The captain drummed on the table with his polished nails for a moment. “All this is most irregular, and I don't know what help I can be. But if Mrs. Conroy will come here, speak to the general and secure his permission, I'll see what can be worked.”
“You're very kind, and thank you for your trouble,” I said, standing up. “At the moment Mrs. Conroy is visiting friends in California, but will probably return within a few months. I'll ask her to come down then.”
“Fine,” the captain said, shaking hands with me.
I went out and had a quick drink. I was far from being a clever liar, and my better sense told me to stop this before I became involved. If anybody ever talked to Lee, how could I explain why I was living with this backward kid?
I made one more attempt. With Lee's picture I went to one of the refugee agencies, told a tired-looking, efficient young woman, “I'd like to locate the relations, if any, of this girl, Lee Unbekant, said to be born in Hamburg. I have reason to believe she isn't Jewish, and that's all I know, except she spent some time in a concentration camp, as a slave laborer, was branded with a number. I don't know the number or the name of the camp.”
The woman lit a cigarette, added a butt to an ash tray filled with cigarettes she had chain-smoked, looked at the picture. “An interesting face, odd nose. Why do you want to find this girl, her parents?”
“For sentimental reasons. A... eh... brother of mine, a soldier, knew them in Venice. That is, he knew the girl. Later he was killed. He seemed to like them very much, that is the girl. I'd like to find them, help them, perhaps visit them.” I had thought this lie out carefully.
“My dear sir, we have a long list of people who are waiting for our help to locate their sons, husbands, daughters, parents, wives, and hardly for sentimental reasons. I'll place your case on the bottom of the list, but we go by the need involved in each case, so I can give you little hope. We're overworked and understaffed, you understand.”
“Then can you tell me how I'd go about finding out this information?”
“It's worse than hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack. We play a great jigsaw puzzle game here every day, with human lives, and happiness as the missing piece,” the young lady said, enjoying her own dramatics. “You have very little information to go on, besides the picture. Hamburg was badly bombed, there are very few records to be found there now. You say her last name is Unbekant. Are you sure it isn't Unbekannt?”
“It might be the soldier—my brother—misspelled the name in his letters.”
She smiled. “My dear man, in that case the girl may have been... how shall I say... stringing the soldier along. Look at the picture, this girl is well fed, she was a long time removed from any DP camp, if she ever was in one, when this photo was taken. Also, Unbekannt means unknown in German, which is hardly a surname, although it isn't impossible.
I had a sinking feeling she was right, I was getting no place: Unbekannt might have been the first German word that came to Hank's mind, and if it meant unknown...? I said, “How would you suggest I go about finding out the information, then?”
“Bravo, you don't give up easily,” she said.
“What?”
“Have you any money?” Her eyes swept over my clothes.
“A little. How much would you want?”
She grinned, showing nice teeth. “My dear sir, I do not want any money. If you can spend about a thousand dollars, I'd suggest you have copies of the picture made, place an ad in various German papers—abroad and here—offer a reward of about one hundred dollars. I'll warn you in advance, it will be difficult to do that from this end, I mean it will be better if you have somebody you can trust place the ads in Germany, the money exchange and the general unsettled conditions, you understand. And once the ads are placed you will receive many false answers, some from outright charlatans. It will require much correspondence and patience on your part, possibly even a trip to Germany. And after all that trouble, you may never find the people, or you could be very lucky and find the girl after the first ad. Also, you can never tell in what part of the world you'll find her.”
“Ill think it over. Where can I find a list of the various papers?” I asked.
“Advertising agencies in Yorkville will be glad to handle it for you, only pick one you can trust. I'd, use one that has started since the war. And demand to see copies of all the ads.”
I said thank you and as I was leaving she called after me, with a wise smile, “You soldiers are all alike. If you liked the girl that much, why didn't you bring her back with you instead of waiting all these years?”
