The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (25 page)

The first drink had affected Jack sufficiently that Rick’s soliloquy struck him as funny. Turning his head to the window, he yelled, “Hurry up, Fred, he’s talkin’ about angst in here!”

“Hell yeah, I’m talking about it. What the hell’s the matter with that?” Rick asked between straw rattles of his own. “She sure as hell threw plenty of it at me.”

Unable to erase the grin from his face, Jack held up a propitiating hand. “Not a thing, buddy,” he said. “I just didn’t think we’d be going off the high dive today. I know she took you over the jumps, but I guess I never knew the whole story, with you guys in
Atlanta
and me in
Athens
while so much of it was going on.”

“Over the jumps ain’t the half of it. She wasn’t the same two days in a row, the whole time I was at Tech. Sometimes we’d go after it the way we used to, all loveyaloveyaloveyaloveyaohhoneyyes, then I wouldn’t see her for weeks, because she ‘felt like we oughta see other people,’ and by God, I took her at her word on that.

“Takes me back to that Christmas when Terry brought ol’ Maybelle home from
Georgia,” Jack said with a sly grin.

“Oh, Jesus, Maybelle! That long drinka water. Filled her full of peach brandy and screwed her in her sleep, looking over my shoulder for the Marshes to get back home. And then that Sugar Bowl weekend in
New Orleans; wouldn’t have happened if ol’ Mose hadn’t paid 150 bucks for my other two tickets and threw ’em away, so I wouldn’t have any trouble with Tech about non-family users. What a hell of a guy he was!”

Jack had hit the straw-rattling zone again. “Bet your ass,” he said, handing his empty cup to Rick. “What do you say, we switch off of Bloody Mary’s? How about vodka and seven?” Rick simply gestured to Fred, who had assumed permanent standby on the porch’s guard rail. He took the new order and hotfooted away, calculating the likely growth of his tip as the contents of the Smirnoff bottle went down. “You know, he was more my dad than my dad ever was. Can’t imagine what’dve become of me if he hadn’t come along.”

“He taught you one hell of a lot, that’s for sure. Planes, motorcycles, boxing...”

“Yeah, he did. But more than all of that, he taught me the most important thing of all.”

Rick’s eyes widened a fraction. “What was that?”

“How to build and run a bullshitometer.”

Rick laughed. “Absolutely, hands down, his crowning achievement.”

Fred had brought 7-Up and ice. “You’d think so,” Jack said, smiling. “Fix me a drink and I’ll tell you why it wasn’t.”

When he’d cleared the Bloody Mary residue from his palate with a gulp of Vodka and Seven, Jack broke the oath of silence that he’d sworn to Moses Kubielski. He told Rick that Moses, careful not to mention his true name, had served in the U.S. Navy as an Aviation Machinist’s Mate, then with
Germany’s Luftwaffe as a fighter pilot and, after being injured during the Spanish Civil War, an agent of the Abwehr, the Nazi’s military intelligence service. As a decorated hero of the Third Reich whose native language was English, he was sent to
New York
in 1939, to assist the highly-regarded resident agent there. The agent, who had operated single-handed in
New York
since World War I, grudgingly accepted an assistant’s being thrust on him. In time, however, Agent “Kubielski” proved to be a resourceful and trustworthy helper, winning his boss’s unqualified trust.

“I don’t believe it!” Rick said. Mose? Our Mose? A fucking kraut spy?”

“Believe it,” Jack assured him. “He’d been railroaded into a court-martial as a sailor down in
Guantánamo
Bay, and even though he was acquitted it left a bad taste in his mouth. His dad was a native German, so he had dual citizenship. He was pissed at
America, and decided to go back to
Germany
and work for his uncle, who owned a custom-tailoring business that catered to the carriage trade in
Berlin. One of the shop’s best customers was a Luftwaffe colonel, and when the uncle told him of his nephew’s experience with U.S. Naval Aviation, he practically recruited him on the spot. In very short order, he found himself in western
Russia, where the Luftwaffe was training its pilots in violation of the Versailles Treaty.”

