by Dick Cluster
“Ah,” said the Reverend, crossing his fork and knife on his plate and then wiping his lips and setting down his napkin with a flourish. This, Alex imagined, was the way he must invite the parishioners to join him in song, if the Anglican church did that. Or it was the way he would gather away the fallen chess pieces after triumphantly crying “Check” and “Mate.”
“Well, Berlin is not the city it once was. I’m told the Berliners appreciate a wry comment much more than a prolix explanation. It’s been an old cleric’s pleasure elucidating this mystery, but in the end, I suspect you’re barking up the wrong tree. Mind you take good care of my daughter, when you return.”
Alex looked back and forth from father to daughter, knowing better than to step into that breach.
15. White Cliffs
Alex kissed Meredith good-bye in Covent Garden, leaving her to the ministrations of her father. This was not so much to avoid farewells— though there was that— as to appear in the station alone. If anyone was keeping an eye on his departure, however, that eye was professional and invisible. Alex made his way past tour groups and reserved cars to a second-class coach near the front of the Channel-bound train. He sat next to an Englishwoman in a gray suit, who chatted about the theater to an identically dressed Englishwoman opposite. Nothing could be more normal.
The train’s departure had the usual magical quality of imperceptibility. One moment the heavy car was stationary, motionless, a part of the scene. In the next its motionlessness was transformed by some alchemy into a slow, gliding acceleration. There was no sound of engines— on the wings or under any hood— no rush down the runway or letting out of the clutch; just a vague cerebral knowledge of a locomotive, pulling, somewhere ahead.
Perhaps, Alex thought, it was this unhurried inevitability of railroad travel that appealed to him. You went where the engine pulled, where the tracks led. You did not concern yourself, and you did not rush.
For the first hour of the trip to Dover, he set to work with pencil and paper trying to diagram the bizarre and Byzantine way of financing trade that, as a by-product, produced paper that investors could buy and sell. What he came up with was this: If you had money to launder and a destination to send it to, you could funnel that money through a pretend commercial transaction that turned it into a legitimate piece of commercial paper that was as good as gold. All you needed was someone in a bank to process the documents and otherwise look the other way. Alex’s diagram had an arrow labeled Jack going into a rectangle that represented this device, and an arrow labeled pol coming out. The rectangle was labeled B. Acceptance (Jerry). For good measure he added a close-up illustration of the device, in the form of a drawing of a hand wielding an old-fashioned rubber stamp. Then he added another arrow coming out of the rectangle. This arrow ended at a circle labeled Cynthia, with a question-mark attached. Discarding the idea that Meyer had been trying to create any kind of imbalance in the bank, he settled on the simpler one that Meyer had decided to divert some funds from their intended recipients to his abandoned daughter. How he had thought he could get away with that, Alex didn’t know.
Satisfied with this as a working hypothesis, for the second hour he slept off the last of the washed-out feeling. When the train reached the sea, he felt that his yo-yo period was over for awhile. He sniffed the salt air, then hurried to the jetfoil lounge and grabbed a phone. He had talked Meredith into lending him her credit card.
“Mr. Glauberman.” Trevisone’s response reached him, via satellite, from the other side of the Atlantic. It was clear, though slightly delayed. “Glad you could fit me in.”
“Yes,” said Alex. “Did Bernie call you?”
“Bernie?”
“Oh. That’s my lawyer. I thought maybe he had called.”
“No. It might be that he should. When did you give Gerald Meyer your business card?”
“My card?”
“That’s what I said. Where the hell are you, anyway? Are you really in London?”
“I can see white cliffs outside,” Alex told him, smart-mouthing automatically while he tried to figure out what was going on now. Had the police found the card, in Meyer’s hotel room maybe? Wouldn’t they have searched the room the first day, before Trevisone had allowed Alex to leave? “When I get on the boat, I’ll have a better view.”
“Uh-huh. Been there myself. What country are you going to next?”
“I’m not sure, Sergeant.”
“Uh-huh. The card had your handwriting on it, and your home address. So now it don’t seem like such an accident he got shot outside your house.”
