by W. T. Tyler
“So you know what it’s like,” Klempner said. “It was the CID that got me interested in the FBI. After I was discharged, I went back to La Salle, got a law degree, and joined the FBI. Shit, you shoulda seen me in those days—dark suit, skinny tie, buttoned-down collar, shined shoes every morning. FBI, right? I was starched right down to my asshole.”
“I think I know the type.”
“Straight arrow all the way, Mr. Clean, a Catholic kid from Philly still trying to polish up the rough edges. After I joined the Bureau, I kept at it—took public speaking at GW, a couple of economics courses, a little philosophy. You know the drill: anything that looks good in your file.” He laughed again and dropped his cigarette out the window. “When they send me down to the Atlanta field office, I’m still wet behind the ears. I still had the Philly accent down there with all those Peachtree Street secretaries, all of those broads with the soft mouths and the warm tit, but I’m not making out, not me. That might give the office a bad name. So I’m trying to live up to the John Q. Public image, Hoover’s G-man, learning to play golf, joining the Lions Club, polishing the apple with the JCs.”
“This was when—the fifties?” The old station wagon rumbled over the potholes, the exhaust pipe banging.
“The fifties, right. Big troubles down there. But that was the first time. I was twice in the Atlanta office. The second time was in the sixties. Anyway, this first time an old inspector comes through from Washington one day and he takes me to lunch down at this club where he always hangs his hat. He’s got a voice like a gravel pit, this old guy, a face like a slag heap, tough as scrap iron, you know what I mean; but he’s married to the Bureau, just like an old soldier, like Hoover—no family, nothing. He’s been through the wars—Crime, Incorporated, up in Brooklyn, Dutch Schultz and that crowd, Philly, Chicago—only now he’s an inspector and they’re gonna retire him. He’s got a little bungalow down near Hialeah near the track, not far from a golf club, right on a boat canal. He’s gonna play the ponies and watch the flamingos, shoot a little golf, grow a little garden, pull in the bass off the boat dock. You’ve heard guys like that who have it all worked out.”
“A few.”
“So he takes me to lunch. It’s the second time he’s been through, a Saturday, half day, and we have a couple of belts. ‘Listen, Klempner,’ he tells me, ‘I’ve been watching you, the way you’re going, but you’re not gonna make it that way.’ Me, I don’t know what the shit he’s talking about and I’m too scared to ask. So we drink some more and he finally tells me, ‘Listen, Klempner, you take your choice,’ he says, ‘the high road or the low road—the soft-collar lawyer the way you’ve been playing it or the grungy bastard the way you are. High road or low road.’ I figure the guy’s got X-ray eyes and knows something, only I play dumb. So we have some more brews. He’s loaded up this time, so am I. ‘The low road’s tough,’ he says, his eyes beginning to wobble around, ‘and it’s slower, and when the other guys get the kudos and their wives take home the roses, you’ll still be standing down there in the crowd, looking up their skirts, but that’s just for the choirboys. You’ll be seeing pussy while the rest are smelling roses. That’s what we all come home to at night, not roses but pussy, and that’s what you like—isn’t it, Klempner?—pussy.’ And he gives my leg a squeeze under the table and when he does, I’ve got his number. I know what this old fart is—a fruit, like Hoover was, only he’s not getting any, either, married to the Bureau like that, an old fruit gone dry to the bone, nothing left but a leg squeeze under the table now and then with some kid like I was. All of a sudden I got sick to my stomach, real sick, but I got a lot of things cleared up that day.…”
They drove along the canal, carried along by the outward-bound traffic. “The poor bastard,” Wilson said after a minute.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. The poor bastard, but he wised me up. This old guy had seen it all and so had I, but I was faking it, pretending I hadn’t, trying to forget the way I grew up, how tough it was. I knew what he was telling me—I was listening to my own conscience talking. Like my old man, talking to me from the grave. So I drove him out to the airport that afternoon and when I got home I threw away the fucking choirbooks. From that time on, when I’d work a case, whether it was a white-collar CPA, a Peach Street blonde, or some dimwit redneck from the Klan rolling over the state line with a trunkful of industrial dynamite, headed for some civil rights sit-in, I’d work them from the bottom, low road all the time. Maybe the promotions didn’t come as fast, but it paid off. I got more ass than the Georgia Tech campus. Maybe that held me back some too. I got married late.” He laughed crudely and lit the cigarette he’d been holding for five minutes. “But I’m almost fifty now and ask me whether I’m sorry, even after they busted me. Christ, no. That’s why I know this town the way I do, why nothing in it’s ever going to change.…”
The house was beyond Chain Bridge on the District side, boxlike, painted white—a miniature colonial replica on a narrow lot. The porch lamp was lit, dimly bathing the small porch and shrubbery in an anemic amber glow. A bicycle leaned against the porch post. A new Dodge station wagon stood in the drive in front of the garage doors. As the lights of Wilson’s car swept the front porch, the aluminum storm door opened and a small girl came running out into the cold. The blue-gray eye of a television screen glowed through the curtained windows of the living room; a few small, dark shadows were silhouetted against it.
