The Dead Don't Bleed: A Novel

by David Krugler

  I didn’t much care for it, although parts of the Suite for Piano, the first selection, reminded me of a choppy sea roiling outside a harbor, waves rolling in to break in unexpected ways against the seawall. My mom loved classical music. Back home, the shelves of a parlor cabinet bowed under the weight of her 78-rpm records. Featured, the usual suspects: Brahms, Handel, and, of course, Beethoven—no household of German immigrants was complete without the master’s works. She also had a fondness for Russian composers such as Glière, Borodin, Glazunov. Not long before I left home for the Navy, she’d discovered Prokofiev and Shostakovich. I grew up hearing those records—as Mom did housework, as Eddie and I did our homework in the parlor, as a prelude to the family listening to radio serials on Sunday nights—so I thought I knew all about classical music, thought I liked it, too.

  “What’d you think?” I asked Liv as we left.

  “Think?” she answered lightly. “S’that what we’re supposed to do when we listen to classical music? Think?”

  “Funny girl. What’d you feel?”

  “Ooh, much better question. Okay, at first I felt unsettled, off kilter. Then what I saw was, what I realized, is that I was resisting the music, that I wasn’t giving myself over to the composer and his vision.”

  “Is that what we’re supposed to do with classical music, see a vision?”

  “Okay, I deserved that. Now, what I most loved was the second piece, when. . . .”

  I smiled like a happy idiot, listening to Liv. She didn’t even notice, she was so caught up in her recitation. I’d responded similarly to Delphine, the girl I’d loved in Chicago, hearing not her words, only her exuberance as she enthused about Shakespeare, Whitman, Austen. That memory—the comparison, across time—wiped away my grin. Seeing Delphine in Liv was an indulgence I couldn’t risk, a way of thinking that wouldn’t just spoil what I had with Liv but would also—

  “El?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I asked what you felt.”

  I didn’t admit I hadn’t liked Schoenberg much, instead telling her how the Suite for Piano reminded me of a windswept sea. She liked that metaphor, urged me to go on. So I did, telling her about the kinds of seas I’d seen when I was assigned to the USS Saratoga and how the music reminded me of them. That, at least, was a harmless memory.

  We were walking north on Fourteenth, dusky sunlight slanting between well-kept row houses. Canopies of wide-trunked elms, riffled by a light breeze, cast shifting shadows across the sidewalk. I held Liv’s hand, our gait leisurely.

  “Ice cream?” I asked.

  “That’d be wonderful.”

  We went into a drugstore, sat at the fountain. Liv studied my face in the mirror behind a shelf of phosphate bottles, smiled brightly when I caught her looking.

  “Book your ticket yet?” I asked.

  “To where?”

  “The Pacific. ‘All those beautiful islands,’ remember?”

  “I remember, all right. But I’m not gonna book a ticket.”

  “No?”

  She shook her head, still watching my reflection. “I’m just gonna go.”

  “Just like that? Wake up one day and say, ‘This is it, this is D-Day’?”

  “Not quite.”

  “So how?”

  “D-Day will wake me up with a whisper and say ‘Go,’ that’s how.”

  I almost made the mistake of asking if she’d call or send a note before she left. I knew the answer, we were having a good time, why spoil it?

  Liv turned from our reflections to look at me. “You look tired, El.”

  “Rotten case.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  “Yeah, but some are easy-rotten, some are not-so-easy-rotten. Guess which one this is?”

  “Easy, hard—it’s all work, and you can’t—”

  “I know, I know, we can’t live to work.”

  She looked down, dipped her spoon into the ice cream of her root beer float but didn’t take a bite.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, Liv, I didn’t mean to sound short, it’s just that, well, I’ve got—”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’ll do when you’re not on duty?” she asked.

  “Are we allowed to have fun while the war’s still on?” Studying her reflection in the mirror.

  “For real, El.”

  “Maybe I’ll become someone else for a while.”

  “Like who?”

  “How about a dark, brooding poet?”

  “A Shelley for our century.”

  “Or a young Werther.”

  “Remember the ending?”

  “Right, maybe someone else. How about an actor?”

  “Ooh, I think you’d be a great actor, El.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know people in theater! Remember that script reading I took you to? I could talk to Emmett, he was the director for that play, and see—”

  “Liv, hold on, I was just kidding. I can’t audition for a play—I couldn’t promise to make it to the rehearsals.” I’d already landed my big part and had just finished rehearsal, though of course I couldn’t tell Liv that.

