Nevertheless, even as he considered his next selection, he knew that there would never be a greater enemy than Felix; and no greater benefactor. He would have liked to have tormented Felix, when all his money would not have helped him to escape; but the means had flowed from Felix, and hence could not have been used against him.
Maybe Felix had been right. Perhaps the two of them had escaped the categories of villain and victim, and were now equals, and that was all the revenge he would ever have.
A letter arrived one day from Felix.
Bruno—
My informant has by now ascertained that you have carried out my wishes, so if you are reading this, an additional bonus has been deposited in your account and a bank statement will arrive announcing that the funds are available to you from today. But this person’s life does pose you a problem. He knows that the woman and her sons have vanished and are possibly dead, and that you might have had something to do with their disappearance. He was instructed to pay you when he saw a notice of missing persons. I never liked him much—so you should get rid of him, just to tidy things up. You’ll get a bonus and I rid myself of one more person I detested. You really have no choice, since he may one day pose a threat to you. I rest easy that you will do this, knowing you have done this additional task for me.
—Felix
Rest? Bruno laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea. Where in all hell would he be resting? The only time Felix could possibly have rested easy had been while he was waiting to die, when he could still appreciate what he had put in motion but would never see accomplished! That appreciation had ended at the moment of his death.
Bruno shook his head at how poorly people understood the physical reality of past, present, and future. They always secretly projected themselves beyond their own demise, assuming that they would somehow be around when the news got out, as if they would read it in the paper or watch it on television. Mark Twain had a lot to answer for, when he had sent Tom Sawyer to attend his own funeral, not to mention all the secret observers who imagined unseen and unheard trees falling in forests no one would ever visit. Surely, as Felix had died, he had realized with a start that he would have no memory of it?
Bruno noted that Felix had deposited the money in advance, and presumably there would be no further confederate to verify that the job had been done, since the whole point now was to get rid of a possibly unreliable agent who might later become a blackmailer. Felix had surely not set up an indefinite series of confederates to be eliminated; which meant that this additional request might be ignored, risking only a mild uncertainty.
Nevertheless, Bruno decided to carry out the instruction, just in case Felix had been very clever somehow, leaving a long line of confederates to deal with Bruno, who had been enlisted only as a tool of revenge. Was this the punishment Felix had planned for him, as one might kill several birds with one stone?
Bruno smiled at his own overly complex suspicions, imagining a series of confederates who would not know what they had to do until they opened a timed letter, a bridge of written communications extending into the indefinite future. But there was no evidence for any such plan. Felix was dead, and the letter was certainly correct in calling attention to the danger of a living confederate, nothing more.
There was a name and an address at the bottom of the letter for a lawyer named Cecil Banes.
Bruno sat back in his recliner and sighed with acceptance. Felix was right in planning to get rid of the lawyer, and the extra money would be welcome; but this was once again a lesser task, nothing like what it would have been to take revenge on Felix himself, who now lurked inside a real but non-existent category of his own, immune to the living.
The lawyer’s secretary, a sad-eyed woman with red hair and green eyes, checked with her boss, then told Bruno to go inside.
“Take a seat, Mr. Willey,” the lawyer said as Bruno came into the office and closed the door.
Bruno saw that Cecil Banes was a heavy man, which meant more work.
“So you were a dear friend of Mr. Lytton?” Banes said with a smile as he leaned back in his chair. “I was glad to transact his last business. What can I do for you, Mr. Willey?”
Bruno went up to the desk and picked up a brass paperweight from the green blotter. Banes looked up at him with surprise as Bruno hit him over the head. The man slumped forward. Bruno put the paperweight down next to the man’s head. Bright red blood was staining the lawyer’s white hair and soaking into the green blotter.
Bruno opened a pocket behind the desk. Mercifully, it came in at about three feet from the floor. He went behind Banes and sat the body up straight, swung the high-tech swivel chair around, and leveraged the lawyer from it into the opening until only his feet stuck out. He grabbed them by the fine Italian shoes and sent him over. Removing the blotting paper sheet from the pad frame, he crumpled it around the paperweight and threw the mess in after the body.
Then he sat down at the desk, and caught his breath as he dismissed the pocket.
This was nothing at all. The man had no idea of what had happened to him and had no time to suffer in advance. There had been no connection between them, hence no opportunity for pointed discussion, Bruno told himself as he sat there wondering if Felix had any more surprises for him.
Was this the punishment Felix left for him—never to be revenged on his worst enemy? For a moment Bruno asked himself if there were better uses for this skill than killing old enemies. Maybe something in politics, he told himself, imagining the complexity of the chesslike moves that would be necessary to wield power with the skill. Examples would lead to private threats, and the fear of him would spread, his power forever present but unprovable. Some might view stories about his ability as urban legends. There would be no end of fruitless evidence-seeking by clueless investigators whose fate would be to perish at the very moment of their success, if they got that far.
And when he had ascended to the summits, what would he do with it? Could society be sculpted? If so, then into what forms of ridiculousness that were not already present?
For now, he told himself, he would stick to old enemies. In the world’s difficult work, they were small matters, much more easily handled.
There was a loud knock on his apartment door late one morning. Bruno was in his bathrobe, finishing his first cup of coffee.
“Mr. Bruno Willey?” a tall, dark-haired man asked as Bruno opened the door. There was a short, bald man with him. Both wore long, gray coats.
“Police,” the tall man said, flashing his badge. “I’m Detective Ben Dillard, and this is Detective Winkes. May we come in?”
“Of course,” Bruno said.
The two men came in and stood in the living room. Bruno closed the door and turned to give them his full attention.
“We understand from his secretary that you had an appointment with the lawyer Cecil Banes,” Detective Dillard began.
“That’s right,” Bruno said.
“She tells us that when you left the office, Banes did not come out with you.”
Bruno said, “I don’t understand.”
“He’s disappeared,” Winkes said. “We thought he might have left the office with you and she simply failed to notice.”
“He was there when I left,” Bruno said.
“Yes,” Winkes added, “she did say that you came out alone. But she didn’t see him in his office at the end of the day, and hasn’t seen him since.”
They were being deliberately vague, to trip him up. “There’s nothing else I can tell you,” Bruno said. “Is he missing?”
“Three days now,” Dillard said.
Bruno stared at the two policemen. The circumstances of the lawyer’s disappearance made an unsolvable, locked-room mystery. The assumptions they would need to solve it were beyond their imagination, even if he confessed. Full, unbelievable demonstrations would have to be performed, and observers would doubt their sanity even then.
“Did Banes seem well when you left him?” Winke
s asked with a slight twitch under his right eye. Otherwise, both men maintained blank expressions.
“Sure,” Bruno said. “He said goodbye and I left.”
“Are you employed, Mr. Willey?” Dillard asked.
“I’m retired.”
“Did you know a Felix Lytton?” Winkes asked.
“Yes. He left me an inheritance when he died recently, enabling me to retire.”
“You knew him well?”
“He was a lifelong friend. We went to college together.”
“He was also a client of Cecil Banes.”
“Yes, he was,” Bruno said.
“Banes also arranged your inheritance, but was not Mr. Lytton’s official executor.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Bruno said, reminding himself that these cops had nothing on him, and would never have anything. “I think that was the name on some of the documents at my bank. Who is the official executor?”
“Banes’s secretary,” Dillard said, “swears that Mr. Banes was in his office when you left, that she was there for the rest of the day, and that he was gone when she went in with a letter for him to sign.”
“Did you look under the desk?” Bruno asked, smiling.
The two cops did not react.
“So he gave her the slip,” Bruno added. “What other explanation could there be?”
“She swears,” Winkes said, “that she heard a thud in the office and some heavy breathing.”
“A thud?” Bruno asked, saying the word as if it were an insult. “What would I know about a thud?”
“A paperweight and the desk pad blotter paper are missing from the desk.”
“A paperweight?” Bruno asked mockingly. “Blotting paper?”
“She has a good eye,” Winkes said.
“I hope they’re both good,” Bruno said.
The cops were silent at his joke.
“I truly do not understand,” Bruno said, pulling himself together. “Why ask me?”
“So how did you and he get out of there?” Dillard asked.
“After you traded blows,” Winkes added.
“What?” Bruno asked, pitching his voice higher to sound surprised. It would be suspicious not to react, to give the impression of preparedness. “Of course. After we traded blows. Are you serious?”
Dillard said, “Did you bring him drugs?”
Bruno smiled. “Oh, sure, I put him in my pocket and left. She saw me go out, right, but didn’t look in my pockets?”
The cops did not react to this joke either, and Bruno began to feel that he was making them unnecessarily suspicious. Not that it could lead them anywhere.
“May we look around?” Winkes asked.
“Sure,” Bruno said.
“Just sit down on the sofa and be quiet,” Dillard said calmly.
As they searched the apartment, Dillard called out, “He had to have sneaked past the secretary, and you were the last to see him. Where did he go?”
“I left him there,” Bruno said truthfully, realizing that they were going to dig harder, maybe even accuse him. Circumstantial evidence. People could get mighty sure of suspicions they couldn’t prove. It was the kind of world in which the unbelievable and unprovable could nevertheless be true. Frustration only encouraged people to jump to conclusions, to look harder, even get vindictive after they had convicted the innocent.
The detectives opened drawers and left them open, rummaged around in the bedroom closet and looked under the bed. Bruno began to feel insulted as he realized that they had formed a low opinion of him—low enough to make them feel secure in ordering him about and messing up his apartment without even the threat of a warrant.
“Be neat!” Bruno called out. “My mother taught me to be neat.”
After a while they came back into the living room, and Dillard said, “Please remain available in case we need you. Don’t leave town for a while.”
Bruno hesitated, not sure of what to do. Disabling two men would be difficult. All he had, as Felix had warned him, was a way to get rid of bodies, but it needed the element of surprise. He stood up, and the two cops tensed, as if they knew that he was a threat.
