My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

Saracen: I hope you haven’t mentioned this to anyone else, boyo. I can meet you in an hour, if that’s the only way.

  Berger: Thirty minutes, Colonel. (Berger hangs up, dials another number.) Is Major Lindstrom there?

  Cut to Henry Berger entering the warehouse building he had been imprisoned in earler, Berger lookng behind htm as he steps inside.

  We cut to a figure in an Austin Healey putting on purple gloves with fastidious preoccupation, his face obscured.

  Two figures approach the warehouse from opposing directions, enter warily the almost pitch black building. Berger waits until they are both in the room, then turns on the overhead spotlights. The camera moves between triangulated shadows.

  Berger: I have a fix on both of you.

  Camera follows Saracen as he moves slowly out of the shadows, his hands out of sight.

  Berger: You too, Major.

  Saracen: So it’s you, old friend. Double agent, is it?

  Lindstrom moves a step or so forward from his corner, only the front of him illuminated, his face still in shadow.

  Berger: One more step, Major. I want to see your hands. If you don’t throw your gun on the floor in front of you and step into the light, I’m going to have to kill you.

  Lindstrom: For God’s sake, Berger, use your head. Saracen set this charade up so that he might get both of us out of the way.

  Berger: Is that the truth, Colonel?

  Saracen: What do you want me to say, Henry? If you can’t trust me, who can you trust? I’ve suspected Lindstrom from day one.

  Lindstrom: Ask Colonel Saracen about the Walmer Connection.

  Berger moves the point of his gun from Lindstrom to Saracen, from Saracen to Lindstrom.

  Shot of Lindstrom’s face through the sights of Berger’s pistol, the mouth the target of focus.

  Saracen (shouting): He’s going for his gun. Put him away.

  We see a purple-gloved hand reaching for a gun, followed by the sound of a shot. There are two further shots and the man in the purple gloves—we are still not clear who it is—falls.

  Lindstrom: Had me a little worried there, Berger. Have to admit. How did you figure Saracen was the man?

  Berger: (his ear to Saracen’s chest, turns suddenly to see Lindstrom, hand in pocket, watching him): It figured, didn’t it, that it was one of you.

  “Don’t you write any real books anymore?” he imagines Tom asking him.

  “As a matter of fact,” Terman says. “I have a draft of a new novel in the bottom of this desk. Is that what you mean by real books?”

  Henry Berger and Colonel Saracen meet as if accidentally at Waterloo Bridge. A light rain falling, a mist of rain.

  Saracen: Seven men—seven at least that we know of—met once a week in a two room flat on Belsize Park Road in Folkestone. All of them except one were distinguished men in their respective fields. We have some idea why they met and what their ties were to one another. Five of these men have died unnatural deaths. It stands to reason that one of the two (or three) survivors—there may have been an eighth member of the society—is the killer of the others and that the remaining survivor or suvivors is in immediate danger.

  Berger: Two other men have died who have no connection to that secret society and apparently at the hand of the same killer or killers. How does that work into your theory, Colonel?

  Saracen: They knew too much or got in the way. Irrelevances, boyo. My money is on our French nobleman, André Lange, alias Pierre de Chartres, the man in the dark raincoat you saw running away in the catacombs. Lay your hands on him, boyo, and we can all take a vacation in the sun.

  Berger: And what about the seventh man?

  Saracen: Inspector D’Agostino, retired police officer. Legs impaired. Has a bodyguard at his side night and day. Not likely. Not bloody likely. Be a dear boy and bring in Monsieur Lange.

  He thought he heard the key turning in the lock, the slightest noise reverberating in the large house. If someone were coming in, he would hear the door open and shut like a muffled cough. If it were Isabelle, she would make her presence known almost immediately, calling to him from the base of the stairs.

  Although he heard no further sounds, Terman came out of his study and hurried down the carpeted stairs, aware of the thump of his own step as if it were coming from somewhere else. No one was in the front room waiting for him. He opened the door to look outside and saw Isabelle coming up the walk. His silhouette, larger than life, waited for her in the doorway.

