Echo House (15 page)

She said, "You never react, do you, Axel?"

Her body had not matured and her emotions had not matured either. How could she know so little when she felt so much? Now she believed in magic, a seer with a deck of cards and an overheated intuition; and someone had talked out of turn, not much doubt about that. Bewitched, Sylvia thought she had deciphered the Rosetta Stone. She did not believe that a human being had a right to his own memory, the right to preserve and protect his own past.

She said, "If only you had some imagination, then we might find a way to talk to each other."

When he did not reply, she said, "You think everyone can read your mind, know your thoughts as intimately as you do. Axel, what happened to you over there? Something must have happened, or is it just this little French tart whose existence I didn't know about until a few hours ago, and now I find she's a guest in my house—"

Axel's hand was snaking when he brought his glass to his mouth, all the while watching her as she moved back and forth in front of the sideboard, her voice a bird's shriek. Blood rushed to his face. He put the glass aside and rose, faltering, groaning from the pain in his back—

Hit her? He could have killed her.

E
CHO HOUSE
was empty now, Alec back at school and only old Mrs. Johnson there to clean and prepare dinner on those evenings when Axel dined in. After Thanksgiving he had dismissed the French staff, his hours too erratic to accommodate a temperamental chef who insisted that dinner be served at nine sharp, no exceptions. Axel enjoyed being alone at table, often reading as he ate, and alone later in his study listening to Django Reinhardt or Benny Goodman while he studied the government documents he had brought home in his briefcase. Axel had no formal tide but operated quietly as a fixer without portfolio. He thought of himself as a mechanic. They had offered him space in the War Department building, but he preferred his own office near Farragut Square, because his own business so often intersected with government business.

Axel insisted that there was much to recommend the bachelor life, its stillness, leisure, and freedom—well, not freedom precisely;
liberty.
He lived happily among men, the musicians on his phonograph, the artists on his walls, the authors of his books, the officials whose observations he read each night in documents, his own comments written in a headmasterly hand, well done, incomplete, good idea, bad idea, see me. Often he would look up when the arm lifted from the last disc, Django's run echoing in the study, and hear the clock ticking in the dining room. His house was utterly still except for the clock's pendulum. If the moon was full, the yard was flooded with light, almost bright enough to read by. The light had a kind of murmur to it, as if the angels were gathering round. At such moments he was filled with well-being.

Once a month or so, round about midnight, Axel would limp to the garage, climb into his black Packard, and drive downtown to the Lincoln Memorial in order to contemplate the ruined face of the President. Axel looked at the great head and saw the barrel of a revolver touch the skull, Lincoln's eyebrows lifting in recognition, an immense sadness settling. Surely at that moment he saw the face of God. He had preserved the Union, but his knowledge of the terrible price cast an eternal shadow on his soul, an ocean of blood to secure an idea, a free, liberated, and undivided nation. Abraham Lincoln had known the cost to the last corpse, and still he persevered. The identical task awaited Lincoln's successors. The demands differed and the price varied with the demand, but it was always paid in blood. The task in the present decade was no less sublime and the cost would be as high. Lincoln's memorial belonged in Washington, a reminder every minute of every day that America's ordeal was to know itself. Thus consoled. Axel Behl put his car in gear and went home.

When the Senate was in late-night session he often drove to the Hill and slipped into the visitors' gallery. These sessions came at the end of the term, the rush to adjournment, legislation fed into the mill helter-skelter, everyone exhausted, the chamber filling with blue smoke from cigars and cigarettes. A man with a connoisseur's nose could detect the odor of whiskey as well. The Senate chamber had an antique feel to it, all carved hardwood and figured carpets, tiny mahogany desks, each with its own brass spittoon, pages in black knickers standing at attention near the rear doors like obedient sons, scribes in business suits taking shorthand on folio-sized sheets of creamy foolscap, earnest as bishops. The scribes were constantly in motion, gliding from one member to the next, recording the colloquy. The lamps were dim, as if to emphasize the obscurity of the proceedings, unintelligible to anyone not familiar with the matter at hand, an arcane parliamentary tongue as stylized as a sonnet. Axel was put in mind of the medieval holy fathers who published the Scriptures in Latin, a language the faithful could not read. The Mass was mysterious, the Bible more so. Ordinary Christians depended on the good faith and learning of their priests, the translators; and when they were disappointed, they turned to sorcery and witchcraft.

