Leary dialed his number.
“It’s cold,” said Mr. Simmonds. “I think the wind wants to blow the house down, and can you believe there’s supposed to be a thick fog tonight?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“So talk.”
“No. I want to come over and talk to you personally.”
“Okay. Come. Frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t come back long ago.”
The wind seethed down the Hudson River and blew through Manhattan in a steady, unchanging breeze. It was filling the sky with a heavy ugly gray cloud cover and did seem to want to blow someone’s house down. It swirled soot and sand in the lobby of J. Simmonds’s apartment building and sang a plaintive minor-key screak on the metal edge of the heavy door. Leary felt depressed.
“It’s cold,” said the old man. “I should have gone to Florida.” He wore a heavy sweater and a thick tweed jacket. “Listen to that wind on the window. You call this spring?”
“I visited Gabriele Napletano.”
“That’s nice. Where?”
“In Rome.”
“That’s nice. Was it warm there?”
“It was very nice. He and I had a talk in a sidewalk café in nice warm sunshine. Very interesting talk.”
“That’s nice. You’ll have a cup of tea with me. I have some nice cookies the lady down the hall makes.” He rose, chafing his dry white hands against each other. “Nice hot tea. Listen to that wind.”
The apartment was warm, stewing in its stale collation of old odors. J. Simmonds had his oven on. He crouched, holding his hands into the heat, and briskly rubbed them as though he were washing them. Then he served the tea—in the same ornate, spidery old teacups he’d used before. “There’s an old joke about this old peasant in Russia who died and six famous doctors tried to save him, but he wouldn’t come around until finally his wife poured a cup of hot tea into him. And she got twenty more years of work out of him. Here’s to the arrival of spring sometime next July.” He saluted Leary with his cup. “Eat a cookie.”
Leary was smiling at him.
“What’s the matter?” asked the old man.
“We’re going to have a nice one hundred percent visit, aren’t we? We’re going to talk about nice things, reminisce a little, but not one word about the Kotlikoff affair—is that it?”
“Well, young Mr. Leary, I found out a long time ago if you can’t agree, you can still be agreeable to one another. To be honest, I hope you enjoy your tea and cookies, because I can’t tell you anything about what you want to know.”
“How do you know what I want to know? Maybe I already know what I want to know.”
“Is that a fact? I can’t believe you came all the way over here for a cup of my tea. Maybe it’s my stories about the old country. You’re interested in them?”
“I think I’ve already figured out what I want to know. I just don’t know who.”
“Who what?”
“Who’s who.”
The old man chewed on a cookie and looked out at the roiling dark sky. “She makes delicious lemon cookies. I can remember when I didn’t care a fig for lemon cookies, but when you get old—well, you learn what’s important, and I have to tell you, lemon cookies deserve a much more important place in our lives. When I look out at that sky, I eat a lemon cookie and I feel better. I know some medicines that can’t do that.”
“You would have liked Rome.”
“Is that so? Right now I think I’d like hell itself if they had the thermostat turned up.”
“I learned that Gabriele Napletano escorted Boris Kotlikoff out of Yugoslavia to Rome. Was that man in the Ardeatine Cave massacre his cousin?”
“Brother-in-law. Pesach. His sister’s husband.”
“I figured that you and your grandson and Napletano are part of an underground railroad to get Jews out of Russia, mainly through Napletano’s people in Italy.”
The old man shrugged and chewed a cookie.
“I think you all had a quarrel,” said Leary, “about a man who’s coming out now. I don’t think you wanted him. I don’t think that Napletano did either. I don’t think that some of your sources of money wanted him—so Boris Kotlikoff put up the money. Whoever he is, the Russians are very upset about it. I even know what he looks like: a very small thick man with thick limbs and black eyes. And I’m pretty sure he’s due to arrive here at eleven tonight to live in the apartment that Boris Kotlikoff rented for him. How am I doing?”
“What else do you think?”
“Well, I can tell you that Napletano was very upset. He’s afraid of a major war.”
