Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

Obviously, she didn’t even know what he was talking about.

  So—maybe they weren’t German agents after all. Maybe he had gone and made a big deal out of nothing, and they were just a couple of fishermen. Score a point for Mr. Hoover.

  And maybe not. After all, the older one hadn’t spoken. Maybe he had his reasons. And you didn’t necessarily have to be a German, or sound like Erich von Stroheim, to be a German agent.

  “What do you want to eat?” Havens asked, turning to Bilson.

  “I don’t know,” he said as he studied the menu card meditatively. “But I’d stay away from the meatloaf if I was you.”

  “Is that all?” The waitress seemed scandalized, but Havens only nodded.

  “For now—I’ll have the corned beef—but don’t worry, honey; this is only the first inning. I’d pack a bag when I got home tonight if I were you. I think you’re probably going to be spending a couple of days away from home—a little vacation, a treat from your Uncle Sam.”

  “Gee.”

  Three quarters of an hour later, Havens and Sheriff Bilson trudged back through the four-inch-deep snow to Bilson’s office. There was no wind, and the cold wasn’t as bad as Havens had expected. Perhaps he was just growing hardened.

  “You gonna wait for the bus driver?” Bilson asked.

  “You think he would be the same one?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.” Bilson shook his head. For some reason the action reminded you of a buffalo. “Could be, but I don’t know.”

  “Could you do me a favor and find out? And if it is the same one, see if you can’t get word to him that he should call the Bureau office in Portland—right away.”

  “Is that where you’ll be?”

  “I suppose so.” Havens looked around him at the storefronts along both sides of the narrow street. They gave the impression of having been deserted for good and all, as if the events of the preceding week were as inaccessibly past as the age of dinosaurs. “We’ve got a trail that’s nearly six days cold. Catching these guys is going to be a close thing.”

  . . . . .

  Havens requisitioned one of the two county cars assigned to the sheriff’s office and drove down to Portland. It was a trip of only about a hundred and fifty miles, but he didn’t get in until close to midnight because large stretches of the road were still unplowed. Almost as soon as he was inside the door, they handed him a transcript of their telephone conversation with the bus driver.

  The driver remembered picking up two men in Ellsworth, neither of them his regulars, not half a block from Cowper’s diner. That was about three-forty in the morning—he had been running late on account of the weather—and what they had done with themselves in the hours since the waitress had closed up after them at midnight was anybody’s guess. They must have found somewhere in out of the cold, because obviously they hadn’t frozen to death.

  They sat by themselves, he remembered, all the way in the rear of the bus. The younger one was asleep most of the time.

  By ten that morning they were on their way south again, with tickets for Boston. Havens himself talked with the woman from the ticket window in Portland, getting her name and address from the bus company and driving over to her rooming house to wake her out of a sound sleep. She, too, like the waitress, remembered the tall, handsome—and silent—man who had sat on one of the station benches for over an hour and a half, moodily staring at his hands. She had thought it strange that the two men, who were obviously traveling together, should hardly have spoken in all that time.

  “He was a looker, the dark one,” she said, blinking owlishly as she huddled at one end of the sofa in her two room flat, her bathrobe wrapped around her like a shroud. At about sixty, she was as desiccated as a mummy, but apparently she still took an interest.

  “That seems to be the general opinion.”

  Havens gave her his card and told her to phone him if she remembered anything more, and she was resolute that he should stay for a cup of coffee and a small square of fudge brownie. It was well after three in the morning, but she kept him there for a good twenty minutes, telling him what a shocking thing it was to work for the bus company and how he ought to investigate them. It was pathetic in a way—she seemed to welcome the disturbance.

  He didn’t reach Boston until the next afternoon—you had to get some sleep sometime—but the local office had their instructions and had already confirmed that two men answering the general description of Havens’ suspects had indeed arrived in town on the afternoon of January 23. It looked like they were getting cagey, because they had checked into a hotel five blocks from the bus station, vanished almost immediately, and were finally traced to a room all the way over in Cambridge, where they stayed for two nights before taking a bus down to Providence, Rhode Island, where they caught the train.

