This was a nice, civilized place, not such a bad place to wait for a while. The lobby of the Clift Hotel was a reasonable place to make a few phone calls. If only she would go over there where there was a nice chair and not sit there fuming. He could tell she was fuming. Why didn’t she go flip through a magazine?
Another busy signal.
He hung up the phone so hard a young woman at check-in glanced his way.
Sarah was watching him as though he were a prize mantis at an insect show. Her patience had faded, and her hands were no longer folded. She was twisting a tissue to pieces. He gave her a hectic smile, showing, he knew, too many teeth.
This isn’t very impressive, Bell, he warned himself. She’s going to think you subscribe to the Curly, Moe and Larry Information Service. All this uncertainty ate at her. In her case, however, it wasn’t the uncertainty that bothered her so much as what she seemed to know. Bell hated this sort of tangle. Give him a machete and half an hour, or a telephone and a credit card and he would have them out of this jungle. Usually. But today he could leave a message after the beep.
He tried another number.
Sarah waited. The wait had become her entire existence. She endured the passing minutes with the dull lack of patience of a person who has been manacled. Here I am, she found herself thinking again and again, waiting. Doing nothing. Watching Bell mismanage his telephone calls. She would be happy to knock a hole in the lobby with her bare hands, and run through it. She knotted the kleenex in her hands. It was worn to white powder. Kleenex dust sifted downward, onto the brightly polished table before her. Bell was punching buttons on the phone like a man who was used to instant gratification. So this was what the logical mind was like when it was frustrated. He was flushed and youthful, and, at the same time, suddenly unattractive.
When he glanced her way she smiled. Her smile encouraged him, she hoped, to both effort and speed. Mostly speed.
The hotel had that desultory but impressive pace of a place where people had plans. Leather suitcases were trundled past, uniformed men hurried to push elevator buttons, their uniforms not implying military crispness or the authority of law, but simply that the customers here were getting what they paid for.
He’ll never get off that telephone. She had never enjoyed sitting around for long periods while nothing happened. Her father had laughed at her impatience as a girl. “Ants in your pants again, Sarah?” he would say with a smile. She enjoyed swimming on her vacations, long strokes carrying her beyond the surf in Samos, and she enjoyed walks, the Luxembourg Gardens brilliant, black elms and white sand. She liked horses and snow. She ran her office like a command center. She made things happen. She would not choose, if she had a great deal of money, to spend her time showing off her latest clothes in a hotel lobby.
That sense of trouble kept flicking on and off, an alarm she could not silence. The memory of Maria’s eyes needled her. She reminded herself that Maria had wanted them to take this jaunt into the City.
What was Maria doing this very minute?
“Asquith,” Bell was saying, and he proceeded to spell out the name.
Sarah folded her arms and ground her teeth. She had to be sympathetic, in a way. Chris responded to a chaotic world with the powers of his intellect. What we need, he no doubt believed, are more facts. Well, facts had a place. On a sinking ship, though, Sarah would not care to sit around for the final report. Facts could wait. Give her a good life jacket.
But, she thought, men are like this—nearly all of them but Hamilton. They were not the macho goofs some women seemed to think them. They did, though, spend an unnecessary amount of time spelling names and jotting down numbers. Only a man would invent a saying like “let’s get our ducks in a row.”
Bell wasn’t saying anything quite that demotic, but he was insisting that someone had to be around somewhere if he had been there a minute ago. His voice had an edge to it. Had they paged the photocopying department?
Her father would have liked him. Her father had prized rational procedure. Even polishing shoes was a methodical business. He called it the Sunday Shoe Review: cans of Kiwi polish lined up, light tan and cordovan and black, and the various cloths folded and waiting to be shaken out and used, beside a coarse brush and wood-handled buffer.
The cop and the newsman. Maybe they were more alike than she had suspected. Sarah did not understand the respect the world had for news, for information of all kinds, the stream of faces and names. Sarah was rooted, more simple and, she guessed, deeper. Information can be misleading, or simply false. Facts could be inaccurate, or lies. She believed in the evidence of experience. If something did not make sense, then there was something wrong.
