Speke slammed the hood, very hard. The radio antenna quivered.
Asquith was not playing an extended joke. Asquith was playing for life, and for death. Speke could feel it now—Asquith was watching, as the tragedian might watch from stage left, in the shadows among the drapes and cables, waiting for his cue.
I am an actor, too, he thought. In my way, without your polish, Asquith, without the acid you could deliver with each consonant. My gift was always instinctive, knowing what the characters would say because I was a human being and had wept and laughed. Asquith had always known only wit. Cunning Asquith had understood only the mind diseased. Asquith had understood why the arsonist in Flash—the play Variety proclaimed was “still burning records in New York and London”—worshipped fire. The arsonist in the play loved fire so deeply he eventually burned alive.
Don’t run, Speke counseled himself. Don’t even consider such a thing. This is your land. You are master here. You know he’s watching.
He couldn’t keep himself from gazing along the line of trees, over the concrete block of the wellhead, over the bottlebrush and the toyon and the buckeye, the silver-dollar eucalyptus and the Russian olive. To the California bays in the dry creek and everywhere beyond, everywhere with their huge, still, wrestling branches, the live oaks.
Beyond the garage, far down through the woods, glittered the lake. A quail far away twisted off one of his calls. The air was hot, and redolent with the exhaled flavors of the wild oats and the foxtails, the thistles and the thyme. The dry perfection, the hills in their summer coma.
I’m trapped here. Caged within a spotlight, an airless zero.
Then he knew how ridiculous he was being. Of course he could walk the few miles to the road. But why should he? He was master here! This was his land. He wasn’t going anywhere.
He turned to his wife. He thought of her this way, as an extension of his body, a deep, vital organ. Asquith had failed. She was his.
“No, don’t go in there, Hamilton, please don’t go. You don’t know how he is,” she gasped. She was hyperventilating, eyes wide. “You don’t know what he wants to do. He wanted to do much worse things to you than try to trick you and deceive you. He wanted to do everything he could to wreck everything that was yours. Hamilton, please don’t go into the house.”
He cupped her head in his hands, and kissed her tears. What power Asquith must have, he thought, to capture a woman and keep her like this. “If he’s in there, I want to see him.”
“I hated you, too. I hated you!” Her voice was like a leak in an airhose, a hiss that was more scream than whisper. Speke could not move for a moment. “But I know you don’t deserve this, Hamilton. I can’t hate you any more.”
There was a thought as sickening as a snapped bone: madness was not impending. It was upon him. There had never been an Asquith. Asquith had never visited, and Speke had buried a road-killed buck in a psychotic delusion, a holiday from reality. Maria wasn’t saying the things he heard her saying. He was having a complete, sunlit hallucination.
Stunned, staring straight ahead, Speke strode through the heat, into the cool vault of the house.
Was it possible that he could have so completely lost his mind? What test was there, what way to determine what was real. Once he had eaten some very bitter mushrooms, curled fungi black and withered as dead tadpoles. “Powerful stuff,” a fellow partygoer had said, sprinkling them into his palm. “Powerful” was an understatement. They had been crippling. He had spent the day watching television simply because he could not trust himself to go outside where there was traffic. Better to stay inside, he had told himself, although to this day ads for certain detergents made him feel a giddy horror.
Asquith had never been strong enough to wear the heavy cape of fame—the love of strangers. Asquith could hide, and he could poison a life he could never have captured and kept. But Speke knew his own strength. He was sunlight. He was laughter. He could feel it in his lungs, his bones—he could save Maria from all that had happened, He loved her.
Asquith had lost his mind. Lost his mind, and his power to love, long ago. Early one morning in North Beach, he had walked naked along Columbus Avenue. So early only pigeons and a street sweeping machine stirred on the street, along with Asquith, blood streaming down his arm, trickling from a bite he had taken out of his own flesh.
I don’t know, Speke told himself, what is real. This is what Asquith must have wanted: he wanted to strip everything away. So let it be stripped, Speke thought, all illusion, to an empty stage set, a landscape of stark light and cutting dark. Let it be simple: this was a contest between faith and hope over spite and cruelty. Light was stepping forward to battle the dark.
