ON SATURDAY MORNING, JULY 4, 1942, the world was united in war. The Russians admitted the Germans had taken Sebastopol, or what was left of it. The Afrika Korps had caught up with the British army inside Egypt, outside the town of El Alamein. The Japanese began construction of an airfield on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, intending to cut the Allied supply route to New Guinea. In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff debated the merits of Operation Sledgehammer, the 1942 invasion of France, against Operation Torch, the invasion of Morocco and Algeria championed by the British. There was another claim by the Polish Free Government in London, reported in the back pages of the New York Times, that the Nazis were randomly killing Polish Jews.
American officials looked forward to a safe Fourth of July. Fireworks were banned in most cities and traffic on the nation’s highways was expected to be slow due to gasoline rationing, the tire shortage and the Government’s request that defense workers forego the holiday. The sun rose in Maine, made its way down the cloudless Eastern seaboard and the telephone rang in a room at a motor lodge on Long Island.
“Mr. Thomas Blair Rice? I am a friend of your friend. We want you to take care of that sailor so you can see us again. You are intending to wait for him outside that house near the docks today?”
Blair said he was. He was too asleep to be surprised someone else knew what was happening. His sailor had vanished into thin air the night before.
“Then I must tell you he is not there today. He spent last night at the Sloane House on West Thirty-fourth Street. If you go now, you can catch him before he leaves.”
“Who is this?” Blair realized the voice had a foreign accent. “Is this Anna’s father?”
“Anna? Anna’s father? No. But a friend. Have you spoken with Anna recently?”
“Of course not. She refuses to see me because she thinks I’m being followed.”
“You will see her soon. I promise you. She sends her best. Goodbye for now. There is no time to talk.” Click.
Blair was overjoyed. Anna had not abandoned him after all. He was a bit disturbed to learn the other spies knew where he was—he assumed he had shaken them along with the police—but it was good to know he was not alone. A network of spies looked after him; a vast net of eyes and ears still connected him to Anna. He dressed quickly, paid his bill and left for the city.
Anna Krull came down to the lobby of the Martha Washington Hotel. It was Saturday, a day she often spent with her father. Sometimes they rode back and forth on the Hudson River ferries on Saturdays, her father taking snapshots of Anna posed against the rail—destroyers and merchant ships directly behind her. She hadn’t seen Simon in four days and missed him painfully this morning. She missed Blair, too, but Anna couldn’t remember him without hating herself for letting desire separate her from a loving father.
She was dreading another anxious, purposeless day when she noticed the poster beside the desk clerk’s window:
FOURTH OF JULY RALLY!
STARS! MUSIC! BONDS!
NOON AT TIMES SQUARE.
That was right around the corner from the Lyric Theater. In a crowd at a war bond rally, she could lose the man or men following her, slip into the Lyric and see her father. He worked on Saturdays now. She would be very careful. If she suspected for a minute someone was still following her, she would walk right past the theater and nobody would be the wiser.
She returned to her room and put on her makeup and her prettiest day dress.
Hank shaved and put on Erich’s white dress shirt. The sleeves were too short, but he rolled them up. The tail was long enough to be tucked in only in the front and his neck was too thick for him to button the top button. Still, it made him look like a dumb, innocent civilian. He put Juke’s knife in the pocket over his heart.
Erich put on a necktie, coat and hat. That way, they wouldn’t look as if they were together. The FBI knew who Erich was, but Rice didn’t. Hank watched Erich get ready and suffered second thoughts. It felt very different when there was another person along—less simple, less pure. It made you more conscious of what you were doing. And yet, Erich had made it clear this was going to be more complicated than Hank had thought it would be. His instincts would not be enough. He needed a cooler head and a second pair of eyes to get this done. His chief fear about Erich was not that he might betray him—not after last night—or fail him in the clutch. His chief worry was that Erich was too green to be a party to murder, too naive. He didn’t know what he was getting into, and Hank felt responsible for him. He would ditch Erich at the final moment and kill his spy alone. Until then, he could use Erich as a thinking, talking bird dog.
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.
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.
The sailor looked up the dark aisle and stood still a moment. He must not have seen Blair, because he resumed walking, to the left, past the front of the booth and out of Blair’s view.
Blair stepped away from the door. He could do it, knowing the woman he did it for was only a few feet away.
Hank stepped past the aisle, then pressed his back against the wall. That was his spy beneath the exit sign around the corner. Hank drew a deep breath. A faint glow in front of him flickered like heat-lightning each time the movie cut to a different shot. He listened for another burst of talk from the screen before he snapped his wrist and clicked the knife open. He would swing around the corner and charge the man. It was so near, so easy, he had to picture Juke’s face before he could do it.
The projector ground loudly in the booth. Simon held Anna’s hands and kissed the tears off her face. “I love you and I am sorry. But you cannot stay here.” His voice had softened but the frown never left his face.
Anna sniffed and nodded. “Yes, Papa. I’ll go now. I won’t try seeing you again for a long time, I promise.”
Simon stood up and helped his daughter to her feet. “Let me go first and make certain nobody is out there,” he said, and started down the short flight of steps to the door.
Erich stood on the landing for half a minute after Hank disappeared into the balcony, then another half minute, and he saw gray trousers and brown shoes run into the foyer outside. Sullivan and two other men appeared at the box office window, Sullivan flashing his wallet as he spoke. The woman answered. Sullivan and one of the men ran toward the glass doors.
