Up in Honey's Room (12 page)

“I read about Ford,” Jurgen said, “before the war and was quite surprised.”

“My point is, there are a variety of prejudices against Jews. Henry Ford was a pacifist while America was neutral,” Vera said. “He refused to build aircraft engines for England. Two years later he's producing an entire four-engine bomber, a Liberator, every hour of the working day. It's what they're doing at Willow Run, putting together more than one hundred thousand different parts to make a bomber. To make a Ford sedan took only fifteen thousand parts. That's the kind of information I store in my poor brain. The Willow Run plant is more than a half mile long. It's put together with twenty-five thousand tons of structural steel. Ninety thousand people have jobs in that one plant. At Chrysler, on the other side of Detroit, they make tanks by the thousands. Packard and Studebaker make engines for planes, and Hudson makes antiaircraft guns to shoot down the other side's planes. Nash does engines and propellers and General Motors makes some of
everything America needs to make war. They can produce three million steel helmets”—Vera snapped her fingers—“like that, at a cost of seven cents each.”

“Now we have to admit,” Jurgen said, “we didn't come close to judging them correctly, as an opponent.”

“Your Führer was too busy strutting before the world to notice,” Vera said. “Do you know what I've been doing, what my contacts used to ask for? They wanted the names and locations of companies that produced light metals. They believed if we could destroy all the aluminum plants in America they wouldn't be able to produce bombers. They wanted me to stop the Allies from bombing Germany. They're going crazy over it, bombs dropping on them twice a day. Abwehr Two are the saboteurs. They were told in directives, ‘For God's sake, cut the fucking source of power to the plants. Turn them dark, quick.'”

“Were any of them successful?”

“You would have read about it.”

“No major feats, like stealing the Norden bombsight?”

“That was 1938, the year Fadey and I got together. I tell them about a fast new welding process at Fisher Body. At the Chrysler arsenal they've reduced the finishing time on antiaircraft guns from four hundred hours to fifteen minutes. I ask if they want details and get no reply. They're down in their bomb shelter.”

“How do you send it?”

“I want to tell them to subscribe to
Time
magazine. Himmler was on the cover again in February, his third appearance since April twenty-fourth, 1939. Walter will frame it, hang it on the wall. Himmler will hate the piece but order a hundred copies…I give the information I send—say it's about the location of a new Alcoa plant—I give it to a man who comes by when I call a number. He goes off somewhere and transmits the message in code to
a German shipping company in Valparaíso, Chile, and from there it's sent to Hamburg.”

“How do you remember April twenty-fourth, 1939?”

“Vera has a fantastic memory,” Bohdan said, “but has to see the words or figures written.”

“If you tell me something I should remember,” Vera said, “I write it down so I have something to look at when I wish to call it to mind.”

No one spoke for several moments. In the silence Jurgen could hear, very faintly, Glenn Miller's “String of Pearls” on the radio in the kitchen. He said, “There's a federal agent, a marshal by the name of Carl Webster, who's after me.”

“Yes, I read that in Neal Rubin's column,” Vera said. “You're the one he's after?”

Jurgen said, “I thought Walter would have told you about him.”

“Walter lives in his own world.”

“If Carl knows about Walter, he knows about you.”

“You're on a first-name basis with this policeman?”

“We know each other.”

“And you think he'll come here looking for you. Would you care to give yourself up, the war nearing its end?”

“No, I wouldn't.”

“I don't blame you. But if your friend wants to search my house, what do we do with you?”

“I'll leave,” Jurgen said.

Vera took her time. She said, “Let me think about it.”

It was quiet again, a silence beginning to lengthen, as Bohdan said, “Well, now we're coming on to teatime.”

“We can let the vodka be our tea,” Vera said and looked at Jurgen. “Why don't you go up and rest. I put magazines in your room I know Walter wouldn't have, or even know they exist. Have
a nap, come down at six for cocktails and a supper Bo will prepare for us.” She turned to him. “What do you have in mind, or would you rather surprise us?”

Jurgen was watching Bo. For a moment Bo's expression said he was tired of this happy home life routine. But then he did come alive and seemed keen to answer Vera.

“I can't surprise you, Countess, the way you come in the kitchen sniffing. But let's see if I can stimulate Jurgen's appetite.”

 

“I hope I didn't sound like I was flirting,” Bo said, on the sofa now with Vera, her fingers feeling through his cap of Buster Brown hair, brushing his shoulder now with her hand.

“I think you have dandruff.”

