The Horse You Came in On

by Martha Grimes

  “Because,” she said patiently, “their suitcases are already on the cart.”

  Annoyed with himself for not noticing this clue, he refused to verify it as he looked into the three-dimensional past. She was under twenty-one, which put her in the child category, that group from which one could exact intelligence only after gummy bears had changed hands. Reluctantly, he abandoned the stereopticon, and with it the past, to set about getting his information. No one else was about, so it would have to be this child.

  She must have been left in charge, for she asked him if he was looking for something particular.

  “Yes—books,” he said. “First editions.”

  She walked over to a bookcase and stood before it. “Here are some old ones.” Her face was peaked, her expression sad, perhaps from cohabitation with grim reminders of hellfire and the almost equally unattractive prospect of heaven, given the pallid look of the saint in the tarnished frame above the bookcase, who certainly didn’t appear to be looking forward to the place beyond the ceiling toward which his eyes were raised.

  “These look a bit newer than what I want,” said Melrose, fingering the cracked bindings. “Actually, I deal in old manuscripts. I don’t expect you have any?”

  “Are you English?”

  “Yes. How did you guess?”

  “From the way you talk.”

  “It’s a dead giveaway, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  He wished she’d stop answering his rhetorical questions. She must be awfully literal. He opened a copy of an Arthur Rackham-illustrated version of Peter Pan. The cover was shabby and the endpapers spattered, but the pictures were lovely: fairies flitting about in the faded blue and pearl-gray dawn or dusk of Kensington Gardens.

  “That’s my favorite book.”

  “It’s very nice. I’m more interested in American writers, though.”

  “I was in England once . . . I think,” she added meditatively.

  “You mean you’re not sure?” He wished she’d stick to the subject.

  She positioned herself where she could see the open book in his hands. “This looks familiar.”

  “That’s a statue of Peter Pan.”

  “Maybe I dreamed it.”

  The macaw chose this moment to squawk. It sounded like “Eh-more.”

  “Be quiet,” she said to it, quite sharply.

  “You mean it’s alive? I could have sworn it was stuffed.”

  The damned bird, awakened now to the fact of its own life, decided to celebrate itself with a squawking iteration of “Eh-more,” which was apparently the sum and substance of its vocabulary. It preened, flapped its wings, danced along its perch to the sound of “Eh-moreehmoremoreehor.” Did it think that would excite someone into giving it a biscuit? Not even the cat was interested. It slumbered away on its camouflage of rags and pillows, only mildly disturbed when the girl pulled a large square of material out from under it and set about draping the blood-red shawl part-way over the cage. “If I don’t do this, he’ll just keep it up. It’s supposed to be saying ‘Nevermore,’ but all it can get out is the ‘more’ part. One of my aunt’s friends tried to teach it. I wish he’d just left it alone.”

  Melrose decided that the girl was, after all, quite sensible, if that was her verdict on the silly business of teaching birds to talk. “Is this your aunt’s shop, then?”

  “Yes, but she’s gone to the store.” She turned to a rack of old jackets and gowns and outmoded frocks and wedding clothes. There was a stiff, white wedding dress, folds creaking with age. These, he supposed, were euphemistically termed “vintage clothing.” She took a dark green velvet gown from a hanger and held it up to her small frame, inspecting herself in the mirror.

  “And when will she return, do you know?”

  “Not for hours. It’s her shopping day. I’m in charge.” She had turned to look at the sweep of the skirt. “Does this look like Scarlett O’Hara?”

  “Not particularly. Look, have you any old manuscripts?”

  In her Gone with the Wind mood, she wasn’t interested in old manuscripts. Perhaps, he thought, seeing her slight scowl, he should have told her yes, she bore a strong resemblance to Scarlett O’Hara. Actually, observing her closely, as if he were again gazing through the stereopticon, there was a resemblance, for she had very dark hair and a slightly tilted nose. Her eyes were an unusual shade of brown, something like the color of the Russian amber necklace he had seen on the jewelry tray. He picked up a dark green bonnet and stuck it on her head. “Now you do. Look like Scarlett, I mean. If you tie that ribbon under your chin.”

