Zuhl Publications was now Flyer Enterprises. Franklin had renamed and reincorporated the company on the second of November, twenty-four hours after purchasing it. With several lawyers and bankers in attendance, Franklin and Otto Zuhl had signed a sheaf of documents in a conference room at the offices of Zuhl’s attorney. Arvin Beckman served as Franklin’s witness, and afterward joined him for a celebratory lunch at Delmonico’s with Stanley Evergreen. The fourth member of the party was Samuel Carstone, Franklin’s former employer, who, after nine years, had recently come back into his life.
Franklin had worn his yellow fedora to the signing, and later hung it from a golden hook above a window in Zuhl’s former office, which was now his office. He left much of the room bare. The walls, for so long cluttered with Zuhl’s paraphernalia, he repainted stark white. After a month, he adorned them with the framed covers of the first issues of the magazines to appear under his ownership. He also hung up the blueprint of his paint-shaking machine. He brought in the sofa from Persephone’s former office and placed the photograph of Anita Snow in a prominent position on his large new desk.
Recently he had again come across, not her image, but her name. In a magazine called Art & Antiquities, which Persephone had left in her old office, there was a short article about an exhibit of Egyptian tomb artifacts at the Museo dell’Arte Antica in Milan, Italy. Franklin had been excited to read that the exhibit curator’s “special assistant" was named Anita Snow. He wrote a letter to this curator, requesting Miss Snow’s whereabouts. Two weeks later, he received a formal reply of two sentences: Anita Snow ceased to work here eleven months ago. She lived in Bergamo at that time.
Deflated, Franklin did not contact the postmaster in Bergamo, as he had done—in vain—several years before with his counterpart on Pharos Island, Maine. Nor did he succumb, now that he could afford it, to the temptation of dispatching a private investigator to Italy. That crude approach held little appeal for him; and he knew instinctively it could serve no purpose: when he crossed paths with Anita Snow, it would be because it was meant to happen. He did cut out the article and slip it into the back of the frame behind her photograph. And then he sat back and gazed at her image. Sometimes, in this new phase of his life, it felt as if, not one, but several women were looking back at him. Her face remained an enigma—at once beautiful and subtly asymmetrical. She was there when he was shipwrecked, and before him now as he enjoyed the fruits of his success. For him, this photograph was like those spiritual portraits Persephone had described; perhaps, like the Egyptians, he had been carrying around, not just the photograph of an elusive woman, but a mirror onto his own soul. One day he would look into it—into her eyes—and everything would come clear. It had to be so.
As for Samuel Carstone, he and Franklin had crossed paths unexpectedly one late-summer day in the stacks of the public library on Forty-second Street. Franklin was researching varieties of latex, and its coagulation properties, for his self-patching tire. Descending a narrow spiral staircase with an armful of books, he stopped to let a large man, ascending, pass him. The man had a pencil clamped in his teeth, a ruler under his arm, and an open book in his hand. Were Franklin not preoccupied—and even if he hadn’t recognized the man by his bald, sloping skull, clipped gray moustache, and signature white cardigan—the pencil in his teeth would have revealed his identity.
In a husky whisper, edged with traces of garlic and tobacco, the man startled Franklin. “Can it be you, Franklin Flyer?”
Carstone always had a pencil between his teeth when he was working. It helped to stabilize his thoughts, he said. When the pencil was transferred to his hand, he chomped down on a pipe. He was a man of few words.
“Be great to catch up on things,” he said. “How about drinks at the Waldorf?”
The following evening they took a corner booth in the Bull & Bear bar. The green leather seats were stiff and squeaky. They ordered Gibsons. Carstone tapped the ashes from his pipe, and after popping an olive into his mouth, rattled the pit around his teeth.
“Of course I’ve heard about your success,” Carstone said, simulating the to-and-fro movement of the paint-shaking machine. “Ingenious. How did you come up with it?”
When Franklin got to the part of the story that involved Justinian Walzowski, Carstone blinked.
“So you visited his little utopia,” he smiled. Then he shook his head. “It’s nothing to joke about: Walzowski has taken a dark path, and there is no going back for him now.”
