New York Station

by Lawrence Dudley

  What a marvel, in a perverse way, Hawkins thought. The craft, the imagination to create such a slimly loathsome libel. Miscegenation and adultery wrapped up in an accusation of insanity. Then, while the defense of the man and his wife was waged, the primary thrust—obscuring whether the Nazis were dangerous—floated out there undisputed in all its spurious glory. In time it‘ll settle into everyone’s mind, hardening as thoroughly as cement.

  Chet impatiently butted into the conversation. “So he’s diseased as well as a cripple!”

  A flicker of annoyance crossed Ventnor’s face at Chet’s clanging, artless addition. The crowd murmured slightly. Chet, his head bobbing and laughing, spotted Daisy. Excited for a second, he called out, “Daisy!” then saw Hawkins. His mood promptly compressed into a curt nod.

  “What happened to you?”

  Hadn’t considered Chet, Hawkins thought. There’s a man can afford hired muscle.

  “Some diseased bastard tried turning me into a cripple, too,” Hawkins said. “They didn’t make it.”

  But nothing in Chet’s relaxed manner indicated recognition, or any cognition at all. “Oh,” he said.

  Daisy swung in between them. “Chetly! You were going to introduce us.”

  “So I was. Walter, this is Miss Daisy van Schenck and Mr. Hawkins.”

  “That cripple stuff, where’d you get that?” Hawkins said.

  “Don’t you know our glorious leader can’t walk?” Chet said. He gestured to Daisy. “Tell him! Your father went to school with him.”

  Daisy actually sighed out loud, her face crossed by well-worn annoyance. “Oh, Chet! Uncle Franklin walks with braces.”

  “Right. Braces.” He started smirking. “When he inspects the navy they pluck him off the dock with a big electromagnet and dump him on the deck like a pile of junk.”

  The crowd laughed uneasily and began drifting away.

  Hawkins felt something akin to shifting ground—a mental earth tremor—and caught Daisy’s hand for a second, whispering in her ear. “Your father knew the president?” She nodded. “Uncle Franklin? You’ve met him?”

  “Oh. Sure. And Aunt Eleanor. Well, not lately, obviously. Father and Uncle Franklin were at Groton together. After Uncle Franklin got polio, before he was governor, he used to come up to the mineral baths and stay at the manor. I’ll show you the photos sometime.”

  “Baths—what?”

  “Mineral baths. Saratoga Springs? For all the racing and gambling and parties that’s why the city’s here in the first place. They’re very good for polios. Mineral water’s quite heavy. Heat or cold penetrates. Helps unkink the muscles. Otherwise he couldn’t straighten his legs out.”

  “You mean—what Chet said—that’s true?”

  “Pretty much.” She turned back to the circle of people. “Chet’s a very bad boy tonight! If you’ll excuse me, I’d rather powder my nose.” She slipped off, leaving Hawkins frozen in place, mind scrambling to catch up, like he’d fallen into a void, like being back on the Meudon hill outside Paris as the lights went out.

  Uncle Franklin. Aunt Eleanor. Can’t straighten his legs out. Braces. The man the world’s hopes hang on. Can’t walk?

  -63-

  “Chet, that old pile of junk isn’t going to be bothering us much longer,” Ventnor said.

  “No, he won’t be …” Chet started to giggle. Ventnor started giggling, too.

  “Yessir, we’re going to be free of Mr. Franklin Rosenfeld.”

  Hawkins stared at them, trying to grasp it all, everything he’d just learned—and now this, mind shifting and bounding from one peak to yet a higher summit, accelerating second by second.

  What in hell were they referring to? That damn rifle? No. Crazy. But … maybe they were getting overconfident. Shooting people, that’s definitely the SS’s style. But the president of the United States? They wouldn’t dare. Such a crazy risk. Suppose they were caught? There’d be American entry into the war in a heartbeat. The US fleet steaming into Scapa Flow in a week. US fighter squadrons in Kent in a fortnight. Marines in Sussex, maybe a month. The Nazis could hardly want that.

