Dry Bones (34 page)

“Thanks for the shine.” Dunne shook the attendant’s hand. “And the advice.”

“Get home safe.”

“I’ll have the best shine on the A train.”

“Be sure to tell everybody where you got it.”

Retracing his steps, Dunne went past the baggage room, made a left to the Eighth Avenue subway entrance. He bought two tokens at the ticket booth, pushed through the turnstile, and leisurely made his way down one flight of stairs, up another, and emerged on the express platform.

He sat on a bench midplatform. Without removing the book from the satchel, he opened it and randomly underlined letters with his pen. A downtown express arrived. Passengers exited and entered. He closed the satchel. About a dozen people still waited on the platform. Snake number one was reading a newspaper at the southern end; snake number two loitered with arms folded several yards to the other side of Dunne.

The approach of the uptown express was heralded by steel-on-steel grind and screech. The train came to a halt. Snake number one entered a rear car. Snake number two lingered one door away. He waited until Dunne got in the car and took a seat before he did the same.

The doors closed. Dunne held the satchel in his lap. The train idled in the station. Snake number two was on the same side of the car as Dunne but at the north end. The doors opened once more, then closed. The train still didn’t move. Suddenly, it jerked into motion. People swayed in their seats. It stopped, jerked again.

Dunne bolted to his feet and toward the door that led to the car behind. Snake number one had already made his way into it.
Framed in the door’s glass panel, he had his hands around the white enamel pole in the middle of the car.

Dunne pulled on the door handle. It didn’t budge. He pulled twice more. It turned down. The heavy metal door slid open. He stood between the cars. Snake number one, in the car behind, let go of the pole and moved toward him.

Dunne pulled the dossier from the satchel and shoved it down the front of his trousers. He dropped the satchel on the car’s metal ledge, scaled the trio of iron chains linking the cars, perched for an instant on top, hands on opposite walls. The train started to gather speed.

He jumped onto the platform, skidded, tumbled, caromed off a bench and into the wall. The train disappeared into the tunnel. He lay sprawled on the floor. His hat rolled on the tracks. A woman screamed in a high, panicked voice, “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

A man in blue overalls loomed over him. “You trying to get yourself killed or what?”

Dunne sat up. His knuckles were badly scraped and bleeding. His right trouser leg was ripped. A bloody knee protruded.

The man continued to hover. “Stay where you are, pal. Somebody went to alert the token clerk to call the cops and get an ambulance.”

“Help me up, will you?” Dunne extended his hand.

“You might’ve broken something or have a concussion. Don’t move.”

“I didn’t break anything. Please, help me up.”

“It’s your funeral.” He gave Dunne his hand.

Dunne walked a few steps. His knee throbbed. “Thanks, I’ll be okay.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” The man scratched his neck.

“I realized it was an express. I wanted the local.”

“It don’t matter. The next stop for both is Forty-second Street. You could’ve switched there.”

“Now I know.”

“You risked your life for
that
?”

“I didn’t want to keep my wife waiting.”

“You must have some wife.”

Dunne hobbled away. He ignored the staring people who kept their distance as he passed. Slowly mounting the stairs, he noticed his shoes were badly scuffed. A great shine gone to waste. He hopped into a cab on Eighth Avenue. He imagined that by now snakes one and two were paging through
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, pondering the underlined letters, and the code they might contain.

He rolled down the window. Traffic was light. They sped up the avenue. The wind hit his face. Fresh air: The best medicine.

S
T.
G
ENEVIEVE
’
S
A
CADEMY
, M
ANHATTAN

T
HE SUDDEN MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT RING JOLTED
D
UNNE AWAKE
. H
E
rolled over. The luminous hands on the clock beside the phone pointed to 2:47. He switched on the light. At this hour, you could be sure you weren’t being notified you’d won the Irish Sweepstakes. The best to hope for was a drunk who’d dialed the wrong number. Otherwise, someone had died, or another war had started, or some equivalent misfortune. He held the receiver slightly farther from his ear than usual. “Hello.”

“Fin, is that you?”

“Who’s this?”

“Bassante.”

“What’s up?”

“Bad news.”

“How bad?”

“Really bad.”

