Bullet to the Moon

Chapter Eight

 "Miss Abbondando?" I said.

O'Grady hauled himself to his pins and took his hat off, like he was offering the lady his chair. He looked as dopey as my voice sounded. Clarence snorted at the both of us.

Behind me, Smith slammed the door shut so hard the roof shook and rained a cloud of dust on us.

"Easy there big fella," Seymour Spitz scowled at her.

Miss Abbondando marched her sensible shoes to the front of the room. She slid sheets of paper out of the battered briefcase she wore on a shoulder strap. She held one sheet in front of Seymour Spitz, with a ink pen in her other plump little hand. She looked down at him through her spectacles with no expression on her kewpie doll face.

"What's this?" Seymour Spitz growled.

"Home Guard Act secrecy oath," Brown answered for her. "You agree that nothing said in this room leaves this room."

"Or what?" Seymour Spitz said.

"Or you don't leave this room."

Seymour Spitz folded his arms over his tie. "I don't sign nothing my lip ain't read."

"Your lip is a long ways from here," Miss Abbondando said. "Your lip don't even know where you are. You all sign or you all go back to the pen and it'll be solitary for the duration."

"I don't like it," Seymour Spitz said.

"I don't like coming all this way to stand in chicken poop and haggle with a gangster I'd as soon see swing from one of them trees outside," Miss Abbondando said. "But there ya go."

They stared at each other over the paper and pen for a few more seconds. Then Seymour Spitz unfolded his arms.

"All right, sister," he said. "I was just testing."

"Yeah? How'd I do?"    

He took the sheet from her. She held the fountain pen at him. He reached inside his jacket and slipped out one of is own. His was gold.

I put my hand on the crown of my hat to keep my head from spinning clean off. I felt like I fell down the rabbit hole and come out in the Sunday funny papers. What the heck did Seymour Spitz corral me into? This sure wasn't no normal caper. I guess I should of figured that out from Smith and Brown and the rest a Rushmore. I knew they wasn't no everyday hoodlums.

But Miss Abbondando? She handed sheets to O'Grady, Clarence and me. I watched my fingers shake as I reached for mine. Miss Abbondando's frumpy business outfit smelled a little of mothballs and carbolic. She lifted one of them thick eyebrows at me.

"I told you there was other work I could give ya."

I looked at the paper shaking like a leaf in my hands. It had the US eagle seal of approval and some typing that began I The Undersigned Hereby Swear. I signed it. We all signed them. She slipped them back in her bag and stood beside Brown.

"Gentlemen," she said. Nobody ever looked like they meant it less. "The state of New York hereby remands you into the custody of the War Department intelligence service. Mr. Spitz here got paroled in return for assisting the government in a project of the highest importance. He volunteered you others. Mr. Bigelow, your papers already gone through reassigning you. I informed Mrs. Jakes."

"She act like she'll miss me?"

"She had a fierce crying jag. Mr. Spitz and Agents Brown and Smith here are your Mrs. Jakeses now. Questions?"

"Only a couple hundred," I said.

"Pick one, Mr. Bigelow."

"What's all the secrecy for?"

Brown answered me.

"This project is off the books. Outside of the people in this room, our bosses and the President of the United States, it doesn't exist. The FBI don't know us, nobody. Hopefully that'll keep the other side in the dark, too."

He turned to Miss Abbondando.

"Thanks. We'll take it from here."

She looked around at us all.

"One last thing, gentlemen. Agents Brown and Smith read your jackets and they probably think they know what kind of bent characters you are, but they don't know you like I do. I'm warning you foul balls not to try any monkeyshines. Your country depends on you. The whole world depends on you. And most important of all, my three brothers depend on you. If I hear one word that you birds is cutting any capers, I'll be all over you like black on the Gold Dust Twins, and I will personally see to it that you are put back in the hole so deep that when a Chinaman opens his eyes in the morning he will be looking straight up your el fideldos."

She looked at Smith. "Pardon my French."

"None taken, I'm sure," Smith said.

Miss Abbondando clunked past us. Smith closed the door behind her.

Mr. Spitz looked at my hand on my hat.

"Stop that. I told you this was a big job." He looked at Jones. "On with the show."

Jones reached behind the blackboard and flipped a map over the top and down the front. It was a map of the world, with big color splotches on it.

"This is why we're here," he said. "This shows roughly the current positions of all the forces involved in the war. Who occupies what territory, where all the trenches are. Nothing you don't hear on the radio or read in the papers, but when you see it all laid out like this you really see how things are."

He was right about that. I never seen it all drawn so clear. Europe was all black with a swastika in the middle. Russia, the edge of Alaska and the top half of China was red with a hammer and sickle in it. The bottom half of China, the rest of the Orient and a whole lot of the Pacific was white for Emperor Hirohito. England, America and the top strip of Africa was blue.

"These positions basically haven't changed since '45," Jones said. "We been slowly bleeding one another dry the last two years. Nobody can keep this up forever, but nobody is ready to quit."

"Nobody ast me," Clarence muttered.

Seymour Spitz shot him a look with ice water eyes.

"Can't go on like this much longer," Jones continued. "That's why everybody on all sides is developing new war machines they hope could break the stalemate for their side. Not just new tanks and artillery. Some of the things we know the other sides are working on is enough to give you nightmares till kingdom come. We know the Japs are working on gas and chemical weapons. Dirty rats been testing them on some of our boys and a whole lot of Chinese civilians. Stalin's got his top brains working on super-long-range bombers that could reach all the way across the Reich, not to mention deep into the continental United States. Hitler's got all the best minds in Europe working for him on a whole slew of new war machines the krauts call Wunderwaffen. Wonder weapons. Some of it you'd think comes straight out of Buck Rogers."

