind a man how helpful you were being.
Chesbro sighed, “I’m getting tired of waiting here, all the same. These tinhorn heroes are getting under my skin. The next idiot that wants to know if I’ll help out with the salvage squads or let them take this car for emergency duty gets a tire-iron across the face.”
Sharon said sympathetically, “You’d think they’d know enough to leave you alone, wouldn’t you?” There was a siren scream from down the road, and they both sat up straight to look. But it was only an ambulance; it slowed briefly at the roadblock, the troopers waved it by and it sped away.
Sharon took out a cigarette and pressed the dashboard lighter; then she remembered it didn’t work and lit the cigarette with a match. It wasn’t much of a car they were in; but it was the best car Chesbro had been able to rent for what money he had in his pocket. And naturally he wouldn’t have been able to do it by himself, she thought comfortably. She was the one who had learned that Representative Akslund was coming into the disaster area on an inspection tour; she was the one who had located the car; and she was the one who had put the idea in Chesbro’s head of meeting the congressman and riding with him. Nicely done, Sharon, she told herself; and the best part of all was that she had succeeded in making him think it was his own idea.
“I wonder how Polly’s making out,” Chesbro said.
Sharon permitted herself a frown, her face turned away. She said gaily, “Probably loving every minute of it, Arthur. It must be pretty exciting for her. Anyway,” she added blandly, “Mickey Groff’s probably taking good care of her.”
“Mickey Groff?” He looked at her with surprise. “Polly?”
Sharon said, “Well, he did seem rather interested—”
Chesbro shook his head. “Oh, no. You don’t know Polly. Believe me, men aren’t her—” He hesitated, and said, “Believe me, she has too much sense to get involved with a two-bit operator like him. She’s loyal, Sharon. Absolutely loyal to me.” He was silent for a moment and then, without looking at the girl, he said, “Polly’s a funny kid. She isn’t, uh, normal, if you know what I mean, like you’d think a wife would be—but she’s loyal. Absolutely.”
Sharon Froman took a deep, quiet breath. Ah-ha, Mr. Chesbro, she thought to herself with satisfaction, the wife isn’t quite normal, eh? Somehow or other she doesn’t respond when you get that urge, and the years go by, and then you notice that you aren’t getting the urge as often—as far as she’s concerned at any rate. So after a while you don’t even worry when she’s off with another man.
Sharon nodded wisely to herself. Just the way it had been with Hesch and his first wife. She’d made a man out of Hesch, even if he had finally let her down, and she could make a man out of this unpromising lout too—
The unpromising lout sat up sharply. “Hey,” he yelled, “something’s coming! It’s got a state-police escort. Maybe it’s Akslund!”
The congressman was on the best of terms with the Air Force—possibly because he held appointments on three appropriations committees. The Air Force had been delighted to fly him up from Washington that morning, and had been eager to fly him right into the disaster area in a helicopter; but Representative Akslund himself had put his foot down about that. Transport planes were one thing; helicopters were something else.
So the last fifteen miles of his trip were in a car furnished through the courtesy of the state police.
“Unbelievable,” he murmured—but enunciating every syllable crisply and clearly. “It looks as if a war had been fought over every inch of this lovely countryside. I estimate the damage I have already seen is in the millions.” Out of the corner of his eye he observed that the AP man who had tagged along wasn’t writing anything down. Disappointing; but Akslund was too old a hand to try to hint about it. The AP man would be with him for a good many hours yet. There was plenty of time for direct quotes.
The police car ahead sounded its siren. The congressman craned his neck.
“Road block,” the driver explained. “They’ll pass us right through, sir.”
But they didn’t. The driver of the car ahead stuck out his arm and semaphored a stop; the congressman’s chauffeur braked sharp and smooth, and stopped a yard away from the other car’s bumper.
A state trooper on point duty walked over and said, “Sorry to hold you up, sir. You can pass, of course, but there’s a man here who says he—”
Artie Chesbro appeared, panting. He stuck his hand in the open window. “Good to see you again, Halmer,” he said. “I’m Artie Chesbro. State delegation. Perhaps you remember our little chat at the Waldorf last year—the fund dinner.”
Representative Akslund opened the matchless filing case in his head and riffled through the cards. He remembered. “Glad to see you again, Chesbro. Are you in this mess?”
“Up to my eyebrows. From the very start. There were eight of us trapped in a building all night long; one was killed by gasoline fumes, another’s in the hospital with pneumonia this minute. But that’s not the point. I’ve been thinking heavily about relief and reconstruction,
Halmer, and I’ve developed some ideas I’d like to share with you. Mind if I come along?”
Representative Akslund noticed that the AP man was scribbling at last. Eight trapped all night, one dead, one dying. This Chesbro knew what he was talking about. His interests were medium-big and diversified, said the Chesbro card in Akslund’s head; he’d be able to give him the sound businessman’s viewpoint. Akslund knew he had to move fast; the first public figure to hit the headlines and newscasts with a formal plan would skim the publicity cream. How to be a statesman-humanitarian in one easy lesson. Chesbro would save him time.
“Get in,” he told Artie.
“Room for my assistant, Miss Froman?” Artie asked.
“Of course, Chesbro. I need facts and I need them fast.”
Artie waved the come-on to Sharon in the car on the shoulder.
She reached into the back of the car for her manuscript briefcase and gaily ran for the limousine. She didn’t even bother to lock up the car, which Artie had rented with a solemn promise that he’d return it to the garage in exactly two hours. It would get back to the man somehow, she thought contentedly. Big things were happening now; no time for trivia.
The AP man leaned forward and asked: “C-H-E-S-B-R-O?”
“Right. Arthur Chesbro, of Summit. I own a piece of the Hebertown newspaper, I have some real estate, I’m interested in broadcasting. Thirty-nine years old.”
“Veteran?”
“Ah, I was a consultant to the War Manpower Commission; I wasn’t actually in the service.”
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