My Father More or Less

8

I ran, trying to make it look like a form of exercise and not, what it was, a display of panic. It was not the wisest course of action. I say that from the vantage of retrospection, though I thought at the time I could lose my pursuers. Before I had broken into a run, I had turned a few corners, had doubled back on myself, if only to demonstrate that their continued presence behind me wasn’t a coincidence. They were punks, my age or slightly older, parodies of some ideal of ugliness. They had been watching me at Selfridges and may have thought I had taken something to which they had some claim.

I shed them despite their tenacity until I made the mistake of turning up a side street that they happened to be heading down. They were at the far end of the block and may not have noticed me until I turned around and retraced my steps. What else could I have done?

I sprinted this time for about half a mile, and when I got tired I ducked into a crowded bakery and watched them rush by while I waited my turn. The punks were only gone a few minutes before they returned. I could see them in reflection, looking into the windows of shops across the street.

After I left the bakery, getting out I think without being seen, I took refuge in a phone booth and, to justify my act, made some calls.

It wasn’t so much that I was scared as that I thought I ought to be. I phoned Isabelle and got no answer, then I remembered the old guy that had taken me to lunch and I dialed the first of the two numbers on his card. A supercilious young man (or woman — it was hard to tell) answered and wanted to know my business with Mr. Fitzjohn. “Mr. Fitzjohn asked me to call him,” I said, reading the name off the card. “Yes, but may I ask on what business?” he said with the phony politeness of someone trying to brush you off without giving cause for complaint. “Just tell him the fellow he met at the bookstore is on the phone.” I gave him my name. A knock on the glass took me by surprise. A face peered in, mean and witless, the pasty pocked skin like a death mask. It hung there a moment, then disappeared. “Mr. Fitzjohn is in conference,” said my informant. “I’ll give him the message that you rang up.” “He wants to speak to me,” I said. “He’s been waiting for my call.” “Why don’t you leave your number with me, Mr. Terman, and I’ll have him ring you when he gets out of conference.” There was no number to leave and nothing I could say to break through his act. Before I could invent a new story, he had hung up. Holding the dead phone in my hand, I couldn’t think why I had called the old guy in the first place. I mean, what could I possibly have expected? Most likely, he would have advised me to call the police. What I wanted was an offer of sanctuary, some place to go where I was safe.

I wasn’t without resources. I made a pretend call to the police, shouting into the phone that there were these three punks menacing me. Wherever they were hiding — I couldn’t see any of them from the phone box — they were probably too far away to hear my bluff. I was ranting into the phone like some kind of madman, saying whatever came into my head. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t come at me in the booth. One of them could pull the door open while the other two rushed in and grabbed me. If they charged me, I would have to use the gun to protect myself and I was considering whether it would be enough to show it to them. The idea of teaching them a lesson attracted me, of letting them know they had fucked with the wrong person. I felt a surge of outrage (I was a guest in their country, wasn’t I?) and imagined their astonishment when I pointed the gun at them and opened fire. The rat-faced one with the purple hair, the most unpleasant of the three, would fall first, a look of total disbelief on his face, then the tall loose-limbed one with the pocked faced. The fat one, who couldn’t keep up with the others, who seemed content merely to hang around with them, would run for his life. And maybe then, I would understand what they were about, would feel their loss like the death of someone close I had wanted to love but hadn’t been able to until it no longer mattered. It gave me a lift for the moment, a fast-fading high, to imagine the danger I represented to them.

“I have my motor parked just around the corner,” Max was saying. “Why don’t we go over to my office, old son, discuss the future of our longstanding collaboration.” He dropped the rock he was holding, put an arm around Terman’s shoulder and led him to a red Corniche parked illegally just where the street turned on itself.

Although distrustful, Terman offered no resistance, let himself be taken in tow to Max’s car. He had no doubt that Max would find some way to exact vengeance when the time was right. The director would not forgive being knocked down, particularly in front of a woman he wanted to impress.

The red Corniche pulled up in front of the Holland Park house.

“This isn’t your office, Max,” he said.

“It isn’t, is it?” said the director who seemed surprised that it wasn’t. “I just remembered there’s someone hanging out at my office I’m trying to avoid. You don’t mind, do you? We’ll conspire in one of the unused rooms.”

