Timothy recorded that two things he was going to play straight and they were the beginning and the end. According to him, Sprott was perfect in both of them. At the end Timothy gave a friendly but puzzled smile.
“‘Sir, it’s been wonderful of you to give us so much of your valuable time but there’s just one more question I have to ask.’ A pause and another smile. ‘How do you sleep in your bed?’
“I underestimated him. You should have seen that lean, shrewd Yankee face deploying the smile of a poker player laying down four kings against a full house.
“‘That’s an interesting question, Mr. Wellfleet, to me at least. You know, sleep’s never been a problem with me. Only time I ever took a sedative was when a medic shot one into me after my left buttock caught a splinter from an 88 in the Huertgen Forest. No aspirin, even in the middle of the Cuban thing.’
“‘The time you were eyeball to eyeball with the Russians?’
“‘Where did you hear that guff, Timmie?’
“‘Are you suggesting those aren’t the exact words of President Kennedy?’
“‘Don’t know. Wasn’t there.’”
This seems to have ended the tape played to the public, but Timothy in his notes added the following of his own: “And is there a human being alive smarter than an old-line Yankee Wasp and could this explain why our world must come to an end? Beyond Sprott can evolution go any farther? And if it can, will Sprott let it? And will God have mercy on the rest of us if the time ever comes when Sprott finally succeeds in boring Him?”
From the expression on his cameraman’s face Timothy sensed that Réjean Roy was not happy about this scenario.
“Okay, Réjean, so you don’t like it?”
“You’re the boss.”
“Well, why don’t you like it?”
Réjean shrugged. “The idea could be okay, but back home there’s only one thing they’re thinking about now.”
“Fuck all! Two politicians kidnapped and what the hell? It’s happening all over.”
“Maybe, but at home they’re not used to it yet.”
“They soon will be.”
“You better walk easy on this one, Timmie.”
Timothy said that he and Réjean always got on well together, that Réjean was one of the best cameramen in the whole network, and that he was lucky to get him from the French sector for his two shows a week. Réjean spoke the French of an educated man, or atleast of a well-trained one, but he had picked up his English in hockey rinks and ball games and fights in a district ethnically mixed. Timothy claimed to speak better French than Réjean spoke English, but when they were together Réjean usually spoke English even when Timothy was speaking French.
“Sorry, Réjean, but I still want you and Jacques to go to Toronto.”
“There could be problems there.”
“How do you mean, problems?”
“Some of the guys in Toronto don’t like you any too good. And this General today, he don’t like you at all.”
“He’ll like me a hell of a lot less when he finds out what we’re going to do to him.”
“You go easy, Timmie. That General could be a very big-sized problem for you. Remember what happened to those guys on the other show? I forget its name but I sure heard about it. You know, the guys that got this big American politician and made him look real bad. Those guys were fired.”
“Listen, Réjean, those guys asked for it. They frigged around with the sound track. This politician was one of Kennedy’s original think-tankers and they really screwed him up. They asked him a question – see. Then they cut out his answer and replaced it with an answer to an entirely different question. They did that four times. As if that wasn’t enough, they jazzed up the sound track and handled the cameras so that he not only looked like a crook, he looked like a moron. Well, he got sore. A complaint came to Ottawa straight from the President and out those guys went on their asses. But we’re not going to do anything like that. We’re going to play the sound track straight all the way. Everything Sprott and I said is going to be repeated word for word and precisely. So now – can you get me the stuff?”
Another shrug, not a contented one. “I can get it, I guess, if you give me a list.”
“Then no problem at all.”
After which Timothy added the thought that “problem” had become the all-purpose word of the System, like “fuck” in the army.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep but no sleep came because he was unable to pinpoint the cause of some apprehensions “that were crawling around inside of me like scavenger cells in a damaged brain.” Then he began thinking about Esther Stahr and desire for her stabbed him. It was more than six weeks since he been in bed with her and now, after five different women in the interval, she was the only one he craved in the entire world. She was still on his mind when the aircraft blasted itself to a stop on the ramp of the airport.
The moment he entered the terminal building he could feel the tension in it. He recognized the president of a big corporation trying to make himself invisible against a wall with his hat pulled down almost to his eyes. “Uptight,” he muttered. “Maybe you’re right, Réjean.”
When they were going out with their bags and TV equipment they were stopped at a check-point, and it was the first check-point either of them had ever seen in that airport. There was a desk and two men, one in policeman’s blue, the other in a nondescript brown suit with a nondescript brown fedora and a red face also nondescript until you looked at his eyes. They were checking the identifications of everyone except the children and the very old people, and when it was Timothy’s turn he asked the plainclothesman what the flap was about.
“Haven’t you been listening to the newspapers lately, Mr. Well-fleet?”
Timothy acknowledged the choice of words with a professional smile and said cheerfully, “Since you know who I am, officer, may I pass? I’m in the business.”
“So you are. In the business.”
