NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
I turn left off Oval Street on to Bails Lane past Diddlie’s on the corner. Crows keep up a lively chat in the branches of a bare sycamore outside Rank Major’s place ahead, and near the highest point in Fauxmont. Dr. Wittgenstein’s house next door can only be seen from the road in winter, when leaves fall from pin oaks under the power lines that cross the hedgerow surrounding his property. The power company keeps cutting the branches back and they look like old coppiced oaks. Four square walls are visible through the branches beyond the curvy driveway, set back from one another; two stucco and one faced with vertical boards and one with horizontal boards. Each is a different height and has its own overhanging flat roof. A single rectangular window is off set to the left on the right hand pair and off set to the right on the pair to the left. From here his house looks like four huts in a small village. Diddlie calls it the ‘cross eyed house’.
Holly, juniper, and a patch of bamboo also shade his perimeter. A pickup marked ‘Women’s Wells Cooperative’ blocks Dr. W.’s driveway. Before the property was developed, his driveway used to be another, even narrower lane called Mid Off which led off through the woods to Wicket Street at the mid point along its length. The old Mid Off sign can still be seen leaning into a thicket at the Wicket street end. The truck’s right hand door is crushing juniper branches hard against the driver’s window and they hang over the dented newly painted cherry-red hood. Lights blink on each side of the bent tailgate. The growl and click of the diesel drowns out everything but the crows as I get close enough to notice a flat front tire.
A woman’s voice yells from the pickup at someone in the grounds. The door slams on the other side of a big white truck with a circular logo on the door. A single water drop pictured in brilliant blue with star shaped highlight. The Coop’s Vienna Virginia address is printed in a yellow semicircle beneath. A fair-haired woman leans out the window backing the big truck loaded with drill-pipe further into the property. Her thick hair is wound up on top of her head, flat and compact with a loose strand flying like a pennant above her ear. Some shrubs are cleared and several small trees are cut down, and you can see from the gate how they have planned the approach to avoid cutting down a large hornbeam or any of the mature post oaks nearby.
It was announced in the Community newsletter last year; “Dr. Wittgenstein has donated a thousand square feet of ground on the old Mid Off lane, now his driveway, for a new community well.”
The pickup’s engine is turned off and the driver gets out as I approach.
“You need any help with that?”
The driver moves toward the tire and bends down to look. “I can take care if it.” Her faded black jeans stretch across wide flat hips as she bends down, examines the valve and runs a hand around the tire.
“We often get flats up here. Looks like this one may be another bad valve stem.” She gets up and looks at me with a grin. “Hi, I am Eddie Carnap.” She rubs her hands together. The dirt is still there from examining the tire and she pulls back form a hand shake. Eddie is tall with big shoulders rounding out the contour of her faded crimson hoody. “Haven’t seen you around before. Have you just moved in to the neighborhood?”
“Yes, I am, Fred Bloggs.”
“Okay you must be Lou Waymarsh’s friend.” Eddie brightens.
“Yeah, Lou told me about you, well, that he was looking forward to having you here in Fauxmont.”
“Eddie, you seem to be well connected around here.”
“I went the Fauxmont preschool. Do you know Arty Bliemisch?”
“Yes, Steve Strether introduced me right after I moved in.”
“We were there together.”
“She is doing interesting work. Have you kept up?”
“We did until she went to Italy, then we lost track of each other. We moved up to New England when I was in seventh grade, but Arty and I did email for a while.”
“Have you ever met Wittgenstein?”
“No, but I have heard a lot about him.”
“Same here, seems like no has seen him.”
“Dr. Wittgenstein isn’t really the owner Fred. So he probably isn’t the donor of this ground, as you have may have heard. I have also heard that he has the place on loan from a friend who is seldom around either.”
“Oh, do you mean Derwent Sloot?”
“No, but I know him too. He tried to teach me chess. Derwent told me Wittgenstein isn’t really a doctor. There’s a story that they used to meet at the Pie Shop all the time, and often got into heated discussions.”
“Yes Mrs. Rutherford mentioned that. They had a falling out in the late eighties and Derwent now claims he doesn’t know the man.”
