December '41, page 24
“Just drive.” Vivian didn’t want to talk any more about either parent.
He sensed it and changed the subject. “You know, we’re driving into history.”
She’d never much cared about history until she saw Gone With the Wind. But Martin Browning was a student of the Civil War, and the Lincoln Highway was following the route that the Confederates took to Gettysburg.
He studied the Civil War because it was one of the few wars that ended with an assassination. Plenty of wars had begun with them—from Roman times to 1914—and the names of the assassins were well-known. Historical and literary fame followed Brutus, “the noblest Roman of them all.” Ignominy stained John Wilkes Booth. But if Booth had killed Lincoln before the bloodshed, so that the North let the South leave the Union in peace, what would historians have said? No man had ever committed assassination at the start of a war and thereby made himself an instrument for ending it. That was what Martin Browning hoped to do.
Killing the president who equipped the Russians and fed the British and was now preparing to turn America’s industrial might fully to war? This would be an act of patriotism for Germany and an act of charity for humanity. Of course, Martin knew that Americans wouldn’t stop fighting, whether Roose-velt was leading them or not. But if you cut the spider from the middle of the web, would the web not weaken and collapse?
He was driving up the long slope toward McPherson’s Ridge as these ruminations spun in his head. On either side lay open fields and split-rail fences, and right at the crest, a statue: General John Buford, who decided to make a stand on the high ground and started the pivotal three-day battle. A single man redirecting the flow of history.
Martin Browning admired such men. He believed he was one himself. But he should have been looking at his temperature gauge instead, because directly under the gaze of General Buford, he blew a radiator hose.
Ten minutes later, he was elbow-deep in the engine.
Vivian, standing beside him with her arms folded against the cold, saw flashing blue lights. She said, “Here come the cops.”
He said, “I’ll do the talking.”
“What if he asks for ID? For registration papers?” And for the first time, she noticed the plates on the Ford. “Ohio?”
“Cleveland, Ohio,” he said. “Do you have a Social Security card?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“Leave it to me. And call me Michael. The car is registered to Michael Milton.”
The cop was out of the car and coming toward them. He was a young guy, fresh-faced, well armed, wearing a nice brown uniform and brown leather jacket.
Martin had considered ditching the car in Pittsburgh. If the bodies of the Diebolds had been found, the house would have been searched, and paperwork on a ’36 Ford Deluxe might have been discovered. Police might have issued an APB. But there were so many black Fords on the roads, Martin had decided to keep driving.
Now he pulled on his calfskin gloves, then slid his hand into his pocket and made sure he could pull the blackjack quickly.
“Afternoon, folks,” said the officer. “Radiator?”
“Radiator or water pump,” said Martin.
“Could be the thermostat.” The officer was friendly, used to dealing with tourists.
Martin kept smiling and glanced at Vivian, as if to say, You smile, too.
The officer gestured to the plates. “Ohio, eh? Where you headed?”
“I’ve always wanted to see Gettysburg,” said Martin, “and—”
“—and I’ve always wanted to see Washington at Christmas,” added Vivian, brightening into her “actress” face, smiling like a star. “We’re going to see the president light the Christmas tree in Washington.”
Martin’s head snapped around. Why that? Christmas Eve, the National Christmas Tree, FDR? Well, it was in the papers. And it was a tradition.
The policeman leaned into the engine. “Gotta be a pressure buildup somewhere.”
Martin slipped his hand into his pocket. What the officer said next would determine his fate … and perhaps Vivian’s.
He said, “My brother runs the gas station in town. I’ll call him. Get you folks to Washington in time to light that tree.”
“We have to keep up our traditions, eh?” said Martin.
“Good for morale,” said the officer. Then he asked for Martin’s license and registration, took a quick look, handed them back. “Thank you, Mr. Milton.”
As the cop walked back to his cruiser, Martin relaxed. He was glad that driver’s licenses did not include pictures.
