The Bell Tower

by Walter Blum

  By now, the new shopping center was on everyone’s lips. At WCAN, a large ad campaign had been planned with spots all over the schedule. It had even been arranged for Kellin in Canelius to broadcast an entire week from a tent on the unfinished mall and even Larry, who generally adopted an air of sang-froid, managed to get caught up in the excitement.

  “This project is really going to put Canelius on the map,” he said.

  ***

  That same afternoon, Max called him at the station and suggested that they have lunch. There was a diner only a few blocks from the construction site where Southgate was being built, and Max said they could meet there. Plain food, but the service was decent and it was convenient. Next day, shortly before noon, he showed up in his shiny black Cadillac. They ate, and then Max drove him over to the shopping center, parking the car just outside the chain-link fence. A workman checking IDs at the gate nearly fell over himself in awe at his distinguished guest.

  For a while, they got along famously. Max took him on a tour of the unfinished shopping center. They sloshed through mud and inspected the stark metal frames of stores that hadn’t yet acquired their skins. It was Adam’s first look at Southgate. Goldman pointed out where the department store was being erected and rattled off figures about sewer lines and electrical connections and the average monthly sum that tenants could expect to pay in rent.

  He was like a small boy showing off his toys, both proud and amused at what was happening to him. Only yesterday, it seemed, he’d been nothing more than a small-town merchant, he said, peddling furniture on time to customers who didn’t know how their limited budgets would cover it. Now fortune was about to turn him into a tycoon. He wondered if it might mean losing touch with the basics that had brought him this far. The big black Cadillac they’d ridden in was much too ostentatious for his purposes. The thought of hiring a chauffeur to drive it appalled him, but that’s what successful people were supposed to do.

  “You should see my new office in the Mishniak Building.”

  “What about it?”

  “Big as a throne room,” Max marveled. “Feels as though I were being swallowed up by something I have no control over. Of course, I don’t spend that much time there. We’ve got some smart young men coming in to run things. They’ve got degrees and know-how and the best of references, but I don’t feel entirely comfortable with them. I need someone who’s close to me, someone I can trust.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “Oh, now, wait a minute,” Adam protested. “I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “No, I’m not. I don’t bark up trees if I don’t know where they’re going. Listen, Adam, you’re family now, and that means you’re one step closer to me than those hired guns with their business degrees and their hundred-dollar gray flannel suits. I need someone I can trust, someone who won’t screw me around just for a few extra bucks. Do you get what I mean?”

  “You want me in a place where you can keep an eye on me.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  They had come to a large open space that Max had set aside for a bowling alley. Taking a cigar from his inside coat pocket, he removed the wrapper. The lighting of a cigar forced Max to slow down. It gave him a chance to weigh the words that needed to be said and make sure they were the right ones. He tried to coax Adam into accepting a cigar, but the young man apparently suffered from none of the conventional vices. It made him ill at ease.

  “Adam, tell me something. This radio business, how long do you plan to stay in it?”

  “Indefinitely,” Adam said.

  “There’s no such thing as indefinitely,” Max informed him. “Sooner or later everything changes. Life moves on, and if you’re not careful it can go shooting past you. Now, I realize that young people these days don’t see any urgency in life, but you have to remember you’re a married man now. You have responsibilities. A wife to look after, a future to think about. You may have a beautiful house, but there are obligations that go along with it. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first house you’ve ever owned, am I right?”

  “That was your doing,” Adam said quietly. “We could just as easily have stayed in our apartment.”

  “No, I’ve made it clear. I don’t want my daughter living in an apartment.”

  A single bench loomed ahead, one of dozens that would eventually line the mall. Goldman settled down in it and invited Adam to join him. Biting off one end of his cigar, he put it in his mouth and lit the tip. A satisfying cloud of blue smoke wreathed his head. The wind was slack, and the smoke rose straight up and hung there until, little by little, it disintegrated like sand washed away by the tide. “The problem is, you’re annoyed that I made the down payment, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not crazy about it.”

  “Yes, I know how it is. I was like that myself at your age. Had to be independent, had to be my own man. Told everyone in sight that I wouldn’t be beholden to anyone. Stubborn as a mule, just like you. But don’t forget, there’s another side to this. This woman you married, Adam, just happens to be my daughter. Someday you’ll be a father, and you’ll know how it feels to have someone so dear, so precious that you want to lavish all your worldly goods on her.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to give serious thought to the offer I’ve just made.”

  “I have no desire to work for you.”

  “Just like that, eh?” He flicked an ash from the cigar onto the cement. “But your answer came too quick. If you have any respect for me at all, I want you to sit down and consider what I’ve told you. Talk it over with Susan. You wouldn’t be working for me, not directly. You’d be an employee of MG Enterprises, the umbrella organization for all the different operations that are sitting on the burner—Southgate, the store, a bunch of investments that are beginning to show reasonable profits.”

  “I don’t know anything about investments or making a reasonable profit.”

