Tanner stood up. “That’s all right. Incidentally, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell the Commander I was here. We’re not through yet and we want an unbiased check.”
“I understand, sir.”
Tanner was almost out the door when the yeoman said, “Say, wait a minute!” He waddled over to a filing cabinet and pawed among the papers for a moment. He finally came back with a form with a small photograph attached to the upper right-hand corner. “The Commander filled out this form and was going to send it in to Bupers about six months ago but the form’s obsolete now. Maybe this photo would help.”
Tanner glanced at it. “No, I don’t think so. It’s a little small for what I would like.”
The photograph was blurred and fuzzy, it could have been a picture of any Navy officer.
Which meant that Arthur Nordlund had suddenly been promoted to a red-hot prospect … .
Smile at the Wave at the information desk on your way out. Find out from her that the Commander almost always gets in late, that he lives in an apartment hotel just off Diversey Parkway and takes his breakfast in a little coffee shop just around the corner.
And don’t embarrass her about how she knows all this. The Commander is no lady-killer but it’s only natural that a pretty Wave who works in the same building should know him rather well … .
Take the El north and stroll past the coffee shop and casually glance in. The Commander is sitting at a table in the rear, toying with grapefruit and burnt toast. His face is just a shade worn this morning, the faint traces of fatigue beneath his eyes.
Just a healthy good time the night before?
Or did he ever go to bed at all? Did he spend the evening in a hotel room at a cheap convention party watching a harried anthropology professor trying to keep alive during the long night?
Possibly, but don’t think about it and don’t watch too long. A quick look and keep on walking so he can’t pick up your thoughts. It wouldn’t pay to tip your hand now.
And then there’s the possibility that you’re mistaken and Adam Hart is actually watching you watching Nordlund and laughing to beat the band. This is a watchbird watching you … .
Buy the paper on the corner and have a Coke in the drugstore kitty-corner from the coffee shop. You finish it in a hurry when Nordlund suddenly gets up and pays his bill and strolls outside. You’re at the cash register when you see him flag a cab and you don’t even wait for your change. There’s another taxi outside and you catch that and tell the driver to follow Nordlund’s cab. It’s hard to tell when you’re being tailed down Michigan Boulevard. There are so many cars. And besides, Nordlund isn’t expecting this and won’t be looking for it.
Or will he?
Nordlund’s cab stopped at the athletic club. Tanner drove up a block and got out, swearing to himself. The club was for members only; he couldn’t get in. And there was no telling how long Nordlund would be there.
He walked across the Drive to a park bench on the lake front and sat down and unfolded his paper. No matter how long the Commander stayed, he was going to wait him out.
He had been waiting a bare half hour before the Navy man came out, dressed in white ducks and T shirt and with a rolled-up towel under his arm. Probably going swimming at a nearby beach …
On the sidewalk, Nordlund lit a cigarette and leaned against the building, watching the passers-by. Tanner hid behind the paper. Nordlund was waiting for somebody … .
Two cigarettes later, a girl in tennis shorts ran up to Nordlund, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and they stood on the walk and talked for a while.
The date,
Tanner thought. While he was watching, the girl suddenly frowned and pointed to Nordlund’s towel. The Commander snapped his fingers and made a face, then gestured down the street towards the beach. The girl started walking, turned, waved once, and went on.
Nordlund walked to the street and hailed a cab. Tanner caught one right behind him and trailed him back to his apartment on Diversey Parkway. He parked while Nordlund ran into the building.
The girl had gone on ahead, he thought, while Nordlund had driven back to the apartment. Why? Because he had forgotten something? Maybe a blanket, maybe a portable radio?
The cab driver drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “Why so interested in him, Mac? You got somethin’ on him?”
“Let’s just say he owes me money.”
The driver nodded wisely. “One of those guys, huh? Y’know, they’re all alike—live in fancy apartments and owe everybody in town.”
The minutes limped slowly by.
What the hell could be keeping him?
Tanner thought.
A dash in, a minute to get whatever he had forgotten, and a quick dash out.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
A half hour.
The mailman made his rounds down the street and walked into the apartments and talked to the girl at the switchboard; Tanner could just get a glimpse of her through the big glass doors. An old man in a Western Union uniform tottered in and three girls, probably secretaries, came out. A laundry truck drove up and a binful of white linen disappeared through the doors. A couple of kids wandered by, tossing a ball back and forth among themselves.
The cab that Nordlund had come in suddenly clashed gears and moved up the street.
Tanner’s own driver stirred restlessly. “Doesn’t look like he’s coming out. I think he’s given you the slip.”
“Wait a few minutes longer.”