  “You frightened me,” she said when she saw he was there.

  It was only afterward, after he had persuaded her to go to bed, after they had made love in a desultory way, imitating the gestures of former passion, that he asked her if she had been at the door with her key five or ten minutes before he actually saw her.

  The question, he could tell, offended her, though she made no more of it than necessary. He trusted her denial and assumed that he had imagined the sound—such a small sound anyway—of someone turning a key in a lock. It came to him later on that if someone had let himself in, he(whoever) was still skulking somewhere in the house.

  Terman slept fitfully, heard from time to time some unaccountable movement in the house, recorded almost every unseen tremor.

  Isabelle woke in a irritable mood, accused him of contriving at every turn to defeat her. They had a brief fight which resolved itself in silences. Terman accompanied her to her flat after breakfast, despite her assertion that she preferred to go alone. When they got to her place, she apologized and invited him in and they pressed against each other savagely though fully clothed, then Terman went home, though not before asking her if she had Tom’s address. She said no, that she knew the street but not the number, knew the phone number but not the address, which he suspected was a lie. “I care for you,” she called after him. “Don’t you know that?”

  The phone rang any number of times that first evening at the Kirstner’s cottage in Ramsgate, but the call was never the one Terman was waiting for.

  “The trouble with you Americans,” Max was saying to an audience, “and it’s great worry to us all, is that you’re so bloody child-centered. In Britain, we set the babies an example—we send them to boarding school until they’re beaten into ploughshares.”

  “He’s not even English,” Marjorie said to no one in particular.

  Terman had two glasses of red wine in front of him, clarets of rival claim, one half-filled, the other as yet untouched. Max opened another bottle he wanted Terman to try, a ‘74 Graves from an obscure chateau and set a third glass in front of him. Isabelle had her hand on his arm, a temporary restraint.

  At some point Isabelle got up and moved to another part of the room, provoked at something he had said or done, an unwitting transgression. A prematurely white-haired man, who had money or was a source of money (he’d forgotten what Max had said about him), occupied Isabelle’s place on the couch next to him. It was the man, who, at Max’s office, had announced himself as an admirer.

  “This seat’s already spoken for,” Terman said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to find one of your own.”

  The man, who looked like a youngish Wilfred Hyde White, smiled broadly. “It is, is it?” he said. “Well, I’ll just keep it warm until the young lady returns. Name’s Tumson, point of fact. Edward Tumsun.”

  “Your reputation trails you like a shadow, Tumsun,” he said in a loud voice, winking at Marjorie Kirstner who was sitting across from him.

  Tumsun took a business card from his wallet and slipped it into the breast pocket of Terman’s jacket. “I’ll let my card speak for me,” he said.

  That Tumsun presumed to invade his space irritated him beyond reason. “So you have a talking card?” he said. “Does it speak in tongues?” He noticed the director watching him from across the room, framing the scene. “Does it speak the language of money?”

  “Hard cash,” said Tumsun.

  “I have the idea that the card’s the ventriloquist,” he said, “and you’re just p
retending it’s the other way around.”

  “I wouldn’t advise making an enemy of me,” Tumsun said, getting up, his unshakable smile etched into his face.

  Isabelle came over a few minutes after Tumsun had vacated the seat. “You’re not still sulking about Tom, are you?” she asked.

  “I’m tasting wines,” he said. He engaged the three glasses on the glass table in front of him, each in its turn.

  She sat down next to him and put her arm around his shoulders. “I’m sorry you feel so awful,” she whispered. “If Tom needs you, he’ll get in touch.”

  He kissed her ear. “Let’s go upstairs to one of the bedrooms.”

  “You’re mad,” she said.

  Max came by and filled one of his empty glasses with a ‘67 Burgundy that he guaranteed would knock him on his ear. “What did you and Tumsun talk about?” he asked out of the side of his mouth.

