Star Chamber Brotherhood (11 page)

The drive to Concord took less than half an hour. Werner pulled the van into the driveway at 50 Middle Street, and parked with the van’s cargo doors as close as possible to Nancy Widmer’s back door.

Entering the laundry room through the mudroom, he saw stacks of open and sealed boxes marked “Donate,” “Discard,” or “Keep” piled against the walls.

Nancy heard him enter and greeted him in blue denims and an old ski sweater. After a suggestion or two about how to maneuver between the cellar and the back door with his hand truck, she pointed out that the family who bought the house from her would be moving in on Monday from their farm near Fitchburg. What with gas rationing, unreliable rail service, and the father’s new job in downtown Boston, the Kiernan family could no longer function so far away from the city and needed a place within walking distance of the rail line, shopping, and schools.

But since the couple could not afford to pay cash for the house and no mortgage financing was available, Nancy had decided, against her attorney’s advice and over her daughter’s objections, to hold the Kiernan’s mortgage, taking the credit risk upon herself.

“I never would have considered it if I hadn’t met their children,” she declared. “The Kiernans have six, you know. Two of their own and four nieces and nephews. And they’re all beautiful. I decided I simply had to do whatever I could to help.”

“Wow, six is impressive,” Werner remarked politely. “My hat goes off to the parents. Back when our girls were at the Academy, I recall that the average number of children per family in Concord was less than 1.5. Maybe the pendulum is finally swinging the other way.”

“Oh, no, it’s not that couples are having more children. Heavens, no. What has happened is that more families have chosen to take in children from their extended families or churches or local communities. Without foster care or the welfare bureaucracy to fall back on, good people have finally stopped looking the other way.”

Werner nodded respectfully. He thought of the children of the prisoners he had known at Kamas and Mactung and pondered how many of them would ever be so fortunate as to live with a family like the Kiernans in the house at 50 Middle Street in Concord.

Nancy opened the cellar door for Werner, switched on the light in the stairwell and excused herself to brew some tea. With that, Werner began carrying the cases of liquor out of the cellar and into the van. In little more than an hour the van was loaded. When he returned from the van to tidy up the cellar, he found a rolled up rug leaning against the cellar door, each end tied with twine. Next to it was what appeared to be a case of Gordon’s Gin.
 

Werner carried both downstairs, then untied the twine at each end of the rug and unrolled it. Inside was a fleece-lined leather rifle case. His face flushed with excitement and his fingers trembled as he unzipped it and removed an engraved Browning Mark II Safari semi-automatic hunting rifle with attached scope. He worked the action to verify that it was unloaded, aimed across the room, and squeezed the trigger. It was a beautiful rifle, in mint condition, with a solid feel to it and the smell of gun oil. blued steel and polished walnut. He returned it to its case, rolled it up in the rug and retied the ends with twine.

Next Werner opened the case of Gordon’s with a box cutter. Inside was a second cardboard carton containing four boxes of Remington .308 ammunition, two boxes of .45-caliber pistol ammunition, a gun-cleaning kit, a leather rifle sling and a military-issue Colt Model 1911 self-loading pistol zippered inside a fleece-lined soft case. Werner removed the pistol, ejected the magazine, jacked back the slide to ensure that no round was in the chamber and then felt the thud as he released the slide. With a smile of satisfaction, he took aim at an empty wine bottle across the room and heard the hammer click on an empty chamber.
 

Today’s bounty was no coincidence, he thought, as he repacked the cardboard cartons. In the camps it was axiomatic that coincidences did not exist. Every prisoner learned that, when the margin of survival is razor-thin, even the most insignificant event carries a meaning. Werner pondered the meaning of someone as unlikely as Nancy Widmer offering him unregistered weapons and ammunition seemingly out of the blue. Then he carried the rug and the Gordon’s box quietly back to the van.

 
Upon his return, he found Nancy in the kitchen, where she was waiting with a pitcher of freshly brewed iced tea. He sat at the table while she poured out two glasses. But before drinking he took an envelope from his shirt pocket and placed it on the table.

“I rounded up to the nearest hundred,” he announced. “Will the new total be all right?”

Nancy grasped his free hand in hers and thanked him.

“And now I have something for you,” she added eagerly. “A bit of news,” she added.

Werner waited for more.

“I received a visit last night from Monica Cogan. She told me you had called on her last week. She also said she was rude to you and wanted to apologize. But you should not call upon her again. You see, she is in a difficult position at the Concord Center.”

Werner nodded while hoping at the same time that this was not the entire message.
 

“Anyway, after you left, Monica felt bad about not having helped you get in contact with your daughter. So she got in touch with a few students she thought might have heard from her. One of them said that your daughter Marie has been studying at some college or university in England, but she didn’t know where and couldn’t remember where she had heard it.”

Werner felt his heart pound at the unexpected news.

“You’re sure they were talking about my Marie and not confusing her with someone else?”
 

Nancy shrugged but with such sympathy that Werner felt it would be ungracious to press for details where none were available.
 

“Monica promised me that she would let me know if more turned up, but not to expect much.”

Werner thanked Nancy for the news and for her delicious tea. Within a week she would be living with her daughter in Northampton and out of touch with Monica Cogan. It seemed unlikely that there would be any more news of Marie through this channel, at least for some weeks. But news it had been, even if fragmentary and unconfirmed. And coming as the first news he had received of Marie since his return to Boston, it made his heart sing.
 

****

Greg Doherty was waiting on the loading dock when Frank Werner backed up the delivery van to unload on his return from Concord. Doherty was the day shift supervisor at his uncle’s bonded warehouse off Boylston Street in Newton. He greeted Frank warmly, took a quick look at the two wooden pallets in the delivery van, and then walked Frank over to the chain-link cage where Werner’s other goods were stored before leaving to fetch a pallet jack.
 

