Touchstone (6 page)

Chapter Seven

T
WO STEPS UP
and a duck of the head brought the big American inside the stone cottage. He paused to let his eyes adjust to the light, and found he was in the hallway of a building even smaller than it had appeared from the outside. To his left was a closed door. To his right was a room with a pair of easy chairs before a time-blackened fireplace; a clock ticked on the mantelpiece. One entire wall was solid with books, its shelves beginning to make inroads on a second wall. A small table beside one chair held a stack of books, an unlit paraffin lamp, and a ceramic ash-tray with a pipe. On a larger table beneath the window stood a small crystal-wireless set.

The room’s only sign of disorder was a drift of newspapers beside the chair. One of them was the Friday
Times,
with a determinedly low-key headline tut-tutting over the Strike as if it were little more than a college prank. On top of the
Times
was a paper whose font he didn’t recognize, folded to an article—he took a step in, just to see—about the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. It was a name he’d come across once or twice during the last week, some semi-official group that sounded like a cross between old boy’s club and reactionary militia. The sort of group that might make him question his stand against Communism, were it to raise its head on the other side of the Atlantic.

A clink of glass pulled Stuyvesant’s mind from the building hysteria of faraway London and drew him deeper into the house, to another doorway, where he ducked his head again, so as not to be brained on the lintel. Here lay a bright and obsessively tidy kitchen: wooden table with patterned red-and-yellow oil-cloth pinned to its top, three wooden chairs, a scrubbed stone sink and single tap, and open shelves, lined with more of the oil-cloth, that held plates, cups, glasses, and a variety of canisters and packages. The windows were spotless, no easy task this near the sea; the room was cozy with the sun and the heat from the black iron stove.

Bennett Grey was standing next to the sink, his back to the room as he drank thirstily. He swallowed—two, three gulps—then set the glass down hard. His right arm came up with a clatter of glass against glass as he poured from a bottle, then he carried the fresh drink around the table, to drop heavily into one of the chairs. He set his elbows on the oil-cloth and cradled his temples in both hands; Stuyvesant might not have been in the room.

The American eyed the bottle sitting in a patch of sunlight. Its shoulders held a light coating of dust, now showing clear marks from Grey’s fingers: not a daily comfort, then.

He ran his eyes over the room, taking in the bachelor’s neatness, the precise borders of the paint and the solidity of the windows. Seven eggs, a spectrum from white to brown, rested on the back of the counter in a lop-sided basket; four elegant wine-glasses with gold trim sat next to three eggshell porcelain teacups on one rough shelf, over a drying-rack filled with dinner plates Stuyvesant’s mother would have crooned over. He’d have laid money that the utensils in the drawer would be solid silver, and that thought made him suddenly, unreasonably, angry.

He felt like taking that carefully preserved medicinal bottle of hooch and smashing it into that spotless stone sink. Or maybe he could just pick up the little man and shake him, headache or no, until Grey told him what the hell was going on and why Aldous goddamn Carstairs had brought him here.

But impatience was rarely a helpful tool—one piece of wisdom he’d gained at high cost over the years. And face it: If he wasn’t here, in this pretty piece of countryside, he’d be chewing at the carpets in London with nothing to do but walk the streets and keep from beating up Union sympathizers until the Bastard’s Battersea speech on Thursday.

Considering the blanket of anger draped over London at the moment, much better to be here, frustration or no. He gave a mental shrug, then pulled one of the cut-glass tumblers off the shelf, pouring himself a scant two fingers of the clear liquid. He took off his overcoat, sat down in the chair across from Captain Bennett Grey, and felt the bumptious American act slide away at last.

Grey peered out at the glass from beneath his hands. “Sorry, I didn’t take you for an early drinker.”

“I’m not, any more than you are. But I’ve been in London for the last week and a half, which is about as restful as strolling through a pack of rabid dogs, followed by twenty-four hours in the company of your friend in the black coat. I think just this once my sainted mother would permit a belt before lunch.”

Despite his brave words, Stuyvesant raised his glass with caution, warned by the powerful fumes. He took a sip. The liquid seared a path from lips to stomach lining, and he coughed, blinking against the astounded tears in his eyes. “Jesus, what is this?”

“I try not to ask,” Grey told him. “One of my neighbors distills it. It makes an excellent fire-starter, if you’re ever caught with wet wood.”