  “El, don’t talk about all the things you can’t do, okay?”

  “All right, Liv, I promise: when I’m not on duty, I’ll find something to do to enjoy myself.” An empty promise, that. Once I was undercover, I’d always be on duty, even when I didn’t have to pretend to be Barston. Trying to separate my lives, thinking I could flick a switch between Voigt and my new identity, was dangerous. I might—no, would—make a mistake, might end up like Skerrill. But hadn’t I been trained to be two men at once, hadn’t that been the goal of the Funhouse and all my work so far? Barston was in me at that moment, and I was still Liv’s El.

  “You don’t have to promise, El.”

  “Okay, I don’t promise.”

  “But don’t use the war as an excuse to wait.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh heartily.

  “What?”

  “I’ve heard this war called a lotta things, but an ‘excuse’? Never.”

  Liv sighed. “I don’t know why everyone makes such a big deal over the war. It’s gonna end soon, but we’ll never get these years back.”

  “So live free now, right?”

  “Right.” She raised an eyebrow. “So?”

  “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER 9

  I TOOK LIV TO THE LOTUS, A BALLROOM ON FOURTEENTH WITH A FAR Eastern décor the owners had hurriedly updated on December 8, 1941, to eradicate all things Japanese. Well, sort of—the brocaded wallpaper featuring silver-edged lotuses remained, as did the enormous ersatz flower floating in the lobby fountain, but a framed placard now proclaimed the lotus to be an import from “India, Our Ally in the Fight Against the Japs!” Before the war, the cigarette girls and cocktail waitresses had worn tight-fitting silk kimonos and ingeniously tied sashes that offered exposure just shy of violating the District’s law defining burlesque performances; now they wore flared black trousers and red and gold Chinese tunics. The menu featured “Did You Know?” facts about China (“Our Ally in the Fight Against the Japs!”) and cocktails like the Shanghai Sweetheart and Canton Clipper.

  Not that Liv and I were at the Lotus to drink. We went straight to the dance floor—thankfully, the Lotus hadn’t changed its house band, the Dexter Pierce Orchestra. The first few sets, you could count on Pierce and his boys to deliver middle-of-the-road standards like “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “My Funny Valentine”; but as the night wore on, and as the early-to-bed crowd tippled away the two-drink minimum and headed home, Pierce, a whippet of a man who preferred a waggling forefinger to a baton, would let the boys loose. The trombones and clarinets would take a break, and a quintet of drums, piano, bass, saxophone, and trumpet would take over. Pierce would sit down at the piano, they’d improvise. Bebop, a head-bobbing corporal had called it the first night I heard it. That Kansas City sound, someone else had said. Liv and I danced for an hour to the full orchestra, then listene
d to bebop as we drank Gibsons and talked. Then back to the dance floor, staying until the band packed up and a girl in a red and gold tunic took away our drinks, finally time to go home, foreheads damp from dancing, smiles bright, no worries of tomorrow to break the spell.

  I WOKE UP WITH FINELY ETCHED MEMORIES OF THE TILL-DAWN TUMBLE I’d had with Liv, the dim yellow nightstand light catching the sheen on our chests, every kiss delicious, hands clasped as we both closed in on climaxes, a squeaky bedspring keeping time like a metronome. Liv heard me stir and smiled without opening her eyes.

  “Still dreaming?” I asked. Traced a finger down her spine and over the swell of her hips, just covered by the tousled sheet.

  “Always,” she murmured, eyes still closed.

  “Nice night?”

  “Yes. You?” Finally opening her eyes, still smiling.

  “A’course. We should do it again sometime.”

  “Thought you didn’t like the Schoenberg.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Schoenberg.”

  “The bebop, then.”

  “That’s a word for it, sure.”

  She punched me lightly on the shoulder. “S’that what you’ll tell the boys at the Navy Building today?”

  “I’m not the kiss-and-tell type.”

  “That’s because you’re learning to live free.”

  “Think of all the followers you’d have, if everyone knew how much fun living free is.”

  “I don’t want followers.” Laughing.

  “Admirers enough, huh?”

  “You know I don’t care about that kinda stuff.”

  True. Liv was the least self-conscious person I’d ever met, also the least egotistical. She had other lovers, I knew I wasn’t her steady; but that didn’t matter to me as much as it once had. A night with Liv, tomorrow’s worries forgotten—why get greedy and demand more? Maybe I really was learning to live free.