“What do you mean?” Franklin asked.
“I’m sorry I interrupted you,” Carstone said. “We’ll talk about Walzowski another time.”
And they did, on the afternoon of October 9 at Yankee Stadium. Carstone had telephoned Franklin to say he had two tickets for the fourth game of the World Series. Knowing Carstone was not a sports fan, Franklin thought this peculiar. But Carstone knew something, too: that Franklin, a former college baseball player, followed the game; and that a noisy ballpark might be the perfect setting—simultaneously relaxed and intense—in which to broach a serious subject with his former assistant.
Franklin picked up on this. And realized that, whatever his worldly position, to Carstone he would always be a former assistant—a protégé who had made good. This despite the fact that, while Franklin was his employee, Carstone had never brought up the subject of his promise. It wasn’t so much Carstone was paternalistic or condescending. A solitary man, with no wife and few friends, he thought that by keeping people in his mind (in as orderly a fashion as he catalogued facts and ideas) he was actually keeping them in his life.
Franklin bought a beer and two hot dogs from the vendor, passed one hot dog to Carstone, and settled into his seat. In a sellout crowd of sixty thousand, they were nestled into a choice front-row box on the first-base side of the Yankee dugout. Carstone must have amazing pull, Franklin thought, to secure such seats the day before a game. And not just any game, but one in which the Yankees, leading the Chicago Cubs three games to none, could clinch the championship.
Warming up on the mound was the Yankee ace, Red Ruffing, and in the Chicago bullpen, his counterpart, the Cubs’ last hope, Big Bill Lee, who’d led the National League with a 22–9 record. Ruffing had already prevailed over Lee in the close first game at Wrigley Field, which Franklin had listened to over the radio four days earlier. Now Franklin watched Lou Gehrig at first base warming up with the other infielders: Red Rolfe at third base, Frank Crosetti at shortstop, and the rookie Joe Gordon at second. For the first time in his career, Gehrig was struggling, as he had all season, in the field and at the plate. He moved stiffly, his face lined, his bat slow. The sportswriters were saying he had undermined his health by keeping alive his streak of 2,122 consecutive games played. In center field, on the other hand, Joe DiMaggio was just approaching his prime. It was a pleasure watching him shag fly balls and throw in to the infield. Franklin, who had taken great pride in his ability to throw to home plate on one bounce from dead center field, watched in awe as DiMaggio made an even deeper throw so hard that there was no discernible arc to the ball’s trajectory before it smacked into the mitt of the catcher, Bill Dickey.
It was a cool, windy afternoon, the sunlight bright and the sky sharply blue. The cumulus clouds were bunched like cotton over the Bronx County Courthouse, beyond the right-field façade. On the adjacent apartment buildings laundry flapped on the rooftops. A sea of white shirts flashed in the bleachers. Nearly every man in the crowd wore a hat. Franklin had on a new yellow fedora. Samuel Carstone wore a derby.
Pitching methodically, Ruffing set down the Cubs in order in the first inning. Franklin studied his mechanics, the high balanced kick and fluid delivery. Growing up on an Illinois farm, Ruffing had learned to pitch by hurling baseballs through horseshoes nailed atop posts. Franklin recalled that, as a boy, he had strengthened his own arm by flinging stones into the sea—out past the buoys from the beach near his house.
The Yankees scored three unearned runs in the bottom of the second after a two-out throwing error by Bill Jurges, the Cubs’ shortstop. Before the Yankees took the field in the top of the third, Carstone, puffing strong Yenidje tobacco in his pipe, turned to Franklin and picked up their conversation at the Waldorf, as if they were still sitting in that corner booth. In a low voice he announced, “I believe Justinian Walzowski is a traitor. We’re not yet at war, but he’s committing treason all the same.”
Franklin had known Carstone’s mind was elsewhere, but still he was stunned to receive this information out of nowhere. “What has he done?”
“First tell me what he was working on when you visited him.”
“Super-vitamins that he said would revolutionize human longevity—for a select few.”
