That wasn’t worth an answer and it didn’t get one.
“Max — pay him. You promised me — you promised me.”
“No,” Max said. “He has not a shred of evidence. Of course—” he looked at me “—the blackmailer is in a position of power. Accusation is a powerful weapon, a bludgeon. I assure you I understand that. But I repeat — you have no evidence.”
“Evidence can be gathered,” I told him. “Let’s say I start with the passenger lists of airlines flying into Schiphol on Tuesday.”
“I doubt if they will be made available to you.”
“The police will have no trouble getting hold of them.”
“Max, I beg you. He is crazy. He will make endless trouble.” Anna was staring at the floor, all color gone from her face.
Max looked at her for a long moment, a peculiar slanting look under half-lowered lids. “All right, Peter,” he said in a toneless voice. “I agree to your terms. Let’s have it.”
“The money, if you don’t mind.”
He reached into a pocket, and this time the roll of bills was considerably thicker. He threw them onto the little table with a gesture of contempt, then put out a hand and fanned the money across the surface. He didn’t remove his hand. “Don’t touch it.” There was no emotion in his voice, but a nerve jumped spasmodically under his eye. “I’ll have the painting first. You are to understand that this is your commission at ten percent of approximate value. That is all it is. It is neither an admission nor a coverup. It is an adjustment of price and an abatement of a nuisance.”
“Fine.”
“Let’s have it then.” He placed himself between me and the table, unsteady on his feet but managing without the crutches, which Anna was holding with a white-knuckled grasp.
I turned away from them and lifted the poor man’s Kline down from the wall.
“Oh,” said Anna.
“That’s it?”
“It’s there. Under your landscape, where you buried it.”
“If you have damaged it!” His eyes were bulging. “It is priceless!”
“If your landscape didn’t do it any harm, then my small effort didn’t hurt it either,” I told him. He opened his mouth and shut it again. “Tell me,” I went on, “how did you protect the painting when Gerrit painted over it? That is — was — his landscape?” I smiled at them. “Gone now, I’m afraid.”
Anna’s voice was vibrant with relief. “It’s overpainted on a styrene wrap. Three-millimeter. It’s a trick to get it to take the paint, of course. Gerrit knew what to do.” At the mention of his name, she burst into tears.
I looked at Max. “What’s under it?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Max. He took his crutches and they left without another word. Anna carried the painting.
I picked up the money from the table and went to the door to close it. Max and Anna were standing just inside the old fashioned vestibule. I saw Max shift his crutches, then reach out and brush the tears from Anna’s cheeks with his strong, ruddy fingers. Then he leaned down and murmured something very low. Anna smiled. The heavy glass door muffled her words, but I heard the familiar rise and fall of her voice. “I’m all right,” I think I heard her say. “Really, I’m all right.”
They left.
I told myself I wasn’t stealing, only demanding a fair return on a business deal. Nor was I concealing a crime. I had no shred of evidence in my possession, only a moral certainty; some words not clearly overheard and a theory that could indeed have fit the case and was quite possibly wrong. And Max, of course, had given me the money. I closed the door and turned back, a sour old man of thirty-two, wondering what the use of money was anyway.
I finished up my business in New York and flew back to Geneva.
I keep thinking of Anna, standing in the vestibule, crying. What if I’m wrong? Is it possible for a woman with such a broad, calm brow, such eyes, such lips, to murder a decent man — or any man — in cold blood, even for a substantial sum of money? I tell myself it isn’t. And yet, there is Anna’s trick of repeating her words, and the recollection of a voice, a murmur, behind a heavy door — someone saying to Gerrit Till, in the last hour of his life, es niet stom — don’t be silly — and saying it again.
I’ll be back in New York in October. I’ll ask her to have dinner with me, just the two of us. We’ll talk all evening, quite possibly all night, and Anna will tell me all I want to know.
But how much do I really want to know?
Maybe we’ll just talk about the weather.
But I should know the truth, shouldn’t I? The truth is an absolute good.
Es niet stom. I’d rather have Anna.
A Burning Issue
by Susan Dunlap
I am not thorough.
I don’t explore every minute detail, every aspect and angle of a subject. Only fanatics do that. But there is a basic amount of preparation required of any adult who seeks to live in relative comfort without being pummeled by recurrent blows of humiliation. And that preparation is what I fail to do.
It is not that I am unaware of this fault. Au contraire. Rarely does a day pass without its being thrust to my attention. There are the small annoyances: grocery lists I tell myself I needn’t write down; recipes I skim only to discover, as my guest sits angrily getting looped in the living room, that the last words are “Bake in 350° oven for ninety minutes.”
There was the time when, as a surprise for Andrew, I painted the house. Anyone, I told myself, can paint a house. I did, after all, have two weeks, and it’s not a mansion. This time I did not neglect the instructions on the paint can. I read them. What I did not do was consider if any preparation was necessary.
“Everybody knows you need to scrape off the old paint first,” Andrew told me later. Everybody? I had the second coat halfway on before I realized the house looked like a mint-green moonscape. But all was not lost. The day I finished, it poured. As Andrew observed, “You don’t use water-based paint outside.”
I could go on — but you get the picture. I’ve often puzzled as to what causes this failing of mine. Is it laziness? Not entirely. A short attention span? Perhaps. “You don’t prepare thoroughly,” Andrew has told me again and again. “Why can’t you force yourself?”
I don’t know. I start to read directions, plodding through word by word, letting each phrase sink into my mind, like a galaxy being swallowed by a black hole. But after two or three paragraphs I’m mouthing hollow words and thinking of Nepal, or field goals, or whatever. And I’m assuring myself that I already know enough so that this brief review will stimulate my memory and bring all the details within easy calling range.
In fairness to Andrew, he has accepted my failing. And well he should, since my decision to marry him was one of its more devastating examples.
I met him while planning a series of man-in-the-street interviews in Duluth. Easy, I thought. People love to hold forth on their opinions. (Not standing on a Duluth street corner in February, they don’t.) Among the shivering, pasty males of Minnesota’s northernmost major city, Andrew Greer beamed like a beacon of health. Lightly tanned, lightly muscled, with bright blue eyes that promised unending depths, he could discuss the Packers and Virginia Woolf; he could find a Japanese restaurant open at midnight; he could maneuver his Porsche through the toboggan run of Duluth streets at sixty miles an hour and then talk his way out of the ticket he deserved. And, most important, my failing, which had enraged so many others, amused him.