The Hunt aka 27 (36 page)

The woman looked up as the drummer entered.

“Come to stay the night?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“You’re in luck. Kin have any room in the place.” She set aside the broom and walked behind the desk, spinning the registration book around so it faced him and handing him a pen.

“Four dollars the night. Includes clean sheets, sink and commode in the room, bath at the end of the hall. Breakfast is on the house.”

“Very reasonable,” he said wearily and scribbled his name on the ledger. She whirled it back and read the name aloud.

“John Trexler, St. Louis. Tell you what, Mr. Trex
l
er, I can tell you’ve had a bad afternoon, as we all have. Why don’t you just go on up to the top of the stairs and take the suite. Has its own bath and shower. I should be able to feed you in an hour or so. We should have the kitchen back open by then.”

“That’s very kind of you,” the drummer said. “Thanks.”

He carried a couple of newspapers up with him and sat in a steamy tub, leisurely reading a four-day-old
Kansas City Star.
In the Help Wanted section, an item immediately caught his eye.

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY

For qualified men only, a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new winter resort. Must be expert skier and mountain climber and have training in survival tactics. Weekly salary, room and board. Inquiries: Snow Slope, Aspen, Colorado.

He got out of the tub, toweled off and dug his atlas out of the suitcase. Aspen was a mere dot in the middle of the Rocky Mountains about 150 miles west of Denver. Trexler sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Twenty-seven had found the perfect place to once again settle down.

Rudman walked down through the ruins of Alicante. The city was virtually leveled. There was hardly a wall more than five feet tall still standing. The civilians were gone. The dogs had been eaten. There was nothing left but the rats and a tattered battalion of Loyalists who were holding the town because it was a port and controlled the main coast road.

It was sweltering hot and there were flies everywhere. Some of the more recent dead had yet to be collected for burial.

Rudman had been in the same clothes for six days, since the hotel had been bombed out. He had bathed naked in the ocean every night but his clothes were stiff with dirt. His beard was beginning to show some gray and he had a slight limp from a piece of shrapnel which had buried itself in his calf months before.

Only one or two restaurants were still open, along with the telegraph office from which Rudman and other journalists covering the civil war filed their daily dispatches. Rudman carried his story into the disheveled telegraph o
f
fice and the telegraph operator, an old man with thick white hair and a drooping mustache, gave him a weary smile.

“Señor Rudman,” he said, “what have you got for me today?”

“Same old stuff,” Rudman said wearily. “I’ve been here off and on since 1935. After three years of writing about this butcher shop it’s all beginning to sound the same.”

He stood at the counter and read
o
ver the hand-written piece once more, marking out or changing a word here and there.

ALICANTE, SPAIN, June 22, 1938. The last remaining Loyalist troops are facing annihilation in this southern coast town today as the Fascist forces of Generalissimo Franco move closer
to
the city.

There is little left of this town that was once a holiday haven for the rich of Europe. But it is no different from most other villages that have been destroyed in this three-year war, the worst civil strife since the American Civil War.

This morning, vultures have replaced Nazi bombers in the skies above, circling the devastated town in search of a feast.

Looking in horror at this fratricidal holocaust, I am reminded of a time in Africa when I saw a gut-shot hyena, nature’s most efficient scavenger, eating its own insides.

In this war, which has pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, church against state, Spain, too, is devouring itself while its German and Italian “friends” sit on the sidelines crying “Ole!”

They have provided the most
m
odern and efficient machines of death to Franco. What a cynical gesture—turning Spain into their private testing ground and using Spanish blood for their grisly experiments. The weapons perfected here will be the weapons used in the next world war..

He put down the pencil and pinched his eyes.

“Oh, the hell with it,” he said, “just send it on, Pablo.”

“Si Señor,” the
operator said.

Rudman went back outside. A Loyalist soldier was sitting on a pile of bricks, digging beans out of a can with his bayonet which he used as a fork. He was thin as a palm leaf, his pale eyes buried deep in black sockets. He wore a r
a
g of a white shirt and torn cord pants and had a bandolier around his shoulder. His toes were sticking through the end of his Loots. His rifle, an old Mannlicher, was leaning on the bricks near his leg.

“Americano?”
Rudman asked.

