The Sunlight Dialogues (58 page)

“Have a chair, Mr. Kleppmann.” Will Jr pointed with three fingers, palm up.

“Thank you.”

Will remained standing after Kleppmann sat down. He stood over his desk, his arms folded over his upper belly, his lips pursed judicially, and after a moment he began, formal, “As you know, I think, it is my unpleasant duty to ask you to answer a few questions this morning, for the purpose of ascertaining, so to speak, the whereabouts of any holdings which might be applied to the satisfaction of your present obligations to my client.”

Kleppmann nodded. He was a man of sixty or so. It was difficult to believe, from the looks of him, that he was not a man of the highest integrity.

Will cleared his throat. “We may as well proceed at once,” he said. “As you know, I presume, I’m obliged to examine you under oath.” He corrected himself, oddly flustered, “That is to say,
you
will be under oath, if I make myself clear.”

Kleppmann sighed. “Just as you say. Yes.”

“We may as well proceed at once.” It struck him that he’d used exactly that phrase a few seconds before. A bad beginning. He irritably switched on the tape.

Well, a grim ordeal. Seated, holding his hat in his hands like a supplicant, Kleppmann had managed to make Will Jr crawl. He was brilliant, that was all there was to it. He had a trace of an accent. In a soft voice, speaking in short, perfect sentences now and then punctuated by the involuntary sighs of a man ground under by adverse fortune, he told his tragic story. He’d been born into a wealthy family of Polish Jews, clothiers originally, but that was long before his time: his father was an art speculator, a man who bought up the work of promising young painters, sculptors, and ceramicists all over the world, particularly those in Paris, then waited, to put it politely, for their stock to rise. In point of fact he did not merely twiddle his thumbs, watching the market. His method was difficult to explain in a few words, Kleppmann said, but it went something like this. One must understand, first, that the world is amply stocked with art collectors who know nothing whatever about art, who buy for fashion’s sake or on speculation, but lack Kleppmann Sr’s eye. And one must understand, second, that a Miró which sells for an unheard-of price automatically raises the value of all other Mirós. The elder Kleppmann’s system was this: he sold paintings in groups, each group including one work—a blue Picasso, for instance—worth plenty. He gave away the Picasso for a song but jacked up the prices of the works by unknowns—and thus jacked up the value of other works by those painters, including, of course, the paintings in his own collection.

“It might seem,” Kleppmann said, “a dubious kind of business.” His sad eyes half-closed. “But there are virtues in it, or so it seems to me. It’s a help to the artist, certainly—it can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. And it’s not as if my father was—” He hunted for the word. “Indifferent. He had a superb eye. But I’m not speaking to the point, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

The old man was murdered by the Nazis, and Kleppmann, just beginning to make his mark as a classicist, was arrested, along with his mother and sister, and sent to concentration camp. He showed Will Jr the tattoo. He was there for three years. Both his mother and sister vanished and he had never been able to learn what had become of them. By a kind of fluke, a story too long to go into, he’d been released at the end of three years, his freedom bought for him by the United States Government, part of a project at that time to rescue incarcerated Jewish intellectuals. He’d come over penniless and, on top of that, physically and mentally sick. He waved two fingers, like a rabbi, dismissing it. “To make a long story short, I gradually improved. In 1952 I returned to Europe to hunt for my mother and sister and reclaim what I could of what we’d had before. It was futile. I married while I was there, however. A countess, beautiful, sensitive, well-off. We returned to this country and I tried to get back into teaching, but, unluckily, I was not up to it. I suffered a relapse of my former mental illness, and I spent from 1953 to 1961 in a private hospital on Long Island. When it was over we hadn’t much more than the clothes on our backs.” He sighed.

“I’m sorry,” Will Jr said.

“Life goes on.” Again he gave his despairing rabbinical wave. “We interested friends in a project. We borrowed money, and in September of 1963 we began, as you know, our hosiery factory here in Buffalo. An odd choice you may say. So it is. But my wife has connections in that line, and it seemed to us best. Luck was against us. We had labor troubles, legal difficulties, a terrible accident for which we were unjustly held liable—you have, I imagine, the record of all this. Things went from bad to worse, the pressure brought on a return of my old complaint, and, in short, we were forced to bankruptcy. I give you merely the outline. I could mention other troubles, but they will not be helpful, I’m afraid.”

