“They tell us that's the largest memorial to the First War in the country,” Silverberg said. “Of course, it was built before we got here. Dedicated in Nineteen Twenty-One by your President Coolidge.”
Early gazed up at it. “Always wanted to ride the elevator to the top of the tower, but never got around to it. You ever do it?”
“I'm afraid of heights, but Ethel has.”
Missus Silverberg touched Early's arm. “Quite a sight of our city from up there. Two hundred seventeen feet high. Judith and I read that number on a plaque by the elevator door when she and I went up. Perhaps we could do that tomorrow.”
“Well, now I'd like that.”
Early waved at a taxicab, a Checker. The driver pulled to the curb, and Early opened the back door for the Silverbergs. After they climbed in, he took the front passenger seat.
“Not you again,” the driver said.
Early grinned. “Sure 'nuff. Jews in the backseat this time. Got a problem with that?”
“And if I did?”
“I still got my money in my suitcase.”
“Uh-huh. Where to?”
“The Muehelbach.”
The driver stuck his hand out the window, signaling to passing traffic, then U-turned on Main Street to go north. “Short jog,” he said as he leaned forward on the steering wheel. “Be thirty-five cents.”
Early grubbed out a pocketful of change. He sorted out two quarters and flipped them into the cup on the taxi's dash.
The driver scowled as he said, “Not in my coffee.”
“Sorry. I thought it was a tip cup.”
“You're not from around here, are you?”
“Manhattan.”
“You got dirt clods behind your ears, huh?”
“I said I'm sorry.”
The driver glanced up at a traffic light going yellow. He stepped down on the gas and swung his Nash around a city bus, Early grabbling for the door handle, to keep from sliding across the bench seat, the driver counting down the streets as he shot on. At Twelfth, he threw the taxi into a hard left as the yellow light clicked over to red.
Two blocks on, at Wyandotte, the driver bumped the taxi's tires up onto the curb and braked to a stop. “Muehelbach Hotel,” he said.
Early peered out and up, the brick building so many stories tall that the muscles in his neck twinged as he looked up.
A doorman hustled over, gold epaulettes and braid on the shoulders of his knee-length red coat. He opened the back door for the Silverbergs. After he helped them out, he opened the front door for Early and took his suitcase.
Early held a quarter out to the driver as he slid off the seat.
“What the hell's that for?” the driver asked.
“Getting us here alive.”
The driver snatched the coin away. “May I never see you again,” he said and stomped on the gas, the car doors slamming as he swung out into traffic.
Silverberg elbowed Early. “You have that effect on everybody?”
CHAPTER 16
* * *
September 15—Thursday Afternoon Late
Stephanowitz
“Name, sir?” the Muehelbach's doorman asked.
“James Early. They got a room for me.”
“Right, sir.” He waved a bellhop over, gave him Early's suitcase, and pointed him inside.
“This way, sirs, ma'am,” the bellhop said, a young black man, smooth faced, by Early's guess no more than twenty-one. He moved away with the same hustle the doorman had shown, only to stop and hold open the door for Early and the Silverbergs. “Welcome to the Muehelbach. Your first time here?”
“As a guest,” Early said.
“And you good people?” he asked the Silverbergs.
“We live in the city,” Mister Silverberg said. He pushed his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose. “We're here to have dinner with this gentleman.”
“May I recommend the Kansas City strip steak? The Muehelbach is known for it.”
As they went up the steps into the lobby of royal oak paneling and leather furniture that spoke of wealth and comfort, the bellhop asked Early, “Are we holding a room for you, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Name, sir?”
“James Early.”
“Mister Early, if you wish, you can go right in to dinner. I'll tell them at the desk that you've arrived, and I'll take your bag up to your room for you.”
“Well, that's unexpected, but thank you.” Early slipped the bellhop a dime.
“Thank you, sir. All part of the service at the Muehelbach.”
The bellman started away, but Early called him back. “I understand the president's staying here tonight.”
“Yessir, we're holding a suite for Mister Truman. He's speaking to a steel manufacturers convention at The Johnson.”
“Couldn't get a room there?”
“The President always stays with us,” the bellman said, pride beaming through his words.
Early tugged at his earlobe. “He'll have breakfast here in the morning, I expect.”
“I expect so, sir.”
“Again, thank you.”
“Not at all, sir.” The bellhop backed away a step, turned, and went on to the front desk.
Early gandered around at the vastness of the lobby, perhaps three times as long as it was wide, people—men mostly—clustered about talking, some smoking cigars, a few reading newspapers. One of the newspaper readers glanced toward Early and the Silverbergs. He folded his paper and drifted after the trio as Mister Silverberg pointed the way toward the main dining room. “Table for four in the name of Silverberg,” he said to the maitre d'.
The man, in stature a double for the doorman except for his vest and swallowtail coat, consulted the notes at his stand.
“Are you?” Early asked, thumbing toward the front of the hotel.
A smile spread across the man's face. “Yessir, that's my brother. There are three of us working here. You met Elroy. My brother Nathan is an accountant in the back office. . . . Follow me, please.”
