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The president tried to stand up, but his legs got tangled in the kneehole of his desk. His chair shot out from under him and toppled over, casters rattling. He screamed. It was a fruity sound, halfway to a yodel. As my grandfather fell on top of him, the president twisted himself toward the window overlooking East Fifty- Seventh Street. He just had time to notice that passersby seemed to be crowding together on the sidewalk below.
My grandfather looped the cord of the handset around the president's throat. He had maybe two minutes before the rocket of his anger burned up its fuel and fell back to earth. That would be ample time. During World War II, he had been trained in the use of a garote.* He knew that, done properly, strangulation was short work.
*A length of piano wire, of all things, typically concealed inside a shoe - or bootlace
"Oh my God," said the secretary, Miss Mangel, making a late appearance on the scene.
She had reacted quickly when my grandfather burst into her office smelling, she would recall afterward, like wood smoke. She had managed to buzz twice before my grandfather grabbed the handset away from her. He picked up the intercom. He yanked the handset cord from the base.
"You'll have to pay for that," Miss Mangel said.
When he told this story thirty- two years later, my grandfather put a checkmark of admiration beside Miss Mangel's name, but with his rocket only halfway up the slope of its parabola he took her words as provocation. He threw the base of the intercom out the window of Miss Mangel's office. The chiming noted by the president was the sound of the intercom sailing through a spiderweb of glass into the street.
Hearing a cry of outrage from below, Miss Mangel went to the window to look. Down on the sidewalk a man in a gray suit was sitting looking up at her. There was blood on the left lens of his round spectacles. He was laughing.* People stopped to help him. The doorman announced that he was going to call the police. That was when Miss Mangel heard her boss screaming. She turned from the window to run into his office.
*My grandfather knew only that the man he had accidentally beaned—fortunately, the intercom had only grazed his skull—declined to press charges. The Daily News identifies his victim as Jirí Nosek, head of the Czechoslovakian delegation to the august body that Alger Hiss had helped to charter. "This is the first time the high-ranking Red has been hit by a flying telephone," the News reported with a straight face, adding, "Nosek said that as a good Czech he was obliged to laugh off anything that didn't kill him."
At first glance the office appeared to be empty. Then she heard the tap of a shoe against a linoleum floor, a tap, another tap. The back of my grandfather's head rose from behind the desk, then sank again. Brave Miss Mangel went around the desk. Her boss lay sprawled on his belly on the polished floor. My grandfather straddled his back, hunched forward, applying the impromptu garote*. The president bucked, and thrashed, and tried to roll himself over. The only sound was the toes of his cordovan bucks trying to get purchase against the linoleum.
Miss Mangel snatched up a letter opener from the president's desk and jabbed it into my grandfather's left shoulder. In my grand-father's reckoning, many years later, this action merited another checkmark.
The point of the letter opener sank only half an inch or so into meat, but the bite of metal blocked some meridian in the flow of my grandfather's rage. He grunted. "It was like I woke up," he said when he told me this part of the story for the first time, during the last week of his life. He unwound the cord from the president's neck. He peeled it from the grooves it had cut into the flesh of his own left hand. The handset clattered against the floor. With a foot on either side of the president, he stood up and took a step away. The president flopped onto his back and raised himself into a sitting position, then sledded backward on his ass into a notch between two filing cabinets. He sobbed for air. When his face had hit the floor, he'd bitten his lower lip, and now his teeth were dyed pink.
From Moonglow by Michael Chabon. Copyright 2016 Michael Chabon. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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