by John Dunning
He read it over, timing it by the clock’s red hand, then added the tag line: “It’s four o’clock, eastern wartime.” In the margin he noted that he had finished this draft at one forty-three, well after the time limit.
Again the floor creaked behind him. He rose from his chair, so slowly that his eyes peered just over the tops of the cubicles. He saw no one, but someone was there. He kept his eyes on the far wall, where the door lay hidden in shadow, then suddenly he squirmed out of the cubicle and walked boldly up the narrow walk.
He reached the corner and at that moment someone stood up near the door and slipped out into the hall.
He hurried to the door and pulled it open. Another steel door halfway down was just clicking shut. He covered the distance in a few long strides, opened the door, and heard feet clattering down steel stairs. He looked over the rail and saw a man hurrying out of the stairwell. An outer door opened, light poured in, and he got a glimpse of blond hair as the man flashed past, into the south parking lot.
He scrambled back through the hall. Crossed the room, parted the curtains, and there below him the fellow stood staring back at the door. Jordan got a good, long look at his face. Early thirties, handsome features, and the stocky shoulders of a woodsman.
The man looked troubled, indecisive. But suddenly he turned and ran to his car, the same black ’35 Ford that had followed Jack Dulaney from California.
Jordan thought he’d seen the face of Kendall’s killer.
Woodsman, he thought. That’ll be his name till I find out who he really is.
( ( ( 6 ) ))
JETHRO Kidd was bony and tall, fifty years old, with spectacles perched on a head that seemed too big for his body. He looked like Ichabod Crane as he read Jordan’s test. But when he spoke, his voice was a steely tenor packed with authority.
“This is the first time you’ve ever applied for a radio job, is that right, Mr. Ten Eyck?”
“That’s right.”
“What made you choose Harford?”
“Actually, I came here looking for a friend.”
“Mr. Kendall, I believe you told Miss Nicholas. I know Kendall by reputation but he was before my time. I only accepted this job a week ago. Officially I’m not due in till Monday. Thought I’d drop in this morning, shake a few hands, get the lay of the land. Big mistake. I haven’t even had lunch yet.”
Kidd gave him a cool look over the rims of his glasses. “At least you seem to know who the president of the United States is,” he said, turning the test down on the table.
“It’s getting hard to remember when he wasn’t president.”
“Miss Nicholas tells me you’ve written for some national magazines.”
It was too late to back out of that. He repeated his literary résumé and hoped Kidd wouldn’t ask for proof.
“Why did you rewrite the continuity after the deadline?”
“Thought I could get it better. And I had time on my hands.”
Kidd had not apologized for the delay and did not do so now. He had arrived at two thirty looking like a man in a hurry.
“That’s the kind of writer I am,” Jordan said. “I’ll always use all the time I’ve got. If you give me five minutes, I’ll get it done; if I’ve got an hour, that’s how long it’ll take. I don’t bill for rewrite time.”
He grinned, hoping to prove he wasn’t taking himself too seriously, but Kidd wasn’t looking. He read the continuity again, took a fountain pen out of a well-starched shirt, and struck through a line. “Don’t play games with the weather. The navy doesn’t like it. It might seem harmless enough on the face of it, that business with the Japs in the Coral Sea. But don’t do it again. Radio’s out of the weather business for the duration.”
He started to say this made sense but Kidd cut him off. “If you want to work in radio you’ll have to learn what the Office of Censorship expects from us. So far they’re letting us censor ourselves and that’s how we want to keep it. If we don’t want Roosevelt to nationalize us, we’ve got to act responsibly. Don’t make ’em mad over little things like weather. Save your energy for the big fights.”
Jordan had no idea what that meant. Kidd looked up and said, “Miss Nicholas tells me you’ve been classified four-F. Something about a deaf ear.”
“I can hear just fine, I just can’t tell where sound is coming from.”
“But they’re not going to draft you.”
“Not for this war.”
“The war’s playing hell with everybody. Most of the talent that was here a year ago is in the army. Women are plugging a lot of the holes. They’ve got a woman doing sound effects. Miss Nicholas says she’s better than the man she’s replacing. We’ll see. One of our production men is now a woman. Another woman composes music for our two locally produced serials. But for some reason women haven’t applied for the writing jobs.”
“Maybe they think it’s too easy, too much like secretarial work.”
“Is that what you think?”
“No, but I’m a writer, I know better. I think women want to stretch their muscles, try out for jobs that’ve always been closed to them.”
“Maybe they don’t know that the entire sound department at the Columbia Network was set up by a woman, must be at least ten years ago.”
“I wouldn’t’ve known that. If I were a woman, that’s why sound might seem more exciting than writing continuity.”
“Continuity’s just the beginning. There’s an opportunity here that should excite anybody who ever wanted to string words together. Our contract with NBC runs through August and there’s a good possibility that we won’t be renewing it. That means we’re going to need writers who can do drama as well as continuity. That’s one reason you strike me as being worth a look. Miss Nicholas tells me you’ve written a novel.”
Jordan nodded warily.
“They’ve never had much luck enticing dramatists to come down here. Our writing staff as of today consists of one very tired and overworked continuity man. That’s what I mean when I say you have an opportunity here. But I have no idea if you’re the right man.”
