He’d had a year of Harvard, but Cambridge, Mass., must have been like the Sahara to Tosh. The bookworm needed New York. There was so much discipline in his head, so much on file, that he’d never have survived without the instant anarchy of the streets. He was handsome and tall, and sometimes he used Holden’s tailor, even with all the dust on his sleeves.
“Tosh,” Holden said, “you could have been an actor, another Gregory Peck.”
They were sitting in Tosh’s bookstore on Hudson Street.
“I used to be an actor,” Tosh said.
“You never told me that.”
“Yeah, I played the tree in Waiting for Godot. I swear to God. They needed a prop. I was the tree. And I got curtain calls, Holden. Audiences loved me. But I couldn’t hack it, theater life. Late hours, slobbering over drama critics … How can I help?”
“This billionaire wants to hire me. Howard Phipps. Toshie, what do you have on him?”
“Off the cuff? He’s not as rich as the Gettys or the Rothschilds.”
“How did he make it?”
“He built up companies, one at a time. Took tiny outfits and managed them like a hawk.”
“He swears he was a bootlegger.”
“I don’t think he ever legged.”
“And his philanthropies?”
“They’re legit. But I doubt if he loses money on them.”
“The woman who runs his foundation, you have anything on her? The name is Vanderwelle.”
“She must be new,” Toshie said.
“Can you dig into her history … and the old man’s?”
“Holden, I’m never sure what I have.”
“I know that, Tosh. But I’ll help you. He’s ninety-two.”
“Why don’t you go upstairs and visit with the wife? Come back down in an hour.”
And Holden went upstairs to sit with Mrs. Tosh. Why couldn’t he fall in love with a sane woman? He’d picked Andrushka out of a showroom when she’d been selling herself to whatever buyers would have her. And he’d had to kill three men to find a path to Fay.
He returned to Toshie’s downstairs office.
“His name isn’t Phipps,” Tosh said. “It’s Feldstein.”
“A Yid?”
“Without a doubt.”
“Where was he born?”
“In Milwaukee,” Tosh said. “And he’s not ninety-two. He’s eighty-nine.”
“Who the hell would lie about a thing like that? He must have wanted my sympathy.”
“Holden, I sell facts. Not motives.”
And suddenly Holden was more interested in Howard Feldstein Phipps than he’d ever been in a man.
“A Yid, you say.”
“And also a bit of a rabbi.”
“I’m speechless,” Holden said. “A rabbi? Where did he practice?”
“Holden, he didn’t have a congregation, or anything like that. He studied at a cantor’s college.”
“What’s that?”
“You know, a cantor. Sings all the holy songs. Leads the choir. He was a terrific grosser.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A cantor with a good voice was like an opera star. Had an agent and everything … Holden, he was a hired gun. Went from synagogue to synagogue. All over the country. You had to book him a year in advance.”
“When was this?”
“Around nineteen twenty-two.”
“But he was a child. Nineteen or twenty.”
“That’s not so young for a cantor,” Toshie said. “But something happened. He fucked up in Chicago. There was a scandal. The big synagogues wouldn’t hire him. And guess what? He shows up in Seattle as a Pinkerton man.”
Toshie started to laugh, but Holden couldn’t get out of his gloom.
“Don’t you think it’s funny? From cantor’s college to the Pinkertons. That’s when he became Phipps. He leaves the agency in ’twenty-nine, and bingo, it all starts for him. He buys, he sells, with terrific concentration. The country goes into a depression, and Phipps becomes a billionaire.”
“What about the girl? Gloria Vanderwelle.”
“Holden, I didn’t come up with a thing.”
“All right. What do we have? He’s a Yid. He sings for a living. He stops. He’s a Pinkerton. Then he makes his first million … Now he’s eighty-nine, he grows bored, and hires Sidney Holden. He talks about funny paper, and he wants to hit the road. Why?”
“He’s in trouble,” Tosh said. “There’s a saboteur in his operation. Maybe more than one. His companies are tumbling, two at a time. His accounts are running dry.”
