When Tito Loved Clara (19 page)

“Take it easy, Thomas. You'll find another job. No problem. They'll regret it. When's your last day?”

“In about six weeks,” he said. “They're throwing me a bone. I'm going to be cataloging a library in Newstead.”

“In Millwood?”

“Yes.”

“Well, at least you'll be near home,” said Clara. “Promise me you won't worry too much? Please?”

“I'll do my best,” he said. “But I really don't know . . .”

“Man, what timing. We only just found out that I'm pregnant.”

“Well, I'm sure I'll be able to find something before the baby comes.”

He got off the train and went to the Odyssey, which was parked in the station lot and drove to Newstead. All joy had been sucked out of his world. Here he was, in the darkest, coldest part of the year, a little tired and wrung out, about to be unemployed, squinting toward spring and rubbing his hands together for warmth. It was the third day since a moderate snowfall and a cold snap had combined to put a crust of ice on everything in the region, which only added to the sense of gelid torpor.

He parked in front of the house, next to the two-foot-high alpine ridge the snowplows had left along the length of the road. Up and down the street, discarded Christmas trees lay half-submerged in the roadside snowdrifts, their branches poking through the snow like fingers. Walking the salted flagstone path, he became self-conscious about how much he resembled a door-to-door salesman:
suit, overcoat, briefcase. He would not have felt so conspicuous in the reception area of a bank or the lobby of a high-rise office building, but here, a mile from his own home, he was the victim of something close to embarrassment. He already felt unemployed, already felt as if he were begging favors. Pausing, he glanced up and down the street at the wintry, socked-in houses and gave a little snort to reassure himself. Who would even be looking?

The door was answered by a young, attractive blond woman wearing white jeans and a white woolen turtleneck, the weave of which was just loose enough to show the white outline of her bra. Thomas assumed she was the widow's daughter. “Hello,” he said. “I'm Thomas Walker, from BiblioFile.”

“I'm Melissa Logan. Come in,” she said, and extended her hand. She had long, warm fingers and the strong grip of a tennis player or golfer. Even now, in the middle of winter, she displayed the solid, season-defying tan of someone who spent time in warmer climes. Thomas imagined her flying in from Sanibel or La Jolla to comfort her desolate mother. Melissa allowed him to pass through the entry hall into a formal living room formidably turned out in neoclassical style. Two years after he and Clara bought their home, they were still furnishing it, and every time he saw a room like this—a finished idea with a coherent style and a tasteful palette—he realized how far they still had to go.

“The library is this way,” Melissa said, closing the front door and gesturing at a passageway off the living room. The motion pulled the sleeve of her turtleneck down her forearm, and Thomas saw a chunky silver bracelet emerge from the flared cuff.
These rich girls and their distinctive jewelry,
he thought. At the end of the passageway there was a large room lined with books and furnished with a Stickley desk and two wood-paneled filing cabinets. It was cozy but decidedly masculine in its details. The bust of someone he didn't recognize—not the usual Shakespeare or Beethoven—stood on the desk. Maps and portraits of generals on horseback
decorated the walls.
Prussians,
thought Thomas, for no reason.
Hessians.
A vitrine nearby contained weapons and military accessories. At a glance, he saw a Samurai sword, a long-nosed revolver, and a brass field glass. Automatically, he began scanning the shelves. The bookcases were expensive built-ins, with slide-out browsing tables and good lighting. He saw a biography of Bismarck. Or maybe it was a book about the battleship
Bismarck,
because next to it was a book about the
Graf Spee
and another about the
Tirpitz.
Already he was free-associating, thinking about index terms, moving away from the disappointment of the morning. At least there was still pleasure in his work. Phrases drifted into his mind:
pocket battleship,
Allied shipping lines,
Scapa Flow.
What would the proper sequence be? Naval Vessels—Germany—Twentieth Century? Second World War—Battleships—Germany? Taking the book from the shelf, he checked the copyright page, but it was in German and he couldn't make heads or tails of it. He flipped to the seam of glossy photo pages in the middle. There was the
Bismarck
in dry dock being constructed. There was the
Galahad,
one of its victims. There was the British aircraft carrier
Ark Royal
with its cloth-winged biplanes. A map showed the pursuit of the
Bismarck
across the seven seas to its final standoff in the Rio Plata. The sound of Melissa seating herself behind the desk startled him and he looked up from the pictures. He'd assumed that she had gone to fetch her mother. Maybe the mother was still too distraught to conduct business.

