by Auster, Paul
I pay Stanley what we owe him. As I sign the check with a trembling hand, I tell him that our partner is dead and that we’re no longer in a position to buy the house. Stanley shrugs. “I knew it wasn’t serious,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy talking about it.”
Tom hands him a piece of paper with his address and telephone number on it. “Please give this to Honey,” he says. “And tell her I’m sorry.”
We pack our bags. We climb into the car. We go.
DOUBLE-CROSS
I considered it a homicide. It didn’t matter that no one laid a hand on him, that no one shot him or stabbed him in the chest, that no one ran him down with a car. Even if words were his killers’ only weapons, the violence they subjected him to was no less physical than a blow to the head with a hammer. Harry was not a young man. He had suffered two coronaries in the past three years, his blood pressure was high, his arteries were in a state of imminent collapse. How much torture could a body in that condition withstand? Not much, in my opinion. Not much at all.
There was only one witness to the outrage, but even though Rufus heard every word they said, he understood only the smallest part of it. That was because Harry hadn’t bothered to tell him about the scheme he was hatching with Gordon Dryer, and when Dryer walked into the store early that afternoon with Myron Trumbell, Rufus took them for a pair of fellow dealers. He led them upstairs to Harry’s office, and because Harry seemed exceptionally tense and excited when he opened the door, not at all himself, pumping the hands of his visitors like some windup doll, Rufus began to grow alarmed. Rather than return to his post at the cash register downstairs, he decided to stay where he was and listen in on the conversation by pressing his ear against the door.
They toyed with Harry for a few minutes before they circled in with their daggers, softening him up for the kill. Friendly greetings all around, casual remarks about the weather, unctuous compliments about Harry’s taste in office furniture, admiring references to the neat array of first editions stacked along the shelves. For all the pleasant banter, Harry must have been confused. Metropolis hadn’t finished his work on the manuscript, and without a completed forgery to hand over to Trumbell, he didn’t understand why Gordon had chosen to drop by now.
“It’s always a pleasure to see you,” he said, “but I don’t want Mr. Trumbell to be disappointed. The manuscript is locked away in a vault at the Citibank on Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan. If you’d called in advance, I would have had it for you today. But unless I’m wrong, we weren’t supposed to get together until next Monday afternoon.”
“In a bank vault?” Gordon said. “So that’s where you stashed away my discovery. I didn’t know.”
“I thought I’d told you,” Harry continued, improvising as he went along, still unable to comprehend what Gordon was doing there with Trumbell four days before their scheduled meeting.
“I’m having second thoughts,” Trumbell said.
“Yes,” Gordon added, jumping in before Harry had a chance to reply. “You see, Mr. Brightman, a sale like this can’t be taken lightly. Not when there’s so much money involved.”
“I’m aware of that,” Harry said. “That’s why we had the first page examined by those experts. Not just one man, but two.”
“Not two,” Trumbell said. “Three.”
“Three?”
“Three,” Gordon said. “You can never be too careful, can you? Myron also took it to a curator at the Morgan Library. One of the top men in the field. He gave his verdict this morning, and he’s convinced it’s a forgery.”
“Well,” Harry stammered, “two out of three isn’t bad. Why trust this man’s opinion over the two others?”
“He was very persuasive,” Trumbell said. “If I’m going to buy this manuscript, there can’t be any doubt. No doubt whatsoever.”
“I see,” Harry said, struggling to elude the trap they had set for him, but no doubt already beginning to lose heart, already demoralized beyond all imagining. “I just want you to know that I’ve acted in good faith, Mr. Trumbell. Gordon found the manuscript in his grandmother’s attic and brought it to me. We had it checked out and were told it was genuine. You became interested in buying it. If you’ve changed your mind, I can only say I’m sorry. We can cancel the deal right now.”
“You’re forgetting the ten thousand dollars you took from Myron,” Gordon said.
