Smart Moves (26 page)

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that joke. The last time it had been me saying “shoot.” That was in Chicago and I still had the little white scar where the bullet went in.

“Zeltz,” I said.

“There is no Zeltz,” said Craig. “That was my arithmetic teacher’s name in grade school.”

“Walker?” I asked.

“He doesn’t know from anything,” Craig said. “We threw his name to you to keep you running in circles.”

“That’ll do it, then,” I said with a sigh. “We’ll work out the details with the real FBI.”

“Enough,” said Parker in exasperation.

“Enough,” agreed Craig, who suddenly stepped to one side like a gangly bird that couldn’t fly. What did fly was a bullet from the gun in Parker’s hand. Shelly yelped and let go of my arm. I fired as Parker’s bullet tore into my arm. I dropped my .38 as Craig or whoever the hell he was backed out of the doorway to give his partner more room. The second shot from Parker hit the wall and jarred his hairpiece. Shelly screamed behind me as if he were a block away but I didn’t have time to figure it out. I lunged forward—gun in one hand, pain in the other—and threw myself against the partly closed door. Craig tumbled backward over his partner. I slammed the door shut and threw the bolt as a fourth bullet came through the door over my head.

I had the vague idea that I should look for my gun, but my eyes took in something else as I stood there. There was Carmichael on the bed, there was my .38 on the floor, but where the hell was Shelly?

Behind me, Craig and Parker hurled themselves at the door. Over the sill of the open window, a bald head rose and then Shelly’s red face. His glasses were clinging, ready to fall from his right ear. I dived for the open window and grabbed at his sleeve. His feet scrambled for a foothold that wasn’t there, which made it even harder to hold him, but he wasn’t in the mood to listen to reason and I wasn’t in the mood to speak it. Then Shelly became dead weight and sagged, almost pulling me over the sill.

“Help,” he whispered, so quietly that I could only read his lips and then he started to sink out of sight below the level of the window ledge like a punctured beach ball in a calm pool. The door splintered behind me. It had done its damnedest. So had we all. I should have thought of something, but all I could find in my memory as I clung to Shelly’s dead weight by his sweating wrists was that once as a kid I had bitten off a fingernail. The fingernail had gotten stuck in my gum behind a tooth. I couldn’t get it out. I had tugged, brushed, worked at it with the stub of dirty fingernail remaining. I think I had even cried, but finally I had to tell my father and face the blast of laughter from my brother Phil. My father, after cleaning his hands, had located the lodged fingernail with the use of a small mirror and a flashlight. It had come out with a tweezer and with it a moment of relief I have never forgotten. Where was my dad now? Where was that tweezer? All I could conjure was my brother’s laughter as the door gave up and shot open.

I couldn’t hold Shelly. I couldn’t hold the blood that was pulsing from the bullet hole in my arm and trickling through my fingers, staining my hand and Shelly’s a deep red. I couldn’t even look back to face Parker and Craig, who would be standing there like ancient imitations of George Raft, guns drawn and ready to shoot me once, again, and for the final time.

“I don’t want to fall,” Shelly screamed, feeling my grip slip.

Now I had a plan. I’d let go of Shelly, dive for my gun, hope I got it before I died, and start shooting in the general direction of the door. I probably wouldn’t make it, but no one was there with a better plan. The problem was that I couldn’t bring myself to let go of Sheldon Minck, in spite of the act of charity I would be performing for his future patients. I clung, sweated, bled, and waited.

Behind me people grunted, feet shuffled. There was a shot and a groan, but it wasn’t me groaning and I was fairly sure I hadn’t taken another bullet.

“Sorry, Shell,” I whispered, feeling the stinging sweat in my eyes and knowing I was about to let go.

“Pull, pull, pull!” Shelly screeched the words he usually reserved for the moment of joyous extraction of the molar, but I had no pull left.

A hand shot past me and grabbed Shelly’s sleeve. Then an arm reached out the window, as I let go and slumped on the floor, looking up at the ceiling and smiling at a curl of white paint that looked exactly like Africa. I was pleased, honored to think that I was probably the first to notice this phenomenon, that I had to remember to call Robert Ripley and tell him, so he could get someone to do a picture for his column.

