Hold Tight Read online

  They sat on a bench by a narrow path in the southwest corner of Central Park. It was late afternoon and the sunlight through the trees fell in tatters on the smooth trunks and untrimmed grass. The quiet of the woods was underlined by a distant rumble and honk of city traffic and, up in the bushes on the hill behind them, the thin, whistley music of a portable phonograph. Blair assumed there was a couple back there, kissing and petting to the cheap songs.

  After last night, everything suggested sex to Blair. His mind had been poisoned. Even the Brahms concert at Town Hall that afternoon, marred anyway by so many jabbering Jews, degenerated into background music to the images Blair could not shake from his head. He kept seeing the sailor flopping on the bed like a landed trout, and wished those writhings had been the man’s death throes. He could not notice anyone, male or female, without wondering what they did in private and with whom. It was disgusting. But now, compensating Blair for his plague of dirty thoughts, was Anna’s admiration of him.

  “You are so clever. A man who works in the chartroom? This will convince Papa how wrong he was about you.”

  “I’m only too happy to be able to help out,” Blair said gallantly.

  “I love you for being so clever.”

  Footsteps crunched gravel as another couple came around the bend in the path, a soldier and an older woman who embraced and kissed as they walked. It was a miracle they could see where they were going.

  Anna took hold of Blair’s arm as the couple came closer. The front of her white blouse was all ruffles, pushed out like the petals of a flower by her breasts. She watched the couple and moistened her lower lip, leaving a gleam of light there.

  Blair began to see Anna writhing on a bed.

  She laid her head on his shoulder and waited for the couple to pass before she whispered, “And where’s this social club?”

  Blair frowned. “Greenwich Village. Near the waterfront.” He had not told her everything, of course. He was too ashamed of where he had been, especially now, when he was with someone as virtuous as Anna. Remembering who she was, he was ashamed of the way he had been thinking of her, but he felt better picturing Anna than he had picturing the sailor.

  “You weren’t too arrogant with them, I hope.”

  “I can control my feelings when I have to.” He pressed his legs together to hold himself down, but the warmth of his own thighs only made it worse. Her breast lay against his arm like a cool pillow.

  “Can women go to this place?”

  “No. Only men. Sailors. It’s very quiet. A place where they can read, relax, write letters home. That sort of thing.”

  “This sailor. He never said anything about when it was going to be?”

  “No.”

  “Hmmm. I’ll tell Papa about where and all. Right away. But it’d be even better if we could find out when.” She drew away and looked into Blair’s eyes. “Could you go back there and feel this man out on that?”

  “No!” He had not intended to answer with such feeling.

  Anna looked puzzled. “But why? You said you made good friends with the man.”

  He pictured the sailor again, obscenely gripping himself and leering at Blair. The stiffness in his own trousers sickened him. Blair shook his head. “I don’t know if he’ll still be there. And it’s not a nice place. Full of riffraff and…cheap cigars.”

  Anna laughed. “But it’d be worth another visit, wouldn’t it? Maybe you’d make some more friends there. Oh, darling. We’ve come this far. Can’t we go a little—” Her eyes focused on something beyond Blair.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw a policeman strolling down the path. The cop was busy with the billyclub he held by its leather strap, flipping the club like a baton, twirling it like a yo-yo.

  Anna swung herself in front of Blair so they would be only another amorous couple. She placed her hands on his back and laid her chin on his shoulder.

  Blair lightly put his arms around her. The weight of a woman always surprised him, like the surprise he experienced the few times he rode a horse and found the animals were not as airy as they looked. He breathed her perfume and hair.

  The policeman crunched past without a word. There was a repeated click each time he caught his club, when it knocked against his wedding ring.

  Anna began to pull back. Blair grabbed her head with both hands, turned her face toward him and kissed her mouth.

  All of her eyes—up this close, his eyes could not bring the double images together—were open and surprised. Then she closed her eyes and gripped his shoulders.

