Hold Tight

by Christopher Bram

  “There are some lovely young ladies to my left, who will be only too happy to take your pledges today to buy more U.S. Bonds, your investment in Democracy. We must give until it hurts. To show you what your money buys, the Army Air Force has provided us with one of their bombs. Sans detonator, of course. So there’s no chance of us being blown to smithereens. Anyone who pledges to buy twenty dollars or more in war bonds will be given a piece of chalk with which they can sign the bomb with their own personal message to Tojo. I’ve been assured that General Doolittle himself will personally deliver your message the next time he pays a call on our treacherous Nipponese neighbors.”

  The crowd grew thicker and more impassible the deeper Hank and Erich went. Twenty feet from the curb, Hank stopped, looked around and said, “God loves us. If we can make it to the other side, we’ll lose all of ’em.”

  Blair had arrived at the Sloane House shortly after ten. He went inside and asked if a sailor was staying there. The desk clerk laughed in his face: the place was full of sailors. Blair tried describing the man, but it was no good. He went back out to his automobile and waited. Towards noon, he was fearing he had missed the sailor, or that the anonymous caller had been wrong, when a tall man dressed in white came out the front door. He wasn’t a sailor, but looked a bit like Blair’s sailor. He even walked like the sailor, a hurried lope that Blair had learned to recognize from a distance. The man’s white shirt bound him under his arms and left an inch of his back exposed. Then Blair realized that the trousers were from a Navy uniform. He jumped out of the car and followed him from the opposite side of the street.

  He followed him to Penn Station, where the sailor was swept up in a crowd of sign-carrying yokels. The man was tall enough for his blond head to stick a little above everyone else’s. Blair kept touching the revolver in his coat pocket. He was not certain what he could do in broad daylight. It would be better behind the docks at night, but what if the sailor never returned to the house behind the docks? Blair would follow him, all day if necessary, and seize any chance that was given to him.

  Walking on the uptown side of Forty-second Street, beneath the movie marquees, Blair heard the noise up ahead, but gave it no thought until he came around the corner and saw the mob. The entire end of Times Square was jammed with another damn war rally, fools being sold Stalin and Churchill the same way they were sold radios and coffee. Why today of all days? He stood on the corner and watched his sailor cross the street and wade into the crowd. Blair went after him, but the man was impossible to see once Blair was surrounded by people. The backs of so many hatless heads all looked the same. All the men seemed to be wearing white shirts today. Blair squeezed his way through with his hand and elbow, using the other hand to cover the gun in his pocket so nobody would feel it. He saw the stage beyond the swaying signs, men with musical instruments climbing up there. He recognized Dr. Woolley at the microphones, who had taught at Yale before he sold his soul and went to Broadway and Hollywood. It made his skin crawl to hear that sophisticated voice condescend to the masses who pressed around Blair like a bog of elbows.

  “And now, without further ado, it’s my pleasure to introduce a percussionist whose sounds may be a tad barbaric to the ears of an old fogey like myself, but I trust they’ll be music to your ears. Ladies and gentlemen, now appearing at the Paramount Theater, Gene Krupa and his Orchestra.”

  When there was music, everyone turned to face it. The path of least resistance turned Blair to the left. He went up on his toes and thought he saw his sailor, but that man wore suspenders and his sailor didn’t. Blair looked back toward the sidewalk, into a hundred different faces, half of them nodding to the music. With their hair combed back, all the hatless men wore long faces. They looked grim even when they were smiling. Damp hairdos lay on the women’s heads like loaves of dough. Blair kept losing his breath, as if drowning.

  Anna heard it underground as she approached the stairs. Crowd and music echoed in the cavernous subway, promising the confusion that would enable her to lose her followers. She hurried up the steps into the sunlight and commotion. She glanced down Forty-second Street, saw the Lyric’s marquee and walked away from it, into the crowd. Anna was so much shorter than everyone else that the crowd seemed to swallow her. Approaching the stage as the piece of music came to its end, she worked her way past bellies, neckties, arms hung with jackets, Anna intended to circle around to the sidewalk and walk back to Forty-second Street, leaving her tail stranded in the crowd.