Stuyvesant gently set the glass down far across the table, half expecting its contents to crawl out and come across the bright oil-cloth at him. He’d drunk his share of bathtub gin since the Volstead Act had passed, but this was one for the books. In self defense, he pulled out his case and placed a cigarette between his lips, then hesitated, lighter in hand. Surely if the vapors from the glass were as explosive as they smelled, the coals in the stove would have blown out the kitchen windows already? Still, he brought the flame gingerly towards his face, and was relieved when his exhaled breath did not turn into a flame-thrower.

He snapped the lighter out, then looked around until his eyes hit on a tin saucer with dark stains in the bottom, and got up to retrieve it. Before sitting again, he shed his jacket, both for the comfort and to set an informal, just-us-boys note to the upcoming conversation.

Grey finished his second drink more slowly than his first, but in all, Stuyvesant figured, the man had just downed eight or ten ounces of raw liquor—extremely raw liquor—with no reaction. Or rather, with one reaction: The man was no longer squeezing his head to keep it in place.

“You find this stuff cures headaches?” the American asked.

“It’s about the only thing that does.”

Stuyvesant flicked the ash from his cigarette over the tin saucer. “I take it Major Carstairs gives you a headache?”

“Like a spike through the brain. It sounds as though he gave you one, as well.”

“Not like that.”

“I hope to God not, for your sake.”

“However, I don’t. Seem to give you one, that is.”

“The day is young,” Grey said grimly.

Stuyvesant sat back against the chair to study the man on the other side of the table. The information he’d managed to drag from Carstairs about Grey had struck him as a closely calibrated doling out of facts, more tantalizing than informative. Still, the bare outline of Grey’s life had led him to expect a typical shell-shock victim: jumpy, pale, and pitiful. Instead he was faced with this sturdy brown-skinned farmer with the high-class accent, whose gaze was even and hands without tremor. Who, moreover, had just managed to squeeze out a little humor despite a pounding fury inside his skull. He’d set out from London anticipating the need to conceal a healthy man’s distaste for a weakling like Grey, yet what he felt now was something very like sympathy.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why does the Major give me one, or why should you keep trying to?”

“Why don’t you have a headache from me? Yet.”

“Because you’re not hiding things.”

Hiding things: Well, that was Carstairs, all right. “You sound pretty sure about it. That I’m not hiding things.” Grey shot him a glance, and went back to massaging his temples. “I mean, doesn’t everybody?”

“The things most people conceal are small and private embarrassments. People like the Major hide themselves; they hide
from
themselves; and it’s an agony to me.” Grey dropped his hands, studying his visitor with the same disturbing intensity that he’d shown when listening to Stuyvesant earlier—the American felt as if Grey was counting the pores on his face. “You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about, have you?”

“Not really, no.”

“The Major brought you here without telling you about me?”

“Basically, Carstairs told me just enough to get me on the train. He said you’d been injured, left with some, what he called ‘peculiar abilities,’ and came here to get away from things. He seemed to think you might be able to help me with a, er, problem I’m having. Oh—and he said you weren’t a mind-reader.”

After a moment, Grey’s mouth twitched, and the ghost of a handsome man flitted briefly through the worn features. “Must have cost him something to admit that,” he said. “Tell me, does he still pull out that damnable note-book of his? I know he still smokes those bloody awful cigars, I could smell them from across the yard.”

“Yeah, he writes notes sometimes in a little book. Why? What’s in it?”

“God knows. It used to make me shudder, that book. Look, would you like some tea, or there’s coffee?”

“Coffee’d be great,” Stuyvesant agreed, thinking that it might be good to get some into Grey, as well; if he had a little more than four hours to figure out how the man was to help him, he didn’t want to waste it watching the blond head snoring face-down on the table. Grey pushed back from the table and stood—or tried to, but his balance failed and his leg gave out on him, tipping him back into the chair and nearly upending it. Stuyvesant’s big hand shot out and seized one flailing wrist, snapping Grey back against the table. This time when Grey’s head went into his hands, it was from dizziness, not pain.

Stuyvesant got up instead and went to hunt through the cupboards for a packet of coffee grounds and a pot. He filled the kettle and stirred up the fire, talking all the while: Keep Grey focused, keep him awake, and, most of all, keep him from going for a refill on the rotgut. And if it took chattering like a cleaning lady, that’s what he’d do.

