The Manhattan Deception

by Simon Leighton-Porter

  She found the Hillmans’ store easily and continued slowly along Main Street looking for the centre of the town, but instead, the few commercial and office buildings suddenly gave way to tired clapboard houses, all in need of a lick of paint and some looking deserted. Then the houses petered out and from there, a few brown, frost-bitten fields were all that stood between Cunningham and the continuation of the pinewoods. It was while she was looking for somewhere to turn round that she saw the sign: “Site acquired for the Cunningham Mall – last few lots still available” followed by a phone number and a web address. Most of the billboard was taken up by an artist’s impression showing well-heeled, white, nuclear families beaming in straight-toothed joy at the wonders on sale in the mall’s shops. Not a black face, not a John Deere baseball cap, not a fat person to be seen and no suggestion that any of the families in the picture had ever so much as sat in a pick-up truck with gun rails let alone spent time in a trailer park. Planet Mars.

  Cathy pulled the car over and got out. Despite the sunshine it was bitterly cold and she pulled her woolly hat down over her ears while she looked around the site. It was easy to see what had happened to Cunningham and why the developers had chosen to build their mall just here. Following the slope up what was now overgrown meadowland, her eye was drawn to the top of the ridge where a line of traffic sped along the interstate that now bypassed the town, filling the air with the distant thrumming of the drivers’ indifference to Cunningham and all it had to offer. Not only would the mall pick up passing trade, its back door would also be accessible to the inhabitants of the town. The Hillmans and every other small store owner would be put out of business by it, but straight away she could see their fight against the inevitable was hopeless, as was the idea that their story might make the pages of New Horizons.

  She returned to the warmth of the car, tossed the woolly hat onto the back seat and, with a quick glance in the rear-view mirror to check that her hair wasn’t too flat, swung the car round to head back into what passed for the town itself. Cathy shook her head; none of this explained what Lisa had been doing here on the day she died.

  Parking directly outside the Hillmans’ store she made her in way through the double doors. For a moment she thought she’d stepped back into a Spencer Tracy movie: the place seemed to sell everything. Stacked on shelves or hanging from the ceiling were bicycles, lawnmowers, clothes, packet food, seed, rolls of fencing, power tools – everything a bustling market town could wish for. The trouble was, this was rural Maryland: the few remaining farmers were too poor to generate trade, the shoe factory on the outskirts of town had shut down nine years ago and the rest of the population was either retired or subsisting on welfare. As soon as they were able, most of the employable young left town. A few people scratched a living from tourism in summer, but summer was a long way off. There were no other customers.

  Cathy walked up to the counter of Hillman’s Stores and hit the plunger of the brass bell with the palm of her hand. She stepped back in surprise as, like a jack-in-the-box, a small, balding figure popped up from behind the counter right under her nose.

  ‘Sorry if I made you jump, ma’am,’ said the little man seeing the look of alarm on her face. ‘Just looking for some invoices, that’s all.’

  She smiled and held out a hand. ‘That’s OK. I’m Cathy Stenmark. Are you Mr Hillman?’ From watching the DVD at home the previous evening, she’d been expecting someone a lot bigger and a little younger.

  He laughed. ‘No ma’am, I’m just the hired help. Arnie’s out back but he’s expecting you. Here, come with me.’

  He led her behind the counter, through a small office in which every surface was piled high with paper, and across a small open courtyard to a door in the opposite wall. He pushed it open and she followed him up a set of bare wooden steps to another door on which he knocked before opening it. ‘Arnie, your visitor’s here,’ he said. Then, almost as quickly as he’d appeared from behind the counter, the little man scuttled back down the stairs like a rabbit returning to its burrow.

  The office in which Hillman sat was almost identical to the first: dusty, paper everywhere and the most modern piece of equipment Cathy could see was a 1980s calculator on the desk next to the telephone. As he stood to greet her, she recognised him straight away. Tall, balding and running to fat, he’d put on a few pounds since the documentary had been filmed, but it was definitely him. As he held out his hand, Cathy immediately gained the impression of a man on whom the force of gravity acted more strongly than on others, and every part of his being seemed to sag under its influence. Even what little hair he had left looked as though it was being dragged down with him.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he said. She declined his offer of coffee and so he continued, speaking quickly as if from a well-rehearsed script. ‘I was very sorry to hear about Miss Greenberg’s accident and I’m very grateful that you’ve come all this way to see me. I presume you know what she and I had been talking about so I’ll get straight to the point. Our appeal’s been turned down by the Supreme Court of Maryland and the mall’s going ahead – you’re our last chance.’

  Cathy tucked a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear and took out her notebook. ‘So what exactly do you expect me to do, Mr Hillman?’

  He shrugged. ‘Carry on where she left off, I guess.’

  ‘Which was where?’ asked Cathy.