  When the band finished its first piece, the drummer in sunglasses drew the microphone towards him. All the loudspeakers around the square let out an electric shriek. “We’re gonna do an old favorite for you on this glorious Fourth,” said the drummer. “‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’ And to help us out, we got my old boss, the King of Swing hisself, Benny Goodman!”

  The crowd went wild, hoots and hollers coming through the storm of applause as a man in a sports shirt and spectacles mounted the stage, carrying a clarinet. He smiled at the crowd, exchanged some remarks with the drummer that were not picked up by the microphone, then bowed as if to say the drummer was boss here. He stepped back and waited. Krupa began by beating on his drums, playing the bass drum like an Indian tom-tom. The crowd’s noise subsided and drumbeats like heartbeats echoed in the canyon of buildings and billboards. The band came in with a blare of brass like the trumpeting of elephants, then swung into the melody.

  A shudder ran from the stage out into the crowd when two sailors cleared a space beside the music where they could dance with their girls. Other people crowded forward, to hear the music better, packing the crowd even tighter. Erich and Hank could not move another step toward the uptown end of the square.

  “Where to now?” Erich whispered. He had to whisper, the crowd was so silent and attentive. A bobby-soxer beside him had closed her eyes and sucked her lower lip beneath her front teeth, the better to hear another roar of elephants, more raw and raucous than the first.

  “Back over to the right,” said Hank, and they stepped past the girl and others who were, all of them, leaning their ears into the music.

  There were a few hard slaps like gunshots, and the clarinet started crying, alone for a moment, then accompanied by the drums. The drums raced like a runner’s heart while the clarinet only floated, hovering sadly in the upper stories above Times Square. It was music for a dream where you run as fast as you can but can only run through weightless air in slow motion.

  Lost in the music, people were easily pushed aside as Anna eased through the crowd below their shoulders. Everyone stood perfectly still, except a large straw-haired thug who shoved past Anna, knocking her chin with his elbow without a word of apology. He was followed by a shorter man in coat and tie and eyeglasses who apologized to everyone. Anna let them pass, then took her bearings off the enormous scaffolded letters of the Planter’s Peanuts sign at the other end of Times Square and began to thread her way back towards the sidewalk.

  Twenty feet behind her, Blair wrestled through the crowd. He hated hearing “Sing, Sing, Sing” played in this rough, nasty manner. At least when they played it at El Mo, they sweetened it, smoothed it out. He tried not to listen, but the agitated music was too much like his nerves in this can of human sardines.

  Hank pushed his way around a boy and girl necking in the privacy of the crowd. There was an abrupt machine-gunning of drums up on stage, and Hank automatically turned to look. When he turned back to the direction he was going, he saw a man in a cap pushing towards him. His spy.

  Blair saw a big man coming at him through the crowd. He glanced up the white clothes to the man’s face, and saw his sailor. He froze.

  They both froze; they stared at each other. They stood three feet apart, their eyes locked, their breaths held.

  The drums were tom-tomming again, alone, interminably. Then a drumstick banged a cowbell three times and the entire orchestra kicked in.

  And Blair spun around and charged the bodies behind him. They gave way and he fell. His hands h
it the pavement and he continued charging, running through the forest of legs on all fours. Voices cursed overhead and knees knocked him as he scrambled past, until his hands left the pavement and he ran bent over.

  Erich had seen Hank come to a halt ahead of him. Hank’s hands hung at his side like the hands of a cowboy about to draw his gun. Before Erich understood, Hank hurled himself at someone in the crowd, someone whose gray cap flew off before they disappeared in the thicket of bodies. There was a ripple through the crowd like the wake of an invisible ship. The crowd recoiled around the thing moving through them, packing everyone tighter behind it. They pushed back when Hank pushed his way through. His size worked against him. The wrinkle through the crowd streaked ahead. It had to be Rice.

  Erich hurled himself after Hank, and was jerked around by his own arm. He found Sullivan gripping his arm.

