Shadow of the Bomb

Chapter 21

The rope or cord or whatever it was dug into my neck before I realized what was happening. I got the fingers of both hands under it, but the leverage was too great.

“So, Mr. Malek, nosing around where you shouldn’t be. A very bad habit.”

“You!” I managed in a croaky voice as I tried to break free.

“Reporters!” The voice behind me was disdainful. “Bunch of frustrated gossips, every one of you. Just interested in getting the story, not in anyone or anything else. And not interested in the harm it might do.”

“I didn’t get any story tonight,” I rasped in a voice I barely recognized.

“Whether you did or not is immaterial, because you won’t ever be able to write it.” With a yank, the cord tightened, and I could feel myself losing consciousness. My assailant was behind me, and my arms were useless, even if I had tried to pull them away from my neck, where the cord was biting into my gloved fingers.

I remember thrashing around, and not much more. I looked down and saw the gray concrete of the sidewalk below just before I was thrown forward violently with a great weight on top of me. I thought I heard a groan, but it might have been me.

It didn’t seem like a bed, but it was comfortable, and I had no desire to get up. However a voice, a familiar voice, was insistent. “Come on, Snap, come on.” A cup of water was pressed against my lips and I drank, although it hurt like the devil to swallow. I slowly opened my eyes and found myself looking up into the large, ruddy, and indescribably welcome face of one Fergus Sean Fahey.

He was leaning into the back seat of a car, where I was lying. “Thought we might have lost you there for awhile,” he said gruffly. “Can you sit up?”

I hurt in about half a dozen different places, including my left cheekbone, which apparently had made contact with the sidewalk, both hands, one leg, and of course my neck. But I was able to lever myself into a sitting position. I peered out into the darkness.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

“You are in the back seat of a cruiser, and we’re on 57th Street near Stagg Field. See that fellow there?” He gestured to a young man on the sidewalk talking to a uniformed cop and occasionally looking in my direction with a worried expression.

“What about him?”

“You owe him your life, Snap,” Fahey said. “He was walking along on the other side of 57th and saw what was happening to you. He came up behind the guy and landed hard on him, and then all three of you toppled over onto the walk. Your strangler was in the middle, like a slice of ham in a sandwich, and had the wind knocked out of him. That’s when the young guy, he’s a junior at the university, kicked him in the balls — hard — and called for help.

“A cruiser got here a few minutes later. The driver knows a little about first aid and checked you out. You were unconscious on the pavement with a cord around your neck. Luckily, it had loosened when you all fell, and our man said he could see that you were going to be okay. I got called at home — I live over in Bridgeport as you know — and it isn’t that far away. I’ve been here maybe twenty or so minutes. That was long enough to talk to someone who’s all but confessed to the murders of two professors and the attempt at killing a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.”

“And just where is our lunatic?” I asked in my still-hoarse voice.

“Right over there, in that squad car on the other side of the street,” Fahey said, gesturing with a thick forefinger.

I looked across the street. The dome light was on in that cruiser, and it cast an eerie glow on the profile of Chester, the University Tavern bartender, who was sitting in the back seat with a uniformed officer. His arms were behind him, suggesting that he was cuffed. Those beefy hands had done enough damage.

“Yeah, I recognized the bastard’s voice as he was trying to strangle me. But why, Fergus? Why me and why those two profs?”

“He babbled like a goddamn brook, first to the guys in the cruiser and then to me. It was almost like he was glad to be caught.”

“Maybe he was. Tell me about it.”

Fahey nodded grimly. “As you may know, our man Chester — last name Waggoner — has a son in the Navy. Chester’s divorced, by the way. His wife took off years ago and he raised the boy alone. He is absolutely obsessed about the kid getting killed in the war. Sounds like that’s all he thinks about.”

“So?”

“I’m getting to it,” Fahey said. “Being a barkeep, he hears a lot of conversations. People tend to talk in bars, sometimes too much.”

“As in ‘Loose lips sink ships’?”

“Right, and they tend to forget that the bartender is even there. He becomes like a piece of the furniture. Same way with waiters. It seems that Chester had some idea that an important weapon was being developed down here, and he was all for it. Anything that could win the war for us — and the quicker the better — would bring his son home safely.”

“And?”

“And he said Bergman often talked too much about his work on the weapon when he was in the bar. It really riled him, thought there might be spies around. Felt the prof was endangering security.”

“So he killed him?”

“Yep, went to Bergman’s apartment, and the guy let him in. Why not? He knew the bartender and didn’t have any reason to fear him. Chester doesn’t have any remorse at all about it. And this is the same guy who, when one of my men interviewed him right after the murder, praised Bergman as a wonderful fellow.”

“Yeah, come to think of it, Chester lauded Bergman to me as well,” I told Fahey. “Had me fooled. Then what about Schmid?”

“That’s a horse of a different color. Chester had heard some other faculty member in the bar kidding him about being a German.”

“I heard about that, too. But he was Swiss.”

“Chester didn’t think so. He got it into his head that the guy was a Nazi spy.”

“Screwy. What about me?”

“Chester has good ears. He heard somebody telling you yesterday that something big was going to happen tonight. And he also heard you talk about Stagg Field, so he put two and two together, got four, and followed you, both to and from the field. He figured you were going to write about whatever had happened in there.”

“There was no possible way I could have written about what I saw, even if I understood it.”

“Yeah, but this Chester of ours, he didn’t know that. He thinks that all newspaper reporters are amoral and are more interested in getting stories than they are patriotic. He was determined that no word was going to get out about the weapon, even though he himself doesn’t seem to have any idea what the thing is.”

“Nor do I, for that matter, and I actually was present a while ago in a place where I shouldn’t have been.”

“I don’t want to know about it,” Fahey snapped.

“That makes two of us. Is the FBI here now?”

The chief allowed himself a brief smile. “No. And I’ll call them when I’m good and ready.”