“And how do I do that?”
“It’s your view, I understand, that as eight figures on a certain list of ten have died in suspicious circumstances, one of the two remaining figures is the assassin?”
“How do you know what my view is?” Berger turns himself slightly to the left, inclining his neck.
“I’ve asked you not to move,” says the voice. “Your pursuit of this assassin has occasioned, what? five additional murders, the killing of accomplices, the covering over of tracks.”
“Who am I talking to?”
“A whisper in the dark, a disembodied voice. The real assassin is above suspicion, long since discarded from your concern.”
“Are you telling me that the murderer is not a member of the so-called Folkestone Conspiracy?”
“You persist in misunderstanding me,” says the voice. “I’ve not said that everyone on that list is above suspicion. In your pursuit of the simple, Mr. Berger, sometimes you overlook the brillantly complex. I have only a few more minutes to spare. Do you understand what it is you don’t know?”
Berger is silent, takes a deep breath. “The assassin is on the list of ten, but is not one of two presumably still alive. You’re indicating that the murderer is one of the murdered. One of the apparently murdered. Is that right?”
“That’s at least one of the possibilities,” says the sandpaper voice. “The pursuit of this assassin may take you places you had been better advised to avoid. Mr. Berger, please count off ten seconds to yourself before going through the main doors. I suggest this measure for our mutual security.”
Berger counts slowly to five, then stops abruptly. “Why are you telling me this?” he asks. “How do I know I can trust you?”
Henry Berger turns abruptly in the direction of his informant, his gun in hand. For as far as the eye can see, there is nothing.
Terman unlocked the door to his house, handed in Tom’s suitcase, was about to close the door when he noticed someone sitting on the sofa, head tilted forward.
“Is that you, Max?”
The figure seemed to move his head forward in approximation of a nod.
“What are you doing?” Terman asked.
“I’m thinking,” the figure said in a midwestern accent. “Does that meet with your approval?”
“Are you a friend of Max Kirstner’s?”
The weary nod was repeated, a gesture so small as to deny its moment as it passed.
This odd presence disconcerted him. “Is Max in the house somewhere?”
The figure seemed to shrug, though it may only have been the effect of the damp chill in the room. “Are you through asking questions?” he asked. “I don’t like being interrupted when I’m worrying an idea. So if you don’t mind.”
When he got back to the taxi in which Tom was waiting, he instructed the driver to take them to the Tate Gallery. He made no mention of the intruder in his living room.
“To tell you the truth,” Tom said, “I’d rather do something else.”
“We’ll go wherever you like,” Terman said.
“The thing is, I don’t know where I want to go, Dad. Could you suggest some places?”
It felt to him as if his skin were being cut away in narrow strips. He recited a litany of names. “The Tower of London, The National Gallery, The British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey.”
“I have difficulty looking at things,” Tom said, his tone apologetic. “No powers of concentration.”
They arrived in front of the Tate without having decided on a destination.
Terman paid the driver, the bill coming to a pound forty more than recorded on the meter, one of the mysteries of London travel he had never resolved. Nothing ever cost what it appeared to cost.
Instead of going into the museum, they crossed the street and walked along the bank of the Thames toward Westminster, the direction as arbitrary as the walk itself. After a point they sat on a bench facing the river, though for all the attention they paid it, they might have had their backs to the water. Terman was thinking how the disappointments they felt in each other’s company seemed to multiply, seemed to carry the weight of earlier disappointments, seemed to carry the weight of disappointments between fathers and sons impressed in the history of the race. Tom took off his workboots and socks and massaged his feet. “I’m cold,” he said.
Terman took off his jacket — he himself was sweating from the heaviness of the weather — and handed it to Tom. The boy put it on over his field jacket, struggling to get his arms through the sleeves. It didn’t work and then it did. No matter what he did, he couldn’t get the buttons to close.
“Just wear it over your shoulders,” Terman said.
Tom shook his head — that it didn’t fit was another disappointment — and he returned the corduroy jacket to his father who was disappointed to have it back. “When I’m cold,” he said, “it doesn’t matter how much I wear. Sometimes I walk around the house with four or five layers of clothing on and I can’t get warm.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“It’s not so bad,” Tom said. He hugged himself, stood up, sat down, blew into his hands which he then rubbed together. “There are worse things,” he said, “aren’t there? I mean, people are starving in Cambodia.”
His father’s shadow seemed everywhere in evidence, seemed to grow more oppressive even as its source diminished. Tom felt deprived of language in the presence of that shadow, aware of the self-consciousness of his least remark. The more he faulted himself, the more he blamed the other for being the occasion of his failure.
“Let’s walk some more,” Terman said.
They walked along the bank to Westminster Bridge then crossed over to the other side of the Thames. Tom was cold, still cold.
They stopped for something to eat in a cafeteria in the basement of Royal Festival Hall, though in fact neither ate. Tom wanted nothing. Terman, though hungry — the same unappeasable hunger he had felt all week — abstained. He had a cup of black coffee, the fluid thick as ashes.
Terman imagined their time together as a segment of a film. You could perceive them from overhead, from one side (or the other) from front or back, in close-up or medium shot, or through metaphoric correlative. The father was smoking a cigar; the son sucked idly on a drinking straw, the accompanying can of Coca Cola of no interest to him. The pained looks on their faces might be mirror images of one another, though otherwise the resemblance was slight, almost circumstantial. They had learned to look like one another, had grown that way.
Purposelessness, thought Terman. What wasn’t? He damned the waste of time and even so the aging process increased its pace, denied escape, denied intention.
They were either at each other’s throats or stiff and formal, a pair of wire coat hangers in the same closet. “I live by my wits,” Tom wanted to say, “so have more trouble surviving than most.” His tongue was tied. He couldn’t take anything from his father, not even a can of Coca Cola, without feeling like a sellout, disloyal to his mother, a thief of self.
Terman was aware as they sat dawdling over cold coffee and warm Coca Cola that time was passing at some accelerated rate, that there were jobs of work he had set himself to do not being done. Years back, before he had given himself to screenwriting, he had outlined a series of ambitious novels that would take him the rest of his life, or longer, to complete. He had started the first, had put it aside to work on the second, and had discarded both at some point to earn his keep. What he had done (more than a thousand pages in manuscript), what he had set himself to do, barely interested him any longer. Only the sense of urgency remained.
“What should we do now?” he asked his son.