“Sure.”
“My uncle, he could’ve talked himself into Eleanor Roosevelt’s panties. More American than Henry Ford. And he told me to talk like him when they come to interview me so they can choose if they’re going to let us stay in America. Which I tried. Maybe I tried too hard. But a European Jew? They thought we were eradicated, they come looking again and again, they want to see this talking animal. They come to the house. They interview my uncle for hours. He wants me to go away, go up to Canada, but I can’t, I can’t leave him. The FBI go away, they come back, they interview me for six hours, it goes on like this six days.”
“Why?”
“They said he was a spy.”
“God, I’m sorry, Leonard.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t.”
“Well don’t.”
“Okay.”
A train was coming. Leonard stood up and brushed the dirt off his palms. He looked like a deflated tire, his grimy trousers sagging down beneath his paunch, dragging over his shoes.
They could see the train in the distance, could feel it in the tracks.
Leonard said, “My uncle was passing information to the Russians.”
“What?”
“You think he was a tailor? Hey? Some kind of small-time schmuck? He was a scientist! It never occurred to you? He never stopped learning. Ever. Yes. A Jew from Munich, that they never let him forget. He loved America. So much he wouldn’t let her destroy herself.”
They stood close to the tracks while the train passed, its panicky clamour turning nostalgic in the distance. Leonard was mumbling. Emmett asked him to repeat it. Leonard shook his head and said, “Not in your sorry life.”
The sky was finally going to give rain. They started to walk again. Leonard said, “Anyway, you heard me. He gave information to the Russians.”
“What kind of information?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. So I had nothing to tell the FBI.”
Six days of interviews with nothing to tell. “It wasn’t your fault, Leonard.”
“Sure.”
“None of it was your fault.”
“I loved my uncle. I worshipped him.”
He’d always considered Leonard old. Now he realized, Leonard was younger than he was by several years.
“Ask me where my uncle is, at this present time,” Leonard said.
“Okay. Where’s your uncle?”
“About thirty, forty miles north of New York. A place called Sing Sing.”
“Jesus. For how long is he supposed to be in there?”
“Life.”
“Life? That’s terrible. God, it must be terrible for your aunt.”
“I’ve gotta go.”
“To New York?”
“To Moscow.”
“Moscow, Russia?”
“Moscow is in Russia, asshole.” Leonard gripped Emmett’s arm and spun him around. “You think I’m just an unhappy Jew. You think I’m depressed, is that right? Sad old Leonard Fischer had an awful time in the war. You think what happened to us hurt my feelings?”
He saw that Leonard was capable of hating him, and he felt a surge of respect. Leonard needed ecstasy, they both did, they’d been made addicts, there was no other way to get over the war but to obliterate themselves in something grand, sublime. Addiction is nostalgia for lost happiness. Again Emmett said he was sorry. “But I don’t understand. How are you going to get to Moscow? What would you do if you ever got there?”
“Work. I’m not saying much to you, Emmett. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. But I’ll tell you — they’ve been waiting. Hoping I’d come over. Any more than that, you don’t want to know. Norfield’s not the only one with something to offer. I’m no spy. But I can work. And I believe.” His eyes filled with tears again. “I’ll miss you.” He remembered that they were likely being followed and looked around hopefully. “I’ll go wherever they need me. Moscow, Leningrad, maybe a farming village by the Black Sea, who knows? I see myself driving a tractor!”
They approached Leonard’s suite, then Emmett would walk on. The man in the white shirt was outside Leonard’s building now, standing with his hands at his side. Leonard stopped so suddenly, Emmett bumped into him. Leonard’s voice trembled. “Look,” he said. “Do me a favour.”
“Of course.”
Leonard fumbled in his pants to produce a black leather wallet and from that a key. “My spare. Take it, will you, man?”
“Why?”
“I might have to leave some stuff. My books. I can’t take them, it’s just too many. They’re valuable.”
“They’re also illegal.”
