by Howard Engel
“Yeah, and it doesn’t hurt to have a few battleships in the neighborhood, does it?”
“You sound cynical, Mr Cooperman. The local people have to swallow much pride to do business with the petroleum interests. The oil business is no game for amateurs, yes? The scoring is fixed. The big winners have never seen this country.” The lawyer had found a cup of what looked like cold coffee in an alcove in his desk. His original cup stood empty.
“Do you think Jake Grange is dead?”
As Hubermann took a moment to consider the question, he mopped his face with a handkerchief and looked at me diagonally twice before meeting my eyes straight on.
“Yes, I do. I tried not to, but I’ve heard no word, seen no sign. He knows where I live, my place in the hills, where I have a small cabana. Nothing! Not in all this time.”
“Might he not be being held against his will?”
“That’s nonsense from the movies. Why would they hold him? They have his company. They are making the profits that would have been his. We are not talking about sentimental men, Mr Cooperman. A living man needs to be fed, watched, confined. If he escapes, he could say too many dangerous things. From their viewpoint, it is far better to kill the man and sleep soundly at night.”
“I guess you’re right.” I chewed on this for a moment, then: “Oh! Do you know who Jake’s partners in business were?”
“Partners? I don’t understand. He had no partners that I knew about. Jake was a very able man of affairs: he needed no partners.”
“I see. Thanks.”
He looked at me from across the desk, his hands holding the edges. It was a signal that the interview was coming to an end, yet he was being polite, waiting for me to make the first move. “Tell me one last thing, Mr Hubermann: Where do you stand in all this?”
“My dear Mr Cooperman, I am a lawyer in a country that sees the law as an obstruction to the normal course of business. Our civil and criminal laws are traditional and—how would you say it?—whimsical. Napoleon’s Civil Code is an almost invisible ghost in our law courts. What do I do in this chaotic labyrinth? I try to survive. I try to make a living. I try to be of service to those who trust me. I do what I can do. I wish I could do more, but the forces at work in the commercial world are like the mountain behind us. It pushes us into the sea. The forest threatens whatever civilization we have built or inherited. So, I draw up wills, I respond to writs, I make partnership agreements, I have a stock of heavy seal presses for sealing agreements. I go through the motions. I take my chances, Mr Cooperman. I do what I can.”
It was a very impressive speech. For certain he had said it before, but he gave it with conviction. I can’t say it left me unmoved. He was either sincere or he was giving a good imitation of it. I couldn’t imagine any other lawyer in Takot telling me anything very different from this. I got up and said, “Thanks, once again.”
“Where are you stopping, Mr Cooperman?” he said. “You will give me the name of your hotel, yes?” I told him the details and we shook hands.
After I left the lawyer, I visited a nearby army surplus store—carrying everything from fishnets and army boots to parachute silk and trenching shovels—then returned to the bank I kept all my diamonds in. (No sense spreading them around.) I had a conversation with a friendly teller, who brought me up to date on the local banking rules and practices—not necessarily the same—then I took another look at my treasure and made some adjustments there. The cost was quite reasonable.
I was beginning to whistle as I made my way along the street, until I remembered my parting from the lawyer. The man’s interest in my accommodation in Takot was unsettling.
I wasn’t sure what I had learned from my visit. I did know that it didn’t make me feel very happy. I was sorry for Jake Grange and his widow. I was also a little sorry for me. This wasn’t as sunny a place as it had looked this morning. The sunlight was streaked with shadow. And the shadows were closing in.
SIXTEEN
A GLANCE AT MY WATCH told me it was still a long time until the fancy dinner the priest was planning, so I ate by myself in a small Chinese café across from the bank. The place was tiny, much smaller than what would be viable at home at the Maple Leaf Café, yet the chef and his helper—his wife, as I thought—kept moving new people into the shop to take the places of those who had just paid up. When I couldn’t describe what a chopped-egg sandwich was and make myself understood, I pointed to the plate of one of my fellow diners and mimed my request for the same: it turned out to be mostly rice, but with a few vegetables and unidentifiable but tasty meat thrown in.
