In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  But the tiny red spot above the rampart kept him in the present, because it meant the guards were expecting the return of Verderamé at any moment. Though the lights across the bay seemed to plead another case, there was no going back. They were slightly blue in cast, and they were beckoning, but up the road the red spot glowed in challenge and held its ground.

  At 9:43—Harry checked the luminous dial of the watch he had strapped to his wrist for the first time since the war—a car suddenly appeared from the north. Had Verderamé varied his route to approach that way even if it meant going through the mud, dirtying the cars, passing the gate, and backing in? The car moved beyond the compound and continued slowly down the road. They noticed that beneath the red dot the image changed. A long gun had been unslung and was now held just beneath the glowing cigarette. As the car moved on, the gun moved back to its resting position.

  The relief didn’t last, because the car stopped on the road, opposite Bayer, who although he was well concealed could not help but suspect that he had been seen. After a long moment, it moved slowly to the right onto a patch of ground that served as an overlook. The view of the bay was open here. Harry hoped that the occupants would take it in and go, but the engine was killed, followed by the lights. Ringing silence ensued, and then the sound of the wind could be heard once more. The hoarse ratcheting of an emergency brake announced that someone was going to stay awhile. Nothing could be allowed to happen as long as whoever it was remained. As if counting the seconds, Harry tensely anticipated the restarting of the engine. He told himself to have patience. Then the car jerked. They had moved to the back seat. Not too many minutes later, the windows began to steam up.

  He tried to think of how to move them out of there. Anyone who crossed the road would be visible to the guard on the rampart. The only thing he could come up with was to throw a rock at the car to scare it away. People having sex on a deserted road had to feel rather vulnerable and might run like hell as one pebble, then another, and then another, hit metal. On the other hand, they might be so engrossed in what they were doing that they wouldn’t take anything in. It was a tossup, but irrelevant, as Bayer was not thinking along the same lines, and he was the only one within range. Harry decided to move opposite the car and do it himself, but before he started out he saw the red dot vanish, so he held. At that moment, Sussingham appeared, having moved up to Harry instead of down to Bayer. “What are we going to do?” he whispered.

  “Go back quietly,” Harry told him. “If in a few minutes nothing changes, go down to Bayer and throw a few small rocks at the car. See if you can scare them into leaving.”

  “There aren’t any rocks,” Sussingham whispered, “just pine needles.”

  “Then throw a cartridge. They’re all wiped clean.”

  Sussingham went back, his footsteps on the pine needles inaudible. Then the gate opened. Two men came out, only shadows but one identifiable by his bulk and the red dot of the cigarette. He walked forward, looking to left and right, the long gun (as he got closer, Harry saw that it was a shotgun) held in the ready position as he moved down the road. He walked right past Johnson though he clearly was wary of an ambush from the woods. He passed Harry, who had him continuously in the sights of the carbine, and he passed Sussingham, who sat quietly and did not move, knowing that Harry would be covering. When he neared the car, which was rocking with coitus, he moved the shotgun to his shoulder, depressed his stance a little, and looked in the right rear window.

  Even Johnson, the farthest away, rapidly switching his gaze from the gate to the car to keep track of both, saw that the guard next to the car had relaxed his posture. The red light flew through the dark toward the center of the road, sparked orange as it landed, and lay there, glowing. The muzzle of the shotgun was rapped so hard against the window it might have broken the glass, but didn’t.

  “Get the fuck outta here!” everyone heard.

  The car stopped rocking for an instant, and then dipped forward violently as, undoubtedly, the driver threw himself into the front seat. The engine turned over, the lights went on, and the car was thrown roughly into reverse. It lurched backward and stalled. The sound of the emergency brake being released, like a falling piece of metal, was followed by another sharp, single rap on the glass. From inside came the scream of a nude woman a foot and a half away from a huge, angry man with a shotgun. The engine turned over again, the car backed onto the road, ground its gears, and roared south, its tires having missed the still-burning cigarette. The guard slung his weapon and started to walk back to the compound.

  It was perfect, Harry thought. Driving at speed down the road, naked, the two people in the car—he assumed there were two—would be forever impressed by what had happened. They would know the approximate time. They would, perhaps, come forward with a sanitized story (they had stopped momentarily to look at the view) and report that in the woods they had run into a bull of a man with a heavy New York accent, a threatening manner, and a shotgun. His cigarette would be found in the road, his footprints by its side in the mud, through which the four men now waiting in ambush had been careful not to walk.

  The gate opened and closed. A minute later, breathing hard, the big man was again on the rampart. He didn’t give himself a chance at the wonderfully fresh air the wind would have blown into his lungs, but lit another cigarette, and as things settled down the red spot appeared once again.

  At about eleven, early for Broadway but late for Croton, and as Catherine took her curtain call to deafening applause, the Cadillac and its escort came up the hill from the south. It shifted into third while rounding the bend from east to north, and then, on the straightaway, lights blazing, moved into fourth.