“My books? There’s no law against them. You’re thinking of Quebec. In Quebec, they’d put you in jail. Here, it’s okay. You think I’d put you in such jeopardy? Never, never in my life would I do anything to harm you.” Leonard wiped tears from his eyes and blew his nose. “Wait a while and go get them. Will you?”
“Whatever you want.”
“I’ll pay rent here for another three months, ahead. You can wait. It’ll be safe.”
The man in the white shirt stood just across the street, waiting at the door to Leonard’s apartment building. He met Emmett’s eye with a blank gaze. Leonard started to walk toward him, backward, talking, “Just go in there, like in November. Nobody’s going to be waiting around in November. And get my books.”
“Wait a minute.” He couldn’t let Leonard go. “How am I going to know you’re okay?”
Leonard was across the street. “Store my books someplace. Someplace they won’t think of looking.”
“I don’t trust that guy.” The man heard and didn’t respond, and his stony indifference angered Emmett.
“Put them in your girlfriend’s house.”
“What girlfriend?” Emmett stood in the middle of street. The whole city seemed deserted. Except for a car parked down the way, the driver turning the ignition and driving slowly toward them.
Leonard said, “Take them to her house. They won’t look there. When it’s safe, sell them. Give the money to my cousin Rachel.”
The man in the white shirt climbed the few stairs up to the front door of Leonard’s apartment building and held the door open, waiting for Leonard to go in. Leonard said, “I’ll get word back to you somehow. From Russia.” Then he took the stairs two at a time. Emmett had never seen him move so athletically.
The car crept up to the front of the building, the driver looking toward Leonard, who turned as he was entering the building, and Emmett could see the boyish zeal, he heard the thrill in Leonard’s voice when he called out, “Live a good life, Emmett,” and disappeared inside.
Chapter Eleven
The man in the white shirt vanished along with Leonard. In November, when Emmett went back to Leonard’s building, he met only one man, in the hallway outside Leonard’s suite, a Polish fellow, a carpenter still wearing his tool belt, who explained in a loud, heavily accented voice that he always came home for lunch. They’d engaged in praise of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, the man standing with his key ready to open the door to his suite, which was beside Leonard’s. Emmett had never run into him before, over the months when he attended Leonard’s meetings. The Polish fellow was about to go into his suite to heat his tomato soup when he asked, “You know where he’s gone? Your Jewish friend.”
“His aunt is sick.”
“Good.”
“Yes.”
“A sick aunt.”
They each had a key in their respective locks. Emmett opened Leonard’s door and picked up the empty wooden crate he’d brought.
The fellow said, “You’re taking some things from there?”
“Yes.”
The bonhomie disappeared and reappeared very quickly, then he burst forth with admiration of young fellows who like to read, he himself not being much of a bookworm but good with his hands. Emmett backed into the suite, thinking, I really like Poles, his head so filled with books he didn’t
wonder how the carpenter knew it was indeed books he was there to remove from Leonard’s apartment.
The crate was too heavy. He unpacked it and carried a loose armful to the car, climbed back upstairs, made several trips up the four flights of stairs. Suzanne sat in the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead. This stillness was her camouflage. He came down with his last load, closed the trunk, and got in beside her. There were times when she seemed to him a gauzy transparency. He believed that she was pure of heart, a quality that didn’t preclude her from being his very own catastrophe. Suzanne was in love with John; he could tell by the hallowed way she said his name.
A beige Chrysler turned onto Leonard’s street and was making its way toward them when it pulled over to the curb and parked. The driver was a woman. But he said, “Turn around.”
“What?”
“Make a U-turn.”
She did, with ease, though she gave it too much gas and backed up too close to the curb and with so much weight in the trunk, she scraped the rear fender of her father’s silver Bentley. “Damn,” she said. “Now I’ll have to make up a story.”
“Tell him you were loaded with revolutionary literature and hit a curb escaping the RCMP.”
She was trembling. “He’ll blame John.”
“Look, I’m sorry I got you involved.”
“With what? With John?” It was supposed to be a joke, flirtatious teasing.
Emmett said, “Anyway, thanks for helping my friend.”
She bit her lip. “These books are illegal, aren’t they?”
