(1969) The Seven Minutes (65 page)

and a paper cup of coffee.

‘What is it, Mike?’

‘Abe, can you define “anachronism” for me?’

‘Anachronism? Sure. It’s when you refer to the wrong time.’

‘Or, as Webster’s has it, “An error in chronology by which events are misplaced in regard to each other,” like “the antedating of an event,” like “anything incongruous in point of time with its surroundings.” Well, Abe, I’ve discovered not one but two striking anachronisms in Van Fleet’s testimony. I suspected it when I heard them in court, but I couldn’t be positive until I checked them out.’ He tapped the almanac. ‘I’ve just checked them out.’

‘Anachronisms. What’s there to get so excited - ?’

Barrett jumped up. ‘Listen, Abe, I’m not nit-picking. There may be something to get mighty excited about.’ He waited for Zelkin to sit down, and then, as Zelkin nibbled at the pickle, Barrett began to pace before him. ‘Remember that part of Van Fleet’s testimony where he quoted from some literary work called Outside the Mainstream, by Dr Hiram Eberhart of Columbia University?’

‘I remember.’

‘And remember the Eberhart quote where he tells the anecdote of the night Jadway was listening to Louis win the heavyweight title by knocking out Braddock, and then, afterward, the way Jadway spoke about how so much lovemaking of the garden variety was like that prize fight, and then going on to say that Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn depicted lovemaking in that manner?’

‘Yes, I recall -‘

‘Okay, Abe. The first anachronism, the one that struck me while we were in court. To lay the foundation, when did J J Jadway die ?’

‘February, 1937.’

‘Exactly. Jadway killed himself and was promptly cremated in February, 1937. But here we have Dr Eberhart telling us how Jadway read and discussed Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, Yet Capricorn was not published by the Obelisk Press until 1939. In short, Jadway was reading and discussing a book published two years after his death. How do you like that?’

Zelkin finished his pickle. ‘Flimsy,’ he said. ‘Van Fleet may have misquoted Dr Eberhart.’

‘Nope. I had my favorite librarian, Rachel Hoyt, at the Oakwood Branch Library, look it up. The quote was correct word for word.’

‘Still flimsy,’ persisted Zelkin. ‘Dr Eberhart made an understandable mistake in his writing. He mixed up Tropic of Capricorn, published in 1939, with Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which was published in 1934, when Jadway was still very much alive.’

‘I’m a step ahead of you, Abe. I, too, saw that such an error would be an easy one to make. As a matter of fact, the error must have been made, because of the second discrepancy. Hear this one. We have Jadway dead and gone in February, 1937. We also have -according to the highly esteemed Dr Eberhart - Jadway listening to

Joe Louis beat Braddock for the boxing title. Know when Louis beat Braddock? Joe Louis knocked out Jim Braddock in the eighth round in Chicago in June, 1937. Get it? June, 1937. That means Jadway was listening to the fight four months after he was supposed to be dead. How do you like that?’

Zelkin set down his coffee. T like that better.’

‘Now, I know the distinguished Dr Eberhart may have been in error a second time. But twice in one paragraph, from a renowned scholar, with all that proofreading ? Maybe. Yet unlikely. So supposing our Dr Eberhart was accurate about this second oddity? What does that give us? It gives us a new and revived Jadway who did not die in February, 1937, as Cassie McGraw, Christian Leroux, and Father Sarfatti have reported. It gives us a Jadway very much alive four months later. And perhaps discussing Miller’s book two years later. It upends all the testimony on Jadway so far. It puts us back in business.’

‘It sure does - if Dr Eberhart’s anecdote is at least half true. Is Dr Eberhart still around ?’

‘Very much so. Still at Columbia. Has an apartment in Morning-side Heights. All that’s left is to phone him, try to wake him up, and, presuming he’s in New York and not off on a sabbatical or something, tell him it is urgent that I see him on a matter involving the integrity of his scholarship.’

‘You can be sure that’ll wake him up.’

‘And it should get me to him and nearer the final truth. I know the dice are loaded against us. But I’m willing to roll them again. What do you say, Abe?’

‘What can I say ? I got a partner who likes to travel. I say take a trip. When you’re going under, even a straw is worth a grab. Okay, I’ll stand in for you in court tomorrow. Only see that you get back before they put Jerry Griffith on the stand. He’s your baby.’