“That's right,” I said, although it took me several minutes to figure out what she meant. Outside, I looked at myself in a store-window mirror, pleased she thought me young enough to have been a soldier.
You see I tried—maybe not as hard as I should have, but I tried to help Lee. My relations with her had changed—on my part. I no longer felt at all clever in having her around, although I told myself I hadn't done anything to hurt her. And of course in bed I could hardly touch her: I could picture all the soldiers, Nazi and American, who had made her so mechanically capable—and sexless.
Lee didn't change. She ate when I told her to, danced now and then, and sat around with that blank look on her face. It was the beginning of October and a little cool, so at least she didn't sit around in the nude much. I still dressed her smartly, took her out to dinner, to the night clubs and movies, and of course I still gave her the hundred every week, which she hid.
Now and then I went back to questioning her about her family, which usually ended up in my not getting any new information and Lee becoming hysterical. Mostly we walked and ate in silence. I had plenty of time to myself, did a lot of reading, and started dunking about doing some writing. I fooled around with the alcohol-has-turned-to-water idea, without getting anywhere. But I did a short story about a dancer who loses his legs in the war and his effort to get back to normal by learning to dance on his artificial legs. To my surprise I sold the yarn for a hundred bucks. I looked around for another subject to write about... and saw Lee. I started her story and it came slowly, but it came along.
For some strange reason, I wanted to see Flo. I suppose I wanted to tell somebody—anybody—about the mess I was in. (Not that I would have ever told Flo.) I tried calling her once or twice, but she hung up on me. When I sent her Henderson's October rent, I sent an orchid with the check, but I didn't hear from her.
However, I heard quite suddenly from her brother—Eddie. He called me one afternoon at the office, asked, “George, I need a hell of a favor. Can you bring me thirty dollars?”
“Sure. I'll send you a check....”
“I need it now, immediately. I'm in a doctor's office. I've been... stabbed,” he whispered quickly. He gave me the name of the doctor, and a Madison Avenue address. I cashed a check, took a cab up there.
The address turned out to be East Harlem, the doctor an elderly Porto Rican. Eddie was stripped to the waist, and the doctor was helping him dress. The kid's shirt was bloody. One shoulder was covered with neat bandages and there was white tape over one side of his jaw. Eddie looked very pale.
I paid the doctor who assured me Eddie was okay, the cuts had been cleanly stitched. He said that after a few days rest, Eddie would be as “good as new.”
We took a cab from his office and when I asked Eddie what had happened, he nodded toward the driver and didn't say a word. We changed cabs and it suddenly dawned on me Eddie had given the driver my address. I said, “We can't go there. I have a girl there. How about your place?”
“Sure,” he said, and gave the driver his address.
He lived in a tiny room on the West Side, with a chest of drawers, a narrow bed, and one chair. There was a pile of books in one corner and a tiny radio perched on top of them. I propped him up in bed, said, “Soon as you rest, I'll take you to another doctor, be on the safe....”
“Why? Because this doc's skin is dark? No, I'm all right, just a little weak. And another doctor might report knife wounds to the police. I don't know what the law is on that. This one understands.”
“Understands what? What the devil happened?”
“What happened is that we're making our country an impossible place to live in. This atmosphere of suspicion and fear... we're all casualties of the cold war.”
“Eddie, without speeches, what happened to you?”
He stared at me, said softly, “That's a new way of dismissing things—everything is a speech. George, are you really cynical, or merely ignorant—if you'll excuse the word? I'll tell you what happened: I was wounded once fighting fascism in Europe, now I've been wounded fighting fascism again, here, right in New York.”
“Kid, stop soap-boxing me. We don't have fascism in New York, or in America. You've been reading the Daily Worker too much. I'll admit that some...”
“George, were you as naive as this before you started working for the oil company?”
“I suppose so. Let's both stop this. What happened to you?”