  “He let his card do his talking,” Terman said in a voice that seemed to extend itself into every corner of the room. “The language it talked of was not one of mine.”

  Max gave him a severe look. “That card talks everyone’s language,” he said. “It is universally articulate. Not advisable to make an enemy of the man.”

  “He said the same thing.”

  He noticed that Max looked elsewhere while talking to him, seemed to be counting the house.

  “Are we going upstairs or not?” he asked Isabelle when Max was gone. Everything irritated him.

  “We really can’t, can we?” she said. “It would be so rude.” She turned her face away.

  He sipped the Burgundy with no sense of its distinction, rued his failure to make connection. “If you won’t go with me, I’ll go alone,” he said.

  On the way to the bathroom, moving through a narrow hallway, a twilight landscape of betrayal and deception, he bumped into a marble sculpture, dislodging it from its pedestal with his shoulder. A chip split off on contact with the floor, a large earlike shape. He lifted the ambiguous sculpture (a woman with her head seemingly between her legs, hair streaming), wrestled it onto its pedestal, but had no success in disguising the statue’s wound. Each time he replaced the broken fragment, it would slip loose again. Marjorie passed him in the hall, said she was going to sleep, then stayed on to observe his efforts.

  At some point she took the broken piece from him and pressed it successfully in its place. “You were holding it the wrong way,” she told him.

  “I’ll pay for the damage,” he said.

  A big-boned, athletic woman, horsy-handsome in the English fashion, she winked at him. “It’s our secret,” she said, leaving him.

  Terman let himself into the bathroom and locked the door. His face was out of focus in the mirror, eyes like worm holes in an apple. He held his prick in his hand like a marksman and fired point blank into the void. While he peed in endless profusion, he thought he heard the phone ring and he held fire until the ringing stopped. It was not that he wanted to hear from Tom but that he felt he ought to want to hear. No one called him to the phone. His burden slipped away, vanished unexpectedly, then returned.

  Terman woke during the night, tumbled from dreams into blackness. A sharp thought like a bramble pricked him. The only thing to do was to go back to London and collect his son. He climbed out of bed and dressed himself blindly in yesterday’s clothes. Isabelle raised her head, said something the matter? Nothing, he said.

  He tiptoed down the unfamiliar stairs, the house silent and dark, invested in shadows. There was a light on in the kitchen, calling attention to itself. He pushed open the door and looked in. Marjorie was sitting at the table, wearing a man’s silk dressing gown, the sleeves rolled up. “I’m going back to London to get something,” “What a bore!” she said, putting her head down on the table. He had the idea she had been crying and closed the door behind him, was closing it when she called his name in a world-weary voice.

  “Do you have a cig?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “What good are you?”

  There was a car parked directly behind his in the driveway and his first inclination was to see fate as his implacable opponent and return to bed. Even as he opened the door of Tumsun’s Bentley and released the handbrake, he could imagine Marjorie saying with that casual contempt that seemed bred into the voice, “You’re back, are you, even before you started.” The car obstructing his path was difficult to move, adamant about its right of place. He threw his shoulder repeatedly against the left fender, rolling the car back a few feet at a time. Whenever he stopped to catch his breath, the Bentley tended to slip forward. Someone, he sensed, was watching him from the house, taking pleasure in the extravagance of his effort.

  He breathed rage. A cold hour passed before there was room for him to get out and by then he was shivering from the exertion, hot and cold at the same time, his face glazed with sweat. Once he was on the road, the trip, despite the veils of fog, seemed to make itself. He was back in London with the first light, parking across the street from his house. He noticed even before he parked the car that there was a light on in one of the third floor windows. His idea was that Tom had come back, had moved back in his absence.

