At that moment I was writing a letter to my contact, Bertrade le Claire. It was Bertrade who had worked a magic to shield me.
An intruder would see her image, her long dark hair, beautiful wide eyes—a face that seemed like something off a movie screen. She wore a jacket of red and gold and a look that said, “Step back!” She was a law officer in the Kingdom beneath the Hill.
The letter I was writing concerned new clients, the Beyers, a couple from Menlo Park, New Jersey. He worked for an insurance company; she taught Sunday school. In my office, she talked, he studied the photos I keep on my wall, and they both clung to hope and the arms of their chairs.
They were the parents of Hilda, a junior at Rutgers and currently a missing person. Hilda, who, according to her mother, was a sensitive girl who wrote poetry, was due to graduate in June of 1952 and become an English teacher. She’d had a few boyfriends over the years, but nothing serious as far as anyone knew. Not the kind of young lady to run off on a whim. But four months back, it seemed that she had.
While his wife talked, Mr. Beyer looked at the signed photo of Mayor La Guardia with His Honor mugging for the camera as he shook my hand and thanked me for civilian services to New York City during the Second War to End All Wars.
The one where I’m getting kissed by Marshal Foch, I leave in the drawer, because some guys in this neighborhood might get the wrong idea.
But I display Douglas MacArthur, executive officer of the Rainbow Division in 1918, pinning a Distinguished Service Cross on the tunic of a soldier on crutches. I’m not that easy to make out. But Colonel MacArthur, with his soft cap at a jaunty angle and a riding crop under his arm, you’d recognize anywhere. I figure it’s got to be worth something that I served under Dugout Doug and lived to tell about it.
Mrs. Beyer told me how the New Jersey cops couldn’t find a lead on Hilda. After other private eyes struck out, my name came up.
Mrs. Beyer paused, then said, “We have heard that she could have gone to another . . . ,” and trailed off.
“. . . realm,” I offered and she nodded. “It’s possible,” I said. Mr. Beyer’s eyes widened at hearing a man who’d been decorated by MacArthur say he believed in fairies.
After that we closed the deal quickly. My initial fee is $250. It’s stiff, but I think I’m worth it, especially since I wore my good suit and a fresh starched shirt for the occasion. I didn’t promise them their daughter back. I did promise I’d do everything I could to find her. On their way out, I shook hands with him. Put my left hand on hers for reassurance.
Playing baseball as a kid, I was a switch hitter, and I could field and throw with both my right and my left. I even learned to write with either hand. These days, the left’s the only thing about me that still works the way everything once did. And I tend to save it for special occasions.
In the Beyers’ presence I walked tall. But I still have metal fragments in my knee. With the clients gone I limped a bit on my way back to the desk.
I took a sheet of paper and a plain envelope out of the desk, stuck in a high-school-yearbook photo of Hilda, scribbled a few lines about the case, dated and signed it. Then I felt the intrusion and added the P.S.: “Some stray elf or fairy just got into my memories.” On the envelope I wrote Bertrade’s full name and her address in the Kingdom.
The phone rang and a woman said, “Sam,” and nothing more. She sounded tired, flat.
“Annie.” Anne Toomey is the wife of my buddy Jim. He and I were in France together. “How’s Jimmy?” Since she was calling I knew the answer. Knew what she was going to ask.
“Not feeling great, Sam. We wondered if you could handle the Culpepper case today.”
“We” meant that Anne was doing this on her own.
“Sure I’ll do it. Nothing changed from Jim’s report yesterday, right?”
“You’re a saint, Sam.”
I picked up the phone and dialed the Up to the Minute Answering Service. Gracie was on duty. Behind her I could hear half a dozen other girls at switchboards.
“Doll,” I said, “I’ll be out for most of the afternoon. Anyone wants me, I’ll be back after six.”
Under her operator voice, Gracie talks Brooklyn like the Queen speaks English. “Be careful, you,” she said. She gets her ideas of private detectives from paperback novels.
We’ve never met. Going down in the elevator, I thought of Gracie as being maybe in her midthirties—which seems young to me now. I imagined her as blond and nicely rounded, sitting at the switchboard in a revealing silk robe.
I imagined the other Up to the Minute ladies sitting around similarly dressed. This is the privilege of a divorced and decorated veteran who once got kissed by a French field marshal.
My office is on the fifth floor. With a couple of errands to do, I crossed the vestibule and stepped outside. They tore down the elevated line before World War II, but better than a decade later, Sixth Avenue still looked naked in the October afternoon sunlight.
Across the way, the women’s prison stood like a black tower as all around it, paddy wagons unloaded their cargo. Some parents find out their daughters have run off to Fairyland. Others discover them at the Women’s House of Detention.
They use the old Jefferson Market courthouse next door to the prison as the police academy now. Sergeant Danny Hogan was showing a couple of dozen cadets in their gray-and-green uniforms how to write out parking tickets. Hogan and I did foot patrol in the old Fourteenth Precinct back when we were both starting out. He spotted me and rolled his tired eyes.
As I headed towards the subway, I saw the headlines and front pages of the afternoon papers. My old pal MacArthur had landed at Inchon a couple of weeks before. Maps of the Korean Peninsula showed black arrows pointing in all directions.
On the subway stairs, I felt something like the opposite of forgetting. A stray sprite with nothing better to do had tried to probe me. The mental image of Bertrade appeared and whatever it was immediately broke contact. I continued down the stairs, stuck a dime in the slot, and got on the uptown A train.
Early in life I heard about fairies. My mother’s mother saw leprechauns in the coal cellar and elves under the bed. Mostly I ignored her once I turned into a hard guy at the age of eight.
My mother was born and raised in the Irish stretch of Greenwich Village. She learned stenography, got a job in an import-export office, and married late. Sam Grant Senior was part Irish and not very Catholic. He had been on the road as a salesman for many years before my mother forced him to settle down. I was the only kid.
I remember my old man a little sloshed one night, telling me about having been on the night train to Cincinnati with “the crack women’s-apparel salesman on that route.” This guy was very smashed and told the old man how he’d gone down the path to Fairyland when he was young, stayed there for a few years, learned a few tricks. My father told me, “He said some of the ones there could read your mind like a book.”
I heard about the Kingdom beneath the Hill a few more times over the years. As a legend, it was slightly more believable than Santa Claus and a bit less likely than the fabled speakeasy that only served imported booze.
Then almost ten years ago, an elf almost killed me, and a couple of fairies saved my life. One of them was Bertrade.
The two errands I had were within a few blocks of each other. I rode the A train up to Penn Station and used the exit on Thirty-Third and Eighth. First I went to the General Post Office. The place is like a mail cathedral. I climbed the wide stairs, and my knee complained.