MONDAY, THE FIRST DAY OF June, 1942. The three-layer headlines stretched all the way across the front page of the Times.
1,000 BRITISH BOMBERS SET COLOGNE ON FIRE; USE 3,000 TONS OF EXPLOSIVES IN RECORD RAID; GERMANS ARE HURLED BACK IN BID FOR TOBRUK
Centered under the headlines was a photograph of an RAF bomber crew sipping tea before their airplane after the raid. The caption read: “Tea After the Greatest Air Raid in History.”
Cassidy’s breathing had just about stopped.
He began reading the stories, gulping down the words, choking on them. The ninety-minute raid had demolished the city on the Rhine where Karin had grown up, where she had returned to her father’s side.
He read the report beneath another headline: “Cologne ‘Inferno’ Astonishes Pilots.” It was datelined May 31, London, from United Press.
Seven-eighths of Cologne, a city the size of Boston, was in flames, an inferno “almost too gigantic to be real,” when the history-making raid was over last night, pilots who took part in it said tonight …
“Cologne was just a sea of flames,” said Squadron Leader Len Frazer of Winnipeg, one of the more than 1,000 Canadian airmen who had a hand in the epic raid.
“I saw London burning during the Battle of Britain and it was nothing compared to Cologne,” Pilot Officer H. J. M. Lacelle of Toronto, gunner in the tail of a bomber, contributed.
These reports were typical of the thousands being sifted tonight and compiled into a record of the mightiest piece of destruction ever devised by man.
The lurid sky over Cologne for ninety minutes was as busy as Piccadilly Circus as the great Lancasters and Halifaxes, Stirlings and Manchesters, streaked in at the rate of one every six seconds to unload their total cargo of steel-cased death …
“It was almost too gigantic to be real,” said the pilot of one Halifax. In every part of the city buildings were ablaze. Here and there you could see their outlines, but mostly it was just one big stretch of fire.
“It was strange to see the flames reflected on our aircraft. It looked at times as if we were on fire ourselves, with the red glow dancing up and down our wings …”
He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of orange juice, stared out at the air shaft and the sparrows who came down to eat bread crumbs from the windowsill. Terry was still in his room asleep.
Karin.
… the mightiest piece of destruction ever devised by man … it looked as if we were on fire ourselves …
The sparrows were going on about their breakfast.
Karin. He found he couldn’t take a deep breath. He closed his eyes, flattened his hands on the tabletop. There was no point in kidding himself.
He went back into the living room and picked up the Times and began pacing, reading as he toured the room, trying to control the movement of his eyes, unaware of time or where he was or anything but the bombs raining down on Cologne, the sea of fire.
There was no point in kidding himself. Karin had been in Cologne with her father. Maybe she survived, maybe she’d gotten to the basement and had lived through it in the debris, maybe she’d been out of the city and maybe it was all a bad dream …
But no, it wasn’t that way at all. No, it was one of those things you heard during the war and you knew the news was bad, it was meant for you, it was inescapable and you couldn’t pretend. You’d never forget the moment you heard it, where you were and what you were doing. You’d never forget that frozen instant when you got the bad news. It was the worst news you could imagine and maybe you were having a piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee in the kitchen and the Western Union man was slowly coming up the walk and you knew, you knew for sure. Or maybe you were listening on the radio and you heard your husband’s ship had gone down or your boyfriend was on Bataan and you just knew you’d never be the same again, that the last of your trust and innocence had been used up. It was always the worst news you could imagine.
On an inside page was the story released from Berlin by official radio. They admitted serious damage to Cologne due to “terror attacks” with incendiary bombs on the civilian population. But they said it wasn’t such a big raid. They said seventy RAF planes had gotten to the city. They said 111 people were killed.
Among the dead they named an actor well known to the German public. And a prominent scientist, several times mentioned for a Nobel Prize. Herr Professor Richter. And his daughter, the famous Olympic skater and film star. Karin Richter. Karin …
She was a German and the Germans were beginning to die in large numbers and they were the enemy and when he turned on the radio everybody was pretty happy about the thousand-bomber raid, about the mightiest piece of destruction ever devised by man. Karin was just an unimportant casualty. In the inferno of Cologne she wouldn’t be missed. A woman who hadn’t ever done much but ice-skate and fall in love and get married. No kids and she hadn’t had time to grow old. She’d been merely another frightened speck beneath the falling bombs.
Karin was dead.
The telephone rang and it was his father.
“My God, son, I’m sorry. You’ve got to be strong, Lew … it’s the goddamn war,” his father said, calling from the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. He sounded as if he’d been crying and when he hung up, Lew broke down.
When Gabriel Heatter came on that night, he finally had a legitimate reason to make America feel good.
“Ah,” he said, “there’s good news tonight. History’s first thousand-bomber raid, more than twice as many RAF bombers than Reichsmarschall Göring’s Luftwaffe ever managed to put in the night sky over London, struck at the heart of Hitler’s Reich last night … ah, yes, there’s good news tonight …”
Karin was dead.
