Bonus Two: Two Ledgers

Emmerich Stahl had kept two ledgers for two years, and it took him an afternoon to dispose of them.

He did it in a kitchen in Queens. It was a small yellow kitchen on the second floor of a two-family house on a street of identical hedges, with a linoleum floor worn pale at the sink and a table covered in an oilcloth printed with lemons, and the late-October light fell across it in long slanting bars. A kettle was ticking on the stove. A cat slept in the window. On the wall by the door hung a calendar from a church, turned to the wrong month, and beside it a child's drawing of a house with a smoking chimney and a family of four in front of it, three tall figures and one very small.

He sat at the table in his gray overcoat with his hat on his knee and the two black notebooks laid before him side by side, and said nothing at all.

"Tea?" said Marianne Hale.

"Thank you."

"It's Lapsang. You like Lapsang."

"I do not like Lapsang," said Stahl, "as you know perfectly well. I drink it because I am too proud to ask for anything else."

His sister laughed.

It was a small soft sound. She was thirty-five, plump and fair and slightly stooped, with a round face like a woman in a Dutch painting and the heavy, tired, kindly eyes of someone who has cried so long that crying has become a sort of weather. She wore a blue housedress. Her reading glasses hung on a cord. She moved about the little kitchen with the careful, practiced economy of a woman who has lived a long time in a space that was meant for two and has learned to make it enough for one.

She set a cup before him. She sat down opposite.

"You came to tell me something," she said.

"I did."

"You've been a week working up to it."

"Nine days."

"Emmerich." She laid a hand on his. It was warm and dry and entirely without hesitation. "I'm your sister. I've known you since I could talk. Whatever you did, it is already forgiven. You needn't make an occasion of it."

"That is the difficulty," said Stahl. "I wish to make an occasion of it. I do not think it is already forgiven. I think you have not been told."

She looked at him, steadily.

"Then tell me."

…

He told her.

He told it plainly, in his dry exact lecturer's voice, as he had once laid a case before a grand jury. He did not soften. He began with the night Dennis had died, and the file that was closed, and the grocery bag, and the judge's chambers. He told her the decision he had made on the steps of the courthouse afterward, with his license in ruins and his career behind him: that the law was a failed instrument and that he would look for a better.

He told her about Anselm Varga.

He told her how he had gone to work for a man he privately believed to be a murderer, and had sat for six years at his right hand, drafting his contracts, reading his post, learning his habits, with the single cold purpose of sharpening him. A gardener, he said. Training a vine. He told her how he had fed the man names. How he'd sent anonymous envelopes to a young reporter at a small newspaper, cream stock, blue-black ink, a single letter for a signature. How he had put a girl's name in front of his employer on a Tuesday, in a gray office, and said her family is very easy to buy.

He did not look up while he said it. He looked at his hands.

He told her about the two ledgers. He told her that he had known, for the whole of the last year, where the proof was kept. That it was in his coat. That he could have laid it before a federal prosecutor on any morning he chose and brought Hollis Brannock to account, and had not. Because to do it he would have had to give the second ledger, too, and the second held the name of a man who had stopped him from drowning in his own grief, and he had not been able to choose.

"I let it sit," said Stahl. "For two years. I told myself I was waiting for the right moment. In fact, I was waiting for permission."

"From whom?"

"From someone who was not me."

A long silence.

The kettle ticked. The cat stretched, and turned over, and slept again. And Marianne sat very still with her eyes on his face, and her hand on his, and he did not dare to look at her.

"Dennis died on a Tuesday," she said at last.

"Yes."

"He'd taken a ham sandwich. I'd put in an extra pickle."

"I know. Miss Halloran wrote it."

"I read it." Her voice was quiet. "I read it standing up in the kitchen. I didn't cry. I thought, someone has got it right. Someone has said exactly who he was." She drew a breath. "I thought it must have been you."

"It was not."

"No. I know. It was the girl." She smiled faintly. "But I thought, for a moment, that it was you. And that you'd found a way to tell me."

He bowed his head.

"Emmerich."

"Yes."

"You've been carrying this for two years."

"Yes."

"By yourself."

"I do not know how to do it any other way."

"No," said Marianne Hale gently. "You never did. You were the same as a boy. You'd break your arm and carry it home in your pocket." She tightened her fingers. "Look at me."

He looked.

Her face was wet. She was not weeping. It was only that the tears ran down, steadily, without sound, into the lines at the corners of her mouth, as water finds its way down a wall.

"I am not going to tell you that you did nothing wrong," she said. "You did a good deal wrong. You used a child to ruin a man. You used my husband's death as a tool. You kept the proof in your coat while other men died." Her voice did not shake. "I'm angry. I want you to know it. I'm very angry. I'll probably be angry for the rest of my life."

"That is only fair."

"It's not fair. It's true." She sniffed. "But you came here. You brought the books. You sat in my kitchen for an hour and told me to my face. And I think—" She stopped. "I think Dennis would have said that's the whole of what a man can do."

"He was a more generous person than I."

"He was an accountant," said Marianne. "He thought everything could be reconciled." She laughed, helplessly. "He'd have been so cross with you. He'd have made a column."

Stahl made a sound that was not a laugh.

He put his hand over his eyes.

…

They sat for a long time.

