The Smuggled Atom Bomb

Duff walked around the establishment twice and then entered the front office, where a half dozen men worked at desks, smoked, roamed about with invoices in their hands and marked crates and cases and bundles.

“What do you want?” one of the men yelled at him from a desk.

Duff grinned. “Looking for work.”

“What kind?”

“Any.”

“We haven’t got any kind. Just three kinds right now. Driving trucks — and you gotta be expert. Timekeeper. And paper work.”

“No experience on those big rigs.”

“You work a night shift?”

“Sure.”

“Then come around in the daytime. That’s when they hire the night force and the day force.” The man seemed to think it was pretty funny that they hired the night shift in the daytime, so he laughed.

Duff laughed. “This company go to all cities?”

The man rocked his chair back. “You looking for work? Or transportation?”

“Work.”

“Florida’s full of guys that came down and couldn’t find a job and want a free ride somewhere else.”

Duff stood in front of a railing that crossed the wide, dingy room. “Look. Suppose I could bring a friend’s business here? Would that help me get a job?”

“Wouldn’t hurt none. What kind of business?” Duff invented a business. “Making a modernistic line of furniture out of bamboo. Getting popular up north. He ships by rail right now.”

“Fool to, I’d say.”

“He’s got a pretty good deal. Still, if your trucks go to all the big cities — regularly, I mean—”

“New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo, regularly. And points between. And unscheduled trips about once a month to ten-fifteen more cities. Would that suit your friend?”

“Sounds good,” Duff said, and left.

He went over to the diner. Four big-shouldered truck drivers leaned on the counter drinking coffee, dunking doughnuts, listening to radio dance music. Duff ordered the same.

The men were alert, fresh — waiting, obviously, for trucks to be loaded and their runs to begin. By morning they wouldn’t be so tidy, so cleanly shaven, and they’d look tired.

“Miami-Dade a good company to work for?”

They looked at Duff closely. “Why?” one asked.

“Going to apply for a job.”

The men shrugged. “Good as any.”

“Where do they truck to, mainly?”

“All over,” one man said, “this side of the Mississippi River.”

“Some guy,” Duff said, “that I ran across in an eating joint told me Miami-Dade was a place where a guy could settle down to a life job. Good management.”

“It’s all right,” one of the drivers answered. “This guy,” Duff went on, “didn’t give me his name, but you might know him.” He looked at them and they waited. “Because he was the biggest guy I ever saw. Maybe near seven feet tall, and broad. A powerhouse.”

Heads shook. “Never saw no giants around the joint… You, Bizzmo?”

“Nope.”

Duff paid and went out into the night to begin a long walk to the nearest bus stop…

When, on the following afternoon, Eleanor took up the attempt to persuade Duff to see the FBI, he told her of his efforts. It was her afternoon to iron and his day to air and turn the mattresses. So their talk was conducted at intervals when he passed through the kitchen with his loads and while she continued to press clothes she had washed, with Marian’s help, on the day before. It made for a rather incoherent discussion.

“In other words,” she finally summed up, “either you don’t think much of my idea or else you’re too stuck-up to take a chance on annoying the G-men?”

He had three sun-warm pillows in each hand. He flung them up the back stairway. “I need something more before I bother the FBI.”

“Wasn’t seeing Harry meet that big man enough?”

“It’ll have to be enough,” he answered, “if it turns out to be all I can get.”

“What in the world did you think you’d find at Miami-Dade that you couldn’t find out just by idly asking Harry?”

He laughed — at himself. “Dunno. Whether there was a big guy working there, for one thing. Wasn’t.”

“Which means practically nothing.”

“I know. Then I thought maybe I could find out the main, regular customers. Crazy idea, that one. You can’t just walk into a firm and say, ‘Who do you do business with?’ and be handed a list.”

“Harry’d tell you that too.”

“Sure. And wonder why the deuce I asked. He’s probably wondered already why the G-men were interested enough in his locked closet to ask him to open it and why that box intrigued them enough to make him open that. In fact, if what we think is going on is real, and if by any chance Harry knows what it is, which I doubt, then Harry is plenty worried by what has already happened. Worried enough, anyhow, so he’d never again have anything in that box in his closet except his precious platinum. I wonder how much it’s worth?”

“Probably two or three thousand dollars,” she said. “Awful funny way to keep your life savings.”

He nodded. “Certainly is! Hard to melt. Hard to make that ingot of it. Be like Harry, in a way, though.”

Eleanor licked her finger and absently tested her iron. “If you really want to know where that company hauls its stuff, I could find out.”

“You could? How?”