by John Dunning
There was a short break just before ten, which Eastman would fill with news, local spots, and schedule ticklers. Here he was now, telling listeners what was left of the Harford day. A band remote at eleven thirty, courtesy of the boys in Blue, followed by Stoner’s Scrapbook of Sound. It all seemed so distant now. The station cut away to the network and he turned it off and went on searching the desk.
In the bottom drawer he found a stack of letters, some in German, some in English, all handwritten and addressed to the same woman, Aleta von Papen. Most were from family in Chicago and Milwaukee. I still worry about Gerda Luise, he read. It’s hard not knowing if she lives or dies, and now we won’t know until this awful war is over. The name teased him and then he remembered that story in the Beachcomber. The dead boy, Georgie Schroeder, had had a sister named Gerda Luise. She had married a German national and had moved with him to Germany. The letters deeper in the pile were all in German, mailed overseas before the declaration of war had shut down the mails last December. They came from a G. L. Nadel or a Gerda L. Nadel and had been mailed from Germany at regular intervals throughout the late thirties. He wished he could read them, because the ones in English were little more than family gossip.
These came from first cousins in Chicago and Milwaukee. Even Hoover couldn’t make a case against them with this as his evidence. They seemed to be good naturalized citizens trying to love their new country enough without loving the old one less. A man like Hitler might make something out of that. You’ve got to choose, he would say: choose now or be branded a traitor. Good thing we’re above that here, Dulaney thought, but then he had a vision of that Japanese family at Tanforan and he wondered what Hoover would say to him about that.
The family in Chicago had had a visit from George. He had come for a rest and needed it. Something very bad was going on with him; he looked terrible, his nerves were shot, he smoked all day, and his sleep was poor and filled with nightmares. Someone called Maynard had terrified him. One night he had cried out in his sleep and one of the words they heard him say was the name Maynard. He denied this, said he’d never known anyone named Maynard, but you could see he was lying.
Then, at the bottom, he found a long letter from George himself. Dear Leta, it began, and what followed was three pages of very cribbed and dense handwriting. Dulaney read the first paragraph and felt a thrill of discovery. Then he heard a clatter from the bedroom. Someone was coming down the fire escape.
( ( ( 27 ) ) )
HE shoved the letters back in the drawer—all but the letter from George. That one he folded and slipped in his pocket. He hurried to the bathroom and doused the light. He stepped behind the door and heard the window squeak as the woman climbed into the bedroom. She was alone, talking to herself. The light went on in the kitchen and a beam of it leaped into the bathroom and fell across the tub. Her shadow passed and he heard her open a cabinet. There was a clink of glass, a gush of water from the tap, the greedy gulping sounds she made drinking it. Another glass. The tumble on the fire escape had left her dry.
Her chatter stopped only while she drank: a stream of Germanic carried on in two remarkably distinct tones of voice. Her husky side was nasty and laced with sarcasm, at one point laughing outrageously at something the other voice had said. Her voice was young and she was high-strung and quick.
She banged her way into the bathroom, shoving the door back against his arm. Through the crack he could see her—a thick mane of auburn hair, a sleeveless dress, a hand on a hip, a leg propped up on the edge of the tub, and the other hand exploring herself under the dress. Another diaphragm: it came out with a rubbery sucking sound and she threw it into the sink. She leaned over and pulled something out to the middle of the room—one of those saddle-seated French bidet things for washing a woman’s private parts—and she wavered between that and a full bath. She hiked up the front of her dress and sniffed, sniffed again under her arms, said,“Du stinkbombe, Leta,” turned on the bathwater, and kicked the bidet out of sight. Now she stood in full view, a beautiful girl whose sweaty face stared at itself in the mirror. She lifted her arms, felt for stubble, wrinkled her face, and began taking her clothes off.
He knew he had to move now. But the telephone rang and she whirled away with an angry outburst. In the sudden distance he heard her yell something that sounded like,“Oh scheiten ficken Telefon!” and she was already a room away as he nudged the door inward and stepped around it.
She was standing at the counter with him at her back, talking angrily on the phone. A hot mix of German and English with Peter on the other end, he would bet. He heard her say, “Didn’t I tell you I’d be here? . . . So I’m here, so what more do you want from me?” A line in German, then, “There’s plenty of time,” then, “Stop acting like that, it’s none of your business where I was, gottdammit, don’t I have my own life to lead? You think my whole world must come stopping anytime you snap your Nazi fingers?”
She slammed her hand down on the counter. “Hey! You want to do this by yourself? You fool around witt me and I walk out of here right now, you can come over here and do your own gottdamn dirty work.”
She slammed the phone onto its cradle and screamed a string of ferocious German obscenities. Then she turned and there he was.
She tried to blink away the shock. Her eyes leaped on to the open bathroom, as if what she’d seen just couldn’t be. Then came a second shock. Her mouth dropped open for a few ticking seconds while the anger filled her up again. He was aware of his own voice, telling her he had come about Peter, but she screamed over the words. “Who der hell are you! What you’re doing in my house!”