When the voices rose in legislative incantation, Axel could identify the various American regions, Mississippi and Louisiana, Maryland and Virginia, Massachusetts and Vermont. The accents had not changed since his father was in the Senate, and his father claimed that even then they had not changed since the Civil War. Illinois and Kentucky were easy enough, Cook County and its satellites, and downstate in the first; eastern and western in the second; and any state of the old Confederacy, thirteen varieties of molasses. The farther west you went, the more anonymous the accent—Arizona indistinguishable from New Mexico or Colorado, California—Califamya—as bland as the Dakotas. Texas was monstrously distinct, however.

They were indoor men, drawn to enclosed spaces, whatever their private dreams of a day at the races, or on the golf course, or hip-deep in a trout stream, or in bed with a secretary. Their words rarely gave a hint of rivalry or petty jealousy, still less of the need for the windowless chamber and its many comforts and amenities, its consolations. His father told a story of a senator who had suddenly and most unexpectedly lost his wife, and in his grief and confusion rushed immediately to the floor to sit at his desk, grieving all day and all night, apologizing later for any disruption. But where else was he to go? Axel sat back and let the voices wash over him, a murmur like the sea in a soft breeze, the vessel barely making way. The sodden language of government had a beat and a rhythm to it if you knew the score. The lobbyists and their principals crowding the front rows had a rhythm also as they leaned forward in their seats trying to decipher whether a vote to move the previous question was a victory or not; and leaning far over the balcony's edge, they would search the face of the majority leader, who would wink or not, depending on the likely outcome. They listened for the great solos as attentively as any aficionado at Carnegie Hall and when the words died they would laugh or applaud, not raucously, because a certain decorum had to be maintained; their laughter recalled the crinkle of money.

Axel always sat in the rear row of the gallery, where he could watch the lawyers for the sugar producers, the man from the corn belt, the vice president of the railroad union, and the airplane manufacturer cup their hands to their ears when they heard something familiar—the quota, the price support, the tax break, the subsidy—and watch as the votes were tallied, ticking off the yeas and nays on their own scorecards and rising wearily at the conclusion, smiling or not, according to the vote, relinquishing their seats to the lobbyists whose legislation was still being marked up for the decisive vote. The moment had aspects of the bazaar and the auction block and the trading floor and the burlesque house, all business conducted in an arcane tongue with its special rules of grammar and syntax, assisted by a lifted eyebrow or a pointed finger. Axel knew the Senate chamber as well as he knew the garden room at Echo House. He knew the feel of the mahogany desks and the nap of the figured carpet, and knew also what the galleries looked like when a senator raised his eyes, the crowded rows filled with anxious men in rut. No wonder, in their crazier moments, senators wanted to be fitted for togas.

Axel sat alone by cioice but occasionally one of the lobbyists would amble up the aisle for a chat, the latest gossip or headline. They were always interested in which item of legislation had brought him to the gallery and nodded skeptically when he said nothing special. He liked the spectacle; it reminded him of his schooldays, when his father allowed him to wander around the cloakroom during the final days of the session. He didn't know until later that he was wearing a leper's bell; the moment he appeared the whiskey bottles would be put to one side. The old senator was sending him around to spy, and more than once he was told to get his ass out of the private rooms, the senator not knowing who he was and apologizing later when he found out.

Axel was surprised one evening when he saw Ed Peralta making his way along the gallery aisle.

"Thought I'd find you here," Ed said. "What's going on?"

"Jimmy Longfellow's nomination to Lisbon. I got it this far; I thought I should be in the chamber for the vote."

"The nomination's not in trouble?"

"Not anymore. But I hear that Alfalfa Bob will have something to say about it. I sent down word that I'd be present so he could say it to my face. I want him to know I'm in the gallery."