I’d known from the beginning that I was sooner or later going to have to master the art of the chopstick or die of starvation. In practice it didn’t turn out to be as daunting as I’d feared. The secret was to keep one of the sticks solid and immobile, while the other did all the roaming and squeezing. To grab a particular morsel, I sometimes skewered it with a single chopstick. It might have earned me a penalty, but the referee wasn’t looking. I liked the challenge of eating in the Eastern way, even if I did get a stain on my clean shirt.
I was finishing my plate of rice and the strange tisane that followed it when I saw a familiar face. My surprise caused another spill down my shirt. It was Hubermann, making his way at some speed up the street through the bicycles and three-wheeled scooters. Hadn’t these people ever heard of sidewalks?
I wiped my chin, fought off the suggestion of a doggy bag, and paid my bill. I ran along in the direction that Hubermann’s tall form had gone. The confusion of pedestrian and vehicular traffic kept my attention on the spaces opening up in front of me. But I caught a glimpse of my quarry’s head above the crowd every fifty meters or so. The street felt more pressing than usual. Office workers mixed with tradesmen and other street bandits. My growing breathlessness told me he wasn’t strolling; he was moving with speed and determination. The pedestrians were in a rush to get back to wherever they intended to take whatever they call those early-evening strolls.
It wasn’t hard keeping a tall European visible in that crowd. I was tempted to overtake him, to inflict my company upon him, but I was more canny than that. I kept my distance, never quite losing him in the throng. Once I tripped and almost came to a bad end under a scooter. I’m not sure why I was turning Hubermann in my mind from a resource into a suspect; it was more instinctive than cerebral. As a resource, he had his uses. As a suspect, I had nothing on him. His hands were clean. And if he was a bad guy, I had only a gut feeling to go on. Hubermann was one of the few familiar faces in this whole country. A small country, I admit, but a familiar face should count for something.
He was almost a full Grantham block ahead of me, with so much traffic between us that I was certain he wouldn’t discover me behind him. From time to time, he stopped to wipe his sweating face with a handkerchief. That’s when I closed the distance between us, taking cover in doorways and once by falling into step behind a man with a small electric organ on his back. The lawyer plowed his way through the middle of the street, mixed in with the vehicular traffic, then he turned a corner into a narrow laneway, skirting vending stands with their wares on display. He winded easily, but always started off again. I seemed to be managing the heat better. I was hot, all right, but I was not yet victimized by the weight of it.
Once or twice, I thought that this was a silly, stupid thing to do, but I calmed myself with the happy thought that I might at least discover a new restaurant. In fact, it was a restaurant that was his goal, and I hovered, hidden in a doorway across the street, long enough for him to be seated inside. I was wondering whether it would be wise to march in after him and was still debating the question when along came the policeman I’d met a day or two ago when I was mugged in the street. I couldn’t recall his name. I don’t think he saw me: I was trying to look as inconspicuous as I could, as inconspicuous as a Canadian tourist might look in this sea of locals. The policeman went into the restaurant. Interesting that he should choose to eat here, possibly
with Hubermann. Should I see this in a sinister light or should I simply put it down to a good café off the beaten track?
Hubermann and my policeman together. What was I to make of this? The place was called Le Select.
Having come all this way following the lawyer, I was in trouble on the way back without a guide. In the end, I grabbed an empty scooter taxi, a tam-tam or whatever, and went back to the hotel. I was left with an unresolved feeling about an unresolved situation. The day had been hot, and the reality of the heat at last started getting through to me. The rain began just as I paid off the driver, a dusty, hot rain, with no promise in it of release from the heat. I ran across the street and paused only when I was safely under the protection of the hotel’s marquee. A short nap, I hoped, would put things back into perspective again. From under the sheet, I listened to the hammering of the rain on the windows. Later, I was aware of the metronome-like beat of the drops on the sill below the window: incessant, hypnotic, sleep-inducing.
