by Dick Cluster
“What happened?” he said.
A simple question. If Alex told the truth, his part in all this would be over. Alex felt the skin of his own fingers crawl as he remembered Meyer’s fingers trembling on the package, remembered shaking Meyer’s more confident hand. But he wasn’t ready to hand this thing over— not now, not yet.
“I was working late at my shop, till about midnight.” Alex got up to offer another of his business cards. “I came home, went to the back to put out a bag of garbage. When I moved the can, he, uh, fell over into sight.”
“You always put out your rubbish at midnight?”
Alex shrugged and sat down. He folded his legs again. “Sometimes. It was kind of smelly after the night air…”
“Okay, never mind. What time was that?”
“Just before I called. I was here for dinner, say from six-thirty to about nine, but I didn’t hear anything then. I went out the front door. I park my car on the street. He might have been here already, or not.”
“And you haven’t got any idea who the guy is?” Alex shook his head piously.
“Never saw him before, around the neighborhood, on the T, nothing like that?”
Alex shrugged. “I don’t think so. Didn’t you find any I.D.?”
Trevisone looked through him and then turned to Anne, and then to Frank.
“How about you folks, did you hear anything?”
They hadn’t. Frank had brought home a videocassette, and they’d watched it till eleven, watched the eleven o’clock news, and then gone to bed. If they’d noticed Kim’s arrival, they didn’t mention it. Trevisone took down names and occupations and other details, while the first cruiser and the ambulance left. Another cop came in and checked out the walls, photos included.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you two to take a look,” Trevisone said to the LaFarges. They went out with the third cop, came back looking shaken and puzzled.
“Okay,” Trevisone said. “That’s it. I could, probably might, have more questions when we find out who he is. Any of you planning to go out of town or anything?”
Mrs. LaFarge glanced quickly at Alex and then away.
Alex coughed.
“Actually, I have plane tickets to London tomorrow night, I’m afraid.” He shrugged in an embarrassed, self-effacing way. “It’s my vacation, Sergeant. It would be awfully difficult, really, for me to rearrange.”
Trevisone looked again at the British antinuke poster, but he smiled for the first time.
“Your bonnie lies over the ocean, huh? How long a vacation?”
“Two weeks,” said Alex, holding up that many fingers together, like a Cub Scout.
“Well, look, I don’t promise, but that ought to be okay. Come down to the station to give a deposition, tomorrow at… let’s make it four.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Thanks.”
* * *
Tenant, landlord, and landlady engaged in the necessary headshaking.
“Mugger or the mob,” Frank LaFarge insisted. He was a short, stocky, friendly man with a pleasant hint of a Quebecois accent. “Either way, why did they have to pick my backyard?”
“It’s odd, though.” Behind that deceptive, middle-aged angel face, Anne LaFarge was quick and logical. “Somebody like that, wandering around our neighborhood. Maybe he has a kid like you, Alex, renting an apartment around here.”
“A kid like me, with forty breathing down his neck?”
“Well, a student, maybe.”
“Maybe he got put here at random,” Alex insisted. “I wonder what time it happened, though.”
“We were up with the TV on all night. We were up there watching, and here was this man getting murdered right below.”
“Yeah,” said Alex. He shook his head, stood to indicate that it was time to wrap up the wrap-up. “You going to tell Donna about this? She used to love a good murder.”
“She can have them in the movies,” Anne said on the way to the door. Their youngest daughter had gone off to UMass Amherst two weeks before.
“It’s a good thing none of us saw it happening,” she concluded. “For us. Not for him.”
When they had gone, Alex plucked an atlas from the bookcase and tried to calculate the time difference between Boston and Berlin. Ninety degrees of longitude equaled a quarter of the way around the world. Six hours later, then, or almost 8:00 A.M. He carried the atlas to the kitchen counter, nibbled cautiously at crackers and cheese. He picked up the phone and told the long distance operator he needed to know the number for the Gasthaus Mockernstrasse in West Berlin, and needed to know how to dial it direct. Scribbling on the margin of the Mercator world, he pushed fourteen digits and listened to the sound of a phone ringing in a blank place. Finally a thin but musical voice said, “Gasthaus hier.”
