them, and even that might not prove anything. He preferred not to run the risk.
Up the steps and into the building. No assassin lurking in the lobby. Up the stairs to his office, wary every time he turned. No crazed Canuck stalking the stairway. He opened the door, flipped on the light switch, and peered inside. Everything was exactly as he'd left it.
He closed and locked the door. Then he took care of the morning housekeeping: he made a pot of coffee and put it on the hot plate. Even though he'd had a cup with breakfast, waiting for it to get ready was a lonely vigil.
Meanwhile, the case ahead. Somebody-under occupation regulations, the military prosecutor didn't have to say who-claimed his client had played an active role in the Canadian uprising in the mid-1920s. Why whoever this was hadn't come forward years earlier was a question Moss intended to raise as loudly as the judge would let him. He'd been trying to find out who had a grudge against Allen Peterhoff. Somebody who stood to gain from Peterhoff's troubles was the likeliest to cause those troubles.
So far, Moss had had no luck finding anyone like that. As far as he could tell, Peterhoff was a pillar of the community. As for what he'd been doing in 1925 and 1926, nobody seemed to have a lot of hard evidence one way or the other. Of course, in cases like this, hard evidence didn't always matter. Hearsay counted for just as much, and often for more.
'Got to be some bastard after his money,' Moss muttered to himself. He hadn't seen a case as blatant as this for a long time. It really belonged to the harsh years right after the revolt, not to 1941. But here it was, and the occupying authorities were taking it very seriously indeed. That worried Moss. Why were they flabbling about Peterhoff if they didn't have a case?
Moss had just poured himself his second cup of coffee from the pot when the telephone rang. His hand jerked, but not enough to make him spill the coffee. He set down the cup and picked up the telephone. 'Jonathan Moss speaking.'
'Hello, Mr. Moss.' That cigarette-roughened baritone could only belong to Lou Jamieson. Moss' one-time client was not a pillar of the community, except perhaps for certain disreputable parts of it. He went on, 'I think maybe I found what you were looking for.'
'Did you, by God?' That perked Moss up better than coffee. 'Tell me about it, Mr. Jamieson, if you'd be so kind.'
Tell him about it Jamieson did. If the man with dubious connections was telling the truth-always an interesting proposition where he was concerned- then a couple of Peterhoff's business associates stood to make a bundle if he vanished from the scene for ten or twenty years. It wasn't anything showy or obvious, but it was there.
'By God!' Moss said again. His pen raced across a yellow legal pad as he jotted down notes. The more he heard, the happier he got. 'Thank you from the bottom of my heart!' he exclaimed when Jamieson finally finished. 'You've just saved an innocent man a hell of a lot of trouble. Even a military court will have to sit up and take notice when I use this.'
'That's nice, Mr. Moss,' Jamieson said affably. 'You done me a good turn a while ago with the goddamn Yanks. Figured this was the least I could do for you.' He couldn't have cared less whether Allen Peterhoff was guilty or innocent. What mattered was that he owed Moss a favor. If he hadn't, Peterhoff would have been welcome to rot in jail, as far as he was concerned.
His sometime client's amoral cynicism would have bothered Moss much more if Jamieson hadn't proved so valuable. As things were, Moss threw the notes in his briefcase, thanked Jamieson again, and got ready to go home early. Dorothy will be glad to see me, he thought, and I hope Laura will, too.
He made sure he turned off the hot plate. He didn't want to burn down the building by accident. Then he went out to his auto. His hand stayed in the overcoat pocket with the pistol, but he wasn't very worried. Nobody could reasonably expect him to leave at this hour. He might even be back before the mailman got to the apartment building where he lived.
As usual, he parked around the corner from the building. Even though he didn't expect trouble, it was one of those days where he would almost have welcomed it. He felt as if he were trouble's master. He remembered that for a very long time. The thought filled his mind as he turned the corner. That was when the explosion knocked him off his feet.
'Holy Jesus!' he said. Bright shards of glass glittered in the snow, blown out of nearby windows. He picked himself up and ran toward the sound of the blast. If anyone needed help, he'd do what he could.
He hadn't gone more than a few steps before he realized his building was the one that had suffered. The hole in the front wall gaped from his floor. And…
'No,' Moss whispered. But that was his apartment. Or rather, that had been his apartment. Not much seemed left of it. Not a whole lot seemed left of the ones to either side, either. Smoke started pouring out of the hole as broken gas lines or wires set things ablaze.
'Call the police!' someone shouted. 'Call the fire department!' somebody else yelled. Jonathan Moss heard them as if from very far away. He ran toward the front steps of the building where he'd lived for so long. Try as he would, though, he couldn't go up them, because all the people who'd lived in the apartment building were flooding out. Some of them were bloodied and limping. Others just had panic on their faces.
'Laura!' Moss shouted. 'Dorothy!'
He didn't see them anywhere. He hadn't really thought he would. But hope died hard. Hope, sometimes, died harder than people. People, as he knew too well, could be awfully easy to kill.
A man who lived on the same floor as he did pushed him away. 'You don't want to try to go in, Mr. Moss,' he said. 'The whole goddamn building's liable to fall down.'
'My wife! My little girl!'
'Wasn't that your place where it happened?' his neighbor asked. Helplessly, he nodded. The other man said, 'Then there's nothing you can do for 'em now, and that's the Lord's truth. If they come out, they come out. If they don't…' He spread his hands.
More people pushed out of the building. More bricks fell off it. Some landed in the snow. One hit a man in the shoulder. He howled like a wolf. Moss tried again to go into the building. Again, he failed. People took hold of him and dragged him back by main force.
Sirens screamed in the distance, rapidly drawing closer. Screams bubbled in Moss' throat. Why they didn't burst out, he had no idea. Everything he cared about had been in that flat. Now the flat was gone, and twenty-five years of his dreams and hopes with it.
He tried to think, though his stunned wits made it next to impossible. He'd been getting threats for a long time. He hadn't taken them too seriously till the bomb went off in the occupation center. After that, he realized disaster really could happen to him. And now it had.
'Who?' he muttered. Who would have wanted to blow up a woman and a child? For if this was a bomb, as seemed horribly likely, whoever had sent it must have addressed it to Laura or Dorothy. Had it had his name on it, they would have left it alone. He would have opened it. And it would have blown up in his face.
Fire engines howled to a stop. The police came right behind them. And soldiers in green-gray helped clear people away from the building. 'Move it!' they shouted. 'The whole thing may collapse!'
'Get out of the way!' the firemen shouted. They began playing streams of water on the spreading flames. A lot of the water splashed down onto the people who had lived in the building. That moved them away faster than the soldiers could have.
A major called, 'Whose place was it that went up?'
'Mine,' Moss said dully.
'You weren't inside there.' The officer stated the obvious. 'You'd be hamburger if you were.'
'Hamburger.' My wife is hamburger. My little girl is hamburger. Moss managed to shake his head. 'No. I was doing some work at the office. I had just got out of my auto when… when it happened. Laura… Dorothy…' He began to weep.
'Christ! You're Jonathan Moss.' Recognizing him, the major suddenly put two and two together. 'This wasn't a gas leak, or anything like that. This was a bomb, or it probably was a bomb, anyway.'
Now Moss' head moved up and down as mechanically as it had gone back and forth. 'Yes. I think you're right. Somebody killed them.' He could say it. It didn't sound as if it meant anything. He was still deep in shock. But part of him knew it would mean something before long. The major seemed to sense it was too soon for questions. He