  But then think of the things they’d done, large and small, the risks they’d taken: attacking Poland and leaving the Rhine defenseless. The friendship pact with Stalin. Or Göring declaring himself “Grandmaster of the Hunt.” Titles worthy of schoolboys in tree houses. All preposterous. Until they happened.

  Should’ve stolen that bloody sniper rifle. But, no, that would’ve tipped them off. Damn.

  “Oh? Really?” Hawkins said. “Going to shoot him down, beat him?”

  “By golly, no,” Ventnor said, “he’s going to beat himself! Americans aren’t suckers.”

  “We’re willing to help a little,” Chet said. He and Ventnor laughed, a relaxed, easygoing laugh. It simply didn’t fit. They had too trifling an air for men in on murder and assassination. Or the beating I got.

  Chet started moving off. “Right. Main room at Riley’s. Later.”

  The crowd had largely drifted away. One on one, Ventnor’s tone was completely different: focused, professional, weighted. None of the onstage bombast.

  “You said Hitler wasn’t a threat to us,” Hawkins said.

  “He’s not. They’re a long ways away.”

  “Then why bother being friends with him?”

  “Because he’s a winner.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What else is there? Roosevelt only cares about losers.”

  “Losers?”

  “Right. See, the world’s divided into winners and losers. Which side do you want to be on?”

  “Always?”

  “Of course. In every transaction between people there’s a winner and a loser—always.” As Ventnor began introducing Hawkins to this hitherto unperceived way of the world, he began smirking, that smirk they all seemed to have. Hawkins puzzled over it as he listened.

  “Can’t people work together, cooperatively, to benefit everybody?” Hawkins said. “Isn’t that easier?”

  “Naw—never happens. There’s always a winner and a loser. Sometimes you simply can’t see who it is right away, that’s all. But somebody’s always getting the best of somebody else, you can bet on it.”

  “Maybe we just make it that way.”

  “Nope. Darwin talked about it. Some people are born to lose.”

  Daisy came up behind Hawkins, listening, too, then curtly turned and walked away.

  “Like who?”

  “The coloreds. The Jews.”

  “Born to lose? The Jews, too?”

  “Yep. Why do they have to cheat, take advantage so? Because they’d lose otherwise.”

  “What happens, then?”

  “They have to make way. Like the Indians. Survival of the fittest. It’s the natural order of things.”

  “But how did we get where we are—thousands of years of human progress, building aqueducts, curing diseases, didn’t that depend on people trusting and working together?”

  “Forget that. Some people are destined to be destroyed. There’s no point standing in the way.”

  “The whole world’s just a jungle.”

  “Don’t kid yourself about it.”

  “Then—you’re saying—everyone has the right to do whatever they have to do to get ahead. Even cheating, breaking the rules.”

  “Hey, winning isn’t the only thing that matters, it’s the only thing that exists. That’s what Hitler understands.”

  Chet had the same smirk when he was talking about cheating, Hawkins thought. It was more than a spoiled rich boy’s sense of entitlement. That smirk conveyed a sense he—they—knew something other people didn’t, that they were in on the great secret of life and those who didn’t were suckers, the butt of the Big Joke.

  Hitler was always serious, grim. But the thugs around him, Göring, the SS types in particular, the party elite. They had that smirk, too. The insider’s smirk, in on the big joke about winning and losing and power.

  The Nazis, people
like Ventnor, so many of the things he’d seen happen, all happened because men like Ventnor and Chet believed the world was inherently, inevitably nothing but a big mess of winners and losers. Or men who believed it was and would damn well make it that way.

  Winners and losers, that’s what I’ve been missing, Hawkins thought, Ventnor and all the right-wing isolationists. It’s why, if Ventnor’s against Social Security, he’s also an isolationist, wouldn’t help Britain. Selfishness abroad, selfishness at home, it’s all the same.

  If life’s nothing but winners and losers, you have to watch out for yourself, and the hell with anyone else. Laws, rules, traditions, social customs, all a mirage, illusions that keep suckers from seeing reality. If winning means cheating, breaking the rules like Chet, it’s perfectly acceptable, even virtuous.

