They were standing where the stairs ended, a three-story drop to the massive heap of timber and stone that had once been the first floor. “It would have been quick,” the insurance man was saying. “I’ve seen a lot of these. They wouldn’t have known a thing. The smoke comes first, you see. Most people never wake up.”
Eleanor said nothing. The collapsed brickwork had fallen right through Grace and India’s flat—Bert’s too, come to think of it, she remembered with a twinge—half a warehouse wall, taking down that entire corner of the walkup in a matter of seconds.
“It put most of the fire out, actually,” the insurance man was saying. “There wasn’t much left to burn.” He hesitated, appraising her. “If you take my point, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. “Knew the family, did you?” He had a handkerchief ready: he always did.
“She was family,” Eleanor said simply, dabbing her streaming eyes. “How did it start?”
“Electrical, is my opinion,” the adjuster said. He was a quiet, chubby little man with the blank adolescent face of the perpetually unworried; he’d done work for Foster on an arson settlement, ages ago. Where does Foster keep them? Eleanor wondered. “A fault in the wiring in the wall. The warehouse went up, the wall fell, then the gas lines cracked open here.”
She looked at him, his hands defensively in his pockets, a man from an office fretting she’d weep again. “Have they found the bodies?”
He cleared his throat again and hesitated. “That’ll take some time.”
Eleanor suddenly realized they might be standing atop the bodies. She shifted her feet, heartsick, her mind suddenly clear as ice. He dyes his hair, Eleanor realized, and then she didn’t want to see any more. Her eyes were sore, as if she’d survived the roiling smoke herself. It was only then she heard the familiar voice, chatting with one of the arson inspectors.
As in most Irish public houses, the bar had the flavor of the high altar. Eleanor and Misha sat well away from the oak monstrosity where the regulars smoked and stared, and far from the window, which gave out onto the street, still crisscrossed with the snaking canvas fire hoses. They were at a side table beneath a worn photograph of a minor ward heeler—complete with imposed smile and snug suit—from the days when the accents of County Clare or County Cork in the neighborhood hadn’t yet been supplanted by those of Misha’s forebears.
“I don’t know if she’ll survive the shock of it,” Eleanor was saying. “I’ll have to tell her. I don’t want the police going to her door. She’s seventy-nine.”
“Mrs. Whyte will survive, don’t you worry,” Misha said. “She’s immortal.”
They sat together in silence, Misha having seated Eleanor with her back to the window. The sound of a jackhammer thrummed through the bar’s window glass, a sound like falling plates. Misha guessed they were breaking up the sections of collapsed wall to get at the bodies.
At the back table, an unwashed fellow dozing on his folded arms revolved his head and considered Misha sideways, smiling blissfully, then faded back into his own embrace. Misha waited as Eleanor took her glasses off and wiped her eyes, timing it, not knowing quite where it would lead.
“I’m not sure how to say this, but your brother—”
“I knew. Yes.”
“I saw the two of them together, the day after the election. Surprised the hell out of me. They seemed a couple.” Her face a mask, Eleanor said nothing.
“Sorry. I’m talking nonsense,” Misha said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, no, you’re not,” Eleanor retorted, a sliver of anger goading her. “Forgive me. That was harsh. You’re trying to be gentle, I know.” She glanced at the clock over the bar. “It’s quarter to two. You have to get back to work.”
“Are you all right alone?”
“I’ll be fine. Foster’s going to meet me at Grand Central—he’s coming with me to tell Mrs. Whyte. There’s … the lawyering things that need to be done.” She looked at Misha with eyes empty of hope. “I don’t know if I can face the funeral. I loved her. I loved her so.”
“I can stay. I’ll call. My boss will understand. You were saying.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” The door opened; two reporters scanned the bar and spotted them. “Keep them away, will you?”
Misha stood and warned the pair off in short order. They headed across the street and contented themselves with morning-after photos of the shell.
Taking a deep breath, Eleanor stared at her beer. “It’s gone flat.”
“And warm. Want a fresh one?”