‘Don’t worry. Thanks, Abe.’ Barrett was momentarily reflective. ‘Jadway not dead in 1937. My God, wouldn’t that be something?’

When he first sat down across from Dr Hiram Eberhart at the lunch table, Mike Barrett had been as stoical about his duty and the probable result as an eighteenth-century executioner in France preparing to decapitate the aristocrat bowing beneath the guillotine.

Barrett had had no worry about suffering from hemophobia. His mind was on truth, truth and justice.

But now that the coup de grace had been delivered, now that Dr Eberhart’s head had rolled, now that he looked as if he had been severed from his senses, Barrett was sorry and felt a twinge of remorse.

They had been sitting at a small table on the second floor of the exclusive Century Club on Forty-third Street, a few doors off Fifth Avenue, in New York City. Barrett’s midnight call last night had not awakened Dr Eberhart - he always read late, it turned out -and Barrett’s enigmatic challenge to his proud scholarship had quickly provoked curiosity and an appointment. Dr Eberhart had said that he was a member of the Century Club and suggested that Barrett meet him there in the lobby near the first-floor entrance at one o’clock. Barrett had come straight from the airport and had arrived before the appointed time, but Dr Eberhart was already there, and by one o’clock they had been shown to their table upstairs.

Barrett had not wasted a minute, and Dr Eberhart also had no interest in cordiality. Unlocking his briefcase, Barrett had explained to his host who he was and what was the reason for his interest in J J Jadway and therefore in Dr Eberhart, and then he had read to Dr Eberhart the professor’s own anecdote about Jadway. He had then related how Van Fleet had quoted the passage in court late yesterday afternoon. Then, mercilessly, Barrett had turned the knob and let the guillotine’s blade flash downward.

Two unexpected anachronisms, Dr Eberhart. Did the professor know when Jadway had died ? No, it had not been relevant to what he had been writing. Well, Dr Eberhart, now it would seem to be relevant. Jadway died in February, 1937. Here you write of his discussing the Louis-Braddock fight, which in fact was staged four months later in 1937, and here you have him discussing Tropic of Capricorn, which in fact was not published until two years after his death. There you have it, Dr Eberhart.

Barrett had once heard that it took the guillotine ten seconds

to behead its victim. After the careful preparation, it had taken Barrett no longer than that to separate Dr Eberhart from his senses.

Dr Hiram Eberhart was a neat gnome of a scholar, perfectly fitted into an academic box, with no world beyond his literary scholarship. He knew very little about many things, but very much, perhaps all there was to know, about his one thing. He was not a snob, not mean, but merely an authority. He was musty, fussy, tidy, complacent. An elderly bachelor on the verge of becoming a professor emeritus. Strands of dull gray hair, myopia, a shiny red button of a nose (decades of medicinal sherry), chicken-breasted, an old-fashioned dull charcoal suit. What he knew he knew best of all, and he was never contradicted. Quoted, yes, but contradicted never.

Now he was undone.

The weak eyes tried to focus. ‘Are you sure, are you sure, Mr Barrett ? Let me see what you have there, let me see for myself. It can’t be.’

He had taken Barrett’s notes, and it was there.

‘Mr Barrett, this has never happened to me before. In a long lifetime dedicated purely to scholarship, I have never been confronted with such a contradiction in my facts. I do not mean to imply that there can exist a man who is without fallibility and error, but I have always been meticulous about my research and my accuracy. I have four textbooks in regular use in university literature courses. This volume, my most recently published work, appeared only the year before last. It was ten years in the making. Despite the imprecations of my publisher, I postponed releasing it for publication three times, in order to check and double-check my facts. Now, this dreadful error. I blame myself only for overlooking Jadway’s date of death. Had I not done that, this gruesome mistake would have been averted. But Jadway’s death date seemed so unnecessary. I had the information first hand - about Jadway’s comment on Tropic of Capricorn, and his analogy about the prize fight and love. I was accurate about tape-recording what I had learned. The mistake could have been made only by my source. He must be given the blame.’

‘Your source?’ said Barrett. ‘It was not evident to me there was any source other than yourself. You credited no one in a footnote for the anecdote. I assumed you were present when Jadway -‘

‘No, I was not. I recall it fully now. I received this material on the condition that I not publicly credit my source. My source was Jadway’s - one of Jadway’s closest friends in Paris in the nineteen-thirties. Entirely trustworthy. He had been with Jadway when the events in the anecdote transpired.’

