Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  “Don’t,” Grey said sharply.

  “It’s true, I’m afraid,” Stuyvesant told him. “That sort of arrest—up-and-coming politician, ancient family—the smaller fish like your sister will—”

  “Stop it!” The American looked over at his companion, and was surprised to see his face twisted with pain. “If you cannot bring yourself to talk straight, I’m going to walk away, and my sister will just have to take her chances.”

  Talk straight? After a minute, Stuyvesant shook his head. He’d been so set on selling the Bunsen connection he hadn’t realized that he was constructing a straw man around Sarah Grey for her brother to follow. Stuyvesant prided himself on his ability to manipulate, and sometimes found himself doing it even when there was no need to bully or cajole. Here, clearly, that approach would not work. “Okay. But seriously? If Richard Bunsen is who I think he is, he constitutes a grave threat, to the United States, and to Britain.”

  “Fine, he’s a dangerous man. But you don’t need my assistance to line him up in your sights and kill him.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “WHOA,” SAID STUYVESANT, “back up there a minute. I’m not looking to kill anyone.”

  “Mr. Stuyvesant, who do you think you’re talking to—Robbie? Of course you intend to kill him. I can see it in the set of your shoulders, the edge in your voice when you say his name, the twitch in your fingers. Lie to the Major, lie to yourself if you want, but you can’t lie to me, not about a thing like that.”

  “Look, that’s frustration you’re seeing, not some kind of plan. Okay, I’m not saying that the possibility of…taking a short-cut to justice hasn’t crossed my mind, but that’s just a story I tell myself to keep me going. What I want is to see The Bastard in an American jail.”

  “Not hanged?”

  “I wouldn’t mind that. But I’m not going to act as executioner.” Not unless I have to.

  “If you say so.”

  Stuyvesant wasn’t sure the man believed him, but he’d said his piece. “Er, can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Am I right in thinking that the idea wouldn’t bother you all that much?”

  “Mr. Stuyvesant, I enlisted the week I came down from Oxford, in July 1915. I spent the next three years on the Western Front, pushing one man after another over the parapets to his death. If I’d ever had Ludendorff sitting in front of me, I’d have happily sliced his throat in cold blood on the chance it would shorten the war by a single day. So no: If you prove Bunsen’s been committing acts of terror, your killing him wouldn’t disturb my sleep.”

  The trench sensation that had touched Stuyvesant earlier returned: The open country seemed to shimmer behind sandbag walls, the sea air bore a whiff of rotting meat, and he could feel his face muscles sag with chronic exhaustion and shell shock. Looking into Grey’s eyes, he saw the same awareness.

  Grey blinked first, and the trenches retreated, then flickered out. Stuyvesant turned away, and noticed that the hand lifting the cigarette to his face had a tremble in it. In annoyance, he flicked the remains into the air, remembering too late the two good draws left on one of his prized American imports.

  “In any case,” Grey said, “I don’t know the man myself, and I do not care to set up my sister like that. And if you imagine that the fact I went to university with his cousin qualifies me to write a letter of introduction to Bunsen, you are sadly out of date.”

  Grey’s scorn grated against Stuyvesant’s irritation. “Oh, for Christ sake. Okay, so Carstairs has you on his brain and dragged me here to chase a wild goose, but I couldn’t very well know that before I left London, could I? When he comes back, I’ll help him get that poor abused car down your godforsaken road so you can go back to chopping your kindling. There’s other ways to get at Bunsen without bringing your sister into it.”

  Stuyvesant frowned at the red smudge in the distance, but after a minute, he couldn’t help sneaking a glance at his companion. Grey had stretched out again and was propped back on his elbows, looking at the endless sea. He’d come away without his hat; in the warmth, his unruly blond hair had begun to curl, and the hair on his tanned forearms glistened like gold. Despite Stuyvesant’s words, the man’s brow remained unfurrowed, the hands relaxed. Then again, Stuyvesant had meant what he said, at least in part.

  He began to see why Carstairs might want Grey so badly: A man could get used to having that barometer of truth close at hand.