  The train went to New York, but they got off at New Haven. Dreamboat—you had to call him something—bought a newspaper at the stand right there in the station and engaged the vendor, who was a Basque refugee, in a long conversation in French. It was as if he wanted to be remembered as having disembarked at that stop, should anyone be interested enough to inquire.

  “Did he speak good French?”

  “Oh, yes, très bien. Very good French.” The paper vendor’s eyes widened in his leathery old face. His mustache was thick enough to cover his whole mouth, but you had the impression he was smiling underneath it. “He was a gentleman, was that one.”

  “Where would you say he came from?” The old man looked puzzled—did he imagine he was being quizzed about train schedules?—so Havens decided to rephrase the question. “What nationality?”

  The paper vendor shrugged. “Oh, well. . . as to that, with a gentleman it is always difficult to say.”

  Where they went next was an open question, but Havens believed they must have gotten back on the train and gone to New York.

  After all, it made sense. Certainly they hadn’t stayed in New Haven. Bureau people had been all over town and hadn’t turned up a trace of either of them. Nobody at the ticket windows remembered them, but quite possibly they could have purchased their tickets on board from the conductor. They would need to stop somewhere long enough to buy new clothes and get their bearings, and New York would be the point of departure for almost anywhere they would want to go next. Besides, they would want to be a little careful before they indicated too clearly where they were bound. They would want to see if they were being followed. New York would be a good place for that.

  So Havens went on to New York, where there wasn’t very much to do except wait. He had both the newspaper vendor and the waitress from Ellsworth run into the Boston office, where they helped a Bureau artist put together a composite sketch of each of the two subjects. They had a lot of trouble agreeing, and neither of them retained any very vivid impression of the younger one—and now guys with badges were all over Manhattan showing copies of the sketches to ticket sellers and rooming house landladies. There weren’t any guarantees that they hadn’t already left the city, provided they had stopped there at all, but that was the best bet going at the moment. If they weren’t there, they weren’t anywhere.

  Havens requisitioned a force of ten men, figuring he could probably hang onto them for no longer than a week before Mr. Hoover would want either the spies or his hide, and there were limits to what you could do with ten men in a week. They were making the rounds, and the train and bus stations were being watched; it was as far as you could go without throwing out a regular dragnet—running the sketches in the newspapers, alerting the taxi drivers, that sort of thing—and it just hadn’t developed into that big a deal yet. Mr. Hoover would never have stood for it.

  So all Havens could do—all anyone could do—was to keep his fingers crossed and wait. It was the sort of thing that drove you buggy by slow degrees.

  He rented a room up on Eighth Avenue, but it was small and dark and silent, and by the second day he couldn’t stand it anymore. It was even worse at the Bureau office; he could sit by
the telephones and listen to them not ringing. By the middle of the afternoon he found he just had to get away for a while.

  He took a walk, but a cold wind had blown up since yesterday—it really wasn’t very nice out. So he bought a cup of coffee and a copy of the Times at a lunch stand on East Thirty-seventh Street and sat down at the booth nearest the window and read about what was happening in the world.

  As always, the headlines only depressed him. The Pacific Fleet had begun its invasion of the Marshalls, and the British had evidently gotten within sixteen miles of Rome. All of this while George Havens was sitting around in New York, waiting for a couple of jokers who might or might not be spies, and might or might not be in town, to stick their heads up out of a hole. It wasn’t fair.

  Outside, people on the sidewalk were pulling their hats down over their ears as they bent into the wind, their coattails swirling behind them. Havens took a sip of his coffee, which looked and tasted like motor oil, and turned to the sports pages.

  Like the fulfillment of prophecy, there was an article headlined “BRADLEY IS SKEPTICAL ABOUT 1944 BASEBALL.” Well, what else was new?

