Up in Honey's Room

Sixteen

Honey made highballs in tall glasses, rye and ginger ale, while Carl opened a can of peanuts saying he’d spent most of the day at the FBI office. He was coming to the tricky part now of what he wanted to tell her.

“They sat me down and said I was to forget about Jurgen Schrenk for the time being. They’re pretty sure the Detroit spy ring’s up to something. They’re meeting tonight at Vera Mezwa’s and the Bureau wants to be sure I don’t get in the way. I asked what the meeting had to do with Jurgen. They said that’s where he’s staying now, at Vera’s. I said, Otto’s with him? It sounded like they’d forgotten about Otto, the SS major. They said they believed he was still at Walter’s.”

“I’d love to meet Vera,” Honey said. “Kevin showed me pictures of her doing her lectures. She’s attractive, has her own style, knows how to fix herself up, writes letters with invisible ink. She knows Jurgen?”

“The Bureau,” Carl said, “believes he’s involved in whatever Vera’s up to, it’s why he’s at her house. But what kind of job would they give an escaped prisoner of war? I said what if they don’t know about Jurgen? Walter’s never mentioned him. He knows what happened to Max Stephan when he showed off the Nazi pilot, so he’s kept Jurgen under wraps. But now he calls a meeting to introduce him to the gang.”

“Why?” Honey said.

“I was asked that. If Walter was so careful before, keeping Jurgen a secret, why would he expose him now? I said I didn’t know, but I’d talked to Walter last night.”

“They were surprised.”

“They said oh, is that right? I told them Walter knows I’m after Jurgen and Otto. He’s afraid I’m gonna come out to the farm looking for them.”

“How do you know that?”

“Why were we out there last night? I told them I must be the reason Walter got rid of Jurgen, sent him to stay with Vera, let her hide him for a while.”

“You think she knows about you?”

“If she’s any good. But if she doesn’t realize I’m closing in, Jurgen will point it out to her. Now what does she do, hide him or throw him out? She can’t hand him over. What’s she doing with an escaped Nazi POW?”

“You told this to the feds?”

“I said she knows you guys would come down on her. And before you’re through ringing her out she knows she can kiss her spy act good-bye. But, I told them if Jurgen feels she’s nervous about the situation he’ll leave, disappear. They want to know how I can be sure that’s what he’d do. I said because he knows he’s better off on his own than having to count on people who’re strangers to him. I know he’d have serious doubts about Walter. Walter’s scared to death to have Jurgen around.”

“They ask how you know that?”

“I said Jesus Christ, I’ve met Walter. I know what kind of man he is. I sized him up as I would any offender I’m after. I said the thing to do before you lose Jurgen, go on in the house and bring him out handcuffed. Vera too.” Carl paused to let Honey wait for what he’d say next, but she beat him to it.

“They ask you what an old boy who wears cowboy boots knows about people in espionage?”

“Only the way they put it,” Carl said, “was why don’t we let the scenario play out a little more, not spook the spooks.”

“What scenario?”

“Whatever they think is going on.”

“How do they know Jurgen’s at Vera’s?”

“Bohdan Kravchenko. He’s been working for the feds since Vera came here.”

“Kevin told me about him, yeah, Vera calls him Bo.”

“Kevin says this Ukrainian tells them spy stuff without telling them anything. There’s a meeting tonight, but Bo doesn’t know why it was called. The Bureau guys admit he could be stringing them along, but he’s all they’ve got. I mentioned before, I think Walter’s gonna present Jurgen to the gang.”

“But you don’t know why, if he’s kept him a secret until now.”

“He has a reason this time or he’s showing off. Look, everybody, here’s an honest-to-God Nazi superman I brought to the party.”

Honey said, “If you think Jurgen will disappear by tomorrow-”

“That’s where I’m stuck. What do I do about it?”

“Don’t they have agents watching the house?”

“That’s why I can’t barge in.”

