In Sunlight and in Shadow (77 page)

“You’ll find someone,” Harry said.

“Yeah, eventually.”

“You will. I saw my wife for the first time on the Staten Island Ferry, and I fell in love with her instantly. She was far away, her back turned, and though I could hardly see her it was as if I had known her all my life. Then she disappeared, and I lost her. But on the way back from St. George later in the day we were on the same boat. At first I lost her again, but then she came right to me, and she was standing—I don’t know—a foot away. What caused her to do that I can’t tell, and neither can she, but the instant I saw her face-to-face I knew I loved her, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and that if that meant the rest of my life would last only ten seconds, so be it.”

“For me,” Bayer said, “that may take awhile.”

“Have you heard from the others?”

“Just their addresses. Rice moved out west. He got a law job in California someplace. Has to do with farming or ranching or something. Everyone else went home, and the dead ones are in heaven, even Hemphill.”

“What are you doing now, for a living?” Harry asked. There was no way to tell from the office: two visitors’ chairs, filing cabinets, telephone, typewriter, shelves lined with folders, a cabinet with office supplies, but no pictures, diplomas, or any other direct evidence of what Bayer did. And the door had just a number, as Harry had noted.

“I’m not proud of what I do.”

“I thought you were a draftsman. I don’t see the table. I always wanted one as a desk. It seems to me a more comfortable desk than the blocky things most people have to lean over.”

“You can have mine if you want. I still have it. I’m a draftsman by trade. In high school I was really good. It caught me at the right time, and I loved the little wooden box I had, with German drafting tools set into the recesses. Other kids had cheap ones, but my father gave me these from when he was in school: Solingen, expensive and indestructible. I felt I had to live up to them, so I did. I worked four times as much as anybody else and they misinterpreted that as natural talent. My own school sent me to technical school during the year and over the summer, actually paid for it. I got an associate degree in technical drawing before I got my high school diploma.

“Before the war I worked at Otis Elevator in Yonkers and then at Bulova out in Queens.”

“That’s right,” Harry said, remembering.

“Not fun to get there, but I did well. Then I came back from overseas. To make all the tanks, ships, and planes, they trained so many draftsmen you can’t count ’em anymore. Now that production has ceased, there’s such an oversupply that if you do find work you earn less than you would breaking pavement.

“After a while I got a job with an architectural firm. I can draw anything to specifications, and it didn’t take long to learn how to do building plans, but the architects weren’t happy with me.”

“Why not?”

“They were making astoundingly ugly buildings, and I told them so.”

“The diplomat.”

“Really, they pollute the world. I mean, how much does it cost to have a peaked roof, for Chrissakes? This whole country is messed up with flat roofs. We have a beautiful landscape, you know? What if New England towns with village greens had flat roofs? It’s gonna happen.”

“How long did you last there?”

“I’m still there.”

“What, they put you in a quarantine office?” Harry asked, looking around the small room.

“And they fired me, too, but I got a big raise, a really big raise.”

“
Comment?
” Harry asked in French. It was an expression that his men used frequently and with a great deal of amused irony when they were in France.

“They said, ‘You can’t work here anymore, but you can be our expediter.’”

“What’s an expediter? I mean, what do you expedite?”

“That’s what I myself said. What’s an expediter? I didn’t know what it was, much less that they had one, or that it would be me.”

“What is it?”

“Let’s say,” Bayer told him, tossing a peanut shell, “that you and your wife buy a co-op in . . . you tell me.”

“Brooklyn Heights,” Harry said instantly. “They’ve got peaked roofs, no aluminum trim, and tree-shaded streets.”

“In a brownstone?”

“The whole building,” Harry told him, “if things go right. If we have a baby. Our apartment’s too small, and it was mine. We want to go to a place that’s ours.”

“Okay, a brownstone. That’s not a co-op, but so what. The problem is that it’s divided up into four apartments, with four kitchens, four cruddy bathrooms. You’re going to have to redo the whole thing.”

“Maybe.”

