In Sunlight and in Shadow (75 page)

Coughing violently, Harry excused himself, jumped from the shoeshine stand, and stepped outside in his socks. Still making the motions of coughing so the cobbler could see them through his window, but with no sound, Harry watched as the overcoats sailed up the street and went right. This was all he needed to know that day. The picture would be built painstakingly piece by piece. But a few minutes later he was pleased when, as he was looking to see if another perch was available for looking up the street where they had turned, two cars appeared. One was a polished black Cadillac, and the other a humpbacked Nash. The bodyguards were recognizable in the front seats of both cars, as was Verderamé himself in the back seat of the Cadillac, where he was reading a newspaper. They went down Prince Street all the way to MacDougal, where they doglegged out of sight.

Catherine, who had never had her hair done, had it done the next day at the junction of Sixth Avenue and Prince, where she sat under the dryer and pretended to read
Town and Country
while she watched traffic out the window. There was nothing to report, and she went back the next day to have her hair cut. “How much would you like me to take off?” she was asked.

“About an eighth of an inch. Subtle differences can really change a look.”

“They can,” the hairdresser said.

“But to really change a look, you have to be bold.”

“Absolutely!”

“Don’t you think the new styles this year herald a wonderful change?” Catherine asked.

“Yes. After all those years of war—drab, drab, drab—they certainly do, but it’s almost too late. Anyway, it’s about time.”

“I favor the classic, unchanging look,” Catherine stated. “Do you?”

“Of course I do. It’s classic, it’s timeless, it’s chic, it’s elegant. Give me that any day rather than all that ridiculous experimentation.”

“Oh damn,” Catherine said. “They went by and my hair’s wet.” They had turned up Sixth Avenue.

“Who went by?” the hairdresser asked.

Catherine’s eyes darted. She had given too much away. “The Pygmies.”

“The Pygmies?”

“Yes.”

“What Pygmies?”

“Pygmies from the Congo. Or someplace. They’re chasing me.”

“Oh,” the hairdresser said.

Catherine rose from her chair, her hair still dripping, and rushed out the door.

“You’ve already paid!” the hairdresser shouted out after her. “Come back anytime you’d like! I’ll cut it!” And then, “She took the smock. Bitch!”

Not quite as raggedly over the following weeks, they reconstructed Verderamé’s route. They didn’t want to use automobiles until they had to, and after long waits, patronizing businesses using various pretexts, and chilling exposure to the elements, they were able to trace Verderamé’s way home, up Sixth Avenue, west across 14th Street, onto the West Side Highway, over the Henry Hudson Parkway through Riverdale and on to the Saw Mill River. It was in December when they finally got to use a car, but only Catherine, who waited by a public phone in Riverdale. When it rang, it was Harry, who was in a telephone booth on Riverside Drive and 145th, where he had seen the two cars pass. He had timed how long it would take to get to where Catherine was waiting, and when she should turn north onto the highway, driving slowly until she saw Verderamé in her rearview mirror. This she did and then picked up speed so as to keep them behind her all the way until they would turn off. They would never think that a car in front of them was following them. Even after dark, Catherine was able to keep track of them because they drove closely together and the Cadillac had widely spaced, powerful headlamps. Every mile was a step closer to the goal, and she went steadily north, past Hawthorne Circle, onto Route 9A, across the Croton River, and toward Peekskill, holding her breath at every juncture. Verderamé’s cars moved at a steady rate until they turned off at Croton.

Catherine was ecstatic. When she got back to New York, with great excitement she told Harry that she had made them, without their knowledge, for almost fifty miles. After a week had passed—among other things, Catherine had her performance schedule—she parked pointing north on the street in Croton where Verderamé had turned off and continued in that direction. There she waited until he passed her, and then followed. As he turned onto a small, rural road, she continued straight. They waited ten days. By this time it was the end of January, and in late afternoon it was, if not light, lighter.

