by Anna Porter
“Next time,” Judith suggested.
“Sure. You can try Jeremy and the mechanical bull at the same time. It should be quite a day.” He was so pleased with that thought he practically bounced downstairs. “I’ll make you some light lunch,” he offered.
It was a shrimp salad with mayonnaise dressing and toast. He told Judith about his “lovely mother,” Eva, who had idolized her billionaire husband. Seemingly she had no will of her own and no life except the one she lived through Paul. She showed scant interest in Arthur. He didn’t recall her ever trying to shield him from his father’s anger; she may have felt he deserved punishment. He thought, though, that their breakup may have had something to do with him. Being only ten at the time, he couldn’t be sure. Later, Eva blamed him for her own loneliness.
When they had eaten, he called a cab for her. She had only one remaining question: “What was it you were about to tell me about Marsha Hillier, when I arrived?”
“About how she lost her cool?” He laughed. “I suggest, my dear, you ask her about that. You are, I was told, supposed to be friends?”
Twenty
MRS. SINGER WAS NOT pleased to see him. The apartment was a mess, her things half packed, she had been living out of suitcases for a week. She was going to Israel. With Harvey gone, there wasn’t much to keep her in New York. The New York Police Department still had Harvey’s death under investigation, but she knew the statistics: she wasn’t holding out much hope.
She offered David a seat among the debris of what had once been their living room. The furniture was covered in yellow plastic, the floorboards were bare. Next to the door there was a thick roll of carpet tied up with string. On the way in, he noticed the mezuzah had been removed from the doorframe. Its absence left a light mark on the wood.
She cleared a spot for him to sit, between two boxes, on a straight-backed chair with thin bandy legs. Through the stiff plastic, he could barely discern the blue and gold embroidery on the seat cushion.
In the cardboard boxes on either side there were picture frames, china figurines, birds and shells, cigar boxes, even a pair of gold-embossed baby shoes. The junk of a lifetime. On the mantelpiece, the only remaining decoration, an oval white frame with a photograph of two people in winter coats, their arms around each other, squinting and grinning into the camera. Her hair was looser and more silvery, the face younger, but there was no doubt the woman was Gloria Singer. He would not have recognized the man. The picture he had fixed in his mind was of a face frozen in a silent scream, the lips drawn back to reveal those pathetic gold fillings, black eyes staring at the sky. The expression was shock and horror, perhaps disbelief. Parr had long ago learned to discount the expressions of dismay on the faces of the dead—most people were surprised by their own dying—but he still found it hard to make the connection with the photograph.
He felt too large and heavy for the daintiness of the chair and was relieved to be able to lumber over to the photograph for a closer look. It made him feel professional, rather than fat.
“That’s Harvey and me in Hungary last year,” Gloria explained. “Our first trip back since the war. And the last. We’d been planning to go for a number of years, but Harvey always postponed it. He wanted to go...and he didn’t. It’s my last picture of him.”
“I expect you both had some memories you’d rather not revive,” David surmised, thinking of Singer’s arm with the neatly tattooed six-digit number. “Was the trip worthwhile?”
“Oh yes,” she said, smiling at last. Her skin brightened when she smiled and the resemblance to the photograph grew stronger. All that gruffness was covering up the pain. She put down the long-stemmed vase she had been wrapping in tissue paper—the whole apartment must have been a study in daintiness—and came over to him. “We went to London first, we’d never been there either. Harvey booked us into Grosvenor House, right on Hyde Park. Beautiful high-ceilinged rooms. A real surprise. We took a boat up the Thames, all the way to Hampton Court. Boy, and was it cold! Flew to Budapest from Heathrow. They served champagne all the way and we discovered we both spoke better Hungarian than we thought. He was tipsy when we landed. It’s because he was nervous. Harvey didn’t usually drink.” She beamed, half ashamed, half proud, like a mother talking about her child’s exploits. “He joked with the passport control people. Can you imagine? After all that waiting and planning, I thought maybe they weren’t going to let us in.”