“Fred, I have also heard Derwent Sloot say Wittgenstein is a boat builder. You may also hear he is, or was, a physician, and an architect, even a philosopher, and that he is over a hundred.”
“From Derwent?”
“Oh from various people. Seems like every one around here has a story about him.”
“Eddie, Derwent told me Wittgenstein is bewitched. Not like a witch, but bewitched by language, what ever that means.”
The big truck engine sputters and shuts down and within moments the sound of a blue Jay’s shriek breaks what seemed like an extraordinarily quiet. The blond woman appears behind Eddie in gum boots, jeans and a heavy brown corduroy jacket. She looks into Eddie’s truck, pulls a clipboard out through the open window and starts reading the attached papers. “That’s Olga Hahn, Fred.” Edie doesn’t turn to look at her. Olga nods in my direction and her pennant flies up, while her eyes scarcely leave the page she is reading. She has a square face with Roman nose. Eddie carries on as if Olga had never appeared.
“Apparenly Mrs. Rutherford heard enough of one their discussions to drive her crazy. She got carried away telling me about it anyway, saying, ‘I never thought I would hear two grown men get so upset about whether or not there was a rhinoceros in the room’ and after that, Mrs. R. started giggling uncontrollably. She said they were expecting another friend called Russell, but he never showed. “I’ll bet his ears were burning.” Mrs. Rutherford kept repeating that and got breathless.
“She must have been bewitched herself.”
“Quite possibly Fred. I sat her down to calm her, and she gave me a free coffee. While she was making it she also told me after that incident Wittgenstein ignored Derwent and read poetry in silence when ever they sat together.”
Eddie stopped to answer her phone. She beckoned to Olga, still without turning around. Olga noticed and stepped over next to Eddie, without looking up from her reading. Eddie put her hand around Olga’s head and pulled her close to listen to the phone.
“Who the hell is that?”
Olga grabbs the phone and presses it to her ear, catching her pennant in the action. A deep frown incises two vertical lines above her Roman nose. Having given up the phone, Eddie steps closer to me.
“Fred, you ever heard of the Fauxmont Militia?”
“No, it’s news to me. Well, may be not so new, now I think of it. It is probably Boyd Nightingale.”
“Okay, what’s he got to do with it?”
“He and Albrecht Intaglio have bought weapons and I imagine they are the ones behind this militia.”
“That was Lou Waymarsh on the phone telling us, or was he warning us? We shall be under the protection of the Fauxmont Militia.”
“I can’t imagine what Lou is up to.”
Olga is off the phone. “Eddie you seen any armed men around?”
“Not yet”
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Not yet, they may be harmless. Just call Tract and Arts and see if they know anything.”
Olga is on the phone again.
“What? Tract and Arts? Never heard of them.”
“They have managed the property for a while. They do restorations on high end properties as well as property management. Good people, they all talk German up at the office. So I get a little small talk in, some consideration and practice my German,.”
Eddie lets her hood down and shakes out curly brown hair. The sun is out warming the wintry morning air even though it is now early spring. Last night’s snow still lingers in the shadows.
I point to the Harvard shield on her hoody. “Are you an Alum.”
“Yeah, I was doing philosophy with Goldfarb, but left Emerson Hall, and all that ABD, to dig wells. Are you?”
“No, no, no … How deep do you expect to go?”
“Between three and four hundred feet, if the survey is correct. Sometimes the water table sinks. There’re a lot of industrial users in this area.”
Olga steps over to give Eddie her phone back.
“They say they don’t know any Militia around here, but I don’t trust them, never have.” Olga ignores me and only looks at Eddie.
“They are not a problem now.” Eddie’s tone is gentle and patient. She seems distracted for a moment.
“Olga turns and walks back to Eddie’s truck.”
“Olga is suspicious of Tract and Arts. They used to be two separate companies. One of which owned a lot of land around here was known as just “Tract”, and the other was Fine Arts Real-Estate, doing antique properties. There are as many stories about Tract and where its money came from as there are about Wittgenstein.”
“Any of them concern Prestige U. and it’s founding?”
“How did you guess Fred?”