“Yeah. You too?” the soldier answered.

“Yep. Join you?”

“Sure, pull up a brick and sit down.”

Rudman sat down and took a swig of water from his canteen.

“What’s your name?”

“What’s the dif? I’m just a soldier.” His voice was hoarse from the dust that drifted up from the ruins.

“Are you a Communist?” Rudman asked.

“Hell, no.
I just
hate these Fascist bastards. You don’t stop them here, they’ll be in Coney Island next. Least that’s what I thought when I came over here.”

“You don’t think so anymore?”

“Hell, I don’t know what I think. Y’know, I never seen a dead body before I came over here? Some education.”

“Sorry you came now?”

Soldier laughed. “Shit, is anybody ever glad they came? It’s something you think you ought t’do. You can’t complain when it doesn’t go right, can you?”

“Where you from?”

“Boston. Boston, Mass. Land of liberty. You ain’t in the Brigade, are you?”

“No, I’m a correspondent.”

“No kiddin’? For who?”

“New York Times.”

“Hey. You’re a big shot, huh?”

“There aren’t any big shots here.”

“Well, that’s a fact,” he said. “That’s a fact for damn sure.”

“How long you been over here?”

“I was in on it almost from the beginning,” the soldier said in his hoarse voice. “November 1935, I think it was. Long Goddamn time. I guess I seen it all. I was at Tortosa the day the bastards wiped out the Lincoln Brigade. Only a dozen of us got out. Six of us drowned trying to swim the Ebro rather than surrender. Christ, what a day that was. The tanks just chewed us to bits. That’s when I knew it was all over. This ragtag army can’t hold out much longer. Thing is, we don’t know how to stop. I guess we’ll just keep fightin’ until we’re all dead.”

“Why don’t you just quit? Walk away from it?”

“Where’m I gonna go?” the soldier answered, staring at Rudman with haunted eyes. “Can’t go home. The U.S. says we broke the law coming over here to fight. Some kind of neutrality act or something.” He stared out at the harbor. A British ship languished in the cluttered port. “Don’t want to rot in some Spanish dungeon. May as well keep killing the bastards until they get me.” He looked back at Rudman. “Where you from?”

“Ohio.”

“That a fact. Never knew anybody before from Ohio. Been home recently?”

Rudman stared out at the British ship for a long time before he answered. “I haven’t been to the States since 1933.”

“Jesus! Why?”

“Work. Pretty sorry excuse, actually.”

“How long you been in Spain?”

“Off and on since the beginning. Occasionally I go back up to Germany and do something.”

“You’re here for the finish, ain’t that it?”

“I hope the hell not.”

“But you know it’s true. Italian tanks, German dive bombers..
.
you look back on it, we never had a chance.” He stopped and changed the subject.

“Don’t you miss it? The States, I mean?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t you miss your friends?”

“
I
only have one friend in America,” Rudman said. “Hell, I don’t even know where he is. Been.
. .
almost four years since we talked.”

“Don’t ever write, huh?”

“Nah. He’s not much for writing.”

“So when are you going back?”

“When the wars are over.”

“Wars?”

“You don’t think it’s going to stop here, do you? Hell, this is just the
warm
-
up. This is the prelims, soldier.”

“You got a pretty dismal outlook.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.” Rudman laughed. “My job’s dismal.”

“Ain’t that the truth.
. .“
The soldier stopped suddenly and looked up, his eyes narrowing, head cocked to one side.

“Hear something?” Rudman asked, shielding his eyes with his hand and scanning the sky.

“Thought I did. Sure has been quiet all.
.

He stopped. Then Rudman heard it. The distinctive rumble of the bombers, their engines roaring in unison.

“Christ, what’s left to bomb?” the soldier asked bitterly.

“Maybe they’ll pass over. Maybe they’re headed someplace else.”

“Not a chance. Better get to the shelter, what’s left of it.”

They stood up and started to walk through the broken bricks and rubble of buildings, picking their way around boards with rusty nails sticking out of them, toward the shelter two blocks away. The roar of the planes became deafening. They looked up and saw half a dozen German Junkers peeling out of formation, engines screaming as they dove toward the ground.

