In Sunlight and in Shadow (51 page)

“I have no hope of ending it justly. It’s impossible,” Harry said, wanting to be realistic. “They have too much power. The strength it would take to fight them hasn’t been given to the police, the government, or to the entire population.”

“They own many of the police,” Vanderlyn said, “and up the chain as well. I know that.”

“No one has ever been able to take them on. The government has only symbolic victories against them. When they’re forced from one area they just show up in another.”

“All true.”

“Then what can I do?”

“Tell me what has enabled you to last this long. You made no mention of it. Why haven’t you closed down?”

“My father, mainly.” Vanderlyn’s expression encouraged Harry to explain. “He started the business from nothing. He taught himself to make fine things that people value. Some looked down on him because, what did he do, after all? He was a tradesman who made briefcases and belts. He didn’t traffic in theory, he had no power, but he was faithful to what he did and he employed many fine people, organizing and then tending the structure that supported them. He was, as I heard my friends say in college, and I heard him say himself, ‘just a businessman,’ but he was my father, he was as good and as worthy as any man, and I loved him.

“It was all thrown in my lap when he died. I was going to be educated for the purpose, he thought, of surpassing him, but I was educated enough to understand that I have no need to surpass him and will be lucky to follow. He built this business with his whole life. Whatever it is, whatever its virtues, whatever its faults, as long as it continues he’s still got some light left.”

“How did he deal with these people?”

“I don’t know, but I’m told he paid them. They said he begged like a dog.”

“Did he?”

“I don’t know, but if he did, I have reason to hold on until they kill me, and if he didn’t, I have reason to hold on just as long, although that isn’t what he would have wanted.”

“But is it what he would have done?”

“It’s exactly what he would have done, but it’s impossible to close the story justly. Not in these conditions.”

Vanderlyn put his fingertips together and rested his face upon almost prayerful hands so that the ring fingers lightly touched the tip of his nose. Brows knit, concentrating, slightly swaying back and forth, he would look up at the city—now, in the deeper color of the afternoon sun, burning with the commerce for which it was famous—just with his eyes, and then he would look down. He was not light in thought; he was in storm. Then he put his hands on the bench, straightened, and, lifting his head so that his eyes met Harry’s, he said, “It can be done, but you can’t go on without making a choice. You’ve either got to pull out and make a new start, which I would recommend. . . .”

“I won’t do that.”

“Or you go all the way. That’s dangerous, but if you neither surrender nor fight back they’ll kill you, and I wouldn’t want to see that.”

“You would care?”

“I would, yes.”

Sometimes in the war, by necessity or accident, a newly or inappropriately trained unit would be sent into battle. Everyone held his breath for these men, not only because of their dangerous inexperience but because they had not, like most soldiers, been properly acclimatized, as if to altitude, in stages. Procession through the army changed body and soul in gradual accretions and strippings away. Eventually battle and hardship were expected and normal, but to get there involved as many leaves and layers as have an artichoke or an onion: the draft notice, the bus ride, the haircut, the night marches, firing range, weight loss, hardening, sleep deprivation. And then the second stage: riding to the front, the sight of combat-weary soldiers moving in the opposite direction, the sound of artillery, the wounded, the dead, firing and being fired upon, losing friends, being hit, sleeping in the cold rain, dysentery, vomiting, bleeding, and perhaps dying. From the family dinner table to a shallow, unmarked grave in the mud, the procession moved tolerably in stages.

When Vanderlyn said “It can be done,” it was for Harry the kind of shock a new recruit might feel when sent directly to the front. But that was where the conversation had led, and there they were. Harry posed the obvious question. “Who are you?”

“If we’re going to do this, you shouldn’t know.”

“Why?”

“Deniability, compartmentalization. It’s habit and the right procedure necessary for such an undertaking.”

“What undertaking? What procedure?” Harry asked, thinking that this was too fast, too soon, and too indefinite.

