“Ta,” she said.
He backed away, slapped the cab as if it were a toy car he could control with a key or a remote, one he could send on its way or make come back.
Only, he couldn’t.
Her face, receding and white in the dark interior, was pressed against the rear window as her hand made a backward, forward wave like a metronome.
Or it could have been you.
• • •
HE DID walk, too. He would be late home, late to Martha’s boudin blanc, but over the last hour, he had lost his appetite. Or, rather, lost his urgency to get back to Northants.
So he walked through the wet streets of Bethnal Green while the mist turned to something more trenchant, a businesslike rain, an unsporting, un-English rain that dropped straight down, bulletlike, cold and soaking.
He walked and wondered what was the matter with him that one day’s coming up to London should leave him feeling so disoriented, depleted, and alone. And different. He felt different, that was all. And that, old son (Melrose told himself), is likely the reason you should stick to your port and books.
Past dark doorways, an alley or two, he walked. Past a few shops—fishmonger’s, greengrocer’s, Hovis bakery. It was only nine, and yet the bleak quiet of Bethnal Green was what he’d expect to encounter in the hours after midnight. The still street and shuttered windows, the lowered blind of the greengrocer’s, the webbed grate before the jeweler’s windows, all of this fairly shouted absence absence. The street was swept clean of companionable sounds: no tires hissing past, no dogs or drunks rattling dustbins, no distant cries, cut off. The London night might as well have fallen into step beside him to let him know how alone he was.
Sorry, guv. You’re in Bethnal Green, mate, not the bloody country. Not the friendly fireside and the snoring old dog for comfort. Bethnal Green, old son, and don’t you forget it. Be wise to stick with what you know and not to go thinkin’ too much about it, know what I mean?
But Melrose kept on walking and the rain let up, returned itself to that gauzy mist, perhaps weary itself with its sudden wrathful turn. He stopped to listen, heard nothing, started up again. He was not sure where he was and he was too sad to care.
He had come to a little cul-de-sac, a blank wall in front of him that was decorated with an ancient poster, an advert for Rountree’s cocoa. And that, as had everything else that had happened that day, set the past before his eyes. You won’t escape, guv.
Melrose bowed his head. It was as if by some act of humility he could exorcise sadness and remorse. Yet he did not really know from what source these feelings had sprung. As he looked at the fading, graffiti-riddled, and peeling poster, a verse from childhood came to mind. He was surprised by it:
A splotch of mud on a Beggarstaff man,
A splotch and that is all.
Yet it blinds the eye of the Cocoa man
On a Bethnal Green dead wall.
PART TWO
Sunset, Santa Fe
TWENTY-FOUR
Jury sat on the rooftop of the La Fonda Hotel and watched the sun reflect off the western face of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He breathed in the weightless, dry air of New Mexico and watched that band of gold widen and diffuse, turn pink-gold that widened again and deepened to orange and red across the dark mountains.
He was too used to the bleak and often bitter dusks of London, where color was nonexistent and light, pragmatic. Light in London served its utilitarian purpose: being there, outside the window at six or seven a.m. to let him know it was time to get to Victoria Street; or at the other end of the day, its dying telling him he’d better take his torch along.
Jury was sitting on the roof of the La Fonda with Jack Oñate, the Santa Fe policeman, who had told him which mountain range that was, and that there were as many as seventy-three mountain ranges. Oñate had said that when he was a kid he’d had to memorize all of the names in school. But he had forgotten them by now, couldn’t recall any of the Northern range, just the Sangre de Cristos out there, the Sandias, the Jemez, the Ortiz—the better-known ones—and maybe a few more.
The fifty-mile-or-so trip from the Albuquerque airport in the hired car had opened Jury’s eyes to a wilderness of silvery sage and cottonwood, of land studded with the dark green of piñon and juniper. It might not be the most beautiful landscape he’d ever seen—there were, after all, the Lake District, the Hebrides—but this one was certainly the most unearthly. It didn’t look real. He noticed the registration plates of the cars that passed him bore the legend Land of Enchantment. That fit.