“You definitely will. So you go to an architect. The architect tells you that you need a certificate of occupancy, a set of plans (or otherwise he has to send people to make them, which is expensive), and a building permit. You say, ‘Can you get them for me?’ And he says, ‘Sure, it will cost such and such,’ a small amount—fees. He doesn’t do anything for two weeks, because to know what’s going to happen he doesn’t have to, and yet he knows that you’re going to have to be made anxious in order to do what he has in store for you. Life is a series of traps, and unless you’ve already been in one, it’s hard to see it coming even if it’s right there.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Your wife is pregnant, your lease may be expiring, you’re already paying taxes on the building you bought, you need the proceeds from selling your apartment if you own it, or you’re paying rent if you don’t. You want to stop paying interest on the bridge loan. You want to get on with your life. Everyone knows this.

“And what the architect tells you is that he went down to the building department—he didn’t; he didn’t have to—and they can’t find the certificate of occupancy or the plans. They ‘lost’ them. Do you have a C of O? No. Does the previous owner? You call the previous owner. He says he’ll look. You bother him for a week. He doesn’t. You call the architect. By this time you’re ripe for the picking. ‘What can I do?’ you ask. The architect says he’ll try again.

“Another two weeks go by. You feel what it’s like to be in prison. He calls. He went down to the building department, and they suggested that you get an expediter. And you say. . . .” Bayer held out his left hand, inviting Harry to say . . .

“‘What’s an expediter?’”

“Ah, but you know now, right?”

“I think so.”

“You go to the expediter the architect recommends—me, if it’s my firm or one of several others I work for—and you present your problem. He says, ‘I’ll go down to the building department and see what I can do.’ He doesn’t. He doesn’t have to. In a week he calls you. Good news. The building department will allow him to search the records. They themselves can’t do it expeditiously because they have a shortage of funds and personnel (most of whom spend their afternoons at the track or in a steam bath). ‘How long will it take?’ you ask. ‘It varies,’ I say, knowing that it doesn’t, that it’s complete bullshit. ‘Sometimes you can find what you’re looking for in twenty minutes, and sometimes, if the papers have been misfiled, it can take a year. That can cost up to twenty thousand dollars.’

“I listen to your inward collapse. Despair. But then I lift you out. I tell you that because of the variability, one can pay a fixed fee. It may be more than you might have to pay, but it’s guaranteed to save you from catastrophe. It’s the same principle as insurance.

“And then, then the sad part. You leap at the chance to pay me two thousand dollars and rush down here with it in your pocket. I see hope and relief in your face as you hand me the check that could help pay for your child’s college, medical bills if someone in your family gets sick, food on the table. But you give it over gratefully, because now your life can move forward.

“I let some days pass. I amble on down to the building department, and in a back room I give a guy fourteen hundred dollars, cash. Then I go to the counter, and they give me the stuff you need, which they always had and which they can find in three seconds, because other than steal that’s the only thing they do.

“Then I go to the architects, and in another back room I give a guy three hundred dollars, cash, and I keep the rest for myself. No one ever complains that the building department asked for a bribe, because it never did. The expediters—of whom there are quite a few—will always say that they were paid for looking for documents, and that they did look for documents. We keep fake time sheets. The client is as happy as the crooks who take his money. When you deliver the necessary materials, he’s virtually glowing.

“I’m a thief. I steal from good, innocent people, from young couples who need the money and have no idea what’s happening to them, from old people with canes, from anyone.”

“Why don’t you go to the mayor?” Harry asked, “or the mayor’s office?”

Bayer looked at him with amusement. “The mayor?”

“Yes.”

“You think the mayor doesn’t know?”

“Really?”

“Really. And the police commissioner. And the heads of the departments. They know, they know. It all runs on graft. The government that’s supposed to serve and protect steals and lies. I’m going to get out as soon as I can, but of course that won’t stop it. It’ll continue, and long after we’re dead it’ll be the same. If I refused, it wouldn’t make any difference. The process begins and ends at the counter, when the city employees tell you that they’ve lost your records, and everyone above them knows exactly what’s going on, and so you pay. And you know who owns the whole scheme, who provides the protection, makes the payoffs to the higher-ups, launders the money, invented the process, and gets a very big piece? The Mafia. It’s part of the city government. While we were fighting a war, it was here, digging in deeper.

