Guilt by Association

by Gilbert, Morris

  “I suppose it was me!” Lonnie snapped. Then Karen, who had sat at the table with Alex, pointed out, “No way any of us could have done it without everybody noticing.”

  “That’s enough!” Holtz’s face was pale, but his voice was strong. “What a bunch of fools! I’m sure Stone is enjoying all this. We are all overwrought and devastated by the tragedy—but we must not fight among ourselves.” Holtz paused and said, “Now, was the omelet poisoned? And if so, how? We have two trained investigators with us; let’s hear what they think.”

  Dani saw that Ben would not speak, so she shrugged, saying, “It wouldn’t be too hard to put poison in an egg, would it? Just remove part of the egg with a hypodermic needle, put the poison in to take up that space, a little glue over the hole, and who would ever notice? As Betty says, Stone didn’t care which one of us died. We all eat eggs, and it was just a coincidence that the poisoned one got in the omelet.”

  Candi cried out, “But, he could do it again—anything we eat could kill us!”

  She had voiced the fear that had touched all of them, but Rosie said, “Well, my daddy was a hard-shelled Baptist preacher. He believed that whatever is gonna happen is gonna happen. He went through World War II as an infantryman, and he told me he never ducked his head once. ‘If a bullet got your name on it, ain’t no tree gonna save you!’ he always said. So I guess I’ll just do like Daddy did. If Old Man Death comes looking for old Rosie, why, he’s gonna find me. So I’m gonna eat my vittles without worrying all the time about what’s inside.”

  Dani smiled at him, saying, “I’m not sure about your thinking, Rosie, but it’s better than some I’ve heard.”

  After dinner, Holtz explained Savage’s plan, but the idea met with less than a groundswell of enthusiasm. Most of them looked dubious, but Vince nodded, his eyes manifesting a new hope.

  Early the next morning, after breakfast, Ben took Dani and Holtz to the spot and showed them a hammer. “I took some wire and tied a bunch of these supports together.” They saw that he had run wires through the bolt holes in the supports. He had six on one side and six on the other, with one brace between them, extended about three inches. He’d wound some adhesive tape around the rough steel to protect the hands. He knelt down on the floor, looked over his shoulder, and murmured, “One small blow for mankind!” Then he lifted the tool and let it fall on the cement. It struck the line between the old and new batches, and a fragment of cement flew off. He paused, stared at it, then began raising the hammer and letting it fall with a dogged regularity.

  Dani and Holtz left, but she returned an hour later to find Vince taking over. “Going to be slow,” Ben muttered as he got to his feet and flexed his stiff fingers. He looked at the blister on the inside of his palm and then at the small irregular crevice represented by his labor. “Don’t ruin your hands, Vince,” he said. “Lonnie will take a shift.”

  Off and on all day, the men worked at it. The next day, late in the afternoon, Dani went back to check the progress. Karen was standing beside Ben, putting tape around his hand. Looking up, she said in exasperation, “Talk to your employee, will you? He’s grinding his palms to hamburger!” She pushed one hand down, and when she said, “Now the other one,” Dani saw that the palm was raw. “This crazy idea will never work, anyway,” Karen complained, slapping something out of a tube onto his palm. She put a cotton pad over it, expertly wrapped the hand with tape, then said, “I don’t think Stone will have to poison anyone else. If he leaves us here like this, we’ll all go crazy and kill each other!”

  Ben cocked his head. “There’s our master’s voice—let’s go.”

  They quickly filed out and joined the others in front of the camera. Maxwell Stone was saying, “. . . Death of your fellow prisoner. No one regrets any more than I do that such stringent measures must be taken. I am hopeful that you will see how serious this matter is and decide to cooperate. Those of you who do so will not be released, of course. The matter is too serious for that. But I promise you that you will be taken from this silo and placed in a comfortable prison. And while no prison is pleasant, neither is death.”

