by Mark Helprin
The next day, just before dark, the two cars passed. Harry hardly looked up. The ground was littered with wood chips, and he was working hard. Verderamé turned left and west, toward the Hudson. When Harry had almost filled the truck, he drove in that direction. After a little way, he passed a wall on the right side of the road. A short apron led to a double gate of solid wood or steel, and beyond this, sited above the river, was an enormous house, the upper storeys of which were visible over the wall. Fittingly, it looked like a prison. Floodlights illuminated the open space between the battlements and the house. A man stood in front of the gate, and Harry saw in the mirror that he stopped his pacing, looked after the truck, and then started again. It had taken three months, but now they knew Verderamé’s tight schedule and where he lived, and he didn’t know they did.
The next stage of the preliminaries was far less time-consuming, although for its second part they were obliged to wait until March. On a glass-shattering cold day at the the beginning of February, Harry went down to Prince Street, walked casually past the social club, turned right at the corner, and went north until he came to the empty lot where the Cadillac and Nash were parked. Despite having only four spaces, two of which were unused, the lot was attended even so. At night, Verderamé’s cars slept in his Croton compound, and during the day they were carefully watched.
The attendant was a miserable yet arrogant wretch of a youth with a repulsive jejune mustache of the type that Catherine called “jump-the-gun facial hair.” He sat in a little wooden hut that he shared dangerously with a charcoal brazier. The only thing that kept him alive was that several windowpanes were missing. Still, he was groggy.
“Do you have any spaces available for daytime parking?” Harry asked, sounding to himself like a phrase from a Berlitz language manual.
After a delay appropriate to a crucial move in the world chess championship, the answer was “No.”
“When do you think one might be available?”
“It’s a private lot.”
Talking to the kid was like talking to cheese. “Who owns it?”
“None of your business.”
“Just curious. They got a Cadillac, huh.”
“Yeah, they got a Cadillac.”
“I always wanted one,” Harry said, moving toward it.
The attendant ran out the door and around his hut. Harry was already at the car. “Hey! What are you doing? Get outta here!” the attendant said.
“What a car.” Harry knocked on the driver’s window. “It’s really solid.”
“Yeah, it’s solid. Now get outta here before I call somebody and you regret it.”
“Just admiring the car.” Harry kicked the tires. “Can I sit in it?”
“No, you can’t sit in it.”
“I’ll give you a quarter if you let me take a nap in it.”
“Are you crazy? Just get going. One . . . two. . . .”
“Okay, okay.” Harry began to leave. “A week ago I saw a Rolls-Royce on Park Avenue. Park and Sixty-eighth. That makes this look like nothing.”
“Terrific,” said the kid, who, as Harry departed, went back into his hut to sacrifice more brain cells to carbon monoxide. He wouldn’t tell anyone about this, because the car was safe, Harry seemed to him to be a harmless jerk, and he himself was an idiot, although he was the last one to know, and what had happened, just like everything else, sailed through his mind like a dime dropping through a subway grate. But now Harry knew that the windows of the car were bulletproof, its solid tires were able to run flat, and, likely, the body was armored: it sat very low and both he and Catherine had noticed how ponderously it turned.
On the third of March, when the snow had melted and the ground was dry, Harry took an express train to Harmon and then a local to Oscawana, a mile or so north of Verderamé’s compound in the woods overlooking the Hudson. With the ground such that he would leave neither tracks in the snow nor footprints in the mud, Harry set out to make a map. By the time he found himself looking up at the house, which was walled even on the western side, high over the river, it was dark.
He sketched every angle and dimension, scaling the cliff, measuring with a metal tape the height of the wall, and crossing the road into the thickets of pine beyond. There, using a red-lensed penlight, he completed his maps while he waited for the two cars to pull in. Although less than fifty feet from the gate, he was completely relaxed as he watched. The leaves of the gate swung open and two men from inside appeared as the Cadillac and Nash rolled through. They then looked down the road, backed in, closed up, and threw a heavy bolt, securing the closure. While this was happening, a man appeared waist-high above the wall, a long gun or Thompson cradled in his arms. The parapet on which he paced appeared to go all the way around.
Lights went on in the house one by one. Harry watched for another half hour or so and then began to walk to Harmon, noting that the pines grew thickly on one side of the road. Until he was near the station, he went into the woods whenever a car passed, which, while people were returning home in the evening, was often. Because the headlights gave him much advanced notice, no one saw him. On the train back to Grand Central, he kept his notebook closed but he recapped. There would be at least seven guards. The wall was twelve feet high. Verderamé was punctual, as they had observed during their slow-motion tracking of his route. And in line with his precise style of dress and rigidity of bearing, he was a man dependent upon routine, perhaps as a refuge from a business in which the only routine was collections and everything else was dangerously and continually improvised. Whatever the reason, he checked his watch often and was hesitant to disobey it. Harry prayed that no children lived behind the wall.
