by Joel N. Ross
He patted his pocket for a cigarette as Davies-Frank settled into the upholstered chair. He had to remember they thought Sondegger believed he was Earl. It was the only way to maintain access, the only way to track his brother. He straddled the chair at Sondegger’s table and faced the mattress in the corner. Sondegger lay on his back. His hands were clasped at his stomach and his eyes were closed. His cheeks were rosy. The chain snaking from his ankle to the bolt was heavy and still.
“In ancient Athens,” Sondegger said, “ostracism was used to prevent tyranny. They’d hold an election, and the winner—a leading politician—would be exiled for a decade. The Greeks understood politics because they understood drama.” His eyes remained closed as he spoke. “In the Inquisition, a minor heresy was punished with a flogging or a fine. More serious crimes were punished with the yellow cross of infamy—social ostracism. The fundamental deprivation, Mr. Wall, is deprivation of human contact. Even a monologue requires an audience. Come closer.”
“I’m close enough.”
“There are obligations of polite conversation.”
“Is that what you have in mind?”
Sondegger’s eyes flicked open. “You’d do well to treat me with at least the pretense of courtesy. Please, join me.” Sondegger patted the mattress at his hip. “Today, I cannot even offer rum.”
Tom stayed in the chair. “Next time, I’ll bring kerosene.”
“You investigated the contents of the cupboard in the hall?”
“Gum boots and slickers. A couple hatboxes.”
“To lie well, Mr. Wall, one must believe. You would do well to study Ibsen. You have an inquiry? A request?”
“Yeah.”
Sondegger sat cross-legged against the wall now. His round moon face was untouched by wrinkles. “Sit with me, if you have something to say. I see no reason to include Rupert in our conversation. I will not ask you again.”
Tom stood, stuck an unlighted cigarette in his mouth, and tossed his lighter to Davies-Frank. He sat on the mattress next to the Hun. Felt ridiculous, which must be why Sondegger had demanded it.
“Do you remember the third most erotic opera?” Sondegger said. “Tristan und Isolde.”
“I remember the fire.”
“Whoever beat you applied more enthusiasm than science.” The German glanced at Tom’s bruised face almost flirtatiously. “Wondrous is the work of the untutored man. No? Two men. Ah. Savvy enough to avoid doing real damage. Who did this?”
“Muggers.”
“Of course.” He pitched his voice lower. “Did they get what they wanted?”
“They got ten pounds.”
He chuckled almost inaudibly, then said, too softly for Davies-Frank to hear, “Your brother left the Rapids.”
“Where is he?” Tom asked equally quietly.
“Waiting in the wings.”
“Maybe I should beat it out of you.”
“You could try.” Sondegger unbuttoned his shirt, and there was a flat white bandage on his chest. “Electric current. A modified wireless, in an attempt at dramatic irony.”
“But you’re too tough to talk.”
“I talked at length—yet remained in character.”
“What the fuck are you saying? Where is he?”
“I’m not convinced Earl is your first concern. Your hand was hurt in combat? It’s not just surgery that pains you, Thomas. Is it love? Memory? Sleepless nights and . . . treachery? Yes, always treachery.”
Something unwholesome crept up Tom’s spine. “He left the Rapids.”
“I don’t know where Earl is. But I do know how to find him.”
Tom couldn’t focus. Exhaustion was like a bad drunk, blackstrap bourbon tasting of burnt sugar and iodine. Audrey Pritchett’s voice: Delerium tremens? Harriet’s smile when she thought he was Earl, and Sondegger’s suffocating presence.
“How much?” Tom asked. “What’s your price?”
“Give me your hand.”
Tom offered his left.
“The other one. You won’t find your brother without me. Give me your hand. You won’t know, Thomas, unless I help you. You won’t sleep.” The air was heavy with smoke and the sun-drenched gold of Sondegger’s voice. His breath was hot on Tom’s ear. “You won’t sleep until you find him. You will not heal. You’ll never recover what you lost—unless you give me your hand.”
Tom gave him his hand.