“Ah, sorry,” he said, slipping the book back into place. He picked up his briefcase and moved to one of the chairs before the desk.

“Military history,” Melissa said. “That was my husband's passion.” She paused, as if caught in a fib. “More than a passion,” she said, with the same pained and bemused condescension that Thomas had heard from women all his life when discussing their husbands' pursuits and interests: hunting, stamp collecting, rock climbing. Whatever it was, the wife had to endure it, like a pre-existing medical condition or a thorny set of in-laws. Thomas's
own father was an amateur astronomer. Copies of
Sky and Telescope
and the
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society
had piled up in the basement of his childhood home. Many times in his youth, his father had woken him in the middle of the night to show him some comet tracing its once-a-century trail across the heavens, or a lunar eclipse, which was inevitably obscured by an overcast sky. The scale of time and distance involved in astronomy and the optical leaps required to participate in it were too daunting for Thomas. He needed something more immediate. His own experience with marriage was that these kinds of interests became increasingly developed and intransigent the longer you were together. It was a way of differentiating yourself, of holding on to an identity within the marital unit. A fiancé with passion for old wars might not have seemed such a problem to tennis-playing Melissa when she was engaged, just as his own mother, a needle-pointer and knitter, might have downplayed his father's interest in the heavens.

Thomas nodded and smiled, sympathetically.

Melissa pointed at the shelves. “That's just part of it. He belonged to this gaming club.” She paused, as if she was about to reveal something long-guarded about her husband. “Rather than trying to explain, maybe you should just follow me.” They went back into the living room and then through the formal dining room into the expansive, light-filled kitchen—the room where he would spend many hours with her in the coming months. A flight of stairs descended into a finished basement. It was a dull, functional space, like a bachelor apartment under the house. The furnishings were Spartan: a mini-fridge, a TV/DVD set up on an old faux-lacquered cabinet. Maps and charts were tacked to the walls along with the well-known portrait of a black sailor from the Revolutionary War. In the middle of the room was a Ping-Pong-sized table on which a green baize had been spread in an undulating layer. It was a land-scape, like one you'd see on a model railroad layout, only there were no tracks. Instead, there were configurations of lead soldiers,
cannon, tents, and a church painted as if on fire, cotton-balls of smoke rising from the shattered stained-glass windows.

“Shiloh,” she said. “I think.”

Thomas cocked an eyebrow. “Is this part of the job?”

“No,” she said. “But these are.”

Shelved in a bookcase near the table were dozens of composition books with flecked black and white covers. Thomas pulled one down and opened to a random page. “The Battle of Austerlitz,” was written at the top of the page. There were lines of text in some kind of shorthand describing the moves in the battle.

“Logs,” said Melissa. “They need to be scanned.”

“Right,” said Thomas. “Anything else down here?”

“No,” she said. It seemed like she couldn't wait to leave.

He was there for another hour, taking a closer look at things and asking her questions. In addition to cataloging the library and scanning the game logs, Thomas was to cross-index them on a Web site so that a log from a battle would be linked to the appropriate titles in the library. This was to be her husband's parting gift to the members of his gaming club. Once the library had been cataloged, it would be transferred, he was told, to another gamer's house. Thomas gave her the name of a moving company that specialized in libraries. He went over his notes and arrived at a figure. The pricing for private collections was the same as for corporate clients. When he presented her with the estimate for the job, he assumed she would blanche. But Melissa glanced at it for the briefest of moments before saying, “Great. When can you start?”

