In Sunlight and in Shadow (71 page)

“Tomorrow,” said Harry, “I’m going to meet someone at the Niagara, the fisherman we almost ran over.”

“Did you ever find out his real name?”

“If I find out too much about him, he won’t help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“The Niagara’s on Wall Street,” he said, not answering the question.    “I know. I’ve been there. Have you?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, you’ll see. In the center is a huge waterfall twenty feet high and fifty feet long. It’s almost impossible to converse if you sit near it, and there’s so much noise and activity you can’t hear anyone else’s conversation or keep track of who’s there. They do business deals there so they can speak privately and still be in a restaurant. Help you do what?”

“We’ll talk under the noise. It works, I’m told. That’s probably why he chose it.”

Catherine stood up next to the window seat, put a thumb and a forefinger next to one of the windowpanes, then turned, took a step toward the middle of the living room, and pivoted back toward Harry. “You really are going to kill Verderamé.” She didn’t have the gallant though half-serious air she had had when, at times, she had petulantly argued for it. Now it was real. “That’s it?”

“It is.”

“Then I’ve got to be involved.”

“No, you’ve got to be uninvolved.”

“That’s not true. I’ve got to share the risk.”

“I’m expendable,” he said. “You’re not. What would be the point if something happened to you? You’re the future. It’s my job to protect you.”

“And what about me protecting you?”

“To put it as simply as I can, if I die, you can have and raise our child.”

“But I’m not pregnant.”

“Not even after what we did last night?”

“Well, maybe.”

“But if
you
die, Catherine, everything stops dead.”

“You could marry someone else.”

“I don’t want to marry someone else.”

“Look,” she said, “this man has no idea you’re going after him, not in a million years. Otherwise, you couldn’t even begin: you’d already be dead.”

“That’s right.”

“So, in the initial stages, when he doesn’t suspect. . . .”

“He can never suspect.”

“Let me be more precise, then: when it would not be possible for him to suspect.”

“Okay.”

“Then I can help. Afterward, I’ll go live with my parents until it’s safe. You can decide when I leave and when I come back, but you must let me help. You’re not the only one with dictates. If I don’t share in the risk I become nothing, just as you would. We’re going to die anyway. If you hold as tightly to life as you propose, you’ll smother it. For richer or for poorer, as one. We took an oath. The man is a killer. He’s killed our own and he almost killed you. The law is paralyzed. He threatens our future. Look, I’m like you.”

“How do you mean?”

“I wasn’t born to run.”

With this they stepped onto a higher and more dangerous plane, but she was right. He asked what she might do.

“You’ve made a plan, or you will have made a plan. You’re not going to just charge in with guns blazing, are you?”

“A surgery, Catherine, would not be better organized.”

“You’ll need surveillance.”

“Yes.”

“And who would have done it? You? One person? Don’t you think that might be noticed?”

“Not if it’s done very carefully, over time.”

“Patterns change with time. You can’t age surveillance, I would imagine.”

“Granted,” Harry allowed, “and that with you it would halve the chances of discovery.”

“No, reduce them by much more than that. I’m a woman. I’m an actress. I can speak in dialects and accents and I have closets full of clothes. I know costumes and makeup. I can be many different people. Someone like Verderamé looks at women only for sex. . . .”

“How do you know?”

“I’ll bet. For him, a
dame
is not someone he has to worry about.”

“But we don’t need that kind of thing. It’s more straightforward.”

“But what if you do? Do you know where he lives?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you know where he takes a walk?”

“I doubt he does.”

“Do you know his routes when he travels?”

“Not at this point.”

“Well, then, it’s pretty clear,” she said with irresistible authority, sounding so much like a Hale, “that I’m in.” And she was.

