by Toni Jordan
I remain yours faithfully,
Martin Fischer
Under this are an address in Williamsburg and a phone number.
‘It was almost five years ago,’ says Caddie. ‘He could have moved house.’
‘We won’t know unless we phone.’ Jamie looks at his watch. ‘But not now. Now, it’s three a.m. in New York. We need to fill in the time.’
She knows what those words would mean if Philip had said them—but Jamie is reaching for the phone.
‘Pizza?’
The sun is heavy in the western sky. Tomorrow is Sunday so they agree to phone at midnight Brisbane time, 9 a.m. over there. It’s an easy decision for two single, childless people but once it’s made, there’s a change in the air. Jamie has no television in his empty house. They can’t make the usual vacuous conversation about furnishings and curios because there aren’t any. No photos in frames, no fruit in bowls, no curtains, no cushions.
Jamie has half a camembert in the fridge and a packet of Jatz, but the pizza comes quickly, delivered by a tired middle-aged woman in an old Ford. Half margherita for Caddie, half vegetarian with chilli for him. She finds her purse in her bag but he waves it away. The kitchen cupboards are missing their doors and the crockery is packed in cartons under the house so they eat straight from the box with paper towel for plates. Jamie spots a corkscrew on the window ledge and produces from the front room a dusty bottle of red wine. When he opened the door to fetch it, she spied a mattress on the floor and, suspended above it, the stark white veil of a mosquito net open like a parachute. He shut the door behind him.
In the kitchen, he rinses two paper cups and pours. Rips another two sheets of paper towel from the roll and hands one to her. He lays the other across his lap as though it’s fine linen.
‘It might surprise you to learn I don’t have a lot of visitors,’ Jamie says.
She tells him it’s fine. She wishes she knew something—anything—about wine. Her father never drank it. When she was a child, only winos did; everyone else drank XXXX, or Bundy and Coke. Jamie’s red tastes metallic to her, and faintly soapy. She takes delicate sips to guard against a winey clown-smile and says nothing at all. She lifts a sagging slice from the oil-shadowed box, leaning over the paper towels. It smells magnificent. Tiny bites, mouth closed. There’s something about the house that demands it. Unlike every other home owner of her acquaintance, Jamie doesn’t talk about his renovation, for which she says a silent prayer of thanksgiving. She’s known people who can make the pulling-up of the kitchen lino last longer than Out of Africa.
‘Help yourself to the phone,’ he says, ‘if you need to let anyone know where you are.’
He looks weary. She bets he wishes they’d never begun. She wonders how people lived in a time before television without dying of embarrassment. Dust motes dance in the valiant last sunbeams. Distant traffic. An itch behind her ear, another on her wrist. The old house creaks and groans.
‘Are you hot?’ he says. ‘There’s a fan in one of the boxes under the house. I could get it.’
‘It’s fine. They were made for heat, these houses.’
‘True,’ he says. Then: ‘How about Scrabble? I have a set around here somewhere.’
*
She loses the first couple of games, can’t seem to put words together for anything. English seems impossibly limited, so few words for so many things, and tonight she can only recall the gaps. Is this really my first language? she thinks. They sit across from each other, as far apart as the table will permit. Outside, the garden settles in to its own hours. She hears a possum clambering across the roof. Jamie doesn’t seem to notice. The Scrabble set is old and the dark red box pristine. Caddie orders her tiles along the rack, in possibilities. Jamie leaves them where he places them. No fiddling. When he moves the tiles, it’s deliberate. He aligns them on the board with the tip of his index finger.
Then she relaxes and starts to win.
‘She’s on a streak,’ Jamie says.
‘Care to make a small wager? I’m sure this is just a temporary reversal of fortune.’
‘No fear,’ he says. ‘I think you were foxing at the beginning. Though we can try something else, if you’d like? Monopoly?’
‘“Try something else”—is that Bulimbian for chicken?’ She feels a bead of sweat run down her back. A persistent moth headbutts the light bulb.
‘I’m merely being a good host,’ he says. ‘Ganivets never shy away from a challenge.’