“I set my mind to play a
goluboy
and everything I say sounds provocative.”

“You're very believable,” Vera said, remembering the afternoon Fadey came home hours early and almost caught them in the bedroom naked. He called her name from downstairs, “Vera?” By the time he came in the bedroom Bo had become a drag queen in one of Vera's frocks, hands on his hips, looking at himself in the mirror. Vera, now in a skirt and sweater, stepped out of the closet to see Fadey staring at Bo.

She said to Bo now, “Do you remember what I said?”

Bo grinned. You said, ‘He loves to wear women's clothes, but he's still the best fucking cook in Odessa.' I wanted to kiss you. And Fadey accepted it.”

“He didn't care one way or the other.”

“I don't know how you thought of that so quickly. You hear him downstairs and I'm a sexual deviant in the same moment.”

“You
know,
” Vera said, “there are times when you do sound girlish. But then you began putting it on—”

“It was fun.”

“Yes, until people notice you, maybe your shipmates. It doesn't take much. You hold your hand the wrong way looking at your nails.” She put her arm around him, drawing his slender body, his ribs she liked to feel, close to her. “The death squad comes by and someone on the dock points you out. ‘He's one.' You try to tell them you have a reason for acting the way you do, to prevent someone's husband from shooting you. And they pissed on you.” Vera began caressing him, touching his face, moving her hand over his hair. “My poor baby. I'm so sorry.”

“I could stop acting like a queen.”

“Not yet. You're my secret weapon.”

“I didn't think Jurgen would be a problem, but he is.”

“I'm not going to worry about it, if I have to give him up, I will. Walter, I don't know, he doesn't say much. But now he has something he wants to tell us. What he's planning to do for Hitler's birthday, the twentieth.”

“What is it?”

“He won't say. He'll tell us tomorrow night, here. He'll bring that loudmouth from Georgia if he flies up. I called Dr. Taylor, told him he'd better come. Keep up with what's going on.”

“I hope Joe Aubrey can't make it,” Bo said. “The weather has him socked in. No, he takes off. Fuck the weather, he's a ferocious, two-fisted little fellow and no storm is going to stop him. But it does, he crashes and burns to death. Wouldn't that be neat?”

“Except he's taking the train this time,” Vera said. “The one I've been thinking about is Dr. Taylor.”

“He doesn't say a word,” Bo said, “as his eyes silently move over us, missing nothing.”

“He doesn't speak very much at a meeting. But he could be talking to the Federal Bureau. I think if he has to,” Vera said, “the doctor will tell on us rather than go to prison. Or have his sentence reduced.”

“What would you like me to do about it?”

“I'll let you know tomorrow night, after I watch these people. See if I like any of them.”

“See who has money to give us,” Bo said. “We know the loudmouth could spare some. You could vamp him, give him one of your lines.”

“No, I couldn't. His cologne makes my eyes water.”

“Mine too. I thought it was Joe's breath. Get him to write you a check for German Relief, the starving people of Berlin, made out to cash.” Bo squirmed against Vera to lay his cheek on her breast. “Tell me when you're out of money, I'll go stand on the corner.”

“Don't say that. Please.”

“Six Mile and Woodward Avenue, partway up the first block. Catch some trade going home to the suburbs, where the people with money live.”

Vera took Bo's jaw in her hand and turned his face to look at her and see the judgment in her eyes.

“Never, ever, tell me what you could be doing when you're not with me. I don't want to hear it. You understand? Not even kidding, or I'll cut you loose.” She kept looking at him, their faces close, and kissed his mouth, Vera gentle now, her voice soft saying, “You understand? You're my love. I want to feel you belong to me, no one else. Be nice to me,” Vera said, “I'll make you happy. I'll let you wear my black sequined dress tomorrow night.”

Bo twisted around to sit up.

“You mean when your spy ring's here?”

“It's up to you,” Vera said.

“The black with sequins?”

C
arl phoned Louly every week at Cherry Point, North Carolina, the marine air base, so he wouldn't have to write letters. He'd listen to her get on a subject like marching, how marines loved to march and had their own snappy way of calling cadence, more like sounds than words, not making any sense. She said, “Why is marching so important? In boot you march everywhere you go. Even now, visitors come up from Washington, congressmen, we're out on the parade passing in review, doing right and left obliques, to the rear march, showing the visitors, goddamn it, we're marines.

Louly sounding like a dedicated jarhead.