  Hillman put his head on one side and looked at her intently, trying to size her up. ‘I won’t mess around,’ he said. ‘You know dance steps, don’t you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  His jowly features struggled upwards into a wry half-smile. ‘That we were using each other to get what we both wanted. That she was no more interested in my store than last year’s little league results. She wanted to open up old wounds, go back over old ground that I thought was dead and buried more than fifteen years ago. And in return, the price I was making her pay for it was getting publicity via your prestigious magazine to stop the mall being built.’ He spoke the word “prestigious” in the same way other people might say “dog-shit”.

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  The smile faded. ‘Course you are. I take it you know about my TV documentary?’

  ‘I do. I watched it on DVD last night. If you’re so uptight about the story, how come you let them make the film?’

  ‘Same as with your magazine – we both had something the other needed. They wanted a story and at the time my wife and I needed the money. We needed it real bad and you know why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We needed it to fight a legal action against a developer who wanted to build a mall right near our store. How ironic is that?’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Started in 1994 when we were living in Seattle. They were planning a whole bunch of TV documentaries to do with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and they got on to that whole gig about Hitler’s family in America. You remember: Hitler’s half brother had a kid who ended up coming here and then joined the Navy during the war.’

  ‘Willy Hitler?’

  ‘That’s the feller. Well, it’s not a story we shouted from the roof-tops, but on the other hand it wasn’t exactly a state secret. As you’ll have seen on the film, I’m descended from Adolf’s younger brother, Walter, who was born in 1903, three months after their father died in the January. Poor Pop had a crappy life. His mother, my grandmother, died when he was only four and he was put into an orphanage until he was eight. After that he was brought up by his older sister, Paula. God knows how she managed because she was only fifteen herself when she took him on. Anyway, Walter, my pop, was too young for the First World War and he studied to be an English teacher while he and Paula were living in Vienna.’

  ‘I don’t remember that from the documentary.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. They cut it about so much and put things together that weren’t shot together so that the entire family looked like a cast of monsters – my father was a gentle, ki
nd man; nothing like his brother. By all accounts, Paula was a good person too. Anyway, things were pretty bad in Austria in the twenties so Pop came to the US, did the usual round of bum jobs and eventually got himself a post as a German teacher at a high school in Seattle. By the time the Second World War broke out he’d become an American citizen and had changed his last name to Hillman for obvious reasons. Then he married an American girl and I came along in 1948. After school I got a job in a general store and in 1974 I opened my own.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Yup. You can’t choose your parents, let alone your father’s brother, so when they wanted to make the film and give us a crazy amount of money for it, I didn’t see what harm it would do.’

  ‘You didn’t think anyone would hold it against you?’

  Hillman shook his head sadly. ‘No I didn’t. I’ve done some dumb things in my life, but that has to be the dumbest. I thought people would be curious, that’s all. And if anything I expected them to sympathise. Jeez, I was dumb – no, I was worse than dumb, I was naïve and greedy.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The day after the documentary was shown we started getting rocks through our windows and then there was a big press campaign to get folks to boycott the store. Now you’ll love this – a whole bunch of the people behind the campaign were Jewish. I tried to talk to them, to explain, but they wouldn’t even listen. I got so mad that I even offered to sew a yellow swastika on my clothes so people would know who I was.’

  ‘I’ll bet that went down well.’

  Hillman pulled a face of disgust. ‘Yeah, you bet it did. We stuck it out for a couple of months but in the end we had no choice. We sold up for half what the place was worth and moved to somewhere a long way from Seattle where no one knew us and where we reckoned there’d be no chance of anyone building a mall in our back yard. Couldn’t make it up, could you?’

  ‘So did you approach Lisa or did she find you?’

  ‘She found me. Said she’d seen something about our campaign against the mall via one of the press agencies and that it tied in with a story she was working on. I thought that was probably BS. And after what’d happened the last time I got involved with the media you can understand why I didn’t exactly jump at the idea, so I said I’d think about it and call her back.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘My wife and I talked it over – for a week we didn’t talk about anything else,’ he said. ‘In the end we decided to chance it, so I called Lisa back and we kicked a couple of ideas around. I told her what had happened after the TV show and that I didn’t want it all brought up again.’

  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘Oh, she said our story would simply be part of a series of articles about the things that were destroying small-town America – you know, big corporations, globalisation, “made in China”, that kind of thing.’

  ‘And so she came out here to see you?’

  ‘That’s right. In the end I decided that she seemed genuine enough for a journalist so I took a chance.’ Cathy ignored the barb and Hillman continued. ‘I asked her to come over and take a look around, showed her the store, showed her the new road and where they’re going to put the mall, and that was it really.’

  Deep in concentration, Cathy frowned and scribbled in her notebook. The brief pause gave her time to word the next question without putting Hillman on his guard – get this one wrong and it’s all over, she thought. ‘Did she ask you anything about politics?’ she asked casually. ‘You know, local politicians who could help or who stood to gain? Anything on a national or party level?’

  Putting his head in his hands, he looked down at the desk again. ‘I know this is a dumb, naïve question to ask a journalist, but can I trust you?’

  ‘It is a dumb, naïve question, but in this case the answer’s yes. You have my word.’

  ‘OK, it goes something like this,’ he said. ‘You’re on the same track, aren’t you?’

  Cathy frowned and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hillman, you’ve totally lost me.’