  The raw threat ran along Dani’s nerves, and she spoke up at once. “Stone, you talk a great deal about justice and freedom. Can’t you see that what you’re doing to us negates everything you claim to stand for? You love this country, but it was to guard against such things as you are doing now that George Washington and his peers risked everything they had. And the wars that you mention, they were all fought by men who would fight against you for robbing us of our liberty!”

  She spoke at length, as if she were pleading before a jury, and Stone made no move to interrupt. Finally, however, she stopped, and he said, “Miss Ross, you are an eloquent speaker. You are a brilliant young woman, and I take your words seriously. But our country is filled with brilliant people—yet we are losing everything!”

  “Here it comes again,” Karen whispered to Ben. “How many times have we heard what a rotten generation we are? He’s like a broken record! But that’s the way his form of megalomania works.”

  For nearly half an hour Stone rambled on about the decadence of modern Americans. “The so-called ‘hippie,’ who has thrown decency and honor to the dust, those pseudo-intellectuals who take more pride in their beards and unwashed bodies—they are not fit to be Americans.”

  After branding the youth and the modern media (straight out of the pits of hell!), he began on the politicians. “Roosevelt sold our country out to Stalin at Yalta—and he was not the last who has fallen into Communist hands. The Supreme Court of the United States sold out to Russia and China!”

  Finally he paused, “But despite all this, there is hope. Some of us are aware of the critical danger America faces. We have no intention of standing by, of being drained of our liberty by the forces that would destroy us. And I am giving you one opportunity to redeem yourselves.” He paused, and his voice dropped into a more intimate—and somehow more enticing tone—than any of them had heard. “If you will decide to confess to the evil that has destroyed you, it is not impossible but that one day you will be invited to join with us. There would have to be a long period of indoctrination, of course, but I would help you. Think of it carefully. You have been a part of the forces that are destroying this great land, but with time, you could come into the truth.”

  Holtz had listened to this with a deepening scowl on his face. “I believe another word for that is brainwashing, Stone. And if what you’re doing for us is a sample of your ways, I’ll rot here before joining you!”

  All of them were startled when Stone gave a low laugh. “Ah, Commander, you are offended by what has happened to you? But you have done worse!”

  Holtz blinked, then nodded. “I presume you refer to my service in the German navy. Well, I confess that we were wrong. Most of us didn’t know about Auschwitz and Dachau—and all those terrible places—and you would be shocked to know how many Germans were revolted by Hitler’s insane cruelty. But I make no plea for forgiveness—not from you!”

  Stone’s voice somehow contained a note of triumph as he answered quickly, “Oh, I was not referring to that part of your past, Commander, as terrible as it is. There is something else that you have done. I refer to your family.”

  Dani saw a sudden reaction pass over Holtz, as if he had been touched with a live wire. His eyes blinked rapidly, and he shook his head abruptly. “I have no family but my sister, Anna.”

  “But you did have a brother, didn’t you? A brother named Wilhelm?”

  Holtz’s mouth flew open, and when he spoke, it was in German: “Ja, er war meinjunger Bruder, wer in Berlin geboren wurde—”

  “In English, if you please, Herr Holtz!”

  Holtz seemed to shrink into his chair. His shoulders slumped, and when he spoke it was in a hoarse whisper. “Yes! I had a brother. He was the best of us all, I think. He left Germany and came to America when he was a very young man. Many times he wrote me, and he always said, ‘Hitler will destroy you, Karl.�
� But I would not listen. He—did well in America. He joined the merchant marine and rose to a high place—a captain. I—I never saw him after he came to America.”

  “Herr Holtz,” Stone demanded. “It is time for the truth!”

  “All right! All right, I will tell you all of it.” Holtz’s face was ashen, and his eyes were filled with pain. “He was captain of a ship called the Republic. She carried fifteen hundred soldiers. She was part of a convoy, and our U-boats attacked one afternoon. I was too far away to be in on the attack, but I took my boat there to—to pick off survivors.”

  He licked his lips and looked blindly around, seeming not to see anyone. “We got there at dusk, and I saw one ship, waddling along, carrying all those men. Then I saw the name on her stern—the Republic! And I knew that my brother Wilhelm was at the helm. My brother, Wilhelm!”