“Where’s the law? I hate people who steal. I hate myself. If I could, Captain, I would take my carbine and kill those guys, just as sure as I would kill an armed man breaking into my house to rob me.”

“They are armed,” Harry said.

Bayer continued Harry’s sentence. “Like an army, with all the powers of government. But killing someone like that wouldn’t make any difference, and besides, they haven’t killed anyone.”

“What if it would?” Harry asked. “What if they had?”

“
Comment?
” Bayer asked.

“Listen,” Harry said. “Let me tell you what I’ve been doing.”

W
HEN JOHNSON LEFT
the Apostle Islands, a curtain of snow had descended upon the lake, obscuring alternating bands of white ice and blue open water that disappeared northward toward Canada. Like almost all things in the Apostles, it was cold, sharp, and well defined. No gray, each crystalline flake falling with a hiss on pine needles that did not bow to the winds of winter. The Apostles were the standard to which Johnson returned. He referred to them, the sentinels of Lake Superior, when he faltered, and the memory of them gave him strength.

After the war, he had returned to teach English—a language they did not yet speak or understand in its subtleties—to young people whose chief regret was that they had missed what he had been condemned to suffer through. Apart from teaching them that sometimes you can end a sentence with a preposition, he taught them that one way to be grateful for being alive was to say it, hear it, and sing it in the song of their language. His work did not produce bales of cotton or stacks of lumber, it filled hearts, opened long views, and allowed the sons and daughters of miners and mill workers to rise in air so metaphysical it might lead them ready and armed to meet the ghosts of sorrow and death.

To get from Bayfield to Milwaukee was not the easiest thing in the world, but, after that, riding the train from Milwaukee to Chicago was what some commuters did every day. Harry had proposed that he and Johnson meet in Chicago, which was fair in that Harry would come nine hundred miles and Johnson less than half that, although Harry would ride the sleek Twentieth Century Limited, and Johnson would have to board a Greyhound at Bayfield and will himself into the kind of Buddhist trance necessary to ride without distress on a bus.

That Harry had prepared a meeting at Johnson’s convenience meant that he wanted something. That it was in Chicago meant that he could have done without what he wanted, for otherwise he would have contrived to get himself to Bayfield, or at least to Superior. It was intriguing especially because Harry had said his father-in-law had a suite at the Drake, where he and Johnson could stay and eat on the company dime. The Drake meant big money. At the very least, it would be luxurious, unlike most reunions, which took place in cheap beer joints or restaurants by the waterside where gulls stole French fries from paper containers that sat on picnic tables like German industrial towns waiting to be carpet-bombed.

This was something else. At Milwaukee the steam locomotive, unsuspecting that in time it would be replaced by a boxy, foul, predictable diesel, was bristling with stilled arms, pistons, rods, and pipes, a black triceratops that could push its way past every Wisconsin cow insolent enough to block the tracks and impede the path to Chicago.

The rhythm of such an engine, heard in every city and town and across open fields, invited Johnson to think high. It was April of 1947, and the tall buildings of Chicago were lit with innumerable lights above the darkening blue of the lake. For Johnson the sounds of the steam locomotive opened past and future. They were assurance, encouragement, a message of faith. This was America’s time. Its engines exhaled and pushed forward, never missing a beat.

He descended at Union Station and walked toward the northern end of Michigan Avenue, thinking about the red shingles he was going to put on the roof of his house in the Apostles. They were guaranteed, it was said, to last and not to crack in the frost, and they were the color of the tiles he had seen in Sicily.

Every day, the great and famous train backed into its berth in Grand Central and waited to be filled with New Yorkers who would throw themselves at Chicago as if on a mission to conquer its superior
lebensraum.
Then it raced north, dusting past commuter trains all the way up the Hudson. Approached from the rear as it sat ready on the track, it was fluted and modern, the wasp-like rounding of its last car squared off in a cream-colored, lighted sign that read
20th Century Limited.