“Tell me,” she said. “Before I die of curiosity.”
Wonder if I can trust her? thought Johansson.
“Well,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t really know where I should begin.”
“Begin at the beginning,” she said, smiling even more broadly. “That’s always the easiest.”
Okay, thought Johansson and nodded. What do I really have to lose?
“It all begins with a shoe with a heel with a hole in it.”
“A shoe with a heel with a hole in it? You mean a shoe with a hollow heel?”
So that’s what it’s called, of course, thought Johansson.
“Hollow heel, yes,” said Johansson.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said with delight. “And I’ll bet it was on John’s foot.”
“Yes,” said Johansson and nodded. “It was, but that’s not the reason I’m here.”
Naturally that’s the pattern, thought Johansson a half hour later. You should always start at the beginning. He had told about the annoying little scrap of paper with his name, title, and home address that they had found in the hollow heel, about Krassner’s suicide, about Krassner’s letter that had gone astray and that he hadn’t yet been able to read, about the actual reason for his visit to the United States, about his own private reasons for now sitting on her couch. On the other hand, he hadn’t said a word about the worry that he had also felt.
She hadn’t said anything. Just listened and nodded while she let her tea stand, untouched. When he told about Krassner’s suicide she stopped smiling and contented herself with nodding now and then. Serious, attentive eyes.
“Well, I guess that’s all,” said Johansson, making an explanatory gesture with his hands.
“Good that you came here,” she said. “I’ve actually been trying to get hold of you.”
Heavens, things are moving fast here.
“You’ll be able to read his letter soon,” she said. “I’m afraid that it’s not especially enlightening, even if it does say quite a lot about John,” she added, smiling again.
“But first you were thinking of saying a little about yourself,” said Johansson.
“Exactly,” she said. “And all policemen aren’t stupid, are they?”
“Not all,” said Johansson, shaking his head.
Then she told about herself and about her ex-boyfriend John P. Krassner, and if she had done so in the same way during an ordinary police interrogation, she would have bestowed eternal and everlasting credit on her interrogator.
Sarah J. Weissman, J. for Judith, was born in 1955. She was an only child; her parents had been divorced for the past ten years. Her mother had remarried and lived in New York, where she was working as an editor. Her father was a professor of economics, and the house they were sitting in was his. Five years earlier he was granted a professorship at Princeton and his daughter had moved in temporarily until he decided whether to sell his house. And because he was still thinking, she had stayed.
“A typical Jewish family,” Sarah summarized, smiling broadly. “Not in that correct, tiresome way but rather more practically Jewish. You noticed the Christmas tree,” she said, and giggled. “Here it’s important to have a Christmas tree.”
“Yes,” said Johansson.
“And snow-shoveling,” she said. “My neighbor usually shovels for me, despite the fact that his wife yells at him, but now they’ve gone to Florida.”
“I can take care of that if you’d like,” said Johansson, for he had learned to do that even as a little boy. Both what he should say and how he should do it.
“I can certainly believe that,” she said, nodding, “but it will get warmer after the weekend so I think I’ll take a chance and wait.”
“What kind of work do you do yourself?” asked Johansson.
A little bit of everything, it appeared. Since she completed her degree in English and history at the university she had started working freelance for several book publishers in New York; it was her mother who had opened the door to that line of business, and her main activity the last few years had been collecting information and fact-checking.
“Both nonfiction and novels. Just now I’m working on a novel about the Civil War, by one of the publisher’s best-selling authors. The author is quite pleased with me. Refuses to work with anyone else.”
I can imagine that, thought Johansson.
“She’s even proposed,” said Sarah, giggling with delight. “So just now we’re having a little crisis.”
Then she suddenly became serious again.
“John,” she continued. “I’m going to tell about John, I promise to pull myself together.”
Then she told about John. It took only a quarter of an hour and when she was through, Johansson had put all the pieces in place. I wasn’t far off, he thought.
“Now you’ve pieced it together, right?” she asked, looking at him contentedly.
“Yes,” said Johansson and smiled reluctantly. “Now it makes more sense.”
“I saw that on your face at the start,” she said. “That you hadn’t really pieced it together.”
Sarah and John had met at the university. She was eighteen, young and inexperienced. He was two years older and, if one were to believe everything he said, which she did at that time, he was a very experienced and exciting young man besides. In addition he looked good, so when her parents separated, she responded by moving into a student apartment at the university with John.
“Dad really hated John,” she said delightedly, “and because I always loved my dad more than anyone else it was actually rather logical. That John and I moved in together, I mean. My dad is a very wise man,” she added, serious again. “He’s so wise that he’s actually never accomplished anything practical, and where John was concerned he was completely right.”
She sat silent a moment before she continued.
“John’s dad disappeared with another woman when John was very small, so he grew up with his mom and her brother. Uncle John. John was christened after his uncle; he was the one who became his father figure when he was growing up.”
“Yes,” said Johansson. What should I say? he thought.
“Two of those kind of shrewd, dishonest, really thirsty, and naturally prejudiced Irishmen. You can become a Jew for less,” summarized Sarah without the least hint of a smile. “His mom died from cirrhosis of the liver a few years after we’d met and her brother no doubt simply drank himself to death, if I may say so. He died last spring. He was a really horrid sort. He was a professor here at our own university, SUNY Albany, but they were forced to fire him in spite of the fact that he had a really special background and in spite of the fact that it was no doubt our own government that paid his salary.”
“Why is that?” said Johansson. What does she mean? he thought.
“I’m getting to that,” said Sarah calmly.
The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, and if that was due to inheritance or environment or a little of each was actually uninteresting because either way she was the one who had to suffer. Young John had a great amount of knowledge, to a small degree factual but in everything essential fictional. He’d been involved in one thing after another and borrowed almost everything from other people, and mostly from his uncle.
She figured that out quite soon after they moved in together, and then it had only gotten worse. Already that first year, although he was still so young, he had started drinking heavily like the Irishman he was and smoking even more, and finally he hit her, for that’s what a real man did when she talked back.
“That was why I broke up with him,” she said, looking seriously at Johansson. “He hit me good and hard and afterward I thanked God for every punch. Then I broke up with him. Although it took more than two years.”