Hold Tight (16 page)

Hank lit a cigarette and pretended its smoke was the most wonderful thing in the world. Pay close attention after sex, Mason had told him, when people are apt to drop their guard. Jones hadn’t had sex, but there was a forced calm in his voice as if he expected Hank to drop
his
guard.

Jones sat down in his chair again. “Uh, could you please cover yourself?”

Hank drew the sheet over his crotch and one leg.

“Yes, it’s good to see you enjoying yourselves. Because I fear for your futures. I do. When this Sledgehammer thing comes off and you land in…where? France? I fear you boys won’t be any match for the Germans.”

“Sledgehammer? What’s Sledgehammer?”

“You
never
heard of Sledgehammer?” The man’s contempt returned. “This thing the whole East Coast is preparing for?”

“Oh
that
.” Hank knew nothing about it, but he was instructed to play along with suspects. And he’d been given items to pass on to them, bits of information that had no truth to them. At least Mason
hoped
there was no truth to them. Nobody knew anything and there was no telling what was being planned. “That’s not for France,” said Hank. “That’s for Dakar.” He pronounced it “Duh Car.”

“The car? Oh,
Dakar!
”

“You know. Over in Africa.”

The man’s eyes focused sharply on the air, seeing something before him. He touched his upper lip with his tongue. “But how do you know? Did they tell you?”

“Hell no. They don’t tell us nothin’. Scuttlebutt. And I work in the chartroom and we all of a sudden got all these Africa charts. Gonna be hot as granny’s stove down there. Right next to the Equator, you know.”

“Dakar,” the man repeated. He almost laughed, he was so pleased. “Yes, hot,” he said. “Hotter than you could imagine. I will worry for you, sailor. I really will.” He was smiling as he reached into his pocket and brought out his billfold. “If the Germans don’t get you, the tsetse flies will.” Fingering the bills inside, he stood up, pulled out a halved bill and flicked it at Hank. The green bill came open, fluttered about and landed on the floor beside the bed.

Hank leaned down to snatch it up, as if that was what was important to him. “Jeez, mister. A ten-spot?”

“Keep the change,” Jones announced. “It was most enjoyable. Watching one of our servicemen enjoy himself.” He made no effort to disguise the contempt in his voice. He treated Hank as someone too stupid to recognize a lie.

Hank wanted to wad the bill in his fist and shove it down the man’s throat. “Hey, buddy. Anytime you want to watch me…” Hank had to get the man to return. Only if the man became a regular could they follow him and find out who he was. What was the next step? Nobody had gone into that with Hank. “And if you want to talk about the war, I’m the fella to see. Working in the chartroom, I get the real skinny. Stuff you never hear about in the newspaper.”

“I’ll keep you in mind,” Jones said coolly. “This has been most entertaining.” He looked straight at Hank as he reached for the door. His fear was gone but he wasn’t as cool as he pretended. He hated Hank and there was a vengeful cut to his gaze, as if he wanted to see this naked body a corpse. Then he pulled the door shut and was gone.

Bastard. Hank wanted to use the ten to wipe himself off, but ten dollars was ten dollars. Hank stood up and angrily washed himself at the basin on the dresser. The man was a spy. He had to be a spy, but it was the man’s contempt that angered Hank now that he was alone, the man’s arrogance. The man had talked admiringly of Hitler, asked about secrets, shown disgust for what Hank and the other men here loved to do, all the while thinking Hank was too dumb to guess what was happening. Hank had just had sex in front of a man who didn’t think he was human. He was going to do all he could to see the bastard identified, tracked down and caught. But Hank wanted to pay the man back directly. He burned to punch the man’s teeth in and fuck his bloody broken mouth.

The image startled Hank. He had thought of sex as pleasure, relief, even here where it was also a duty. Only nuts like Mick saw sex as a weapon. But the house, the war, that bastard who had treated sex as vile—all were confusing Hank about something that once had been as simple as eating.

E
RICH ZEITLIN RETURNED TO
the Sloane House from a Sunday concert at Town Hall, full of Brahms and memories of Brahms, to find a message at the front desk: “Mr. Fate called and says he must see you immediately.”