“And this was in … ?”
“March 1933.”
“A month after Hitler came to power. Super-vitamins for supermen,” he said scornfully. “The Führer is supposedly a health culturist. But Walzowski’s up to bigger things than that. Recently he’s made several trips out of Dayton with very interesting destinations—Rome, Vienna, Berlin. What exactly did he tell you?”
“He said his biochemical research was built around the Fibonacci series. Are you familiar—”
“Yes, yes,” Carstone said impatiently, “I know what the Fibonacci is, but the biochemical stuff is a red herring.”
The crack of a bat interrupted them when Joe Gordon lined a double through the gap in left field and the crowd rose as one.
“What is it you know about Walzowski, besides his travel habits?” Franklin asked.
“I know he’s lending his services to the fascists. Why, and how, he’s deluded himself into doing so I can’t imagine, but, God knows, he’s not alone.”
“That’s a serious charge.”
“Not open to debate, believe me. It’s been confirmed several times over. Franklin, I need your help. I’d like to know exactly what Walzowski’s up to.”
Franklin just looked at him.
“It’s an official request,” Carstone added, putting his lips to Franklin’s ear. “Office of Navy Intelligence, the War Department.”
“You’re—”
“It’s where I served in the Great War. I even did some fieldwork back then.”
“And now?”
“Now I offer advice, based on my particular expertise. Other people in turn advise me. That’s what I’m asking you to do.”
His pipe had gone out and he was chewing the stem. “You’re one of the few people who could drop in at Walzowski’s farm, ask questions, and look around with an educated eye.”
“What makes you think I’d be welcome?”
“You told me you worked there for a while. You could thank him for the way the work’s paid off—that sort of thing.”
“You brought me out here just to ask me to do that?”
“And a few other things.”
Franklin watched Gehrig trudge back to the dugout, short of breath, after striking out and leaving Gordon stranded at second base.
“But it’s best,” Carstone continued, “that we discuss them elsewhere.”
Franklin realized Carstone might have preferred their leaving the game at that moment, but they remained in their seats until DiMaggio ran down the final out and the Yankees poured from their dugout to mob Ruffing, once again World Series champions.
Twenty minutes later, in the Shamrock Tavern on River Avenue, Franklin and Carstone concluded their conversation over the din of revelers from the stadium. They must have been the only patrons drinking coffee, at a table in the rear.
“Checking on Walzowski will involve a short trip to Dayton,” Carstone said. “But I’m going to ask considerably more of you than that, Franklin. I applaud your buying the magazine company. A great accomplishment. You must be enjoying yourself. To me, though, you’ll always be an inventor first. The paint-shaking machine and the self-patching tire are brilliant, but I’d love to see what would emerge if you focused your energies from a different angle. Your country could use your dynamism and street smarts.”
“I feel like you’re recruiting me,” Franklin laughed, signaling the waitress for a refill.
“I am,” Carstone said.
“But what is it you’d have me focus on?”
“Devices for the coming war,” Carstone replied simply, again surprising Franklin.
“That’s not exactly my line,” he replied.
“I don’t mean weapons. There are specialists for that. But one uses more than weapons in a war. For example, fleets of ships and tanks have to be painted quickly and efficiently, and right now the technology is slow. Uniforms need to be considerably lighter and more adaptable. Across the board there’s a pressing need to modernize intelligence work—methods and machinery. For the latter, sometimes an outsider’s eye is best. In the last war it was a professor of French who developed a thumb-sized camera with a high-definition lens—perfect for photographing documents. For my part, I worked on some of the first gas masks—a subject I previously knew nothing about.”
"When do you think we’ll enter the war?”
“My guess is sooner rather than later.”