  “Alva Bradley, one of organized baseball’s frankest magnates, advised major league owners today to suspend operation for the duration rather than present ‘a low form of comedy’ during the 1944 season.”

  Oh God, that was all the country needed was for some purist to shut down the World Series. Then there really wouldn’t be anything left to live for.

  Leo Durocher was going overseas to entertain the troops, the paper said, and Joe Tinker was in a hospital down in Florida, dying of influenza. It was enough to make you take a vow against reading anything except True Detective Stories.

  He refolded the pages with almost fussy deliberation and laid the newspaper down on the seat next to him. The virtue had gone out of everything.

  The girl at the cash register smiled and took his receipt and a dollar bill and gave him a Mounds bar and ninety cents in change. A Mounds bar, for Christ’s sake—maybe it was his lucky day after all. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had tasted a Mounds bar.

  As he walked along the pavement, in the general direction of the Forty-second Street Library, it occurred to him that this was almost the first time he had been in New York since his divorce. No wonder he wasn’t enjoying himself very much.

  Poor Karen. What she had wanted more than anything was a nice, steady sort of husband who steps off the commuter train at 6:05 every evening and doesn’t stir from the front parlor until it’s time to go to bed, and what she got was the Lone Ranger.

  “I’m in the spy catching business, sweetheart—just like ‘Terry and the Pirates.’ The Nazis don’t keep bankers’ hours, so I can’t very well either.”

  “But you could be home for dinner once in a while. I roasted this lovely saddle of lamb, and the Gormers were coming over in the evening to play Parcheesi, and you never even phoned.”

  “Yeah, well. . . things got a little rushed.”

  So, after two years, four months, and twenty-two days, Karen decided she had had enough and moved back in with her widowed mother. Havens hadn’t even gotten a card from her in over a year—probably by now she was married to a bus conductor, if she could find one who was 4-F.

  And her ex-husband had applied for a leave of absence to go fight in the big war across the water, and Mr. Hoover—damn his eyes—had issued his pointed refusal, and now the George Havens who had been the terror of the Abwehr spent most of his time behind a desk in Washington answering nut phone calls about whether the Japanese had invaded New Rochelle. It was by no means certain that Karen would have appreciated the irony.

  God, how he wished these Nazi sons of bitches, if that was what in fact they were, would do the decent, sporting thing and give him a peek—just a peek, so he would know the game hadn’t been called on account of rain. It was the waiting around that made an old man out of you.

  The cement lions at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the library looked patient and faintly sleepy, as if content to wait for the snow to melt. Each of them seemed to be ignoring the other’s existence, and the thin stream of harassed looking and, at that hour, mostly female pedestrians passed back and forth beneath them with almost insulting indifference. Havens trudged up the steps, feeling like a petitioner on his way to court.

  Actually, all he wanted to do was to use the men’s room. When he was finished, he found he was no longer able to withstand the temptation and hunted up a telephone. Probably there was nothing stirring. There never was. It was like waiting for prices to go down.

  “Mr. Havens?—no, sir, no sightings yet.” The voice belonged to a kid named Irving who was fresh out of Quantico and keen as mustard. “But we got a kind of screwy call about forty minutes ago; some guy said he wanted to talk to Mr. Hoover about spies. We gave him the standard pitch about Mr. Hoover being out of the office just then and would he like to talk to one of his assistants, and finally he decided to settle for that. But not today, thank you—he said he’d call you back.”

  Havens studied the initials carved all over the inside of the phone booth—“N.H.” “J.G.” “L.O. + R.W.” “P.D.Q.”—and wondered whether espionage hadn’t become the exclusive property of the demented. There weren’t any real spies anymore, only a bunch of crazies who thought they were in on the Final Secret. Why did they always think they could insist on talking directly with Mr. Hoover?

  “Do you think he was just a nut?” he asked wearily.