“Not here. Only in Quebec.”
She didn’t look convinced but added nervously, “It’s not like we’re hiding a dead body.” She gripped the big wheel of the Bentley till her knuckles were white. “When’s he coming back? Your friend.” Suzanne had never met Leonard. She wanted small talk. “Is his aunt going to die?”
“I don’t know.” Emmett couldn’t store Leonard’s books in his rented rooms on the third floor of the widow’s house because she snooped; he knew she did, he could smell her talcum as soon as he opened his door. Leonard’s idea was good, probably safe, hiding the books at Suzanne’s father’s house. The McCallum place would be vast; he imagined many forgotten recesses thick with cobwebs. He thought they’d store Leonard’s contraband with the great-grandmother’s wedding dress and relics from the Boer War.
They arrived at the McCallum estate in the early afternoon. Three ancient maples stood at the gate, still in leaf, a radiant gold; the pool was drained, revealing a lotus blossom made of lapis lazuli in its marble basin; the junipers were wrapped in yellow burlap.
She parked the Bentley in a stable converted into a garage. It smelled of straw and motor oil. Six English saddles sat on wood beams covering one wall. An oak cabinet with nuts and bolts, nails of differing sizes, everything labelled. He felt abruptly homesick for his childhood at the Shioya estate. He’d forgotten the persuasions of wealth. An immaculate 1937 Alfa Romeo was parked beside a new Cadillac, gleaming chrome and leather, as polished and orderly as Japan. Beautiful objects, their magic allure, exempt from mess and happenstance, perfectly maintained. There were no half-empty boxes, no discarded suitcases or shipping crates, no dirty rags, not a speck of dust, no cobwebs, on the entire estate not a fallen leaf, not a twig. An orderly mind — he assumed it was her father’s — had thorough possession of the place.
The stable was chilly. Suzanne opened the Bentley’s trunk and then she, too, seemed to measure the quantity of what they intended to hide against the sheer and total consciousness behind every feature of her parental home. She gave a gasp and blushed. “I don’t know why I thought this would be easy.” Then she slammed the trunk shut and said, “Hello, Mama.”
Backlit, at the door to the garage, a woman. Her cool voice, “Why the Bentley?”
“Pardon?”
“Why the Bentley? Why not the Cadillac?”
Suzanne’s flustered grace. “I guess I was showing off to Emmett. Oh! You haven’t met!”
Suzanne hauled him forward to meet the grande dame, who maintained her place and her perfect posture. Mama was dressed in a camel-hair skirt and sweater set. She had great legs. He was taken with her shoes, which were long, narrow, tri-tone leather pumps, fawn, ivory, and black. She held her head high, her mouth in a small smile, thus eliminating jowls and laugh lines.
Mama put her manicured hand into his, the “how do you do” delivered in a leathery contralto that had something to do with Scotch whisky — in proportion. “We’re just back from Provence,” she told him and pressed the waves of her hair into place, “and still out of sorts.” She had a more cultured British accent even than Norfield’s. She took a step into the chilly shade and waited while her eyes adjusted before proceeding. “What is it you do, Mr. Jones?” She was examining the cars, running her finger over the canvas lid on the Alfa Romeo, then coming around the grill on the Bentley, yellowed with gravel dust. It would take a Geiger counter to measure the true value of her dissatisfaction, so unimpressed was she by the world she governed.
Emmett, feeling diminished, admitted that he was still a student. “I’m studying Asian history,” he added.
She raised her head. “Chinese?”
“Japan. Mostly. But yes, China. And Vietnam.”
Suzanne said, “Emmett was born there.”
“In China?” Mama spoke as if quoting someone else’s vulgarity. There were aspects of the world beyond her ken, where they belonged. This time, the head stayed low, examining the silver paint, slowly making her way around to the Bentley’s dimpled rear end.
“No,” he said. “I was born in Japan. Near Kobe.”
She heard him politely, mildly curious, perhaps remembering the Bomb. Then, “And what’s this?”
“I had a little scrape,” said Suzanne. “A bump. I was just going to confess to Dad.”
