The League of Night and Fog

by David Morrell

  “Something the matter?” Sid Henderson asked across the table from him. Like Miller, Henderson was in his seventies. Indeed all the bridge players in this room in the St. Paul community service center were either that old or just slightly younger.

  Miller strained to focus on his cards. “The matter? Nothing.”

  “You sure? You look kinda sick.”

  “It’s too hot in here. They’ve turned up the thermostat too high. Somebody ought to open some windows.”

  “And give us all pneumonia?” Iris Glickman asked to Miller’s right. She claimed she was only sixty-seven. “It’s freezing outside. If you’re hot, take off your suit-coat.”

  But Miller had already loosened his tie. He couldn’t allow himself to ignore decorum completely and play cards in his shirtsleeves.

  “Maybe you should go home,” Harvey Ginsberg said on the left. “You’re awful pale.”

  Miller dabbed his sweaty brow with a handkerchief; his stomach felt queasy. “You need four players. I’d ruin the game for everybody.”

  “Screw the game,” Harvey said.

  As usual, Iris pursed her lips in pretended shock at Harvey’s vulgar language.

  Miller’s forehead throbbed. “You won’t think I’m a poor sport?”

  “What I’ll think, Frank, is you’re a damned fool if you’re sick and you don’t go home.”

  Miller smiled. “Such good friends.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow and make sure you’re feeling better,” Harvey said.

  3

  The instant Miller stepped from the hall, an icy wind stung his face. Shocking snow pelted him as he trudged toward the parking lot across the street, clutching his overcoat. At least he didn’t feel ill anymore. The gusts revived him, affirming his suspicion that his headache and nausea had been caused by excessive heat inside the hall. He fondly remembered the winters of his youth. Toboggan rides and ice-skate races. My mind’s still spry, he thought. It’s this damned body that’s let me down.

  The street was deserted; the arc lamps in the parking lot were shrouded by falling snow. He reached his car—an Audi, a gift from his son—unlocked the driver’s door, and heard a voice behind him.

  Frowning, he turned, straining to see through the swirling snow. The voice had been muffled by the shriek of the wind. A man’s voice, he thought, but when he didn’t hear it again, he began to wonder if his ears were playing a trick on him.

  He shrugged and gripped the latch on his car door. But again he heard the voice behind him, closer, though still not distinct. It seemed to be saying a single word, a first name, his first name.

  Once more, he turned. “Is someone there?”

  No answer.

  He opened the Audi’s door.

  A hand grasped his shoulder, preventing him from getting in. Another hand slammed the door shut. A third hand spun him with such force that he almost lost his glasses. Three men. The snow obscured their faces.

  “Please. I’m old. Take my wallet. But just don’t hurt me.”

  “Wallet?” One of them laughed.

  The snow lessened. When he saw their faces and understood what they really wanted, he despaired.

  4

  Sounds we don’t hear can sometimes wake us. So it was that William Miller, unconsciously aware of the silence outside his bedroom windows, began to squirm in his sleep. Like a father whose rest is not complete until his teenage son or daughter comes home from a date that shouldn’t have lasted past midnight, he felt uneasy because no car had entered the driveway, no automatic garage door had rattled as it opened and shut. But he wasn’t a father who waited for his son. The opposite—a son, who waited for his father. His mental alarm went off. He opened his eyes and blinked at the digital clock beside his bed.

  2:38 A.M.

  Taking care not to wake his wife, he eased from bed and peered out a window toward the driveway below. A distant streetlight glinted off falling snow. Fir trees were cloaked with white. There weren’t any tire tracks in the driveway.

  “What’s the matter, hon?”

  He turned to his wife. “Sorry. I tried to be quiet.”

  “I couldn’t sleep either. What are you looking at?”

  “It’s what I’m not looking at that bothers me.”

  Miller explained.

  “No tire tracks?” She slipped from bed and put on a robe. “Maybe it snowed after he got in.”

  “Yeah … maybe.”

  He left the bedroom, passed his children’s rooms, and reached his father’s room at the opposite end of the hallway. When he didn’t see a form on the bed, he flicked on the light. The room was empty.

  His wife appeared beside him. “Let’s think a minute. This might not mean anything. He might be downstairs asleep in front of the television.”

  “Maybe.”

  They went downstairs but couldn’t find him.

  “Car trouble?”

  “He’d have phoned,” Miller said.

  “Unless he’s with a friend.”

  “This late? He hardly ever stays out past midnight.”

  “I said with a friend. He might have decided to spend the night.”

  “With a woman?”

  She smiled. “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t make a difference. He’d still have phoned.”

  “Unless he felt embarrassed.”

  “What?”

  “You know, with your mother dead a year now and …”

  “Hey, I loved my mother, and I’m sorry she’s gone. But if he’s still interested in women at his age, more power to him.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know that’s how you feel. Have you ever talked about sex with him?”

  “With my seventy-three-year-old father? Give me a break.” He studied the kitchen clock. “It’s close to three. If he isn’t home by three-thirty, I’m calling the cops.”