The driver shook his head. “Uh-uh. This is a busy time of day and I’m losin’ a lot of fares as is. I’m gonna have to beat it.”
Tanner paid him off, then walked into the drugstore on the corner where he could watch the entrance of the apartment building. He leafed through the magazines at the newsstand and had himself a cup of coffee.
Forty minutes.
He walked over to the phone booth, left the door halfway open so he could still see the apartments, and called Grossman. He could go up alone but there was no sense in taking chances that he didn’t have to.
One hour. Grossman drove up in a cab and barged into the drugstore, his fat face sweaty. “He has not come out yet?”
“Not yet—and it shouldn’t have taken him longer than a few minutes. Let’s go up.”
At the desk, the woman said, “Commander Nordlund has apartment 607. I’ll give him a ring.” Before he could stop her she was buzzing the room. There was no answer. She frowned. “Now that’s odd. He
should
be in. He had a visitor just a little while ago … .”
The noises from the street were suddenly very sharp.
“What visitor?”
She looked flustered. “Why, a gentleman who came in a little over half an hour ago—I think that was about the time. Is something wrong? What on earth’s the matter?”
“What did he look like?”
“Well, I should say he was a very distinguished-looking gentleman.” Her face softened a little. “Really, a very fine appearance and very dignified. Tall and somewhat thin, steel-gray hair, a small salt-and-pepper moustache …”
There was the same subtle change in her voice and the same distant look in her eyes, Tanner thought. He had seen the same look and heard the same sort of tremolo when he had been in Brockton. From the little girl who had served him breakfast at the hotel.
“I think,” he said gently, “that all of us should go up. I don’t think the Commander is feeling very well.”
“Oh!”
She told the other girl at the switchboard to take over and scurried out from behind the counter. About fifty, Tanner thought, and a little on the dumpy side. Like the girl in Brockton, she had seen the man she had wanted to see. She caught the burly laundryman just as he was leaving. “Jeff, help us a minute, will you? A man on the sixth floor is ill!”
Now there were four of them, Tanner thought. Maybe enough to handle Adam Hart if he had stayed behind … .
The floors slipped by in silence and he could feel the jitters begin. What if Hart was still there? So there were four of them, but that was no guarantee. It would take sudden surprise and shock and no thought at all about what he was going to do. He took the Beretta from his pocket and checked it. The woman’s eyes widened and the laundryman looked surprised and said, “What’s the idea, mister?”
He didn’t answer and when the elevator doors slid back, he hit the corridor, running. 601—603—605 …
He crashed into the door with his shoulder. It hadn’t been locked, it hadn’t even been closed tightly, and he stumbled halfway through the living room before he could stop himself.
It took him a full ten seconds to realize that there was nobody there, that there was no tension and there wasn’t going to be any plucking at his mind. But there was a subtle electricity to the air, as faint as a woman’s perfume, and he got the impression that somebody
had
been there and just a moment before.
And then Grossman was shouting from the bedroom, “In here! Come quickly!”
NORDLUND’S
eyes were half closed, the muscles in his face rigid and his loose linen shirt soaked with sweat. He had sagged to his knees by the bed, one hand clutching at the spread. He was suffering from primary shock, Tanner thought. The skin was cold, the pulse so feeble as to be almost undetectable, the breathing shallow.
“Nordlund!”
He got his hands under the man’s armpits and lifted him onto the bed. The laundryman and the woman who had been at the desk downstairs were staring. She started to edge towards the door. “Maybe I better call a doctor … .”
He was panicky for a moment, then flipped open his wallet and showed her the faked identity card for Naval Intelligence. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t. But you might go downstairs and get some hot coffee.” He jerked a thumb at the laundryman who was looking helpless. “You, help me get him undressed and under the covers—he’ll come around in a few minutes.” He loosened the laces in Nordlund’s shoes and a moment later they had him under the blankets. Warmth and hot drink and Nordlund would recover all right. But it was a wonder the man was still alive.
“What d’ya think did him in? Somebody get in or something?”
Tanner was blunt. “Don’t you have laundry to deliver, jocko?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess I do.” The laundryman turned in the doorway. “Next time you want help,” he said bitterly, “ask somebody else.”
I’m still a flub at human relations,
Tanner thought.
But damnit, I couldn’t have let him stay … .
“Watch the Commander, will you, Karl?”
He walked back to the living room and looked around. The table by the window, a chair moved slightly away from it as if somebody had been sitting there. Nordlund had walked in and was probably in the bedroom when Hart had come up and sat down. Towards the bedroom itself, a chair had been overturned and a lamp shattered on the floor.
