A Family Madness (18 page)

He was still awake, sore in the shoulder and afraid, at noon. Training was to begin at five. He would go early and get Wallie the club masseur to treat the damage with all his old-fashioned liniments with their ancient labels featuring goannas and emus and hinting at Aboriginal and magical healing substances. Wallie would be good for the spirit. He treated the bodies of footballers as if they were the temples of the Lord.

Danielle's last sentence, when turned end to end, meant nothing and meant too much. You could imagine a girl like that, bear-hugged by a footballer within arm's length of wedding shots and of John Paul's blessing, naming Gina as an impediment. But her regret wasn't for Gina. It was because he was no Kabbel. He fell asleep at last wondering if she was saying—in the indirect, arse-up Kabbel manner—that she wished they were married, that he was incorporated in the Kabbel tribe in that way. He left unexamined, sitting in the dimmest corner of his surmises, the idea that she might be telling him she wished he was her brother.

24

F
ROM THE
J
OURNALS OF
S
TANISLAW
K
ABBELSKI
, C
HIEF OF
P
OLICE
, S
TAROVICHE
.
Nov. 30, 1943

Further meeting on Ganz problem today at Natural History Museum next door my office. Was amazed to find Kuzich present. Since his wife's death our mayor has got by quite happily with occasional solace from Mrs. Dorovina, the department store owner's wife, but today he
looked
bereaved, red-eyed, and badly shaven and angry with fate.

“We've got him!” said Bienecke quietly to me, not wanting to seem to crow in front of the widower Kuzich, but his face alive with that excitement peculiar to police work, when events and people seem to cooperate to deliver up to you a long-cherished target. Have not relayed to Bienecke my disgust at excessive aspects of Ganz's personality nor my horror at the foul pederastic kiss he imposed on Radek. Even if I were anxious for the Kommissar's destruction I would not share such intimate concerns with Bienecke.

It seems Bienecke has enough to go on from other sources though. Two months back, within an hour of what Bienecke still calls the
Kaffee Aktion
, Ganz turned up at Bienecke's office to accuse him of murder and chicanery. Ganz had already met young Harner in the lobby and, seeing some blood on his trousers, called him a swine. Both officers—Bienecke and Harner—then in a condition of shock, since Bienecke's foredoomed experiment had not gone well, and some of my men and a platoon of Lustbader's had to be sent round to end the misery of sundry victims. To have a tear-stained hysteric turning up and yelling accusations at such a time was very hard to take for proud and narrow men like these two.

Later, more calmly, Ganz tried to get even with Bienecke on procedural grounds. Wrote to von Gottberg, to Lohse, and to Kappeler saying that Jews from his office had been executed but that those working for Oberst Lustbader and the Wehrmacht have been left quite alone, and that this distinction constituted a personal insult to him as Kommissar.

No doubt Bienecke will win paper war. Already has powerful Dr. Kappeler on side. Also sent off to von Gottberg photographs of Ganz and his driver Yakov in overfriendly stances, including one of Ganz congratulating Yakov, holding him by the arm, the day of Radek's birthday, when Yakov rescued Ganz's Mercedes from burning garage. Seems this constitutes a race crime adequate to excite someone like von Gottberg. Other photographs and testimonies Bienecke has collected concerning Ganz-Yakov connection must be enough to blow von Gottberg's hat off.

Bienecke, after giving me a summary of the further complaints everyone now had with Ganz, let the remarkably pensive Mayor Kuzich begin to speak. There's a secretary in the Town Hall named Drusova. One of the clerks had informed Kuzich that Drusova was stealing stationery, secreting it in the lining of her jacket, and even beneath her blouse and underwear. Kuzich had his chief secretary, a middle-aged woman, detain Drusova at the end of the day—that was yesterday. Kuzich and chief secretary thought they were dealing with ordinary pilferage, but also found on the girl's person carbons used in typing up a number of documents—the names and personal details, for example, of appointees to administer the various
Wehrdorfer
in the oblast of Staroviche, lists of invitees to the mayor's Christmas party, memos from Kuzich to me on law-and-order matters, memos from Kuzich to Bienecke on partisan matters, memos from Kuzich to Ganz on ghetto matters. Obvious the girl was passing this species of intelligence to the partisans.