“It’s a possibility. You read the newspapers.”
“Unless the Russians can torture Kotlikoff into telling them the truth.”
“They don’t know he knows anything.”
“Then why did they kidnap him?”
“As a message.”
“Message? Who’s the message for?”
“I can’t tell you anything, Mr. Leary. If you knew who was coming out, you’d faint. I just feel so sorry for Boris. Now that’s all I can say. We’ll have a little more tea and then you’ll go looking elsewhere. I think this whole thing is a mistake and we’ll be sorry for a long time.”
“Does it have anything to do with the shtetl in Russia?”
“Yes and no. Period. Okay?” The old man chewed, his eyes looking at the cold gray clouds, defying them with a cookie.
“Napletano told me about the ice-pick murder.”
Mr. Simmonds put down his cookie. “How’s the tea?”
“Good.”
Mr. Simmonds seemed to be making a decision. At last, holding his teacup cradled in both thin hands, he said, “Gabriele Napletano is dead.”
Leary stopped chewing. “He was right. He was in danger.”
“You may have been the last one to see him alive. The railroad’s smashed. I knew it would come to this. Bringing out some old Jews—even a poet—is one thing. But—Boris and my grandson have reaped a whirlwind. Gabriele paid for it. Did he tell you the name of the man who got the ice pick in his ear?”
“Rossolini.”
Mr. Simmonds nodded. “What did he want you to do with the information?”
“Give it to the Secretary of State or the Attorney General.”
“That was Gabriele. Go to the top. Well, okay. His name wasn’t Rossolini.”
“I know.”
“It was Potkin. You know Potkin? He was very big stuff, let me tell you.”
“Russian?”
“Russian. You bet he was Russian. He invented the new metal alloy they use on Russian tanks. Bombs bounce off it. The United States would love to have it. Potkin was a sick old man. Napletano wanted no part of him.” Mr. Simmonds rubbed his hands together, chafing warmth into them. “I’m telling you this because of what Napletano told.”
“So. Who killed Potkin? Napletano told me the killer was an American, and he was later killed by other Americans.”
“So? You answered your own question.”
“But why would Americans kill a man trying to give them a priceless military secret?”
“They were paid to.”
“You’re talking riddles.”
“They’re bounty hunters. Inside our own government. But they worked for Russian bounty. The Russians would put a price on a defector’s head, okay? And these people inside our government would have all the secret information they’d need to find the defectors and kill them before they could talk. Okay?”
Leary nodded without speaking.
Mr. Simmonds said: “Napletano brought Potkin out with Boris. See how things fit together? There was no bounty on Boris—he had no secrets, so he was delivered to the Embassy. But Potkin was a hot number. He could tell all about Russian tanks and alloys. So he was supposed to be transferred to the United States in secret by American military authorities. The bounty group had to move fast before Potkin could talk—and they had to make it look like a natural death. Okay? They couldn’t let Po
tkin get two words out of his mouth to the Americans. So they hired this animal with the toothpick.”
“Ice pick.”
“Yeah. And the ice-pick man done the job just right for them. Potkin thought he was the American agent come to take him to the United States. Let me tell you how good this Bobby Whispers was. Gabriele Napletano witnessed the murder. And he didn’t know it. He thought Potkin dropped dead of a heart attack. Only after his people followed Whispers and saw him murdered—in fact, only weeks later, when Napletano finally learned who Whispers really was, did he figure it all out. That’s when he shut down the railroad. He quit. And he should have stayed quit. But Boris and my grandson—oh well. This was going to be Gabriele’s last job—guaranteed, positively. He was sick. And the bounty men were just too much.”
“You know this Geller?”
“Monster. A real monster.” He ate a cookie. “I wonder if Napletano talked before he died.”
“We’ll know tonight at eleven, won’t we?”
“Boris kotlikoff wrote a little sketch in his journal for a poem about the Shabbes candle. Did he ever show it to you?”