“Uh, Moment bitte,” Unprepared, Alex groped for his German. He felt he was about to toss a penny down an incalculably deep well.
“lch wünsche mit, um, Fraülein Cynthia Meyer zu sprechen. Bitte. Ich telefonier…ich rufe aus die Vereignigten, aus Amerika.” In the days when Alex had been studying German, no one had taught him how to say Ms.
“Ja, ja,” the thin voice said. “Cynthia kommt in einer Stunde zürück.” Meyer had been right about the mess he’d made with his daughter’s name. It came out something like Tsin-tia, halfway Chinese. “Mit wem spreche ich?”
“Ich heisse Alex Glauberman. Ich bin ein Freund.” Alex stopped. Was he a friend? Hardly. How the fuck did you say acquaintance? “Ein Gekennte,” he tried without much hope the word was right. “Ein Erkentnis ihres Vaters.”
“Vater? Sie suchen den Vater?” The tone, Alex thought, held a measure of hostility overshadowed by surprise.
“Nein, nein. Ich bin, ich habe einen— shit, oh, sorry, I can’t say it in German! Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
“A bit only. She comes in one hour back, and speaks good English. Sie heissen Herr Glauberman? Your telephone number, please.”
Alex gave it.
“Danke sehr,” the voice said noncommittally.
“Bitte,” Alex replied.
In one hour. If not, he’d call again in the morning, Boston time. At two-thirty, though, he decided the time had come to call Meredith. He pushed another fourteen digits, and prayed in an agnostic but fervent way that he would hear her clipped, warm tones. The man who answered instead identified himself as Mark. Alex felt his heart sink like a torpedoed vessel, all at once.
“She’s left to give her seminar at university,” Mark said. “It’s a morning one. She won’t like missing your call, Alex. We’ve heard so much about you.”
For no reason, Alex disliked the man already— a social service bureaucrat, if he remembered Meredith’s rundown correctly, married to Meredith’s old friend, now seeing her every day in a scene Alex did not know. Well, not for no reason, then. He disliked Mark because he missed Meredith. “Look,” he said, “could you tell her I’m coming? Yes, arriving tomorrow morning, at Heathrow, same old ticket, as originally planned. All reports to the contrary are canceled.”
“So, that’s good news, Alex! I can look forward to meeting you, then?”
“Yeah,” said Alex. “Yes. But tell her I’m probably going to do some traveling by myself on the Continent, okay?”
“Yes, of course. Ciao, Alex.”
“Yes, of course,” Alex repeated. “Ciao.” He drank a little milk, set out his medications for the morning, and shut off the kitchen light. In his bedroom he began tossing clothes into a pile to pack. He took a quick shower, pissing out dead cancer cells and other debris. He took a sleeping pill and got himself horizontal for what was left of the night. The phone rang just as he felt his nerves begin to let go.
“Cynthia Meyer here,” said a voice different from the one that had answered his call to Berlin. This voice was fuller and less musical, more businesslike and in-a-hurry. Yet it was a welcoming voice. Perhaps that was a professional trick, Alex thought, that went with the innkeeper’s trade. Alex tried to sound professio
nal himself.
“Cynthia. Ms. Meyer. My name is Alex Glauberman and I’m calling from the U.S. I don’t know how to explain this, but I was instructed to visit you, by a man who gave his name as Gerald Meyer and said he was your father. To be honest, he hired me to be his representative with you.”
To be strictly honest, he had only offered to hire Alex. Hiring, as Alex’s friend Bernie would no doubt point out in the morning, meant that money exchanged hands.
“Representative?” Her tone grew colder, more correct. “Are you a lawyer, Mr. Glauberman?”
“No, no, not me.” Alex sat up and got ready to give the news that it had fallen to him to give. “I’m not a lawyer. I fix cars.”
She laughed. “The world would be better off with fewer cars and also with fewer laws. Why would this father want to pay you to visit me?”
“I don’t know. But now he’s dead.”
“But now he’s dead,” Cynthia repeated. “Am I supposed to mourn?”
