by Dick Cluster
Behind him, as in the post office, Meyer coughed. “Excuse me,” he said. “I wanted to see whether you needed any help.”
The wave broke slowly, and receded. Alex took his time flushing the toilet, spitting, blowing his nose, and flushing again. The tank had not filled, so bits of escaped vomit danced together and apart in the bowl. The smell, he assumed, was in the air as well as in his nostrils. Stuck in his thumb, Alex thought, and pulled out a plum. And said what a good boy am I. He tottered to the sink, rinsed his mouth, and splashed water on his face.
“No,” he said finally. “Really, you wanted to see whether I had run out on you. Let’s get out of here before we get busted for indecent acts, okay?”
Alex led the way past diners and waitresses who paid them no mind. Outside, on the sidewalk, he stood leaning weakly against the wall. The air had cooled already, yet the smells of urban evening and auto exhaust were still heavy, almost visible, like a curtain drawn around Gerald Meyer and himself. A green Ford was double-parked halfway down the block, but no blue Rabbit.
“That doesn’t happen too often,” he apologized. “But it will be over after Sunday. So it wouldn’t interfere with my doing that job, if I chose.”
Meyer wiped his hands on a handkerchief but seemed otherwise undisturbed. His skin was tinted the palest pink by the illuminated sign proclaiming the Pa-Kua Restaurant. His suspicions, if any, were voiced with a courtly irony.
“No, I wasn’t concerned it would interfere. Your condition is singularly disarming, as I assume you are wise enough to know. I paid the bill for our little meal, by the way. So, if you’re all right now…”
“Yes,” Alex said. “A lot better. I was in the middle of giving you my address…”
Meyer gave him back his card. Alex wiped his hands on his pants and finished what he had begun.
“Ganz gut,” he declared, “if that will make you happier. I do speak some German, by the way.”
“By the way of Yiddish?” Meyer asked. He did not seem to be in a hurry. Again Alex felt that Meyer wanted to hold him, just as he wanted to hold Meyer.
“No, by way of Kafka. I don’t know. By way of Brecht. I studied some German literature, once upon a time. Before I got kicked out of college.” Alex shrugged off this past tragedy grandly. “Sixties,” he added. “You know. Then there was the German Volkswagen mechanic who taught me my trade. It made more sense to me to understand how engines work than to distinguish between romanticism and Sturm und Drang. And fixing an engine had a timeline a lot shorter than fixing our social ills.” He shrugged again. “This was in Nebraska. The mechanic’s name is Hans Heidenfelter, if you’d like a reference. He loved it out there, on the plains. I sort of wanted to love it too, but I guess I was already hooked on cities. I grew up in New York. Did you?”
Meyer nodded but did not speak, while Alex was fast running out of things to say. Just then a tall, striking white woman with short black hair walked past, hesitating on the corner. She was not in paint-spattered jeans but in black velvet slacks and a black cape that the weather did not require. A little conspicuous, Alex thought, but he forgave her this foible.
“Well,” he said heartily. “Call me tonight, Mr. Meyer.”
Meyer nodded again and walked past the hesitating woman. He still moved stiffly, but maybe not stiffly enough to be noticed by anyone who hadn’t seen him escorted away earlier in the Green Cab. He crossed the side street and kept going. Alex walked the other way, not looking back, until he spotted Kim’s Rabbit parked neatly in front of a fire hydrant across the street. He collected the car, turned the radio up loud, and made his way home. He found that, not only from chemical causes for once, he was high as a kite.
* * *
Alex’s apartment was on the first floor of a regulation North Cambridge two-family house, two stories plus attic. By the time he reached it, he had sobered. From the front porch he could hear his phone ringing, but when he got his key in the lock it stopped. He went into the bathroom to brush the lingering sour taste from his mouth.
The face that looked back from the mirror did not look very much like his image of a disreputable confidential agent. The pouches under the eyes were all right— they might come from strung-out exhaustion and stale coffee and all that. The untrimmed beard, though, the unruly hair, the long nose never broken on the police force or in the ring… .