Vivian looked at him. “Michael Milton?”
“Just call me Mike.”
* * *
FRANK CARTER ARRESTED FOUR Germans that day. Back in the office, another pile of names sat on his desk for Friday. He complained, but Hood just waved a hand. “You can have Saturday to go to Barstow.”
“Saturday may be too late.”
“J. Edgar gives me orders. I give them to you. I give you Saturday.”
So Carter headed over to Stella’s office in the 1900 block of Wilshire.
Bartholomew Bennett answered the door. He wore an impeccable double-breasted suit with a carnation in the lapel and a paisley pocket square.
Carter sniffed at the cologne in the air. “Oh, Barty, you smell so good.”
Bartholomew pursed his lips. “We’re just closing.”
“Off to the Run, are you?” Carter was referring to the row of downtown hangouts where Los Angeles homosexuals met to socialize.
“If anyone really needs to know,” said Barty, “I’ll be at the Biltmore Bar.”
“Don’t show them your gun,” said Carter. “You might frighten them.”
“I’ll just show them the barrel.” Bartholomew patted his pocket square and the Beretta holstered beneath it. “Licensed in California.”
“But the Beretta 418 is a lady’s gun,” said Carter.
From the inner office, Stella shouted, “I gave him that gun.”
Barty shouted back, “Is this G-man really your new boyfriend?”
“Good night, Barty,” said Stella.
“Gah.” Barty slammed the door after him.
Stella was behind her desk, waiting for the phone to ring. She said to Carter, “Barty can hit a hummingbird at fifty yards with that gun. I carry the same model myself.”
“You prove my point. A lady’s gun.” Carter dropped into a chair.
“Lay off, or I’ll think you’re a bully instead of a nice guy with a hard job.”
His response was to offer her a cigarette. She poured two glasses of bourbon. And they waited for the call that Sam Holly had promised for five thirty.
It never came.
Around six, Stella called Holly. No answer.
They had another bourbon, waited another half hour. Then Stella said, “I told him I’d pay him him fifty bucks. The Sam Holly I know would take off his two-toned shoes and walk across the desert in his bare feet for fifty bucks. Tomorrow, I’m driving out there.”
“I can’t go,” said Carter.
“I’ll take Barty. Like I told you, he’s a dead shot.”
* * *
KEVIN HAD MISSED THE early bus to Washington. That meant he’d have to wait until the wee-hours milk run, which meant a stop in every Podunk town and Civil War skirmish site in the state of Virginia, which meant sleeping half the night in a sitting position on a bouncing bus and not arriving until morning, bleary-eyed and exhausted and probably confused as hell.
Then what? He didn’t have much. Carter had told him to stay in the open. And Carter was his only friend, except for Leon Lewis.
Now that he’d been running for four days, it would be a lot harder to talk his way out of a murder charge, unless he could find the real murderer himself, because in a world where everyone was chasing Nazis and Japs, catching a fake Nazi might be better than catching no Nazi at all.
He took a seat in the waiting room next to an old man and his wife. The man glanced, then gave him a second look. Lots of people were giving him second looks lately. But it wasn’t that they recognized the Hollywood Nazi beneath the three-day stubble. They were looking at the buttons on his cap, including that Star of David. A lot of these people had never seen a Jew before.
He nodded and smiled and silently thanked Dilly Kramer again.
Somebody’d left a Washington newspaper on the bench. He flipped through it until he came to this: “DC Man Suspended over Hollywood Nazi: Pullman Porter Stanley Smith worked the car where Sally Drake, daughter of a professor at The George Washington University, was killed. In Chicago, he allowed two witnesses to step off the train before police could question them. He was also found to be carrying a hundred and sixty dollars in cash, an enormous sum. ‘Somebody overtipped him,’ said railroad authorities, ‘and he disobeyed orders. Disciplinary action has been taken.’ Smith returned to the District yesterday.”