Jordan clasped his hands and leaned forward on his chair. “Well, I can probably write a sentence that won’t stink up your air too bad. But I’d be starting right from scratch.”
“That might turn out to be an advantage. It means you haven’t learned all of radio’s bad habits yet. It can be damned difficult to unlearn something, once you’ve had success doing it the old, tired way.”
This struck Jordan as a profound thing for a manager to say. Abruptly Kidd changed the subject. “How are you at taking orders?”
He had to think about that. The safe answer struck him as kowtowing, and he didn’t think Kidd would be impressed by an ass kisser. “Most of the time I take orders fine. Generally speaking, I don’t work well for fools.”
“Generally speaking, I try not to hire them.”
Kidd fingered Jordan’s test paper as if the words could be absorbed through the skin and tell him what he needed to know about the man who’d written them. His eyes were like his voice, steely gray. “Radio’s full of stories about people who had never given it a thought, or who came in on a dare because they thought they could do better. Some of them are national stars today.” He picked up Jordan’s two station breaks. “We’ll use your original in the four o’clock slot. Give you a chance to hear how your words sound on the air.”
But Jordan sensed before Kidd spoke again that he was still being tested. “Here’s a hypothetical problem for you. Somebody gives you a script. It’s great, it’s true, it cries out to be done. But it’s political dynamite, especially in wartime. It could be embarrassing to us or our closest ally. What do you do—bury it, or argue to put it on?”
“That’s hard to say without knowing what it’s about.”
“Then let’s narrow it down. I’m sure you’ve heard the horror stories of German concentration camps and their treatment of Jews in Poland. What if we had a script with the action set in a c
oncentration camp? . . . Only the masters weren’t Germans, they were Americans or British.”
Jordan thought at once of the Japanese being processed into Tanforan: an almost impossible thing for radio, and yet . . . what was Kidd getting at? “I don’t see how it could be done,” he said. “Even as an allegory.”
“I’m not talking about an allegory. Assume it’s real.”
“Then my natural inclination would be to try and do it.”
“And how would you do that, without getting the station shut down by federal marshals and all of us thrown in jail?”
“I don’t know.”
But suddenly he did know. Once the question had been asked and the elements defined that made it impossible, he saw the faint shape of an answer. “I think I’d try to submerge it in theme. Give it context, so maybe it wouldn’t stand alone as an attack against us or England.” Kidd sat stony faced and Jordan went on to the next logical step. “Context means you’d need more stories.”
“Could you write them?”
“Maybe.” He nodded. “Sure.”
“What would these stories be?”
He didn’t immediately say: his mind had leaped ahead to the bigger picture. “A limited series,” he said; “probably no more than half a dozen stories. Tales of wartime incarceration, each with a point about the horrors of being a prisoner.”
Kidd was watching him intently now.
“I think I’d start with the German camps. It would almost have to start there. And end with the Japs on Bataan. That way you’ve got the Axis like bookends, like lightning rods at both ends of it.”
“How would you write it? We don’t know what’s going on on Bataan.”
“We can imagine. All of a sudden the Japs got tens of thousands of prisoners. What will they do with them? Build a camp somewhere and the men will be marched there; that’s what always happens.” He thought of his own country and its vicious Civil War. “I’d have to fictionalize it. Infer the panorama through one pair of eyes.”
In the middle he would put in stories from various lands. Maybe something on Andersonville in 1865. Of turncoats and the makeshift justice of the camp. A lynch mob rose up from some dank place in his Southern heritage, but a split show suddenly occurred to him as having more thematic strength. People are the same all over and we never learn anything from history. A single hour with two stories, prison camps North and South; then plunk Kidd’s piece, whatever it was, down in the third or fourth show.
“I’m guessing . . . is your script about our camps for American Japs?”
For a moment he thought that what he had said had taken Kidd’s breath away. “Actually, I hadn’t even thought of that,” Kidd said. “Jesus, what a thing that would be. Talk about getting us all arrested.”
Jordan sat forward on his chair and waited. Kidd said, “I wouldn’t mind reading your book,” and Jordan said, “Wish I had one to give you.”
It didn’t seem to matter now. Kidd said, “Are you going to be in town awhile?” and Jordan said, “It’s beginning to look like it.”
“What about this afternoon? Can you hang around?”
“Sure.”
“There’s no guarantee I’ll even be able to get back to you today.”
“All I’d be doing is looking at girls on the beach.”
“I might ask you to come down tomorrow. I know it’s Sunday but the show goes on. And you’ll be working for nothing until I decide if I can use you.”
“Writers are used to that. It’s called writing on spec.”
“There’s one thing you can do right now if you want to make yourself useful. I’m talking about heavy lifting, not writing.”
“I’m no stranger to that.”
“Go ask Miss Nicholas if she can run you over to the office. When you get there, ask for Mr. Stoner. He’ll tell you what he needs.”