  The light was coming from Tom’s room, but the room was untenanted, showed no signs of having been otherwise employed. Terman didn’t recall leaving the light on, was all but positive he hadn’t, which meant that Tom (or someone else) had visited the room briefly. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, tested the bed, woke as he saw something rush from the closet toward him. He sat up in the bed in an empty room, the overhead light glaring. He turned the light off before leaving, recalled to himself the act of pushing the wall switch down with the index finger of his right hand.

  He fixed himself a cup of instant coffee, though he had no taste for it once made and poured it down the sink. What did his son want from him? “Tom,” he shouted from the bottom of the stairwell. “Are you there?” His voice rattled the walls. “Where the hell are you?” He expected no acknowledgement of his cry and was fulfilled in that expectation alone.

  He went to his study to check something in an early draft of The Folkstone Conspiracies—then called The Last Days of Civilization—found himself turning out the drawers of his desk, looking for something else. The gun wasn’t where he remembered putting it and he persuaded himself, not wanting to believe it had been stolen, that he had absent-mindedly moved it to another place. Where else might he have put it, wanting it at the same time out of sight and at hand?

  He went through every drawer in the desk, systematically emptying and refilling, searching for the gun as if it were an object half its size. The box of ammunition was also missing. He had left Ramsgate in the dead hours of the night, paralyzed by exhaustion to discover that Tom had stolen a gun from his desk. There was some comfort in having his most disheartening suspicions borne out.

  Returning from Europa Foods with a bag of croissants, two oranges, and a bottle of white wine, Terman rang his own bell before letting himself in with the key. The mail had been delivered through the slot; otherwise the house was as he remembered leaving it, though also different, changed by time, by modifications in the patterns of light and shade, by the actuality or potentiality of another presence. There was a letter from Magda, one from his agent in New York that included a check he had been expecting, and one, written on American Express stationery, that he suspected was from Tom. It was already nine o’clock (actually two minutes to nine) and he dialed Ramsgate to tell Max he was on his way back. Marjorie answered, said Max was still sleeping, but that she expected him up and about any time now. “What are you doing in London?” she asked.

  “Looking for a gun,” he said.

  “How positively bloody-minded of you! I hope you didn’t make anything of last night. I’m the kind of person who can do without sleep altogether if it comes to that.”

  “An enviable quality,” he said.

  “Hurry back to us,” she said.

  Terman returned to hi
s study and took one final turn through the drawers in his desk. The news was inescapably the same. He composed a note to Tom, demanding the return of the gun, then tore it up and dropped the scraps in the wastebasket. Someone else might have taken the gun—others had keys to the house—or he might have displaced the gun himself out of distraction. As he was going down the stairs he had an image of Tom sitting on the floor of his study piecing the note together.

  Terman nodded off for prolonged stretches, waking to find himself straddling two lanes, a horn trumpeting in the background.

  He pulled off the Motorway first chance he had, parked the car with the object of taking a nap, then he remembered the letter from his son and opened that instead. He wondered why he had waited so long to deal with it.

  He screened his eyes as he read as if to avoid the direct rays of the sun. There was no mention in the letter of the missing gun, no direct mention. The letter started out as an apology, and ended up as a bill of grievances. There was nothing new except an edginess in tone and with it an air of undefined threat. The letter was typed on an electric typwriter with the same or similar typeface as the one he had in his study in the Holland Park house. Was that the real message, the implicit confesson of intrusion and theft? He sensed that there was something else in the letter beneath the litany of complaints (“Whenever we’re together you act as if you wish you were somewhere else.”), an unspecified request, an asking for something while refusing to ask.

  Isabelle greeted him with a kiss, running from the house to embrace him. “I missed you,” she said lightly.

  “I’ve missed myself,” he said. “Has Max been wanting to get to work?”

  “Max took most of his entourage to see the Dover Castle. He asked if you and I wanted to go and I said no. I don’t believe he even knew you had gone off.”

  “Did I get any calls?” he asked.

  “Someone rang up this morning while we were all having breakfast and then hung up without speaking a word. If you want that one, you can have it.”