State Party Headquarters
Concord, N.H.
May 3, 1943
For Distribution List “A”
Following note was received through mail slot entrance of Party headquarters last night:
Dear Sirs,
My name is Cal Winslow and I am a public works employee at the city of Portsmouth. I wish to report that last night, during our Party meeting at the American Legion Hall, there was a time when it was requested of people there to submit three names on file cards for future investigation. I was assigned to help collect and assemble these cards.
What I wish to report is that one card listed the following names: Huey Long, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin. As an employee of the city, I used to work as a janitor at the police department. I recognized the handwriting on this card and am certain it belongs to Sam Miller, an inspector for the City. I wish to denounce him as a subversive.
P.S. For more information, please contact me at home, not at work. Please also advise what reward I might receive. Thank you.
Tony came up next to him, and Sam noted the smell of sweat, of coal, of old clothes and bad meals and long travel along back roads and rails.
His brother held out a hand, and without hesitation, Sam took it and gave it a squeeze. The hand was rough from all of the outdoor work his brother had done in the camp. Sam reached into his coat pocket, took out a waxed-paper package he had gotten from the truck stop for twenty-five cents, and passed it over. Tony tore open the package greedily, started eating the roast beef and cheese sandwich. Sam let his older brother eat in silence. When he finished, Tony said, “God, that tasted good. Thanks,” and then sat down next to Sam on the Packard’s wide fender.
“You’re welcome.”
Tony wiped a hand across his mouth and Sam asked, “How long have you been out?”
“Just over a week.”
“You okay?”
“Stiff. Sore. Hope I never pick up an ax again for the rest of my life. And you?”
“Doing all right.”
“How’s Sarah? And my nephew?”
“Doing fine.”
“Good. Glad to hear that. You know… well, you get to feeling odd up there in the camps, wondering how family and friends are doing. All those months dragging by, every shitty day the same as the one before. And Sarah and Toby… good to know they’re doing well. Up there… means a lot to think about family.”
Sam said, “I know they worry about you.”
Tony crumpled the waxed paper and tossed it into the shadows. “Those food packages, they make a hell of a difference, even though the guards steal a third of everything. If it wasn’t for those packages, it’d be stale bread and potato soup every day.”
“Glad to hear the packages make a difference.”
“You know, where the camp was built, it’s gorgeous country. Would love to try hunting in those mountains one of these days, if things ever change. Christ, that’s another thing I miss, heading out into the woods for a quiet day of hunting.”
Sam remembered how Tony always seemed happier fishing or hunting than doing chores or being at school. “How long are you staying here?”
“Don’t know yet.”
Sam knew what he had to say next and was surprised at how it felt, like he was twelve again, trying to stand up to his older brother. “Then you should know this: You can’t stay long.”
“Why’s that?”
“You know why.”
“Enlighten me, little brother.”
Little brother. “Tony, you’re a fugitive. You stay here, you’re going to get picked up, sure as hell. Portsmouth’s the first place the Department of the Interior and the FBI will look. Once they publicize a reward on your head, there are damn few places for you to stay out of sight in this town.”
“Maybe I don’t have a choice, you know? On the road after getting out, this was the only place I could go, at least for now. And tell me, what’s got you worried? Me getting arrested? Or you getting the heat for me being caught in your backyard?”
“I don’t want you to get arrested, and I’m also trying to protect my family. If you think so much of Toby and Sarah, you’ll be going someplace else tonight.”
“You’re my family, too, little brother.”
“If I get picked up because of you, Toby and Sarah will suffer. You ever take a moment to think about that?”
No response, just the old and complicated silence between two brothers who were never really friends. Sam felt like kicking something. It was always like this, always, like he and his brother were two radio stations endlessly transmitting past each other on different frequencies.
“I’ll be along in a while, I promise you that. All right?” Tony’s voice had softened, as if he recognized Sam’s frustration and was trying to make amends.
“Really? You got something going on? Something planned?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Me in my smelly clothes, my feet covered in blisters, no money, no place to sleep, oh yeah, I got plans, brother. Lots and lots of plans.”
Sam felt ashamed, thinking of how Tony must feel, finally being free after years of being in a work camp and not getting anything but grief from his younger brother, save a cheap truck-stop sandwich.
Tony asked, “How’s Mom doing? Any change?”
“She has good days and bad days. Depends on when you visit her at the county home.”
“Next time you see her, if she’s with it, tell her I said hi. And Sarah, she still working at the school department? And Toby still a hell-raiser?”
“Yes on both counts,” Sam said. “You telling the truth about moving on in a couple of days?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“I can put you up someplace, if you’d like.”
“Am I hearing you right? A minute or two ago, you were so shook up you were going to hand me over to J. Edgar Hoover himself. Now you’re offering me a hidey-hole? A hell of a change of heart.”
“No, it’s not,” Sam said. “It’s being realistic. You stay on the streets, it’s easier for you to get picked up. I can get you in at a boardinghouse; a landlord I know owes me a few favors. What do you say?”
“If I say no, will you arrest me?”
Something thickened the air between them. There was a cry of something out in the woods being hunted and killed. Sam said quietly, “I should. I should grab you right now and see that you transported back to Fort Drum tomorrow. You’ve always been a pain in the ass, you’ve always thought you were better than me, but I won’t turn you in. It’s… it’s bad now, Tony, but not bad enough to turn in my own brother.”
Tony nudged him with an elbow. “You wouldn’t believe the number of guys back at the camp who were ratted out by family members, either for a reward or to save their own hides. You’re a better man than a lot of folks.”
“Not sure what kind of man I am, but I won’t arrest you.”
“So you got both of my messages.”
“Hard to ignore them,” Sam replied. “I’ll always remember what you or me would do, whenever Dad got into one of his tempers, to warn the other.”
“Yeah, three stones or three sticks on the porch, and haul ass to Pierce Island to wait until his mood changed. Or he fell asleep in his chair. Or Mom told him to go to the cellar to sleep it off. Tough times but good times, brother.”
“Well, if that’s how you remember it. I just remember Dad drunk a lot, beating on us and making Mom cry.”
“He worked hard for us, you know that. The job ended up killing him.”
“That’s history, Tony.”
“The hell it is. It’s the reason I got into trouble back at the yard. Family can mean more than blood, you know? I wanted to reorganize the union, get better health care for the workers, increase the number of docs on shift… you know, the yard doc, back when Dad started coughing and coughing, didn’t even know about Dad’s service in the first war. So he told Dad to stay away from dust, told him his lungs would get better. Some fucking diagnosis. It killed him.”
Sam said, “That wouldn’t have made any difference, and you know it.”
“Oh, my cop brother, he’s a doctor now, huh? Don’t you ever think that if Dad hadn’t gotten sick, then he wouldn’t have drunk as much, wouldn’t have been so mean to Mom and us over the years? Don’t you?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” Sam said, hating to be put on the spot in the same place he had been so many times before.
“All I know is that what happened to Dad shouldn’t happen to anyone. And trying to do something about it got my ass in a labor camp.”
“Now your ass is out of a labor camp. Where exactly do you plan to take your ass, Tony?”
“You asking me as my brother? Or as a cop? Somewhere I can make a difference. Where else?”
“Yeah, you’re right. You’re always right, Tony, and that’s always been your problem.”
“And your problem is that you’ve always taken the safe and easy way out, Sam,” he shot back. “Star football player, Eagle Scout, cop, kiss-up to the mayor, and good little son-in-law. Or so you think.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Even in labor camps, news gets around. Met a guy out in the woods once, bundling brush. We got to talking, and when I told him I was from Portsmouth, that made him take notice. Seems he had a sister—an organizer from Manhattan, the ladies’ garment union—and she was on an arrest list. Got out of Manhattan ahead of Long’s goons, got on the Underground Railroad, and spent a night in Portsmouth. Should I go on?”
“Do whatever you want.”
“So she spent the night in Portsmouth in the basement of a little house. A little house that was near the river and across from the shipyard.”
“Tony…”
“So don’t use the Goody Two-shoe defense. You’re in the same fight as me.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Oh, yes, you are. Different tactics, but trust me, your tactics—letting people sleep in your basement on their way up to Canada, that’s not going to change things. Direct action, getting people in the streets, fighting this government hand to hand—that’s what’s going to change things.”
“Sure it will,” Sam said. “It’ll change a lot of living people to dead people.”
“Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”
It always ended like this with Tony, with one or the other losing his temper until all that was left were savage words and corrosive memories.
“Look, if you’re going to stay here for more than a day or two, the offer of that room still stands.”
“Please, no favors, all right? I know how to keep my head down from the feds and the screws. So go back home and be safe, and I’ll be out of here in a few days. Look, we all have our jobs to do. My job is other things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as I’m not going to tell a cop, even if he is my brother. I’m outta here, Sam. You take care of you and your family, and I’ll take care of my own things.”
Tony started walking away and Sam said, “I’m glad you’re out, but I’m not glad you’re here.”
His brother called back, “You know, you make this big old act of not liking me that much, and I know that’s so much bullshit.”
“You do? Why’s that?”
“Because of your boy. And his name.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Christ, for a police inspector, you can be dense. Yeah, his name. Where did you get it? A relative on our side of the family? On Sarah’s side of the family?”
“I don’t remember,” Sam said. “It just seemed… just seemed right.”
“Your boy and me share the same first and last name, except for one letter. Tony and Toby. You can call it coincidence. I won’t. In a way, I think the two of you named him after me.”
Then the shadows swallowed him. Sam listened for a moment, then called out, “Tony!”
There was no answer.
After he saw his brother’s Packard leave the parking lot, he started walking to the city. He stood on the wooden bridge going from Pierce Island to the mainland, looking over at the shipyard lights. That’s where it had started, that’s where he thought it had ended, but now it was starting again. Organizing, fighting… back then he thought he was making a difference, but he realized it was just preparation. Preparation for that special day, the day when he would be there to make one shocking difference in this world, to make it better.
Sam was too much of just living in the day-to-day, not looking about him, not looking at the world that needed saving, that needed changing. His brother had no idea what was coming at him.
He squeezed his hands on the guardrail, thinking of his time in the labor camp, recalling all the things he had learned, remembering most the correct way to cut down a tree. Funny, in a time like this, with so much at stake, that you remembered how to slice at the trunk with an ax, knowing it was a delicate job no matter how clumsy it looked, hammering away at the tree, for how you cut it meant how it would fall.
If you judged wrong, a couple of tons of lumber were coming down straight at you, so you learned pretty quick which way to jump to save your life.
He resumed his walk into his old hometown, heading back to Curt’s place. Which way to jump. Except what do you do when there’s no safe place to jump?
The next morning Sarah had toast and coffee for breakfast, while he and Toby had cream of wheat. He and Sarah talked about random things—including a request for him to take the boy to school, since Sarah had to go check on her aunt Claire, who was feeling sickly yet again—but Toby kept on kicking his feet against the table legs while working on a drawing.
Finally, Sam said, “Kiddo, you knock that off right now and get ready for school or you’ll lose your comic books for the week. Savvy?”
“But I wasn’t doing anything!”
“What, you think I can’t hear? You’ve been kicking the table all morning, so cut it out.”
Toby said, “Fine!” and clambered off the chair, heading to his bedroom. “What is up with that boy?” Sam asked. “For the past month, he’s been a handful. Notes from school, the bed-wetting, and now this. What’s going on?”
Sarah poked the crumbs on her plate and didn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know. I wish I did, Sam, I wish I did. If I could, I’d tell you.”