N
EW YORKERS OFTEN FORGET
, and some may not know, that theirs is a state of truly vast forests, spectacular rivers, fjords, and lakes, long pastoral valleys, and a huge, vertiginous fall of water that through a single spigot drains an area the size of Western Europe. And sometimes they remember, which is why Harry was able to wait for Vanderlyn in front of the Niagara, where hundreds of people were eating or serving lunch, and the noise befitted the name. Intermittently but unceasingly the front doors flapped like elephant ears as people entered and exited. From the hard-working, blue-jacketed Wall Street runners in white bucks half constructed of cardboard, to the top, pompous, stately, plump investment bankers in Florentine leather shoes, people came for the broiled fish, the mulligan stews, raw shellfish of fifty types and twice as many cocktails and beers, including beer from Mongolia, Anatolia, and the interior of Nigeria. The floor was made of little white tiles, the same mosaic found in millions of New York bathrooms, but here they were covered in sawdust that twice a day busboys swept up and dumped into the harbor. According to tradition, one threw one’s oyster and clam shells aside. This started in the eighteenth century, no one had ever thought to stop it, and now, close to midcentury and after two hundred years, the discarded shells still hit the floor like bullet casings.

As Harry waited, he looked through a window into the restaurant. The thin mistresses of fat men; the fat mistresses of thin men; secretaries in mouton; waitresses with strong, straight backs, because they carried heavy trays; and other women, business women, wives, college girls who had drifted downtown, God knows who from God knows where, were inside, working the fields of force that directed the actions of men, who could, without seeing, feel the presence of a woman walking by or sitting near them, and who adjusted their glances, positions, and thoughts accordingly, their breathing involuntarily, and their behavior summarily. The presence of a woman was such that if she walked into a restaurant and sat down at a table, the vital signs of every man who could see her would change in proportion to the inverse square of the distance between them, and some might even die. This was the subtext not only of restaurants but of the world, a metaphysics that would forever overlay everything.

Harry scanned the room. Each of the five or six hundred people within seemed intent and absorbed, on fire with ambition, dreams, memories, resentments, and thought on many levels: how much horseradish to add to the cocktail sauce or which oyster to eat first; would there be time after lunch to go to the bank; how to pay for college; why the head of the foreign currency trading desk had cast aspersions; what movie to see on Saturday; was Dewey going to run in ’48; ah, the girl in high school, with the spectacular red hair; how could God have allowed children to have been blown to bits in the war;
Rhapsody in Blue
echoing without cease in memory; let a shoeshine seat be open at the stand in the Schlumberger Building after six (if you could say it); who was right, Hamilton or Jefferson; I wish my father were alive, sitting next to me now; do birds have nightmares; two days ago, above Central Park, a skywriter wrote “I love you, Jill”; how much will it cost to rent a summer house for a week on Lake Winnipesaukee; how the hell can a grasshopper jump so far; he (not a grasshopper) makes more money than I do, or anyone else in the department; Cleopatra’s Barge; here comes the check; if nothing is the absence of something, then nothing is something; I wonder if I will die in a hospital, and will it be on a beautiful day in September; what the hell, exactly, is a prairie dog, is it a dog, how could it be—and so on, all proceeding at a fantastic rate, interweaving as much as the sound of voices, cutlery, crockery, and china, rising to hang in silence like the smoke of a waterfall, leaving only a frozen picture of five or six hundred people eating lunch or bustling about, their hands busy in reaching, their eyes reflecting, their souls invisibly weeping.

Then Vanderlyn touched him on the right shoulder. Not tapped, which would have been too low for Vanderlyn. “Hello,” said Harry, taken by surprise. (How did Vanderlyn get right next to him without his knowledge?) “I don’t want to go in there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Come with me, then,” Vanderlyn said, moving in the direction of the Battery, “and we’ll figure it out.”

They went right to the rail, where the wind was up just enough to ruffle the water into leonine whitecaps that would rise and then sink with a hiss into the rocking of the waves. October light made the harbor glow and shine in blue so intense that looking at it hurt. Ferries, barges, and tugs glided by, and a gray warship headed toward the Narrows as an ice-white Caribbean freighter backed into a slip at the Brooklyn piers. Every now and then a ship’s whistle more powerful than a thousand tubas thundered across the gaps and echoed, if you listened closely, off the walls of St. George.

“I’m hungry,” Vanderlyn said. “Where would you like to eat?”

“In the private dining room,” said Harry, “after we walk into the bank with your name on it and you’re greeted by smiling women and deferential men.”

“Why do you assume,” Vanderlyn asked, “that I have a private dining room?”

“Because your suit costs as much as a car.”

“That’s it?”

