Up in Honey's Room cw-2, Page 2

  It was a morning in late October 1944, America at war nearly three years. In the Philippines again since yesterday.

  Honey was a buyer now in Better Dresses at Hudson’s, moving up in her world from a flat in Highland Park to a one-bedroom apartment on Covington Drive, a block from Palmer Park where she’d learned to ice-skate in the winter and play tennis in the summer. At night she would hear the streetcars on Woodward Avenue turn around at the fairgrounds and head back six miles to downtown and the Detroit River.

  She had returned home only once since leaving Walter, late last year taking a bus to Harlan County for her mother’s funeral, dead of respiratory failure, Honey with a twinge of guilt standing by the casket, the daughter who’d left home for the big city to live her own life, meet all kinds of people instead of coal miners and guys who cooked moonshine. She did ask her sister-in-law to come to Detroit, stay as long as she wanted, and Muriel said as she always did she’d think about it.

  Well, since Honey was in Kentucky anyway, she might as well hop a bus over to Eddyville and see how her brother Darcy was doing in prison. My Lord, he actually seemed quieter and listened for a change. Or was it seeing Darcy sober for the first time in years? He had taken prison courses to finish high school at age thirty-two and no longer acted bored or like he knew everything. He’d grown a mustache and actually did resemble Errol Flynn a little. She told him, “You do,” and Darcy said, “Oh, you think so?” He’d have his release pretty soon but wasn’t going back to digging coal. “You’ll be drafted,” Honey said, “if they take ex-cons.” He grinned at her the way the old Darcy used to grin, sure of himself, saying he had learned meat cutting and planned to get in the meat-processing business, make some money and stay out of the army. Honey thinking, Maybe he hasn’t changed after all.

  Then this past August she got a phone call out of the blue, Muriel wanting to know if she’d seen Darcy.

  Honey said, “He’s here in Detroit?”

  “Somewhere around there. I gave him your number.”

  “Well, he hasn’t called. What’s he doing up here, working in a plant?”

  “How would I know,” Muriel said, “I’m only his wife.”

  Honey said, “Jesus Christ, quit feeling sorry for yourself. Get off your butt and come up here if you want to find him.”

  Muriel hung up on her.

  That was a couple of months ago.

  Kevin Dean came in showing his ID, quite a nice-looking young guy who seemed about her age, Honey thirty now. He said he appreciated her seeing him, with the trace of a down-home sound Honey placed not far west of where she grew up. She watched him gather the morning paper from the sofa and stand reading the headline story about the invasion of Leyte, his raincoat hanging open looking too small for him. She saw Kevin as a healthy young guy with good color, not too tall but seemed to have a sturdy build.

  “I have to fix my hair, get dressed, and leave for work,” Honey said, “in ten minutes.”

  He had his nose in the paper, not paying any attention to her.

  “If Walter’s all we’re gonna talk about,” Honey said, “let’s get to it, all right?”

  He still didn’t look up, but now he said, “We’re back in the Philippines - you read it? Third and Seventh Amphibious Forces of the Sixth Army went ashore on Leyte, near Tacloban.”

  “That’s how you pronounce it,” Honey said, “Tacloban?”

  It got him to look at her, Honey now sitting erect in a club chair done in beige. She said, “I read about it this morning with my coffee. I thought it was pronounced Tacloban. I could be wrong but I like the sound of it better than Tacloban. Like I think Tarawa sounds a lot better than Tarawa, the way you hear commentators say it, but what do I know.”

  She had his attention.

  “You’ll come to the part, General MacArthur wades ashore a few hours later and says over the radio to the Filipinos, ‘I have returned,’ because he told them three years ago when he left, ‘I shall return,’ and here he was, true to his word. But when he waded ashore, don’t you think he should’ve said, ‘We have returned’? Since his entire army, a hundred thousand combat veterans, waded ashore ahead of him?”

  Kevin Dean was nodding, agreeing with her. He said, “You’re right,” and took a notebook out of his raincoat and flipped through pages saying, “Walter was quite a bit older than you, wasn’t he?”

