Corporal Vincent Morgan lay in a notch atop the berm that ran along the forward zag at grid PF246105 on the Provence line, north of the Rhone River. Corporal Morgan was directing artillery fire on a German trench 1000 yards distant. It had been a quiet day, and despite the shelling, the German’s water-cooled machine guns had remained quiet. As he was calling in an effect fire order, Morgan heard the rattle of the bike and then the shrill trilling of the Communication Sergeant’s whistle.
He crawled back and then pulled his rifle to port before sliding down the embankment and running along the bottom of the trench toward the sound of voices. The grumbling of starving soldiers – whose hungry eyes measured the fat on the Communication Sergeant’s bones as he delivered the news of the armistice – was loud enough to wake the dead German soldiers, whose corpses were scattered across the valley.
A week later Morgan was bathing and eating in the war-torn remains of a four-star hotel. After a month, he had transferred back to Liverpool and boarded a troop ship for Fort Dix.
He thought about the brief romantic inferno that had burned between him and the peasant girl Estelle Argos. They had met when he was on patrol. She had given him a loaf of bread and he had given her his last of the pouch of pipe tobacco. Another day they had shared a hungry conversation over an end of bacon he had taken off a dead German soldier and brought to her. On the third day, he found her in the barn and their hunger for conversation and filling their stomachs had turned into a hunger for each other. It went on until the lines shifted and their liaison went from daily to weekly to too dangerous for either of them.
It was their final night together that he thought of as he rode quietly in the back seat of his father’s Westcott touring car. A Model T Pickup had backfired as they were leaving Grand Central and he had reflexively taken cover at the corner of a concrete buttress. His mother and father had been embarrassed. It was not something they had prepared for, and it was plain from the beginning that his shellshock was not a topic for family conversation.
In the twelve-block journey from the train station to their apartment in the Garment District, his father had wiped the unpleasantness of his military service from the family ledger and dictated Vince’s life plan, including a suggested betrothal to Charlotte Morris and returning to his clerking position in his father’s textile concern. Their voices faded from the static of road noise into the static of the Crosley table model radio.
At noon, Tuesday a month later, September 3, 1918, Vince sat on the dock eating a sandwich from the Jew’s Deli and contemplating the sound of traffic in the street when a tallish gentlemen in a starch pressed uniform entered the gate of the receiving lot and walked right up to him.
“Morgan, Vincent?” the husky voice asked, though it was more of a statement.
Vince sized him up. “Who wants to know?”
“The Pinkerton Agency has been contracted to deliver a certified post to Vincent A. Morgan.” He presented a small receipt book and Vince signed, giving the fellow a more critical eye. Something in the man’s countenance was surrealistically familiar.
The agent pocketed the receipt book and presented Vince a brown Kraft Paper envelope. Vince looked it over without opening it. The textbook perfect handwriting added to the brown Kraft paper pouch’s ominous look. He tore the end off and blew into it to puff it open. Couched snugly inside was a second envelope.
He slid the smaller envelope out and tucked the Kraft paper pouch under his knee. He read the front of the envelope, which stated only his name in a very proper looking copperplate hand.
He pursed his lips unconsciously, turned the envelope over, and ran the blade of his Boker folding knife under the seal. The weight of the heavy paper was worthy of note. He recognized its similarity to the heavy home deckled paper he had seen abroad. There was something familiar about the copperplate handwriting, which he could not place.
The note was brief and poetically to the point:
Mr. Vincent Morgan,
To your requisite knowledge, some matters are in motion to which you are a party, but must remain unknown to you for the time being. You will have received this request within a week prior to Monday, 09 September 1918. It is requested that you retain the second Monday monthly for the duration to receive a package on or about 15:30, on Platform 44, Grand Central Terminal. You will retain said package without opening and engage in service as courier to the below address:
Number A 247 West 42nd Street New York.
This task will be in your interest. Please do not fail in this duty and the eventual reward will be substantial. We ask only that you keep the time free and observe an amount of decorum in this matter.
Best to you and God’s Blessings,
A
“Hey what is this?” Vince looked up from the letter to address the Pinkerton Agent, but he was alone, save for the chill on the late summer’s breeze. He shook his head slightly and tucked the letter back into the envelope, and the envelope back into the Kraft paper pouch, which he folded several times and tucked into a pocket on the way back to his desk.
September 9, 1918 15:20.
Vince heeled it through Grand Central, counting a half dozen shine boys, two preachers, a singing barber, and a Fuller Brush salesman whose coiffeur reeked of Dapper Dan Pomade. He was still thinking that the brush salesman should have opted for religion over fashion and consulted either preacher over the barber’s advice on the pomade, but alas, city girls preferred the likes of a Dapper Dan Man to an altar boy any day.
He was contemplating a cigarette and the distant sound of Jacques Beaumont’s coronet coming from the oyster bar when a swirl of activity brought him up short. Vince sidestepped a small boy with very mature Irish features who raced past with the buxom Gretchen Stallhauer (a woman reputed to provide much more than interesting conversation to the gentlemen she escorted) on his tail, cursing at him in a mixture of gutter Dutch and German.
“Du kleine Teufel hunden, you come back here mit meine money,” she wailed, as she tore headlong after him up the concourse.
Vince smiled as he sank onto the bench beneath the “44” placard on the long varnished bench. He glanced at his watch and at the old Remington clock above the information booth. It read 3:26 p.m.
He reached for his tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette while the 3:30 backed in. He lit the cigarette and took the first draw as the coach doors opened and the conductors swung down with their steps. The last conductor swung down and set his step in place. As if he were on a swivel, the fellow wheeled on his heel in an about face, and made a half dozen strides to where Vince sat.
“You’re Vincent Morgan?” he asked, though nodding assumption.
“Yes. What’s this about?” Vince asked a bit more wisely than the conductor was expecting. The big fellow jabbed the small parcel at Vince and loped back to the rear of his coach, where he tipped his hat to a lady and offered her his hand as she reached for the grab iron.
Vince watched the conductor a moment longer and made for the street, tucking the package under an arm, wary of the wee leprechaun and his buxom pursuer. As the door swung closed behind him, separating him from the roaring din of the crowd and Jacques Beaumont’s swinging eighths, he pulled out the letter and reread the delivery address, and read aloud, “A 247 West 42nd Street New York.”
“Dat’sa bush station.” A husky voice spoke Brooklynese from somewhere.