THAT NIGHT HE came out of sleep and a football-playing dream to hear an alarm clock ringing. No, it wasn’t that; an early riser even in winter, Nessheim had never needed an aural prompt and didn’t own one. What was it then? As he dimly re-entered the world – Stacey emitting a light snore beside him, the features of the bedroom gradually emerging – he realised that the phone was ringing down the hall in the kitchen.
He threw back the bedclothes and staggered out of the room, cursing the apartment’s former occupant, the Communist philosopher upstairs, for installing the phone in the kitchen at the very rear of the apartment. He hit the light switch in the hall and weaved past the dining-room table, then grabbed the phone.
‘Hello.’ He forced a crispness into his voice. At this hour – the kitchen clock said midnight – it had to be news of a death or disaster, unless some lush had dialled the wrong number.
‘Meester Nessheim, thank God you are there.’
Heavily accented English, a pantomime foreigner. ‘Who is that?’ he demanded, wondering if it was some kind of joke.
‘It’s Laura Fermi. I am so sorry to call, but Enrico is in Washington and I do not know what to do. I think there is someone upstairs at the very top of the house. They have been there for some time.’
‘Have you called the police?’
‘Police,’ she said, as if it were an odd suggestion. ‘No. Enrico would not allow it.’
What did that mean? ‘Are the kids all right?’
‘Yes. They are downstairs. You see, the door to the top floor is kept locked. But I am sure the person is there.’
‘Stay put. I’ll be right over.’
He put the phone down, wondering if he should call the cops – Enrico’s proscription be damned. But they might be slower than he was to respond, especially once they heard Laura’s accent. He went back quickly to the bedroom, where Stacey was sitting up with the bedside lamp on. ‘Who was that?’ She sounded scared.
He explained as he threw on his clothes. ‘Why she’s calling me and not the cops, I couldn’t tell you,’ he said crossly as he buttoned his shirt. ‘I gave Fermi the number here, but I didn’t expect to act as his wife’s bodyguard.’
He left his suit jacket but took his gun and holster from the closet, strapping it carefully around his shoulder. When he looked over, Stacey had got up and was getting dressed. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘I’m coming with you.’
He was putting on his shoes now. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. If there’s a burglar in their house, I don’t want you getting in the way.’
‘I’ll keep her calm while you flush out the bad guy. The kids know me now – I bet they’re scared to death.’
He didn’t have time to argue. He went out into the hall and took his heavy duffel coat from the closet. As he opened the front door he found Stacey just a step behind him, miraculously dressed, wearing the padded coat he bet she’d bought to make her look like a student.
Downstairs in the courtyard, he stopped for a moment, inhaling the dry cold air. ‘I’m not going to drive – it’s only a block away. I’ll see you there – I’m going to run now.’
He took off then in his street shoes, and almost came a cropper before he even reached the street, since he slid like a hockey puck on the packed icy snow. But soon he got the hang of it: he didn’t try to grip the ground with his feet, but floated, skated and flew along the sidewalk.
The night was quiet, windless, the only noise an occasional car slithering along 57th Street and the harsh yap of a little dog. Against the snow-white background of the Ray School playground, the stark branches of the elms looked like finely etched figures in a pen-and-ink drawing. As he ran he wondered what he would find when he got there. What kind of burglar stuck around when the occupants stirred in a house?
The Fermi house on Woodlawn Avenue was ablaze with light. A good sign. He ran up the front steps and as he stopped on the porch the door opened and Laura stood with her hand on her heart in relief. She had brushed her hair, but wore an old quilted housecoat that had lived on two continents, and a pair of oversized slippers.
He went through into the big front room where he had watched Stacey dance while the world’s leading physicists applauded. Now, standing at the back in the doorway to the kitchen were the two Fermi children, cute as bugs in their pyjamas and bathrobes. They both stared wide-eyed at Nessheim.
‘He is still there,’ Laura Fermi declared. ‘I heard noise from the room above our bedroom, at the front of the house on the high floor.’