Vanderlyn stated it simply. “Getting out from under the Mafia.” He saw Harry’s skepticism and that he might bolt, so he backed up a little. “All through the war,” he said, “we ran operations that pitted a David against a Goliath. A few men would take on whole units of the Wehrmacht. I myself did that, in Germany before the Normandy landings.

“Like you, we had to parachute in, but we had no divisions following us. We had great difficulty passing as locals, we could never entirely trust our networks, none of our bases was ever really secure. You learn from that how to compensate. The compensations are not always what one might think, but they can be very effective.

“If you really want to do this, look at all the advantages you have. You’ll have to avoid the law, but not attack it, and it will be delighted to look the other way. Your bases are safe at least until you open the fight. You’re native born, and free to circulate. You can order food in a restaurant or walk down the street and you don’t even have to think about it. You have many resources that we didn’t have in the war, and your enemy has many weaknesses that you can exploit.”

“That may be true, but I don’t have license.”

“Take license. They do.”

“If I can’t know exactly who you are,” Harry said, “I’d like to know whom you’re with.”

“Fair enough. Let me put it this way. America really suffered in the war and a lot of people died because before the war our special services were undeveloped. It has been decided that we won’t be caught short again, and that, therefore, people like me, who can’t get this out of their system, can continue. What’s under construction may go in a number of directions, depending upon the funding, the political reaction, and the international situation of the next few years. We’re starting out now as we did: informal recruitment, relationships, improvisation. It worked well during the war, and we hope that whatever comes out of this is not too bureaucratic and stiff.”

“You’re recruiting me?”

“No.”

“Then, what?”

“From what I know about you, you’re ideal: a pathfinder with years of combat, the best education. Languages other than French?”

“A few.”

“Good.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“And a businessman. It’s what we were built on. I regret that you weren’t in before, but I’m not recruiting you. This is personal. If in the future you want to come in, that’s another thing. For now, for this, I told you why I’m here.”

“And how can I trust you?”

“To trust is both to sense accurately and to risk, to neither of which, I believe, you are a stranger. Do you think I’m with
them?
”

It would have been absurd, and Harry said, “There isn’t one among them who could pass for Fred Astaire, and there never will be. You don’t do this full time, do you? What do you do?”

“Wall Street,” Vanderlyn said, “just like the Hales.”

“You knew.”

“In the morning I saw the house. I was there once for a reception. I remember the daughter when she was about eight. She got to be really stunning, didn’t she? She used to be a sweet little thing, with glasses, excited just to be passing out hors d’oeuvres. Every time someone took one, it was as if she had been given the Nobel Prize. Granted, the whole thing is a bit risky. But think about it. What needs to be done seems obvious. It’ll have to be refined. I’ll need more to go on, but I know the outline of these things generally and how they work. As for the methods and means, I’m hardly a genius, but I’ve been there before. I think it can be done, and I think you think it can. It would be interesting.”

“Yes,” Harry said, “it would be very interesting. You’re talking about. . . .”

“Assassination.” Vanderlyn started to walk, and then turned. “They will never, ever, be expecting to receive what you are capable of visiting upon them. Like everyone else, they’re creatures of habit. They have their systems and their rules. They know about crime, they don’t know about war, and you do. It would be better to retreat and let them have their way. Don’t you think? Just start a new life. But, if you need it, I’ll help.”

Vanderlyn turned placidly toward the city. Without looking back at Harry, he said, “You leave first. I’ll take the next boat.”

The play debuted in the midst of three days of Indian summer that threw open outdoor cafés and propelled not a few boys to jump from the rocks at Beekman Place into the early October waters of the East River. Audiences are cruel but understanding, as half the tension and excitement when the curtain rises comes from their imagination of themselves onstage doing the difficult and wonderful thing they know they cannot do. Looking upon the performers, they fear every potential slip, miscue, or mistake, so that when actors or actresses are lifted up and out of themselves, the audience, empathetic to the point of physical pain, rides with them on the same wings.