  Earlier that evening there had been a problem with Catherine’s stage exit: the audience would not let her go. Amidst their applause they shouted for an encore and reasonably expected that she would oblige. But Sidney’s rule about encores was that they were to be husbanded for the curtain call rather than that they interrupt the action. This was to apply throughout, but especially at the beginning, when, as Sidney put it, the audience was still “learning the idiom of the next few hours.” Before the Boston tryouts, he had said, “I don’t direct like everyone else. They’ve got to get used to my language, and then, when they do, they come along.”

  Honoring this, Catherine had refused the encores. She could have left the theater early, but outside its confines that night she had nothing, so she decided to take the curtain call, which meant that she would have to sing at least twice. Although it would keep everyone late, she wanted to sing—as if to keep Harry safe, as if to lift him and her parents aloft, to keep them afloat, to lock them into the buoyancy of a world that could raise the living above the passage of time if only in the brief moments when music holds the heart. This was why she had chosen the theater, a status far below that which she could have claimed without effort. But from the very beginning, early in childhood, Catherine had known exactly what she was about.

  There was a problem with the detonators in that they were the kind used by the OSS, which was not at all surprising given from whom they had been obtained. The standard detonator generated its current as a long shaft was pushed down to spin gears that turned a magneto. But detonators like this were too cumbersome to be carried easily and surreptitiously. The ones that Vanderlyn had known were much smaller, with heavy clock springs wound with a key. That key was then moved to the trigger, another hole in the apparatus, in which the detent, which held back the triggering mechanism, was recessed. After winding, the key was moved and set for release. To prevent accidents, the detent was grooved according to the key. Setting the key properly took a second or two and required a steady hand.

  Harry had wound both detonators and set a key in the one that would fell the tree north in front of the cars. Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the river or on the cliff, one of the keys had been lost, which meant that in the dark, amid the daze of explosions and gunfire, the remaining key had to be withdrawn from
the north detonator, moved to the south detonator, made to find the hole, set properly, and turned to fell the second tree, which would then complete the boxing-in of both vehicles. This was the first instance of fact diverging from the plan, although they all knew that, as always, there would be others.

  Now, amid the spotlights’ mitered rays, Catherine sang again. The genius of the play had been that when she entered the scene, with the honking of horns and knocking of cowbells to express the bustle of the city, and the audience expecting something as light and frothy as the musings of a kewpie doll set to music, she launched instead into the breaths of astonishment infilling her lungs with air as if she were a newborn child, and then into a pure and heart-rending song such that, as Sidney knew, everyone was so deeply moved that they were not merely surprised but disturbed. For they had been taught that opera was European—and this was an aria, an American aria, inimitably beautiful in its own way, and by the time Catherine finished they knew what it was, and she had them completely, especially now, when she put everything she had into the song. At the curtain call they made her sing it three times. Though the cast was not happy at first, they forgot their unhappiness and their envy and they, too, came along. And although Catherine could not know it, her song was the accompaniment to the battle from beginning to end. But in a way she did know, and in a way Harry could hear it, in memory and at the present as the two combined, as in great and stressful moments they often do.

  The Cadillac and the chase car approached. In the dim light the Cadillac’s whitewalls were visible as they rolled like earthbound moons, and the hubcaps, polished that day by a boy in Little Italy, glinted with suppressed light. As the Cadillac passed him, Harry said to himself, “Here we go,” and started it all with a clockwise one-quarter turn of his right wrist. He heard the detent snap up and the magneto whir violently. Before the whir ceased the charge was detonated and it lit up the scene like a star shell.

  Sussingham lifted the bazooka to his shoulder, waiting for Harry’s order to fire. Johnson embraced the light machine gun, ready to pivot as needed. And Bayer aimed his carbine at the rear car. The tree fell like a man dying, slowly at first but then with hopeless surrender. It settled like a cross between a railroad gate and a discarded Christmas tree.

  The Cadillac jammed on its brakes. Reacting more slowly, the chase car hit it from the rear and, as if to make up for its lack of alertness, put itself into reverse with a major grinding of gears and roared backward. Harry had lifted the key from the north detonator and was trying to get it into the hole of the south detonator, but in the dark this was not easy. He still hadn’t done it when the chase car sped past him in reverse, veering wildly as the driver overcompensated in one direction and then another.

  Harry found the hole and plunged the key into it. He found the right position. Then he made the quarter turn to unlock the detent, and another explosion lit up the night. As the tree fell—a dignified fir that, because it was bigger, went down even more slowly than the first—the chase car sped up as if to beat it, and didn’t. It was not, however, as blocked as the Cadillac. The tree fell across it. Gunning the engine, the driver tried to escape the net of fragrant branches, but all he could do was spin his tires and make ruts in the road.

  For a moment there was silence, and then pistol shots and bursts from two Thompsons erupted from the chase car, unaimed, it seemed, sweeping the woods at random, so that limbs and twigs fell, severed or hanging. Seconds later, gunfire from the ramparts swept the woods. They had no other option and plenty of ammunition. The Cadillac remained motionless, doors closed.

  Bayer could see the car amid the evergreen boughs. He fired his carbine, to what effect he was not sure, but when they saw his muzzle flashes they shot at them through the back window, to no avail, as he had already moved to the other side of the road and, seeking adequate cover, was getting ready to enfilade them. Sussingham held, waiting for the order, and Johnson was quiet, holding for what he was sure would be the opening of the gates and the charge of reinforcements. Before checking the Cadillac to make sure that Verderamé was in it and neither women nor children were with him, Harry took careful aim at the figures on the rampart.