Terman pretended he had lost his key or left it behind, went through each of his pockets for Max’s witness, feigning distress.

“That was stupid of you,” Max said.

“A human error,” he said, forgiving Max his crude remark.

“I seem to remember a kitchen window that has a broken lock. Do you know the one I mean?”

“The lock’s been repaired,” Terman said.

Max studied the situation, removed a key from his wallet. “This just might do the trick,” he said.

“A skeleton key?” Terman asked.

Max opened the door. “I have learned, my friend, to be prepared for any emergency that might arise.”

In a moment they were inside, shoulders bumping as Max pressed on ahead, moving Terman out of his way. Stationing himself at the kitchen table, Max made seven phone calls to let those who might want to be in touch know where he was staying. After that, they settled in the study, Max behind the desk, Terman on the couch, their habitual configuration.

Max took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves. “To work,” he said, withdrawing a script from his briefcase.

“How many nephews does the producer have?” asked Terman, a remark he remembered having made at least once before, and which he promised himself he would never make again.

“Regard,” said Max.

It was not, as he expected, another version of The Folkestone Conspiracies (AKA “The Last Days of Civilisation”), but something else altogether, an unsigned screen treatment of a moderately popular English novel of two years back. “What am I supposed to do with this?” Terman said. The phone interrupted them, as it would, at approximately eight minute intervals for the next hour. “I want the benefit of a lucid intelligence,” Max said.

“Wherever you go,” Terman said when Max was free momentarily, “you carry with you the seeds of distraction.”

“That doesn’t sound quite right,” said Max who seemed to be waiting for the next phone call to deliver him from a conversation he had no inclination to continue.

I continued moving south, avoiding the mob scenes whenever I could, though also careful not to be caught alone on a side street. I no longer made any effort to get away from them, pretended indifference to their pursuit. They kept out of sight much of the time so when one or another appeared, popping out of some storefront as I passed, it was always a shock.

Max was lordly on the phone, threatened, cajoled, dispensed rewards, talked in voices Terman had never heard him use before. On one occasion he seemed to be offering the Holland Park house for someone else’s use. “What’s going on?” Terman asked.

“This doesn’t concern you, cowboy,” said Max. “Not to worry. I’m going to take a bath and change my shirt if it’s all the same to you. You might use the time to review the script I showed you.” He sailed the thick envelope at the couch, Terman ducking under it as it approached his head. “If anyone rings up while I’m in the bath, would you take the number down and say Mr. Kirstner will ring back in a bit. I’d appreciate it if you could do that.”

“Is the Henry Berger project dead?” he asked.

“Chancy,” Max said. “Hanging on.”

“Are we going into production?”

“Max made a gesture with his hand that indicated the remotest of possibilities. “Some of the money we expected has dried up. The script has got too many private jokes that only you and I understand. Do you get what I’m saying?”

When the phone rang Max asked Terman if he would answer it and take the caller’s number.

If that was all that Max wanted, it was easily enough done, yet he held back, letting the contemplation of a response suffice for the response itself.

“What are you waiting for?” Max asked.

“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” said Terman. “I’m waiting for all the money to be in place.”

Max yawned, turned his back to him. “If you don’t want to work with me on this project,” he said, “you’re perfectly free to go your own way.”

The moment Terman lifted the phone to say hello, it had silenced.

“It doesn’t matter,” Max said, his abruptness belying the remark. He left to take a bath like a man leaving on a flight into space.

Terman stepped out into the hall and listened to the sounds of Max wallowing in his bath. When it was quiet he imagined that Max had fallen asleep in the tub, that leonine head slipping by degrees into the steamy water. The melodrama of Max drowning in his own bath gave him a certain satisfaction like a bad film that fulfills the crude expectations it has itself set in motion. He knocked on the door of the bathroom. “Find your own,” Max said. “This one’s mine.”

What else might happen? The ringing of the phone recalled him to his study. “Dad,” the voice said, “I’m glad I reached you. I’m having some kind of trouble with these three guys.”

“Where are you?”

“Broadwick Street, I think. It’s about a mile southwest of Oxford Street.” He had difficulty catching his breath.

