by Mark Helprin
“Orange drink?”
“If it had anything in it related to an orange, which it doesn’t.”
“You crazy. You don’t want nothing.”
“Yes I do.”
“What you want?”
“I want you to change the name of this place to Angel of Death Hot Dog Stand.”
“Where you live, Los Angeles?”
“No.”
“Yes. Everybody Los Angeles. Always talk. Tell you who they are. Lazy!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Go back to there!” The proprietor moved to the western extremity of his empire, near the cheaty, pointy-bottomed cups and the giant, dangling pretzels coated with salt crystals as big as snails, and would not look at Harry. Harry took the stairs and found himself once again in the sweet air of April, when all is in balance and the world, like something tossed into the air and hesitating at the top of its arc, is momentarily ardent, motionless, and perfect.
With every step he took toward Madison Square he grew less and less certain not only of the chances of recruiting Bayer or anyone else to his plan but of the plan itself. “My enemy is not the law,” he found himself saying under his breath as he walked—talking to himself was not a good sign—“but the enemy of the law, against which the law is too weak to defend itself. If the law is complicit in crime, is it the law? If, when not complicit, it not only fails to protect but proscribes self-protection, then it is not law but fraud. Anarchy arises not from those who defend themselves by natural right, but from officials who fail in their calling, look the other way, succumb to threats and blackmail, or who are themselves criminal. If without defending me the law says I can’t defend myself, it is no longer the law, and I have to defy it.”
As rationalization usually follows rather than precedes motivation, it was not likely that Bayer would be convinced by such abstractions. Harry faulted himself for seeking to lead his friends back into danger after they had come through so much of it, and by the time he got off the elevator on the ninth floor of a building on the south side of the square he was almost despondent enough not to knock on the door, except that through a frosted-glass panel upon which only a number had been painted he saw movement—of the friend to whom he had many times entrusted his life. This made him so happy he almost forgot what he had come for.
“Ha!” Bayer exclaimed when he saw Harry. North light flooded in through large windows overlooking the square, making Bayer, who was enormous, look like a crowned figure in a Flemish painting. “Have you had lunch?”
Harry said yes, though he hadn’t.
“How about a Scotch?”
“No. Don’t need it.”
“An orange drink?”
It could only have been a coincidence, Harry told himself.
“Straight peanuts, then,” Bayer said, going to a desk drawer from which he pulled out a small burlap sack of roasted peanuts. “How about these?” In one motion he moved a gray wastepaper can from beneath his desk to the space in front of them, and as if they were doing piecework they began to shell the peanuts and toss the husks, missing only rarely. Feeling a sense of joy merely in sitting with Bayer, whom he had seen blown into the air by a German cannon, but who now was alive, he felt that they were two schoolboys. All rationales fled from him.
“What are you doing now? Are you married?” Bayer asked.
“I am.”
“So quick. I’ll bet she’s beautiful.”
“She is. Not everyone thinks so, but for me every imperfection is like a sharp cut driving her in deeper—every time I think of her, and I think of her all the time. I think I’m crazy.”
“I wish I could be crazy like that.”
“I could marry her ten thousand times. She’s twenty-four years old. She has the charm of a girl and the wisdom of a woman. I’ve never seen such grace or beauty.” An awkward silence followed, during which Harry was embarrassed for having gone on about Catherine as if Bayer didn’t exist. “And you?” he said, now almost fearfully.
“Ah well,” Bayer answered, throwing a whole, unshelled peanut into the wastepaper can so that it sounded like a distant shot. “Marriages are made in heaven, but not mine. She left me.”
“I’m sorry,” Harry said.
“Yeah. It’s nothing new, either, although I found out about it only after I got back. In ’forty-four—can you imagine that? I could have died and I wouldn’t have known, which is maybe why she didn’t tell me—she took up with some Jewish fucker and they moved out to the Island.”
“You’re Jewish,” Harry said.