“I have to assume,” Honey said, “the FBI guys know what they’re doing. Don’t they?”

“They do, only their scenario’s different from mine.”

“You’re afraid Jurgen’s gonna slip by them,” Honey said, “and you’ll have to start all over. What’s he like?”

“Jurgen? He’s a nice guy, he’s smart, he’s funny. He can do different accents.”

“How old is he?”

“I think he’s twenty-six.”

“What’s he look like?”

“He has dark blond hair, blue eyes, he’s five nine and a half, one forty-five, he’s always tan, his legs, ’cause he likes to wear short pants.”

“Is he good-looking?”

“Girls like him, they think he’s cute. I’d see girls that worked in the administration building, just outside the gate, watching him through the wire fence. One of them pulling on the front of her blouse like she needed air. He had a girlfriend at that time, a hot young babe, he’d sneak out of camp to visit.”

“You mean he’d escape. What did the hot babe do?”

“It was an experience,” Carl said, “to know her. She went from the debutantes’ ball to a cathouse in Kansas City, became a very expensive call girl and got rich, saved it, didn’t get into opium. She’s gonna write a book, says I won’t believe some of the things happened to her in her life. I think she was sixteen working in the cathouse. Shemane had a sideways look she’d give you.” Carl grinned. He said, serious now, “She’s a redhead.”

“You liked her,” Honey said.

“I already have a redhead.”

“But you lusted after her. Was she famous?”

“In Kansas City.”

“Will she name names in her book?”

“I told her don’t get any good guys in trouble, that’s all.”

Honey said, “Tell me what you want to do.”

“About Jurgen?”

“About now. What do you want to do?”

They had their drinks and cigarettes sitting low in the sofa, both of them sunk into the cushions that crushed to fit their shapes, close enough to reach out and touch each other.

Carl said he needed a guide since he’d lost Kevin for a while. If she’d like to fill in he’d write a letter to get her off work for a few days and pay her for her time. Or have someone in the FBI office write the letter.

“I call in sick,” Honey said, “it’s no problem. Yeah, I’d love to take you around. I have a car a friend’s letting me use while he’s at Benning jumping out of planes. He’s an instructor, airborne. It’s a 1940 Model A coupe, but I don’t have any gas stamps. The guy’s just a friend of mine.”

Carl said he’d get her stamps, but they’d do their running around and maybe surveillance in the Pontiac. He had maps he’d show her.

Honey said, “Wow, maps.” She said, “I’m thinking we should go across the street for dinner. The Paradiso, right there, I think is the best restaurant in Detroit. Outside of the Chop House. It’s Italian, but not heavy on the tomato sauce Italian. Really good scaloppini and Tosca, the house salad’s terrific, and they have collard greens like back home. I told them they ought to have grits on the menu. Whenever I fix calves’ liver and bacon I make a little gravy to put on the grits.”

Carl said, “I crumble bacon in my grits.”

Honey said, “Are you hungry?”

“I’m not in any hurry.”

“The trouble is, if you’re hungry and you eat first, and then decide what you want to do or just let it happen, there are certain things you’d be too full to, you know, throw yourself into.”

“Certain things,” Carl said.

“I went with a guy from Argentina during another entire year of my life, after the entire year I spent with Walter. Those two were night and day. Arturo, the guy from Argentina, could order dinner in five languages and choose just the right wines. He said only one restaurant in Detroit had a decent wine list, the London Chop House, so that’s where we went. We’d come back to his digs at the Abington, kick our shoes off and have cognac and coffee. The Abington had a dining room, but we only used it if we were too tired to go out. This is when Art would start fooling around in his Latin way, very serious about it, after the dinner and three different kinds of wine.”

“You drank three bottles?”

“Once in a while we’d finish them off. The first time we went out together he said he came to Detroit six times a year for meetings at GM.”

“How’d you get together?”

