Us Conductors (28 page)

LAVINIA AND I WERE
married on St. Valentine’s Day, 1938. In a hotel room in Montauk, she danced her love song. I sat on the bed, dry-throated, watching the fan of her limbs. She was gorgeous and unreal. Her arabesque, weightless, rose up in the candlelight. Her straight leg pointed back across Long Island Sound. To you. I rose, in the shadows. I simply stood there, waiting for my wife to look me in the eyes.

THEY GAPED AT ME
across a plate of toast.

“Who is she?”

Coolly, I drank the poured vodka. “A dancer,” I said.

“Russian?”

I snorted. “She is an American.”

The Karls did not smile. I measured their expressions. “She supports the class struggle,” I said.

I had expected them to be pleased. And yet despite their pleadings for matrimony, their warnings about visas, the men now sat staring at where they had written Lavinia’s name in their notebooks.

“You did not consult us,” said the Karl with the moustache. “I spoke to Pash,” I said.

Instead of looking chastened, sullen, the Karls seemed merely weary, exchanging glances. “We believe you should leave the country,” one of them said.

“I am married now,” I said.

“Even so.”

My nerves felt as if they were fraying. “There is the new contract with Ossining prison,” I said.

“Even so.”

I flexed my jaw.

“I do not wish to leave.”

Again those weary glances.

I stood up. “I am doing vital work here. Work that is vital to the future of our country. To the Soviet project. Remember the investigations I have done into American aeroplanes, into prisons and railroads. You brought me here to do these things. That’s the point of this whole life. How can I replicate such accomplishments from far away?”

“It is not a question of utility,” said Karl. “There are other reasons to leave a place. There are questions about your visa. We believe you are under investigation.”

“Investigation? For what?”

The handlers exchanged a look. “We’re not sure.”

“I have friends here,” I said. “I have a wife. A family.”

“A family?” Bearded Karl raised his eyebrow.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “Who knows?” Would I now need a son? “My future is tied up in this place. I cannot just disappear.”

The men folded their arms.

Darkly, one said, “Tell us more, Lev, about what you can and cannot do.”

JUST A WEEK EARLIER
, Pash had given us the keys to a Cadillac. He smiled. “Belated wedding present.” We went out and stood on the curb. The car was long and low, black, a bullet. I clasped and unclasped my hands. I shook my head. Pash wrapped Lavinia and me in his arms, a business partner with his friends. “A married couple deserves certain privileges.”

Now I drove the car home from Mud Tony’s. Its engine growled in a way that felt just barely controlled. People watched from the side of the road. I arrived at the house. Lavinia was reading by the front window. She came to me as soon as I walked in the door. She was always so full of desire, tinder on the threshold of flame. “Are you all right?” Her fingertips grazed my cheek. “What’s wrong?”

I murmured something wordless. I gazed at the perfect ridge of her shoulder. “Everything’s fine,” I said.

She laid her nose against my nose. “Pash called.”

“Yes?”

“He asked you to meet him at the machine shop.”

For a short moment we held hands.

I took the car to Frederick’s Garage, where he and I were paying men to assemble metal detectors for Ossining jail, Sing Sing. The wardens wanted arches like the ones at Alcatraz. The contracts were big, but Pash refused to hire a proper manufactory. So I drove across the bridge to Queens, to the deserted end of a dead-end street, where a little Russian garage slouched amid chamomile. As I pulled up, Pash was standing beside a pneumatic lift. One after another, he lifted glass sheets from a crate at his feet, threw them to shatter on the concrete. I approached him gingerly, through the broken glass.

“What are you doing?”

“Breaking glass,” he said.

“Why?”

He didn’t respond. I watched another strong piece of glass slice through the air and separate into ten thousand shiny pieces.

Finally I said, “You wanted to meet?”

He nodded. He looked at me. “Problems in Frisco.”

I tried to give him a smile.
Frisco
. As though we were two cowpokes at a saloon.

He could see there was something else in my face. “What is it?” he said.

I made a vague gesture.

“What’s wrong?”

I told him what the Karls had said. About an investigation. About leaving.

“Always with the cut and run.”

“It seems different now,” I said. “There’s something about the visa.”

Pash clicked his tongue. “A visa’s not
why
you leave. It’s
how
you stay.”

“I don’t know. Maybe the Americans are on to us?”

He snorted. “What reason would they have? You’re clean.

They’re just a gang of skittish lambs. A department of paranoiacs.”

“Mm,” I said.