The easiest place in the world for shaking off a tail is in the subway in midafternoon, when whole cars or entire trains can be empty. Vanderlyn shuttled from train to train and line to line as skillfully as an eleven-year-old boy who has committed the system map to memory, and when he found himself in a nearly empty train hurtling toward the Bronx with a deafening and continuous rattle—tourists whose mistakes kidnap them this way often descend into panic, terror, and regret (and sometimes they never return)—he was sure that he was in the clear. It seemed to him that the wicker seats, the open windows, and the overhead fans, their blades of varnished wood, were sad things that, like so much else, were soon to disappear. Then he was alone in the station, in the shocking silence after the train had rumbled north and disappeared. Water dripping onto the blackened track bed thundered in his ears as the cool, moist air of early April fell from the grate on the street above. Incandescent lights gave off a pale, ashen glare onto white tiles as if in an icebox. Nothing is quite as brassy and cold as a New York subway station dazzlingly lit for the benefit of no one. At 96th and the park, Vanderlyn emerged from this into a world of the lightest green. In the rain the new leaves held as much water as they could and then bent to let go. Taxis drove by, full because of the rain, their windshield wipers making a sound that can put small children to sleep better than a cradle endlessly rocking. Water quieted and soothed the world, relieving it of ambition if only in promising its dissolution.
It was Harry’s idea to invite Vanderlyn for lunch. Harry wanted to speak with him openly and at length, and in the dining room where he and Catherine had never before entertained a guest, he did, over consommé, smoked trout, and French bread, as rain cascaded down the dining room’s one window.
“Billy Hale,” Harry said, “my father-in-law, brought you up out of the blue when he was talking about people who had lost a son. I’m sorry.”
For a moment, Vanderlyn’s eyes seemed unable to focus on anything except the tablecloth, which was as empty as a snowfield. “Then it wasn’t out of the blue, and, yes,” he said, “I did.”
“I need to know more about you,” Harry told him, “because I’m about to gamble my whole life on an enterprise from which you are inseparable.”
“But gambling,” Vanderlyn replied, “is in its essence acting despite a lack of
information—when you don’t know, and yet you move—or you don’t move.”
“There are degrees.”
“There are. What would you like to know?”
“Anything at random.”
“Not a bad technique, and not new, either. All right. I’m teaching myself Russian.”
“How’s it going?”
“Very difficult for an old man, but I just finished a Chekhov story. I’ll never be able to work in Russia. It might as well be Chinese.”
Vanderlyn also read every day in French, and in regard to a language he had known since childhood, was distressed by his weakness of memory. “I have to look up words I don’t know, and when I encounter them again, they’ve left me.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Harry assured him.
“You’re very kind.”
“No, not at all. Think of it. Throughout your life you’ve read thousands of books, newspapers, journals, monographs, letters, documents, magazines—millions of pages, scores of millions of sentences, hundreds of millions of phrases, and perhaps a billion words. Of this, what do you remember? How much can you quote? Most likely not a thousandth of a percent, perhaps much less, which, of course, is why it’s written down.
“And yet your reading, your education, what you have seen and learned, have shaped you. Although the exact form falls away almost immediately, the essence remains. In what you read, the difference between the great and the pedestrian is something very subtle that rides above the static form. The clarifying spirit can’t be memorized, and the essence is in what’s elusive, which is why those who can’t grasp it other than willfully tend to deny it, because they can’t see it.”
“Go on.”
“To know what you have read isn’t necessarily to understand or to benefit from it immediately, as its central qualities exist above its mere form. If you and a cow listen to Mozart, you both know exactly the same sounds, the same notes, but you and presumably not the cow would hear a lot else, beyond the sounds, meaning, and meter. You would hear something the cow would not, and that the cow, if he could, would strenuously deny—I imagine.”
“He?” Vanderlyn inquired.
“I like to refer to a cow as a he. Cows don’t seem to me like shes.”
“That’s—almost—sane,” Vanderlyn stated.
“What I’d like to know,” Harry asked, “is who you are other than someone who spends his time on languages, sailing, and parachuting into France.”
“I haven’t parachuted into France for a while, and apart from work, I don’t do much at all. I take very little pleasure in things. Either it’s a sickness or part of growing old. With a few exceptions who are incomprehensible to me, and whom I envy, I find that happy older people are happy because they’re idiots. Frankly, I’d rather be dead than go to a sing-along with Mrs. Buford at the piano and a dozen geriatrics who can neither remember lyrics nor clap in time. Have you ever noticed that the vigorous young talk to old people as if they were dogs?”
“No.”
“You will.”
“But you’re not old.”
“I’m forever old. My son, before he died, had begun to pull away from us, as I suppose he should have, and as I suppose is natural. Our job with him was done, my friends were dying, my wife and I sensing more and more the envoys of mortality that begin to visit you at a certain point whether you want them to or not. By nature’s command and to protect his heart, my son had to put distance between himself and me. But, unlike Charlie, who had a full life to look forward to, it left my wife and me in a very lonely place.
