In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Come with me, then,” Vanderlyn said, moving in the direction of the Battery, “and we’ll figure it out.”

  They went right to the rail, where the wind was up just enough to ruffle the water into leonine whitecaps that would rise and then sink with a hiss into the rocking of the waves. October light made the harbor glow and shine in blue so intense that looking at it hurt. Ferries, barges, and tugs glided by, and a gray warship headed toward the Narrows as an ice-white Caribbean freighter backed into a slip at the Brooklyn piers. Every now and then a ship’s whistle more powerful than a thousand tubas thundered across the gaps and echoed, if you listened closely, off the walls of St. George.

  “I’m hungry,” Vanderlyn said. “Where would you like to eat?”

  “In the private dining room,” said Harry, “after we walk into the bank with your name on it and you’re greeted by smiling women and deferential men.”

  “Why do you assume,” Vanderlyn asked, “that I have a private dining room?”

  “Because your suit costs as much as a car.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You want more? You know the Hales; you work on Wall Street; your schedule is up to you; from the way you speak you must have gone to Yale; you were, or are, in the OSS; you have a manicure and a Patek Philippe; you’re about to embark on some sort of dollar-a-year-type government service; you’ve risen above caring about money; you’re about sixty; and despite the fact that it was the Winabout that sank in the storm that day, you still have the yacht.”

  Vanderlyn smiled.

  “In a package like that is an excellent chance of a private dining room, not far from here, which is where I want to go. What we’ve been talking about is dangerous and illegal, and if you’re going to know all the details of what I might do, I want to know at least who you are.”

  “Tell me why,” Vanderlyn commanded in a neutral tone, saying it quickly.

  “How do I know, for example, that you’re not the FBI, and this is not entrapment?”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know,” Vanderlyn said, “that they have to have law degrees.”

  “The FBI? So?”

  “So here’s some etiquette from Emily Post. Never inquire of an FBI agent if he passed the bar: you’ll make an enemy for life. If I had been a lawyer, I would have passed the bar, Harry, I wouldn’t have had to join the FBI. The FBI is trying to shut us down even before we’re established, because they don’t want us to intrude upon what they think is their territory, and so what if they know less about operations abroad than they do about shitting in a milk bottle.”

  This was all news to Harry, who had drawn Vanderlyn out far more than he had expected.

  “They’ve been looking into anyone involved, trying to blackmail us into abandoning it. They’re on me, they’re on everyone in it. That’s one reason for a buffer between us. Given what you may do, you don’t want them to be thinking about you in any way, not that they would give a fig—except that they might try to force me to stand down by threatening to put you away. Needless to say, that wouldn’t work. We can take some casualties, including me, including you, because what we’re trying to do is very important.”

  “But they must already have some things they can use,” Harry speculated, “unless you and everyone around you are absolutely pristine.”

  Vanderlyn was amused. “Of course we’re not,” he said, sweeping his hand toward what lay in back of him. “Wall Street, Harry. Its mother’s milk is corruption. We shepherd and maneuver capital, and the country couldn’t exist without us, but why are our rewards so exceptional, except that because we turn the valves we drink from the tap when we want? It doesn’t require a Pascal or an Einstein. Government employees—generals, cabinet secretaries—who have more skill than we do, and more responsibility, make a hundredth, a thousandth, of what we make. And capital, in the free-market countries, is almost a public trust, so dependent are they upon it. We don’t even pretend it’s ours. It just passes through us as we siphon and divert. It belongs to other people, but, you know, you’d hardly know it as we sit at their table and sup. Diamond miners don’t get to fill their pockets with diamonds, Harry, but we do.”

  “How do you propose to continue whatever it is you’re setting up,” Harry asked, “if they can blackmail you?”

  “Blackmail them back.”

  “The FBI?”

  “The FBI. They’re not the only ones who can find things out. We had people in the Chancellery in Berlin. Why wouldn’t we be able to penetrate an agency of our own government?”

  “Because they don’t speak German.”

  “They might as well, because they hardly speak English. Believe me, it wasn’t too challenging, but it was unpleasant.”

  “The bureaucracy will merely sacrifice a clerk. I was in the army. I know.”

  “Not if the person responsible is the person at the very top,” Vanderlyn said with unconcealed delight.

  “J. Edgar Hoover?”

  “We’ve got that crumb completely covered. Believe me.”

  Shaking his head in both disbelief and disengagement, which Vanderlyn found annoying, Harry said, “He would claim that whoever actually did whatever was done was a rogue employee and probably a low one, too. As I said, a clerk.”

  “Unless he did it himself.”

  “With his own hand? J. Edgar Hoover?”

  For some reason, Vanderlyn thought this was very funny.

  “What did he do?”

  “You don’t want to know, and you can’t know. At least until we get established, knowing it and keeping it contained is our shield. Probably no one will ever know, but had he not slipped up we couldn’t have begun. They’re still waiting for an opening, just in case, but I can’t think of anything that could happen that would get them out of check—and, oh, we’ve got them in check, even if Hoover dies. But if we go to my office—I don’t have a private dining room, I like to get out—they’ll get your picture and they’ll want to know who you are. That’s no way to begin.”