( ( ( 7 ) ) )
OUT in the yard the picnic tables were now crowded with people, but Miss Nicholas was not among them. It looked like a party building, and the talk revealed a mix of specialists in the single-minded search for the compelling half hour of air. Salesmen talked with their own or with clients, and off at the table abandoned by Miss Nicholas a group of actors rehashed last Saturday’s horror show. The show had gone well and surprised them all. The idea of boring out Easton’s heart with an electric drill had sounded corny at the table reading, but on the air the bloody thing had come so vividly to life that two dozen listeners had called to complain. “You can’t ask for a better reaction than that”—this from a middle-aged woman who had obviously been part of it. Jordan, standing nearby, learned that her name was Hazel.
No one questioned his presence. It was an open affair, come as you are, and a stranger among them was nothing unusual. The grill had been stoked and a cloud of rich gray smoke carried the aroma of cooking franks over the trees and down to the inlet. Jordan helped himself to a hot dog and beer. Drifted past one conversation and into another. Asked about Miss Nicholas, but she had not been seen in at least an hour. But she was doing a commercial at five, so she couldn’t be far away.
He felt an almost constant unease now. A cold prickly undercurrent had planted itself under the hazy warmth of the bright spring day. The chain of events he had started was out of his control. At that moment the wind swirled the smoke across the yard and the Woodsman appeared. First there was only a ghostly presence beyond the pits; then he came through the knots of people and the smoke wafted past him. He had changed his shirt: now he wore a bright red shortsleeve of some thin, cool material, open to midriff to show off a barrel of a chest, shaved like Charles Atlas, smoother than the underarms of Rita Hayworth. He was a genial fellow, a born lady-killer, not at all the nervous creature Jordan had seen from the window.
The man started across the yard. Jordan hadn’t been seen yet and there was a moment when he might have slipped away undetected. Instead, for some reason, he dropped his half-finished beer into the wire trash basket and circled the tables on an intercepting course.
The moment was less than that—part of a second when the man saw him coming at the edge of his vision. He turned his head and looked: their eyes met, but it was Jordan who broke stride and balked.
This was not the Woodsman. This was someone new.
A brother, he thought. They were too much alike not to be related.
They nodded to each other, the polite, impersonal greeting of strangers. Jordan recovered his pace and followed the man into the building, past the empty receptionist’s desk, and on across the lobby to the men’s room.
They stood side by side, alone at the urinals. The man stopped at the washbowl and ran water over his hands. He was suddenly tense: the air between them had changed as awareness set in. This man never saw me before, Jordan thought, but he knows me now.
He stepped up to the second bowl and their eyes locked in the mirror. They were just a word away from mortal combat.
Then the man looked away, intimidated for all his hard male strength. He fumbled at the towel dispenser but it jammed and he left dripping water.
Jordan opened the door and watched him cross the lobby.
Suddenly he was on the man’s trail again—through the door and out, bird-dogging him across the yard. What was he going to do now? He didn’t know.
A hand reached out and grabbed him. He spun around, ready to fight.
“Good grief,” said Miss Nicholas. “Where’s the fire?”
When he looked around again, the second Woodsman had disappeared in the smoke.
( ( ( 8 ) ) )
THE Harford building was a little less rosy in the fading afternoon, and there was still only that luxury Packard in the parking lot. Miss Nicholas pulled in beside it. “I’d better come in with you. I can run you back if this doesn’t take too long.”
The building was locked. She rapped on the glass and Jordan cupped his hands and peered inside. He was looking down a hallway with darkened offices on either side.
“Let’s look around back
,” Miss Nicholas said.
On the west side they found a loading dock and ramp, with a pickup truck at the ramp and a row of wooden crates, some as large as small refrigerators, lined up on the dock. “We’re making progress,” she said. “That’s Stoner’s truck.”
They climbed an iron stair to the dock and squeezed between the crates to a dark steel door half hidden in the shadows. She opened the door with a loud metallic snap and they looked into a dark back hallway.
“Gus!” Her voice had a slightly hollow sound in the cavernous building. “Hey, Gus!”
They stepped inside and moved deeper into the back room with only a gray shaft of light to guide them. “It’s an elevator,” Jordan said. “For freight, from the look of it. Should we go on up?”
“Didn’t Kidd tell you what to do?”
“All he said was ask for Stoner.”
“Hard to do when there’s no one to ask.”
“Then let’s go up.”
He pushed a button and there was a whirring sound. A large wire cage, lit on both sides by bare bulbs, floated down the shaft. It thumped on the ground and she stepped in. “You know how to run this thing?”
“Sure I do.”
“God help us.”
He pulled the cage shut and gripped the only visible means of control, a lever, and they started up with a jerk. He maneuvered the cage to a quivering stop at a large number 2 painted on the wall, and opened the door on another hallway, dark for the weekend.
The third floor was no different. But in its stillness he could hear music coming down the shaft. A swing band, playing a number so familiar he could almost call it by name.
“Listen.”
The lift started up again, the music got louder and clearer, and then he knew it. “All the Things You Are.” The door opened on the top floor and that voice came out of nowhere, nowhere and everywhere. It electrified him, chilled him, raised the hair on his neck. He forgot about Kidd and Miss Nicholas. He stepped out of the elevator, shook off the hands that grabbed him, and walked up the hallway.