Kevin decided that if he couldn’t find the Kelloggs, he’d find Stanley Smith.
* * *
THE MECHANIC IN GETTYSBURG knew his stuff. So Martin Browning now knew that the Ford Motor Company had enlarged their water pumps in 1938 to improve the cooling systems. You could still get a pump for a ’36 Deluxe, but you’d have to go to Harrisburg to get it … in the morning. Martin considered throwing some money around. Maybe an extra fifty if the service station could get the pump and put it in right away. But that might attract more attention that it was worth. Besides, he’d already told the cops that he’d come to enjoy the history.
So he and Vivian checked into the Gettysburg Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Michael Milton. Then he hired a guide, who took them from McPherson’s Ridge to Little Round Top to the Angle. Along the way, the guide made speeches about the bravery of men whose spirits would now inspire another generation of Americans, and Martin nodded with patriotic fervor, even though he knew that those men had probably been like soldiers in every war: scared to death one minute, fatalistically throwing their lives away the next.
And all afternoon, Martin worked on answers for Vivian’s questions: Who was Michael Milton and why did he keep a car in the Deibold barn? By dinner, he had his lies lined up.
Gettysburg was quiet in the week before Christmas, in the first month of war, so the hotel dining room was only about a third full. Martin and Vivian both had the Thursday night special, pot roast and gravy, along with Yuengling beer, the brew of Pennsylvania.
Martin began by toasting to Vivian’s quick thinking. “Lighting the National Christmas Tree … a genius touch.” He knew she liked a compliment.
“I read about it in the paper,” she said. “I’d love to see it.”
“You’ll be home by then. Home with your mother. Much better.”
“Mom … I love her but she loves her late-afternoon highballs a little too much. The truth is, closer I get to home, the worse I feel.”
He asked her, “Do you wish you stayed in Los Angeles?”
“When I’m there, I dream of home. When I’m almost home, I dream of the big, bright California sun.”
“We always want what we don’t have. It’s the nature of existence.”
She laughed. “Since we’re talkin’ about existence, does Michael Milton exist?”
“He’s a fictional character. You know about them. You’ve played your share of them.”
“Yeah, but I don’t carry their driver’s licenses.”
He took another sip of beer. “Before the end of Prohibition, Diebold distributed whiskey across the Midwest. His agricultural supply trucks made good cover. But the syndicate liked their drivers to carry false IDs and registrations, just in case.…”
“So you were a rumrunner? Like my father?”
He knew that he’d hit the right note, presenting himself as a man who worked hard to make his way and sometimes coasted close to the edge of the law, like her father.
And he saw a bit more deeply into her. A young girl from a home of contradictions. When she was growing up, bootlegging was a good way to make a living, but afternoon drinking was a bad way for a mother to show her daughter her love.
His explanation worked. He put his hand on hers, and she opened her palm.
She leaned across the table and said, “So why are you really going to Washington?”
He pulled his hand back. “I hoped that by now, you’d trust me.”
“I trust you,” she said. “But you don’t trust me. Otherwise you’d tell me something more than you have.”
“Please, just trust me.”
“You’ve been good to me. I guess that’s enough.” She slid her other hand across the table to his. “So, Michael, is tonight the night?”
“The night?”
“The night that Joshua fights the battle of Jericho.”
“And the walls come tumbling down?”
And they did.
Vivian gave herself to him.
He accepted with pleasure and a sense of something more. He couldn’t tell if it was love or guilt. But he promised her that after his work in Washington was done, he’d come back to her. He didn’t tell her the truth, that on Christmas Eve, he’d be coming for her father’s boat, not for her. He didn’t even know if it was the truth anymore.
PART THREE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
FRIDAY,
DECEMBER 19
KEVIN CUSACK STEPPED OFF the bus at Greyhound’s sleek new terminal on New York Avenue. He was scruffed and smelly, but he knew that if he walked confidently toward some destination in the middle distance, there wasn’t a cop in the country who’d pick him out as the Hollywood Nazi.