  The hat was much too big and nearly engulfed her face, but she seemed to think this was a grand idea and tied the velvet ribbon in a bow.

  The several long-casement clocks started chiming, each coming in a split second after the other, and she said, “It’s time for tea. We always have tea mid-morning. I guess you want some because you’re English. I’ll be back after I put the kettle on, in a minute.”

  He took the minute to inspect the inside of the lid of the trunk she had opened. But lightning doesn’t strike twice.

  In a very short while she was back, still wearing the bonnet, rooting through another of the several trunks stationed around the shop. Over the top of the raised lid were draped various garments of white—or what had once been white—linen and lace. She picked out a blouse and tried it on over her T-shirt.

  Why, he wondered, was he bothering to be so circumspect in his questions? It wasn’t as if she had any reason to be on guard. As she was putting a green jacket on over her jumper, he said to her, “Someone told me that a very important manuscript was found in a trunk here. By accident, by one of your customers.”

  She became suddenly very still, as she turned away from him, buttoning up the green jacket.

  “Very valuable,” he repeated. He thought, seeing her reflection in the mirror, that her face looked white and drained.

  She shrugged her apparent indifference to the turn this conversation had taken.

  He did not think she was indifferent. “Did you happen to see this trunk?”

  “Yes.” A larger silence drew out, and then she said, “She’s dead.”

  A kettle screamed. Melrose started.

  “I’ll get the tea,” she called back as she rushed from the room.

  The macaw, which had been in a flurry of excitement when the kettle whistled away, had jostled the shawl part-way from the cage. Now, seeing there was only Melrose left to entertain him, it dozed on its perch. A dish of little white biscuits sat on a plant stand beside the cage, and Melrose pinched one up and through the open cage door. The bird ignored the proffered biscuit and the door to freedom. If the only thing on the other side of a cage was Melrose Plant, it might as well stick to its perch.

  “Suit yourself,” said Melrose and turned to the cat, who shivered himself awake, arching his back and yawning widely. He sniffed at the biscuit and recoiled himself on the cushions.

  Once more she was returning, this time balancing two mugs and a teapot on a tray; a bowl of sugar and a jug of milk sat beside them. There was also a plate with lemon slices, cakes, and stacked-up biscuits. The cakes were round and thick with icing and coconut; the biscuits were chocolate with creamy centers.

  “What,” Melrose asked, conversationally, “is your name?”

  She answered, “Jip,” in a flat tone, as if she’d rather not have answered him at all. They were silent for a moment as she offered the sugar, which he spooned out, and the lemon, which he refused, pouring out a bit of milk instead.

  “Well. Mine’s Melrose. How do you do?”

  Unhappily, he thought, she drank her tea, her deep golden-brown eyes regarding him over the rim of the cup. “Jip. That’s an interesting name. What’s it a nickname for?” For he assumed that it was.

  “Nothing. It’s just Jip.”

  Her expressive face was now solemn, as if she too knew it did not sound like a real name, like a name one would be likely to find
on any birth certificate. Was it possible, he wondered, that she did not know her real name? Her face, under the fold of the ridiculous wings of her bonnet, was woeful. She replaced the biscuit and yanked off the hat. Playtime was over. Or something was over.

  “It’s probably a patronym,” said Melrose, taking a seat in a very low old chair with a cushion through which you could see the shape of the springs.

  In the process of licking the icing from another biscuit, she stopped. She frowned. “A what?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said breezily, “the Russian thing. You find it in the Russian novels. Patronyms. They have this affectionate way of referring to people. I have one. A patronym, I mean.” Oh, why was he saying this? He hadn’t any name at all except Melrose. His parents hadn’t even given him a middle name. He became unreasonably irritated by this. Why couldn’t they have named him Melrose Fyodorovitch? A middle name—several middle names—might have come in handy in the circumstances.

  “What is it?”

  “Melrovitch.” He cleared his throat. “You see it’s rather like, say, Petrovitch for Peter; or Anna Petrovna, say.” He smiled and consulted the biscuit-plate. “And then there’s the diminutive. In my case it’s Melshi. What are these?”