Shelly came up over the windowsill, a limp penguin, eyes dazed and in need of the glasses that dangled by one ear down to his right shoulder. Whoever had pulled him in was big and dark-suited. The face was blurry and unfamiliar. From my position on the floor I looked back over my head and saw an upside-down Parker, hands against the wall, hairpiece askew. Even upside down he looked suddenly very old. I didn’t feel sorry for him.

“Who?” I croaked, feeling myself lose consciousness.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation,” came a voice from somewhere.

“No, no, they’re not,” I said, trying to sit up.

“We know,” came the voice. “
We’re
the FBI.”

I think I said something about the rented tuxedos before I passed out, maybe not. Koko was waiting for me impatiently at the top of a snow-covered hill, sitting on a sled, a Flexible Flyer just like the one my brother Phil and I had when we were kids—or was it like the one I had given Phil’s sons Nate and Dave? Koko waved to me to hurry. I hurried and got on behind him. I clung to his billowing costume, felt the fuzzy buttons on his chest, smelled the makeup, and was about to say something when he pushed off and we went over the rim and into a white void of snow. There was no difference between hill and horizon. We shot forward. I wasn’t sure whether it was down or up, but it was forward. Koko laughed, a high hysterical scream of a laugh, and I joined him. What the hell? I joined him, not worrying about the snow that was ruining the rented tux, not worrying about a damn thing.

Koko’s laughter was loud, too loud. It woke me up. I opened my eyes and searched for the outline of Africa in the ceiling of the room at the Waldorf, but this ceiling was a different shade of white and the patterns weren’t there. Koko was still laughing. I looked around for him. He wasn’t there.

“Where’s Koko?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Shelly, following my eyes as I searched the hospital room. There was no cartoon clown, but someone was standing behind Shelly.

“Who’s laughing?” I asked, trying to sit up and point at the man. “Him?”

“Jeanette MacDonald,” said Shelly. “On the radio. Charlie McCarthy just made a Nelson Eddy joke. He said …”

“Forget it.” The tux was gone. He was wearing his brown suit. “Is this a hospital?”

Shelly looked around as if he were seriously considering the question, and then confirmed that it was.

“And it’s still Sunday. That’s Charlie McCarthy, it’s Sunday.”

“It’s Sunday,” he agreed.

“Unoriginal or not, I have to ask it—what the hell happened?”

The guy behind Shelly stepped forward past the dentist. There was something familiar about him. I tried to place him from high school, Warner Brothers, the ring announcer at the Garden in Los Angeles, and then I remembered that he was the guy who had pulled Shelly through the window. He was about six-something, dark, built like Lou Gehrig, some age over thirty-five, and wearing a haircut that looked as if it had just come out of the barber’s chair.

“You’re the FBI,” I said.

“Right,” he answered. “Special Agent Kaiser.” He pulled out his wallet and showed me a card with his picture on it.

“Suchart is dead,” he said. “We’ve got Lambert in custody.”

“Who?”

“Craig and Parker,” Shelly explained. “Spade and Archer. They were German spies.”

“No, sir,” Kaiser explained, “they were hired by a Nazi organization. They’re Americans. We hoped that they would lead us to the people who hired them and we could break the Fifth Column.”

“But …? I put in, trying to focus as I listened to him talk and Jeanette sing “The Bell Song.”

“But,” Kaiser said, looking down at me with his hands folded in front of him, “you came along. We were watching those two and Povey, had been for some time. We were well aware of their surveillance of Professor Einstein.”

“You were …” I started and then changed direction. “You knew about Povey? Were you guys there when …”

“… Povey was killed,” Kaiser said. “And when the attempt was made on your life at the lake. We’ve been on the job all the time.”

“You guys could have gotten me killed,” I said, trying to sit up despite the pain in my tightly bandaged arm. “You could have gotten Einstein killed. You could have gotten Paul Robeson killed.”

“Toby,” Shelly said, “they saved our lives.”

“We were on top of the situation, Mr. Peters,” Kaiser said confidently.

“The hell you were,” I said, trying to look dignified on one elbow wearing a hospital gown.

“We’re at war,” Kaiser said patiently, as if I were a stupid six-year-old. “It was vital that we do whatever was necessary to find and destroy the Nazi cycle. And besides, we were not at all certain whether Professor Einstein and Mr. Robeson were not somehow involved or if this might be a subversive situation involving radical causes, even the communists. Both Einstein and Robeson have been under surveillance for some time.”

