Homeland

by John Jakes

  “How do you know that?”

  Bitzer leaned back, resting his leather elbow pads on the fine mahogany bar. “He’s been telling people that some young pup accosted him in a pushy way. Knowing Paley, that means you were polite and he was his usual snotty self. Bill Paley’s a prick. Maybe if we’re lucky he’ll get sick and go home.”

  “He already looks terrible.”

  “Used to demonstrate and sell X-ray machines. He claims his sickness is related to that. I like to be charitable when someone’s had tough luck, but not if they’re nasty. Want another beer?”

  “Yes, I’ll buy this one.”

  “What’s your first name?”

  “They call me Dutch.”

  “Put ’er there, Dutch.” They shook hands. “Pals united against pricks like Paley. Sounds like a lodge. Let’s drink to it.”

  They drank to it. Presently Paul ordered a round and they drank to it again. They took to each other immediately.

  They talked about girls. Bitzer preferred the ones in New York; Paul thought the Cuban girls of Tampa looked very passionate and desirable. They talked about beer, agreeing that the local stuff was to be consumed strictly for its effect, certainly not for its quality. They talked about cameras. Bitzer was envious of Paul’s because his from the Biograph Company had one drawback that canceled out many good features.

  “Runs on storage batteries. Almost two thousand pounds of them. I bitched in New York and they said, ‘Billy, you don’t want to go, we’ll pay somebody else.’ I sit on my kiester for hours just waiting for a teamster willing to haul all those crates. Your Luxograph sounds like a honey. Maybe I should steal it.”

  He winked and waved for refills. They parted soon after, exchanging garrulous vows of friendship and promises of future revelry.

  With four steins of Florida Brewing’s Extra Pale sloshing around inside him, Paul was more than a little unsteady riding the elevator to the fifth floor. As usual, stepping from the cage was like going from a small hot closet to a large hot oven. He’d gotten used to sweating all day outdoors, and all night in the hotel.

  He tried to insert his key in the keyhole and kept missing. A door opened far down the hall. A man darted out of a room next to the staircase, clapping a derby on his head. Smoke trailed from a cigarette in his other hand.

  The man was quite tall and thin. Smartly dressed, with a neatly trimmed beard. He flashed a look along the hall, saw Paul, and then, without any reaction, stepped quickly around the corner to the stair going down.

  Paul’s room key had fallen from his hand, unnoticed. Was he drunk? Somewhat. Was he insane? Definitely not. The face had leaped out with burning clarity. Vivid dark eyes. Gold-wire spectacles with round lenses no bigger than pennies … anywhere in the world he would recognize the man he’d first met in the Berlin rail yards.

  But the man leaving hurriedly was barbered, well-tailored; clean.

  Paul forgot his key lying on the carpet and ran down the hall, noting the number of the room from which the man had emerged. He took the stairs in pursuit. At every landing there were tantalizing aromas. A trace of gents’ cologne; a hint of talc … Mikhail Rhukov gave off odors, but not that kind.

  On the ground floor he saw no sign of the man. He dashed by a couple of startled Navy men, straight to the rotunda. The night clerk was sleepy and cross.

  “I am Mr. Crown, five eleven. Can you tell me the occupant of room five thirty-six? It’s very important.”

  The clerk opened his mouth to say no. Paul slid a dollar across the green marble. The clerk covered it and drew it smoothly to his pocket, then turned the morocco-bound ledger a hundred eighty degrees. He leafed through the pages slowly. He glanced at the pigeonhole rack, connecting a name with a number.

  “It’s the wife of an American officer who’s encamped with his men at Tampa Heights.”

  “Thank you. One more question. Upstairs, very briefly, I thought I saw a friend. Possibly he’s a guest. He’s Russian, his name is Mikhail Rhukov.”

  “Spell the last.”

  Paul did it as best he could. The clerk again turned pages.

  “We have no one by that name.”

  “Are you sure? He speaks English with an accent heavier than mine. You would remember him.”

  “I would, and I don’t.”

  “But I saw him, there can’t be any mistake. Mikhail Rhukov—?”

  “We have no Rhukov from Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Switzerland, or any other address in Europe. That’s all I’m going to tell you. This hotel protects the privacy of its guests. We have many celebrities who stay with us in the winter season.”