Ed Peralta eased himself into the chair next to Axel. "Never cared for Congress. My father loved the House and always wanted me to come listen to the debates, but they never made any sense. Curly said that if you listened carefully enough you'd hear the nuance of the deal. Never appealed to me, all that open talk. Easy to get burned."

"Senate's different," Axel said.

Ed propped his feet on the seat in front and said, "Alec got in touch with Sylvia. She's not in London anymore. She moved back to New York last week. Do you know Willy Borowy? She's with Willy."

Axel craned his neck to watch the action on the floor.

"Wedding plans, too. I think."

Suddenly everyone around them was laughing, a colloquy that had turned unexpectedly droll. The president pro tem rapped for order.

"What's on your mind, Ed?"

"Money problems at the firm," Ed said. "I need your counsel."

"I heard you had some trouble."

"The things we're doing," Ed said. "They're ad hoc. We're improvising. It's a damned amateur hour, no fault of ours." Ed lowered his voice, peering down to the floor, where a member was unsuccessfully attempting to move the previous question. "It's our wallet, and they're behaving like it's a mercantile exchange, ten percent per transaction. They're eating us up. What did you hear?"

"Drums along the Potomac," Axel said.

"You're so helpful, Axel."

"Always at your service," Axel said.

"The problem we've got is the problem you'd least expect," Ed said.

"Transfers," Axel said.

Ed Peralta nodded. The money was transferred overseas, sometimes by courier, sometimes by pouch. And there had been some grotesque mistakes, fuck-ups really, embezzlement and theft being only the most embarrassing. The drawing account in Switzerland was safe but expensive and inconvenient in other ways, Geneva in the middle of everything but close to nothing. Swiss law was a briar patch. The banks still held Nazi assets.

Axel listened carefully, trying to see around the next corner.

"We even sent one of our people to visit with the old man up in Armonk. He's been helpful in the past and they're rolling in money and have the ways and means to transfer. But it came to nothing." Ed struggled with his cigarette lighter, zip zip zip zip. "The modalities, Axel"

Axel watched Alfalfa Bob, nonchalant in his chair; he was listening to his legislative assistant, who was speaking urgently into his ear, handing him an envelope. The senator opened it and sat up straight, looking into the gallery until he found Axel; his heavy eyebrows and scowl were reminiscent of Adolph Behl. The senator brusquely dismissed his aide, then wrote something on the back of the note and looked around for a page.

"Last month we had a crisis," Ed said. "One of the crises in which someone could've ended up dead or in Siberia, whichever's worse. Our mar. was in London. That bank in the City was closed because they were all off in Yorkshire, shooting grouse. Embassy funds weren't sufficient, and we've had problems with them in the past. They want everything in triplicate. So we had to go to our good friend in Curzon Street and ask him to give us a hundred thousand dollars at once, in greenbacks from his personal safe. Of course he was happy to oblige, as you would've obliged if the shoe had been on your foot. But it was embarrassing. It made us look like idiots. Our friend thought so, too, and let us know it."

"It's inefficient," Axel said.

"No problem with funding," Ed said. "We have funding. We're the drunk in the wine cellar, but we don't have a corkscrew."

"Yes," Axel said.

"We need something that's permanent, reliable, and private, always keeping the paperwork to a minimum. It isn't only them we're worried about; it's us. You know the foundations and philanthropies we've set up to meet the payroll. It's a nightmare to keep straight. Most of the people who are getting the money don't know where it's coming from, or pretending not to know. Reputation means a lot to our novelists, editors, and parliamentarians. And they're walking a tightrope, too. They like the things that money can buy but they don't like it known that the money's coming from Uncle Sam and Uncle Sam wants a return on his investment. We own them, but only so long as we're quiet about it. That's why we're holding this so close, do you see? But it's a time bomb, Axel. We need expertise from a man who knows how it's done, who knows how to keep his own counsel, someone who's been through the mill and knows the score. We need a treasurer
in place.
"

Axel was silent a moment, remembering the story he had heard the week before. "What happened to the one we bought at Echo House last Christmas?"