Jury and Jack Oñate, along with several other guests braving the February cold to catch the sunset, sat on folding chairs, bottled beer in their hands, gazing out towards the Sangre de Cristos. Jury asked about snow.
“On some of these mountains it never completely melts,” said Jack. “I go camping sometimes up in the San Juans and if you dig under that snow you get ice. Glacier snow, I call it.”
“How far off are they?” asked Jury, squinting at the mountain range.
“I don’t know, maybe twenty miles.”
“They look so close.”
“Here, thirty or forty miles looks like walking distance. It’s the air, see. The air’s so clear.”
For a while they were silent, watching the sunset, and then Jack Oñate, with a back-to-business sigh, slapped open one of the files he’d been carrying in a beaten-up briefcase.
“Angela Hope,” Oñate read from the sheet of paper, the manilla file open across his knee. He took a pull at his beer, set the bottle on the cement roof. “Thirty-two years, five-foot-six, brown eyes, dark brown hair. Angela Hope had an artsy little shop over on Canyon Road, where everyone and his brother has an artsy little shop. She lived some fifteen miles outside of Santa Fe, between here and Española. That’s the 753 exchange we called where the people never heard of her. The 473 and 982 exchanges are Santa Fe. But 753, that’s Española. Angela and her sister have this isolated little place in several acres of desert. The sister’s pretty young. Thirteen, but acts older. Her name’s Mary. Then there’s a housekeeper, Rosella Ortiz, been with them ever since they came here. She’s Indian. Cochise, maybe, or Zuñi.”
“You didn’t mention this cousin, Dolores Schell. The one who identified the body.”
“Right. Schell’s Pharmacy, that’s her. Her dad was the pharmacist and then when he died, Dolores took it over. It’s over on Old Pecos Trail.”
“She’s a pharmacist.”
Oñate nodded. “Now, the Schells have been here a long time.”
“She married?”
Oñate shook his head. “Lives by herself in a house over in El Dorado. A semi-swank development outside of town. I get the impression she and Angela weren’t all that close.” He shrugged. “Not unusual; I got cousins I ain’t even seen.”
“The Schells have been here a long time, but not the Hopes? Where are they from, then?”
“From the East.” Jack Oñate thumbed the papers. “New York. Hmm. New York money, or at least some kind of money. Parents died when their private plane went down.” He retrieved his bottle of beer. “So what do you guys figure?”
“Not much.” Jury shook his head, watched the blue mountains turn grape-dark.
“What’s ‘not much’?”
“Nothing.”
Oñate nodded. “I’d say that’s not much.” He returned his gaze to the file. “Her friends say she was nice, talented, nice, spiritual, nice, generous, nice. No deviations from that list, so no enemies, or none we heard from.”
“What about men? As they say, ‘significant others’?”
“Hard to tell, but this one guy, Malcolm Corey, might have been. He also has an artsy little shop on Canyon Road. This one’s a gallery. He claims to be a painter—who doesn’t around here?—but what he really is, he says, is an actor. He says.”
“How’d he react when he was told about her death?” Jury leaned over to see the address in the file and wrote it down.
�
�Pretty shocked. Might have gone pale but with the guy’s tan, it’s hard to tell.”
“You don’t sound overly fond of him.” Jury watched a long streak of magenta diffuse and spread into pale pink and lavender underlined with dark gold melting like caramel. “You said this Corey’s an actor?”
“No, I’m saying what he says. There are a lot of movies made around here. So they need extras for big scenes, or just people wandering around the streets. That’s the sort of thing this Corey guy does, except he wants you to think he’s really set for big roles. Claims he has this shop of his as a ‘hobby.’ He paints when he’s ‘resting between roles.’ That’s what these actors say when they’re out of a job. Meaning Corey’s not much in demand as a movie guy. Anyway, he’s got a high-profile agent. You want to talk to him, he just might be over at Rancho del Reposo. That’s one place they’re shooting. It’s a high-priced sort of hotel, main lodge and casitas, several miles outside of town.”
Jury held his bottle up to the light, brooding on its emptiness. “Then you get a lot of California types here?”
“Oh, hell, yes, but not just because of the movies. They flock here from Southern Cal. They love it, think they’ve ‘discovered’ Santa Fe.”