“Look. Carstairs told you I know what he’s got in mind, or some of it anyway, but like I said, I really don’t have anything more than an educated guess. Maybe I ought to begin with me—how I got here, what I’m after—and we can go from there. That sound good to you?”

“Fine.”

“Okay. Harris John Stuyvesant, at your service. I’m an agent for the U.S. Bureau of Investigation. You don’t see a lot of Bureau agents outside the States, but for the last five or six years, my job’s been agitators. Anarchists, Reds, Unions, the lot. Same as you have here, for the most part, although our strikes tend to be more violent than yours, and a lot of the chief agitators were born outside the country. Then again,” he mused, “most of our workers were born outside the country as well, so maybe it doesn’t signify. Anyway, until recently the Bureau’s main goal, outside of bank jobs, has been to keep the agitators under control. Now, what with Prohibition and all, things are shifting to straight crime, but I’m still mainly—”

“Anarchists.” Grey seemed to be addressing the oil-cloth. “Did you have anything to do with the arrests of Sacco and Vanzetti?”

Yeah, Stuyvesant thought: Grey might live at the end of the world, but he kept up with the London papers, and apparently some kind of wireless broadcasts penetrated this remote toe of England. He might know as much about the two Italians as any man on the streets of New York. “I worked on the case for a while, but I got myself reassigned when I flat out told my boss he had the wrong guys. Those two aren’t lily-white innocents by a long shot, but they’re not guilty of
that
murder.”

“Will they be executed?”

Stuyvesant shifted the kettle to a hotter spot, then raised his eyes to the window, tracing the lines of Grey’s Phoenician city. What had those ancient residents done by way of law enforcement? “I hope to Christ not. They’re on appeal now. I’d say they have a good chance of getting off, or at least getting reduced sentences. Hell, they’ve got half-decent alibis and there’s even another man’s confession floating around, they’re sure to get—”

“Stop!” Grey’s cry broke into the American’s monologue. He was cradling his head again, nursing its pain. “For God’s sake, man, if you don’t believe it, don’t say you do!”

Stuyvesant stared at the other man in bewilderment, which slowly edged into understanding.
He knows things,
Carstairs had said Saturday in Hyde Park.
He sees into people.
Well, Grey had just seen through the threadbare argument that Stuyvesant had held a thousand times over the past months, never quite managing to convince himself of its truth. The blunt fact was, Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were scapegoats who’d been loaded up with the country’s nightmares and driven in the direction of the execution chamber.

But if Bennett Grey could see through the determined self deception of a perfect stranger like Harris Stuyvesant, how could he possibly carry on everyday relations with his fellows? Was that why he lived ten miles from Nowhere? How could the poor bastard so much as go into town and buy a loaf of bread, if everyday guile hammered a tenpenny nail into his skull? “Sorry,” Stuyvesant said. “Yeah, you’re right. The truth is, I don’t know if those two’ll escape the electric chair. There’s a lot of people hot to make an example of them.” My boss, for one. “You know how it works—if you can’t find the real villains, find a couple of convenient ones and push them in people’s faces. I keep trying to convince myself that they’re going to win their appeal. I…I don’t much like feeling ashamed of my country.”

Grey relaxed a fraction. “Thank you. Now, you were telling me about your work.”

“Right.” Stuyvesant tipped back the lid of the kettle, decided the contents were close enough to boiling, poured water over the grounds in the pot, and was transported to another time and place.

Perhaps it happened because his mind was occupied with the matter of winning over this man, or because he felt momentarily safe from both the overt madness of London and the shadowy menace that seemed to accompany Aldous Carstairs. Or maybe there was something about his companion that evoked the memory, but at the crisp sound of water meeting coffee grounds and the rich uprush of aroma, Stuyvesant was abruptly standing in a place of eternal clamminess and muck, the weight of a helmet pushed back on his head, the awareness of lice in his armpits and groin, the ache of trench-foot on his toes. The rumble of guns was far away, not enough to bury the sound of Kowalsky reading aloud the latest drivel from his girlfriend in Sioux Falls, or the sound of the men up the trench playing poker, or the scraps of conversation Tim was having with Sergeant Jimmy DiCicco (nick-named The Padre because of his clean mouth), who was Stuyvesant’s partner in the business of Keeping Tim Safe.