The Brass Chills Read online

  “I wanted to see her tonight,” I said.

  “You’ve got the rest of your life to feel good in,” he said.

  “The way things are going around here,” I said, “the rest of my life may not be long enough. Do you think Bradley has anything to go on at all?”

  “He says not. But don’t sell him short” Then Bill stretched and yawned. “You’ve been sleeping all day, but I’m bushed. The hay for me.”

  There wasn’t anything else to do so I went in and stretched out on my bunk in the dark. I lay there, thinking about Jess. Tomorrow we’d get things straightened. Tomorrow I’d tell her what I tried to tell her all the way out on the boat. Tomorrow …

  I don’t know how long I’d been day dreaming when I heard someone running up the path outside our shack. There was a sharp hammering at the door. I heard Bill stumble out of his bunk and then the light came on.

  O’Rourk came in as we opened the door. He seemed relieved to see us both there. “There’s hell to pay,” he said, “Someone’s sending a short-wave message from somewhere on this rock pile. Code message to the enemy. You’re ordered to report to the mess hall at once. And don’t break your necks going along that path in the dark.”

  PART FIVE

  I

  WE got into clothes faster than I’d ever done it before. I heard Bill swearing over a broken shoelace. When I joined him, his pale blue eyes were cold with anger.

  “I’ve been waiting for this,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for the son of a bitch to contact the enemy. That’s all we need to make a madhouse out of this place.”

  “How could he get a short-wave radio set on the Island?”

  “How should I know? In a hollow tooth, maybe. God knows every place else has been searched.”

  We blew out our kerosene lamp and went stumbling down the path toward the mess hall. O’Rourk hadn’t been kidding when he warned us about the footing. Bill fell once, and a moment later we collided and nearly went down in a heap together. We finally reached the mess hall, where we were challenged by an armed marine. The canvas draping was pulled aside and we were ushered in.

  Cleave was there. The man looked about as close to a walking corpse as anyone I’d ever seen. His face was the color of wood ashes, and his eyes burned in sunken holes. With him were Wasdell and a warrant officer from the Seahorse named Carver. Carver was the sub’s radio operator. He had a portable short-wave receiving set on the table in front of him, and out of it came the most incongruous sound I’ve ever heard. It was a rebroadcast of a Fred Allen show.

  “Today,” came Allen’s nasal twang, “we are making a house-to-house canvass in connection with the preservation of wild life week.”

  “Listen,” Carver said. “You can hear it.”

  What I had taken for static was suddenly louder as Carver twisted dials. It was clearly some sort of dot-dash code. I didn’t know Morse, but I could tell from the expressions on the faces of Cleave, Wasdell, and Carver that this wasn’t something they knew either.

  “It’s somewhere within the area of this encampment, sir. I’d swear to that,” Carver said.

  “… and now, Mr. Wilberforce Humperdink, what are you doing to further the preservation of wild life week?” Allen’s voice was as clear as it used to be in my house in Hollywood.

  “I bought two cases of sparkling burgundy.”

  “So that’s your method of preserving wild life, Mr. Humperdink?”

  “You said it. But if they don’t do something about Mayor LaGuardia closin’ the burlesque houses and shuttin’ down on the bookies, there won’t be no wild life to preserve!”

  Dots and dashes, steady, rhythmic. They were complete Greek to me, and yet as I listened I could feel needles along my spine. Somebody was talking to the enemy. There was only one thing to tell them. That we were here; with only a handful of marines to protect us.

  Then, even as we listened, it stopped, and the Allen program went on unmolested.

  Wasdell took a handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped his face. “If the Japs have got something afloat out there with real fire power, we’re done,” he said. And then, quite typically, he ignored what he’d said. “There’s a stock of automatic rifles here and a dozen or more machine guns. We can give ’em quite a lot of hell if they try landing men.”

  The leadermen began arriving in various stages of undress. They all looked half asleep and bewildered. Ed Winthrop, busily polishing his glasses, seemed the calmest of the lot.