“I’ll come for you in the car,” he said, though once made, he regretted the offer, felt exploited.

“You don’t have to if you’re busy,” Tom said. “It may not be anything at all. These three punks — they’re just kids really — have been following me for over an hour. I don’t know what they want and I don’t think I want to find out. They’re rather horrendous looking actually.” He laughed his nervous laugh.

“Why don’t you call the police?”

“I can’t do that. I think you understand what I’m saying.”

Terman couldn’t admit that he didn’t. “I’ll come down in the car and get you. At this time of day, it’ll take at least twenty minutes.”

“I didn’t mean for you to come after me. I mean, that wasn’t the reason I called.”

“You don’t want me to come or you do?”

“The phone booth I’m in is in front of a pub called The Wycherly Arms. There’s a Pizza Land and a Sketchley’s down the street on the same side and a Chinese Restauant with these skinned ducks hanging in the window across the street. If you don’t see me, I’ll be moving around. Look for me in front of the pub or in the phone box. Okay?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can, Tom. Don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“So in about twenty minutes, right? I’m depending on it.”

What he felt before, what he had named as rage, was nothing to the bloodstorm in his head as he unlocked the door of the car, as he climbed in behind the wheel, as he fought the key into the ignition. What he didn’t know was whether his anger was directed at Tom for getting into trouble or at the thugs harassing him.

He was off, debating the unmoving traffic, rushing and stopping to no useful purpose, unforeseen obstructions at every turn. Attempting to circumvent the worst of the traffic, he took himself further and further out of the way, wanting above all to keep moving. The trip would take longer than estimated, perhaps twice as long, and he could imagine Tom thinking that he wasn’t coming or that he had intentionally delayed. He found his son’s distrust unforgivable.

Terman drove down Holland Park Avenue, which turned into Not-ting Hill Gate, then turned south on Kensington Church but the traffic was so dense it seemed preferable to make his way on narrow side streets. Each new route seemed less felicitous than its predecessor and so he rued his choices, his judgment awry. The more frustrated he became the more he resented his errand. He could readily imagine Tom, accosted in the phone box by the toughs, pulling out his father’s revolver in a moment of desperation. What would follow? If the gun were loaded, and if there were no other choice, Tom might wound one of the boys to frighten them away. More than likely nothing exceptional would happen. It was not impossible that Tom had made up the story about being followed or had exaggerated an ordinary street confrontation into melodrama. It was melodrama, however, that teased Terman’s imagination, the pleasures of the improbable.

I watched them huddle together in front of a record shop, looking over toward me as they conspired. They wanted trouble, were addicted to it, and they had fixed on me as their target. So I knew when they walked off that it was only a ruse and that they would be back, hoping to catch me off-guard. What I didn’t expect was that they would show up again as quickly as they did. One of them, the one with the purple streaks in his hair, showed his head from around the corner opposite the street they had turned up. When he saw that I was watching him he scuttled back. They had concocted some cretinous plan, had split up and were laying for me, supposedly out of sight, in three different spots. A dessicated woman, about my mother’s age, who had been standing outside the booth, knocked on the glass with a key. I opened the door without thinking. “Do you mind, luv?” she said, squeezing past me.

It was hot in the car, his shirt sticking to his back, and he unrolled the window while waiting for the light to change. The light defied anticipation, stayed red for a prolonged time. Terman took the occasion to open the street guide on the seat next to him, to check again where he had to go. The light was still red when he looked up and he thought just my luck to get stopped indefinitely at a broken light. A horn honked from behind, a mild squawk. Even after three years in England, he tended not to understand, or pretended not to, the mysteries of London traffic. He drove like an American, he thought, justifying his negligence.

