A thousand suns

There were some vanishings that had stuck in his mind more than others; the truly unpleasant ones. They were the ones that, even today, could disturb his sleep and keep him up until the first pale shades of dawn. There were other ones, though, that he’d found comparatively easy to organise. For example, there had been that obnoxious Brooklyn janitor who had discovered the decomposing remains of a body on the roof of his tenement building late in the summer of ’45. He could still remember the janitor’s name — Bradley Donegan. The body he had accidentally stumbled upon was grostesquely distorted by both the fall impact and several months of decomposition and would have passed as just another John Doe in a city that served them up every day.

It would have passed for a John Doe, that is, except for the fact that Donegan had seen the German uniform and was asking a lot of awkward questions. The mess, of course, had been quickly cleared up by the Department. The body never made it to a morgue, and the uniform was hastily incinerated in the building’s basement boiler room. His report to the local police went missing, and Bradley Donegan, a single, middle-aged man with a legacy of violent offences against his ex-wife and a taste for under-aged hookers, was found hanging in his apartment a few days later.

He smiled.

Never lost a single night’s sleep over that piece of shit.

The world was most definitely a better place without Bradley Donegan in it.

But then, to counter that, there were those ones that had troubled him deeply.

For example, the young elementary school teacher, Ms Elaine Scherbaum, who had spotted the erratic behaviour of ‘a large military-looking aircraft’ over the Prospect Park area. There had been children in her care at the time. That had complicated things further.

He had struggled with that one, long and hard, allowing himself much more time than was prudent to wrestle with the decision of what to do. Most of the children he was prepared to let go. None of them had seen the plane themselves, and had only heard their teacher comment on it briefly. It would have been an unnecessary risk to consider these children as liabilities. Children tell stories all the time. No one ever listens to them.

But it turned out that one of them, a twelve-year-old girl, had seen the plane along with Miss Scherbaum. Worse still, the girl had made a big deal about seeing something that looked like a body fall from the plane. Deciding what to do with them had been a very tough call, but there was no way he could afford to let them go around talking. The young teacher had family, sisters and parents in New York, and the longer she was left the more it looked like she would share her story with them. With some regret, there had been strings that needed pulling, quite a few in fact, to ensure both the little girl and the teacher were held longer than they should have been at the precinct station and then driven back home in the early hours by a squad car that met with an unfortunate end off the Brooklyn Bridge. The policeman driving the car had drowned along with them, and the next day the vehicle and all three bodies were recovered. The police discovered one of the car’s tyres had blown, and a curiously weak section of guard rail on the bridge, it appeared, had failed to prevent the car from going over.

That one had been unpleasant. But it had been by no means the worst.

He shuddered at memories that crept insidiously forward into the light.

What about the young boy?

They are taking the boy and his father, the only two people from this small coastal town to have seen the body on the beach, taking them back to Washington to be properly debriefed. At least, that’s what he’s told them. And, being patriotic Americans, they’re eager to help in any way they can.

It’s just him and Blaine in the car with them. He doesn’t know Blaine well. The man is older than him, has served in the OSS for some time. He had helped in the round-up of Japanese-Americans back in ’ 41. Blaine looks like a hard sonofabitch, and there are no black marks on his record. He comes across as the kind of guy that doesn’t ask questions, just gets the job done with as little fuss and fanfare as possible. That’s why he was one of the first to be hastily headhunted and recruited by the Department. A safe pair of hands.

They’re driving south along the coast road, looking for somewhere remote enough to pull over and do this thing. Blaine spots a track off the road, leading into woods. It’s perfect. Blaine looks at him, and he nods back. The car pulls off the road and bounces uncomfortably along the rutted track into a tree-shrouded twilight. He turns round to the father and the boy and tells them it’s probably a good point for them to take a toilet break, as they won’t be stopping for some time. Even then, odd and unlikely as that is, they nod, trusting him unquestioningly because he wears a suit and has shown them an ID card with the American eagle embossed in tin across it.