“He was murdered. I feel responsible for carrying out his last wishes, more or less. Also, I’m hoping you might be able to explain some things about his death.”
There was a long pause during which Alex tried to picture the woman at the other end, who she was and what she might be doing. He got only a black-and-white image of Marlene Dietrich in some war-ravaged basement. That would be her mother, not her. He substituted a leather-jacketed punk, but realized he had skipped a generation. Gerald Meyer could have been Alex’s father— a thought he preferred not to dwell on— and so his daughter would be someone his own age, in fact slightly older. Someone dealing with the fact that if she looked back, her view was blocked by the crest of the hill.
“He was murdered,” she said, “and you fix cars. All of this is a little hard to understand. When and where would you like to meet?”
“I’m arriving in London Sunday, but, um, I’d rather not leave there right away. Would it be convenient to see you any day during the week?”
“I’m traveling too, as it turns out, so I won’t be available immediately myself. Hm. But that means I could meet you en route, somewhere. Suppose we find each other on the Ost-West Express, Tuesday night’s train. I’ll be boarding in Hannover.”
“Hannover?”
“Look on a map, Mr. Glauberman. It’s the last major city before the DDR, the East German border. I will carry…” She laughed again, a more pronounced laugh that was both mocking and amused. “I will carry, for sign and countersign, a white rose. And you?”
“A bewildered look. A black beard and a hook nose. I don’t know. I’ll be coming from England, like I said. Is there something I can get you there?”
“A record of reggae music? I leave the choice to you. We meet, let me look, it is actually Wednesday morning, about three A.M. If you take the boat-train from London on Tuesday, you will pick up the Express in Aachen. You will see— it’s done all the time. Like the murder of one’s long-lost father. I don’t know what to make of you, Mr. Glauberman. But I do appreciate your call.”
“One more thing,” Alex said.
“O, ja?”
“Depending on when you leave, you might receive a package in the mail first, from Gerald Meyer. It was his strong request that you shouldn’t open it until we’ve had a chance to talk.”
“Really? Well, perhaps. I will see you when I have said, by Hannover. Get yourself a ticket through to Berlin.”
“Right,” said Alex. He sank back onto the mattress, and set his alarm for ten. He wondered how much it cost to buy a ticket on the Ost-West Express from London to Berlin.
9. You Pick ’Em
This time the electronic beeping dragged Alex, hand over hand, out of a deep and dreamless place. It was ten, Saturday morning. He was due to pick up Maria in an hour.
Alex wolfed down prednisone and orange juice, starting two eggs frying and whole wheat bread toasting. While breakfast cooked, he finished packing. When he was done, the toast had popped and grown cold. The eggs weren’t bad, if a little crispy around the edges. Burned-over animal fats probably contained more than one form of carcinogen, but they did not stack up as something to worry about just now.
By the time he had mopped up the last of the eggs with the last crust of the toast, Alex had considered and rejected the idea of telling all to Sergeant Trevisone. Aside from how it would feel, there was the fact that, if he did, Trevisone would never allow him to make his plane.
Clear on that point, he fished his dope supply out from the box of crackers where he’d stashed it after dialing 911 the night before. He rolled a fresh joint, smoked half, and again laid out the thirteen chalk-white pills totaling 650 milligrams of cyclophosphamide. This was his fourth day out of five. It was possible to take the whole five days’ worth in a single intravenous administration, but the reaction was more intense. Anyway, Alex liked to receive his drugs from his own hand.
He swallowed the pills without trouble, cleaned up, showered, and was dressed by the time his doorbell rang. That would be Bernie and Bernie’s two children, ready to go apple-picking as Maria and Elizabeth, Bernie’s oldest, had decided earlier in the week. The weather forecast called for ten degrees cooler than the day before. It was a perfect day for apple-picking, no doubt about that.
The man at the door wasn’t Bernie. He was younger, and dressed in an old-fashioned khaki uniform with a uniform cap— just the sort Alex had wished for when playing Olympia Florist the night before. “Messenger service,” he said, consulting his clipboard just as Alex had done. “Glauberman?”