“No. Boris made me wait until all the poems were published, so I haven’t seen anything.”
Leary took out a journal and turned the leaves. “Here. This is something you must have told him. I can hear your voice saying this:
Every Jewish child in eastern Europe, Boris, remembers the melted ring in the middle of the frozen windowpane by the window ledge where the Shabbes candle stood.
The winter in the steppe is terrible, Boris, a cold you can never forget and an endless white as far as the eye can see, white snow, white sky—blank white everywhere except for a brighter white circle of the sun setting in the west on the eve of the Shabbes.
All day Fridays, the house, the whole house, the whole collection of worn sticks and rags, everything was scrubbed and boiled and polished, and Friday night, when the sun went down and the hard frozen points of stars came out, the Shabbes began with the ceremony of the mother lighting the candle and saying her short ceremonial prayer.
It was magic, that candle. When she lit it, the miserable hut became a palace, and from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday every Jew became a king. We were the people of the Covenant, the contract, the Berit. We knew a contentment, a security no one else on earth knew. Each week on the Shabbes we read the Covenant in the Book to each other and renewed it. Each week Shabbes was the foretaste of the heaven we could look forward to.
Those were bitter, bitter cold nights, Boris. Outside, all bundled up against the terrible cold, you could see the candles in all the windows, feel the crystal-clear air, smell the wood fires and the baked breads and the cooked foods, hear the squeak of snow underfoot, and hear the sound of voices inside, singing, laughing, talking, praying, shouting—life, family life bursting the walls of the crowded little huts of the shtetl.
For inside—inside was rosy soft light, oven-warmth, hot food and song and beautiful smiling faces and love and God! Yes, God! God-love inside, with the candle melting the ice on the window pane. Like a halo. Like a halo, a beacon to God. A little candle melting a whole Russian winter.
The old man nodded at the journal solemnly. “That’s the way it was. Did you know that in most shtetls people were so poor, they skipped eating two days a week? That’s why the Shabbes was so important. No matter how poor you were, you made a feast on Shabbes, a chicken or something. Those women in the shtetl, what they could do with a handful of flour, a piece of chicken and some dried-out old greens. My grandson—Oh well, you’ll have another cookie, Mr. Leary.”
Leary stood up. “This man coming out is not from the old shtetl.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, you did. And that’s what your quarrel with your grandson is—you set up this railroad to rescue Jews from Russia. Only Jews. I thank you for the tea, Mr. Simmonds. After this is all over, if there’s still a teapot left in the world, I’d like to come back.”
“I’m in the phone book,” said Mr. Simmonds. “When you come back, bring the warm weather with you.”
“Next time I see a Shabbes candle, I’ll think of you.”
“Everyone should see Shabbes candles once a week.”
Leary considered that. “The man coming out knows nothing about Shabbes candles, does he?”
“Be sure you see the Attorney General, or whoever he said, right away.”
The man let Leary see him once too often.
In midtown Manhattan, Leary stepped from his cab, and as he was paying the driver, he saw the man get out of the cab behind him. He tried to remember where he’d seen the florid face and the florid tie.
The face was ordinary, with a slightly bent banana nose and old acne scar tissue. His muzzle was purple. The tie finally sprang into Leary’s memory—at the airport that morning, at a newsstand. And, Leary seemed to recall, he’d seen him also when he called his office in Washington.
The man crossed the sidewalk and purposefully entered a tobacco shop.
When he called the bookseller back, the man had an English translation of the dedication: “Got a pencil? You can write it down.”
He read it to Leary, whose slowly writing hand halted before it finished. (“If you knew who was coming out, your hair would turn white before my eyes.”) Leary murmured the name to himself in recognition.
“That’s right,” said the bookseller cheerfully.
Leary hastened to the Public Library and stepped into the periodicals room.
Leary’s secretary read to him over the phone the list he asked for. “It’s all the airline arrivals in New York on all airlines, foreign and domestic, with flights arriving from any foreign airport, including Canada. Also, I got you that information on ships that are arriving in New York. There’s only one arriving at eleven.”
