Hold Tight (35 page)

The lobby was deserted, which made both of them uneasy. Hank followed Erich through it, keeping a good fifteen feet behind him. They could not walk together, but they would not get too far apart either. The FBI might not swoop in and arrest Erich if Hank were present, for fear of giving the game away.

Erich stepped outside first, looked around and lifted his face into the sun, as if he were only seeing what the weather was like. Then he started walking. Hank came out the door and followed. It was late morning and the street ran east to west, so everything was in full sunlight. The plan was that they walk around the city, see which faces repeated themselves from place to place, pinpoint the men following them and do what they could to lose them. Not until sunset would they race down to the Bosch house, where Rice would be watching for Hank. There was sure to be a man watching Rice, but one man would be easier to deal with than two or three, especially if that man thought Hank was being watched by someone else.

Hank caught up with Erich waiting for the light at a crosswalk. He stood beside him in the handful of pedestrians and muttered, “Whodja see?”

“Man reading a paper at the bus stop. Man in an auto parked across the street. Another man in a cap dozing on a park bench.”

“There was a guy getting his shoes shined at the newsstand back there. Shoes looked kinda shiny already,” said Hank.

“Too many possibilities yet,” Erich admitted. Now that they were on the street, he wondered if they should have stayed in his room until sundown. But staying still only gave the FBI time to decide what to do with him. Erich had not been able to use the toilet without fearing he’d find a man in a slouched hat waiting for him there. Out on the street, all fears felt justified and there was no room to acknowledge any second thoughts. He was too deeply engaged with the details of the immediate present.

The light changed and they parted as they stepped into the street. Opposite them was Pennsylvania Station and Erich noticed a crowd of people gathering out front, men, women and a few children, some of them carrying signs. More people came out of the train station and joined them, as if they’d come into the city together. Everyone was dressed as if for a Sunday picnic, in straw hats and sun bonnets. The signs tilting over their heads were hand-lettered: “Axe the Axis,” “Scrap the Japs,” “Stamford Stamps Out Nazis.” Erich saw a small gap-toothed boy wearing what must have been a brother’s army jacket, complete with ribbons and insignias, so big on the boy it hung to his bare knees like a dress. He proudly held a sign that read “Kill All the Japs, the Rats.” The group, thirty or so people, moved together along the sidewalk and Erich and Hank had to stop to let them pass.

Erich glanced at Hank and nodded toward the group. Hank understood. They joined the group, working their way through it until they walked with them on the side away from the street. Shielded by the little crowd, they could peer between the patriotic signs and see who was out there. Bystanders applauded as the group made its way uptown. Other passersby joined them and the group grew.

They came to Forty-second Street and turned east, going past the penny arcades and movie theaters, half-deserted at this hour. Red-eyed servicemen came out of the arcades to see what the noise was about. Some of them applauded. The crowd applauded them back and somebody cried, “Three cheers for our men in uniform!” Erich and Hank were surrounded by hip-hip-hoorays. Not joining in, Erich felt like a traitor, then realized that, in the eyes of these people, that’s exactly what he was. He noticed Hank’s similar silence and frown.

Hank was looking across the street, at the rows of movie marquees, one of them over the entrance to the theater where he’d gone when he was somebody else, someone who would’ve been enjoyed being hoorayed by these people. He despised them now, despised the servicemen they were cheering. It was all such a pack of lies.

Up ahead, from Times Square, there was an electric cawing, a voice echoing against the buildings and billboards overhead. The electric sign wrapped around the
Times
Building ran with “Buy Bonds…Buy Bonds…,” the words barely legible in the sunlight. Then there was a cheer like an enormous breath. Beyond the wall of people standing on the corner, the rally itself appeared.

Seventh Avenue between Forty-second Street and Broadway was an ocean of white shirts scattered with dresses, a few hats floating over it all. A stage was erected between the enlistment office and the war bonds booth that stood in the narrow triangle of Seventh and Broadway. A twenty-foot Statue of Liberty stood on the roof of the war bonds booth, dwarfing a bearded man who stood on a stage behind a fence of microphones. His voice became a dozen voices buzzing from loudspeakers scattered all around the square.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Monty Woolley. And I am here to remind you what all of us already know. Our freedom is at stake.”

There was a thunderous exhalation of cheers and applause from the crowd. The group from Penn Station came to a halt at the edge of the crowd, but Hank kept going, followed by Erich. The billboards as big as football fields hung overhead, advertisements for cigarettes, liquor and peanuts. Beyond the stage, streetcars and automobiles continued to run up and down Broadway, indifferent to the heartfelt words drumming the air.

“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 hit 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.