“We even marched a lot,” Carl said, meaning the Seabees. “You're in the service, it doesn't matter which one, they march your ass off. I think it's to get you doing what you're told on the beat. You're in combat, you get ordered to move, you don't stop and think, you move.”

So his wife would think he was as Semper Fi as she was.

Toward the end of the conversation Louly would say, “You staying out of trouble?”

Carl would say, “I don't have time to get in trouble. How about you?”

“We stay in the barracks we play hearts or read. We go out, we have a few beers and listen to gyrines try their dopey lines on us. The officers who've been in combat think they're hot stuff and act real bored. I tell them my husband's shot more people who wanted to kill him than any of you, without even leaving Oklahoma.”

“What about the two Nips I got? On an island supposed to be secured?”

That time Louly said, “Don't worry, I tell them about your scoring a couple of Nips.”

He'd feel good after talking to Louly. Her enlistment was up in the summer and he'd tell her he couldn't wait to have his sweetie home. He'd start looking for an apartment in Tulsa.

This time, talking to him in Detroit, Louly said, “You staying out of trouble?”

He said what he always did about not having time, but with pictures of Honey Deal flashing in his mind, Honey wearing her black beret, in the car and at dinner, Honey's eyes on him as she sipped her dry martini, straight up.

Louly said over the phone, “I love you, Carl,” and he said, “I love you too, sweetie,” remembering not to call her honey.

There were two anchovy olives in Honey's martini.

She said, “I take one of the olives in my mouth, like this, crush it between my teeth and sip the ice-cold martini, the silver bullet. Mmmmmm.”

He said, “They get you feeling good in a hurry.”

“Yes, they do.”

“If you aren't careful.”

She said, “Even if you are.”

Her eyes smiling at him.

He dropped Honey off at her apartment after they had supper. She thanked him. Hoped she'd see him again sometime. She didn't ask if he wanted to come up.

See?

She was fun to be with, that's all. She flirted a little bit with her eyes, certain things she said, but that didn't mean he'd ever go all the way with her. He had a good-looking wife who'd shot two men in her time and taught twelve hundred gunnies to love their .30-caliber Browning. Louly was all the girl he had ever wanted, and had sworn at the time to remain faithful to her. He had no intention of ever committing adultery with Honey. If that's what she was game for and it looked like it might happen, Honey being what you'd call a free spirit, with bedroom eyes and that lower lip waiting there for him to bite, the girl acting like there was nothing wrong with free love.

Carl told himself there was no possibility of his ever going too far. Even if he'd be seeing more of her now. Pretty much every day, now that he'd lost his guide to Detroit, Kevin Dean reassigned to bars blowing up.

He phoned Honey from the FBI office where he'd spent most of the day. She sounded busy but calm answering questions thrown at her by salesgirls, sounding like she was in charge over at Hudson's Better Dresses; so all he said was his plans had changed and he would like to talk to her about what they'd be doing. He could give her a ride home after work, save her taking the streetcar.

Honey said, “Carl, you're my hero.”

He said, “Shit,” once he'd hung up.

At the hotel cigar counter he picked up a copy of the
Detroit News
and went through the paper until he found Neal Rubin's
column. Carl saw the heading and said “Jesus Christ” out loud and then read about himself.

Neal Rubin filled the rest of his column with Esther Williams, telling what it was like to have lunch with Esther at the London Chop House. He called it “The next best thing to going swimming with her.”

 

Honey got in the Pontiac saying, “Did you see Neal Rubin's piece? I think he's great, his style is so…conversational. He doesn't act
like he knows everything, the way most of those guys sound, with their inside stuff. You notice you were the lead item? You up-staged Esther Williams.”

“I saw it,” Carl said.

“Does it blow your cover?”

“I never had any to begin with.”

“I could tell it was you in the picture.”

“How? The guy shot me from behind.”

“The way you wear your hat,” Honey said, and sang the next lines to him in a low voice. “‘No, no, they can't take that away from me.' What's the new thing you'll be doing?”

“It's Kevin. They put him on an investigation that came up.” Driving out Woodward in traffic, he told her about it.

“If a bar owner doesn't want to do business with these guys that supply jukeboxes, mob guys, they try to intimidate the owner, blow up his bar. They aren't experts at handling dynamite, they leave clues. The mob also tries to sell the bar Canadian whiskey they've heisted, no tax stamps on the bottles in violation of federal law. The FBI gets on it and that's what Kevin's doing, poking around in bars that were blown up and smell awful.”

Honey said, “Are we going to have dinner?”

“Yeah, if you want.”

“Let's have a drink and talk first, at my place.”