“I give out lots of cards,” Alex said. “You told me Meyer’s pockets bad been stripped. Where did you get this particular card, and what makes you think Meyer had it, or that Meyer got it from me?”
“Somebody gave it to us, somebody that wanted to be helpful to the police. It had Meyer’s fingerprints on it.”
Ah, Alex thought. So that’s the way it fits together. That’s why Trevisone only sent me a cable, instead of sending a bobbie to Meredith’s door.
“Look, if the person who killed him planned ahead, they could easily have set that up,” Alex reasoned. He knew the same reasoning would already have occurred to the detective. “Getting his prints on my card, using my house as a red herring…”
“Yeah. But why you?”
“I’ll get to that, if you’ll give me a minute. Is there anything else that points to me?”
“Yeah. I found out you changed five hundred cash into British and German before you took off. That’s a lot of cash to be carrying. And we found the murder weapon.”
“You’re not going to tell me you found my fingerprints on that?”
“No. It was wiped. But we did find it in the rubbish behind your shop. We’re working on a search warrant. Where did you say you were Friday night?”
“In my shop, the way it says in my deposition. Look, Sergeant, that’s a very neat picture, but you know it doesn’t make any sense: I used my card to lure the guy to my home address, then I shot him, stashed the gun in an obvious place, collected my fee, and fled to the Old World. Then what? I’ve got a kid waiting for me, and I’ll be back in two weeks just like I said. If you want me then, you can have me. The reason I called is because I have some loose ends for you. They aren’t neat, and parts are probably wrong. Two guys grabbed Gerald Meyer in Davis Square, out of your jurisdiction, last Friday about five, and took him away and roughed him up. About six I sat and talked with him in Petros’s coffee shop, three blocks from your desk. I told him I was going to Europe. He offered me twenty-five hundred dollars to visit his abandoned daughter while I was over here. He wanted me to get back something he sent her.”
“Something like what?”
“I don’t know, but I have a guess. That would be bankers’ acceptances for nonexistent transactions, used to launder money for payoffs to public officials. Do you want me to say that again?”
There was a pause, longer than the transatlantic time delay. The pause ended with Trevisone saying, “Please.”
“Bankers’ acceptances for nonexistent transactions, used to launder money to make payoffs to pols. You’ll have to check this out through Meyer’s bank. What I mean is, he was using his position to deliver bribes. The bribes weren’t cash money, but something close to it.”
“And why would he be doing that?”
“I don’t know, and anyway, that’s as much as I think it’s safe for me to tell you right now. Somebody knows Meyer asked me to do this. I’m taking a chance by calling you at all. In another day, I might have more news.”
“Glauberman, you are a first-class asshole, you know that? You withheld evidence so I’d let you go visit your girlfriend. And you’re not visiting your girlfriend, am I right, you’re going to see Meyer’s daughter?”
“Well, asshole or not, I’m out of your reach. Maybe I’ve left you out on a limb, but now it’s in both our interests to cooperate. Is there anything else it might be useful for me to know?”
Alex was afraid he might be pushing too hard, but apparently the detective was willing to do things Alex’s way, like it or not.
“We got a tip that Meyer had been hitting the bottle at the airport,” Trevisone said sarcastically, “in case you know anything about that. Anyway, we checked it out, in our jackass slow and careful way. He tried to pick up a woman but she walked out on him. He left. He came back and tried again, seems like, and did better. He left with the second one. So it could’ve been a hooker with big ideas, I don’t know. His pockets were empty, like I said. But why pull the trigger? And why your house? You know what this daughter looks like, by any chance?”
“She’s got an alibi,” Alex said. “She was in Berlin. I called her as soon as you guys left my place. I thought she deserved to know he was dead.”
“Glauberman, you are the limit. Notifying the next of kin is my job, in case you didn’t know. When you called her, she was in Berlin?”
“No, but she called me back an hour later.”
