by Paul Auster
“Does she have proof, or is she just making a wild guess?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t ask her. We didn’t really talk about it much.”
“Why don’t you ask her now?”
“We’re not exactly on speaking terms anymore.”
“Oh?”
“It was a rocky visit, and I haven’t been in touch with her since last year.”
“You had a falling out.”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“About Ben, I suppose. You’re still stuck on him, aren’t you? It must have been hard listening to your friend tell you how he’d fallen in love with her.”
Maria suddenly turned her head away from me, and I knew I was right. But she was too proud to admit anything, and a moment later she had composed herself sufficiently to look back in my direction. She flashed me a tough, ironic smile. “You’re the only man I’ve ever loved, Chiquita,” she said. “But then you went off and got married on me, didn’t you? When a girl’s heart is broken, she’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.”
I managed to talk her into giving me Lillian’s address and telephone number. A new book of mine was coming out in October, and my publisher had arranged for me to give readings in a number of cities around the country. San Francisco was the last stop on the tour, and it wouldn’t have made sense to go there without trying to meet Lillian. I had no idea if she knew where Sachs was or not (and even if she did, it wasn’t certain she would tell me), but I figured we would have a lot to talk about anyway. If nothing else, I wanted to set eyes on her myself, to be able to form my own opinion of who she was. Everything I knew about her had come from either Sachs or Maria, and she was too important a figure for me to rely on their accounts. I called the day after I got her number from Maria. She wasn’t in, but I left a message on her machine, and much to my surprise, she called back the next afternoon. It was a brief but friendly conversation. She knew who I was, she said. Ben had talked to her about me, and he had even given her one of my novels, which she confessed she hadn’t had time to read. I didn’t dare to ask her any questions on the phone. It was enough to have made contact with her, and so I got right to the point, asking her if she would be willing to see me when I was in the Bay Area at the end of October. She hesitated for a moment, but when I told her how much I was counting on it, she gave in. Call me after you check into your hotel, she said, and we’ll have a drink together somewhere. It was that simple. She had an interesting voice, I thought, somewhat throaty and deep, and I liked the sound of it. If she had ever made it as an actress, it was the kind of voice that people would have remembered.
The promise of that meeting kept me going for the next month and a half. When the earthquake hit San Francisco in early October, my first thought was to wonder if my visit would have to be canceled. I’m ashamed of my heartlessness now, but at the time I scarcely even noticed it. Collapsed highways, burning buildings, crushed and mangled bodies—these disasters meant nothing to me except insofar as they could prevent me from talking to Lillian Stern. Fortunately, the theater where I had been booked to do the reading escaped without damage, and the trip went off as planned. After checking into the hotel, I went straight to my room and called the house in Berkeley. A woman with an unfamiliar voice answered the phone. When I asked to speak to Lillian Stern, she told me that Lillian was gone, that she’d left for Chicago three days after the earthquake. When was she coming back? I asked. The woman didn’t know. You mean to say the earthquake frightened her that much? I said. Oh no, the woman said, Lillian had been planning to leave before it happened. She had run the ad to sublet her house in early September. What about a forwarding address? I asked. She didn’t have one, the woman said, she paid her rent directly to the landlord. Well, I said, struggling to overcome my disappointment, if you ever hear from her, I’d appreciate it if you let me know. Before hanging up, I gave her my number in New York. Call me collect, I said, any time day or night.
I understood then how thoroughly Lillian had tricked me. She had known she would be gone before I ever got there—which meant that she had never had any intention of keeping our appointment. I cursed myself for my gullibility, for the time and hope I had squandered. Just to make sure, I checked with Chicago information, but there was no listing for Lillian Stern. When I called Maria Turner in New York and asked her for Lillian’s mother’s address, she told me she’d been out of touch with Mrs. Stern for years and had no idea where she lived. The trail had suddenly gone cold. Lillian was just as lost to me now as Sachs was, and I couldn’t even imagine how to begin looking for her. If there was any consolation in her disappearance, it came from the word Chicago. There had to have been a reason why she didn’t want to talk to me, and I prayed it was because she was trying to protect Sachs. If that were so, then maybe they were on better terms than I had been led to believe. Or maybe the situation had improved after his visit to Vermont. What if he had driven out to California and talked her into running off with him? He had told me that he kept an apartment in Chicago, and Lillian had told her tenant that she was moving to Chicago. Was it a coincidence, or had one or both of them been lying? I couldn’t even guess, but for Sachs’s sake I hoped they were together now, living some mad outlaw existence as he crisscrossed the country, furtively plotting his next move. The Phantom of Liberty and his moll. If nothing else, he wouldn’t have been alone then, and I preferred to imagine him with her than alone, preferred to imagine any life other than the one he had described to me. If Lillian was as fearless as he had said she was, then maybe she was with him, maybe she was wild enough to have done it.