Her impatience made her thoughts quick. She had the intelligence of a cat. The intelligence that let the chipmunk snatch the crust of bread, and let the quail escape the fox.
There were foxes at Live Oak. She had seen one once, a cat-sized, auburn creature so confident in the early dawn and his own prowess that he did not bother to startle, like a deer, or make a beeline in another direction. He actually paused and took her in, and then merely altered his trot to take him more quickly to a tangle of mesquite. So small, and so fine, she had been astounded that this was the wily reynard of the tales, the figure of cunning. She had run to tell Ham about it. He had laughed with delight.
Bell hung up again. “Let me try one more person.” He hesitated.
Go ahead, thought Sarah. Try the president. Try Moscow. But be quick. And she experienced another, nearly treasonous thought: this reporter, this gatherer of facts, laboring like an ant after crumbs, was not fit to write the biography of Hamilton Speke.
“It’s a woman I hate to bother,” he was saying, talking to himself, it seemed. “Someone who knows Speke, actually, but who hasn’t been well lately.” He hesitated. “She sent me some of Ham’s early tapes and I haven’t had a chance to listen to them yet. I’ve been more interested in the actual human being than something from the archives. The story is that she’s burned out. Some kind of personal problem. She doesn’t want to hear from people. My question is: am I ‘people.’”
“You’re not.”
He gazed at Sarah, barely seeing her.
“Call and be quick about it.”
She could tell by the way he hunched his shoulders, leaning eagerly into the phone: he was getting what he wanted at last. He scribbled some notes, and she was embarrassed to eavesdrop simply because of the intensity with which he nodded, and the way he tilted his head, as though the connection were weak and he might not hear every syllable.
She tried eavesdropping anyway, sidling around the table, but it did no good. Chris was not doing the talking. Now and then he would say “Uh-huh.”
Hurry up, Chris, she tried to mentally telegraph him. Hurry up, don’t get someone’s life story. Let’s get out of here.
Bell was asking more questions. More questions! When was this? What did he say? And he did something that made Sarah strangle the last fiber from the Kleenex—he switched ears. That could only mean that ear number one was tired, and he needed a new, fresh ear. It could only mean that this conversation was far from over. It meant they were staying here for a long, long time.
Chris put on an I’m-hurrying-this-won’t-be-a-second expression. Her growing suspicion was well founded. There was without doubt a real flaw in his character: he was slow in the most grinding way.
Oh, it could be a strength at times. Her father had been methodical, too, loving nothing better, it seemed, than sorting screws and nails in the garage, a glass jar for each type: Phillips, wood, molly bolt, brad, two-penny, upholstery, bulletin board tacks for his Twain and Thoreau. He had hoarded a row of jars of rarely used fasteners. The task of sorting was an end in itself. Bell loved gathering information because he was a gatherer. Making notes was what he loved to do. The act of understanding itself was an accomplishment.
There was only one man in the world she wanted to see.
She missed his enthusiasm, hi
s wild It’s-Raining dance, his excitement when he saw the first poppy, or when he saw a skunk with three babies by the well. Her father would not have liked Ham at first. Ham was too unpredictable, too lively. Ham would have won her father, though, with his enthusiasm for the cottontails at dawn, or his hatred for whoever it was that shot a deer with a thirty-eight and let it escape and die days later in a dry creek. Her father, like many cops, had less than love for the cruelty of gunfire.
Ham blundered, got nervous, lost his temper. He made mistakes. He was not a notetaker, not a man who would be, necessarily, cool under fire. In danger, he would probably run away, and laugh at himself for doing it, and then, just as easily, lose his temper and run immediately back to the danger, fists swinging. He was neither brave nor cowardly. He loved life.
She realized, standing there in the hotel lobby, refusing to sit, fuming, why she had stayed so many years with this man who was neither husband nor brother.