  The one who still held a cigarette in his mouth as he pumped a shotgun would be the first. Harry adjusted for the distance and the rise, calculated to hit not quite a foot below the red dot, and fired. The bulky shape tumbled backward from the rampart and disappeared, the red dot with it. Just after that, the others vanished. Johnson expected that within moments they would charge out the gate, with no idea that after a few seconds’ run a mounted machine gun would be trained on them.

  Harry bolted toward the Cadillac, his carbine pointed at it in case they opened a window to fire at him. Unlike the chase car’s, the windows were bulletproof and would have to be cranked down before a shot went out. When the firing from the rampart had ceased, the living occupants of the chase car were aiming to the rear where Bayer had been, and the Cadillac remained inert. Harry stepped into the clear, except that he doubled over in pain and almost went down, as if he had run straight into a sharp branch.

  Recovering, he went right up to the Cadillac, carbine at the ready. He peered in through the thick glass. There, illuminated by the muzzle flashes that came from a Thompson in the chase car and Bayer’s carbine that in a moment or two would silence it, was Verderamé, pistol in hand, sitting in the back seat, waiting. In the front were two guards, their pistols out as well. It was as if they had been frozen in molten glass. None of their weapons could fire, contained as they were by the bulletproof glass.

  Now the gates were thrown open and eight men armed with Thompsons, rifles, and shotguns ran out, some firing as they moved, most waiting to find a target. No one saw through the branches of the first felled tree clearly enough to see Harry, locked in place, staring into Verderamé’s car. Before they ever would, Johnson—the English teacher who had spent four years as a paratrooper and pathfinder, and had another self with which he could not reconcile and would not abandon—opened fire at six hundred rounds per minute, easily and justly cutting down these cruel men who for so long had been so confident in their numbers, armament, and ruthlessness. They were used to beating people, tossing Molotov cocktails through store windows, shooting bound captives, and raping helpless women. They didn’t really know how to fight, never having come up against anyone but those who were weaker than they were. Their power and their terror, when resisted with determination, evaporated. They were cowards, murderers, and easy to kill.

  Bayer silenced the last resistance in the chase car. Johnson had already dismantled the machine gun and was moving toward the center. It was suddenly quiet. Clutching the part of his abdomen that he thought the sharp end of a limb had penetrated, Harry peered into the Cadillac in a way that frightened Verderamé beyond measure. It seemed to those inside to make no sense that Harry pressed against the glass of the rear right-side window and raised his head almost to the roof of the car. They had no idea what he was doing, but he was checking to see that Verderamé had no passengers—a child who had been at a friend’s house, a servant coming back after a day off, Verderamé’s wife. If this were so, the woman or child would be on the floor, half hidden, and he wanted to make sure that no one was there. It was hard to see inside, and several pistols were aimed at him. But he knew that, if fired, the bullets would ricochet and probably kill them all. This made them helpless and it terrified them, as did Harry, because they didn’t understand what he was doing as he looked in, and they never would.

  Satisfied that only three men were inside, Harry gave Verderamé one last look, and fell back. Verderamé knew he was going to die, and, to his credit, he smiled.

  As Harry retreated he called out to Sussingham, who had been waiting in a standing position to get a shot above the brush. “Clear,” Harry shouted. “Fire.”

  Sussingham pulled the trigger and the rocket blazed from the tube. It went easily through the armored door and exploded in the interior, blowing the sides
and roof off the Cadillac in a flash of orange, and killing everyone within.

  From the first tree felled, to the rocketing of Verderamé’s car, less than four minutes had passed, although to Harry and the others they were indistinguishable from either four hours or four seconds.

  They had known from the beginning that the local police, state police, and FBI would quickly determine what weapons they had used. From bullet fragments or whole bullets lodged in people, cars, soil, and trees, they would know their calibers and the types of guns that had fired them. Two hours of collection and a day of putting the pieces together would identify the rocket that had killed Verderamé. And at first glance, from the lines of bullet holes stitched across the targets, it would be possible to see the signatures of the carbines and the machine gun.

  Nor did they suffer the illusion that, having to flee immediately, in the dark, they would be able to collect shell casings, some of which would have been ejected out to ten feet or more, at all angles, landing in pine needles, rolling under fallen branches, or sinking in mud. Each cartridge had been wiped clean. Although the four pathfinders had crawled across soft ground when they could, as a diversionary measure they had worn new dress shoes in a larger size than what fit them, and which they would discard in the river; and they had been fairly heavily weighted down, making footprints attributable to heavier people. Each man had a checklist of things to take with him upon leaving. The weapons themselves and detonators, wire, surplus ammunition, and anything that might cast suspicion on them if their truck were stopped on the way back to Newark would be dropped in the ship channel of the Hudson. There, a scouring current would eventually sweep everything south into the many miles of the Tappan Zee, fingerprintless and, according to Vanderlyn, untraceable.