He leaned back in the booth, watching Anne, while he said: “He’s about five feet, ten inches tall, stocky build, with a small round face going flabby in the cheeks. You can see the flesh wriggle about the jowls when he chews gum. His nose, flat at the nostrils, fleshy at the tip, looks as though he had been picked up by it as a child. He has two small black buttons for eyes and his eyebrows run together like a black gash across his forehead.”
Anne, her eyes wide, moistened her lips. “Where did you see him?”
“Is that he?”
She nodded.
“Outside Bradleys’ as I was leaving.” He was there, Mather knew.
“Did you tell the police? I mean they could make a picture of him from a description like that, Eric. I didn’t see him that well, but now it’s just like you’d frozen him in front of me at that second I saw him.”
“More live than life,” Mather mocked.
“You must tell Lieutenant Marks,” Anne persisted. “Or I will. Only I’d mess it up.”
“Lieutenant Marks,” Mather repeated. “He’s a very clever fellow.”
“He’s great,” Anne said. Then seeing Mather’s look of pained distaste: “I mean he isn’t square. He knows things in a way like you do—you know, starting from a hypothesis that makes people think out loud.”
Mather smiled. “You’d better say it in algebra, Annie.”
She sipped the fresh drink, glanced at the menu and then laid it aside. “Eric … I guess this is the martini talking, but when you asked if I’d have thought it dirty, you know, something between Peter and me?”
He nodded when she waited to see if he had followed her. Then trying to proceed she faltered entirely and took a cigarette out of the package he had left on the table. “Forget it.”
“For heaven’s sake, Anne, don’t string me up like a Chinese goose.”
She put the cigarette back in the package. “You’re fond of Janet, aren’t you, Eric?”
He remembered Janet at the window as he gave the signal, the Judas signal, and he remembered Anne coming up behind her.
“You don’t miss much, do you?” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry. I won’t tell anyone.”
“There is nothing to tell. There never was anything beyond what you could have seen with your own eyes. Except my fantasy and I demand the right of privacy in that domain.”
“Only … Eric, it shouldn’t just be fantasy, not now. Janet needs you. It’d be great really. She’s not like us. She has to feel something and then she can say it in a deep and beautiful way.” The girl leaned back, despairing herself of words. “You’re right. I can only talk in mathematics.”
“When you say ‘she’s not like us’ …”
“That was a silly thing for me to have said.”
“The martini?”
“Maybe.”
“That, my dear, is what martinis are for, to sniggle out the truth,” Mather said. “You are snobs, you know, the lot of you. Towered and walled, you see the scramblers after life like piteous ants beneath you, bearing one another gifts. I used to feel myself crawling up that endless hill …” Suddenly he was tired, bone tired of trying to relate. He did not want to talk about the way he felt. He did not care. “What will you do now? Will you have to start your doctorate over?”
Anne tried to adjust to his change of mood. She felt it might be the drink in him—or even in herself. She said: “I’m going to talk with Dr. Bauer over the week-end. I should think Bob might be able to take over … only … the light’s gone out. You know?”
“I know.”
She tried going back: “And it’s not that we’re snobs, not really, Eric. It’s just that we’re safe in that little world we know best …”
“In that little world of cyclotrons and megaton thrusts, of smashed atoms and hydrogen mixes. It sounds like a party, you know, like you’re having a ball.” He finished off the sentence with his old devastating sarcasm.
“Eric,” she said, trying to reach him with her eyes, to convey to him at least her own humanity.
“Oh, to hell with all of you,” he said, unable to admit to himself, much less to her, that his distress lay in his inability to cope, not with scientists, but with the intimacy of man and woman, with the thought she had tried to share with him of Janet and himself.
Anne gathered her bag. “I’m going to skip dinner if you don’t mind, Eric. But thank you very much for the drinks.”
