Amerikan Eagle (8 page)

Across the street, the door of an old house opened and a man stepped out, silhouetted by the light. The man looked around, bent over, put two empty milk bottles on the stoop, then went back inside.

In the darkness beneath the bush, he smiled. All clear. One bottle or three, and he would have left. But two was the sign. He crossed the street, through an open gate to a picket fence, then to a cellar door. He opened the door and went down the wooden steps. The cellar was small, with a dirt floor, an exposed rock foundation, and three
wooden chairs set about a wooden table. There were two men in the chairs, only one of whom he recognized, and that was a problem.

The man on the left had a thick mustache and swollen hands, scarred with old burn tissue. The owner of the house, Curt Monroe. He looked to him and said, “Curt.”

“Boy, I’m glad to see you, pal,” the scarred man said.

He said, “You tell me who this other guy is, Curt, or I’m out of here.”

The other man had thinning hair and a prominent Adam’s apple. Curt said, “This is Vince. He’s all right.”

He thought about that. Then he took the spare chair and sat down. “How’s he all right?”

Vince said, “Look, I’m—”

He stared at the second man. “I don’t remember asking you a goddamn thing.”

Vince shut up. Curt tapped his fingers on the table. “I used to date Vince’s sister back when I was working, before my hands got burnt. I know him, he’s okay, and he can get what we need.”

Now he looked to Vince. “Where?”

“Huh?”

He had to struggle to keep his temper under control. “We need something particular. Something that’s hard to get nowadays, with the latest confiscation laws for firearms. So. Where the hell are you getting it from?”

“A guy up the street from my sister. He’s got a ready supply. I already paid him with Curt’s money. You just tell me where you want it.”

He thought about that and said, “I want it delivered to Curt.”

Vince was confused. “I … that wasn’t the deal. The deal was, I get paid half for making the buy and the other half for delivering it where you want it.”

“Fine. And I want it delivered here, to Curt.”

“But—”

He stared right at him. “Bud, last time I’m going to say this. I know Curt. I worked with him back when we were both employed. I was one of the first guys to get to him when his hands got burnt. So me and him, we got a history. You, I don’t know shit about you. Curt’s vouched for you, but I’m a suspicious bastard, you know? Last time I trusted somebody I didn’t personally vouch for, I got my ass arrested. So the deal’s changed. All right? You deliver it here. You get paid. And then you forget this all happened. Got it?”

Vince looked to Curt, and Curt shrugged, and then Vince got up and left, going up the wooden steps, his feet thumping hard. Curt said, “Pal, you’re even a bigger prick since you’ve gotten out.”

“All that government attention will do it to you,” he said. “Be back in a sec. Don’t leave.”

“What?” Curt asked, but by then he was at the cellar door, swinging it open. There was movement out on the street, and he followed Vince in the shadows as he strode away, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched forward, moving fast.
Idiot
, he thought, trailing him with no difficulty at all.
Damn fool isn’t even checking who might be behind him
.

Vince walked four blocks, then stopped at a corner. This part of town was more commercial, with two bars and a
corner grocery and an abandoned bank building, the former Portsmouth Savings & Trust, one of many abandoned banks across the country. He stood in a doorway, watching. Vince took a cigarette out, stuck it between his lips. It took three tries to light it up.
Nervous twit
, he thought, and then a sedan came down the street and stopped.

Vince tossed the cigarette into the gutter and got into the rear of the sedan. The vehicle quickly drove off. It was too dark to see the license plate or who was inside the car, a model he didn’t recognize, knowing only it was a pricey set of wheels.

He stayed for a few moments, looking at the now empty street corner. He started walking back to Curt’s place, thinking of another chore that had to be done later the next day.

Revolutions were so damn tricky.