“Damn!” Rick exclaimed. “So he becomes a pilot, goes to
Spain, gets shot down, and ends up in
New York. OK. But he was still a fucking spy.”

Jack held up his hand, waving a finger from side to side in testimony to his vodka intake. “Hold on. I like my stories to have happy endings whenever possible, and in this case it’s quite possible. Remember, we weren’t at war with
Germany
then, so even if he’d been caught they’dve just deported him. But things were getting nasty in
Germany; as a member of the Abwehr, Mose knew what was going on with the Jews and Hitler’s ‘final solution.’ He was already looking for a way out in 1941, when his boss confided in him about a scheme he’d been working on that made his mind up for him on the spot.”

“What was that?”

“The boss had been dealing off-and-on with an Irish Republican Army faction that was based in
New York. They came to him with a fantastic proposal: the assassination of Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt. A highly-placed Nazi sympathizer in the British government had tipped them concerning the timing of the two leaders’ meeting off
Newfoundland
in August. An IRA member, a Royal Marine Warrant Officer committed to the suicide mission, would shoot both men as Churchill arrived aboard the USS Augusta. Only problem was, it was a cash-only deal; $3 million for both. Not wanting to risk a radio transmission requesting that kind of money from
Berlin, he hotfooted it down to see their chief at the embassy in
Washington. The chief agreed that it was the buy of the century, but was not at all encouraging about arranging that kind of money in
US
currency, which the IRA had said was all they’d take. Time was short; it was already the middle of June, and the meeting was scheduled for early August, I think the ninth. The down-in-the-mouth boss returned to
New York
and decided to share his frustration with Mose, who concealed his shock as well as he could. It climaxed a thought process he’d been involved in for months; he was, from that moment on, 100% American.”

“Jesus,” Rick exhaled. “And about time, too. How’d he get out?”

Jack took the Smirnoff bottle from between the seats. “Any ice left in that cup?” Rick poured the remains of the ice into Jack’s cup, giving the horn an impatient toot for an unseen Fred. Jack sipped vodka on the rocks with smiling satisfaction. “A lucky stroke, no pun intended. The boss- Kramer! That was ’is fuckin’ name-  had started to have second thoughts about the whole operation. He knew he’d have to shut down the
New York
station, whether it was successful or not, and he worried himself into a heart attack. So guess who got elected to pick up the money and pay off the IRA?”

“Well, Dr. IQ, that’d be Mose!”

“Give the man in the balcony 10 silver dollars and a box of Mars Bars! And guess what he did with it? Two fat leather two-suiters full of hundred dollar bills?”

Rick looked slyly sidewise at Jack from under lowered eyebrows. “He stole it!”

Jack laughed triumphantly. “Fuckin’ A! That’s exactly what he did! Took a bus to
Baltimore, put the loot in a local Swiss bank branch, and went undercover to see how the war worked out. We were in it pretty soon anyway, so anyone who’d be looking for him would shortly be packing to go back to
Berlin. He already had a fake ID made up- got the name off a Philadelphia tombstone, he said-  got a job in a movie house and laid low till ’46. He was headed to
Florida, and a ship to
Cuba, when his radiator blew up right here in little old Bisque. How’s that for pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down?”

“Not bad,” Rick agreed, pouring a vodka-on-the-rocks of his own and looking with regret at the scant centimeter that remained in the bottle. “No wonder he bought the Ritz and did so well with it!”

“Oh. And he didn’t get shot down, by the way.”

“He didn’t? How’d he get hurt, then?”

“Crashed. Engine quit on him, climbing out after takeoff. The only field that he could get into was full of stumps; caught one with the landing gear and flipped over, with full tanks. An officer with a truckload of troops just happened to be driving by, so they hauled him out, broken leg and all, before the plane caught fire. It was broken so badly that they sent him back to
Berlin
for surgery. Turns out that the guy who saved his life was riding on the same plane. By the time they’d touched down, his rescuer had promised to visit him after his surgery. Turns out he was an Abwehr guy, and before you know it, old Mose is in there himself. And guess who the recruiter was.”

“Give up,” Rick grunted, taking a sip from the bottle and handing it to Jack to finish, which he did before he spoke.

