Amerikan Eagle (51 page)

“Yeah, I am,” Sam said, looking at the prisoner. His suit was well cut, and he had a trimmed black mustache and haircut. Sam recognized him as a businessman from the next city up the coast, Dover. Woods, was that his name?

The Legionnaire twisted the man’s arm, and Woods winced. The Legionnaire said, “Yeah, and you’re the inspector that was in that greasy-spoon restaurant the night me and Vern had to get new tires on our car ’cause some asshole knifed ’em. Vern and me, we got ambushed and tuned up a couple of days later.”

Sam said, “Look, I don’t—”

The Legionnaire said, “You may be so high and mighty, boy, but remember this, me and Vern and everyone else like us, we’re runnin’ the show. No matter if you like it or not.”

The young man pushed Woods hard in the small of the back. “Run, you son of a bitch, run,” and Woods, stumbling a bit in the mud, started running after the moving line of prisoners. Sam saw what was going to happen next, started to yell out, “No!” In one smooth and practiced motion, the Legionnaire lifted his shotgun and fired
at the back of the running man. The hollow
boom
tore at Sam’s ears, and Woods crumpled to the muddy earth.

“So maybe you’re a hero today, bud,” the Legionnaire said, “but you and everyone else who don’t fall in line, you’re still shitheads, and you can still get shot while tryin’ to escape, and there’s nothin’ anybody can do about it. Understand?”

Sam felt his face burning. He had just seen a first-degree murder right in front of him, and been powerless to do anything. Not a goddamn thing. He walked away.

* * *

He sat in one corner of a small green canvas tent smelling of dampness and mildew. Inside were a table and a couple of wooden chairs sinking into the soil. The flap of the tent opened, and another Long’s Legionnaire peered in. “You Miller?”

“Yeah,” he said, not wanting to see again in his mind’s eye a man murdered to prove a point. That was all. A man dragged from his home today, accused of God only knew what, and because he was last in line and easy to grasp, he was shot dead.

“Your prisoner is coming,” the Legionnaire said.

The guard seemed to be in his early twenties, with close-cropped blond hair and Legionnaire’s uniform complete with Confederate-flag pin on the lapel. The look on his face seemed to indicate he would be equally comfortable in the uniform of the SS, just like his shotgun-wielding partner. “You the same Miller who saved the President?”

“I am,” Sam said, looking out at the mass of prisoners.

“Then it’d be an honor for us to buy you a drink or six when the day is through, if you don’t mind.”

Sam fought to keep a friendly smile on his face. “That sounds great, but my schedule’s pretty packed. I tell you what, you tell your friends here that I said hello. Okay?”

“Sure,” the Legionnaire said, and then another arrived, holding a man by the elbow. The man had on a light brown tweed suit but no necktie. His shoes had no laces. His hands were cuffed, and the second Legionnaire said, “The cuffs are comin’ off, boy, but you best behave. You got that?”

The man whispered, “Yes,” and Sam noticed his left eye was bruised and swollen. The prisoner rubbed at his wrists as the cuffs were removed, and both Legionnaires left.

“Hello, Walter,” Sam said.

“Sam, what a pleasant surprise.”

“Have a seat.”

The former science professor sat down in one of the chairs, breathed an apparent sigh of relief. “It feels good to be in a real chair. The interrogations … sometimes they ask you question after question and make you stand for hours … it doesn’t sound like much, but do it for hours, and you’ll see what kind of torture it is.”

“I can imagine,” Sam said.

Walter shook his head. “No, you can’t. Unless you’ve been here or someplace similar, you can’t.”

Sam looked to his wrist, where the hidden numeral was tattooed into his skin, was. “Walter, I’m not here to debate.”

His former tenant smiled wanly. “Of course, yes, of
course. How in the world did you get in here? Lawyers and family are all being kept out while we stumble through our version of Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. Remember that, back in the ’30s? It was decided it was time for Hitler to kill or jail all his opponents, and they did. Oh, that was a time—”

“Walter, for once, will you shut the hell up?”

Walter did just that. Sam said, “I got in because I called in a favor from the Secret Service. Told them I needed to see you.”

“I take it you’re not here to free me.”