“So it’s a crisis. He can hire whoever he wants. Some big law firm with a whole team of bloodhounds. They’d find the leaks, wouldn’t they? Why me?”
“I don’t have the facts,” Toshie said.
“Why me? I’m retired, Tosh. You know that.”
“But the cantor doesn’t.”
5
Holden was at Phipps’ cathedral restaurant a minute before nine.
He couldn’t bear to look at the food the waiters brought. He drank a cup of hot water, with a lemon slice, while the old man had a dish of breakfast curry.
“Lost your appetite, Sid?”
“Well, I saw my fiancée. She didn’t recognize me.”
“I’m sorry, but you ought to eat. We’re going on a long trip … to Chappy.”
“Never heard of the place.”
“Chappaquiddick. To collect some funny paper.”
“Just like that?”
“It’s been arranged, Holden. We leave in half an hour.”
“I never travel without twenty-four hours’ notice.”
“You’ll have to break your rules. It can’t be helped. The money is waiting for us in Chappaquiddick.”
“Let it wait.”
The old man began to diminish in front of Sidney Holden. The cardigan sat like an envelope around a bag of bones. “I can’t go by myself.…”
“You could raise an army in five minutes.”
“Don’t want an army. I want you.”
“All right,” Holden said.
And the bag of bones was gone. “Do you have a gun?”
“Yes. But it’s at home.”
“Then we’ll have to collect it, won’t we? Finish your breakfast, Mr. Holden.”
Holden gulped the hot water. “Cheers.”
They went down to Phipps’ office to meet Mrs. Vanderwelle. She’d packed an overnight bag for the old man. And Sidney Holden had that same dilemma. He could sense the lines of her body under the suit she wore. The mouth was soft. But was she pretty, and why should he have cared? Holden wasn’t looking to replace his darling. It didn’t matter how damaged Fay was. He was devoted to her, even if she couldn’t remember his name. He’d have to visit Elsinore again, bring her some roses, talk about Red Mike … with Dr. Garden.
He must have been inside a trance. Mrs. Vanderwelle tugged at him. “Some pocket money,” she said. “For the trip.”
She gave Holden a thick packet of twenty-dollar bills. He wanted to question her, but not in front of the old man.
“You’ll take care of him, won’t you? He mustn’t forget to put on his pajamas.”
And Holden started to dig. “Why don’t you come along?”
“I wish I could. But I have the foundation … and Howard didn’t invite me.”
“I’ll invite you,” Holden said.
“Another time.” And Holden understood now why it was so hard to make up his mind about Mrs. Vanderwelle. He couldn’t meet her eyes. Under the tinted glasses, her eyes weren’t there. She might have been looking at the wall while she chatted with Holden. It infuriated him. He was feeling homicidal, but he’d never have touched the lady.
He went down into the street with the old man, whose chauffeur appeared in a rented Plymouth. Holden could have found a better car in the meanest body shop. But Phipps wanted to be anonymous on the road to Chappaquiddick.
And while Holden had been measuring the Plymout
h, the chauffeur disappeared.
“Who’s going to drive us to Chappaquiddick?”
“You are.”
“That’s the limit,” Holden said. “My dad was a chauffeur. I watched him suffer behind the wheel. It broke him, Mr. Phipps. It kept him a fucking child. I swore to myself that I’d never follow my dad into that line of work.”
“But I can’t take my chauffeur. It would ruin it for us. He’d know all our plans.… Get in. I’ll drive.”
“You’re too old. And you have bad feet. I’ll drive. But don’t make it a habit. I’d have to quit.”
“I’ll sit up front with you, Sid. We’re companions. I won’t let you down.”
He couldn’t escape that shadow, the shadow of his dad. It was a recurrent dream, a nightmare Holden had endured since he could remember. Holden wearing some kind of livery while he sat behind the wheel. Sidney Holden, the prince of chauffeurs in a peaked cap. But his uniform had eagles and stars and buttons of the United States. It was a soldier’s livery. Holden’s dad had been a soldier during the big war. But Holden couldn’t tell who he was driving in all the dreams. Now he saw the face. It was God, God in the back seat, wearing the cardigan of Howard Phipps, that hidden singer of holy songs. And Holden had to laugh. God had been a Pinkerton man.