  But she didn’t for a second seem to hear him. She was holding the two halves of her biscuit aloft, one piece in each hand, staring at him. “Melshi,” she said. Then she answered his question: “Oreos and Snowballs.”

  “Did you make them?”

  “No. They’re store-bought.”

  Melrose selected one of the round, white cakes, thickly covered with gluey white frosting and shreds of coconut. One bite was enough. He set it down on the rim of a plate holding a selection of antique coins.

  “Go on. About the names,” she said.

  He scratched his head. “Of course, you’re probably not Russian—are you? There are many people who aren’t but who have these patronyms and diminutives. Although, as I said, you do find most of them in Tolstoy. Or Dostoyevsky.”

  She watched him closely as she licked the icing from her Oreo.

  Melrose had decided long ago that if you were in deep, the only thing to do was go deeper. “I once knew—well, he was my very best friend really—a Russian named Alexei. But the diminutive was Alyosha.” Jip was leaning back against the rack of old clothes. The stiff white gown rustled. “I was at his wedding. He was quite wealthy; it was a huge wedding. I got a piece of white cake in a small white satin box—”

  “I thought it was only ladies got that.”

  “Not in Russia. In Russia it’s the men. In Russia, the men need the luck more.”

  She nodded and divided another biscuit.

  Absently, Melrose was turning the plate full of foreign coins beside his mug of tea. “But when I opened this box I found not a piece of wedding cake but a ruble and a note all folded up. It was a note telling me . . . no, warning me, to leave, uh, Leningrad right away and go to—” His eye fell on a stack of old postcards; one was of the Rockettes kicking out lustily, old babies in satin diapers, and he thought of the graceful Georgian dancers. “—to Georgia. Yes, I was to leave Leningrad and go to Georgia.” He tried to think of some reason for the ruble’s being in the box but couldn’t.

  “Atlanta?”

  “What?”

  “Were you supposed to go to Atlanta or where?”

  “No, no. I mean Georgia. The Russian Georgia.”

  She nodded and set down the now-denuded biscuit beside the first one, also icing-less, and picked up another. He looked at the Snowball and continued: “It was winter.” The rack of clothes swayed behind Jip as she nestled into it. There was a ratty old fur coat behind the white gown. “I was provided with warm clothes and a sleigh. I seem to remember the coat I was given was Russian sable.” Looking into her Russian amber eyes, he wondered, should there be a woman in this sleigh?

  “Who gave you the sleigh and stuff? Was it Alyosha?”

  “Yes.” Ah, good! She was providing the background herself. “He was wealthy.”

  “You told me.” She pressed the two halves of the licked biscuit together and replaced it on the glass plate. She took another from the stack. “Go on.”

  “You have no idea how deep the snow was. Great mounds of it everywhere.” Melrose could almost feel the heavy, wet, fat flakes on his face. “It fell in . . . droves. We travelled for three days and three nights.” Things always happened in threes in stories.

  “We?”

  He had forgotten to add The Woman.

  “A friend of Alyosha. A woman.”

  “You met her at the wedding, I guess. Do you want more tea?”

  “Yes, thanks.” She was an excellent audience. As the fresh teabag plopped into his cup and she added water from the pot, tepid by now, he went on. “She was Alyosha’s sister.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Julie.” Where had that come from? “Julie” didn’t sound Russian.

  This was pointed out to him. “She doesn’t sound very Russian.”

  “Her mother was British.”

  “But she’s Alyosha’s sister. So she must be Russian, too.”

  “His half-sister,” said Melrose briskly. “But she’s—I mean, she had been living in Russia her entire life. Is it important? She was stunningly beautiful. Her hair was very dark, and her eyes were like . . . the color of sand at sunset. In Arabia.” His mind drifted off to smooth and endless golden dunes, the red sun sinking behind them. . . .

  She prompted him. “You and this Julie—then what happened?”