  Paul turned away, wondering if he had really mistaken one man for another. Or seen the human equivalent of a desert mirage.

  No, absolutely, he wasn’t that besotted. It was Rhukov. Scrubbed up; sartorially transformed—but Rhukov.

  If an Army officer had put his wife in the hotel but returned to his camp every night, Paul could readily imagine why Rhukov had left in such haste. But that answered none of the other questions hammering in his head.

  Where had he come from? Where had he gone? Where was he now?

  What devil’s miracle had transformed him?

  From that night, Paul devoted his few free moments to the mystery. It remained unsolved. No employee he questioned recognized Rhukov’s name or description, but that proved nothing; he’d already learned that the staff was not overly forthcoming about guests.

  Several of the journalists thought the description sounded familiar but couldn’t identify the man. They were unanimous about one thing. He wasn’t Russian. One man insisted he was English, a second countered with Canadian, a third said that whatever he was, he had only stayed for a day or two.

  Paul telephoned other, cheaper hotels across the river. Nothing. One day when he and Jimmy were away, filming, the wife in room 536 checked out and a young Navy ensign moved in.

  It was a dead end. Whatever the explanation, the clean Rhukov had vanished as suddenly, inexplicably as the dirty one.

  May wore on. Several times, Army horses or mules broke loose from their corral and stampeded through the downtown, terrorizing citizens. Paul and Jimmy were never in place at the right moment to film one of these equestrian rampages. Instead, they photographed “Blanket-Tossing A New Recruit” and “Cuban Refugees Awaiting Rations.” Hundreds of these refugees had come to Tampa via Key West.

  Next came “Friendly Enemies,” a baseball game between a Tampa team and the Irish of the New York 69th Volunteers. Crane was in the bleachers, shouting profane and sarcastic comments when either side made a mistake.

  If Crane was a genius, his appearance belied it. He was a man of average height with straw-colored hair, a sallow face, and a large mustache. His duck trousers and white shirt were grimy. He smoked a pipe and, every inning or so, left his seat for a bottle of beer. Toward the end of the game, when the 69th had fourteen runs to the home team’s one, Paul and Jimmy moved the camera to shoot a few frames of Mr. Crane the baseball fan. People seated around him wondered about the attention; he looked like a dirty idler. When Crane saw the camera, and Paul cranking, he tipped his straw hat in a sardonic way, stuck out his tongue, and laughed uproariously. Paul suspected Shadow wouldn’t like the footage, no matter how famous the subject.

  Because it was taking a long time to organize the troops and the attack convoy, picture subjects became fewer and, in Paul’s estimation, duller. They were reduced to “A Trolley Ride Through Tampa” and “Morning Washup of the 1st Florida Volunteers.” Florida had raised twenty companies, but Army regulations stipulated that a regiment was twelve companies, so eight had been sent home. Paul wished the whole lot had been sent home. He and Jimmy filmed the Escambia Rifles of Pensacola, a scruffy, loud-mouthed lot. Several of them mocked Paul’s accent to his face. For a change Paul was the one ready to fight, Jimmy the one who dragged him away. “Bad odds,” Jimmy said later. He was correct. There were a lot of farmers in the Florida companies; big, with sunburne
d necks and strong arms.

  That night at the hotel, Paul got two more shocks, the first while he was riding the elevator downstairs for a meal and beer.

  The crowded car stopped at every floor. On the second floor a foreign officer stepped in. He wore khakis and the familiar red-dotted roundel on his cap. A military attaché Paul hadn’t seen before.

  Then his spine crawled. Yes I have.

  He’d only glimpsed the man’s face—could see nothing but the back of his head as the car descended—yet he was almost positive. When the car opened at the ground floor, he hung back. The attaché stepped away briskly, in profile a moment. Yes! There were the gray eyes that chilled the otherwise ordinary face. There was the hook-shaped dueling scar on the left cheek. He had never forgotten the lieutenant with the gold cigarette case in the Berlin rail yard.

  A reporter he knew slightly stepped off the car with him. Paul said, “Do you know that officer?” The attaché was bowing to kiss the gloved hand of an American officer’s wife.

