Thief of Glory (35 page)

“Fifty-five bucks,” he yelled to my back as he leaned across the front seat to speak through the open passenger window. “Don’t think you can outrun me, Gramps.”

Gramps
—spoken like that—is a word that can spoil your mood in a hurry. I understand why it’s insensitive to mock or criticize obesity; it’s now been classified as a disease and gets treated accordingly. But why are wrinkles open game for anyone who wants to be a comedian?

I wasn’t going to let it spoil my mood. I had a diamond ring in my front pocket.

“Fifty-five bucks,” he repeated. “You deaf?”

Again, deaf is not something you have much choice about, so to pose the question as an insult is just another example of blatant ageism. But personal hygiene? That
is
a choice. Taxi Driver was unshaven—in a patchy, greasy way, not in the Hollywood style, where shavers are set at the correct length to give a suitable virile look. He smelled too. I’m not cranky about this—okay, I am, but I won’t apologize, as the formative years of my boyhood were spent in a concentration camp where dozens shared one house and overflowed one toilet, so I think I have a right to be sensitive about the issue.

I walked back to the cab.

“I’ve got your money,” I said. “And I apologize. My mind was on other things.”

I wasn’t going to propose to Laura immediately. But I wanted the ring with me, if there came the moment I could do so with honor.

I was carrying my leather satchel, the one I’d had since architect school, battered and comforting. I set it on the hood of the taxi.

I unzipped an outer pocket for my wallet. It wasn’t there. I unzipped the larger pocket inside. Not there either.

“Hurry up, old man!” Taxi Driver shouted.

I pulled out the contents, carefully setting articles one by one on the hood of the cab. Two moleskin notebooks. A camera. Some paper novels. Folded city maps. I didn’t feel a sense of panic; I had put a system in place that I knew I could rely on. These days, I was all about backup systems.

I carefully placed each article back into the satchel and zipped it closed.

Ah, yes. The outer zipper pocket. That’s where my wallet was. No, it wasn’t.

All right. The larger zipped inner pocket. Not there either.

Maybe it was inside the satchel. I carefully pulled out each article. By then, Taxi Driver was standing on the other side, strumming his fingers on the hood, beaming hostility in my direction.

I vaguely remembered why I didn’t feel a sense of panic. Travel and unfamiliar surroundings made me anxious these days, so I had begun the habit of wearing a money belt instead of a wallet that could be easily misplaced. The money belt held cash, a credit card, my government-issued identification, and the key to get me into my condo. I reached for the small of my back and was comforted to feel the slim pouch in the center of the money belt when I patted my shirt.

I began to lift my shirt to turn it around where I could reach the pouch, but somehow time slipped past my awareness and when I returned from the reverie, I was looking at my satchel, thinking that the wallet was in the outer zipped pocket. But I also noticed that someone had pulled out the notebooks and city maps and paperback novels, so I carefully placed each piece inside the satchel.

“If you weren’t so old,” Taxi Driver said, “I’d pop you in the face.”

“That wouldn’t help you get your money,” I said. “How much do I owe your?”

“Sixty-five bucks,” he said. “A drive to L street, a half-hour wait with meter running, a drive back here. And just now I turned on the meter again so I could enjoy this little charade of yours.”

What was my task? Right. Wallet. Outer zipped pocket of the satchel was where I kept it. But it wasn’t there. I felt no panic for some reason. I checked the main front pocket inside but then remembered I wore a money belt.

My shirt was already untucked. I frowned. Normally, I wasn’t that sloppy. Stop caring about little things, and soon enough, the big things are totally undisciplined.

There it was. Beneath my shirt. My money belt. I found the pouch, withdrew cash, counted out fifty-five dollars, and handed the cash across the hood.

“Seventy-two dollars,” he said, holding out a grimy palm for more.

“For some reason, fifty-five sticks in my mind,” I said. “That’s all you get. If you want a tip, I’m happy to offer one. Don’t call someone ‘Gramps’ if you want a tip.”

“Didn’t expect one after that little senile routine you just pulled. My tip? If you’re young enough to actually have a day job, keep it. Your acting is horrible.”

He slammed the door and tried to squeal tires as he floored it.

The spring in my step was gone. I was tempted to drop the diamond ring into a sewer grate. Laura didn’t deserve what I was becoming.

Laura Jansen had grown into an exquisitely beautiful woman. It was not the fragile beauty that some women managed to magnify, becoming porcelain and brittle like fine china held together with invisible glue.

At breakfast, she wore a long blue dress of expensive material. It radiated the warmth of her eyes. She wore her hair short. Not gray. Not platinum. Not blond. But an ageless blend, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if that was the color that was natural for her.

Grace Kelly. It’s a reference that you need to be as old as I am to understand, but who today in Hollywood has effortless elegance without haughty superiority? Laura didn’t deserve what I was becoming, and I certainly didn’t deserve her. But my heart still soared at her presence.

At the restaurant table, she looked over a cup of tea at me. She spoke with the curve of a smile on lips that I longed for with the heat of an adolescent. We’d been together only a few days since her arrival in America. Long enough to share our histories, the events that had happened over sixty years. But we’d yet to approach what really mattered. It would have been unseemly to rush it, and I hoped she was enjoying the slow journey as much as I was. Eventually, however, she or I would get to the question neither of us had asked; sixty years ago, I had not shown up on the evening we agreed to elope to America.

