At a small white Cape Cod house at the outskirts of Portsmouth, the county medical examiner answered the door after Sam spent nearly ten minutes banging on it. Saunders’s hair was unkempt, and he had a dull green robe wrapped around him. Saunders looked at Sam and said, “What is it?”
“The other day, at my brother’s burial, you asked me if you could trust me to do the right thing.”
“I remember.”
“The answer is yes,” Sam said. “And now I have a question for you.”
The doctor opened the door wider. “Come in and I’ll give you the answer.”
Resuming his drive just a few minutes later, he checked his watch and knew he was pushing it, since Hanson was always one of the first to arrive every morning. But there was one thing he had to see before he went on.
On State Street, he pulled up across from the brick building. The building had once housed the only synagogue within miles. It was shuttered and closed; the posters of President Long he had seen slapped up the other day were still there. Those who had worshipped here, who had raised their families here as Americans, had fled to other parts of the country during the unsettled months after Long’s election. Self-ghettoization, it had been called. He tried to recall what he had thought about it at the time and remembered hardly a thing. It was just one of those unsettling bits of news that came across, and since you couldn’t do anything about it, you kept quiet and went about your business.
For some reason, he recalled his high school days, a kid on the team named Roger Cohen, who was a halfback. During one of the training sessions, out on the football field that was now a temporary prison, someone had made a crack about Roger being a weak-kneed Jew, and Roger had practically flown across the grass to slug that other kid.
Good ol’ Roger. Not one to take crap from anyone. He wondered where Roger was, if he ever thought of his days back here in Portsmouth, if anyone else even remembered him and his family.
Did anybody remember? When did they all stop caring?
He shifted the car into drive. But before he left, he looked at the shuttered synagogue one more time, and he saw that someone had taken the time to tear away some of the Long posters from the far wall of the synagogue.
That one sight cheered him as he drove away.
At Pierce Island he stood by the shoreline, looking across the harbor to the naval shipyard. The cranes and smokestacks and buildings were still there, as well as the hulls of the submarines under construction. The wind was biting, and his hands were in his coat pockets as he stared out at the shipyard. By the dock where Hitler had landed, the decorative bunting was still up, though parts of it were snapping in the breeze.
The circle closed.
The rumble of a car engine reached him. A black Ford sedan clattered over the bridge and came to the parking area, where it pulled in next to his Packard. The driver’s door opened and Marshal Harold Hanson got out, dressed in his usual suit and tie, his face puzzled.
“Sam… what’s going on?”
He walked over to his boss. “You know,” he said softly, “something I’ve always wondered about this little island.”
“What’s that, Sam?”
He looked around at the flatland and the scrub brush and trees. “This has always been a magnet for illegal activity, hasn’t it? Every few months we get sent here to make some arrests, make some headlines, and after a while, the problems return. But you know what? Why isn’t there a gate over there by the bridge? A simple gate, closed at dusk, opened at dawn, and instantly, you take care of about eighty, ninety percent of the problems.”
Hanson said, “That’s interesting, Sam, but what—”
“But there’s never been a gate, has there?” Sam interrupted. “And you know why? Because this island serves a need; it’s a safety valve. The mayor and the city council and the police commission, they’d rather have this place open so that any undesirables congregate in one place, make it reasonably safe and happy for the rest of the city.”
Hanson didn’t say anything, just stared unhappily at him. Sam said, “That’s all we do, isn’t it? We do the bidding of others, we do things either illegally or not at all, to make those higher up happy and content. Whoever the hell they are.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
Sam reached into his coat, past his shoulder holster, and took out his revolver. He cocked back the hammer—the click sounding very loud in the morning air—and Hanson held up both hands and said, “Whoa, wait a minute, Sam, what do you mean—”
