by Mark Helprin
To get from Bayfield to Milwaukee was not the easiest thing in the world, but, after that, riding the train from Milwaukee to Chicago was what some commuters did every day. Harry had proposed that he and Johnson meet in Chicago, which was fair in that Harry would come nine hundred miles and Johnson less than half that, although Harry would ride the sleek Twentieth Century Limited, and Johnson would have to board a Greyhound at Bayfield and will himself into the kind of Buddhist trance necessary to ride without distress on a bus.
That Harry had prepared a meeting at Johnson’s convenience meant that he wanted something. That it was in Chicago meant that he could have done without what he wanted, for otherwise he would have contrived to get himself to Bayfield, or at least to Superior. It was intriguing especially because Harry had said his father-in-law had a suite at the Drake, where he and Johnson could stay and eat on the company dime. The Drake meant big money. At the very least, it would be luxurious, unlike most reunions, which took place in cheap beer joints or restaurants by the waterside where gulls stole French fries from paper containers that sat on picnic tables like German industrial towns waiting to be carpet-bombed.
This was something else. At Milwaukee the steam locomotive, unsuspecting that in time it would be replaced by a boxy, foul, predictable diesel, was bristling with stilled arms, pistons, rods, and pipes, a black triceratops that could push its way past every Wisconsin cow insolent enough to block the tracks and impede the path to Chicago.
The rhythm of such an engine, heard in every city and town and across open fields, invited Johnson to think high. It was April of 1947, and the tall buildings of Chicago were lit with innumerable lights above the darkening blue of the lake. For Johnson the sounds of the steam locomotive opened past and future. They were assurance, encouragement, a message of faith. This was America’s time. Its engines exhaled and pushed forward, never missing a beat.
He descended at Union Station and walked toward the northern end of Michigan Avenue, thinking about the red shingles he was going to put on the roof of his house in the Apostles. They were guaranteed, it was said, to last and not to crack in the frost, and they were the color of the tiles he had seen in Sicily.
Every day, the great and famous train backed into its berth in Grand Central and waited to be filled with New Yorkers who would throw themselves at Chicago as if on a mission to conquer its superior lebensraum. Then it raced north, dusting past commuter trains all the way up the Hudson. Approached from the rear as it sat ready on the track, it was fluted and modern, the wasp-like rounding of its last car squared off in a cream-colored, lighted sign that read 20th Century Limited.
Countless passengers had seen this upon striking out for the Second City. For New Yorkers it is always painful to leave New York, no matter how much they dream of escaping, because when they turn their backs on it they feel as if they are going to prison rather than leaving it. Racing along the Hudson at what seemed like spectacular speed, Harry closed his eyes. There was Catherine, caught in the net of streets. The registers and years of the city would shift and turn, and its shafts would spin, while he was not there. Flying away from her, he saw her in a silence that rose as an inaudible fume.
The ice on Lake Erie that had accumulated in slowly melting thirty-foot moraines resulted in a chain of red lights that halted the Twentieth Century and forced it to stay stock still, breathing like a charger, dripping as if hot from its run, and vibrating with the strain of stopping somewhere west of Cleveland, which meant that Johnson would arrive at the Drake before Harry. It didn’t matter. One thing Johnson had learned in recent years was to give someone time to show up alive. Whereas in Bayfield the richest colors were the greens, whites, and blues of the islands and the lake, here they were overwhelming and intense reds, browns, and gold, with a touch of royal. Neither snow nor ice covered Lake Michigan, only dusk made duskier for Johnson by the yellow glow of little lamps spread across the tables at the Drake. The silverware glistened with a muted shine almost like nickel. The war was over, he had lived, and here he was, waiting, with a bandage on his nose, now fairly well soaked in blood.
“How did you get that?” Harry asked as he guided his suitcase in the air and around the table, having come straight in because he was late. “I want to put this down where the waiter won’t trip over it.” They didn’t need to shake hands. A hundred years might elapse and they could still speak to one another as if they were walking down a snowy road in France, numb from cold and exhaustion.
Before Johnson could answer, Harry had another question. “Why didn’t you order something?”
“The prices.”
“The company’ll pay for it.”
“Are you sure?” Johnson asked.
He had not fathomed what was involved. Harry said, “They keep the suite year-round and no one was scheduled for it. It’s got two bedrooms, on a high floor. I’ve been told you can’t hear anything but the wind, and you see the lights blanketing the North Shore.”
“What about the food?” Johnson asked. “If no one were here, they wouldn’t be paying for that.”
“They said the budget is set in such a way that they assume someone will be here on an expense account eighty percent of the time. An ordinary mortal can’t quite understand this—I never will—but Billy Hale said to me, If you were in an office and you took a drink from the water cooler, would you worry about what it costs?”
“What kind of water cooler?” Johnson asked. It was a very odd question. “You mean, one that has those conical cups you can’t put down unless you’re Houdini? That’s about a hundredth of a cent’s worth, if that, if it’s delivered. If it comes from a pipe, it’s a millionth.”