“Shoot.” Dunne reached over and grabbed an open pack of cigarettes.

“Dick Van Hull is dead.”

“When did it happen?” He lit the cigarette.

“Five days ago.”

“And you’re just calling me now?”

“I just found out a little while ago. I stopped into Red’s to see
how he was doing. Terry, the bartender, gave me the news. Dick died right there, in the bar, massive heart attack as he got out of a booth.”

“What about funeral arrangements?”

“There were none. He had no next of kin, but he had a proper will that directed he be cremated and his ashes thrown in the harbor. Terry’s already seen to it.”

“Nice of him to let us know.”

“That’s the way Dick wanted it, quick and quiet. But Terry said there’ll be a memorial ceremony at St. Genevieve’s, where Dick taught.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, noon.”

“You have the address?”

“Not with me. But it’s in the phone book.”

“I’ll see you there.”

It was drizzling on and off. Dunne had trouble finding a cab. The crosstown traffic crawled. He arrived twenty minutes late. The turreted, three-story gray stone Gothic facade was two parts imposing, one part oppressive, like an old-style penitentiary. He rushed up the stairs. The chapel was next to the entrance. It was empty. The shimmering, spotless linoleum hallways were deserted and silent. Maybe Bassante had got the time wrong.

He stepped back outside. Bassante signaled from the corner. “Over here!” He led the way into the building’s side entrance. “It’s in the auditorium. The sisters couldn’t have it in the chapel. Fond as they were of Dick, he was a Protestant. The head nun said it was all right for us to attend. They’re already well into it. It seems like it’s going to be short.”

They slipped into the last row of seats. Faced framed by drapery of auburn hair, the teenage girl at the podium in the center of the stage read from a sheet of paper held in an awkward way as she tried to speak into the microphone. Her voice quavered slightly.

In front, beneath the stage, was a motionless curtain of nuns in black wimples; behind, several rows of lay faculty, overwhelmingly female, a sprinkling of men. The rest of the auditorium was filled with the girls of St. Genevieve’s Academy, homely and lovely, most yet to bud out of girlhood, a few in full flower, all dressed in identical uniforms of knee socks, plaid skirts, white blouses, and blue vests.

The girl put aside the paper and left the stage. A tall nun rose from the aisle seat in the front row. Railing gripped in right hand, robe raised an inch or two above old-fashioned high-buttoned shoes with the left, she mounted the stairs to the stage and went to the podium.

“Mr. Hull was a godsend to this school.” She leaned close to the microphone. “He might not have been the best organized person who ever walked these halls …”

A murmur of muffled laughter rippled through the room.

She swept the room with a stony, cursory stare, a reminder that her interest was in brevity, not levity: Say what should be said; don’t dillydally, or indulge in frivolity, or violate the truth.

The laughter stopped.

“But he was a dedicated, talented teacher. Let him be remembered by us all as a man of true allegiances—to his country, to this school, and, above all, to his students. Let us pray he has found eternal happiness in the presence of God.” She left it at that.

The girls stood, their clapping tentative at first, then louder and more confident. When they were done, the tall nun led the girls up the aisle, out of the auditorium.

Dunne stood with Bassante on the steps of the school. A light drizzle fell. Bassante pulled down the brim of his hat. “Didn’t sound to me like that nun knew Dick very well.”

“Dick was a private guy.” Dunne glanced to see if a taxi might be coming down the street. They hadn’t seen each other in almost a decade and a half, and even during their time in Slovakia,
they hadn’t talked much about the lives they’d lived up until then, childhoods, careers, stuff that might have mattered in some other time, some other place, although neither was much for sharing revelations or reminiscences whatever the circumstances. “That’s something we had in common.”

“I know that—so am I. But Dick was a hero. He deserved something more.”

“I suppose.”
Dick deserved a full military funeral, honor guard, the salute of bugles and rifles, flag folded in farewell and placed in the hands of his beloved. Except he’s left all that behind when he’d resigned from the service rather than let Michael Jahn’s name be besmirched.
“But I think maybe that’s all he would’ve wanted.”

“Still, that nun barely said anything at all.”

