“You’ll be coming from Town Hall, and I want to get to a meeting. Paris Green? Say a quarter after ten?”
“Perfect.”
“I’ve had a busy day,” I told Lisa. “George Sadecki was stabbed to death by another prisoner, but I suppose you knew that.”
“It was on CNN this morning.”
That figured. I told her a little of what I’d found and hadn’t found in various government records. She said she’d heard from Drew, but as far as I could tell his call had been designed just to keep the client happy.
Maybe you could say the same for my call.
“I’m going to be busy tonight,” I said. “I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”
While I was on the phone, one of the library books caught my eye. It was an anthology of twentieth-century British and American poetry, and I’d recognized the volume because Jan Keane owned a copy. I thought I might be able to find the Robinson Jeffers poem about the wounded hawk, but it wasn’t in there. There were half a dozen others by Jeffers included. I read one called “Shine, Perishing Republic” that suggested he had a low opinion of human beings, Americans in particular.
I read the opening of “The Waste Land,” with its observations about April’s cruelty. October, I thought, could be fairly savage in its own right. I read a few other things, and then I read a poem of the First World War, “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” by Alan Seeger. I had read it before, but that was no reason not to read it again.
It reminded me of the poem at the base of the statue in DeWitt Clinton Park. I didn’t know the author, but there was a title index and I found it that way. The author was John McCrae, and the lines on the monument were from the third and final stanza. Here’s the complete poem:
I was all set to copy it down when I thought to look inside the front cover. For five dollars I could own it. I paid for it and my coffee and went home.
It was close to ten-thirty when I got to Paris Green. Elaine was at the bar drinking a Perrier. I apologized for being late and she said she’d made good use of the time, that she’d spent it flirting with Gary. Gary, Paris Green’s bartender, had announced at the beginning of the summer that he was through hiding from the world; he had accordingly shaved the great oriole’s nest of a beard he’d worn as long as I’d known him.
Now he was growing it back. “Time to hide,” he explained. “Lot to be said for hiding.”
We went to our table and ordered, the large garden salad for her, fish for me. She assured me I would have hated every minute of the lecture. “I hated it,” she said, “and I was interested in the subject.”
I had the book with me, and back at her place I found the poem again and read it to her.
“That’s why I was late,” I said.
“You were busy grabbing the torch?”
“I walked a few blocks out of my way,” I said. “To Clinton Park, where the last three lines are carved at the base of a war memorial. Except they got it wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“They misquoted it.” I got out my notebook. “Here’s how they’ve got it on the monument. ‘If ye break faith / With those who died / We shall not sleep / Though poppies grow / On Flanders fields.’ ”
“Isn’t that what you just read me?”
“Not quite. Somebody changed ‘us’ to ‘those’ and ‘die’ to ‘died.’ And ‘in’ to ‘on.’ They used eighteen words from the poem and got three of them wrong. And they left off the author’s name.”
“Maybe he insisted on it, like a disenchanted screenwriter taking his name off a movie.”
“I don’t think he was in a position to insist on anything. I think he finished the war beneath the poppies.”
“But his words live on. That’s what I keep forgetting to ask you. Something you said a few days ago about Lisa Holtzmann.”
“What about her?”
“Something about a cleaner, greener maiden, but that can’t be right.”
“ ‘I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land.’ ”
“That’s it, and it’s been driving me crazy. I know the line, but where do I know it from?”
“It’s Kipling,” I said. “ ‘The Road to Mandalay.’ ”
“Oh, of course. And that explains why I know it. You sing it in the shower.”
“What do you say we keep that to ourselves?”
“I had no idea who wrote it. I thought it must be the title song from a Bob HopeBing Crosby movie. Wasn’t there a movie called that, or am I nuts?”
“Or (C) Both of the above.”
“Nice. Kipling, huh? What do you think, are you in the mood for a little Kipling?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s kipple.”
Afterward she said, “Wow. I’d have to say we haven’t lost our touch. You know something, you old bear? I love you.”
“I love you.”
“You didn’t talk with T J, did you? I hope Julia’s not teaching him how to dress for success.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“How did you know the inscription was off?”
“It just wasn’t the way I remembered it.”
“That’s some memory.”
“Not really. I just read it a couple of days ago. If I had a great memory I’d have known then and there that they’d got it wrong. After all, I read it in high school.”
Chapter 19
The next day was Friday, and I spent it downtown having another crack at government records before they locked them all away for the weekend. I didn’t learn much.
I quit in time to beat the rush hour and rode uptown on the subway. There was a message to call Eleanor Yount. It was almost five o’clock but I managed to catch her at her desk.
She was delighted to report that there had been no embezzlement. “My accountant was quite startled when I suggested the possibility,” she said, “and very much relieved when he was able to rule it out. I hate to think that Glenn might have been a thief, but it does make the thought less unsettling to know he didn’t steal anything from me.”
I hadn’t really figured him as an embezzler. Nor had I pictured an enraged Eleanor Yount keeping a rendezvous in Hell’s Kitchen and pumping four bullets into her in-house counsel.
She asked me if I’d learned anything.
Not much, I said. I knew a few things I hadn’t known before, but I couldn’t make them add up to anything.
“I wonder when it started,” she said.
I asked her what she meant.
“I always wonder,” she said. “Don’t you? Whether someone’s a born criminal, or is it the scar of some childhood experience, or is there some pivotal incident later on. Glenn seemed such a supremely ordinary young man. But he seems to have told so many lies, and lived a life so different from what it appeared. I suppose it will turn out that he was beaten by his father or molested by his uncle. And then one day a cartoon light bulb formed over his head and he said, ‘Aha! I’ll commit embezzlement!’ Or traffic in drugs, or blackmail someone. It would be convenient if one knew what exactly it was that he did.”