David was glad Gloria had started to loosen up. “Specially in Hungary,” she said. “As though we were trying to slip in unnoticed. And stay.” She took the picture from him, wiped the glass with her sleeve, and put it back on the mantelpiece, angled so as to face the window. “We stayed at the Gellért Hotel for two days. It was sunny for December. We sat on the balcony mostly, watching the boats go by. He had been there once when he was only six, with his parents. Before the war. But he remembered the room. It was all yellow and green flowers, on the furniture, the wallpaper, even the drapes. He said his father wore a cream-colored suit, his mother a flowing creamy dress with big sleeves. They ate on the balcony overlooking the river. So did we. We had all our meals there. Apparently his father knew all about boats, and every time one went by, he would tell Harvey and his mother what it was. Became a bit of a game, then, his pointing at a boat, Harvey and his mother racing to be the first to call it. If the first guess was wrong, the other person automatically won.” She took a deep breath and gazed out the window. “In those days, of course, there were more sailboats and pleasure cruisers. Most of the ships up and down the Danube now are cargo ships and tourist boats. There isn’t the variety.”
When he was certain she wasn’t going to continue on her own, David cleared his throat and muttered something inane about his grandfather having been a sailor. That turned the switch back on.
“They had changed the decor,” Gloria said resentfully. “The whole damn place is different now. But he did find the same room. And for our last night, he found his father’s favorite restaurant, on the Pest side. It’s called Százéves, which means something like ‘one hundred years old,’ but Harvey said it was a lot older than that. It had been ‘one hundred years old’ when he was a child. There used to be wooden platters and gypsy music. Harvey still remembered the words to some of the songs...” She swallowed hard, her face turning soft and tearful. “The gypsies played music in the camps. The Nazis got them, too.” She had tried to sound matter-of-fact, but her voice cracked midway. She glanced at David to see if he had noticed. When he gave no sign of acknowledgment, she went on: “For the last week, we went to Eger.”
David let that sit for a while. Eger. He asked her to spell it.
“E-G-E-R, a small town in the Bükk Mountains, about a hundred kilometers from Budapest. It’s a historic site, but the reason we went is that Harvey was born there.” She turned from the window now, looked at him with curiosity, the light gone from her eyes. “Anyhow, memories won’t bring him back. And they’re not what you came for.”
Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. David wasn’t sure what the key was he had to turn. He fished the old photograph with the serrated edges out of his wallet, flattened it by holding it between two palms, rubbing one palm over the other, as though trying to warm it. Levine had once told him he had a lousy habit of rubbing his palms together. Some primeval practice denoting that his ancestors were usually cold.
“I’m curious about this photograph,” he said, holding it balanced on his fingertips. “Your husband sent this to Paul Zimmerman last December 21st. Was that right after you came back from Hungary?”
“Yes,” she said. “It must have been...,” she hesitated, “a few days later. We were back more than two weeks before Christmas.”
“Do you recognize the people?” he asked.
She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose and studied the photograph as he held it toward her. Then she took it out of his hand, angled it up to the light, and shook her head slowly. “No,” she said thoughtfully, and returned the pi
cture to David. “I don’t think so. It’s pretty old, though, isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for him to agree. She pulled another pair of glasses from a dark brown purse, put them on her nose and looked again. “People change,” she said, her lips pursed carefully. She looked more purposeful with the half-moon glasses. They were tortoiseshell, long, narrow, slanting slightly upward for a catlike effect. “Why did he send it?” she asked. “I mean, was there some sort of explanation with it?”
There was also a change in her voice. Caution, and maybe something else. Was it fear? He had been trained to recognize such things, but it didn’t last. Only a flicker. “It came with this letter,” he said, showing her the enigmatic note. He watched her closely as she took it from him, held it up to her face to read it. Her expression held nothing but surprise.
“I can’t imagine what he could have meant,” she said. “I didn’t know he had ever met Zimmerman. I told you that. I never even heard of the man till I read those clippings I gave you. Do you believe Paul Zimmerman had something to do with Harvey’s death?” she asked, her mouth forming the words too carefully.
