The Hour of the Cat (52 page)

Huber picked up Anderson's gun and threw away the spade. Sparks pulled a pistol from beneath his slicker and got in the car. Loben ran to the passenger side. A phalanx of towering waves crashed atop the dunes. Huber jumped on the running board and the car took off down the road. Dunne scrambled to his feet and ran in the same direction. He didn't hear a gun shot, but felt the hot, ugly whine of a bullet as it grazed his ear. He kept running. Sparks's car reached Roberta's sedan. She wasn't in it. The doors were locked. Sparks broke the window with the butt of his gun, opened the door, and released the brake. He and Loben went to the rear and started to push.

Huber had hopped off the car and was approaching. The acute, agonizing impact of a bullet in the back of his knee sent Dunne tumbling forward. His face struck the sand. He raised himself up on his other knee and wiped his eyes. Ahead, Sparks and Loben moved Roberta's car so there was space enough to squeeze past. They returned to their car. There was no sign of Roberta.

Dunne fumbled on the ground and wrapped his left hand around a piece of driftwood. His last chance was for Huber to come sufficiently close so that he could slam him with the wood. Ocean and sky were a single curtain of gray, devouring water. Huber stopped a few paces away, beyond where Dunne could reach him. As Dunne made a futile effort to stand, Huber staggered forward, dropped to his knees and collapsed face down on the sand. Roberta stood over him, her hair blowing across her face. She pushed it away and fired a single shot into the back of Huber's head, a coup de grace that finished the work of the other two bullets she had just put in his back. “I told you. Shoot first.”

She knelt beside Dunne, put her arm under his shoulder, and helped him up. They stood on the knoll as the vast sea, a seamless fusion of water and wind, rushed over the dunes and trapped Sparks and Miss Loben. The roofs of their car and Roberta's sedan disappeared under the water's swift advance.

Dunne's weight and the force of the wind made it impossible for Roberta to move. She lowered Dunne onto the ground, removed the cloth belt from her jacket, tied it around his left wrist and her right. She lifted him back up as the water swept over the knoll and plunged them into the churning, unstoppable current. The debris of Sparks's cottage—shutters, doors, chairs, tables, and bedsteads—swirled around them.

His strength left him entirely. He tried to keep his head above water, but couldn't. He felt himself sinking and then the heavy tug of the cloth around his wrist. Roberta pulled him up. As the broken framework of a roof sailed by, she grabbed it and draped the belt over a protruding beam. She screamed at him to hold on. The rain pelted their faces. They swirled in circles. There was no east or west, nothing but water. He sank again, into the cold, enveloping silence of the sea. He closed his eyes. They were all there: Big Mike, his mother, Jack, Maura. All together again. Roberta dragged him up and shoved him across the beam. He gagged on the water he'd swallowed and struggled to breathe.

He remembered: Death by drowning could be quick and merciful. The secret is not to resist.

RAMPAGE IN GERMANY ENDS JEWS ASK: ‘WHERE ARE WE TO GO?”

by John Mayhew Taylor
Special to the
New York Standard

 

BERLIN, Nov. 10—The havoc wreaked on Germany's Jewish population over the last two days represented a major escalation in the Nazi regime's anti-Semitic campaign. Estimates of the number of Jews arrested are as high as 30,000. Most were immediately shipped to concentration camps. Though there are as yet no official figures, it's thought at least 100 Jews lost their lives and thousands more were injured. While the police stood by, Germany's towns and cities reverberated with the sounds of shattering glass as Jewish businesses were looted and vandalized, and homes and apartments raided and pillaged. In Berlin and Munich, the major synagogues were put to the torch. A similar fate befell scores of other Jewish houses of worship throughout the country. In many instances, the crowds that gathered to watch quickly joined in, giving the violence the atmosphere of a street carnival. The event that ostensibly triggered this rampage was the assassination of the German Third Legation Secretary in Paris by a young Jew angry over the forced repatriation of Polish Jews, his family included. This expulsion, in turn, was a reaction to a recent decision by the Polish government to ban the return of its Jewish citizens living abroad. The almost universal refusal by other countries, including the U.S., to suspend entry controls and allow in more Jews has left many in a despondent state. In an apartment near the Kurfürstendam, with the smell of smoke from a nearby synagogue hanging in the air, a group of Jews were offered refuge by their gentile employer. The oldest, a well-dressed woman in her fifties, spoke for the rest when she asked, “Where are we to go? We must leave Germany but where can we go? Who will take us?”

“T
HE COLONEL WILL BE with you shortly.” Colonel Donovan's secretary was businesslike without being impersonal. “If you'd like, the receptionist will bring you a cup of tea.”

“I'll wait in the hallway,” Dunne said.

He sat on the sill cattycornered to the elevator bank. He didn't feel like explaining about the trapped sensation that came from sitting too long, like being choked or drowned. The view out the window was the wall of the adjacent building, but the sliver of space was filled with cool, moist air. The sound of traffic wafted in from below, incessant honks, screeching brakes, impatient chorus of traffic choked in the narrow passageway of Wall Street.

Dunne picked his teeth with the edge of the matchbook he'd grabbed from his bureau. He hadn't noticed the logo until now: BEN MARDEN'S RIVERIA, FORT LEE, NEW JERSEY. He tore out a match, struck it, and held it to the tip of the cigarette in his mouth. As he sucked in the smoke, the flame shrank, flared as he exhaled.

He dropped the still-lit match out the window
. . . Looking for the light of a new love to brighten up the night, I have you love, and we can face the music together, dancing in the dark
. . . It spiraled downward, trailing a plumelet of smoke. Roberta Dee and Elba Corado had taken the train to Florida the week before. It was Roberta's idea. Though Wilfredo was quickly granted a new trial that resulted in his exoneration, she was sure that the taint of the Lynch case would remain and that before long the cops would turn their attention to her operation, either to bust it up or shake it down. She convinced Wilfredo to leave first.

