It wasn’t easy. His heart began to pound abnormally fast. But gradually it subsided; his nerves steadied. He was actually dozing when at last he heard the door open. He didn’t open his eyes until he sensed that the doctor was standing beside the bed.
“Asleep?”
Burgess opened his eyes and stared up at the doctor in what he hoped was a listless manner.
“Dozing, I guess.”
The doctor pulled up a chair and sat down.
“Care to talk any more? Questions you want answered?”
Burgess shrugged imperceptibly. “You know, Doctor, the first reaction I had when you explained my predicament to me yesterday was one of regret.”
“Regret?”
“Regret because I hadn’t been allowed to participate in the invasion. I suppose you could hate me for that. A lot of Germans must have died.”
“That’s all behind us. Germany and America are now friends.”
“It isn’t that far behind me. You can understand that?”
“Of course.”
“It’s a date that is indelibly imprinted on my mind.” Burgess stared into space, his expression reminiscent. “The Fourth of July.” He smiled crookedly.
“The Fourth of July?”
“Independence Day. That’s a holiday in the States. The day we declared our independence from England.”
“I see.”
“No American ever forgets the Fourth. That’s why we thought it fitting.”
“I recall now that that was the date.”
Burgess closed his eyes again and murmured as though he were speaking to no one in particular. He opened his eyes, his expression apologetic, but the doctor’s face had changed. A certain cold and shrewd cunning had come into his eyes. There was an air of excitement about him. He stood up abruptly, only now there was a military bearing about his every move. He stood stiffly erect.
“Herr Colonel, I thank you. You have provided the information we have been wanting.” A wry smile touched his lips. “You will probably be happy to know, Colonel, that you fell easy prey to a rather cleverly concealed hoax. Other ‘methods’ of obtaining information from you American flyers having failed, we decided upon a new approach. It seems to have worked.”
Burgess stared at him, contriving to make his expression one of blank astonishment and bewilderment. He wet his lips.
“You mean—”
“I mean, Herr Colonel, that it is still May, nineteen hundred and forty-four and that you are a stupid pig.”
The doctor clicked his heels together, bowed stiffly, did an about face and went out of the room.
The moment the door closed Burgess scrambled out of bed, moved swiftly across the room and put his ear against the panel. He could hear the doctor’s footsteps retreating down the hall. Abruptly they came to a halt. There was the sound of a knock, a door opening, and then a guttural voice asked: “The American has talked?”
“Ja,” came Schroeder’s reply.
There was the sound of footsteps, and the door closing. Burgess could hear no more. He returned to the bed and sat on its edge. He felt more alive than he had ever felt in his life. There was a glow inside of him, a sense of complete satisfaction and elation.
He lay down and stared up at the ceiling. He knew that would not be the end of the questioning. They’d be back. They’d probably question him around the clock. There would be no pretense now. They’d employ the “methods” they had tried on others.
He wondered if the rumors he’d heard about the June 6th landing on the Normandy beaches were accurate. He hoped so. If they were, the invasion was less than two weeks away. He wondered if he could hold out that long. He thought he could.
Out of order
by Carl Henry Rathjen
Long have we been subjected to the archetypical image of the “dumb cop.” Unlike the mass of mythologically based truisms, it is surprisingly difficult to substantiate these claims, my though we may.
The kid got it in the back at seven-thirty that evening.
He’d answered the service station’s inside phone, listened, then covered the mouthpiece and said to Jim Daly, “Duck! It’s The Sniper. I’m going to call his bluff.”
“Don’t,” Jim had warned, feeling exposed with glass on four sides of the office.
But the kid ran out to call the police from the phone booth near the driveway. A customer, driving in, made him swerve, slipping on a glob of grease. So there was no telling whether the slug got him before or after he began twisting down. No telling from which direction it cause. And no sound of a shot either.
Jim Daly, with hair as black as the grease on big knuckles he kept rubbing into a palm, told all that to Whitehead, the squat, blond detective who came in the second police car while the ambulance guys were covering the kid with a canvas.
“So that’s an out for you, I suppose,” Daly added.
This was the seventh such robbery of a service station. Somebody phoned and said, “You’re covered with a gun, every move. Put a clip or rubber band on the bills from the till. Drop them over the wall behind the air hose, then go on with your work. Don’t get nosey or call the police. You’ll be covered every moment.” Seven of them, and the police, as usual, said they were working on it. Now the kid was dead. The first killing.
Whitehead’s square face got a little white, then he spoke quietly. “Seeing anybody killed is hard to take, but was he something special to you?”
Jim Daly looked toward the canvas, a hub for a ring of morbid stares being held out of the station by uniformed police.
“He tried to hold me up once,” said Daly. “I talked him out of it and gave him a job.”
Whitehead stared. “Instead of calling us.”
“All he needed was a break,” snapped Daly.
“That’s all we need too,” Whitehead murmured. His partner, a thin man with razor-sharp gaze, said nothing.
“In other words,” Daly charged, “you haven’t done a damn thing. Now a good kid’s dead, murdered. He never had a chance.”
Whitehead seemed to sort words before he spoke. “You’d know better than I would how many service stations there are in the metropolitan area. Close to a couple thousand, isn’t it?”
“All right,” said Daly. “You can’t stake out every one of them. But you guys are supposed to know how to run down these killers.”
“It takes time,” Whitehead began.
“I can’t get away with that in my business,” Daly declared. “I’m expected to trouble-shoot a customer’s car in five minutes.”
Whitehead nodded, staring around at apartments across the avenue, store windows facing the sidestreet with a slice of night sky showing in the alley.
“And the customer,” he said with a slight smile, “expects it because he thinks it’s easy, doesn’t know the problems of your job. That works two ways, Daly. If you were a policeman, you’d know.”
“I tried to know once.” Daly pressed his lips.
Whitehead faced him curiously. “Why’d they turn you down?”
Daly answered defiantly, staring at a fist making his thumbnail white as the blood squeezed back. “I did time once when I was a kid.”
Whitehead studied him. “That’s why you gave this one a break.”
Daly nodded. “That’s why I’m sore, damn sore. A guy sees he’s made a mistake and more than makes up for it. Then someone louses it up for him, and you hand me the usual hogwash alibi. Save it for somebody else. I’ll find who got him.”
“Take it easy,” Whitehead began.
“That’s the trouble. I have, waiting for you to do something.”
Daly pulled off his coveralls.
But he was still in the station at midnight, though not open for business, when Whitehead drove in with his partner.