It was a long mean summer for Cassidy. His thirtieth summer. When he wasn’t wandering in a daze of helplessness and sorrow, he was fuming in the furious frustration of not being able to get into the service. He hated his leg and he drank too much and when he was drunk he wanted to die for Karin and for his country. Some nights he just wanted to die. He sought the punishment he believed he deserved for falling in love with Cindy Squires, for letting Karin slip away even before she died. He sailed on a stormy sea of bourbon, tried to fill the unfillable empty blackness at his core with booze and self-pity. He limped around with his cane and fell off the occasional barstool.
And Terry Leary was always there to catch him. Stinking drunk and maudlin and full of anger and yelling and screaming and crying—and still Terry Leary was there to catch him when the trapdoor opened and the hungry monsters beckoned.
Cindy, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen. He began to think of her as a phantom, an illusion. She’d never happened at all and he’d never told her he loved her and he’d never spoken her name. And Terry set out to bring him back from the mists of the dead where he seemed to hover like one of the bad spirits from poor Markie’s Necronomicon.
Terry bought all the new records everybody was playing. He made sure Cassidy had all the new books to read. Every so often the gloom lifted. See Here, Private Hargrove left them both on the floor helpless with laughter. The Robe wasn’t as funny.
They went to see all the new movies and some days they even stood in line. They saw Noel Coward in In Which We Serve and Ronald Colman and Greer Garson in Random Harvest and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year and Walter Pidgeon and Garson again in Mrs. Miniver.
Terry was still ruminating about what he was going to do when he left the Force. Paul Cassidy kept calling Lew offering him jobs which he knew, even as he procrastinated, he should have taken. Make movies, his father said, win the war on a Culver City back lot and chow down at Musso & Frank’s or the Brown Derby. Help with the war bond tours. Take your mind off things, there was plenty to try to forget,…
August was brutal, the dog days. They killed a lot of time at Yankee Stadium. They’d keep score and eat hot dogs and soak up the sun and lose themselves in the flow of the games.
In the middle of August there was a doubleheader with the Senators, what they called a War Chest Benefit. It was hot, the kind of day you just had to wear seersucker slacks and your shirt stuck to your back and you found your old straw boater and wore it at a jaunty angle over your eye. Karin had bought Cassidy’s for him but he tried not to think about that. He was trying to discipline himself. Two and a half months had passed since Cologne had been reduced to rubble. He hadn’t seen Karin in nearly three years. He told himself he’d never see her again. He told himself he had to get on with life.
There were seventy thousand people at the stadium that afternoon. It wasn’t just the doubleheader. It wasn’t just the War Chest and the patriotic fever, though people were feeling a little better about things. The battles of the Coral Sea and Midway were victories that began the summer, and Doolittle’s incredible raid on Tokyo had perked people up as far back as April. A week before they went out to the stadium for the doubleheader with the Senators, some German saboteurs who’d been landed on Long Island from U-boats were sent to the chair. By God, don’t fuck with us, the Americans seemed to be saying.
Still, the fans weren’t coming out just because the news was good. There was something special that day. Between games Walter Johnson, now fifty-four but with a name that was still magic, the greatest fireballer of them all, was going to try to throw a lamb chop, as the sportswriters were saying, past a wolf named Babe Ruth. The Babe was forty-seven and had last been to bat in 1935. Johnson had retired in ’27, that greatest of all years when Lindy flew the Atlantic and the Babe hit sixty. Big Train Johnson and the Babe, again, after all these years. The whole thing sent shivers up your spine.
The Babe looked pretty much the same. The belly was a little bigger but the legs were still spindly, the bat still an extra heavy the size of a tree. Johnson looked to be in good shape, too. The papers said they’d both gotten into their old uniforms and, what the hell, maybe they had.
The crowd was going nuts when old Walter wound it up and started throwing. The Babe hammered the fifth pitch deep into the right-field seats and Johnson stood frowning at him from the mound. Pandemonium. Then there were twelve inconclusive pitches, two of which were swinging strikes triggering all the old-time oohs and aahs. On the eighteenth pitch he did it again. The battered baseball made a tiny hole in the sky, soaring high and far, back into the seats in right again, and this time he trotted in that pigeon-toed way around the bases with his elbows tucked back like a man doing an impression of a duck.
That was it. They walked off the field together and Terry threw his hat in the air and it bounced from hand to hand out onto the emerald grass. Seventy thousand people had seen the Babe hit a couple off Walter Johnson and life was simple and wonderful again. The war was far away. But only for a moment.
It was beginning to dawn on everybody that summer of ’42 that things were changing forever, that the world of the Babe and Walter Johnson was receding into the shadows, that there would be no going back to the world they’d grown up with, not even when the damn war was won … It was a brief good-bye to the past that afternoon; it needed about as much time as it took to throw eighteen pitches and circle the bases for the last time.