  Honey watched him sink into her velvety beige sofa. “Your raincoat isn’t wet, is it?”

  “No, it’s nice out for a change.”

  “Have you talked to Walter?”

  “We look in on him every now and then.”

  “You’re wondering why I married him, aren’t you?”

  “It crossed my mind, yeah.”

  “Being fourteen years older,” Honey said, “doesn’t mean he wasn’t fun. Walter would show me a political cartoon in his Nazi magazine, the Illustrierter Beobachter, sent from Munich he got a month later. He’d tell me in English what the cartoon was about and we’d have a good laugh over it.”

  She waited while Kevin Dean decided how to take what she said. “So you got along with him.”

  “Walter Schoen was the most boring man I’ve ever met in my life,” Honey said. “You’re gonna have to pick up on when I’m kidding. You know Walter and I weren’t married in the Church. A Wayne County judge performed the ceremony in his chambers. On a Wednesday. Have you ever heard of anyone getting married on Wednesday? I’m saving the church wedding for the real thing.”

  “You’re engaged?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But you’re seeing someone.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk about Walter. What if I asked if you’re married?”

  Having fun with him. She could tell he knew what she was doing and said no, he wasn’t married or planning to anytime soon. Honey wanted to call him by his first name but pictured a guy named Kevin as a blond-haired kid with a big grin. Kevin Dean had a crop of wild brown hair Honey believed he combed in the morning and forgot about the rest of the day. She knew he packed a gun but couldn’t tell where he wore it. She wondered if she should call him Dean, and heard lines in her memory, It was Din! Din! Din! You ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been? Left there from a ninth-grade elocution contest. And saw Dean in the sofa waiting for her to say something.

  An easygoing type. He might not be her idea of a Kevin, but that’s what he was. She said, “Kevin, how long have you been a G-man?”

  See if she could find out how old he was.

  “I finished my training this past summer. Before that I was in the service.”

  “Where’re you from?” Honey said. “I hear someplace faintly down-home the way you speak.”

  “I didn’t think I had an accent.”

  She said, “It isn’t East Texas, but around there.”

  He told her Tulsa, Oklahoma. He went to school there, the University of Tulsa, graduated midyear right after Pearl and joined the cavalry.

  Making him no more than twenty-five, Honey at least five years older than this good-looking boy from Oklahoma. She said, “The cavalry?”

  “I went to language school to learn Japanese, then spent the next year with the First Cavalry Division in Louisiana, Australia, and New Guinea, training for jungle combat, the kind they had on Guadalcanal. I made second lieutenant and was assigned to the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, the one J. E. B. Stuart commanded before the Civil War. He was always a hero of mine, the reason I joined the First Cav, not knowing we’d be dismounted in the Pacific theater. You know the Stuart I’m talking about?”

  “You told me, Jeb Stuart.”

  “Shot through the lungs at Yellow Tavern, the war almost over. Do you have a hero?”

  “Jane Austen,” Honey said. “Where were you in the Pacific with the cavalry?”

  “Los Negros in the Admiralties, two hundred miles north of New Guinea, two degrees south of the equator. Destroyers dropped us off and we went ashore twenty-nine February of this year, to draw fire and
locate enemy positions. I was with a recon unit so we were the first wave. We wanted an airstrip on Momote plantation, thirteen hundred yards from the beach, sitting in there among rows and rows of palm trees, coconuts all over the ground.”

  Honey said, “Were you scared to death?” at ease with him, able to say something like that.

  “You bet I was scared, but you’re with all these serious guys sharpening their trench knives. On the destroyer taking us to the drop-off that’s what you did, sharpened your knife. Some of the guys had brand-new tattoos that said death before dishonor and you start to think, Wait a minute, what am I doing here? What you don’t want to do is throw up or wet your pants. Right before you go in is a tricky time.”

  “Well, you made it.”

  “I made it with metal frags in my back. The evening of the second day a Jap threw a grenade I saw coming and it took me out of the war. I never did get to ride with the cavalry. But I got a Purple Heart out of it, an honorable discharge and a visit from the Bureau. They came to the VA hospital and got around to asking if I’d like to be an FBI agent, since I’d finished college, had taken accounting and spoke Japanese, sort of.”

