Surveillance

11

“MOM’S WRITING,” Ali said.

“Ah, one of those days.”

Ali was full of her trip, and Tad was happy to listen. Elementary Buddhism helped him suppress every niggle of what might otherwise have been his irritation at Ali’s wide-eyed wonder at the marvels of this reactionary old coot. When she showed him the inscription in the book, he said, “Fantastic — cool how he calls himself uncool, huh?”

“He’s pretty cool. We saw dogfish again when we were kayaking, and I wasn’t scared at all.”

“You get your homework done?”

“Nah, it’s just some math that’ll only take half an hour.”

“Bring it here. If your mom’s so busy writing, I guess I can take care of dinner. I’ve got strawberries and cream, and pasta, and some pesto sauce that I made fresh. We can all feast on that.”

“Great,” Ali said. “Minna, that’s his wife, she’s like a gourmet cook.”

Tad needed a few more grams of Buddhism for that.

Over Tad’s pasta and pesto and ten-dollar wine, Lucy was in a state of silent distraction, hair all over the place like Struwwelpeter’s. Declining the wine, she asked for water, a sure symptom of major mental disturbance. Every so often she’d rouse herself, or try to.

“Did he come here over the weekend?”

“I don’t think so. He’s probably sulking in his tent.”

“Whose tent?” Ali said.

“Achilles’ tent. The landlord’s tent. We’re talking about Mr. Lee.”

“He’s got a tent?”

“It’s just an expression,” Lucy said. “Achilles was this ancient Greek who spent a lot of time sulking in his tent.” Which was about as near as she came to sociability during the course of the entire meal. When she left, after eating three strawberries, she said, “Tad — God, I’m sorry I’m so elsewhere. But thank you. It was lovely.”

“Go enjoy your elsewhere.” Tad kissed her, cheek to cheek. “It’s not as if we’re not used to it, honey. We just wish you were on medication.”

Tad and Ali washed the dishes, then played chess.

Ali took Tad’s last bishop with her knight. “Check…mate!”

“The king is dead,” Tad said.

BY TEN O’CLOCK, Lucy had covered twenty-five pages of her notebook with scrawled notes. To bring off what she wanted to do, in seven thousand words or less, would take extraordinary craft and guile. There was material here for a full-length book about the relationship between journalist and subject, and the prospect of the sheer labor involved in boiling it down to an article made her feel defeated before she’d even begun. But in the morning it would all look different. She needed the fresh eye that she’d bring back from the school run.

Dog-tired, she checked her messages. There were three of them, all from Mrs. Tillman, each more testy than the last, demanding to know whether the package had arrived. It was too early to call England now, and Lucy was damned if she’d stay up till after midnight. More than anything, she craved sleep.

At five A.M. she was punished by the insistent trilling of the phone. She groggily reached for the receiver in the dark.

“Marjie Tillman — I’ve been trying to reach you since Friday.”

“I’m sorry, we were away for the weekend…. just got back. When I got your messages, it was still too early to call you. But thank you, yes, it did come. Excuse me, I’m not too c-c-c-c-c-coherent right now, you see it’s five in the morning here and I was—”

“Five? It’s surely eight!”

Mrs. Tillman was accusing her of self-serving deception. “No, no — it’s eight on the East Coast, like in New York, but we’re three hours behind out here. It’s only five.”

“Well, in that case, perhaps you—”

“No, honestly, I’m awake now, we can t-t-talk—” Better to deal with this call straightaway than to wake again at seven with it still hanging over her head. To get to her piece, she needed to be done with this peremptory and deluded pest. “But thanks so much for getting the picture to me so fast — it must’ve wrecked your day. I’m hugely grateful to you.”

“So now you see.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s him.”

Speaking gently, trying as best she could not to offend, Lucy explained the differences between the two photos — the change in lighting, the overexposure of Juris Abeltins’ face, exactly how the two sets of barbed wire looked not quite the same. She said, “And then there are the chickens. If you look carefully at the picture of J-J-J-Juris you can see chickens pecking in the background. That’s obviously taken on your farm. But there isn’t a single chicken in the V–V-Vanags one.”

“Well, of course not!” She spoke as if Lucy were a total half-wit. “They use airbrushes and things!”

Lucy remembered the brown envelope of papers that had accompanied Augie all the way from Germany to Useless Bay. He’d asked her to remind him to dig it out for her, and, maddeningly, in the happy conviviality of Saturday’s dinner, when she’d gotten more than a little drunk, she had neglected to do so. The contents of that envelope would prove everything.

“Marjie, August Vanags has papers to prove his identity. He’s not your Juris Abeltins.”

“Papers? What papers?”

“Well…” For inspiration, she rummaged in her memory for the background reading she’d undertaken more than two weeks ago. She had to somehow rid herself of this madwoman at the far end of the line. “There’s a sort of temporary passport issued by…” Who would it be issued by, the embassy? Did they even have an embassy there then? “By the American authorities in Berlin. Then there’s…a l-l-l-letter from his sponsors, a group of Latvians in New York. There’s another letter from Sergeant C–C-Cahan, the soldier who took care of him for a while. Oh, and there’s another one from someone in UNNRA, an Englishwoman, like you. She was in charge of displaced children at the c-c-c-c-camp….” Surely that would do. “And of course there’s the ph-ph-ph-ph-photograph on the book.”

“What’s the date on this so-called passport?”

“I’m not sure. I think…August or S-S-September in 1945?”

“You can’t place it more exactly than that?”

“No.”

“And you’ve seen all these ‘papers’?”

Lucy paused fractionally before saying yes. That she hadn’t seen them was, after all, her own silly fault. And if they weren’t precisely as she’d described them, they must be very similar. There was no doubt in her mind as to the existence of the brown envelope.

Thousands of miles away in Thetford, Norfolk, there was silence. Evidently Mrs. Tillman was taking time to adjust to the fact that she’d been wrong from the start. At last, her voice came back on the line. “Miss Bengstrom?”

“Yes?”

“If these ‘papers’ exist — which I have to say, with all due respect, I rather doubt — they’re forgeries.”

A click at the other end, and then the dial tone.

IT HAD BEEN FIVE in the morning, after all — a time when anyone could be forgiven for being, as Augie liked to say, a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Besides, Marjorie Tillman was both unbelievably rude and downright crazy, possessed by her unshakable but totally bogus idée fixe. If she really had anything on Augie, as opposed to Juris Abeltins, she’d have said so in her letter, which Lucy pulled out and read carefully again. It was simply a long, tedious complaint about the immense inconvenience to which her family had been put by harboring the boy. There were rambling, digressive paragraphs about ration books, the coeliac stuff, the Jenny Lind Hospital, and something they’d had to eat, apparently called snoek, if Lucy was reading the word right; rants about a politician named Herbert Morrison, the bananas that had to be specially flown in, about the indignities of being forced to raise chickens; scattered admiration for “Winnie,” whom Lucy took to mean Churchill; but otherwise only ingratitude — how could the child be so ungrateful to his benefactors? There was nothing whatsoever to connect Juris Abeltins with August Vanags. No wonder the poor kid had never written back to the Vickers family, who appeared to have treated him like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.

Yes, she’d lied, but not only was it five in the morning, she’d lied in the service of the truth, trying to rid this unpleasant woman of a vengeful fiction that had its entire basis in a chance glimpse of a dust jacket in a bookstore. For what else was there? And Mrs. Tillman hadn’t caught her in her lie; she was merely desperate to evade the truth, which was that she was living in Fantasyland. It was written all over her letter, and palpable in her every pronouncement: the bitch was a fucking psycho.

Yet against all reason her adamantine certainty still shook Lucy, They’re forgeries! continuing to ring in her head, a measure of the power of even psychotic certainty to sway one’s feelings in spite of one’s better judgment. Spend enough time with the mad and you’ll catch their madness, because sanity is a fragile, feeble, defenseless thing when battered by the intractable, lunatic conviction exemplified by Mrs. Tillman. It was weak of Lucy to feel so shaken.

She badly wanted to drive back to Useless Bay and get Augie to show her the papers in that envelope. She thought of phoning him now; he could make photocopies in Langley, FedEx them over, and she’d have them in hand tomorrow. That’d stop Tillman’s toxic shit. But then, of course, having described them in such probably inaccurate detail, Lucy could hardly send copies to Thetford, because now they’d really look like forgeries.