“Remember Paul Pulaski?”

“Paul Pulaski? The Minister of Music with Shepard Peters’ revival bunch?”

“The very same. He was in
East Prussia
when the Soviets broke through, and long story short, he was pulled into the KGB. He was assigned to infiltrate the Savannah River Project; the revival team was just a way to get here.”

“For Crissake. No pun intended,” Rick grated. “As if there weren’t enough normal kooks under that tent. I can’t believe I bought into that junk. A regular little apostle,” he went on. “But the son of a bitch was good, you’ll have to give ’im that. I wasn’t the only one who thought that smirking pissant was the shortcut to salvation.”

“By no means,” Jack agreed. “He had the town pretty well buffaloed.”

“But not Mose. And by extension, not you. The two of you are still the only people in Bisque who ever called yourselves atheists. I still don’t know how y’all had the guts to do that.”

“I can’t remember now what town worthy he said this to; seems like whoever it was asked him if he’d ever practiced the Jewish faith. He said, “Nope. None of the God stuff makes any sense at all to me. I’m with Epicurus.”

Rick shook his head. “I know you’ve felt that way too, for a long time. I hope you’re right, for your sake. But I just can’t imagine living without faith. Hell, if I couldn’t confess my sins to God, they’d drag me down.”

Jack reached for Rick’s elbow and squeezed it. Thanks, buddy. I do have faith, y’know.”

“Whachoo talkin’ about?”

Jack leaned back against the car door, letting his head drop back and out the open window, and released a deafening burp, which threw Fred and Tony, his fellow car hop who had just come on duty, into a leg-slapping chortling fit. Straightening up, he said, “My faith is this; long term, everyone acts in his own best interest.”

Rick engaged Jack’s gaze and held it for half a minute before he spoke. Then: “Shithead. Don’t you know I’d die for you?”

Jack reciprocated the pregnant pause. “Hell yeah, I know that. But you’d enjoy it.” He was prepared to wait for the laugh, but it came almost immediately. Jack joined in. Their combined paroxysm put the car hops’ mirth deep into the shade. It subsided, then restarted each time they’d look at each other.

Weak from laughter, they waited for breath. Jack caught his first. “You hungry?”

“Cat got an ass?”  Hitting the horn once again, Rick called forth a somewhat apprehensive Fred, whose professional experience was rife with the caprice of drunken moods of his clientele. “Three all-th’-way dogs, fries and a coke for the driver, my good man.”  Looking at Jack, he said, “Name your poison, bub.”

“I’ll do that, too,” Jack said with a reflexive flip of the hand.

Six hotdogs later, raw onion bouquet hung inside the Nomad, permeating the headliner, defying the spring breeze’s modest efforts to waft it away. Twilight shadows deepened in the parking lot, cueing the floodlights. The kid customers and their bald-tired transportation were gone, headed for ham salad and homework, their parking slots filling up one and two at a time with heavier, shinier hardware. A man and a woman somewhere in their thirties, unrecognized by Jack or Rick, oozed into a secluded parking place under one of the big Oaks in a top-down Packard Caribbean. “Come on out to the house for awhile. We can cut by the Casbah for a couple of sixpacks.”

Rick shook his head. “One thing you learn when you’re making a living with your body is when to quit. Usually. I think I’ll pack it in, buddy. Couple APCs, get up for bacon and eggs with the folks. Really need to spend some time with them, seein’ as how I’m headed down the road on Sunday. Got to swing by and see your aunt Cordelia, too, but we don’t need to talk about that.”

“What time?”  Jack asked him.

“After lunch, I guess.
Columbus
ain’t all that far down the road. Hey, bub.”

“Hm?”

“That’s some story you told me tonight. Of all the people who did incredible, impossible things to help us win in World War II, Mose was the one who saved FDR’s and Churchill’s lives. How many times’ve you told it?”

“Just once. And that’s as far as it’ll go. He was the father that I never had, and you’re the brother. I thought you ought to know about it; a guy could get himself killed doing what we’re about to do. He loved you, too, buddy, and you needed to know what a great goddam man walked into our lives back in ’46.”