It was like reading a passage in a novel, or hearing a snatch of music, and suddenly weeping, and realizing: I’m sad. I’m sad, and I didn’t know it.
Watching the well-coifed travelers, the bellhops, and Bell’s earnest, eager pen, she realized what she felt for Hamilton Speke.
Christopher Bell was a rare figure of a man, and “loving” in a way that aroused and satisfied her. But Ham was mythic, a blundering human who was life itself. He erred, cursed himself, laughed at himself, and more than anything he saw. He saw the colors of the sage and the deer, and heard the cries of the birds. She missed his voice.
She tried to send a mental message to him, but she found herself, to her surprise, thinking a prayer. “Let Ham be all right. Let nothing hurt him.”
She tucked the demolished Kleenex into her purse. She had suffered with Ham, and she had seen him hurt himself with booze and a problem temper. She had endured the trespass of a new wife, never understanding what she really felt toward him.
She was more than his manager. She was more than the woman who opened his mail and reminded him to tuck in his shirt before ABC arrived. She was the only human being in the world who understood him, who wanted him to live the sort of life only he could, laughing and hurrying in with the gleeful news that there was frost on the lawn.
She had always wondered why she had felt this strange loyalty toward him, and why even the insight that he was not a great playwright after all did not shake her faith in him.
When Bell hung up the phone at last he stayed by it, unmoving, as though stunned with what he had heard. His hand flipped the notebook shut, and fumbled as it tucked the book into his inside pocket.
“You got what you wanted?” asked Sarah, reminding herself to be ever cheerful, ever polite.
“We better hurry,” he said. “What I found out is bad news.”
Bad news, thought Sarah, with a certain irony. You found out that we have to hurry. I started thinking that in Erika Spyri’s black leather office. I’ve been convinced ever since the Redwood Room. She herself had never needed “information.” She had her mother’s judgment, or was it her father’s? Slow to waken, now that she knew the truth she was alert and ready.
But she did not speak. She had just discovered who she wanted to see more than any other human being in the world, and all she could do for the moment was treasure the memory of his voice.
Don’t worry, she breathed to herself, to him. There’s something wrong, Ham—I can feel it. But don’t worry.
I’m coming home.
V
THE BLACK CAT OF LA GUADAÑA
32
Speke closed his eyes, crouching in the kitchen.
He pressed his eyelids together so hard he saw lights, and thought: this could not be Clara. The thought was definite: Not Clara. This was another one of those macabre jokes. Surely that thing he had just seen wasn’t human at all. Once again, just like the body in the grave, this was some kind of animal. That’s all. Nothing more than that. It was just another one of Asquith’s tricks with a dead deer.
Now, he told himself. Look now.
He made himself wait a long moment, a long hesitation on the high dive of reality.
He opened his eyes.
His mind came and went like a pulse. He pulled himself to his feet, and reality switched off and on, like a mercury switch. He clung to the butcher block table to keep from falling, and he heard the great panting, as of a huge beast, a loud shuddering in-and-out of breath.
The light was magnified to a nearly blinding glare. The kitchen faucet gleamed, a truncated arc of sterile chrome. He had been stripped of his humanity, and he was a frightened beast, now, a creature of no name, no past, no hope.
It was Clara.
Innocent. The word hammered him. Clara was an innocent person, a good person. And the kitchen was black-red with the wreck that had been her body.
The refrigerator made a low, interior chuckle, the mutter of digestion. The presence of this death, and its scent, shocked his body into knowledge. He had to do something. He had to take revenge. He had to strike back, in Clara’s name.
First, he thought, cover her. Cover the woman, the broken, besplattered thing that had been a human being. He found himself in a bedroom, tugging at a quilt, dragging it, the mantle of cloth sweeping behind him until he hesitated again outside the kitchen.
Asquith was someone—something—he had never dealt with before. Envy did not commit such deeds. This was not spite or the desire to reclaim one’s life. Everything, every option, he told himself with a nauseating lucidity, had to be reconsidered.