Surprised to hear that Johnson was also irritated by the Houdini cups, Harry continued on in the line of conversation. “That’s what I said to him, more or less. And he said that, proportionately, given the resources of the firm, if we ate like hogs and stuck to Russian caviar, it would be no more than taking a drink from the water cooler.”
“I can’t grasp that,” Johnson said, “but I’ll have a Champagne cocktail. I’ve never had one. I don’t even know what it is. But it sounds good.”
“I’ll bet Catherine knows,” Harry said.
“Who’s Catherine?”
“My wife.” Harry’s anaesthetized look told Johnson exactly how far gone he was.
“I can tell,” Johnson said, “that though she may be an heiress, it’s not for the money.”
“No,” Harry said, still intoxicated with thinking of her, “it’s not for the money.”
The waiter came to them, gliding over the thick carpet as gracefully as a manta ray. Everyone’s face was slightly red-orange in the light of the table lamp, its shade chosen to show to perfection a woman in makeup. But without makeup, anyone in this light looked like a pumpkin. They ordered four Champagne cocktails. “Are you expecting other diners?” the waiter asked. He was a horsey-looking Slav with huge mother-of-pearl cufflinks as round as the moon.
“We aren’t,” said Harry. “We just like to have our reserves in place.”
The waiter returned with the four drinks and put them down so daintily as to indicate resentment, then disappeared into near darkness lit only by a painting light over a canvas of either starving racehorses or really fat greyhounds. Although they didn’t know what a Champagne cocktail was, it was lemon juice, sugar, bitters, and Champagne in a glass so cold it was frosted. “It didn’t make Milwaukee famous,” Johnson said, “but I like it. It’s festive.”
“Yeah,” said Harry. “It’s festive. You know, you’re still bleeding.”
The gauze taped to the ridge of Johnson’s nose was getting heavier and redder. “Oh, that,” he said.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Well, almost nothing. I got to the hotel and I was looking up at it and not at my feet. I don’t walk around looking at my feet. At the entrance there’s a lectern which is the doorman’s post.”
“I noticed. The doorman is seven feet tall
and dressed like Frederick the Great.”
“Did you notice that there was a tent-like structure where people waiting for taxis can get out of the wind and rain?”
“No.”
“Neither did I. That’s because the canvas part is gone. The frame, however,” Johnson said, finishing the first cocktail and searching for the second (there would be a third), “remains. Including the brass bars at the bottom. Excuse me, the fucking brass bars at the bottom, about four inches above the ground.”
“Ah,” said Harry, who was taking yet another chance on what he was drinking, “it’s coming into focus.”
“I fell flat on my face, not holding my arms out, because I was reflexively reaching down to free my feet. All right, so I smashed up. It happens. What really bothers me is the doorman.”
“The doorman.”
“First, he laughed. Then he sneered at me, lifting his upper lip like a garage door and moving his head from side to side. And then he turned away. If a dog got hurt it would excite more sympathy than that.”
“Did you complain?”
Johnson had a determined look. “I have better plans. The way I’m dressed, the way I look, he didn’t think I was a guest. People who stay here don’t carry U.S. Army packs.” Near Harry’s Copeland Leather suitcase was an olive-drab knapsack.
“But then he saw you go in.”
“I went around the other side. He doesn’t know I’m staying here, which is good. And he won’t, because I’ll never go out the front door.”
“Why?”
“Because, on the day we leave, and I’m flexible about that, it’s the weekend. . . .”
“That’s why it’s so empty in here,” Harry commented. “It’s for businessmen, not for taking a date or your wife.”
“And maybe,” Johnson said, “that’s why the waiter was a bit put out to bring Champagne cocktails. I would say it’s a woman’s drink.”
“Do you think we shouldn’t be drinking it?”
“What the hell. The day we leave, you’re going to take my pack and wait for me in a taxi on Michigan Avenue. The lectern that that son of a bitch stands at is quite complex. It’s got a lamp, some sort of log or ledger, guidebooks, umbrellas, a pitcher of water, glasses, flashlights, probably the lunch of the son of a bitch, and a telephone.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I weigh a hundred and ninety pounds. When the tank tread ran over my leg, the plate settled on an unevenness of ground, and didn’t crush it as it might have. I’m okay now: I don’t even limp. I coach the track team, so I run with them a lot. I still can move fast. So what’s fourteen miles an hour times two hundred pounds—include clothing and shoes—in foot-pounds?”
“Two thousand eight hundred.”
“Like a car. He won’t know what hit him. The lectern will shatter. Its contents will explode in all directions. He’ll be knocked five or ten feet, and his hat will fly twenty feet. He won’t be hurt much unless he tries to get in a punch, but he’ll wonder for the rest of his life what it was that came flying down the sidewalk like a bat.
“And that’s me.”
“I’m in the taxi?”
“You’re in the taxi. I get in, we drive five or ten blocks. I take my knapsack and get out, you go another few blocks. We mix with the crowds. To the Union Station . . . just like Lenin. Then home.”
“Unlike Lenin,” Harry said, “I’m going to Indiana to see Sussingham. And I can tell him that you haven’t changed.”
“Should I have? My values are timeless, but my morals are flexible where required.”
“Revenge?”
