The Man Who Cried I Am (54 page)

Harry, these papers: I'll get them to New York for you. I know this other guy who isn't afraid to die, and he doesn't have cancer, as far as I know, which truly makes him bad! Problem, Harry: do I tell Michelle you hated me so much that you were willing to have her killed, or do I just let her death come as a surprise to her?

Halfway down the stairs, two more pills starting to catch up with the pain, and wondering just how many times Harry had gone down or climbed up the steep, narrow steps, Max forced a smile to greet Michelle standing at the bottom of the steps. “Hey. How about some whiskey?”

Michelle had watched him come down, cushioning each step with exaggerated bends of the knees. His face had gone a brownish-gray. She smiled back up at him; there was a game to be played here. “Whiskey? Why not, after a hard afternoon's work and a little nap?”

“Love you,” Max said. He clutched the case under one arm and stood holding to the back of a chair; he'd sat down much too long upstairs, and there was the long car ride back to Amsterdam. He looked at Michelle. God, he was not going to have a redhead.

Michelle waited. Had Harry left word of any kind for her, any word at all? But Max said nothing. As she moved finally to fix the drink, she said as casually as she could, “There was nothing for me?”

“No, Michelle, nothing.”

“Oh.”

“I'm sorry.”

Michelle shrugged; it was that Gallic shrug that expressed in its way the ultimate unimportance of such small things.

“I'd like to use your phone, Michelle. Is it working?”

“Yes, it's working. Why don't you sit down?”

“In a minute. I want to call New York.”

“New York? The papers were very important then?”

“Yes, they are.” Perhaps now was the time to tell her that after seventeen years all she had amounted to in the end was nothing more than a piece of red-trimmed white ass to Harry. Otherwise, how could he have done this thing to her?
I can only hope that no harm comes to her
. Sure, like that. After seventeen years a little stinking hope. “Thanks,” he said, taking the drink.

“Michelle, when I finish my call, you must call your husband—” He could see horror creeping in startled degrees across her face. “—tell him to come and get you right away, and take you back to France. Then call the French Embassy. Tell them you want protection until your husband arrives.”

White-faced, Michelle stammered, “But I do not understand, Max. My husband, what will he think? I told you, he knows nothing of this place. Besides,
why?
”

“It's the papers,” he said in a hollow voice. “Harry's papers. Don't ask me to tell you more. If you want to live, do as I say.” He stared outside at the dark green canal. Placid. Ugly anyplace else. “Throw away anything that has to do with Harry. Do it now. There's no other way. Please do it and don't sit there asking questions with your eyes. I want you to live. He—Harry would want you to live.”

She moved quickly across the room and gripped his arm. “Who killed him?”

“Who? People. Fascists, I think, who else? And they know you.”

Silence filled the room until she said, “And you?”

“I've cancer. You know.”

“Does Margrit know?”

“Go clean up, Michelle. This is no time for that.” Now the pills were getting to him; it seemed, suddenly, easy.

“She would want to know.”

“Aren't you afraid, Michelle?”

“Yes. Can't you tell? And you, Max?”

Max thought: Here we are, just two people, strangers, really, with just the feel of a tit and a kiss between us. “Yes, I'm afraid.” He felt her hand sliding tenderly along his arm.

“I will know someday what this is all about?”

“I hope not.”

“All right. I will go now. To clean up. There is no other way, you are sure, Max?”

“No other way. None at all.” He didn't tell her that even this might not work.

When she had left the room he pulled his telephone book from his pocket. Yes, he was going to call New York, but first he was going to call Margrit. At least she should know about the cancer; she deserved that. He listened to her phone ring. Outside, between Leiden and Amsterdam, maybe even in Leiden, they waited. They would not have had time to do anything with the phone. Holland wasn't in the Alliance, didn't even have an auxiliary group—yet.