Franklin agreed. And recent events pointed in that direction. You didn’t have to search anymore for ominous portents; catastrophes occurred with numbing regularity. Two months after the invasion of Ethiopia, civil war had erupted in Spain. Franco had long been supported by the Italians; when he asked the Germans for more than logistical help, they gladly provided it, turning the tide for him. The Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion went from ferrying troops to carpet bombing the Basque town of Guernica on market day when the plazas were jammed. On their own front, the Nazis remilitarized the Rhineland and annexed Austria. Just ten days before he filed into Yankee Stadium with Carstone, Franklin watched a news-reel of the British prime minister, Chamberlain, waving beside Hitler on a balcony in Munich, selling out Czechoslovakia. Within twenty-four hours, the Wehrmacht poured into the Sudetenland and the SS went to work on the civilian population. In Asia, meanwhile, the Japanese had overrun China, expanding their puppet state of Manchukuo before occupying Peking, Shanghai, and Nanking, the capital, which they pillaged, slaughtering 200,000 people.
Franklin felt as if events—history itself—had been speeded up to a lunatic pace. Everywhere the air was filled with a high, demented whine—like the gramophone record a child spins as fast as he can. Men—entire nations—were crazed. And through all this suffering and destruction, what were the European democracies doing? Appeasing dictators, Arvin observed sarcastically. “The French and the Brits are the worst,” he went on one day, buttonholing Franklin in the corridor that linked their new offices, “continually saying they’re hoping for the best even while they know in their hearts the worst is yet to come.”
At the Shamrock Tavern the raucous crowd at the bar was now ten deep, overflowing onto the sidewalk. Inches apart, Franklin and
Carstone could speak loudly to one another without being overheard. “With due respect to that French professor,” Franklin said, “I would think things have become too complicated for the amateur.”
“Franklin, there are no amateurs when it comes to the imagination.”
That sounded good, but Franklin was still dubious. “Invention on demand seems like a chancy way to get results,” he said.
“On the contrary, think of it as creative pressure.” Carstone studied him closely. “Is it the investment of time that worries you? You’ll still be able to run your company.”
“No. I plan to have other people run the company. I purchased the company in order to buy myself some freedom.”
“All the better, then.”
“What about your lab?” Franklin said. “How are you managing it while working for the government?”
“By doing only government work. It’s more complicated than gas masks this time around,” he smiled grimly, “but it’s my priority now—in and out of the lab. When I was recruited for the last war, they said to me, ‘Freedom isn’t free.’ Period.”
Franklin finished his coffee. “I like that.”
“Think it over, then.”
“I will.” Franklin leaned across the table. “While we’re on the subject, can you tell me if you’ve ever heard of a metal called zilium?”
“I have.”
“Did you know the Germans are using it to armor their tanks— and maybe their troops?”
Carstone smiled and took an envelope from his inside pocket. “We knew that even before we received this. In fact, we knew before the Italians invaded Ethiopia. But I’m hoping you can learn more about it.”
Franklin was stunned to see his own handwriting on the envelope: it was the letter he had written to the War Department.
"You’ve had that all this time,” he exclaimed. “That’s why you took me to the ballgame.”
“No,” Carstone said, raising his index finger, “I took you because you’re a baseball fan. This letter is why I bumped into you at the library.”
Franklin nodded. “Of course that was no coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in it,” Carstone said drily.
Franklin took a cab downtown, speeding along the Harlem River Drive. At a coffee shop on West Fourth Street he got a ham and cheese sandwich and a piece of blackberry pie to go. In addition to the seemingly endless transitional work at the office, setting up Flyer Enterprises to his own specifications so that—paradoxically—it would run smoothly without him, he was moving into a more spacious apartment that weekend. He had the means now to acquire a bigger place—with a real study, for example, and a well-equipped experimental laboratory—but he was also eager to move because his current apartment still held painful memories of his relationship with Pamela. He had seen nothing of her for months, but there was always the chance she might turn up at her sister’s. He still found himself peering out the window when he heard a motorcycle backfire. While he remained friendly with Violetta, and liked to dine out with her and Joe, the subject of Pamela, by mutual consent, became off-limits.