“Sarah, look, it’s—”
She reached over, touched the back of his hand. A nice surprise. “I’m sorry about yesterday. Sorry about not telling the truth. It won’t happen again. But… please… just tonight. I swear it’s over.”
“Sarah, Tony’s out.”
“What?” Her face grew pale. “Paroled?”
“No, escaped.”
“Oh, Sam,” she said, drawing her hand back. “That’s why you went out last night.”
“He left a signal for me. Something from our Boy Scout days. I went to see him at Pierce Island.”
She kept quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You’re not turning him in, are you?”
“For God’s sake, what do you think? I can’t believe you asked me that.”
Her eyes moistened. “I’m sorry. It’s just that… lately I don’t know what to think. There’s a teacher at the school, he has a son who’s in the National Guard, was about to get promoted. The son found some anti-Long flyers in a closet in his father’s office, and the son turned him in. Can you believe that? The son turned his own father in! Just so his promotion would go through.”
“Tony and I, we’ve had our rough patches. We’re not like those fun brothers you see at a Mickey Rooney movie. Sometimes I think I don’t even like him much. But I’d never betray him.”
“Then what’s going to happen?”
“I offered him a place to stay. He said no. He said he’d be leaving in a few days. It’s just that— Dammit, is there any way you can cancel tonight’s visitor?”
“No, I can’t, Sam. You know how dangerous phone calls can be. Messages sometimes get passed hand to hand, through couriers. There isn’t time.”
“We could lock the bulkhead door.”
“And do what?” she said. “Force him to sleep in the bushes? Try his luck at the hobo camp? Picked up, maybe, by one of your brother officers for loitering? He’s my responsibility.”
“All right. The last one. And Tony—forget I mentioned him. Officially, he’s still in prison. Any questions from anyone, that’s all you know. I’m sure the FBI or somebody will be checking up on him. You haven’t seen him, you don’t know where he is. And that’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Days like this, you surprise me, Inspector. Just when I’m going to give up on you and think you’ve been seduced by Long and his people, you come back and stand up for something.”
Sam thought of Tony’s critique of him and said, “I’d rather be seduced by you than anyone else, Sarah Miller, and that includes the President. Don’t forget about that rain check.”
Sarah looked tired but pleased, may be because the argument about their upcoming guest was over. “Oh, sweetie, that’s one rain check that will never expire. Here, I’ll even show you where it’s being stored.” She brought her hands to the hem of her skirt, slowly drew it up past her thighs. He moved his hand under her skirt, on the smooth stockings. He slid his fingers up, past her thighs. Sarah played a little game with him, squeezing her thighs tight, but as he pushed ahead, past the top of the stockings and the garter snaps, she moved her legs open. The skin of her thighs was soft indeed, and he heard her take a sharp breath as he moved his hand higher and—
Toby thumped out, carrying his book bag, eyes downcast. His parents straightened up, Sam breathing hard. “I’m sorry about kicking the table, Dad. I’m ready for school. And here. See? I finished my drawing. What do you think?”
The paper showed some sort of stick figure with a big head. There was a star drawn in the middle of the torso. “See? It’s you, Dad. Do you like it?”
“I sure do,” Sam said.
“Mom?”
“You made his head too small,” Sarah said.
Sam looked at his former cheerleader. “How about his heart?”
“Not big enough,” she said, smiling back, her gaze warming him despite all that had gone on before. Still… he had the feeling that all of this had been some sort of act, from the pleadings to the upraised skirt. The cast of her eyes didn’t match the brightness of her smile.
Toby sat next to him on the big front seat of the Packard, his school bag gripped with both hands, prattling on about a new lady at the cafeteria who kept on dropping mashed potatoes on the floor during lunchtime. Sam thought about the day ahead of him, about his John Doe, about Tony out there in the woods or maybe now in the city, and about their illegal guest coming tonight.
As they went down to the end of Grayson Street, there was movement off to the right at a house that had been empty for a month. It once belonged to the Jablonski family. One day the family vanished, just like that, and no one knew why. If anyone had seen a Black Maria come up to the house late at night, no one was talking.
There was a freight truck backed up to the house, a couple with two young boys standing nearby, huddled together, as three Long’s Legionnaires directed the movers bringing in boxes and furniture. That’s how it went sometimes, in other places. But not in Portsmouth, not until today. Somebody had been denounced to the authorities, and the denouncers got to move into the house of the deported as a reward.
Sam stopped at the yellow and black stop sign and looked into the rearview mirror, watching his new neighbors move in. Then he put the car in gear and drove on.
“Ask you something, Dad?”
“Sure, sport, go ahead.”
“You’re not a rat, are you?”
He turned. Toby looked up at him, his face serious.
“A rat? What made you ask that?”
“Oh, some of the guys at school say cops are all rats. That they put dads in jail for made-up stuff. That they take money from bad guys. Stuff like that. Some guys at recess yesterday, they said you were a rat.”
His wife, operating an Underground Railroad station in their basement. His brother, living God knew how five miles from here, and he, a sworn peace officer, letting him be. Family versus duty. Good guy versus rat. And just how did we get the money to buy our house? he thought.
“No, Toby, I don’t take money from anybody except from the city for my paycheck. I only put bad guys in jail, for real things, not made-up things.”
His son kept his mouth shut, toying with the buckles on his school bag.
“Toby, you believe me, don’t you?”
“Sure, Dad, of course I do.” Toby didn’t say anything more until Sam drove up to the squat brick building of the Spring Street School. Across from the school was a small grocery store. Glistening red on the store’s cement wall was a painted red hammer and sickle, and below that, in sloppy letters, DOWN WITH LONG. Toby looked out the window and said, “See that kid, Dad? Over there by the fence, the kid with the brown coat? That’s Greg Kennan. He told me you were a rat. I’m… I’m gonna tell him how wrong he is.”
“Don’t get into any trouble, Toby, okay?”
“I could take him, you know. If we had a fight.” The look in his eyes, the look of the devil that sometimes reminded him of Tony.
“Don’t have a fight.”
“I just want to stick up for you, that’s all.”
“And I want you to behave and do good, okay?”
Toby’s lips trembled. “I don’t like getting into trouble. I don’t. I… sometimes it happens. I can’t help it. Mom understands. Why can’t you?”
“Understand what?”
Toby opened the big door and climbed out, a little figure running toward the fenced-in asphalt courtyard. Two boys wearing short jackets and knickers were bouncing a ball off the side of the brick wall of the school. Nearby was a small parking lot for those teachers and administrators fortunate enough to own automobiles. Three girls were on the sidewalk, playing with yo-yos. Out in the yard was Frank Kaminski, the brother of the local agitator Eric. The owner of the grocery store came out with a bucket of whitewash and a paintbrush, standing in front of the red hammer and sickle, his shoulders sagging.
“No, Toby,” Sam said to himself, shifting the Packard into drive. “I’m not a rat. And you don’t have to stick up for me.”
In the basement of the Portsmouth City Hospital, seven blocks south of the police station on Junkins Avenue, the Rockingham County medical examiner had a small office and work area next to the morgue. The walls were brick and cement block painted a dull green. The lights flickered as Sam opened the door. The medical examiner sat behind a desk covered with papers and folders, the usual debris of an overworked and underpaid county employee. On the walls hung framed photographic prints of the White Mountains, photos taken by the doctor, a hobby he was proud to show off.
“It’s about time you got here,” William Saunders said. The doctor’s voice was raspy—an old throat wound from his time on the Western Front during the last world war.
“Couldn’t be helped,” Sam replied. “Yesterday both my boss and the mayor had to have a piece of my butt.”
“Hell of a thing, to be so popular,” the medical examiner said. He was tall and thin, with a thick thatch of gray hair, and as he stepped up from his chair, he remained stooped, as though working in the basement of the hospital had permanently weighed him down. “But I won’t give you any more grief, Inspector. You’ve given me a delight this fine morning.”
From a rack he pulled down a black rubber chest-high apron, which he tossed over his head and tied behind him. Sam followed him.
The examination room, like the office, was cluttered. On the far wall were three heavy refrigerator doors. Three metal tables stood centered on the tile floor, the middle one occupied by a sheet-covered lump. Saunders picked up a clipboard and started flipping through the sheets of paper. Sam imagined bits of bone, flesh, and brain tissue stuck in the cracks and grooves of the tiles and metal equipment.
“Why is it a delight?” Sam asked.
“You know what my customers are like day in, day out? A hobo from one of the encampments with a knife wound. A drunk pulled from a car crash. Or some wretched fisherman who fell into the harbor and was found a month later. Do you know how much a body in the water swells and decomposes after a month?”
“I have a hunch,” Sam said. “You still haven’t told me why this body is a delight.”
“Because the bodies I usually get are boring. They’re traditional. They’re easy. Lucky for me, no corpses have come by with their hands tied behind them and two bullets in their skull.” Saunders tapped the clipboard on the feet of the body on the metal table. “This John Doe, this one is a mystery. I’ve been with this good man for hours now, and I’ve only come up with a few crumbs of information.”
“So tell me what your crumbs are.”
“Ah, the crumbs.” Saunders tugged the sheet down. The dead man looked ghastly in the yellow basement light, the Y-shaped incision ugly on the pale skin of his sunken chest. “What we have here is a malnourished white male, approximately fifty to fifty-five years in age. There was no identification in his clothing, and his clothing had no store tags, no laundry marks.”
“Yeah, I know. I noticed that when I first examined him.”
“Something, isn’t it, Inspector? It was like someone—either him or somebody else—wanted to make sure that identifying him would be impossible. Which is probably true. But you see, this poor dead man has one distinct advantage.”
Sam really wanted Saunders to pull the sheet back over the body, but he didn’t want to show a weakness. “And what’s that?”
“He ended up in my county and faced me, that’s what. Any other county in this state, he’d be in a potter’s field. But here, not quite yet. First of all, I believe the man is European.”
“Why?”
“Two reasons. One, the clothing. The stitching is different, the quality of the cloth. Second, his dental work. There’s a difference in American and European dental work—the amount of gold and how it’s used, for example.”
“Can you be more specific? French? English? German?”
“They’re all German now, aren’t they? Sorry, no way to tell which occupied land this man is from.”
“You said he’s malnourished. What do you mean by that?”
“There’s a scale you use when you have a male subject of a certain height and certain age. This gentleman should have weighed between one hundred sixty pounds and one hundred seventy pounds. He actually weighs one hundred twenty. Almost skeletal.”
“Did he have cancer or TB?”
Saunders shook his head. “Internal organs were distressed from being underweight, but there was no obvious sign of disease. I sent his blood out for analysis, but it seems to me, odd as it sounds, that your friend here hadn’t eaten a good meal in a very long time. Some of the hoboes I’ve examined over the years have been underweight, but nothing like this man. It was like he was deliberately starved. However, just to advise you, his lack of eating didn’t kill him.”
Sam felt frustrated, like he was being lectured to. “So you don’t know what killed him. Good for you. Then what was the cause of death?”
The medical examiner stepped up to the dead man’s head. “His neck was snapped.”
“Broken neck. All right, accident or homicide?”
“Homicide, without a doubt. Here”—Saunders pointed to the neck and jaw with a pencil—“and here, there are bruises that indicate to me your John Doe was forcibly grabbed from behind. He had his neck snapped. By someone taller and stronger than he. Left-handed, I have no doubt. To be fair, in his frail and malnourished state, a teenage boy could have probably killed him. There you have it. One older European male, neck snapped, and dropped right in your lap.”
“There was a tattoo on his wrist. A bunch of numbers. Did you see any other tattoos?”