The man moved away with the same brisk pace as the doorman. Early loped along, the Silverbergs hurrying to keep up. At a table in front of the window on Twelfth Street, the maitre d' pulled out a chair for Missus Silverberg and held it. After he seated her, he pulled out a chair for Silverberg. Early merely plopped himself onto one of the velvet chairs across the table from them and tossed his cattleman's hat on the seat of the spare.
The maitre d' gathered the hat. “If it's all right with you, I'll check this in the cloakroom. Your name, sir?”
“James Early.”
“Shall I take yours, too?” he asked Silverberg.
The older man handed over his Panama as he said, “Silverberg, just Silverberg.”
“Very well.”
The maitre d' waved a waiter to the table and hurried away.
The waiter, a smallish man in a tuxedo, came up carrying three goblets of water on a silver tray. He placed a goblet forward and to the side of each of the three. “I'm Terrance,” he said. “Anything you need I can get for you.”
Early winked at the Silverbergs. “Money?” he asked.
“Except that. But I can tell you where a very reputable card game is, should you wish to win some.” He gazed at Missus Silverberg. “Of course,” he said, “you never heard it from me. Dinner for three, then?”
“We're expecting a fourth,” Silverberg said.
“Very good. Do you wish to order now or would you rather wait?”
A slim man in a white summer suit, a newspaper sticking from his jacket pocket, slipped into the empty chair. “No need to wait,” he said.
“Very well. Do you wish menus?”
Silverberg shook his head. “The house specialty for everyone.”
“Excellent choice.”
While the waiter leaned down to Missus Silverberg, to get the details for her order, Silverberg pointed from Early to the stranger. “Sheriff,” he said, “this is Mister Isaac Daniel Stephanow
itz from our new nation of Israel.”
Early extended his hand, but it was Stephanowitz's left hand that met Early's, making for an awkward shake.
“You'll have to forgive me,” Stephanowitz said and brought up his right hand, a clawlike structure, “this one doesn't work very well. Souvenir of another time.”
“War?” Early asked.
“You might say that.”
The waiter moved to Silverberg where the two discussed in whispers the choices of sides that went with the strip steak.
“You knew Judith?” Early asked.
Stephanowitz leaned in close, his chin resting on the back of his crippled hand. “In Palestine at the time it was becoming Israel. I got there a year earlier courtesy of Mister Churchill.”
“You're British?”
“Hardly. Polish—Warsaw. I was studying in London when the German Panzers invaded my country. I couldn't get back home.”
“So you—”
“Yes, with a British regiment. The Royal Fusiliers liked my company because I was sexta-lingual—spoke Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, some Arabic, German, and English the English way.”
“I speak it the Kansas way.”
“Is it different?”
Early held up his thumb and index finger, a half-inch apart.
The waiter came to Stephanowitz. “And how would you like your steak, sir?” he asked.
“However Mister Silverberg is having his is fine.”
“And the sides?”
“Again, whatever Mister Silverberg is having.”
The waiter turned to Early, his pencil poised over his pad.
“The same,” Early said. “Ah, just a minute. How are they having their steaks?”
“Rare.”
“Oh no, I don't want mine bawling when I cut into it. Well done, please.”
The waiter raised an eyebrow. “And to drink, sir?”
“Sweet tea now. Coffee later.”
“So it shall be,” the waiter said and whisked away.
“Did I say something to offend him?” Early asked Stephanowitz.
“Can't imagine what.”
Silverberg sipped from his water goblet before he set it aside. “It took a number of cables to maybe twenty people to learn that Mister Stephanowitz was the person closest to Judith in the movement.”
“The movement?” Early asked.
“The Zionist movement, and another half-dozen cables to convince him to come to Kansas City.”
“Some reluctance, Mister Stephanowitz?” Early asked.
“My name's a mouthful. Call me Steph.” He glanced around the room, giving Early the impression he was checking to see whether anyone might be eavesdropping. “I resigned from the British army to join the Haganah.”
“And what would that be?”
“In your army, the Rangers. We operated in enemy territory.”
“Kill and destroy.”
“And get out before the Arabs or the British could catch us, yes. One of my team's jobs was to meet the leaky old ships landing Jewish refugees and get the refugees off the coast, inland before the British could intercept them.”
“And Judith?”
“She was one.” Stephanowitz paused, as if he were sorting through his words. “She and three friends came in one night,” he said. “Their boat capsized in the breakers, and my team fished them out of the water.”
Early fiddled with the corner of his cloth napkin. “What did they want to do?”
“The Dutchies? Live and work on a kibbutz—be pioneers, you would say. Judith thought she might like to teach.” Again Stephanowitz paused, and again it appeared to Early the man was weighing his words.
Once more the Israeli resumed. “We were talking, Judith and I after we were well inland and safe, and she said she had been an ambulance driver. So I recruited her.”
“She drove ambulances for you?”
“No, Land Rovers we liberated from the British, desert cars with machine guns mounted on them.” Stephanowitz glanced at Missus Silverberg who had gone blanch white. “Your daughter was a soldier, a very good one.”
“We didn't know,” Silverberg said.