Sondegger enfolded it between his palms and bent over the bandage, a chubby blond boy inspecting a dead dove, snow white and frozen still. “It must be tender.” Sondegger stripped the stiffened gauze from his flesh. “A good man, your surgeon. First-rate, but not brilliant. Shrapnel? A half inch lower . . . Are you familiar, Mr. Wall, with Laurence Sterne?”
“Laurence Sterne,” Tom said, from a distant place. “No.”
“He wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. A seminal work, a comic masterpiece—an extraordinary and self-reflective investigation—a repository for the information you seek.”
“What the fuck are you saying?”
Sondegger tightened his grip. “In the spine, Thomas. In the Pugilist Room. In Tristram Shandy.” Then, more conversationally, though no louder: “Surely you’re not unaware of the marvels of microphotography.”
Microfilm? In the spine of a book in Earl’s room? “Bullshit.”
Sondegger released his hand in disgust. “Believe what you like. There is microfilm in the book, and within ten days a surprise attack will be launched against your country.”
“The Fallschirmjägers are gonna drop on D.C.,” Tom said. “And you’re telling me because you’re a true-blue American patriot.”
“I’m telling you because it is in my interest to tell you. Remember Tristram Shandy, Thomas,” Sondegger said. “It, at least, is not spineless.” He raised his voice, Davies-Frank now permitted to hear. “Your aversion to your own right hand is biblical, Mr. Wall. ‘If thine hand offend thee, cut it off.’ Does your hand offend? Are you frightened of what it might do, or sorry of what it has already done? You failed in love, Mr. Wall. You failed at war. You are a man of many parts, none of them whole. You stumble, you fall. You fail . . .”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 2, 1941
TOM OPENED THE car door, reached for the wheel that wasn’t there. He slid to the right side, hit the self-starter, and drove. The MG smelled of Harriet. Her scent enveloped him—her scent, Sondegger’s voice, Earl’s betrayal, his own fatigue. Highcastle had searched him, debriefed him until there was nothing left: What had the Hun said? Was the meet tonight confirmed? Where was Earl?
Tom had lied, and for nothing. For the fantasy of a microfilm in one of Earl’s books . . .
The car wouldn’t stay on the road. The sun was red and misshapen. Wispy clouds stretched over the horizon like gray gauze tinged with blood. He was on a narrow country road. The car jolted over a grassy hillock; he wrenched the wheel. His face ached; his hand was numb. He was on a busy wide street. Car horns blared. He was stopped at a traffic light in a city square. Someone banged on the window. The little MG jerked forward.
He was standing on the sidewalk. He threaded through a line of parked cars toward a stairwell. There was no stairwell. He asked a man for Tudor’s Dry Cleaning—the shop near the Waterfall—and found himself standing in an alley with a set of double doors and a half moat of sandbags. Inside, the foyer had high ceilings and cream walls and red-and-gold carpet that faded out of focus.
“Jacket and tie required, sir,” the doorman said.
“I haven’t—” Tom said. “I’m Earl Wall’s brother.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tom looked toward the narrow stairway. “My jacket’s in Earl’s room.”
“Not upstairs, sir. Perhaps you might speak with Miss Pritchett?”
“With Audrey.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No. I’ll run upstairs, get a jacket and tie. . . .”
The doorman was smooth and deferential. He said “Yes, sir” and “Of course, sir” and led Tom to the door on the left side of the foyer. The wrong door—it didn’t lead to the stairs. Led to another door, to what the doorman had called “the small flat.”
A languorous redheaded girl answered Tom’s knocking. She wore lounging pajamas, which emphasized more than they concealed. “Vee has all the luck,” she said, softly sarcastic, and stepped aside.
In the entrance, there was a white coatrack adorned with brightly colored scarves and wraps and a dark fur. There were three pairs of Glastonburys lined neatly at its base. There was a long narrow table and a half-open door, through which Tom saw a tiny, tidy kitchen. Through an archway was a small room papered sky blue. An India-print davenport was angled in the corner, crowded by two low armchairs overflowing with round cushions. There was a delicate tea table and a sturdy piano with no bench, and a jade plant and gewgaws and curios. It was a comfortable, welcoming, haphazard room.