“Not a one,” Saunders said. “But it’s intriguing, isn’t it?” He lifted up the left arm. “Six digits in a row. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Any guess what it can mean?”
“Who knows? Mother or girlfriend’s birth date. A safe combination or a bank account number. Like I said, intriguing. In the meantime, I’ll write up a preliminary report and have it sent over this afternoon. I won’t officially put down the cause of death—I want to wait for blood work—but you can be sure it was murder.”
Despite his earlier frustration, Sam was pleased. Saunders could be a pain in the ass with his lecturing style, but he knew his job. “Appreciate the work, Doc.”
“Let me know how this one turns out before it appears in the newspapers. Half-starved European with a broken neck dropped off in our fair city. Before you go, would you care for a bit of advice from someone who’s been on the job longer than he should have been?”
“Depends on the advice, I guess.”
Saunders slowly tucked the sheet back into place, as tenderly as if preparing the dead man for a long nap. “This is an unusual case, and unusual cases tend to have something sinister attached to them. Be careful, Sam. So many think that the story ends here, with a dead man on a slab. More often than not, this is where the story begins.”
Back at his desk at the police station, Sam typed up another memo, in triplicate, while Mrs. Walton sat glumly nearby, working at her own typewriter.
TO: City Marshal Harold Hanson
FROM: Inspector Sam Miller
An autopsy performed by Rockingham County Medical Examiner DR. WILLIAM SAUNDERS has determined the cause of death for the unidentified male found last night by the B&M railroad tracks to be a HOMICIDE. According to DR. SAUNDERS, his autopsy results have not yet been finalized, although he is confident in his finding of HOMICIDE. No progress has yet been made on the victim’s identification, although the investigation continues.
It was time to notify the state. In New Hampshire, the state’s attorney general was brought in for all homicide cases, and for the first time in his career—feeling just a bit nervous, despite the giddiness of having a murder case before him—Sam picked up the phone, got an operator, and placed the call to Concord.
A bored-sounding woman on the other end of the line informed him that all available assistant attorney generals were at court, with the state police, or otherwise engaged. She promised a return phone call later today or perhaps tomorrow. Depending.
Sam hung up the phone, feeling oddly satisfied. Fine. He would continue the investigation on his own, which suited him perfectly. Next to his typewriter was a manila envelope with the return address of the Portsmouth Herald. Opening the envelope, he slid out a handful of black-and-white photographs of his John Doe, sprawled on that bare stretch of mud. How in hell did he get there? Dropped? Thrown? From where? And why?
He picked up the phone again and dialed a four-digit number from memory. In seconds, he was talking to Pat Lowengard, the station manager in town for the Boston & Maine railroad.
“Sam, how are you today?” Pat’s voice was smooth and professional, as though it belonged over a station’s PA system.
“Fine, Pat, fine. Looking for a bit of information.”
“Absolutely. What do you need?”
Sam picked up his fountain pen. Pat and the cops had a long and cooperative relationship. The department and its officers got a break on ticket prices to Boston and New York, and the railroad station got a break from automobiles parked illegally on side streets.
“What trains did you have come by two nights ago?” Sam asked.
“Can you narrow it down a bit?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” He looked at his notes. “Anytime before six P.M.”
“Just a sec. Let me check that day’s schedule.”
Sam leaned back in his chair until Pat came on the line again. “Got two in the afternoon. One at two-fifteen P.M., the other at five forty-five P.M.”
Two-fifteen in the afternoon? No, too early. The body would have been noticed way before Lou Purdue stumbled across him. So it had to be the later train, for if it were a train that went to the Portsmouth B&M station, it would have slowed before stopping. Which meant maybe John Doe was murdered on the train and tossed off. From there, start checking the train, the passenger manifest, the conductors and the train crew, and you could start making some effort to finding out just who in hell had been—
“The five forty-five P.M.,” he said. “A local?”
“Nope,” Pat said. “Express. Straight shot from Boston to Portland.”
Damn, he thought. So much for that theory. “How fast does the express go?”
“Through town? Thirty, maybe forty miles an hour.”
Sam looked back at the glossy prints of his John Doe, lying peacefully in the mud. At thirty to forty miles an hour, the body would have been tumbled in a mess of broken limbs and torn clothes. But there he was. No broken bones, no smears of mud on his clothes, no identification, half starved…
He rolled the fountain pen between his fingers. “Any unscheduled trains come through yesterday? Trains associated with the Department of the Interior?”
A pause, as though the connection had been broken, and then Pat’s voice returned. “No, nothing like that, and please never ask me that again over the phone, all right?”
Sam dropped his pen on his blotter, hearing the sudden fear in the station manager’s voice. “Sure.”
After a quick stop in the grubby men’s room, Sam went back to his desk. The phone started ringing and he picked it up as he sank into his chair. “Miller, Investigations.”
“Inspector? Inspector Miller?” From the rumble of traffic over the wire, he could tell the call was coming in from a pay phone. “It’s me. Lou Purdue. Lou from Troy. You was lookin’ for me earlier, weren’t you?”
Inadvertently, Sam touched his sore cheek. “Yes, I was.”
“Good, ’cause I want to see you again. The other night you said to call you if I remembered somethin’. And I did.” Lou coughed. “Shit, I know I only got a couple of minutes ’fore the pay phone hangs up on me. Look, meet me over at the camp, okay? I’ll be there in five minutes. Hey, will I get another buck from you?”
“You’ll get more if you tell me what you remembered.”
Another cough, and in the background, the sound of a truck driving by. “Like this, I remember standing there in the rain, waitin’ to see if a cop car was gonna come over, there was another guy waitin’, too. So what, right? But now I remember. His shoes were all muddy… and they was nice shoes, too… but they was muddy like he had walked down the side of the tracks, just like me and you and those cops. Made me think maybe he knew somethin’ about that dead guy.”
“What did he look like?”
“Oh, a nice-lookin’ fella, you could tell that—”
Click.
“Hello? Lou? You there?”
Nothing save the hiss of static. The operator had cut him off after the first three minutes.
“Dammit!” he said, banging the phone back into the cradle, shoving back his chair and grabbing his coat, leaving the station and Mrs. Walton to her typing, before she could say a word.
Back to the encampment he went, making that long walk after parking in the Fish Shanty lot. Like before, the old man who was the unofficial mayor stalked up to him and said, “You, the cop. Lookin’ for another slug?”
Sam poked him in his skinny chest with his index finger. “Are you?”
The old man laughed. “Like I said ’fore, cop, arrest me, I don’t give a shit, and—”
Sam stuck out a leg and then tripped him. He fell to the ground and squawked. Sam pressed his boot down on his left wrist, bent, and said, “I gave you that last one, pal, but don’t think you can screw with me again, all right? And maybe I’m not in the mood for arresting you, maybe I’m in the mood for breaking a finger or two, so shut up, all right?”
The old man grimaced, and Sam knew he should feel guilty, but he didn’t. He looked around at the worn-out cars and trucks, the shacks and lean-tos, the smoky fires and the children, children everywhere, thin and too quiet. “Lou from Troy. Is he around?”
The old man spat up at Sam. “Nope. He was here a few minutes ago. But he’s gone now. Jesus, step off my arm, will ya?
Sam saw three men, joking and talking by one of the shacks, ignoring him and the man on the ground. “Where did he go?”
“Lucky son of a bitch got himself a job. Ran into camp, grabbed his bundle, said he had a job up north, won’t be back for a month. A month! Lucky bastard.”
Damn, he thought. Damm it all to hell. “Did he say where he was going?”
“Nope. Jus’ that he was gone, it paid okay, and he’d be back.”
Sam stepped off the old man, who scrambled to his feet, rubbing his wrist, eyeing Sam, spit drooling down his chin. Sam slid a business card from his wallet, passed it over to the old man with a quarter and a nickel. “You save that nickel and call me the minute Lou comes back. Okay? You do that and I’ll pay you a dollar.”
The old man shook his head. “Think you can bribe me, that what you’re thinking?”
Sam said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
“Mister, that there’s a deal, no matter what you call it.”
A man emerged from one of the shacks, laughing. Sam watched him go over and josh some with his coworkers—oh yeah, they were Navy Yard guys. The four of them—in dungarees, work boots, and heavy shirts—looked at him as he approached.
“Fellas, time to leave,” Sam said.
A pudgy guy said, “Hey, take your goddamn turn, okay? We got here first.”
Sam held out his inspector’s badge. “I got here last, and you’re leaving now, and you’re not coming back. Unless you want your names and pictures in the paper.”
Eyes downcast, they moved away hastily, and as Sam left, a woman yelled at him, “Who the hell are you, huh? Mind your own goddamn business!”
He looked at the shack, saw it was the woman he’d seen before, the one collecting her dollar from the visiting dockworker. She said, “You gonna make up for these guys not comin’ back here? Huh? Are you? You got money for me, a job for me, you got anything, you bastard?”
Sam shook his head and walked on.
Parking outside the police station and walking up the sidewalk, Sam felt as though he could use a bath. The size of the camp ebbed and grew depending on the weather and the availability of jobs, but it had been in that spot by the cove for years. In other places, such as Boston and New York and Los Angeles, the camp populations were in the thousands, or so he had heard. One never saw the camps on the newsreels.
Up ahead, Sam was surprised to see who was coming toward him: his upstairs tenant, Walter Tucker, with a tentative smile, his leather valise firm in his hand.
“Hey, Walter, everything okay?”
“Oh, yes, things are fine.” Walter’s watery eyes flickered behind his eyeglasses; a soiled blue necktie fluttered in the breeze through his open coat. “You see, I was walking to the post office to mail out my latest opus, and I thought I’d come by and take you out to lunch. My work habits aren’t the best, but I do get to the post office every day at noon. So. A lunch to thank you for cleaning out my sink the other night.”
“Walter, really, you don’t have to—”
“Please, Samuel. A free hot meal that doesn’t come from a relief or a soup kitchen. Doesn’t it sound attractive?”
Sam paused, thinking maybe Walter wanted to become more friendly in exchange for a rent reduction, but to hell with it. The curse of being an inspector was being suspicious all the time. “Sure, Walter,” he replied. “Lunch sounds swell.”
They walked three blocks from the police station, joining the thin lunchtime crowd from the shops and businesses. A few of the men in the crowd were sandwich men, sad-looking fellows wearing cardboard signs on their front and back. One said CARPENTER WITH 10 YEARS EXPERIENCE. NO JOB OR PAY TOO SMALL. PLEASE HELP. I HAVE 3 CHILDREN. Sam looked away. The signs were different, but the men all looked the same: unshaved, thin, clothes and shoes held together by tape or string. The sky was slate gray, a sharp breeze bringing in the salt air from the harbor. Walter said suddenly, “Let’s cross the street, all right?”
On the other side of State Street, Sam saw the problem. A squad of Long’s Legionnaires was outside a shuttered and closed synagogue, slapping up posters with buckets and brushes dripping glue, laughing as they plastered the paper over the dull red brick. The large posters showed President Long’s grinning face, and each poster had one of two slogans: EVERY MAN A KING or SHARE THE WEALTH.
They walked on. After a moment Walter said, “Well, it’s not ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, but it’ll do. Sam, do you miss your Jewish neighbors that much?”
“I was just a patrolman when they left back in ’36. My dad said we lost the best deli in town and the best haberdasher. That’s all I remember. There were only twenty or so Jewish families in town at the time.”