Alex rinsed his mouth once more. So he was out of his depth. So what? The fact remained that this was the kind of story one cherished to tell one’s grandchildren— in the unlikely event, for Alex, that he lived to see any. If not he, perhaps Maria could do it. He pictured his daughter, who loved to tell a story. Out of parental generosity, he gave her a fireplace, a rosy face glowing from the flames, a nice pair of breasts beneath a soft sweater with sleeves pushed up over her elbows. He gave her two wide-eyed children and a figure in the shadows that might or might not be a husband.
What story, though? What story would explain why a well-mannered, bloodless, professional sort of man would offer him twenty-five hundred cash for this seemingly pointless errand? Baby pictures or no baby pictures, the package was on its way to the daughter, and it was the daughter’s to keep if she didn’t want to give it up. Sending Alex after it didn’t get it back for Gerald Meyer, or keep it out of the hands of an alleged Jack Moselle or of the two men, unnamed, in the shiny suits. The only story that would explain Gerald Meyer was the story of a man who is sinking, grabbing at any floating object within reach.
When Alex got tired of looking at his face in the mirror, he came back to the living room and dropped into a soft armchair whose cushion was shedding bits of feathers as usual. On the opposite wall, over the couch, hung a few of Kim’s paintings: abstract, textured, mostly blues and whites and grays. Just now they seemed a little too… vacant. It was one thing to dip his own inquiring toe into the well of Gerald Meyer’s affairs, but he wished now that he hadn’t pushed Kim in headfirst. He struggled out of the chair and went to the kitchen to answer his empty stomach’s craving for grease and salt. He put Tilsit cheese and Genoa salami on the butcher-block section of the counter and sliced himself a tentative piece of each. When those went down okay, he poured himself a glass of milk and sliced some more.
The kitchen cheered him, perhaps because he had redone the room himself. The LaFarges had been happy to give him a rent reduction in return for his labor in putting in the shining wood floor, the counters and cabinets and racks for showing off cookware. There was no doubt the kitchen would enhance the apartment’s rental value, or its sale as a condominium someday.
But Alex could have the place as long as he wanted, Anne LaFarge had assured him. She was an admirable landlady who knew an amazing store of neighborhood babysitters. She had even tolerated the women Alex had allowed to drift in and out of his life in the years since he’d moved in. She was enthusiastic about the staying power of Meredith, despite the liability of Meredith’s being a Brit. Mrs. LaFarge was French Canadian by marriage, and Irish by birth. But she declared that she knew a good woman when she saw one. If Alex didn’t get on that plane for London tomorrow night, he knew he would have to bear the unspoken accusation in Anne LaFarge’s eye. Afraid to get tied up again, it would say; once bitten, twice shy. Well, whatever Declaration of Independence he was making, if he ran Gerald Meyer’s errand, he could keep his London date without compromising his flexibility. See his mate, and leave her too. Saturday Boston, Sunday London, if this is Tuesday it must be Berlin. But, shit, why didn’t Kim call?
It didn’t seem like Meyer, to be pacing endlessly along the city streets. He ought to come to rest someplace, allowing Kim to phone. Or was it Kim who couldn’t stop, because she was pursued rather than pursuer? Was she being asked, right now, to explain her interest in this affair? Or would the phone ring, and a gravelly voice tell him, Okay, Alex, here’s what you’ve got to do now, if you want to get Kim back?
Alex kept slicing, mechanically, and eating, and not trying not to think. That was the trick of medi
tation— not trying. This was a meditation on the sound of a telephone not ringing. There were no more rolled joints, and just now he did not feel like rolling one. When he needed something to focus on, he focused on that little refrain: Saturday Boston, Sunday London, Tuesday Berlin. Then would come London again, and Meredith, and then he’d come back home and take care of Maria and have his lumps checked and his blood checked, and then the whole cycle would begin again. And, shit, why didn’t Kim call?
6. Tell Alex
What rang, finally, was not the phone but the doorbell. Kim flung her purse and cape on the floor and slumped into the chair that was losing its stuffing.