‘Right.’ He unbuttoned his duffel coat but kept it on, not wanting to scare the kids with his gun. ‘I want you to stay down here with the children while I go upstairs. Is the door to the top floor still locked?’
‘Yes, here is the key.’ She handed it to him with a slight shiver. She looked very frightened.
‘Stacey is on her way.’
‘She is?’ She sounded as though Christmas had come early.
‘Yes, any minute now. Stay down here for now, okay?’
He went up the first flight of stairs and moved along the central corridor on the higher floor. Coming to the closed door that sealed off the staircase to the top floor, he stopped to listen for a moment. Nothing. He used the key to open the door, and in the darkness of the stairwell listened again. He heard only noises from downstairs and realised Stacey had arrived. He reached for a light switch and found it at the bottom of the dark stairwell. Kicking his shoes off, he drew the Smith & Wesson from its holster, then walked on tiptoe up to the top-floor landing.
There were two rooms towards the back of the house, their doors open. The front room, where according to Laura Fermi the noise had come from, was on his right. Its door was closed.
He stopped to think. If there were an intruder, would he be armed? Only if he had come to kill Fermi. But a hired killer would have forced his way downstairs by now. And if instead he was a burglar, he wouldn’t bring a gun, not unless he wanted triple the sentence if he got caught.
The more he considered it, the odder it seemed. Finally, out of sheer impatience, he walked to the door and flung it open, while he stood to one side, out of the line of fire.
Feeling a sudden blast of cold, he reached around the door frame and touched the Bakelite light switch. He pushed it on, simultaneously moving through the doorway, his gun held level in both hands. Quantico training.
There was no one there. The room was barely furnished: an iron bed against the far wall, a naked mattress on the springs; a single light bulb, in a papier-mâché lampshade that hung by a wire cord from the ceiling. There was also an old divan with a missing leg, a couple of side tables covered in dust, and a broken plate on the floor, which must have been knocked off one of the tables. The floor consisted of bare wooden boards, except for the centre of the room underneath the light, where two worn oriental rugs had been laid. One of them had a corner doubled up, exposing the boards beneath.
On the front side of the house a tall sash window was open a good ten inches at the bottom. He realised that was why the room was so cold. He walked to the window, pulled the upper half down and stuck his head outside. Looking up, he saw that the roof overhung the house, but no one could come down that way without falling off. Looking down, he saw it was a ten-foot drop from the window to the porch’s gable below; a tricky jump at the best of times, impossible with the snow packed on the porch’s roof. And that was just the way down; to climb up to the window would have required an acrobat of Olympic calibre, and a trampoline.
He pulled back into the room and closed the window. There was a sudden scratching noise not far from his feet, and he started in surprise, then looked down and found himself staring into two yellow eyes, big as marbles. They belonged to a massive tabby cat, as fat as a county-fair cabbage. It looked tetchily at Nessheim, who was satisfied now that he had identified the mysterious intruder: the cat must have nipped through the open window and roamed around the room, with a thump here (the plate), and a scratch there (the turned-up rug). Making enough racket on the resonant wooden floor to alert a nervy Laura Fermi to its presence.
Nessheim went and checked the other rooms, but found nothing there, other than a few empty suitcases and a packing crate. He went back to the room with the cat, who followed him as he opened the window again and then stood clear. After a moment’s hesitation, the cat suddenly leaped on to the sill, then jumped. Seconds later, as Nessheim closed the window for good, he saw it, lit by a street lamp, scamper across Woodlawn Avenue.
He headed towards the door, stopping to flip the ruffled rug back with his foot. As he stepped on to one of the exposed boards, its far end suddenly sprang up like a see-saw. In the cavity exposed beneath, between the underlying joists, he saw something red and green. Kneeling, he reached down and brought it out. It was a chamois pouch, the size of a baseball mitt, tied shut by a leather string. Untying the string, he turned the pouch upside down and shook out its contents.