“You’ve lived here a long time?” Jury thought he could sit here, slumped in this chair, feet resting on the porch railing, for the rest of the night. He was tired, but not with a London bone-tiredness. He felt as if a lot of tension were seeping out of his body, leaving him feeling wilted.
“All my life. It used to be so different. Now it’s citified, know what I mean? Sophisticated, trendy, beautiful—but in a whoring kind of way. Paid to be pretty, paid to keep itself up.”
Jury laughed. “This place isn’t cheap like that.”
“Who said cheap? Believe me, this is one place in the U.S. of A. that is decidedly not cheap. You can see the way the edges are rotting away, though. You drove here, you came on Cerrillos Road.”
“The highway with the string of motels?”
“Right. Cerrillos Road is like afterbirth; it’s the mess left behind because of tourism. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hate tourists. In fact, it ticks me off when I hear these fancy store owners complain. Where the hell would they be without the tourists? Who is it spends the money? But it’s the concept of ‘tourism’ that gets to me. It’s like a monster the city itself created and now the monster’s clumping around town demanding a room for the night.” Oñate sounded sad. “Hell, another ten years, old Santa Fe’ll be gone.”
“You could say the same thing about old England.”
Jack Oñate shook his head. “It’d be pretty hard to bury England under a pile of turquoise and carved coyotes and cactus. I just don’t think a culture can stand this much hammering. Want another beer? You’ve been doing everything with that empty except standing it on your head.”
Jury grinned. He’d been watching two women at the end of this row of sunset watchers light up cigarettes. The women were good-looking in a perfectly coiffed, enameled sort of way. But it was the cigarettes that made him salivate. “Yes, I want another. Do you smoke?”
“I used to. Gave it up some years back. Why?”
“I’m trying to quit.” He watched the threads of smoke from the freshly lighted cigarettes turn a bluish-pink against the mellow umber of adobe wall. “But then I see that—” Jury nodded toward the women, both with cigarettes held within bare inches of their moist, red lips—“and it’s like . . . sex. It’s lust; it’s a hunger, devouring. When I watch, I lust after them. The cigarettes, not the women.”
“Took me years to stop. Must’ve tried two dozen times.” He got up and clapped a hand on Jury’s shoulder. “So, listen, man; let’s have another beer and talk about stuff.” He went off towards the rooftop bar.
Talk about stuff. That, and the childlike expression on Jack Oñate’s face, made Jury smile; it took him back to the years he’d spent in the house of his uncle, after his mother’s death, after the home he’d been put in. He was nine or ten. Behind the house was a long garden that emptied onto deep fields of grazing land belonging to some well-to-do farmer. There was a shed, a fairly large one that served as shelter for whatever farm animals might be stuck out in the fields in rain or snow. There was his best friend, Billy Oakley, a couple of years older than he, who used to nick his dad’s cigarettes and sometimes his whisky. They would sit in the shed and make themselves ill, and often, a cow or a sheep joined them for company. Billy Oakley’s favorite word was “stuff.” It sufficed largely for anything he didn’t understand, anything beyond his comprehension. His dad did “accounting and stuff”; women had “tits and stuff.” And a couple of years into the shed visits Billy’s mother died. It was “leukemia and stuff.”
Jack Oñate resettled himself and handed Jury another beer. He sighed. “Angela Hope. I didn’t know her myself. Only to see, that is. Her and her sister.”
“I’ll want to talk to anyone you know of who did know her. Who else besides the perhaps-boyfriend Corey and the little sister?”
“Well, there’s some of the other people on Canyon Road. Since she had her business there, it stands to reason they’d have known her. On one side there’s a Ms. Bartholomew. Sukie Bartholomew. My God—” Jack looked at Jury—“ ‘Sukie’ Bartholomew. Go figure. She’s into crystals, tarot cards, stuff like that. But you get more of that in Sedona. Actually I think this Bartholomew woman is from there. Which is kind of strange. Most of them leave Santa Fe to go to Sedona. Spiritual place, they say. ‘Vortexes’ and stuff. Some kind of magnetic center that’s supposed to be real spiritual. Holes in the ground. They call them vortexes. Me, I call it mystical shit.”