So Nordlund had come out and tried to fight and they had gone to it for a few minutes, he thought. And Nordlund had been partially successful; at least he had lived long enough so that help could arrive. The sheerest sort of luck, the one chance in a million that depended on somebody’s watching him and finally getting curious as to why he hadn’t come back down from his apartment.
Tanner walked back to the bedroom and looked at Nordlund with a good deal more respect. Nordlund was about his own height and thin, maybe about a hundred and fifty pounds, with thin wrists and slight shoulders and a narrow chest. But in other respects he must have been a bear of a man.
The coffee came up and he tried to pour some into the slack mouth. It didn’t work very well; a little dribbled in but a lot more slopped over on the sheets. He pressed the jaws open, held down the tongue with a finger, and tried again. It worked a little better but it was still a messy proposition.
Grossman had shown the woman out and come back. “Should we call a doctor, William? He does not look good.”
“No, he’ll be all right.” He took his pipe from his pocket and noticed for the first time that his own hands were shaking. “It was a close call.”
“I would not want to come closer.”
“Do you think he was working on a separate line of investigation? After all, you were, Scott was, and I was.”
“Perhaps, although he did not seem inclined to believe what happened that Saturday morning.”
Tanner stood up. “Let’s take a look around.”
They turned the apartment upside down. There was nothing, outside of personnel work that Nordlund had been doing for the Navy. A sheaf of carbons of transcripts of the meetings at the university, some personnel records, and a large file of restricted naval publications.
There was a small noise from the bedroom and Tanner raced back. Nordlund was sitting up, his eyes staring.
“It’s all right, Commander, he’s gone. You’re going to be all right.”
The light in Nordlund’s eyes faded and he sagged back on the pillow.
“Oh, God!”
Tanner waited a moment for Nordlund to recover and then asked the question he had been wanting to ask for the last hour. “Who was he, Commander?”
Nordlund shook his head. “I never managed to see his face, Tanner. He walked in and then we were at it. I never saw his face, he never let me see it!
Do you know what it’s like, Tanner, for a man to slip into your mind and start driving you like he would drive a car?”
His voice started to shake and Tanner said, “Take it easy. Hart isn’t here and he’s not coming back, at least for a while. And I know what it feels like, I’ve been through it, too.”
The horror of it suddenly washed back on Nordlund and he shook underneath the covers; he bit his own wrist to keep from screaming. Tanner watched him curiously and waited for the spasm of fear to go away. Nordlund’s eyes were red-rimmed and sunken, his face a fine grid of jumping muscles. His nerves were shot, Tanner thought. Somebody had taken the starch out of the man, somebody had snipped the wires that had strung him together.
He said, “What have you done since that Saturday morning, Commander?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you try investigating Olson or any others on the committee, anything like that?”
“No, I didn’t think it was necessary.” Nordlund’s mouth tightened. “I saw everything that you people saw but it didn’t make sense to me. I thought that perhaps a draft had moved the paper—you thought that yourself at the time.”
Poor, pragmatic little Navy man,
Tanner thought. He believed what he could touch and nothing else, and after Saturday he had been in over his depth and floundering around. He hadn’t known what to believe.
“And after Olson was killed?”
Nordlund looked away. “They said you did that. I believed them. And you had disappeared, it seemed logical.”
“And Professor Scott?”
“Old men are killed crossing the street every day.” His voice turned bitter. “I was pretty stupid, wasn’t I?”
“You were, but that’s water over the dam. Maybe I ought to bring you up to date.”
After he had finished, Nordlund said, “It’s easier to believe in the Abominable Snowman.”
“Do you think I’m lying, Commander?”
Nordlund shivered. “God, no. If I was any firmer a believer, I’d be dead.”
Tanner walked to the window. It was getting late. A few more hours and night would have rolled over the city. And the problem of what to do when the sun went down would be with him. “There’s three of us now and we’ve got two men to go after. Who will be first, Van Zandt or DeFalco?”
Nordlund closed his eyes. “You make the decision, Professor. I don’t know enough about either one of them.”
“There is not a great deal to know,” Grossman said precisely. “Van Zandt was born in Belgium—1950, I believe. His father was a baker, his mother was a seamstress. He came to this country at the age of ten. A precocious child, from what other faculty members have told me. He did his undergraduate work at Beloit and his graduate work at Harvard. A brilliant student. Professionally, he has written a number of papers on the psychology of factory workers—invaluable, I understand, if you are interested in that sort of thing.”
“What about DeFalco?”
“I do not know much about him. He was born in 1967, here in Chicago. An above-average student, though not exceptionally so, and very much the athlete. He was expelled from school during his senior year and readmitted after a month. He has done both his undergraduate and graduate work here.”
