The Elegant Lie

…

The day after his staged arrest at the Dornheim military base, Carter boarded a plane bound for America. Two days later, after an overnight stay in Lisbon, where he had slept on the metal floor of the aeroplane with a life jacket for a pillow, Carter stepped out onto the tarmac at Fort Dix in central New Jersey. It was a hot summer day and he could feel the humid air like butter between his fingertips. Huge cauliflower clouds, which the pilot of his transport plane had jockeyed past on his way down, now passed by majestically above them.

There to meet him was Captain Tate, the officer who had walked into Pavel’s cafe all those years ago.

Tate was not in uniform this time. He wore an unpressed pair of chinos, boondocker boots and a white T-shirt. ‘It’s Jersey camouflage,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to stand out, after all.’

‘You mean you’re coming with me?’ asked Carter.

‘I guess you’re too valuable for us to let you out of our sight.’

‘You don’t trust me on my own?’

‘I trust you just fine. It’s the people we work for who don’t. Say, are you really flying out of here tonight?’

That was the deal he had struck with Wilby. Two hours with his father. That was all. Wilby dared not risk any more. ‘They drive a hard bargain,’ Carter said.

The tarmac shimmered with heat haze as they made their way to the parking lot, where Tate climbed behind the wheel of a Packard Super Eight sedan with purplish-black paint like the skin of a ripe eggplant, white wall tyres and a fat chrome bumper that looked as if it could push down trees.

It startled Carter to see such a beautiful, clean and new machine. Most of the vehicles he encountered back in Germany either belonged to the military and were painted olive drab or else were civilian cars which somehow survived the war and had been resurrected by their owners. In many ways, the technology had gone backwards in Europe, not forwards, as people turned to the only working machinery they could find, which had remained intact simply because it had been obsolete by the time the war began.

‘And this won’t draw attention?’ asked Carter.

‘This isn’t so fancy.’ Tate looked at him and grinned. ‘You’ve really been away a while, haven’t you?’

Just outside the base, Carter asked Tate to pull over at the same gas station where he had telephoned his father to say goodbye. ‘I need to make a call,’ he said.

Tate pulled off the road and the bell clanged as he rolled over the air tube laid out in front of the pumps. He tanked up his car while Carter went over to the phone booth.

‘All set?’ asked Tate, when Carter returned.

‘All set.’

‘Any chance you’d care to tell me who you called?’ asked Tate.

Carter said nothing but, for the first time in a long while, he smiled.

They drove up through the Pine Barrens, the long, straight roadways lined with orange-khaki sand and withered-looking trees. Carter rolled the window down and breathed in the smell of the scrub pines and the scorched tar of the road surface. He had dreamed so much of coming home that he could not be sure he was actually here. He thought he must do something◦– scream or cut himself◦– and by the sound or sight of blood convince himself that he was home, even if only for a day.

A block short of the cottage where Carter’s father lived in Belmar, Tate pulled up to the kerb and cut the engine. ‘I’ll wait here,’ he said. ‘Make sure you keep an eye on the time.’ When Carter moved to open the door, Tate reached across and rested his hand on Carter’s shoulder. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of running.’

Carter settled back into his seat. ‘I have a choice,’ he said. ‘I could bolt, knowing you would find me in a day or two, and let you turn my world into something even worse than you did last time. Or I can let some guy, whose name you maybe know and maybe don’t, blackmail me into working for him, in which case I’ll be home in two years and you and all your kind can slink back into the shadows where you came from and let me get on with my life.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Tate, releasing his grip. ‘Just make sure you’re back here in two hours.’

Carter walked around the corner and, as soon as he was out of sight, he turned in the opposite direction from his father’s house and made his way along the narrow streets towards the boardwalk, beyond which lay a stretch of beach the locals called the Irish Riviera, and then nothing but ocean until you reached the shores of Spain or Africa.

It was a weekday, so the beach was not crowded. A few families had set up towels and umbrellas and were eating sandwiches out of metal-sided coolers. Children played in the lazy surf and on the stone breakwaters. Along the wooden boardwalk, people rode by on bicycles or pushed strollers. Some, too old to walk, were pushed along in wheelchairs, wool blankets covering their legs, vacant looks upon their faces. The smell of lemonade and fried dough stands flooded Carter’s senses.