She shook her head no. “I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland. We’re Scots-Irish. I’ve always wanted to go,” she repeated, far away. “Grace and I swore we’d go together, once the Armistice was declared, spend a month on bicycles in Ireland, away from all that death in France.”
Misha studied her, letting her run on.
“It seemed like such a good thing to do,” Eleanor was saying. “With her, I mean. I wish we’d done it.” Her eyes were filling; that seemed to annoy her. “I should be brave. Braver. But then there’s the child, and I think of Sophie.” She let out another big breath and straightened her shoulders.
“Jews bury quickly: it’s in our law. Good thing, I think. Get on with the mourning, with living life. I’ll come with you to the funeral, if you like.”
“Oh, I doubt there’ll be one,” Eleanor countered, shaking her head again. “Not with Bert’s family. Too complicated, I think. No—a private memorial service. Otherwise,” she went on, working up a wry half smile, “there might be a scene. Those Dunlops don’t know when to quit, I hear. Even at a wake.”
The barman, solicitous, caught Misha’s eye, but he declined with a raised hand. “Where are you tonight?” he asked gently.
“Back to Washington. Back on the train. My second home. I’m teaching one day a week at Bryn Mawr. Day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll see you off, if you like.”
She smiled, bravely. “Grace would laugh. The least sentimental woman I’ve ever met.” She touched a handkerchief to her eyelids. “You’re very kind, but I’m not fit company. I should go.”
He stood and helped her on with her coat. Eleanor brushed his cheek with a kiss. “Good of you,” she said simply. She searched his eyes for a moment, looking for God knew what, then she left, her gaze straight ahead, never looking once at the sodden heap of smoking stone and coal-black beams.
She was, Misha decided as he paid the bar tab, a superior sort of person, this Dulles woman, with her plain talk and her common sense and her love of the underdog. He opened his satchel and took out a public library book: Brittan’s War Poetry. In pencil, some pages in, was a New York telephone number: Wintergreen-6 3022. He dropped his nickel into the wall pay phone and dialed. Once connected, he let the bell ring three times and hung up. Then he waited, working his way through a half-completed crossword at the bar.
Precisely at 3:10, a small dark man with the cropped hair of a factory worker and the knowing slow eyes of a country cleric came to the door. “You will meet Alex at seven past seven this evening,” he said, indicating a well-known address on a square card. “You understand?”
Misha said he did. The messenger’s dispassion chilled him. “There’s something wrong?” Misha asked.
“Deviation is everywhere,” the messenger replied. “We must root it out wherever we find it. That is our cause.” He examined Misha, his gaze devoid of any clue. “The dedicated have no concern. Only the deviationists.” He nodded, almost to himself. Then, self-contained, watchful, he departed as quietly and deliberately as he’d come, a breath of ice.
Moscow will come soon. A real hood, too, this time, Misha decided. With Center in an uproar, they’ll give me both barrels.
At the fire site, two men with a tape measure marked off the sidewalk with chalk, consulting a sheaf of architectural drawings. The fellow with the jackhammer was on his break, black rings of sweat darkening his shirt, a man happy to be thinking he was almost done another day�
�s work, a Thermos cup in hand, his back against what was left of the front wall, blithe caretaker of someone else’s tragedy.
The evening cold chased the sunlight from the Radio City concrete. Misha stood stock-still in the chilly shadows at the West Fiftieth Street curb, at the open mouth of the truck ramp that burrowed deep beneath the tower behind. And sometimes you wait and you wait some more. You have to wait like—Shiloah had told Misha this once, long ago in a Baghdad restaurant, after one of Misha’s first kayak trips through Germany—you have the patience of God Almighty.
A tired Ford coupe rolled up to the curb: he was face-to-face with Moscow’s latest missionary, who announced himself as “Alex from Philadelphia.”
Misha was Carl from Baltimore; he handed over the book of poetry, which the Russian slipped into his valise. “Get in, we’re late,” the man called Alex ordered. “You have the documents?”
He was furious, coiled with tension, snapping his fingers at Misha. His clothes were good, American in cut and fit, and he had a dime-sized mole on his cheek and slight cast in his right eye, a kind of floating cloud over the iris. He looks like George Raft, Misha thought.