Erich brusquely thanked the desk clerk and rode the elevator upstairs to change out of his uniform. He doubted it was anything important, assumed Fayette had only come up with more questions or, at best, misunderstood someone. They had uncovered nothing of interest in two weeks, not even a contraband cargo. But, putting on civilian clothes in his cell-like room, Erich found he was glad to have somewhere to go that afternoon. Sunday, the one day he had to himself, could be interminable.

The subway ride downtown was slow and miserable. Portions of families sat in stupors in the glaring electric light, burnt air pouring through the open windows when the train was moving, stale air sighing from the small caged fans when the train was stalled. Up and down the car a few hand fans paddled away. Collars were unbuttoned and stockings were down. These people had no notion of public decorum. One might as well be sitting with them in their kitchens. Erich felt guiltily alone among them.

At least when he was in uniform, he looked as though he belonged here. His foreignness was especially painful after the concert this afternoon, when, for two hours, he had belonged to
something.
Town Hall was full of refugee profiles and accents, people older and even more lost than Erich. Sitting among them in his uniform, he was both one of them and an American, too. And there had been the homeland of the music. All that overstuffed orchestral furniture had grown dowdy to Erich’s ear by the time he had gone to England, but now, with that dowdy, bourgeois life gone, he found Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler beautiful again. History had hurled him so abruptly into the future, he grasped at the past, even his father’s past.

Erich loved his father, E. I. Zeitlin, the chemist. He loved him so much he had spent years trying to make a life independent of the respected man, studying philosophy in Vienna, mathematics in Zurich, economics at Cambridge, his failure in each only prolonging his dependence. Erich was in America only because of his father, hired by the University of Chicago and allowed to bring his family from Austria despite the quotas and restrictions that kept most Jews out. If Erich had suffered in some way, he might feel he deserved to be here.

In the station at Fourteenth Street, where Erich got off, a tall young man with a banjo and a runty skull-faced man with a guitar sang hillbilly war songs. There was no open guitar case or upturned hat set out for contributions. The two seemed to believe their songs did good and sang them for free. “This machine kills Fascists,” was painted in blue on the short man’s guitar.

Up on the street, it was peacetime and Sunday.

The farmers’ market in front of the Bosch house was breaking up when Erich crossed the square. Tarpaulins came down and broken crates were hurled into a garbage truck. Mixed with the trucks and wagons were a few automobiles owned by victory-gardeners, trunks piled with vegetables. Beneath the shed roof to the right of the house, poultry butchers hosed off the pavement. Sunday was ignored for the duration. “Victory Chicken,” declared the sign painted on the poulterer’s wall, with a picture of a giant chicken chasing Hitler.

Two men in paper caps and bloody aprons nudged each other and laughed when they saw Erich go up the steps to the house. Erich rang the doorbell and wished it were answered more quickly. He hated standing out here in broad daylight.

The door was opened by Mrs. Bosch herself. She wore a brown hat with white netting and was pulling a white glove on. “Meester Zeitlin? What are you doing here?”

He explained he had come to see Fayette, of course.

“He is here, but he is sleeping, I think. We not to keep bankers’ hours, you know.
Juuuk!
” she hollered into the hallway. “I would get him myself, but I must get to six o’clock mass. My houseboy will take care of you.”

Before he could remind her Fayette was
their
secret, Mrs. Bosch clomped down the steps and set off across the square, quick and serene, piously indifferent to the whistles and catcalls from the chicken butchers.

Erich stepped inside and cautiously pulled the door shut. The sudden silence was unnerving. The house seemed abandoned and dead.

Then the houseboy strolled out of the kitchen. “Mrs…? Oh, you again, Mr. Bookkeeper. Mrs. Bosch ain’t here and I’m only the lady of the house.”

The boy had a polka dot kerchief tied around his head and his sleeves were rolled over his shoulders. His brown arms were leanly, startlingly muscular. Noticing him on earlier visits, Erich assumed the boy was as frail as a girl, sexless and harmless. Those arms seemed like the ultimate stroke of perversity. The boy smelled of harsh soap and bleach.

“Yes. I passed Mrs. Bosch on her way out. I’m here to, uh, see Mr. Fayette.”

The boy looked blankly at him, then sneered and said, “So you’re taking your fees out in trade.”

Only a Negro, Erich told himself, and it was of no importance what a Negro thought. Erich cleared his throat and said, “Get him for me, boy. I need to speak to him.”

