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“The magician was a friend of yours?” said the clerk with an unaccountably hostile air. “He cut out hours ago.” “Oh.” It hit her like a blow. He was supposed to come up to the apartment after the performance. The fact that he had not done so meant that something terrible had happened to him. And in its wake, in possession of this knowledge, he had not wanted to see her. “Are they—is anyone—”
The suit was incredible, trousers trimmed with white braid, pockets and buttonholes with white frogs, precisely the color of humiliation itself. “Is it about that boat that sank?”
“Yes,” Rosa said. “His little brother was on it. A boy about your age.” “Jeez.” He fidgeted with the end of his brown necktie, unable to make eye contact with Rosa. “That explains it, I guess.”
think it was on the way down that Uncle Lou must have told him about the ship, you know, sinking and all, ’cause when we got down here he looked, uh, I don’t know. Like his mouth was kind of hanging crooked. And he
When, after the war, he was put on trial for this and other crimes, the commander of U-328, an intelligent and cultivated career officer named Gottfried Halse, was able to produce ample evidence and testimony to prove that, in full accordance with Admiral Dönitz’s “Prize Regulations,” he had attacked the ship within ten miles of land—the island of Corvo in the Azores—and given ample warning to the captain of the Ark of Miriam.
Halse’s reply is preserved in the transcript of his trial without comment or any notation as to whether his tone was one of irony, resignation, or sorrow. “They were children,” he said. “We were wolves.”
Carl Henry Ebling had pleaded guilty and been sentenced, by a judge named Cohn, to a term of twelve years for bombing the bar mitzvah reception of Leon Douglas Saks at the
While Ruth had never entirely agreed with Carl Henry’s views—Adolf Hitler made her nervous—or felt comfortable with her brother’s having taken such an active role in his party’s activities,
That the bomb her brother had made—in the shape of a trident, how could they not see the craziness in that?—had
Mr. James Haworth Love himself. James Love had, from the early thirties, been extremely vocal in his opposition to Charles Lindbergh, to the America Firsters, and above
suspects, she determined to notify the authorities of the activities taking place in the house.”
followed, on the role of the comic book in triggering Ruth Ebling’s act of retribution, the only guest at Pawtaw that evening for whom there is no existing arrest record is the book’s author.
“I’m truly sorry to do this, Mr. Love,” said a clear flat voice behind Sammy. “But I’m afraid you and your ladyfriends are under arrest.”
Love, in particular, never forgot this service, and after Pye was killed in North Africa, where he had gone to drive an ambulance because the army would not take homosexuals, saw to it that Pye’s mother and sisters were provided for. As for Tracy Bacon, he did not give the question of fighting or not fighting the police a moment’s thought. Without revealing too much of the true history that he had so assiduously labored to erase and reconstitute, it can be said that Bacon had been falling afoul of the police since the age of nine, and defending himself with his fists since well before that.
AFTER HE RAN OUT of the Hotel Trevi, Joe became merely one of the 7,014 drowned men out stumbling through the streets of New York that night.
That was how she learned of the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor.
“I just can’t do it anymore, Bake,” Sammy said. “It’s just—I don’t want to be like this.” “You don’t have a choice.” “I think I do.”
Sammy turned to look at her, his eyes bright, wild with an idea that Rosa grasped at once, in all its depths and particulars, in all the fear and hopelessness on which it fed. “I get you,” he said.
He stumbled to his left, wildly veering to avoid touching any of the bunks he walked between or the men lying in them, toward the light switch. No one protested or rolled away from the blaze of light.
Houk was dead; Mitchell was dead; Gedman was dead. That was as far as Joe got in his investigations before a sudden desperate understanding drove him to the ladder that led up through the hatch in the roof of the Waldorf and out onto the ice. Coatless,
wide in best cowboy manner. Shannenhouse was from a raw town called Tustin in California
the old man of Kelvinator Station,
eight-kills ace from the first war who had spent the twenties flying in the Sierras and in the Alaskan bush.
disappointed as any of them by his assignment to Kelvinator. He had not serious...