  “There are over three hundred of us, sir,” he said. “Every one of ’em will be ready to fight if you can supply ’em with any sort of weapons.”

  “Thanks, Winthrop,” Cleave said. “I’m sure we can count on your crews.”

  “Can we expect any help from outside, sir Navy, or planes?”

  Cleave shook his head.

  “If the attack doesn’t come for another forty-eight hours,” Wasdell said, “the Seahorse can be got back in the water. Even without her port tubes she’s got a lot of kick left in her.”

  “I wish I thought we’d have that long,” Cleave said. “Even a heavy shelling isn’t going to put us out of business with the shops underground. But a landing force — well, that’s something else.”

  Bradley and Alec were the last to arrive. The men all looked to Bradley as if they expected him to provide some sort of answer. He just shook his head.

  “O’Rourk and I have covered each of the shacks. There’s no short-wave sending set anywhere. O’Rourk’s not overlooking anything. He and half a dozen of his men are going over the workmen’s quarters. But we can take some cheer out of it. It’s a mistake … the first mistake our man has made. He didn’t realize that even with his ship in dry-dock Carver would be on duty. Over the kind of portable receivers the men have brought with them it would pass for static.”

  “I don’t find that knowledge very satisfying, Lieutenant,” Cleave said. “The enemy has been told of our presence here, and the whole usefulness of our base may be destroyed before we ever get underway.”

  “We’ve got to prevent that happening, sir,” Wasdell said. “I suggest we deploy every available man into positions overlooking the beach, if there’s any danger from immediate attack, it will come there. An approach from the other side of the Island through the swamp would take them a long time.”

  Cleave gave his orders. O’Rourk had a defense plan. They would obey his instructions and take up his prearranged defense positions. “Dr. Walker, you and the nurses will have to prepare the hospital quarters for heavy duty. If there’s an attack we’ll have wounded, plenty of ’em.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “We’re hampered by one necessity, gentlemen.” Cleave’s voice was hard as granite. “Nothing has led us to change our belief that the man who’s jeopardizing every life on this island is standing right here in this room.” He searched our faces with his hot, burning eyes, as if he hoped to blow-torch the mask from the murderer’s face. Nothing happened, nothing but an uneasy shuffling of feet. “So, I’m sending you out in pairs. You’re to stay with your bunkmate. You’re each responsible for seeing to it that your bunkmate stays with you. I don’t want you to leave each other for a moment. You may not be able to work or fight quite as effectively, but this is a positive order. I don’t want any of you taking the responsibility for trusting anyone else. Is that clear?”

  It was.

  O’Rourk came in then with two of his men. The sweat was running over the grim sergeant in rivers.

  “Blank!” he said angrily. “Not a trace of any sort of sending set anywhere, sir.”

  “I’m turning over the placing of the men, and the distributing of what arms we have, to you, Sergeant.”

  “We’d better get moving at once,” O’Rourk said.

  II

  Bill Regan and I, with half a dozen men from Bill’s crew, were stationed along the top of a cliff overlooking the beach. It wasn’t much of a cliff. There was a drop of maybe twelve or fifteen feet from the rocks behind
which we were sprawled to the sand below. There was a steady roar of surf in our ears which would blot out any sound from the sea itself. It was still dark, and we lay there straining to see through the curtain of black.

  Bill and I had a machine gun between us. I’d never even seen one close up before and didn’t have a great deal of faith in my ability to handle it. The men, spread out on either side of us, had one automatic rifle, a couple of ordinary Springfields, and the rest of them nothing but wrecking bars and a couple of heavy wrenches. They weren’t going to be much use unless the fighting got to be hand to hand, and I wasn’t betting heavily on a monkey wrench against the cold steel of a Japanese bayonet.

  “You think they’ll come?” I asked Bill.

  “God knows!”

  We spoke in whispers, although there was no reason on earth to do so. Something of tension in the air forced it on us automatically.

  “I simply don’t understand how anyone could have gotten a sending set ashore,” I said.

