“Business is a complicated game that you wouldn’t understand,” Mr. Henkler said. “Your father doesn’t understand it either. Not really. It’s not the paperwork, you see. It’s the relationships. You do business with people in power and together you prop each other up. Not everyone is a fine, upstanding citizen. People like the men who came in here—and others of their . . . ilk—are relied on, from time to time, to grease the complicated machinery that powers the world. It is a machine in its own way. Now, put that gun on my desk and get out. I will decide in the morning what to do with you.”
Abe stood up, but he did not put the gun on the desk. He pointed it at Mr. Henkler’s head and walked around to his side of the desk.
“What the hell are you doing now, you ingrate?”
Abe placed the barrel of the pistol against Mr. Henkler’s temple. His hand shook. His whole body tensed. The muscles in his legs, his abdomen, his forearms. It was like diving into water that’s too cold—the muscles constrict and use up all the oxygen and leave the lungs gasping for more. His whole machinery trembled; an engine overtaxed.
Mr. Henkler knew the name of the man who had killed his uncle Joseph, who had killed Sheldon’s father. Mr. Henkler said he was doing business with the mobsters who were threatening his family. Mr. Henkler had promoted his father into a job where he was going to be a scapegoat for his boss’s own financial or political ends. Abe shook with rage and fear and the certainty that everyone he knew was in danger and that there was no way out.
Mr. Henkler reached up to take the pistol away from his head. When he did, his brains splattered all over the far end of the office.
* * *
Looking down at his hand and the smoking revolver, Abe wasn’t sure he had even made the decision to pull the trigger. The dead body in front of him was flopped over; blood was seeping out of its skull onto the floor like a punctured bag of syrup.
Abe’s hands trembled. He looked up and around. There was no one there. No new sounds. No sirens or boots rushing up the steps. No echoes or reverberations. No hand of God smiting him. Only a new kind of silence.
Everything that happened next was an emotionless dream. He performed the actions he’d imagined back in his bedroom in front of the typewriter; he was able to perform them only because he had already done them over and over and over again in his mind. Abe prepared the crime scene as a sequence of gestures that were as scripted as religious ritual.
Untucking his shirt, he wiped any fingerprints from the gun. Using a pen from Mr. Henkler’s desk, he carried the gun by the trigger guard and placed it in Mr. Henkler’s right hand. Abe then gently pressed Mr. Henkler’s hand around it. Then he dropped it to the floor.
Abe opened the desk drawer to return the pen, and when he did, he saw the .45 automatic. Abe took the gun and left the pen behind.
There were papers on the desk. Work papers that showed Mr. Henkler had been busy. Would a man be working and then suddenly stop in midtask to put a bullet in his brain?
Using the edges of his hands, Abe collected them all, rolled them up, and shoved them into his pants so he could throw them out later. Maybe burn them. The whole city was awash in paper and debris. He could hide them anywhere.
There was water on the floor from his dripping clothing, but water was the surface of the world now. It too was everywhere. It was a clue to nothing.
Abe walked out of the room and closed the door behind him. Samuel Stone’s office was down the hall on the right. He covered the distance quickly and then crouched down and slid Mr. Henkler’s suicide note under the door.
* * *
A fire-escape door led to an alleyway behind the armory that was filled with broken crates and boxes. Abe burst through the door, faster than was wise, and walked north through puddles up to his ankles. He was sheltered from view on either side by towering brick walls that could have been waves; Abe was a fleeing Moses at the bottom of the Red Sea escaping punishment for smiting the slave master.
Five blocks away, he found a garbage can filled to the top with rainwater. He removed the papers from his pants and shoved them in with the rest of the detritus. They soaked in the water, the ink and blood ran, and they became a part of whatever had been there before.
* * *
Thirty minutes later and back in bed in dry boxer shorts, Abe lay with his hands under his head staring at a ceiling that was so dark it might have been a clouded night sky or a premonition. Across from him, Sheldon’s right foot stuck out from his blanket, and after fifteen minutes had passed and Sheldon didn’t move, Abe rose from the bed, pushed his cousin’s foot back onto the mattress, covered it up, and then returned to his bed and tried to quiet his mind.
“Don’t make trouble,” said the cowardly Jew facing the firing squad. If he was going to be shot anyway, wouldn’t it have been better to die for one’s actions rather than inactions?
Yes, thought Abe. It was an imperfect code to live by, but was still better.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY THERE WAS nothing in the papers about what he had done and nothing on the radio. Just like the pawn shop heist, which he was certain would come back to them but never did. The hurricane was the news and the damage the topic. With the weather finally breaking and blue skies appearing, the devastation outside looked like the end of a nightmare or a war. People emerged from their city homes in a daze. The roads were still flowing but were no longer filling. A few buses were returning with the refugees who’d fled the city and gone to relatives farther inland or westward.
The coast was almost fifty miles to the south, but salt was in the air. The newspapers were running pictures of tankers on their sides, washed up against the shore like toppled skyscrapers. The headlines were no longer about the crisis in Czechoslovakia and were all focused on the leveling of New England.