“Yeah, but my name isn’t Jewish Bayer. His is Jewish Lucky.”
“That’s his real name?”
“It’s at least his nickname.”
“Probably just a nickname, wouldn’t you think?”
“That’s what it is in the telephone book.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Check if you want. They have a kid. I know it’s Jewish Lucky’s kid, but somehow I think of it as my own. Even if it doesn’t know it, I’m a ghost in its life. It’s either a boy or a girl.”
“Right,” Harry said.
“It’ll probably grow up to be the president of the United States, and I’ll be ninety years old, living in a cold-water flat on Avenue D. On the day they light the White House Christmas tree, if that’s what they do, I’ll eat dinner alone at Horn and Hardart. On the way home I’ll slip on the ice and lie in the street for two hours before I die. My last words will be spoken to a Bowery bum who’s too drunk to understand them, and the president, who would have been my kid, will be waltzing in the White House, eating rondalays of beef. Why are you laughing?”
“Because you’ve got it all planned out,” Harry said.
“From the time we jumped into Normandy. . . . God, had I known, I almost certainly would have been killed. All that time, all the blood, and the snow: you can’t describe it—and I loved her, I yearned for her. Thinking about her saved me.”
“I’m sure that’s why she didn’t tell you.”
“You think she was that decent? I’ll tell ya, when I got home . . . there was a stranger living in the apartment where we used to live. He had forwarded my mail to her for a year and a half. She was gone. He told me that she was with this guy Jewish Lucky, and he was sorry to break it to me. He gave me her number. I called. She said it would be best for us not to see each other. ‘Ever?’ I asked. She said, ‘Ever.’ ‘What if I run into you on the street, like at the Macy’s parade or something?’ ‘You go to that? What, are you ten years old?’ ‘I mean in front of Macy’s, or in Macy’s.’ ‘Then you do, that’s all, but it’s over.’ I said okay, and she said goodbye as if I was talking to some sort of clerk in an office. She was very curt. She cut me off. Just after the line clicked, I told her I loved her.”
“You’ll find someone,” Harry said.
“Yeah, eventually.”
“You will. I saw my wife for the first time on the Staten Island Ferry, and I fell in love with her instantly. She was far away, her back turned, and though I could hardly see her it was as if I had known her all my life. Then she disappeared, and I lost her. But on the way back from St. George later in the day we were on the same boat. At first I lost her again, but then she came right to me, and she was standing—I don’t know—a foot away. What caused her to do that I can’t tell, and neither can she, but the instant I saw her face-to-face I knew I loved her, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and that if that meant the rest of my life would last only ten seconds, so be it.”
“For me,” Bayer said, “that may take awhile.”
“Have you heard from the others?”
“Just their addresses. Rice moved out west. He got a law job in California someplace. Has to do with farming or ranching or something. Everyone else went home, and the dead ones are in heaven, even Hemphill.”
“What are you doing now, for a living?” Harry asked. There was no way to tell from the office: two visitors’ chairs, filing
cabinets, telephone, typewriter, shelves lined with folders, a cabinet with office supplies, but no pictures, diplomas, or any other direct evidence of what Bayer did. And the door had just a number, as Harry had noted.
“I’m not proud of what I do.”
“I thought you were a draftsman. I don’t see the table. I always wanted one as a desk. It seems to me a more comfortable desk than the blocky things most people have to lean over.”
“You can have mine if you want. I still have it. I’m a draftsman by trade. In high school I was really good. It caught me at the right time, and I loved the little wooden box I had, with German drafting tools set into the recesses. Other kids had cheap ones, but my father gave me these from when he was in school: Solingen, expensive and indestructible. I felt I had to live up to them, so I did. I worked four times as much as anybody else and they misinterpreted that as natural talent. My own school sent me to technical school during the year and over the summer, actually paid for it. I got an associate degree in technical drawing before I got my high school diploma.
“Before the war I worked at Otis Elevator in Yonkers and then at Bulova out in Queens.”
