“Did you ever find out what those boys wanted from you, Tom?” Lila asked.
Tom mumbled something unintelligible, then said, “They were up to no good.”
“I didn’t get that,” she said. “Perhaps you didn’t want me to get it. I’m going back to America tomorrow and I thought I’d tell your mother that I saw you and that you were in one piece. You are in one piece, I hope.”
“The only injuries are internal,” he said, playing to her as if she were an audience in a theater. “What you see is what you get.”
“Where do you want to be dropped?” Terman asked Lila, though Tom thought the question was meant for him and said it didn’t matter.
“You can drop me at a bus stop,” Lila said. “What’s your destination?” They had been driving in circles.
“I’ll take you wherever you want to go,” he said. “I don’t want you reporting to Magda that I mistreated you.” He meant it as joke, or thought he did, though he could see from the flicker of perception on Lila’s face that she believed he was dependent on Magda’s opinion of him. Whatever Lila might say in his favor, Magda would be unimpressed. “He went out of his way for you,” she would say to Lila, “because he wanted Tom to think better of him.”
After a while, he found himself alone with his son.
Even though we were packing to leave, I was embarrassed for the room, wanted it to show itself to better advantage. Some pink roses Astrid had given me had withered away in their plastic vase, though the dead flowers were better than none at all, I thought, gave off the memory of flowers. As mediocre as the room was, I wanted him to admire it, to perceive in it endearing qualities that I had somehow missed. It was a room I had lived in and now would no longer live in.
“I’d like you to return the things you’ve taken,” he said, glancing away from the ill-gotten goods I had laid out on the bed.
“I can’t bring them back without asking for trouble,” I said. “Most of it’s not worth anything anyway.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Well,” I said. “I mean, what is the point as you see it?”
“You won’t do it again?”
It was easier to say I wouldn’t than to say I wasn’t sure so I told him what he wanted to hear. Anyway, I never thought of it as going on forever; each theft seemed final in itself.
We heard the door to Mrs. Chepstow’s apartment close softly, the click like a sound made with one’s tongue.
“Give it up,” he said, staring out of the room’s only window.
“Give up what?”
“You don’t want to have to come back here again,” he said. “It’s cleaner to move everything out, make a final break.”
Cleanliness had never excited me much, nor had final breaks. I mentioned that I owed the landlady some money and he said he would take care of it, whch wasn’t what I had in mind.
“She doesn’t really care about the money,” I said. “She likes to have me in the house.”
He sat down in my one chair (I still thought of it as my chair) and stared ahead of him in disapproval. “What if I lent you the money and you paid her,” he said. “Would that make it all right?”
“I don’t like to rush into anything,” I said.
He looked sick, so I said if he wanted to pay her, if that would gratify him, to go ahead.
I picked up the valise to carry down the stairs and my father said he would take it and pulled it from me, then I tried to take it back. “I can handle it,” I said.
We were both holding on to it, then both let go, the overstuffed valise falling to the floor with a thud. He apologized for letting it drop and I said well it was my fault too, then I remembered something and reached under the bed for a copy of a book I had stashed there.
“Is there more?” he asked, dragging the valise to the door.
“I thought you might be interested in having this,” I said, my voice full of phony self-amusement. I handed him the novel which was not in the best condition, having been scrunched in my jacket among other displaced possessions.
“I’ve been looking for copies of this,” he said, clearly upset at its condition. “I’m very pleased to have it, Tom.” He came over as if to put an arm on my shoulder then stopped himself, or else had never intended any more than an undefined step toward me. “Where did you come on it?” he asked.
“It came on me,” I said or something equally ambiguous. I imagined he thought I had taken it from his study and was now giving it back under the pretense of a gift. There were a few other things under the bed I had somehow forgotten and I thought it might be a mistake to leave them behind for Mrs. Chepstow to take to heart. I filled my jacket pockets with odds and ends.
He was still unbending the book, worrying it back to its origingal condition. “This novel was rejected twenty-seven or twenty-eight times in America over a four year period before it found a publisher,” he said. “If for that reason alone, it’s been my favorite. I reworked it a number of times, trying to make its obvious flaws less apparent. I doubt that I made it any better but when it appeared in print what had been wrong with it miraculously vanished.”
“Well, I’m glad I got the right book,” I said, “the appropriate symbol.”
I carried the valise down the stairs, my father occupied with his book. He stopped at the landlady’s apartment and knocked forcefully at the door, demonstrating how to make his presence felt.
It was odd that she didn’t answer right away; she tended to live close to the sound of things, eager for some invasion of her lonely privacy.
“She must be taking a nap,” I said.
I tried the door and discovered it unlocked, and we looked at each other with what I thought to be some kind of understanding.
“I’ll leave a check for her on the table in the hall,” he said.
Terman called, “Hello,” opening the door just enough to permit his voice to carry, thought he heard something in reply, a hiss, a muffled groan. He called again, heard what sounded like the echo of his own voice.
“Let’s go,” Tom said. He picked up his suitcase and they walked down the remaining flight of steps to the front door. Terman heard something from upstairs that turned him around, an ashtray falling or the slamming of a window, the whispering of conspirators, the creak of steps. He wrote a check for sixty pounds and left it on the long table in the foyer, considered his obligation discharged.
The car was unusually sluggish, moved as if it were riding through sand, which seemed perfectly reasonable to the driver, an extension of some feeling about himself. It was Tom who suggested that something might be wrong. He got out and discovered that a back tire was flat. The slash marks just above the tread indicated sabotage.
Tom got out of the car and offered his regrets. Father and son stood bent over the damaged tire in shared grievance.
Why only one tire? Terman was wondering. It seemed, if nothing else, a failure of the imagination.
Henry Berger enters the almost pttch-black interior of an abandoned church, whistling to himself. As soon as he adjusts his sights to the dark, he determines a figure standing next to the pulpit.
“Don’t come any closer,” a voice says, a burnt out whisper. “I am of no use to you once you know who I am. Please turn your head.”
(The figure in the shadows is tall and angular, elongated even further by the shadows.)
“I understand you have some information for me.” Henry Berger says.
“I have no information for you,” says the other. “I can tell you nothing. If you’re going to discover you’ve been moving in the wrong direction, you’ll have to do it on your own power.”