“Can’t really blame them for leaving. When Long was elected, you could smell trouble was coming, somehow. So the Jews self-ghettoed themselves in Los Angeles and New York and Miami. Easier to help defend one another if you’re in one place. Still, a hell of a thing. Makes you wonder if they thought it through. Being in one place makes it easier to round you all up, and if that’s one thing this and other governments have learned, it’s how to round people up.”
The Rusty Hammer was a restaurant set on the corner of State Street and Pleasant Street, with a quick lunch service, and Sam hated to admit it, but he was pleased that Donna Fitzgerald turned out to be their waitress. Her uniform was tight and pink, the skirt a bit above the knees, and with a zippered top she had undone some, exposing the tiniest scrap of a white lace bra when she leaned over to give Walter his menu.
“So good to see you, Sam,” she said, putting a warm hand on his shoulder when she gave him his menu.
“You, too, Donna,” he said. “Any news about Larry?”
A wide smile, the same dimple flashed. “Yes, he came home early. And my, it’s so good to see him, but he’s tired and thin, and he can’t sleep that well. But I’m trying to fatten him up, and I hope I can get him a job here when he’s stronger, maybe even as a dishwasher, so long as he stays out of politics.”
“That’d be great,” Sam told her, and with a wink she went back to the kitchen. Walter eyed him, and Sam just stared back until he looked down at the soiled tablecloth.
Where they sat overlooked the street through a set of bay windows in a quiet corner. In the windows, as in so many other windows in the city, was a sign that said WE SUPPORT SHARE THE WEALTH. A radio in the kitchen was playing Rudy Vallee’s “As Time Goes By.” Donna came back with fried haddock chunks for Walter and a cheeseburger for Sam. She gave Sam another smile and another warm touch on the shoulder, which pleased him.
When lunch was finished, Walter delicately dabbed at his lips with his napkin and cleared his throat, “Despite all my problems, I’ve come to love Portsmouth. Here, you have one of the oldest port cities on the East Coast, a place where John Paul Jones stayed as one of his ships was being refitted. Nearly forty years ago, it was one of the great diplomatic triumphs of this new century.”
“Sorry, you lost me at that last one,” Sam said.
“What do they teach young’uns nowadays? The Treaty of Portsmouth, ending the war between Russia and Japan. Big doings here in 1905. Teddy Roosevelt was behind it all and got the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.”
“Some efforts,” Sam said. “Russia and Japan are still at war.”
“Hah,” Walter said, “but not with each other now, right?”
“True,” Sam agreed.
“You know, speaking of history, a more recent history happened here just over a decade ago, about three blocks away. Do you remember that, Sam?”
“No, but I’m sure you’re going to enlighten me.”
Walter moved in his chair, looked out the window, as if trying to catch a glimpse of whatever had been there ten years earlier. He said quietly, “Roosevelt came here for a campaign rally in the summer of ’32. A funny place for a Democratic candidate to be, since New Hampshire’s been solidly Republican since… God, probably since Lincoln’s time. But FDR was here and gave a little talk about the different times he had visited New Hampshire, and the Navy Yard, and just a bit of gossip. It was a Sunday, and Market Square was packed… and you know what? He could have read from the telephone directory and he would have been cheered. He had such magic in his words, such power.”
“Sounds like you were there,” Sam said.
“I was,” Walter said simply. “Took the train up from Boston. He had… he had energy, a confidence, a style that was just what we needed. He won in a landslide. And then, just before he was inaugurated in ’33, he was assassinated. Murdered by Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian with a grudge against power and powerful men.”
Sam checked his watch, was sure that Mrs. Walton was now back from lunch and was keeping careful track of his absence from the office in her all-important Log. “I’d just gotten out of high school. Don’t remember much about the assassination… more interested in girls and trying to get a job to help out my mom and dad. Walter, he was just a man. Okay? Just a man. He didn’t become President. Somebody else did. Life goes on.”
“Inspector, I’m sure you are correct about many things, many times, but you’re wrong about Roosevelt. He was what this country desperately needed. Hell, maybe even what the world needed, a real strong leader, and he was taken away before he could do one damn thing. And the man we got after his murder, his Vice President, was a Texan nonentity who bumbled through his four years and did nothing of note except clear the stage for our current glorious leader, a two-bit demagogue from Louisiana who loves being on the stage, loves crushing his enemies and jailing them, loves eating and drinking and whoring and doesn’t do much of anything else except drive this nation deeper into our own little red-white-and-blue brand of fascism. Don’t ever think one man can’t make a tremendous difference.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t have the benefit of your college education,” Sam said.
His companion smiled wearily. “Not many do. Tell me, Sam. Did you vote for the son of a bitch?”
Sam toyed with his napkin and said, “My first vote for President. And who else was I going to vote for? It was even tougher back then. My dad, he was getting sicker, needed help… and none of the hospitals or relief agencies could help him. He died at home, coughing his lungs out. So yeah, I voted for Long. He promised change so old guys like my dad wouldn’t have to die without medical help.”
“It was meant to be, Long being elected the first time around,” Walter said reflectively. “Unemployment was thirty percent, factories were cold, grass was growing in city streets, people were literally starving. When people are scared, they’ll give power to anyone they think will protect them. So he promised change, and we certainly got a whole lot of change. And none of it good. We could have been a great generation, you know, something for the history books, instead of what we’ve become.”
Sam thought of the dead man, thought about his own job. Do your job and try to keep your head down. That’s all that really mattered in these days of the Black Marias and political killings and lists.
“And me,” Walter quietly went on. “Blackballed from Harvard, and all because of something I did back in 1934 that put me on a list.”
“In ’34? You were an early hell-raiser, then.”
Another faint smile. “Me and a few dozen others. We were protesting the fact that our learned institution was honoring one of its famed alumni, Ernst Hanfstaengl, who had graduated twenty-five years earlier. Good old Ernst, varsity crew rower, football cheerleader, performer at the Hasty Pudding Club, and in 1934, devoted Nazi, head of foreign press operations for the Third Reich. That Nazi bastard even had tea at the home of James Conant, the Harvard president, even though everyone knew the terror he and his friends were beginning against the Jews and others. So I protested, got on a list, and when I refused to sign that loyalty oath a couple of years ago, that’s all it took. Now here I am, back in Portsmouth—”
He stopped, as Donna dropped off the check on the table and said, “Thanks for coming by, Sam. And even with Larry back, don’t be a stranger, okay?”
“Sure,” Sam replied. “And good luck to the both of you, all right?”
“Thanks, hon,” she said. Walter watched her walk back into the kitchen, and so did Sam. “Walter, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”
“Oh. Excuses, I’m terribly sorry. One of the many curses of being a writer. You forget other people have jobs and responsibilities and places to be.”
The college professor reached for his wallet, and Sam thought of something. “Walter, you’ve been my tenant for more than a year. This is the first time you’ve ever had lunch with me. What’s going on?”
Walter seemed to struggle for a moment and then leaned over the table, lowering his voice. “I’m… I’m sorry to say this, but I was hoping I could ask a favor of you.”
“You can ask,” Sam said. “Doesn’t mean I’ll say yes.”
Walter took that in and nervously looked around again. “It’s like this. In my time in Portsmouth, I’ve made a number of friends with our… our foreign guests. Guests who might not have the proper paperwork. I was thinking—hoping, actually—that if you were to hear word of a crackdown, you might, well, see your way through to—”
“Walter.” Walter’s face was expressionless, as though he knew he had pressed too far.
“Yes?”
“Pay the check. I’ve got to get back to work.”
Walter examined the bill, and the next few moments were excruciating, as the older man counted out three singles and then a handful of change. Sam felt a twinge of guilt. Being a police inspector didn’t earn much, but at least the pay was regular. Depending on money to arrive magically in your mailbox from magazines in New York had to be a tough life.
“Let me help you with the tip,” he said, and Walter’s face colored, but he said nothing as Sam pulled out his wallet. On the sidewalk, Sam said, “Walter, no promises. But I’ll see what I can do if there’s a crackdown. Now. Here’s a question for you: Do any of your refugee friends have tattoos on their wrists? Tattoos of numbers?”
“No, I’ve never heard of such a thing. Why do you ask?”
“I can’t say,” Sam said. “Sorry. But I’ve really got to go now.”
“Very good, Sam. It… it was a pleasure.”
A shiny black Buick wagon with whitewalls went by, two men in the front seat. It seemed as though Walter shivered, standing next to Sam. “A Black Maria, on its rounds,” the older man said. “Such evil men out there, to drive and use such a wagon.”
“Yeah,” Sam said to his tenant. “Such men.” He quickly crossed the street and almost bumped into another man. This time the sign said EXPERIENCE IN PLUMBING & HEATING. PLEASE HELP. CHILDREN HAVE NO SHOES. The man looked up at him, chin quivering, cheeks covered with stubble, and Sam murmured a quick “excuse me” and briskly walked back to his own job.
Outside the City Hall and police station, a slight man was pacing back and forth, stopping when he saw Sam approach. He was dressed in a dark brown suit that had been the height of fashion about ten years ago; it had exposed threads at the cuffs. A soiled red bow tie was tied too tight about the shirt collar. The man nodded, licking his lips quick, like a cat that had been caught stealing cream. His face was sallow, as though he had spent most of his life indoors, which he no doubt had, since the man before Sam was one of the best forgers in the state.
Kenny Whalen said, “Inspector, please, a moment of your time?”
“What’s the matter, Kenny? Still upset that I arrested you last week?”
“Price of the business I’m in, including paying for my bail. But please, a word in private?”
“Just for a minute. I’ve got to get back to my desk.” Sam led the forger down an alleyway and stopped by an overflowing trash bin. He said, “Kenny, I still don’t know why you were so stupid to forge those checks for your brother-in-law. The idiot tried to cash them at the same bank, all at the same time. He gave you up about sixty seconds after I arrested him.”
Kenny grimaced. “If one has a shrew of a wife, one does what one can to soothe the home fires.”
“All right, what do you want?”
“What I want… Inspector, you have me charged with six counts of passing a forged instrument. If I’m convicted on all six counts, I’m looking at five to six years in the state prison in Concord.”
“You should have thought about that earlier.”
“True, but if I may… if I were only charged with five counts of passing a forged instrument instead of six, then my charge would be of a lower class. If convicted on all five counts, I’ll be facing one to three years, and if I’m lucky, at the county jail across the street. Not the state prison in Concord. Easier for friends and family to visit, you understand.”
“I still don’t know what you’re driving at, Kenny.”
“You’re a man of the world, you know how things work. If, for example, one of the charges were to be dropped or forgotten, it would make a world of difference for me and my family. And in return, well, consideration could be made. Favors and expressions of gratitude could be expressed. And, um, so forth.”
“This is your lucky day. I’ve decided to review your charges, just like you’ve asked. And you know what?”
“What?” He asked it eagerly.
“I’ve decided not to charge you with attempted bribery along with everything else. Forget it, Kenny. Leave me alone.” He started out of the alley, and Kenny muttered something. Sam turned and said, “What was that?”
The forger looked defiant. “I said you’ve got a price, just like everyone else in that station! Least you could do is tell me what it is.”
“Wrong cop, wrong day. Can’t be bought.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yeah, take care of yourself, too, Kenny,” Sam said. “Drop me a postcard from Concord if you get a chance.” Out of the alleyway, the sunlight felt good as he went up the police station’s front steps. He should have felt a bit of pride for turning down a bribe—and this hadn’t been the first time on the force he had done that—but the small victory tasted sour.