‘Then we stick with this. I like this game,’ she says, ‘I like the rules. You get what you get. No selling or buying; no chucking out. You might be blessed with wonderful tiles or cursed with xs and js. It’s up to you to make the best of it.’
‘A person who likes a challenge,’ he says.
‘I like…’ She thinks. ‘Making things move. Going from one thing to something else.’
‘So what is it you like about Inga?’
‘Everything. Raised in a tiny village, parents had no education, and she writes this book that changes lives.’
‘So the story of the author matters. It’s not just about her work.’
She frowns. ‘It’s the whole picture. A person’s work is the extension of themselves. Plus, it’s the impossibility of it. The near impossibility.’
‘“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.”’
‘You do know your Quixote.’
‘I told you, I love that book. I do take books off the shelf, you know. Occasionally I even open them and turn the pages.’
His hands are still as they play but his gaze flicks over his tiles, dancing between them, ordering and reordering in his head. He makes different sounds with the tiles as he lays them down, like punctuation: one he settles edge first and then clacks it down, for emphasis; he slides another with one finger, a smooth swoosh like a child with a toy car. There’s a language here, she thinks. You could speak it, if you knew the rules.
They play until almost midnight and it’s only when he takes off his watch (they’ve decided to try speed Scrabble, against the clock for variety) that they realise the time has passed.
‘Time to ring,’ he says. ‘I imagine you’re dying to get home.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Dying.’
*
The phone rings a dozen times, no answer. She’s about to suggest they try again in another hour when his face changes: someone has picked up. He’s holding the receiver because it’s his phone (and his phone bill, she thinks: international long distance). He turns the receiver slightly away from his face and she brings the side of her face to its other side. His knuckles, tight around the receiver, brush against her cheek before she corrects it.
‘I’m not sure if I have the right number. I’m looking for Martin Fischer,’ he says.
There’s a faint crackle on the line like paper being screwed into a ball.
‘This is Marty.’
Jamie gestures towards her with the receiver, offering it. She shakes her head.
‘Mr Fischer, my name is Jamie Ganivet, from Brisbane. Australia. I’m calling regarding a letter you wrote me five years ago.’
He won’t remember, she thinks. It’s been too long. They live on opposite sides of the world, in two cities that couldn’t be more different. She can’t think of anything that could link them. It’s absurd. If Brisbane and New York are somehow connected, then the world must be a markedly smaller place than she has always believed.
‘It’s Marty. Australia, did you say?’
Yes, Jamie says. Brisbane. Australia.
The wonder of it. Marty Fischer whistles loud enough for Jamie to pull his ear away. ‘I remember, of course I remember. Well, fancy that. One of the Karlson guys, the down under one. You took your sweet time.’
‘I wasn’t in a position,’ Jamie begins. ‘I couldn’t help you back then.’
‘But now?’
Jamie angles his head to catch Caddie’s eye. ‘Now I have a lot of questions.’
&n
bsp; ‘Funny, now I have no questions and even less interest. Hang on.’ There’s a clunk as the phone is laid down somewhere, on a laminate kitchen table, Caddie imagines, and then a stream of fast, distant talking. She can only pick up every third word but the others are easy to guess: you kids, eating in front of the television, just this once, bit of peace and don’t spill anything or so help me. The family breakfast she hears so faintly could hardly be further from her and Jamie, alone in this hot house in the middle of the quiet night. They are like two lost astronauts connected to civilisation by a spiral cord.
‘OK. The grandkids, they’re watching cartoons. The house could burn down, they don’t notice,’ Marty says, when he comes back.
‘Marty,’ Jamie says, ‘I’m going to put you on to my colleague, Caddie Walker.’
She’s mouthing no but Jamie hands her the receiver and she takes it, steels herself. Introduces herself to this distant voice, this orphaned son.
‘Why did you send that letter, Marty?’
A sigh escapes down the line. ‘Look, I don’t know. I was grabbing at straws back then. I knew the old man was a typesetter. I knew the last job he did was that missing Karlson book, the burnt one. I got it in my head to find out what it was…what people say about my old man in all the books about it, and it turns out they don’t say anything. And then… like I said, I’m not interested anymore.’