Two days later, having been to see Mindy Evans in HR, having agreed (what choice did he have?) to the terms of his severance, having received the sympathetic handshakes and backslaps of his colleagues, who were, he could tell, relieved that it wasn't them, he returned to Melissa's house with a scanner, sheets of bar code stickers, and a laptop computer. The house had high-speed Internet access, and so he could download MARC records and wireframes
from the Web developers. Despite his initial reaction, he was intrigued by his client. He felt that he had known women like her since high school; or, more precisely, he felt that he had been unable to know women like her since high school—attractive, cultured, and somewhat bored daughters of privilege who had seen so much of the world by the time they were eighteen that it was impossible to talk to them, let alone impress them. They'd had boyfriends ten years their senior, tried every drug and every position in the
Kama Sutra,
knew ahead of time what was going to be in fashion that season, and had already developed tastes in obscure writers and indie rock bands. Bethesda, where he'd grown up, had been full of such young sophisticates; so had Boston, where he'd gone to college. They could be found in New York, too, of course, but, by the time Thomas got there, he had given up on them; he was moving in another direction, a direction that would bring him to Clara.

He set up in the library. The deceased husband, Stephen, had his books organized chronologically, starting with the Babylonians and ending with books about Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism. (He'd like to see the layout for that game!) Many of the books were already in OCLC, so it was a simple matter of copy cataloging. At some point he'd have to access the library of the Imperial War Museum to process the more rarefied stuff. He played Stan Getz on the laptop's meager sound system as an antidote to the bleak weather outside and the bleak news about his career. The house was warm. He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves: the image of hard work. Soon he was contentedly lost in it.

At twelve-thirty, Melissa knocked on the door. “Would you like some lunch?” she asked. He had not seen her since his arrival that morning, when she'd given him a key and told him how to deactivate the alarm system. She said she would be in and out of the house all day, and he figured he'd drive into the center of town for lunch. As he worked, he'd heard her elsewhere in the house—footfalls and
closing doors. And now she leaned on the entrance to her dead husband's library, her arms folded across her chest. She was more casually dressed—light gray cords, a pale pink Izod shirt, and a pair of matching Pumas, which looked like the shoes worn by tightrope walkers. Maybe she was a little older than he'd thought the day he'd come to give her the estimate. Maybe she was closer to him in age than he'd first figured.

“OK,” said Thomas, setting down a book on the Battle of Thermopylae.

“Good!” She gave him a little nod.

In the kitchen, he washed the dust from his hands. The farmhouse-style table had been set with two places. There was soup, a loaf of crusty bread, and a plate of cheese and grapes. A colorful bottle of mineral water stood like a maypole in the middle of it all.

“I didn't know this was part of the deal,” said Thomas.

“It's nothing,” she said, seating herself and indicating that he should do the same. “So, how's it going?”

“Fine.” Thomas tasted the soup—minestrone—and wondered if she had made it herself. The sink and the Viking range were spotless, as if the meal had been brought in by a caterer.

“My husband, Stephen, spoke highly of your work.”

Thomas gave her a quizzical look.

“Your team worked for him at Norse McConnell. He was a partner there.”

“Stephen Logan?”

“No. Logan's my maiden name. Stephen Epstein.”

“Ah,” said Thomas. “Right.” Norse McConnell was an accounting firm that had hired BiblioFile to digitize its archives. Stephen Epstein was the partner they'd dealt with. Thomas recalled talking to him about Suetonius's
The Twelve Caesars,
which he had been reading after seeing
Gladiator
on DVD with Clara. “If you like that, you should read Caesar's
Civil War.
I have a copy. I'll bring it in for
you,” Epstein had said to him, but he'd never followed through, and Thomas had never gotten around to reading it.

“It was in his will,” said Melissa. “He wanted BiblioFile to do this thing with his library.”

“He asked for us by name? In his will?”

“Yes.”

“That's flattering,” said Thomas. “I guess he liked the work we did for Norse.”

“You should be flattered. Stephen was hard to please.” She immersed her spoon in the soup. “Do you think your estimate is realistic? Six weeks?”