Harry used his false identity to rent a pickup truck. He drove up the road into which Verderamé had disappeared, and at the first junction parked and began to cut fallen wood. He was dressed like a farmer, in a watch cap that made it difficult even for Catherine to recognize him. Cutting half a truckload of wood, he worked until dusk, hoping, because a farmer would not be cutting wood in the dark, that Verderamé would come by before then. But not a single car passed, and he had to leave. Because he hadn’t been seen by anyone, he was able to return the next day in the same guise, his truck bed empty after he had surprised the Hales with a gift of unseasoned wood to keep in the garden shed for the next season’s fires.

The next day, just before dark, the two cars passed. Harry hardly looked up. The ground was littered with wood chips, and he was working hard. Verderamé turned left and west, toward the Hudson. When Harry had almost filled the truck, he drove in that direction. After a little way, he passed a wall on the right side of the road. A short apron led to a double gate of solid wood or steel, and beyond this, sited above the river, was an enormous house, the upper storeys of which were visible over the wall. Fittingly, it looked like a prison. Floodlights illuminated the open space between the battlements and the house. A man stood in front of the gate, and Harry saw in the mirror that he stopped his pacing, looked after the truck, and then started again. It had taken three months, but now they knew Verderamé’s tight schedule and where he lived, and he didn’t know they did.

The next stage of the preliminaries was far less time-consuming, although for its second part they were obliged to wait until March. On a glass-shattering cold day at the the beginning of February, Harry went down to Prince Street, walked casually past the social club, turned right at the corner, and went north until he came to the empty lot where the Cadillac and Nash were parked. Despite having only four spaces, two of which were unused, the lot was attended even so. At night, Verderamé’s cars slept in his Croton compound, and during the day they were carefully watched.

The attendant was a miserable yet arrogant wretch of a youth with a repulsive jejune mustache of the type that Catherine called “jump-the-gun facial hair.” He sat in a little wooden hut that he shared dangerously with a charcoal brazier. The only thing that kept him alive was that several windowpanes were missing. Still, he was groggy.

“Do you have any spaces available for daytime parking?” Harry asked, sounding to himself like a phrase from a Berlitz language manual.

After a delay appropriate to a crucial move in the world chess championship, the answer was “No.”

“When do you think one might be available?”

“It’s a private lot.”

Talking to the kid was like talking to cheese. “Who owns it?”

“None of your business.”

“Just curious. They got a Cadillac, huh.”

“Yeah, they got a Cadillac.”

“I always wanted one,” Harry said, moving toward it.

The attendant ran out the door and around his hut. Harry was already at the car. “Hey! What are you doing? Get outta here!” the attendant said.

“What a car.” Harry knocked on the driver’s window. “It’s really solid.”

“Yeah, it’s solid. Now get outta here before I call somebody and you regret it.”

“Just admiring the car.” Harry kicked the tires. “Can I sit in it?”

“No, you can’t sit in it.”

“I’ll give you a quarter if you let me take a nap in it.”

“Are you crazy? Just get going. One . . . two. . . .”

“Okay, okay.” Harry began to leave. “A week ago I saw a Rolls-Royce on Park Avenue. Park and Sixty-eighth. That makes this look like nothing.”

“Terrific,” said the kid, who, as Harry departed, went back into his hut to sacrifice more brain cells to carbon monoxide. He wouldn’t tell anyone about this, because the car was safe, Harry seemed to him to be a harmless jerk, and he himself was an idiot, although he was the last one to know, and what had happened, just like everything else, sailed through his mind like a dime dropping through a subway grate. But now Harry knew that the windows of the car were bulletproof, its solid tires were able to run flat, and, likely, the body was armored: it sat very low and both he and Catherine had noticed how ponderously it turned.

On the third of March, when the snow had melted and the ground was dry, Harry took an express train to Harmon and then a local to Oscawana, a mile or so north of Verderamé’s compound in the woods overlooking the Hudson. With the ground such that he would leave neither tracks in the snow nor footprints in the mud, Harry set out to make a map. By the time he found himself looking up at the house, which was walled even on the western side, high over the river, it was dark.

