Cue for Quiet Part 2

I reached. Quick.

The gunman backed to the outside door and flicked it open with one hand, never taking his eyes from me. Footsteps pounded on the back porch and hard faces filled the kitchen. One even had one of these gaspipe Sten guns, and I liked that even less than the howitzer. My pajama tops might have concealed an a.r.s.enal from the care I got when I was searched. No one said a word, and I didn't dare. Just about that time Helen got the sandman out of her eyes. Likely the noise had awakened her appet.i.te, and she had come down to help me eat a snack.

One of the gunmen heard her slippers clattering down the stairs, and a hard hand slapped over my mouth and a gun rammed viciously against my spine. Spun around and held as a human s.h.i.+eld I had to helplessly watch her come yawning in the kitchen door. One look she got in at me, and the drawn guns, and her mouth opened for a scream that got no further than a m.u.f.fled yip and a dead faint. They let her fall. The gunman took his hand from my mouth and swung me around.

"Shut up!" he snapped, although I hadn't tried to say anything.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

At the point of his gun he held me there while the rest of the hard faced crew roamed the house, upstairs and down. None of the faces did I know, and I began to wonder if behind one of those granite masks was the revengeful personality of R. C. Jones, President of Local 77, AFL. I heard footsteps pad on the back porch, and my head tried to turn in spite of myself. The gun in my back gouged a little harder.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see who pushed open the screen door I hadn't got around to taking down yet. The gun in my back helped me stand up.

J. Edgar Hoover motioned to the gun and the pressure eased a trifle.

His voice was reasonably unexcited, but to my present taste, ominous.

"All right. Someone go get him some pants." To me, "Your name Miller?

Peter Ambrose Miller? Get that woman off the floor."

Yes, I was Peter Ambrose Miller. I agreed to that. My mouth was dry as popcorn, but I managed to ask him what this was all about.

Hoover looked at me and scratched his nose. "This is about your fingerprints being all over an anonymous letter received in Aberdeen, Maryland."

I gulped. "Oh, that. Why, I can explain--"

Hoover looked at me with the fond expression of a man who has cracked open a bad egg. "That," he said, "I doubt," and he turned on his military heel and walked out the back door. When they got me my pants I followed him. I had to.

I ended up at the Federal Building, which is a cavernous morgue, even during business hours. They gave me what might have been a comfortable chair if I hadn't had to sit in it. A young fellow was sitting opposite me with a stenographer's notebook, and I knew that any story of mine had better not be repeated two different ways. Hoover came in with a nondescript man with a hat pulled down over his eyes, who inspected me from all angles and then shook his head, a little resentfully, I thought. The hat-over-the-eyes left and I s.h.i.+fted nervously under those grim eyes staring at me.

"All right," said Hoover; "now we'll hear that explanation. Talk!"

So I talked.

When I finished my throat was dry and he was nodding as though he believed every word. He didn't. I asked for a cigarette and for news of my wife, and they gave me a cigarette. They told me my wife was all right, or would be, if I behaved.

"Don't worry," I said. "I'll behave." They just laughed when I said that.

"Quite likely," said Hoover. "Now, let's hear that once more. Begin at the beginning."

They gave me a room all to myself, finally. For three days, maybe more, I had that room all for myself and the various people that walked in at all hours of the day and night to ask me some of the silliest questions you ever heard just as though they expected sensible answers. After that first night I didn't see J. Edgar Hoover at all, which is just as well, because I don't think he liked me one little bit. They brought me a suit with the lining in the sleeve ripped and a s.h.i.+rt with the cuffs turned. When I got those I began to worry all over again about Helen, because I knew she had no part in picking out the clothes they brought me. I didn't feel too chipper when they came after me in force again.

The same room, this time more crowded. Older men this time, and a few of the usual high school boys. Again we went through the same routine, and once again my voice cracked dusty dry. They were all desperately sorry for such an incurable psychopathic liar. I hadn't felt so helpless, so caught-in-a-quicksand since my days in the army.

"I'm telling you the truth, the truth. Don't you see that I've got to tell you the truth to get out of here? Don't you believe me?"

Never such disbelief outside of a courtmartial. In desperation my eyes jerked around looking for escape. They slid over, and back to, the ventilation fan purring on the wall. I sucked in a loud gasp. The blades of the fan slowed to where you could see them as individuals, and the motor housing began to smoke.

"See?" I yelled at them. "Believe me now?"

The blades came to a standstill and the black smoke oozed toward the ceiling.

"See?" I yelled again. "Look at that fan!"

Their eyes showed their astonishment. The smoke began to disappear in the stillness. "What about that? Now do you believe me?"

Maybe they did. No one said anything. They took me back to my room.

About an hour or so later they came after me again. The chair felt no more comfortable than it ever had, though it was beginning to shape itself to my seat. The same faces were there, but the air was a little different this time. On the desk, where I had seen sit no one but J.

Edgar Hoover were a half dozen fans, plugged to an extension cord that snaked away and lost itself in a dark corner. My ears twitched hopefully. Maybe this was going to get me out of here. One of the younger men spoke up.

"Mr. Miller," he said briskly, "can you stop these fans as you did, apparently, the other?"

I started to tell him that "apparently" wasn't the right word. One of the older men broke in.

"One moment," he said. "Can you stop any one of these fans, or all of them? Any particular one, and leave the rest alone?"

I thought I could. "Which one?" There were five fans whirring silently away.

"Well ... the one in the center."

The one in the center. One out of five. Hold your breath, Peter Ambrose, hold it now or you can hold your breath the rest of your natural life and no one will ever know, nor ever care. The fan in the center began to smoke and the blades choked off abruptly.

I said, "The one on the far left ... the one next to it ... the far right ... and four makes five." I watched the last blade make its last swing. "Has anybody got a cigarette?"

I got a full package. While I tore off the cellophane someone held a light. I filled my lungs so full they creaked and sat back defiantly.

"So now what?"

No one knew just what. Two men slipped out and the others drew together their chairs for a whispered conference full of dark looks in my direction. I sat quietly and smoked until even that got on my nerves. Finally I broke it up with a yell.

"Can't you fatheads make up your minds? Don't you know what you want?

Do you think I'm going to sit here all night?"

That was a stupid question; I knew I was going to sit there until they told me to get up. But at the time I wanted to say it, and I did, and I said a few other things that were neither polite nor sensible. I was a little upset, I think. It didn't matter. They paid no attention to me, so I lit another cigarette and waited. The outer door opened and one of the two that had left came back in. He came directly to me, waving the others out as he came. They filed out and he stood in front of me.

"Mr. Miller. This is rather an awkward situation for all of us, particularly for you, obviously. I want to say this, Mr. Miller; I--that is, we here in the Bureau are extremely sorry for the turn of events that brought both of us here. We--"

At the first decent word I'd heard in days I blew up. "Sorry? What's being sorry going to do for me? What's being sorry going to do for my wife? Where is she? What's happened to her? Where is she, and what are you doing to her? And when am I going to get out of here?"

He was a polite old man, come to think about it. He let me blow off all the steam I'd been saving, let me rant and rage, and clucked and nodded in just the right places. At last I ran down, and he moved a chair to where he could be confidential. He started like this: