Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3

by Dick Cluster

  “Kicking out,” said the woman with the stripe. “He kicked you right out. You better stay away from that shit.”

  The rest of the crowd, seeing someone take responsibility, moved on. Alex said, “Yeah, I’ll try.” He shook off the helpful hands and made his way, hunched over, fists in his pockets, down to the corner. He felt raw, raging, and foolish, all at once. He walked doggedly but gingerly, head down. When he reached the station, he continued across the big, grimy lobby, past the long trains backed up to the old iron gates, until at last an electric eye slid open the door to the Continental travel office before him.

  He found himself in plastic-land, an insulated world of rounded counters and textured pastel walls. Taking a waiting number from beneath a digital prompter, he tried to slump back in an upholstered bench. He winced and stiffened as soon as his ribs took any weight. His mouth had stopped bleeding inside. He could feel the cheek swelling, and noticed that his right eye was starting to close. When the prompter signaled his turn, he presented himself to a long-faced man whose lank, parted hair showed a few flecks of gray.

  The man pursed his lips as his eyes flickered over Alex, but when he set to work his eyes quickly veiled over. He guided Alex through the purchase of a second-class ticket to Berlin, via a Channel crossing to Ostend, Belgium. To catch his connection without leaving early in the morning, Mr. Glauberman would have to pay extra and take the jetfoil across. In Aachen, as Cynthia Meyer had said, his car would be tacked onto the Ost-West Express from Paris.

  The clerk waited for his computer screen to register Alex’s reservation. In the meantime, he told Alex that he might know Aachen by its French name of Aix-la-Chapelle, just as the Germans still knew Liege as Lüttich, no matter what. And both sides were still fighting over Cologne versus Köln. They would fight over it again someday, Mr. Glauberman would see.

  When he said “fight,” the clerk let his eyes pass disapprovingly over Alex’s face. Then he advised him to invest five pounds in a couchette for the night journey from Aachen to Berlin. It could get pretty grotty, he said, sitting up in a coach all night.

  To Alex, none of it seemed the least bit real. He paid cash and left the station, boarding a double-decker bus at random. He rode for half an hour along a tortuous route through a flat, low-slung, endless gray city. This was Orwell’s London, he thought. That gray, cheerless city of the grimmest future. It was not in ruins, nor under rocket bombs, but it exuded a cold, crumbling heartlessness from just beneath the surface of things. He remembered a line, perhaps the last one, from the hopeless conclusion of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston dreamed that “the long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.”

  Maybe Meyer had hoped for that bullet, maybe not. Alex remembered making a point of that issue in Moselle’s office, though he couldn’t say why. From now on— he felt his jaw again and winced— it wasn’t what Gerald Meyer wanted that mattered. He wasn’t in this anymore to do his client’s bidding. From now on, he was in it for lack of a way out.

  Alex climbed down, finally, somewhere the driver said was Camden Town. The place didn’t matter, really. The point was only to keep personal things personal, and not bring the results of his own willfulness down on Meredith and her friends. The point was to walk a few zigzag blocks hatless through the rain, to make sure as best he could that he wasn’t being followed. Then he flagged a cab, telling the driver the neighborhood he wanted but not the address. When they reached familiar territory, he asked to be let off at the outdoor market.

  The market had shrunk, most of the stall operators pursuing Monday fortunes elsewhere— or idle, or in the pubs, Alex didn’t know. A few lifeless yellow chickens still dangled, and a stranded red fish observed the chickens with sightless, colorless eyes. Alex saw himself as Orwell’s hero, Winston, stranded helpless like the fish. What was it the little man from the Thought Police had said?

  Of course: “You are the dead.”

  * * *

  Alex managed to take some comfort from the fact that his sentiments did not extend quite so far.

  The house was still empty, though a new note from Meredith, in violet felt-tip pen, sat propped against the salt shaker: Back again at five. By this time it was too late for Alex to put ice on his bruises. He climbed unsteadily to the second floor and drew a bath, in which he lay submerged, soaking his injuries in the warm, womblike, buoying water.