  “So they send you after German spies,” Honey said. “Tell me, does Walter still live in that house on Kenilworth? He’s rigid about his appearance, but he sure let the house run down, never put any money in it. He was saving up for something.”

  “He turned the floor above the market into a small apartment.”

  “He isn’t married, is he?”

  “Not since you left him. There is a woman who might be his girlfriend, Countess Vera Mezwa Radzykewycz.” Kevin looked at his notebook. “Born in Odessa, in the Ukraine. She claims she was married to a Polish count, killed leading a cavalry charge against German panzers.”

  “You and the count,” Honey said, “a couple of cavalrymen.”

  He saw her smile and looked at his notes again. “Vera came here in 1943 and leased a home on Boston Boulevard. She has a young guy, Bohdan Kravchenko, also Ukrainian, cooks and keeps house for her.”

  “If Vera lives on Boston Boulevard she’s got money. Walter’s interested in her?”

  “They see each other.”

  “The countess climbs the stairs to his apartment over a meat market?”

  “Most of the time it’s at her place.”

  “Why do you think she’s a spy, because she’s keeping company with Walter?”

  “I’m not telling you everything we have on her.”

  “But she was married to a Polish count, a war hero?”

  “There’s no record of the count as an officer in the Polish Army. That’s the cover they made up for Vera. We believe she was trained by the Gestapo, was given money and credentials and came on a ship to Canada as a highly respected Ukrainian refugee. Vera moved to Detroit and gives lectures to women’s groups, tells them how awful it is to live under the Nazis, no shampoo, no cold cream. We’ve got her down as a possible enemy alien.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Gathering information about war production.”

  “The Germans don’t know we’re making bombers?”

  “Now you’re acting smart.”

  “What I’m asking,” Honey said, “is if you think what Vera sends the Germans does them any good.”

  “It doesn’t matter. If she’s working as a German agent, the U.S. attorney will bring her up on the charge and put her away. It doesn’t matter if her information helps the enemy or not.”

  “What about Walter?”

  “He’s been a U.S. citizen since he was fourteen. If he’s involved in anything subversive it’s an act of treason. He could hang.”

  Kevin looked at his notebook and turned a page, then a few more and stopped. “How about Joseph John Aubrey?”

  Honey shook her head.

  “Lives in Griffin, Georgia.”

  “Oh, Joe Aubrey, yeah,” Honey said, “owns restaurants. He was big in the German-American Bund at that time. Walter met him at the rally they had in New York.”

  “Madison Square Garden,” Kevin said, “1939.”

  “Walter brought me along thinking I’d be impressed by all the fans Fritz Kuhn had, the American Hitler.”

  “Over twenty thousand,” Kevin said, “they filled the Garden. You met Joseph J. Aubrey, talked to him?”

  “You don’t talk to Joe Aubrey, you listen to his rant or walk away. Joe was an active member of the Bund and a Grand Dragon of the Klan. Bund get-togethers he’d say, ‘Heah’s some more of the dirty tricks international Jewery is doin’ to spread Commonism.’ That’s what he called it, ‘Commonism.’ At Klan rallies he’d say, ‘We gonna have integration, nigger kids and our white children goin’ to the same school-’”

  “Over his dead body,” Kevin said.

  “You’re close. Joe said, ‘When they pry my hands from my empty rifle and lay me to rest in the cold ground.’ Joe Aubrey never shuts up. He got rich in the restaurant business promoting finger-lickin’ barbecue.”

  “He has a plane, a Cessna?”

  “Yeah, he’d fly up and spend a few days at the Book Cadillac. He always stayed at the Book. One time he was there, Joe said he was at the desk registering, he looked up and could not believe his eyes. He said, ‘You know that dude nigger Count Basil? Wears that kind of skipper cap so you think he has a yacht? He’s walkin’ around the hotel lobby bold as brass. What was he doin’ there? He couldn’t of been stayin’ at the ho-tel.’”