Speke had no weapon.
Nothing but his anger, and his love.
29
If Asquith was in the house, hiding, soaked into some recess of the interior, Speke would find him.
He called Asquith’s name.
The house was his. The house was home, and affection. The house was knowledge that a future was possible, a human future.
He stormed through the sun room, that beautiful airless place, the hall, that carpeted, ferned atrium, and bounded up the stairs. He burst into one bedroom after another. Each chamber was a page from a decorator’s brochure, the air in the teak room scented with tung oil, the bunch of dried rose petals in Maria’s study surrendering the ghost of a perfume into the air. He was, he knew, violating each uninhabited, perfect room with his anger.
But he knew he was right to do what he was doing. He would not be cheated of his life, cozened into a lesser world. He wanted to rip the air itself. He kicked open a door.
“Asquith!”
The chimney of a hurricane lamp shivered, chiming. A spray of baby’s breath trembled at his tread. He had not been in this room for months. It was delightful, colonial American, hand-finished maple, great oval rag rugs. One of these rooms was supposed to be Empire, all spindly legs and mother-of-pearl inset rosewood. He couldn’t find it, and then, when at last he did, he broke one of the chairs, tossing it aside. The leg was pink where it had fractured, like a thing of flesh. There was no air.
No, he thought, this is wrong. His search did not have to be this frenzied. Take your time, he told himself.
He called his old friend’s name. And as he searched, the fury returned. He threw open doors, whisked dresses off their hooks in closets, and there were many closets, walk-in rooms of empty, unused shelves, and others crowded with stylish silk frou-frou from Milan, clothes Maria had just bought, a brass hook from each neck.
When he had exhausted the upstairs, he pounded downstairs to the office. To the bar, with its princely piranha. To the dining room, and into Sarah’s office, where he fumbled with that phone long enough to realize that this receiver too, was dead.
“Maria!” he called. He stabbed at the intercom, and heard his voice echo in distant rooms. The two-way system told him that the house was empty. It had mikes so sensitive you could hear a fly whine in a far-off room. Except that at this moment there were no flies. No distant footsteps, no stifled laughter. No one but one confused, sweating, angry Hamilton Speke.
The intercom was dead, too. Of course.
Hamilton, said a sweet, soft, smart-ass inner voice. Hamilton: you are losing your mind.
There never was an Asquith. Never. He was never here.
Christ, he thought. Where is Maria?
Be steady, he commanded himself. Stay calm. Move step by step. Asquith wants you to panic. He might be listening even now. Don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing you like this. Take a deep breath. Remember those breathing exercises that were supposed to stave off panic, the ones the therapist taught you? Asquith wants the old, ragged Speke to come back, the Speke who chewed tranquilizers like antacids. He wants you to be as sick as he is.
I was just an ordinary kid. I had a bicycle, and a paper route. It was California suburbia, lawns and friendly dogs. I wanted something more.
I will be all
right, he told himself. I’m taking big, deep breaths, just as the therapist instructed me to do when I felt a panic attack and couldn’t get my hands on the one-hundred-and-fifty milligram beta blockers.
Asquith had taken the sleeping pills, too. And the tranquilizers. He had cleaned them all out. He squirreled them away, and probably swallowed them all himself in one great belly-bloating party. That’s all right. Hamilton Speke didn’t need chemical solace. He was here like iron.
But there was something wrong. Something very wrong. He stepped into the corridor. The house was too silent. An instinct, a hunter’s guile, perhaps, came to him from a prehistoric part of his mind. This quiet was bad.
“Clara?” he called.
Maybe, he thought, she can’t hear me from here. She occupied her own world, the kitchen and her recipes, her drying herbs, her muffin tins. Maybe she had left the house altogether. That’s it—she’s not here.
He called her name again, and there was no answer.
Not here, he told himself. There’s no question about it. She’s gone.
This silence was very bad.
Clara was still here. He could tell. That same instinct, that same hunter’s savvy, returned to him. The woman he thought of as the unacknowledged guardian angel of this place, the sentinel that kept it safe, the woman who would know where Asquith had been hiding, was somewhere in the house, and almost certainly right where she always was—in the kitchen. Asquith was cagey, but he had always needed that extra toke of hashish to keep plodding, that extra slug of cognac to stay bright.
Asquith had met his match. He was up against Hamilton Speke, two-fisted, life in his lungs. “Clara!” he bawled into the shadowy walls of the hallway, knowing that by now she should have heard him and responded.
He shrank back into the office. His instinct told him: find something in here that you can use. Put your hand on a weapon.
Sarah’s office was hot, stuffy, glittering with tiny toothed objects, staplers and staple removers like fanged robot snakes. Why did Sarah need three sets of those? And what a strange invention they were, really, nothing like the elegant solutions that his father had brought into being. We’ve got the answer to the staple problem, sir. We’ll bite them off with one of these.
He was cold. There was nothing that resembled a weapon here. Besides, he was unnerving himself. There was no need to find a weapon at all. This was just another form of giving in to fear.
He needed to see Clara. He needed to wash dishes with her, and help her dry all the cups in the sunny kitchen.
Clara.
He crept carefully, very quietly, down the long hall. You see, a nasty inner voice said. You see? She should have heard you. She’s only at the end of the corridor, behind a door.
Bad quiet.
He lunged at the kitchen door and the broad white door swung open.
The room was silence and light.
There—you see how foolish it was to worry. You were silly to get so upset. Everything is just fine.
The kitchen was sunny, yellow walls and Spanish tile gleaming. The door was on a spring and swung back and forth, a trap that hid what it had just displayed several times before working its way to the closed position.
Speke slumped, panting, in the hallway.
He had been overexcited, nothing more. There were no problems at all in the kitchen. None at all.
Except for that one little detail that didn’t quite belong. That one little smudge. Well, it wasn’t exactly a smudge. It was not a smudge at all, really, so much as a handprint. It had been a dark, sticky looking handprint. It was nothing more than a jam handprint.
Nice, tart jam.
Go ahead, he told himself. Take another look. Open the door and take a nice long look. But it wasn’t his voice nudging him forward. It was that nasty, wise little voice that knew everything too well.
I should call the police.
Sure, said the little voice. Go ahead and call the police on your brand new AT&T state-of-the-art telephone system that somehow just doesn’t seem to work all that well.
Go back and find a weapon. Something hard and heavy, something that could kill.
His hands were numb, and his arms did not obey the command to lift, and push the door. The door wasn’t heavy. It was a single swinging door. There was even a window in it, through which yellow wall was visible, a small window, just big enough for one servant to see another coming with a brace of roast pheasant.
Just big enough for Speke to step to one side and see the jam handprint. It was clear and very bright, at the bottom of a cupboard, down by the gleaming floor.
He slumped to his knees. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t real. But if it isn’t real, then I might as well go ahead and look. Right?
Asquith has met his match, right? Isn’t that what you were just telling yourself? Or maybe the dark is powerful, so much more powerful than the light. He told his hands to move, and very slowly he climbed up the wall, and carefully, very gently, pushed at the door.
Even then he didn’t look. Whatever you do, he told himself, don’t look. You could make a mistake if you look too soon. The early evidence might prove misleading. Wait until you step all the way into the nice yellow kitchen, until the swinging door has done its pendulum routine and has shut all the way and then, only then, take a nice long look.
He was shuddering, deep in his muscles, like a man up to his chin in ice water. His arms and legs had no feeling, limbs lost to hypothermia.
Turn around and look. Turn around and take a look at Clara.
Because that’s who it was. He could tell through the back of his head, through his shirt, through his skin. There was a smell.
It was not the smell of blueberry muffins.
He turned his body. He closed his eyes, but it was already too late. It was already much too late, and a moan was rising from the bottom of his lungs, rising, and increasing in pitch and volume to a cry.