  As we were getting dressed, Liv asked, “Who’s Delphine?”

  So now I’m calling her name out in my sleep? I thought, annoyed. Didn’t even remember the dream.

  “My first girlfriend,” I answered.

  “Back in Chicago.”

  “Yeah. We started going together in high school.” I never talked about Delphine, not anymore, but maybe sharing a bit of that history would get her out of my head.

  “She left you.”

  “She left all of us.”

  “You mean she died.”

  I nodded.

  How? Inevitably, the next question everyone asked, but not Liv. “Are they happy or haunting?”

  “What?”

  “Your memories of Delphine. The dreams.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, El, it does.”

  HAUNTING. EVERY MORNING, THE DREAMS OVERTOOK WHATEVER HAPPY memories remained. Delphine at Montrose Beach on a July afternoon, sun on her face, treading water, grinning devilishly, wagging her finger for me to dive in. The two of us at Goldblatt’s on Christmas Eve a half hour before closing, so caught up in our conversation about the Wordsworth we were reading in English class that we forgot we were there to buy presents for our parents.

  Liv was trying to tell me I could replace the nightmares with my memories, if I tried hard enough—she was a fervent believer in willpower. What Liv didn’t realize is that the Delphine I recalled was unchanging, unaging, a life prisoner of the places we’d been, words shared, deeds done. I’d tried reading Proust, that didn’t work; the memories were as fixed as a film’s images. But the Delphine who visited my dreams was always different, always unsettling, the outcome of our encounter not known to me until I awoke. Liv would probably tell me it would take time, but that I could, eventually, conjure up a joyful Delphine in my dreams. Yet I didn’t want advice or encouragement. Already I regretted telling Liv about her. Besides (and I wasn’t about to tell Liv this), the dreams weren’t really about Delphine. She was a totem, a stand-in for someone else, as the persistent shadowy figures who stalk our night worlds always are. All I had to do, if the Austrian dream guru was right, was figure out who that stand-in was.

  But I had no time for such noodling, not that day. After walking Liv to the bus stop so she could get to work, I pulled out the Barston file and pored over it, yet again. Roughened up my hands some more. Downed four fingers of bonded whiskey and jabbed the scabs on my forearms with a sewing needle to perfect my track marks. At noon, closed the file. Made sure Franklin D. had lots of food and that the hatch in the back door for him was opening. Then off to meet Terrance.

  We were eating lunch at Margie’s, an ancient saloon on Seventh Street that had survived Prohibition by billing itself as an amusement parlor. Depending on who you asked, the now-dead Margie had been a bootlegger’s moll, a senator’s mistress, a retired madame—whoever she’d been, everybody knew her joint still served the city’s finest breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. Sagging tin ceiling, high-backed wooden booths. Bar like a beached shipwreck, a massive hull of paneled oak set at an angle. So dark newcomers came through the door blinking like cattle pushed into a slaughterhouse, the barflies shirking the bright stabs of sunlight that disappeared when the heavy, windowless door swung shut.

  “How you doing, Teddy-boy?” Terrance greeted me, smiling.

  “Hangin’ in dare.”

  “That yer Joisey accent, Teddy-boy?”

  “So far. And stop calling me Teddy-boy.”

  “Okay, Teddy.” Still smiling.

  We took a booth, ordered sandwiches and Schlitzes.

  “All set to go under?” Terrance asked, all business now.

  “Think so.”

  I reviewed my preparations so far, the clothes, the flop, the track marks.

  “Lemme see your arms.”

  I rolled up my sleeves. Terrance scrutinized my forearms like a doctor. “That one’s too far from a vein.”

  “Yeah, well, when you’re jabbing a sewing needle into your arm, maybe you don’t wanna hit a vein.”

  “Try to keep ’em covered for now, till they heal some more and look older.”

  “S’why I bought long-sleeve shirts, Pops.”

  “Don’t call me Pops.”

  “Okay, Poppy-boy.”

  We laughed and took long draughts of our beers, which had just arrived in mugs with ice chips gliding down the sides.

  “Ready for your quiz?” Terrance asked.

  “Hit me.”

  He peppered me with questions about Theodore Barston, mixing it up, just like a batting coach tossing pitches. Where had I gone to school, what was my grandfather’s name, who was my homeroom teacher sophomore year, where had I enlisted, what did my recruiter look like? Also trick questions, like how old was my sister (I didn’t have one, remember?). I didn’t stumble once.