I slept longer than I had planned. The thunder outside only divided my nap into acts and scenes. At home my mother would have been nagging me to be up and about. A trip to foreign parts isn’t intended to be spent in a hotel bed when there are ruins out there to walk over and photograph. “Rise and shine,” she would have chorused in my ear. But she wasn’t here to nag at me, for once. My dreams came courtesy of old Warner Bros. movies. Much of the time I spent chasing the lawyer, Hubermann, through opium dens and covered markets. He was off to India to secure an empire half the size of France. I had to stop him. Me! All the celluloid heroes of my youth: Flynn, Bogart, Wayne, Cagney and Co. I hated to wake up.
When I got to the Hôtel de Nancy, I was surprised to find that Raffles was the main dining room of this posh hotel. I had cobbled together a sort of outfit from my suitcase and fastened the only tie I’d brought with me. It wasn’t black, but a disagreeable smoky yellow. As I started entering the dining room, the maître d’ stopped me. “Monsieur désire quelque chose?”
“Huh?”
“May I help you, sir?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Our coffee shop is downstairs, sir.”
“But I’m meeting people here in the dining room. I’m looking for Father O’Something’s party.” I was getting a little rattled. This was my day for getting rattled.
“Father O’Mahannay. His party is expected, but you are a little early, sir.”
“I’m still on Canadian time.” Now he was looking at my yellow tie as though I had picked it up behind the kitchen in a bin.
“I’m sorry, sir. But there is a dress code in effect at dinner.”
“A what?”
“You need a jacket, sir, and a proper tie.”
“Oh! I didn’t know. Has Father O’Mahannay’s party arrived yet?”
“No, sir, you are the first. May I get you one of the jackets we keep for these awkward occasions, sir? I think one of them may fit you?”
“Never mind. I’m quite comfortable as I am.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I must insist. It is the policy of the house.”
“Oh! I misunderstood. I’ll see Father O’Mahannay later.” The maître d’ gave a classic Gallic shrug, a gesture the French should bottle and keep underground.
I don’t know what set me off. It was more than the maître d’s manner. It was a big bundle of all my petty humiliations and frustrations. I had walked into another brick wall and I was unwilling to admit it. I considered stomping out of the hotel lobby in high dudgeon. But I hadn’t packed a dudgeon either. It was one of those moments when I wished I’d had the means to buy the hotel right there and then if only to discharge the maître d’. I went out through the entrance, not quite stomping, leaving myself room for a re-entrance at a later date. Maybe you could get breakfast here without a tie. Maybe I could get brunch in a T-shirt. Probably, if the designer labels were showing.
I bought a beer at a hole-in-the-wall café nearby, where they weren’t so particular about who they served. When I ordered a second, I asked for a chopped-egg sandwich; they delivered a fried egg sandwich. This wasn’t my day. I pushed it to one side and thought of England. Then I brought out my little puzzle, the letters I’d copied from the refrigerator in Jake and Vicky’s flat. I began treating it as an anagram, and was able to get it to spell several words, but not one that used up all of the letters. Was I mad to waste my time this way? I gave it another two minutes and, voilà and eureka: I had it! “I LOVE YOU.” And, now that I had it, by how much was I the wiser? With success ringing in my ears, I wanted to go on to the longer message, but it was safe in a pocket back at my hotel.
The roads were dry and clean when I came out into the street, feeling a little better. But it was momentary. The incident at the Hôtel de Nancy still burned in my stomach. It was the normal letdown of anyone who has been rejected and turned away. Head low on my chest, I walked aimlessly back in what I guessed might be the direction of my hotel. The streets were less crowded now, and the din of small-engine traffic was at a tolerable level. I had almost grasped the idea that I was lost when, suddenly, across the street, I saw it in the window of a tailor shop. A white tuxedo jacket! I wove my way through local pedestrians in their variety of hats, turbans, and rags to the door.
Once inside, when I found that the tailor spoke English as well as French, I told him my problem, which he immediately made his own. In less time than it takes to tell it, he had come up with my smoking. Whenever I had occasion to wear it later back in Grantham, it was never without the highest compliments. The tailor, it turned out, had worked for many years as a cutter for Dior in Paris. He imported all of his fabrics, and even his thread came from wherever the best thread originates. The local thread, he told me, would begin to break down in three months. With his assistant, a pretty Eurasian in her early twenties, chalking and marking and the tailor making notes, I began to catch my breath. The girl measured my inner seam; I wondered whether she shouldn’t measure me for an extra pair of trousers.