The light was still red. He remembered, or had the illusion of remembering, the day he announced to Kate and Tom that he was moving away. He had put it off as long as he could, awaiting a moment when such unsettling news might be given with grace and reassurance. It was when he recognized that no such moment would ever arrive, that there never had been and never would be an appropriate moment to tell his children he was leaving them, that he was able to tell them at all. Kate, who was seven and a half, went to her room and closed the door, saying she didn’t think she wanted to talk about it now. He remembered her marching out of the living room like an adult, like the person she might imagine herself becoming fifteen years later. He called after her to say he would visit on weekends, that it wasn’t as if he were leaving forever. “Don’t lie to her,” Magda said. “Once he steps out that door we’ll never see him again.” Tom, who was four, for whom none of it made much sense, was sitting on his lap. “Would you read me a book?” he asked. Terman said he would but first he wanted to see if Kate was all right. “It’s not fair,” Tom said. (Even then, particularly when his own wants were at issue, he had a passion for invoking justice.) Terman said, “You pick out a book and I’ll come right back and read it to you.” When he came into Kate’s room she was lying on her bed, facing the wall. She was stoney, had willed herself into an inanimate state. “It’ll be all right, Kate,” he said in a weary voice. “I promise you.” He put his hand on her shoulder, tried to turn her toward him. She was so rigid there was no moving her without the use of force. She was still immobile when he gave up and left the room. Perhaps if he had stayed with her, it would have made a difference in both their lives. In the living room, on the yellow corduroy couch, Magda was reading to Tom from The Wizard of Oz. He offered to take over but Magda said nothing doing. “We’d like you to go,” she said. He stood his ground, thwarted. “See you soon, Tom,” he said. There was no answer or none he remembered, neither wave nor nod. “Read,” he said to his mother and Magda repeated in an overly inflected voice the sentence she had read when he entered the room.

The light was still red. He was thinking it was odd how rarely he went to the movies in London during the past year. Once a month on the average and more often than not to the National Film Theater or the ICA. It was particularly odd because he used to go all the time, an insatiable witness, addicted to images in the dark, finding miraculous accidents in the most commonplace work. The light was green (finally), but the cross street was backed up and the light came red again before he could move through. Terman turned the car around and went the other way, took a left and then another left. A woman he thought he knew — it was odd how familiar and unfamiliar she was at the same time — was walking on the right side of the street, rapt in self-absorption. He rolled down the passenger window and called her by the first name that came to mind.

Before I could think of anything to say — I have trouble getting my story together — she was in and I was out. In a panic I stood with my back to the phone box for the longest time, waiting for her to finish her call. After a point, I walked over to Pizzaland. One of the punks, the smallest of the three, a ferret-faced kid with acne scars, emerged from the doorway. He grabbed my arm but I was too strong for him and knocked his hand away. When he brought out a penknife I had no choice but to show him the gun and, in a gesture I regretted even before its conclusion hit him with it across the face in an awkward jabbing motion. Then I ran in what I thought to be the only safe direction available. I didn’t look back, though I assumed the other two, if not all three, were converging on me. I don’t know what I regretted most, that I had hit him with the gun or that I hadn’t hit him hard enough. If I could keep away another ten minutes, I estimated, my father would appear with the car. Then I had the perception — it came unbidden which gave it added weight — that my father had seemed unsurprised at my news. I mean, why shouldn’t it surprise him that these three punks were trailing me around London. What did he know that I didn’t? Whatever his part in the business — I didn’t actually believe he had hired these kids to harrass me — I began to have doubts that he would show up as promised. He was capable, I knew, of finding excuses for indefinite delay. I didn’t see my pursuers when I glanced over my shoulder, but then one of them turned the corner and pointed a finger at me.

“My name isn’t Isabelle,” the woman said in an American accent.

The woman looked more like Magda than Isabelle and perhaps thinking of Magda, he had confused the two. “Excuse me,” he said.

When he stopped at the next corner for a light she wandered over to the car. “What a series of coincidences,” she said. “First at the airport and then here. Don’t tell me you still don’t know me.”

“Why should it matter whether I know you?”

“It matters to me. It makes me distrust my own identity if someone ignores me. Where are you going, Terman? Maybe you can drop me off somewhere on the way.”

The light had changed and the car behind him registered mute disapproval. “I’m going to Broadwick Street,” he said. “Do you know where Broadwick Street is?”

She came around the other side and climbed into the passenger seat, transferring the street guide to her lap. “I haven’t the smallest notion,” she said. “What’s there?”

She deigned to read the street guide for him while Terman rushed obliquely to his destination, detouring whenever traffic blocked his way.