Let them go, he told himself, thinking of the aluminum bat in the front closet.
The two detectives watched him closely.
“Anything else?” he asked, smiling.
“I guess not,” said Dillard.
“Sorry I can’t be of much help.”
“I guess you can’t,” Winkes said as if he was sure that Bruno could.
The two detectives turned away and moved toward the door. He followed, wondering how quickly he could open the closet door and bludgeon them with the bat. Not quickly enough. Both were probably armed. He might get one, but not the other.
“Thank you,” Winkes said as they went out the front door, his politeness a reluctant offering to the god of covering-your-ass in case you’ve made a mistake.
Bruno was sweating by the time he closed the door and threw the deadbolt. Suddenly feeling very tired, he staggered to the sofa and sat down.
Someone was pounding on his door when he woke up and found himself still on the sofa. He struggled to his feet, peered at his watch, and saw that it was ten in the evening. What kind of exhaustion had made him sleep through the whole day? The visit from the police?
“Okay!” he cried as he staggered forward, “I’m coming.”
He opened the door, expecting to see the two cops again, but saw Cecil Banes’s secretary. She seemed to have been weeping.
“Oh, Mr. Willey,” she said, “I’m so sorry to be here so late, but I have to talk to you. I found your address in Cecil’s address file. You remember me, don’t you? I’m Eleanor Jones, Mr. Banes’s secretary.”
“What is it?” Bruno demanded, still sleepy.
Her eyes fixed on him with panic. “Oh, Mr. Willey, you must tell me where the love of my life has gone. Please!” She grabbed his right wrist and held on tightly. Her mouth opened wide as she spoke, and Bruno imagined that she would pull him to her and bite his head off like some female praying mantis if he didn’t let her in.
“I have no idea of what you’re talking about,” he said calmly, moving back and taking her inside as she held on.
She let him go. Her red hair was disheveled and the bright green seemed to have faded from her eyes. She wore a tweed business suit, and now seemed older than her mid-thirties. Still, she was quite appealing in her tearful state.
“You really don’t know?” she asked.
“No, I don’t,” he said, reaching to shut the door.
“You wouldn’t tell me if you did, would you,” she said as the door closed behind her.
He turned and looked at her carefully. People sensed things they couldn’t prove and were sometimes right. She was probably convinced that he knew what she wanted to know. Now she would be struggling between the impulse to plead with him or accuse him, wondering which was the better way to get him to tell her where to find her lover.
She looked down at the floor and said, “I’ll... satisfy you if you tell me where to find him.” She looked up at him, and her submissiveness was even more appealing. He toyed with the prospect of having her; after all, she wasn’t going to get anything more from the lawyer, and sex with a stranger might sidetrack her distress. “I’ll do... whatever you like,” she added with difficulty.
“Don’t demean yourself,” Bruno said, moved by her vulnerability. “I’ll show you where he went.”
She looked up at him as her face brightened with hope, and Bruno knew suddenly that she would be too much of a risk to let go; her suspicion would only grow and fixate on him. She would never stop. One fine day she might get lucky, or he might make a mistake, unlikely as it seemed. In any case, he realized that she was just beginning a time of great unhappiness and instability, from which he could save her, short of bringing back the lawyer.
He opened the pocket behind her, then stepped forward and took her in his arms. She rested her head on his
shoulder.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You don’t know what this means to me. I know he was planning to leave, and now he’ll have to take me with him.”
“I think he might have been planning to send for you,” Bruno said, “after... he was settled.”
She looked up into his face. “You know that? You really know that—you really do!” Her sudden joy was overpowering, throwing a renewed youthfulness into her face. Bruno hesitated, surprised by his own attraction to her and shamed by his weakness.
He pushed her away. Her hands let go of him as her butt went in and she folded in half with a scream—and the darkness took her. Too bad, Bruno lamented for a moment, that she couldn’t have shared the same pocket with the love of her life. Then he considered what she had so briefly deposited in him, but there was nothing left of his concern for her except a vague uneasiness.
He went to bed. She came to his door several times that night, and each encounter was the same.
Late the next morning there was another knock on his door. He got out of bed, glad to escape the anxiety of his sleep, and hurried to see who was knocking.
“Police,” said a male voice.
Bruno opened the door.
“I’m police captain Ernest Buck.”
“What is it?”
“May I ask you a question?”
“Sure, come in,” Bruno said, thinking it might be safer to talk to him. One man he might be able to handle, if need be.
The captain entered, closed the door behind him, and said, “Two detectives who work for me were sent to see you yesterday.”
“Sure,” Bruno said, “I couldn’t help them much.”
“They felt that you hadn’t told them everything you knew,” said the captain. “Can you tell me anything else? I mean, maybe you’ve recalled something else.”
“Well, no,” Bruno said, wondering if the captain had parked downstairs, alone or with a fellow officer. “How would I know?”
“What do you mean?”
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