Again silence, then finally: “I do not mean to shout at people who need help. I repeat that it simply does not mean anything. Unless... well, it might be an anagram mightn’t it?”
“How?”
“ANAGRAM. I shall look up the exact definition for you.” Then: “A word or phrase made by transposing the letters of another. That’s Webster talking, sir.”
“Transposing the letters,” Geblick said, frowning darkly, trying to make his brain work better than it was.
“I love them, really. Let’s see now. What could we make?”
Geblick listened to the woman mumbling.
Finally she said, “Droecr?”
“What?” Geblick demanded.
“But that isn’t anything either, is it?” she said. “Wait! There it is! Record!”
“What?”
“That’s all I can see it could be. RECORD. But that doesn’t mean very much either, does it?”
“Oh, the hell it doesn’t.” Geblick said loudly, and slammed down the receiver.
He returned to the house at a run. He locked the door behind him, then knelt in front of Snider’s old phonograph and his collection of records, which were held upright in their wire holder. Feeling his hands begin to shake, he took a record from the holder and placed it on the turntable. He started the machine. In a moment, he heard the sound of Snider’s clarinet — coarse, off-pitch, squeaking — playing a ragged, nondescript melody that made Geblick’s ears hurt.
He played the record through, then started another.
He rubbed his head, which was aching now, and grabbed his whisky bottle.
Another and another. His nerves had begun to hum.
Finally the clarinet stopped and a familiar rasping, high voice, said, “Eh, Geblick?”
Geblick wagged his head, balanced on hands and knees, listening tensely.
“Oh, what say you, Geblick? Eh?”
“Where is it?” Geblick demanded.
“I’m going to tell you exactly where it is, Geblick. So that you may be rewarded for your diligence, your hounding, your torture.”
“Where!”
“Are you listening, Geblick?”
“Yes!”
“Then here are the precise instructions, and the only instructions, you will receive. Geblick?”
“Spit it out, Snider!”
“Listen closely, then, as I tell you exactly how to find the money. It is hidden in the, hidden in the, hidden in the...”
Geblick stared at the turning record as the voice repeated the phrase.
Eyes wild, he stopped the machine and bent closely over the record to see that the needle was poised at the very edge of the final groove where there was a slight nick which appeared to have been created deliberately.
“No!” he whispered.
He started the machine again. The voice was ghostly and wavering, then it became clear again, as it repeated, “...hidden in the, hidden in the, hidden in the...”
Geblick fell back, and lay on the floor, listening. Finally, and although he had not done so in forty-three years, he began to cry.
The Message
by Isak Romun
Someone threw a galley on my desk while I was out to lunch. I picked it up expecting to read a proof of my column. But it wasn’t that, it was the obits along with one or two slightly extended writeups on the deaths of the great, the near great, and the forgotten. One of the writeups told me that the last principal of the Hands Crusade had died.
The uncorrected article was brief and to the point.
Dorcia Brand, retired evangelist, died yesterday at the age of 58. She had been a guest at the Farnsworth Rest Home for upwards of a year. Death occurred as a result of an overdose of sleeping tablets.
Ms. Brand figured prominently in the late forties as the executive assistant to Buttolph de Strange, leader of the Hands Crusade. De Strange was executed in 1951 for the murder of Harry Gossett at the latter’s woodland cabin in California.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
“D, o, r, t, i, a,” I muttered. “She spelled it with a t.” Absently, I picked up a blue pencil and made the correction.
It was that galley, that writeup, that convinced me I should prepare this account. I suppose the brief two-paragraphs-plus-a-line made the next edition. I never checked.
It wouldn’t have mattered whether it made the next edition or not. Almost no one remembered Dortia Brand and few, I imagine, remembered De Strange. But between 1947 and 1950 those two shook up the country, were on the brink of turning it around as Butch de Strange promised he would. I wonder, futilely now, if he could have pulled it off if the then inexplicable and seemingly motiveless murder of Gossett hadn’t brought the whole thing crashing down.
The story really starts back in January, 1945, in a battered winter-whitened town called Bastogne. I won’t go into that part of it; even those who weren’t around then know about the Battle of the Bulge. Suffice it to say that Butch was in one of Patton’s tanks, speeding to relieve that nearly crushed outpost of American resistance.
From all accounts, and from his own story in a Crusade handout, Butch was not an atypical GI. Maybe more the happy heathen, but generally average. He drank, he caroused, he wenched, but unlike most of his olive-drab peers he didn’t feel accountably contrite about it when it came time to move out and face Jerry. He wrote that he used to kid the Catholic boys as they stood in line for confession before a move-up or a push. After Jerry, though, it was back to fun and games for Butch, for the boys in line, for everyone.
In England, where De Strange staged before Normandy, there was plenty enough to turn the golden-haired head of a Stateside country type, particularly if predisposed. But in France’s liberated cities, in the food-hungry and grateful towns between the cities, there were unlimited opportunities for a handsome swaggerer to swill deeply at life’s trough. Until it was time once again to persuade the Wehrmacht to give up yet more real estate.
That was how it was with thousands of GI’s, including Butch de Strange, until De Strange got to Bastogne.
We can only speculate now that there had to be a buildup, that the inconsistency between the rest-and-recreation life and the life up front must have made its impression on Butch. The suffering had to have helped too — the drained, wan faces, the emaciated bodies, the towns without young men, the ruins, the necessity and idiocy of war. By the time he reached Bastogne, it seems, given a sensitivity of which even he was unaware, Technical Sergeant Butch de Strange was separated by miles of subtle and unexpected changes from the Corporal Buttolph de Strange who light-years before had crashed ashore at Omaha Beach.
How Bastogne must have looked to him as his tank pushed toward it, I don’t know. I was inside the town and saw it from that viewpoint. The sun had broken through on that day of deliverance. Earlier, C-47’s had flown over and dropped us the wherewithal — the food, ammo, and plasma — to hold out a while longer as we awaited arrival of Patton’s tanks.
The town was desolation itself and I remember wondering why the ragged remains of our division bothered hanging on to it at all. It was a scene of death, the townspeople and soldiers shuffling about, the dead seeking rest. The only thing that seemed alive was the noise; the empty popping sound of small-arms fire, the overhead swish of incoming artillery, the crash of shells tearing apart an already torn-apart town. If there was any place back in 1945 that could have affirmed an atheist in his belief that there was no guiding intelligence directing the world, that place had to be Bastogne.
Well, that was Bastogne as it looked to me, and I suppose something of the same impression was made upon De Strange. I didn’t meet Butch there. By the time he got to Bastogne I was, thankfully, trudging to the rear on frostbitten feet — my ticket Stateside — as the liberating tanks came roaring into and through the town and out toward the German perimeter.