“You were so awful to me at the airport,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing you a favor. I didn’t even like you much in the old days when we were all such good friends.”

Terman had to jam on the brakes to keep from hitting the car that had stopped abruptly in front of him. He held out his arm to keep Lila from pitching forward.

“I’m surprised you didn’t let me hit my head,” she said. “I used to think — it was also Magda’s opinion — that you were the most self-centered person of our acquaintance. Still, you were nice with the children at times, you really were. Take a left at the next corner. Was it that you didn’t like adults or that you didn’t like me and my then husband, or was it that you were secretly shy? I always meant to ask you but in those days I didn’t have the courage. It’s different meeting someone years later in another country. You always looked so angry, you know, so fierce really as if you wanted to kill anyone who got in your way. I thought of you, you’ll laugh at this, as a buccaneer. It was undeniably attractive in a certain way, though I think one had to have a masochistic streak to find it so. Take a left here. Tell me the truth. What was your impression of me in those days?”

He edged his way through traffic, trailed by some unnamable dread. That it mattered to him that he reach Tom was indication that he was capable of feeling. His sense of urgency was in itself like passion. He sensed, on the other hand, that he would probably never reach Tom and that in the long run it wouldn’t matter. Before he knew it, he was there. He drove down Broadwick at ten miles an hour, waiting for Tom to declare himself. A trick had been played on him. There was no Sketchley’s, no Chinese restaurant with ducks in the window, no phone in front of a pub called Wycherly Arms. “Could there be another Broadwick Street?” he asked her.

“Oh my,” she said. “Will you ever forgive me? We’re on Broadwick Place not Broadwick Street.” She checked the street guide, advised him to take a right turn at the corner they had already passed.

He swung the car around, an ill-timed audacity, a taxi coming the other way. He lived through the collision — the black Austin smashing into their left side as they turned — before he realized the cab had managed an abrupt stop inches short of contact.

The driver shouted at him, “Trying to get us all killed, are you?”

Terman had nothing to say in his defense, drove on with his head down, turning left at the appropriate street.

“You should have apologized to him,” Lila said.

“What difference would it have made?”

“You’re as incorrigible as ever, aren’t you? I don’t know why I allowed myself to get into this car.”

The phone box in front of The Wycherly Arms was unoccupied when he drove past, Terman discovering the pub only as it receded before him. He pulled up to the curb at first opportunity, kept the motor running. Tom’s absence determined the landscape.

“I’ll get out and take a bus,” she said. “I don’t want to get in the way.”

Two of the punks appeared on the other side of the street, shrunken and demented figures, sexually ambiguous, arms around each other’s shoulders like lovers. One of them might have been a woman, though it was impossible to tell which one. They seemed to him more pathetic than dangerous. He sat hunkered down in the car, observing them.

“I don’t know when I’ve had so much excitement,” Lila said.

Terman got out of the car after a few minutes and walked to the front of the pub. He peered into the back garden where a young couple sat eating what looked like bangers and mash, a child with a stuffed fox in its lap asleep in a stroller behind them. The commonplace scene fascinated him and he forgot for the moment the object of his search, or imagined himself as the object, the lost and forgotten child. The couple spoke German and he wondered at their apparent ease in this foreign place.

The sight of his son coming toward him took away his breath, made his chest ache, brought tears to his eyes.

Tom had his head down, barely acknowledged his father as he came up to him. They walked together to the car and Tom got in back slamming the door after him.

As they drove quickly away, Terman glimpsed the two punks staring at them, one had his fist raised threateningly, the other (the woman?) made a face like a gargoyle.

They escaped the street, rushing away in silence like thieves. “Do you remember me?” Lila asked, smiling at Tom. “My husband, Stanislaus and I used to be neighbors of yours. You used to play with my son Petey, when you were both much younger.”

Tom nodded.

“Are you all right?” Terman asked him.

“I’m on my last legs,” Tom said, laughing nervously. He held out his hands. “No stigmata yet. I had a few bad moments right before you came. And I thought for a while, you know, because you took so long, that you weren’t coming.”

“Did you ever find out what those boys wanted from you, Tom?” Lila asked.

Tom mumbled something unintelligible, then said, “They were up to no good.”

