Hold Tight (36 page)

Erich hurled himself after Hank, and was jerked around by his own arm. He found Sullivan gripping his arm.

“You crazy bastard!” Sullivan’s moustache was stretched above his bared teeth. “Why’re you with him? You gone queer, too?”

“Dammit, Sullivan! Didn’t Mason tell you that I’m to stay with Fayette and make him think we’re…”

For a split second, Sullivan was frightened by the thought that he was in error. His grip loosened slightly.

Erich yanked his arm free and pushed Sullivan hard with both hands. He ran after Hank, plunging into the path closing behind the sailor. People hollered at both of them. When he glanced back, Erich saw Sullivan trapped among heads, shouting at somebody far away and raising one arm to point his finger at Erich.

He caught up with Hank and grabbed his belt. Hank kept going, dragging Erich.

“Get down, Hank! Bend down so Sullivan can’t see us!”

“Rice is here! I seen Rice!” But Hank realized he didn’t see Rice anymore, had no idea which way he had gone. He stopped and surveyed the acres of heads around him.

“Sullivan’s here, too, dammit! He was right beside us back there. Get down so he can’t see you.”

Hank could not see Rice, so he obeyed Erich, slouching down and bending at the waist. “Damn,” he whispered. “We just stood there eyeballing each other. I coulda whipped my knife out and stuck him right here, but I wasn’t expecting him. Damn.”

“Shhh,” went Erich. A woman beside them looked at Hank funny. “We have to get away from Sullivan. He was close enough to have shot you back there.”

Hank followed Erich through the crowd. Bent down like this, it was like hiding from a farmer in his cornfield. They reached the curb and moved toward the right, away from Forty-second Street and behind a clump of boys who stood on the base of a street lamp, four boys clinging to the lamp post and each other.

Blair reached the curb and turned left, toward Forty-second Street, scrambling more carefully so the people overhead would not give him away with shouts or stumbling. He did not stop until his path was blocked by a newsreel truck parked at the curb, the roof of the truck crammed with men and movie cameras recording the rally. Looking for a way around the truck, Blair realized that nobody followed him. He stood up, suddenly wondering why he had fled. He was the hunter here, not the prey. What had he been thinking? The sailor didn’t even know Blair was hunting him. There had been a chilling look of anger or terror when they locked eyes in the crowd, but the sailor must have been only stunned to run into the man he had betrayed. Blair had no cause for panic. He had a gun. He should have pulled it out, pressed it to the sailor’s gut and fired. With the drums banging away, nobody would have recognized a gunshot until they saw a man bleeding to death.

He stepped up on the curb and looked for the sailor, but saw no trace of the man. The shadow of the building behind him stretched a few feet out into the street, lying on the crowd like the shadow of a cloud on rough water. On the sunlit stage they were still playing the same damn song. Despite everything that had happened, the band was only at the part where a piano quietly talks to itself, drums softly hurrying alongside like a locomotive. It was eerie hearing two thousand people listening to a lone piano while the city continued to rumble around them. People filled the windows above Times Square. Blair saw them in the building behind him, faces and hands piled on the sills. He decided to go inside and upstairs, where he might be able to spot his man from above. He glanced over the building, looking for its entrance. A pretty woman crossed his line of vision, briskly walking through the crowded shadows on the sidewalk.

The woman had reminded Blair of Anna. He looked for her again and saw a petite back and familiar walk against the brightness of Forty-second Street. Then the woman stepped into the sunlight, turned right and Blair saw the profile of Anna’s pout and breasts disappear around the corner.

“Anna!” he shouted. Already moving after her, Blair glanced back at the crowd. He would not find the sailor here again. “Anna!” He broke into a run, stopped by a pack of soldiers, then hurried around them to the corner.

Erich looked for Sullivan from behind the crowded lamp post. Hank began to stare at faces on the sidewalk, looking for Rice again, hoping he had come this way. Maybe Rice had gone back into the crowd, or maybe he had gone off the other way, toward the truck with the movie cameras. Knowing his enemy was nearby, Hank lost all patience. He jumped up on the base of the street lamp, knocking the boys loose.

“Whaya think ya doin’, ya moron! Go find ya own lamp post!”