  “You crazy bastard!” Sullivan’s moustache was stretched above his bared teeth. “Why’re you with him? You gone queer, too?”

  “Dammit, Sullivan! Didn’t Mason tell you that I’m to stay with Fayette and make him think we’re…”

  For a split second, Sullivan was frightened by the thought that he was in error. His grip loosened slightly.

  Erich yanked his arm free and pushed Sullivan hard with both hands. He ran after Hank, plunging into the path closing behind the sailor. People hollered at both of them. When he glanced back, Erich saw Sullivan trapped among heads, shouting at somebody far away and raising one arm to point his finger at Erich.

  He caught up with Hank and grabbed his belt. Hank kept going, dragging Erich.

  “Get down, Hank! Bend down so Sullivan can’t see us!”

  “Rice is here! I seen Rice!” But Hank realized he didn’t see Rice anymore, had no idea which way he had gone. He stopped and surveyed the acres of heads around him.

  “Sullivan’s here, too, dammit! He was right beside us back there. Get down so he can’t see you.”

  Hank could not see Rice, so he obeyed Erich, slouching down and bending at the waist. “Damn,” he whispered. “We just stood there eyeballing each other. I coulda whipped my knife out and stuck him right here, but I wasn’t expecting him. Damn.”

  “Shhh,” went Erich. A woman beside them looked at Hank funny. “We have to get away from Sullivan. He was close enough to have shot you back there.”

  Hank followed Erich through the crowd. Bent down like this, it was like hiding from a farmer in his cornfield. They reached the curb and moved toward the right, away from Forty-second Street and behind a clump of boys who stood on the base of a street lamp, four boys clinging to the lamp post and each other.

  Blair reached the curb and turned left, toward Forty-second Street, scrambling more carefully so the people overhead would not give him away with shouts or stumbling. He did not stop until his path was blocked by a newsreel truck parked at the curb, the roof of the truck crammed with men and movie cameras recording the rally. Looking for a way around the truck, Blair realized that nobody followed him. He stood up, suddenly wondering why he had fled. He was the hunter here, not the prey. What had he been thinking? The sailor didn’t even know Blair was hunting him. There had been a chilling look of anger or terror when they locked eyes in the crowd, but the sailor must have been only stunned to run into the man he had betrayed. Blair had no cause for panic. He had a gun. He should have pulled it out, pressed it to the sailor’s gut and fired. With the drums banging away, nobody would have recognized a gunshot until they saw a man bleeding to death.

  He stepped up on the curb and looked for the sailor, but saw no trace of the man. The shadow of the building behind him stretched a few feet out into the street, lying on the crowd like the shadow of a cloud on rough water. On the sunlit stage they were still playing the same damn song. Despite everything that had happened, the band was only at the part where a piano quietly talks to itself, drums softly hurrying alongside like a locomotive. It was eerie hearing two thousand people listening to a lone piano while the city continued to rumble around them. People filled the windows above Times Square. Blair saw them in the building behind him, faces and hands piled on the sills. He decided to go inside and upstairs, where he might be able to spot his man from above. He glanced over the building, looking for its entrance. A pretty woman crossed his line of vision, briskly walking through the crowded shadows on the sidewalk.

  The woman had reminded Blair of Anna. He looked for her again and saw a petite back and familiar walk against the brightness of Forty-second Street. Then the woman stepped into the sunlight, turned right and Blair saw the profile of Anna’s pout and breasts disappear around the corner.

  “Anna!” he shouted. Already moving after her, Blair glanced back at the crowd. He would not find the sailor here again. “Anna!” He broke into a run, stopped by a pack of soldiers, then hurried around them to the corner.

  Erich looked for Sullivan from behind the crowded lamp post. Hank began to stare at faces on the sidewalk, looking for Rice again, hoping he had come this way. Maybe Rice had gone back into the crowd, or maybe he had gone off the other way, toward the truck with the movie cameras. Knowing his enemy was nearby, Hank lost all patience. He jumped up on the base of the street lamp, knocking the boys loose.