“We started talking. A young woman from Grosse Pointe, I’ll call her, very tailored, brought him along while she tried on dresses. We talked for maybe fifteen minutes and he asked me out. I said, ‘What about your girlfriend?’ He said, ‘She’s my mother,’ deadpan, and we went out.”

“Did he buy her a dress?”

“She had two that she liked. I thought he’d show off and tell her she could have both. No, he said he didn’t care for either of the dresses. The tailored young woman handled it. She said, ‘Okay,’ and was just a little bit cold.”

“And he never saw her again.”

“I don’t know, I never asked about her, or what he was doing at General Motors.”

“He told you he came to Detroit six times a year.”

“Never stayed more than a week, and wanted to see me each time he came. I said, ‘You’re asking me to sit and wait for the phone to ring?’ He called me every day from Buenos Aires.” She sipped her drink. “We worked it out. I liked him, he was fun, he was thoughtful. He came every month for five days whether he had a meeting at GM or not. I thought that was sweet.”

“Did he want to marry you ’cause his wife didn’t understand him?”

“I think he was married and had kids, but it never came up. He was Latin and fun at the same time. I called him Art. Or I’d call him a Latin from Manhattan and he’d say ‘You can tell by my banana.’ He was a terrific dancer.” She was quiet a few moments. “He had something to do with auto racing. He took me to the Indy 500 the year we were seeing each other. Walk along Gasoline Alley, he knew just about everybody, and you could tell they liked him. Mauri Rose won that year, qualified at a hundred and twenty-one miles an hour and led thirty-nine laps out of two hundred.” She said, “After Pearl Harbor, December of that year, I never heard from him again.”

She told him she was going to change, get out of the suit she’d been wearing all day picking up lint and put on a dress. “The paper’s right there.” She said, “Decide when we should have dinner,” giving him a look. Or maybe not, he wasn’t sure. She said, “I’ll be, oh, fifteen minutes or so.”

It made him think of Crystal Davidson eighteen years ago going into her bedroom while he was waiting for Emmett Long. Crystal telling him, “Don’t get nosy,” but left the door open. It wasn’t a minute later she stepped into plain sight wearing a pink-colored teddy, the crotch sagging between her white thighs. She thought he was from a newspaper. He told her, “Miss, I’m a deputy United States marshal. I’m here to place Emmett Long under arrest or put him in the ground, one.” A line he’d prepared for the occasion.

Now he was looking through the front section of the Free Press. He remembered saying to Crystal, “What you want to do when Emmett comes is pay close attention. Then later on you can tell what happened here as the star witness and get your name in the paper. I bet even your picture.” Crystal said, “Really?”

Carl looked at the paper again and read a couple of stories he thought were funny. He got up from the sofa and began reading aloud from the paper as he approached the hall, Honey’s bedroom on the left, the bathroom on the right. “‘A woman was shot in her fashionable eastside home by a jealous suitor. The suspect said he did it because she had trifled with his affection.’ You think those were his words?” Carl said, looking up now at the bedroom door standing open.

Honey still had on the skirt to her suit but was bare otherwise, her breasts pointing directly at Carl. She said, “I can’t imagine anyone saying that.”

Carl looked at the paper again-Jesus Christ-and read another news item. “‘Barbara Ann Baylis was bludgeoned to death with an iron frying pan in her home in Redford Township. After several days of grilling, her sixteen-year-old son, Elvin, admitted he had slain his mother in reprisal for a scolding.’” Carl looked up.

Honey hadn’t moved.

She said, “Don’t you love the way they write? The boy goes insane, screams at his mom and beats her to death with a skillet. ’Cause she scolded him?”

Carl said, “I can imagine the scene”-closing the paper-“the boy going into a rage.”

Honey said, “Have you decided what you want to do?”

Carl said, “I was thinking we could have supper then drive by Vera Mezwa’s. Check on the cars there for the meeting and get the license numbers.”

Honey still hadn’t moved to cover her breasts.

She said, “That’s what you want to do, check license numbers?”