And from what he could see, there were cops everywhere, uniforms in the station and out on the sidewalk and probably a few cops hidden under overcoats and fedoras, too. But he blended into the crowd of government workers, then ducked into the first phone booth he saw and called L.A.
Frank Carter accepted the charges and congratulated himself that his man had made it all the way to Washington. “I expected to hear from you yesterday.”
“I’m on the run, remember? Sometimes, not even Sam Spade can find a phone.”
Carter was still going on the theory that the best way to flush Kellogg was to let him think he was in the clear. So, he’d used his L.A. newspaper contacts to plant stories that the G-men were looking for someone else. He didn’t know if it was working, but if he was playing puppet master, at least he had Pinocchio on the line. He said, “You need to help me, Kevin. You need to stay on the run.”
“What about your friends in high places?”
“Just keep moving. Keep looking.”
Kevin knew that Carter wasn’t above setting him up. Leon Lewis had warned him. Friendship only went so far with these government guys. “Why do I have to stay on the run?” he asked.
Carter said, “Well … because … I need you out there.” It was all he had.
“All right,” answered Kevin. “Be at your phone this time tomorrow.”
“Where are you going?”
After a long pause, Kevin said, “Home for Christmas.”
“But you can’t.”
“Not yet. So for now, I’ll try the best hotel in Washington.” Click.
* * *
VIVIAN AWOKE NEXT TO her “husband.” She leaned on her elbow and watched him sleep.
He opened one eye and said, “Good morning.”
She said, “I can get a train from Washington to Annapolis, you know. So take me to Washington. One more night before we say goodbye.”
“I’m not saying goodbye.” He almost believed it. “Get the guest room ready.”
“Guest room?” She laughed. “In my parents’ house? Don’t make me laugh.”
He put a finger to her lips, then kissed her. A kiss led to more. When they were done, he rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I’m thinking you’re right.” He had one night in Washington before the Stauers arrived. He could check into the Willard with Vivian, and they could stroll arm in arm around the White House grounds, just like any tourist couple.
* * *
AROUND 11:00 A.M. PACIFIC, Stella Madden drove through the sand-scoured outskirts of Barstow, California. She slowed as she passed the sign squeaking in the wind: GOBEL’S GUNS AND HARDWARE. Three tumbleweeds went rolling by, just like in the movies.
She said, “I don’t see a Dodge coupe … or a pickup.”
“All I see is hell … or purgatory,” said Bartholomew Bennett.
“Save the melodrama. Read the map.”
He directed her a half mile farther, to Rimrock Road, which led past more scrub lots, more sand, more bungalows leaning into the wind.
Stella pointed her Studebaker Champion at three spindly palm trees and pulled into the driveway next to them. A shingle on the front door of the little house read SAMUEL HOLLY, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, THE HIGH DESERT HOUNDS-TOOTH. The carport was empty.
“Forget purgatory.” Barty looked around. “Hell. Definitely hell.”
Stella knocked on the door, then peered in a window.
A neighbor lady tending her roses called over, “He ain’t been home for two days.”
Stella offered her card. “Did he say where he was going?”
“Always goin’ somewhere.” The lady was shaded under a sunhat that she’d put on a few decades too late, considering that her face looked like a worn baseball glove. “Could be anywhere in the high desert. That’s why they call him—”
“—the High Desert Houndstooth. Yeah. I know.”
Back in the car, Barty said, “God, I hate houndstooth.”
“I think somebody else does, too,” answered Stella.
“I mean the fabric,” said Barty.
“I mean the guy,” answered Stella. “The fifty I promised him would buy a lot around here. More houndstooth, another pair of two-tone shoes—”
“A one-way ticket out of town.”
“Right.” Stella threw the car in gear. “So let’s go punch ours.” She drove back to Gobel’s and pulled up beside the squeaking sign.