  “They’re not watching us now?”

  “It’s easy to lose them. They’re idiots, after all. But they’ve got my firm covered. They’ve got someone inside my private office to whom we feed false information. She’s lovely, so it’s easy to be dazzled, which covers all the signs that we’re playing her like a lute.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Would you like me to give you a personnel roster? Remember, gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail, which, of course, is what we will overturn.”

  “I want to know at least who you are.”

  “And if I don’t tell you? How would you proceed without me?”

  “Somehow. Or not.”

  “Must I?” He had already come around.

  “Yes.”

  When Vanderlyn thought, he looked like someone playing chess . . . well. He said, “You know I want to take you in anyway, afterward. I have deniability, I trust you, and I want to help you.” He put both hands on the rail, and looking not at Harry but out at the harbor, spoke as if addressing the distant gulls following a Staten Island ferry, “Why not, then? James George Vanderlyn, with a y before the terminal n. You have to say that, or people spell it any which way.”

  They started walking. As they rounded the bend of lower Manhattan and the East River bridges came into view they were both struck by the color of the light in the north wind, which was enough to wake the dead.

  “Take this,” Vanderlyn said, handing Harry a thin leather wallet.

  When Harry opened it he was speechless. On one fold was a gold shield, the badge of a New York City police detective, on the other, police department identification with Harry’s photograph over a different name. “What is this?” he asked.

  “If you can’t figure out what it is, you’d better give it back.”

  “What am I suppos
ed to do with it?”

  “I’m serious,” Vanderlyn insisted nervously. “You tell me.”

  “To get out of tight spots,” Harry reasoned, “smooth things over if necessary.”

  “That’s right. It works wonders. Not only can you cross the street during parades and park anywhere you want—don’t—but let’s say you’re loading a truck and you excite the suspicions of a passing patrol car. Again, don’t let it happen. But if it did. . . .”

  “What if they called it in? They’d know at any precinct who their detectives are, and that this one doesn’t exist.”

  Vanderlyn shook his head. “Look,” he said, “we’re not amateurs. This is real. It’s a prerogative of the mayor. It’s legitimate except that you have a false identity. Should anyone ask, you’ll be okayed at police headquarters. You can carry a firearm. You can go into a police station and get their assistance. You can, if you want, stop traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge,” under which they were walking at that moment, “and you can speed and get out of a ticket.”

  “Ah,” Harry said, entranced.

  “But don’t. It’s only to give you a way to cover a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes.”

  “My driver’s license is in my real name.”

  “Driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, Colt—all coming,” Vanderlyn said. “Sorry about the delay.”

  “Jesus.”

  “James, his brother.”

  “You have a brother named Jesus?”

  “It’s his middle name,” said Vanderlyn. “My parents may have had a bit too much to drink when they named us. The baby arrives, you break out a good Lafite. I’m James George, he’s James Jesus. We’re twins. They started out calling us both James, but that didn’t work, so they called him Jesus. It became much more of a problem for him than it did for me, as you might imagine. People tend to think he’s from Mexico. It’s always been his cross to bear, so to speak. I was the lucky one.”

  In struggling to keep pace with Vanderlyn, Harry was almost breathless. “Two questions,” he said. “First, I find it somewhat difficult to keep up with you, and I run six miles around the park every day, often twelve. How is that?”

  “I run ten, invariably. Even in blizzards. You have to.”

  “You have to?” Harry was astounded. “All right, you have to. Second, how did you get this picture?”

  “Look at it.”

  “From the army,” Harry said. The uniform was retouched into a suit.

  “No one can tell the difference with certainty. Anyway, no one would try.”

  “What you do is like magic.”

  “To do what we have to do, it has to be that way, which is what makes it so attractive now and what made it attractive during the war. For example, we didn’t know that the Czechs would beat us to it, but to prepare for assassinating Heydrich we found someone with a photographic memory—he was in the film business, a Columbia graduate. He looked a lot like you. We trained him at the Field estate and at Camp X in Canada. He spoke German because his first language was Yiddish, so we parachuted him into Germany so close to the target that after they caught him they kept him in the building where Heydrich worked. For several months they interrogated him. That is, they tortured him. We had made him a major. Wanting to know why an American major in full uniform was nonchalantly walking down the street in the heart of the Reich, they were too curious to kill him.

  “He committed to his photographic memory every document, every schedule posted on every bulletin board, every shift change, to the minute, every coming and going of cars and trucks, every rank and every insignia of everyone he saw, names, plans of wherever he was taken. He counted paces when he was marched blindfolded through halls, and knew when he passed doorways, because the echo of his footsteps changed. He speed-read (is that a word?) all the documents on all the desks that he faced during questioning. They were, to him, upside down. Didn’t matter. Then he escaped, floating on the rivers of Germany down to the sea. He was a great swimmer, and the currents did most of the work, but it took two weeks and when he finished he thought like a fish. In Hamburg he climbed onto a neutral ship, and as it passed through the Channel he dived in and swam to England. Three hours after they arrested him on the beach he was in my office. It took him a week to disgorge everything, which he did as if he were reading it.