Clara was everywhere.
30
Splashes of shadow slipped over him. Asquith melted from tree to tree, making his way quickly into the woods.
He stopped to listen. The brush around him was busy with the keen and blurt of tiny lives, and there was a dry wind, a sturdy breeze, beginning to stir in the upper branches.
Hamilton no doubt still believed that he was Asquith’s equal. He could easily imagine Speke’s reasoning: I am the man of life and reason, and with a little perseverance Asquith doesn’t stand a chance.
Poor man, so full of trust. Hamilton Speke had always had too much faith, and too little understanding of the ways of darkness. Speke thought the world was good.
He clung to yet another tree for a moment, looking back toward the house. He heard Speke’s cry, calling the name of his old partner. Asquith’s senses had always been more keen than the senses of most athletes. Most men were so clumsy, although Hamilton was keen enough, in his way. Asquith was trembling inwardly, alive to the great power he had over this place.
Yes, dear friend, you really are finished. Look hard, Hamilton. Search from room to room. Enjoy the last moments of this sunny chapter of your life.
Asquith did not need to run, now. He slipped along a trail of his own making, a path no eye could detect but his, his feet seeking stones and the pithy, sun-baked loam because he knew that while Hamilton Speke was not a skilled tracker he was not, at the same time, a stupid man.
His own play, the great work of his life, was proceeding magnificently, and it was satisfying how little was surprising him. Of course Maria had divulged all, taken in at last by Speke’s overpowering warmth, his genuine animal liveliness, his beauty. He had not overheard her, but he had seen it in her eyes. She was beginning to fall under the spell of her husband.
As Maria had told her inevitable tale, Asquith had played his game of love. It had only taken a few minutes, just a few perfect moments, slipping like pearls, and the woman had been so fortunate as to die in a convulsion even as he slipped into her. His spasms had thrown her body
against his, and he had crooned into her the faith he had that the journey she took, the tide that swept her outward, was far more blissful than any joy she had ever experienced in this page after page existence some people prized.
He trotted downhill, dodging boulders and down-swept branches, leaping the man-thick roots of the ancient oaks. He fell panting beside his hiding place, his camp, with its smudge of campfire ash and its discreet roll of sleeping bag.
He stood still, listening.
Soon, he knew, she would slink to his secret place, and lie to him, pronouncing a complete falsehood, bringing him something, candy or a thermos of coffee as a distracting gift. Asquith waited for her approach, and listened to the purling waters of the spring, a moss-greasy fault in the rock that leaked water and made it hard to hear the approach of anyone, but did after all allow him both water and a comforting cool against the heat.
In all he was that sole man against a kingdom, much like Hamlet, but what had Hamlet to do but feign madness, while Asquith was enacting the tireless, noble carriage of a murdered man.
His audience was select, even tiny, that one man who would most appreciate such theater. Well, hardly appreciate. But such a play was working on Hamilton Speke as on no other human being. Asquith knew his audience. So a little hardship was itself a kind of pleasure, and despite his fastidiousness where human beings were concerned, he had always loved the feel of getting really earthy, asleep and slowly waking to the rustle of dead leaves under the ear, a temporary forester turning by the hour more and more the dusk of wood and clay.
One does need a cup of coffee, and a portable propane stove loses its gas until at last there is nothing to do but make a fire, small, secret, out of old wood that exudes so little smoke it is but another exhaled breath into the air. All he had to do was swallow some of the chemicals purloined from Speke’s dispensary and the forest had a new lord, a magician.
Real theater had never been so delicious. Playing Hamlet in his theater days had not quite met his glorious expectations. Enacting the antic disposition in Chico during a festival of moths had been amusing enough, the feathered insects thumping off the spotlights, spinning in the radiance amidst Ophelia’s mad scene. During the instructions to the players, hardly a great speech but a sensible one, how could he speak of not sawing “the air too much with your hand, thus” while a blizzard of moths rose up and into the light, including the light of one’s countenance.
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