Yes, David was sure now, she was being overly cautious. “Possibly,” he said, though he had no reason to surmise anything other than that the photo was supposed to cause Paul Zimmerman some embarrassment. A few sleepless nights.
In 30 years on the force, he had learned to read the signs. She was holding out on him.
“Funny,” he tried, “first time I saw it, I thought it was a blackmail note. You know, Mr. Singer with those expensive shoes from Dack’s? Perhaps he’d gotten tired of watching the other side have all the fun. It happens.” He added a sympathy-laden tone to that remark but it didn’t work.
“Harvey was straight as they come,” she stated indignantly. “He was a mensch. A real mensch, if you know what I mean.” (David didn’t, but he nodded anyway. He could guess.)
“We were married 30 years,” she said. “I ought to know. And it’s not that opportunities weren’t there, because they were. In this city—” she waved angrily with her hand “—you can have anything you want if you don’t care how you get it. Every time, Harvey would rather have less. Besides, he’d made quite enough for us to be comfortable. Not rich, but comfortable.” She ran her fingers through her hair, which showed signs of having been to the hairdresser. David could never understand why women liked their hair stiff.
“There’s nothing wrong with liking fancy shoes,” Gloria added, a bit defensively. “A respectable weakness, that. Harvey also loved good cigars.”
Okay, David thought, that’s not the right direction. She isn’t concerned about my discovering a blackmail scheme.
“You said he’d seemed preoccupied. He forgot your birthday in January, didn’t pay attention to plans you’d made, arrangements to see friends. That sort of thing.”
She nodded, yes, but said nothing.
“After your return from Hungary,” David went on. “There was this letter, the photograph, and his going to Toronto without telling you, February 26th, to see Paul Zimmerman. He phoned Paul Zimmerman that day, at least twice. They may have met shortly before...your husband’s death.”
She drew a small white handkerchief from the sleeve of her fresh paisley dress and carefully dabbed her nose. “Paul Zimmerman died, didn’t he?” she said.
“Not until Sunday,” David said. “Anyway, Zimmerman died of a heart attack.” He was suddenly a lot less sure of that than he had been when joking with Judith about opening graves. Gloria’s fear was almost palpable.
“So they say,” she said quietly. “Perhaps I’m getting paranoid, but I think there are still too many Nazis in Canada. Your government let them in, knowing what they’d done and would do again, given a chance. You gave them asylum.”
David shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “We didn’t exactly give them asylum, we just didn’t turf them out. There’s a difference. Anyway, they’re mostly dead now. Near as dammit, dead.”
“Not dead enough,” she murmured. “And not soon enough, either.”
“If you’re trying to tell me you think some leftover SS trooper killed them both—” he stopped short of telling her he thought she was crazy “—how do you explain the note he sent to Zimmerman? Why on earth would he want Zimmerman to have sleepless nights? It sounds sort of like a threat to me.”
“Or a warning,” Gloria said.
“And you’ve never seen this photograph before?” David asked quickly.
“Not that one,” she said. She went over to a stack of shoe boxes on top of the TV set and returned with a red and white Bata box. “I did find these,” she said, handing him the box. “They look like they were taken around the same time. They were in one of his drawers in the study.”
David put the box on his knees. It contained a mélange of postcards, a silver-colored yarmulke, a locket with a little girl’s picture inside, and photographs. Each group was held together by a rubber band, and each package labeled. The label on the package of small black-and-white photographs with serrated edges was: EGER.
“That’s all that’s left of Harvey’s childhood years,” Gloria said. There was pride and resentment in her voice as well as the fear he had heard before. “Everything else was burned or looted by the Germans and the locals,” Gloria continued. “The house was completely destroyed. There’s a sweetshop on the site now. We bought some bonbons there.” She showed him a photograph with a two-story house. It had dark shutters and creeping vine on one side. A man and a woman stood in the doorway. He held her by the arm, protectively. She was leaning against him. She wore a short skirt, fashionable in the ’30s. Her blouse had an embroidered design across the front. Her white high-heeled shoes had bows across the front. Her hair was bobbed and there was a white spot to one side of her head—either another bow or a flower. He wore a floppy hat, short jacket, and plus fours. They were both very young.