  He broke off, tears running down his face, but Stone continued implacably, “And what did you do, Commander?”

  “I sank her!” Holtz whispered. “She went down with all hands!” He got to his feet and stumbled away, disappearing into the sleeping quarters.

  Stone let the silence run on, then said, “That is a good beginning. It is not the real crime that burns into the commander’s soul, but that will come. That will come!”

  Then the red light blinked out, and the camera went dead.

  9

  A Glimpse of the World

  * * *

  Wednesday brought a break in the cold weather, but Lonnie warned them after breakfast not to get too excited. “Old man winter’s just foolin’.” He nodded. “We’re in for a hard winter.”

  “How can you know that, Lonnie?” Karen asked from the kitchen.

  Lonnie gave her a surprised look. “Why, the caterpillars was extra fuzzy this year, and the acorns had thick shells.” He nodded sagely, but when Karen laughed, he said in an insulted voice, “Go on and laugh! But when the real winter hits this sardine can, you’ll see!”

  She apologized, but he stalked away to join the poker game Sid and Vince pursued languidly at the table. Putting her dish towel away, Karen paused, then moved over in time to see Ben straighten his back and look up. “You’ve been chipping away at that floor off and on all morning,” she scolded. Going to lean over his shoulder, she saw that an area no more than a foot square and about two inches deep had been removed. Shaking her head, she asked, “Ben, do you really think there’s a chance to break out?”

  “Always a chance, Doc,” he said. His inner toughness intrigued her, and she studied his face, wondering what had put such dogged purpose in his features. It was the face of a fighter, the bridge of his nose showing a small break, and the fresh scar on his forehead giving him a tough look. The hazel eyes, which regarded her, seemed relaxed, half hooded by his eyelids; those eyes and the rounded muscles in his body gave the impression of a large cat. Perhaps, she thought suddenly, behind his toughness was also a weakness.

  “Come along!” she commanded, but a smile curved her generous mouth and touched her eyes. “You can play at being the Count of Monte Cristo anytime.”

  He dropped the chisel onto the floor with a sharp clanging and got to his feet. She walked like a farm girl, he noted as they moved through the kitchen and across the recreation area, with big steps and swinging her arms more actively than most women. She sat down in a chair, drew her feet under her, and nodded at the other chair. When he dropped into it, she asked at once, “What do you make of all this, Ben?”

  He regarded her carefully. She wore a man’s shirt, open at the neck; it fell carelessly away from her throat and showed the smooth, white shading of her skin. Her features seemed sharp, but he knew that this was an illusion dispelled by the room’s light. Her lips were long, and her light-blue eyes were wide spaced and steady. The strongest impression she left with him was of a woman who kept herself under strict control at all times. She was, in a way, almost mannish in her driving energy, but there was nothing masculine in the rounded figure that was not concealed by the loose-fitting shirt and the long, full skirt.

  “You want the conclusions of a trained investigator, I guess.” He touched the scar on his forehead pensively, then shook his head. “I guess it’s going to take more than a few hints from Crime Stoppers to figure this one out. One thing, people are going to start breaking pretty soon. All these interviews—they’re wearing people down—and they’re going to get worse.”

  Karen nodded. Ever since his encounter with Holtz, Stone had summoned various individuals for his attention. He had grilled Sid for over an hour, and by that time Sid was a bundle of quivering nerves. “I know. It’s like an interrogating room, isn’t it? Wear people down until they can’t stand it. Who’s next?”

  “No telling,” Ben shrugged. “He’s already had a shot at Vic, Holtz, Candi, and Rachel. Sooner or later he’s going to do the same to all of us. Morrow was just about ready to go over the edge, and that was a rough jolt Holtz took yesterday. He’s a pretty hardy specimen, but he’s not rolling with this one so well.”

  “I know. He’s been covering that guilt for a long time, I’d guess. Candi isn’t going to make it. I’m giving her antidepressant tablets, but she’s not responding well. As a matter of fact, Ben, I’m not too sure any of us are going to make it.”