“All that’s from the records,” Tanner said. “Which means that only one of those backgrounds is true.”
Which left them about where they had started, he thought.
Power, power, who has the Power?
Professor Harold Van Zandt—cold, distant, bitter? Or Edward DeFalco, the DeFalco who had been so scared that morning in the cemetery. Or had that been an act, too?
“Any suggestions?”
Nordlund’s thin hands plucked at the blankets. His voice was so low Tanner almost didn’t hear him. “We could go away—we could run. Hide where he could never find any of us.”
“And spend the rest of our lives wondering if we were safe? You don’t think Adam Hart’s going to forget you, do you, Commander?”
Nordlund sighed. “All right, so I was just making noises.”
“Karl?”
“I think, perhaps, we ought to eliminate DeFalco first. There is probably less chance of him actually being it and then that would make four of us on our side.”
Nordlund struggled up in bed. There was a little color in his cheeks and his eyes didn’t look quite as whipped as they had. “Aren’t we beating around the bush? We’ve got it down to two, why take chances?”
It took Tanner a moment to catch on.
“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Nordlund asked sharply. “If you were in a war you wouldn’t hesitate. The longer we wait, the less chance we have. Why take the risk?”
“I would not want to kill a man in cold blood,” Grossman whispered, “without knowing for sure.”
The idea couldn’t be so easily dismissed, Tanner thought. But to identify Hart and to kill him were two entirely different things. Murdering Van Zandt and DeFalco was possible, a sniper’s bullet would do it. But if the first shot missed, they’d never get another chance. And to kill a man who might be innocent … He said, “Would you have seen anything wrong with it when there were three of you to eliminate?”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Nordlund said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“Do you think you can get out of bed?”
Nordlund tried it. “I’m a little weak but outside of that, I guess I’m all right. What do we do now?”
“The first thing to do is to get out of here. Just because Hart failed the first time doesn’t mean he’s going to leave you alone. The police will probably be coming around a few minutes from now—they’ll have some charge worked out.” He felt a brief surge of sympathy for Nordlund. “You realize you’re all washed up in the Navy, don’t you, Commander? Your records will disappear and somebody will dream up some reason to nail you.”
“I’ve thought about that.” Nordlund went to the clothes closet and started packing a small overnight case. “What do we do the rest of the evening?”
“That’s up to you. We’ll split up for the night and meet tomorrow morning, say the same place I met Karl this morning. Ten o’clock in the lobby of the public library downtown.”
They took the elevator down and separated on the sidewalk outside. Nordlund started north. Grossman bought a paper at the newsstand and turned west. Tanner watched them go and started back to the Loop.
It was suppertime and the walks were crowded with people hurrying home. A few more hours and the sun would be down and another long night would have begun.
How many nights had he hidden? he wondered.
How many nights had he spent hiding behind closed doors and drawn shades, waiting for Adam Hart to show up in person? And how many nights had he walked the streets trying to stay with the crowds or spent the night with a drunken party, anything to keep from being alone?
He was walking through the Loop again. Maybe he could hit another hotel and invite himself into another convention party … .
But it wouldn’t be easy to stay awake all night again. He already felt half dead with fatigue. The dextroamphetamine was losing its effect and he felt jumpy, skittery. Nerves. His were only going to take so much. And once he was off the dextro binge and had fallen asleep?
He laughed to himself. It wouldn’t take much to kill him then. A child with a blunt instrument could do it.
He yawned and shook his head and forced himself to take an interest in the city and the people around him.
Funny,
he thought,
I’ve forgotten how ugly the city can look. At night it’s all neon and chrome and plastic but you can look above the level of the lights and see the old buildings through the glitter.
The buildings, all angles and ugly corners and covered with soot and grime and pigeon shit. The bright, flashy store fronts, glass and chrome and stainless steel, and above them the sordid, cluttered architecture of the early 1900s. The dirty, littered lanes of tar that passed for streets and the flashing, raucous signs. The ugly street lamps and the squat metal boxes that said
Keep Our City Clean.
The imitation Roman of the Art Institute and the hideous building that was the public library and the modernistic messes that were the cheap jewelry stores and the cut-rate clothing shops.
And the people.
The jostling, greedy, overdressed, stupid people. The fat man in the restaurant window, drowning himself in a bowl of spaghetti; the overdressed woman window shopper, her face cast in a mold of powder and rouge, dreaming of buying more clothes than she could ever possibly wear; the teen-ager, thick black hair waved out over his temples and his sport coat drooping over narrow shoulders, staring at a nude dummy in another window.