“Hank!” said Erich in a panic. “Get down! They’ll see you up there!”

But Hank wrapped his hands around the pole, then his legs and shinnied a few feet up it.

All heads, a waving carpet of heads, were turned away from Hank and toward the stage, except for one. But that single face beneath a slouched hat was not the face Hank was looking for. His eyes scanned over the crowd to the shaded sidewalk and the pedestrians weaving through knots of spectators.
And he saw him.
His spy zigzagged up the street, glancing once over his shoulder so that Hank saw it was definitely Rice. He slid down the pole and jumped to the sidewalk. He pushed past the whining boys and headed up the street after Rice.

“What? You saw him?” said Erich, breathless but beside him. “But they probably saw
you
up there! They’ll be coming at us right this minute!”

“Then I gotta work fast!” He dodged people on the sidewalk, wanted to dodge Erich, but the huffing petty officer kept up with him. They came to a smoke shop on the corner and went up Forty-second Street. Hank stopped and reached behind him to steer Erich closer to the wall. “There!” he said.

Erich saw Blair Rice fifty yards away, beneath a movie marquee that said, “Hope & Crosby,
The Road to Morocco.
” Rice was wiping his palms against his coat while he stared at something inside. Then he walked slowly into the foyer.

“Too crazy for you out there today?” said the woman in the box office window.

“Did a lady buy a ticket from you just now?” said Blair.

“No. Nobody’s been by in the last minute except the projectionist’s daughter. But she gets in for free.”

“Projectionist’s daughter? Do you mean Anna?” He looked around the foyer again, at the naked lightbulbs beneath the marquee, the canvas banner that promised air-cooling, at the shiny, stout woman behind the glass. He was in love with a girl whose father was only a technician, a motion picture projectionist? “I have to talk with Anna,” he said.

“Then you’ll have to wait for her here. Unless you want to buy a ticket.”

Blair bought a ticket and went inside, asking the usher who tore the ticket in half if he knew Anna and where he might find her.

“She’s gone up to the booth to see ole Kraut-puss, her father. Hey, was you at the rally? Who’s that playing? That Goodman out there?”

Up the street, the entire band was at it again, playing full blast, audible even through the closed glass doors.

“I don’t know,” said Blair and went up the stairs without asking for directions. If Anna’s father were German, maybe he was a spy after all. But there was something unseemly about a foreign agent who was working-class.

Walking along the wall, Erich and Hank quickly approached the theater. Erich kept looking back to see if they were being followed yet. Everyone else on this side of the street hurried toward the rally, where the music was frantically pounding toward some kind of conclusion. Hank stopped in front of a glassed-in poster of two men and a woman. He peered around the corner. The foyer was empty and there was only a uniformed boy inside the lobby. He crossed the foyer toward the ticket window, stopping when he recognized the woman behind the glass.

“Damn,” he told Erich. “I been here before. Why’d he want to go into this place?”

Erich was too busy watching the street to answer.

“But yeah,” Hank whispered. “This’ll suit me. Dark movie house. Be as good as night. Okay,” he told Erich. “You stay out here. I’m going inside.”

“What? No. I’m going inside with you.”

“Uh uh. I need you to keep a lookout,” Hank lied. This was where he would drop Erich and do the killing alone. “In case Sullivan and them get here.”

Part of Erich was relieved by the proposal. He wanted a man to be killed, but did not want to see it. And yet, he felt excluded by the proposal, hurt. “All right, then. But I should watch from inside the lobby. I’m too easy to spot when I stand out here.”

Hank agreed. He bought two tickets and they went through the door, just as the crowd at the rally roared its approval at the end of “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

“Very busy today?” Erich asked the usher.

“No, sir. Almost empty, what with the free show outside.”

Erich and Hank stepped deeper into the lobby. After the fury outside, the place felt almost haunted, the noise of the rally and street muffled by the glass doors, the buzz of a movie muffled by the heavy curtains hung over the theater exits.

“Now,” Hank whispered. “You stand out here away from the doors. Anyone comes in, run in after me and shout, ‘Jones.’ Okay? If I do this right, nobody’s gonna ever know. Except you and me. I’m gonna sit down behind him, and cut his throat.” Hank pulled the knife from his pocket. Closed, it was almost invisible in his fist.

