FICTION
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
Algie
It
was a breathless night in the spring of 1970. The air was heavy with
anxious memories and things to come. The small Connecticut town
close to the border of New York was asleep . The only sounds were the
whirring chorus of air conditioners and the intermittent barking of a
dog far away, piercing the night as though it came from a distant radio
transmitter.
Suddenly there was a crashing noise, coming in waves as if a house
was being blown up. Nothing like this had ever been heard in a
slumbering town accustomed to going to sleep and getting up without
any disturbance. People jumped out of bed. Could it have been an air
raid: the question stirred the minds of the half-awake. No, who would
bomb this peaceful town, except a madman? In a few minutes, fire and
police sirens began to screech.
By morning it became known that a Ford truck had blown up and
the body of a man, dissevered and mangled, probably in his fifties, was
found twenty feet from the wreckage. Both of his legs had been blown
off, one was under his body, another twenty feet away. He had been un–
conscious but still breathing heavily when the police arrived.
The New York Times
carried a three-paragraph story on page six the
next morning. A police investigation, by the town's twenty-man police
force, was begun. But it was beyond the capabilities of the local police,
trained to handle drunks, traffic violations, and petty burglaries. They had
no clues and no means of finding any to the identity of the dead man
and the mission of the small red pick-up truck. All they could find were
the remnants of unexploded bombs, of unknown make and source.
After a few days of unprofitable speculation, the state police and the
FBI were called in. Soon it became clear that the accident, if it was an
accident, was too mysterious for even the state police, and the FBI took
over.
As everyone knows, the FBI is nothing if not methodical. Its investi–
gations move slowly, step by step, from one person to another, one fact
to the next, interpreted by a procession of guesses.