There was a love seat the color of rubies, and Audrey was curled like a cat into its overstuffed embrace. She was dressed like a man, in dark trousers and a white shirt and someone’s old school tie. Her hair fell untidily around her face; her little white teeth nibbled on the cap of her pen as she frowned at the pad of paper in her lap.
Her wide mouth moved into a vivid smile as Tom entered, then immediately turned downward in anger. Her eyes darkened, her lips narrowed, and she cocked her head and the anger was gone, replaced by forgiveness. A flicker of impishness chased that across her face . . . and was itself replaced by concern.
Two seconds. A dozen emotions. Tom smiled.
“Your face!” She stood from the chair, knocking her notebook to the floor. “Oh, you poor bunny.”
“Told you Earl was the handsome one,” he said.
She traced his lip and the bruise on his cheek with her fingertips. “Mum always said, ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ Shall I wet some tea? We have a nice thick soup—and the bottled gooseberries I won in a raffle. Have you slept? Here, sit. It was very wrong of you to leave.”
He told her to hush. “The doorman told me—”
“First sit,” she said. “Then eat. Then speak.”
“I’m finished sitting.”
“Then I am finished speaking.” She put her palm on his chest and backed him into one of the low armchairs.
He sat. He wanted soup. He wanted comfort. He wanted a woman’s care—a pipe and slippers and Audrey to curl into his lap. The soup was parsnip. It was sweet and thick. He ate a bowl, and asked for another. Audrey disappeared into the kitchen and he grabbed her notepad from the floor.
Her handwriting was looped and tidy: “Anticipation of the raids combines resignation and fear with a great part of relief. To be engaged again, rather than merely waiting. To be on the front, in the war, rather than merely . . .” He flipped toward the front of the notebook: “. . . Young people of the ‘faster’ set scoff at those who seek shelter, perhaps because they enjoy a sense of community in nightclubs and . . .”
The hell was this? It read like an intelligence report.
“Mass Observation,” she said, from the archway. “They send a directive—a questionnaire—once a month.”
“Who does?”
“Mass Obs, silly, to gauge the public mood. We answer questions about rationing, transport, war work. How people feel about coupons, about air raids and ack-ack flak.”
It reminded Tom of the COI’s propaganda branch, the Foreign Information Service, and he was struck by a sudden suspicion: The Brits must have a similar arrangement. The girl was too good to be true. Too interested and too generous and too beautiful. “You work for them?”
“You’re as bad as Inch! You hear nothing at all. They send a directive, and I answer.”
“Mass Obs,” he said. “It’s based in Whitehall?”
“We’re volunteers,” she said. “Three thousand civilians, keeping the muck-a-mucks informed. I know it isn’t much, but one does what one can.”
“Does one entertain the troops? Aid the war effort? Stiffen morale?”
She ignored him. “It’s an opinion survey, really. They were happy to have me because I’m in a unique sort of position. I’ve access to a public most volunteers haven’t.”
“You mean pillow talk?”
She slammed the notebook on the piano. “Why, Tommy?”
“Money, I suppose.”
“Why be cruel? Have I been anything but kind?”
It was her kindness that frightened him. “The doorman wouldn’t let me in the club. I need a jacket and tie.” He needed that fucking book, Tristram Shandy. He needed to play Sondegger’s game until he learned the rules—and found his brother. “I need to go to Earl’s room.”
She turned to the wall. Her bare feet peeked underneath the cuffs of her trousers. She lifted her arms and gathered her black hair in her white hands. She spun it into a loose bun, a shining black tiara. “His clothes are here. In the flat.”
“I thought— You said you weren’t one of his girls.”
“He was late on rent, so they cleared his room. Michael told me you didn’t want to pay, so I—”
“He said I what? Who the hell is Michael?”
“The barman.”
Who had the shovel chin, saying Earl settled his accounts before the last of the month. “And they cleared Earl’s room.”
“There’s a queue for the upstairs rooms. I took his clothes”—she turned to him, her face expressionless—“as a favor to you.”
