Jitterbug (15 page)

“McReary!”

This time Canal opened the door. “He’s taking a shit. Want me to tell him to wipe up and get moving?”

“I need his eyes.”

“I got eyes enough for us both.”

“I mean a younger set. Well, take a look at this.”

The big sergeant had to swivel his shoulders to get through the door. He picked up the sheet and held it close to his face.

“If you can make it out, I can translate,” Zagreb said. “If it doesn’t make sense it’s Yiddish.”

“These are Cyrillic letters.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means it ain’t Yiddish. It’s Russian.”

“Yegerov was a Russian Jew. You read Russian?”

“My grandfather was a Cossack in the Imperial Guard. I got cop in my blood.” He looked at it again, then put it back down in front of Zagreb. “It says ‘uniform.’”

T
HE WAR WAS
stalled.

He glowered at the American flag pin skewering the fly-speck identified as Pantelleria on the war map in his living room. It had been there for a week, with no new pins to join it, and it was looking stale.

He was impatient, and not a little put out. Since that pin had gone up he had struck three times in support of the Allies, who as far as he knew were sitting around some bomb-blasted villa swilling wine from the cellar while the Axis raped its way across Europe and the South Pacific.

To be truthful, he shouldn’t count the dry cleaner, who so far as he knew was not an enemy to victory, or the girl. They were just pawns, whom he had been forced to sacrifice to preserve the secrecy crucial to his success. The point was he had been
doing
something, and he felt betrayed.

Turning away from the map, he viewed the apartment with his objective eye. The small gateleg table where he took his meals looked naked without the oilcloth. He had used it to wrap the girl’s body, stitching up the ends with a stout needle and fishing line he had made a special trip to Woolworth’s to get. While he was out he had looped a two-inch length of cotton cord over his doorknob, which upon returning he’d been gratified to see had not been dislodged.

After that he’d decided not to press his luck. He’d stayed in the apartment the rest of that day, through the night, and until the following evening, when his landlady left the house in her blue worsted suit and white pillbox hat and white gloves and took her big Buick out of the garage and burbled away toward her twice-weekly night of euchre and dandelion wine with friends in Sterling Heights. He’d waited another half hour, just in case she forgot something and came back, then went out to his Nash parked on the street and pulled it up the driveway and around to the back door. Up the stairs and back down, his stiff bundle across his shoulders in a firemen’s carry. The Nash had a big trunk, compensation for the fuel it wasted in a time when gasoline meant men’s lives.

He was about to heave his burden inside when someone came walking along the sidewalk whistling. He froze, unwilling to make a noise that might tempt investigation; then as the whistling grew louder, he spotted the narrow cupboard built next to the back door to shelter the electric meter. If it was the Edison man, he’d run out of time to throw down the bundle and slam the trunk lid on it. It was a cool evening at the end of a day that had been trying to rain since morning. He had on his two-tone zip-front with the bottom of the right slash pocket cut out to give him access to the bayonet in its scabbard inside his dungarees. He shifted his load, freeing his right hand to reach down and grip the cold slippery steel.

The whistling began to fade. It was just a stroller after all. He laid the bundle on the floor of the trunk, closed the lid, and climbed behind the wheel. The starter ground a long time before it caught. He made a mental note to have the motor looked at. He might need the car in a hurry someday. The enemy was all around.

He kept well within the wartime speed limit. He considered it liberal anyway, but he was under special pains to avoid breaking any laws. He slowed down for yellow lights, rolled to a complete halt at stop signs, signaled all lane changes and turns. He passed two police sedans and remained invisible to both. Rather than encouraging him, however, his success filled him with contempt. Did they expect the fifth column to run through red lights and fly swastikas from their radio antennas? There were times when he felt he was fighting alone.