“Let me guess. It’s arriving from Italy.”
“From Genoa. How did you know?”
“And it’s docking at Pier 90.”
“How did you know?”
Brewer should have been somewhat relieved.
Abbott had worked out a far simpler rescue route. Instead of lowering themselves sixteen stories from the roof and then trying to hoist Kotlikoff sixteen stories back up (“We’d never make it,” said Abbott), Abbott suggested they hang the chairs from the lowest office window over the peak of the mansion roof.
That would be the seventh-floor window; there were no windows on the first six floors of the office building.
“In fact,” said Abbott, “what we’ll do is come down from the eighth floor. Then we can hoist your buddy right up in front of the seventh-floor window. He can step right in without doing no climbing. Good?”
Good.
But it hadn’t gotten any easier for Brewer: they had spent the afternoon in the bosun’s chairs, he and Abbott, swaying in that shaft and hauling their lines through blocks, up and down the wall, up and down, while the cold wind hooted softly through the broken windows.
Brewer was still as irrationally terrified, dangling there, as he had been at that moment when the idea of rescue had first occurred to him. Five stories up, his arms turned to limp rubber. He didn’t trust them with his weight. He saw himself falling. He saw Abbott’s hand grabbing for him and missing—and it all filled him with a paralysis. He’d come to hate the smell of that char which constantly wafted up the shaft, to hate the ceaseless spattering of falling water. “That wind,” he said, “is going to be a bitch.”
“Nah. The thing to watch for is rain.”
“Rain?”
“Yeah. On them roof slates. Come on, we got to practice climbing down the rope from the window into the chairs.”
At the top of their lines, still some five feet below the fifth floor, Abbott climbed out of his chair and up into the door opening. He stood up and walked back to the edge, looking straight down. The tips of his shoes protruded. He waited a moment before lying down on his gut, and in a series of coordinated moves he extended his legs out
into the air-shaft; slid down the anchor line, groping with his feet; lowered himself into the chair and sat, looking at Brewer next to him.
“You got to make those moves, Brewer. And you got to help me get this guy to climb out of the chair and into the windows. Come on. It’s as easy as getting out of bed. I almost said falling out of bed. Come on. Do it.”
Twenty years in my brown coffin in the Complex if I don’t, thought Brewer. He reached his arms up and pulled himself out of the seat and stood on it. Urgently, then, he reached up and grabbed the anchor line and pulled his torso up and over the edge. His legs followed with one more effort. He was flat on the floor.
“Okay” called Abbott. “Come on back.”
Brewer knew that in a few hours he would be at a window of the office building and that he would have to throw one leg over the sill, then the other, lie on his gut with his legs sticking straight out, eight stories up, and then shinny down the rope to the seat—or it was all over for him. Had to do it. He took a deep breath, lay on his gut and stuck his legs out over the airshaft, gripping the anchor line fiercely.
“Come on,” said Abbott.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to commit his body to the shaft. And he lay there with his legs protruding, his eyes squeezed shut, his forehead pressed to his fists.
He felt Abbott’s hand on his shoe, pressing it lightly against the line. “Come on, Brewer.”
Brewer put his torso over and down, kicking violently to find the chair. He got one foot on it, then the other. Eagerly he lowered his body with both arms and slipped into the chair. The amount of soaking sweat that flowed from him was astonishing. He had to press his eye sockets into his sleeves to mop them. It was the loss of strength in his arms and hands at such moments that worried him. If it ever happened when he was climbing down, his hands would fail him and he’d fall.
“Look, Abbott. There’s no sense in practicing this. I got the general idea, and doing it over and over is going to make a basket case out of me. I got to do it once—once down and once up. So no more practice, okay?”
“Sure. It’s okay. You know how to do it. Just don’t miss getting those legs through the opening in the seat, or it’s a long step down.”
Catch Me: Kill Me Page 22