  If he could overlook the fact that the barometer’s needle moved to a stimulus of pain.

  “So how does it work, this…ability of yours?” he asked. “You just pick up small giveaways?” Like a poker player, or any of a hundred varieties of con man.

  He thought Grey was not going to answer, but after a while the Englishman sat up and crossed his legs. “I suppose it comes down to that, but in fact there’s really no vocabulary for talking about it.”

  “Explaining sight to a blind man?”

  “Or music to the deaf. Analogies are the closest way to describe it—some behaviors give off color. Seeing someone’s agitation makes my skin crawl.”

  “Or Aldous Carstairs makes your yard stink so badly you can’t hear yourself think.”

  “Mixed metaphors of perception,” Grey admitted. “It makes no sense, except to me it contains perfect logic. When Robbie’s mother gets angry it makes my teeth ache. Possibly because she doesn’t let her anger out, just chews on it? I don’t know.”

  “So it’s, what, the turmoil that you feel?”

  “Dissonance might be a closer description. I came across a fake Rembrandt portrait a while ago; standing in front of it was like being assaulted by the clamor of a dozen mismatched bells, out of tune and very disturbing. Dissonance seems…well, call it the vehicle on which other sensations ride.” He sounded unsure of his words, almost tentative; Stuyvesant wondered if he had ever talked about this before, apart from whatever the people of Carstairs’ “Project” had got out of him.

  “And if Robbie’s mother just got mad and swore and slammed the pans around? Is that ‘dissonance’?”

  “Mr. Stuyvesant, this is precisely what the Major could never understand—either that or refused to accept. The answer is no: If she got honestly angry, I’d feel the anger, but my teeth wouldn’t ache. It’s like…how to put this? A con artist makes my skin crawl because he’s torn between what he wants and what he thinks I want. He’s afraid of missing some clue in my behavior that will tell him how to clinch the deal, he’s charming on the surface and greedy underneath, and that dichotomy is…dissonant. Physically disturbing. Like a rolling barrage, you know?” Stuyvesant knew: a long stretch of standing under firing guns left a man with liquid bones and severe twitches in every muscle. “But if he’s a monomaniac, with what they call an idée fixe, if he is deluded down to his bones and has sincerely convinced himself of the truth of every lie that comes out of his mouth, all I feel is a sort of queasy mistrust.”

  “So you couldn’t, say, walk through a crowd and know which man in it is contemplating murder?”

  “If the intent was tied up in rage and fear and hesitation and uncertainty, then yes, the man’s turmoil would shout at me. Just as I would know the man who was, quietly and in the back of his mind, nurturing the real intent of murder and had not yet acknowledged it to himself. Or am I wrong about that, too?” he asked.

  Stuyvesant held his face completely still, to give nothing away, but Grey looked amused by the attempt.

  “She wasn’t a redhead, was she?”

  “You can’t be right all the time.”

  “I wish you could convince the Major of that. But to get back to killing. I think that if a man were to hold a coming murder in the front of his mind as a given fact, absolute and unquestioning; if the intent and the sense of necessity and inevitability reached all the way down to his deepest sense of himself, then no, there would be nothing to tear at him and make his body react. The most evil creature on earth, the devil incarnate, would probab
ly slip right past me, assuming he truly believed that what he was doing was the right thing. His body and his mind would be easy with his acts, so he’d ring with the same note, as it were, down to his bones.”

  Stuyvesant had a vivid image of a madman he’d helped arrest once, an ordinary, balding bank teller who had butchered six people, efficiently hidden their bodies, scrubbed his hands, and taken the train home. They’d caught him more or less by accident, three weeks later, and when the handcuffs went on, the man had patted the hand of his appalled secretary and told her to cancel his appointments for the next few days. He’d calmly admitted the murders, and never offered any explanation, even as he was being led to the electric chair. All he’d ever said in his defense was, “It was necessary.”

  “And Carstairs—”

  “Couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t march through Whitechapel and point out the sinners. Or through Whitehall, for that matter.”