He took the new expressway west. The four-lane sweep of white concrete made him proud. While squadrons of American and RAF bombers pounded holes into the medieval roads and cart paths of Europe, American surveyors and engineers were building a network of shining highways, blasting tunnels through mountains and slashing straight lines through cornfields and pastures for the speedy transport of men and materiel to plants and embarkation points, filling the charged air with the oatmeal smell of wet cement and the acid stench of poured steel. Eleven short months from groundbreaking to ribbon-cutting, reducing the travel time between Detroit and Ypsilanti from an hour and a half to twenty minutes. He swept past teams of yellow earthmovers with their headlamps on, planing hills for yet more ramps and overpasses, convoys of canvas-covered trucks carrying soldiers from Selfridge field and the National Guard camp in Grayling to the Light Guard Armory, lines of cars driven by defense workers on their way to and from their shifts. The buzzing of the rumble strips under his wheels vibrated up through the soles of his feet like a steady charge of low-grade electricity.

He had not had to use the bayonet on the girl. Her neck was slender, the bones that protected her throat thin and hollow like a bird’s. He had barely felt them crunching beneath the pressure of his thumbs. He’d stared without expression into her congested face, bending her without effort backward over the open drawer of the sideboard and the ration stamps inside. After he’d stripped her body of his shirt and dressed her in her own clothes, he’d noticed her nails had left a row of small semicircular cuts on his wrists, but he’d poured iodine on them and could wear long sleeves until they finished healing. He’d resigned himself to the fact that the war he fought offered no Purple Hearts, no medals of valor—only the satisfaction of having done his part.

He exited the expressway hear Willow Run and followed a country road in transition, a narrow ribbon of raw earth alongside a lane of freshly poured concrete lined with yellow cones, to an intersection, where he braked and for a time studied his choice. At length he downshifted and turned right, toward a stand of woods where no lights shone, away from the farmhouses that had so far withstood relentless industrialization. The road was barely wider than the car, walled on both sides by hardwoods and evergreen scrub, dense enough to double the noise of his bubbling exhaust with its own echo. He used the brake once only, when his headlights caught the glass green glow of a pair of eyes in his path. The deer, a young spikehorn buck, froze for a moment, then found its legs and vaulted up over the bank into the cover of the trees. After that he proceeded slowly, moving at scarcely more than an idle. The atmosphere inside the car became airless. When he rolled down the window on the driver’s side, the ratcheting of the crickets drowned out the sound of the motor.

He congratulated himself upon his discipline. Every atom of him wanted speed. He longed to jettison his load and turn around and fly back to the city. He hated the country. It was an alien place without measure or right angles—sloppy, random, out of all order. Civilian life at its most blatant. He despised its anarchy. He thought the greatest punishment that could be handed the enemy was under way: the bombing and mortaring and bullet-clobbering of its buildings and monuments, the reduction to rubble of its mitered walls and stately streets, the laying open of its civilization to the slathering gluttony of nature. He had spent the spring of 1940 listening to Edward R. Murrow’s descriptions on the radio of London beneath the bombs with every light in his apartment blazing, exactly as if he had tuned in to some crawler of a Halloween story on
Lights Out
, or the Orson Welles broadcast of
The War of the Worlds.
He gave no thought to the bodies under the debris, but to the survivors who after the raids had to go about their business stumbling over piles of shattered architecture, the streets they knew transformed into something at the base of some hideous irregular mountain in Idaho, or some place equally hideous. That was how he had felt walking out of the Light Guard Armory, having been denied his escape from the horrifyingly disordered life outside the military. Only destiny had spared him then, steering him toward his new quarters and the uniform left behind in the closet by its former occupant.

At last he came to a clearing. Really it was only a break in the monotony of the forest where an old fire had burned several acres, long enough ago for a new growth of grass to have covered the char, but recently enough that no new scrub had sprung up. He stopped, set the brake, and turned off the lights and ignition. He sat absolutely still for five minutes, possibly longer; it was too dark to read his watch even had he allowed himself that luxury. He considered it a further test of discipline as much as a safety measure to determine that he was indeed alone in a spot where traffic was infrequent, at least at that hour of the evening. How many cars or pedestrians might visit it after he left, or what they might discover, interested him not at all. Crickets ratcheted, a nighthawk signaled to an accomplice with a short, reedy whistle like a tentative teakettle. Mosquitoes whined in through the open window. He was pricked numberless times but let them feed, not even moving to smack at them, although that was his first instinct. A soldier without repose was a casualty in the making.

