Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

16.

Part III: San Francisco, 1945

San Francisco—March 15, 1945

On a rainy evening, in a time when gas rationing still kept most cars off the streets of San Francisco, a lone trolley car rumbled along Clement Street in the Presidio. Tim Nordhall was glad to be back in the U.S.A., and looked forward to exploring the West Coast for the first time. Already, he had a whiff of San Francisco’s unique flavoring, as different from anything he’d known as London was from Katanga or New Haven—an exotic cocktail of Asian and European cultures at times garish, at other times subdued, thriving day and night. It might mean a Japanese fish market or an alley right out of Canton, an Italian spaghetti restaurant or a Oaxaca taco shop, an Alabama Negro gospel hall or an all-white New England-style boarding school, a Zen meditation center or an Anglican church perched on hills ages ago inhabited by Shellmound Ohlone. Overlaying it all was a comfortable American feeling of home, complete with neon, jazz, Sinatra, bobbysox, and lots of cars.

Tim had just that afternoon arrived on the train from back East, and now the city seemed to slumber, taking a break between frantic moments. In the stillness, shreds of fog drifted among glistening sidewalks and shuttered buildings. Fog horns whispered in from ships far out at sea on the Pacific Ocean. Smoky clouds winked over a full lemon-pie moon, which, had it been outfitted with clock hands, might have offered a jazzy, exotic Pacific Time.

The world was at war, but just now all the warriors seemed to be asleep behind blacked-out windows in the sprawling Presidio military complex. Like a mobile island of sanity and reassurance, the White Front trolley of the Market Street Line hummed along Route 31 on a journey that brought its passengers west across the peninsula from the Embarcadero on the east docks. Behind thick shades drawn for safety from possible air attack, the car was well lit inside. Sitting at his controls behind the front window was a white-haired man in rumpled conductor’s uniform.

The loud hum, metal on metal, dissipated on all sides in the shadows of large Canary Island date palms and shadowy lawns between darkened official buildings. Five young soldiers in khaki Class B uniform sat smoking near the front, and they smelled heavily of the beer they’d consumed in the Barbary Coast nightlife district. Cigarette smoke drifted thickly in the yellowish, almost orange light under colored print ads for such patriotic American commodities as Lucky Strike cigarettes with their green circle package, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, and Maxwell House Coffee.

Seated alone in the back was a handsome, dark-haired Naval officer of 33 with a sea bag on the floor under his polished black shoes: Tim Nordhall. His white saucer cap lay on the seat beside him, and he sat back hunched in his night-blue knee-length coat betraying the fatigue and beard shadow of a man who had traveled far and alone.

Letting the muted noises of the trolley and his fellow passengers fade into an aching haze, Tim rested his head to one side against the cold window and dozed. In his fragmented dreams, he thought of himself as a tiny dot on a vast landscape of war. Up came distant flashes of his ship being torpedoed and sunk in the South Atlantic, then more flashes as London succumbed to V-1 and V-2 bombings. He’d spent a few heady days in Paris and Versailles as a tourist, then flown back to CONUS via Reykjavik, Greenland, Gander, and Westover; then had a week’s nostalgic leave with family in New Haven, Connecticut—he could still see their faces warm, cheering, wistful in the ache of departure. Then came the long journey behind a chuffing coal locomotive across the vastness of the U.S.A. as one of myriad warriors being pulled toward the still-raging war with Japan. All this, in a blender of image fragments and emotional puzzle chips, until he jerked awake as the trolley stopped.

The trolley’s hum deepened an octave or two and stopped as the car stopped before a row of partially lit enlisted barracks from which emanated the click of pool balls, the echoes of dozens of shouted conversation fragments, and a steady swing beat from a radio turned up loud on a window sill. The young men and the NCO got off in a drumbeat of shoe leather, and the trolley ground out two more blocks before stopping again. “Visiting Officer Quarters,” the driver intoned tiredly with a glance back.

Tim heaved himself erect in a powerful motion, gripping the shining steel handle atop the seat before him. He slipped the cap on his head with the bill riding low over his dark eyes. Grabbing the sea bag off the floor, he strode down the rubberized floor, nodded to the driver, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. A wood sign in black lettering on white stood in the grass, advertising the Visiting and Bachelor Officer Quarters (V/BOQ). As the trolley hummed away on its last few blocks before turning around, Tim adjusted his white scarf and tucked it securely under his lapel collars. Two Shore Patrol enlisted men in white puttees, white helmets, and white belts over dark blue Class B uniforms strode lazily toward him. They walked almost in step, looking bored but alert, with their nightsticks swinging ominously on one hip and their pistols looking huge on lanyarded holsters on the other. They saluted, and Tim saluted back. “You fellows got the time?”