When he stepped into the kitchen again he gagged at the sight. The room was hotter now, the smell of flesh ripe in the air, not putrescent but wet and heavy. Death was ascending here on the estate, a sick power breaking over the sky, and he was not equal to the battle. He had thought himself strong. He had been mistaken. He was strong enough to struggle against anything alive. He was not strong enough for this.
The big quilt hovered in the air over what was left of her. He whispered her name: Clara. He had never known or understood a thing in his life. It was that simple: he knew nothing. All his knowledge vanished. He had enjoyed his fame, the glee of seeing his name in advertising and on marquees. He had watched videotapes of this talk show, and that interview, until the tapes got streaky. Stick the mike in my face and watch me talk.
The quilt settled over the rise and fall of the body, and its thickness blotted up the blood, growing sodden as he watched, islands and continents of fluid fanning out, the weight pulling the quilt down around what it hid.
And there was so much it could not hide. A human being, he saw, was only so much meat.
He clung to the table, gazing at the knife cuts scarring the wood. He was amazed that he could still command his hand to move, and that it would obey.
On the sun-yellow linoleum lay a thing, unrecognizable and bloody, and for an instant, as his eye fell upon it, he knew that this was some strange, geometrically perfect organ torn from Clara.
Then he realized what it was: a cleaver. That’s all it had taken to do the job, an ordinary object, because Clara had been only a creature, after all. Undone by that wedge with a handle, that inert thing.
Wading through nausea and a yellow haze that seemed to ascend upward from the floor, Speke grappled with a drawer handle. Must find one, his mind ordered him, must find one right away.
His hand sought a weapon. The tool his hand fell upon was, he knew, an innocent thing in itself, wood that had never felt or dreamed, steel that was, in human terms, equivalent to nothing.
Clara, I should have protected you. It’s my fault that fiend was here in the first place.
And then Speke had a thought as definite as a splash of ice, a thought that struck him as cruel and at the same time thoroughly honest: thank God it wasn’t Sarah.
He closed his hand around the handle. To him this common implement was death, and life. To touch it steadied his hand. The handle was worn by use and by dishwater into the gray brown of a mule dee
r’s hide, of driftwood. Three brass rivets were coin-bright. Ten or so inches of molybdenum steel, the blade was heavy, a slender, daggerlike counterpart to the cleaver.
Speke nearly dropped it. What are you doing? he asked himself. What are you thinking?
Its similarity to a weapon was no accident, Speke saw. What cleaves flesh in the battlefield is not only brother to the kitchen implement, it is the same tool. The dining room is an extension of the slaughterhouse.
You were so glad Asquith was alive.
The ancient hunter sense rolled forward in his soul again, and he found himself looking upward, as though trying to make the ceiling and the walls invisible with his gaze. The thought paralyzed: what if he’s still in the house.
And as soon as the thought occurred it stung with all the venom of the truth. He is in the house—of course he is. And he is waiting.
For you.
Good, Speke breathed. Good. I’ll make him suffer.
But at the same time it was sickening. Don’t you remember those documents Holub left with you? You barely cast your eye over them. It hadn’t seemed important that Asquith had slaughtered innocent women.
He reminded himself of something especially ugly: Maria had something to do with this. Maria, the woman he had sworn to understand some day, this new, sudden stranger.
He would have left by the back door. He would have taken the few strides, and let his hand fell upon the knob—except that the knob was thick with gore, and with hair, a glistening protrusion, a brass knob becoming animal, glutinous and raw.
It was just as well, it was better to stay in the house. If Asquith was in the house he wanted to corner him. Let’s get this over, Speke thought. The swinging door squeaked more and more slowly, and more and more quietly, until it was still.
Clara—I want to talk to you. You should have had a priest. You should have died with a prayer. All the things he should have said to her stung him, the appreciation he had always felt and never uttered.
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