  But his father wasn’t home by three-thirty, and Miller did call the cops. No auto accidents involving an Audi had been reported. No old men had been admitted to the local hospitals after midnight, and none of those admitted earlier had been Miller’s father. The Audi, covered with snow, was discovered in a parking lot across the street from the community service hall. The keys had been dropped and somehow kicked beneath the car.

  But Miller’s father was never found.

  5

  Mexico City. April. Martin Rosenberg, seventy-two, stepped out of the synagogue, tucked his yarmulke into his suit-coat pocket, and surveyed the cobbled street. From two blocks away, the drone of traffic along the Paseo de la Reforma disturbed his sense of tranquility To his right, the lights of the ancient castle on Chapultepec hill gleamed against the darkening sky.

  He exchanged shaloms with a group of young people coming out of the synagogue and turned left toward a corner. His son’s home was five blocks away, one of the historic Spanish mansions interspersed with high-rise apartments in this affluent section of Mexico City. As usual, his son had offered to have him driven to and from the synagogue, but Rosenberg had insisted that walks were essential to his health, and besides, the scenery throughout this district never failed to give him pleasure.

  He rounded the corner, proceeding toward the well-lit broad avenue that connected Chapultepec hill with government buildings.

  6

  “I don’t care how old he is!” Aaron Rosenberg said. “It’s never taken him more than an hour to walk back home!” He paced in front of the arched windows that took up one wall of his living room. “But it’s been more than two hours, not one!”

  With his pencil-thin mustache, aquiline nose, and dark burning eyes, Rosenberg looked more Spanish than Jewish. He seldom went to the synagogue anymore, but he donated generously to it and knew the rabbi, whom he’d telephoned forty-five minutes ago, learning that his father had left the synagogue at dusk.

  “Perhaps he stopped to visit with someone,” his wife said. Her face was deeply tanned. Thirty-eight, lithe from daily tennis workouts, she wore a solid-gold watch, a turquoise neckla
ce, and a bright red designer version of a peasant skirt and blouse.

  “Who? And surely not for two hours.”

  He saw the headlights of a Mercedes sedan pulling up at the curb. “Esteban’s come back. Perhaps he found him.”

  But Esteban reported that he’d driven along every route that the father would have used to return from the synagogue. Then he had widened his search to every street within a twenty-block grid. Other servants, having searched on foot, came back with the same disturbing report.

  “Go back out again! Keep looking!”

  Rosenberg called every hospital in Mexico City. Nothing. At midnight, when the servants again returned without his father, he sacrificed a cardinal rule of his import-export business—never deal with the police except to bribe them—and phoned a captain whose home on Lake Chalco, eight miles south of the city, had recently been renovated thanks to Rosenberg.

  One month later, his father had still not been found.

  7

  Toronto. May. From the window of his first-class seat in the Air Canada 727, Joseph Kessler peered down at the glinting expanse of Lake Ontario. Even at twenty thousand feet, he could see the distinctive length of a Great Lakes freighter. Ahead, close to shore, he saw the smaller outlines of barges, the gleam of wind-swollen sails. Despite the brilliance of the day, Kessler knew that the water would be numbingly cold. The crews of the sailboats down there had to be fanatical about their sport.

  He nodded with approval. Because of his own ability to harness his obsessions, he’d developed a small Providence electronics firm into a thriving corporation that had made him a millionaire by the age of forty. But at the moment, his obsession was not related to business. It was personal, fueled by rage.

  He didn’t allow himself to show it. Throughout the flight, he’d maintained composure, studying business documents while inwardly he seethed. Patience, he told himself. Success depends on patience. Keep control.

  For now.

  Below, he saw the sprawl of Toronto, its flat residential subdivisions stretching along the lake shore, its skyscrapers projecting from the heart of the city. He felt a change in pressure as the jet began to descend. Six minutes later, it landed at Toronto’s international airport.

  He went through customs. “Nothing to declare. I’m here on business.” His briefcase and carry-on bag were not inspected. He proceeded through a sliding glass door into the noisy concourse, scanned the crowd, and approached a muscular man who wore the same blue-and-red striped tie that Kessler did.

  “How much did you pay for that tie?” Kessler asked.

  “How much did you pay?”

  “Someone gave it to me.”

  “I found mine.” The code completed, the muscular man added, “Have you got any luggage?”

  “Just what I’m carrying.”

  “Then let’s get out of here.” The man’s Canadian accent made “out” sound like “oot.”

  From the terminal, they entered a parking lot, got into a station wagon, and soon reached a divided four-lane highway, heading west on the 401.

  Kessler looked behind him toward the receding skyline of Toronto. “How soon till we get there?”

  “An hour.”

  “Everyone showed up?”

  “You’re the last.”

  “Good.” Kessler felt his fury blossom. To distract himself, he pointed toward the farm fields and stands of timber at the sides of the highway. “Something’s missing.”

  “What?”

  “No billboards.”

  “Right. They’re against the law.”

  “Three cheers for Canada.”

  Kessler put on his sunglasses and stared straight ahead. The small talk was over.

  8

  Eighty kilometers farther, they reached the exit ramp for Kitchener. Instead of entering the city, the driver used side roads to head deep into farm country, finally turning up a zigzag gravel driveway toward a mansion on a bluff above a river.

  Kessler stepped from the station wagon and studied the estate—surrounding wooded hills, a nine-hole golf course, a tennis court, a television satellite receiver, a swimming pool. He turned toward the five-car garage, then toward the mansion. With its dormer windows, towers, and gables, it looked like it belonged in New England more than in Ontario.

  “Mr. Halloway knows how to live well,” the driver said. “Of course, he owes it all to—”

  One of the double doors at the mansion’s entrance came open. A lithe man of medium height, wearing a perfectly fitted exercise suit and expensive jogging shoes, stepped out. He was in his early forties, had thick wavy hair, and beamed with health. “Thank you, John. We won’t be needing you for the rest of the day. If you like, you can use that new set of exercise machines in the gym. Have a steam bath. A drink. Relax.”

  “I appreciate it, Mr. Halloway.”

  The driver got in the station wagon. Halloway came down the granite front steps and held out his hand. “Joe? Or is it … ?”

  “Joseph.” Kessler shook hands with him.

  “We’ve been a long time meeting. With so much in common, it’s a pity we had to wait for misfortune to bring us together.”

  “Misfortune’s not exactly what I’d call it.”

  “What then?”

  “Fucking insanity.”

  “The nature of the world. That’s why I prefer to live out here. Away from the madness.” Grimacing, Halloway gestured toward the road hidden beyond the wooded hills. “Come. The others feel as distressed as ourselves. They’re waiting.”

  9

  The mansion’s foyer was shadowy; its slate floor emphasized the click of their footsteps. Still needing to calm himself, Kessler paused to examine a colorful landscape painting. The artist’s signature was Halloway.

  “My father’s,” Halloway said. “His acrylic period.”

  The reference to Halloway’s father rekindled Kessler’s indignation. Down the hall, he heard angry voices and, preceded by Halloway, entered a large oak-paneled room where eight men interrupted their fierce discussion to look at him.

  Kessler studied them in return. They were of different heights, weights, and facial structures, but they shared one physical characteristic: their ages fit within the same narrow range, late thirties, early forties.

  “It’s about time,” one said.

  Two others spoke in rapid succession.

  “I’ve been here since yesterday.”

  “This meeting was supposed to be urgent!”

  “My flight got delayed,” Kessler told them. “I came as soon as I could.”

  The three men who’d spoken had accents—Spanish, Swedish, and American midwestern. Coming down the hall, Kessler had heard other accents—French, British, Italian, Egyptian, and American southern.

  “Gentlemen, please,” Halloway said. “If we start to argue among ourselves, we help the enemy achieve the second half of his purpose.”

  “Second half?” The Frenchman frowned.

  “And what do you mean ‘his’?” the Texan asked. “One man couldn’t have done this!”

  “Of course,” Halloway said. “But no matter how many, they’re organized, and they share a common goal. That’s why I think of them as one and why we have to act as one.”

  “It’s true,” the Italian said. “We can’t allow ourselves to be distracted by our frustrations. We mustn’t be divided. Isn’t that why we got in touch with each other so many years ago and why we stayed in touch? Because as a group we’re stronger than each of us is alone. We can better protect ourselves.”

  “But we’re not the ones who need protecting!” the Spaniard said.

  “Not physically perhaps,” Halloway said. “At least not yet. But in our hearts? And suppose they’re not satisfied? Suppose they decide to come for us now, our wives, our children?”

  The others straightened.

  “That’s what I meant by the second half of our enemy’s purpose. It’s to torture us with uncertainty, to make us suffer from constant dread.”<
br />
  “Dear God.” The Egyptian paled.

  “You understand?”

  “It’s the Night and Fog all over again.”

  Kessler couldn’t restrain himself. “What’s the matter with all of you?”

  They stared at him.

  “Before you pat yourselves on the back about how smart you were to stay in touch with each other, why don’t you admit you’ve been your own worst enemy?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How do you think they found us? All they had to do was track down just one and follow the trail to the rest.”

  “We took precautions.”

  “Obviously not well enough. And look at us now. All together.”

  The American midwesterner stepped forward, his features twisted with resentment. “My father would never have told.”

  “Under torture? Come on,” Kessler said. “How much pain can an old man stand? Or what if chemicals were used? I was late because I almost didn’t come at all. The reason I did was to warn you. You’re as much to blame as whoever did this. Don’t stay in touch with each other. I don’t want to know anything more about you, and I don’t want you to know anything more about me.”

  “That won’t solve the problem,” Halloway said. “We’d still be in danger, and it doesn’t bring our fathers back.”

  “I’ve already accepted the fact—mine’s dead.”

  “I don’t give up as easily as you,” Halloway said. “But what if you’re right? What if your father and mine and everybody else’s are dead? Do you intend to let the matter end?”

  “Oh, believe me, I want the bastards to pay.”

  “In that case, we have plans to discuss.”

  Kessler stepped quickly forward. “You have something specific?”

  “Indeed. It may be you didn’t notice. You weren’t the only member of the group who had second thoughts about coming. Two of us in fact declined. In many respects, the most important members.”

  Kessler glanced at the group in confusion and suddenly understood.