  And if Grey actually went through the corridors of Whitehall pointing out the villains, Stuyvesant wondered how long it would take before someone in power arranged for a knife in the back one dark night? Some gift: curse was more like it.

  “So you have a blind spot.” More than one—Stuyvesant suspected that the man could be distracted from the truth, especially in the presence of pain and alcohol: He hadn’t picked up on the flaw that had rendered the January bomb inert; perhaps because Stuyvesant’s remembered terror was all too real?

  “Absolute conviction is the same as absolute innocence, when it comes to my being able to read a person.”

  “Funny, but I’d have thought Major Carstairs would come under that heading.”

  Grey’s thumb came up to brush against his temple, a response to the name. “I reacted badly to the Major’s sudden appearance today. The first couple of years I came here, I couldn’t bear anyone but Robbie, but the past months I’ve had little trouble controlling it. I can manage Penzance on market days without undue problems. I thought my skin was finally growing thicker. Looks like I was wrong.”

  “Don’t know about that. Sounds to me like Aldous Carstairs is connected with a lot of your past you’d rather not think about. It might have been simply memory, not…the other thing, that put your hackles up.”

  “You may be right,” he said, sounding relieved at the idea.

  “But still,” Stuyvesant persisted, “it surprises me that you read Carstairs as being pulled in two directions. The man strikes me as being single-minded as a rattlesnake.”

  “He does give one the impression of absolute conviction, does he not? But it isn’t at all true. He grew up in shabby gentility, and ended up detesting wealth and poverty alike. He hates himself most of all for emulating the leisured classes: his accent never slips, but his vocabulary sometimes does. His mother was a Chapel foundation-stone, his father a violent drunk, so gentle forgiveness infuriates him and tyranny both revolts and attracts him.

  “He’s ambitious but hides it, and commits acts of brutality by telling himself the end result requires it of him. In fact, he takes considerable pleasure out of causing pain—I understand he was a highly effective interrogator during the War—but at the same time, he deeply loathes himself for that pleasure. I have no doubt that he sees his pursuit of me as an honest attempt to serve King and country, yet at the same time, his temptation to make me squirm is almost more than he can bear. It’s a sexual quirk, of course, at least in part—another thing to hate me for. But he’s also afraid of me, that I might tell others what’s inside him. No, the Major would be far easier to cope with if he were simply evil. Can I trouble you for another smoke?”

  Speechless, Stuyvesant held out the silver case and lighter with hands that looked as steady and capable as ever. Which was kind of surprising since Grey’s little speech shook him nearly as badly as that out-of-the-blue shoot-out with the bootleggers, three years before. An almost sexual pleasure. His temptation to make me squirm… Said so matter-of-factly. Stuyvesant had caught a glimpse of something of the sort in Carstairs, very briefly, during that first meeting in London, but…Jesus H. Christ.

  “It’s a wonder you didn’t come after him with that axe, the minute you laid eyes on him.” Or turned and run—which was what Stuyvesant would have done if he’d seen Carstairs get out of a car accompanied by a six-foot-two, wide-shouldered thug like him.

  “It was tempting. And if you’re thinking that it’s dangerous to possess knowledge about the Major, I’m probably one of the few people in the world who is absolutely safe from him, so long as he believes there’s a faint chance I might return to his beloved Project. You, however—that’s another matter.”

  “Me? I don’t even know the man, much less his secrets.” Other than what Grey had just told him.

  “Nonetheless, I’ve seen how he looks at you. He loathes you—everything you stand for, from your size to your country to the morality that stiffens your spine. You think I’m the only one he’s tried to ruin over the years? I should take care, if I were you. Things happen to people whom the Major hates.”

  He can try, Stuyvesant said to himself. The idea of being permitted to defend himself against Aldous Carstairs was oddly attractive. “What about you? What did Carstairs do to make you attack him?”

  “Me? His scar, you mean? No one thing; more a matter of final straws. The last months I was at his clinic—that’s what he called it, though it was more a laboratory than anything else—his people had been working on a machine to read the truth. I was the means by which results were checked and readings calibrated.”