  Her lipstick tasted like raisins. Her hair felt crisp and lacquered. He moved his hands down so he would not spoil her hair. Her blouse slid against the skin of her back and the seams of her bra. His hand followed the seam around, under her arm, to the breast squashed against his chest. She had nothing in common with what he had witnessed last night.

  Remembering that, he kissed her harder, wedged his thumb between his chest and her breast and felt the spot where the squared seams met.

  She moaned through her nose, reached down and pulled his hand away, but continued kissing. Her moan faintly echoed the sailor’s groaning.

  He placed the hand on her hip, then abruptly brought it over her lap, as if to assure himself for good that this was different.

  She stopped kissing. “No, don’t, please…Blair.”

  His hand was pushed away, but not before he felt a comforting absence beneath her skirt.

  “But I love you,” he said gratefully. He could enjoy being sprung up like a broken toy now that he trusted its purpose.

  “And I love you. Only—” She looked around. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Even the phonograph in the bushes played nothing, suggesting its owners were too occupied to turn the record over.

  “We could go to my apartment,” he suggested. “You’ve never seen where I live.”

  “Oh, Blair.” She drew a deep breath and attempted to smile. The penciled skin of her eyebrows was crimped in worry. “I don’t want to do anything I’ll feel bad about afterwards. I’m not that kind of girl.”

  “I know. And I’m not that kind of man. But I love you. It’s only right we should want to…”

  “Part of me wants to,” she whispered. “But…It feels wrong wanting to now, what with the war and Papa and all.” Her hands slowly wrestled with each other in her lap. “It feels selfish.”

  He did not know what to say to that. She was right, of course.

  A few birds had begun singing in the first coolness of the evening. The yellow scraps of sunlight faded in the trees. They sat together in silence, waiting, as if desire were something that would pass by, like a policeman.

  “Getting back to what we were talking about,” Anna announced. “This club. I know it’s asking a lot of you, darling, but won’t you please be brave and go back there? One more time?”

  The idea of the house still repelled Blair, although he felt safer with his dirty thoughts now that they had a suitable object. If he and Anna were lovers, in the fullest sense of the word, then he could face the men there. But he didn’t know how to explain that to Anna without abusing her innocence, or making her wonder about him. He leaped over the explanations and said only, “I can be brave if you can, darling.”

  She looked blank, until he lightly laid his hand on her arm.

  “You mean, you won’t go back unless I give myself to you?” she said calmly.

  It sounded awfully caddish phrased that way. Blair swallowed his guilt. “We should give each other little rewards for doing the things we don’t want to do.”

  But Anna didn’t appear insulted or threatened. The suggestion seemed to tempt her. “Then I wouldn’t be doing it for myself. I’d be doing it for Papa, wouldn’t I?”

  “And the cause,” Blair added. “Only I don’t want you to think I won’t do that unless you do this. It would just make it easier for me to face such riffraff, knowing I had your love, Anna. Completely.”

  “No. I don’t think that.” But
she sat there thinking something. “If I do this to help you, then it isn’t selfish, is it?”

  “It’s selfless. Admirable.” That approach made it seem like a horrible sacrifice, but Blair didn’t care so long as the woman he loved went home with him.

  “No,” said Anna. “There’s selfishness there. But it’s being put to good use.” She lowered her eyes and smiled. “Okay then. I will.”

  “Oh, Anna.” He held her shoulders and kissed her smooth, moist forehead. “Yes. We should. We love each other. The cook and maid are off tonight and we can—”

  She stopped his mouth with hers, kissed him with her arms around his neck. This time she parted her teeth a little and let his tongue touch hers. Then she drew away, looked down and smoothed out his necktie over his chest and stomach. “Yes. We will,” she whispered excitedly. “When you get back from that place.”

  “What? Not tonight?”

  “Don’t you see, dear? It’ll be even better when we won’t have anything else on our minds. Our reward to each other for a job well done.”

  “Maybe.” But Anna didn’t talk like a tease. She seemed as confused and eager as he was. “You promise?”