“She didn't want you to worry.” Stephanowitz smiled.
To Early, the smile lacked emotion, as if it were given as a courtesy. He rolled and unrolled the corner of his napkin. “What ended it for her?”
“A nation being born needs money, more money than it has,” Stephanowitz said. “My colonel thought Judith would be of greater value to us if she were to return to your country and be a fund-raiser for Israel. The Silverbergs know she was very good at it.”
“How good?”
“Ten thousand a month. A third of a million in three years.”
“I'm impressed,” Early said. “So I have to ask could anyone from what was once Palestine have killed Judith? They can't have loved her.”
“It's possible. A year ago, we picked up word she had become a target, so I dispatched one of my men to shadow her, to be her bodyguard if necessary.”
“And?”
“Nothing ever happened, so we called him home.”
“When was this?”
Stephanowitz pulled a small, black notebook from his inside pocket. He paged into it, reading down. “Your Valentine's Day, February Fourteenth.”
“Perhaps too soon?”
“It would appear so.”
“You came all this way, eight thousand miles, to tell me so little?” Early asked.
Stephanowitz closed his notebook. “I'm a soldier. I go where ordered.”
“Uh-huh.”
The waiter hustled up with a serving tray he carried high over his shoulder. He swung the tray down and set off plates of steaks and baked potatoes. As the waiter gave Early his plate, he announced, “And one extremely dead steer for you, sir.”
CHAPTER 17
* * *
September 15—Thursday Evening
Meeting at the Memorial
Early stood back, studying the frieze that comprised much of the north wall of Kansas City's War Memorial. Twilight deepened, putting the words and the life-size figures into everincreasing shadows until a series of floodlights flicked on, making the wall, the halls at either end, and the monolith in the center appear as in daylight were it not that the sky beyond them had gone from deep reds to purple in the time Early had been there. Overhead, he heard the thrumming of motors and gazed up to see the wing and taillights of an airplane, an airliner. A DC-Three, Early guessed, bound for—where else could it be?—the island airport on the north side of the city. Some way to travel, he thought. Where had the passengers come from? The pilots, the crew? Where would they go tomorrow?
Something else took his attention, the near silent steps of someone crossing the Memorial's lawn a quarter to the rear.
“Mister Stephanowitz,” Early said without turning, “wondered when you'd come away from the trees.”
“You knew?”
“Saw you in Union Station, in the lobby of the Muehelbach, even coming up the hill.”
“And I thought I was a pretty good spy.”
“One of the better ones, I expect. Of course, I didn't know who you were at the train station or the hotel until you joined us in the dining room.”
Stephanowitz, his suitcoat slung over his shoulder and his necktie pulled loose, sidled up next to Early. “Have you seen me anywhere else?”
“Come to think of it, the cemetery, yes, after Judith's funeral. As I remember, you weren't in your white suit that day.”
“White would not have been respectful. You are very good, Mister Early. . . . Some memorial, isn't it?” Stephanowitz said, gesturing at the frieze.
“Indeed.”
“I wonder what kind of memorial we will build in Jerusalem someday, to remember those who died in making the new Israel?”
“Know many of them?”
“Only those on the ground in the small area where I moved. Not one died a hero, Mister Early. None of us really wanted to be ther
e, certainly not with a gun or a grenade in our hand.”
“That's not what your prime minister and your president say.”
“Stories old men tell. They didn't have to lace on boots in the morning or look down a gun barrel at an enemy intent on killing them.” Stephanowitz shook a cigarette from a pack. He put the cigarette between his lips before he offered a stick to Early. “Do you know what the real tragedy is?”
Early, intent on the frieze, did not answer, not immediately, nor did he take a cigarette. He gazed at a bareheaded soldier carved into the granite, to the side of the Angel of Victory, the soldier standing next to a cross. “Don't know what it was for you,” Early said, “but for us, it was the fact that we never stayed long enough to bury our dead. I didn't see the cemeteries until the war was over. The one on the bluffs beyond Omaha Beach—acres and acres of crosses.”
Stephanowitz flicked open a brushed-steel Zippo. He lit his cigarette. “I have seen it and the British cemetery above Gold Beach. . . . You know one day, thirty, forty years from now, we will be the old men. Our grandsons will say the same things of us because we took our nations to war.” He blew a plume of smoke toward the night sky.
“Perhaps there won't be another war.”
“And perhaps you and I won't wake every night, screaming from our nightmares. War, my friend, it's a condition of mankind. Read it in your Old Testament. Read it in our Torah.”
“War is holy?”
“No, it's killing someone you do not know before he can kill you.” Stephanowitz pointed his cigarette at a cannon and gun crew and a group of charging infantrymen carved into the east end of the frieze. “That is what war is, deafening and bloody.”
“And peace like we have now?”
“Merely an intermission.”
Early swept a hand toward the women sculpted into the frieze at either side of the center. “Tell me about Judith. Could she be one of them?”
Stephanowitz shook his head. “Mothers and nurses, no. She would be on the far end with the charging soldiers.”
“You did mention that to the Silverbergs. Is there something you didn't want to tell them?”
“You noticed.”
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