  “A lie-detector? We’ve got a bunch of guys working on that—sweat, pulse, blood pressure. Problem is, what those machines seem to read is nervousness, and even innocent people can get a little jumpy talking to cops.” The most promising design was called a polygraph, and law enforcement agencies around the country had their eyes on Berkeley, California, whose police department had begun to use one in their interrogations. So far, however, the courts hadn’t been convinced.

  “I heard something about that, but this is considerably more sophisticated.”

  “Wonder what it is? Never mind—go on.”

  “One of the nurses he’d tested had come up with some wrong readings on his machine, and he wanted to know what she was hiding. So the three of us were in a room, him keeping at her and keeping at me and pressing to know what I was feeling about her, and was it worse after this question or the last, and finally the poor bloody girl just broke and started sobbing and it turned out she’d been assaulted by her brother five years earlier—sexually, you understand—and when I looked at the Major he wore this…gloating expression. That was just more than I could take, so I picked up her water glass and smashed it into his face. It’s possible I may have been about to turn it on my own throat next, but the guards came through the door before I could and that was an end to it.”

  Stuyvesant would not have believed a man could refer to his own thwarted suicide in such academic tones, as if the only thing left unsettled was a mild curiosity. He hugged his knees to his chest.

  The decorative clouds that had graced the western sky were beginning to move in; one of them, scudding high above, sent a shadow racing across the land. The waiting figure atop the wall far below vanished for a moment, then the darkness cleared and the red shone out again.

  “Well, that might explain why Carstairs broke into a sweat when he saw you standing there with that hulking great weapon on your shoulder.”

  After a moment, Grey made a peculiar choking noise. Stuyvesant jerked around and saw the man’s contorted face, but to his astonishment, Grey was laughing, baring his teeth to the sky while his hand slapped the rock in pleasure. “Yes, oh yes, that was worth the price of admission, wasn’t it?”

  Stuyvesant gave a chuckle, but a moment later the dark shadow reached them and the day went abruptly cold. He picked up his coat and put it on, but as he’d hoped (for Stuyvesant was, in his own way, very good at interrogations) Grey couldn’t leave matters unfinished.
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br />   “If you can’t reach your man Bunsen through my sister and Laura Hurleigh, how do you propose to do so?”

  “Haven’t a clue, yet. But don’t worry, I’ll manage.”

  “Stuyvesant,” Grey shouted, “will you for Christ sake stop trying to manipulate me!”

  Stuyvesant threw up his hands. “Jesus, you don’t make it easy on a poor Bureau agent, do you? Okay, look: Carstairs’ original idea was that we could talk you into writing your sister to say that you and I were great pals and I was interested in her work. I’d go meet her, take a look at the clinics, and eventually she’d introduce me to her friend Richard Bunsen. Like I said, I’ve done a lot of undercover work, Grey; I’m good at getting close to people. Very good. And that’s all I need to do—to get close to Bunsen and get a sense of whether he could be our man, to see, among other things, if he has an alibi for the times our agitator was in the States. Clearly, having you make an introduction through your sister would have saved me some time. But I can see why you wouldn’t want to do anything that brings you within arm’s reach of Aldous Carstairs.”

  To Stuyvesant’s interest, and gratitude, Grey did not storm off as he had threatened. Then again, Stuyvesant supposed that what he had told Grey wasn’t really a lie: He might still be nurturing faint hopes that Grey would write that letter, but really, he was more or less resigned to writing this Cornish trip off as a bust.

  However, Grey did not climb to his feet and accuse him of deceit, which was a good sign, and the silence that fell was more thoughtful than uncomfortable. After a while, Grey seemed to come to a decision. He said, “I actually had a letter from my sister not very long ago.”

  “That’s good.” Carstairs was right: The two were still in communication.

  “She happened to mention that there’s a Friday-to-Monday at Hurleigh House coming up.” Stuyvesant grunted, and forbore to comment that Fridays and Mondays tended to take place in that order everywhere. “She’ll be going, and a number of the other Hurleighs will be there. It starts the sixteenth. What’s the date today, the thirteenth?”