  “Of course. Because I want to, Blair, I love you.”

  They were lovers, and yet they bargained with each other like shopkeepers.

  But Blair believed her. He could pass again through that den of perversion, knowing he had this waiting for him afterwards. “All right, then. I will.”

  “Oh, goody.” And she embraced him again and kissed him deeper than before.

  The bushes rustled behind her and, his mouth joined to Anna’s, Blair saw a fat woman stumble onto the path, followed by a stocky, strutting sailor carrying a portable phonograph. The sailor’s back and seat were covered with dirt and leaf mold.

  11

  MRS. BOSCH’S BOOKKEEPER CAME over Monday afternoon, as always, and spoke to her for a long time in her office. She called for her houseboy and sent him out to buy a Czech newspaper, which meant he had to go over to Union Square. Shortly afterwards, two electricians arrived at her door—Sullivan and another younger FBI man. They exiled Fayette to the kitchen and spent a long time up in his room. They hung a microphone on the ceiling up there—an enormous perforated metal sausage they disguised with a Chinese lantern—and ran a line that looked like the lantern’s electric cord down to the floor, along the baseboard and out the window. The line hung loose and uncovered down the outside of the house, then passed through the cellar door. There was only the furnace in the cellar, and no reason for anyone to come down here at this time of year. The ceiling was low. Sullivan’s partner, tall and gloomy, kept banging his head on the joists, but without so much as a curse or groan in response. The paw prints of a small dog or large rat ran across the uneven dirt floor. The place smelled like something had died down there.

  When everything was set up, Erich was called down to listen in. “After all,” said Sullivan, “you’re the one who’s going to be using it.”

  “Me? I thought that was your job.”

  “You’re nuts if you think the FBI’s going to sit around listening to queers go at it.” He patted the shoulder holster beneath his overalls, his gun proof of who he was. “It’s not decent. No, we’ll set things up and tail anybody you want tailed. But we’re leaving the ear-to-the-keyhole business to you and your superior, thank you. We’re G-men, not peeping toms.”

  Erich had hoped he’d be able to keep his distance during this phase. Maybe Mason would do all the listening. The commander had jumped so quickly at Fayette’s suggestion that Erich again suspected he was more interested in monitoring pathology than in catching spies.

  He accepted the earphone and wire headband Sullivan handed him, placed it to one ear. There was only electric air, like the roar inside a seashell. Then, beneath the roar, as if deeper inside the shell, Erich heard Sullivan’s partner, who’d been sent back upstairs. The glum young man stood three floors above them and sang, “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” The thing actually worked, dammit.

  Afterwards, Sullivan and his partner explored the backs and alleys behind the house, finding a route between the slaughterhouse and high wooden fences that would get them from the cellar to the street without going through the house. Then, by going around the block, they could reach a spot opposite the front door in time to see the man after he left Fayette’s room. Sullivan replaced the red light over the front steps with a white one, so they could see what the man looked like before they followed him into the darkness.

  Erich and Sullivan returned after dinner, accompanied by Commander Mason. Sullivan’s partner remained in the government-issue black Ford parked around the corner. Mason, out of uniform, dressed like a man who was going to putter around in his garden, was more full of himself than ever. He brought a folding canvas chair with him. With the others standing around him in the glare of a work light hung on a nail, Mason sat there wearing the headset, happily grinning at his ability to hear everything in an empty room upstairs. Nobody entered the room. After an hour, the mere idea of the thing was no longer enough for Mason. He began to get bored. He passed the headset to Erich and tried to talk to Sullivan about the mother Sullivan still lived with. Sullivan sat on a crate and played solitaire, laying the cards on the dirt floor at his feet. Each time the ceiling beneath the front hall creaked, Mason snatched the headset from Erich, but nobody ever entered the room. They heard doors and, once, they heard a bed collapse, but nothing in the room itself.

  Shortly after ten, there was thunder in the distance, then a rattle of rain on the cellar door. The air crackled loudly in the earphone, turned into violent static and began to flick on and off, until the earphone went dead.

