Elmer hung around with them a little longer, then repaired to Billy's side when the Brits wanted a more competitive game. Elmer and Billy were about the same size and saw things eye to eye. Billy was slumped over a drink.
"What’s the matter, Billy boy?" Elmer asked.
"Dunno," said the young man. "Thinking about home too much, I guess."
"Why don't you telephone home? Talk to Mom and Pop?”
Pritchard looked at Elmer as if the latter were crazy. "Long distance?"
"Yeah."
"Who's got the money for that?" the ensign asked with irritation.
"I'll treat you. I got a secret telephone. Not tonight. But I'll show you sometime."
Pritchard looked at Elmer in the dim light of Reilly's. "Yeah," he said after several seconds. "A secret telephone. Sure." He glanced at his watch. "Hey, I got to get back to base," Billy said next.
Then he stood, paid, and lurched toward the door. Elmer watched him go.
Elmer assumed Billy's place at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka with a chaser. Through the mirror behind Buck, Elmer watched the dart game in progress. He tuned in the conversation.
"Try not to hit me in the ass, mates," Elmer said, exaggerating an English accent.
"Who'd you think I am? Hitler?"
"You look more like Uncle Joe Stalin to me," someone answered with a Midlands twang.
"Them's fighting words!" Elmer exploded, leaping upward from his barstool, his fists raised like a pair of gnarled. potatoes. Two sailors quickly interceded before Elmer split up with laughter. Then the rest of the sailors realized that Elmer's rage had only been a lonely old man's sense of fun.
Someone else paid for his drink and Elmer watched the young men play darts. He fell appreciatively silent for the rest of the evening.
What a funny bunch of people these Brits were, Elmer was thinking. Motorcycles and sidecars from Detroit. Machine guns from Illinois packed fifty to a crate. The English were bolstering their ground defenses for a possible invasion from Europe. And Roosevelt, in defiance of every tenet of the Neutrality Act of 1937, was sneaking weapons to them.
*
Two nights later, Elmer told Billy Pritchard more about the secret telephone. It was a public booth located a short walk from Reilly's, up a hill toward the old truck route beyond Red Bank's downtown. The telephone did not work right and you could call anywhere in American for a pocketful of aluminum slugs. The telephone was near an all-night diner, Elmer said, which had failed when the new truck route was built east of the town.
"I don't believe it," Billy Pritchard answered, disconsolate and half drunk. "It's bull."
"I'll show you."
Ensign Pritchard studied the old man, wanting to believe. "Ah, go on…" he scoffed a second time.
"All right," grumbled Elmer. "If you don't want to talk to your folks, it's no skin off my ass."
"Okay. Show me the booth," Billy Pritchard said.
They left together and no one missed them.
The old man guided Billy up a steep incline several blocks from Reilly's. The incline followed a back street upon which the lighting was poor. There was no traffic and Elmer was always a step or two ahead. But sure enough, at the crest of the hill there was a telephone booth, standing like a lonely sentry at the edge of a dark parking lot. The diner that Elmer had mentioned was no more than a burned-out skeleton of an enterprise that served its last lukewarm hash before the stock market crash.
Billy Pritchard looked around. They were easily a mile from the old truck route and only a few yards from the wooded end of a public park. The place, Pritchard now noticed, was eerie.
"I still think you're full of crap, old man," Billy Pritchard said hotly. "What are you up to?"
"Do you see a telephone or not?"
"I see a telephone," he admitted. "Does it work?"
"Try it, you young jerk!"
The old man seemed not quite as bent over as he had seemed earlier, and although Pritchard was breathing hard from the climb, Elmer wasn't. Pritchard stared him eye-to-eye and suddenly came away with a queer sensation. Elmer's blue eyes were glaring now and filled with some intense emotion. The youth couldn't recognize it. Anger? Impatience? He did not know. He only knew that the glare put him off-scared him, almost-and Elmer's hand was in his coat pocket jangling something. Slugs, Pritchard assumed.
"Go ahead! Try it!" Elmer ordered.
The young officer turned, still trying to decipher the look in Elmer's eyes. Then, just as he faced the telephone, Pritchard realized what he had seen.
The eyes were not the glazed eyes of an older man. In the natural light, Pritchard had seen what the dimness of the bar had always hidden. Elmer's eyes were the piercing, intense eyes of a younger man. Much younger. The realization stabbed Pritchard like a stiletto. Pritchard began to turn, but suddenly the cold rough grasp of a bicycle chain was around his neck and Siegfried was pulling the young naval officer backward.
The chain had been knotted at the center, forming a murderous chunk of metal that could crush any Adam's apple and throttle any larynx or windpipe. The hands on the chain were powerful and Pritchard knew he would have only a few seconds to fight.
He flailed at his attacker. He kicked and twisted. He was not weak. He landed several blows of the elbow to Siegfried's body. None slowed the killer. Siegfried only clutched more tightly, as if he were trying to snap Billy Pritchard's neck in half. The youth's head was throbbing. His eyes felt as if they would spurt out of his head.
Pritchard managed to twist just enough to face his executioner. From a distance of inches, he saw the firmness and muscle of the flesh. He saw that the gray complexion was from powder of some sort, rubbed deeply into the crevices around the nose, eyes, and mouth. He saw that the lines were from a pencil. The gray hair, he now assumed, was a dye.
Who…? Pritchard wondered insanely. Why…?
With a final spasm of effort, Pritchard hammered at his assailant's ribs, pounded with an elbow, and brought a knee upward toward the man's genitals. But the killer blocked Pritchard's fists with his forearms. He stopped the knee with his thigh. And all the time, the chain tightened like a steel tentacle around the young ensign's throat.
Billy Pritchard's brain coursed with obscenities. His eyes felt as if they would explode. Then everything was fading and Billy felt terribly weak.
He thought of home in Ohio… He fancied he was on his way there.
Then everything was black.
Working by moonlight, Siegfried stripped the young sailor of his uniform, then dragged the corpse fifty feet into a wooded area where he already had prepared a shallow grave. He laid the body in it and covered it with dirt. He dragged several branches and broken brambles into place across the grave.
Siegfried returned to Newark by car. As was usual, he quietly entered his rooming house through a rear door. He was unobserved. He removed the dye from his hair and the makeup from his face. He shaved.
Then he slept, secure in the knowledge that sometimes great sacrifices or odious deeds were necessary in order to perpetuate a far greater good.
It was the great new Aryan state, after all, that was important. Not the individual. Adolf Hitler thought that, preached that, and said that. And Siegfried believed it.
FOURTEEN
A special terror struck Siegfried when he reached the quiet, winding corridor that led to the engine room of the HMS Adriana. He stood in Billy Pritchard's white uniform, a black bag in his hand, and he waited, like a sentry frozen in place, to hear the slightest sound of a footfall.
There was none. But the terror convulsed him nonetheless.
How foolish his gambit suddenly seemed! He had no cover story and no weapon. His black bag carried only the evidence of his purpose there. He had only this sizzling anger toward those morons in Berlin.