Phipps wanted to stop in New Haven for lunch. Holden shivered when he saw the towers of Yale. It was like coming to a foreign country, and he panicked for a moment, thinking they’d need some currency with a queen’s head. Oh, he’d dealt with Yalies before. He’d even been to the Yale Club in Manhattan. But the college startled him. He expected to see monks riding around on bicycles, and all he met were kids and tweedy men, dressed like they were living in a kind of noble poverty, a knighthood of books and baggy pants. Holden was glad he’d gone to Bernard Baruch.
Phipps led him to a neighborhood behind the college. There were no towers. The streets were broken, and black children played in the rubble. Holden couldn’t find a restaurant. There was a merciless regularity to the small, dark buildings, like the inner walls of a heartland Holden had never heard about. The town was like Phipps himself, porous, with a lot of different pasts.
And then, in those dark streets, Holden discovered a tiny Italian restaurant that didn’t have a signboard or a name in the window. Holden parked in front of the restaurant, and the two of them went inside and sat down. The waiters ignored them until Phipps shouted in some Italian dialect that must have been born in the streets of New Haven, because suddenly the waiters danced. A tablecloth materialized, together with silver, and a blue candle that no one would let Holden light all by himself.
“What did you say, Mr. Phipps?”
“I told them that their mothers slept with strangers, and their fathers only fucked cows and sheep, and if they didn’t serve us in a second, you would piss on the wall and fuck their baby sisters.”
“They could have gotten angry, and I would have had to fight the whole restaurant.”
“Holden, you’re wrong. They love to be cursed. That’s the language that’s dear to them.”
“When was the last time you ate in this restaurant?”
“Twenty years ago.”
“Then why were you so sure the same trick would work?”
“I took a chance. I’ve always been a gambler.”
Holden’s nausea was gone. He had a bowl of tortellini soup, with great hunks of bread. Black wine arrived in tiny glasses. Holden drank six. He had chicken and potatoes. Broccoli and carrots. He had chocolate cake.
“You’re a glutton,” the old man said. “I couldn’t afford to keep you, Sid. You’d bankrupt me with an appetite like that. Want another dessert?”
He whistled to the waiter in that special Italian of his, and they brought Holden a wedge of cake with towers and canopies of hazelnuts and dark cream. Holden took a bite, and he would have killed for that piece of cake. “What’s it called?”
“In English, Sid? College pie. It’s a local dish.”
They had cups of coffee to wake Holden from the black wine. Then they got up and shook hands with all the waiters. But Holden never saw the bill.
“How come they didn’t charge us?” he asked in the street.
“It would take an hour to answer.”
“I have the time.”
“This was one of my hunting grounds a long time ago. They recognized that from the way I spoke. They wouldn’t have dared charge us for the meal.”
“And what did you hunt in New Haven?”
“Whales. The hooch we delivered was kept in big white barrels called whales.”
“Ah, when you were a bootlegger,” Holden said. “Did you bless the barrels with kosher songs?”
The old man fixed his bumper’s eyes on Holden. “What kosher songs?”
“Don’t take it to heart. A friend of mine says you were a cantor once.”
“Do I look like a cantor?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Have you been investigating me, Sid? What did you find?”
“Very little. You were born in Milwaukee. You went to cantor’s college. You were a big draw in the best synagogues, but you had to pull out. You surfaced again as a Pinkerton man in Seattle. And your name is Feldstein, not Phipps.”
“Your friend has an active imagination,” Phipps said. “I could show you my birth certificate.”
“Mr. Phipps, should I tell you how many birth certificates I keep in my drawer? I have enough social security numbers to field a baseball team. There were times when I had to disappear too. My dad loved the New York Giants. So I’m Johnny Mize. Jack Lohrke. Mel Ott.”
“And I’m Howard Phipps.”