  “I don’t believe they did, in the sense you mean,” Bill said. “It must have been assembled after he got here. It’s not a very powerful set. That means if the enemy has heard it at all, he must be close by.”

  “You’re a cheerful bastard,” I said.

  “He must have put it together with hairpins,” Bill said. “Several of the men have portable receiving sets … battery jobs. Unless O’Rourk took each one of them apart, which he didn’t, the equipment for a sending set, might have been smuggled in that way.”

  “My knowledge of radio is limited to the station-finding dial and the volume control,” I said. “But when did the murderer find time to put it together? Every one of these guys has been either working or constantly with his bunkmate?”

  “If you believe everyone,” Bill said.

  “I can’t believe that two of these guys are in cahoots.”

  “For that matter,” Bill said, “I can’t believe any one of them is guilty. But one of them is, all the same.”

  We were silent for a while. I found myself trying to penetrate the darkness. It was so black, the Island was so quiet, it seemed as though Bill and I and the men stationed near us were the only people standing by to face the Japs — if they came.

  “Anybody could know about radio,” Bill said unexpectedly. “But there is one guy in this outfit who does know. Cameron. He’s a crack electrician. A radio would be duck soup for him.”

  “But Ed Winthrop was with him all the time!”

  “Like hell!” said Bill. “They’re the one couple who haven’t stuck together. Besides us, Chris. I had a lot of time to myself while you were hiding out in the swamp. As for Ed and Scotty, Ed has had to cover every shop on the island, now that he’s the boss. For that matter, all the leadermen have been separated during working hours. In the electrical shop Scotty could work on something quite openly. Unless somebody stopped to ask him what he was doing he could have spent several hours at it.”

  “But Ed was with him while the sending was going on. O’Rourk would have reported it if they hadn’t been together.”

  “My head aches,” Bill said. “This is a cockeyed world. How can you believe that any man who has lived all his life under the democratic system could bring himself to fight for world slavery?”

  “Maybe you never saw any share-croppers in the South,” I said, “or the Okies in California. I’m not sure where I’d stand if I was in that boat.”

  “Why, Chris! Don’t tell me you’ve got a social conscience after all. I thought it was your idea to win the war and worry about social problems afterward.”

  “I thought a lot of things two weeks ago that I don’t think now.”

  “I hope to God it sticks with you, Chris. With too many people democracy is just a word that symbolizes the kind of life they’ve been used to living. Cars, and movies, and golf, and the right to go to the polls and vote. People who haven’t got all those things, they think, just aren’t bright. Suppose they do have to pay a poll tax? What’s a few bucks to them? But if their hired man can’t raise the dough, that’s just too bad. They don’t see that it hurts democracy. If there are ten million unemployed, they don’t really care, so long as they are employed. For them democracy is working. Wait and see, Chris. When this is over … ”

  “If it ever is in our lifetime!”

  “Oh, the fighting, in the formal sense of war, will end, Chris. And when it does most of our people will start dusting off their golf clubs, studying the new automobile styles, and looking for the old life to spring up in a couple of weeks. The hell with China, they’ll say, or Russia, or Greece, or the Czechs. We got rid of the Nazis for them. Let them work out their own problems. Let them figure a way to feed themselves, reorganize their industries, rebuild their cities and their transportation lines. The hell with them. They’ll never pay us the dough they owe us anyway.”

  “I don’t believe the American people are like that,” I said.

  “Don’t you, now! Well, let me tell you something, Chris. War psychology is one thing. But when it’s over that great feeling for humanity — for the peepul — will die like that.” He sounded bitter, angry. “But the fight against slavery will only just begin after the formalities of war are done, Chris. Mark my words. The chance of spilling your blood for a cause will be just as great then as it is right at this moment. If the people of the world find they’ve been played for a bunch of suckers by their so-called democratic leaders, there’s going to be almighty hell to pay. It will make the war look like a Pathé News reel. It will be brother against brother then; neighbor against neighbor; employer against employee. No matter what side you’re on you’ll be able to reach out and touch a guy who wants to beat your brains in for tampering with his conception of things. It’s not going to be nice, Chris. It’s not going to be nice at all.”