“Your daughter is a lovely woman, Jeremiah.”

“Yes,” I said.

“She and I had a lovely conversation this morning.”

“She and I had a conversation this morning as well.”

“I hope you don’t mind. I called your room to see if that would be all right to introduce myself to her properly, but there was no answer.”

“Had I answered,” I said, “I would have merely warned you that she likes to ask questions.”

“She did,” Laura said, setting her cup down on the saucer, without a hint of china clinking against china. “She started by telling me that she was born six months after a civil service marriage in front of a judge.”

“Ah.”

“I understood what she was trying to tell me. That it was a loveless marriage. Was it?”

“I made the best of it,” I said.

Laura let out a long sigh. “That’s what I told her about mine. She asked me if I had pined for you.”

“Mawidge,” I said. “Twue wuv.”

Laura giggled. “My favorite movie. English, with Dutch subtitles. But I had learned English by then.”

I’d already made a note in my journal to watch the movie so I could understand what was meant by those words. Mawidge?

“And did you?” I asked. “Pine?”

“I told her that Holland is a small country,” Laura answered. “I explained to her that my family was among the pampered elite. Early on, because those were different times, I knew it was unthinkable to marry outside of my class. I told her that I had been ready to leave all of it and begin with nothing in America. With you. Then she pointed out I had married someone else. Someone at the outer edges of Dutch royalty. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I made the best of my life.”

“So,” I said, “she asked the natural question after that.”

“I told her on the night we were going to elope, you did not appear where
we had agreed to meet. And that you had disappeared from Amsterdam, so eventually, I married the man that it had been determined I should marry. Then, when my husband passed away, I flew to America. To find out why you had abandoned me when you had promised otherwise.”

Here it was. The question we had avoided.

“I was in a jail cell,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Is this a pattern?”

“An attorney hired by your parents gave me a choice. Stay and face murder charges. Or take his offer to bail me from the jail and accept his help in fleeing the country.”

The memory was never far from me. Like all the old memories, it remained clear. I could find myself in my armchair in my condo, staring at a cup of near-cold coffee, returning to the present from the dank, still waters of a canal in the gloaming of an evening in the fall of 1949. I would still have the smell in my nostrils—a whiff of cat urine from the alley where I’d finally found Pietje near the canal. I would still see the pale gleam of the man’s face as it had rolled once, then twice, in the water below the bridge, as if a carp had been at the surface and bellied itself to the air in throes of death.

The scene itself on the bridge had been brief, anger rushing through me with the force of a nova. Beneath the single light at the entrance to a cheap hotel, a street girl had smiled with blackened teeth at the description of Pietje and given me directions.

Pietje, by then, was beyond caring about anything except how to find just one more pipe. The opium had wasted him horribly, his own teeth black, his eyes jaundiced, and his hair as stringy and dirty as his clothes. He was a wild and feral teenager, living the life of an ancient addict.

I had reached the bridge in time to see Pietje standing in the center, by the iron rails, accepting a pipe from an older teenager.

“Ah, the brother’s keeper,” Pietje said, his voice dreamily high-pitched and mocking. “Yet again you find me. Doesn’t this crusade tire you? I can promise, it certainly tires me.”

“Pietje …” I could not find any words.

“Where are my manners?” Pietje said. “Johannes, this is my only remaining family member, Jeremiah. I refuse to call him brother. I’ve done my best to lose him, but you have heard about bad pennies. Jeremiah, this is Johannes. He truly is like the brother I never had. Never judges me, always keeps me happy. With him around, never am I short of the bliss of poppy.”

“Pietje …” Again, trying to find something to say. Close to a bridge farther down, at another cross street, well in the shadows, was a light splash in the water of the canal. A fish, maybe. Or someone dumping something out of one of the houseboats.

I had begged. Cajoled. Threatened. Promised money. Anything to get Pietje away from the underbelly of Amsterdam.

I turned my anger on the man beside Pietje. “Go away!”

I advanced, motioning with my hands like I was shooing at pigeons, and raising my voice. “Go! If you dare give my brother—”

Johannes laughed. “You really are the judge and God that he claims you to be. How long is it going to take for you to understand that you are no longer his brother?”

Both of them began to cackle.

“He needs help!” I said to Johannes.

“From you?” Pietje said. “Like you helped Mother?”

Pietje swayed as he cackled again. “You thought I didn’t know? Every night I try to forget. And now I have help from my friend to help me forget.”

Pietje put his arm around Johannes, at the waist.

“No!” I shouted. “You don’t understand!”

From a houseboat below came a circle of light, catching the two of them squarely in a tableau.

“Shut the noise,” came a bellow. “I’ll call for police.”

I ignored the shout. I reached for Pietje, to pull him away from Johannes, but Johannes reacted by swinging at me.

It was truly a nova of anger. A bright explosion of cold rage, and I returned his blow with all the frustration that had been bottled inside me. It was a punch that hit Johannes along the side of the jaw, snapping his head back, and his body followed the momentum. Johannes hit the railing waist height and plummeted.

There was a thud of impact against the hull of the houseboat, then the splash.

The man on the houseboat put the beam on the water, finding Johannes in time to see the rolling. Once, twice. The face of Johannes like a belly of a carp each time before disappearing into the water.