The house, a voice inside him whispered, remember the house…
Up on the second floor, he saw a chilling sight: the city marshal sitting at Sam’s desk. Harold Hanson was leaning back, hands across his plump belly, looking up at him from behind horn-rimmed glasses. Mrs. Walton was at her desk, lips thin, no doubt distressed at seeing the order of the ages upended by the city marshal sitting at a mere inspector’s desk.
“Inspector Miller,” Hanson said. “There’s a gentleman from the FBI in my office, along with another… gentleman. They’re here to see you.”
“About what, sir?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is one of Hoover’s bright boys, with another bright boy accompanying him, are here. You’re going to use my office, talk to them, cooperate, and when they depart, I expect a full report.”
A voice inside him started to nag. Do it now, it said. Tell the marshal about your brother. Don’t try to cover it up. Give up Tony and you can salvage your career, your life, your future. You can tell the FBI you were surprised last night, which is why you didn’t give up Tony earlier. Now, the voice said, more insistent. Give him up now and maybe they won’t dig more, find out about the Underground Railroad station running out of your basement, and all will be good, and—
“I understand what you want, sir,” Sam said.
“Good. Now get your ass in there and do what you have to do so I can have my goddamn office back.”
Sam hesitated. Could he trust Hanson to contact Sarah, tell her to grab the boy and leave town before the FBI shipped them off to Utah in a boxcar? And if he asked his boss to do something like that, wasn’t he admitting he was guilty and—
Could he trust Hanson? Or anyone?
Sam walked to the door. He didn’t bother knocking. He just opened it and went in, keeping his head high.
He entered the marshal’s office into a dense fugue of cigarette smoke. One of the visitors was sitting in Hanson’s chair. He was a ruddy-faced, large-framed man with dark wavy hair. He had on a loud gray and white pin-striped suit that said flashy big city to Sam, and his black wide-brimmed hat was on the marshal’s desk. Sitting in one of the captain’s chairs was a second man. His suit was plain dark gray, and his blond hair was fine and closely trimmed. Unblinking light blue eyes looked out from behind round wire-rimmed glasses. His own black hat was in his lap.
“Inspector Miller?” asked the man in the pin-striped suit. He stood up from Hanson’s leather chair, holding out a hand.
“That’s right,” Sam replied, feeling the strong grip as he shook the man’s hand.
“Special Agent Jack LaCouture, FBI, assigned to the Boston office.” LaCouture’s voice was Southern—no doubt Louisianan, for the Kingfish made sure a lot of his boys were sprinkled throughout the federal government.
“Glad to meet you,” Sam said, knowing his tone of voice was expressing just the opposite. LaCouture motioned to his companion, who stood up. Sam froze, knowing the mild-looking guy, who resembled a grocery clerk or something equally bland, must be with the labor camp bureau of the Department of the Interior. In a very few seconds, he knew, everything was going to the shits.
So be it, he thought.
But Tony wasn’t mentioned at all. Instead, the FBI man said, “Allow me to introduce my traveling companion. Hans Groebke, from the German consulate in Boston.”
Groebke gave a brisk nod, and his hand was cool as Sam did the usual grip-and-release. Sam made out the faint scent of cologne.
“A pleasure,” the German said in a thick accent, and he turned to LaCouture and rattled off something quick in German. LaCouture listened and said to Sam, “Hans says he’s glad to make your acquaintance and hopes you will be able to assist him in this matter. He also apologizes for his rough English. He doesn’t sprechen the King’s language that well, you know?”
They all sat down and Sam said, “What kind of matter are you interested in?”
LaCouture answered, “The dead man by your railroad tracks the other night. We’d like to know how your investigation is proceeding.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said, feeling his head spin: the body, not Tony, not the Underground Railroad, that was why the FBI was here! “Why is the German consulate concerned about a dead man?”
LaCouture smiled, revealing firm and white teeth. “First of all, it appears your body may be that of a German citizen, perhaps here illegally. Second, the German consulate doesn’t give a crap about the body. But Herr Groebke does, as a member of the Geheime Staatspolizei.”
“The Geheime… I’m sorry, what’s that again?”
“Geheime Staatspolizei,” LaCouture repeated patiently. “The Secret State Police. More commonly known as the Gestapo. Hans is stationed at the Boston consulate.”
How many lurid newspaper stories had Sam read and potboiler movies had he seen, all about the sinister Gestapo in Berlin and Vienna and Paris and London, keeping track of illegals, Jews, anybody opposed to the Nazi regime? Dark stories of torture, of the midnight knock on the door, to be dragged out of your home and never seen again. The Gestapo had replaced the bogeyman to scare little boys and girls at night.
But Groebke looked like an accountant. Nothing like the ten-foot monster in a black leather trench coat, slaughtering innocents across a half-dozen occupied countries in Europe.
Sam said, “I didn’t know the Gestapo were here in the States.”
“Sure,” LaCouture said. “All the embassies and consulates have the Gestapo kicking around. The long arm of Hitler reaches lots of places, and there’s a fair number of Germans who live here. The Gestapo likes to keep their eyes on everything, make sure they’re good little Germans, even in the States.”
Groebke said something in German to the FBI man, and LaCouture snapped something back. “Sorry, Inspector. Hans is a bit impatient. Krauts like everything to be neat and tidy and all official. So, let’s cut to the chase: Did you have a body pop up here two days ago?”
“Yes, we did. An old man, no identification. A homicide. Found near railroad tracks down by a cove off the harbor.”
“Any suspects?”
“No,” Sam said.
“Did he have any luggage with him?” LaCouture asked.
“No.”
“Any papers or photographs?”
“Nothing.”
LaCouture translated the last few answers for the German. Then he said, “How was the body found?”
“A hobo walking the tracks found it. He also thought he saw someone in the area who might be of interest, but I haven’t been able to recontact him.”
LaCouture rattled off another string of German and then said, “Go on.”
Sam looked at the blank, smooth face of the German and thought, Sure, an accountant, a bank accountant who could toss a family from their home for one late mortgage payment without blinking an eye.
He said, “That’s about it. No other witnesses, not much information. I think the body—”
LaCouture interrupted. “I’m sure you were quite thorough. But from this moment forward, this matter is now under the jurisdiction of the FBI. All right, Detective?”
“Inspector,” Sam corrected dryly. “My position within the department is inspector, not detective.”
“My apologies, Inspector.” The FBI guy smilied without a trace of remorse. “We’ll be talking to your local medical examiner later today, and we want a copy of your report.”
“You’ll get what you want,” Sam said, “but I’d like to know why you’re so interested in this body. And how did you find out about it?”
“You sent a telex to the state police,” LaCouture said. “We get copies of all those kinds of telexes. The Germans had been looking for this particular character for reasons they’ve kept to themselves.”
“So you can’t say who he is and why he was here illegally?”
“Even if I could, I won’t, because it’s now none of your business,” LaCouture said. “Because we believe the body is that of a German illegal, it’s a diplomatic matter, and because the investigating arm of the German government is the Gestapo, it’s a Gestapo matter. And because we don’t like the Gestapo traipsing across our fair land without an escort, it’s also an FBI matter. Do I make myself clear?”
“Quite clear, but I still want to know—”
LaCouture folded his large hands, and Sam saw the man’s nails gleamed with polish. “You seem to be a curious man. So am I. And I’m curious how a patrol sergeant like you became a police inspector while your older brother is serving a six-year sentence in a labor camp. A labor camp in New York, correct? The one near Fort Drum? The Iroquois camp?”
The German looked like he was enjoying seeing the two Americans sparring. Sam felt his mouth go dry. So Tony’s name was going to come up after all. “Yes,” Sam said. “My brother is serving a six-year sentence. For organizing a union. Used to be a time when that wasn’t illegal.”
“There was a time when booze was legal, became illegal, and then became legal again. Who the hell can keep track nowadays?” LaCouture chuckled.
Sam looked at the German and said, “You’ll get my report. I’ll have Mrs. Walton type up a copy, should be ready in under an hour. But I still want to know something.”
“I don’t care what you want to know, I don’t have anything more to say to you.”
“The question’s not for you,” Sam said. “It’s for the Gestapo, if that’s all right.”
LaCouture glanced at Groebke. Then he said, “Go ahead, Inspector. But make it snappy.”
Sam said, “This man was half starved. And there were numbers tattooed on his wrist. The numerals nine-one-one-two-eight-three. Can he explain that?”
LaCouture spoke a sentence or two to the German, who nodded in comprehension. Groebke said something slow and definite, and LaCouture told Sam, “He said he doesn’t know the man’s eating habits. As to the tattoo, perhaps someday you will be in Berlin, at Gestapo headquarters at Eight Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and then he may tell you. But not here, and not now.”
“Not much of an answer,” Sam remarked.
LaCouture motioned to the German, stood up, and grabbed his hat. “Only one you’re going to get today. Now, this has been cheerful and all that, but you mind not wasting our fucking time any longer?”
Sam could feel his face burning. “No. I don’t mind.”
The German made a short bow. “Herr Inspector, danke. Thank you. Goodbye.”
“Yeah. So long.”
After they left, Marshal Hanson came right in and reclaimed his seat with a look of distaste that somebody else could have occupied his place of honor and polluted his office with cigarette smoke. He folded his hands and said, “Well?”
“The FBI guy’s name is LaCouture. His buddy there is from the Gestapo. Groebke. They say the body from the other night was a German illegal.”
“So they’ve taken the case from you. Now a federal matter. Good.”
“Good?” Sam asked. “What’s good about it? They waltzed right in here and took my case away… a homicide! You know how the FBI operates. We’re never going to hear anything more about it.”
“We’re cooperating,” Hanson said gruffly. “Which is the smart thing to do, so we don’t piss off the wrong people and the FBI and Long’s Legionnaires leave us alone. I know this was your first homicide, and you wanted to see it through. But I also know what your caseload is like. If you spend more time on your caseload and less time worrying about a matter now belonging to the Germans and the feds, then I’ll be happy, the people of Portsmouth will be happy, and so will the police commission. Got it?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Fine. Now, about the other night. I was glad to see you at the Party meeting. Have you thought about what I said—about becoming more active?”
“No, I really haven’t. With this John Doe investigation, I haven’t considered it much.”
“Do you think I was joking, Sam? This is no longer a request. Soon I’ll be putting in your name for the county steering committee. There’s a vote, but it’s just a formality. And I expect a return favor from you concerning your father-in-law.”
Sam felt as if the day and everything else were slipping away from him; he thought about what Sean had said. Nats versus Staties. “But the mayor, he’s said something similar about me—”
“Divided loyalties, Sam? Or do I have to remind you who signs your time sheet?”
“No, you don’t have to remind me.”
“I didn’t think I’d have to,” Hanson said, looking triumphant. “What’s ahead for you?”
“I told the FBI they could have copies of my reports later today. And that Mrs. Walton would type them up for them.”
Now Hanson didn’t look happy. “Since when you do start making commitments for my secretary?”
Sam stood up and pushed the chair back toward the desk. The legs squeaked gratingly against the wooden planks. “Since you told me to cooperate, that’s when,” Sam replied.
Sam spent a few minutes at his desk, staring at the piles of paperwork. Then, restless and irritable, he headed for the stairs. Mrs. Walton—frowning because of the extra typing—called, “Inspector?”
“Off for a walk,” he called back.
She smirked. “A walk.”
“Sure. Put it in your log. W-A-L-K. A walk.”
He went down the wooden stairs two at a time, through the lobby, and then outside. It was cloudy, and the salt smell from the harbor was strong.