‘Well, everybody—Karlson scholars, academics, historians—they know your father didn’t typeset that book. Charles Cleborn, he was Inga’s publisher—’
‘No kidding,’ Marty says.
‘You must know about the posthumous letter from Inga, thanking Charles for doing the typesetting himself.’
‘Inga never wrote that letter. She couldn’t’ve. She was dead by then. Look, the letter arrives two days after the fire and everyone thinks it’s from her. Inga. But two days for a mail delivery? In 1939? Now, maybe. Now, it’d take them a week, the bums. Not then. Not on your life.’
Jamie and Caddie look at each other. Jamie takes back the phone. Caddie comes a little closer, then closer still. She wants to hear. She wants, beyond reason, to be closer.
‘The provenance of the letter’s been established,’ Jamie says. ‘Her stationery. The handwriting, it’s been shown to be Inga’s, compared with examples from several sources. There were heavy snow falls around then and the letter was delayed, that’s the theory.’
‘I don’t know anything about handwriting but no, no way. It’s faked or something. That stuff about the weather: convenient, but garbage. Listen carefully. Inga never wrote the letter because she was dead by then. And also because my old man typeset that book.’
Caddie brings her palm to her mouth.
‘The old man was no angel. He had a temper, he was mean when he drank. He had…certain political beliefs. He bitched about that job every time he came home. Even tried to resign once and Cleborn offered him a bonus if he stuck with it. He promised me a Buck Rogers rocket pistol, which I never got, by the way. Then, a few weeks after he finishes and three days after the fire, he’s dead. It stunk to high heaven.’
‘You suspect there’s more to it?’
‘I don’t suspect, buddy, I know there’s more to it. I was only a kid, but everyone knew. Stabbed, around the corner from our place? Where he’d spent his whole life? Not in a zillion years.’
‘Your mother. She didn’t say anything to anyone? To the police, maybe?’
‘The police were no fans of my father so let’s just say they were not motivated to work very hard on the case.’
In the pause that follows, Jamie says, ‘It must’ve been hard on her. Your mother.’
‘She never talked about it. I mean at first, the grief—said she shoulda told him the money didn’t matter. She wished he never met Charles Cleborn, or Inga, or any of that crowd. But we did OK for a widow with three kids and no job, I guess. We still lived in the same shitty apartment. We got by.’
‘Where did the money come from?’
‘Who knows? I was a kid. Rent gets paid, food appears on the table. That kind of stuff doesn’t mean much to kids.’
‘People die in muggings,’ Jamie says. ‘All the time. Your father’s murder must have been a coincidence.’
Caddie hears a rasping noise: a man in his mid-fifties running a leathering hand over an unshaven face. Turning pale, thinking about his grandchildren eating in front of the television in the next room and praying he’ll never have to leave them. No matter how many years have intervened, the death of a boy’s father is never the past. Marty Fischer will hang up now, surely. They’ll ring back and he won’t answer and that will be the end of that.
‘You ain’t the first person to try to tell me that,’ Marty says. There’s a shrug in his voice. ‘I could care less these days, frankly. I mean it used to make my blood boil—being treated like a fool or a liar by the kind of dumbass who believes in a coincidence like that. And I wanted to find out why, you know? Why we lost—’ He clears his throat. ‘Anyway, now I know the full story I don’t really give a shit who offed him.’
‘What full story?’
‘We found out…it was when my mother died last August. There was a box of the old man’s stuff among her things and…’ He clears his throat again and lowers his voice. The kids in front of the TV, Caddie thinks.
‘Look, you wanna know? My father was a Nazi. An actual, card-carrying, paid-up member of the German-American Bund.’