“I didn’t get that,” she said. “Perhaps you didn’t want me to get it. I’m going back to America tomorrow and I thought I’d tell your mother that I saw you and that you were in one piece. You are in one piece, I hope.”

“The only injuries are internal,” he said, playing to her as if she were an audience in a theater. “What you see is what you get.”

“Where do you want to be dropped?” Terman asked Lila, though Tom thought the question was meant for him and said it didn’t matter.

“You can drop me at a bus stop,” Lila said. “What’s your destination?” They had been driving in circles.

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go,” he said. “I don’t want you reporting to Magda that I mistreated you.” He meant it as joke, or thought he did, though he could see from the flicker of perception on Lila’s face that she believed he was dependent on Magda’s opinion of him. Whatever Lila might say in his favor, Magda would be unimpressed. “He went out of his way for you,” she would say to Lila, “because he wanted Tom to think better of him.”

After a while, he found himself alone with his son.

Even though we were packing to leave, I was embarrassed for the room, wanted it to show itself to better advantage. Some pink roses Astrid had given me had withered away in their plastic vase, though the dead flowers were better than none at all, I thought, gave off the memory of flowers. As mediocre as the room was, I wanted him to admire it, to perceive in it endearing qualities that I had somehow missed. It was a room I had lived in and now would no longer live in.

“I’d like you to return the things you’ve taken,” he said, glancing away from the ill-gotten goods I had laid out on the bed.

“I can’t bring them back without asking for trouble,” I said. “Most of it’s not worth anything anyway.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Well,” I said. “I mean, what is the point as you see it?”

“You won’t do it again?”

It was easier to say I wouldn’t than to say I wasn’t sure so I told him what he wanted to hear. Anyway, I never thought of it as going on forever; each theft seemed final in itself.

We heard the door to Mrs. Chepstow’s apartment close softly, the click like a sound made with one’s tongue.

“Give it up,” he said, staring out of the room’s only window.

“Give up what?”

“You don’t want to have to come back here again,” he said. “It’s cleaner to move everything out, make a final break.”

Cleanliness had never excited me much, nor had final breaks. I mentioned that I owed the landlady some money and he said he would take care of it, whch wasn’t what I had in mind.

“She doesn’t really care about the money,” I said. “She likes to have me in the house.”

He sat down in my one chair (I still thought of it as my chair) and stared ahead of him in disapproval. “What if I lent you the money and you paid her,” he said. “Would that make it all right?”

“I don’t like to rush into anything,” I said.

He looked sick, so I said if he wanted to pay her, if that would gratify him, to go ahead.

I picked up the valise to carry down the stairs and my father said he would take it and pulled it from me, then I tried to take it back. “I can handle it,” I said.

We were both holding on to it, then both let go, the overstuffed valise falling to the floor with a thud. He apologized for letting it drop and I said well it was my fault too, then I remembered something and reached under the bed for a copy of a book I had stashed there.

“Is there more?” he asked, dragging the valise to the door.

“I thought you might be interested in having this,” I said, my voice full of phony self-amusement. I handed him the novel which was not in the best condition, having been scrunched in my jacket among other displaced possessions.

“I’ve been looking for copies of this,” he said, clearly upset at its condition. “I’m very pleased to have it, Tom.” He came over as if to put an arm on my shoulder then stopped himself, or else had never intended any more than an undefined step toward me. “Where did you come on it?” he asked.

“It came on me,” I said or something equally ambiguous. I imagined he thought I had taken it from his study and was now giving it back under the pretense of a gift. There were a few other things under the bed I had somehow forgotten and I thought it might be a mistake to leave them behind for Mrs. Chepstow to take to heart. I filled my jacket pockets with odds and ends.

He was still unbending the book, worrying it back to its origingal condition. “This novel was rejected twenty-seven or twenty-eight times in America over a four year period before it found a publisher,” he said. “If for that reason alone, it’s been my favorite. I reworked it a number of times, trying to make its obvious flaws less apparent. I doubt that I made it any better but when it appeared in print what had been wrong with it miraculously vanished.”

“Well, I’m glad I got the right book,” I said, “the appropriate symbol.”