They drove to Woods Hole and sat in a line of cars near the ferry slip. There was a fog over the water, and the ferry arrived out of the gloom. Holden heard the engines, and the boat docked with a soft bump. The ferry door opened and cars drove out of the ferry’s big barn. Holden stared into that ribbed well and thought of a whale’s mouth. Phipps shouldn’t have mentioned whales.
Then it was Holden’s turn to drive into the barn. He didn’t want to sit in that enormous well. “Shouldn’t we go up to the deck? We don’t have to be baby-sitters for a goddamn car.”
“It’s safer here,” Phipps said.
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s safer here. You can never tell who we might meet up on the deck. It takes one push, Sid, and we’re overboard.”
“Is somebody after you, Mr. Phipps?”
“Not at all. But we’ll be carrying a lot of paper on the return trip. And it’s better for both of us if we’re not conspicuous.… Stay in the car.”
And so they sat inside the whale. The ocean beat against the metal door with a thick boom that sent tiny shivers through the ferry. It felt like some sort of attack, that relentless drive of water. The ferry leaked. Water spilled in through the bottom of the door and a pool began to build under the stairs to the main deck.
“We could drown,” Holden said.
“I’ve been on this ferry a hundred times, and no one ever drowned.”
The engines stopped, and Holden heard that same bump of metal against wood. The door lowered like a drawbridge and the cars bumped over the door and onto Martha’s Vineyard.
They drove to Edgartown and waited for another ferry. They had to cross the channel to Chappaquiddick. It was too far to spit across, and Holden could tell that the current was mean. The ferry had no doors. It was an open green box, and Holden watched the ferryman at his wheel.
It took half a minute to get across the creek.
Holden couldn’t find a village on Chappy.
Sand and trees and a country club, houses with gray shingles, a couple of barns. It was his idea of what an island ought to be, a home for lots of Robinson Crusoes.
They stopped at a junkyard that reached across several fields. Holden saw stoves from the time of Martha Washington, toilet commodes, the bottom of a ferry, weather vanes, rotting wood and rust. Entire fields had tha
t bright orange look of decay.
A pack of dogs guarded the junk. They weren’t wild. They were meant to growl at strangers. The dogs surrounded the car and slobbered the windows with their wet jaws.
“It’s time to get out,” Phipps said.
“With those dogs? They’re attackers, Mr. Phipps.”
Phipps got out of the car, whacked the nearest dog with his cane, and the other dogs scampered to the next rusty field.
“Leave the key. No one steals on Chappy.”
They ventured into that rust.
The dogs grew courageous and barked at Holden, but only from a distance.
There was a house behind the junkyard, with the same orange color. The old man whistled once. The sound shot across the fields and rang in Holden’s ear. Then a whistling came from the house. It was like birds calling, the birds of Chappaquiddick.
They entered the house. Three old men sat behind a table. It was a family, a father and his two sons. The sons had to be seventy-five, and the father could have been a hundred. Phipps introduced them as the Coleridges. Ethan and his sons, Minot and Paul. Holden smiled at all the aliases. The Coleridges were the Cardinales, gunmen who ran Providence for fifty years until federal attorneys chased them out of the rackets. All three were wanted for murder. Holden couldn’t imagine a hundred-year-old man sitting on his ass in the pen.
“This is the baron of Rhode Island,” Phipps said, touching Ethan’s shoulder.
“Phippsy, you shouldn’t exaggerate. Why brag to the boy?”
“Because he’s one of us. Sidney Holden.”
“Never heard of him,” Ethan Coleridge said.
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“Was he in the Vineyard Gazette?” Minot asked, and fumbled with his hearing aid.
“That’s a stupid question,” Phipps said. “He’s not a local.”
“Phippsy, don’t rile my boy.”
“But that’s the problem,” Phipps said. “You’re stuck here on Chappy, and you don’t get the news.”
“Chappy’s fine. You ought to come and live with us … you and the boy. There’s nothing on the other side of the creek, nothing that’s worth cooing about.”
“Come on. You can’t even get cable TV.”
“We’re happy. I play checkers with my boys. We have the run of the land. The rest of the world is one big graveyard.”
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