“You’re talking about Sedona, Arizona.”
“Yeah.” Jack looked over at him. “Even in your business, you’ve heard of Sedona?”
“Coincidence. I just happened to read something in a newspaper about it. New Age people, that’s what they were called.”
Looking down at his notes, Jack continued. “I get the impression no one who does business on Canyon Road really knew Angela Hope all that well. Except maybe for this Sukie person, I mean, they had tea together sometimes. Probably that ginseng, herbal junk.” Oñate studied his bottle label as if to compare ingredients. “And as for these two Brits of yours, Frances Hamilton and Helen Hawes—” Jack shook his head—“there’s even less there. They both stayed here—” he pointed down at the roof “—for two days, and the Hawes woman was here longer. This Frances Hamilton checked in for the two days before they left. But no one I talked to—not the desk clerk, not the maid, not the dining room hostess ever saw them together.”
“Could Frances Hamilton have been staying somewhere else before that?”
“Sure. But I thought you only wanted to know where they were together. I can ask around some more—”
Jury shook his head. “Thanks, but I can do it.”
Oñate thought for a moment, then asked, “Did she have money?”
“Frances Hamilton? Yes, quite a lot.”
“Then try Rancho del Reposo. It’s maybe ten miles the other side of Santa Fe.”
“Right.” Jury glanced at Oñate’s notes. “Anyone else?”
“Then there’s this scientist type, Nils Anders. Doctor Anders, I should say. He was a friend of Angela Hope. Again, how good, I don’t know. He’s over at the Santa Fe Institute. All I have is, he’s a friend.”
“What’s the Santa Fe Institute?”
“It’s where all kinds of scientists hang out thinking up weird stuff.”
Jury rolled the cool bottle across his forehead, and said, “What kind of weird stuff?”
“It’s like a think tank. All kinds of scientists—physicists, biologists, mathematicians, chemists—they get together and knock ideas around. They use computers a lot; they got more computers in that place than Macintosh.” Jack tilted his bottle, took a long drink. “They’re mostly into something called ‘complexity theory.’ ”
“What’s that?”
<
br /> Jack shrugged. “Some theory of the way the universe acts. It’s after ‘chaos.’ Don’t look at me; I didn’t make it up. It’s got something to do with order. A kind of order.”
Macalvie might like that, thought Jury, returning his gaze to the dark mountains. He was getting hungry. There must be a hundred terrific restaurants in Santa Fe. “Where is this place?”
“Hyde Park Road. You go like you were headed for the ski basin or for that spa up there—”
“I’m not skiing or spa-ing, so you’ll have to direct me.”
Jack nodded. “What I think is, if Einstein had been around when there were places like this Institute, he’d have gone there and chilled. You know?”
“And Dr. Anders. Which particular kind of weird stuff is he into?”
“Anders . . . Anders . . . Anders . . . ” Jack was whispering, leafing through the file pages. “Weird stuff . . . weird. . . . Ah, here it is: Ph.D., psychology. Ph.D., sociology. Ph.D., mathematics. Hell, I’m impressed. Guy’s got three of them.” He went back to the notes. “You going to see him? And the rest of them?”
“I imagine, yes. Right now, how about dinner?”
“Okay. Incidentally, Rich. These people at the Santa Fe Institute, they are not dumb.” Jack repeated this, his mouth an O, silently mouthing the words NOT DUMB.
Jury leaned over towards him, also mouthing, NEITHER ARE WE.
TWENTY-FIVE
Canyon Road, the sign said, and given that the other streets Jury had passed were not posted with turquoise and brown wooden signs, he assumed that this one was one of Santa Fe’s prime attractions. So variously and brightly painted were the adobe and wood buildings that bordered each side of the narrow, winding street, he thought he might have come upon one of those “Prettiest Villages in England.” They were selling either Native American crafts, or art, or food. In the summer months he imagined it would be a touristy hell, but now, in February, it lay quiet and golden, sunlight reflecting off turquoise and blue and rose-colored paint.
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