“Symmetry. The universe not only consists of it, it demands it.”
“I’ll tell you what, Johnson. Let’s have a great dinner, charge it to Hale and Company, and go up to the suite, pull two chairs to the window, prop up our feet, and have a long talk.”
“About what?”
“Symmetry.”
When they opened the windows, the sound of traffic on Lake Shore Drive, occasionally muted by gusts of wind shot from the looming darkness above the lake, gave body to the arc of red and white lights moving in two streams far below them. A white voile curtain swept back and forth with the spring breeze, and they were able to sense the humidity of the air coming from over the water, because the left sides of their faces were slightly drier than the right.
“Even with a view like that,” Johnson said, “I mark it for ranges.” He meant for rifle, BAR, machine gun, mortar, tank, 88, and howitzer. “Do you still do that?”
“No, but sometimes I’m afraid to go to sleep, because I think civilian life is a dream and if I let go I’ll wake up in a freezing hole in Germany. What haunts me is the men who never came back, and the ones now hidden away in hospitals, without a jaw, or half a face, no legs, bodies scarred with burns; the ones who’ll go back to their towns or neighborhoods and the people there will freeze when they see them. The luck we had, that saw us through . . . ,” Harry said.
“But you’re not scared of anything anymore, right?”
“Nothing physical, not yet. My father-in-law—who just paid for our dinner—is almost sixty. He says, when you’re young—and from his perspective that would mean us—take the risks you’re going to take in your life, because risk hates the old. Make your dangerous moves when you still have the ability and time to recover. Which is why I asked you here.”
“I figured something. The Drake. . . .”
“To ask a favor. More than a favor.”
Johnson turned from the high view to Harry. “Whatever you want, I can tell you in advance, I’ll do it. You know that. As long as I don’t have to kill someone or rob a bank.”
Harry was absolutely still. Then he looked down.
“Uh-oh,” Johnson said, leaning toward the windowsill, like a judge about to get up from a massive leather chair in his club. “Which is it?”
“A bank would be no problem.”
“It’s a person?”
“More than one.”
“How many?”
“Maybe half a dozen.”
“Half a dozen? The war’s over, Harry,” Johnson said.
“Not for some people.”
“It is for me.”
“That’s fine. It’s okay. I would never expect this of anyone. Don’t worry.”
“I didn’t say no. What is it?”
“In essence, it’s this: If you have a fire in your house, you call the fire department and they come as fast as they can. If someone is robbing a bank, the police and the FBI come as fast as they can. There could be a gun battle. They could kill the robbers, and die themselves. But for organized crime it’s different. If you’re being shaken down, and they beat you, set your place on fire, kill you if you resist . . . if they steal from a whole city, intimidate a whole nation really, run prostitution and burglary rings, murder for hire, pay off police and judges, kidnap children for ransom . . . for these things, if you go to the police, not only will they not do anything, someone among them will report you if you persist, and you’ll be killed.”
“This is happening to you? You’re really going to do this?”
“I’m being driven out of business. They killed one of my workers. They beat me to within inches of my life. They rule the city and they enjoy it. You can see it on their faces. They walk around like kings.”
“What about the FBI?”
“That’s what I wanted to say. If there’s a fire in your house, you call the fire department and they come to put it out. If the Mafia is shaking you down and murdering your people, you go to the FBI and they say that they’re working on it. What does that mean? It means two things. First, they may have a task force or two, let’s say in Newark. Maybe in ten years they’ll arrest some guys in Newark and it’ll be all over the front pages. It’s as if you report that your house is burning down and the fire department says, We’re working on putting out a fire. Well, it’s in Phoenix, not that they can tell you that, or any details, so you don’t know
if in ten years they’ll put out a fire in Phoenix or not. It’s left to your imagination. And the other thing is that when you go to them they ask if you’re willing to testify. What that means is that you’re going to die, because they can neither protect you nor keep a secret. You’re dead when you open your mouth. They know that no one testifies. They ask it to get rid of you and to make you feel responsible for their failures. Because, you see, they know who’s committing these crimes, how, where, and when. They could get the evidence themselves with surveillance, wiretaps, and presence at the scene. And they do, every now and then symbolically, with their well publicized task forces. To put it simply, they have a modus vivendi, and for some of them there’s even what we would call a ‘relationship.’ You don’t know who knows whom or what will be reported to whom.”
“Who else?” Johnson asked.
“Thus far I’ve spoken only to Bayer. Sussingham tomorrow. Then Rice.”
“What did Bayer say?”
“He’ll do it.”
“What exactly is it?”
“A road ambush in a fairly remote area, with a wide river across which to escape in the dark. Any reaction from the law or the mob will be channeled north and south, which is how the roads run. No one will cross the river to look, as the nearest bridges are forty and twenty miles away.”
“The Mafia knows how to protect itself, Harry, doesn’t it? This kind of thing is their business.”
“Not like it’s ours. We’re not going to do it their way. We don’t know how to do that. We’ll do it our way. We’ll have heavy weapons—bazooka, light machine gun, explosives. They have, at most, a few Thompsons. Before the war, who would have known how to do something like this? Now it’s like brushing your teeth.”