Dunne escorted them to the train. “I promise I'll come,” he said. “Soon as I've wrapped up some loose ends.” He drew Roberta close. She pushed him away. “If you think you can interest anyone in what Anderson had to say about the grand schemes of Sparks and his Nazi friends, forget it. He couldn't convince anyone. Neither can you. People have to learn for themselves.”

Elba waved distractedly at him from the window of the train. She seemed neither pleased nor upset at the sight of the embrace. Dunne guessed that her mind was probably on other things: how confusing and complicated the triumph of good can be, the unexpected—even painful—truths it can reveal.

The train pulled out into the tunnel; its rear lights glowed, grew faint, then disappeared.

The rhythmic, deliberate tap-slap of footsteps, a military stride, signaled someone was coming down the marble hall, march time. Dunne stood in a civilian version of attention. Colonel Donovan stopped the instant he turned the corner. His eyes did a quick up-and-down. “I'm glad to see you, Dunne,” he said. “I'm sorry about what happened.” Walking slightly ahead of Dunne, he led the way past the receptionist and his secretary into his office.

“Please take a seat.” He pulled his chair close to Dunne's. “Too bad about Anderson. I sent him to you because, well, I thought you could give him a hand.” Donovan paused. “I'd no idea that he'd drag you out to Long Island and put you at mortal risk.”

“I wasn't dragged.”

“You got caught in that storm. Poor Anderson was lost.”

Dunne opened his mouth, almost ready to say “was murdered,” but stopped himself. “Colonel, would you mind if I stood by the window? I need a bit of air.”

“Feel free.” Donovan went to the window and raised it higher. It was a mild evening, wet with fog. “Would you care for water—or something stronger?”

“No, just some air, straight up.”

“I heard you were pretty badly banged up. The Czech crisis was such a strong distraction that most people don't appreciate how vicious a storm it was. Towns and villages wrecked. Thousands of homes washed away. Over 2,300 people dead or seriously injured, yet the Weather Bureau never issued a single hurricane warning for Long Island or New England. Can you imagine if, instead of a storm, it had been an enemy fleet? Let's just hope naval intelligence doesn't have its head stuck in the same hole as the Weather Bureau.”

“Anderson saw it coming,” Dunne said.

“If I'd the slightest inkling of how it was all going to play out, I'd never have sent him to you. He was an intelligent, sensitive man, but the war left him a little addled. He'd been shell-shocked at the Somme, in 1916. After the war, he worked for British Intelligence, yet they maintain he'd gone on his own several years ago.”

“He told me he worked for himself.”

“He wouldn't have said whether or not he was an agent.”

“Anderson didn't lie.”

“He never would have been an intelligence agent if he didn't.”

“Maybe that's why he left. He was telling truths most prefer not to hear.”

“My first impression was that he'd become paranoid. But when he came to me looking for an introduction to someone in the prosecutor's office who was connected to that Grillo case, he seemed quite rational. I should have stuck with my initial impression.”

Donovan's secretary knocked and entered. “Colonel,” she said, “your car is waiting. Your dinner appointment is for six-thirty.”

He nodded and went to his desk. He took a large manila envelope from the drawer and placed it next to that day's
New York Times
. He turned the paper so Dunne could see the banner headline:

“I'm dining with the loser. He lost by only 64,000 votes. Lehman beat me in '32 by almost 900,000. If it hadn't been for the size of the Democratic pluralities in Albany and the Bronx, Dewey might have pulled off the upset of the century.”

Donovan opened the envelope and spilled its contents on the desk: several pairs of cuff links, a set of gold shirt studs, and a gold watch and chain with a locket attached. “Unbeknown to me, Anderson made out a will and named me executor. He lived in a furnished room. I gave his clothes to the St. Vincent de Paul Society. He left his small savings to doctors, a married couple, who were friends of his. This is all that's left.”

Dunne picked up the locket and pried it open with his thumb-nail. Inside was an oval cut from a larger photograph: Mathilde Ignatz's face.

“I've no idea who she is,” Donovan said. “Anderson had no family. I'm sure he'd be pleased if you kept it.”

Dunne put the watch and locket in his pocket. “Maybe I can give it to someone who'd appreciate it.”

Donovan took a letter from the same drawer as the manila envelope. “This was at his apartment. It's the only piece of personal correspondence that arrived after his disappearance. The post-mark is Copenhagen but there's no name or return address. Can you make any sense of this?” He handed an index card to Dunne. On it was printed in large letters:

“It seems as though he was planning some sort of rendevouz.”

“He kept it.”

“In Montauk?”

“Not far away.” Dunne recalled a line of Roberta's, about love and the strange places it can take us, but kept it to himself.

Donovan didn't inquire further. He removed Anderson's card from the envelope. “This was in it, too.” He turned it over so the four lines of verse on the back faced Dunne, who picked it up without reading it. Donovan gathered his papers. “I'll give you a ride uptown, if you'd like.”

“Thanks. I'll walk. Need the exercise.”

They rode the elevator down together. Wall Street was still clogged with traffic. “You'll probably beat me walking.” It was refreshing, Donovan thought, to encounter somebody from the regiment who hadn't let himself go to seed. Although a little gaunt, Dunne seemed fit and trim. “Stay in touch, Dunne. I occasionally have use for a good detective. Never know when the need will arise.” He shook Dunne's hand.

“I'd like that, Colonel.” Dunne raised the collar of his trench-coat. He decided to walk up Broadway to Duane, buy a pack of smokes at Liggetts before he went home and turned in early, be fresh and ready when the need arose.