“You’re late, Alex, it’s seven-twelve,” Misha declared, locking eyes with him. “Here, it’s all in here. The documents.”
Alex’s driver was a wide-necked Italian with narrow eyes; he smelt of pomade and garlic; his neck was so thick he could barely turn his head to see Misha get in.
Alex said nothing, avoiding Misha’s eye. He rapped on his window with a bare knuckle and they were off, just as Misha expected, doubling back and heading for the waterfront, rolling through Times Square, the storefronts and billboards dropping into the straight-ruled shadows as the half sun settled into the Hudson.
“The Amtorg dock?” the driver asked.
Alex nodded yes and glanced over the National Cash Register documents. “What does the mechanism here do?”
“Sets the number of variables. Say you wanted an artillery calculation performed, follow? You’d have to recalibrate it—”
This was beyond Alex. He said something short and hard in Italian to the driver. “You have been most undisciplined,” Alex complained. “Most undisciplined. Concrete thinking is in order.” He jammed the papers back into the briefcase then reached into his pocket, producing a handgun, which he jabbed into Misha’s side. “You are a Fascist spy, contact of the known German operative Kronthal.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Misha replied, but Alex only nudged the gun into his ribs harder.
“You will shut up,” he growled, and Misha gathered Alex was very angry indeed. “I will speak. You will listen.” He said nothing more as the Ford turned west onto West Twenty-ninth, at the foot of Pier 68. The pier head was a fire inspector’s nightmare—heaps of smashed crates, empty oil drums, a coil of ancient hawser, the pier itself reeking of creosote, its boards crumbling. A twin-smokestack freighter, a big one, lay tied up at the end of the dock; a wire mesh gate opened onto the dock. The Italian turned off the ignition. Not a sound, not a soul moved aboard the ship.
“You don’t understand what I’m giving you—”
Alex ignored him, searching the night.
A faint light flicked on and off from the bridge of the ship. Alex peered out the window, then tapped the Italian driver on the shoulder.
The engine started and Alex relaxed fractionally, looking down to check on the pistol.
Misha braced himself against the door, his shoes flat against the doorjamb, coiled, and then launched himself, headfirst, at Alex’s lowered face. For a split second he thought he’d missed completely, but then the top of his skull crushed Alex’s nose, driving a groan and a considerable splash of fresh blood from the Russian. Misha felt the nose cartilage break and caught a whiff of gasped beer and sausage from Alex’s shocked innards. Misha leant back and saw Alex slumped, unconscious, against the driver’s-side rear window, his neck cricked at an odd angle, blood trickling from his displaced nose, not a breath in him.
The pistol had fallen to the floor. Misha swept the warm metal up and brought the gun butt down with everything he had into the driver’s temple, accelerating right through him, just as Shiloah had taught him, sending the Italian’s squat head bouncing off the side window. The glass starred; the Italian’s eyes pinwheeled. Slithering downwards, he became intimately acquainted with the steering wheel.
Misha’s breaths came in deep gasps. Worse than piano moving, he thought absurdly, and then he realized the Ford was creeping ahead in neutral now that the Italian no longer kept the brake on.
He could barely see and felt something wet on his forehead; he must have sliced his own scalp with the impact against the Russian’s face. He wiped his eyes and tore the briefcase open, fumbling past the photostats of Metropolitan Gas’s latest meter design on NCR letterhead, his fingernails breaking as he ripped at the tongue of stiff leather at the very base of the briefcase.
The leather gave way and he pulled out Shiloah’s Beretta, two spare clips taped to the grip. He jumped from the car, leaving the door open, then threw the Russian’s pistol far into the Hudson, glimpsing a nick of silver against the river’s dark where the gun sank.
His briefcase in one hand and the Beretta in the other, he heaved his shoulder with all his might at the Ford’s door pillar. The car picked up speed along the dock’s gentle downslope. The front wheels went over cleanly, then the chassis dropped with a terrible clunking sound, and from somewhere underneath petrol coursed; the rear fender levered up, almost as high as Misha’s head, and it was a matter of a short sharp push with his shoulder against the Ford’s belly pan. The car went over, settling with a great sucking splash on its roof, the river water greedily filling its interior.
