In Sunlight and in Shadow (94 page)

Bayer silenced the last resistance in the chase car. Johnson had already dismantled the machine gun and was moving toward the center. It was suddenly quiet. Clutching the part of his abdomen that he thought the sharp end of a limb had penetrated, Harry peered into the Cadillac in a way that frightened Verderamé beyond measure. It seemed to those inside to make no sense that Harry pressed against the glass of the rear right-side window and raised his head almost to the roof of the car. They had no idea what he was doing, but he was checking to see that Verderamé had no passengers—a child who had been at a friend’s house, a servant coming back after a day off, Verderamé’s wife. If this were so, the woman or child would be on the floor, half hidden, and he wanted to make sure that no one was there. It was hard to see inside, and several pistols were aimed at him. But he knew that, if fired, the bullets would ricochet and probably kill them all. This made them helpless and it terrified them, as did Harry, because they didn’t understand what he was doing as he looked in, and they never would.

Satisfied that only three men were inside, Harry gave Verderamé one last look, and fell back. Verderamé knew he was going to die, and, to his credit, he smiled.

As Harry retreated he called out to Sussingham, who had been waiting in a standing position to get a shot above the brush. “Clear,” Harry shouted. “Fire.”

Sussingham pulled the trigger and the rocket blazed from the tube. It went easily through the armored door and exploded in the interior, blowing the sides and roof off the Cadillac in a flash of orange, and killing everyone within.

From the first tree felled, to the rocketing of Verderamé’s car, less than four minutes had passed, although to Harry and the others they were indistinguishable from either four hours or four seconds.

They had known from the beginning that the local police, state police, and FBI would quickly determine what weapons they had used. From bullet fragments or whole bullets lodged in people, cars, soil, and trees, they would know their calibers and the types of guns that had fired them. Two hours of collection and a day of putting the pieces together would identify the rocket that had killed Verderamé. And at first glance, from the lines of bullet holes stitched across the targets, it would be possible to see the signatures of the carbines and the machine gun.

Nor did they suffer the illusion that, having to flee immediately, in the dark, they would be able to collect shell casings, some of which would have been ejected out to ten feet or more, at all angles, landing in pine needles, rolling under fallen branches, or sinking in mud. Each cartridge had been wiped clean. Although the four pathfinders had crawled across soft ground when they could, as a diversionary measure they had worn new dress shoes in a larger size than what fit them, and which they would discard in the river; and they had been fairly heavily weighted down, making footprints attributable to heavier people. Each man had a checklist of things to take with him upon leaving. The weapons themselves and detonators, wire, surplus ammunition, and anything that might cast suspicion on them if their truck were stopped on the way back to Newark would be dropped in the ship channel of the Hudson. There, a scouring current would eventually sweep everything south into the many miles of the Tappan Zee, fingerprintless and, according to Vanderlyn, untraceable.

The cigarette that had been thrown onto the road by the stocky guard manning the rampart was a perfect dead end. Adding to this, Harry would drop a sandwich wrapper from a delicatessen in Bensonhurst known to be frequented by Verderamé’s rivals of both low and high status. One wrapper. That was all. Several hundred shell casings. The traces of new weaponry. Footprints here and there, of very large men who wore fancy shoes in the woods. The tire tracks, a gift of coincidence, of a car that had come from the north, stopped at the overlook, backed onto the road, and gone south at high speed. And then, of course, the wreckage of Verderamé’s cars, and the bodies, every single one of them a known gangster, every single one armed. Who would think of an English teacher from Wisconsin, a steelworker from Indiana, an expediter in Union Square, and a former student of the humanities married to an heiress?

Often in France, Holland, and Germany—not in Sicily, where the country was more open, and not when the forests were simplified by a cover of snow—Harry had had to move very fast through branches and brush, or throw himself down without thought of where he would land. Descending by parachute into a forest could be fatal if a broken branch acted as a spear or the edge of a sword, and as they sliced through the trees paratroopers held themselves in odd-looking ways to protect their arteries. In the speed and desperation of battle, sharp cuts and penetrations often went unnoticed for a long time. More than once, Harry had removed his shirt or pants and been surprised by a mass of dried blood that had sealed shut a wound he did not know he had.

