The Hour of the Cat (36 page)

He opened one to a picture of a boy who looked about seven or eight. There was an index card stapled to the cover sheet with a notation written in a clear hand:
Maria Savati, age 10, Caucasian (Mediterranean), polio, spastic idiot. Luminal dose administered 21.2.34, 8:30 A.M.

After he put the file back and relocked the cabinets, he pulled the cord and turned off the light. He was about to step outside when he noticed an electric glow leaching through a razor-thin slit at the base of the far wall. He put his palm against the wall and patted it. There was no latch or keyhole. He kept his hand pressed to the wall and moved it to the right. The wall slid sideways, gliding noiselessly out of the way.

He entered a glistening, fully equipped operating room, shoes tapping loudly on the tiled floor. He toured the large, windowless space. The stainless steel cabinets were all locked. Two steel tables were in the middle of the floor. On one was a neatly arranged row of injection needles and a single syringe, a glass jar filled with cotton balls, a rubber tourniquet, and a bottle of clear alcohol. An immaculate white towel covered the other. He lifted it and exposed a precisely laid out row of surgical knives and instruments. Nearby was a steel basin and, above it, a shelf with a large jar filled with cloudy liquid. He drew closer to peer at its contents. Inside was a brain, pink with white and gray ridges. Typed on an index card beneath:
Thomas Packett, age 20, Negro, epileptic, low-grade moron. Luminal dose administered 9.7.38, 1:00 P.M.

He slid the panel door shut and was ready to step into the office when he heard the outer door open. He froze where he was. A voice said, “There's nobody in here,” and the door closed again. He waited several minutes before he ventured out. Once in the hallway, he turned left and ran down the servant's stairway into the kitchen and through the pantry. The door to Miss Loben's office was directly in front of him. He entered without knocking, sat in the same seat as before, picked up the file from her desk, and dashed off a nearly illegible signature with her pen.

Miss Loben burst into the room just as he finished. Louis and another attendant were directly behind her. She uttered a small yelp when she saw him in the chair. “My God, where were you?”

“Where Louis took me.” He handed her the file. “I've signed it.”

“You
weren't
there when I checked,” Louis said.

“I came down the back stairs.”

The other attendant spoke up. “I went up and down them and never saw nobody.”

“I made a wrong turn in the kitchen and got lost. I could've used your help.”

Miss Loben turned to Louis. “How many times must you be told to stay with the guests?”

“I did,” Louis protested.

“You weren't there when I came out,” Dunne said, “or I wouldn't have got lost.”

“I was gone a minute, but
just
a minute. I waited a while before I knocked to see if he was okay and that's when I discovered he wasn't in there any more.”

“If you wish a break, you must ensure your position is covered by a replacement. This is the last time I'm going to tell you, Louis! Do you understand?”

Miss Loben's cold, contained fury made Louis hang his head. “Yes, ma'am.”

“Good, then get out.” She stood behind her desk and produced a pack of cigarettes from her smock. “Doctor Sparks frowns on smoking in the building but the frustrations of this job sometimes makes that impossible. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Be my guest.”

She cranked open the casement window behind her desk and blew the smoke outside. He came around the desk and stood beside her.

“Sorry for all these mix-ups,” she said.

“It happens.”

“It's thankless work we're in, Mr. Waldruff. Even those who grasp the principles of racial hygiene are often either too weak or too scared to follow through.”

“Call me Woody,” he said. “That's my nickname.”

“Thank you, Woody.” Her smile revealed that the spot of red lipstick was gone from her teeth. “Please call me Irene.” She hugged herself and her shapely breasts protruded against her smock. “It can get very lonely living and working here.”

“It must take a lot of dedication.”

“What it takes most of all is the strength to do what must be done and to carry the struggle to its end. To do anything less is to surrender the future to the unfit.” The puff of cigarette smoke that she let out became a lone cloud in an otherwise empty sky. “But given the proportions of the challenge we face, how can we be anything less than brutally, even pitilessly, strong? The defective population grows and grows. Eugenic sterilization is at best a stop-gap. The great mass of defectives goes on reproducing, constantly multiplying their number and infecting the healthy. The kind of experiment we're carrying out here cannot be replicated widely. Political conditions make it impossible in the United States. But in other places, in a more eugenically advanced nation, conditions are becoming ripe.”

“Dr. Sparks is lucky to have you, Irene.”

“You're generous to say that.”

“It's only the truth.”

“We all need to hear the truth, even if only occasionally.” She took hold of his bicep. “So many of our visitors say all the right things but they're afraid. You can smell their fear. For all their rhetoric about the survival of our race, they have no capacity for action. They're moral and physical weaklings who've never tasted real struggle. But you have, Woody. I sense it. I hear it in your voice. You're hard. Come, let me show you the sanatorium. Perhaps you might like to stay to dinner.” Her gem-blue pupils were softened by a watery mist. “I'd love if you did. I really would.”

The sound of tires on the gravel driveway caught her attention. “If that's Dr. Sparks he's awfully early.” She let go of his arm, thrust her head out the window, and tossed her cigarette on the ground below.

Dunne quietly turned, went directly to the closet beneath the stairs, and retrieved his hat. He exited onto the porch. Louis was already outside, next to the car with Vermont license plates that had just arrived. The driver, a spectacled, mousy man in a gray-brown suit, got out and offered Louis his hand. “I'm Peyton Waldruff,” he said. “I have an appointment with Miss Irene Loben. Sorry to be so late.”

Louis looked at him but didn't take his hand. Dunne rushed down the stairs and shook it. “Welcome to the Hermes Sanatorium!” He patted Louis's brawny shoulder. “Louis here will show you inside. Miss Loben is eager to meet you.”