  What’s doubly awful, Hawkins thought, is that if they get in an arrangement, exchange, whatever, a mutually beneficial situation, they’ll think there’s something wrong. It would have to be wrong, by definition, precisely because there wasn’t a loser. A fix like that could only mean one thing to these men: if they weren’t the winner, then they had to be the loser. Had to be, since everyone had to be one or the other. And they would probably panic.

  That means you go for the power. You practically worship power, make a cult of it, the way the Nazis and Fascists did, because power is more likely to win. To hell with justice, what’s right, helping others. Win at any price. The rest is all illusion.

  Naturally, men like Ventnor opposed the League of Nations. They didn’t want any international rules. Cooperation? A joke. Or trying to destroy Roosevelt’s Social Security. Those people were losers, so let them starve. Or Chet’s cheating and breaking the rules at the track. Rules? Merely another hedge on the steeplechase, another obstacle in your way. Underneath, it was all the same, who was going to be the winner and who was going to be the loser.

  The idea of sportsmanship, of fair play? That quaint notion was rooted in a humbling recognition life was unfair, and that life could be unfair to you, too. The idea that competition was a dangerous tool, that it could coarsen and reduce everything to the lowest common denominator unless reined in by fair play and sportsmanship? Gone, too. Competition was no longer a mere means to make things better. It was now an end in itself, the very nature of human existence, no matter how far it took society back to the cavemen.

  What can one possibly say to such twisted logic? Nothing, probably. If you dared reasoning with them, they would merely see a stratagem, a maneuver designed to hoodwink and sucker them, and take advantage. Their belief in winners and losers corroded everything.

  Truth requires some sense of cooperation, in that people have to be willing to consider a possible truth as representing something more than a ploy. To Ventnor, Chet, and right wingers like them, there could be no truth, only tactics. Truth had ceased to exist. Winning was the only truth, and a lie that worked was truth, because it worked. Which meant that lies were equal to the facts. When they lied, they probably didn’t always even know they were lying.

  Why in holy hell am I listening to Ventnor? Hawkins thought. What a waste of time. He quickly thanked Ventnor and moved on.

  -64-

  A quick search. He spotted Daisy. She and Chet were quietly dancing, moving in and out of the crowd. The dancers parted again. The music stopped. Chet led her over to a floral archway with a broad gesture. Hawkins walked through the crowd and across the floor, watching.

  Daisy was standing with her back toward him. Chet drew a distinctive blue box from his pocket. The color meant only one thing: Tiffany’s. Chet flicked the lid open with his thumb. Inside rested a ring with a diamond the size of an almond. The stone flashed a brilliant bluish white all the way across the dance floor.

  Blood surged up behind Hawkins’ eyes. He was back in the cemetery, back on the street in front of the Waldorf, all reaction, more feeling than thinking. Go over there. Grab that bastard by the collar. Drag him out of the pavilion and into the bushes. It wouldn’t take much to break his neck.

  No. Wait. Later. There are people here. Maybe daytime. That’d be better. Drive him off in the country. Out in the sun. See the big pink spray of blood and brain and bone fly out the other side of his head. Shove him in a culvert. Let the vermin feed on him for a week or two. Rats, weasels, raccoons, a merry feast. Damn! Why’d I have to give the Hi-Power away?

  After all, I’ve killed people since joining the Secret Service, he thought. What difference will an obnoxious American millionaire make? If Daisy isn’t worth fighting for, what is? The music picked up again. The crowd started dancing. The dancers pressed around Chet and Daisy. They disappeared. Hawkins caught himself.

  No. No. Won’t do, he thought. Get a grip. I’m about to become a G-man. Can’t exactly go around ignoring the law. A passing waiter offered another glass of champagne. He took a deep cold sip. It tasted bitter, hard to swallow. His temper settled slightly. He dumped the glass on a passing tray. After ten minutes of glumly loitering by the side of the dance floor Hawkins’ side and thigh began to really hurt again. He went back and sat down.

  Winners and losers. Is that what this is all about, too? he thought. Maybe I’m a sap to think anything else. Does Chet have the power to simply swoop in and take what he wants? Maybe. Maybe my presence pushed him to make his move. No guarantee she’ll accept. Could Daisy be using me to push him along? Could I be too late? He brushed that idea aside with a mental shudder. The connection they’d felt. It was real, it had to be.