Drusova has been prisoner since last night. Can't suppress a surge of pity for her, though Bienecke says that
for obvious reasons
she hasn't been touched. Asked of course what the obvious reasons were. He said she could be used to draw the partisans to Ganz. Asked how he intended to turn her, how to ensure that when she speaks to her partisan contacts she will not include a code sentence which will tell them she's been caught.

Had he any relatives of hers for surety. Bienecke said, Of course, her fourteen-year-old brother. He is hostage. Drusova's been told he'll be released if she does her task properly.

My pity's now transferred itself from Drusova to the boy.

Kuzich said, “She's the one who sold my wife to the bastards. My wife's social and official itinerary was typed up in the office. Tell her any lies you wish to, but don't keep any promises you make to the bitch.”

It's clearer than ever how strongly Kuzich also is set against Ganz and his policy of moderation. The man doesn't have an ally in Staroviche, Kaunas, Riga, or Minsk.

Bienecke's method is this: He releases the girl. She tells the partisans she has been chastised for stealing paper and expects to be civilly tried and fined for it. She says that her boss the mayor pleaded for leniency to apply to her case. In a short time, within a few days at the most, before the partisans are aware that the boy is a prisoner of the SS and not away in Gomel with his grandparents, she will give her partisan contact a rundown on the feud growing between Ganz and everyone else, and advise them that through Kuzich's correspondence with us she knows the SS and I both intend to withdraw our protection, leaving him merely with two or three of Lustbader's middle-aged asthmatics. This fatal thinning of his protection would happen either outside his office or more likely outside his apartment.

Question Bienecke asks is whether I will cooperate and withdraw my men?

Even then not certain. Ganz profoundly flawed. Don't want him near Danielle or the children. But still a man of brilliant promise. In the end I asked for a few hours. It is not good for my Belorussian purpose to be too supine to the desires of the Gestapo and SS.

Telegraphed Kappeler asking for assurances that a Belorrusian National Congress
would
be called and seeking an urgent reply. Three o'clock this
P.M.
telegraphic assurances from Kappeler arrived on my desk. Have decided to assist Bienecke in what is probably essential for the ultimate security of this oblast.

25

F
ROM THE
M
ATCH
D
IARY OF
T
ERRY
D
ELANEY

Penrith v. Balmain. Least said the better. 37–8. Missed a crucial tackle which set up their first try after twenty minutes. Tuomey of course his usual charming self. “If that shoulder's not up to it, tell us and we'll bloody take you off.” Kabbel tells me from his intelligence sources the blond punk who did it copped thirteen stitches in the hand, so that's some comfort. Sluggish in attack today—couldn't get anything going in the back line and Terry Mansfield and forwards slow and let the others penetrate up the middle. Reserves and firsts won. Deecock brilliant at five-eighth, so I'm glad the bugger's retiring this season. Most of our tries from bombs though. Not from real penetrative football. Shoulder so fierce by tonight Gina and I didn't go to club. Bugger that blond with the hammer!

He pretended greater shoulder pain than he felt and avoided touching Gina that night. The late night television news he sat up watching was full of lumpy footage from the American networks, which the local stations boasted of as “the full resources of our worldwide satellite hookup.” There were garish ruins in an unimaginable town in Mississippi in whose main street a chemical tanker had exploded. A scrawny dog owned by an obese couple in Orlando, Florida, could use a home computer to do basic calculations and draw diagrams. That was the quality of the stuff for whose sake Delaney avoided Gina's bed. A yellow flicker bounced across the room from the face of the dog owner as Gina stood watching Delaney from the door.

“If the damage is permanent, you'll just have to sue Kabbel,” she said.

When he came to bed at last he lay straight and still. He was pleased that his status as a professional athlete—that his body was not any body, that people paid at the turnstiles to see its tricks—gave him the extra authority to lie like a board at Gina's side. Sometimes he would glance at her to ensure she was sullenly asleep, her back to him, her shoulders assuming a hunch which belonged to an older woman, some widow of the future. The sight filled him with bewilderment and misery. He felt an urge to telephone his mother, to get her praying, repetitive prayer on which Mrs. Delaney could spend a whole day, a tide of repeated formulas, of sympathetic utterances.