His first thought was that the terrible pain in his abdomen was the result of a freakishly sharp, strong, and long broken branch that as he had run toward the road had penetrated as deep into his body as an arrow. He felt for its shaft in case it had broken off in him. Even when he felt no shaft he wanted to think it wasn’t a bullet wound. In France, he had been unaware of the wound in his back because his senses had been monopolized by the wound to his shoulder. Here, there was only one area of distress, but it had to have been caused by just a branch. The shots flying from the chase car had been directed toward Bayer far to the left. With some things of a mortal nature, what one knows and what one wants can exist with equal strength at the same time. Harry knew he was shot, but he also knew it was a cut from a broken branch. It wasn’t a matter of one prevailing over the other in his mind; both were and would be true until in the passage of time fact would assert itself as eventually it always does.

With the checklist on the ground and a penlight in his right hand, he held his left hand over the wound. Detonators. Bayer and Johnson were walking-in the wires. Carbine. Five magazines of ammunition. Penlight. List. Wrapper. Etc. Everything was in order, and he needed two hands to get things into the rucksack for carrying them out. But when he moved his left hand he felt a sharp, almost electrical lash circling his waist. It was bad enough that he cried out. Then he shone the light on his hand and saw that it was red, covered in new blood. The wound, when illuminated, was a round hole. “Oh, Christ,” he said, sitting down to wait for the others. It wasn’t a long wait, but during it he noticed that his right arm had gone almost completely numb. He could move it, and grasp with his hand, but he couldn’t feel it anymore, and, despite the numbness, both hands felt cold.

“Are you all right?” he asked Bayer. “Are you all right? I need a pressure bandage.”

“We’re all okay,” Johnson told him. Johnson was the medic. They were in the boat, halfway across Haverstraw Bay. “We stopped the bleeding. Can you feel your legs?”

“No.” Harry wondered how he had forgotten packing up, descending the cliff, rowing halfway across the river. He was very cold, and there was a wind. Water splashed over the sides of the rubber boat, from the paddles and the waves, and being wet made him even colder. He felt that he had a fever, but just in his head. And he had no blanket. Oh, how he wished for a blanket.

“Look back there,” Johnson said.

On the east bank, high on the bluff, was a chain of lights atop police cars and ambulances. Little white flashes like stillborn lightning, or perhaps fireflies, pulsated on the ground. These were flashbulbs going off as photographers did their work. “We’re almost across,” Johnson told him. “I have to paddle now,” and he went back to paddling.

Harry was in and out. He woke to feel the boat swept quickly as they reached the middle of the shipping channel. Then the boat lightened as armaments, shoes, and rucksacks were tossed into the current. By now the line of lights, even though it had grown longer, had been made by distance to look shorter and more intense. And although Harry, whose head rested on the air-filled gunwale, did not see, and the others, paddling furiously in a race for his life, could not have noticed, for a short moment the tops of Manhattan towers, shining with encrusted lights, were visible over the lower ground west of the Palisades. Foreshortened, they sparked and shone like a crown of fire, and then went dark.

They had driven as fast as they could, with Harry and Johnson in the compartment amidst the hay bales. Johnson had useless tourniquets, pressure bandages, and a suturing kit. The external bleeding had stopped, and his forceps were far too shallow to retrieve the bullet, if indeed it could have been found, so he used morphine liberally and with sadness.

During the several hours in the truck, after he had been carried into the warehouse, and waiting for the surgeon, who had stepped out to get something to eat in an all-night diner near the railyards, Harry could hardly say a thing, but he was eloquent and longing within.

Readily and quick, a hundred thoughts, the kinds of things that fill the lives of philosophers, came to him as if from a gun set on rapid fire. As he lay dying, he realized too late that although he might never know the purpose of things he did not have to know if only he could somehow draw as if from life and out of love the city, his times, and Catherine—all destined to vanish into silence. How he regretted that he had not devoted himself to portraying them, and, because he loved them so much, to make an echo, fix them in the light, halt them for a moment in their rush to God knows where.

