Amerikan Eagle

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Sam spent the night at the station, having no desire to go back to the wood-frame building that had once been a home. He hoped being here would push away the thought of Donna, standing alone, betrayed by her government and by the man who had been a childhood hero. By now the National Guardsmen and the cops not on regular shift had gone home, leaving him alone with a desk sergeant who was content to sit in a wooden swivel chair and read the latest copy of Action Comics. Sam dragged a cot up to his office area and made a bed there. Before stretching out, he read and reread his notes and the medical examiner’s report from those few first days when everything seemed possible, his very first homicide case, one that he would solve and get off probation and make everything safe and secure for his family.

Sarah. Toby.

The pages fluttered as he read them. He supposed he should have fought harder when she left with his son, should have made a scene, but there was too much going on, too much knowledge—his wife a revolutionary, her own father her contact, Toby a courier as well. He had just let her go.

Would Tony have done that? Just let her go?

He doubted it. Tony was a fighter, always a fighter, even going into a suicide mission with his eyes and purpose clear.

And Sam? What was Sam Miller?

He read the report one more time, saw what he had been looking for.

The papers shook in his hands.

Who was Sam Miller?

He was going to find out.

* * *

Later that night, he got up from his cot, padded down to the lobby in his stocking feet. As he had hoped, the desk sergeant was still in his swivel chair, but he was snoring, hands clasped across his belly. Even as the department’s janitor, operating in the darkness as a spy, was probably busy signing arrest or execution warrants back at Sam’s high school playing field. Sam went back upstairs, where a desk lamp was on, illuminating both his desk and Mrs. Walton’s.

In his upper drawer he reached to the back. He pulled out a screwdriver that he used now and then to fix his own swivel chair. Not tonight. Hell, he thought, looking up at the clock, not this morning. He went over to Mrs. Walton’s desk, which smelled of her lilac scent. He knelt and jammed the screwdriver into the lower drawer. The wood squealed, and a piece of metal snapped free, and then the drawer came out.

Sitting there in plain sight was the infamous Log, the record of every upper-ranking officer in the Portsmouth Police Department. Luckily, Mrs. Walton had prim schoolteacher handwriting, for everything was as clear as day. When he got to a certain page and a certain date, he stopped, sucking in his breath. He read the entries three more times before he was satisfied, and then he tore out the page, tossed the book back inside, and closed the broken drawer.

The page now folded, he stuck it in his pants pocket and stretched out again on the cot and stared up until the morning light came through the windows. Then he got up and did some work at his desk. After that he went into Marshal Hanson’s office and propped a note on his desk blotter.

As he drove away in the early hours, he looked back one more time at the old brick building and thought, I’m never coming back.

* * *

At a small white Cape Cod house at the outskirts of Portsmouth, the county medical examiner answered the door after Sam spent nearly ten minutes banging on it. Saunders’s hair was unkempt, and he had a dull green robe wrapped around him. Saunders looked at Sam and said, “What is it?”

“The other day, at my brother’s burial, you asked me if you could trust me to do the right thing.”

“I remember.”

“The answer is yes,” Sam said. “And now I have a question for you.”

The doctor opened the door wider. “Come in and I’ll give you the answer.”

* * *

Resuming his drive just a few minutes later, he checked his watch and knew he was pushing it, since Hanson was always one of the first to arrive every morning. But there was one thing he had to see before he went on.

On State Street, he pulled up across from the brick building. The building had once housed the only synagogue within miles. It was shuttered and closed; the posters of President Long he had seen slapped up the other day were still there. Those who had worshipped here, who had raised their families here as Americans, had fled to other parts of the country during the unsettled months after Long’s election. Self-ghettoization, it had been called. He tried to recall what he had thought about it at the time and remembered hardly a thing. It was just one of those unsettling bits of news that came across, and since you couldn’t do anything about it, you kept quiet and went about your business.

For some reason, he recalled his high school days, a kid on the team named Roger Cohen, who was a halfback. During one of the training sessions, out on the football field that was now a temporary prison, someone had made a crack about Roger being a weak-kneed Jew, and Roger had practically flown across the grass to slug that other kid.

Good ol’ Roger. Not one to take crap from anyone. He wondered where Roger was, if he ever thought of his days back here in Portsmouth, if anyone else even remembered him and his family.

Did anybody remember? When did they all stop caring?

He shifted the car into drive. But before he left, he looked at the shuttered synagogue one more time, and he saw that someone had taken the time to tear away some of the Long posters from the far wall of the synagogue.

That one sight cheered him as he drove away.

* * *

At Pierce Island he stood by the shoreline, looking across the harbor to the naval shipyard. The cranes and smokestacks and buildings were still there, as well as the hulls of the submarines under construction. The wind was biting, and his hands were in his coat pockets as he stared out at the shipyard. By the dock where Hitler had landed, the decorative bunting was still up, though parts of it were snapping in the breeze. The circle closes, he thought. This was where he and Tony had played and hidden as children, this was where Tony had come when he had escaped from the labor camp, and this is where he was going to try to make it all right.

The circle closed.

The rumble of a car engine reached him. A black Ford sedan clattered over the bridge and came to the parking area, where it pulled in next to his Packard. The driver’s door opened and Marshal Harold Hanson got out, dressed in his usual suit and tie, his face puzzled.

“Sam… what’s going on?”

He walked over to his boss. “You know,” he said softly, “something I’ve always wondered about this little island.”

“What’s that, Sam?”

He looked around at the flatland and the scrub brush and trees. “This has always been a magnet for illegal activity, hasn’t it? Every few months we get sent here to make some arrests, make some headlines, and after a while, the problems return. But you know what? Why isn’t there a gate over there by the bridge? A simple gate, closed at dusk, opened at dawn, and instantly, you take care of about eighty, ninety percent of the problems.”

Hanson said, “That’s interesting, Sam, but what—”

“But there’s never been a gate, has there?” Sam interrupted. “And you know why? Because this island serves a need; it’s a safety valve. The mayor and the city council and the police commission, they’d rather have this place open so that any undesirables congregate in one place, make it reasonably safe and happy for the rest of the city.”

Hanson didn’t say anything, just stared unhappily at him. Sam said, “That’s all we do, isn’t it? We do the