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Kelvinator—the official, classified name was Naval Station SD-A2(R)—the
The Hangar, though buried in the snow of Marie Byrd Land like all the other buildings of Kelvinator
“Look here, the fellows are dead and the radio is out, but there is no connection between the two. One has nothing to do with the other, like everything else in life. It was not some Nazi superweapon. Jesus Christ. It was the fucking stove.” “The stove?”
“It was carbon monoxide from Wayne.”
John Wesley Shannenhouse,
his Curtiss-Wright AT-32. The Condor seaplane was ten years old,
formerly shared with twenty other living,
even caught the end of a broadcast of The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, learning thus that Tracy Bacon was no longer playing the title role.
Shanghai, Mr. O.K., Mr. Guess Who, and to the throaty insinuations of Midge-at-the-Mike, whom he quite often thought of fucking.
midst of which, to Joe’s horror and delight, floated the rich, disembodied tenor of his maternal grandfather, Franz Schonfeld. He was not identified by name, but there was no mistaking the faint whiskey undertones, nor for that matter the selection, “Der Erlkönig.”
“Heil Hitler,” the man signed off, leaving a burble of empty airwaves and a single, unavoidable conclusion: there were Germans on the Ice.
The land was thus staked and claimed for Germany, and renamed New Schwabia.
The German base could have lain not ten miles away across level ice, blazing like a carnival, and still remained invisible.
As he approached it, a breeze kicked up, carrying with it an acrid stench of blood and burning hair potent enough to make Joe gag. Shannenhouse had fired up the Blubberteria.
freshly tanned seal. “All the canvas I had was ruined,” Shannenhouse said defensively and a little sadly. “It must have got wet on the trip down.” “You are covering the airplane in the skin of seals?” “An airplane is a seal, dickhead. A seal that swims through the air.”
In the course of two weeks of careful monitoring, he was able to reach a number of positive conclusions, and to listen as a drama unfolded.
Pecuchet shot Bouvard and then turned his weapon fatally on himself.
The corvettes and sub hunters found U-1421, chased it, and pelted it with hedgehogs and depth charges until nothing remained of it but an oily black squiggle scrawled on the water’s surface.
He crawled down to the foot of the bunk and opened his footlocker, and took out the thick sheaf of letters that he had received from Rosa after his enlistment at the end of 1941. The letters had followed him, irregularly but steadily, from basic training at Newport, Rhode Island, to the navy’s polar training station at Thule, Greenland, to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he had spent the fall of 1943 as the Kelvinator mission was assembled.
Then, in her fifth letter, Joe was startled to read that, in a civil ceremony on New Year’s Day of 1942, Rosa had married Sammy.
then in September 1942 she wrote with the news that she had given birth to a seven-pound, two-ounce son, and that, in honor of Joe’s lost brother, they had named the baby Thomas.
In the spring of 1942, old Mrs. Kavalier had died, in her sleep, at the age of ninety-six. And then a letter from late summer of 1943, just after Joe’s arrival in Cuba, reported the fate of Tracy Bacon.
actor had joined the Army Air Forces shortly after completing the second Escapist serial, The Escapist and the Axis of Death, and had been shipped to the Solomon Islands. In early June, the Liberator bomber of which Bacon was the copilot had been shot down during a raid on Rabaul. At the bottom of this letter, the last letter in the packet, there was a brief postscript from Sammy. Hi buddy was all it said.
In any case, it would have been superfluous to try, since on the third day of their journey, in a tent pitched on a plateau in the lee of the Eternity Mountains, Shannenhouse’s appendix burst.
“I am very glad to be here,” the American said in flawless German. He smiled. The smile caught for an instant as if on a sharp wire. There was a neat black hole in the shoulder of the parka. “The flight was difficult.”
took Joe nearly half an hour to drag the German across ten of the twenty meters that separated them from the hatch of Jotunheim. It was a terrible expense of strength and will, but he knew that he would find medical supplies inside the station, and he was determined to save the life of the man who, just five days before, he had set out across eight hundred miles of useless ice to kill.