Sussingham and the surgeon ran across the railyards near the warehouse, jumping rusted tracks covered with weeds and trash. The surgeon was apologetic. And as they were running, beyond their hearing, and before they arrived, Harry was saying, “Catherine, Catherine,” and trying to bring her to him in his senses rather than to think useless thoughts, for what good were they when life was so short and time so limited? If you are dying, what good is thought or speculation compared to love? Love simple and unadorned, that forgives and embraces all regrets and imperfections of judgment, and holds you in its arms as you fall away.

C
ATHERINE AWAKENED, AFRAID
to look at the time. After so much rain, warmth, and unsettled weather, the city had finally surrendered to fall. The air was clear, and the weakening sun, bright nonetheless, intensified all colors, especially blues. The winds that barreled down Kips Bay, colliding with Corlears Hook and the shoulder of Brooklyn massed awkwardly against the East River, pushed barges and tugs gliding on the current out toward the open sea. Everything glittered or was lost in deep shadow, and things were moving on.

She had slept in a slightly worn satin-and-lace camisole, and when she sat up the straps descending from her shoulders stretched taut and her hair fell about her neck more fetchingly than if it had been carefully arranged. She could not wait to arrive at the Esplanade at eleven, and yet she also wanted time to stop so that she could look forward to it always and never have to be disappointed. But unlike clocks that tell just time, the clock of the city is unimaginably complex, its gears set at all angles, with so many millions of them running off and intersecting and curving back ’round again in a mechanism that transcends all mechanisms. And although now and then the clock stops and time stands still, these are the rarest of moments, and time always begins again, and pulls you out of bed.

Seeking refuge in the shower, she turned her face to the strong stream and the bright light and held in a position that she knew was prayer, that every Renaissance painter knew was prayer, and that the body, tensed with looking up to receive, knew was prayer. There she stood, naked, gorgeous, and straight, the water cascading over her until she was rose-colored, but, eventually, the capacity of the hot-water boilers notwithstanding, she had to wind down the nickel taps and choke the stream that had seemed to hold her safe as long as she was in it.

Wrapped in a towel, she opened her bathroom door and watched the steam rush out, as white and visible as alpine cloud, to disappear into the colder air of the room as if it had never existed. Steadily and slowly, she accomplished the ritual of dressing. Each movement had been taught to her by her mother, and she honored every one of them. She chose the elegant clothes she had worn at the parley by the fireplace, when Harry hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her—pearl and gray, tight against her body, overwhelming. Yet again, as in the theater, she dressed as ceremonially as a bullfighter, as if what she put on would protect and sanctify her. She had no idea how or why this was so, but the notion was impossible to dismiss. She applied her makeup. She was a grown woman now, an actress who knew how to make up far better than even the women at the continents of counters—veritable Ross Ice Shelves—on the first floors of department stores. She knew exactly, as a stage actress, how to accommodate light strong enough to wash out everything but white, or the dimming of the light almost to darkness. The world was generally more moderate than the stage, but although she was made up more than usual it matched the elegance of her clothing, her mien, and the resplendent sun that day. It had always been her mother’s expert ornamentation, and now it was hers.

The servants were gone, her father had left for somewhere in Asia, her mother for San Francisco, where she would wait for him. Catherine was so alone in the house that she was reluctant to go downstairs: not out of fear but because no one would be there. As a child who spent most of the time by herself, she understood that coming into an empty room was to experience the distant traces of infinite sadness.

Perfectly attired and turned out, moving with the grace and power of the natural-born royalty she was, she walked down the staircase that went by the many windows looking out on the street. The Hales had taken some of the windows from houses they had owned for generations, carefully restoring them, and these filtered every day’s new light through old experienced glass neither so disciplined nor so clear, like modern glass, as to be nothing. Light passing through them was changed, light reflecting from them reinterpreted. When she passed one of these windows, from which house in the past she did not know, her rapidly moving reflection was like the fluttering of birds that had suddenly taken flight. She saw not the picture of a young woman in her prime descending a staircase, but of white doves rising as quickly as the puff of a flashbulb and then vanishing in favor of the motionless façades across Sutton Place.