Erich watched Hank disappear through the curtain into the orchestra seats. The usher was standing at the front of the lobby, pushing the door open and leaning out, trying to listen to the rally. Erich wondered what it would be like, if there would be a scream or nothing at all, only Hank coming out with blood on his hands. He began to shiver, but told himself it was only the chill of air-conditioning after the heat outside. New thoughts darted through his head. He had trusted Hank, as a real American, to know how to kill a man. But did he? There was reason to believe the man who killed the houseboy might kill Hank, too.

The movie bleated between the opening and closing of the curtain. Hank reappeared, as expressionless as a butler. “Not down here,” he said. “He must be up in the balcony.”

Erich followed Hank around to the stairs. “I’ll stand on the landing. I can watch the doors from there and have time to come after you if anyone comes in.” He calmly trotted up the flight of stairs to the landing, then suddenly grabbed Hank’s sleeve. “Will you be all right?” he whispered. “What if he has a gun?”

Hank remained stone-faced. “He didn’t have a gun back at the rally.” Hank looked over the brass railing. There was a clear view of the glass doors and the foyer outside, but Hank couldn’t believe there’d be any need to warn him. He was so impatient to kill Rice he could not imagine anyone stopping him. He patted Erich on the back and went up the last flight of stairs to the balcony lobby.

Blair stumbled into darkness. His eyes adjusted to the light and he found a low wall in front of him and, beyond the wall, rows of empty seats sloping down to the lip of the balcony. The black, white and silver image of a man singing to a woman hung in front of the balcony; a voice crooned about moonlight and hair. A ray like moonlight ran back from the screen to a tiny window on Blair’s right, where the ray came together. That was the projection booth, where Anna must be. He looked for a way to get into it. The booth jutted into the balcony like a fortified pillbox. This side of the booth was flush with the aisle Blair had come down, but there was no door in the wall. He had seen no door in the balcony lobby. There was an aisle between the front of the booth and the low wall in back of the seats. Aisle and low wall ran the width of the balcony. The door to the booth must be on the other side.

A man stood at the low wall directly beneath the projector beam. He saw Blair coming, clasped his hands behind him and turned back to the movie. Blair walked one step past him, and heard voices overhead, from a window in the booth ten feet above him. He stopped to listen. He could not make out any words because of the singing on the screen, only the guttural grumping of a man, and a woman’s voice—it had to be Anna’s—that sounded close to tears. He glanced at the low wall, wondering if he could climb up on the parapet and look into the booth, and see who Anna really was. The man standing at the parapet was watching Blair.

“Little blowjob, friend?”

Blair drove his hand into his pocket and backed away from the man. “Get away from me. Who are you?” Blair slipped his fingers around the trigger and handle. But he could see the man’s head in the movie light, bald and shiny. Not his sailor. “Get out of here,” he told him. “Leave immediately or I’m calling the police.”

“Sheesh,” said the man and walked away, but only to go down the steps into the balcony and sit beside another figure. Blair counted four, no, five figures scattered among the seats up here. Were they all queers? He had to save Anna from this awful place.

He reached the righthand corner of the booth. At the end of a dark aisle was an exit sign, the curtain below it outlined in wiggles of light, like the curtain he had come through on the other side. In the booth wall was a recessed doorway and two steps. Blair went up to it, felt the darkness and found a doorknob. He was about to knock. Instead, he pressed his ear against the door.

“They are stupid, but they are sometimes stupidly smart. You were a fool to come here today.”

“I know, Papa. But I get so lonely in that hotel.”

So they
were
spies, Blair decided. He was glad to know that it was real. Ever since he entered the theater, he had been afraid it might all be some terrible joke.

Lifting his ear from the door, Blair saw a figure standing in front of the screen, looking around. Another queer? This man was taller than the first and dressed in white.

The theater suddenly lit up. The moonlit screen instantly became a bright desert. Someone laughed and Blair pressed himself against the door. That was his sailor out there.

The man was looking for Blair. Why? Maybe he knew Blair killed the nigger. Although what did these people care what happened to each other? Maybe he had come in here only to be with queers. It did not matter. Blair eased the revolver out of his pocket. He would do here what he had forgotten to do at the rally.