“Yessir,” said the older, a grizzled looking petty officer, snapping his wrist up under his chin to look at a silvery watch. “2230 hours, Sir.”

Tim nodded. “Thanks.” He put his collar up against the damp night wind that smelled of grass and kelp and the sea. He could see the distant lights on the towering, cloud-shrouded concrete piers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“You doing okay, Sir?” said the petty officer with some concern.

“Oh yes,” Tim said. “Catching a breath of night air before I hit the hay.”

The two men fumbled in their pockets and produced cigarettes. They offered, but the officer shook his head. A lighter clicked, casting up a weak orange light that flickered on the men’s cavernous cheeks and veiled eyes. For a moment they were all one with the world and the war, and the petty officer nodded as though someone had said something. The clouds loomed up over the screaming moon as if Japanese bombers were about to pour out by the thousands any minute, obliterating men and ships and buildings. That was how people lived these days when it wasn’t clear if the Fascists on the east and Imperial Japanese on the west were playing a cruel joke—perhaps they really did have Fortress Germany and Fortress Japan, and it was one thing to drive them out of New Guinea or North Africa, but it was another thing to tackle, on their home turf, these fanatical legions of killers who had for several years now demonstrated they would stop at nothing.

As Tim spoke with the sailors, men crossed paths in the night without speaking, nodded at each other’s secrets without asking any questions, and passed on just as quietly to their separate fates. Everyone figured there would be a day, someday, in the dark and dangerous and looming future nobody could read, when there would be peace again. It was the same helpless patience that had seen people through the Depression a decade earlier, when poverty and starvation had endlessly danced with fear and despair. If nothing else, this was an enemy you could shoot at. Then again, it was an enemy who had shot first and would be happy to shoot back. And the scariest part was that one could not imagine what new horrible weapons the enemy was about to throw at the free and democratic world. The two policemen drifted on down the quiet, glittering sidewalk under a weak street light kept as dim as possible.

Tim picked up his sea bag and walked into the building. He stepped up to the grill of the reception desk, where an Army NCO Charge of Quarters sat by an olive-drab saucer lamp. “Evening, Sir. Signing in?”

“Yep. Here are my orders.” Tim took a thin sheaf of folded papers from an inside breast pocket and smoothed them over the battered wooden counter. The place smelled of laundry soap, the cheap paper used in religious tracts strewn on the tables in the waiting area, and stale cigarette ashes in overflowing old coffee cans on the linoleum floors.

“Lieutenant Commander Timothy Nordhall,” the sergeant said, savoring the name as he read it to himself full of speculation. “Will you be staying with us long?” He said “sir” a bit too frequently, less as a military courtesy than with the annoying air of a civilian who was selling Tim something. Tim wasn’t sure what he was selling, but it was most likely bogus. Tim sighed and made a face. “Is there a good hotel nearby anywhere?”

The sergeant grinned, showing a gold tooth. “It’s San Francisco, Sir. They have anything you need here, from the Hotel Mark on down. All you need is the cash.” The sergeant rose and lightly tossed up and down a key on his palm. He was a little squat man, and he looked as though he needed a shave. As he bent to open the steel linen locker, he said: “Looks like you came a long way, Sir.” Tim knew it was small talk and did not answer. The sergeant carefully—as if linen were his career—laid sheets, a blanket, a pillowcase, and a tiny blue-white pinstriped pillow on the counter. He smoothed the linens with a gnarled hand as he spoke. “Need you to sign in and leave one copy of your orders, Sir.”

As Tim produced a fountain pen and started signing the logbook, head tiredly hanging as he jotted his name, rank, service number, time signing in, and other details.

“Oh, I just realized—this came for you, Sir.” The sergeant produced an official looking Kraft envelope with War Department seal and a bunch of administrative hieroglyphics in the upper left corner. It was addressed to Lt. Cdr. Nordhall. Tim took out a small pocketknife and slit open the envelope. Inside was a letter on official stationery, signed by the executive officer of his new station. They’d known each other while serving at Admiralty Headquarters near St. James’s Park in London. Scrawled under the signature block was a note in pencil: “Call me right away—Stan” followed by a phone number and a wild zigzag.