“You want more? You know the Hales; you work on Wall Street; your schedule is up to you; from the way you speak you must have gone to Yale; you were, or are, in the OSS; you have a manicure and a Patek Philippe; you’re about to embark on some sort of dollar-a-year-type government service; you’ve risen above caring about money; you’re about sixty; and despite the fact that it was the Winabout that sank in the storm that day, you still have the yacht.”

Vanderlyn smiled.

“In a package like that is an excellent chance of a private dining room, not far from here, which is where I want to go. What we’ve been talking about is dangerous and illegal, and if you’re going to know all the details of what I might do, I want to know at least who you are.”

“Tell me why,” Vanderlyn commanded in a neutral tone, saying it quickly.

“How do I know, for example, that you’re not the FBI, and this is not entrapment?”

“What for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know,” Vanderlyn said, “that they have to have law degrees.”

“The FBI? So?”

“So here’s some etiquette from Emily Post. Never inquire of an FBI agent if he passed the bar: you’ll make an enemy for life. If I had been a lawyer, I would have passed the bar, Harry, I wouldn’t have had to join the FBI. The FBI is trying to shut us down even before we’re established, because they don’t want us to intrude upon what they think is their territory, and so what if they know less about operations abroad than they do about shitting in a milk bottle.”

This was all news to Harry, who had drawn Vanderlyn out far more than he had expected.

“They’ve been looking into anyone involved, trying to blackmail us into abandoning it. They’re on me, they’re on everyone in it. That’s one reason for a buffer between us. Given what you may do, you don’t want them to be thinking about you in any way, not that they would give a fig—except that they might try to force me to stand down by threatening to put you away. Needless to say, that wouldn’t work. We can take some casualties, including me, including you, because what we’re trying to do is very important.”

“But they must already have some things they can use,” Harry speculated, “unless you and everyone around you are absolutely pristine.”

Vanderlyn was amused. “Of course we’re not,” he said, sweeping his hand toward what lay in back of him. “Wall Street, Harry. Its mother’s milk is corruption. We shepherd and maneuver capital, and the country couldn’t exist without us, but why are our rewards so exceptional, except that because we turn the valves we drink from the tap when we want? It doesn’t require a Pascal or an Einstein. Government employees—generals, cabinet secretaries—who have more skill than we do, and more responsibility, make a hundredth, a thousandth, of what we make. And capital, in the free-market countries, is almost a public trust, so dependent are they upon it. We don’t even pretend it’s ours. It just passes through us as we siphon and divert. It belongs to other people, but, you know, you’d hardly know it as we sit at their table and sup. Diamond miners don’t get to fill their pockets with diamonds, Harry, but we do.”

“How do you propose to continue whatever it is you’re setting up,” Harry asked, “if they can blackmail you?”

“Blackmail them back.”

“The FBI?”

“The FBI. They’re not the only ones who can find things out. We had people in the Chancellery in Berlin. Why wouldn’t we be able to penetrate an agency of our own government?”

“Because they don’t speak German.”

“They might as well, because they hardly speak English. Believe me, it wasn’t too challenging, but it was unpleasant.”

“The bureaucracy will merely sacrifice a clerk. I was in the army. I know.”

“Not if the person responsible is the person at the very top,” Vanderlyn said with unconcealed delight.

“J. Edgar Hoover?”

“We’ve got that crumb completely covered. Believe me.”

Shaking his head in both disbelief and disengagement, which Vanderlyn found annoying, Harry said, “He would claim that whoever actually did whatever was done was a rogue employee and probably a low one, too. As I said, a clerk.”

“Unless he did it himself.”

“With his own hand? J. Edgar Hoover?”

For some reason, Vanderlyn thought this was very funny.

“What did he do?”

“You don’t want to know, and you can’t know. At least until we get established, knowing it and keeping it contained is our shield. Probably no one will ever know, but had he not slipped up we couldn’t have begun. They’re still waiting for an opening, just in case, but I can’t think of anything that could happen that would get them out of check—and, oh, we’ve got them in check, even if Hoover dies. But if we go to my office—I don’t have a private dining room, I like to get out—they’ll get your picture and they’ll want to know who you are. That’s no way to begin.”