“Have you stocks? securities of any kind?” He could not look at the man as he asked it.

“Nothing.”

“Household valuables, perhaps?”

Kleppmann smiled wanly. “You must visit us and see.”

Will Jr rubbed his upper lip with the inside of his finger. “Yes, I must, actually. It’s part of—”

“Yes of course.”

Kleppmann reached up to his face, brought his hand up under his glasses, and pressed the tips of his fingers to his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Will Jr asked.

“Yes, thank you,” Kleppmann said.

The questioning went on, useless. It was perfectly clear that the whole story was true. At last Will Jr switched off the tape. “I’m sorry to have caused—” he began.

“No harm, Mr. Hodge. I perfectly understand.” Kleppmann rose sadly from his chair and held out his hand.

Will shook it. “Thank you for coming.”

“My pleasure,” Kleppmann said. Then, with dignity, he withdrew.

The second examination was even more painful than the first. It was at Kleppmann’s place. A splendid house, but Kleppmann did not own it. He did not own the paintings either, he owned only the statuary, inexpensive plaster imitations of Renaissance masterpieces. That day Will spoke with Kleppmann’s wife.

She was tall, as tall as Will Jr himself, and thin, and elegant as glass. She had a clear voice, far-apart blazing eyes, a thick accent—Austrian, he thought. She walked slowly through the house with him, nodding with distant politeness when he praised the view of the garden from the second floor, admired the luxurious carpet (he felt like a peasant beside her, his bulging briefcase an old sack of beets). In the master bedroom he stood at the foot of the largest bed he had ever seen, with magnificent posts of hand-carved myrtle, and he said, “Good heavens! What a beautiful bed!”

She smiled, looking straight at him, and the openness of her smile was like a girl’s. “Yes,” she said. “Ours, I’m afraid.”

The frank, almost amused admission of what their business together was made Will Jr blush. And it was more than merely her admission. She was fifty-eight, but she looked perhaps forty, and when she smiled, standing in the sunlit room with the enormous bed, the handsome white shades and purple drapes, her bosom full and perfect, Will Jr’s heart sped up.

They walked down the second-floor hallway the same way they’d come, and the memory of her smile molested his thoughts. He felt more than ever like some public executioner. As if reading his mind, she stopped at the landing and put her hand lightly on the ball of the newel post. “You know about my husband’s health, don’t you, Mr. Hodge?”

He nodded. “He told me, yes. I hope from now on he’ll be better. I sincerely hope.”

Her eyes narrowed just perceptibly, and a hint of the smile returned, ironic this time. “My husband is dying of cancer.”

It shook him to the soles of his shoes and he touched the banister for support. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked at him, her eyes gentle now, as though he, not she, were the one to be comforted. As if speaking to herself, she said, “I shouldn’t have told you. It can only make it harder—your job.”

“Sometimes—” Will Jr began.

She touched his arm. “Don’t say it,” she said very gently. “We understand.”

His final examination of the Kleppmanns—together this time—was scheduled for a Thursday morning, two days after his visit to the house. Will Jr reached his office at seven in the morning, when the city was still asleep, the streets empty except for the winos sitting against walls, the pigeons, and the blowing papers. He had work to catch up on, he’d told himself. But it was a lie. He had come to pace and slam his fist into his hand and agonize. Nine o’clock came. The Kleppmanns were late. He ate Tums like candy, but still it was as if he’d drunk gasoline and swallowed a match. Nine-thirty. Still no Kleppmanns. At quarter-to-ten he was so sick at his stomach he believed he would have to go home for the day. June, his secretary, lectured him about seeing a doctor. He stood at the window, looking out at the tops of the buildings, ignoring her. Suddenly, he slammed his fist on the windowledge. “Damn them!” He bellowed it out so loudly that Ray Polsby ran in from his office next door. June sat with her mouth open, her fists at her collarbone.

“What’s the matter?” Polsby said.

Will snatched his coat from the back of the door and stormed out.

The house was stripped clean when he got there. Even the old silver doorknobs were gone. He learned from the neighbors that it was Mayflower that had moved them out, and he immediately phoned the company to get them to stop the truck. The truck was in Utica by now, they said. It would cost him a hundred dollars to bring it back. Will Jr paid. He seized what he could legally seize, auctioned it off, and so collected twenty thousand dollars. It still left a long way to go.