“That’s right,” Harry said, remembering.
“Not fun to get there, but I did well. Then I came back from overseas. To make all the tanks, ships, and planes, they trained so many draftsmen you can’t count ’em anymore. Now that production has ceased, there’s such an oversupply that if you do find work you earn less than you would breaking pavement.
“After a while I got a job with an architectural firm. I can draw anything to specifications, and it didn’t take long to learn how to do building plans, but the architects weren’t happy with me.”
“Why not?”
“They were making astoundingly ugly buildings, and I told them so.”
“The diplomat.”
“Really, they pollute the world. I mean, how much does it cost to have a peaked roof, for Chrissakes? This whole country is messed up with flat roofs. We have a beautiful landscape, you know? What if New England towns with village greens had flat roofs? It’s gonna happen.”
“How long did you last there?”
“I’m still there.”
“What, they put you in a quarantine office?” Harry asked, looking around the small room.
“And they fired me, too, but I got a big raise, a really big raise.”
“Comment?” Harry asked in French. It was an expression that his men used frequently and with a great deal of amused irony when they were in France.
“They said, ‘You can’t work here anymore, but you can be our expediter.’”
“What’s an expediter? I mean, what do you expedite?”
“That’s what I myself said. What’s an expediter? I didn’t know what it was, much less that they had one, or that it would be me.”
“What is it?”
“Let’s say,” Bayer told him, tossing a peanut shell, “that you and your wife buy a co-op in . . . you tell me.”
“Brooklyn Heights,” Harry said instantly. “They’ve got peaked roofs, no aluminum trim, and tree-shaded streets.”
“In a brownstone?”
“The whole building,” Harry told him, “if things go right. If we have a baby. Our apartment’s too small, and it was mine. We want to go to a place that’s ours.”
“Okay, a brownstone. That’s not a co-op, but so what. The problem is that it’s divided up into four apartments, with four kitchens, four cruddy bathrooms. You’re going to have to redo the whole thing.”
“Maybe.”
“You definitely will. So you go to an architect. The architect tells you that you need a certificate of occupancy, a set of plans (or otherwise he has to send people to make them, which is expensive), and a building permit. You say, ‘Can you get them for me?’ And he says, ‘Sure, it will cost such and such,’ a small amount—fees. He doesn’t do anything for two weeks, because to know what’s going to happen he doesn’t have to, and yet he knows that you’re going to have to be made anxious in order to do what he has in store for you. Life is a series of traps, and unless you’ve already been in one, it’s hard to see it coming even if it’s right there.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Your wife is pregnant, your lease may be expiring, you’re already paying taxes on the building you bought, you need the proceeds from selling your apartment if you own it, or you’re paying rent if you don’t. You want to stop paying interest on the bridge loan. You want to get on with your life. Everyone knows this.
“And what the architect tells you is that he went down to the building department—he didn’t; he didn’t have to—and they can’t find the certificate of occupancy or the plans. They ‘lost’ them. Do you have a C of O? No. Does the previous owner? You call the previous owner. He says he’ll look. You bother him for a week. He doesn’t. You call the architect. By this time you’re ripe for the picking. ‘What can I do?’ you ask. The architect says he’ll try again.
“Another two weeks go by. You feel what it’s like to be in prison. He calls. He went down to the building department, and they suggested that you get an expediter. And you say. . . .” Bayer held out his left hand, inviting Harry to say . . .
“‘What’s an expediter?’”
“Ah, but you know now, right?”
“I think so.”
“You go to the expediter the architect recommends—me, if it’s my firm or one of several others I work for—and you present your problem. He says, ‘I’ll go down to the building department and see what I can do.’ He doesn’t. He doesn’t have to. In a week he calls you. Good news. The building department will allow him to search the records. They themselves can’t do it expeditiously because they have a shortage of funds and personnel (most of whom spend their afternoons at the track or in a steam bath). ‘How long will it take?’ you ask. ‘It varies,’ I say, knowing that it doesn’t, that it’s complete bullshit. ‘Sometimes you can find what you’re looking for in twenty minutes, and sometimes, if the papers have been misfiled, it can take a year. That can cost up to twenty thousand dollars.’