Margrit's phone rang twice more. (Be there, baby.) Twice again.
(Be
there, Maggie!) Three times more and he imagined that she was just coming up the steps to her flat. (Now she was at the top of the landing, hearing the phone for the first time.) Max let the phone ring again. (Now! She had her key out; was slipping it into the lock, pushing open the door, rushing into her flat! Picking up the phone! Now, now,
now!!)
The phone continued to ring and Max slowly hung up.

He poured himself another drink, thinking to himself, Man, am I starting to fly!

Although in another room, Michelle heard Max squeeze the cork from the bottle, heard the neck of the bottle rattling unsteadily on his glass. She did not understand it all, Max, Harry's sudden death, nothing, except that there
were
the papers which Harry had enjoined her to get to Max in New York, somehow, some way, as quickly as possible. And Harry
had
died the following day, the very day, it turned out, that Max arrived in Paris. His presence at the funeral had taken her by surprise. Surprise, grief and now mystery. It was too much. She had been planning to go to Leiden when Max called from Amsterdam. She could not, in the presence of her husband, behave as though nothing had happened. She had left, going, she said, to Cannes. But she went north, met Max, and now, soon, her husband would be coming north and unless she lied very well and circumspectly, grief might come to him after all. Grief, or anger.

Here: a pair of Harry's sneakers, old, faded from white to a vile gray, but they had made him look young, especially with these: two V-necked sweaters. There was some underwear and three shirts laundered and fresh for his next visit, which would have been in July. Handkerchiefs, old pages from manuscripts either published or abandoned. There: an extra set of galley proofs; pictures which he had taken of her in the courtyard along with pictures she had taken of him. A picture of Max Ames, pensive, almost scowling, as if sensing that the picture was destined to be viewed far far away from his home in Paris where it had been taken by his father.

Fear came slowly to Michelle, but she could not particularize it. Was it the fear of discovery by her husband, the deep grief or, on the other hand, the angry words, the blows, perhaps the lonely life without him, a catastrophe at her age, or the life with him in which he quite deliberately carried on affairs with young female poets, American mostly, for all Europe waited for the Americans to come during the summers with their money and sex to fit to their strange dithyrambs.

Or was it the fear of death because of association with Harry, as Max had implied? Why hadn't Harry told her more? They had shared so many things, everything and now—the thought was too appalling—this single secret threatened to take her life as it had taken his. Was that the greater fear?

No. It could not be. She was European and dying violently was a European habit. All other deaths were commonplace. A European learned by his condition to expect catastrophe and invariably that was exactly what he received. In Europe, a winner was one who bested those common deaths arbitrarily assigned to others. You crawled, kissed behinds, ate
merde
, and grinned like you loved it. Living was everything. The final fact of death was of no consequence; it was the living while everyone around died that counted. Michelle knew there was no other tradition for her but to be a survivor.

She moved hurriedly from room to room, gathering papers, pictures, clothes, ashtrays from restaurants where they had eaten. No, she did not want to know what was in that case Max held so tightly under his arm. Obviously, it was the knowing that killed. The suitcase she was stuffing the things into was full now. She looked around, retraced her steps and saw nothing more of Harry's to put into it. She locked the case and trudged heavily up the stairs to the attic. She had no intention of throwing Harry's things away. They'd keep well enough in a corner. She almost smiled to herself. That was the most European of traits, putting things into attic corners. She passed the room where Max had napped and read the papers. What secrets did that room now hold!

Downstairs, Max waited for the international operator to call him back. He felt good now. The pills, the whiskey, the decision-making. He knew he did not hate; they'd exhausted him in too many ways before allowing that to congeal; he'd had some breaks. He didn't hate the way Harry had, not that killing hatred that turned in upon yourself and those close to you. Max could have hated. There had been the Army, there had been Lillian (but they had given him Margrit in her place). There had been enough ammunition to hate them every single, unrelenting tick of the clock every day of his life. But he did not hate. Oh, he had not forgotten; it was just that the future demanded something else. He had made his decision with the same cold objectivity that made the Alliance so formidable. And it had been an easy decision to make. After all, he was as good as dead. Was the doing difficult at such a time? At any other time in his life, given the chance, he would not have been able to make such a decision.

