Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  “How far is it to the next town? God, don’t you ever get tired? We must have come five miles.”

  “We have come perhaps two,” von Niehauser stated quietly, simply as a neutral fact. “And there should be a place called ‘Sullivan’ no more than three or four miles along this road. We will be there in another hour, no longer.”

  “An hour? Jesus, we’ll freeze to death by then.”

  “We will not freeze; we will merely be uncomfortable. If we sat down and fell asleep, with our backs resting against a tree, then we might freeze. But we will not do that.”

  No, they would not freeze. But, still, it was cold enough to make you forget the possible existence in the world of anything except misery. Von Niehauser wondered what sort of life Harry Stafford must have been leading all these years to make him look with such offended surprise on a little common inconvenience. In Russia, boys of sixteen and seventeen, fresh from home, had slept in shell holes on nights that froze the very hair in your nostrils—boys who by then had forgotten all about serving the Fatherland and the Führer, or turning aside the wrath of the godless Bolsheviks; who had forgotten everything except that they were expected to be men. Some of them had died, with their heads down as if they were praying and their hands clasped around their rifles, but they hadn’t complained.

  It was close to eleven before they saw the headlights in the distance. At first it was merely an uncertain glimmer through the trees, and then there was the low, sullen groaning of an engine.

  Before they knew it, it was almost upon them.

  But they still had time. Von Niehauser took Stafford by the arm and started back toward the cover of the trees. Two yards off the road and no one would see them. Why should they? Who would be looking for anyone out on foot on such a night?

  But Stafford had other plans. He pulled himself free from von Niehauser’s grip with a jerk and turned around, glaring at him.

  “Are you kidding?” he asked, his voice unnaturally shrill as he stepped back a pace. “We can catch a ride.”

  And by then, of course, it was too late. Even as Stafford spoke he had come into the field of moving light. The driver of the car must have seen him by then: a man standing directly in your path isn’t the sort of thing anyone would miss.

  There was nothing else he could do. Von Niehauser stepped out from the edge of the road, where the lower part of his body was immediately washed in the hard glare of the headlamps. He took off his hat and held it in his left hand, feeling the sort of embarrassment one might experience at being forced to witness some pointless cruelty one was helpless to prevent.

  “Leave it to me,” he murmured, turning his head a little toward Stafford but keeping his eyes on the approaching car. “Just stay where you are and let me deal with it.”

  It was obvious that Stafford didn’t have any inkling of what he meant.

  Von Niehauser raised his arm, holding the hat over his head and waving it back and forth. He tried to smile, to look the part of the stranded traveler grateful for this chance of being rescued, but he found the effort was beyond him.

  For an instant he thought whoever was driving might not stop, might do the sensible thing and keep right on going, just as if he, too, might not relish an encounter with strangers on a lonely road. Von Niehauser almost hoped that he would.

  But it wasn’t to happen that way. The car slowed gradually, trying not to fishtail on the patches of ice that dotted the road here and there, and stopped almost directly in front of the spot where von Niehauser was standing. He could almost have reached out his hand and set it on the brow of the right headlamp.

  It wasn’t a new car. Except for the staff limousines of the SS, you didn’t see new cars, not since before the start of the war; it was probably the same in America—but someone had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble to maintain this particular survivor in pristine condition. Even in the dark the paintwork seemed to glow under uncountable coats of wax, and, if the sound of the engine slowing to an idle meant anything, the same kind of care had been lavished there too.

  Von Niehauser could see the driver now, peering out through the windscreen at him. It was an unpleasant surprise to realize he was hardly more than a boy, just a fresh faced farmer’s son with a shock of reddish brown hair hanging heavily down over his forehead. He couldn’t have been more than about seventeen, and he was watching him with the unsuspecting alertness of someone who had not yet learned to mistrust the adult world.

  “Problem, mister?” he asked, rolling down his window and thrusting his head and left shoulder out through the opening.

  A glance back at Stafford insured there would be no trouble from that quarter. He merely stood where he was, his hands thrust deep into his overcoat pockets as he stamped his feet against the edge of the pavement in a profitless effort to strike up a little warmth in them. He was too absorbed in his own misery and too happy at the prospect of getting in out of the cold to interfere. He would let his partner deal with the specifics.

  Von Niehauser walked around the front of the car, forcing himself to appear relaxed.

  “Our car has broken down,” he said as he approached the door on the driver’s side. He moved slowly, with a deliberate weariness, all the time appalled at the transparency of the deception—couldn’t the boy hear his accent? Couldn’t he see the danger? What sort of fool stops in the darkness, in the middle of nowhere, for men who could be anything? “I wonder if you could perhaps just take us to a phone? I could call a mechanic, and. . .”

  He had his hand on the door latch now, just resting it there casually, as if it were something he did unconsciously, merely to support his weight as he leaned down to have a word with this healthy, accommodating, apparently rather stupid youth.

  If the boy suspected anything, he gave no sign. His arm still rested along the top of the door and he was still smiling, the way anyone might smile at a poor stranger in distress.

  “Sure, mister. If you—”

  But he never had a chance to finish. He had been leaning against the door and suddenly it was gone, just as if it had disappeared. The sound of its opening was like a pistol shot.

  Von Niehauser took him by the back of his collar, jerking him the rest of the way out onto the road. He was a big lad, tall and solid, but surprise and balance were all against him; he simply fell, like so much dead weight. He struck the pavement with his shoulder and chest, without even the time to cry out.

  After that it was simple. Von Niehauser brought the heel of his shoe down just a little to one side of the boy’s spine. There was a hoarse little bark, something between a cry and a gasp, as his ribs pulled loose and the air shot out of his lungs. He was alive and conscious, but that kind of pain would render anyone as helpless as a sucking babe. There would be no resistance now.

  Von Niehauser turned him over onto his back, almost gently. Already it was like handling a dead body; the eyes were large and frightened but seemed to be looking out at nothing. Already the boy and his murderer seemed to inhabit different worlds.

  “My God! You. . .”

  It was Stafford, of course. He had been attracted by the sound of a struggle—or perhaps just by the sound. Perhaps he had been half afraid of being left behind. In any case, he was there now, looking down at them, apparently too astonished to speak.

  Von Niehauser glanced up at him, the expression on his face conveying nothing. It was only an instant. And then, with a sharp, delicate movement that was almost too quick to be seen, he broke the farm boy’s larynx with the back of his fist—it made a noise like the crushing of a walnut.

  It was impossible to know whether the boy felt anything. After a few seconds he tried to roll over on his side, and a heavy trickle of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. He seemed to struggle for a moment, like a man drowning, and then he was still. His eyes were still wide open, but no one had ever looked like that while he was alive.

  Stafford retreated a few paces, his movements rusty like those of an old man, as if he w
ere afraid of falling. He looked at the dead body on the road, and then at von Niehauser. He seemed to be trying vainly to swallow. Von Niehauser rose to his feet.

  “Yes.” He stood with his arms dangling at his sides; he gave the impression he couldn’t have raised them if he had wanted to. “Yes—as you see, I’ve killed him. What did you expect? He saw our faces. He could have placed us, here, tonight. How should we have explained ourselves? Did you imagine no one would think to ask us?”

  He turned away, as if in disgust, and stared down at the dead farm boy, whose limbs were twisted around at odd angles.

  “You did a stupid thing, my friend,” he went on, his face, which was still illuminated by the harsh yellow light from the car’s headlamps, was as rigid as a mask. “And because of that, I have found it necessary to do this.”

  2

  Ever since Pearl Harbor day, George Havens’ desk had been the dumping ground for every screwball report on German espionage activity, anywhere in the Eastern United States. Havens was the man who had to follow through on all the anonymous tips about mysterious radio transmissions that turned out to be “Yiddish Theater of the Air” and all the rumors of massed, brown shirted storm troopers every time there was a Boy Scout rally in New Jersey. If the Bureau got it, Havens got it.

  “Sometimes I think it’s just Mr. Hoover’s way of getting even with me,” he said, leaning back in his chair, his shoulders barely touching the wall behind him as he thrust his hands morosely into his trouser pockets. “I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me for trying to enlist, so I’m benched for the season.”

  Sam Fraser passed a hand over his perfectly bald head as he calculated the chances of the chair collapsing under his subordinate—it had happened once, and these days office furniture was difficult to replace. His eyes narrowed, giving him, for the moment, an uncanny resemblance to Vladimir Lenin.

  “Your timing could have been better. Tuesday, December the ninth, 1941.” He shook his head ruefully. “You’re lucky you’re not in Kansas City right now, polishing filing cabinets. You should have known.”

  “Yeah, well. . .”

  Fraser, the careerist, who hadn’t spent a working day away from his desk in twelve years and had no discernible ambitions except to live to collect his pension, could still feel sorry for him in an abstract sort of way. After all, it was different for George—George was a field man. It had been an act of cruelty to promote him out of the New York office, where he had been having the time of his life as head boy for counterintelligence, but the war had changed all that. There wasn’t much work for spy hunters these days.

  And George was right about the Director—he had hit the ceiling. God forbid that anyone anywhere should ever get the idea that he could serve the war effort better than in the FBI. Apparently it was a matter of bureaucratic prestige. So that was that; there would be no resignations. Anyone who tried would find out that the Army and the baseball teams weren’t the only ones with authority to draft.

  “I have this vision of myself,” Havens went on. “It comes to me now and then: I’m on the bridge of an aircraft carrier, looking out to the edge of the horizon. The water is an unbroken, soundless surface in every direction, and everyone else on board is asleep. It’s the morning of the Battle of the Coral Sea.”

  “That’s very poetic.” Sam Fraser’s mouth compressed in a thin, bloodless line.

  “Good God, Sam, this is one of the turning points in the whole history of the world.” The front legs of Havens’ chair came back down to the floor with a snap and he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees so that his slender body seemed lost in a tangle of limbs. He was no longer quite a young man, but he seemed young as his pale blue eyes lit up his face, making you think for a moment you were witnessing a religious conversion. “Everybody knows the Allies are launching an invasion into Northern Europe this spring. What happens over the next six or seven months might just settle things for the next hundred years, and here we are sitting in Washington, reading reports.”