I carried the valise down the stairs, my father occupied with his book. He stopped at the landlady’s apartment and knocked forcefully at the door, demonstrating how to make his presence felt.

It was odd that she didn’t answer right away; she tended to live close to the sound of things, eager for some invasion of her lonely privacy.

“She must be taking a nap,” I said.

I tried the door and discovered it unlocked, and we looked at each other with what I thought to be some kind of understanding.

“I’ll leave a check for her on the table in the hall,” he said.

Terman called, “Hello,” opening the door just enough to permit his voice to carry, thought he heard something in reply, a hiss, a muffled groan. He called again, heard what sounded like the echo of his own voice.

“Let’s go,” Tom said. He picked up his suitcase and they walked down the remaining flight of steps to the front door. Terman heard something from upstairs that turned him around, an ashtray falling or the slamming of a window, the whispering of conspirators, the creak of steps. He wrote a check for sixty pounds and left it on the long table in the foyer, considered his obligation discharged.

The car was unusually sluggish, moved as if it were riding through sand, which seemed perfectly reasonable to the driver, an extension of some feeling about himself. It was Tom who suggested that something might be wrong. He got out and discovered that a back tire was flat. The slash marks just above the tread indicated sabotage.

Tom got out of the car and offered his regrets. Father and son stood bent over the damaged tire in shared grievance.

Why only one tire? Terman was wondering. It seemed, if nothing else, a failure of the imagination.

Henry Berger enters the almost pttch-black interior of an abandoned church, whistling to himself. As soon as he adjusts his sights to the dark, he determines a figure standing next to the pulpit.

“Don’t come any closer,” a voice says, a burnt out whisper. “I am of no use to you once you know who I am. Please turn your head.”

(The figure in the shadows is tall and angular, elongated even further by the shadows.)

“I understand you have some information for me.” Henry Berger says.

“I have no information for you,” says the other. “I can tell you nothing. If you’re going to discover you’ve been moving in the wrong direction, you’ll have to do it on your own power.”

“And how do I do that?”

“It’s your view, I understand, that as eight figures on a certain list of ten have died in suspicious circumstances, one of the two remaining figures is the assassin?”

“How do you know what my view is?” Berger turns himself slightly to the left, inclining his neck.

“I’ve asked you not to move,” says the voice. “Your pursuit of this assassin has occasioned, what? five additional murders, the killing of accomplices, the covering over of tracks.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“A whisper in the dark, a disembodied voice. The real assassin is above suspicion, long since discarded from your concern.”

“Are you telling me that the murderer is not a member of the so-called Folkestone Conspiracy?”

“You persist in misunderstanding me,” says the voice. “I’ve not said that everyone on that list is above suspicion. In your pursuit of the simple, Mr. Berger, sometimes you overlook the brillantly complex. I have only a few more minutes to spare. Do you understand what it is you don’t know?”

Berger is silent, takes a deep breath. “The assassin is on the list of ten, but is not one of two presumably still alive. You’re indicating that the murderer is one of the murdered. One of the apparently murdered. Is that right?”

“That’s at least one of the possibilities,” says the sandpaper voice. “The pursuit of this assassin may take you places you had been better advised to avoid. Mr. Berger, please count off ten seconds to yourself before going through the main doors. I suggest this measure for our mutual security.”

Berger counts slowly to five, then stops abruptly. “Why are you telling me this?” he asks. “How do I know I can trust you?”

Henry Berger turns abruptly in the direction of his informant, his gun in hand. For as far as the eye can see, there is nothing.

Terman unlocked the door to his house, handed in Tom’s suitcase, was about to close the door when he noticed someone sitting on the sofa, head tilted forward.

“Is that you, Max?”

The figure seemed to move his head forward in approximation of a nod.

“What are you doing?” Terman asked.

“I’m thinking,” the figure said in a midwestern accent. “Does that meet with your approval?”

“Are you a friend of Max Kirstner’s?”

The weary nod was repeated, a gesture so small as to deny its moment as it passed.

This odd presence disconcerted him. “Is Max in the house somewhere?”

The figure seemed to shrug, though it may only have been the effect of the damp chill in the room. “Are you through asking questions?” he asked. “I don’t like being interrupted when I’m worrying an idea. So if you don’t mind.”