For her part, Violetta was relieved about this: she didn’t relish what she would have had to report about her sister if she spoke honestly. She and Pamela had also had a falling-out, which was why Franklin never saw Pamela around the building anymore. After Pamela brought Andy Teresçu around a couple of times, Violetta, the socialist, forbade her from doing so again. “I won’t have a brownshirt in my house,” she said quietly but firmly. On a more visceral level, Joe also detested Teresçu. “The guy is so slick I could skate on him,” he muttered to Violetta. Also, because Joe liked Franklin so much, he resented that Pamela had taken up with Teresçu. It didn’t help that, during his second visit, Teresçu let slip a disparaging remark about Hungarians. Joe checked his temper— barely—but swore to himself that one day he would repay Teresçu for the insult.
Franklin’s new apartment was still in the Village, just a few blocks away, on the other side of Washington Square Park. But it was in a far larger building, on the twelfth floor, so Archie would still have his unimpeded view of the trees and the arch when he perched in the living room window. There was a doorman in the lobby, and Franklin had a terrace with a greenhouse that he was stocking with plants and flowers. The painters had finished their work, as had the tilers in the kitchen and bathrooms, and that morning carpets had been laid down in several rooms. Now, with the movers coming in two days, Franklin had to finish his packing.
His old apartment was turned upside down, and when he first entered, it wasn’t so much what happened as what didn’t. For one thing, Archie didn’t run to the door to greet him: no matter when Franklin came home, day or night, that never happened. Also, the place was pitch-dark. Franklin always left a lamp burning for Archie, and on that day, with crates and boxes everywhere, he had made sure to do so in the living room. Violetta had a key, for emergencies, but why would she come in and turn off the lamp? And where was Archie?
Feeling along the wall for the light switch, Franklin flicked it, but the lamp in the foyer didn’t come on.
“Archie,” he called out, edging down the hallway.
The floorboards creaked. From the kitchen he heard the faucet drip and the curtains rustling in the window.
Suddenly he was slammed against the wall and a massive arm locked around his neck.
“Hey!" Franklin cried. Struggling to keep his balance, he drove his fist into his assailant’s midsection. There was a grunt, and the next thing he knew Franklin was thrown to the floor. A light came on. He was in front of the hall closet wrestling with a burly man in a gray coat. The man got off several punches. Some Franklin parried; the ones that landed in his gut felt like a wrecking ball. He gasped for breath and the man pinned him down with his knees and started banging his head against the floor. There was a shout from the living room, and another man, in a leather jacket, ran from the darkness and joined in, getting off well-timed kicks to Franklin’s ribs.
Kicking and clawing, Franklin knocked over a small table and rolled free for a moment, flat on his back. Through the open closet door he glimpsed Archie on the top shelf, hiding among the hats. Wide-eyed, Archie inched forward in a crouch and sprang onto the head of the man in the leather jacket, scratching at his face. Screaming, the man staggered down the hallway, slapping at Archie, who leaped to the floor and dashed into the kitchen.
The burly man was distracted, and Franklin, summoning all his strength, crunched his nose with a straight right.
The man bellowed, his nostrils gushing blood as Franklin jumped to his feet.
The man had a slab of a face, a square jaw, and close-cropped black hair. He pulled a pistol from his coat. Bracing himself, with no time to move, Franklin felt something hiss by his ear. The man let out a terrible cry and dropped his pistol. He had been pinned to the wall by a large knife that had gone clear through his right shoulder.
Franklin spun around to find Joe Szabo, in shirtsleeves and a vest, giving him a thumbs-up. Next Joe yanked the man in the leather jacket from the kitchen, doubled him over with a knee to the groin, and followed with a vicious uppercut.
This man, who fell hard with blood streaming down his brow where Archie had clawed him, was Andy Teresçu.
Joe left him in a heap and attended to the man pinned to the wall. “You okay?” he barked at Franklin as he breezed by.
“Yeah.” Franklin was trying to catch his breath. He wasn’t used to fighting anymore: his whole body felt battered, his lungs raw, and his head was throbbing. Now I know firsthand why they call him “Joey the Knife,” he thought. He calculated that Joe had thrown the knife about thirty feet, at a difficult angle, in order to immobilize the man’s gun hand.