There was a little coffee shop on the corner of 16th and Ocean Avenue where, for as long as Carter could remember, they had made cider doughnuts and sold them for a nickel a piece. They were still selling them, but the price had gone up to a dime. He bought one anyway and stood there, letting the sugar dissolve on his tongue with each bite, just as he had done when he was a kid.

‘I was surprised to get your call,’ said a voice.

Carter turned.

It was Palladino, his father’s old partner in the police, who had looked after Carter during his time with the Office of Price Administration. Palladino wore a short-brimmed panama hat and an untucked shirt with a Hawaiian print on it, which helped to hide the half-moon of his belly.

‘Thank you for coming,’ said Carter.

‘I heard you’d left the country.’

‘I did,’ replied Carter.

‘Heard you were in some trouble, too.’

‘I was, but I’m setting that straight.’

Palladino nodded. ‘Glad to hear it.’

‘It wasn’t like they said.’

‘I never thought it was.’

‘I have to go back,’ said Carter. ‘I might be gone a while.’

‘And you want me to keep an eye on the old man?’

‘I’d be grateful if you did.’

Palladino smiled. ‘I do that anyway,’ he said. ‘He knows it, too, a fact he’s too proud to admit. We just keep having these coincidental meetings. He never asks me why. You know how it is with your father. As a matter of fact, he’s over there now’◦– Palladino pointed towards the boardwalk◦– ‘keeping an eye out for U-boats. That’s what he always says, even though the war’s been over for years.’

Carter turned and looked.

The old man was sitting on his usual bench, looking out to sea and oblivious to the people passing by. His hands were folded on the top of an Irish blackthorn walking stick and his chin was resting on his hands.

‘You want to say hello?’ asked Palladino.

Carter paused, as if willing his father to turn around. But the old man just kept staring out to sea, his eyes peeled for the German submarines that now lay rusting on the sea floor, the bones of their crews lying in heaps of sticks down in the green-grey silt of the Atlantic. ‘I think I’ll leave him be,’ said Carter.

‘I expect that’s for the best,’ answered Palladino. ‘You go and do the things you have to do. And don’t you worry. I’ll be watching over him.’

There was nothing more to say. Carter shook Palladino’s hand and watched him plod across the road towards the boardwalk, his flat-footed gait like a baby just learning how to walk. Palladino stopped beside the old man and slapped him on the shoulder. Carter’s father turned and jerked his chin in greeting.

The last Carter saw of the two men, they were sitting side by side, both of them looking out to sea as if the U-boats might still be there, after all, like iron sharks prowling the deep.

On his way back to Tate, Carter stopped at his father’s house. The front door was locked but he knew the screen door around back would be open. As he stepped inside, Carter filled his lungs with the familiar smell of his father’s laundry soap and tobacco and the lemony-scented polish he used on the furniture in the dining room where he never sat, since he never had guests and preferred to eat his meals at a small, bare wooden table in the kitchen.

He made his way into the family room.

Nothing had changed. The same overstuffed chairs. The same unread pile of newspapers. The ashtray full of cigarette butts.

Carter stood there for a while, suddenly aware that if he stayed any longer he would never have the strength to leave. He spun on his heel and walked out of the house, closing the screen door carefully behind him. He returned to the car, where Tate sat with the windows rolled down, one arm sticking out of the window and a cigarette pinched between his fingers.

‘You’ve only been gone half an hour!’ said Tate.

‘I did what I came to do,’ replied Carter.

‘That is the damnedest thing,’ said Tate. He sipped at the smoke from his cigarette and exhaled against the inside of the windshield, sending the grey cloud arcing back into his face. Then he flicked the half-smoked stub out of the window.

That single, careless gesture made Carter realise how far he was from the place in which he had just spent the past few years. If Tate had thrown that cigarette into the gutter of a German road, people would have rushed to pick up what he had thrown away. But now it just lay there, smouldering and ignored. This part of the world had always been Carter’s home but, even though he could have found his way blindfolded through these streets, he felt so out of phase with everything around him that he wondered if he could really belong here anymore.

Tate’s voice snapped Carter out of his momentary trance. ‘I guess we had better be going,’ he said.

Before the sun had even set upon that day, Carter found himself in a cargo plane bound for Europe as it climbed steeply over the gunmetal blue sea, and the shoreline of New Jersey faded back into the clouds.