  “We put him up at the Connaught. We said, ‘Order anything you want from room service. Go out and buy a suit. We’ll get you a Swiss bank account.’ We all had them, after all. And when he was finished with the debriefing we asked, ‘What do you want to do now? Would you like to go home? You’ve earned it. Just tell us.’ He looked at me and said, ‘If we’re going to kill Heydrich, you might need me.’

  “That’s magic, Harry, and I never want to leave it.”

  “But there’s no war.”

  “There will be. Or perhaps we can prevent it. What we could have done to Heydrich, we might be able to do to another Hitler before he’s unleashed.”

  “And the unintended consequences?”

  “How many millions have to die, Harry, before we stop worrying about unintended consequences?”

  “What if all nations decided to kill off what in their eyes was mortally dangerous leadership? It would be a Hobbesian world.”

  “The world just lost fifty million dead. Is that Hobbesian enough? Politeness can be a form of collaboration, or suicide. Besides, our focus is primarily intelligence. You have to play it by ear. As you know, as you must know, having fought your way through Sicily, France, Holland, and Germany, your responsibility is not to be morally pristine but to preserve the maximum number of innocent lives. How many men have you killed?”

  “Too many.”

  “Yes, and probably most of them were as innocent as you,” Vanderlyn said, “or more so. You know that. And yet you had to kill them, and you did, because all in all, in the gross and scope of it, scores of millions are alive now who would not have been, or who would have been enslaved, had Germany not been defeated—children by the millions, Harry. They are the reason you killed men. Now you are forever morally impure, but, Harry, if only by the weight of the flesh and blood in the balance, you’re purer than those who refused.”

  “What if your judgment of these things is wrong? What if mine, in the case of Verderamé, is wrong?”

  “That’s a chance you take as a consequence of your imperfection.”

  “Doubt and sadness for the rest of your life,” Harry reported. “And it never leaves you.”

  “Doubt and sadness for the rest of your life, so that others may live. I thought we were already beyond that.”

  “We are,” Harry said.

  “Good, then tell me what you need.”

  “I won’t know until I’ve done a lot of preparation.”

  “When you’re ready, call my office. You know my name now. Say that you need specifications for framing a painting I left with you. They’ll ask for your number. Tell them I know it. They wonder about calls like that, and the occasional rough-looking character who shows up, but that’s okay: the curiosity of a certain kind of employee is mysteriously limited. If they have the kind of curiosity they need, they either rise to the top or they’re fired. It’s a defining difference, curiosity. I’ve never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.”

  Vanderlyn shook Harry’s hand and then veered left toward the Municipal Building. Harry headed into Chinatown. He was addled all the way to Washington Square.

  “What’s all this?” Harry asked Cornell, referring to a pile of cardboard boxes that almost blocked the entry to the office.

  “Returns.”

  “Returns? We don’t sell on a returnable basis. Why did you accept them?”

  “They’re damaged. Workmanship.” Cornell picked up a leather portfolio and turned it over so Harry could see a deep scratch that ran across it. Then a briefcase, with loose and broken waxed threads projecting from a seam.

  “We’ve never sent out anything
like that,” Harry said angrily.

  “Of course not.” He gave Harry the briefcase and a little loupe. “You can see where a stitch puller went into the hole. It cut a slit at the edge.”

  “Then we should refuse all these.”

  “I did at first, but a dozen stores came in, just yesterday. A customer wants to buy something, takes it to the counter, and discovers the damage. The store apologizes and asks him to grab another one. He does, and it’s damaged, too. So the store inspects, and sees that most of our products are that way.”

  “Then it’s a matter of security.”

  “They don’t think so. I tried to refuse. They said if we do they won’t reorder. If we take it back, they will. What this means is that however long we have to work to replace the damaged inventory—and who knows when this will stop—we’ll be working, paying salaries, paying suppliers, but giving away what we produce. I have a horror of working for nothing, Harry. I don’t want to be pulled back into that nightmare. My father, my father’s father, and his father all had the same dread all their lives. It never goes away, and it makes me very angry that anyone, anyone, would presume to own my time and my labor, and, therefore, me.”

  “I don’t understand,” Harry said. “They beat us and they kill us, and then they pull threads and scratch the leather? Since when do you escalate down?”

  “However they work, with what we’re paying them it’ll mean the end for us. I guess this is just to speed things up.”

  “And if we don’t pay them?”

  “They’ll kill us. You know that.”

  “I mean if we didn’t have to pay them.”

  “If we didn’t have to pay them, the weights and chains would be removed. It wouldn’t be easy, but we could get back. We’d survive. Orders are down so much I was about to reduce our hours again, but if we’re going to replace this stuff, we’re going to have to work.”

  “Can we restitch?”

  “Only by hand. The needle holes are already in the leather. A machine would make another set.”

  “What about the scratches?”

  “Every one I’ve seen goes too deep to buff out.”