Joe wasn’t stopping there, however. As the man howled with pain, spitting and cursing, Joe brought both fists down on his ears, as if he were crashing a pair of cymbals.
The man bellowed that much louder, and swiftly, compactly, Joe kneed him in the groin.
“Shut up,” he said, pulling the knife from the man’s shoulder and pushing him to the floor. The man let out a groan so heavy that Franklin thought he must be dying.
Joe peered inside the man’s coat. “It’s just a flesh wound,” he muttered. “He’ll live.” Wiping the knife blade on the man’s sleeve, he said to Franklin, “Get a rope, cord, anything. And some rags. Shut the door, too, for Chrissakes.”
Franklin and Joe dragged Teresçu and his companion into the kitchen and trussed them each to a chair.
Archie, meanwhile, emerged with a loud cry from the cabinet beneath the sink, which he knew how to nudge open himself. Franklin picked him up and examined him carefully, but he was unscathed.
“The little guy’s quite a fighter,” Joe said, scratching Archie’s head.
“Without the two of you, I’d be a goner,” Franklin said.
“Hey, you’d do the same for me. Now do me a favor and put on some coffee water,” he added casually.
“You want coffee now?” Franklin said.
“Just do it, Frankie. Please.”
Joe stuffed a rag inside the burly man’s coat, to stanch his wound. Then he lifted his chin. “Get ready to sing, big boy.” He fished the man’s wallet from his inside pocket and emptied it onto the table. “First, I didn’t catch your name. It’s rude not to know a guy’s name.”
The wallet contained three hundred dollars, an air mail postage stamp, a card for a Bavarian restaurant in Brooklyn, and a New Jersey driver’s license in the name of Rudolf Stupfel.
“Rudolf,” Joe nodded, brandishing the cash. “Is this what they gave you to come down here?”
Rudolf Stupfel maintained a frozen stare.
“Is it?”
He remained silent.
“No? What’s the matter, Rudolf? Sleepy? Maybe you could use some coffee. When it’s ready, I’m gonna bring you some.”
Before Joe focused on Teresçu, who was just regaining consciousness, Franklin took him aside.
“How did you know I was in trouble, Joe?”
“Are you kidding? You should’ve heard the racket. I was listening to the radio, having a drink, and it was like the ceiling was going to come down. I expected the other neighbors to call the cops. Violetta went to bed early and slept through it. She says she can sleep like that because her conscience is clear.” He grunted, tightening the cords that bound Teresçu’s wrists. “Mine must be, too, because I sleep the same way.”
Joe slapped Teresçu’s cheeks lightly. “Come on, wake up. I wanna know: you still think Hungarians are ‘Hunkies'? Isn’t that what you call them?”
Teresçu shook his head in bewilderment.
“Isn’t it, you fucking Nazi?”
“I’m—”
“You’re nothing,” Joe said, slapping him hard now.
“Joe,” Franklin said, “I want to find out why they were here.”
“Sure, okay. Tell him why, you little prick.”
Teresçu closed his eyes. Blood from his scalp made his eyelashes stick.
“Tell him,” Joe shouted, slapping him again. “And open your fucking eyes.”
"They wanted to find out what you know,” Teresçu gasped, looking at Franklin.
“Who?”
Teresçu shook his head.
Joe made as if to slap him, then pulled up. “Enough of this,” he said. “My hand is sore.” He started rummaging in one of the utensil drawers. “I’m getting some pliers.”
Teresçu looked at him in terror.
“Every time you make us ask you a question twice,” Joe said, “I’m pulling out one of your teeth.”
“No!”
“He’ll do it, too,” Franklin said.
“Hey! Come on!”
“How did you get in here?” Franklin asked.
“These jerks couldn’t pick a lock,” Joe interjected. “And I would’ve heard it if they broke in.”
“Pamela had a key,” Teresçu said.
To hear her name from Teresçu’s mouth made Franklin want to punch him. “She gave it to you?”
He shook his head. “I found it.”
“Does she know about your playmates?” Franklin demanded, nodding toward Stupfel.