  He studied her intently, tormented by a despair born of the realisation that this pretty blonde woman with the high cheekbones and the broad smile was not only his last hope, but potentially his betrayer. ‘So are you really telling me you don’t know what her angle was?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Cathy. ‘I knew she’d been out this way working on a story but when you called me that was the first I knew about it.’

  ‘And the question about national politics?’

  She was back on thin ice now and she knew it. ‘Just wanted to get the big picture, that’s all. Did she say something that upset you?’

  ‘Not exactly. It meant nothing to me at the time. It came up in conversation that I vote Democrat and from there we got onto the subject of Senator Pauli. After that, she wouldn’t talk about anything else: wanted to know if I’d contacted him, just a whole heap of questions about Pauli.’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘Have I what?’

  ‘Contacted him?’ She knew as soon as she’d said it that she’d made a mistake.

  ‘Not you as well?’ he said angrily.

  She tried the smile again but this time its effect was partial at best. ‘Just curious, that’s all. He’d be a useful ally if he did become president one day,’ she said, trying to sound as offhand as possible.

  Hillman snorted derisively. ‘I’ll be bankrupt long before then,’ he said. ‘No, it was only after she’d gone that I looked the guy up on the web. Sure I’d heard the name but I didn’t know the first thing about him. And so imagine my surprise when it turns out that his parents were Germans too. What a coincidence, eh? Now perhaps you understand why I said we were using each other to get what we both wanted –’

  Cathy interrupted him. ‘Well my grandfather was Swedish. So what? – we didn’t all come over in the Mayflower. I don’t see the German thing as anything more than a coincidence’

  The jowls shook as he struggled to find the right words. ‘You might not, but you haven’t been run out of town because your uncle was Hitler, for Christ’s sake. Have you seen Pauli’s web site?’

  ‘Of course I have, I’m a political journalist.’

  ‘And you’ve seen all that stuff about how his parents were sent to Auschwitz for opposing the Nazis? That he remembers the tattoo on his mother’s arm; that he prides himself on fighting the forces of oppression wherever he may find them and all that good crap?’

  ‘You thought Lisa was setting you up. Good German versus Bad German.’

  ‘Damn right I did. And are you really telling me you know nothing about this?’

  ‘Mr Hillman, like I told you, I knew she’d been to interview someone in Maryland and until I got your phone call that was all I knew. You have my word.’

  He paused. ‘So what’s the deal then?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘You don’t? Then let me spell it out for you, miss. How much detail about my family do I have to let you print in return for your magazine running a story on the mall?’

  Cathy closed her notebook. ‘Mr Hillman, I don’t know how to put this, but I’m not going to run a story on the mall and I’m certainly not going to write anything about you and your ancestors.’

  ‘Nothing about my family?’

  ‘Nothing about you, nothing about the mall. Don’t think I don’t sympathise, but I just don’t see either story as something I’d want to cover. You do understand, don’t you?’

  Hillman nodded sadly, ‘Guess I do,’ he said. ‘Even if you’d run a four-page spread on the bastards who are putting all the family stores in the country out of business, I can’t see how it would stop them. I just hoped it would… I dunno, slow them down a bit, trip them up somehow.’ He managed a faint smile. ‘Dumb and naïve again, huh?’ Cathy wanted to give him a hug but decided against it.

  Five minutes later, she was back on the road, headed for DC and home. As she drove she tried in vain to m
ake some sense of what she’d learned. So far as she could make out, if the German connection really was just coincidence then the late Lisa Greenberg had led her into the back of beyond on a wild goose chase. But the letter and its strange contents wouldn’t go away – if Lisa had found some link between Hillman and Pauli, then what the hell was it? Maybe I should try asking Pauli, she thought.

  Chapter Nine

  End of three terrible days in Washington. Non-stop questions and almost no sleep. Treated like common criminals. A. says this wasn’t part of the agreement and is going to lodge formal complaint but I think he’s wasting his time.

  *

  After a few days of the same routine, James became used to the limitations of his new life; institutionalised would’ve been a better word, he thought. Time flatlined, with nothing to distinguish one day from the next as he sat by the bedside waiting for his uncle to wake. St Catherine’s hospice was modern, clean and, as the doctor had told him, the staff were kind to a degree that James found humbling.

  The old man was hooked up to a morphine drip and even as he slept, James could see a look of serenity in his tired features, something he’d not seen in the few days they’d spent together at the Lodge.

  Not far from dozing off himself in the over-heated room, James sat staring aimlessly into space and watching the specks of dust as they danced in a shaft of sunlight streaming through the window. Time stood still.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts?’ He jolted awake. The friendly nurse who’d already brought him several cups of tea had returned to check on Uncle Bill. ‘Still asleep?’ she asked.

  ‘He did wake up for a bit about half an hour ago, but I couldn’t get any sense out of him,’ said James. ‘Poor chap was just rambling to himself.’

  ‘He’s been doing a lot of that,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s not uncommon when they’re on morphine but he got himself into quite a state last night.’

  ‘What was he saying?’ James asked.