  “Boy!” I said. “When you get on the soapbox!”

  “That’s where you ought to be,” he said earnestly. “It isn’t enough to fight the outside enemy, or to sacrifice your gasoline, or your coffee, or your physical comforts. Every man who has an idea in his head and a tongue to voice it with, should holler bloody murder. You can’t leave it to leaders. If you leave it to them they turn out to be Hitler.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re on Westbrook Pegler’s team,” I said. “You think the great white father in Washington wants to be king of the world?”

  “Pegler’s a louse,” Bill said. “He’s a cheap sensationalist with a gift for tearing things apart in colorful language. We got no place for guys like that, Chris. We need men with positive programs, no matter what they are. Destruction never moved anyone an inch forward. We’re fighting a war of destruction now because nobody had the brains or the unselfishness to present a positive program to the world. That’s why I say winning the war isn’t going to get us anywhere at all. Unless we’re going on then with a real liberation program, we’ll keep on destroying until there’s no one left with the strength to think a thought or produce an idea.”

  “You’re a lovely optimistic guy,” I said.

  “I wish I was, Chris. I wish to God I was. But don’t you see what war is? It’s an anesthetic to make us forget the real problems. We devote all our energies to fighting a real and tangible enemy. Then, when we’ve licked him, we’re just where we were at the start — holding a bag full of the same problems, and with all the causes of the war just as much alive as they ever were.”

  “Now my head aches!” I said.

  It got to ache worse very shortly after that. We heard someone running along the path in our direction.

  “Bill! Chris!”

  It was Tubby Garms. He stopped beside us when we hailed him. He was panting for breath, and Bill’s blackout torch showed his round moon face wet with sweat.

  “Jap destroyer about a thousand yards off shore,” he said.

  “Now isn’t that the sweetest thing!” Bill said.

  “You guys are supposed to hold this section of the beach no matter what,” Tubby said.
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  “We’ve got about a dozen rounds of ammunition for this machine gun,” Bill said, “and not much more for the rest of our artillery. What are we supposed to do when that gives out?”

  “Wait till you see the yellow of their eyes,” Tubby chuckled. “Then let ’em have it. The skipper has a hunch they’ll try to land without any opening barrage from the ship. Sneak stuff. It may be here or somewhere else, or everywhere at once. As soon as they know where it’s coming from, you’ll be reinforced.”

  “With what, my fine feathered friend?”

  “Personally I’ve borrowed Mama O’Rourk’s rolling pin,” Tubby said. “Pip-pip, cheerio-o, luck-luck, and all that sort of rot, old tomato.”

  Tubby scurried away in the darkness. We were in for it, thanks to our murderer.

  III

  Waiting is the worst part of any unpleasantness. The fifteen minutes in the dentist’s office, with the sound of the drill working on someone else’s molar, is harder on me than the direct contact with the drill itself. Lying there on the top of that rocky ledge, straining to hear something that made no sound, was about as bad as anything I’ve ever been through. Bill slipped away for a moment to pass the word to the rest of the men in our group. It was bad being alone.

  I remember wishing Bradley would come along and say something calm and reassuring. I think the sound of his voice would have helped as much as anything else, But he didn’t come. No one came.

  Bill returned and flopped down beside me.

  “You feed me the new belts of ammunition as I need ’em,” he said. “If anything happens to me, you’ll have to take over. Remember, don’t just put your finger on the trigger and keep firing. Short bursts do the trick, and be sure you’re firing at something beside shadows.”

  I wished I was back in Hollywood. I even wished I was at the Brown Derby watching the stars strut their stuff — which I hate! I wished I’d accepted the desk job Sullivan had offered me. I wished I’d let Rozzi’s friends get me out of it entirely. I wished it was tomorrow and this was all settled one way or another. I wished Bradley had never made that crack about being paraded through the streets of Tokyo in a cage. I wished I had a large, neat slug of Jed Quartermayne’s bonded whisky.