The Last of the Wise Lovers (10 page)

   We had to strain our eyes to see.
 Mom sat in the dark on one of the three stone steps in front of the
house.  I pulled out the spring in the screen door so that it would stay
open without slamming against the frame.  Crouching next to the railing
among the geraniums, Aunt Ida was swallowed by the darkness.

   It's hard to say how long we waited
like that, Mom, Aunt Ida, and me.  I just remember it was cool, and dew
covered everything.  Suddenly two headlights lit up the street.  A
car passed in front of the house and disappeared.  There was nothing
special about it, just any old car with a long shadow and a hump, an Olds or a
Ford.  In any case, Mom got up and started walking.  She walked for
two or three minutes to the place where the road bends and a large maple tree
grows right on the edge of the sidewalk.  She waited there for a brief
moment, then turned around and came back home. This time she didn't go back to
her stoop, but skipped over it and went inside by the main door.

 "Aunt Ida," I said, then immediately
shut up.  Inside the kitchen, right next to us, the light came on.
 Mom was looking for something in the freezer.  Suddenly she noticed
the open screen door, and she peered outside.  She looked right at us, at
me and Aunt Ida, but didn't pick us out in the darkness.  She pulled on
the spring I'd removed and replaced it.  The door slammed noisily.
 Mom went back to poking around the freezer, then took out something
square, wrapped in plastic.  She took off the plastic wrapping but she
didn't place the contents in a bowl, like she usually does when she wants to
defrost something.

   It was her notebook, and from where I
crouched I could even make out that the first page was covered with crowded
scrawl.  She went inside, probably to the bedroom to write sitting next to
Dad - nothing could wake him, anyway.

"Aunt Ida," I touched the arm next to
me.  It was cold and inert. A moment later, after I'd already thought of
all the most horrible consequences, she woke up.

"I'll keep watch now," she said, without
opening her eyes.  "You go to sleep."

  
I
opened the screen door.  The car that had passed down our street came back
and passed our house.  Only then I realized how lucky it was that I hadn't
yet gone inside.  For a moment the headlights lit up the living room,
where Mom was sitting, looking out.  I carefully closed the door and went
back outside.  The car glided down the street.  When it got to the
maple tree, it stopped for a few seconds.  No more - just a few seconds in
which the brake lights flared, washing the trunk in red light - before it
vanished.

   Mom got up and went to the
windowsill, sighing as if she'd completed some task, and again disappeared
somewhere inside the house.  I went down to the garden and got into my
room by climbing through the window.  Aunt Ida stayed on the porch,
dampening with dew.

   The next day I woke early, dressed
quickly, and went off down the street.  I stood next to the maple tree and
looked around.  Nothing special.  Just an old tree with lots of knots
and notches and dead branches.  I had to know what had made Mom walk out
here, what had made that unidentified car stop here in the middle of the night.
 I went over every inch of the trunk, until I discovered a deep notch.
 The tree was full of them, scars from branches that had fallen, except
that all the other notches were full of moss and squirrels' nests, and only
this one was empty and hollow, as if it had been cleaned out.  There were
fresh tire tracks in the dirt by the side of the road.  Those on the edge
ran right next to the tree, so close that the driver must have scraped his car
door on the trunk, just as I'd scraped against the wall of the Lincoln Tunnel.

   And then, maybe because of the
Lincoln Tunnel, I had a brainstorm: I stood on the tire tracks, bent my knees
forward and stuck my ass out as if I were sitting down, and extended my arm out
of an imaginary car window.  It reached straight into the notch.

  
I
still wasn't ready to admit what I knew.  It took the entire trip on the
bus, the walk from Port Authority to the library, and standing behind my
counter until Ms. Yardley had tired of me, before I understood what anyone who
goes to see a c-movie understands without trying: Mom had put something in the
notch in the tree, the car had stopped there for a minute, and whoever had been
in it had reached out and taken that something.

*

   What happened next had to do with Mr.
K.   I don't know who -besides you - will see these pages, and I
wouldn't write it down unless I was certain that no one could do him any harm
any more.

   At about nine he arrived at work and,
as usual, passed through the Catalog Room.  He didn't say anything as he
walked past and didn't stare his usual straight-ahead absent stare; he looked
right at me and indicated with his head that I should come upstairs.

   After a minute I found an excuse to
go up there.  When I came in, he jumped up and turned the lock on the
door.  This time it seemed that all his aches and pains had vanished.
 He still had those circles under his eyes, but his movements were no
longer sluggish and the expression of pain his face usually wore had been
almost completely erased.  On the desk in front of him was the envelope
with the slide. "How did you get involved in this?" he asked.

   I could still permit myself to assume
that the word "involved" represented a kind of humor, and not danger.
 

I said: "I found it."

   "Where?"

   Now his voice sounded severe.  I
was silent.

   "Do you know what the letters
`T. S.' stand for?"

   "No."

   "Top Secret."  He reached
inside his desk and deftly pulled out a piece of paper.  "Here, this
is the system to which the diagram on the slide corresponds."  It was
a quick and imprecise drawing of a large machine.  "I copied it from
the description of a government requisition.  The secret details had been
erased and I reconstructed them as best I could according to my
knowledge."

   Together the lines formed a kind of
large turbine.

"An engine?" I asked.

   "Of a missile."

   "A missile?"

   "Agitator.  Actually, it's
called FM40, but `agitator' sounds better to the senators who have to ratify
budgets.  You can read about the political debacle surrounding this
missile in any newspaper, but the technical details are an official United
States secret.  I'm breaking the law by talking about it, you're breaking
the law by holding on to this slide, and whoever lost it was also breaking the
law...”  He peered at it in front of the window.  "The part
that's in your diagram is the one that draws in gases from the combustion
chamber and distributes them in four different directions.  That's how you
get the revolutionary effect. The missile is projected as it revolves around
itself, like a giant screw. If you add a suitable warhead...”