5

I can try to withstand my poisons.

Danny’s and Madeline’s voices came from outside now, and when he pulled back the plastic curtain he found he could see them, in the driveway almost directly below him. They’d finished their breakfast, then, and she’d sent them out to play. He rinsed the shaving cream off his face, put on scented aftershave, patted the skin dry on the towel, and hurried to his room to dress. He was later to work than he’d been in months, and strange to say, it gave him a kind of satisfaction, almost elation. It was like playing hookey, like the times when he and Ben Jr had casually walked away during noon recess and had gone down the long hillside where the town of Alexander lay, and had stripped and gone into the creek. It had been very fine, the warm silty creek with the willows hanging over it. It was in weather just like this that they would go, a steamy morning after an August rain.

Today was—He thought a moment. Monday. He remembered all at once that this afternoon he had a flight to Chicago, chasing an account on the Cobb file. His stomach gave a quarter-turn. He felt in the pocket of his suitcoat—still hanging in the closet where Louise had put it—and found the Tums. Then he got into his shoes, a tortuous business, hooked his suspenders and hunted for cufflinks. He found in the mess two silver ones that matched, and as he was putting them on, gazing absent-mindedly at the odds and ends in the plastic box, he thought again of the little white stones Chief Clumly had asked him about. He looked at his watch. Ten-after-nine. He would call Uncle Ben from the office. He got out his suitcoat and was just in the act of putting it on—taking a deep breath, catching the cuffs of his shirt under his fingertips—when Louise screamed, downstairs. He bounded down, his mouth gaping open, and met Louise running up to meet him. She held out the paper.

“Will,” she said, “look! Someone was murdered in your father’s apartment!”

He thought it some lunatic joke, at first, though he knew at the same time that it was not. He took the paper from her, his mouth still open, heavy eyebrows drawn down, and read. “Mrs. Palazzo!” he said. He said it as if with relief.

Louise said, “Will, this is terrible! Why didn’t he phone us last night?”

He went on reading, walking on down the stairs now, scowling. The back door slammed and the four-year-old, Danny, came tentatively toward him, silently clapping his hands together. “Coogie?” he said.

“Don’t talk baby-talk, Danny,” Louise said. “Go away and play. We’re busy.”

Still silently clapping, unpersuaded, the small boy watched his father moving toward him, oblivious as a tide. “Coogie?” he said. The same instant Will ran into him with the side of his leg and knocked him just enough off balance to make him fall. Danny began crying furiously, and Will looked down at him with undisguised rage. “Damn it all, Danny,” he roared. But Louise broke in sharply, extending and spreading her fingers apart at her sides as if in agony, and Will gave in quickly. “Daddy’s sorry, Danny,” he said. The crying turned to screaming. “Danny, Daddy
said
he was sorry.”

“Oh,
Will!”
Louise complained.

He tried to look back at the paper. “Well I don’t see
you
doing anything about it.”

“That’s all we do around this house. Fight, fight, fight. When I married you—”

“I’m sorry,” Will shouted.

He stormed out to the car, carrying the paper. He backed out of the garage too fast, beside himself with anger, and almost slammed into the side door’s concrete stoop. Madeline came running from the back yard, arms out to him. “Daddy, let me kiss you good-bye!” she wailed. A phase she’d been in for it must be almost a year now. He understood very well how it was for her: he remembered his own acute sorrow, in his childhood, when his mother or father left, and at times he pitied her fiercely. But he was repelled now, too. Because the love he had tried to cling to as a child, the family he’d tried to bind together by the sheer force of his childish hunger, had been done for already, in his case, and was done for already in hers. She must sooner or later be betrayed, heart-broken, however sweet the Judas kiss he gave her. But he opened the door for her and accepted her kiss. “Be good,” he said. She looked at him sadly, as if she knew he’d betrayed her. Abruptly, on an impulse, he slipped his left hand under her armpit and lifted her off the ground and shook her hard, meaning it for love. She caught hold of his arm with both hands, accepting the shaking. He put her down, disgusted with himself, the infernal complexity of things. In the house Danny was still crying, and Louise was yelling at him.