All offices, however, were closed. Abe’s father was told not to come in “by order of management” and didn’t know why. He was unable to reach Mr. Henkler by phone for more news and he didn’t dare call Mr. Stone or anyone else. With the unexpected day off, Nate forced the kids to attend synagogue for the Sabbath that evening. Sheldon listened. Mirabelle stared out the window and Abe was utterly silent.
* * *
When they returned home that evening, the entire family dispersed. Sheldon didn’t retire to the bedroom because Abe’s presence took up far more than his half of the room. Instead, he sat down on an oversize blue velvet sofa in the parlor and randomly pulled down a book by Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Sheldon had read Tom Sawyer in school back in Whately, and of the authors on the shelf, Twain was the only one Sheldon recognized. After a few minutes of reading, he came on the first sentence of a section called “The Stranger’s History.”
I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut—anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose—or poetry, in other words. My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as rolling off a log. I became head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men under me.
Sheldon looked up. The great arms factory in Hartford? Was he writing about the Colt Armory? Sheldon had never read anything in a book about anything he had actually seen, anything that he didn’t have to imagine but could remember instead. In that moment, he felt something new and astonishing: the sense of being at the center of the world. Twain gave Sheldon a feeling that the world was watching him, that an eye in the sky knew where he was on the map and that the things he saw or experienced o
r learned or said might matter somehow. That he might be part of something larger than himself. Forgetting his family and their moods and traumas, Sheldon continued to read until the phone rang and Uncle Nate walked into the living room to answer it.
The expression on Uncle Nate’s face caught Sheldon’s attention. It was an expression of absolute shock. Sheldon inadvertently glanced at the stairs, which helped him to remember that Mirabelle and Abe were both safely home and that—for now—whatever news was coming through the telephone would not be catastrophic to him.
He wondered if Uncle Nate had looked the same when he had heard the news of Aunt Lucy and Sheldon’s mother. Or his brother. Uncle Nate must have been standing in the same spot.
Nate placed the phone back in the cradle and immediately walked to the kitchen and poured himself a tall glass of bourbon, which he did not typically do. Sheldon watched, unable to concoct a scenario that would have prompted this.
He suddenly felt a terrible need to be close to Mirabelle.
He raced upstairs, and without knocking or thinking at all, he burst into Mirabelle’s room.
“Hey? What gives? You have to knock, you little—”
Sheldon walked right up to her and placed his hand on her head. She looked at him and didn’t object. The feeling of her hair, of the warmth of her scalp, was enough for the moment. He left the room with Mirabelle watching him—perplexed—and he sought out his oldest cousin.
Abe was sitting on his bed with a copy of Popular Mechanics. On the cover was a water-skier being pulled by a dirigible. It was an old copy. Sheldon had seen it before.
“What’s up?” muttered Abe without much interest.
“Nothing,” said Sheldon, clearly lying.
Abe looked at him and saw that he was vibrating like a guitar string.
“You been eating catnip?”
“No.”
“So, what then?”
“Uncle Nate got a phone call.”
“That’s not interesting yet,” Abe said, flipping a page.
“He’s drinking a big glass of bourbon.”
Abe folded the magazine.
“You know what’s going on?” Sheldon asked.
“I’m sure he’ll tell us,” Abe said.
* * *
Nate didn’t tell them until the next day, when it appeared on the front page of the newspaper. Carl Henkler, it said, had committed suicide.
Maybe.
A janitor had found him, and Samuel Stone had cut short a business trip in New York to find a note under his door that he submitted immediately to the police. Somehow the newspapers had gotten hold of it and printed it in full.
Dear Mr. S. M. Stone,
It is with regret, shame, and humiliation that I have reached the only ending for the path on which I put myself. Within the past year, I have made closer business ties to a crime family in an effort to better serve the company and ensure our free flow of merchandise that their operations were going to threaten. At the time, I thought it was a pragmatic business decision. However, that changed. They started requesting several hundred weapons a year that could be acquired without their needing to pass through a traditional point of sale. Why this was important to them, I didn’t ask.
When you became aware of the missing inventory and asked me to solve it, I knew at once I could not. I therefore hired Mr. Nathaniel Corbin as a proxy. I instructed Mr. Corbin to solve the mystery while I simultaneously withheld key documents he would need to do so. My plan was to run him in circles long enough to find a solution. Unfortunately for me, Mr. Corbin proved dedicated and unrelenting in his service to the company and was coming close to solving the matter just as news reached me that various newspapers had heard rumors of the missing inventory. This would have shattered Colt’s reputation at a moment when war looms in Europe.
The walls were closing in and it was only a matter of time until my actions would be exposed.
During the stock market crash, I heard stories of men jumping to their deaths. At the time, this struck me as absurd. Now I understand why.
To my family: I am sorry. Please forgive me.
