The Letter Writer (11 page)

Cain sat in silence while watching Euston cross the room. One of his bigshot clients, perhaps. Or Mulhearn, checking to see if Maloney had delivered the parcel as promised.

The irony of this meeting was that, under other circumstances, Cain might easily have been dining with Euston as a colleague of sorts. After two years on the job in Horton, when Olivia was a toddler and he and Clovis were still scraping together a down payment on a small house, Euston had cruised into town on his one visit south to offer him a job at Willett & Reed. Not a lawyer's position, of course, although Euston made vague intimations that the firm would help pay Cain's way through law school on the side.

He had refused the offer outright during a long and testy evening. It was the one time Clovis took her father's side in an argument, but Cain refused to budge. Too prideful, or maybe he just hadn't liked the idea of making New York his home. To Clovis's credit, she had never again raised the subject.

Cain had never second-guessed the decision, but looking around him now he wondered. He might yet be married, not to mention more handsomely employed, their daughter in a stable home, safe from all that had happened. Or maybe things still would have ended in disaster, but in a different way—Clovis's passions burning even more dangerously brighter in this city of motion, Cain driven to drink or depression by homesickness and dissatisfaction. Although one thing was inescapable: Rob Vance would be alive. Cain had to wash down that thought with another swallow of bourbon.

Whatever the case, here he was in Manhattan all the same, with Euston still trying to run his life. He felt the roast going cold in his belly, and then saw Euston returning to the table, looking a bit disconcerted.

“Bad news?”

“Nothing that you need to know.”

“Words to live by.”

Euston ignored the barb and began picking at the margins of his lunch.

“So how are things going for you otherwise, Woodrow? Personally, I mean. Are all of your needs being addressed?”

His needs? The question made him flash unbidden on an image of Clovis, a moment from their honeymoon in Florida. She stood naked in bands of slatted sunlight through a jalousie window, both of them sunburned. They touched each other, lightly at first, and then with passion, no longer caring if it stung as they climbed into bed.

Euston was staring at him, as if reading his mind. Cain impaled a green bean on his fork and replied: “Sure. Mostly. I did have a question for you. Partly because I'm guessing Olivia will want to know.”

“Then by all means.”

“Where's Clovis?”

Euston frowned. He dabbed his mouth with a napkin as if someone had struck him across the jaw. “That's not your concern.”

“As I said, Olivia will want to know. Believe me, she'll ask.”

Euston looked him in the eye. “She's someplace where she's being well cared for.”

“A place for drying out?”

“You never did understand her properly, you know, or maybe she wouldn't have developed such a thirst.”

“Her thirst predated me, as you might recall. You might also remember that toward the end of things she developed a certain hunger.”

“Which you could have deterred by paying her the proper sort of attention, instead of leaving it to others. But I'm not here to judge you, or to make her out to be a saint. It's why I've agreed to help provide for your needs. Olivia's, too, of course. That's my main concern. It's Clovis's concern as well.”

“She knows I'm here?”

“I keep her apprised of
some
things about you. Not all of them, of course. Not until she's ready for it.”

“And when will that be?”

“That will be my decision. And hers.”

“I'm a little surprised she cares at all.”

“Proving once again how poorly you know my daughter.” He leaned forward, eyes narrowing and his skin turning red. All that other business—the big shot clients, his ready supply of cops—was behind him for the moment. Now it was deeply personal, and his voice took on an edge. “Tell me, Woodrow. Once you put my daughter down there in that quiet old backwater, this beautiful cosmopolitan girl who used to be so vibrant and alive, did you really believe that your bashful Southern charm alone would be enough to keep her satisfied and entertained? And on a cop's salary, no less?”

Cain opened his mouth, but no words emerged, and Euston jumped right back into the breach.

“Yes, I thought so. And now that everything's gone, here you are, still eating on her daddy's tab.”

Neither of them had much to say after that. When the waiter asked about dessert or coffee, Cain declined and Euston signed for the bill. Paid by Willett & Reed, or even Chase National Bank, for all he knew.

Cain dropped his napkin on the table and stood to leave. Euston kept his seat. His face was no longer red, and his voice was calm.

“Remember, Woodrow. Keep me abreast of things. In my business it's always useful to have information from a wide range of sources. And while I do have friends in the station house, family is always a more reliable conduit.”

“I don't recall making any promises to that effect.”

“Who said anything about promises? It's an implicit part of our arrangement, presuming you wish to stay housed and employed. The fine print, if you will, and you know how lawyers are about fine print.”