Erich turned and ran up the stairs to the balcony lobby. “Jones!” he cried and ran past the first curtained doorway to the second one. He plunged through the curtain into a dark aisle, where a man stood with his back to the exit. “Jones? Hank?”
The man turned. Before he could answer, a door opened beside him.
Light poured from the door. The man glanced at the light and Erich saw Rice, the hand at his side clutching a gun.
Hank appeared in front of the movie screen, coming towards them with his fist.
Erich had to shout about the gun, but it was too late to shout. He jumped at the man’s back, grabbed the wrist with the gun. He threw his other arm around the man’s neck to stop him from breaking away and freeing his wrist.
Blair had been grabbed from behind. He tried twisting free. Twisting back, he saw his sailor coming towards him. He raised the gun to fire—but something held his arm.
Hank saw Rice as paralyzed as in the crowd. Juke’s knife was open. Hank rushed into the man, slipping his left arm around the man’s shoulders, holding him against the knife. The blade pressed against clothes and ribs, then broke through.
The gun fired at the floor.
The body in Erich’s arm stiffened as if given an electric shock.
The man threw his head back, his mouth opened wide for a squeak from the back of his throat. The gun dropped from his hand.
Hank saw Erich’s face behind the man, saw Erich for the first time and understood they held the man together.
“Hands up! All of you! Hands up or I’ll shoot!” someone shouted.
There was more light, from behind Erich now. Then a second gunshot. And despite everything Erich told himself, about Hank’s life and his depending on holding Rice, Erich let go. Erich’s own body collapsed beneath him. His right leg was burned out from under him.
“Release him, Fayette! Let go of him!” Sullivan stood in the open exit, the curtain ripped to the floor. His gun was pointed at them, ready to fire again.
Blair arched backwards, trying to unknot the pain in his chest that left him breathless. The weight embracing him from behind disappeared. He pushed away from the weight in front of him, only to grab at it with his right hand when he felt his legs failing him. He turned to the left. He remembered a door opening there, but had not had time to see who was behind it. Gripping the shoulder above him, Blair raised his head and saw a balding gentleman in a long white duster. Behind the man stood Anna, his Anna, her pretty face spoiled by enormous eyes and red lips pinched back in disgust.
“Is it this awful tie?” Blair wondered. He lay one hand over the ugly necktie, and found something hard sticking out. It hurt when he touched it, as if it were part of him. He looked back at Anna, ashamed, but all he saw now was ceiling, then red like sunlight through closed eyelids, then nothing.
“What did you do to him, Fayette?” Sullivan stepped over Erich, who lay there clutching his leg, and knelt beside Rice, keeping his gun aimed at Hank. “Don’t move. One move and I’ll shoot you in the head.”
But Hank stood perfectly still, empty hands at his side. He looked down at the body curled around Juke’s knife. Now that the deed was done, it seemed cheap, nasty. The man needed to die, and yet he was so pathetic in death that Hank was sorry he was the one who had done it. He had felt the same way the first time he killed a chicken for his aunt by wringing its neck. But you can eat a chicken.
“Buddy? You okay, buddy?” Sullivan rolled the body over. Only when he saw the blood did he see the knife. “Dammit to hell! Look what you’ve done!” He glared at Hank, his gun pointed at the sailor’s face. Then he remembered the projectionist standing in the door. “You there! Stop rubbernecking and call an ambulance. Turn on some house lights. And shut off that damn movie! We have a murder here!”
Rice was dead? The carpet around Erich was wet and warm, but he had thought it was all his blood. The old man disappeared from the door. A pretty girl stood in his place, hand over her mouth as if she was going to be sick, her eyes never leaving the body at her feet. Then she was pulled into the booth and the door closed behind her. The house lights came on. The movie continued to play in the distance, a pale pair of ghosts exchanging wisecracks on the washed-out screen. Above Rice, above everything from where Erich lay, Hank stood like a cold, white angel of death, a bit of blood on his pants leg. His eyes met Erich’s.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, a dry sadness in his voice.
Erich nodded. He almost smiled, proud to be bleeding.
Hank stepped forward, unbuckling his belt.
“Don’t move, Fayette!” Sullivan jumped up, waving his gun at Hank. His other hand held Rice’s gun, a handkerchief wrapped around it. “Put your hands on your head.”
Hank pulled his webbed belt through the belt loops. “I’m putting something around my friend’s leg. So he don’t bleed to death.”
“Get back, Fayette. I’ll kill you. I’ll—”
“Go ahead,” said Hank, stepping past him. “I’ve done what I was gonna do.” And he crouched beside Erich to slip the belt around his thigh, above the wound.
Sullivan lowered his gun. He looked around, embarrassed. “FBI!” he shouted to the people on the balcony. “Everybody out! We’re clearing the theater! Use the other exit!” Returning his gun to his shoulder holster, he looked back at Hank and Erich. “Yeah, let the authorities take care of you two,” he muttered. “I don’t want the blood of the likes of you on my conscience.” Another man appeared in the doorway. “Where the hell have you been?” Sullivan hollered at him. “Clear this balcony. We don’t want anybody seeing this. There’s a projectionist in there. He stays. We have to talk to him. Send Brown and Cohen over here when they come in.”
Erich watched Hank cinch the belt around his leg. There was pain, but he was pleased to feel pain. He knew he was getting giddy from the loss of blood. It began to feel almost tender: Hank tending his wound, the fact that they had just killed a man together. Pain was Erich’s way of paying everyone back. He felt all distance disappear between himself and Hank, conscience and world, watcher and watched. Looking at the dead man beside him, Erich felt he understood everything. And then he passed out.