“No, I’m not,” Harry answered. “I’ll give him back the money, and then we’re quits.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple, Mr. Brightman,” Trumbell said. “Or should I call you Mr. Dunkel? Gordon’s told me quite a bit about you, Harry. Chicago. Alec Smith. Twenty-odd forged paintings. Prison. A new identity. You’re a champion liar, Harry, and with a record like yours, I’d just as soon you kept those ten thousand dollars. That way I’ll be able to press charges. You were planning to rip me off, weren’t you? I don’t like it when people try to take my money. It irritates me.”
“Who is this man, Gordon?” Harry said, his voice suddenly shaking, out of control.
“Myron Trumbell,” Gordon answered. “My benefactor. My friend. The man I love.”
“So this is the one,” Harry said. “There never was that other person.”
“Just the one,” Gordon replied. “Always just the one.”
“Nathan was right,” Harry moaned. “Nathan was right all along. Goddamn it, why didn’t I listen to him?”
“Who’s Nathan?” Gordon asked.
“A man I know,” Harry said. “It doesn’t matter. Someone I know. A fortune-teller.”
“You never could take good advice, could you, Harry?” Gordon said. “Too fucking greedy. Too fucking full of yourself.”
That was when Harry began to crack. The cruelty in Gordon’s voice was too much for him, and he was no longer able to pretend that he was talking business, discussing the ins and the outs of a deal that had gone wrong. This was love that had gone wrong, deception on a scale he had never encountered before, and the pain of it destroyed any power he might have had to resist the onslaught.
“Why, Gordon?” he said. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because I hate you,” his ex-lover said. “Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“No, Gordon. You love me. You’ve always loved me.”
“Everything about you disgusts me, Harry. Your bad breath. Your varicose veins. Your dyed hair. Your awful jokes. Your fat belly. Your knobby knees. Your puny cock. Everything. Every part of you makes me sick.”
“Then why come back after all these years? Couldn’t you have left well enough alone?”
“After what you did to me? Are you insane? You destroyed my life, Harry. Now it’s my turn to destroy yours.”
“You ran out on me, Gordon. You betrayed me.”
“Think again, Harry. Who turned me over to the cops? Who cut a deal for himself by pointing his finger at me?”
“And so now you turn me over to the cops. Two wrongs don’t make a right, Gordon. At least you’re alive. At least you’re young enough to have something to look forward to. You put me back in jail, and I’m finished. I’m a dead man.”
“We don’t want you to die, Harry,” Trumbell said, suddenly reentering the conversation. “We want to make a bargain with you.”
“A bargain? What kind of bargain?”
“We’re not out for blood. We’re only looking for justice. Gordon suffered because of you, and now we feel he deserves some compensation. Fair is fair, after all. If you cooperate with us, we won’t say a word to the law.”
“But you’re rich. Gordon has all the money he needs.”
“Certain members of my family are rich. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them.”
“I don’t have any cash. I can scrape up the ten thousand I owe you, but that’s about it.”
“You might be short on cash, but you have other assets we’d be willing to settle for.”
“Other assets? What are you talking ab
out?”
“Look around you. What do you see?”
“No. You can’t do that. You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I see books, Harry, don’t you? I see hundreds of books. And not just any books, but first editions, even signed first editions. Not to speak of what’s sitting in the drawers and cabinets below. Manuscripts. Letters. Autographs. Give us the contents of this room, and we’ll consider the account square.”
“I’ll be ruined. I’ll be wiped out.”
“Consider the alternatives, Mr. Dunkel-Brightman. Which would you prefer: arrest on charges of fraud, or a quiet, peaceful life as the owner of a used-book store? Think about it carefully. Gordon and I will come back tomorrow with a large van and a team of moving men. It won’t take more than a couple of hours, and then you’ll be rid of us forever. If you try to stop us, I’ll simply pick up the phone and call the police. You decide, Harry. Life or death. An empty room – or a second trip to prison. If you don’t give us the books tomorrow, you’re going to lose them anyway. You understand that, don’t you? Be smart, Harry. Don’t fight it. If you give up without a struggle, you’ll be doing everyone a favor – especially yourself. Expect us between eleven and noon. I wish I could be more precise, but it’s so hard to predict the traffic these days. A demain, Harry. Ta ta.”