“I listen to your inward collapse. Despair. But then I lift you out. I tell you that because of the variability, one can pay a fixed fee. It may be more than you might have to pay, but it’s guaranteed to save you from catastrophe. It’s the same principle as insurance.
“And then, then the sad part. You leap at the chance to pay me two thousand dollars and rush down here with it in your pocket. I see hope and relief in your face as you hand me the check that could help pay for your child’s college, medical bills if someone in your family gets sick, food on the table. But you give it over gratefully, because now your life can move forward.
“I let some days pass. I amble on down to the building department, and in a back room I give a guy fourteen hundred dollars, cash. Then I go to the counter, and they give me the stuff you need, which they always had and which they can find in three seconds, because other than steal that’s the only thing they do.
“Then I go to the architects, and in another back room I give a guy three hundred dollars, cash, and I keep the rest for myself. No one ever complains that the building department asked for a bribe, because it never did. The expediters—of whom there are quite a few—will always say that they were paid for looking for documents, and that they did look for documents. We keep fake time sheets. The client is as happy as the crooks who take his money. When you deliver the necessary materials, he’s virtually glowing.
“I’m a thief. I steal from good, innocent people, from young couples who need the money and have no idea what’s happening to them, from old people with canes, from anyone.”
“Why don’t you go to the mayor?” Harry asked, “or the mayor’s office?”
Bayer looked at him with amusement. “The mayor?”
“Yes.”
“You think the mayor doesn’t know?”
“Really?”
“Really. And the police commissioner. And
the heads of the departments. They know, they know. It all runs on graft. The government that’s supposed to serve and protect steals and lies. I’m going to get out as soon as I can, but of course that won’t stop it. It’ll continue, and long after we’re dead it’ll be the same. If I refused, it wouldn’t make any difference. The process begins and ends at the counter, when the city employees tell you that they’ve lost your records, and everyone above them knows exactly what’s going on, and so you pay. And you know who owns the whole scheme, who provides the protection, makes the payoffs to the higher-ups, launders the money, invented the process, and gets a very big piece? The Mafia. It’s part of the city government. While we were fighting a war, it was here, digging in deeper.
“Where’s the law? I hate people who steal. I hate myself. If I could, Captain, I would take my carbine and kill those guys, just as sure as I would kill an armed man breaking into my house to rob me.”
“They are armed,” Harry said.
Bayer continued Harry’s sentence. “Like an army, with all the powers of government. But killing someone like that wouldn’t make any difference, and besides, they haven’t killed anyone.”
“What if it would?” Harry asked. “What if they had?”
“Comment?” Bayer asked.
“Listen,” Harry said. “Let me tell you what I’ve been doing.”
40. The Train from Milwaukee
WHEN JOHNSON LEFT the Apostle Islands, a curtain of snow had descended upon the lake, obscuring alternating bands of white ice and blue open water that disappeared northward toward Canada. Like almost all things in the Apostles, it was cold, sharp, and well defined. No gray, each crystalline flake falling with a hiss on pine needles that did not bow to the winds of winter. The Apostles were the standard to which Johnson returned. He referred to them, the sentinels of Lake Superior, when he faltered, and the memory of them gave him strength.
After the war, he had returned to teach English—a language they did not yet speak or understand in its subtleties—to young people whose chief regret was that they had missed what he had been condemned to suffer through. Apart from teaching them that sometimes you can end a sentence with a preposition, he taught them that one way to be grateful for being alive was to say it, hear it, and sing it in the song of their language. His work did not produce bales of cotton or stacks of lumber, it filled hearts, opened long views, and allowed the sons and daughters of miners and mill workers to rise in air so metaphysical it might lead them ready and armed to meet the ghosts of sorrow and death.