  “What happened to your aircraft carrier in the Coral Sea?”

  Havens only glared at him.

  “Look, George, it isn’t that I don’t sympathize.” Sam Fraser smiled, tilting his head to one side like a pantomime clown. “But it can’t all be cowboys and Indians; the Germans won’t land a boatload of saboteurs every week just for your personal amusement. There are probably some pretty slack times out on the Pacific too.”

  “Yes. That was lovely, wasn’t it.”

  “What was lovely?”

  Havens laced his fingers together and dropped them over the top of his head, as if he wanted to keep it from floating away. His face took on a dreamy look; he might have been recalling the beauty of some long lost passion.

  “June, 1942. Wasn’t that what you were talking about? All those wicked Nazi spies paddling around by East Hampton in their rubber boat. They didn’t amount to much as villains—remember the one who phoned us up to tell us how he really didn’t like Hitler and would we please let him surrender? But we had such a marvelous time running the rest of them to earth. It was just like before the war.”

  “Yes, well. . .” Fraser sniffed impatiently, frowning at the tip of the pencil he held in his left hand. “You weren’t the one who had to do all the paperwork on that.”

  “God knows, though, I’ve done enough of that in the meantime.”

  They regarded each other accusingly for a moment, and then Sam Fraser made a gesture with his hand as if sweeping away a cobweb.

  “All right, but be reasonable,” he said, the least little edge of annoyance in his voice. “All I want to know is if it would be too much to expect to have my desk cleared by tomorrow night. You know how Ida’s likely to take it if I tell her we have to put off visiting her mother in Myrtle Beach.”

  “Myrtle Beach?” Havens wrinkled his nose. “I thought you didn’t like Ida’s mother.”

  “I don’t, but I like staying in Myrtle Beach—it’s warm there, donkey. You can go swimming and sleep with the windows open. Now, am I going to get to go or not?”

  Havens lifted himself slowly out of his chair. His every movement conveyed the impression of weariness and boredom.

  “I haven’t checked the morning’s cables yet,” he said, stopping for a moment by the door and speaking over his shoulder. “But I can’t remember the last time we had a good cable, so Ida can probably start packing her beach towels. Hell, what are you going to do, take the train? That must be an eight- or ten-hour trip.”

  “Twelve, not counting delays. Then another five hours from Columbia in my mother-in-law’s 1932 Chrysler.”

  “Christ, Sam, I envy you the high drama of your life.” Havens raised his hand in what looked like a casual caricature of a salute and started back toward his own office, where he could spend the rest of the morning locked up with the crank mail.

  The hallways in that part of the Bureau headquarters were painted a cream yellow that reminded you quite forcefully of Mom’s hominy grits. A spidery network of cracks was visible in the ceiling, and all around the door frames and light switches there were hundreds of overlapping handprints. In places the linoleum floor had been worn away almost down to the glue.

  A year ago he probably wouldn’t have noticed, but the intervening time had brought George Havens to one of those astonishing revelations by means of which we discover ourselves surrendering our youth—he had found that he was getting bored with his job.

  He had been with the Bureau ever since his graduation from law school in 1934. It had never occurred to him to go into anything else—he loved the Bureau. But for about a year now, ever since it had finally gotten through to him that he was going to have to sit out the war, he had felt increasingly restive. He wanted to do something, and they weren’t going to let him. He was going to stay in Washington, writing polite letters to the little old ladies in White Plains, right up until the last day of the war. It was like being dead.

  After the war, he had decided, he wou
ld quit. They couldn’t very well stop him then; he would draft Mr. Hoover a well behaved little letter of resignation and call it a day. He would go back to New York, enter private practice, and grow old watching the World Series. He didn’t see how he could stay with the Bureau after this—it was like the failure of a marriage. He felt betrayed.

  But until then he would school himself to be like Sam Fraser. He would go through the motions while he waited to be set free.

  Having collected a cup of coffee from the urn in the secretarial pool, he picked up a manila folder from his mail slot and went to the little partitioned off space on the third floor where he had a desk, a filing cabinet, and two chairs. He sat down, opened the envelope, took a sip of coffee, and started going through that morning’s collection of hot tips from the local constabularies.

  He was a little less than halfway through the pile, and about ready to knock off for lunch, when he found the telegram from the Hancock County Sheriff’s office.

  Probably with so much of the country’s violence having been exported to Europe and the atolls of the Pacific, the police were having a pretty dull time of it; that and the fact that so many cops had gone into the Army and been replaced by middle aged amateurs was the only way Havens could account for the quantities of hysterical nonsense that came in for him over the Teletype. Sometimes it seemed that half the little towns on the Eastern Seaboard were populated almost exclusively with suspected Axis spies.

  Most of it was just junk and could be dismissed out of hand—some loony’s neighbor was named “Schmidt” or listened to Wagner or owned a dachshund, and the Bureau was supposed to run a background check to verify it wasn’t really Hermann Goring out there in East Stroudsburg. He wondered if the Gestapo had these problems.