  When he woke the water was cold, and his head ached fiercely. He jumped up and then sat back immediately on the edge of the tub. He felt once again that someone had drained his oil and not replaced it. He stood slowly, dried himself gently, wrapped himself in the towel, and trudged upstairs through the empty house. At last he lowered himself carefully onto the bed, where his mind dragged him painfully around a slow, muddy racecourse, a course that began with Gerald Meyer in a long-ago occupied Berlin.

  The course was marked with mileposts, and the mileposts were shattered lives. He knew this was a private tragedy that he had blundered into unasked, but it had opened and made room for him too. Now he was powerless to do anything but follow, and others, in his wake, could only follow him. When he woke again, he found himself sobbing into the pillow. Meredith was sitting beside him, pressing her fingers into the spasmodic muscles of his back.

  “I really didn’t mean to make things worse for you,” Alex blurted out between shaken breaths. “I really didn’t mean to be such a fool…” Hiding his face from exposure and from contact, he felt Meredith massaging his back and neck, very lightly exploring the bruised surface of his left side, and then slowly stroking his hair. From a long way off, her words carried solace despite a hint of desperation.

  “I don’t know what happened to you, but this part now, this is only the drug. It’s an aftereffect, that’s all. Like a bad trip. Remember bad trips? The thoughts are real, but not…but not usual. The chemistry changes, and the thoughts change. It’s the drug, honey, it’s left you… without your armor. It’ll grow back. Shh. Quiet now. It’ll grow back soon.”

  14. Acceptance

  Thank God, Meredith announced, for in the morning at least there would be sun. She gave Alex a few minutes to study his face in the mirror, where purple beneath his eye seemed to glow eerily next to the darkness of his beard. He looked to himself like something out of a black-light exhibit. Meredith hurried him outside into the fresh air and lukewarm rays. She had on the red leather jacket again— an extended loan from Heloise, the medical student, it turned out.

  “We’ll go to the Center,” she said. “You won’t have to talk to anyone but me. And you wanted to pick up some books for Maria, didn’t you?”

  The Center, up Kingsland High Street, offered services to women, immigrants, and the unemployed. Attached to it was a coffee shop and bookstore that provided some income, perhaps.

  “Not much besides muffins and meat pies to eat,” Meredith said on the way, “but those ought to do. There’s Nicaraguan coffee without fear of the FBI, if you’re drinking coffee again.”

  The little shop was crowded with mothers and babies, and with lone men and women reading newspapers. It had a few meat pies remaining. Alex felt washed-out still, and quite sore. But he was at home in his mind again. “It was my weakened state,” he said with his mouth full. “I fell down the steps. Will your father buy that, would you say?”

  “Women who get black eyes from their husbands have used it successfully for years.” Meredith’s color heightened, and her jaw set. “Father will believe what he wants to believe.”

  “Uh-huh,” Alex agreed. “What else besides my bruises are we going to talk with him about?”

  “I don’t think it’s a question of ‘we.’ You’re the man he’s come to see. Finance, government, matters like that will do fine. You know. Man to man. He enjoys showing off his knowledge of worldly things.”

  “But what he really wants to know is whether I’m planning to marry his wayward daughter. And if so, how I’ll support her once I’m dead.”

  Meredith smiled for the first time. H
er green eyes flashed. Her fingers on the coffee cup softened as well.

  “He wants to know that, but he won’t ask. Deep down, he just wants to know what kind of man you are.”

  “What kind am I?”

  “After yesterday, from the sense you made last night, I’d say you’re about as gullible as the average. And like all Americans, you’re easily seduced by the prospect of meeting the peerage.”

  “Ouch. So you think there is no Friedhoff?”

  “I doubt it. I think he meant a cemetery, as you said. Only, J… J for Jewish, maybe.”

  “Jüdische. The Jewish cemetery, in Berlin?” Alex remembered something he would have been happy to forget. “Last night, in my circles, I was thinking about Berlin. The Reichstag, Hitler’s bunker, streets where millions cheered him. That scared me. That’s where the thread leads— the one I’m following back.” He didn’t follow it further just now. “Do you think your father is concerned about you cohabiting with a Jew?”