“Jesus, it’s the fuckin’
Junkers! Let’s go!” the soldier yelled and they started to run. The engines screeched as the dive bombers dove toward the earth, then howled almost painfully as they pulled out. Then came the most chilling sound of all, a sound both of them knew well, a piercing scream that got higher as the missiles got closer to the ground. The earth shook as the bombs began to hit, stitching a great trench through the city’s debris. The screams got louder. They ran harder. Rudman could see the entrance to the shelter but they were pulling the door shut.

“Wait a minute!” he yelled, “Wait for
.

But his plea was lost by the screaming bombs. The screams got higher and higher and louder and louder.
.

“La-d-e-e-e-s and gent-u
l
-men, your attention pu-lease. This is the main event of the evening. Fifteen rounds of boxing for the heavyweight cham-peen-ship of the world. In this corner, wearing black trunks and weighing two hundred twenty-one pounds, the U-lan of the Rhine, from Berlin, Germany, the challenger, M-a-a-x Schmeling!”

There was a chorus of boos and catcalls from all over Yankee Stadium as the brutish, glowering, unshaven fighter stood up. He sneered at the insults from the audience.

“He looks like a Nazi,” Beerbohm said.

“He’s got a head like a rock,” Keegan answered. “But
Joe’s got the hammer to crack it.”

He looked around. There were almost a hundred thousand people in the special stands built especially for this grudge fight between the pride of the Aryan race and the Negro from Detroit. It was the largest crowd ever to see a prizefight.

The mob had long since peeled off
jackets and ties. Everyone was sweating in their shirtsleeves but nobody cared. This was a fight to sweat for.

“And in this corner, at two hundred twelve pounds, wearing white trunks, the Brown Bomber from Dee-troit, Michigan, heavyweight champeen of the world
. . .
Joe Louis!”

The crowd went berserk and Beerbo
h
m and Keegan were with them. Everyone was on their feet as the lean American strode loosely to the center of the ring, one arm raised. They were still screaming as the tuxedoed referee called the fighters to the middle and gave them their instructions.

There was electricity in the air. Two years earlier at the Olympics in Germany, Hitler had insulted America’s running pride, Jesse Owens, by refusing to attend Owens’s gold medal ceremony because he was an “American
Née-
gro.” That same summer, Schmeling and Louis had met for the first time. In the twelfth round, Schmeling had connected with a crushing right and Louis had taken the count, the only time he’d ever been knocked out.

Now, two years later, it was get-even time and the crowd knew it. Grudge fight? Hell, thought Keegan, this is the grudge fight of all times. This is bigger than David and Goliath.

Louis looked great. Louis looked ready. Louis had death in his eyes.

“It won’t go five rounds,” Keegan said.

“I don’t know, kid. Schmeling’s no pork chop.”

“You want to talk or bet?” Keegan said from their second- row seats, squinting up at the two fighters.

“Name your poison.”

“I got twenty says Schmeling’ll answer the bell at the sixth.”

“Let’s see it,” Keegan said, peeling o
ff
a twenty. Beerbohm took out two tens. Keegan snatched them out of his hand, wrapped them in his twenty and tucked them in his shirt pocket.

“How come you hold the money?” Beerbohm asked with mock suspicion.

“Because I’m rich, Ned. I’m not going to abscond with a measly forty bucks. On the other hand you are, how can I put it...?”

“Poor,” Beerbohm said.

“Yeah,” said Keegan with a nod. “Poor’s good. That covers it.” They both laughed. Keegan was feeling good tonight for a change.

A year after Keegan returned, his Uncle Harry had died suddenly of a heart attack, willing him the Killarney Rose. Dispirited, Keegan spent almost a year focusing his energies on renovating the top floor of the building, turning it into his private luxury apartment.
Jenny Gould remained paramount in his mind. It was an open wound that would not heal. It was with him when he awoke in the morning and it stayed with him until sleep temporarily eased the ache. Although he knew his anguish was partly caused by uncertainty—was she alive or dead?—he could not push it from the forefront of his mind. Nor did time ease the hurt. He gradually retreated into himself, avoiding old friends, ignoring phone calls. He went to Hong Kong on business, spent months at a time alone on his horse farm in Kentucky and spent the rest of the time in the back booth of the pub, which he used as a kind of ex-officio office.