“Then I guess you should have gotten it in writing.”

Euston smiled. “If I didn't know better, Woodrow, I'd say you didn't learn a thing from today's chauffeured ride. I can always arrange for other destinations, you know. Bear that in mind next time you're debating whether to return one of my phone calls.”

Cain felt the blood rise in his cheeks. He squeezed the back of the chair, then turned to leave before he said something foolish.

He walked the entire way despite the throbbing in his leg, and he needed all eleven blocks to cool down. Not that it did him much good once he reached his desk, where he saw that Maloney had placed his gun and holster right on top of his paperwork, perched where everyone could see them, for maximum embarrassment. There was a note on top, scribbled on a page from a memo book. Maloney had signed it with a flourish, so that everyone who looked would know who was pulling Cain's chain.

“Better brush up on your gun security, Citizen Cain. Never know when you'll need one of these.”

He angrily crumpled the note and was about to toss it in the trash when his more practical side prevailed. He smoothed it out, put it in the top drawer of his desk, and locked it away. Maloney, Steele, and Mabry. Names worth remembering. He vowed to make it into the 95 Room as soon as possible, even if Mulhearn again caught him in the act.

No one in the squad room said a word as he strapped his Colt back on. He looked from desk to desk, wondering how many more of them were on his father-in-law's payroll.

CAIN CAME UP FROM
the subway onto Delancey, entering Danziger's world for the first time. He couldn't help but smile. It was the very sort of place Euston had been railing about the day before in the sterile sanctity of the Union League Club. The “Semitic squiggles” of Hebrew were on plenty of signs, and many women were indeed covered head to toe. But here, too, the wider world had infiltrated deeply. There was even another Thom McAn.

The sidewalks were bustling on a sunny market day as vendors called out their wares and prices. The air smelled of freshly butchered meat and of washed fruit and vegetables. Plucked chickens hung by their necks all in a row in a shop window. Cain supposed he might just as easily be in some urban corner of Europe as Manhattan, and he found himself liking it, buoyed by the vibrancy, the intensity, the enveloping noise.

A newsboy in shorts and a flat hat bumped past on his right, carrying a sack of fresh copies of the afternoon edition, which smelled of ink. The boy held aloft a copy and began shouting the day's headlines even as the heavy bag banged against his knobby knees. A fishmonger, white apron smeared with blood, poured a bucket of ice onto a gleaming row of the day's catch.

“Haddock fresh from the docks, sir. You won't find a better price.”

Cain nodded in passing but didn't dare open his mouth, knowing his accent would immediately mark him as an outsider. He was having too much fun pretending he belonged, a feeling that carried him all the way to the narrow tenement house at 174 Rivington Street, where there were two front doors. The one on the right opened onto a narrow hallway with a stairwell. The door on the left was painted black, with one of Danziger's business cards tacked above a mail slot. Cain knocked loudly until Danziger opened. The man's look of surprise quickly gave way to an irritated frown.

“You should have given me warning.”

“Warning? I'm a policeman.”

“I am with a client.”

Another voice, a man's, shouted from somewhere behind him:

“A client? Is that how you refer to me behind my back, Sascha? A
client
?”

“Sascha?” Cain asked.

“A term of endearment. He is an old friend.”

The man shouted again: “Ha! Friend! Now that's more like it!”

“We are discussing deeply private matters for his correspondence. So if you could please return later. Half an hour, perhaps.”

“Nonsense!” the man shouted. “I have no secrets from anyone. You know this, Sascha. Besides, I doubt that any man sounding as he does will understand a word of Russian. Invite him in at once!”

Danziger sighed and stepped back from the doorway. “Wait here at the front while I conclude with his letter. I will be with you in a moment.”

“Greetings, sir!” An older man stood from a chair in the back of the room and nodded toward Cain, smiling broadly. He wore a black waistcoat and pants, and a starched white shirt. His silver hair was long and uncombed. He looked at least sixty, possibly older, but the shimmer of his watery brown eyes was visible even through the dusky gloom of the long, ill-lighted room.

Cain looked around him with a growing sense of wonder. Danziger's office appeared to take up the entire floor. There was no bed or lavatory, so presumably he slept and bathed elsewhere. Up front where Cain stood the room was furnished as a sort of narrow parlor, with a ratty brown love seat and an emerald wing chair with stuffing poking from its cushions. The walls were covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves. The titles were in many languages, and included thick volumes that appeared to be dictionaries and reference works. It smelled like a library, a mustier and more raffish version of the study they'd visited the other night in Yorkville.