  “Shit, Alex. He married Roger and me in his own church, and the charm didn’t hold. Probably he’s happy I haven’t come back with an African or an Arab. Now, if you’re feeling so cocky again, it’s time for me to stop playing the supportive wife. Why don’t you give this up, Alex, before you get in any deeper?”

  Alex picked at flakes of pie crust on his plate. He wanted to say that nothing he’d confessed last night should be admissible against him.

  “I don’t know. I can’t. I mean, I don’t know how I could convince them, even if I did decide to give it up. And there’s something about ‘If you can’t get mad, get even.’”

  “So now you have to go,” she said crossly, “because now you have something to prove.”

  “Oh-oh. That I’m a whole person— that I can handle this— that all my faculties are intact?”

  “You said that, not I. I meant something sillier, and simpler— like that nobody can beat you up and get away with it.”

  She let that lie there on the table between them, adding nothing more. Alex offered her a concession, but it wasn’t much. He promised to place a call to the Cambridge police that afternoon, as soon as he reached the Channel. Then he chose a book for Maria about a boy and girl in Jamaica living through a hurricane, and another about a strike organized by the animals in the London zoo. He tried not to deliberate too heavily over the selection, though the thought did cross his mind that these might be the last books he would ever buy her. Meanwhile, he would ask the Reverend to discourse on finance, indeed.

  * * *

  The Reverend Phillips was not tall, but he stood straight amid the swirling crowd by the entrance to the salad-and-sandwich shop. Brunch was in neutral territory, a pseudo-Continental place by Covent Garden. The old man’s pinched face, like the hand he extended, was a pale red that reminded Alex of boiled ham. He’d been in his forties already when Meredith was born, but she swore he was now determined to outlive his children as he’d already outlived his wife. Not that he’d wanted to outlive his wife, but there it was. Meredith accepted his peck on the cheek and led the way inside.

  In the stuffy booth, Alex shifted uneasily. Under the guise of stroking his beard, he tested what places he could touch his face without wincing. The Reverend eyed Alex while pointing a boiled finger at the “No Pershing/No Cruise” button on Meredith’s purse. His sharp Adam’s apple bobbed above his neat navy-blue bow tie.

  “What is the sound of one hand clapping, as the Japanese monks ask?” he inquired.

  “Excuse me?” Alex said. Judging by the Reverend’s eyebrows, the question appeared to be directed at him.

  “I favor disarmament in principle,” Reverend Phillips explained, “but not unilaterally, like my daughter.”

  When Alex hesitated, Meredith began an answer about the unofficial peace movements of Eastern Europe. The old man cut her off. “Well, well,” he said. “I didn’t mean to provoke any disputation.” Meredith flushed but took it. Alex hurried to create a diversion by explaining about falling down the stairs. Then, escaping that topic as well, he said he had a financial question on which perhaps Reverend Phillips could shed some light.

  “Meredith didn’t mention you were interested in banking, Mr. Glauberman.” Reverend Phillips raised his brows, wrinkling the skin above. “Are you thinking of investing the proceeds from your business? To judge from my own local garage, automobile mechanics now have the rest of the populace over quite a barrel.”

  “No. I haven’t got that kind of proceeds. But I got into a conversation with a client who deals in bankers’ acceptances. Would you mind telling me what those are, exactly?”

  The Reverend made clearing-away motions with his hands, as if the explanation he was about to deliver were a trifle that anyone could be expected to know. Behind the motion, with a practiced air, he sifted the facts. Perhaps the man’s problem was that, in retirement, he missed the opportunity to compose and deliver sermons.

  “If I’d understood your interest, I could have brought you a cutting from the Times. They published a series on money-market instruments, not long ago. Suppose you wish to buy, for instance, a shipment of new dynamos for those Volkswagens you repair, hmm? The dynamos are made by a manufacturer in Frankfurt, who is hardly going to advance any credit to an unknown American garage. An acceptance is a device by which a bank lends its good name to help you. In brief, you approach your banker, who issues a letter of credit promising to deliver payment within, for instance, ninety days. You, of course, must sign an agreement to provide the equal funds to your bank.”

