LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      Swan was a splendid commissioner. Within three days after taking office, he had John Sullivan Reek and seven assistant district commissioners arrested, tried, and imprisoned, all within twenty-four hours, and an eighty-year-old woman, mother of a New Underground agent but not otherwise accused of wickedness, penned in a concentration camp for the more desperate traitors. It was in a disused quarry which was always a foot deep in water. After he had sentenced her, Swan was said to have bowed to her most courteously.

      The New Underground sent out warning, from headquarters in Montreal, for a general tightening up of precautions against being caught distributing propaganda. Agents were disappearing rather alarmingly.

      Buck scoffed, but Doremus was nervous. He noticed that the same strange man, ostensibly a drummer, a large man with unpleasant eyes, had twice got into conversation with him in the Hotel Wessex lobby, and too obviously hinted that he was anti-Corpo and would love to have Doremus say something nasty about the Chief and the M.M.'s.

      Doremus became cautious about going out to Buck's. He parked his car in half-a-dozen different wood-roads and crept afoot to the secret basement.

      On the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, 1938, he had a notion that he was being followed, so closely did a car with red-tinted headlights, anxiously watched in his rear-view mirror, stick behind him as he took the Keezmet highway down to Buck's. He turned up a side road, down another. The spy car followed. He stopped, in a driveway on the left-hand side of the road, and angrily stepped out, in time to see the other car pass, with a man who looked like Shad Ledue driving. He swung round then and, without concealment, bolted for Buck's.

      In the basement, Buck was contentedly tying up bundles of the Vigilance, while Father Perefixe, in his shirtsleeves, vest open and black dickey swinging beneath his reversed collar, sat at a plain pine table, writing a warning to New England Catholics that though the Corpos had, unlike the Nazis in Germany, been shrewd enough to flatter prelates, they had lowered the wages of French-Canadian Catholic mill hands and imprisoned their leaders just as severely as in the case of the avowedly wicked Protestants.

      Perefixe smiled up at Doremus, stretched, lighted a pipe, and chuckled, "As a great ecclesiast, Doremus, is it your opinion that I shall be committing a venial or a mortal sin by publishing this little masterpiece—the work of my favorite author—without the Bishop's imprimatur?"

      "Stephen! Buck! I think they're on to us! Maybe we've got to fold up already and get the press and type out of here!" He told of being shadowed. He telephoned to Julian, at M.M. headquarters, and (since there were too many French-Canadian inspectors about for him to dare to use his brand of French) he telephoned in the fine new German he had been learning by translation:

      "Denks du ihr Freunds dere haben a Idee die letzt Tag von vot ve mach here?"

      And the college-bred Julian had so much international culture as to be able to answer: "Ja, Ich mein ihr vos sachen morning free. Look owid!"

      How could they move? Where?

      Dan Wilgus arrived, in panic, an hour after.

      "Say! They're watching us!" Doremus, Buck, and the priest gathered round the black viking of a man. "Just now when I came in I thought I heard something in the bushes, here in the yard, near the house, and before I thought, I flashed my torch on him, and by golly if it wasn't Aras Dilley, and not in uniform—and you know how Aras loves his God—excuse me, Father—how he loves his uniform. He was disguised! Sure! In overalls! Looked like a jackass that's gone under a clothes-line! Well, he'd been rubbering at the house. Course these curtains are drawn, but I don't know what he saw and—"

      The three large men looked to Doremus for orders.

      "We got to get all this stuff out of here! Quick! Take it and hide it in Truman Webb's attic. Stephen: get John Pollikop and Mungo Kitterick and Pete Vutong on the phone—get 'em here, quick—tell John to stop by and tell Julian to come as soon as he can. Dan: start dismantling the press. Buck: bundle up all the literature." As he spoke, Doremus was wrapping type in scraps of newspaper. And at three next morning, before light, Pollikop was driving toward Truman Webb's farmhouse the entire equipment of the New Underground printing establishment, in Buck's old farm truck, from which blatted, for the benefit of all ears that might be concerned, two frightened calves.

      Next day Julian ventured to invite his superior officers, Shad Ledue and Emil Staubmeyer, to a poker session at Buck's. They came, with alacrity. They found Buck, Doremus, Mungo Kitterick, and Doc Itchitt—the last an entirely innocent participant in certain deceptions.

      They played in Buck's parlor. But during the evening Buck announced that anyone wanting beer instead of whisky would find it in a tub of ice in the basement, and that anyone wishing to wash his hands would find two bathrooms upstairs.

      Shad hastily went for beer. Doc Itchitt even more hastily went to wash his hands. Both of them were gone much longer than one would have expected.

      When the party broke up and Buck and Doremus were alone, Buck shrieked with bucolic mirth: "I could scarcely keep a straight face when I heard good old Shad opening the cupboards and taking a fine long look-see for pamphlets down in the basement. Well, Cap'n Jessup, that about ends their suspicion of this place as a den of traitors, I guess! God, but isn't Shad dumb!"

      This was at perhaps 3 A.M. on the morning of June thirtieth.

      Doremus stayed home, writing sedition, all the afternoon and evening of the thirtieth, hiding the sheets under pages of newspaper in the Franklin stove in his study, so that he could touch them off with a match in case of a raid—a trick he had learned from Karl Billinger's anti-Nazi Fatherland.

      This new opus was devoted to murders ordered by Commissioner Effingham Swan.

      On the first and second of July, when he sauntered uptown, he was rather noticeably encountered by the same weighty drummer who had picked him up in the Hotel Wessex lobby before, and who now insisted on their having a drink together. Doremus escaped, and was conscious that he was being followed by an unknown young man, flamboyant in an apricot-colored polo shirt and gray bags, whom he recognized as having worn M.M. uniform at a parade in June. On July third, rather panicky, Doremus drove to Truman Webb's, taking an hour of zigzagging to do it, and warned Truman not to permit any more printing till he should have a release.

      When Doremus went home, Sissy lightly informed him that Shad had insisted she go out to an M.M. picnic with him on the next afternoon, the Fourth, and that, information or no, she had refused. She was afraid of him, surrounded by his ready playmates.

      That night of the third, Doremus slept only in sick spasms. He was reasonlessly convinced that he would be arrested before dawn. The night was overcast and electric and uneasy. The crickets sounded as though they were piping under compulsion, in a rhythm of terror. He lay throbbing to their sound. He wanted to flee—but how and where, and how could he leave his threatened family? For the first time in years he wished that he were sleeping beside the unperturbable Emma, beside her small earthy hillock of body. He laughed at himself. What could Emma do to protect him against Minute Men? Just scream! And what then? But he, who always slept with his door shut, to protect his sacred aloneness, popped out of bed to open the door, that he might have the comfort of hearing her breathe, and the fiercer Mary stir in slumber, and Sissy's occasional young whimper.

      He was awakened before dawn by early firecrackers. He heard the tramping of feet. He lay taut. Then he awoke again, at seven-thirty, and was slightly angry that nothing happened.

      The M.M.'s brought out their burnished helmets and all the rideable horses in the neighborhood—some of them known as most superior plow-horses—for the great celebration of the New Freedom on the morning of Fourth of July. There was no post of the American Legion in the jaunty parade. That organization had been completely suppressed, and a number of American Legion leaders had been shot. Others had tactfully taken posts in the M.M. itself.

      The troops, in hollow square, with the ordinary citizenry humbly jammed in behind them and the Jessup family rather hoity-toity on the outskirts, were addressed by Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, a fine ruddy old rooster who could say "Cock-a-doodle-do" with more profundity

Скачать книгу