The Man Who Kept Two Books

The parking garage on Ninth Street was six levels of cold concrete, and Greer Halloran had been standing in its east stairwell for fifty-one minutes when the man in the gray overcoat came up out of the dark.

She heard him before she saw him. A measured tread on the steps below, unhurried, ascending, with the faint tap of a cane or an umbrella on every third stair. Her heart lunged. She backed against the cinder-block wall with her bag clutched to her chest and her thumb on the button of a can of pepper spray she had bought at a drugstore in a state of fury at eleven that night. The stairwell lamp buzzed. A moth was beating itself to pieces against the bulb.

The footsteps stopped on the landing.

"Miss Halloran," said a voice. "Please do not use that. I have a great respect for your aim, and no desire to test it."

She stared.

He stood at the turn of the stair, in the gray overcoat, with a long pale scarf and rimless glasses, and a furled black umbrella hooked over his forearm. He was tall and spare and perhaps forty-six. He had a narrow, intelligent, weary face. The face from the photographs she'd taken in October, through the windshield of her Corolla, outside a grain warehouse in Red Hook.

"You're Stahl," she said.

"I am."

"You work for Varga."

"Also true." He inclined his head. "Mrs. Varga asked me to collect you. She woke her husband at eleven-fourteen. I am told that she did not tell him why. She said a single word, and he reached for the telephone." A faint, dry something moved at the corner of his mouth. "I have been in my profession for a great many years, Miss Halloran. I have never seen a man cross a room so fast."

Greer's knees nearly went.

"Linnea said," she began, and her voice broke, and she tried again. "She said she was coming herself."

"She would have. Mr. Varga prevented her. He pointed out that a woman in a stone house in the Hudson Valley, in a thunderstorm, without a vehicle, was of limited use, while a man who lived eleven minutes from your garage was of considerable." He took a handkerchief from his coat and wiped the damp from his glasses. "He also pointed out, with some force, that if she went, she would be followed. And that a person being followed is a person who leads the follower to the thing they are protecting. She understood the argument. She hated it. She hung up on him."

A shaky laugh escaped her. "That sounds like her."

"It is the most Calder thing I have ever heard." He replaced the glasses. "Come. The sedan at the foot of the ramp is not mine. I would prefer to be elsewhere when it decides what it is."

…

They went out through a service door and an alley that smelled of grease and wet cardboard. He walked fast for a man of his years. She had to trot. Rain hissed in the gutters. At the far end of the lane, a small gray Volvo, ten years old, with a dent in the fender, sat with its lights off and its engine running, and he held the door for her like a doorman at a good hotel.

She got in. He got in. He pulled out without turning on the headlights until they were around the corner.

"Where are we going?"

"A flat in Windsor Terrace. It belongs to a woman who owes me nothing, and who has not asked a single question." The wipers beat. "You will sleep. In the morning we will talk. I think you have a number of things to say to me."

"I have one," said Greer.

"Which is?"

"You've been sending me things."

She said it quietly. It had come to her in the stairwell, around minute thirty, in the dank dark with the moth against the bulb, and she had not wanted to look at it. The envelopes. Eleven of them, over six months, arriving at the Dispatch with no return address: a photograph of a port authority memo, a typed list of shipping dates, a Xerox of a Coast Guard report that had been officially lost. Always on cream stock. Always with a small, dry, precisely typed note: For your attention. Verify independently. And a signature that was not a signature, only a single letter, in blue-black ink. H.

Not for Halloran. She'd always assumed that.

For Hale.

The wipers beat on. Stahl drove with both hands on the wheel, staring at the rain.

"I will answer all of it," he said, "in daylight."

…

The Brooklyn Central Library at ten in the morning is a vast limestone temple on Grand Army Plaza, with a gilded door and a lobby the size of an airplane hangar, and the Magazines Reading Room on its third floor has long oak tables and green lamps and the air of a place where nobody has ever been murdered.

He had chosen it deliberately. She understood that by the second sentence. A hundred witnesses. Cameras in the corners. A public room in which no one could do anything but whisper.

They sat at the end of the farthest table, with a stack of old newspapers between them and cups of tea he had carried up from the café. Greer had slept four hours on a stranger's sofa. Her hair was a mess. She had on yesterday's clothes and a borrowed cardigan, and the can of pepper spray was in her pocket, and she felt strangely light, like a person who has been told that the worst has already happened.

Stahl took off his gloves. He laid them on the table, one on the other.

"Dennis Hale," he said, "was married to my sister."

She had known. She had known since the stairwell. It still went through her like a blade.

"Marianne is eleven years my junior. I raised her, after our parents died, in a flat in Queens. When she was twenty-six she met a quiet man with glasses who did not drink and who read the whole of Middlemarch aloud to her on their second date. I walked her down the aisle." He turned his cup a quarter turn. "I was a federal prosecutor then. I was proud of it. I believed that the law was a mechanism for taking the world as it was and making it as it ought to be. I was perhaps the most insufferable man in the Eastern District."

"What happened?"

"Dennis died." He said it without inflection. "And I reviewed the file. And I was told by my superior that the matter was not worth pursuing. That the autopsy was inconclusive. That my interest was personal, and therefore inappropriate." A pause. "I did not take it well. I took a case file from the office, which is a crime, and I made copies of the evidence room, which is a greater one, and I walked into a judge's chambers with the whole bundle in a grocery bag and said something that cost me my license."