“Hardly. I’ve got two things I want to talk to you about. Remember the night I was called out for the body by Maplewood Avenue?”

“No, not really.”

“Of course you do. I had to come upstairs and unclog your sink. Who told you to do that, Walter? A couple of weeks earlier you had pulled the same stunt, clogging the sink with potato peels. You’re scatterbrained but not that scatterbrained. So who told you? Was it Sarah?”

Walter blinked. “She asked me to do something to get you upstairs for a while.”

“Did she say why?”

Walter squirmed in his seat, and Sam went on. “Sarah had a guest coming, right? Someone to go in the cellar, someone she didn’t want me to know was there. And she wanted me upstairs at a certain time so she could sneak the man in.”

“That’s what I surmised.” He wiped at his bruised eye with a soiled hand. “She didn’t say it so plainly, but yes, I believe that’s what she wanted. So who was that dead man?”

“Not your place to ask questions,” Sam said curtly. “Only to answer them.”

From his coat pocket he took out the papers the medical examiner had given him. “Take a look these, tell me what they mean.”

Walter looked puzzled, but he did as he was told. He unfolded the sheets and examined each one, sometimes holding them close to his undamaged eye. “There are some serious mathematical formulas in here. Even with my teaching background, I’m not sure I can puzzle them out.”

“You better try. I need for you to look at those equations and tell me what they mean.”

“I’m not sure I can do that,” Walter insisted, his voice plaintive.

“Then, dammit, tell me why they’re important. Tell me why someone would be willing to die to protect these pages.”

Walter stared at him a moment. Then he bent again on the pages, pursing his bruised lips. Finally, he gathered the pages together and pushed them back across the table. “Can I ask you where you got these?”

“No.”

“Some research facility? A physics laboratory of some sort?”

“Walter …”

He moved in his chair, winced from something paining him. “A guess, that’s all. An educated guess.”

“I’ll take that. Tell me.”

And Walter told him.

* * *

Sam shoved the papers back in his coat, tired and cold and feeling as if he were climbing the slope of a mountain that kept on getting steeper and steeper. Walter put his hands together and said, “What now?”

Sam said, “I go back to work, and I’m sorry, you go back to your interrogators.”

Walter shivered. “They caught me as I was driving up to Maine, Sam, trying to get to the Canadian border. I suppose a brave man would have raced through the roadblock, but I’m not. And later, when they brought me here, I had illusions of trying to resist, trying to be strong, trying to hold out as long as I could … I held out for five minutes before I started crying and answering every question they asked me. Do you want to know how they did it?”

“No, I don’t,” Sam said.

Walter ignored him. “They put you on a board, tie your hands and feet together, and then tip you back, put a wet cloth across your face, and pour water over you. They laugh as you think you’re drowning. A nice little treat they learned from the Nazis. It worked, but still, the questions keep on coming.” Walter cocked his head. “Is it true, what I’ve heard? That you got to Hale before he got to Long? That you shot Hale, and he blew himself up, but not close enough to hurt Long?”

“True enough,” Sam said.

“You son of a whore. Do you have any idea what you did in preventing that monster’s death?”

Sam got up, thinking of his tattoo and of his nameless camp companions, alive and spread out across the nation, thought about that dead businessman out there, dead on a muddy playing field, all because of him. “Yeah, Walter, I think I do.”

* * *

When he left the tent, a young Legionnaire stood waiting, his red hair closely trimmed, patches of wispy orange hair about his chin.

“Mr. Miller?” the Legionnaire asked. “Somebody needs to see you right away.”

The man took Sam’s left arm, and Sam angrily shook it off. He thought about striding out of the camp, ignoring this young punk, but with all the shotgun-toting Legionnaires and angry-looking FBI agents about, how far could he go?

“All right,” Sam said. “Take me there, but keep your damn hand to yourself.”

The Legionnaire glared at Sam but kept quiet, and Sam kept stride with him as they went to a larger tent. “Right in there, sir,” he said. Sam hesitated, then ducked his head and walked in. This tent had a canvas floor, chairs, a dining room table, a wet bar, and a desk with matching chair and a black metal wastebasket. Lights came from overhead lightbulbs, and a small electric heater in one corner of the tent cut the chill. Sitting in the chair was another Long’s Legionnaire, older, his uniform crisp and clean, the leatherwork shiny, and on the collar tabs, the oak leaves of a major.