He started to rise but she was gone. “I don’t mind,” he said, slumping down heavily. “I don’t truly mind.” But he picked up the half-empty glass she had left, turned it in his hand for a moment, and then drank from where her lips had touched.
thirteen
AT A FEW MINUTES past nine, refreshed after a couple of hours of badly needed sleep and a shower, Marks walked into the Red Lantern. He was first struck by the resemblance of the place to a calendar picture of an old English pub. A wheel of candle-shaped lights hung over the bar; the dark paneling, the solid benches, and especially the covey of costumed students gathered at a large table in the rear all fit in the Old World setting. Even the bartender, his shirt open at the throat, his sleeves rolled up, and his face a ruddy moon, belonged where he was. He was drawing dark beer for a couple of men in work shirts at the end of the bar.
Marks studied the youngsters and was impressed by the fact that while one of them talked, earnest, animated, the others were actually listening. He wondered if even the listening was an affectation. His own attention focused then on the one girl amongst them: she was playing her fingers through the long hair of the boy next to her. Her own hair sat like a red beehive atop her head.
The bartender came to him. His small blue eyes were round and sharp as steel. An Irishman, Marks thought, a canny Irishman. He ordered a beer.
“Let’s see your identification,” the Irishman said.
Marks obliged him. He would have shown it in any case, asking questions.
“That’s what I figured,” the bartender said. “A fellow named Pererro was round this afternoon.” He nodded at the table of youngsters. “Them’s your patsies.”
“What’s the costume?”
“Edwardian,” the bartender said, the word lathered with sarcasm. “At the beginning of every year I think I’ve seen everything, and by the end of it I know I’ve seen nothing at all. Still, I’d rather have them than the lousy ones.”
Marks realized he was being literal. “Were they all here last night when Professor Mather came in?”
“I didn’t count them. It’s the usual crowd.”
“The young lady?”
“She was here. She’s their mascot as near as I can figure. Not much up here,” he tapped his head, “but more than enough in the places that count.”
Marks grinned. “Did you talk with Mather last night?”
“No. He was on the run when he went out of here. I figured he’d got a bellyful of the kids and took off. He’s like that, you know. He’ll stand round talking with you for an hour and you’d think you were really into something with him—religion—the old ballads, he’s got a fund of them, but you go down to draw a beer and look round and he’s gone. An unhappy man, I’ve always thought.”
“But a man?” Marks suggested.
“I’ve thought about that, and I’d give the nod in his favor.”
“I want to talk to the young lady,” Marks said. “Is she old enough for me to offer to buy her a drink?”
“She’s old enough to buy you one,” the Irishman said. “Take a seat by the wall there and I’ll send her over.”
The girl approached Marks with a saucy swing to her hips. If the boys were interested in either girl or detective, Marks observed, they failed to show it. Marks introduced himself and waited while the young woman settled herself in the booth. He had to ask her her name.
“Sally Nobakoff.”
Marks arched his brows. With her red hair and freckles he was not prepared for the Nobakoff. He wondered which of the boys had
given her the name. “Are you a student of Professor Mather’s?”
“No-o-o,” she said, an amiable growl.
“But you are a student?”
“Not exactly. I work in the Records Office.”
“I see,” Marks said, and with a slight nod toward the Edwardians, “you’ve got a boyfriend.”
“A few,” she said and sighed.
Marks cut bait. “What will you have to drink?”
“Johnnie knows—Dubonnet, please.” She looked across to the bartender.
“Dubonnet,” Marks repeated. “You won’t mind if I stick to beer?”
“It’s not good for your bladder.”
Marks could think of nothing he wanted less to discuss at that moment than his bladder, but he was at a loss trying to figure out the girl: she was neither ingenue nor pickup. Fragments of the boys’ talk floated across the room, a discussion of someone named Bergson. The name was remotely familiar, but he did not want to chance showing his own ignorance. “I’m keeping you from the wars,” he said.
Sally laughed throatily. “They won’t even let me talk. But I think they’re cute anyway.”