The girl ran through the headlights of the car, her yellow hair bouncing against her thin shoulders. She was coatless despite the winter nip in the air. “Did you get it, Daddy? Did you bring it?”
Klempner pulled a long, thin package wrapped in white paper from his pocket. “You think I’d forget?” She snatched the parcel away, leaving her father squatting in the drive.
“Are you sure it’s the right kind?”
“Chocolate mints, just like you said. Hey, don’t I get anything?”
But the girl had already turned through the headlights and back to the porch, the box held out like a trophy.
“It’s her teacher’s birthday tomorrow,” Klempner said through the open window. “You remember how it was—the fourth grade and your teacher’s birthday tomorrow. Forget that and all the clocks in town stop, Santa Claus closes down.” He didn’t move away immediately, watching his daughter go into the house. “Who gives a shit?” he asked after a minute. “You tell yourself that after a while: Who cares? You? Me? If I knew then what I know now, I’d have been on the take twenty years ago—had a two-hundred-grand pad down near Hialeah by now. It’s too late for me now.” He leaned into the car again. “Just between you and me, like everything else we’ve been talking about, but these guys are trouble, Wilson. Don’t do them any favors.”
“I’ll try to remember.”
“A word to the wise, O.K.?”
Coming from Klempner, the cliché sounded so patently false that he wondered why he bothered.
“Is everything all right?” Betsy asked, coming into the kitchen, her apron still on. He stood in the middle of the floor in his overcoat, not yet entered his house at all, still turning over the events and conversations of the past week, as he’d done all the way home.
“I think someone’s conning me,” he said. He pulled off his coat and slipped his arms around her waist. “What would you think of that?”
“Impossible,” she said.
5.
At the top of the rear stairs at the Center’s main building was a small office lined with empty bookcases, containing a desk, a few wooden cabinets, a blackboard, and an electric heater. The room had been recently dusted, the windows washed, and the carpet vacuumed in expectation of Dr. Pauline Rankin’s arrival. The study had most recently been occupied by a Polish-born mathematician and linguist who late in life had turned his attention to the quantification of Soviet political behavior based upon an obscure calculus of his own design which was keyed to certain obscure Soviet periodicals. He’d been a resident fellow at the Center
for two years, but had departed without publishing a word. A carton of his documents sat in the corner of the office, awaiting forwarding to his new address, which he’d never provided. The carton had been waiting there gathering dust for eighteen months.
The blackboard behind the desk had been scrubbed clean of those obscure calculus sets and symbols which the mathematician-linguist had once pondered by the hour, sitting atop his desk, chalk in hand, warmed by the electric fire which he mounted on the desk during these hours of meditation, like an émigré who still carried in his bones the icy grip of a gulag from which he would never recover.
If the figures and the equations were gone, however, one sentence still remained, drawn in a wavering, eccentric script at the top of the blackboard. It read:
When nations, like individuals, come to “know” those particular theories which explain their behavior, they escape their bondage by becoming free to disobey them—and they always do.