“You get him yourself,” Juke snapped back. “I got things soaking.”

Erich knew he was being fought, but he wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. “All right then. Where is he?”

“He’s somewhere. I forget.”

“Please.”

The boy smiled. “Up these steps. Third floor. Third door on the left. But I should warn you, honey, he gets mighty ripe when he’s been sleeping in his funk all day. Or maybe you like ’em cheesy.”

Erich pinched his lips bloodless, then immediately climbed the steps to get away from the boy. He could feel the boy’s obscene eyes following him until he was past the second floor.

The hallway on the third floor was hot and dusty. The doors to all the rooms were open and there was plenty of light, but no air. Bare mattresses lay in each room. Erich knocked on the doorjamb of the third door on the left, careful not to look inside. No answer. He peered around the open door. Not only was the bed empty, the mattress was gone. Someone clearly lived here, however. Clothes lay neatly folded on a chair. There were no books, no knickknacks or framed photographs to suggest what kind of person lived here, only the stamped metal wafers of the dog tags that lay with their chain on the dresser. A half-wit had no other identity he could impart to a room.

“Who’s down there? That you, Juke?”

The voice came from down the hall. Erich looked and saw a man’s shadow stretched along the end wall in the sunlight that came from around the corner.

“Fayette? It’s me…Erich.” First names were the closest American equivalent to
du,
but Erich had no alternative. He was afraid his last name, divulged by Fayette, might tie both of them back to Navy Intelligence.

“Thought it was you. Had to be sure. Come on up, Erich. Cooler on the roof.”

Around the corner was a rickety staircase. Fayette stood in the door at the top of the stairs, the sunlight at his back glowing in the nimbus of hair on his arms and legs. He wore an undershirt and boxer shorts—the silhouette inside the white shorts was edged with orange—and his sailor’s cap was upside down on his head, to keep the sun out of his eyes. He took the cap off as Erich came up.

“Sorry I wasn’t downstairs waiting for you,” he said. “You’d gone out already when I rang you this morning, and I needed some shut-eye.”

Seeing him so large and blond and out of uniform, Erich told himself this man would be a storm trooper, if they were in Germany. The idea didn’t make him feel any better about what they were doing with Fayette.

Fayette stepped back when Erich reached the door and stood in front of a view of warehouses, zig-zag painted ships and bright river. The view opposite was curtained off by rows of patchy sheets tugging and floating on clotheslines. Erich felt unbalanced when he stepped through the door, until he realized the flat roof slanted away from the street. A mattress and sheet lay on the tar paper where Fayette had been sleeping.

“I came when I received your message,” Erich said coldly. “Why did you need to see me?”

“You want to sit? This might take some telling.”

“I’ll stand, thank you.” He remembered to take a quick look back inside the door.

“We’re fine up here,” Fayette assured him. “Just the colored boy down there and the stairs in this joint are like walking on a squeeze-box.”

Erich was doubtful, but it sounded reasonable. “All right. I’m listening.”

Fayette went down in a crouch, laid his arms across his thighs and balanced his whole body on the balls of his feet. He took a deep breath and announced, “I think I met a Nazi spy last night.”

Then he told a story.

He addressed the tar paper and air while he told the story, as though he were telling it just to himself or making it up as he went along. He even raised his eyebrows over some of the details or worriedly smiled over others, as if he had never heard any of this himself. He gave a yarn instead of a report. Erich impatiently waited for him to get to the point, already doubting that there had been a spy.

There had been a well-dressed man who asked too many questions. When Fayette undressed and abused himself in front of the man—“I know you don’t like hearing that stuff, but if I start skipping I might leave out something important”—the man went crazy, cursing America and praising Hitler.

Who wouldn’t go crazy, Erich told himself. Cursing America was nothing new. Praising Hitler sounded suspicious, but people unleash their nastiest secrets when they’re upset; homosexuals probably adored Nazi men.

Erich knew he was overly skeptical toward Fayette. Part of it was prudence, but there was more. Afraid of the pity he felt for the man, worried that sympathy might cloud his judgment, Erich distanced himself by distrusting Fayette, doubting his every word. Not that he thought Fayette was lying. Lying required cunning and Fayette was incapable of that. Wasn’t he? Doubt was a slippery slope and, once begun, Erich found himself doubting that Fayette was what they thought he was.