Last night, she’d so looked forward to this morning, to reading through her notes and seeing how she could pull this story off elegantly, economically, in a space that GQ could print without cutting. But that phone call had blighted the day. She’d never gotten to sleep again and had squandered the next two hours rearranging the pillows to find a cool surface on which to rest her hot head. She felt jangled and hungover, though she hadn’t had so much as a sip of wine on Sunday.

She read over what she’d written yesterday. Here and there it was hard to decode her own handwriting, so fast and excitedly had she been scribbling. But overnight all excitement had leaked out of the words. What was she trying to do — reinvent New Journalism? Surely Janet Malcolm had already done this in…what was it called, The Journalist and the Murderer? Not quite this exactly, but uncomfortably close. In her twenty-five pages, she found only four or five that still seemed workable, and they were all Augie-specific and indistinguishable from how she might have written about any other subject. She told herself she was too tired, too rattled by the madwoman, to fairly judge what she was reading, but that tomorrow she might perhaps be able to recapture the elation and ambition that yesterday had her so firmly in their grip.

Gazing dispiritedly at her notebook, Lucy thought that had Mrs. Tillman been anywhere in the vicinity, she’d willingly have slit her throat.

FINN’S VALUE seemed to have shrunk over the weekend from ten to zero. He was just another boy now, doing such Finn-ish things as covertly picking his boogers and scowling lumpishly into space. Alida, having zoomed through the page of math problems, alternated between spying on him and doodling on the piece of scrap paper covered with her calculations.

First, she drew kayaks. She was really bad at art, and Gail’s pictures put hers to shame. But her kayaks, slicing through the water, looked real enough to feed her daydreaming. Then she tried the dogfish, which were a lot more difficult, though their mean jaws, set low and far behind their long blunt noses, were easy enough; those, and their piggy little eyes. It was the rest of them that was the problem, and Alida’s dogfish repeatedly turned into ferocious goldfish. When dogfish swam close to the surface, she wondered, did their dorsal fins stick out like other sharks’?

She longed for the bell. Humanities was next, and she needed to catch Mr. Tonelli early to ask if she could do her book report on Boy 381.

She’d brought the book to school, wrapped in a plastic bag, and carefully placed atop all the other stuff in her backpack. She wanted to show Gail — and maybe Emma — the inscription.

ACT WELL, and you’d live; act ill, and you’d soon die. This was Tad’s one medical theory, to which he tried scrupulously to adhere. On visits to Brian, his doctor, he sat in the waiting room taking deep breaths, preparing to go onstage. When called, he gamboled into the examination room, not quite like a spring lamb, but at least like a man of, say, forty-five, who wasn’t HIV…His handshake was firm, his smile wide and confident, and his cheeks bore only slight, nearly invisible traces of cosmetic color to convey the impression of someone in a state of ruddy, impregnable good health.

He and Brian went through the routine: weight, blood pressure, chest and back, blood sample.

Brian went to the sink, took off his latex gloves, and washed his hands. “Stools?” he said.

“The usual. Not too light and not too dark.”

Before Michael got sick, they used to sometimes see Brian in a gay bar, now long closed, on Capitol Hill. They’d socialized a little, the three of them, talking work and politics and gossip while sizing up newcomers. Brian had a roving eye, especially for young black men. Michael had been first to go to Brian as a doctor; Tad had followed, shortly after his death. Their relationship now was mostly guarded and professional, doc and patient, though sometimes Brian still let his mask slip and became, momentarily, a friend.

Tad couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but this morning it seemed to him that Brian, too, was acting. His voice was just a little too detached, too professional, his examination a shade too perfunctory. Tad was out of the doctor’s office within fifteen minutes, armed with Brian’s usual reassurances, yet less than usually reassured by them.

Stepping onto the sidewalk, he first felt fear. Brian was holding out on him, knew something he wasn’t telling — bad news he couldn’t bring himself to deliver on this sunny but cold April morning, with the wind blowing unseasonably out of the mountains to the east. Then it occurred to him that what Brian was holding back was something about himself. Last time, he’d said cheerily, as Tad thought then, “I’ll be pushing up daisies before you do.”

What was it, cancer? Tad thought, then felt a rush of sympathy and pity. It would be even worse for a doctor; unlike Tad, Brian couldn’t believe that he might act his way out of the disease, and would review the biopsies with the same clinical absence of illusion he directed to those of his patients.