  Both to stall for time and to ease his back, Melrose rose from the broken-springed chair and moved to some shelves containing bits and bobs of clothing—scarves, gloves, squashed-looking women’s hats.

  “Well? Go on.”

  Melrose poked his hand into a white fake-fur muff and thought of Julie. Julie Christie! That was where the name had popped up from! Driving through the snow with that heavily mustached actor in Dr. Zhivago. “Julie was wearing a cape with a hood outlined in ermine. She had a muff. There was a gun concealed in it.” He looked out of the corner of his eye to see how this news was being received.

  Fairly well, for she had stopped eating and wore an expression of mild alarm.

  “You see, Julie was running away from the KGB. Or what had been the KGB. Things have improved now,” he added vaguely.

  “What did Julie do? Why were they chasing her?”

  “They claimed she’d killed—your telephone’s ringing.”

  She looked over her shoulder. “It’s just for my aunt.” As if she were pursuing a line of thought apart from Melrose’s, she added, “She’s not my real aunt.”

  “Oh? Then how did you come to acquire her?”

  Enough of real life. “Who did Julie kill?”

  “The husband of a woman very high up in the government. Madame Vronsky. That’s who she was accused of killing, at least. No one was sure. Except she trusted me enough to tell me the truth. Naturally, it was a dark secret. But she knew she could trust me.” He looked down to see his hands were still in the muff. He was glad no one had come into the shop.

  “So did they catch her?”

  “No. But you’re getting ahead of my story,” he added, rather too impatiently, considering he himself was so far behind he had no idea what these Russians were up to.

  “You still haven’t said why Alyosha told you you had to get out of—where was it?”

  Where? Oh, yes. “Leningrad. That was only clear to me much later. Don’t jump ahead so much.” Melrose rubbed his forehead. In his mind’s eye he could picture it: the great frozen wastes; a line of black trees, the beginning of a wood, across the horizon; the purple shadows. Was it dawn or dusk? A band of pale pink hung like a scarf above the distant trees. And he saw himself (and Julie) gliding along in the sleigh over the silent snow, as the sun slowly rose. And then, looking at the pavonine splashes of light thrown by the green and blue insets in the shop windows, he thought, But this is wonderful!
And he thought of Joanna the Mad, sitting there in the Jack and Hammer and talking of the job of writing as completely mechanical. Ah, surely she was wrong. It had nothing to do with the hard, greasy machinery of life. Oh, it was work, yes, but the work of gathering dews in a teacup or riveting stars to the moon.

  “Well, that’s glory for you!” he exclaimed.

  “Huh?”

  Melrose had forgotten momentarily where he was. “Sorry. Just a little Alice in Wonderland. I got carried away.”

  He got up to stretch and visit a small cupboard of what appeared to be brightly colored and carved little animals. He picked up one painted as brilliantly as the macaw with a long snout and shingled tail. Armadillo? Iguana?

  “We drove in the sleigh for what seemed days, but of course was only a few hours. Suddenly, the horses whinnied and stopped. Something had slithered across their path. I just caught a glimpse of something very small, running. It had a tail.”

  “A rat? Baltimore gets a lot of rats.”

  “No,” said Melrose. “This is Georgia in Russia we’re talking about.”

  “I guess there are rats in Russia.”

  “Look, I said it wasn’t a rat.”

  She nodded.

  He replaced the armadillo or iguana. “Julie grabbed my arm and said we might have just seen one of the fabled trotskitoskis of the Russian steppes. They are a sort of animal, something like a small fox, said to bring luck to anyone whose path they cross. ‘Trots’ for short.”

  “Did the trot bring you luck?”

  Melrose was pleased with himself for having thought up the trot. “Wait and see.”

  “I have to wait and see about everything.”

  He had to admit, his story was laden with detail. But wasn’t that what it was all about? He frowned. He wasn’t sure. Ellen’s story had practically no details except a few pieces of furniture and this Sweetie person waiting for a letter to slip through the door. He stood idly fingering the old lace and satin and tulle gowns, heavy with pearl insets and tiny, iciclelike beads and wondered if his story was too heavily embroidered, too weighty with ornament.