Sam took the chair across the desk. The Legionnaire said, “Sam. Good to see you.”

“How long?” Sam said.

Clarence Rolston, the janitor and handyman for the Portsmouth Police Department, picked up a file folder and replied, “Years and years, of course. And damn long years at that. Pretending to be brain-soaked, slow and
dense, takes a lot of work. Most Legionnaires are happy to do their work in public. It takes a special talent and commitment to spend years underground.”

“Was Hanson in on it?” Sam had to ask.

Clarence’s smile was thin-lipped. “Sort of defeats the purpose of being undercover if your supposed boss knows what’s going on.”

“You were very convincing,” Sam managed to say, thinking of what Clarence must have overheard, must have seen, all the while toiling in the background of the police department. He remembered what the marshal had told him back in Burdick:
That’s our world, Sam. Spies and snitches everywhere
.

“Thanks, Sam,” Clarence replied, going through the folder. “Only the ones who desire to see the President and the Party succeed can be chosen for such a task. But you know what? I was proud of every second of my job.”

Sam thought,
Back there, dammit, should have taken that chance, should have taken off when that kid said somebody wanted to see me
. All those important papers he had … and his plans for them … oh, Christ.

He said, “Does your brother know?”

Clarence grimaced. “You mean my older brother, the honorable Robert Rolston, city councillor? He knows how to toss a vote for the right bribe, how to skim a city contract for money, and how to get booze and broads in return for city jobs. Other than that, he knows shit.”

Sam said, “I see.”

Clarence said, “Let’s get right to it, all right?”

Sam was startled at the sound of a shotgun blast coming from outside, but the firearm discharging didn’t bother Clarence a bit. Sam said, “Sure. Let’s get to it.”

The supposed janitor put on a pair of reading glasses and said, “What I have here is a collection of documents, Sam, all implicating you in a variety of anti-Party crimes and activities. For example, I have a denouncement saying that at the last Party meeting, you wrote down the names of Long, Coughlin, and Lindbergh when you were asked to list the names of local undesirables. I also have a canvassing report from two Legionnaires who detected suspicious activity at your house when they arrived for a visit. And I have an interrogation report concerning your brother and other plotters against the President. This report strongly implicates your participation. Finally, I have a request from a facility in Vermont seeking your immediate arrest and internment because of activities threatening national security.”

Sam stayed still, his ears roaring like tidal waves crashing over him, overwhelming him and everything in their path.

Clarence peered at Sam over his reading glasses. “Do you have anything to say about these documents, Sam?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you deny the information contained in these reports?”

“No.”

“Anything to say in your defense?”

Sam said, “Not a goddamn thing.”

Clarence stared, then put the papers down. “Very well, then. I have no other choice, I’m sorry to say.”

The Legionnaire lowered his hand, opened a desk drawer, and Sam watched as Clarence took out a—

Cigarette lighter. Sam was expecting a pistol, or handcuffs, or an arrest warrant.

Clarence took the papers he had read, held them over the wastebasket, and with a flip of the lighter set them ablaze. The flames quickly rolled up the sheets of paper until Clarence was forced to drop them in the wastebasket. Wisps of smoke rose to the peaked green canvas roof of the tent.

Clarence put the cigarette lighter back into the desk drawer, slid it shut. He took his reading glasses off. “Sam, you always treated me well all the years I was undercover. Every single time you saw me. Not like some of your fellow cops, who figured I was just a dummy, a moron they could ignore or tease or rough up … Anyway, how you treated me day after day, month after month, year after year, that tells me what kind of man you are. Not whatever was claimed on those sheets of paper—which, of course, no longer exist.”

The Legionnaire picked up a fountain pen. “You’re a good guy, Sam. But get the hell out of my sight, all right?”

Sam did just that.

* * *

Outside of the temporary holding areas on the football field, a small crowd of people had gathered against the fence, looking for friends or family members. A couple of the braver ones were arguing with the Legionnaires keeping guard at the gate. Sam slipped through and thought of the luck that had just graced him.

As he was going to his Packard, there was a touch on his arm and a familiar voice. “Sam? Sam?”