“His parents,” Gloria said, almost unnecessarily. “They both died in Auschwitz. They lasted over a year, which is not bad for survival in that camp. My parents didn’t last two months. This is Harvey, about six years old.” She pointed to another picture in the deck. A serious-looking boy in short pants, jacket, and tie. “He was on his way to a birthday party. His brother,” another serious-looking boy, but taller, dressed more formally, in long pants, “and sisters,” two squirmy little girls with ponytails and ballooning white dresses. David didn’t ask what happened to them all.
Then there was a group shot of ten boys in black bathing togs. They were various ages and sizes, all sitting on the edge of a swimming pool, their feet dangling into the water. David instantly recognized the chunky, angular boy in the middle, sitting next to his shorter, dark-haired friend. Again, they had their arms around each other’s shoulders. They were grinning in much the same way.
On the far side, near a water sprinkler, were Harvey Singer and his older brother.
“Do you know any of these other people?” David asked her gently.
“I’m from Budapest,” Gloria told him. “Didn’t meet Harvey till after the war. I didn’t know any of his friends. All I can say is which is him and which is his brother. And there is Ferenc Lantos from the sweetshop I was telling you about.” She pointed at the kid next to Harvey’s brother. He had a mop of blond hair and long, thin arms with big ungainly hands he crossed over his belly. “We met him in Eger,” she said. “Harvey had known him before, of course, but I hadn’t. He was so glad to see Harvey had...survived. Hadn’t seen each other since before the war.”
“How did you get the photographs?”
“Ferenc. He’d found them in the debris of the Singers’ house and kept them all these years. Some people never forget,” she added, and he saw there were tears in her eyes.
***
From the Plaza lobby David called Singer and Singer Clothiers in the Bronx and asked to speak to Mr. Singer. Mel, his name was, short for Melwyn. They weren’t expecting him in the factory for a few days. Had he tried the showroom on Seventh? The rece
ptionist in the showroom was no more helpful. Melwyn, she thought, was taking a brief vacation in Florida.
Maybe Joe Martelli would talk to him when he returned.
Twenty-One
JUDITH HAD NEVER liked Marsha’s office. There was normally a fortresslike quality to it, secretarial guards questioning intruders every few steps. Even on a Saturday you had to sign in with the uniformed man on the ground floor, who summoned the ever-present and indomitable Miss Stanley, who finally led the way to Marsha’s office. Judith’s relationship with Miss Stanley had, for the past ten years, straddled a fine line between mutual suspicion and open enmity. Miss Stanley thought Judith wasted Marsha’s precious time—there were already too many demands on her from diverse unworthy quarters; Judith found Margaret Stanley presumptuous and inflexible—an image that Margaret would have enjoyed hearing attributed to herself.
The offices along the corridor were of uniform size and shape, like monks’ cells. More important people were on the window side, with views over the blue and white glass towers of Fifth Avenue; others had overhead fluorescents. None had curtains, carpets, or more than two extra chairs. There were a few tentative reaches for individuality: small potted plants, posters, family portraits, book jackets, a crocheted seat cushion. Marsha’s space was distinctly superior: it made a conscious statement that set her apart and above the others. She had a rug, curtains to block Fifth Avenue, drapes for show on the inside wall, plants, prints, coffee table with couch and chairs, a safe, a liquor cabinet with discreet sliding doors, an armchair on rollers, and an imposing oak desk. The windowsill, like her coffee table, was piled high with manuscripts, her desk covered with letters, folders, envelopes, and handwritten notes. Knowing Marsha as well as she did, Judith guessed the notes would be reminders to herself. Marsha was proud of her unerring memory for facts, comments, events—all with the aid of these little mechanical assists.