  “Sure. Captain von Rike. German embassy, Washington.”

  His past seemed to be gathering around him as if some great climax was brewing; something personal, beyond the war and his insignificant role in it. He felt unseen forces rising like storm winds; forces he could neither identify nor comprehend. They were driving him inexorably zu einem Wirbel; to some vortex, some whirlpool. And an unknown end.

  The second shock came in the rathskeller, not long after he found Mr. Crane in the middle of an argument. Mr. Crane was faced off against another reporter. Crane’s straw-colored hair straggled over his forehead to his brows. His soiled shirt lacked a collar. There were six empty beer bottles lined up at his elbow.

  His adversary was a reporter named Sylvanus Peterman. He worked for the New York Journal, but he was never seen with Davis, the Journal’s star, and only seldom with the other men, two or three dozen, whom Mr. Hearst had sent to Tampa to handle the lesser chores of receiving editorial instructions, writing minor stories and fillers, sketching, transmitting copy, paying bills. Paul had heard that daily telegraph charges for the Hearst organization often exceeded a thousand dollars.

  Peterman was plump, pale, well dressed; he wore shell-rimmed glasses and smelled of toilet water. Though no older than Crane, he was already going bald. He combed his pomaded hair sideways to hide his bare skull. Most all the reporters disliked him. Crane looked as though he wanted to strangle him.

  Paul edged closer. Peterman was saying sententiously, “Kipling put it admirably. ‘Take up the White Man’s burden, send forth the best ye breed—’ ”

  “Oh, not that shit,” Crane said through the smoke from the cigarette hanging on his lip. “Freddy, another bottle.”

  “ ‘Go, bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives’ need.’ ”

  “Oh, shit, shit! Freddy, God damn it, step lively, I can’t listen to this sober.”

  “Crane, what’s wrong with you? Where’s your perspective? If we don’t civilize and democratize the backward colored peoples, who will? We must develop these new markets—occupy new lands if necessary. We’re the leaders of the world now. We are a conquering race!”

  The fresh bottle arrived. Crane laid his cigarette on the bar and took a long swig. He raised the bottle. “I salute you”—a wet, phlegmy cough hunched him over for a moment—“salute you, brother Peterman. Or is it brother Hearst?”

  “You can sneer all you want, I’m proud to work for a true American visionary who—”

  “Shut up and answer the question I asked you five minutes ago. Just how are you and wild Bill going to accomplish this magnificent conquest if the recipients don’t want it?”

  “What a hypocrite you are. How can you take money from the World?”

  “Easy. I don’t send the paper any pandering copy.”

  “How very noble. But you forget, Mr. Pulitzer and Mr. Hearst believe what I’m saying.”

  “Bullshit. Mr. Hearst and Mr. Pulitzer don’t believe anything but the circulation numbers. Now answer me. How are you going to spread and enforce your great American gospel? With whips and chains, while shooting red, white, and blue rockets out your ass?”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “And you jingo boys make me sick.” Crane hurled his cigarette at the nearest spittoon and missed.

  “So self-righteous,” Peterman snarled. “You and your filthy novels and your arrogance. Always mocking the traditional values. Trampling on them like some damn pagan. Decent Americans won’t have it—and we’re the majority!”

  “Then almighty God help us, brother Peterman, because no one else will. I’ve had my dose of propaganda for the night. Get out of here before I knock you down with a fart, that’s all it would take.”

  He turned his back.

  Sylvanus Peterman swept his eye along the bar, past Paul, various journalists, a pair of second lieutenants trying to contain their anger. He stalked to the stairway with a martyred air.

  “Fill me up again, Freddy,” Crane shouted, waving his empty bottle. It slipped from his hand and smashed behind the bar.

  The barkeep said, “Mr. Crane, maybe you’ve had too much.”

  “Too much is never enough. Is Joe Pulitzer’s money good in this rat hole, or isn’t it?”

  “You should eat something—”

  “Absolutely. Tomorrow or the next day. Plenty of time.” The hacking cough bent him over again. He gripped the bar with both hands until the spasm passed.

  Sighing, the barkeep snapped the crown off another bottle, set it in front of Crane, then began cleaning up the glass with a broom and pan. Leaning on his elbows, Crane rolled his head blearily from side to side. He noticed Paul standing at his left.