His very first homicide, taken away from him. And not by the state police; no, by Hoover’s own SS, the FBI. With the assistance of the Gestapo. And the assistance of his boss. Who would have thought?
Dammit.
He started walking away from the police station, heading south. Before him, a small gang of truant boys were huddling around something in the gutter. When they saw him approach, they looked up but kept at work, each holding a paper sack. Cig boys, picking up discarded cigarette butts to strip out the tobacco and then roll their own, selling them for a penny apiece on the streets.
Not much of a crime, but still.
“Beat it, guys,” Sam said. “You’re blocking traffic.”
They scattered, but one boy with a cloth cap and patched jacket and black facial hair sprouting through his pimples said, “Screw you, bud,” and lashed out with a fist.
Something struck Sam’s right wrist. He grabbed at his arm and stepped back, but by the time he reached for his revolver, the boys were gone, racing down a trash-strewn alleyway. He looked at his wrist. Part of the coat sleeve was torn; the little thug had sliced at him with a knife! He pushed the tattered threads together and looked down the empty alleyway, holding his arm.
A few feet in another direction… could have been buried in his chest.
He lowered his arms, kept on walking. He couldn’t do anything about those little bastards. Too much was going on. Damn Tony for breaking out and making everything even more dangerous. To add to the fun, he had been drafted twice this week: for the state National Guard, and now the county steering committee for the Party. What would Larry Young do when he heard his political rival was sponsoring his son-in-law?
Crap. Where the hell was he going?
Up ahead was the Portsmouth Hospital on a slight rise of land. It was as if his mind were directing him where to go.
Sam found William Saunders sitting at his desk, smoking a cigarette. The doctor looked up from a sheaf of papers. “Inspector Miller, to what do I owe this pleasure?”
“Looking to see if you’ve had any special visitors lately.”
Saunders tapped some ash from the cigarette. “Alive or dead?”
“Alive, of course.”
“Yeah, I have,” he said. “Two thugs. One working for a gangster called Hitler, the other working for a gangster called Long. Charming visitors.”
“Mind if I ask what they did here?”
“Hell, no,” Saunders said. “The usual crap about autopsy, cause of death, that sort of thing. Stayed all of five minutes and then went on their way. But one interesting thing… They didn’t want the body or his clothing. Funny, huh? You’d think a murder case that has the interest of the feds and the Gestapo would mean they’d want the body. At least to have another autopsy done by a fed coroner. Nope. Our John Doe stays with the county.”
Sam said, “I’d like to look at him again.”
Once again, Sam followed the medical examiner into the autopsy room. Saunders went to the wall of refrigerator doors. The one in the center said JOHN DOE.
Saunders opened the center door and reached in. The metal table slid out, making a creepy rattling noise. Saunders pulled down the soiled white sheet.
Sam stared at the dead man. Once upon a time this man walked and talked and breathed, was maybe loved, and had ended up here, in his city. Murdered.
Who are you? he thought.
As if he were watching someone else, Sam reached down, turned over the stiff wrist, examined the faded blue numerals again.
9 1 1 2 8 3.
“Inspector?” Saunders asked. “Are you through here?”
“Yeah, I am,” Sam said. He put the wrist down and wiped his hands on his coat. The sheet was placed back over the body, the tray was slid back in, and the door was closed.
“So what now?” Saunders asked.
“The FBI and the Gestapo have taken my case. This John Doe belongs to them. Question is, what do you do with the body?”
“Potter’s field, where else? But if need be, I can keep him here for a while. If you’d like.”
Sam remembered something from a couple of years back about old Hugh Johnson, his deceased predecessor. Hugh had been holding court one night in one of the local taverns when he loudly announced that the most important part of the job was closing the case. That’s it. Close the case and move on. Closed cases meant no open files, no pressure from the Police Commission, and a good end-of-the-year report, to keep your job for the next year.
Just close those cases, boys, Hugh had said. Close ’em up and move on.
“That’d be great, Doc,” Sam said. “Because I’m still going to work the case. It’s mine. No matter what my boss says. Or the FBI and the Gestapo.”
Saunders scratched at his throat, where the shrapnel scar from the Great War glistened out. “Your boss? The FBI? The Germans?”
“Yeah?”
“Fuck ’em all,” the county medical examiner said.
“That’s an unpatriotic response, Doc.”
“Glad I surprised you. You get this old, sometimes that’s the only joy you get—that and ticking off the powers that be.”
Sam said, “What are you driving at?”
Saunders raised a hand. “Enough. Leave me be with my dead people, okay? Christ, at least they have the courtesy to leave me alone most hours.”
When he left the city hospital, Sam knew where to go next. He walked the eight blocks briskly, thinking and planning. The Portsmouth railroad station stood at Deer Street, almost within eyeshot of his crime scene. It was an old two-story brick building with high peaked roofs, which looked as though the architect who had designed it had been frustrated that he hadn’t been born during the time of the great European cathedrals. The last time Sam had been here had been as an errand boy, dropping off that Lippman character for the Interior Department.
Sam made his way past tiny knots of people buying tickets to Boston or Portland or checking on arrivals. He went through a glass door that said MANAGER and took the chair across from Pat Lowengard. Pat was a huge man with slicked-back hair who looked like he couldn’t stand up without his office chair sticking to his broad hips. He had on a tan suit and a bright blue necktie and looked surprised to see Sam. His desk was nearly bare, and on the walls were printed displays of train schedules for northern New England.
“Something more I can do for you, Sam?”
“Yeah, there is,” Sam said. “I’m looking for more information about that five forty-five express from Boston to Portland.”
“What kind of information?”
“Let’s just say… is there anybody working at the station who might have been on that train?”
Lowengard rubbed at his fleshy chin. “Gee, I’m not sure…”
Sam waited, but Lowengard kept silent. Sam said, “Well?”
“Huh?”
Sam said, adding a bit of sharpness, “Then find out, will you? I need to know if anyone here was on that train. The sooner the better, Pat.”
The man’s face flushed. He picked up the phone, started talking to his secretary, made a second call. Sam sat there patiently. From outside there was the sharp whistle of a steam engine heading out, its engine hissing and grumbling.
Lowengard put the phone down. “You’re in luck. A stoker named Hughes was on that train. He’s in the marshaling yard. I told his boss to send him over. That all right?”
“That’s perfect.”
Sam waited, took out his notebook. Lowengard said, “Heard there was a corpse found two nights ago near our tracks. I hope you don’t think we hit him, Sam. Even though the express goes through here pretty fast, our engineers would notice something like that.”
Sam said nothing. Lowengard wet his lips with his tongue, as if he couldn’t stand having his mouth being dry.
There was a knock at the door. Lowengard called out, “Come in!” and a man about Sam’s age came in, wearing greasy overalls and a denim cap. His skin was soiled as well, especially his big hands, and when he entered the office, he took off his hat. There was a white stretch of clean skin on his forehead, making it look like an errant paintbrush had struck him.
Lowengard told Sam, “This is Peter Hughes. Peter, this is Sam Miller. He’s an inspector from the Portsmouth P.D. He’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Hughes blinked and looked at Sam. “Is… Am I in some kind of trouble? Sir?”
Sam said, “No, not at all. I’m conducting an investigation, and I have some questions about the Portland express.”
Hughes was twisting his hat in his big greasy hands. “An investigation, sir?”
“A police investigation,” Sam said, flipping open his notebook. “You were on the express two nights ago, from Boston to Portland?”
“Yep.”
“Did the train hit anything when it came through town?”
“No, sir. Not at all.”
“You sure?”
“’Course I’m sure. When we got to Portsmouth, hell, even if we did hit somebody, it probably wouldn’t’ve hurt ’em bad, anyway.”
Sam lowered his fountain pen. “I’m sorry, say that again.”
Hughes looked to Lowengard as if for reassurance, but Lowengard’s face had paled and Hughes found no reassurance there. He said, “Well, we were coming through town at a crawl.”
“You were? How fast was the train going?”
“Oh, crap, who knows. Three—maybe four—miles an hour. A nice slow pace.”
Lowengard said, “What the hell do you mean, four miles or hour? You’re supposed to be traveling much faster through there. Was the engine having problems?”
“No, the engine was fine, Mr. Lowengard. It’s just that, well, there was an auto on the tracks. On Market Street. Damnedest thing you ever saw. An auto, just sitting there pretty as you please. A yellow Rambler. Stan Tompkins, he’s the lead engineer, he hit the brakes and we slowed damn fast, and then the car drove off the tracks and headed downtown. Damn thing slowed us down right, that’s for sure. We had to pour on the steam somethin’ awful so we’d make our schedule to Portland.”
Sam looked at Lowengard. “And you didn’t know this?”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, indignation in his voice.
“Really? Station manager for Portsmouth and a train is forced to slow way down by a conveniently parked car, and this is the first you know of it?”
“If the train hit the car, fine,” Lowengard said. “Then I’d know. But a train slowed down by a car? Christ, Sam, every day something slows down the train. Kids playing on the tracks. A stuck truck. I don’t know everything about every damn train that comes through. This is the first I heard of it. Honest to Christ.”
Sam knew what both men were thinking: In these days, companies had no patience with anyone getting noticed by the law. If you caused a problem, any problem at all, you were out. Plenty of talented people were out there in the dole lines, begging for a job.
He said, “Mr. Hughes, thanks for the information. You can go.”
In an instant, the railroad worker was out the door. Sam said, “Pat…”
“Yes?” The station manager’s face was still pale.
“I want the passenger manifest for that express train.”
“That might be hard to get.” Lowengard frowned. “Lots of paperwork. Ever since the new law about internal transportation records kicked in a couple of years back, you wouldn’t believe the stacks of paper—”
“How long?”
A shrug. “Lots of paper. A week. Maybe two.”
“All right,” Sam said. “Two it is.”
The station manager grinned with relief. “Thanks for understanding.”
“Sorry, maybe you didn’t understand me. When I said two, I meant two days.”
“Days? Two days? That’s impossible!”
“Well, it’s going to have to be possible. Or there’re going to be lots of parking tickets around this station in the future. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” Lowengard said, and Sam noted his forehead was shiny with sweat. The phone on the desk rang, and Lowengard grabbed it before the second ring. After listening for a few moments, he grunted a “yeah” and tossed the receiver back into the cradle. “There’s a train here that’s not on the schedule, that needs to be watered up. You wouldn’t believe the crap I have to put up with, Sam. Would not believe it… and then you waltz in here and add to it.”
“I’m investigating a homicide, Pat,” Sam said.
Lowengard picked up the phone again. “And I’m trying to run a train station and trying to keep my ass out of said train. Grace? Get me dispatch right away.”
Outside, Sam spotted some cars parked at the other end of the station, blocking the entrance. People were running away from the cars, heading to the tracks. A few of them were yelling, raising their arms, as other cars braked, two with steam spewing from their radiators.
He followed the noise to a fence blocking off the tracks. The men and women and some children were up against the chain-link fence, holding on to it with their hands, looking out to the train yard, to a parked locomotive, eight boxcars trailing and—
Sam saw National Guardsmen standing outside the train, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. No wonder Lowengard had been so upset. A labor camp train, stopping here for coal or water before going out west or up north or someplace where the communists, the labor leaders, the strikers, any and all enemies, foreign and especially domestic, were dumped. Something cold tickled at the back of his neck. Those people in that train… they were heading to a labor camp for choices they had made, people they had associated with, organizations they had supported.
Choices. The cold feeling increased. And what kind of choices was he making now?
“Saul Rothstein!”
“Hugh! Hugh Toland!”
“Sue! Sue Godin! Are you in there?”