“You owe me thirty-three dollars and seventy-eight cents,” she told him. “Plus you pay the ticket for parking at a hydrant, if I got one. And that doesn’t include compensation for my valuable time and the creeps I had to fend off.”
“Creeps?”
“In the bar by United at the airport. Including your friend.”
“He spotted you?”
“Uh-huh. Have you got anything to eat? I’m starving.”
“There’s cheese and salami on the counter. Frozen chicken nuggets in the freezer, Maria’s current favorite.”
“Shit, Alex, don’t you believe in vegetables?” Kim stretched her long legs before heading into the kitchen to forage. When she came back and settled her full plate on her lap, she demanded, “So? You first.”
Alex stood, back against the wall, as he explained. Kim listened, knitting heavy brows and grinding the heel of her leather boot into Alex’s old braided rug.
“His name is Gerald Meyer. He went to the post office to mail a package to his abandoned daughter in West Berlin. Two guys appeared from somewhere and scared the crap out of him. I mailed the package— I was in the post office— and arranged to meet him later. Now he wants me to help him get it back. I wanted to know more about Mr. Meyer. Who else would I have called but you? I shouldn’t have done it, but I did.”
Kim was not above flattery. She and Alex had known each other since college, a small liberal-arts school in the Midwest. In fact, they had left there together, keeping each other company until they reached the Pacific. They’d kept in touch through subsequent changes and crises— his wandering about the country and her coming out of the closet; his putting down roots, not all of which took; her putting in a decade as a high school teacher and now struggling to re-emerge as an artist. She smiled, then caught herself.
“Help him how?”
Alex didn’t smile back.
“By going to see the daughter in Berlin, standing under her mailbox, and telling her everything might be better if she stayed abandoned. For that, he’s willing to pay two thousand five hundred bucks.”
“Uh-huh. Well, report first, questions after. Your Mr. Meyer took the subway to Harvard Square. He showed some hesitation at the entrance. I don’t think he knows his way around here, or else he’s above the subway. That’s a pun, Alex, laugh. He walked into that new hotel, went up in one of the elevators. I sat in one of the few chairs, feeling like everybody in uniform was glaring at me, till he came down again. He had on a new suit and was carrying a briefcase. He got the doorman to put him in a cab to the airport. I got the doorman to put me in a cab, too.” She gave Alex a quick, mocking smile. “Same cab,” she added.
“Kim!”
Kim tossed her head like a stamping colt. “I’m an amateur at this, you know. What was I s’posed to do? Jump in the next one and say, ‘Follow that cab!’? Anyway, don’t you know what it’s like at Logan on Friday night, Alex? It was arrive in the same cab or good-bye, Johnny. Jerry. Whatever his name is. I thought I’d see what plane he took, or met, and that would be that. When he said he was going to United, I said, ‘Me too.’”
Alex slid to the floor, propping his back against the wall under a poster, another gift from Meredith: Greenham Women Everywhere. The poster celebrated resistance to American missiles in Europe.
“I went in first and stood around studying the TV screens, you know. He went past, and headed into the bar, so after a while I did too. He drank pretty steadily. I sipped and fended off creeps, the last one of which was him. He came over to me and sat down, drinking without saying anything, looking in his glass and giving me a pickled eye. Finally he kind of oozed across the table and said, and I quote, ‘You’re pretty obvious, honey. I suppose Mr. Glauberman fancies himself a detective?’ I didn’t answer, so he said, ‘Get out.’”
“And you got?”
“No, I was cool.” Kim drew herself up and looked down her nose in imitation of being cool. “‘Want to tell me what you’re doing here?’ I said. ‘Just so I can tell your Mr. Glauberman.’
“‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘I’m picking up a lovely lady. Sadly, it’s not going to be you. Now go. Not all my friends are gentlemen, if you know what I mean.’
“‘Right,’ I said. I remembered your advice, and I decided my job must be over. Only then he held on to me. He covered my fingers on the table with that cold-fish hand of his. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Honor among thieves, if nowhere else. Tell Alex I’ve got a little riddle for him. Tell Alex I once met the lady in the company of Jay Friedhoff, in Berlin.’ So there’s your message, Alex. I got my hand back and caught a cab.”