“Perhaps you should confess to me, dear.”
“Oh, it was nothing. I hit a curb, that’s all.”
Mama surprised Emmett by squatting lithely to give the Bentley’s fender a forensic exam. “What kind of curb?”
Mama stood. As he grew more accustomed to her features, he could see a certain warmth there, a candid irony. She said, “What have you got in the trunk?”
“Books.”
“Lift the latch.”
Suzanne opened the trunk.
Beautiful, manicured hands moved over the dun-coloured books, lifting a cover, “Jack London? What’s this?” She lifted Theodor Dreiser from the pile, Eine Amerikanische Tragödie. “German?” She returned it and picked up another. “Revolution Betrayed. What on earth? Literature and Revolution. Ah. The Communist Manifesto. This I know. What do you intend to do, Mr. Jones? Blow the place up?”
Suzanne said, “We’re keeping them for a friend.”
“Because?”
Suzanne looked to Emmett for clarification, then answered bravely, “Because they were too heavy for him to carry.”
Mama’s sterling irony. “On the run.”
Emmett took Marx out of Mama’s hands. “This was my mistake. I never should have asked Suzanne to bring them here. I’ll take them away.” He began to stack the books in his arms.
Mrs. McCallum was speaking to Suzanne as if he weren’t there. “Is this the suitor I’ve been hearing about?”
“No, it is not. The suitor you’ve been hearing about is a horse’s ass.”
“I am not speaking of Dirk Dupont. The other one. The new one.”
John Norfield. Mama put her weight back on her heels, a position that thrust her hips forward, like a gunslinger.
Suzanne realized that Emmett was leaving the stable. “Where are you going?” she asked.
He would walk to the road and hitchhike. “I’ll come back for the rest. The books will be gone by nightfall.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Suzanne. She appealed to Mama. “We can store them here, can’t we?”
“We certainly cannot. For goodness’ sake, these books are illegal
!”
“That’s only in Quebec, Mother.”
“I cannot have — paper, here,” waving, “in the garage,” pronounced gá-rahj. She was struggling; she did not like her fear to be evident. “We’ll get mice.”
Emmett stood out in the sun, looking into the fragrant stable, aware of Mama’s pale face, the narrow nose with its pink nostrils, Mama saying, “My husband is an important man.” He turned and headed for the road. Mama’s voice rose, strident, “Do you want to destroy everything your father and I have fought for?”
“Fought for?” Suzanne hissed. “You just sit on the phone with your broker!”
Then he was out at the road. A milk delivery truck, an old Ford, picked him up at the end of drive, as if they’d timed it on purpose. The truck’s cab was upholstered in spotless Jersey cowhide, unsettlingly supple and soft, a sacrifice made by a cow. “Like it?” asked the driver. “Did it myself.” The driver, a man of maybe seventy years, had no teeth; he had a habit of sucking his lips over his gums in a way that must have been pleasurable. The truck was hauling steel canisters filled with milk, everything sealed and spotless, the atmosphere milky. “Name’s Ed,” he said and reached across his sunken chest to offer Emmett his left hand while he held on to the wheel with his right.
Ed was cross-eyed. He took a gander at the books and stiffened, appraising Emmett for a moment, then driving several miles in silence.
Emmett expected Ed to kick him out. But then he heard a wobbling tenor, Ed rolling down his window, letting in the wind while he sang, “You will eat, by and by, in that glorious land above the sky. Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” That one verse, before he rolled up the window, driving on. “Yep,” he said. And a few minutes later, he added, “You a vet?” Emmett said that he was. “Non-profit enterprise,” Ed drawled, nodding sagely, “unless you’re in the steel business. Aircraft parts, coal, that kind of thing will make a whole lot of money in a war.”
They were downtown. “Just drop me off here,” Emmett told him. But Ed said, “Blood profit,” and insisted on taking him all the way to Leonard’s yellow brick building, where he reached around to shake Emmett’s hand again, saying, “They fed you a load of horse manure, gettin’ you to fight their goddamn war.”
Mr. Jones Page 6