  “You’ll learn. It’s not as complicated as you think. Parker Goodwell is my man at Southgate. He’ll give you a crash course that will have you up to speed in no time. You can be his protégé‚ if you like. There’s no better teacher than Parker, and everyone who’s worked with him has turned out well.”

  “I like radio.”

  “I’m sure you do. I’m sure it’s a great way to get your kicks and enjoy the life of a celebrity—for a while—but it’s a dead end. You and I both know that. You and I both know that unless you’re an Arthur Godfrey or a Martin Block—oh yes, I’ve heard of these people—unless you’re at the top of your profession, and you’re nowhere close to that, you may never be—if you stay in radio you’ll spend the rest of your life in small towns like Canelius, playing records and reading commercials. Is that what you want?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t maybe me. I’ve been around. I’ve seen what goes on in the world. You think radio’s a career, but it isn’t. Radio’s a pastime. Show business itself is nothing more than an evasion of responsibility. You’re in a little world all by yourself, spinning your wheels and going nowhere. Climb down from this Bell Tower of yours, Adam. Climb down now before the barbarians come after you with their bulldozers and knock it over while you’re still up there.”

  “I don’t scare that easily.”

  “You don’t have to be scared. But the most courageous thing you can do is to get out now—pick yourself up and get out while the getting is good.”

  13

  He sat on the bench and listened to the voices.

  Across the way and down the path, a pair of elderly Chinese hunched over a table under a bower of trees, playing a game, part checkers, part chess. A small crowd had gathered to watch the game, commenting on each move in Cantonese. They waved their arms, made faces and argued among themselves as to whether each move was right or wrong. Around the corner and up the street beside the park, a line of children holding hands came marching in file, strung out like beads an
d giggling as they walked. A tour bus paused at the corner to let its passengers photograph the scene. The tourists aimed their cameras briefly, took their pictures, re-boarded the bus and were gone.

  Now the voices spoke. They sang, they hummed, they called in tongues, they made up stories that were not true, but who’s to know? Against the northern tier of hills, a wall of fog lay, silent, still. Tendrils of mist making tentative forays into the city. Gulls from the ocean in full squawk, an engine’s horn bellowing as it galloped to a fire. A day of familiar sensations, everything the way it should be, and yet as long as the past intruded, he would never be satisfied with anything the present held.

  He had been here many times before. They called it Portsmouth Square, although the area was less than a city block in size. Historically, it once had marked the city’s heart, its focal point. But San Francisco, like so many cities, had grown, had moved south and west. The square fell into disrepair. Finally, the powers-that-be had it torn apart and rebuilt as a small oasis of greenery over an underground garage.

  The Chinese who lived around it filled in the streets with their restaurants and gift shops and replicas of ancient shrines. On the far side of Kearny Street, where once the courts and city jail had stood, there now rose a vast slab of concrete catering to the needs of tourists and businessmen who ate and slept and spilled into the streets, mingling with the locals and ignored by them. The hotel had none of the flavor of its neighbors, but it wasn’t meant to. It was a processor of people. It fulfilled its function with quiet efficiency.

  Across the way, the group of onlookers that gathered around the two men at the table beneath the trees had become noisier. Their voices rose and fell as it became evident that one of the contenders was on the verge of victory. A few feet away a pair of younger men were deep in thought over another board, but hardly anyone bothered to watch their game.

  Reaching into the attaché case on the bench beside him, he pulled out a paper bag. Sitting here like this made him feel old, although he didn’t know why. Anyone passing by would dismiss him as just another player in a city that already had too many of them. He thought of how he must look to others, a rather unspectacular man with brown eyes, gray hair thinning in back, gray moustache neatly trimmed, significant notches around the eyes and below the mouth. A little heavy around the middle, but a nice, decent face. In dress, almost self-effacing. The expensive gray suit, tailored to his measurements, designed to conceal some of the less desirable inroads of time.

  Today was his birthday—the big six-oh, as his doctor friend Genero called it. But he came here even when it wasn’t his birthday. The park was a welcome change from business lunches and conference calls and people who wanted to pick his brain for advice on how to invest their money. He carried no cell phone, so anyone who wanted to get in touch with him would just have to wait. His colleagues, who had no idea where he was, speculated that a vigorous man such as he must be having an affair. Let them speculate, he thought. It amused him to think how disappointed they might be if they knew where he really was, and why. The facts are seldom as tantalizing as the fantasy.

  He thought about the man who had visited him earlier that morning. Grohmeyer. Complicated name for an uncomplicated man. Gray like himself and like the fog. A man of infinite grayness—gray suit, gray tie, gray hands, gray face, like ashes from some long-forgotten fire—strange sorrows beneath layers of pumice and protocol. A man so simple and yet so elusive he seemed on occasion almost to disappear, to withdraw from the world at the snap of a finger, an illusion that could be both unsettling and unpleasant and certainly made conversation difficult.

  Good credentials, though. He thought about what it must be like to spend a lifetime opening boxes, turning over stones, peering into dark caves on the odd chance that something slimy and offensive might crawl out. Did it make sense to call in someone like Grohmeyer to search for something that might never be found? Logic argued that too many years had intervened, that he was plowing a barren field. Logic might be right, but still, if there was a truth out there waiting, he had to know.