Finally he popped the glove compartment, retrieved his black rubber flashlight, and got out to reconnoiter. He directed the beam downward, turning it on only intermittently, memorizing what he saw in its light to avoid tripping over roots and burned stumps in the dark. When he was satisfied of his choice he went back and opened the trunk. Holding the end of the flashlight in his mouth, he drew the bayonet from its sheath and sawed through the stitches he’d taken in the oilcloth to prevent incriminating particles from collecting inside.

The sound of a distant car reached his ears like surf. Noise traveled at night, you could never tell for sure how close it was or if it was approaching. Moving quickly now, he scabbarded the blade, switched off and laid the flashlight inside the trunk, and hoisted the girl’s body free of the cloth. Rigor mortis had made it easier to handle than when he had wrapped it. Using the firemen’s carry he retraced his steps a few yards into the clearing, ducked his head, and flung the corpse forward. It made little noise landing. The girl had weighed barely a hundred pounds.

He drove another quarter mile before he found a place to turn around, and he didn’t use it. Instead he continued until he came to the next crossroads, where he executed a neat, unhurried Y and headed back in the direction he’d come. Before he reached the spot where he’d dumped the body, he passed another car going in the opposite direction. In the beam of his lights he saw a pair of faces, pale and elderly, a flowered hat on the passenger’s side, a fedora with the brim turned up all around on the driver’s. They didn’t look like a couple that had discovered a corpse. Obligingly he stepped on his dimmer switch, taking his high beams out of their eyes. When he passed the clearing he didn’t turn his head.

He felt his heart growing lighter with each mile he put between himself and that patch of woods. He’d heard it was the same way for men returning from the front, though the identical territory had filled them with fear going in the opposite direction. He grinned his Robert Taylor grin when he quit the gravel road for the entrance ramp to the expressway. By the time he saw the lights of civilization reflected on the belly of the overcast he was positively giddy, whereas normally he disapproved of the target they made for enemy bombers. He was an indispensable defender of an invincible country. He turned on the radio, caught the last five minutes of an episode of
Suspense
starring Ray Milland and then all of Lowell Thomas, who hinted that something was about to happen in a place that sounded a lot like Sicily. He laughed out loud. He felt as if his night’s activity had actually freed things up. He was Admiral Halsey, standing on the bridge with the sea wind in his face. He was George S. Parton peering through binoculars from the open hatch of a Sherman tank.

He had changed back into his prized brown oxfords in the car. In Romulus, ten minutes outside the Detroit city limits, he stopped for gas at a Red Crown station, and when the attendant took his dollar and went back into the office for change, he bundled the new pair of tennis shoes he’d worn into the woods inside the newspapers he’d spread on the Nash’s floorboards—the name
KILROY
shouted at him from the crumpled surface—got out, and pushed the bundle well under the surface of the trash in the bin that stood next to the air hose. He couldn’t be sure how clear were the footprints he’d left in the woods or what kind of regionally unique dirt he might have tracked into the car. A good commander protected his flanks.

T
HE FIRST THING
Dwight saw when he entered Earl and Elizabeth’s living room at Sojourner Truth—the first thing
anyone
saw—was the big Zenith radio in a walnut floor cabinet with fluted corners and a big old Buck Rogers dial in the center, all aglow, with a Tigers game washing out of the tapestry speaker. It was the most ornate thing in a small room with celery-colored walls, prints clipped from magazines and mounted in cheap Bakelite frames, and secondhand furniture, albeit clean and decked out with homemade slipcovers and Elizabeth’s unfussy doilies pinned to the worn spots. Dwight wondered how many payments were left on the radio and if any Earl made had come from the couple’s savings.

Earl was sprawled on the studio couch in peg tops and a sleeveless undershirt, with blue-and-yellow argyles on his long bony feet. A forest of Pfeiffer bottles had sprung up on the Sears & Roebuck coffee table, polished to a high gloss by Elizabeth and protected by a crocheted mat with silver thread. An open bag of New Era potato chips squatted on the floor in a litter of crumbs and pieces.