Teresçu looked at him defiantly. “I am part of a great movement, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s it,” Joe said, slamming the drawer shut. “You had your chance. You don’t answer, you lose a tooth; you lie, you lose two teeth.” He made a clicking sound behind his back with a pair of spoons, for there were no pliers in Franklin’s kitchen.
“Who is it that’s so interested in what I know?” Franklin asked.
Teresçu was breathing hard, eyeing Stupfel nervously, then Joe. “Guiterrez,” he said finally. “He’s the one.”
“Idiot,” Stupfel said.
“You shut up,” Joe snapped.
"And what is it I’m supposed to know about?” Franklin asked Teresçu.
“I don’t know.”
“You can do better than that, Andy.”
Teresçu shook his head. “And my name is Andrei.” Suddenly defiant again, he added, “Long live the Iron Guard!”
“The hell with the pliers,” Joe said, shoving the spoons into his pocket and squeezing Teresçu’s head between his palms like a melon.
“Stop!" Teresçu shouted. “Damn you.”
Why would Guiterrez and his allies break into his place now, Franklin thought, and not after the picnic at Zuhl’s or the Sinarquista rally—or even earlier?
“Why would Guiterrez be interested in me?” he asked.
Teresçu shook his head.
“Come on,” Joe said through his teeth, increasing the pressure on Teresçu’s ears.
“I don’t know,” Teresçu screamed.
“Tell me,” Franklin said, “before it’s too late.”
“Before this Magyar Hunkie breaks you in half,” Joe put in.
“I’m telling you, I don’t know!”
“Maybe he’s telling the truth, Joe,” Franklin said.
Abruptly Joe released Teresçu’s head. “Maybe.”
Teresçu’s face was bright red. His eyes rolled back and he began coughing for air.
Joe leaned over to Stupfel. “Your turn, pal. And I warn you, I’m running out of patience. Why were you sent here?”
“I have nothing to say,” Stupfel declared, and jerked his head toward Teresçu. “I’m no weakling.”
“No?” Joe went to the stove, where the water in the coffeepot was boiling. “Ever seen a guy that’s used coffee for aftershave?”
“Fuck you,” Stupfel said.
“Maybe you will,” Joe nodded, spooning coffee into the pot. “But no broad’s ever going to fuck you again, Rudolf.”
With narrowed eyes Stupfel studied Joe, trying to take his measure. Franklin wondered why he bothered. Joe had already impaled him with a knife and beaten him: why should he hesitate to disfigure him with coffee?
Evidently Stupfel came to the same conclusion, for after a long silence, watching Joe wait for the coffee grounds to settle, he blurted, “I don’t know anything.”
From Stupfel’s tone, Franklin and Joe both knew he was going to talk.
Nevertheless, Joe lifted the coffeepot from the stove and brought it so close to Stupfel’s face that the steam made him wince.
“Why were you sent here?” Joe repeated.
“Marius,” he said in a flat voice. “Karl Marius sent us.”
Franklin and Joe exchanged glances.
“That’s the who,” Franklin said. “We want to know why.”
“Because you met a man today. I wasn’t told his name.”
So that was it—his rendezvous with Carstone. “Of course you’re also a member of the Bund,” Franklin said.
“I’m a German,” Stupfel said stiffly. “Now, what are you going to do with me?”
“Not so fast,” Joe said.
“Just call the police,” Teresçu piped up suddenly.
Obviously at that point he preferred being arrested to remaining in Joe Szabo’s hands.
“Oh, I’m going to call someone, all right,” Joe said, stepping into the foyer. He picked up the telephone receiver, dialed a number, and started speaking in Hungarian.
Franklin knew what that meant. Applying ice to the back of his head, where a lump was rising, he joined Joe as he hung up.
“Two of my boys will be over here in ten minutes,” Joe said, unwrapping a stick of gum.
“What are you going to do?” Franklin asked.
“We ought to kill them,” Joe replied simply. “Instead, we’ll break their legs and take their clothes and dump them somewhere upstate. That’s what they do with scoundrels in Hungary,” he smiled. “It’s better than shooting them—out in the forest the wolves just leave the guy’s bones. In winter, they eat the bones, too.”