  “I know you. The camera kid. You tried to preserve me for posterity at the ballpark.”

  “Good thing you did, Dutch,” Freddy said. “At the rate he’s going, he won’t be around long.”

  “Up yours,” Crane said cheerfully. “What’s your name, camera kid?”

  “Dutch Crown. American National Luxograph Company of Chicago.”

  “Graph this, graph that—every one of ’em’s a graph. Damn things’ll never catch on.” He put a new cigarette in his mouth, or tried. On the first attempt he mashed the end against his lip. “Buy you a beer?”

  “Fine, thank you.” Freddy drew a Florida Brewing Extra Pale. Crane raised his bottle for a toast. Paul did the same with his stein.

  “Let’s drink to absent love. Have you got an absent love, Dutch?”

  Paul said softly, “I do.”

  “Mmm. Mine’s Miss Cora Stewart. Proprietress of the Hotel de Dream, Jacksonville. If there is a sporting house in America more tasteful and well-mannered, I don’t know it. Salud. To Cora.”

  “Prosit. Cora.”

  They drank.

  “Not much to do around here, is there?” Crane said. “Not much to write about. I’m bored silly. I’ve been working on another short story.”

  “I greatly admire your writing. I haven’t read Maggie, your first, but The Red Badge—if you wrote nothing besides that, I would say your mark is made.”

  “Thanks. Thanks very much.” He seemed tired all at once.

  “May I ask a question on another subject?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know a thing about Joe Pulitzer’s girlfriends or bowel habits.”

  This was a strange, compelling man, Paul thought. But very self-destructive. Crane kept the cigarette dangling from his mouth, squinting through the blue smoke, to nowhere.

  “It’s nothing like that. Recently, in this hotel, I thought I saw an old acquaintance. I saw him at a distance, on the fifth floor. I wanted to hail him but he hurried off. Now I can’t find him. His name is Mikhail Rhukov. Like you, he’s a journalist.”

  Crane shook his head. “Maybe if you describe him—”

  “Tall, very slender. Has a beard. When he smiles, his teeth seem whiter than piano keys.” Crane straightened up, blinking. “His spectacles are small. Lenses no bigger than th
is.” Paul showed a circle, thumb and forefinger. “He’s very outspoken.”

  Crane drew the cigarette from his lips and dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. “What did you say his name is?”

  “Mikhail Rhukov.”

  “Then he has a twin. You described Michael Radcliffe. He’s a journalist. But he’s an Englishman.”

  “Englishman?”

  “Do you have a hearing problem? The man you described is Michael Radcliffe. Very upper-upper type. If he wasn’t born in Blighty and bred up at Oxford or Cambridge, I’ll pay you a thousand dollars. As soon as I get it.”

  “A British journalist—how can it be?”

  “I dunno, kid, but it is.”

  “I described him to several of your colleagues. A few seemed to remember him, but no one knew his name.”

  “He was registered in the hotel only two nights. Came over by steamer to Charleston, then took a coaster to Fernandina and a train here. We drank champagne at this very bar, then continued at one of the tables. We got on damn well. We talked for hours. I believed everything he said about himself, but at the same time a voice in my head was yelling fire, fire! He was all that he seemed, but he was something more. Have you heard of Otto Hartstein, Lord Yorke?”

  “No.”

  “One of the two great press lords of England. Michael Radcliffe’s a roving correspondent for Hartstein’s London Light. The flagship paper. He’s married to Lord Yorke’s only child, Cecily Hartstein. Talk about career insurance.”

  Radcliffe? England? Married? No Russian accent? Paul was reeling.

  “Do you know why he left the hotel, Mr. Crane?”

  “Well—” Crane coughed and as soon as he recovered, lit another cigarette. He was scrutinizing Paul warily now, his eyes clearer, his concentration intense. “Some affair of the heart. Or at least the bedroom. It involved a lady who was in the dining room regularly for a while. On her left hand the lady displayed large and expensive engagement and wedding rings.”

  “Mr. Crane, I must find this man. I must see if he is Mikhail Rhukov.”

  “You say you’re his friend.”

  “Rhukov’s friend, yes, absolutely.”