“I'm glad to be here at last,” Waldruff said as Dunne continued to pump his hand.

“Who
are
you?” Miss Loben was on the porch. She seemed slightly dazed, and it was unclear to whom the question was directed.

Waldruff removed his hat. His darting glances betrayed his confusion. “Is that Miss Loben?” he asked Dunne.

“Yes, I forget that you've never met.” Dunne bowed in her direction. “Allow me to introduce Miss Irene Loben.”

Looking up at Miss Loben, Waldruff's face brightened. “Ah, Miss Loben, Dr. Sparks has spoken very highly of you. I'm Peyton Waldruff. Sorry I'm late, but I got a little lost. The Bronx is a confusing place.”

“You're not the only one who thinks so,” Dunne said.

“Who
are
you?” Miss Loben repeated her question. This time there was no doubt it was directed to Dunne.

A trolley sounded its bell as it came over a small rise and clattered along the tracks toward Westchester Square.

“I'd love to continue our conversation, Irene, but there's my ride.” Dunne walked rapidly down the driveway. As he neared the open gate, he trotted onto Tremont Avenue and waved to the trolley driver, who slowed the car to a crawl. He swung himself aboard and the car picked up speed. He dropped a dime in the fare box. In the window behind the driver, Dunne saw Miss Loben alone on the top step of the porch stairs. She had her hand on her throat, as though choking back a scream.

Dunne exited the subway at 86th Street and went into Child's, where he nursed a cup of coffee. A warm, light drizzle fell on the throng of pedestrians flowing toward the Yorkville Casino. The crowded sidewalk had the same anticipatory air usually encountered outside Madison Square Garden, commencing in October with the Six-Day Bicycle Race, continuing through the Horse Show, college basketball, boxing, and the Rangers, and culminating the following May with the circus.

The crowds lined up behind the police barricades were rapidly thickening. A contingent of mounted police stood guard in front of the Casino. Alert to the noise and animation of the crowd, the horses snorted and stamped their hooves. Across the street, on the north side of 86th Street, an assortment of protesters was packed together. The largest contingent was gathered behind the banner of the Young Communist League, fists raised in the air, chanting “To hell with Hitler!” The mounted policemen pulled hard on their reins and stroked the necks of the horses, trying to calm them.

Dunne came out of Child's just as the music of the approaching band began to surge through the street. The protesters grew louder. A large Czechoslovakian flag was suddenly draped from the parapet of the building directly across from the Casino. The group next to the Young Communists, a loosely organized collection of children in Bohemian folk costumes, chanting students and older, grayer Czechs, let out a roar that momentarily drowned out the Communists. Pressed against the barricade, his face red and contorted from shouting, was the doorman from Sparks's building.

The honor guard and band of the German-American Bund turned the corner of Third Avenue onto 86th Street. Following the men carrying the Stars and Stripes and the swastika flag was a line of tall, stocky troopers in brown shirts and riding boots. Several more units of brown shirts and Nazi youth came past. There was no sign of Bill Huber. Dunne thought about trying to cross the street and ask Sparks's doorman if he'd seen Huber, but the size of the crowd and the barricades made that impossible.

He retreated to a brownstone stoop and stood in the doorway, out of the drizzle and high enough to see over the crowd. A good-looking kid about fifteen or sixteen with slicked-back hair and prominent cheekbones came up the stoop.

“Wanna buy a paper?” he asked.

“Got all the papers I need.”

“Bet you don't got a copy of
Social Justice
. Give you the
real
truth, the way Father Coughlin tells it.” He moved next to Dunne in the doorway, pulled a paper from the stack beneath his arm, and held it out. “Only three cents.”

“No thanks.”

“You a Jew?” The kid hooked his thumb on the belt of his black trousers, which were tucked into laced-up boots. His shirt, the color of tarnished silver, was embossed with an eagle holding a cross in its talons. His black tie bore the same emblem.

“None of your business what I am.”

The kid put his papers down on the doorstep and took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “Got a match?”

“Thought the Boy Scout motto was ‘Be Prepared.'”

“I ain't no Boy Scout.” The kid's front tooth was chipped and discolored. He was better looking with his mouth closed. “I belong to the Christian Front.”

Dunne tossed him a pack of matches. He hung a cigarette from his lower lip, lit it, and sucked in the smoke. He exhaled through his nose and kept his eyes half-closed. He had the tough guy's way of lighting a cigarette down pat, the standard movie routine.

Another line of American and Nazi flags came past. The kid stretched out his arm in a Fascist-style salute. A large number of people in the crowd did the same. A chorus of “Heil Hitler!” started up. For all the hubbub, it was a sterner, flintier gathering than found at sporting events. Burly men in groups of two or three prowled the edge of the crowd. Beneath their canvas rain slickers they wore quasi-uniforms, with brown and silver shirts. Sprinkled about were unescorted older women, thin and gray, in cheap dresses that had been laundered one too many times; they had faces to match, worn and washed-out. Clutching their handbags, eyes trained on the ground, they seemed desperate to make sure they didn't step on any toes.

A brawl erupted down the street, closer to the casino. Three brownshirts descended on a man who held up his middle finger as the honor guard went by. They knocked the demonstrator to the ground and began kicking him. The cops waded into the crowd, swinging their billies indiscriminately. The mounted police trotted over to reinforce them. The kid started toward the spreading melee but Dunne grabbed his arm.

“I'd stay where I was, I was you.”

The kid tried to twist his arm free. “Lemme go!” he shouted. Dunne tightened his hold. In the space of a few minutes, the cops chased away the brownshirts and brought the crowd under control. Dunne let go. The burned-down butt still hanging from his lower lip, the kid picked up his papers. “What are you, a friggin' cop?”