on Berlin.
One of the reporters asked, 'Now that you have your property back, Mr. Smith, what do you aim to do with it?'
Smith looked amazed all over again. 'I don't really know. I haven't really thought about it, because I didn't believe the Yanks would play fair and give it back to me. I don't suppose they would have without Mr. Moss here.'
'No, that's not true, and I don't want anyone printing it,' Moss said. 'Americans respect the law as much as Canadians do. It wasn't a judge who said Mr. Smith has good title to that land. It was the law. And the law would have said the same thing regardless of whether Mr. Smith's attorney came from the United States or Canada '
The reporters took down what he said. If they didn't believe him, they were too businesslike to show it on their faces. John Smith, less disciplined, looked highly dubious. Moss felt dubious himself. One of the things he'd already discovered in his brief practice was that judges were not animate law books in black robes. They were human, sometimes alarmingly so.
After a little more back-and-forth with the reporters, Moss reclaimed his overcoat, hat, and galoshes from the cloakroom. In a pocket of the overcoat were mittens and earmuffs. He put them on before venturing outside. Even so, the cold tore at him. The coat that had been better than good enough for winter in Chicago was just barely good enough for winter in Ontario. He wished for a nosemuff to go with the earmuffs.
He also wished for taller rubber overshoes. As he kicked his way through the new-fallen snow toward his apartment, some of the freezing stuff got over the red-ringed tops of the galoshes and did its best to turn his ankles into icicles. He wished he would have driven his motorcar over to the courthouse. If he had, though, it was only about even money the Bucephalus would have started after sitting so long unprotected in the snow.
The people of Berlin took the weather in stride in a way even Chicagoans didn't. When it stayed this cold this long, people in Chicago complained. Complaining about the weather was as much Chicago's sport as football was America's. People up here simply went about their business. Moss didn't know whether to admire them for that or to conclude they hadn't the brains to grumble.
He hurled coal into the stove when he got into his flat, then stood in front of the black iron monstrosity till he was evenly done on all sides. He didn't have a whole lot of room to stand anywhere in the apartment. Ever since he'd started the action against his landlord, he'd been moving crates of books out of his office, anticipating that Paul Heusinger or his own client would give him the bum's rush.
'Tomorrow,' he said, having picked up the habit of talking to himself down in Chicago, 'tomorrow I get to find myself some new digs. Then maybe I'll be able to turn around in this place again.'
He took some pork chops out of the icebox, dipped them in egg and then in flour, and fried them in a pan on the hot stove. He fried potatoes in another pan at the same time. Practice had made him a halfway decent cook-or maybe he just thought so because he'd got used to eating what he turned out.
He didn't go office hunting the next day, nor the several days after that, either. The blizzard that roared through Berlin kept even the locals off the streets. It was the sort of blizzard that sent Americans running back over the border. Moss didn't think of leaving-not more than a couple of times, anyhow-but he was damn glad he had plenty of coal in the scuttle.
'Have to start burning books if I run out,' he said. He had enough books in the flat for… He looked around. 'Eight or ten years, is my guess.'
Despite the dreadful weather, he did get some work done. He'd already seen that the Canadians were good at keeping telegraph and telephone lines up and functioning in the teeth of the worst winter could do. The telephone in his flat rang several times a day. Somehow, the newspapers had gone out, and with them word of his victory for John Smith. Other Canadians with similar problems wanted him to give them a hand, too.
He had just headed for the bathroom to dispose of some used coffee when the telephone jangled yet again. He thought about ignoring it-anyone who really wanted him would call back- but duty defeated his bladder. Stepping over a crate, he went back to the telephone. 'Jonathan Moss, attorney at law.'
'Hello, Mr. Moss. I called to congratulate you for getting Mr. Smith what belongs to him.'
'Thank you, ma'am.' He wondered where the woman was calling from. The line had more clicks and pops on it than he would have expected from a call placed inside Berlin, but the storm might have had something to do with that, too. He waited for the woman to say more. When she didn't, he asked, 'Can I do anything else for you?'