I learned nothing more after that. Eight months passed, and when Iris and I returned to Vermont at the end of June, I had all but given up on the notion of finding him. Of the hundreds of possible outcomes I imagined, the one that seemed most plausible was that he would never surface again. I had no idea how long the bombings would last, no inkling of when the end would come. And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it—which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever. The struggle was to accept that, to coexist with the forces of my own uncertainty. Desperate as I was for a resolution, I had to understand that it might never come. You can hold your breath for just so long, after all. Sooner or later, a moment comes when you have to start breathing again—even if the air is tainted, even if you know it will eventually kill you.
The article in the Times caught me with my guard down. I had grown so accustomed to my ignorance by then that I no longer expected anything to change. Someone had died on that road in Wisconsin, but even though I knew it could have been Sachs, I wasn’t prepared to believe it. It took the arrival of the FBI men to convince me, and even then I clung to my doubts until the last possible moment—when they mentioned the telephone number that had been found in the dead man’s pocket. After that, a single image burned itself into my mind, and it has stayed with me ever since: my poor friend bursting into pieces when the bomb went off, my poor friend’s body scattering in the wind.
That was two months ago. I sat down and started this book the next morning, and since then I have worked in a state of continual panic—struggling to finish before I ran out of time, never knowing if I would be able to reach the end. Just as I predicted, the men from the FBI have kept themselves busy on my account. They’ve talked to my mother in Florida, to my sister in Connecticut, to my friends in New York, and all summer long people have been calling to tell me about these visits, worried that I must be in some kind of trouble. I’m not in trouble yet, but I fully expect to be in the near future. Once my friends Worthy and Harris discover how much I’ve held back from them, they’re bound to be irritated. There’s nothing I can do about that now. I realize there are penalties for withholding information from the FBI, but under the circumstances I don’t see how I could have acted any differently. I owed it to Sachs to keep my mouth shut, and I owed it to him to write this book. He was brave enough to entrust me with
his story, and I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I had let him down.
I wrote a short, preliminary draft in the first month, sticking only to the barest essentials. When the case was still unsolved at that point, I went back to the beginning and started filling in the gaps, expanding each chapter to more than twice its original length. My plan was to go through the manuscript as many times as necessary, to add new material with each successive draft, and to keep at it until I felt there was nothing left to say. Theoretically, the process could have continued for months, perhaps even for years—but only if I was lucky. As it is, these past eight weeks are all I will ever have. Three-quarters of the way into the second draft (in the middle of the fourth chapter), I was forced to stop writing. That was yesterday, and I’m still trying to come to grips with how suddenly it happened. The book is over now because the case is over. If I put in this final page, it is only to record how they found the answer, to note the last little surprise, the ultimate twist that concludes the story.
Harris was the one who cracked it. He was the older of the two agents, the talkative one who had asked me questions about my books. As it happened, he eventually went to a store and bought some of them, just as he had promised to do when he visited with his partner in July. I don’t know whether he was planning to read them or was simply acting on a hunch, but the copies he bought turned out to have been signed with my name. He must have remembered what I told him about the curious autographs that had been cropping up in my books, and so he called here about ten days ago to ask me if I had ever been in that particular store, located in a small town just outside of Albany. I told him no, I hadn’t, I’d never even set foot in that town, and then he thanked me for my help and hung up. I told the truth only because I saw no purpose in lying. His question had nothing to do with Sachs, and if he wanted to look for the person who had been forging my signature, what possible harm could come of that? I thought he was doing me a favor, but in point of fact I had just handed him the key to the case. He turned the books over to the FBI lab the next morning, and after a thorough search for fingerprints, they came up with a number of clean sets. One of them belonged to Sachs. Ben’s name must have been known to them already, and since Harris was a crafty fellow, he wouldn’t have missed the connection. One thing led to another, and by the time he showed up here yesterday, he had already fit the pieces together. Sachs was the man who had blown himself up in Wisconsin. Sachs was the man who had killed Reed Dimaggio. Sachs was the Phantom of Liberty.
He came here alone, unencumbered by the silent, scowling Worthy. Iris and the children were off swimming in the pond, and it was just me again, standing in front of the house as I watched him climb out of his car. Harris was in good spirits, more jovial than the last time, and he greeted me as though we were old familiars, colleagues in the quest to solve life’s mysteries. He had news, he said, and he thought it might interest me. They’d identified the person who’d been signing my books, and it turned out to have been a friend of mine. A man named Benjamin Sachs. Now why would a friend want to do a thing like that?
I stared down at the ground, fighting back tears as Harris waited for an answer. “Because he missed me,” I finally said. “He went away on a long trip and forgot to buy postcards. It was his way of staying in touch.”
“Ah,” Harris said, “a real practical joker. Maybe you can tell me something more about him.”
“Yes, there’s a lot I can tell you. Now that he’s dead, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
Then I pointed to the studio, and without saying another word I led Harris across the yard in the hot afternoon sun. We walked up the stairs together, and once we were inside, I handed him the pages of this book.
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