Eddie said, “I was canvassing for the ALP congressman up there, and some paid hoodlum stabbed me. Simple as that—the pattern of violence is always the simple one.”
“Look, Eddie, I never considered myself overbright, but neither am I an outright moron. What in God's name were you doing canvassing over in East Harlem? If you needed the money...”
“George, nobody was paying me. I knew that the candidate was one of the few men in Congress aware of the menace of fascism. That's why the papers have been attacking him so vehemently. For the last few weeks I've been working over there, as a volunteer, along with hundreds of other people from offices and unions.”
“But why get mixed up...?” I began.
“I've told you why over and over—I never want to see another concentration camp again. George, you sound as though I was doing something shady. Know what I was doing? Merely visiting voters, urging them to be sure to register, so they would be able to vote next month. Why even the Democrats and Republicans want a large registration. I was in a house on 107th Street when this fellow came up and attacked me, stabbed me twice before I knew what hit me.”
“By God, we'll get the police after the bastard!”
Eddie smiled at me. “Good old George, sometimes you act as simple as a country girl hitting Broadway. The police are probably looking for me.”
“You? Why?”
“I think I killed him,” Eddie said calmly. “If not dead, he's badly hurt, and there will be a trumped-up assault charge against me—if they find me. You can picture the headline holiday, stuff about, 'Red Vote-Getter Assaults Porto Rican...' And what can I tell them; that I'm only a poor slob looking for peace and decency in the world? They'd laugh in my face! Peace is a dirty word, a crazy word, these days.”
“Wait, stop all this jabbering and tell me what happened, exactly what happened, without any speeches as trimmings,” I said, beginning to think clearly again.
Eddie lit a cigarette, offered me one, as he said, “I knew he was following me, I'd seen him when canvassing another house, but didn't think anything about it. And I'd heard rumors that the old political machine, the tough ward-heelers, were supposed to have thugs out after us, but I really didn't believe that. Well, this tenement was a small one, about four stores, with one family to a floor. It was the middle of the afternoon, and all the doors I'd knocked on remained closed, the people were probably out working. He came up the stairs, passed me, as though going up the next floor, then turned and had his knife out—all in one movement. I saw the flash of the blade and turned sideways—that's why I got it in the shoulder instead of the back. We grappled and he cut my jaw and I kneed him, then slammed him against the wall; face forward, threw him down the stairs, ran down past him and out.”
“How do you know he's dead?”
“I don't, but I know he's badly hurt—real badly. George, when you've been in a lot of combat, seen many men laying around, you get a kind of special sight—you can look at a man and know he's dead or ready to die. I had that feeling about him.”
“Still, you're not certain, maybe he got up and walked away.”
“He never walked away, George.”
I asked, “Anybody see you leave?”
“I don't know. I held a handkerchief over the cut on my jaw, and the blood didn't come through my coat from the shoulder cut. I walked over to Lexington Avenue and there was a bus at the corner. I rode that a few blocks. I was getting weak and dizzy. I got off and called the cops from a candy-store phone booth, told them where the guy was. I was afraid he would die for sure if he laid there till the tenants came home—maybe hours later. Then I went to the doctor.”
“This doc, who is he?” I asked, feeling sorry for the kid. Nothing seemed to go right for him, and I couldn't even understand what was troubling him.
“I took a chance. I'd canvassed him a few days before. We had quite a long talk—seemed like a right-thinking guy. I simply told him I had been in a fight and I think he understood. He didn't ask questions, just sewed me up. Then I told him I was going to call my brother and called you. It was stupid involving you, but I had to have money to pay him. He told me I could return later, but I can't return. Anyway, he didn't see me dial and there's little chance of the number ever being traced to Sky Oil. Maybe I made a big mistake, maybe I should have gone back to election headquarters. I don't know, I didn't want to involve them. George, I have to get out of town.”
“Take it easy, kid. Way I see it, even if they find you, you have a perfect case of self-defense. I'd go to the cops and...”