They wound up that hot sticky night in the lobby of the Algonquin where the fans struggled against the muggy heat. A big old cat checked them out while they drank Tom Collinses. Munched on peanuts. Bob Benchley was holding forth in a corner looking just like he did in the movies. Cassidy was watching him, and Terry was tapping his arm with a finger salty from peanuts.
“I said I’m going into the private-eye business. Whattaya think of that?”
“It sounds like a movie. Are you serious?”
“Hell yes, I’m serious.”
“Can you make any money at it?”
“If I do it right. Corporate clients, missing persons, rich missing persons only need apply. Maybe a big divorce. Maybe a little security work. Bodyguarding the rich and famous.”
“You’re gonna have your hands full.”
“I’m staffing up with some former cops. It’ll work, Lew. Only I need a partner. I’ve been thinking about that.” He was grinning wolfishly, popping peanuts into his mouth.
“Sounds like a fella could get hurt.”
“Don’t worry about the boss.”
“All the same …”
“But I’ll need a steadying hand. A partner I respect, a guy I’ll listen to. Somebody who can back me up when I need it. That make sense to you, compadre?”
Cassidy nodded.
“Well, there’s this guy I know. I want him. I wondered what your reaction would be—”
“Who is it?”
“Only man I can trust. Only man I’d trust my life with. You, Lew. I want you to come in as my partner.”
Terry was beaming, feeling good, figuring it all out. The Babe had put a couple in the seats and the war in the Pacific was looking up. He’d had his own personal sneak attack the day after Pearl Harbor and he’d survived. Now he was ready to get out there on his own and start fresh.
He was going to be Humphrey Bogart.
He was going to be Spade of Spade & Archer.
He wanted Cassidy to be Archer.
Only Archer had gotten killed. Miles Archer got shot down by Bridget O’Shaughnessy on a foggy San Francisco night. Everybody knew that. Never trust a woman.
Terry was smiling, smug and happy, waiting for Lew to say something.
“I need another drink,” Cassidy murmured.
Cassidy was still having a bad time of it and he felt like he was dragging Terry down. The depression that had flowered with Karin’s death wouldn’t relent. Neither would his desire to see Cindy Squires, who had herself, with Max, retreated into a kind of abstract lunar distance. Bennie came around occasionally and he’d drop news of Max and Cindy but they were always out of town, always out of reach. But Cassidy’s state of mind wasn’t bothering Terry, who was optimistic and excited and planning the opening of his detective agency. He was a blur of fast talking and high hopes. He resigned from the NYPD, a fact the columnists duly noted in the papers, and had begun following up on his connections with lawyers who could provide clients. He leased space in the Dalmane Building on Madison at 43rd, just a nine iron from Grand Central Station, which he kept calling “the crossroads of a million private lives.” He seemed to think that augured well for the detective business.
He hired a couple of old pals he’d served with on the Force. He got the telephones put in, hired a secretary/receptionist, had the name painted on the door. The Dependable Detective Agency. The legend beneath the big letters read: Discretion Our Watchword. The letterhead was delivered, very simple, elegant, no little magnifying glass, no deerstalker, no open eye, nothing cute. All very uptown. He was patient, waited for Cassidy to give him an answer about the partnership.
One night in late September Cassidy told him he was moving back downtown to his own place in the Village. He told him he had to get pulled back together on his own time, not on Terry’s. And finally he told him he didn’t have a detective somewhere inside himself crying to get out.
“I think you’re wrong about that, old sport,” Terry said, hooking his thumbs behind suspenders decorated with a pattern of chubby naked ladies. “You’ll come ’round later. I’ll bet you a dollar you do. But sure, you need some time to yourself. I understand that. Just remember, whenever you need me, or want me around, I’m ready. Dependable, that’s me.” He grinned, all Irish charm. “And the day’ll come when your name gets painted on the door, right next to mine. Trust Terry, sport.”
He went behind the bar and brought out a long thin package, wrapped in gift paper covered with little blue and pink babies. He handed it to Cassidy.
“Shower gift?”
“Only paper I could find. Sort of sweet, really. Go on, open it.”
Cassidy stripped the paper away, feeling something hard and knobby. He sat on the couch staring at it.
He was holding a long, heavy, gleaming blackthorn walking stick. It was polished, smooth yet brutal, lethal. Elegant. It was topped by a leaded brass knob that fit firmly into the palm of his hand. There was a gold band which had been engraved. Lew Cassidy. 1942. Below the name in small lettering he had to squint to see. The Best of the Backup Men.
“Jesus, Terry …”
“Here, gimme that thing.”
Holding it so Cassidy could see what he was doing, he pointed at a tiny black button beneath the knob. He pressed it with his fingertip.
Without a sound the heavy knob leaped into his grasp. In one swift motion he withdrew a thin gleaming blade.
Cassidy damn near jumped out of his shoes.
“Finest Sheffield steel,” Terry said.
Terry lowered the blade first onto Cassidy’s right shoulder, then onto the left.
“Go in peace, Lew,” he said. “But use your steel if you must.”
Terry Leary winked at the best of the backup men.