“And Professor Mather?”
“He’s the most,” she said.
“You like him?”
“Well … I don’t know him very well and I bet he wouldn’t know me if he saw me on the street. But the first time I met him … My friend—he doesn’t come here much any more—but the night he introduced me to Mr. Mather, you’d have thought I was Queen Victoria, and him Sir Walter Raleigh, or somebody like that. Gosh, you know …”
“Queen for a day,” Marks murmured.
“Exactly. The next time and ever after if I even presumed to speak to him—drop dead! You know?”
“What’s your friend’s name, the one who introduced you?”
“Jeffrey Osterman. Isn’t Jeffrey a lovely name?”
Marks nodded.
Sally took the Dubonnet off the tray as the bartender leaned down, about to serve them. “Johnnie is my darling,” she said.
“That’s ‘Charlie,’” the Irishman said with a wink at Marks.
“No. It’s Jeffrey,” Sally said.
The bartender, moving away and out of Sally’s sight, made the gesture of holding his nose, Marks presumed at the mention of Jeffrey.
Sally swilled half the wine at one swallow. Definitely the Dubonnet type.
“Last night,” Marks suggested, “was Mather in good form?”
“Last night was the most,” Sally said. “The boys were discussing something—I mean they’re always discussing something—but all of a sudden just as though he was the only person there except me, he started reciting a poem. I mean I liked it—he was getting dramatic and more dramatic, and looking at me because he knew I was understanding it, you see? And the others didn’t know what it was all about.”
Marks grinned in spite of himself. “What was it all about?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly, but it was very patriotic—all about tyranny and blood, and rape. Afterwards the boys said it was a joke he was playing on them. I mean they think Lord Byron is square. But square. I was the only one who knew, but gosh, the way he opened his collar, and ran his hands through his hair …”
“Professor Mather?”
Sally nodded, and Marks had been given something to think about: he was remembering the last entry in Peter Bradley’s journal, his trying to explain the poet Byron to the Russian physicist at the monument in Athens. How strange that on the night he died, at the very hour probably, his friend Mather should be spouting the rhymes of the same Lord Byron.
“Sally, how would you like to introduce me to the boys? Or would you rather I introduced myself?”
She nodded with heavy emphasis in favor of his self-introduction. Marks, leaving her, signaled the bartender to give her another drink.
“Excuse me, gentlemen.” Marks tried to keep the mockery from his tone: they were so young, so apple-cheeked young as their faces turned up to him. “I’m Lieutenant Marks of the police department.” He saw one of the boys glance at his glass of beer. Under-age, Marks thought. Johnnie should watch that. “It’s a routine check—you’ve heard about the homicide last night?” The boys nodded. “Mr. Mather was with Dr. Bradley earlier. I wonder if any of you remember what time he joined you here?”
God help Mather if his life depended on their awareness of time. For Marks it had merely been an opening gambit. “What was the subject under discussion here?”
“T. S. Eliot.”
One of the young pups sniggered at the mention of Eliot to a cop.
Marks said: “Eliot was passé in my day, but the Hollow Men seem to have come into their own again.”
A boy said then, and Marks took it as their acceptance of him: “It was the Sweeney poems we were talking about last night, sir.”
“‘Sweeney among the Nightingales,’” Marks murmured. He was not going to be able to go much further. “Tell me something: is Professor Mather really a Byron enthusiast?”
“No, sir. I know for a fact, he absolutely loathes Byron. I take British Poetry under Mr. Mather, and I know. He thinks Byron was an exhibitionist, a fraud, an adulterer and a bad poet.”
Marks said: “That last is unforgivable, isn’t it?”
The boys laughed.
“Why do you suppose he took off on Byron then last night?”
The boys glanced at one another. The one who had made himself their spokesman said: “We were wondering about that. We thought—well, he doesn’t think much of Sweeney either, and we thought maybe it was his way of saying that what Byron was in his day, T. S. Eliot is now.”