  “Drat,” said Mason. “What if one of us poses as a customer, goes up there with Fayette and fixes it?”

  “Sir,” said Erich. “The houseboy has seen me twice in two days. If he sees me tonight, he’ll get suspicious.” The thought of going inside made his stomach cramp up.

  “Naturally,” said Mason. “I was thinking maybe I should go up.” The man was dying to see what went on in this house.

  Sullivan bent over the open suitcase, fiddling with the batteries and vacuum tubes inside. “Outside line’s shorted out,” he announced. “The rain. Nothing we can do until we replace the connectors with ones that’re waterproof. You can go in there if you like, Commander. But won’t be a thing you can do tonight, unless you want to stake out the room from under that pervert’s bed.”

  Mason seemed to consider that, briefly. Then he lost his temper. “Why in blazes didn’t you use the right thingamabobs to begin with?”

  Sullivan remained aloof and remorseless. “It did not seem necessary.”

  Mason glared at him, glanced at Erich, then the ceiling. They were trapped down here by the rain, with only their ideas of what might be going on upstairs.

  “So,” said Mason, admitting defeat. “Let’s hope this spy, imaginary or otherwise, stays home tonight because of the storm.” Failure had brought out a little skepticism in the commander about the enterprise.

  The rain let up around midnight and they stumbled out through the alleys with their equipment to the car—the blind leading the blind, thought Erich.

  Erich returned the next afternoon, the houseboy was sent on another errand, Sullivan fixed the line and Erich learned from Fayette that the man had not been there. When he reported back to Mason, the commander said he had a previous engagement that night and was leaving Erich in charge.

  Tuesday night, Hank sat in the kitchen with Juke, eating Juke’s chicken stew. Mrs. Bosch took her dinner in her office, with a single glass of wine “for the stomack,” so Hank and Juke usually ate alone. Hank used to enjoy eating with Juke, his taunts and teases, even his calling Hank “po white trash” for covering everything with catsup and stirring it together into one pink mass. But Juke had been acting strange lately, pestering Hank when Hank wanted to give his full attention to the web of secrets thickening around hi
m, or, when Hank wanted to talk, responding to his remarks with cold shrugs and sulky silence. It was as though, whatever Hank wanted, Juke would do the opposite.

  Tonight, like last night, Hank was conscious of the men in the cellar, what they might hear, what they might think. It was like when he was a kid and felt God, or someone out there, watching and judging his every move. It made him worry he might be wrong about the swell being a spy. The wire getting fouled up the night before only gave him something else to worry about. Hank wanted to distract himself by swapping insults with Juke—“This chicken or some poor pigeon you snagged?”—but the boy refused to respond to the baiting.

  Juke sat there, drawing figures on the oilcloth with his fork when he wasn’t picking at his food. From where Hank sat, the indented marks looked like valentine hearts. The boy rubbed each one out as soon as he drew it.

  The back door was open and there were the usual smells of stewed garbage, river and chicken lime. It was dark now. Erich and the others should be arriving soon, or maybe they were already down there. They had no signals to let Hank know what was happening. He wouldn’t know if the wire worked or even if there was anyone down below listening until tomorrow, if Erich came by. It was like not knowing for sure if Jesus was real until you died and went to heaven.

  Out in the alley, the steady hum of machinery coming from the docks was broken by a nearby clatter and bang. A garbage can had fallen over.

  Hank listened. He watched Juke so hard that Juke looked up and paid attention to what he had heard.

  “Just a cat,” said Hank, trying to undo the suspicion he had aroused. But he thought he heard a heavy suitcase knocking against a leg. The men were returning. “Or dog or something,” he added.

  Then, on the raised railroad track toward the river, a train started up, couplings banging taut up and down the line, like a slow string of firecrackers. There was a rumble of empty boxcars and every other sound outside was buried.

  “Dumb hick,” sneered Juke. “The city. Things are always bumping in the dark.”