Werner was both pleased and relieved that Doherty showed no signs of having downed a few beers with lunch. At forty, Doherty still looked extremely fit, as might be expected of a stellar high school hockey player who spent nearly twenty years in the Second Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of Master Sergeant. He served in Afghanistan, Civil War II, the Canadian and Mexican incursions, and the Manchurian War.
 

Doherty was tall, lean and sinewy, with a severe hawk-like profile inherited from his mother’s French-Canadian ancestors. He wore his graying hair in a buzz cut as he had since joining the Army just out of high school. But inside that warrior’s body, Werner had come to know, was a simple, honest, forthright character motivated in large part by a desire to please.

Werner had met Doherty in late 2027, only a few weeks after returning to Boston from Utah, at a bar in Newton frequented by military veterans. Many of the vets had fought in the Manchurian War and had either been taken prisoner by the Chinese, or had been held by their own government in so-called repatriation camps in Alaska and the Yukon.
 

When Werner met him, Doherty had been working at the warehouse for five years, ever since his discharge from the U.S. Army and release from the P.O.W. reindoctrination center at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Doherty had been a career soldier when he had shipped off to Vladivostok to help the Russians repel the Chinese invaders. He fled the Chukhotka Peninsula in the Second Infantry Division’s final evacuation from Russia in 2020, having experienced almost continuous combat for the better part of a year.

Doherty and his fellow soldiers were shocked and bewildered when military police arrested them on arrival in Anchorage and transported them to a military prison camp in the Yukon as a precaution against mutiny. Later, those who were deemed politically unreliable were transferred to a civilian labor camp operated by the Corrective Labor Administration of the Department of State Security—without a hearing, trial or right of appeal.

Doherty spent nearly a year at a camp called C227, because it was located at Milepost 227 on the Canol Road (short for Canadian Oil), built during World War II to transport oil from the Northwest Territories to the Yukon. This, in fact, was the same N312 camp where Werner had labored briefly in 2024, before his transfer to the Mactung tungsten mine. When Werner confided this to Doherty while walking home after a night of barhopping in Newton, the hardened combat veteran collapsed onto a park bench in tears. After that, the two men shared a special bond that they knew few others in their lives could ever understand.

While being held at N312 as a political prisoner and facing an early death from cold and malnutrition, Doherty was suddenly transferred to Ft. Leavenworth for reindoctrination, pending release in the military amnesty of 2021. As a condition of his release, he signed an agreement denying him an honorable discharge and any rights to a military pension, and prohibiting him from any public disclosure about his time in Russia, Alaska, or the Yukon.
 

When Werner had decided to enter the bootlegging business, he had called on Doherty to store his inventory. He was pleased to learn that Doherty and his uncle were already experts at dealing with black- and gray-market goods and knew exactly how to support his special business needs with the proper measure of discretion. But Werner could see that relations between Doherty and his uncle were cool at best, and that Doherty was often morose, drinking heavily several nights per week and nearly losing his job once after a three-day bender. Though Doherty was able to control his drinking when he attended his AA meetings, lately his attendance had been less than perfect.

“Need any help with unloading?” Doherty asked when he returned with the pallet jack.

“Nah, it’s just two pallets,” Werner replied. “I can handle it.”

“No, really, Frank,” Doherty persisted. “I don’t have anything else going on and I could use every extra hour of pay I can get.”

“All right, you’re on. If you can help me get these boxes sorted and stacked, why don’t you come grab a cup of coffee with me afterward and bill the time to me?”

Doherty gave Werner an obliging smile and slipped the pallet jack under the nearest pallet. As the work did not take long, he enlisted Doherty to help him recount the inventory, though it was only mid-month.

When they had worked for an hour, Doherty notified the office manager that he needed to help a customer and joined Werner in the delivery van. They drove two blocks to a deli where the checkout girl was young and pretty, and the coffee was always fresh. After Werner paid for the coffee, they took it out to the curb and drank it in the parked van.

“How’s your gal Moira been doing?” Werner asked, breaking the silence.

“Not so hot,” Doherty replied. “She went in for another checkup on Monday but the doctors still don’t know what’s wrong with her. So now she’s on the waiting list to get approved for more testing. But in the meantime they won’t give her any drugs for the pain so she can go back to work. So she’s still at home. I offered to move in with her to help with the boys but she won’t hear of it. To be honest, I don’t think she trusts me to stay sober around her boys. Can’t really blame her for that, I suppose.”

“What about your sister,” Werner inquired. “Don’t you have one who works in Longwood at one of the big teaching hospitals? Couldn’t she help?

“No, Sharon moved to Georgia to live with her husband’s family. She says it’s healthier for the kids down there and her husband found a good job at the Air Force base. So it’s just me and Moira and her kids. And Uncle Ed, of course, but I don’t think he’d miss me much if I were gone. You know, in all the time I was overseas, I never thought for a minute my life would come down to this. If I had, I don’t know if I’d have made it.”

“Don’t talk that way, Greg. It may be tough, but at its worst moment it’ll never be half as bad as the best day in N312.”

“What you say may be true, Frank, but that place still took a huge piece out of me,” Doherty confessed. “If you want the honest truth, I don’t think I’ve been good for much of anything from the day I left the Yukon.”

“There you go, exaggerating again,” Werner broke in. “You’ve had your ups and downs, but you’ll get back on your feet soon enough.”

“No, really, Frank. I mean it,” Doherty continued. “It’s like my Dad’s voice coming back at me from the dead. There he is, drunk as a skunk, screaming at me that I’ll never do anything or amount to anything as long as I live. Until I got off that plane from Russia, I knew he was wrong. I had been more places and accomplished more than he could have ever imagined.