  “Whaya think ya doin’, ya moron! Go find ya own lamp post!”

  “Hank!” said Erich in a panic. “Get down! They’ll see you up there!”

  But Hank wrapped his hands around the pole, then his legs and shinnied a few feet up it.

  All heads, a waving carpet of heads, were turned away from Hank and toward the stage, except for one. But that single face beneath a slouched hat was not the face Hank was looking for. His eyes scanned over the crowd to the shaded sidewalk and the pedestrians weaving through knots of spectators. And he saw him. His spy zigzagged up the street, glancing once over his shoulder so that Hank saw it was definitely Rice. He slid down the pole and jumped to the sidewalk. He pushed past the whining boys and headed up the street after Rice.

  “What? You saw him?” said Erich, breathless but beside him. “But they probably saw you up there! They’ll be coming at us right this minute!”

  “Then I gotta work fast!” He dodged people on the sidewalk, wanted to dodge Erich, but the huffing petty officer kept up with him. They came to a smoke shop on the corner and went up Forty-second Street. Hank stopped and reached behind him to steer Erich closer to the wall. “There!” he said.

  Erich saw Blair Rice fifty yards away, beneath a movie marquee that said, “Hope & Crosby, The Road to Morocco.” Rice was wiping his palms against his coat while he stared at something inside. Then he walked slowly into the foyer.

  “Too crazy for you out there today?” said the woman in the box office window.

  “Did a lady buy a ticket from you just now?” said Blair.

  “No. Nobody’s been by in the last minute except the projectionist’s daughter. But she gets in for free.”

  “Projectionist’s daughter? Do you mean Anna?” He looked around the foyer again, at the naked lightbulbs beneath the marquee, the canvas banner that promised air-cooling, at the shiny, stout woman behind the glass. He was in love with a girl whose father was only a technician, a motion picture projectionist? “I have to talk with Anna,” he said.

  “Then you’ll have to wait for her here. Unless you want to buy a ticket.”

  Blair bought a ticket and went inside, asking the usher who tore the ticket in half if he knew Anna and where he might find her.

  “She’s gone up to the booth to see ole Kraut-puss, her father. Hey, was you at the rally? Who’s that playing? That Goodman out there?”

  Up the street, the entire band was at it again, playing full blast, audible even through the closed glass doors.

  “I don’t know,” said Blair and went up the stairs without asking for directions. If Anna’s father were German, maybe he was a spy after all. But there was something unseemly about a foreign agent who was working-class.

  Walking along the wall, Erich and Han
k quickly approached the theater. Erich kept looking back to see if they were being followed yet. Everyone else on this side of the street hurried toward the rally, where the music was frantically pounding toward some kind of conclusion. Hank stopped in front of a glassed-in poster of two men and a woman. He peered around the corner. The foyer was empty and there was only a uniformed boy inside the lobby. He crossed the foyer toward the ticket window, stopping when he recognized the woman behind the glass.

  “Damn,” he told Erich. “I been here before. Why’d he want to go into this place?”

  Erich was too busy watching the street to answer.

  “But yeah,” Hank whispered. “This’ll suit me. Dark movie house. Be as good as night. Okay,” he told Erich. “You stay out here. I’m going inside.”

  “What? No. I’m going inside with you.”

  “Uh uh. I need you to keep a lookout,” Hank lied. This was where he would drop Erich and do the killing alone. “In case Sullivan and them get here.”

  Part of Erich was relieved by the proposal. He wanted a man to be killed, but did not want to see it. And yet, he felt excluded by the proposal, hurt. “All right, then. But I should watch from inside the lobby. I’m too easy to spot when I stand out here.”

  Hank agreed. He bought two tickets and they went through the door, just as the crowd at the rally roared its approval at the end of “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

  “Very busy today?” Erich asked the usher.

  “No, sir. Almost empty, what with the free show outside.”

  Erich and Hank stepped deeper into the lobby. After the fury outside, the place felt almost haunted, the noise of the rally and street muffled by the glass doors, the buzz of a movie muffled by the heavy curtains hung over the theater exits.