When he got back to the taxi in which Tom was waiting, he instructed the driver to take them to the Tate Gallery. He made no mention of the intruder in his living room.

“To tell you the truth,” Tom said, “I’d rather do something else.”

“We’ll go wherever you like,” Terman said.

“The thing is, I don’t know where I want to go, Dad. Could you suggest some places?”

It felt to him as if his skin were being cut away in narrow strips. He recited a litany of names. “The Tower of London, The National Gallery, The British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey.”

“I have difficulty looking at things,” Tom said, his tone apologetic. “No powers of concentration.”

They arrived in front of the Tate without having decided on a destination.

Terman paid the driver, the bill coming to a pound forty more than recorded on the meter, one of the mysteries of London travel he had never resolved. Nothing ever cost what it appeared to cost.

Instead of going into the museum, they crossed the street and walked along the bank of the Thames toward Westminster, the direction as arbitrary as the walk itself. After a point they sat on a bench facing the river, though for all the attention they paid it, they might have had their backs to the water. Terman was thinking how the disappointments they felt in each other’s company seemed to multiply, seemed to carry the weight of earlier disappointments, seemed to carry the weight of disappointments between fathers and sons impressed in the history of the race. Tom took off his workboots and socks and massaged his feet. “I’m cold,” he said.

Terman took off his jacket — he himself was sweating from the heaviness of the weather — and handed it to Tom. The boy put it on over his field jacket, struggling to get his arms through the sleeves. It didn’t work and then it did. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get the buttons to close.

“Just wear it over your shoulders,” Terman said.

Tom shook his head — that it didn’t fit was another disappointment — and he returned the corduroy jacket to his father who was disappointed to have it back. “When I’m cold,” he said, “it doesn’t matter how much I wear. Sometimes I walk around the house with four or five layers of clothing on and I can’t get warm.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“It’s not so bad,” Tom said. He hugged himself, stood up, sat down, blew into his hands which he then rubbed together. “There are worse things,” he said, “aren’t there? I mean, people are starving in Cambodia.”

His father’s shadow seemed everywhere in evidence, seemed to grow more oppressive even as its source diminished. Tom felt deprived of language in the presence of that shadow, aware of the self-consciousness of his least remark. The more he faulted himself, the more he blamed the other for being the occasion of his failure.

“Let’s walk some more,” Terman said.

They walked along the bank to Westminster Bridge then crossed over to the other side of the Thames. Tom was cold, still cold.

They stopped for something to eat in a cafeteria in the basement of Royal Festival Hall, though in fact neither ate. Tom wanted nothing. Terman, though hungry — the same unappeasable hunger he had felt all week — abstained. He had a cup of black coffee, the fluid thick as ashes.

Terman imagined their time together as a segment of a film. You could perceive them from overhead, from one side (or the other) from front or back, in close-up or medium shot, or through metaphoric correlative. The father was smoking a cigar; the son sucked idly on a drinking straw, the accompanying can of Coca Cola of no interest to him. The pained looks on their faces might be mirror images of one another, though otherwise the resemblance was slight, almost circumstantial. They had learned to look like one another, had grown that way.

Purposelessness, thought Terman. What wasn’t? He damned the waste of time and even so the aging process increased its pace, denied escape, denied intention.

They were either at each other’s throats or stiff and formal, a pair of wire coat hangers in the same closet. “I live by my wits,” Tom wanted to say, “so have more trouble surviving than most.” His tongue was tied. He couldn’t take anything from his father, not even a can of Coca Cola, without feeling like a sellout, disloyal to his mother, a thief of self.

Terman was aware as they sat dawdling over cold coffee and warm Coca Cola that time was passing at some accelerated rate, that there were jobs of work he had set himself to do not being done. Years back, before he had given himself to screenwriting, he had outlined a series of ambitious novels that would take him the rest of his life, or longer, to complete. He had started the first, had put it aside to work on the second, and had discarded both at some point to earn his keep. What he had done (more than a thousand pages in manuscript), what he had set himself to do, barely interested him any longer. Only the sense of urgency remained.

“What should we do now?” he asked his son.