The dingy lobby of the Portsmouth Police Department was crowded the next morning with poorly dressed men and women checking on family members or friends picked up the previous night for the typical offenses in a hard-drinking and hard-living port city. Upstairs at his desk, Sam found a note propped on his typewriter:
Sam. See me soonest. H
. There was also a single sheet of brown paper with a penciled handwritten note:

There was a scrawled signature, also in pencil, on the bottom of the sheet. Sam shook his head at the memo’s misspellings. He was sure Frank and his young partner had spent ten minutes walking around in the rain before coming back to the warm station and spending an hour on this report. Sam put the useless report down, looked again at the note.

Sam. See me soonest. H
.

H being Harold Hanson. Something about last night had gotten Hanson’s attention—what was one dead guy, even if it was a possible homicide? He looked over to Hanson’s secretary, a woman whose gray hair was always tied at the back of her head in a severe bun, and who wore vibrantly floral dresses no matter the season. He called out, “Mrs. Walton? Is he in?”

Linda Walton looked up from her typing, eyeing him over her black-rimmed reading glasses. She had been working for the city for decades; nobody knew her husband’s name, and the jokes were that she actually ran the department, a joke nobody had the balls to mention in her presence. She was also responsible for religiously maintaining a leather-bound book known as The Log, a
record of where every senior police officer was day or night, week or weekend. With the city in a continuous budget struggle, The Log also made sure the city wasn’t cheated on its meager salaries.

“Yes,” she said, looking down at her telephone and its display of lights. “But he’s on the phone and— Oh, he’s off now.”

He lifted the note as though it were a hall pass and she were a high school geometry teacher. “He says he needs to see me.”

“Then go see him already.” She went back to her typing.

He got to his feet, not liking the way she talked and knowing he would do nothing about it. Cops who irritated Mrs. Walton often found their overtime hours mysteriously went away at a time when scraping for overtime meant the difference between soup or ground round for dinner. He went past her, detecting a scent of lilac, and after a brief knock on the door, went in.

Hanson looked up from his desk, and if it weren’t for his clean shirt, he would look like he’d spent the night there. He told Sam, “This won’t take long. Have a seat.”

Sam sat, and Hanson said, “I take it you made the prisoner transfer successfully last night?”

He thought about that poor man pleading to be let free and how he had delivered him as ordered. “Yes, it was successful. And I don’t want to ever do it again.”

“Sorry, Sam. Can’t promise you that.”

He kept his mouth shut, and his boss said, “Did Frank and Leo find anything concerning your dead John Doe?”

“Not a thing.”

“You’re on your way to see the medical examiner?”

“In just a bit,” Sam said.

“Good. Let me know what you find out. And remember what I said last night. If this guy died from hunger or cheap booze, leave it be. Now. I need to ask you something else. You were at the Fish Shanty last night, am I right?”

“Yes, I was.”

Hanson picked up a sheet of paper, and Sam felt uneasy, as if a tax assessor were about to double his property tax bill. “An interesting coincidence, then, since about the same time you were at the Fish Shanty, two fine members of Long’s Legionnaires said they exited the restaurant and found two tires on their car slit. I suppose you have nothing to tell me about this.”

“That’s right, sir. I don’t have anything to tell you.”

“Fine.” Hanson crumpled up the paper, tossing it in his wastebasket. “Goddamn Southerners forgot who kicked their ass back in ’65. Look, knock it off, all right? So far, we’re doing all right here. We don’t want another South Boston incident. Understood?”

Sam had heard a few rumors about South Boston and saw his opening. “What South Boston incident?”

Hanson hesitated, as if judging whether he could trust Sam with the information. Then he said, “Some of Long’s Legionnaires were in South Boston two months ago, trying to instill a little freelance Party discipline. Fighting broke out, got escalated, and before you know it, you had barricades in South Boston with a couple of squads of Legionnaires on one side, and some Southie Irish cops on the other, shooting at each other. Ended up with three dead, scores injured, and one police precinct burned down. Only by the best of luck did the mayor avoid having martial law declared and National Guard platoons sent in. And what I just told you is confidential.”

“I understand.”

“I hope you do. I also hope you didn’t forget that other matter from last night. About the Underground Railroad.”

Sam wondered what he could say, for he was out on a very long limb, and his boss was holding a very sharp saw.