  “No, sir. He was scared, but he wasn’t crazy—at least, I don’t think so. He said something about a submarine.”

  “What time did he say he’d phone back?”

  “Nine o’clock in the morning, sir.”

  Havens hung up, feeling better than he had in days.

  But nine o’clock was a long way off, and sitting on one of the wide benches in the main corridor, right next to the entrance to the Oriental Room, was what was generally referred to as the Genuine Article. She had blond hair that swept back behind her ears and fell down between her shoulder blades in a roll, and she was perched there with her legs crossed, reading a magazine. She didn’t look all that busy.

  Mr. Hoover had rules about this sort of thing. You were supposed to be as pure as Shirley Temple, married or not. And if you were married, it was supposed to be to the right kind of girl, the kind who was a good trooper, loyal to Mr. Hoover, the flag, country, and your own sweet self in just about that order. Well, it hadn’t worked out that way. Mr. Hoover hadn’t been pleased—divorces weren’t exactly rejoiced over, even divorces that resulted from spending too much time on the Bureau’s business and not enough on your own—and Mr. Hoover wouldn’t have been pleased now, since girls who let themselves get picked up outside the Oriental Room probably wouldn’t have qualified in his mind as good troopers. But what Mr. Hoover didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, and Havens was in the mood for an easy steal.

  The doorway from the telephones and the elevators was about fifteen feet high; he stood next to it, waiting for her to notice him. Finally she looked up—she had blue eyes and a red, full mouth, which was very nice. And she smiled.

  Havens sat down beside her and fished around for a moment through the pockets of his overcoat. He was smiling too. He wondered whether she would feel like splitting a Mounds bar.

  4

  It had been snowing at intervals ever since lunch. Von Niehauser stood behind the rear window of his apartment, looking down at the corner of Eighty-first Street and Lexington Avenue, hardly able to see a thing for the smears left behind by thousands of half melted snowflakes that had traced their way across the dusty glass.

  He was in his shirt sleeves and a pair of light gray flannel trousers that looked a size too large for him, and his hands were locked together behind his back. He hadn’t stirred in perhaps as long as twenty minutes. He was quite alone, staring through the clouded windowpane with almost painful concentration.

  All day long he had been prey to a kind of anxiou
s melancholy that was quite new to him. It was like a warning, but against what he couldn’t have said. Stafford was gone—off amusing himself with the money he had swindled from the SS. Perhaps, von Niehauser found himself thinking, perhaps, after all the weeks of enforced intimacy aboard Meyersdorff’s submarine, he had lost the knack of being alone. Perhaps he was no longer used to the solitude. Yes, perhaps it was something as simple as boredom.

  His father had used to do the same thing sometimes—stare out through one of the sitting room windows at home, sometimes for hours. Especially after the death of von Niehauser’s mother. Had that been boredom, too? Was it simply that without the baroness the world had become empty? Or had his father been visited by some harsher ghost?

  But, no. The late Rolf, Baron von Niehauser, had died a lieutenant general in the first heady days after the invasion of France, so he had been spared everything that was to follow. He had never had to face the world Hitler had made of Europe since 1940. For him it had been simple, nothing more than a second chance to fight yet once again the Great War of 1914-18—and his sons, all of whom had seen service in Poland, had kept the truth of that conflict from him. He had thus never known about the wholesale executions behind the lines, about the work of the Einsatzgruppen, about the whole sickening spectacle. And when a land mine had blown up under his staff car, he had been able to die in innocence.

  So he would never have understood.

  His father, had he lived and been compelled to witness what the last of his line had come to, would probably have turned away from him in disgust. What, after all, should a von Niehauser have to do with espionage and murder? When you were the head of one of the oldest families of the Prussian nobility, members of which had worn the red trousers of the General Staff in unbroken succession ever since the time of Frederick the Great, your traditions were those of honorable combat and blameless service to the state. What had any of that to do with stolen cars and the police and the butchery of farm boys? What indeed?