It slipped into madness. He heard a soft little growl and in her eyes the moment passed from anger to insanity. She was coming at him: less than half his size but stalking him like a predator.
He backed away, keeping the table between them. He kept trying to reason with her—he had come to meet Peter—and this time she heard him but it didn’t matter. Her lip curled back as she circled to his left. He followed her step for step. A shift in her eyes was his only warning, and suddenly he saw the butcher’s block with a ten-inch knife sticking up in the wood. She lunged at it as he moved to stop her. He caught her shoulders, she spun, the knife popped out of the block and clattered under their feet. He caught her under her arms as she went after it: she fought him back across the room, slippery, still slick with sweat. He tried to pin her hands and she hit him . . . a slap across the face, then a searing pain as she went for his crotch and got it. He tied her up with a bear hug and they fell to the floor. He had her then, wrapped in a fetal shape with his arms and legs around her. All she could do was buck and writhe and curse him hotly in German.
They lay still. Her breath tickled his arm and the aroma of sex and sweat was heavy between them. “You bastard,” she said at one point.
Then she laughed.
At once she was convulsed, heaving in desperate mirth that went on for an impossible time. “Oh, you bastard. You big ficken booby, you should see your stupit face when I grab you by der nots. I bet we look like two dogs humping down here. Gottdamn Doberman and der poodle.”
She went off again into fits of hysteria.
“Pity der poor poodle.”
She shrugged against his arms. “So what you do now, kill me? Or we just gonna sleep togedder on der floor all night?”
“Nobody’s going to kill you. I’m trying to tell you something.”
“I heard you der first time. You come to see Peter and this makes it okay for you to break into my house.”
She lay quiet for a moment. Then: “You bring der money?”
“Sure.”
“How much?”
“Four hundred was the deal, wasn’t it?”
“Deal was for you to come at eleven o’clock and fifteen minutes. Ask for Richit.”
“Things changed. I had a good reason.”
“Reasons can get your dick cut off.”
He cleared his throat, made a little laugh out of it.
“Well, it worked out all right. I’m here, still in one piece. Where’s Richard?”
“Is no Richit. Just me you talk to. You gonna let me up?”
“Maybe. If you can behave yourself.”
“I guess you gotta find out.” She sighed and leaned her head back under his chin. “Come on, Delancy, my gottdamn tub’s running over.”
Now he was sitting on the closed toilet, telling her what he’d come to say while she mopped the floor and mostly said nothing. Her rage was gone, drained with the bathwater, but still in the air like the half-remembered tantrum of a child. At times she seemed absorbed in what he was telling her, then her mind would drift. She would become suddenly playful, splashing him with water from the draining tub and laughing explosively as he sat dripping before her. A crazy girl: fickle, gorgeous, scatterbrained, and horny, nutty as a chipmunk’s den. Her madness filled a room, warping it. He had seen that flushed, heated sheen on a woman years ago, a lust that never cooled, preorgasmic even when she’d just been with a man. An older generation had defined it: nymphomania, the word for the sexual psychopath.
It left her no attention span for such matters as life and death. She seemed unfazed at the thought that killers might have her address: either she didn’t believe it or she missed the fear in his voice for her safety. Her eyes would dart away—to the outer room, to the sink where her diaphragm still lay soaking, to the mirror for a glimpse of her own lovely face, which always made her smile—then her face would twitch and her gaze come back to the tight place below his belt. There was sex in everything she did. “How old are you, Delancy?” she asked at one point. When he told her thirty-two, she said, “I’m twenty-eight. That’s good, huh?” There was sex in that too.
• • •
The room was suddenly quiet.
“Did you hear what I said? Did you hear any of it?”
“Yah, yah. Peter said you’d try something.”
“What’s Peter so afraid of? Did you ever ask him that?”
“Who said he’s afraid?”
“He’d be here himself if he wasn’t.”
“Maybe he’s got his reasons. You don’t know everything.”
He prompted her with his hands. For the moment now he had her attention and his best chance to keep it was to stay with the short questions, the confrontational responses: anything that forced her to answer and think about what he had said.
“What don’t I know?”
“What it’s like to be German.”
“Is that what Peter’s afraid of? Is he running from the law?”
Suddenly irritated, she shook her head. “I’m saying nothing about that. I don’t know nothing and I don’t want to.” But her hands had begun to tremble.
“Maybe I should ask what you’re afraid of.”
She sighed. “Jesus Christ, Delancy, you’re pretty stupit for an American. You need a picture drawn on you?”
He smiled. “Just a little picture maybe.”
She said nothing and he pressed on. “I heard you talking to him. On the telephone you called him a Nazi.”
The word shocked her, as if in the heat of the moment she hadn’t known she’d said it. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. He sensed his advantage. “Are the police looking for him? Is that why he went into hiding? Is he afraid he’ll be arrested because of his politics?”
“He tells me nothing. I don’t let him tell me nothing. I don’t know who’s looking for him and I don’t care. Peter’s a bastard and I hate him.”
“Then why do you help him?”
She looked at him: a quiet, fearful moment full of indecision. “Is what you do witt family. I don’t like it but mine papa makes it a thing of honor.”