  He studied her closely, then nodded, “You’ll make it, Doc. You may bend, but you won’t break.” He leaned back, laced his hands, and covered his eyes. “You got a family out there?”

  She shot a quick look at him, then shrugged. “No.” The brief reply sounded curt, and she added, “I had one once, but it got away from me.” She waited for him to ask for details. If he had, she would have broken off at once. But he lay there, relaxed, with his eyes hidden behind his hands, so she went on speaking.

  “I always wanted to be a doctor—always! No matter what else, that was the one thing I never let go of. I worked as a waitress to pay my way through college; then I learned how to get grants and loans to get through medical school.” Her voice changed subtly as she added, “My third year I met Pete Sanderson. It was his first year, and he was having a hard time with money. We started going together and fell in love, got married. I got a good appointment as soon as I finished and was able to make enough to get him through.”

  She reached over and pulled his hands away from his eyes, asking, “Are you pumping me, Savage?”

  “Certainly.” He nodded. “Like I said, I’m a trained investigator.”

  Again, she would have stopped, but his relaxed attitude seemed to encourage her. She was not a big talker, but the tensions of the silo had drawn her nerves fine, so she leaned back in the chair and continued: “Pete specialized in surgery, and when he finished, we both got good positions. More money than either of us had ever seen. Why, Pete made more for one operation than most men make in six months! And I had a baby the first year we were married. We named him Charles, after my dad.” Karen’s voice grew tight, and she said, “There were eight good years—and one bad one before the end. We had everything money could buy, and we lived at a terrific pace. I thought I had the perfect marriage—then one day Pete came home and said he wanted a divorce. He’d met a socialite, and said he had to have her—and he did. It was a messy divorce, fighting over Charlie. We hated each other by the time it was over, and Charlie was a nervous wreck.” Her voice suddenly trembled, and she looked away from him quickly.

  “Always hardest on the kids,” Ben said quietly.

  Karen nodded and whispered, “I’d like to go back—do it all over. But it’s too late for that, Ben. It’s way too late!”

  He handed her a handkerchief, then sat there looking at the wall while she wept silently. Finally she handed him the handkerchief back, and when he reached to take it, she said, “Sorry, Ben.” A look of surprise came to her face, and she said in wonder, “I didn’t mean to unload all that on you!”

  “It’s my honest face.” He nodded, then gave her a sudden smile. “You’re going to make it, Doc.”

  She stared back
at him, then laughed shortly. “Yes, I’ll make it. Thanks for not offering all kinds of advice!” She said suddenly, “Let me see your hands.” She held them and looked carefully at the half-healed blisters. Neither Ben nor Karen was aware that Dani had come out of the sleeping area and was watching them. Just as Karen said, “They’re healing nicely, just don’t work without protection,” Dani turned quickly and went back to the kitchen.

  He got up and said, “Most women can’t throw straight. Can you?”

  She stared at him in amazement, then shook her head. “You’ve got a mind like a butterfly, Savage! What in the world makes you ask a question like that?”

  “Wait here, and I’ll show you.” He headed for the sleeping area and came back at once carrying something. “See that vent up there?” He indicated the small rectangle, thirty feet up. “I want to get a look out of that thing.” She stared at him, and he held out a foot-long piece of steel with a rope tied to the center. “Got just enough rope to reach that far, but getting the thing through that little hole is going to be hard. Want to try?”

  She got to her feet, looked up at the small square, and shook her head. “I can sew up your head, but I can’t throw for sour apples.”

  He grinned and gathered the thirty-foot length of rope in a coil. Holding it in his left hand, he measured the distance to the vent and threw the piece of steel in an overhand motion. The line played out well enough, but his throw fell short. The steel clanged against the wall four feet below the vent, then dropped to the concrete with another loud clatter.

  “Hey!” Lonnie yelled. “What in the cat hair are you doin’, Ben?” Savage didn’t answer, but after he tried twice more and failed, the three men came over to watch.

  “You don’t plan to get out through that little hole?” Vince asked curiously.

  “Nope, but if I could get a look out that vent, we might learn a little more about this place.”