Because the theater filled with people who had arrived touched with sun and with neither the fur wraps nor greatcoats common to opening nights, the coat-check girls were despondent. Exhaust fans had run on full power since five o’clock to pull in the cooler evening air, and would be shut down only just before curtain time. It was hoped that a convection current would draw enough of a breeze through the lobby to cool the hot lights and exit through the roof vents, rising like a sea current into the pink sky of Times Square.

Catherine now had no choice but to sing for the sake of singing itself. She expected nothing or worse from the critics, and, no matter what Sidney said, to be booted from the production. This gave her songs a quality of defiance, emotion, and truth that paralyzed her listeners with admiration not for her but for the state she had attained. She carried them on a wave that made quite a few of them fall in love with her through the mystery of a voice that was evocative beyond reason. The way Catherine sang a single, simple word could summon memory, love, and the best graces of her listeners. Even the position of her body, the way she held her hands, the expression on her face (powdered and yet flushed), and the sparkle of her eyes were surpassed by the voice, most feminine, with which she conquered and commanded.

She dominated the first act. Had she been onstage more, she would have become a rising star of Broadway, pushing aside the doubts sown in the press. But her part did not afford her that, and she waited in her dressing room as the building vibrated with the cheers and applause that had begun to interrupt the action more and more as it built, and would have followed her songs and pressed her to an encore had her audience been as warm and relaxed as it could not have been at the beginning of the play.

Not wanting his exit to suggest disapproval to those sitting around him, Harry waited until the intermission to go to her. The lobby and sidewalk were packed with people eager to finish their drinks and go back in. The production was more than safe, as were Sidney and the investors. Harry circled into the alley and entered through the stage door. Left and right, stagehands, chorus girls, and people with clipboards were rushing in opposite directions like sailors summoned to general quarters.

Because the mirror was surrounded by eighteen clear bulbs that burned hot, a fan was turning in Catherine’s dressing room. She had exchanged her costume for a silk robe. “Don’t you have to wear that,” he asked, referring to the wool suit of the girl from Red Lion, “for the curtain call?”

“Yes, but I must be an Eskimo. If I keep it on I’ll be dripping with sweat.” She took a drink from a glass filled with water and ice.

He told her that she had been without peer. He told her how much he loved her, how proud he was, and that, as she sang, he fell in love with her as if for the first time. Her answer was to look at him sadly, but lovingly, which was all he needed and every bit of the truth.

After intermission, the idea had been to shock the audience back into what Sidney called the “
Dramatische Weltanschauung,
” with a vigorous production number from the play within a play, in which the full chorus appeared in tap shoes and pounded the boards so rhythmically and hard that had a subway passed underneath, the blades of its fans and the brims of the last-of-the-season straw hats would have been bent down as if by ten-pound weights. The sounds of keening clarinets and hound-like trombones, and the very vibrations of the boards possessed the theater, moving Catherine’s tumbler across the glass top of her dressing table as if on a Ouija board. “Those chorus girls,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t want to get in their way.”

And then Catherine, hesitating just like her mother—she often had, even at twenty-three, the gravity and calm of long introspection—said, “They never tire. It’s something in the flesh. Like Betty Boop, they were born bouncing. The other day I spoke to one who thinks that melancholy is a type of dog that loves fruit. Their energy comes from innocence. Oh,” she said, holding up her right index finger and looking at the ceiling as a wave of laughter rolled through the walls, “they laughed for George. That’s wonderful. It’ll bring him back to life.”

“And what about you? They applauded like a rainstorm.”

“Like hail,” she said. “And I’m not from Texas.”

“Will that bring
you
back?”

“I have to be cautious,” she answered. “I have to learn to do what I do and push through like an armored division. But I’m not like an armored division. I’m not armored, which is a problem, although if I were, that would be a problem, too.”

“Play your part every day,” Harry said, “until the end of the run. It’ll give you strength beyond what you can imagine. That’s how iron is tempered and hickory is cured. Nothing is born as strong as it can become.” He took her into his arms and she stayed there comfortably until just before the curtain call, listening to the music from above, muffled and vague, the sounds of horns and traffic filtering in from the stage entrance, and the hard whirring of the fan like wind moving through sails.