“There is nothing wrong with magic,” Father Doig had told his shocked congregation once. “Magic is
meant
to be potent in all societies, in our society as in Aboriginal society. Magic—the Rosary or some other tribal incantation—can kill a cancer, save a marriage, revive the doomed.”

“Now we're bloody myall blacks!” old Greg Delaney had complained, and had spoken—as he often did—of writing to the Cardinal about Doig's heresies.

But that was all Delaney wanted—what Doig had talked about. Someone to take the curse off.

He did not wake until she was getting ready for work. The brisk sound of her dress going over her shoulders and down her body brought him around. It was already after eight and Gina was hurrying. He gave her like charity the small news that his shoulder had improved. He tried to set up the lying impression that
that
was their reward for not touching all night. The mortgage payment was safe—he would get a match fee on Sunday. She said that was good. He watched her frown at him, her doubt that that was all the distance between them, a few bruised sinews. He grinned candidly, and panic crashed his heart against his ribs.
I can't keep up the lies, I haven't got the guts for it
.

Then it came to him that it would be better if he'd
had
Danielle Kabbel, acquired something definite to lie about. Something you could say in a sentence.

That night Delaney returned to the control room from Blacktown in the middle of his shift. Danielle Kabbel was dozing on the couch, an old-fashioned quilt covering her lower body, a sky blue cardigan crookedly over her shoulders. On her thigh sat an open spine-up copy of
Catch-22
, a novel which Delaney had once read and been shocked by—the lunacy of its love and war and death. It amazed him to think of her reading it, figuring it out. Yet she was deeply into it, the meat of the book spread evenly across her leg. She gaped and then smiled when he woke her.

He said, “I believe there's a painting Warwick did of the two of you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Why?” She stretched, yawning on the word. Her breasts lifted within the cardigan.

“I wanted to see it. That's all.”

She swung her legs off the couch and found her shoes. She led him into the hallway and toward the Kabbel kitchen he had never seen. The inner part of the house was immaculate and cold. On either wall were dim and ancient black and white photographs—the Kabbel ancestry, Delaney supposed—and shiny colored prints of the Kabbel children. Danielle turned on the light and Delaney saw the painting. “Good, isn't he?” Danielle asked him. She smiled again. Delaney was delighted with the smile. He saw in it the simple arrogance of kinship, nothing more.

Stanton's description of the thing had been pretty exact. Danielle and Warwick were blank-eyed. But that was because Warwick's craft didn't stretch to living eyes. The Wave, breaking over the Harbor Bridge and the ugly Centerpoint Tower silhouetted like a vast folded clothes hoist, was beautifully marbled with sea spume and had a depth to it. It was the sort of schoolboy painting that was hung on construction hoardings in the city during Education Week. If you saw it there, you'd guess that the deep blue costumes with the four brass circles on the collars were the uniform of some minority-group high school.

“Hey, you never wear the uniform!” said Delaney.

He heard a faint sigh of fabric as she shrugged. “Warwick must have thought he'd put me in it for some symbolic reason.” She laughed quietly. “It isn't as if I don't slave for the business.”

“Why the four rings?”

“That's symbolic. My father's design. It stands for the four of us. Interlocked. My father goes in for that sort of thing. It's the—”

He knew what she was going to say: “The Belorussian in him, I suppose.”

She laughed again. “Exactly, Terry. You're catching on.”

“I love you too, Danielle,” he said, hoping it would loosen somehow the Kabbels' interlocking rings.

Danielle said, “Oh,” made a little squeak with her lips, and put her hand to his jaw.

“Can I be your lover?” It was a strange thing for him to say. He had never used that term with Gina. With Gina he had always been his honest, Delaney, five-eighth self. Such a word as “lover” may have alarmed Gina or seemed to crowd out the boundaries of life so that there would be no space left for practical matters, including practical marital affection.