“Suppose I found out there had been a station? But that the station had stopped operating … was no longer sending criminals north? What then?”

Sam’s heart was racing at the gamble he had just taken. From the other side of the closed door, Mrs. Walton kept on slamming at her typewriter keys. Hanson lowered his head and said, “Officially, I want you to prepare a report—in your spare time, of course—on what you learned about the station. Unofficially, I’d be very glad to hear there’s no longer any illegal activity attracting the attention of the Party.”

Hanson’s tone changed. “All right, that’s enough for now. Let me know if you find anything out about that dead man, and remember that Party meeting tonight.”

“Yes, sir. Party meeting tonight.”

Hanson picked up a fountain pen. “You got anything else for me?”

“Just one thing, if I may.”

“Go ahead.”

“I heard a … a rumor, actually, that there might be a crackdown coming down on the refugees. That we might be used to clear them out and turn them over to the Department of the Interior.”

“Who told you that?”

Sam thought of Sarah and fought to keep his voice steady. “Nobody … well, nobody of importance, sir.”

“I see,” Hanson said, writing something down. “Well, I won’t press you for your source. But I’ll tell you I don’t know anything about a crackdown, and you know how your father-in-law and I feel about it, that being one of the few things we agree on. It’s the federal government’s mess. Not ours. And speaking of your father-in-law, go see him right after you get out of the building. The honorable Lawrence Young is being a pain in the ass and requires an immediate visit from you.”

“But the case—”

“The man’s dead right now, he’ll still be dead an hour from now, but your father-in-law will still be a poisonous bastard today and tomorrow and for some time to come. So go see him and solve something, and get him off our collective asses. And Sam—after tonight’s meeting, I want you to plan to become more active in the Party. It would be a great help to the department and to me personally if we knew what was going on with the mayor and his allies. Just … information, that’s all. There are factions, groups within the Party, jockeying for funds and influence, and any information you could provide about the mayor would be very helpful to me and my friends. Do you understand?”

Sure
, Sam thought with cold disgust.
Be more active in the Party and be a rat as well
.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “I don’t know, but I promise I’ll think about it.”

“Good. Now get out. You’ve got a full day ahead of you.”

As he left, Sam noticed the smile on Mrs. Walton’s face. She had no doubt listened to every word.

Outside, the sky was gloomy, threatening more rain. Sam walked up Congress Street, where he passed a man setting up a table on the sidewalk with a rough wooden sign that said
HOMEMADE TOYS FOR SALE
. He didn’t look long at the man—who had two well-dressed little girls in blue dresses and cloth coats with him, sitting on wooden milk crates—for guys like that came and went like the seasons, selling apples in the fall, gadgets and toys during the spring and summer, and—

“Hey, Sam,” came a voice. “Sam Miller.”

He stopped and looked back. The toy peddler had on a coat that was a size too small, a battered fedora, and his sunken face was unshaved. Sam stepped closer and, with a flush of embarrassment, said, “Brett. Brett O’Halloran. Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”

Brett smiled shyly. “That’s okay, Sam. I understand.”

Sam looked to the table and picked up one of the toys, a wooden submarine. Brett told him, “I get scrap wood from here and there, carve it at night, then paint it. Not a bad piece of work, huh?”

“No, Brett, not a bad piece of work at all.” He balanced the submarine in his hand, not wanting to look at Brett. He had been an officer in the fire department until last year, when someone found a pile of magazines and newspapers in the bottom of his locker at the fire station.
PM, The Nation, The Daily Worker
—just printed words, but by the end of the day, he was gone.

Brett said, “Relief ended a long time ago, so I do what I can. I mean, well, nobody wants to hire me, considering I’m trouble, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Sam said, throat tight, and Brett said, “These are my twin girls. Amy and Stacy. They were in the same class as your boy … Toby, right?”

“That’s right.”

Brett reached over and rubbed the top of the smaller girl’s head. “They should be in school, but I sell more if they’re out here. Tugs at the old heartstrings. Not a fair trade, but—”