“If you’d like me to,” I said.
“What do you think?” she replied.
THE DRIVING RANGE was in a semi-rural part of Houston where urbanization had not had its way. The late nineteenth century was still visible, including pastureland and clumps of live oaks wilting in a savannah and a general store and saloon with a wide gallery that had barrels of pecans on it in the season. Mr. Epstein’s “club” was a former American Legion bar now owned collectively, mostly by men who had served in World War II. It was dark and cool inside and smelled of tap beer and cheese and heavily seasoned smoked meats. The ceiling was made of stamped tin and hung with wood-bladed fans. The bartender told me Mr. Epstein was in the men’s room and that I could wait at the bar and have a soft drink if I wanted.
It was a strange setting, a hybrid one that seemed disconnected from the Texas where I had grown up. There were newspapers printed in Hebrew attached to poles along one wall, and tables for dominoes and cards and chess games, and a long glass case filled with athletic trophies, an inflatable flight vest, a Flying Tiger jacket, a photo of the Times Square celebration on V-J Day, an Israeli flag, a shot of French paratroopers coming down in a rice paddy.
One photo reached out to me like a fist in the face. Six men dressed in military fatigues without insignias, all of them bearded and wearing flop hats, stood with their arms over one another’s shoulders in front of a burned tank, a sand dune in the background. The man in the center was Mr. Epstein. The man next to him was either a look-alike or in reality someone I had hoped I would never see again, even in a photo. At the bottom, someone had written “Palestine, 1947.”
I felt rather than saw Mr. Epstein standing behind me.
“Valerie called and said you were on your way,” he said. “Want to sit down in a quiet corner?”
“Is that you in the photograph?” I tried to smile.
He squinted at the glass case. “That’s me.”
“You were in the Israeli-Palestinian war?”
“I popped in and out a couple of times. Nothing to write home about.”
“The man next to you looks like my metal-shop teacher.”
“Yeah, that’s old Krauser. He was quite a character.” Mr. Epstein sat in a booth and waited for me to sit down across from him, his attention occupied with everything in the room except me. “What’s on your mind?”
I tried to suppress the vague sense of resentment I always felt around Mr. Epstein; he seemed to suggest that others were supposed to adjust to his perception of the world, his experience, his knowledge.
“Mr. Krauser was one of the worst people I ever knew,” I said.
“He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea.”
“He was OSS?”
“For a while.”
“In my opinion, he should have been on the other side.”
“With the Krauts?”
“No, with the Nazis,” I said.
“What do you know about Nazis?”
“They’re bullies. Like Krauser. They feed on the weak.”
“Nazi scientists built our intercontinental missiles,” he said.
He went into a digression about Operation Paperclip and the missile program in Redstone, Alabama, his gaze roving around the room. Then he stopped and picked at his hands as though he had given me more time than he’d intended.
“Mr. Epstein, Valerie said you went off somewhere with a grease gun and then came home and said, ‘All this is going to pass.’ What is ‘all this,’ sir?”
“I talked with a couple of people.” He paused to see if his meaning had settled in. “I mean I ‘talked’ with them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“People who work for the Atlas family?”
“I didn’t say who they worked for.”
“You ‘talked’ to them in a way they won’t forget?”