The sun went round the window. The kettle boiled dry and she rose and refilled it, moving quietly about the stove while he sat with his face in his hand and his shoulders, once or twice, shaking. She did not speak. When the water boiled she poured it, and set before him a cup of something other than Lapsang, and he drank it without a word.

"Which one is mine?" she said at last.

He looked up.

"The ledgers." She nodded at the table. "Two of them. One for each man. You didn't bring them to give to a prosecutor. You've done that. Perry Lindqvist has the Brannock book. He told me so himself." She touched the cloth cover of the nearer one. "You've brought them to me."

"I have."

"Why?"

"Because I do not know what to do with them."

"You want me to decide."

"I want—" He stopped. He tried again. "I want you to hold them. I want you to be the one who has them. I think I have been unfit to keep them for some time."

She picked up the first.

It was plain black, cloth-bound, with an elastic band. She turned back the cover, and glanced at the first page, which bore a column of dates in his upright hand. Her mouth tightened. She turned another page, and another. He watched her face as she read.

"This is Hollis's," she said.

"Yes."

"It's very long."

"Eighty-one payees. Eleven years."

"And it's all been used."

"Everything that could be proved in a court has been given to Mr. Lindqvist. The rest is background. Names of men who took small sums. A clerk. A customs inspector. A priest." He hesitated. "I have wondered whether it would be a kindness to burn it."

"You can't burn a record," said his sister. "You taught me that."

"I did."

"You said that a record, once made, is a debt to the people it describes." She closed the cover. "It doesn't matter if they're guilty. It doesn't matter if they're dead. It belongs to them, in a way. You can't just put it in a fire."

"No."

"So I'll keep it." She placed it on the shelf above the stove, between a jar of rice and a tin of flour. "For Ilse. When she's old enough. She ought to know what her father was up against."

He swallowed.

She picked up the second.

This one was thicker. The cloth was worn at the corners. A strip of masking tape on the spine bore, in his hand, a single word: V. She held it for a long moment in both hands, not opening it.

"This is the other."

"Yes."

"It has his name in it."

"Yes."

"And the girl's."

"As a witness," said Stahl. "Not as a party."

"What have you decided?"

"I have decided nothing. I have been unable to decide since I first began it. I have come to believe," he said slowly, "that the only person with the right to decide is the woman whose name it carries."

Marianne frowned.

"Linnea."

"Linnea Calder. Linnea Varga. She married in June, and her husband is eleven weeks into a sentence in a federal camp. She has already had one book placed in her hands this year that she could not bear to open." He drew a long breath. "I do not wish to hand her a second. I wish to hand it, instead, to someone she trusts, and who has no stake in it but love. And I wish that person to say: here is a thing that exists. It is yours. Do with it what you will."

"And if she says burn it?"

"Then it will burn."

"And if she says publish?"

"Then it will be published." A faint dry smile. "Miss Halloran has been telling me for some time that she would like to see it."

Marianne said nothing.

She held the book against her breast, and for a long, long moment looked at her brother, and her face did something he had not seen it do since she was seven years old and had fallen off a swing, and run to him, and he had said: there, there, you will not die of it.

"You do realize," she said, "that you're asking me to be your conscience."

"I am."

"I'm not a lawyer."

"No."

"I'm not an officer of the court. I'm a school librarian."

"You are the only person I know," said Emmerich Stahl, "who has never in her life done anything dishonest."

She started to laugh.

It broke out of her, a wet, startled, shaking laugh, and she put the book on the table and covered her mouth with both hands. The cat lifted its head. The little yellow kitchen rang with it, and in the middle of it, out of the sheer physical impossibility of remaining unmoved, Stahl found his own face contorting into an unaccustomed grimace.

"Oh, Emmerich," she gasped. "Oh, you idiot."

"I am aware."

"You absolute brilliant idiot. I once stole a pencil from Sister Agnes in the second grade, and I confessed it for thirty years!"

"I am glad to hear it."

"Take your tea."

He took his tea.

…

He left at five.

She walked him to the door, down the narrow stair and through the little vestibule smelling of floor wax and lilies, where a pair of child-sized rubber boots stood on a mat and a yellow raincoat hung from a hook. On the step she stopped him with a hand on his arm.

"Emmerich."

"Yes."

"Will you come to dinner on Sunday?"

He blinked.

"Ilse's making a cake. She's taken up baking. She says it's chemistry." Marianne's mouth trembled. "She's been asking after you. She said, where's Uncle Em? She said you promised her a story."

"I did."

"Then come."

"I am not certain I am entitled."

"No," said his sister. "You aren't. But you'll come anyway. That's what family is, you old fool. It's the people you're not entitled to."

He stood on the step in his gray overcoat with his hat in his hand.

It was a small dim street. The sun was low, lighting the tops of the hedges red, and a boy was dribbling a basketball somewhere out of sight. A woman called her dog. A radio played. It was an ordinary American evening in an ordinary neighborhood, and he stood in the middle of it, a tall thin gray figure with a heart that felt, for the first time in two years, like a thing with weight.

A decent thing, he thought, is not the same as a right one.

But it is perhaps the only kind available.

"What time?" he said.

"Six."

"Shall I bring something?"

"Bring the story," said Marianne Hale.

He bowed his head. Then he put on his hat, and turned, and walked down the steps and along the path between the hedges, and out into the amber light, with his umbrella furled over his arm.

It was not going to rain. He carried it anyway.

A man must have something to hold.