A Drop of the Hard Stuff

this is.”

“I might.”

“You bought me a drink the other day,” I said, “and I never got the chance to thank you for it.”

“I seem to recognize the voice,” he said, “but I can’t say I’ve got any idea what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t always know myself. I think we should talk face-to-face.”

“Oh?”

“To clear the air.”

“Never a bad idea. Breathing’s easier when the air’s clear. And you probably think I got that from a fortune cookie, but I’m proud to say I made it up myself.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Which is not to say Confucius wouldn’t have said it if he’d thought of it first. You want to meet? Where and when?”

We met at three in the afternoon in the Museum of Natural History. I got there early and waited beside the fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur, and he showed up right on time, wearing a suit and tie and carrying a topcoat over his arm. His glasses were steamed up, and he handed me the coat to hold while he cleaned the lenses with his pocket handkerchief.

The coat would have felt heavier, I decided, if there’d been a gun in the pocket. But I hadn’t expected him to come armed. He’d suspect a trap, and if he brought a gun he might have to explain it to somebody.

He put his glasses on, blinked at me through them, and took his coat back. “Thanks,” he said. He walked over to the nearest dinosaur and said, “Hi there, buddy. All these years and you haven’t changed a bit.”

“An old friend?”

“My daughter loved these guys,” he said. “Don’t ask me why. I’d bring her here every other Sunday to see the dinosaurs and the other divorced daddies. But that was a while ago.”

“I guess she outgrew them.”

“She would have,” he said, “but her mother took her along to the Caribbean for a winter break. There’s this island called Saba. You know it?”

I didn’t.

“You get there by taking a small plane from another island. I forget which one. Saba’s this volcanic island, so basically it’s a mountain with a beach at the base of it, and every once in a while one of the small planes that go there crashes into the side of the mountain.”

Was there something for me to say to that? I couldn’t think what it might be.

“The divorce hadn’t become final yet,” he said, “so officially I’m a widower. With a dead kid too, but I don’t think there’s a word for that. And if you look at it a certain way it’s heartbreaking, but you don’t want to get all choked up about it. Because it was just about time for her to be getting too old for dinosaurs, and what was stretching ahead of us was a fucking lifetime of not having much of anything to say to each other. So she was spared that, and so was I.”

“That’s an interesting way to look at it.”

“Is it? If you’re wearing a wire, you can transcribe that touching little story and show it to the shrinks. God knows what they’ll make of it.”

“I’m not wearing a wire.”

“No? Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t, and if you were younger and better-looking I’d pat you down. If you were a girl, that is. Nothing queer about old Vann.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“But what good would it do me? What would it prove? The cloak-and-dagger boys keep coming out with newer and better gadgets. Ballpoint pens with microphones in them, and just the other day I heard about a recording device the size of an aspirin tablet. You swallow it, and along with all the intestinal gurgles it picks up any conversation within a twenty-yard radius. Of course you wind up having to pick through your own crap, but those clowns are doing that metaphorically anyway, aren’t they? Come on, let’s get out of here. We can’t really talk here, and they don’t allow you to smoke. Like it’s gonna bother the bronto-fucking-saurus.”

XLIV

HE LIT UP as soon as we were out the door. We crossed Central Park West and walked a few hundred yards into the park. Steffens considered three benches and rejected them all for unspecified reasons. Then he found one he liked and wiped the seat with the handkerchief he’d used earlier to clean his glasses. He sat down, and I sat beside him without bothering to wipe the seat.

“It’s your meeting,” he said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got to say. I’m just gonna sit here and take it all in.”

I took three sheets of paper from my jacket pocket, unfolded them, handed them to him.

I’d reached the age where reading was more comfortable with glasses, especially if the print was small or the light dim. Steffens was the opposite, he wore glasses all day long and took them off to read. He’d removed them when I handed him Jack’s confession, and when he was done he didn’t put them on again right away. Instead he sat looking off into the distance.

There were trees across the way, their leaves mostly gone now. Bare ruined choirs, a poet had written, but I couldn’t remember his name or anything else from the poem.

He said, “This is a Xerox copy.”

“That’s right.”

“There an original?”

“In a safe place. And there’s another photocopy.”

“In another safe place, I’ll bet.”