Dunne kept on the lookout for a cab.
Either Dick was in a place where there was nothing, no sadness, no joy, only oblivion, or he was happy in a place where happiness was forever. Believe what you want or need to believe. Who can say for sure? The only thing that could be said with certainty was what that nun, whether she’d realized it or not, had got exactly right: Thornton Richard Van Hull IV was a man of true allegiances.

The drizzle stopped. After scouting the street one last and futile time, Dunne took hold of Bassante’s elbow. “Come on, let’s go find a bar and get a drink.”

“Now there’s something we can agree on. The last time we had a drink together was in London, just before you left for Prague. And that awful weather—remember?”

“Hard as I try, I can’t forget.”

Under pretext of attending to company business, Stefan Schwimmer left for Europe to use the dossier to scare up what interest he could in Hemmer/Heinz. “What’s important,” Dunne told him, “is the perception that the hunt is still on. Even if you
don’t get close, odds are he’ll be moved somewhere. The more he moves, better our chance of getting a bead on his whereabouts. Meantime, I’ll do my best to rattle Bartlett.”

“That could be dangerous, don’t you think?”

“He doesn’t know what or how much I know. Far as he’s concerned, I’m a small-time operator, a onetime favorite of Bill Donovan’s who, at worst, can’t be much more than a minor headache. Any time he spends on me is, as he sees it, wasted time. Still, I might be able to put a dent or two in that iron-sided self-confidence of his.”

A note arrived from Bassante. He’d found a permanent job as a translator at an import-export firm in lower Manhattan and rented a room in a boarding house in Brooklyn Heights. He provided the address.
You can reach me here
, he wrote,
if you have to.

Dunne endured a painful lunch with Wynne Billings. He half listened as Billings did his diplomatic best to convey the corporation’s dissatisfaction with the performance of PISS in general and the level of Dunne’s interest in particular. “You’re a real pro, Fin, and your service to our country is recognized and appreciated …” Blah, blah, blah … But that was then and this is now, “and, well, in this critical time when we’re redefining our priorities …” Blah, blah, blah.

After Dunne apologized for creating the misimpression that he wasn’t focused on his work and reaffirmed his commitment to “implementing the changes necessitated by our SEA strategy,” Billings was mollified enough to grant what was in effect a temporary reprieve. “We’ll see how things work out over the next several months.”

Dunne then set in motion the process that he knew would result in his immediate and final termination. He called Ken Moss at Bartlett & Partners and congratulated him on his new job. Moss was delighted to hear from him. “This place is better than I hoped. It’s plugged into everything. At last week’s executive lunch, Roy Larsen from Time Inc. was the guest.”

“I’m happy for you, Ken. I also have a favor to ask.”

“Shoot. You know I’ll do whatever I can.”

“It’s as much for Wynne and ISC as it is for me.”

“All the better.”

Well aware that Moss knew of his relationship with Bartlett going back to the OSS, Dunne bluffed. “Wynne thinks I might drop by the next time Bartlett’s in New York for a casual conversation about our desire to deepen the relationship between ISC and Bartlett and Partners. Wynne said Bartlett uses his office there when he’s in the city.”

“He’s formally severed his ties.”

“Sure, except we know how it works. Informally, his advice still matters.”

“Did you contact his office in D.C. about setting up a meeting there?”

“There’s no getting through to him in D.C. It’d be easier to get an appointment with Ike. Wynne thinks if we knew the next time Bartlett is going to be in New York, we could arrange a casual chat.”

“He’s not here on any regular schedule. It’s hit or miss.”

“All we need is a heads-up.”

“A heads-up?”

“A call. Nobody’ll know.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Moss called a week later. “Tomorrow. Nine a.m. Flies back to D.C. at four.” He hung up before Dunne could blurt out a thank-you.

Dunne arrived in the lobby at 8:30. He parked himself in the phone booth closest to the elevator bank. Promptly at nine, a plain-clothes type scouted the lobby and spoke to the elevator dispatcher, who directed one of the operators to hook a red cord across the entrance to his car, indicating it was reserved.

A moment later, Carlton Bartlett’s escort preceded him though
the revolving doors. Plump (but no plumper than he’d been the last time Dunne saw him), wearing a gray homburg and a well-tailored double-breasted suit, he waddled/strutted with duck-like gait to the elevator.