  “I assume you’ll want progress reports,” the man had said.

  “Not necessary.”

  “Phone calls?”

  “Only if you’re close to a breakthrough.” Adam opened the top middle drawer on his desk. “You’ll take a check?”

  “I prefer it,” Grohmeyer said, fingering the fringe on top of his head. No more than a dozen strands of hair remained, and he had long since given up the struggle to keep them in order. “A check tells me the person I’m dealing with is honest. I’ve had experience with customers who pay in cash, and nine times out of ten, there was something not quite kosher about the deal.”

  “There’s nothing shady about this, Mr. Grohmeyer.”

  The detective took a peek inside the envelope, nodded approval, wrote an identifying number on the envelope, slipped the envelope into his breast pocket, got to his feet and extended a chubby hand. “I’m sure there isn’t,” Grohmeyer reassured, “but in my line of work you can’t be too careful.” He rose. Adam followed him to the door. “Anyway, it’ll be a while before you hear from me. This is not an easy case.”

  “You would have been paid much less if it was an ‘easy case.’”

  The schoolchildren were gone now, but the bubbles of their laughter lingered in the air. They had frightened the pigeons who, experienced urban guerrillas, knew when to advance and when to keep their distance. He wondered what any of them would think—pigeons and children and the more casual passersby—if they knew the truth about the man sitting on a park bench in downtown San Francisco with an attaché case and a paper bag and a look of deceptive innocence on his face. Would they be shocked, horrified, devastated to know the truth? Would they lay blame where blame was deserved? Or would they forgive him, agreeing that this was something men did when they were young, when they lacked the wisdom and maturity to understand what they’d done?

  Well, there was no way people would know. After all these years, only one person had been treated to the truth—himself—and after a while, the years piled up and life stepped in and made the secret a possession for one alone. Now, even the words were beginning to dim, the pages curling around the edges. There was nothing left to read, or so it seemed.

  But it wasn’t about to go away, not that easily. He could blot it out of his waking hours, but there were always the dreams, the nights when he awoke choking and weeping and had to invent excuses to explain what was happening. There were the days when he fell suddenly silent, sometimes in his office, to the consternation of visitors and even colleagues who had seen this happen before and had no idea where he’d disappeared to and feared that the man with whom they shared this moment might very well have lost his mind.

  How could they know? There were the words and phrases that occasionally fell from his mouth and puzzled them, even the more knowledgeable, because he seemed for some reason to be living backwards. And always there were the reminders, like the beautiful young Chinese woman in a silk dress crossing the plaza now, the way she walked and held her head, the smell of her perfume drifting across the plaza, the look in her eyes. Reminders, dreams

  And of course, there was Grohmeyer, with his gray face and wisps of hair. Grohmeyer already knew a sliver of it. After all, when you hire someone to push his way into the past, some of it has to be revealed. But he gets to know only what you want him to know.

  The pigeons were starting to close in, sensing the prospect of nourishment. Adam set aside the attaché case and transferred his attention to the brown paper bag on his lap. From the bag he extracted an apple and a cream cheese and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread. It wasn’t much of a lunch, but it suited his appetite and kept his weight down. At his age, when most men were either taking daily jogs or vegetating in front of the TV, he made obeisance to the gods of hygiene by watching his diet. Crumbling some of the bread in his hand, he flung it at the advancing horde. The pigeons retreated, then closed in, pecking furious
ly, their red eyes glittering at the unexpected treat. A panhandler came by.

  “Any small change?”

  “Change?” Adam murmured absent-mindedly.

  He didn’t like having to respond that way, but it was part of him now. Over the years, his own voice had grown deeper and gravely, like an untended path. Once it had been a pleasant, musical tenor and he had earned his living with it. Now, the sound was less pleasing. Once, after a bout of the flu, he had almost become voiceless and it stayed that way for almost two weeks. There was talk of nodes on the larynx or even, God forbid, the possibility of cancer, but suddenly the condition had lifted like a blanket of fog, and he was back to speaking in a normal way. The doctor said it was a not uncommon experience, but from then on, he kept track of every word, every syllable.

  “Whatever you can spare.”

  The request thrust Adam out of his reverie. “Sorry, no change,” he said, and then on impulse he brought out his wallet and handed the man a five-dollar bill. “Will that do?”

  The panhandler seized the bill and fled. Adam smiled, for the first time that day, at the frenzied reaction. He finished off his sandwich, rubbed the apple against his sleeve to polish it, as he had been taught to do as a boy, and took a bite. Then, as was his custom on these occasions, he laid the apple on top of the attaché case and took out his wallet with its miniature gallery of photographs. The little ceremony occupied him for a good ten minutes, and then finally he put away the wallet and took out the key chain.

  Time to complete the inventory, the reason he had come out to the park in the first place, having lunch in the sun, going over the elements of his life, one by one, as he did ever year on this day. The keys were the last to be counted—the key to his house, to his car, to his desk, to the safe deposit box he kept in a Bank of America down the street.