The door opened then, and as Dryer and Trumbell pushed their way past him, Rufus looked into the office and saw Harry sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, sobbing like a young boy. If only Harry had stayed there for a few minutes and taken the time to reflect on what had just happened, he would have understood that Dryer and Trumbell had no case against him, that threatening to turn him in to the police was no more than an artless, heavy-handed bluff. How could they have proved that Harry knowingly tried to sell a forged manuscript without also implicating themselves? By confessing to their knowledge of the forgery, they would have been obliged to deliver the forger to the police, and what were the chances that Ian Metropolis would have admitted he was involved in the hoax? Assuming there was such a person as Ian Metropolis, of course, which struck me as less than likely. Ditto with the three so-called experts who had supposedly examined his work. My hunch was that Dryer and Trumbell had manufactured the Hawthorne page themselves, and with a gullible man like Harry as their victim, how hard would it have been to persuade him that he was looking at the penmanship of a master forger? Harry had told me he’d met Metropolis while we were in Vermont, but how could he be certain that man was who he claimed to be? The Dickens letter was of no importance. Whether genuine or fake, the letter had no bearing on the story. From start to finish, the plot to crush Harry had been a two-man operation, with a brief appearance by a third person posing as someone else. Two not-so-clever crooks and their anonymous crony. Bastards all.
But Harry wasn’t thinking clearly that day. How could he think when his mind had been turned into an open wound, a suppurating mass of scrambled brain matter, exploded neurons, and short-circuited electrical impulses? Where was reason when the adored one of your life has just insulted you with a litany of monstrous denunciations, ripping apart your hapless self with the hatchet blows of his contempt? Where was mental equilibrium when that same man and his new cohort have declared their intention to rob you of everything you own and you feel powerless to stop them? Could anyone criticize Harry for lacking the wherewithal to take the long view? Could anyone fault him for being in a state of pure, animal panic?
When Rufus entered the office, Harry stood up from his desk and began to howl. He was beyond words then, incapable of forming a single coherent sentence, and the sounds that rushed out of his throat were so ghastly, Rufus said, so agonizing in their torment, that he began to shake with fear. Dryer and Trumbell were still on their way down the stairs to the ground floor, and without bothering to acknowledge Rufus’s presence, Harry bolted out from behind his desk and began chasing after them. Rufus followed – but slowly, cautiously, nearly immobilized with dread. By the time he got to the bottom of the stairs, Dryer and Trumbell had already left the shop, and Harry was yanking open the front door – still howling, still in pursuit. A yellow cab was parked at the curb with its engine and meter running, and the two men climbed into the backseat before Harry could catch up with them. He shook his fist at the departing taxi, paused for a moment to scream two words – Murderers! Murderers! – and then, totally out of his mind, began charging down Seventh Avenue as fast as his legs could take him, bumping into pedestrians, staggering, falling down, picking himself up, but not stopping until he reached the next corner and the cab vanished from sight. Rufus watched it all from a distance, following the blurred form of Harry’s body as tears streamed down his face.
At the moment Harry stopped at the corner, Nancy Mazzucchelli rounded that same corner and approached her former boss, stunned to see him in such a gruesome state. His cheeks were bright red, he was gasping for breath, the elbow of his jacket was torn, and his eternally well-groomed hair was flopping around on all sides of his scalp.
“Harry,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“They’ve killed me, Nancy,” Harry replied, clutching his chest and continuing to gasp for air. “They stuck a knife in my heart and killed me.”
Nancy put her arms around him and gently patted his back. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything is going to be all right.”
But it wasn’t all right; it wasn’t the least bit all right. Just after Nancy spoke those words, Harry let out a long, faint groan, and then she felt his body go limp against hers. She tried to hold him up, but he was too heavy for her, and little by little they both sank to the ground. And so it was that Harry Brightman, once known as Harry Dunkel, father of Flora and ex-husband of Bette, died on a Brooklyn sidewalk one sultry afternoon in the year 2000, cradled in the arms of the B.P.M.