In forty minutes—yes, that short a time—I left the shop wearing my new, immaculate white smoking and dark trousers with a satin stripe up the leg. While the tailor had worked at his machine, his attractive assistant had rounded up a dress shirt, vest, collar buttons, and bow tie to complete the job. She even buffed my shoes to make them pass muster. Would you believe cufflinks? They let me go only when I promised to return the suit, which was merely basted together, for a proper job the following morning. I crossed my heart and walked out into the night clutching the tailor’s card and instructions about the whereabouts of the Hôtel de Nancy.
It was the same maître d’ who had stopped me less than an hour and a half ago. As I walked by him, I detected no sign on his face that this was our second encounter. In fact, he smiled as he waved me in the direction of a table near the big window.
Several people were sitting with Father O’Mahannay when I got there. The priest himself was dressed in a very formal soutane, cassock, or whatever you call clerical garb with skirts, and the rest of the company were no less well turned out. Next to the priest, wearing a spectacular midnight blue evening dress, sat Fiona Calaghan, who gave me a warm smile of recognition. I’d been expecting to run into her again. Next to her sat my friend Billy Savitt, looking uncomfortable in his dark, unpressed dinner jacket.
Fiona wasn’t the only surprise at the feast: the policeman who had pulled me out of the gutter smiled up at me.
“Hello, Mr Cooperman. Good to see you.”
“Good evening, Colonel. We meet in the strangest places. Didn’t I see you going into Le Select a few hours ago?”
“I’m delighted to hear that you know the restaurant.”
I’d lost his name again as soon as I heard it. I wondered whether my inability to retain names might not be tinged with a trace of racism. Certainly I had my peculiar problems with all names, but his was the name I stumbled over most. In penance, I gave him a specially friendly smile. He flashed a warm grin.
The only
complete stranger in the group was tall, blond, and handsome, and introduced to me as Chester Ranken, an American businessman. Instead of shaking hands, Ranken raised his right hand in a gesture that showed me his open palm, the way Indians did in the movies of my youth. He was a goodlooking man with a long face, well barbered, with a hint of aftershave. He struck me as a man comfortable with women.
The introductions having been made, and a chair pulled out for me next to Ranken, the stranger began quizzing me about my origins. It turned out that he came from Syracuse, about halfway between Grantham and New York City. His manner was informal and youthful, in spite of tufts of gray hair at his temples. It wasn’t long into the conversation before the formal
“Mister” was dropped in favor of “Ben” and “Chet,” which was “what everybody calls me.”
Father O’Mahannay commandeered the privilege of ordering for everybody. (It was then that I noticed that up to now they had been nibbling on what looked like shredded carrots.) The policeman, whose name was secure in my Memory Book back at the tailor’s, as a local might have claimed the privilege of ordering, but he smiled on. The priest’s ordering was like a theatrical performance. The waiter made detailed notes. His few suggestions were made with knowledge of the kitchen’s current resources. O’Mahannay pondered each of his choices, while pulling at his earlobe. When he ran into an impasse with the waiter, he called for the chef. Now the ordering began in earnest. This he did in a long conversation with the apparently rapt chef. They seemed to know one another. English and French competed with hand gestures. I didn’t know, from what I’d overheard, whether to expect frogs’ legs or chop suey.
When the ordering had finished, the general conversation started again. Chet Ranken asked me about the Niagara frontier. (I’d said that I lived “outside Toronto.”) He seemed to know a lot about the Upper Niagara and also about the river below the falls. “Even at Queenston, the current will give a small boat a rough time.” I told my story about Lij Swift, the bootlegger, who now ran an after-hours restaurant not far from there. Ranken added: “The Feds never nailed Lij. By the time they got interested, he was part of the folklore. But his old car, a big Buick, had bullet holes in it.” Hearing about Lij—short for Elijah—here in Takot, shrank the world to pocket-size. My police friends from Grantham were among Lij’s regular customers.