"I'm sorry."

"I am not. I would do it again." The pale eyes lifted. "I told you in the stairwell that I would answer everything, Miss Halloran. I should like to start with the part that you will find it hardest to forgive."

She waited.

"I am the one who put her name in front of him."

…

The reading room was very quiet. Somewhere, a page turned. A radiator hissed.

"I don't understand," Greer said.

"Of course you do. You are the cleverest person I have dealt with in four years who is not named Calder." He did not look away. "I had worked for Anselm Varga for four years already, as his counsel. Not out of loyalty. Out of calculation, and I told myself it was only a living. Then, two years ago, my sister buried her husband, and the calculation changed. I had a theory. I believed that Hollis Brannock had killed my brother-in-law, and that the only man in the city powerful enough to destroy Brannock was the man who hated him most. I wished to put a weapon in a hand. I did not much care whose."

"A weapon."

"Anselm. I fed him. Names, dates, shipping schedules. I drafted his contracts and read his mail. I made him a better enemy for Hollis, year by year, as a gardener trains a vine." His voice did not change. "And at the same time I have been giving the Dispatch a thread, now and then, to pull. Because Anselm is a gun, and a gun is a clumsy instrument, and I should like, in the end, to have the matter proved in a court. By someone who is not afraid of the paper."

"You've been using both of us."

"Yes."

"Me and him."

"And a third." He folded his hands. "A girl who wrote the finest sentencing memorandum I have ever read, whose father worked for Varga for nine years and for Brannock for twenty-five, and whose father's name, as I discovered in the course of a long and miserable week, was written in my brother-in-law's own handwriting on the key to a locker. I went to Anselm with the memorandum. I said: This is the author. She is exactly what we require. And then, God forgive me, I said: Her family is very easy to buy."

The air had gone out of the room.

"You knew," said Greer. "You knew what he'd do with it. You handed her over."

"I told him that she was a lever. That is the word I used. I did not think of her as a person. I thought of her as a clause." His mouth twisted. "I know better now. I know that I handed a young woman to a man like Anselm Varga on a tray, and that she has paid for it every day since October, and that I will carry it as long as I live."

She was shaking. She hadn't known she was going to. Her hands had curled into fists on the table, and a hot, ugly, sobbing fury was rising in her throat, and she wanted to hit him, and she wanted to go on listening.

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because Hale's daughter is thirteen years old. Because the only person who has ever tried to prove what happened to her father is sitting across from me with a can of pepper spray in her pocket." He leaned forward. "And because Pell is dead, and your apartment has been turned over by Wick's men, and the time for gardening is over. I have kept two ledgers, Miss Halloran. One for each of them. Every sin that Anselm Varga has committed in six years, dated, annotated, with the evidence. And one for Hollis Brannock, which is longer. I have never known which to burn and which to publish."

"And now?"

"Now I think it is for someone else to decide." He put his hand inside his coat. "I should like to give you the second."

…

It was a plain black notebook, the size of a hardback novel, with a cloth cover and an elastic band. He laid it on the table between them. She did not touch it.

"It is the one on Brannock," said Stahl. "I will give you the other when you have shown me what you can do with this one."

"Why not the other now?"

"Because the other contains the name of the woman you love." He saw her face change. "No, Miss Halloran. She is not in it as a criminal. She is in it as a witness. Everything she has seen in that house, everything she has said into that ridiculous pen. A great deal of it would hang him." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "I should like to know first which of them she intends to save."

Greer sat without breathing.

She understood, at last, what he was asking. Not a favor. Not information. A judgment. He was a man who had spent his whole life in the service of a theory, and had come to the end of it, and had put the instrument into the hands of the one person who had no stake in the answer but love.

"You want me to decide," she said.

"I want you to be there when it is decided."

She picked up the notebook. It was lighter than she'd expected. She held it for a moment against her chest, and the leather smelled of tea and tobacco and old paper. She nodded, once.

"Okay."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I haven't forgiven you."

"No." The ghost of a smile. "I hope you will not. It would make me suspicious."

She almost laughed. She did not. She reached for her tea, found it cold, drank it anyway. The sun had come out in the high windows, throwing long gold bars across the oak, and the whole beautiful room hummed with its silence, and she thought: Marianne Hale is his sister. Dennis Hale was his brother-in-law. And I have been writing the wrong man's name on a corkboard for three years.

She looked out through the tall arched window.

Grand Army Plaza lay below, white and gold and wet, with its great arch, its fountain, its crowd of tourists and dog-walkers and mothers with strollers. Cars circled the oval in a slow river. And across the street, parked at the curb in front of the Botanic Garden entrance, was a long black sedan.

She didn't recognize it at first. She was looking at the driver, a big man in a dark coat, gray at the temples, with a face like a closed door. He had a newspaper unfolded over the wheel. He wasn't reading it. His head was turned, very slightly, toward the library.

She had seen him before. In a diner, in January, two tables from the cash register.

"Mr. Stahl," said Greer.

"Yes?"

"Is that Varga's security man?"

He looked.

She watched it happen. She watched the color drain from the narrow face, all at once, like water from a tipped basin. He sat absolutely still, his hand flat on the oak, and for the first time since she had known him he looked old, and frightened, and very much a man who has just done his arithmetic wrong.

"That is Ruddick," he said, very quietly.

"Is he supposed to be here?"

"No," said Emmerich Stahl. "No, Miss Halloran. He is not."