Carl Henkler
Nate read them the letter at the kitchen table to the sound of chain saws and axes as the WPA workers chopped apart the storm-felled trees.
Nate shook his head when he finished. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?” Abe asked.
“All of it. He was the most rooted and steadfast man I’ve ever known. All business. No emotion. I suppose it’s not impossible that he decided to do business with the criminals. The world is held together by a delicate balance. I understand that,” Nate said very quietly—almost to himself. “But suicide? He’s not the type. He’s a dealmaker and a numbers man. He would have found a solution. He didn’t need a way out. Not like this.”
“You really think you can know a man just from working with him?” Abe asked. “He might have needed the money. You don’t know.”
“The paper has questions too,” Nate said, flipping to a related article. “The wife said she’d never seen the gun he used. It was an old model that he didn’t prefer and she insisted that she knew guns. She said he kept an automatic in his drawer. She was quite insistent, it says here, that anyone with even a passing knowledge of guns could tell a revolver from an automatic. The article says that revolvers like the one used are known to be even more reliable than .45s, so perhaps that was on his mind. He was German, after all. But no automatic was recovered from his desk and his wife is insisting it wasn’t suicide. And for another thing”—Nate skimmed over the paragraphs to find the relevant bit—“it says here that the revolver he used had two empty shells in it, not one. The police are looking to take fingerprints from them. They said that a man as familiar with guns as Mr. Henkler would have filled the cylinder with six new rounds. When would he have discharged a single round before firing this one? If he’d been at a range, he would have spent the rounds and replaced them. All of them, not just one. They searched the office for a second bullet hole but didn’t find one.”
“How many bullets were in his head?” Mirabelle asked.
“That’s not funny,” Nate said.
Sheldon looked at Abe. Abe wasn’t talking.
Mirabelle crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back. She’d finished one piece of toast and an egg, and had been sipping tea, but she wasn’t thinking about the suicide now. She was thinking about other parts of the letter.
“He said nice things about you,” Mirabelle said.
“Yes,” Nate said. “Assuming he wrote the letter.”
“If it was murder,” Mirabelle said, apparently unbothered by the subject, “why would a mobster include nice comments about you?”
“I can’t imagine a reason,” Nate said. “That’s why Mr. Stone believes it was suicide, which brings me to my second piece of news.” Nate took a gulp of his coffee as though it were a stiff drink at a bar, and then said, “Mr. Stone called me. He wants to see me on Monday. I’m pretty sure he’s going to give me Henkler’s job. I think he’s promoting me. If so, this is going to turn our fortunes around. All of ours. It’s going to make all kinds of things possible. Summer vacations in the Catskills. Maybe a trip to Europe.”
“We don’t want to go to Europe,” Abe said.
“Sure we do! Paris, Rome, Berlin. Here I come!” said Mirabelle.
“Trust me,” Abe said. “Forget Europe.”
“Speak for yourself,” Mirabelle said. “Actually, now that I think about it, maybe you killed him, Dad. I mean . . . it makes sense.”
“That isn’t funny either.”
She tilted her head and opened her hands. “You write a nice suicide note that makes you look good, you kill him, you get his job. I’m not even angry.”
“A man is dead, Mirabelle. Can you not feel that?”
“So now what?” said Abe.
“We will all go to the funeral. Show our respects. Let the widow see that we came. Let the commu
nity know that if I’m stepping into his shoes it’s with the greatest humility. Because . . .” Nate shook his head.
All of Nate’s thoughts and emotions were spinning too fast. His wife had died a year ago. And then a promotion. His brother only recently. And now another promotion? If he wasn’t sitting, he’d have to brace himself.
“When your grandparents died in the flu,” he said to all of them, “Joseph—Uncle Joe—was back from the war and he wanted to stay in Whately. I wanted him to come to Hartford with me. I told him that this is the land of opportunity. That everything’s possible in the city now. We’ll have to fight through some unfairness and some bigotry, but so does everyone else. And if we persevere and focus on what’s important and work hard—and be seen to work hard and fit in—we can get there. We can go from that wooden cabin in the Berkshires to a brownstone and from being cobblers to running a department at Colt.” Nate looked at Abe. “We can get past being Jews.”
“Why do we have to get past being Jews?” Abe asked. “Are we doing something wrong? We’re model citizens. We’re the stars of the show. Milton Berle, Peter Lorre, the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, Jack Benny, George Burns—”
“All right, Abe.”
“Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson . . . Hedy Lamarr, for God’s sake! And what about the fact that for three thousand years we’ve applied our heads and our hearts to the deepest questions of human existence and created a legacy of moral learning that has informed and defined—”
“Enough, Abe! We live in the real world,” Nate said. “We need to fit in, and it’s worth it. You could try asking everyone you just listed but none of those people exist; they’re all stage names and you know why. Milton Berle is Mendel Berlinger. George Burns is Nathan Birnbaum. And your Hedy Lamarr? Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. None of that was going to work. And they knew it!”
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 12