Jones waited a couple a beats for all that to sink in.

"But we got all the top scientists and engineers in America working on a new thing that tops them all," he said. "A bomb. A super bomb. We call it the atom-bomb."

He paused for effect again. The only sound was O'Grady snoring like rocks in a tumbler.

"You want to wake him?" Jones asked Seymour Spitz.

"What's the dif?" Seymour Spitz shrugged.

"Any questions so far?" Jones asked.

"Yeah," Clarence said. "When's lunch?"

"Clarence," Seymour Spitz said, "I changed my mind. Wake up O'Grady."

Clarence leaned forward and gave Potatoes a poke on the shoulder. Potatoes sat up and blinked over at Seymour Spitz.

"Give Clarence a smack," Seymour Spitz told him.

Potatoes turned around and cuffed Clarence's ear with the flat of his palm. It sounded like a firecracker. Clarence didn't fall out of his chair, but he come close.

"Move on," Seymour Spitz told Jones.

"Okay then," Jones said. "Bigelow, you know what an atom is?"

"Ask Clarence," I said. "He's the wise man."

Seymour Spitz swiveled his gray profile about a inch in my direction, which was all I needed to see.

"No I sure don't," I said. "But I'm eager to learn."

Jones drew some circles on the board and lectured us for a while about atoms and uranium and plutonium and radioactivity. He explained how our bright boys worked like the dickens to figure out how to turn atoms into bombs. He said a single one of these atom-bombs could flatten most of Manhattan.

"You're dreaming," I heard myself say. "That's strictly funny papers stuff."

Jones gave me a real serious look.

"No, Bigelow, it's real. Fewer than a thousand Americans know it, but our side successfully exploded the first one of these things ever on a deserted island off Cuba last week. The force of the blast was equal to twenty thousand tons of TNT. It made a crater half a mile wide and melted the sand on the beach into green glass."

Me and Clarence stared at him. Even O'Grady woke up.

"Applesauce," he rumbled.

"Fraid not, Mr. O'Grady," Jones said. "It's God's truth. Or the devil's. Twenty thousand tons of TNT in a single bomb. And the bright boys say that's just the beginning. No one even knows how big these things can get."

We all got real quiet trying to picture that. O'Grady scratched behind his ear. It made a sound like a dame filing her nails.

In the quiet, Mr. Spitz swiveled his face at me.

"Pick your chin up out the hay, Bigelow," he said.

"I was just wishing Righty Rourke was around to hear this," I said.

Righty Rourke was a freelance safecracker worked for all the big outfits in the olden days. He probably did a few box jobs for Mr. Spitz. Righty wasn't a safecracker like you see in the gangster pictures. He didn't kneel on the floor with his ear to the safe and spin the dial a few times and say open says me. It don't work that way. You got to feel your way around the dial one tiny click at a time, real slow and gentle. You need nerves of steel, a feather touch, the ears of a bat and the patience of a saint. Most hoodlums ain't got the time for it. Every second they waste feeling around that dial is a step toward the calaboose. What we called safecracking usually meant either pushing a sawed-off shotgun in the bank manager's ear, or strapping a stick of TNT to the safe door to blow it off its hinges.

Righty was a stick man. He started out Lefty Rourke, but he lost that hand when a stick went off too soon one time. Lost the whole left arm and got blown clean out a window and landed two stories down. That was just one stick of TNT. I sat there trying to feature how many sticks was in a ton of sticks, and then multiply that by twenty thousand. I couldn't do it.

"Mr. Spitz, even if this ain't all eyewash," I said, "and I ain't saying it ain't, what's it got to do with us?"

"You don't care if it's our side or the natsies wins this war?"

"No sir, I mean what's a bunch a jamokes like me and Clarence and O'Grady got to do with it?"

"We're getting to that," Seymour Spitz said. He nodded at Jones to continue.

"So now we got the atom-bomb," Jones said. "And we got the long-range bomber to carry it. Baby called a B-29. Dropping a couple atom-bombs in Tojo's lap is in the works. Pay them dirty nips back in spades for what they done to our POWs. Flatten Tokyo and a couple other cities and the war in the Pacific is over.

"But the Reich, that's more complicated. While our side's been working on the atom-bomb, the krauts have been working just as hard on advanced aircraft. Bigelow, tell the boys what a jet-plane is."

"I sure don't know but I'm darn eager to learn," I said.

Jones grinned. "Follow me."

We all stood and Smith threw the doors open. We walked out into the sunshine, blinking. Sarge yapped. Clarence was still rubbing his ear. Brown and Jones led us toward the other shed.

I trailed the pack, using the opportunity to suck on a Lucky. Smith strolled beside me with her bandaged mitt dangling and the other in her trousers pocket. She was hatless and in shirtsleeves like the rest of them now. I was surprised to see that except for the square jaw her big mug was soft and girly. Her dark hair was cut real short and greased back the way I remembered a lot of flappers wearing theirs in the Twenties. Even on the flappers it looked mannish. She still smelled like roses, cut with that petroleum smell.

"Learning anything, Bigelow?"

"Sure doll. World's been cuckoo long enough so we gonna blow it all up and be done with it."

"Don't call me doll," she said.

Brown and Jones hustled everyone into the shed and Brown slammed the doors shut behind us. We stood around in the dark for a few seconds while the college men groped for the light. Then Jones pulled the string on an overhead bulb.

"Yeow!" I said.   

TO GO ON TO CHAPTER NINE, CLICK here.

I periodically add more stories to this site. If you'd liked to get an alert whenever I do that, use the RSS feed at the bottom of the home page, or click here and send me your email address.

All material on this website is copyrighted and may not be republished in any form without written permission. Copyright © 2009-2010 John Strausbaugh