In the rear, where the old man stood next to a ladder-back chair, the space was anchored by a massive rolltop desk of varnished walnut, cluttered with books and papers. But the real wonder was on the wall above it—row upon row of cubbyhole mail slots—at least a hundred, maybe even two hundred, and every last slot had something in it, including some that bulged with a dozen or more envelopes. Cain marveled at the magnitude. All those lives, past and present, and this was their nerve center, possibly their only connection to the wider world beyond these crowded blocks.

Beside the rolltop desk was a broad writing table with a row of four aging typewriters, side by side, presumably one for each of the different alphabets Danziger employed—Cyrillic for Russian, Hebrew for Yiddish, a German model to handle the umlauts of that language, and then the last one for English. The writing desk sat beneath a high frosted window that loomed above the cubbyholes. It was louvered open at the top to let in fresh air, along with a slanting shaft of sunlight which illuminated tumbling motes of dust.

Over to the right was a large woodstove. The floor, which creaked and moaned with every step, was covered by an overlapping series of Oriental runners and rugs of varying shapes, designs, colors, and thicknesses. This patchwork nature gave the room a palpable sense of topography, as if you might have to negotiate your way to the rear via a series of footpaths and valleys. All in all, the room was a bit of a firetrap, a bit of a museum, a bit of a riddle. But above all it felt like an embodiment of Danziger, a man with so many of his own nooks and crannies.

Danziger briskly made his way across the undulating floor to the back, where he settled into the office chair with a deep groan of its universal joint. The old man sat down as well, in the chair facing Danziger.

“Now,” Danziger said, continuing as if Cain weren't there. “Where were we?”

“Come now,” the man said. “First you must introduce me to your guest.”

Danziger stood slowly, looking somewhat put out. The other man stood again, so Cain followed suit, feeling a bit mannered, as if they were gathered in a sitting room in Bohemia.

“Mr. Cain, this is Fyodor Alexandroff, an old and trusted friend who has been using my services for years. Fedya, this is Woodrow Cain, a detective sergeant in good standing with the New York Police Department. We are assisting one another on a private matter of some import.”

“Are you now? Well, then, greetings to you, sir.”

“Pleasure to meet you, sir,” Cain said.

“My niece may be arriving shortly to join you. She always enters without knocking, and is often nosy to the point of rudeness. Please feel at complete liberty to ignore her.”

“I shall.”

Shall? Cain never talked like this. He felt as if he'd walked into a different century, and was adapting on the fly. He pictured Alexandroff's niece as a weathered old crone, smelling of cabbage and dressed in a black wool skirt that would brush against the floor with every step.

“He is exaggerating, of course,” Danziger said. “She is quite harmless. A do-gooder of the first order. So, once again, Fedya. Where were we?”

The two men sat back down. Cain did as well.

Alexandroff answered in Russian, and the two men were soon deep in conversation, leaning closer until their foreheads were only inches apart, while Danziger took notes in a thick ledger, nodding occasionally. They continued in this way for another ten minutes while Cain watched, fascinated by their body language. At times they seemed to slip into a trance as they stared into each other's eyes, exchanging words in Russian.

The door opened. The two men looked up, the spell broken. Cain turned and squinted into the sudden glare. He beheld the silhouette of a young woman in a thin coat. Her face slowly came into focus as his eyes adjusted to the light.

He swallowed hard, momentarily speechless. It wasn't beauty that struck him with such force. If anything she was a bit plain, and quite unadorned. It was more a case of her presence, or perhaps of her movements—a sense of sureness and energy that radiated from her like a force field, as if it were part of the nimbus of sunlight, although the effect didn't diminish in the least even after the door shut and she was enveloped by the gloom. Her eyes, that was part of it. Brown and welcoming, carrying their own light. Full of empathy, wit and—to Cain's eyes—allure.

“Who are you?” she asked, not rudely, but with little warmth.

“Woodrow Cain. I'm waiting on Danziger.”

“Not as a customer, surely?”

“No. I'm…we're…” He could hardly get the words out. He felt like an imbecile, and a thirteen-year-old imbecile at that. “We're working together.”

Fyodor Alexandroff shouted to her from across the room.

“He is a police detective, Beryl dear, so you must be on your best behavior!”

Alexandroff said it as a joke, but Beryl—at least he knew her name now—didn't seem amused or impressed.

“So, Sascha is collaborating with the authorities now?” Then, to both of the older men. “Don't rush on my behalf. I brought a book.”