This reminded Timothy that a year previous he had grilled a high RCMP officer on something connected with an Indian reserve, with the result that questions embarrassing to the Force had been asked in Parliament. Still another area in which he was unpopular. The RCMP man took his time as he searched their bags and when he found Réjean’s tape he scrutinized it with such concentration that Timothy grew nervous. He admitted that policemen always made him feel nervous because they reminded him of his father.
“That tape’s got nothing to do with anything here,” he said. “We made it in Washington this morning. Here – would you like to see our ticket stubs to prove that’s where we came from?”
The officer returned the tape to Réjean and said, “Thank you, Mr. Wellfleet, but that won’t be necessary.”
“May we pass now?”
“Why not?”
“It’s like I said,” Réjean said as they went out with their gear to the parking lot where Réjean’s car was. “This whole town is very uptight. There’s only one thing in this town now.”
“It’s been coming for years. Cool it.”
“Yeah, but like I told you, they’re not used to it here.”
“And like I told you, they soon will be. There’s plenty more of the same where this came from.”
They drove off “into the tawny pollution of the city’s high prosperity with a pale sunlight filtering through it and the leaves on the roadside looking tired and gritty.” Half an hour later they drew up in front of the apartment building in the central city where Esther Stahr lived.
FIVE
The moment he saw Esther’s face he realized that the change he had been sensing in her for a long time had grown to the point of some kind of decision. When he put his arms around her and kissed her there was no eager surge of her hips, no mouth opening to welcome him, just two stern eyes looking at him in judgment.
“I’ve missed you, Esther.”
“Have you, Timmie?” she said and turned away and sat down.
“Now for Christ’s sak
e what’s the matter?”
No answer.
“What have I done?”
She continued the kind of silent treatment that rude ancestors of today’s females doubtless gave to hairy and inarticulate males in caves long before the first Ice Age.
“Okay, Esther, what’s this all about?”
She watched him steadily and said, “Please stop trying to look so innocent.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“As you once remarked to me in another context, that’s what the girl said to the sailor.”
“Is it this kidnapping flap? Is that it?”
Her eyes continued to scrutinize him. “Our pigeons were sure to come home to roost sooner or later. I should say your pigeons, for you haven’t paid any attention to an opinion of mine for nearly a year.”
“I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Which is the trouble. Just for the sake of a story you do it. Just for the sake of a story you’ll do anything now. You and a few others have been building up the egos of these neurotics till they think they can get away with anything. You make them feel they’re the center of the universe. A little more of this and it will bring back the fascists. If you were French it might make a little sense, but you aren’t. What’s the matter with people like you? Do you want to turn yourselves into the Jews of the future?”
“Now just what do you mean by that one?”
“You Anglo-Saxons. Or Anglo-Saxons like you, would be to put it better. The Wasp is everyone’s target now. Or didn’t you know it? According to you – or according to what you do on the program – every Wasp is guilty until he’s proved innocent. Did you read that last communiqué from these kidnappers, the one they left in the garbage pail?”
“It so happens that I’ve been in Washington, and preparing for Washington, and in Washington this two-bit crisis isn’t the only thing on people’s minds. If they printed anything at all about it, they must have put it in the back pages. I never saw a mention of it.”
“Here they put it on the front page. The paper is there on the table. You’d better read it.”
Timothy read the then-famous (or at least locally famous) message written by a kidnapped cabinet minister to his premier. Deep in the recesses of Timothy’s mind this affair was to linger like a half-healed scar for the rest of his life, for reasons I will give you later. Afterwards, of course, there were so many kidnappings, bombings, skyjackings, and assassinations all over the world that even in our city this affair was soon forgotten, but as Réjean Roy said, our people had still to get used to them as something normal.
Timothy looked up from the paper. He admitted later that it had shaken him a little, but he was in no mood to admit this to Esther. He grinned at her and said, “You’ve got to hand it to them. This is terrific propaganda.”
“You make me despair.”
He sat down again. He wanted her body, even though there were plenty of other bodies he could have. Which meant, I suppose, that he wanted her body to want his. It would have been beneath his intellectual dignity to admit that he also wanted her soul to like his own soul.
He calmed down and said in a professional voice, “All right, Esther, you know more about this than I do. So tell me what’s really happening.”
“How can I, when nobody knows anything?”
“Esther dear,” he said calmly, “don’t forget that I predicted kidnappings six months ago.”
“You also predicted that the kidnappers would be students. Well, it doesn’t seem that they are.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the police know their identities, and students they are not.”
“If the cops are so smart, why don’t they go in and get them?”
“Because they’ve gone underground, of course. Timmie – look at me.”
He looked at her.
“Timmie, we Jews have an instinct.”
“Well?”
“This thing is not small. It’s one of the biggest things that’s happened in this city. Queer things are going on under the surface. People you and I know nothing about are operating here.”
She turned away and went to the window, standing with her back to him. The window was open and they could hear the deep, asthmatic breathing of a great city.