Four wads of paper landed in succession on the floorboards. Each was bound by a gutta-percha band. He riffled all four; they were fifty-dollar bills, divided into equal stacks. He counted two hundred notes in one stack. That was ten grand. Times four and you had forty thousand dollars. Jesus Christ, he thought as he holstered his gun, that was a lot of dough for a working physicist.
Downstairs the two children were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking mugs of hot milk, while Laura Fermi and Stacey stood tensely by the stove.
As Nessheim came into the room he said, ‘I didn’t find anyone up there. Just a cat that must have come through the window. It had made a bit of a mess.’
‘Un gatto?’
When he nodded Laura clapped her hands in relief.
‘The kids can go back to bed now,’ he said. ‘It’s safe.’
‘I’ll help you,’ Stacey said to Laura, and the two women herded the children upstairs. When they came back down a few minutes later, Nessheim was waiting in the kitchen. Laura said, laughing, ‘I cannot believe all this was caused by one large cat.’
‘I did find something else.’
Nessheim put the pouch down on the kitchen table. Laura stared at it, as if a feared enemy had returned unexpectedly. Then she burst into tears.
Stacey looked mystified. ‘What have you found?’
He shook his head and waited for Laura to stop crying. ‘What is it?’ Stacey kept asking, until finally Laura wiped her eyes and looked at Nessheim.
He said, ‘I need to know where this came from.’
Stacey looked at him as if he were crazy, so he gestured at the pouch. ‘Go ahead – open it.’ She untied the leather string and reached in, then gasped as she extracted the first stack of bills.
‘I need to know where this came from,’ repeated Nessheim. ‘I’m just trying to do my job.’
Laura wiped her eyes with her fist. She said angrily, ‘That is what the man in Rome said when they confiscated my family’s properties because of the Jewish laws. I had known this man since I was tiny, but he said to me, “I am only doing my job. It is the law.” And we then left Italy with nothing. So now you say the same thing, and the government will say that too and take the money if they put us away.’
‘What do you mean, put you away?’
‘They put the Japanese in camps, and now some Germans and Italians too. Why not us?’
‘Because your husband is helping the United States.’
She gave this short shrift. ‘And if he cannot help? If he is sick and cannot work? So they put him on some small island with other Italians. What happens to this money then?’
‘If it’s your money then it would still be yours. But keeping it under the floorboards doesn’t seem the smartest thing to do. What if there had been a burglar and he’d found it?’
‘Enrico said it was safer than a bank.’
‘All right,’ he said, unwilling to argue, ‘but where did you get it from? You said you left Italy with nothing. This is a lot of money.’
Stacey had been listening quietly but now she said sharply to Laura, ‘You don’t have to answer that. It’s none of his business.’ She turned to him. ‘You’re not the IRS.’
He said firmly, ‘Why don’t you go check on the children, Stacey, and let me do my job?’
‘Why don’t you check on them instead?’ she said fiercely. ‘Look how upset she is. Stop bullying her.’
‘I’m not,’ he protested.
‘Is this part of your training? Softening up the suspects.’ He ignored her, saying to Laura, ‘I need to know where this comes from.’
‘Why –’ Stacey started to say, but Laura held her hand up. ‘It’s okay, I will tell you. The money is from the prize.’
‘What prize?’
Stacey interjected, ‘The Nobel Prize, you horse’s ass.’
Laura continued, ‘We collected the money in Stockholm, but did not return to Italy. The cheque was in kronor. When we got to New York, Enrico had it changed into dollars – and then into cash. He said it was our safe money. If something bad happened or we had to flee again, there was this money to use. He did not want anyone to know about it – he was scared it would be taken away from us.’
‘Why didn’t you say so right away?’
‘Because she was scared, Nessheim,’ said Stacey, as if Laura wasn’t standing there.
‘Scared of me?’
‘Scared of everything. They got out, but most people didn’t. You need to remember that.’