  Wait—the Bureau. Maybe there’s something better than killing, he thought. How soon could I do something about Chet juicing his horses? Racing season only lasted a month. But they did move on south. Any federal laws violated? Fraud perhaps? They moved the horses across state lines—Chet had mentioned a train. That meant federal jurisdiction. Get back to Manhattan, call Kelly, first thing. What’s a stolen-car case next to rigging a high-stakes horse race? Scandal, money, horses, celebrities. Very much an FBI-Hollywood newsreel kind of story. Think how Kelly’s face will light up at this one.

  And what was going on with Chet and Ventnor? “We’re helping.” What did he mean, we’re helping—Ludwig? That might be better than rigging horse races.

  Humiliation. Disgrace. Ruin. Then jail. A dead man wouldn’t know he’s been beaten. Give Chet twenty years sleeping on a hard bunk a foot from his toilet to think about it.

  That’s it, Hawkins thought. I don’t need to kill Chet. I can handle him. This is like the daily double. Send Chet away. Whatever it takes. And put a smile on Kelly’s and Director Hoover’s faces at the same time. Winners and losers? Fine. We’ll see about that.

  Two or three minutes later Daisy spotted him and came running through the crowd. She seemed nervous or distracted.

  “Roy, are you having a good time?”

  “Yes, I’m having a great time,” trying to stay pleasant, relaxed. “How’s Chet?”

  “Chet? Oh, yes. We were—talking about our investments.”

  Yes, Hawkins thought, judging from the size of it, that stone is quite an investment. “Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt a conversation like that.”

  “Um, yes.” She almost wrung her hands. There was no diamond visible, though. “Roy, I hate to ask this.” Here it comes, he thought. Can almost hear the words already. “I’ve been having such a wonderful time, too. But could we go back now? I’m getting a headache.”

  “Of course,” he said. Daisy acted correct to form. Always leave with the one who brought you, then dump him privately. She took his arm. They hurried out to the Cord and zoomed back through the already darkened town. When he stopped in front of her house she kissed him on the cheek.

  “Please call,” squeezing his arm. “Will you?” He nodded. She ran partway up the steps, waved and smiled again, then disappeared into the house. He watched her, feeling very little.

  After spinning around in a driveway up the street he eyed her house lights passing by. Chet’ll probably pick her up in a few
minutes, he thought.

  “Winners and losers.” Then he exploded, slamming his fist on the steering wheel, shouting, “Everything … everything was … Damn! The Hi-Power! Why’d I have to give my gun away! Fuck all!”

  -65-

  Harris shuffled some receipts and removed a leaf from the back of his thick butler’s notebook. He quickly scribbled down directions to Riley’s and handed the page to Hawkins, grinning knowingly, slowly wagging a finger.

  “You watch out for those wheels, young man, especially those birdcage things. Stick to cards! That’s a gentleman’s game.”

  There was gambling, it seemed.

  “Thanks, I will.”

  Moments later Hawkins was accelerating the Cord out of town. The cool, refreshing breeze soothed his mood slightly. Around a corner a chain of taillights wound up a twin driveway to a hill crowned by a necklace of lights. He spun around an illuminated fountain at the top and slammed on the brakes.

  A monumental ensemble of stylish structures reminiscent of the Chrysler Building stretched along the rim of a small lake. Nothing even hinted at the shady unease of an illegal gambling operation. The bold entrance surmounting the long main pavilion practically shouted the establishment’s grandeur. Four superimposed geometric facades proudly marched forward, each narrower and higher than the other, rising several stories to shape a powerful ziggurat. A pointed alcove in the center framed a vertical neon RILEY’S, blinking red.

  A group of noisy revelers burst out a side door. With a whoop they threw themselves across an iron footbridge into a long stucco hall on the left. To the right, music poured through the open windows of a tremendous octagonal ballroom.

  This isn’t the English style of gambling, Hawkins thought, little card games in an upstairs room at one’s club, all low-key, clannish and confidential. Amazingly American—bald really. An obviously illegal but protected playhouse the size of a large resort hotel. No doubt run by one organized crime syndicate or another, perched out here on the edge of the piney woods.