Pash turned to me. “You work for me, Lev. I am your champion and protector. I will carry you on my shoulders through the wolves.” He lifted up a piece of glass. I waited for him to throw it onto the driveway. He did not.

“All right,” I said finally.

“All right?”

“All right.”

He heaved the glass sheet. It seemed like it was coming apart before it hit the ground. “The metal detectors aren’t working,” he said in a level voice.

“What? Where?”

“At Alcatraz. They’ve stopped working.”

“Why?”

He shot me a wry glance. “That’s your area of expertise. The ones here are fine. Seem fine. For now.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Work out what’s wrong,” Pash said. “Fix it.”

“I’ll book a flight.”

Pash hesitated. All of a sudden I realized that he was afraid. He had been hiding it very well. There, a brittle fear, at the edges of his eyes. “No, stay here,” he said.

“Why?”

“Why? Why?
I am your protector. Do as I say.”

I swallowed. Pash was staring a straight line down the road.

“Is there something I should know?” I said. “Is it those loans?”

“What loans?”

“I don’t know. That bank in Wisconsin?”

Pash made a kind of smiling face, without any kind of smile.

“Are you in touch with family? Back home?”

“In Leningrad?”

“Yes.”

“No, not really,” I said.

“You have a sister?”

I pressed my lips together. “Helena.”

“You write to her?”

“We’re not close,” I said. “She’s married.”

Pash shifted. “Much is happening.”

“To whom?” I said.

“Not to us.” He drummed his fingers against the rusted lift. “Not to us.”

SPRING CAME
, and summer came, but they were like visitors in another part of the house. I did not see them, only their signs.

Lavinia planted mint, sage and beans in the window boxes.

At the end of August I had another visit from Commerce and Burr. I had gone with Lavinia to eat at the Plaza Hotel, my old home. Valets parked our car but they gave us a table in the corridor, on the way to the kitchen, as if we were sacks of potatoes. I was furious. Not from what they did with us, the white man and his coloured wife—from the surprise. “What did you expect?” Lavinia murmured. But there were no warnings, no signs. “If they don’t want Negroes, they should say so,” I said. “This is a
hotel
.”

We ate and came home. I felt my stomach grinding up the Plaza’s lentils and quail. As always, the Cadillac felt like some phantom carrier, a spell for moving from place to place. We did not speak in the car. Lavinia was angry with me. When we pulled up in front of the house, a man was at the window, cupping his hands around his eyes, looking in.

I honked the horn. He looked up. He put his hands in his pockets. He smiled. It was Jim, the debt collector.

“Who is that?” Lavinia asked.

“Nobody,” I said.

As we got out he sauntered over, as though we were old friends. “Hi, Dr Theremin,” he said.

“Hi,” I said thinly.

He half-bowed to Lavinia. “Jim Swiss. Commerce and Burr.”

“Lavinia,” she said.

“Lavinia …?” he asked, leadingly, utterly rude.

“She is my wife,” I said.

“Your wife!” Jim exclaimed. He shook his head. “You’ve been busy, Dr Theremin!” He lightly kicked the tire of the Cadillac. “And that’s a nice car.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Lavinia led me past him. “Excuse us,” she said, “we’ve had a long day.”

“Yes, of course! Who hasn’t? What a scorcher. Just wanted to give you this.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh! And Dr Theremin! Do you have a new number for Julius Goldberg? The old one stopped working!”

“No.” We paused on the step.

“No?” Jim asked, with feigned surprise. “I thought he was your business manager?”

“Yes, sorry. Yes. I do have his number. Let me get it for you.”

In the parlour I scrawled Pash’s new number on a sheet of notepaper. I brought it back out to Jim Swiss, in his ugly green suit. “Hey, thanks,” he said. He smacked me on the shoulder. “And that’s some pretty girl you found.”

I went back inside. I sat on the couch, with Lavinia beside me. I unfolded the letter he had given to me. It was not from Commerce and Burr. It was from the Internal Revenue Service. It advised me that I owed $59,000 in back taxes to the United States government.

“What does it say?” Lavinia asked.

“I need to send in some forms,” I said.

In the morning, Walter Tower Rosen came to see me. He rang the bell. He owned the house I lived in but he rang the bell.

“Walter. What a nice surprise.”

“Yes,” he said. He looked older than the last time I had seen him. I asked myself how long it had been.

“Lucie’s going to be round later to practise.”

“Good,” I said.

His eyes searched the doorway. He cleared his throat. He asked, “Is everything all right, Dr Theremin?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course.”