“Uh-huh.” So, truthfully, Kim had been in danger, Alex thought. And now Meyer was somewhat the wiser, and Alex might be, or might not. “Listen, Kim. How did he seem?”
“Creepy, I told you. He’d had a lot to drink, and he was kind of woozing over me, so I was trying not to look in his face. He sounded… I guess sorry for himself would be the best way to describe it. It’s a common tone in the mouths of intoxicated men. He seemed pleased to take that out on me or you.”
Kim drifted past Alex toward the kitchen with her plate. He heard her washing the plate and silverware and, from the sound of it, his too. When she came back, she bounced on the balls of her feet as if she wished there were more busywork she could find to keep herself in motion. She stopped bouncing, and now it was the toe of her boot that she worked into the rug.
“What’s it all about?” she demanded.
“Do I know? Wait, sit down. He told me a lot of stuff about his life, but along the way he made a point of bringing in a wealthy ex-black-marketeer in London named Jack Moselle. Moselle runs some kind of business empire called Interface. Sounds very up to date, doesn’t it? Only the guys who more or less kidnapped Meyer, earlier, seemed to come from this Jack. The only thing I know, really, psychologically, is that Meyer is a man with a habit of changing his mind. The reason he has this abandoned daughter is because he married a German woman. He claims, anyway, that he planned to bring wife and daughter back here, then backed out. He implied that his family here— Jewish— wouldn’t tolerate them. The way my mother hit the roof when I told her I was fixing Volkswagens, only more so.”
“You ended up working with your hands like your father, Alex. Your mother would have hit the roof if you had been fixing Chevys. Are you asking me what she would say about you getting involved in this?”
Alex stood up, stung, then sat down on the couch under Kim’s paintings. “Maybe he’s scared off now. If he does call me, maybe I’ll just say no. I want you to understand the temptation, though. Suppose some gangsters offered you two thousand to, I don’t know, decorate their boardroom with a pornographic mural?”
“If I knew where to find somebody like that, I’d say four thousand and get to work. But painting doesn’t have quite the same lure of illicit adventure. This came to you on a platter, that’s the point, and things that come to you on platters you don’t like to pass up.”
Kim stopped there, pressing her lips together as if she’d said enough but wanted Alex to know she could say more. She bent to pick up her purse and cape, slung them both over her shoulder as she stood. She paused and looked at Alex on her way to the door.
“Spit it out,” he said. Kim worked her boot into the rug some more.
“It’s terminal behavior, Alex, to
get mixed up in something like this.”
Alex nodded knowingly. That was an accusation he’d learned how to handle. “Look,” he said in his most reasonable tone. “It’s not so unlike me to explore it a little. Right now, I don’t even know what I’m getting mixed up in. So I mess around. I try this, I try that. I see what makes it work.”
Alex remembered explaining himself in almost the same words to Meyer, when Meyer had told him he must be looking for adventure.
“What does that have to do with what I just said?” Kim demanded.
Alex shrugged. “Terminal is just being yourself,” he said. “Only more so.”
“Oh shit, Alex.” Kim scowled and kicked viciously at the rug. She examined the rip she had made, then bent to smooth it out. “Okay, what the hell else am I supposed to say to you? How did my car sound, anyway?”
“Valves are a trifle noisy, that’s all. Listen, thanks a lot for what you did, following him. I couldn’t have done it half as well. Can you drop me at my car, on your way home? I left it by the post office.”
“When is old fishy Meyer supposed to call?”
“Tonight. I told him I’d be working, finishing up. Listen. I’ve got Maria in the morning— we’re going to the country with Bernie and his kids. I’ll call you in the afternoon, okay? One way or the other, will you promise to let me tell Meredith about this in my own way?”
Kim glanced toward Meredith’s poster, hanging between a pair of stereo speakers. She seemed to be asking Meredith to speak.
“I will expect you to do just that, Alex,” she said finally. She frowned. “And how about locking the door to your shop while you work?”
7. Without Warning