“You took his books, too? Are they his?”
“This isn’t a lending library.”
“Audrey, listen—did you take his books?”
“No.”
“The trash—the rubbish—they cleared his room? I need— Show me where they threw the trash.”
She lifted her chin. “I would rather not.”
“Miss Pritchett—Audrey. Please.”
She curled into the love seat and flipped through her notepad. She traced her finger down the page, pretending to read. She took the pen in her hand, and a moment later between her wide unsmiling lips.
Tom clawed himself from the chair. As long as he was motionless, he didn’t feel it, but the moment he stood, the world spun. The floor slid from under his feet and he grabbed the back of the chair. He had to find the book. He’d check the Pugilist Room, then the garbage. He thanked Audrey. She frowned at the notepad. He let himself out.
HE WAS IN THE FOYER. The doorman approached and Tom brushed him aside. He removed the chain at the stairway and climbed to the second floor. Last room on the right. He worked the key he’d pocketed last time he was here.
Inside, there were no clothes. No hats, no ties. No lipstick, matches, change, pen. No books.
He’d failed, then. A dead end. He wouldn’t get another chance at Sondegger. He wouldn’t find Earl. He stood with his shoulders slumped, his mind barren. After a long, dark, empty pause, he heard something behind him.
Audrey was in the doorway. She was wearing a semiformal frock, which made her look young and sweet, the same dove gray as Harriet’s eyes. She shook her head. She’d been there for some time, watching him lost in the middle of the room.
“Yeah,” he said, trying to smile. “I also jitterbug.”
She laughed and took his hand, then escorted him downstairs. A crowd of young bloods with bright girls on their arms made a noise coming in from the street. Tom and Audrey waited at the foot of the stairs until the crowd faded into cigarette smoke and expensive perfume.
Audrey asked the doorman what had happened to Earl’s books.
“Sold for late payment. You know the policy.”
“Sold to whom?”
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“A scrap jobber—don’t even know the bloke’s name—a tattered old man with a tattered old barrow. He stops in when he has cash and inclination. He’s often about.”
“Swell,” Tom said. A tattered old man, in blackout London.
“It doesn’t matter, Tommy.”
Did Audrey know why he wanted the books? Did she care? Did she think he was crazy?
“We’ll find them,” she said.
Instead of answering, Tom watched Inch enter the foyer from downstairs, lean elegantly on his crutch.
“Tommy Wall and Venus Lovingsly,” Inch said, “arm in arm. How goes the day, my cherubim? Ghastly mouth, by the way, young Tom.”
“I accidentally hit him with a cricket bat,” Audrey said, rising on tiptoe to kiss Inch’s cheek. “Seven times.”
“They sold Earl’s books,” Tom said. “To a jobber.”
“What? What? His boots?”
“His books, Inch. To a scrap jobber.” Audrey spoke clear and loud. “Earl’s books, from his room. They sold them for the December rent.”
“Sold his books to a copper, eh? Didn’t sell all of them, though.” Inch tapped his fingers on his crutch. “Earl squirreled away bits of the old library last month. Took ’em home. The moth-eaten tome and the dog-eared incunabulum, the—”
“Wait, stop,” Tom said. “He took books home?”
“At least one. Remember most distinctly.”
“Like you remembered Hyde Street Misfits.”
“Memory keen as an eagle’s beak.”
“There’s no such place,” Tom said.
“Rubbish! You think they eat with their claws?”
“Hyde Street Misfits—no such shop. No such street.”
“Never said there was. Don’t scowl, Thomas. You’ll frighten young Vee.”
Audrey squeezed Tom’s arm so that he wouldn’t grab Inch by the throat. “So what did you say?” she asked.
“Gent’s apparel on Hyde. Remember distinctly. I mean to say, he probably said ‘Hyde.’ Definitely ‘gent’s apparel.’ Hyde Street might’ve occurred to me on account of Pongo McCormick. He does a bit about misfit shops. Had the Earl in stitches. Ha! Ha-ha! In stitches! I mean to say! What? Tommy? Where’s he off to now?”