She settled into the ratty wing chair, pulled a book from her shoulder bag, and immediately began to read. The signal couldn't have been clearer: Leave me in peace. Cain chose to ignore it.

“China Sky,”
he said, reading the cover. “How does it compare to
The Good Earth
?”

“Policemen are reading Pearl S. Buck now?” She spoke without looking up.

“I was an English major.”

“Where?” This time she at least peeped above the pages.

“Chapel Hill.”

“Ah. Where Thomas Wolfe learned to overwrite. I met him once, at a party in the Village. He was being swarmed by girls who didn't know better. He was quite vulnerable and charming, exactly the way you'd expect for a rough-hewn mountain boy. He was huge.”

“Does he still live up here?”

“He's dead.”

“Oh, right. I knew that. Only a few years ago, wasn't it?”

“Yes. Tuberculosis.”

She looked back down at her book. Cain knew he'd blown it, but he couldn't stop now. He wondered if he could find some way to finagle an address, or a phone number. It occurred to him that it was no sure thing that her last name was Alexandroff, or even that she was single, although he had already checked her hand and seen there was no wedding ring. If he had to guess, he would've said she was twenty-nine or thirty. Nearly his age, or close enough. He groped for something to say that wouldn't sound ridiculous.

“He does interesting work.”

“Wolfe?”

“Danziger.”

“Oh. Yes. I suppose he does.” She put her book facedown in her lap and glanced toward the two older men, who had resumed their trance and were muttering in Russian.

“My uncle has been coming here for years. He's not illiterate like most of the customers. But one of his cousins from Minsk reads only in Yiddish. My uncle lost that years ago, as an act of rebellion against his parents, I suspect. So Sascha translates for him, into Russian. Reads the incoming letters and types up the outgoing ones, from his notes of their conversations. Although that's never the reason they're talking for this long. Uncle Fedya comes as much for the fellowship and the neighborhood gossip. They go way back. And they met while speaking Russian, so that's how they often prefer to converse. The letters themselves, well, they're nothing to write home about.”

“Good one.”

She smiled for the first time. For a moment the room was a hundred watts brighter.

“I've watched him working with women, though. Sascha, I mean, and that's where he really earns his keep. With the men like my uncle it's usually just ‘I am fine, I hope you are well,' plus one or two events of the day. Boring. Skeletal. Nothing of real substance or energy. But these women, you should see them, you should
hear
them! Old World to the core, and Sascha is their town crier, their daily newspaper. He draws it all out of them—he is quite gentle, when he wishes to be, very courtly and respectful—and once they get going, goodness, they spill everything. Truly everything, until they have drained the deepest well of their souls. I've seen some leave in tears. Catharsis, I suppose. And from what I'm told, Sascha really makes their words sing.”

“But how would they know, if they're illiterate?”

“Good one,” she said, smiling again. “I asked that very question. It seems that oftentimes the replies, often as not written by
other
paid letter writers, include effusive compliments for the style of his prose.”

“Or maybe he just says that.”

“Now you're thinking like a policeman.”

This time Cain smiled.

“You and your uncle call him Sascha.”

“Yes. The diminutive for Alexander.” She reopened her book.

“But his name is Maximilian.”

“The name on his business card, you mean.”

“Yes. Well, no. That just says Danziger.”

“Obviously you don't know him very well.”

“Not for very long, anyway.”

“I see.”

She went back to her reading, but now Cain was too curious—about Danziger, and about her—to stop. And he still didn't have an address, or even her last name.

“He told me the other day that he tries to forget everything people tell him, all of their secrets.”

She looked back up, a little wearily this time. “You sound skeptical.”

“Well, for a man whose business is supposedly information, it didn't sound very likely.”

“I think it's quite plausible, especially considering what his customers are often hearing from their friends and family lately, from all over Europe. Who'd want those dark stories shunting around in your head all night, like boxcars in a switching yard? I know they'd keep me awake. Besides, to hear my uncle Fedya tell it, Sascha has had quite a lot of practice at forgetting.”

“Meaning what?”

“Ask Sascha. Or Max. Whichever name you prefer.”

She went back to her book. This time Cain did not interrupt. He was too busy thinking about all she'd said. A few minutes later, Danziger and Alexandroff concluded their business. Alexandroff shook Cain's hand in parting. Cain was hoping to speak more to Beryl, but she ducked out the door to wait on the stoop for her uncle. Then the door shut behind Fedya, and she was gone. Cain sighed and decided he might as well get down to business. But that aspect of his visit was also destined to end poorly.