“Oh. Right. And you knew her voice, and you could tell she was calling from Berlin…”
“No, you’re right, I jumped to a conclusion.” He had liked her on the phone, and didn’t want her to be a killer. “I’ll try not to jump to any more. Now look. Suppose I call you back tomorrow, about this same time? I appreciate you telling me as much as you have, and I’ll try to do the same. Think of me like I’m your lonesome end.” Alex laughed. “Or your Wandering Jew.”
He heard a soft cough, a clearing of the throat on the other end of the line. “I don’t give a fuck how you worship,” Trevisone said. “Just make sure you call me back.”
“Yes sir,” Alex answered, and hung up. The jetfoil didn’t board for another quarter hour, and he had one more call to make. He could just catch Maria before she left for school. That would be no help to Laura, trying to get kids out the door, but it would have to do.
Maria’s voice was like a stranger’s, unaccountably high-pitched and childish.
“This is Tuesday,” Alex said. “So I’m on my way to Belgium. What’s happening there, much?”
“Not much.”
“Did you eat all the apples we picked?”
“I brought a bag to school, to share. Is Meredith with you?”
“No, I just left her and got on the train. Now I get on this jet-powered boat and zip across to Belgium, and another train into Germany.”
Maria hadn’t asked what he was riding where. She’d asked whether he was with Meredith.
“Probably I’ll be with her again by the weekend,” he added. “Do you like knowing who I’m with?”
Transatlantic silence greeted that.
“I took my last pills Sunday, so I’m all done with that for now.”
“Did you sleep all day Monday?”
“Not all day, but a lot.”
“And you were sad.”
“Right. But not now.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“‘Bye, kid. I miss you. I’ll see you not this Saturday but the next.”
Alex listened to the click of the broken connection. Good marks on sparring with the sergeant, bad marks with the kid. But he didn’t know what else he had wanted to say, or hear. Intimacy was a hard thing to get out of a telephone.
Maybe this place was getting to him. Dover. He’d crossed from here with Laura, a decade ago, on a sunny, early-fall day not too different from this. They’d sat somewhere and read World Series news in the International Herald Trib— Yankees demolished, four straight. Alex, Brooklyn-born, had taken it as an omen. He’d been seeking omens anyway, now that the decision was as good as made. On the crossing, they’d bought two small bottles of champagne. They’d gone on deck to drink up, and then they’d ceremoniously launched the empty bottles into the brine. The bottles had disappeared. They’d thrown Laura’s diaphragm after.
Alex turned away from the phone and found himself wondering how Reverend Phillips would get on with his father, if they ever chanced to meet. Ira Glauberman had little affection for the Old World, and most likely it would take a wedding to coax Reverend Phillips across the other way. But just supposing… Would Ira enjoy showing his new in-law the better delicatessens of Queens, and the tattered but still magical glories of Broadway?
Not that Alex had any interest in a repeat performance of marriage. Nor did the parson’s daughter, as far as he knew. It was children she would have liked, not a ceremony or a title or a ring. He was only thinking these thoughts because he was here in Dover, missing his daughter. And because he was here in Dover, leaving Meredith behind.
16. Hitler’s Ghost
The jetfoil might as well have been a 747, for all the sense it gave of being seaborne. Belted into his airliner-style seat, Alex found that the cramped windows and low angle yielded only a small slice of Channel to his eye. His thoughts went back to his father, who had crossed the waters not far west of here, without benefit of a view. His father had been down in the hold of a troopship, with German torpedoes and artillery zeroing in.
The Continent was at peace now, the alliances of nations reshaped. Or, as Bob Dylan had put it, “We forgave the Germans, and they became friends.” In the meantime the difference between war and peace had dwindled down to a question of seconds. Somewhere, in clean, modern underground bunkers, missile technicians sat poised to wage the deadliest of all European wars, and the last.
These dark musings reduced Alex’s own murky business— and his bodily ills— to a pleasing insignificance. In Ostend, he stepped briskly off the craft onto a concrete walkway. He glanced backward over his shoulder toward the big jet engines mounted on the open deck. He would have liked to linger in the salt air and examine these machines. Instead, he followed the line of passengers onward into an enclosed, carpeted hallway. The Belgian officials were foppish and comical in their uniforms and braid, like a collection of clean-shaven Hercule Poirots. They asked no questions, stamped no passports, and stared at no bruises on one’s face. They waved Alex forward toward his train.