‘Who was your source?’

‘Well, considering how I was misled, I see no reason not to reveal his name. I acquired the information from Sean O’Flanagan, a poet who had known Jadway in Paris.’

‘Sean O’Flanagan,’ Barrett murmured. ‘I’ve heard the name.’ He tried to recollect where or from whom, and then he remembered. From Olin Adams, the autograph dealer. ‘Yes,’ Barrett went on, ‘I’d hoped to see O’Flanagan myself recently, but he had no phone, no address, received his mail in care of General Delivery. How did you get to him, Dr Eberhart, and when?’

‘It was three years ago, while I was still rewriting Outside the Mainstream. By an accident of good luck - it seemed good luck then -I came across an obscure poetry quarterly being published in Greenwich Village. It contained an anonymously written verse about Jadway. The publisher of the poetry magazine was Sean O’Flanagan - publisher and editor, according to the masthead. I traveled to Greenwich Village to find him. At the publication’s address I learned that, weeks before, the magazine had been foreclosed on by creditors such as the printer and the landlord. I was directed to a neighborhood pub which, I was told, was O’Flanagan’s hangout, as it had been for many years.’

‘And you found him there?’

‘Not on my first visit, but I did on my third. There was a round corner table and a padded chair on which O’Flanagan had staked a claim, and from which he had held forth for almost a decade. The proprietor tolerated him as a character, a part of the decor, and he was regarded rather as the Ezra Pound of the pub. He had the reputation, I learned, of being a heavy drinker, an alcoholic, living off some meager private income, while occupying himself with reminiscing of his days as an expatriate in Paris and Rapallo and dispensing advice to the younger poets who gathered around.’

‘His drinking,’ said Barrett. ‘Perhaps that accounts for his misinforming you.’

‘I think not,’ said Dr Eberhart. The late afternoon that he received me, he was stone cold sober, at least in my view, and meticulous about the information that he gave me. He had agreed to speak to me providing I would not ask him any personal questions about Jadway. I promised to confine my interview to literary matters and did. It was O’Flanagan who, near the end of the interview, volunteered the personal anecdote in which you have discovered two horrifying anachronisms.’

‘What was O’Flanagan like?’

‘I have only a dim impression of him now. A somewhat rheumy, bucolic, ill-clad old man - in years perhaps younger than myself, but in appearance seemingly much my senior. I imagine he could be a nuisance and tiresome when tippling from the bottle. However, he determinedly avoided drink in my presence. One beer, I believe, and no more. I perceived he wanted his wits about him and was eager to put his best foot forward. A rather egotistical old man who felt that the world was remiss for not having crowned his own genius. In his failure he took refuge in self-deception. But I fear the world is right and O’Flanagan wrong. I have read his poetry. Now,

presuming he is still alive -‘

‘He is,’ said Barrett. ‘Or at least he was a week ago.’

‘Well, then, no doubt you will want to see him and probe for the truth behind this unfortunate anecdote. If you do, I am sure he is still entering that pub in Greenwich Village every cocktail hour, which is around five in the afternoon, assuming his place of honor at the corner table below the frosted window, and there nodding over memories of happier times. Should you find him, and straighten out the dates of Jadway mort and Jadway redivivus, I would be grateful if you would keep me informed. I must correct the unhappy error in the next edition of my book, or else excise the anecdote completely.’

‘I owe you a good deal, Dr Eberhart, and I promise to keep you informed. That club in Greenwich Village where Sean O’Flanagan hangs out. Can you tell me its name?’

‘O’Flanagan’s pub? It is called - forgive me - The Appropoet. No orchestra or dancing or floor show in the usual sense. The only entertainment consists of a poetry-reading session during every cocktail hour. Aspiring amateurs are invited to declaim their verse to the intoxicated clientele. The readers are accompanied by much hooting and catcalling. Deserved. The new poetry, the formlessness of it, the wretched corruption of the language, is enough to drive one to drink. I imagine that’s the point of it. What happened to Sara Teasdale? Now, that’s rather a good title, isn’t it ? At any rate, I wish you luck with the Keeper of the Anachronisms.’

The club had not been listed in the New York telephone directory. A new thing. Anti-conformity, anti-commercialism, anti-establish-ment. Barrett had supposed that to Charles Dodgson this might have made sense. After all, did Wonderland have an address ? Did Eden ? Does an oasis ?