“The punishment sounds stiff enough without the wolves.”
“Hey, Teresçu I owe. The Bosche was ready to kill you. We have to teach these guys a lesson they’ll never forget—so they don’t come back at you.”
An hour later, Franklin was sitting in Violetta’s living room, sipping Scotch, while she applied a cold compress to his ribs. Violetta was wearing a yellow bathrobe and matching silk slippers. Joe’s men had come and gone, escorting Stupfel and Teresçu, guns at their backs, hands bound, Teresçu pleading pitifully for his life. Joe himself was in the bathtub, smoking a cigar. Violetta had been awakened by a desperate phone call from Pamela, who was on her way over from Brooklyn.
“She told me she was worried sick, that she’d gotten wind Andy was doing something crazy,” Violetta said thickly. “I said, ‘You’re right, and he did it over here.’ ”
Franklin shook his head sadly. “I don’t want to see her.”
Violetta uncapped the iodine and swabbed it on his cuts. “She made her own mess, getting mixed up with that guy, and now she’s going to have to clean it up. None of us here owe her any explanations.”
Franklin turned to her in surprise and she smiled thinly.
“I’m a socialist, Franklin, not a pacifist. She’s lucky tonight not to have your murder on her conscience. As her sister, I’m grateful for that much. And for the fact that Joe knows how to fight. Excuse me, but I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in this city, and watched what they do to one another, and I don’t see much difference between Joe’s business and any other business. He operates in the real world—the one beneath all the shifting, shining surfaces. He sees clearly in that world, the way a cat can see in the dark. I trust him implicitly there.”
"And you believe that is truly the real world?”
“Now more than ever. Look around: the bastards who want hell on earth are getting their way—and taking the rest of us along for the ride.”
When Franklin returned to his apartment at midnight, Violetta’s words were still ringing in his head. It was over now with Pamela, once and for all, and he had a bad taste in his mouth. Narcissa had been self-destructive; whatever damage he suffered from their relationship was incidental, some of it of his own doing. Pamela was more actively destructive; her jealousy, unchecked, had set in motion a perilous train of events. Some memories would fade, but he would never forget the crucial lesson she had taught him: that a single unstable person, let in close, can inflict irreparable damage. Can kill you. And walk away from it herself. A moral lesson appropriate to the times, he thought grimly.
Pressing an ice pack to the base of his skull, Franklin telephoned Carstone. “Count me in,” he said. “I’ll help you in any way I can.” And Franklin told him what had happened.
When Franklin was done, Carstone remained silent; Franklin could hear him puffing his pipe on the other end of the line. “I’m only surprised that they would come at you so recklessly,” he said finally.
“So they know about your ‘official’ work.”
“Oh yes.”
“And they must think I sought you out as a contact.”
“Yes, that’s what set them off. Of course you guessed correctly about the zilium. Just as they equipped the Condor Legion with new explosives in Spain, the Germans have used the other Axis forces to test zilium. Not just the Spanish Nationalists, but the Italians and even the Iron Guard. God help us when the Germans go into Czechoslovakia and beyond if they have enough of the stuff to shield their Panzer divisions. We need to prevent that at all costs. Now that you’re aboard, can you come see me in the morning?”
“In the meantime, I’ll arrange to have a man posted outside your building.”
Downing a last shot of whiskey, Franklin stretched out on his sofa with Archie curled up beside him. His head was pounding. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like the next morning when he left his office and crossed the street to the Globe Building. Strange to say, he had not been back inside that building since Black Friday, 1929. It would turn out to be the same sort of October day, golden sunlight pouring down, big clouds suspended high—a day that would mark yet another turning point in his life. From Carstone’s corner office he would see the freighters and ocean liners in New York Harbor, toy-sized, like playthings in a dream.
He was dreaming, he realized, when a soft knock at the door awakened him. The radium hands on his watch read 2:20. He picked up a hammer, and still unsteady on his feet, peered through the peephole in the door.
There was no one. He opened the door a crack and looked down the hallway. It was empty.