Until darkness fell, he watched the passage of the right, tight green fields and the right, tight picture-book towns. Then night, the lights of Brussels, and darkness again. Sometimes the train plunged in and out of a deeper darkness, roaring through mountain tunnels. The German border crossing, just before nine; sounded a different note. Hearing clipped German commands spoken by young, blondish men in uniforms gave him a chill. Not long after, at Aachen, his car was dropped between platforms, on a middle track. Alex warmed up his dormant Deutsch by studying travelers’ phrases in a pocket dictionary. Liegewagen, couchette car. Anschliessen (railroading term), to connect. Yes, he reminded himself, and also (geopolitical term) to annex. The Anschluss had taken Austria, if he remembered his history, in a single day.
When the Ost-West Express rolled in, Alex’s car was pulled backward to a switch and then shoved forward, to be annexed. The coach passengers looked at their watches and stayed seated, but Alex picked up his things and descended to the platform in search of a Liegewagen to match the number on his reservation. He tried to acclimate his ear to snatches of conversation, picking out words as he passed. He found the right car toward the front of the train, the right compartment midway along its corridor.
The compartment was dark except for a reading light on one of the bottom couchettes. A black man, his eyes on a book, greeted Alex quietly in French. Opposite, a white woman, face to the wall, appeared to be asleep. The beds above these two had been folded down from the wall and provided with a sheet and blanket each. The third tier remained folded up against the walls. Only four reservations, then. The fourth occupant, presumably, would be boarding later in the night.
Lifting his bags to the rack, Alex spread out the sheet on one of the empty bunks. He pulled off his sneakers, mumbled “Pardon” as he stepped on the edge of the cushion where the man was reading, and pulled himself up. There was a strange, un-American communality about this accommodation. He bunched his windbreaker on top of the detachable
armrest for a pillow, tucking his ticket and passport underneath. Then he lay flat, staring up into nothing, as the train pulled off toward the east. It would not reach Hannover until after midnight. He listened to the rhythmic clacking, and tried to conjure some vision of Cynthia Meyer.
All he could summon from the phone conversation was a tone of voice, a kind of mocking tone, mocking and self-mocking. The tone had taken him and his message in stride, and seen something perhaps darkly amusing in them. He wondered whom she might have become, if Gerald Meyer had brought her back with him to grow up in the fabulous fifties. He could see her in Westchester, maybe, in a hired photographer’s touched-up shot, at the bat mitzvah party she would surely have had. An uncomfortable just-teenager, she posed with her father’s itchy woolen arm around her bare shoulders, awkward and blushing in a black formal dress against a white tablecloth and a bouquet of mixed flowers. Cindy Meyer. She squirmed in front of the camera with beautiful sad eyes, glowing cheeks, and honey-colored hair.
Alex was nearly asleep when the conductor slid open the door, demanding a ticket. In his best German, Alex asked to please be awakened at Hannover, where he was meeting someone. When he did sleep, the teenager in strapless black stole silently into his dream. She emerged, on Gerald Meyer’s arm, from the North Terminal bar. Meyer’s arm was around her waist now, and creeping upward in a drunken way to experimentally stroke her right breast. She recoiled, but there was no escaping her father’s embrace. Then she stood beneath the living room windows of Alex’s apartment, blowing smoke away from the barrel of a little nickel-plated gun. She put the gun into a black patent-leather bag with a silver clasp, which she handed to Alex through the window. There was a right thing to do with it, Alex was sure, but he didn’t know what.
He woke with a start, froze, then breathed and dropped his head to the pillow and breathed again. He tried to meditate on his breath, matching the in-and-out to the clicking of the wheels. When the train stopped to take on and discharge passengers in Köln— or Cologne— Alex did not notice. He crossed the Rhine bridge in a dreamless sleep. It was much farther on that something woke him. The offending thing bothered his neck just below the Adam’s apple. He reached to scratch at it, and then someone hissed curt syllables at him. He froze again.