  “You’re sounding a little more Joisey, too,” Terrance said.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  We tucked into our sandwiches, chewing happily, and ordered two more beers. Terrance devoured his pork tenderloin, but I savored mine, enjoying every bite.

  “The real Barston’s not gonna eat that slow,” he observed, pointing with his last french fry.

  “I know. But the real Ellis Voigt wants to.”

  “Kinda your last meal, ain’t it?” Crooked smile.

  “Gonna hang me high tomorrow, sure.”

  He pushed his platter to the side and lit up, even though I wasn’t finished. No matter—where I was going, manners were the least of my problems.

  “So whatta you think?” he asked, exhaling.

  “I’m ready, I’m not gonna mess up like I—”

  “I don’t mean you; I mean this whole undercover business.”

  “You mean, do I think the commander’s seeing Red again?”

  “Comes to the commies, he’s always been a little batty.”

  “You brought it up, you tell me.” Neither of us had to promise to keep the conversation to ourselves—unnecessary with a solid partner.

  “I think he’s off the mark,” Terrance answe
red. “Way wide, even.”

  “Why?”

  He tapped ash into the tray as I wiped my mouth and lit up. “Awright, the first thing is, we got no evidence this H & H clipping service is queer. The commander reads part of a report saying clipping services are commie fronts, Logan Skerrill went to this H & H once, so that means he was a Red and got murdered because’a it? Tea’s so weak you can see through it.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “It’s way too soon to go deep like this. Dontcha think we oughta be coming at this clipping service the usual way? Pull their business records, check with the P.O. about their shipments, maybe sit up on them for a few days and see who comes and goes?”

  I did, actually. I didn’t think much of Paslett’s boys in 7R, but they’d put umpteen man-hours into the Barston identity, which couldn’t be used again, ever—if I went into H & H tomorrow to learn that Skerrill only had a girlfriend there, well, that was it, end of story. All that work and effort, mine included, would be squandered. But I didn’t tell Terrance that. Truth was, I was thrilled to be going undercover. Had to prove myself, no mistakes, not one.

  So what I said was, “If I’m gonna pull this off, I can’t let myself think about that. It’ll distract me, I’ll make a mistake.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think about that,” he said, nodding.

  I told him about my room at the Jefferson Club Hotel, and we went over how I’d get ahold of him while I was undercover.

  As we left, Terrance asked, “So how’re you gonna go in?”

  Meaning H & H.

  “I got no idea,” I lied.

  CHAPTER 10

  WE PARTED WAYS AND I WENT HOME, SHUCKED OFF MY UNIFORM, and put on Barston’s clothes. Then I walked to Logan Circle, to the home of Griffin Crieve. A risky move, which is why I didn’t tell Terrance. He didn’t know about Crieve—it was a fluke I did. If I told my partner what I was going to do, he’d tell Paslett, and I knew the commander would order me to stay away. But it wasn’t Ellis Voigt who was calling on Crieve, it was Ted Barston.

  For a man who lived alone, Crieve had plenty of house. The roof of his two-story Victorian pitched steeply into a glut of yellow clapboard gables. A broad veranda stretched the width of the house. The lawn had been reseeded with bluegrass, which made the lot appear abandoned. Passersby were apt to overlook the unusual yard in favor of the home’s distinguishing feature: Crieve had removed the original windows and replaced them with colored glass. Orange, red, vermilion, blue, green, purple. The porch was piled high with empty window frames, some bent at crazy angles, as if they had popped right out of a collapsing house; broken sills, sashes, and chains; twisted metal bars; and jagged wood strips. All this, the detritus resulting from Crieve’s monomaniacal collection of colored glass. Every week he pored over the finds of his legion of peddlers and junkmen who, like lawyers on fat retainers, scoured the city in zealous pursuit of their client’s interest. Crieve paid handsomely and asked no pesky questions about provenance. Even before his mercenaries had pocketed their money, Crieve began extracting the desired panes from their mountings, wielding tools with the precision of a surgeon. The shriek of cut metal, the echoing clatter of falling boards, and the groan of dovetailed frame corners being pried apart were just a few of the reasons why Crieve’s neighbors had filed many nuisance complaints against him. But, as rumor had it, Crieve’s largesse also extended to the city’s building inspector.