“The Pentagon is incredible,” he said. “Just like a jail. It’s even built like a super-maximum-security penitentiary. The inmates all look like cons and guards. They wear the same-color uniforms. They even wear prison haircuts. My father’s old playmate General Sprott is just about the finest-honed con I ever met in my life. He thought he took me all the way, but wait till I’ve dressed up that tape.”
“So you’re going to do that again?”
“Esther darling, in this particular moment of history the truth has got to be improved.”
She smiled sadly and he wondered whether she was amused or had simply given up on him. In her present mood, Esther made him despair of ever being understood by anyone. But at least she seemed more tender than when he arrived.
He said quietly, soberly, “Apart from everything else I feel for you, I also happen to be very fond of you.”
She sighed and looked away. “I know you are. Which is the problem.”
This scene from so long ago has for me a wistful beauty it could never have had in reality. Almost certainly Esther and Timothy are no longer alive and I can only think of them as having always been young. Sometimes I wonder if years later, perhaps in the time of the Great Fear, they passed each other on a street without recognizing one another, both having changed so much. Among the many photographs that turned up in the iron box was one of Esther in color. Timothy had taken it on a beach and behind her the sea is intensely blue. Esther is wearing a bra and a kind of loincloth and there is no hint in her of prima vera. At twenty-seven and about one hundred and seventy centimeters she was a majestic woman with a broad forehead, Scythian nose and cheekbones, a wide mouth with full, molded lips, and large dark eyes that look out of the picture straight into yours. Her body is opulent and from her bearing she is proud of it, though I doubt if she appreciated Timothy’s boast that it had been as well and truly laid (by him) as the cornerstone of the Sun Life Building.
Of course, it is true that there is no excellent beauty that hath not a strangeness in the proportions and Timothy recognized that this was the secret of Esther’s power over his senses.
“Her eyes,” he wrote, “were the kind that normally are matched by the sable hair of a beautiful woman from Spain or Portugal, but Esther’s hair was a tawny gold. I asked her if this was a legacy of a female ancestor who had been raped on the North European plain by some Russian or German trooper and she gave me the look that can be the only reply of a sensitive Jew to a goy who asks that kind of wrong question. The idea that Esther’s all-Jewish pedigree had been crossed by a rape was a mild aphrodisiac to me, though I hadn’t the faintest understanding of why it was. In any case there was a wonderful mixture of genes in that girl. Her father, the little tailor and cantor, the gentle man who played chess and pondered the Talmud and Spinoza, had married a broad woman with big hands who loved him, and when Esther introduced me to her she did not smile but looked right through me. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Stahr in a single generation had advanced their family in the New World as far as, or farther than, my own family had done in five generations. And now this wonderful daughter of theirs was sitting in judgment on me when the only thing I wanted to do was to screw her.”
“Come over to the window,” she said. “I want you to see something.”
He joined her and pointed down over the cascade of roofs with the new highrises jutting up among them like tombstones. Farther down they could see the city’s largest hotel nestling between the largest skyscraper and the old cathedral (the one with the twelve apostles standing in stone on the pediment), almost obliterated by the gigantic glass and ferroconcrete oblongs that had risen beside it.
“The top floors of
that hotel have been turned into a fort,” she said. “The whole cabinet and their families are there. The Prime Minister’s mother is there. Dozens of corporation chiefs and bank presidents are there. The lobby is full of plainclothesmen.”
“Good!” said Timothy.
“We’ve come to this and you call it good! Thousands of dynamite sticks have been stolen. After dark the streets are almost empty. Nobody knows how many cells are waiting to jump. I suppose you call that good, too?”
“For Christ’s sake, do you believe all that crap? It reeks of a handout.”
“My family came to this country to get rid of political maniacs and now it’s beginning to look like the same story all over again and you think it’s funny. Can’t you see a fact even when you fall over it?”
Timothy laughed. “The thousands of dynamite sticks a fact? Who counted them?” He got up and returned to her. “Now you look at me, Esther. I’ve been around longer than you have and I know better than you do who the real bastards are. So you listen to me for a change.”
“Listen to you! When do I do anything else but listen to you?”
“I know, I know, I talk too much. But this whole thing stinks. This crisis has been manufactured.”
“Next thing you’ll be telling me that what you call the Establishment has hired the kidnappers.”
Timothy laughed again. “The Establishment! It would be a smart move if they did, but they haven’t the brains. But the government is parlaying this affair into fifty times what it’s worth.”
She flared at him. “You make me sick to my brain. Crazy kids on the loose everywhere. Operators on the loose. Murderers on the loose. Do you blame them? No, you blame your own people. Another thing. Do you still have Che’s picture on your wall? It’s so long since I’ve been there I have to ask. If you do have it, take my advice and remove it, for the police might take it into their not entirely stupid heads to pay you a visit.”
He screamed at her. “Two kidnappings, for Christ’s sake, and everyone in this town goes crazy! I’ve just come from a place where they think in body counts of ninety millions. I could tell you –”
Voices in Time Page 10