The last Misha saw of Alex’s second-hand Ford was the glinting chrome of the rear fender sliding into the swirling current and the spreading crescents of bright water.
He heard voices. Of course: the watchers. A car started, close, then headlights came on, revealing the empty space where Alex’s Ford had been. That’s done it, he thought, starting to run. Misha reached the wire mesh gate and threw that shut, snapping the lock on the chain through the uprights: his pursuers were locked in. The second car leapt straight at the gates, screaming at him in low gear, then squealed to a halt on the oiled decking. The engine dropped to idle and there was a slamming of doors and running feet, the footfalls echoing off the dock’s planks.
He heard a shot, cringed, waiting for the impact. I need a hat, he thought. I’ve cut my head and I need a hat. He ran his fingers through his hair and they came away slick, not with blood, but with sweat. He slowed to a jog, breathing hard, crossing a wide street, he had no idea which, right into the path of an oncoming cab.
“Hey, Mac, you late for a train or what?” shouted the driver.
Misha stopped and turned, gasping. “Where’s the nearest rail station?”
“You gotta be kidding. Penn Station’s right behind you. Where you going?”
Misha had a dim memory of crossing the Hudson with Eleanor. He made himself remember the name. “Across the river.”
“Where?”
“Lexington Manor. D’you know where it is?”
“Livingston Manor. I know where that is—you’re talking to a charter member of the Sullivan County Rod and Game Club, bub.”
“How far is it?”
“Ten bucks. That’s how far it is.”
Misha climbed in and showed him two fives. The cabbie swung the car around savagely, U-turning in the middle of the broad avenue. “Tell me,” Misha asked, “does Sullivan County have anything to do with Sullivan and Cromwell?”
“Sullivan and what?”
“Cromwell. The law firm.”
“Oh, those guys. They own halfa Wall Street. But so far they don’t have their mitts on my fishing hole.” The cabbie slapped the meter off and settled in for the duration.
XXVII
Misha paid the cabbie and followed a path to the front door through the hi
p-high grass. The mansion was teetering and massive, the size of a fair-sized European villa, shuttered, gray clapboard, a huge porch, half hidden in the trees and long grass. “Gawd help ya, Mac,” the cabbie shouted before wheeling his car back to town. A light switched on on the second floor and a face appeared; even in the darkness Misha could see the beard and the curls and the white shirt. The window opened and a thin young man leant out.
“Shabbat shalom,” he said. “Welcome to Ezrath Israel. You came all the way from New York by cab?”
“Shalom shabbat,” Misha replied, shifting the briefcase with the Beretta from one hand to the other. “Yes. Yes. That’s me.”
“You must own the cab company, mister.” He was smiling.
The caretaker’s name was Aharon. He was bearded and lantern-jawed and, despite his friendliness, quiet to the point of disappearing. He gave Misha an austere high-ceilinged room on the second floor, very clean, good bed, a side table, a window that opened on the forest. The place smelt of disinfectant and the cedar coat hangers in the closet, which clacked together when Misha opened the door. No books, no bible, no ashtray, nothing. Every drawer was empty, spotlessly clean; the mirror shone, the waxed floorboards glowed in the light from a single overhead bulb, which Misha turned off immediately.
He asked Aharon to bring him candles and matches and some writing things. After Aharon left, Misha stowed the Beretta and the spare clips behind the water closet tanks. Memorizing the penciled telephone number in the passport Shiloah had left him in the bank box—Grover-1 1522—he sealed the Swiss passport and almost all the cash in an envelope. The envelope he thumbtacked onto the back of a dresser drawer, an old trick from his days in Germany. The briefcase he gave to Aharon, for luck; the caretaker, who had his own angular sense of humor, accepted the gift with mute amusement.
The crickets began. Misha went to the window and let his eyes grow used to the night, until he could make out the individual branches on the pines. A breeze came up; he could smell the resin and the faintly mossy smell of the lake in the distance, and he remembered climbing the fire tower and the two kayaks and the sun on the water.
The Witness Tree Page 22