A world away, Marty Fischer sits in his kitchen, telling his story. All across Bulimba, all across this city, people are asleep beneath their cotton sheets, alone and together, spread wide and curled tight. In this room, in this half-empty house, Caddie and Jamie are still where they were ten seconds ago under the naked bulb, possum still scrambling on the roof. They are not the same, though. Caddie looks at Jamie’s face and knows it mirrors hers: a sharp intake of breath, a pallor. Horror and excitement; revulsion and the thrill of the chase. A Nazi who knew Inga, Charles and the missing book. Killed only three days after the fire. To cover it up? Almost five decades have passed. A clue to the mystery of who killed Inga Karlson: have they found it?
‘Your father.’ Jamie’s other hand goes to his own throat. ‘I don’t know how to ask this, Marty.’
Down the line: ‘I’ve always found that straight out is best.’
When Jamie speaks again his voice is softer than she’s ever heard it. ‘Was your father capable of violence?’
A short, harsh laugh. ‘That’s affirmative.’
‘Marty,’ Jamie says. ‘We don’t know anything yet, and there’s lots of research to be done. Interviews with people who knew him, archival research on the ground. But if it turned out that your father was involved in the fire that killed Inga Karlson—how would you feel about that?’
There’s a pause that makes Caddie feel sick to her stomach.
‘I read that book—what’s it called? All Has an End? After the war. My kids have all read it.’
‘Marty,’ Jamie says. ‘This is really important. This is something the world will want to know.’
The squeak of a distant chair, the wheeze of a heavy man sitting. He was a small boy, Caddie reminds herself. If he wants to protect his father, that’s something she understands. He’d be within his rights to hang up on them. She braces herself.
He says: ‘These bums. Beating women and kids, terrorising half the goddamn world. He was a rotten father and a worse husband. Just tell the truth, that’s all.’
‘Are you sure?’ Caddie says. ‘Your grandchildren. This might be a big deal.’
‘Understand this: if he had anything to do with that fire, I’d have killed him myself. If the kids and grandkids can’t be proud of him then I’ll damn well make them proud of me.’
‘It’s a horrible thought, we understand,’ Jamie says.
‘Let’s just say I wouldn’t put anything past him. Probably one of his Nazi pals killed him, that’s what probably happened. I got distracted by the flowers for a wh
ile but if you lay down with dogs. Well. Fleas is the least of your worries.’
Caddie tilts the phone so that it’s level between her and Jamie. ‘What flowers, Marty?’ she says.
‘That’s got nothing to do with anything.’
Caddie nods, even though she knows Marty can’t see her. ‘But you thought they did, at one time? Some flowers? Did your father send some flowers to someone?’
‘Look. I’m pretty sure this is personal business, but what happened is this: at the old man’s funeral, this big bunch of flowers came. Biggest you’ve ever seen. White lilies and chrysanthemums and you name it, four feet high.’
‘Who sent them?’
‘Someone my ma didn’t care much for. She takes one look at it, she yanks the card from the flowers and reads it. Then she picks up the flowers by the brass stand and she walks back down the aisle, dragging them along the floor of the St John the Evangelist, screech screech, and she tosses them down the front stairs. Crash, it goes. And whaddaya know, she rips the card in half and throws it out the door too.’
‘The card,’ Jamie says. ‘I don’t suppose she told you what was on it?’
‘She didn’t say a word,’ he says. ‘Never mentioned it. It happened, though. Like it was yesterday. No one in the church knew where to look.’
‘Oh,’ Jamie says.
‘Things like that, they drive kids crazy. The loss part hadn’t sunk it yet. Later, sure. But at the funeral—I was curious. I mean, he used to buy me Detective Picture Stories, Detective Comics. Mostly after he belted the living Christ out of me, but I was a regular junior Ellery Queen. Anyway, I said I had to pee and snuck out the back, around to the front of the church. Someone cleaned up the flowers but they didn’t see the ripped-up card in the snow. I found it, eight little bits, because I was looking for it.’
‘And what did it say?’
‘Short and sweet. With deepest sympathy, then it was signed. But this is nothing, and I don’t want this blabbed everywhere. If the old man committed a crime and you can nail him—go right ahead. But private business should stay private. Probably he was having an affair, probably that was it. Why else was Ma so mad?’