He sketched every angle and dimension, scaling the cliff, measuring with a metal tape the height of the wall, and crossing the road into the thickets of pine beyond. There, using a red-lensed penlight, he completed his maps while he waited for the two cars to pull in. Although less than fifty feet from the gate, he was completely relaxed as he watched. The leaves of the gate swung open and two men from inside appeared as the Cadillac and Nash rolled through. They then looked down the road, backed in, closed up, and threw a heavy bolt, securing the closure. While this was happening, a man appeared waist-high above the wall, a long gun or Thompson cradled in his arms. The parapet on which he paced appeared to go all the way around.

Lights went on in the house one by one. Harry watched for another half hour or so and then began to walk to Harmon, noting that the pines grew thickly on one side of the road. Until he was near the station, he went into the woods whenever a car passed, which, while people were returning home in the evening, was often. Because the headlights gave him much advanced notice, no one saw him. On the train back to Grand Central, he kept his notebook closed but he recapped. There would be at least seven guards. The wall was twelve feet high. Verderamé was punctual, as they had observed during their slow-motion tracking of his route. And in line with his precise style of dress and rigidity of bearing, he was a man dependent upon routine, perhaps as a refuge from a business in which the only routine was collections and everything else was dangerously and continually improvised. Whatever the reason, he checked his watch often and was hesitant to disobey it. Harry prayed that no children lived behind the wall.

The easiest place in the world for shaking off a tail is in the subway in midafternoon, when whole cars or entire trains can be empty. Vanderlyn shuttled from train to train and line to line as skillfully as an eleven-year-old boy who has committed the system map to memory, and when he found himself in a nearly empty train hurtling toward the Bronx with a deafening and continuous rattle—tourists whose mistakes kidnap them this way often descend into panic, terror, and regret (and sometimes they never return)—he was sure that he was in the clear. It seemed to him that the wicker seats, the open windows, and the overhead fans, their blades of varnished wood, were sad things that, like so much else, were soon to disappear. Then he was alone in the station, in the shocking silence after the train had rumbled north and disappeared. Water dripping onto the blackened track bed thundered in his ears as the cool, moist air of early April fell from the grate on the street above. Incandescent lights gave off a pale, ashen glare onto white tiles as if in an icebox. Nothing is quite as brassy and cold as a New York subway station dazzlingly lit for the benefit of no one. At 96th and the park, Vanderlyn emerged from this into a world of the lightest green. In the rain the new leaves held as much water as they could and then bent to let go. Taxis drove by, full because of the rain, their windshield wipers making a sound that can put small children to sleep better than a cradle endlessly rocking. Water quieted and soothed the world, relieving it of ambition if only in promising its dissolution.

It was Harry’s idea to invite Vanderlyn for lunch. Harry wanted to speak with him openly and at length, and in the dining room where he and Catherine had never before entertained a guest, he did, over consommé, smoked trout, and French bread, as rain cascaded down the dining room’s one window.

“Billy Hale,” Harry said, “my father-in-law, brought you up out of the blue when he was talking about people who had lost a son. I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Vanderlyn’s eyes seemed unable to focus on anything except the tablecloth, which was as empty as a snowfield. “Then it wasn’t out of the blue, and, yes,” he said, “I did.”

“I need to know more about you,” Harry told him, “because I’m about to gamble my whole life on an enterprise from which you are inseparable.”

“But gambling,” Vanderlyn replied, “is in its essence acting despite a lack of information—when you don’t know, and yet you move—or you don’t move.”

“There are degrees.”

“There are. What would you like to know?”

“Anything at random.”

“Not a bad technique, and not new, either. All right. I’m teaching myself Russian.”

“How’s it going?”

“Very difficult for an old man, but I just finished a Chekhov story. I’ll never be able to work in Russia. It might as well be Chinese.”

Vanderlyn also read every day in French, and in regard to a language he had known since childhood, was distressed by his weakness of memory. “I have to look up words I don’t know, and when I encounter them again, they’ve left me.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Harry assured him.

“You’re very kind.”

“No, not at all. Think of it. Throughout your life you’ve read thousands of books, newspapers, journals, monographs, letters, documents, magazines—millions of pages, scores of millions of sentences, hundreds of millions of phrases, and perhaps a billion words. Of this, what do you remember? How much can you quote? Most likely not a thousandth of a percent, perhaps much less, which, of course, is why it’s written down.