Tad next reverted to his first thought. It wasn’t Brian’s condition, but his own. He was trying to shield him from the death sentence, and perhaps would call him up later, inviting himself to a drink at Tad’s apartment in order to break the dire news to him there. He was dreading Brian’s anticipated call when he switched tack again, back to worrying about the illness Brian was so bravely trying to hide from Tad.

He wished he’d spoken up in the office. They knew each other well enough, surely, for Tad to say, “Come on, Brian, come clean with me.” But he’d been so busy maintaining his own character that any such line would’ve broken the vaudeville rules of their established double act. Now he was stuck with the worst of both worlds, fearing for both himself and Brian without knowing who, or what, or why.

Crossing Second, he ran into traffic stalled by a shoal of Humvees clad in camo netting, with troops around the Scoop Jackson Federal Building, arms at the ready. Streets were blocked off with tape and cops. Far up on Second, somebody was barking something through a megaphone, but Tad couldn’t make out the words. Just one more scare to be ignored.

Puffing up Adams Street, pausing for breath midway between intersections, he thought, It’s me, then No, it’s Brian, then Maybe I was just imagining the whole thing. Down by the federal building, the emergency vehicles, honking and wailing about what would almost certainly turn out to be nothing, were sending him a personal message.

SEATED AT HIS LAPTOP, he clicked on Word, and when the blank page came up he selected from the control panel first 150 %, then Arial Black, then 48-point type, then Bold, then Underline. Prodding at the keys with his forefingers, he typed:

NOTICE OF DEMOLITION

Looked good. He thought the dense, black, official appearance of his handiwork would scare the living shit out of the fuckers when they found it in their mailboxes.

He reset the controls and with his old Webster’s New World Pocket Dictionary—its pages now held together with a fat rubber band — at his elbow, began to compose the letter to his tenants:

Sir or Madam:

AFTER A LUNCH that included a cautious glass of chardonnay, Lucy’s spirits rose a little, and when she went back to her desk she felt ready to write the first of what she thought of as her “snapshots.” She chose this one at random: Augie at the piano, his thick and blunt “shade-tree mechanic’s” fingers splayed awkwardly across the keys, white mustache bristling as he squinted intently at the score on the stand.

For help, she went over to the stereo and put on Stephen Kovacevich’s recording of Schubert’s last piano sonata — as she’d thought, an insanely ambitious piece for a raw beginner. The first movement, molto moderato, wasn’t moderate at all. It began with a deceptively simple, plangent tune, but within moments one began to hear darkness in the ominous rumble of the bass; then the music rushed and slowed, rushed and slowed, continually dissolving from gentle, elegiac lyricism into crash and clangor. As the notes that came with the CD said, it was “as if the grim reaper himself were present, forbidding any touch of solace, let alone Gemütlichkeit.” The emotional swings — sweetness to fear, threat to anger — followed so fast on one another that Lucy could hardly keep up with them. Bipolar Schubert, with his alternating bursts of mania and depression, seemed to be in the room with her as she listened. He’d died at thirty-one, dogged by failures in love and his musical career, and riddled with syphilis, according to Grove’s great musical dictionary.

Augie himself would surely die long before he could play just this first movement with anything remotely like Kovacevich’s sureness of touch and feeling.

First she tried writing in the past tense, then changed to the present. Vanags—no, Augie — sits at his brand-new Steinway grand.…The paragraph was brief, mainly about his haphazard fingering. By 3:25, when she had to go pick up Alida from school, she had three paragraphs she could live with: Augie murdering Schubert, Augie discovering the gumboot chiton, and Augie displaying his presidential cuff links. Not bad for half an afternoon, considering.

Though the sun was out, it was still too cold to drop the Spider’s top. And driving to school, she found herself beset by the question she’d been fighting off all day: why was Mrs. Tillman so keen to know the exact date of the temporary passport that Lucy had invented for him?

RICH ON her sand-dollar money, Alida wanted to catch Mr. Kawasuki’s Almost Antiques before he closed the store at six.

“You finished your homework already?” Her mom didn’t even look up from her writing.

“Yeah, it wasn’t much.”

“Don’t be too long, Rabbit — and watch out crossing the street.”