These words weren’t in chalk, as they appeared, but had been painted there in enamel by the resident scholar himself the afternoon of his departure, standing on a wooden chair, being watched by Billy O’Toole, who’d brought him the paintbrush and the can of paint. They might have served as his epitaph. He disappeared the same afternoon, out the door and down the walk, an emaciated figure with stringy yellowish-white hair, wearing a threadbare overcoat and carrying a battered cardboard suitcase, a man not unlike those derelicts who queued up at the back door of the thalamus building each Friday for the coming week’s biochemical experiments.
The morning Dr. Rankin arrived at the Center, Haven Wilson was in his office, reading a draft statement Dr. Foster had dropped off. The latter’s appearance before a congressional subcommittee hearing on Soviet subversion in Latin America had been agreed to and Foster had nervously supplied Wilson with the testimony he intended to give.
Reading the statement, Wilson understood Dr. Foster’s nervousness. The language was too dense, the sentences too long, too elliptical. Remembering from his years on the Hill how short the congressional attention span would be, he took a red pencil from his desk drawer and began to mark up Foster’s typescript. The author had hovered in the corridor for a few minutes after he’d left his testimony with Wilson, lingering there as if awaiting a summons. He’d reappeared at the front receptionist’s desk, gossiping as he craned his head to look through the open door to see what Wilson was up to. He hadn’t been enthusiastic about his appearance before the congressional subcommittee, but Wilson had insisted. Once Foster had seen the red pencil raised against his typescript, he’d quickly clamped on his hat and fled in humiliation out the front door.
A few minutes later, Wilson heard a noise in the corridor and discovered Fletcher, a heavy carton of books in his arms. Dr. Rankin stood with him, a small figure wrapped in a quilted kapok coat that embraced her like a life jacket, hiding her neck and lifting her arms, penguin-like, away from her trunk. Her thick glasses were misted by the warm air of the corridor.
“Is this the office?” she asked Fletcher. “It seems to be occupied.”
“Looks like it.” On his head was a salt-and-pepper cap, the crown folded forward over the bill. The smell of the hunt country was in their garments.
“Your office is at the top of the stairs,” Wilson said as he joined them.
“I really don’t like stairs,” Dr. Rankin said.
“Maybe we can switch around later.”
“I’m really a creature of habit,” she said. “Once I get accustomed to an office, I don’t like moving. I detested leaving Angus’s cottage.”
“Maybe you’ll get used to this one, then,” Wilson said. “I’ll show you, come on.”
She didn’t seem pleased by the office. “It’s very dark,” she said, opening the drapes. Fletcher left the box of books on the desk and went back downstairs to the van. “It’s still very dark,” she said. “Why is the woodwork so dark?”
Wilson went downstairs to help Fletcher unload the van, but by that time, Billy O’Toole had arrived. He heard that familiar voice rattling on in the same collegial way he’d come to recognize on a dozen occasions during the previous weeks.
“… even after I got out of the seminary, they still came after me, stayed in my head all night. You ever know Latin?”
“Don’t think so,” Fletcher muttered as they reached the foot of the stairs, both of them carrying pasteboard cartons of books and papers. Wilson waited for them on the landing.
“You never studied Latin?” O’Toole asked.
“No. Don’t remember if I ever did,” Fletcher answered.
“If it’s Latin, once it gets in, you can’t get it out. Like mice in the pantry, you know what I mean? All night long running around in there. In Chicago once, it really had me going. March the fifth, nineteen fifty-three, the day Joe Stalin kicked the bucket. You ever been in Chicago?”
“A few times.”
“March the fifth,” Billy O’Toole said, stopping on the narrow steps. “I woke up in a doorway in Chicago near the el and I finally figured out who I was. You know who I was?”
“Haven’t got a clue.”
“St. Thomas Aquinas redundant, the old man himself, writing the Summa Theologia. An old parish priest on the South Side took me in, but I didn’t fool him. St. Agnes Parish. You know St. Agnes parish on the South Side?” Billy O’Toole still waited on the stairs, holding the box of books against the banister.
“The books go upstairs, Billy,” Wilson called.
“Don’t think so,” Fletcher answered, giving Wilson a brief baffled look.