One heavyset woman with a blue scarf tied about her head turned to Sam, tears in her eyes. “Sir? Can you help? Can you?” She gestured at the train. “That train… it left Brooklyn two days ago. We followed it, best we can, they no tell us where it’s going. Now we just want to bring food and drink. That all.”
Brown paper grocery sacks lay on the cracked sidewalk. There were barred windows at each end of the boxcar, and hands were poking out between the bars, waving. Sam looked up and down the fence, spotted a gate. A B&M railroad detective, dressed in a brown suit, with a badge clipped to the coat pocket, was standing on the other side.
“Hey,” Sam said. “How about opening the gate, let these folks bring some food over to the train?”
The detective shifted the toothpick in his mouth. “Hey. How about you leave me the hell alone?”
Sam pulled out his badge, pressed it up against the fence. “Name’s Miller. I’m the inspector for the Portsmouth Police Department. What’s your name?”
“Collins,” he grudgingly replied.
“Look, Collins, let these people go in there. And tell you what: For the rest of the month, you can park anywhere you want, speed anywhere you want, and no Portsmouth cop will ever bother you. How does that sound?”
Collins said, “Boss’ll get pissed at me.”
“I can handle Lowengard. C’mon, let these folks go over, drop off the food, be a nice guy for a change.”
Collins shifted the toothpick again. “What’s it to you, then?”
“Guess I like being a nice guy sometimes.”
Collins scowled and spat out the toothpick, but stepped back. The crowd watched silently as he unlocked the gate. In a brusque voice, he said, “You folks go up there, pass over the stuff, then leave. Any funny business, you’ll be thrown in the boxcar with those slugs, and you’ll be in a labor camp tonight!”
Sam felt the crowd swirl about him like water parting around a rock, and there was a touch on his arm, the woman with the scarf, who whispered something foreign—Yiddish, perhaps?—and said, “God bless.” She joined the other family members streaming to the parked train, rushing over the railroad tracks. Within moments grocery sacks, bottles of Coke and Pepsi, and sandwiches were being passed up to the barred openings, the eager hands reaching down, grasping for life.
Sam walked away. Maybe Walter was right. Maybe one man could make a difference. But for how long?
He stopped and looked back at the train, thinking again of the train that had sped through late one night, the one that was sometimes in his dreams. It was similar to this one but different—there were no openings allowing air and sunlight to come in. Those boxcars had been shuttered closed, as if those in charge didn’t want anyone to see what was inside.
But they couldn’t hide the voices, couldn’t hide the screams.
And one more thing. The train that night, speeding through the darkness, had gone past a streetlight, illuminating the shuttered boxcars and…
And what else?
The paint scheme. The cars in front of him were dark red. The special train from that night was a dark color as well, but there was a difference.
Yellow stripes had been painted on the sides of those special trains.
What the hell did that mean?
Nothing, that’s what, and nothing that was going to solve this murder for him.
He went to his desk, ignored Mrs. Walton, and when she got up to powder her nose, he picked up his phone, got an operator, and made a call to Concord again, this time to the motor vehicle division of the Department of Safety. He quickly found out it would take a week to get him a listing of all yellow Ramblers registered in the state. A week… well, what the hell. Make it thorough. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was deliberate, but the train slowing down in Portsmouth was a question mark, and he wanted that question answered. Was the train slowed on purpose so the body could be dumped?
After the phone call, he was going through his old case files when a familiar voice spoke up.
“Inspector,” said the man. “You look like you could use some hooch. And since this department is officially dry, how about a cup of joe instead?”
Sam swung about in his chair, saw a smiling Sean Donovan before him, holding two white mugs of coffee. Sean limped over and pulled a chair closer to Sam’s desk. “I understand you’ve had quite the busy day.”
“I have,” Sam said, sipping the coffee. Sean had made it the way he liked it: black, with two sugars.
Sean nodded. “No doubt dealing with the forces of darkness. I’m surprised you didn’t go home and take a bath after spending time with those two G-men.”
“Only one was a G-man,” Sam said. “The other was— Oh, I get it. A joke. FBI guy and Gestapo guy. Both G-men.”
Sean raised his mug to his lips. “So now we both have something in common, having spent time with these G-men.”
Sam swung around in his chair, glad Mrs. Walton wasn’t back yet. “They’ve talked to you, too?”
“I’m not sure if ‘talk’ is the right word,” Sean answered. “This was more like requests made, requests complied with. The FBI man wanted some files, which I happily passed over to him. And he seemed pretty eager to share what he had with his goose-stepping friend.”
Sam said, “What kind of files?”
“Hmmm,” Sean said, sipping. “Anybody else in this building, I would say none of your business. But since you’re more than the average cop, I will tell you this. Personnel files.”
“I thought the FBI would be looking into active cases. Not personnel files.”
Sean laughed. “That’s a good one. Sam, why would the FBI give a shit about criminal cases at the Portsmouth Police Department? Drunk driving? Hookers? Break-ins? Oh, I know they’ve taken away your homicide, but the real crimes the FBI and their German friends are interested in are the new ones: disloyalty, lack of enthusiasm for the new order, thought crimes like that.”
Sam heard footsteps, saw Mrs. Walton ambling her way back. He leaned over to Sean. “So. Whose personnel files were they asking for?”
“You really want to know?”
“Of course.”
Sean smiled. “Yours.”
That night Sam and Sarah went out to the movies. He was eager to slip into a make-believe world for a while, a world without the FBI or Gestapo or the Underground Railroad or rats or the Party. Sarah had tsk-tsked over the slash the knife had made in his coat sleeve, and had promised to mend it later. Still, Jesus, what a day.
Though a small city, Portsmouth boasted three movie theaters, and tonight they went to the Colonial, up on Congress Street. Throughout Sarah’s pre-movie dinner—fish stew—he kept up a steady patter of conversation, playing the good husband, playing the good father (definitely not playing the rat!), though he had hardly any appetite at all. He had a cold feeling about the meeting with the FBI earlier today, about how close he had seemed to losing it all because of Tony. If that wasn’t enough, another Underground Railroad passenger was going to spend the night in their basement. Talk about living dangerously.
And then there was that train, ready to depart Portsmouth, to drop off another load of prisoners, where there was always room in other trains for one more dissident, one more family.
During dinner Sarah had seemed more cheerful, as though determined to gloss over what was going to happen in their home later that night. And when he had mentioned the visit by the FBI and the Gestapo, Sarah paused at that, ladle held in the air. “Gestapo? Here?”
“That’s right,” he had said, buttering a piece of bread. “Assigned to the consulate in Boston. It seems my dead man was from Germany, here illegally. So it’s not my case anymore. The feds took it away.”
Sarah glanced at Toby and dipped the ladle in the stew. “It’s impossible to believe the Gestapo are here in Portsmouth. It’s bad enough to have Long’s Legionnaires here, but the Gestapo…”
“That’s what the papers and newsreels say. But this German didn’t look that evil to me. More like a paper shuffler, a cop like me.”
Sarah shook her head. “No. You’re wrong, Sam. I don’t care what he looks like. The whole bunch of them—Nazis, Gestapo, SS—they’re pure evil. Mrs. Brownstein at the school, some of the stories she’s told us about what they did to her relatives over in Holland…”
Sam had raised his eyebrows, glancing at Toby taking in every word, and Sarah had changed the subject. Then they had left, with their tenant Walter in charge as a babysitter. Toby had that devil look in his eyes. Sam hoped Walter was in a mood to be tested by an eight-year-old.
Now they were sitting in the darkened theater, most of the men nearby smoking, a paper bag of greasy popcorn between them, Sarah cuddled against his shoulder. Tonight was a Judy Garland musical, and though Sam enjoyed being out, he had to work to pay attention. The FBI—and the Gestapo!—were looking at his personnel files. For what? Not much was in there, nothing that the FBI probably already didn’t know, but maybe the Kraut wanted to learn more about Sam and—
He was suddenly poked in his ribs. “What?” he whispered to Sarah. “What’s wrong?”
“I said something, and you’re not listening to me,” she whispered back.
“Oh, sorry. Mind drifted. What did you say?”
“I said I hope Walter does a better job babysitting. Last time he fell asleep on the couch and Toby tied his shoelaces together.”
Sam said, “At least he’s free. You remember what happened with that bobby-soxer Claire. She charged us two dollars, brought her boyfriend over, and Toby got a quick lesson in make-out sessions about five years ahead of schedule.”
“Shhh,” someone in the audience scolded, and then the films began.
There were a couple of previews of coming attractions, and then a Bugs Bunny short, and Sam felt himself unwind as he joined Sarah and the others in laughing at the antics of that wascally wabbit. Then came the familiar trumpet tunes of Movietone, showing the bloody world in its black-and-white glory.
Up on the screen, thick smoke was rising up over a village, and a line of panzer tanks was crossing a field. The narrator said, “As spring continues and summer beckons in the fields of Russia, fresh fighting continues while German and Russian tank divisions grapple once again for supremacy. The third year of fighting in Eastern Europe continues afresh, with most observers predicting another fierce struggle for each side to gain the upper hand. Unless there is a dramatic change in the fortunes for Nazi Germany or Red Russia, experts say to expect another year of bloodshed before the snows come.”
As the narration continued, the familiar newsreel shots of tanks on the move, Stuka aircraft dive-bombing, and German soldiers on the march were repeated, but Sam noticed that now, as opposed to during their blitzkrieg victories in ’40 and ’41, the Krauts looked exhausted, faces dirty and grim.
Trumpet tone, change of view, showing more troops, this time Japanese, swarming across rice paddies. “The Empire of the Rising Sun,” the narrator went on, “continues its expansion west as it fights to secure some sort of stability in Manchuria and China. Forces loyal to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Communist leader Mao Tse-tung continue their guerrilla warfare, making sure the soldiers of the Japanese emperor battle for every inch of ground lost in China.”
Sarah whispered, “I’m so sick of this foreign news. Let’s see the movie already.” He squeezed her leg as a familiar cherubic face popped up on the screen, to the assortment of scattered boos and a few cheers. A rotund man who was smoking a cigar walked through a hotel lobby through a barrage of camera flashes and questions from a mob of reporters. The man held up two fingers in the shape of a V.
“Former British prime minister Winston Churchill, in New York City this week, continues to meet with supporters of the so-called British government in exile.”
Churchill stopped before a set of radio microphones and said in a tired, lisping tone, “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.”
Another trumpet tone, another switch, and even more cheers and a few boos as the President appeared on the screen, shaking hands with a dour-faced man wearing formal clothes.
“In our nation’s capitol, President Huey Long completed discussions this week with the German ambassador over future relations between the American republic and the Third Reich. Neither man had anything to say for reporters, but word around the capitol is that a new era of peace and understanding lays ahead for American democracy and the Third Reich.”
There was a quick jump in the newsreel to a bald man in a suit, hurrying past photographers in a polished corridor. “Also in Washington, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was again unsuccessful in his attempts to expand the number of Jewish refugees allowed into this country by Congress.”
A shout from a male in the audience: “Leave the kikes where they belong!” and a couple of others laughed; Sam sat still, embarrassed at the outburst.
Another jump to a number of gray-suited men with matching gray faces, standing in front of some government office.
“From our friends in the north, an unexpected trade delegation from the embattled Soviet Union has paid a surprise visit to Montreal, refusing to even go to that nation’s capital of Ottawa. What areas of discussion were made with the Canadian government remain a secret, but some observers believe the Reds are looking for assistance from their neighbors across the North Pole.”