'I don't think so,' she answered. 'I've already found out that you aren't what I thought you were during the war. No-you may be what I thought you were, but you're more than that, too.'
Moss almost dropped the telephone earpiece. 'Laura,' he whispered.
He didn't know if Laura Secord would hear him, but she did. 'Yes, that's right,' she said. 'When I found out what you had done, I knew I had to come into Arthur to ring you up and say thank you.'
He hadn't stirred out of doors since coming home from winning the case. Did that say she was hardier than he, or just that she was out of her tree? Moss couldn't make up his mind. Whatever else it said, it said she'd very badly wanted to telephone him. 'How are you?' he asked.
'Well enough,' she said. 'As well as I can be with my country occupied. I'd heard you'd set up in Empire'-she would be one not to call it Berlin-'but I didn't know what sort of practice you had, and so I didn't think it right to speak to you. From the way you lent me money, I thought you were a decent man, and I am glad to see you proved me right when you had nothing else on your mind.'
'Ah,' he said. Then he shrugged. She could hardly have helped knowing what he'd felt about her. He'd gone up to Arthur in weather almost this bad-Christ, had it been three years ago? — to tell her so. And she'd told him to get lost.
He noticed how he thought about that as if it were in the past tense. And, he realized, some of it was. He'd been surprised — hell, he'd been flabbergasted-to have her call, but some of what he'd felt, or thought he'd felt, was missing. That flabbergasted him, too. Where did it go? Into the place where everything that doesn 't work outgoes, he thought.
Now she'd been waiting for him to say something more, and seemed nonplussed when he didn't. 'When the weather gets better, maybe you could come up for a picnic, if you care to,' she said. 'We haven't seen each other in a long time.'
Moss didn't know whether to laugh or to weep. Had she said that in 1919, he would have driven his Bucephalus through fire, never mind ice, to go to her side. But it was 1922. He'd got over some of his infatuation without quite noticing he was doing it. While he was doing that, had she grown interested in him? So it seemed.
'I'll sec what I can do,' he said, which was polite, even friendly sounding, and committed him to nothing.
'All right,' Laura Secord said. 'I hope to see you. I'd better go now. Good-bye.' She hung up. The line went dead.
Slowly, Moss set the earpiece back on its cradle. He stood staring at the telephone for a long moment before his body reminded him of what he'd been about to do before the phone rang. He took care of that, then went into the kitchen, which wasn't so overrun with books and crates as the rest of the apartment. To make up for that, it did contain several bottles of whiskey. He picked one, yanked out the cork, and looked around for a glass.
He didn't see one. 'Hell with it,' he said, and took a long pull straight from the bottle. He coughed a couple of times, drank again-not so much-and set the bottle down. He started to pick it up once more, but changed his mind. Instead, he shoved in the cork and put it back in the cupboard, where it would be out of sight.
'Laura Secord,' he said. 'My God.' He started to giggle, which was surely the whiskey working. 'That telephone call would shut Fred Sandburg up forever all by itself.'
He didn't need Fred to tell him he'd been foolish to fall so hard. He'd figured it out all by himself. And now, if he wanted to, he had the chance to make his dreams turn real. To how many men was that given? Of them, how many would have the sense to steer clear?
He laughed out of the side of his mouth. He wasn't nearly sure he would have the sense to steer clear, or even that it was sense. As the snowstorm howling through Berlin attested, picnic weather was a long way away. Now his mind would start coming back to Laura Secord, the way his tongue kept coming back to a chipped front tooth. It hardly seemed fair. Just when he'd thought he was over her at last…
He'd known Arthur wasn't that far from Berlin when he started his practice here. He'd figured the John Smith case would draw wide notice. Had he hoped Laura Secord would be one of the people who noticed it? Maybe he had. He shook his head. He knew damn well he had, even if he hadn't admitted it to himself.