  Kevin said, “Who’s Count Basil?”

  “He meant Count Basie. Joe doesn’t know the ‘One O’Clock Jump’ from ‘Turkey in the Straw.’”

  Kevin looked at the notebook page he held open.

  “Did you know a Dr. Michael George Taylor?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He might’ve come later,” Kevin said, looked at his book again and said, “No, he was at the rally in New York. Though I bet Walter knew him from before.”

  “That rally,” Honey said, “a sports arena full of all these boobs sieg heiling everything Fritz Kuhn said, this thug in a uniform standing in front of a giant portrait of George Washington. He led the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and then talked forever, saying President Roosevelt was part of the international Jewish banking conspiracy. I remember Joe Aubrey calling FDR Frank D. Rosenfeld and the New Deal the Jew Deal. That’s what the whole thing was about, blame the Jews for whatever was wrong with the world.”

  Kevin said, “But you don’t remember a Dr. Michael George Taylor. An obstetrician, he has quite a large practice here, a lot of German-American women.”

  Honey shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “He studied in Germany a few years,” Kevin said, looking at his notebook. “He thinks the Nazis have the right idea about the Jewish problem. He says their methods are extreme, yes, but they do the job.”

  “How did you learn that?”

  Kevin was still looking at his notes. He said, “Dr. Taylor is a friend of Vera Mezwa and a frequent visitor. On one occasion he told her he would be willing to do anything, whatever he could, to further the cause of National Socialism, even if it meant incarceration or even his death. He said, quote, ‘The world would be a far better place for my children to live’”- Kevin looking at Honey now-“‘under the guidance of the firm Nazi philosophy.’”

  “He sounds like a bigger idiot than Joe Aubrey.”

  “They’re his words, what he believes.”

  “You tapped the phone?”

  Kevin shook his head. “We didn’t get it that way. I’ll tell you something else. Dr. Taylor supplied Vera with amedo pyrine. You know what it is? One of the ingredients you use to make invisible ink.”

  “The German officer,” Honey said, “unfolds the blank sheet of paper, looks at it and says, ‘Our Vera has a beautiful hand, no?’”

  “I’m serious,” Kevin said, “these people work for the German Reich.”

  “How’d you find out about the invisible ink?” Honey w
aited, watching him. “I won’t tell anybody, Kevin, I swear.”

  He said, “We’ve got somebody on the inside. And that’s all I’m saying.”

  “If I guess who it is, how about, just nod your head.”

  “Come on-I’m not playing with you.”

  “Is it Vera’s housekeeper? What’s his name . . . ?”

  “Bohdan Kravchenko. He’s a lightweight, but there’s something shifty about him.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Blond hair like Buster Brown’s, we think is dyed.”

  “He’s queer?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You turned him around,” Honey said, “didn’t you? Brought him in for questioning and used a sap on him, got him to talk. Does he give you good stuff?”

  “We don’t hit people,” Kevin said, “when we’re asking them questions. What I’d like to know, was Walter close to Fritz Kuhn.”

  “Walter would talk about Fritz and his eyes would shine. We got home from the rally in New York, I was ready to leave him. But once he found out Fritz had swung with about fifteen thousand from the rally proceeds, Walter changed his tune. He was quiet for a while, I think confused.”

  “Did Walter know Max Stephan?”

  Honey said, “Jesus, Max Stephan. That whole time he was in the paper - it seemed like every day for months - I wondered if Walter knew about the German flier. What was his name, Krug?”

  “Hans Peter Krug,” Kevin said, “twenty-two, a bomber pilot.” He opened his notebook. “Shot down over the Thames estuary. Sent to a POW camp in Canada, Bowmanville, Ontario. Escaped and reached Detroit eighteen April 1942. Found a skiff and paddled across the Detroit River with a board.”

  “Walter’s name was never in the paper,” Honey said. “So I assumed he wasn’t involved. You understand this was three years after I’d left Walter.”

  “But you knew Max Stephan?”

  “He was a jerk, as pompous and stuck on himself as Walter, and crude. But this was before Max was charged with treason.”