“During the war, I convoyed over to Liverpool. I didn’t have to—I had been taking a flying boat—but I felt that I should. We were hit at night in the North Atlantic. It was in the summer, but it was still miserably cold. Nineteen ships went down. Everything was in chaos. We tied the lifeboats from my ship together, but as the weather worsened we had to cast off the lines. We tried to stay in sight of each other’s lights, but it rained, we soon lost sight of anything, and in the morning, when the sky cleared, we saw that we were alone in the middle of an empty sea.
“That’s what happens when your children leave, but it’s bearable, because you know they’ll continue. When you know they won’t, you know as well that you’ll be on the sea forever, and that for you the sea has had no purpose. My son was estranged from me when he died, and I was waiting for him to come back.
“So now I work. I don’t really care about it, but, just like you, people depend upon me—not only the living but the dead, to whom I owe a certain conduct and constancy. It’s odd how people struggle for position and spend a whole life building a résumé that no one will read. A résumé follows you into the grave, a piece of paper that jerks like a moth. We get them at my company from seekers of employment. I never look at them. I find them offensive. If I can talk to someone for an hour, and watch his face, his hands, his eyes, I don’t care what he’s accomplished or what schools he’s attended. Every second, you start over, and I want people who, second by second, can hew to the good and break the mold. That’s what I see or don’t see in their presence.”
“And you?”
“I have no future. What I want to do, second by second, is that which is worthy in itself, that which I would do even if no one in the world were living, that which I would do at the cost of my life, in return for nothing, with great difficulty, and against terrible odds.”
“Which is like war.”
“Whatever it is, Harry, there’s always plenty of it without my having to make it. As long as blood never cools, I’ll have a place. I was in both world wars. It’s time for me to retire, but there would be no point, so I’ll step into the breach and perhaps spare someone else from having to do so. You’re welcome to come along if you feel the need. Or you can run. Nothing wrong with running. Most people do. Perfectly honorable if that’s what you decide, especially if you never want to kill again. You’d be entirely right.”
Harry walked to the window. Water went on streaming down the panes. “Sometimes,” he said, “my wife, who is twenty-four, and still like a young girl in many respects, has more sense and courage than almost anyone I’ve ever known. In very difficult conditions, she keeps at what she does steadily and without complaint. There’s something in her that’s admirable and instructive, inbred from so far back that it’s breathtaking. As for me, this terrible thing is hanging over us, someone has been killed, the dead have been dishonored, and I’m going to clear the air.”
39. Office in Madison Square
SOMETIME AT THE END of April, when the whine of distant lawn mowers had returned to the parks, Harry had a two o’clock appointment with Bayer at his office in Madison Square. With everything garlanded in light green, it was neither too hot nor too cold, and now and then the wind billowed gently, carrying the scent of new grass. All morning, Harry and Catherine had left the windows open and lain together, sheets peeled back and trailing on the floor like a wedding gown. Their nightclothes discarded, her satin and lace splayed on the bed, time vanished until they heard the one o’clock bells from a church on Columbus Avenue.
After bathing and dressing at high speed, Harry passed the doorman, jumped the wall, and ran across the park until he disappeared into the haze of taxi horns and jackhammers that rolled out of the East Side like a fog bank. If he didn’t have to wait long at 96th Street for an express, he might make it. He didn’t want to be late for Bayer, whom he respected immensely, and arriving at even 2:01 would not be right. Long before any noise, the light of an express appeared far up the tunnel, jerking slowly and silently from side to side, yellowish white with traces of electrical red. Then came the cool air and the sound, pushed forward by the first car as if by a ramrod. Harry would be able to make 14th Street and then walk the nine blocks north to Madison Square, but with only minutes to spare.
Carrying Harry and remnants of winter air, the number 4 train squealed into the 14th Street station of the Lexington IRT like a screaming harpy, made a dead stop,
gave up, and opened its doors. Harry exited into the harsh light between the rows of steel columns at the edge of the tracks and a food stand tucked against a wall of white tile. As layers of air fell from the gardens of Union Square through many open grids, people ran to throw themselves into the downtown express and then sat breathing heavily as the doors stayed open and the train, humming tensely, did not move. All that time to spare was both embarrassing and like money in the bank.
With the rumble of idling electric motors in the background and the scent of their metal-infused oil issuing from under the train, Harry stared at a machine in which a dozen hot dogs were trapped on stainless steel rollers and spinning like torpedoes. “What is that?” he asked a squat, sweating man with a mustache and distressed eyes.
“What is what?”
“That machine.”
“It for hot dogs.”
“If it cooks them,” Harry said, “aren’t they terribly overcooked? And if it’s just holding them at a warm temperature, isn’t that dangerous after a while?”
“No one is ever been sick.”
“How would you know? They take them, and then they get on a train to Brooklyn.”
“Not just Brooklyn. And if they sick, they come back, and no one come back.”
“You don’t come back if you’re dead.”
“Mister . . . what you want? You want hot dog?”
“Are you kidding?” said Harry.