Ira Levin - Boys from Brazil

He got down off the stepladder, backed away, and studied the three checks over his glasses.

Yes, they would do.

He climbed back up on the stepladder and painted checks in the boxes of Runsten—Schweden—22/10/74 , and Rausenberger—Deutschland—22/10/74 , and Goodwood—England—24/10/74 , and Oste—Holland—27/10/74 .

He got back down and took another look.

Very nice. Seven red checks.

But hardly any pleasure at all.

Damn Rudel! Damn Seibert! Damn Liebermann! Damn everybody!

Pandemonium, that was what he came back to. Glanzer the landlord, who would have made a marvelous anti-Semite if not for the fact that he was Jewish, shouted accusations at a trembling little Esther while Max and a gawky young woman Liebermann had never seen before pushed at Lili’s desk, forcing it toward the corner by the bedroom door. A musical pinging and plopping came from pots and bowls that sat everywhere catching water-drops that fell from dark wetnesses all over the ceiling. A piece of crockery smashed in the kitchen—“Oh rats! ” (that was Lili in there)—and the phone rang. “Aha!” Glanzer cried, turning, pointing. “Now comes the big world figure who doesn’t care about the average man’s property. Don’t put that suitcase down, the floor won’t take it! ”

“Welcome home,” Max said, hauling at an end of the desk.

Liebermann put his suitcase down, and his briefcase. He had expected, because it was Sunday morning, a quiet, empty apartment. “What happened?” he asked.

“What happened?” Glanzer squeezed toward him between the backs of two desks, his bulbous face fire-red. “I’ll tell you what happened! We had a flood upstairs, that’s what happened! You overload the floor, you put strain on the pipes! So they break! You think they can take this load you’ve got here?”

“The pipes upstairs break and I’m to blame?”

“Everything’s connected!” Glanzer shouted. “Strain is transmitted! The whole house ’ll come down because of the overloading you’ve got here!”

“Yakov?” Esther held out the phone with a hand on its mouthpiece. “A man named von Palmen, in Mannheim. He called last week.” A wisp of gray hair stuck out from under the side of her red-brown wig.

“Get the number, I’ll call him back.”

“I just broke the pink bowl,” Lili said, standing mournfully in the kitchen doorway. “Hannah’s favorite.”

“Out!” Glanzer shouted, on top of Liebermann, spewing bad breath. “All these desks go out! This is an apartment house not an office building! And the file cabinets too, out!”

“ You go out!” Liebermann shouted just as loud—the best way to deal with Glanzer, he had found. “Go fix your rotten plumbing! This is my furniture, desks and file cabinets! Does it say in the lease only tables and chairs?”

“You’ll find out in court what it says in the lease!”

“ You’ll find out what you pay for this water damage! Get out! ” Liebermann thrust a finger toward the door.

Glanzer blinked. He looked at the floor beside him as if hearing something, looked at Liebermann worriedly, nodded. “You bet I’m getting out,” he whispered. “Before it happens.” He tiptoed his bulk toward the open door. “My life is more precious to me than my property.” He tiptoed out, and drew the door cautiously closed.

Liebermann stamped on the floor and called, “I’m stamping on the floor, Glanzer!”

From a distance came “Fall through!”

“Yakov, don’t,” Max said, touching Liebermann’s arm. “We’re liable to.”

Liebermann turned. He looked around, and up, and let out a woeful “Ei, yei, yei ” and bit his lower lip.

Esther, stretching to wipe at the top of a file cabinet, said, “We caught it early, it’s not that bad. Thank God I baked this morning. I brought over a nut cake. When I saw what was doing I called Max and Lili. It’s just in here and the kitchen, not the other rooms.”

Max introduced the gawky young woman, who had beautiful large gray eyes; she was his and Lili’s niece Alix from Brighton, England, staying with them on her vacation. Liebermann shook her hand and thanked her for helping, and took his coat off and joined in the work.

They wiped the desks and furniture, replaced full pots and bowls with emptied ones, held towel-covered brooms to the wet places in the ceiling.

Then, sitting at desks and the accessible half of the sofa, they had coffee and cake. The leaks had dwindled to half a dozen slow trickles. Liebermann talked about the trip a little, about old friends he had visited, changes he had seen. Alix, in halting German, answered questions from Esther about her work as a textile designer.

“A lot of contributions, Yakov,” Max reported, nodding his gray head solemnly.

Lili said, “Always after the Holy Days.”

“But more this year than last, darling,” Max said, and to Liebermann: “People know about the bank.”

Liebermann nodded and looked to Esther. “Did anything come for me from Reuters? Reports? Clippings?”

“There’s a Reuters envelope,” Esther said, “a big one. But it says Personal.”

“Reports?” Max asked.

“I spoke to Sydney Beynon before I left. About the Koehler boy’s story. There wasn’t anything about him , was there?”

They shook their heads.

Esther, rising with her cup and saucer on her plate, said, “It can’t be true, it’s too crazy.” She moved to Max’s desk. Lili rose, gathering her plates, but Esther said, “Leave everything, I’ll clean up. You go show Alix the sights.”

Liebermann thanked Max and Lili and Alix as they put on their coats. He kissed Lili, shook hands with Alix and wished her a happy vacation, patted Max on the back. When he had closed the door after them, he picked up his suitcase and carried it into the bedroom.

He went to the bathroom, took his twelve-o’clock pills, hung his other suit in the closet, and exchanged his jacket for his sweater and his shoes for his slippers. With his glasses in his hand he went back into the living room, picked up his briefcase, and went around and between desks toward the French doors to the dining room.

Esther said from the kitchen doorway, “I’ll stick around and keep an eye on the dripping. Do you want me to get that man in Mannheim?”

“Later,” Liebermann said, and went into the dining room—his office now.

The desk was heaped with magazines and stacks of opened letters. He put the briefcase down, switched the lamp on, put on his glasses; moved a stack of letters from several large envelopes beneath. He found the gray Reuters envelope, hand-addressed, bulkily full. So many?

Sitting, he cleared everything else out of the way, pushed piles of mail to the sides and back of the desk. Hannah’s picture turned; magazines slapped the floor.

He unwound the envelope’s string fastener and tore the taped flap open. Tilting the envelope to green blotter, he shook out, pulled out, a mass of newspaper clippings and teletype tear-offs. Twenty, thirty, more, some of them photocopies, most quick-scissored patches of newsprint. Mann getötet in Autounfall; Priest Slain by Robbers; Eldsvåda dödar man, 64 . Blue and yellow labels with dates and the names of newspapers were pasted to some of the clippings. A good forty items altogether.

He looked into the envelope and found two more small clippings and a sheet of white paper that had been folded around the whole bundle.

Keep me posted , it said in small neat handwriting at its center. S.B. Dated 30 Oct .

He put it aside along with the envelope, and spreading the clippings and tear-offs with both hands, opened them out to greater visibility, a layered patchwork of French, German, English—and Swedish, Dutch, others, indecipherable except for a word here and there. Död was surely tot and dead . “Esther!” he called.