Alex laughed— he couldn’t help it— and felt a resilient wholeness ripple through the muscles from his belly to his face. He signed and was given a manila envelope, nine-by-twelve, that bulged slightly. The messenger got back in his van and sped off. Alex shut the door and opened his present. Inside the envelope were two rubber-banded bundles, each wrapped in white writing paper, labeled simply ALEX. He unwrapped one bundle and thumbed quickly through twenty-five likenesses of Ulysses S. Grant. Some were crisp, others worn. Behind the two bundles rested a brief handwritten note. The writing came in a neat, precise hand he recognized from the day before. Dear Alex, it said. Here is your fee. Best of luck. G.M.
Alex rewrapped the bills and re-closed the envelope in a careful way that came naturally to a man who took things apart and put them back together. He finished just as Bernie’s new BMW did indeed drive up. He stuffed the envelope in his carry-on bag, and threw bag and suitcase into Bernie’s trunk.
Elizabeth, Bernie’s daughter, was Maria’s best friend. Bernie’s son, Matthew, was three years younger than the girls. They were all going to swoop up Maria for the expedition, and drop her back at her mother’s afterward. She would stay there through Alex’s two-week vacation and then his next week of drugs. After that, Maria was supposed to return to her accustomed schedule, splitting the time between her two homes.
Alex chatted with the kids until they pulled up in front of Laura’s house near Fresh Pond— not far away, but both literally and figuratively on the better side of the tracks. Maria was ready to go, in blue jeans and sneakers plus her new red, purple, and blue vest. She ran to the car to conspire, leaving Alex the customary minute to deal in logistics with his ex-wife on the porch.
“She’s in good shape,” Laura said. “She’s been nicer than usual with Sarah, even found her blanket for her. What time do you think you’ll be back?”
Sarah was the baby— toddler, actually, by now— Laura and her new husband’s kid. The new husband was a software designer and in general an intelligent, reasonable man. Two seaworthy, even-keeled, unadventurous craft, Alex thought, joining together for a voyage when they were old enough to know that about themselves. If that was so, he couldn’t ask for a better conveyance for his daughter. Still, it always surprised and saddened him to be reminded how little he and Laura could find to say.
“My flight’s not till eight, but I’ve got to be somewhere by four. So suppose we get back around three?”
“I
guess so. Are you going anyplace besides England?” She meant, Alex suspected, Are you going back to Paris? That was where Maria had quite probably been conceived.
“Germany, I think. I’ve got somebody to visit in Berlin.”
“Oh. Berlin should be… interesting.”
“I guess so.” He tried to be businesslike, but thought he succeeded only in being brusque. “So we’ll be back at three. The medical report is generally sunny with patches of fog. Tomorrow in London is the last day of this round. I’ll call in the next few days, to tell her myself that I’ve finished the pills and stuff.”
“Okay, Alex. Take care.”
“You too.”
Bernie already had the three kids belted in the backseat, but he left it to Alex to keep up running banter and guessing games for the half-hour drive to the you-pick-’em orchard. The cooler day and distance from the city made everything suddenly feel like fall. Air and fruit were bright and crisp. Alex organized the girls to clamber among the branches and toss the reddest apples down to Matt; then he started to tell Bernie about the post office and everything that followed, but Bernie interrupted.
“Is this because you’re chasing death, Alex, or are you finally getting tired of the shop?”
Uh-oh, Alex thought. “Kim called you?”
“Of course. We care about your health, not just your disease.”
Of course was not exactly right. Kim and Alex were kindred spirits, which accounted for the length and depth of their friendship. Bernie was much more a case of the attraction of opposites. He was a lawyer downtown now, and Kim considered him a stuffed shirt. He’d grown richer and fatter since he and Alex had met, but the two men had grown ever closer. Alex didn’t know who he’d talk to if he didn’t have Bernie, and vice versa. For Bernie and Kim to line up against him was unusual.
“When did she call you?”
“Last night.”
“And?”
“I called a few people about the names you gave her. Jack Moselle is well enough known. Interface is a sizable asset-management firm. That shows you how little he has to fear from anyone, much less a walking drugstore of a nobody like you.”