“Eliot and Byron?” Marks said incredulously.
Their hearty agreement set them all to talking at once. Marks listened, amused at the mixture of erudition and pomposity. There was nothing sadder, really, than a pompous child.
Finally the under-aged youngster said to Marks: “He just wings it sometimes, sir, to purposely throw us off. Sometimes he’s spoofy, you know?”
Marks supposed it was as good an adjective as any.
“The thing he said when he took off from here last night …”
“I think it’s bloody unfair to tell that,” one of the others interrupted. “Out of context it could mean whatever somebody wanted it to.”
“It was said out of context, wasn’t it? Agamemnon died tonight—what did it mean to you?”
“What he said was, ‘Live, Sweeney. Agamemnon died tonight.’ To me that meant we’re living in a Sweeney’s paradise, a society of ape-necks with money—the hero, the individual’s been crushed, murdered by them.” The youth’s face flushed with the excitement of his own rhetoric.
“My dear fellow, you are winging,” the protester said. “That isn’t Eliot’s meaning at all.”
“But couldn’t that be what Eric meant, couldn’t it?” he appealed to the group.
Marks took advantage of the pause and gave his place to Sally who was standing beside him, her empty Dubonnet glass in hand. “Poor old Sweeney,” he said, and then nodded to them. “Goodnight, all. Thank you.”
He moved quickly to the bar and paid his bill, getting out of the Red Lantern at about the hour Mather had the night before. Across the street the intermission doors were opening at the Triangle Theater.
He sat in the car for a few moments, thinking. Agamemnon died tonight. Fact? Prophecy? Guilt? Or complete nonsense with no reference to Bradley? It was time to see the one person who could tell him what it meant—or what he chose now to pretend it had meant. In any case Marks had a pair of shoes to return.
He radioed in to Communications, and on the “Over” picked up the information that Miss Russo had telephoned him, leaving her number.
Marks stopped at the nearest public phone booth and called her. She told him how Eric Mather had described a man he had seen near the Bradleys’ who, she was sure, was the same man she had met in her hallway.
fourteen
“MY DEAR LIEUT
ENANT, UNTIL I learned that Annie had been trying to describe him, I had no idea of the possible connection.”
Tonight, Marks thought, he was overplaying the nonchalance. In velvet smoking jacket, he had even dressed the part. He sat, his long legs stretched, his feet slippered, one arm draped over the back of the sofa. No matter how you served him, Mather was not his dish.
“How’s the toe?”
Mather described a circle with his foot and flexed the toes: completely healed.
“What time of the day was it, Professor, that you realized we might be interested in this man?”
“Annie and I had a drink this afternoon. Sixish.”
“And she didn’t impress on you how important it might be?”
“If it were important, I expected you would tell me, Lieutenant. I’ve been waiting here for you all evening. I knew you would come.”
“Intuition?”
“Call it that.”
Marks said: “Did your intuition tell you earlier last night that Peter Bradley was going to be killed at, say, a little after nine thirty?”
Mather’s high-boned face showed a twitch of tension. “No. I swear to God I had no intimation of that.”
It was a very earnest protest to come from an innocent man who liked to play it cool. Marks said: “What did you expect to happen? Something. That was obvious from your behavior. Make it easy for both of us and tell me.”
Mather shook his head and shrugged.
“I’ll find it out in time. You can be sure of that.”
“Then you must inform me,” Mather said with a touch of the old bravura. In Marks’s presence he reverted—and all the more quickly it seemed to him for not wanting to—to the kind of snide and supercilious fop he hated most. “As I told Anne today, none of us is altogether innocent.”
Whatever that meant, Marks thought. He did not propose to be led down the garden walk by this phony. He leaned back and folded his arms. The ridge of his back struck the frame of the chair. He smiled to conceal the pain. “I’m an ignorant sort,” he said. “Who was Agamemnon?”
The Pale Betrayer Page 10