  Alex nodded. The explanation was rapid and precise. It was the kind of gadget, unfortunately, for which a circuit diagram ought to come along with the text. But probably the gist was all he needed.

  “Now that you have this unimpeachable backing,” Reverend Phillips continued, “the manufacturer is happy to issue credit, provided he can slightly inflate the price of the dynamo. Because, you see, he doesn’t have to wait the full ninety days to collect.”

  “Because…”

  “Because the manufacturer sells the letter of credit to his own bank, for slightly less than the face value. Now this scrap of paper may be sold and resold any number of times until those ninety days are up, at which time it is redeemed for full face value. You, in the meantime, repair the cars, collect from the customers, and pay off your bank.”

  “I get it,” said Alex. This wasn’t quite true, but he was at least memorizing details for future mulling over. “It’s kind of like a savings bond, which is gaining value all the time as it gets closer to maturity, only it all happens inside ninety days instead of twenty years. Where does the term acceptance come in?” He watched Meredith catch the eye of a waitress several tables away. Unless he was mistaken, preaching rather than eating was sustenance to the old man.

  “There’s an ancient convention that the issuing bank must declare the instrument— the letter— valid, and certify its intention to pay when the note comes due. An officer of the bank must stamp ‘accepted’ upon it— physically, I believe, though perhaps this now has been computerized. Now the letter of credit is called an ‘acceptance,’ which may be traded in the market as I explained.”

  “So, after it’s accepted, it doesn’t matter whether I originally ordered a generator from Bosch, or Margaret Thatcher ordered a missile from General Dynamics, or a drug wholesaler ordered ten pounds of cocaine from Colombia, is that right? All that matters is that Bank of Boston, or whoever, stamps ‘I accept’ in big letters on the back? From then on, it’s like a check made out to cash?”

  “I believe so. Like quite a large check, of course. Many thousands, much more than the cost of a case of dynamos, in practice.”

  A piece of the diagram suddenly became clear in Alex’s mind. “And what would keep someone who wields that stamp from stamping everything in sight, grocery bills or who knows what? Then he or she could sell them himself or herself, on the market?”

  The Reverend frowned. “Almost always male, I should say, though if bright yo
ung women like my daughter were to begin pursuing degrees in finance, maybe in thirty years’ time we should see this change.” Alex hoped Meredith would not try to defend her career right now, because he wanted the man to finish his thought. Alex was wondering whether Meyer been using his position as cog to create some kind of funny money that would come back to haunt Moselle later on.

  “No, I don’t think so,” the Reverend said, glancing at his daughter but then back to Alex. “One reason is the short maturity. Within ninety days the unlucky purchasers will begin trying to redeem them. If no customer has paid in funds to cover them— if you have not put in the money for your dynamos— an imbalance will rapidly show up on the bank’s books. Your, ah, person with the stamp had better have caught a quick flight to Patagonia.”

  Satisfied, Alex looked meaningfully at Meredith, but she had gotten the waitress and was now taking it on herself to place the orders. When the ordering was done, Meredith remarked that capitalism, in its centuries of development, had produced truly bizarre and Byzantine ways of getting products from one place to another. Then she prodded the old man to talk about parish matters until fresh salad and not very fresh bread were served. Finally, the Reverend held up a fork and leveled the tines at Alex.

  “Mr. Glauberman. I can’t help thinking that you had reasons other than academic ones for asking about bogus bankers’ acceptances. Is that so?”

  Alex wolfed down raw spinach and hard-boiled egg. No explanation came to mind, but Reverend Phillips’s boiled-ham hand continued to demand one. This meeting was primarily a ritual combat, he reminded himself, and the goal was for the two parties to walk away with mutual respect.

  “The client I mentioned may have been involved in something like that,” he admitted. “The next thing I heard, he had died— suspiciously, perhaps suicide. I’m supposed to explain things to his daughter, in Berlin. That’s why I’m in such a hurry today. I’m due at Victoria for my train.”