COUNTERATTACK
Tom drove fast, and we made it back to Park Slope in less than five hours, pulling up in front of the store just as the sun was beginning to go down. Rufus and Nancy were waiting for us in Harry’s upstairs apartment, huddled together in the darkened bedroom. It felt right to me that she should be present, but until Rufus began telling us what had happened earlier that day, I didn’t understand why she was there. With so many pressing matters to attend to, it never even occurred to me to ask.
Neither one of them had met Lucy before, so introductions became the first point of business. Then Tom took our girl into the living room and planted her in front of the TV. Normally, that would have been my job, but I believe Tom was so startled to encounter the B.P.M. in such an unlikely setting that he had to withdraw for a moment to catch his breath. His queen had miraculously surfaced again, and no doubt his heart was racing, pounding madly in his lovesick chest.
Rufus was a good deal calmer than he had been on the phone that afternoon. The shock had begun to wear off a bit, and he was able to get through the story without too many interruptions. He and Nancy were sitting on the bed, and every time he broke down and cried, she would put her arms around him and hold on firmly until the tears had passed. She was somewhat weepy herself, but kindness was her specialty, and she understood that of all the people in the apartment that night, Rufus was the most desperate, the one most in need of comforting. As he went on talking to us in his slow, lilting Jamaican voice, my mind kept conjuring up images of Harry’s corpse, which was laid out in a freezer at Methodist Hospital, just a few blocks from where we sat.
I hadn’t known Harry well, but I had been fond of him in a peculiar sort of way (part fascination, part awe, part disbelief), and if he had died under any other circumstances, I doubt that I would have been as affected as I was. More than shock, more than sadness, I was filled with anger over the grotesque thing that had been done to him. It didn’t help matters that I had predicted Dryer’s double cross, that my instincts had told me the Hawthorne scam was no more than a ruse, an elaborate hoax within a hoax, and that revenge had been the single motive from the start. What good is knowledge if you don’t use
it to stop your friends from being destroyed? I had tried to warn Harry, but I hadn’t been emphatic enough – I hadn’t put in sufficient time and effort to make him understand why he should have backed out of the deal. And now he was dead – murdered in cold blood, and murdered in such a way that his killers would never be charged for their crime.
After Rufus had finished talking, my immediate impulse was to partake in some vengeance of my own. Tom had only the fuzziest idea of what the dispute with Dryer and Trumbell had been about (he knew it was connected to Harry’s deal in some way, but that was all), and Rufus and Nancy were in the dark about everything. Unlike Tom, they had never even heard of Gordon Dryer, and neither one of them was aware of Harry’s less than sterling past. I didn’t take the trouble to fill them in on the details. There wouldn’t have been any point. The only point was to get on the phone as quickly as possible – and make sure that no van turned up at the store the next morning. Dryer and his boyfriend might have killed Harry, but I wasn’t going to let them rob him as well.
I asked Tom for the key to the downstairs office, and since he was in a state of extreme discombobulation at that moment (mourning the unexpected death of his boss, trembling with joy and terror at his sudden proximity to the B.P.M., doing what he could to console the all but inconsolable Rufus), he absentmindedly reached into his pocket and gave it to me. It was only when I was walking out the door that he came to his senses long enough to ask me what I was doing. “Nothing,” I said vaguely. “I just need to check on something. I’ll be right back.”
I installed myself at Harry’s desk and opened the top center drawer, thinking it might be a logical place for him to have put Dryer’s telephone number. I was prepared to call information and track down Trumbell if necessary, but I was hoping to save a little time by looking in the drawer first. For once in my life, I got lucky. Affixed to a business-size envelope at the very top of the drawer was a square green Post-it with two words scribbled on it in ink – Gordon’s cell – followed by a ten-digit number that began with a 917 area code. When I removed the Post-it from the envelope and stuck it on the desk beside the phone, I saw that the envelope had writing on it as well: To Be Opened In The Event Of My Death.