   "If the technical details are
secret, how do
you
know them?"

   He wasn't insulted by my doubting
him, and I interpreted this to be some sort of credit I had with him.

"I dealt with this once," he said.

   "Were you an engineer?"

   "Not exactly."

   For a moment I wondered whether he'd
tell me what brought him to a wooden cubicle in the corridor of a municipal
library in New York, but then I started thinking about the slide, which I now
had
to get back into my possession.  Finally I just grabbed it, with the
envelope, and got up.  

He didn't show any intent to stop me, but said,
"If I were in your shoes I'd burn it and forget the whole incident."

   That's exactly what I intended to do.
 Mom's doings worried me enough, and I didn't have any interest in fallout
from Dad's spy business.  

The look on my face must have given away what I
was thinking, because he said, hesitantly, "It seems to me you have some
sort of a problem... if you need anything, perhaps just someone to talk to...”
and he gave me a look that invited me to sit down again, which I did after a
moment's hesitation.  It's not hard to understand why: I was lonely,
confused, in need of someone who would listen.  Otherwise it's hard to say
why I trusted him, of all people.  Because he spoke some Hebrew?  But
as I've already explained, Hebrew works no magic on me; and actually, the last
Hebrew-speaker I'd encountered had caused a lot of trouble. The fact that he
knew his way around the inside of a missile?  The missile wasn't
important, or at least didn't seem to be just then.  I think the answer lay
in a mixture of different, perhaps contradictory characteristics that I divined
in him: sensitivity mixed with aloofness, wisdom mingled with ingenuousness,
organized thinking disguised by a disorganized, informal manner.

   So I sat down opposite him.  He
gathered all the books, papers, tissues, orange peels, candy wrappers,
thumbtacks and paper clips into one pile and pushed them to the corner of his
desk, underneath the globe lamp, revealing a worn blotter.  I began to
talk.  At a certain point he again opened his desk drawer and took out a
piece of paper, and asked my permission to take notes.  I nodded yes.
 He wrote down a few details (the ones that seemed to me to be least
important, like he address of The Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of the
Body, or the dates of Dad's trips).  When I finished, the paper was full
of large squares, most of them filled in but some of them still vacant.

"Do you think I'm crazy?" I asked.

   He didn't answer, just put question
marks inside the empty squares.

"The slide," he said quietly.
 "How does it fit in to the whole story?"

   "It doesn't.  It has
something to do with... something else."

   "Your father?"

   "No," I said immediately.

  
He
was silent.  It took all the will I had to return his stare with a steady
gaze.

   "If you really want help, you
should tell me the truth."  He looked down at the paper.
 "We have a slide showing part of the propulsion system of a missile.
 The fact that it's in your hands, together with the fact that your father
is here in an official capacity, leads me to believe that your father received
this slide from someone, possibly through theft, in order to pass it on,
possibly to Israel.  In the meantime, your mother is being threatened by
someone who talks of... well, of murder, and who is possibly trying to send her
on a vacation of a dubious nature.  Two unusual circumstances in one
family.  Chance?  Perhaps. But if we consider that this missile is
the hottest thing in military technology this year, and it's reasonable that all
sorts of parties would like to get their hands on it...” apparently, the pain
started up again.  He began to writhe in his chair from one uncomfortable
position to another.  "Something here smacks of more than just
coincidence. Somehow, in a way that I don't quite understand, you are the axis
connecting two circumstances: the one that motivates your father, and the one
that threatens your mother...”  He stuck out his lower lip and thought a
moment. "Therefore," again he looked me in the eye, "I sense
there's something else that you haven't told me...”

   I hesitated.  He didn't push me,
and that's what caused me to finally tell about the events of the previous
night - the car with the hump and the notch in the tree.  When I finished
there were a few more squares filled in on his sheet of paper.  He kept
looking at them, thinking, and then said in a very soft voice that was almost a
whisper, "What's the chance that someone is photographing these diagrams
of the missile while they're in your father's possession, and putting them in
the notch in the tree so that they'll be passed on?"

   I stared at the slide until it became
a blurry black spot in the center of the desk.  My ears burned.  My
temples pounded with pain.  From beyond the beating of my heart I could
hear his voice.

"This slide is part of an entire series,
apparently an unsuccessful copy that someone intended to discard...” I recalled
Mom busying herself in the basement on the night I came back from the Lincoln
Tunnel, the scraps of celluloid in the garbage disposal, the polaroid camera in
her crate of books, and something else: the story she tells whenever my grades
are too low for her taste, about her dream of becoming an engineer, about
universities that refused to admit Jews, and about how she compromised by
registering for the photography course at the People's Institute of Technology
in Bucharest.

   "What would you do in my
place?" I asked.

  
"I
don't know who's threatening your mother or who's using her, and I also don't
know who's giving your father this material or where it goes after it leaves
his hands; but what's clear is that things like this blow up even when they're
handled in secret, as they should be.  In this situation, since so many
factors are involved, I don't know what to advise...”  He started to break
up the pile under the lamp: books, papers, paper clips, thumbtacks. "Just
keep your eyes peeled, maybe do something if the need arises."

   I felt a little abandoned by him,
even betrayed.  "Do
what
?"

   "At the moment, how can you
possibly know?"

  
It
was all too heavy and depressing for me to bear.  "This guy, the one
who's going to die, I won't be able to live with the thought that I
could've...”

   "The world is full of people who
are going to die.  You needn't get involved in it.  Just make sure
that your mother doesn't get hurt, that's all."  He again pointed to
the slide in my hand.  "And as for that, I still think it should be
destroyed."