“St. Agnes helped me out. Went to night school. Would have studied code-breaking, but they didn’t have any. Someone was lying. It wasn’t St. Thomas at all, but an old priest from my Jesuit school days. Studied the Summa so long it came out in his sleep, you know what I mean? ‘We proceed thus to the Tenth Article.’ You married?”
“Married once; still am.”
“I wouldn’t mind, but you’ve gotta find out what you want in life. What is it you want? What is it with all these blackboards, all these books we’re carrying, all these words? Wax, like those pears they kept on the parlor room table at St. Agnes parish on the South Side. Couldn’t eat them. Try sinking your teeth into that and you’ve got a mouthful of nothing. Where do you want these here books at, lady?”
Pauline Rankin confronted O’Toole at the door of the small office, her hair springing up like a burning bush in the orange glow of the electric heater on the desk behind her. Lured to the door by O’Toole’s surging voice, she stood looking at him curiously, her small hand at her throat. “I can’t seem to get the lights on,” she said.
O’Toole immediately put the books down inside the door. “You ever been to Sandusky, Ohio?” he asked, unplugging the electric heater and inserting another plug in the receptacle.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“It’s on Lake Erie,” O’Toole said, turning on the switch. The room came softly alive.
“I know,” she said.
“Try thinking for a while,” Billy said, looking around the room. “Try thinking about Sandusky, Ohio. Maybe it’s where your parents took you for a summer on the seashore, only you were too little to remember where it was except how big and dark all that water was you’ve been remembering ever since.”
Pauline Rankin turned to look at Wilson in silent astonishment.
“This is William O’Toole,” Wilson said.
Wilson returned to his office downstairs, wondering who would give Pauline Rankin the bad news. He and Nick Straus had met the previous week with a white-haired Soviet specialist from the Library of Congress who’d been examining Lenin’s letters to Inessa Armand, the French-born Bolshevik feminist. In his hundred-page analysis, he’d concluded that the letters were undoubtedly forgeries, probably dating from the early thirties, when an attempt had been made by certain Soviet personalities to discredit Lenin. Pauline Rankin’s obsession with restoring the Bolshevik revolution to its true founder
, a forerunner of modern feminism, was thus denied its only historical prop. She’d been possessed by the idea for over fifteen years, ever since she’d done her doctoral thesis at Columbia.
Nick Straus, absorbed in his own secretive research across the hall these long evenings, said that it probably didn’t matter to Pauline Rankin one way or the other. He agreed with the analysis and was convinced that the letters were forgeries, but pointed out that after fifteen years, historiography would have little impact on her obsessions and she’d probably continue to write the same book the rest of her life. If she couldn’t write accurate history, whatever that meant, she could write pop history, and few would know the difference.
Wilson was more concerned with the reaction of Angus McVey, who’d spent thirty thousand dollars to acquire the Lenin letters.
He also had other things on his mind.
It was shortly after four when he left the Center by the back gate. After reviewing his appointment book for the past several weeks, he’d decided to begin again, focusing once more on those days the confusion had begun.
The building manager at the Potomac Towers was out, but a gray-haired secretary in the reception room supplied him with a dog-eared directory listing the tenants, issued six months earlier. He found no one named Davis under the Caltronics entry. Morris’s name was there—the man Klempner had mentioned—but no Davis.
The secretary didn’t remember the name, either. “How come you’re asking?” she wondered.
Wilson told her he was trying to reach him to return a check.
“The manager probably knows. I think he went down to the coffee shop.”
The arcade below was deserted. In the small boutiques, the clerks stood idly behind their glass cases, gazing out the showroom windows, waiting for closing time. A dark-skinned Latin American was leaving the door of the Embassy Car Rentals cubicle. Wilson walked back to the coffee shop, but the stools were empty and the counterman was mopping the floor. He returned to the glass doors in front and stopped as he pulled on his coat, looking out at the windswept drive and the waterless pool filled with blowing leaves. The Latin American was climbing behind the wheel of a gray Mercedes sedan with New York license plates. Wilson watched the car drive away, remembered something, and then went back to the arcade. The sign in the window of the car rental firm read: Foreign Cars a Specialty—Discounts for Diplomats.