“Got a phone?”

“There is a booth in the corner,” the sergeant said.

“Thanks.” Tim stepped into the wooden booth and closed the windowed door behind him. It smelled of old phone books inside; and of ashes and gum from an endless procession of uncaring callers dropping their cigarettes or gum on the floor while speaking. Tim dialed his friend’s number and waited while it rang on the other end. Stan Kehoe, his former roommate in London, now stationed in San Francisco at the same command where Tim was to work, answered with a muffled voice that sounded as if he’d had a few drinks too many. “Hey, good to hear from you. I was afraid my note wouldn’t get to you in time.”

“Thanks—are you sending someone to rescue me from this flea hotel?”

Stan laughed. “There is a duty driver at the Coast Guard barracks up the road. They’ll drive you to this little spot we have reserved for you. I managed to pull a few strings for you.”

“I’m in your debt, old pal. I hope it’s good.”

“The best, my friend. Wait till you see the place.”

“I can’t wait. Tomorrow at work, eh?”

“See you then.”

Tim stepped from the booth, unbuttoning his coat and loosening his tie. “Sarge, call the Coast Guard duty car for me, will you?”

Fifteen minutes later, Tim sat in the back of a grayish panel truck with military numbers stenciled on the doors along with the legend U.S.C.G. The driver, a lanky young black yeoman with yellow skin and a cigarette over one ear, drove as if the truck were a chariot or a farm wagon. “Nob Hill, Sir. Nice address.” He grinned.

“Let’s get there alive,” Tim growled.

The young Coast Guardsman slammed the stick shift from gear to gear, and swung the big wheel in wide turns as the car sizzled on slick roads, around turns, ever uphill. Fog lay wrapped around the empty houses in Japantown whose denizens had been taken away to some snowy freezing hell on the Prairies. Neon signs gleamed in their reflections on the sidewalks as the truck labored up the grade on California Street. Here and there, men and women spirited past in the night from doorway to doorway, standing on corners talking under their umbrellas, or catching a cab, or stepping in twos into one of the many cozy looking little bars for a little relief from the rationing. Everything was in short supply—metals, meat, fat, rubber, flour, anything one could think of. If you had cash and needed x, there was a thriving black market operator who either had x or knew where to get x, always just around the corner or in a pool hall nearby. They drove past neo-Gothic Grace Cathedral, whose spectacular windows were blacked out. As they drove, memories of a previous visit floated back. The city was pleasant and cosmopolitan, even in wartime with minimal lighting. It was a great place for walking, congregating, conversing—if one had time.

They passed Huntington Park with its trees and fountain. They crawled along ever-narrower streets, around corners, until they came to a small, quiet, tree-lined back street. “Here you are,” the driver said. Tim thanked him and got out, hefting the sea bag onto the sidewalk. The truck sped off.

It was nearly midnight now, and the street was quiet. A strange, lovely magic descended that Tim would remember always, recalling a special time that was about to unfold in his life. It would be a short but wonderful, if dangerous and crazy little block of time, like all things topsy-turvy in a world war. It seemed the laws of logic and convention were suspended. It was okay for a stranger in uniform to be dropped off at an unknown address in the dark of night, carrying only a satchel and a scrap of paper with an address scrawled in pencil.

The homes were decorous old Victorian houses, with high, narrow fronts that reminded Tim of places in London. Same wrought iron fences, ornate trim, and plain homey windows.

Just as was so typical in London, a rainsquall broke loose. Cool, fresh, silvery raindrops dropped at an angle, shattered on the sidewalk, and bounced up. Tim pushed up his collar and pinched it together over his chin. Gathering up his bag with his free hand, he hurried down the sidewalk until he spotted the white on blue enamel number sign, 56 that signaled his new residence. His hair was plastered down, and water ran freely down his face so that when he sputtered his lips, spray flew. He huddled in a rounded doorway and knocked on the door. Sheltered from the worst of the rain, but chilled by a wind that blew up from below and whipped trees and his coat tails about, he huddled by the door. After several knocks, he heard movement somewhere back in the house. A dim light snapped on. A voice muttered, and slippers shuffled on wood floors and carpeting.

“—is it?” an elderly man’s voice called out, truncated.

“Tim Nordhall, USN.”

A latch snapped, and an elderly, balding Asian man in a nightshirt peered out. After a solid glance, a chain rattled and the door swung open. The man took Tim’s bag, towed him inside, and closed the door.