“Does your father know Peter’s a Nazi?”
She recoiled a second time, then pushed the air as if she could force the word back upon him. “You listen, you! I got nothing to do witt no gottdamn Nazis!” But her voice had dropped to a whisper and he had to lip-read the last word.
He repeated the question. “Does your father know about Peter?”
“Peter’s his brother’s son, that’s what he knows. He doesn’t think about me or der trouble I could get in.”
Her attention was all his now, her madness and lust absorbed into something far deeper. The great fear of her life. Her eyes were clear, fixed on his face. Still trembling, she said, “Mamma Christ, what am I doing talking to you? I don’t know nothing about what Peter does, I don’t know no damn Nazis, don’t you even think such a lie! Jesus, I could get in such trouble! Do you have any idea what Hoover would do to me?”
He had a very good idea. Hoover was her Fraunkenschtein, the little man with the cold eyes who made the trumped-up killers thrown at her by a stranger fade to nothing. She coughed and looked at him in disbelief, her face the oddest mix of pleading and menace. She seemed to be saying something—How der hell did I get into this? How could that door blow open so fast? How could I be so stupit, tell my worst night mare to a foreigner who is probably an enemy? She knew he had found her weakness and now she must beg him not to exploit it. But the more she talked, the worse it got, the more she had to talk and the greater her fear was.
“You better not spread these lies, Delancy. You got to promise me, swear you won’t say nothing if you know what’s good for you.” She touched her mouth with a shaky hand and said, “Please,” a word he knew she didn’t say often. “You be a good boy, huh? Be sweet and I’ll take care of you. You’ll be amazed at what I can do. But you got to promise. You don’t understand about Hoover. He will think, Well, she’s just German trash, he can do what he wants witt me, so I got to give him no cause to ever hear my name. He don’t need proof, he makes it up. Who’s gonna believe me?”
She droned on and it made him sad to hear her. What he was doing made him sadder; it felt dishonorable because what she was telling him was at least possible. But the clock was running so he said nothing and he knew this was more terrible than if he’d screamed at her in disbelief.
She was telling him what a good American she was. “I am going to night school, I’m learning about Thomas Jefferson, I learning to talk so I don’t sound like such a kraut. I don’t say ‘dis’ or ‘dat’ no more, only sometimes. I’m trying to get hold of my temper and be a good citizen. You think Hoover cares about that? I can swear der truth on a pile of Bibles and it don’t matter what I say, Hoover won’t care. I hate Hitler, I despise that son of a bitch, I got nothing to do witt them baby killers. I start off every day gottdamming Hitler and his war. I got my papers, I’m a good American, and Hoover doesn’t give a shit. If it makes him look good to put me in jail, that’s what he does. You people who were born here just don’t know what he can do, all that power they give him. You can be a perfect American and still he gets you. He finds der evidence you never saw, der papers you never wrote, they find stuff under your bed or behind der wall, under der floor. They bring in people you never heard of to tell on you, and you’re gone.”
She sat on the tub, weak from fear and peaks of rage. Talked about her struggle, coming to a new land without a word of its language. “You don’t know what it’s like being a German girl trying to make her ends meet in this awful time. Everybody blames you for Hitler and every bump in der night means Hoover is comink to get you. I swear to gott I am going to kill Peter. If they deport me I will kill that penis-pulling swine witt my own teeth. Right into Hitler’s front room I will track him . . .” She smiled. “But this is not going to happen, is it, Delancy? Tomorrow Peter’s gone and you’re not going to tell on me, are you? I know you’re going to be a good sweet boy.”
She gripped his shirt. “Dammit, say something!”
“It’s not Hoover who’s coming for you, Leta. Tonight Hoover’s the least of your worries.”
“You should walk in my shoes. . . . Live in my life. Then you can tell me about Hoover and his G-mens.” Her smile flashed and the charm flowed again. He noticed how much more German she was as her nerves unraveled.
“So what do you want, Chack? See, I call you Chack—is your name, yes? What do you want, a nice little piece of German shortcake maybe? A hot bath and a douche. I could make it sweet again. Still lotsa time till Peter calls.”
He leaned toward her. “You’re a pretty girl, Leta, but you don’t hear so good. I can’t wait around for Peter to call. I want you to call him. Tell him I’m here. Tell him what I said. Tell him if he wants any of this money he’s got to meet me right now.”
“I can’t.”
“Then you’re both on your own.”
“I’m telling you I can’t! He’s got no phone, he’s got to call me from a phone in der hall.”
“Then you’re out of choices. You’ve got to take me there.”
( ( ( 28 ) ) )
THEY went out the back way, to a night so deep they vanished from each other. Down the hall to the back door, and through it to oblivion.
She clutched his hand and pulled him along the walk.
We made it, he thought. Nothing back there for a killer to find— just an empty flat and a fading whiff of a horny woman’s sweat.
Suddenly she seemed to want this showdown, as if the rage had returned and broken the fear apart, refilling her with madness. One of us will kill the other, he thought: that’s what she’s hoping. But how she hoped it would turn out was the sixty-four-dollar question.