“Do you hear that?” I asked Shelly, who was listening to Jeanette’s final trill. “That’s the same sewage Craig and … the other two handed me.”

“I prefer Lily Pons,” he said.

“I’m not talking about that,” I wailed. “I’m talking about this man, this … man who thinks Einstein and Robeson are enemy agents, maybe that you and I are enemy agents.”

“I’m not an enemy agent,” Shelly said suddenly. “I buy defense stamps.”

“Take it easy,” Kaiser said. “This entire operation was set up directly by Mr. Hoover. Povey is dead. I think Mr. Hoover will consider this a successful operation, even though we didn’t achieve our goal.”

“I’ve got another question,” I said, reaching over to turn off a Chase and Sanborn commercial on the radio. “Why didn’t you just stop me, catch me when I first crossed the street in front of Einstein’s house or when Povey took those shots at me?”

Kaiser looked at me and Shelly and then back at me before answering, “We determined that you would be a catalyst, accelerate the situation, and bring it to a more expeditious conclusion. We determined that your presence would not cause Suchart and Lambert to abort their operation.”

“Because I was no threat to them?”

“Because they would conclude that while you were a minimal threat they could handle you,” Kaiser explained.

“Carmichael?”

“Thousands of men in the armed services are giving their lives for their country,” said Kaiser. “We didn’t anticipate that.”

Shelly reached for the radio. I slapped his hand away. “But they … forget it. Forget Carmichael. Forget Albanese,” I ranted, turning my back and dragging my aching arm with me.

“They won’t be forgotten,” Kaiser said. “A personal letter from the director will go to Mr. Carmichael’s widow.”

“I’m sure that will be a great comfort.”

“Toby,” Shelly warned.

“Your country appreciates what you’ve done, Mr. Peters,” Kaiser said.

“How do you know?” I asked over my shoulder.

Before he could tell me, the door to the room opened and Einstein stepped in, wearing his baggy tuxedo and a worried smile. He glanced at me, then at Kaiser and Shelly.

“I’ll have to be going now,” Kaiser said, not acknowledging that he even recognized the scientist. “We would appreciate it if the events that transpired over the past few days were forgotten.”

“They’re forgotten,” said Shelly immediately.

I didn’t answer. Kaiser excused himself and eased out of the door. I didn’t hear his feet touch the hard linoleum floor.

“How was the concert?” I asked, shifting my body back to face a weary Einstein.

“Passable,” he said. “Paul Robeson sang perfectly, I played adequately, and the rich people paid dutifully to see the trained seals. Your arm …?”

“… will be fine in a few days,” I said, not knowing the condition of my arm or the world.

“Doctor says about five days,” Shelly added. “Bullet went through, didn’t hit bone.”

“I am pleased to hear that and grateful for your efforts,” Einstein said, stepping close to the bed. “I am sure I owe you more than gratitude, however.”

“I’ll send you an itemized account,” I said. “But I know what you owe me. One dollar payable by check, not cash.”

“By check?” Einstein said.

“I don’t plan to cash it, just put it on the wall of my office,” I explained. “Might impress the clients, even if my office doesn’t.”

Einstein smiled, shrugged, and pulled a checkbook from his pocket. It was worn at the edges, but the checks were clean and white. Using the table on which the radio sat, he made out the check and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No, I thank you for your professional service,” said Einstein. “If you’d like to spend a few days recovering at my home …”

“No thanks,” I said, putting the check back on the table. “Shelly and I have to get back to Los Angeles. Give my best to Walker.”

“Goodbye then,” he said, and then to Shelly, “Goodbye to you also.”

“Goodbye,” Shelly said solemnly, adjusting his glasses. “Can I ask you one question before you leave?”

“Certainly,” said Einstein, plunging his hands in the pockets of his baggy trousers.

“Did you know that miraculous things can be done with modern science to take care of an overbite, even a small one like yours?”

“Shelly,” I warned, and Shelly clenched his teeth and backed off.

When Einstein was gone, I put my head back and closed my eyes. The radio snapped on and Ella Logan sang me a song I’d never heard before. I woke up hours later, with Shelly dozing on the chair near the bed, the radio still on, and my leg aching. I checked Einstein’s check and next to it found an envelope with my name on it. I opened it and read the neatly inked message: