The Nurse Novel

by Alice Brennan

  In this sudden spasm of fury, St. Georges shifted his gun so that he held it by the barrel and swung with all his might, hitting Morgan on the side of the head with the heavy handle of the ugly .45. Morgan fell to the sidewalk instantly. To Alice, watching terrified from the taxi window, it was as if Morgan had fallen down an elevator shaft. He simply disappeared. She screamed. She screamed as loudly as ever she had in her life, but not a sound escaped from her constricted throat.

  The big Cadillac backed up, made a U-turn, and disappeared swiftly uptown.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was eight thirty-two p.m. when St. Georges lost his head and struck Morgan O’Neill.

  He was worried sitting in the back of the Cadillac now, as they sped uptown through the almost empty streets. No violence, he had been ordered, and it could well be that he had killed O’Neill and that he would find himself fleeing not only a murder charge in the United States but the vengeance of his bosses as well. How had this blind moment come over him, Henri St. Georges, the imperturbable? What tensions had been building within him?

  But now he was reasoning coolly. He would admit he had hit Morgan—they would find out anyway—but he would claim he had to, because O’Neill had tried to attack him. This was plausible, and once in Mexico he knew how to hide, from everybody if necessary, and to change identities. He had not always, for example, been Henri St. Georges. And he had money hidden in Mexico and it was not in the name of St. Georges.

  But he was feeling crowded and pressed for time. He wished he were at the Philadelphia airport right now. Or better, in a plane headed south of the border.

  The limousine dropped him a few blocks from the apartment in the West Fifties and he walked the rest of the way. Antoinette admitted him. She was dressed in an oatmeal-colored tweed suit and her gorgeous hair was wrapped in a scarlet scarf. The lovely girl, the ornament of a lovely weekend in the country—just what she was supposed to resemble. Felix was there, too, in slacks and a bright sports jacket.

  It was eight-fifty when St. Georges walked into the apartment, and he went directly to the dining room. He deposited the briefcase on the table.

  The mirror said, “Thank you. Leave the room, close the door behind you, and return, all of you, in five minutes.”

  “I have something to say,” St. Georges said.

  “Can it not wait five minutes?”

  “Yes.”

  When the three filed back into the dining room, it was empty and there was no briefcase on the table. There were, however, two envelopes.

  “It is not bad,” said the mirror. “We will go along as planned. Your plane tickets are on the table, made out to your new names, and you will find therein instructions about boardinghouses where you must stay till you get further instructions. I have a car downstairs for you; it should be there by now. The car is a red Chrysler convertible. The more conspicuous you are in America the better you are hidden. And now, what did you have to say, St. Georges?”

  * * * *

  It was around eight-thirty that Wednesday evening that Jacques Stern panicked, though not the way the ONI wanted him to.

  When Alice’s telephone call came he knew from her strange choked voice that something was the matter, but he had agreed to wait for her until nine, nine-thirty, whenever. He had made his voice sound light and cheery. “You’re not two-timing me, are you?” he had even managed to say, making one of the last quips and doubles-entendres he was to utter in a long time.

  But as he waited for Alice his fears grew. Each minute seemed like five at least. He expected it to be nine o’clock when his slim watch read only eight-fifteen. And then very quickly, very clearly, he saw through the scheme of St. Georges and his boss, whoever he was. And who cared?

  It was simple. They were throwing him to the dogs. St. Georges, by manner if not by words—he would never be quite that crude, for it did not fit the gentlemanly suavity he had assumed and which Jacques looked upon with contempt, feeling that his own was genuine, Henri’s a fake—St. Georges had certainly hinted that Jacques Stern would be expendable if anything went wrong with the scheme of planting a popular host in Washington. “One does not fail,” St. Georges had said, and failure there had been.

  It was clear that they were getting out and leaving him to disgrace, ruin, and interrogation—and how little, in truth, he knew! They might even be gone by now and he was being left like a sitting duck. Not only sitting, but stupid. Like St. Georges, Jacques Stern did not like to be considered stupid.

  So around eight-thirty that evening Jacques Stem panicked—and, in anger, forgot precautions. He fled his apartment, taking all the cash he had and throwing one parting glance at the real Picasso. He gave an idling taxicab he had the good fortune to find the address of the apartment in the West Fifties. There was a circuitous route to be taken before one went to that apartment but Jacques had no time for it. He went directly.

  That was a mistake, for two minutes after Jacques emerged from his apartment a call was received at the temporary ONI-FBI headquarters at 90 Church Street.

  “Our boy’s skipped. He’s in our cab. No need the nurse coming up now. Shall we take them?”

  “Take everyone you can get. Let Stern lead you. Let me know where he goes. We won’t send the nurse.”

  The cab came gently to a stop in front of the apartment house alongside a sleek red convertible. There was a man at the wheel, in sports clothes, smoking a cigarette.

  Then Jacques made another mistake. He waved to the man in the convertible as he was paying the taxi. The man nodded.

  The cab kept to the one-way street, turned the corner, and stopped. Another car joined it. Headquarters was telephoned and all the watchers, now assembled, waited for the Chrysler to come to them. Nobody was nervous, but everybody admired the idea of using a fire truck-red convertible as a getaway car.

  “Maybe they’ll give it to us as a bonus,” one of the men said sadly. He hadn’t paid this month’s installment on his own car.

  * * * *

  The mirror had taken Henri St. Georges’ story very well.

  “It’s too bad,” it said, “but sometimes these things can’t be helped. Americans are too hasty. If, for instance, Van der Meer had written instead of telephoned his information we would not have been alerted. But since Americans are hasty, my friends, get on to your weekend. You’ll hear from me. Stern won’t be calling for an hour or so and even then… What is that?”

  The front-door buzzer was sounding, repeatedly, frantically.

  St. Georges took over. “Felix,” he said.

  While Antoinette and Henri stayed out of sight in the dining room, Felix opened the front door to admit a distraught Jacques Stern. He brushed past the big man and strode into the dining room.

  “Thank you, my dear loyal friends. I saw the car downstairs. So you were going off without me, leaving me to the wolves? Oh, no. You can count me in on your little party. If I’m caught, you get caught, too. If you escape, so do I…” He babbled on almost hysterically.

  St. Georges glanced at the mirror. “I am sorry, but we cannot include you in our plans, Stern,” it said.

  Again, St. Georges said, “Felix.”

  Felix smiled and said, “I have wanted to do this for a long time.” He hit Jacques, who was still babbling, with a murderous right. Never has a tirade so effectively and so suddenly been stopped.

  “I may,” said Felix as he looked at Jacques prostrate on the floor with the warm feeling of an artist who has done a good job of work, “have broken his jaw.”

  “Good-by and good luck,” the mirror said.

  The three of them (Antoinette had watched the whole performance as impassively and remotely as a statue) filed out of the apartment and got into the red car, which started off immediately. Felix was grinning and rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. He was still rubbing them when a taxi blocked their way at the end of
the street and another car drew alongside them. They were caught, surrounded.

  “We’re the FBI, kiddies,” said the leader, a gray-haired man in his fifties.

  Automatically, St. Georges began to bluster, “I want an attorney,” he said. “You can’t do this. What are you holding us for?”

  “For illegally feeding the pigeons in Central Park, sweetheart,” the leader said. “And where is your boyfriend, Jacques Stern?”

  “I refuse to answer.”

  “The Fifth Amendment already? But I don’t think you can plead it. You’re not a citizen. Now tell us where Stern is or we’ll keep you here until we’ve searched every apartment in that whole building.

  “He’s in 2-A,” St. Georges answered in a surly voice.

  The gray-haired man and a companion, leaving St. Georges and company under guard, went to the apartment and got no response to their ringing.

  “This is breaking and entering,” smiled the leader, “but we haven’t time for superintendents and passkeys.” And he shot the lock off the door and broke and entered. Stern was still on the floor of the dining room, still unconscious.

  The leader, whose name was Francke, looked speculatively at the big Louis XIV mirror. “You’re too young to remember,” he said to his companion, “but that’s a one-way mirror. You can see through it from the other side. An old speakeasy dodge. You can tell because it’s sort of cloudy on this side…”

  He picked up a chair and smashed the glass. They discovered a small room on the other side, evidently once a maid’s room, with a door of its own onto the service stairway. There was also a secret door that led into the dining room and a small loud-speaker system. There were two telephones, the wires torn out. A bare table and a chair. There was absolutely nothing else, not an article of clothing, not a cigarette butt.

  “This is where the boss worked,” Francke said. “Not a bad idea. The guys we have probably never saw him. He talked to them through the mirror. And he could get out down the back stairs without being seen.

  “Well, let’s get glamour boy onto his feet and take him to headquarters with the others. Then you come back and question the superintendent, square things for blowing off the lock, and question everybody who can shed some light on who used this room. I’ll post a guard here, too.”

  And so around ten o’clock that Wednesday night a strange cavalcade threaded its way to 90 Church Street—a taxicab; a bright-red Chrysler convertible, of which the most conspicuous feature was a breathtakingly beautiful girl with a red scarf on her head; and a third car, inconspicuous where the Chrysler was flamboyant, but somehow stealthy and ominous and occupied by five men, not one of whom spoke or smiled.

  CHAPTER 10

  The training that makes a nurse, the ability to move quickly, to make a decision, came to Alice Smith. Morgan was unconscious on the pavement hut, thank God, he was alive. She threw her cloak over him and said to the taxi driver, “Don’t move him. Don’t touch him. I’ll get help.”

  The driver was stunned into immobility. But he managed to nod agreement. After all, she had asked him to do nothing. He was feeling that was about all he could do.

  An infinitesimal moment before, Alice Smith, USN, had been screaming silently in horror and disbelief. Now she was a nurse in charge of an emergency. She knew what to do.

  The street was purple and dark. There was not another person on it. It was as if time had been suspended, frozen into an arrested second-tick of terror.

  But the training stayed with Alice. “There’s help at Ninety Church. I’ll get it. You stand by.”

  And she ran down the street to the Navy building. It was only a few blocks, but it seemed miles. And then, panting, she got through the doors and hurried to the guard. “There’s a man hurt—down the street. Quick! Give me help!”

  “Lady,” the guard said, a civil servant, willing but bewildered, “this ain’t a hospital. What can we do? There’s nobody here now anyhow.”

  “Trilling. Captain Trilling,” she cried, not remembering whence she had dredged up the name that Morgan had mentioned to her only once, and that on the fateful taxicab ride.

  “Oh, Trilling,” the civil servant said. “Wait a minute.”

  Time is a relative matter. To Jacques Stern, waiting for Alice, every minute had seemed like at least five. To Alice, waiting on the amiable incompetence of a nightman, every second was an hour. Yet it was no more than five minutes before the elevator doors opened and Captain Trilling appeared in the lobby.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” he said. It was the first time he had seen Nurse Smith, but he knew her well. “We’re just about to arrest Stern, forgive me”—somehow this courtesy seemed due to a girl who was engaged to the man—“but where is O’Neill?”

  Alice told him and they all ran uptown the few blocks to where the taxicab was still idiotically pulled up at a right angle to the curb. But Morgan was not there.

  It was a simple matter. A prowl car had come by and a police ambulance had been summoned. There was a cop with the cabbie, still taking notes.

  “I told him to wait for you, lady,” the cabbie said.

  “He’s better off where he is,” said the policeman. “The emergency ward at Bellevue.”

  Bellevue. The city hospital. It sprawls along the East Side of Manhattan taking care of the great city’s sick, its wounded, its poor and feeble. Narcotics addicts have been there and attempted suicides. Babies have been born there and old men have died muttering confessions to an absolving priest who could not understand them. “So live that you may die at any moment,” Hiram Smith, Alice’s father, liked to say, but to most of those who died at Bellevue death seemed a surprise and an occasion not prepared for. All races, all religions came there, if there was the need. The hospital was more generous than the city which supported it. It never rejected anybody; its doors were never closed. The city might deny some admission to its domain—nobody was ever turned away from Bellevue.

  But, somehow, because Bellevue was a charity hospital, because it would take care of anybody, Alice felt that Morgan should be elsewhere. Morgan O’Neill of ONI. It was Captain Trilling who set her straight.

  “He’ll get as good care as at any place in the world.” They were on their way now in a speeding Navy car. “I want to take a look at him and then I’m afraid I have to go back to Ninety Church. I’ll ask permission, and it will be granted, to have Bauman come in on the case, too.” Captain Bauman was the top surgeon at St. Albans and Alice knew him well. “You can stay with Morgan as long as you want. And don’t worry. He’ll pull through this all right. He’s tougher than you think.”

  Captain Trilling was speaking in the dark, but it was part of humaneness to soothe this stricken girl and his voice of assured authority did give meager comfort to Ensign Smith. “You’re pretty fond of O’Neill, aren’t you?” he asked, knowing the answer, but trying desperately to get some answer, some reaction, from this grief-mute girl.

  Alice spoke to him then as if he were a loving father, as if he were, indeed, a confessor, a person to whom she could tell anything, and who would be a comfort to her and take care of her and take care of—everything.

  “Captain Trilling,” she said. “He once asked me to marry him. And I said ‘No.’ It was the greatest mistake of my life. And now I’ve done this to him.”

  “You’ve done nothing, dear,” the captain said in an extremely unofficial voice.

  Captain Trilling realized that he was talking like an idiot, making no sense. Yet it was important to say something, anything, to keep this girl together. Actually, she was a sort of nuisance to him. He wanted to check on his man, O’Neill, and then he wanted to get back to Stern and his companions. But Captain Trilling had a daughter just about Alice Smith’s age…

  The car was whizzing through solitary dark streets and Alice, herself now almost in a state of shock, was fighting not to cry. One did not
cry in uniform and assuredly not when next to you was a captain, USN. But there were tears in her eyes which made them big and luminous.

  Could it happen so suddenly, she was thinking, that Jacques Stern, who had been the sun and the moon to her, could in the twinkling of an eye mean nothing to her? That she could turn like this from what she thought was love to contempt, even hatred? For now she had no doubt that Morgan was right about Jacques. And bitterly she imagined Stern joking to his cronies about the naïve little girl from upstate who had fallen for his elegant ways and phrases, his flowers and presents.

  First thing in the morning, she suddenly thought with feminine orderliness, she must return the diamond necklace. And where would Jacques be? In jail?

  And Morgan, oh, she had let Morgan down, but it would be she who would nurse him back to health. Captain Trilling would arrange it, Captain Trilling who knew that Morgan was going to be all right. Yes, she would take care of him and then, when he was well, quietly she would resign from the Navy and slip back to Alexanderville.

  The farm was no longer her father’s, but she would find a place to live. And she would find work to do. All the hospitals in that neighborhood needed nurses. Girls didn’t like to stay in the country nowadays; they wanted to come to New York, as she had done. But she, the country girl, would return to the country and there’d be plenty for her to do…

  The car braked gently and they were at Bellevue, huge and uncompromising but vibrantly alive in the hot dark summer night.

  Captain Trilling went immediately into the office of Dr. Gordon, one of Bellevue’s top surgeons. Alice was told to wait outside. The corridor in which she sat was not brightly illumined. But it throbbed with sounds, whispers, and occasional moans from the wards, and now and then nurses, interns, or doctors sped by on their urgent missions. To Alice, used to her 850-bed hospital, this was an enormous and awesome place. But not without soul.

  A nurse came out of the doctor’s office and beckoned to Alice. She led her down to a nurses’ locker room where she lent her a white working uniform, shoes, and cap, and gave her a surgical mask.