They had had several chances. They had the Civil War; that was to be a start. Reconstruction; that was to be a start. Truman's integrated Army; that was to be a start. May 17, 1954; that was to be a start. The March last August; that was to be a start. Each new President, his mouth filled with words, promised a new start. There were always starts, the big ones and the little ones, but there were never any finishes. Enzkwu's papers proved they were faking it all the time;
all the goddamn time!
Time had moved on, but beneath the surface change remained in doubt. And it was time they came to know, once and for all, that Negroes now knew everything. No more of those stupid television interviews:

Sir, are you a violent Negro?

Sir, ubba, ubba ubb!

That was going to change.

Now, another one of the white man's inventions, the telephone, the transatlantic cable, was flashing signals, voices and numbers under the sea to New York. Ironic that one must inevitably come to use the tools of the destroyer in order to destroy him, or to save oneself. Destruction, however, was very much a part of democratic capitalism, a philosophy which was implicitly duplicitous, meaning all its fine words and slogans, but leaving the performance of them to unseen elfs, gnomes and fairies. And Max had known this for the better part of his life; but it was only now, no longer vulnerable to the dangers of that life, that he not only saw it quite visibly, but could act on it because King Alfred and Alliance Blanc had form and face and projection. Before, all was nebulous; there were few names and places and the form was so all-pervading that it seemed formless. But now the truth literally had been placed in Max's lap. That truth told him that change could no longer be imperceptible, without cataclysm. Permanence was imperfection.

Max had never agreed with Shakespeare that murder would out, and he knew the Alliance and King Alfred were not stopped by the faintest consideration that they would be discovered. Max knew that people who believed as he now believed had to adopt that view, too, and at once, for the secret to converting
their
change to
your
change was
letting them know that you knew
. And he now knew to what extent they would go to keep black men niggers.

White men had done in their own by the hundreds, thousands and millions, pausing along the way from time to time, just to keep in practice, to do in a few million Negroes. All this while great cheers went up, for there are no nonparticipants, no lonely untouched islands. Then you always got back to the race of the Six Million. You visualized them bellowing, shouting, chattering, screaming in, say, New York City one single day, driving the cabs, buses, subways, or riding in them; you saw them walking the avenues and cross-streets, manning the offices and corners, the stores, the markets, jamming the hotels and parks, theaters, restaurants and movies. Catastrophe. The next day they are gone. The city is silent, mocking traffic lights directing no one. But Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Washington continue to blare, honktonk with traffic, hum with people, spark with neon. All without pause, without prayer. You had to picture it that way. Why the Six Million?

Because their deaths happened in my time, Max thought, and because before I was made aware of it and sent to crawl belly-down over Italian mountains, I danced the Lindy and the Jersey Bounce and the Boogie Woogie; and the American air was thick with banal phrases: I'm Making Believe, Mairzy Doats; God Bless America, I Heard You Cry Last Night; Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer, Don't Cry, Baby; Don't Fence Me In, Kalamazoo; Chattanooga Choo-Choo, Don't Get Around Much Anymore.

The songs did not obscure the bankruptcy of the human soul, for no such thing existed. Help
was
pledged (by the ignorance later pleaded) to the extinction which, being so widespread and evil, brought on collective amnesia again and made that evil not only unreal, but untrue.

There were lessons:

The unprotesting, unembattled die.

The enemy today is the believer in Anglo-Saxon updated racial mythology.

The clash is inevitable because Justice is an uncool lesbian.

Many, many will die, Bernard Zutkin. Black bodies will jam the streets. But thoses bodies, while they still have life, would be heading downtown this time. No more Harlem. East Cleveland. Lynch Street. Watts. Southside. Downtown. Those people are going to tear up that unreal tranquility that exists in the United States. The promises, unfulfilled, can go to hell now. That three-hundred-and-forty-five-year-old bill, its interest climbing since Jamestown and
before
, is going to be presented.