One more trumpet tone and a few more cheers and whistles as the the Hollywood sign came up on the screen, and then a swimming pool, and some sort of talent contest involving young lovelies in bathing suits standing under palm trees. It was hard to hear what the narrator was saying over the wolf whistles. Sarah nibbled his ear. “Like what you see, sport?”
“Like who I’m with,” he said. “How’s that?”
She whispered, “Glad to hear it. Here’s a taste of what’s yours.”
He looked down, felt a warm tingle expand from the base of his neck. Sarah had daringly pulled her skirt up past her thighs, showing the top of her stockings. She gave a soft laugh and pushed the skirt back. Sam whispered, “Never get tired of tasting that, sweetheart.”
That earned him another kiss. He bit her ear and she sighed. He whispered, “Remember the times back up in the balcony when we were dating, learning to French?”
One more kiss and she warned, laughing. “You keep it up and I’ll drag you back up there, Inspector.”
He squeezed her leg. “No room. I already checked. We’ll have to save it for later.”
“Deal,” she whispered back, fingers flickering over the front of his trousers. “Now be a good boy and watch the movie.”
He sat back in his seat, feeling warm and almost happy, despite all that had gone on this day. The feature film started, a cowboy musical called Girl Crazy, with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. The thought nagged at him as the credits unrolled up on the screen that it seemed unseemly, with the world at war and in chaos, with empires bloodletting for survival, that what got everybody’s interest here in the States were Hollywood starlets.
It was, he thought, like living in an apartment building. When the screaming from the neighbors started, when the bottles were being tossed and the punches thrown, you just turned up the radio and pretended everything would be all right.
When the movie let out, they joined the other patrons spilling out onto the sidewalk. Standing by the entrance, waving, was Donna Fitzgerald. Sam gave her a wide smile and saw a skinny man standing next to her, Donna’s hand firmly clasped in his. Sam thought, Welcome home, Larry. Welcome home from the camps.
Somebody else called out, “Sam! Hey, Sam!” Standing by the theater door was Harold Hanson, accompanied by his wife. Hanson waved Sam over, and Sarah’s hand tightened on his arm. “Oh, God, his wife… I forget, what’s that shrew’s name?”
“Doris,” Sam murmured. “Come on, we’ll make it quick.”
The marshal’s wife—a tiny woman with gray hair tied back in a bun and a pinched expression—stood up on her toes and whispered something in her husband’s ear, then ducked back into the movie theater. When they reached him, Hanson held out his hand to Sarah and said, “Dear, so nice to see you out tonight.”
Sarah said properly, “And so nice for me to have him for a night. Without being called out on a case. Or going to a Party meeting. Or something else.”
Hanson seemed taken aback. Then he nodded. “Well, yes, we all have duties and obligations to perform, including the Party. Sam, I wanted to thank you for your cooperation today with the FBI and his German friend. They said they got everything they needed.”
Sam said, “Did they tell you who the dead man was?”
“No, they didn’t. And it’s not our case anymore, so let it be. They promised to inform us if they have anything we need to know.”
“I’m sure,” Sam said, and Sarah squeezed his arm again. She could sense the sarcasm in his voice, but Hanson didn’t seem to pick up on it, for his expression lightened and he said, “If you excuse me, Doris said she had to go powder her nose, and you know how long that can take.”
“Good night,” Sam said, and Hanson smiled down at Sarah and went into the theater.
“Sam, what was that all about?” Sarah asked him.
“I’m being warned off.”
“Warned off what?”
“That dead man by the tracks. The case supposedly isn’t mine. And I think the marshal saw me tonight and decided to remind me of that.”
She stopped, making him stop as well, in front of a Rexall drugstore. “What do you mean,” she demanded, “supposedly? Are you off the case or not?”
“Officially, yes. Unofficially, Sarah, it’s my first murder case. I’m not going to just give it up.”
She looked up at him, and there was something going on with her eyes. He couldn’t decipher her expression. Then she seemed to make a decision. “All right, Sam. Do you what you have to do. You’re still on probation… and well, I don’t think either of us can stand it if you get bumped down back to sergeant. Just be careful.”
“I will.”
She surprised him by kissing him on the lips. “That Harold Hanson… if he and the rest of them only knew how lucky they were to have you, Sam Miller.”
He put his arm around her, squeezed her tight, and kissed her. “As lucky as I am to have you.”
And then her mood lifted, as if changing a frock, and she chattered on about the musical they had just seen, but he was distracted as they walked up to the Packard. He always prided himself on being able to gauge Sarah’s moods. But back there, when she was asking about his case, it was as if he were looking at a blank wall.
What was going on with Sarah? That had always been part of her allure, that at one moment she could joke about dragging him up to the balcony for some loving and then be hard as stone when it came to running the Underground Railroad station. A lover and a fighter, all mixed in one pretty, exasperating package.
Sam knew he should ask her, but now her mood was cheerful, upbeat, and he wanted it to last. He also wanted to stop thinking of Donna and that sweet, uncomplicated smile.
When they got home, Walter tottered back upstairs, declaring Toby had been a peach of a boy. Sarah went to check on their son as Sam hung up their coats. When Sarah came back, he walked to the cellar door. “Going to the basement for a second.”
“All right. And it’s the last one. Promise. And be nice to him, whoever he is.”
“I’ll be nice,” he replied, trying to keep his voice even. “And you’re the one telling me to be careful, my little revolutionary.”
He was rewarded with a smile. “When you come back up, sweetie, I’ll show you just how dangerous I can be.”
As he turned the knob, the doorbell rang. Sarah stopped, shocked. He said more sharply than he intended, “Any chance there’s been a foul-up? That your passenger thought he had to come to the front door?”
Sarah had paled. “No, impossible. They all know the routine.”
The doorbell rang again, followed by a pounding at the door and muffled voices. To his wife, in a low and determined tone, Sam said, “No argument, Sarah. No discussion. Go to Toby’s room now. If you hear me shouting, grab him. Climb out the window. Go to one of the neighbors and call your dad. Do you understand?”
Lips pursed, she left the room. Sam went to the vestibule, looked at the upper shelf, where his service revolver rested.
“Just a sec,” he called out. He switched on the porch light and opened the door.
Before him stood two Long’s Legionnaires.
He took a breath. “Something I can do for you?”
He’d never seen these two before. They looked so alike that they could have been brothers. But the one on the left was taller and carried a clipboard, and the other one was shorter, squatter, and had his arms crossed across his uniform jacket, as though he was impatient about everything.
“Evenin’, sir,” the one carrying the clipboard said. “My name is Carruthers. This here is LeClerc. We’re doin’ a survey of our local Party members, lookin’ for some information.”
Sam held the doorknob tight. “What kind of information?”
An insolent shrug from LeClerc. “Stuff. You know how it is.”
“No. I don’t know how it is.”
Carruthers said, “All right if we come in?”
“No, it’s not all right. It’s late. My boy’s in bed, and my wife is getting ready to retire.”
LeClerc made a point of leaning to one side, looking over Sam’s shoulder. “Your wife getting’ ready by goin’ into your cellar? Door’s open.”
Sam didn’t move. “I was just down there, checking on the furnace.”
LeClerc said, “With the light off?”
“I turned the light off when I came up, when I heard you fellows ringing and banging on our door. Now, if you don’t—”
Carruthers smiled. “Well, sir, we do mind, if you don’t mind me sayin’, and we’d like to come in and ask a few questions…”
LeClerc started moving forward. Sam stayed where he was, blocking the doorway. “It’s late,” he said. “You know who I am and where I work. If this is so damn important, you can talk to me there. Otherwise, get the hell off my porch.”
Carruthers glanced to his companion, then looked at Sam. Sam tensed, wondering if Sarah was ready; if these two clowns made one more step in his direction, he was going to start throwing punches, and—
The Legionnaire on the left—Carruthers—smiled. “If you say so, sir. We’ll try to get to you tomorrow. At the police station. Tell your wife and boy good night, now, okay?”
Their heavy boots clattered on the worn planks, as they went down the porch stairs. Sam closed and locked the door, then switched off the light. He realized his hands were shaking.
The door to Toby’s room was open, the night-light on. Sarah sat on the end of the sleeping boy’s bed. Sam said in a quiet voice, “They’re gone.”
“Who are they?” Sarah whispered back.
“Long’s Legionnaires. Two of them.”
“Oh, Sam…”
“They said they were conducting some kind of survey. I told them to come to my office tomorrow.”
“Sam—”
“I’m going to the cellar,” he said curtly. “I’ll be up in a bit. And Sarah… that was a damn close thing. I hope you know just how damn close it was.”
His frightened wife just nodded, not saying a word.
He went through the open door to the cellar, walked down a few steps, then switched on the light. The basement snapped into view, and there, behind the hanging sheet, he could make out a shape.
“Hey there,” he called, descending the rest of the stairs. “You okay?”
A hand came up to draw the blanket aside, and Sam stopped. The man was a Negro, huge, with penetrating eyes and… hard to put a finger on it, but a presence.
“Hello, and thank you for your help,” the man said. His voice was deep and unexpectedly cultured. Sam came closer, tried not to stare. In this part of the world, one didn’t see too many Negroes.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Is there anything you need?”
“No. I’m told that my travels will continue in just a few hours, and by tomorrow evening, I should be in Montreal.”
Just a few seconds earlier, Sam had been ready to dislike the man who was putting his family in jeopardy, but that feeling was now—inexplicably—gone. He said, “I hope it works out all right.”
The visitor laughed, a full sound that echoed in the old root cellar. “Ironic, isn’t it, that I should find myself here. My own father was a slave on a plantation in North Carolina. He had high hopes for me, he did, and now here I am, a hunted man on a new Underground Railroad. I was in Britain for a while, working before the Nazis invaded, and I came back here, hoping to continue the fight. And look where I am. Alone, hunted, just like my daddy, like a fugitive slave from the last century, on the run from the South. All because of that man in the White House.”
Sam looked at the man closely. Damn, he looked familiar. Hadn’t he seen him in a newsreel or a newspaper? He wanted to ask but didn’t want to pry. “You take care. I’ve got to go back upstairs to my wife and boy.” He held out his hand to the Negro. “Sam. Sam Miller.”
The man shook his hand warmly. “Nice to meet you, Sam. I’m Paul. Paul Robeson.”
The name was familiar, but it was time to go.
“Good luck, Paul.”
“Thank you, Sam. I appreciate that.”
Sam left the man and went back upstairs.
Sarah was in bed, the radio off, and he changed into his pajamas and slid under the sheets. Sarah gently touched his chest, and he rolled to her. “Close. We were that close to being arrested and sent away. Do you understand, Sarah?”
“Yes,” she murmured. “I promise, Sam. He’s the very last one.”
“It’s too late,” he said. “Somebody knows, somewhere, that there’s an Underground Railroad station here. And I don’t mean the marshal. He was just giving me hints earlier. This is much more serious.”
“How can you tell?” she asked softly.
“Because those two Long’s Legionnaires, they saw an open door, and they knew it led into the cellar. They know, Sarah, they already know. At some point, the hammer’s going to fall hard.”
He kept silent for a bit, and then she pressed against him, perhaps frightened more by his silence than the threat the two uniformed men at their door presented. He kissed her cheek, her lips, and she said, “Sam… thanks for keeping them out, for standing up for us.”
“My wife… my little revolutionary… we’re in this together, okay? No matter what. You and me and Toby. The three of us. Always.”
“Yes, Sam. Thank you. The three of us. Always.”
He fell asleep with her sweet scent all about him.