Animal. We are animal, and mortality is not an idea. It is real. He had never realized what a treasure Clara was. It’s so wrong to kill, he thought, except it wasn’t a thought at all. It was like having the wind knocked out of his body, empty of every breath ever taken, empty of sky, of life. This is the truth. To kill is a terrible thing.
Red jam.
There was a click, a creak of floorboard or hinge somewhere above and beyond him in the timbers of the walls. Don’t make a sound, he told himself. Hold your breath.
In here—he’s in the house. This house was life itself, and the dark creature that had been, long ago, his friend Asquith was here somewhere. Speke crouched, holding the knife before him in a way that surprised him, in a way that told him how frightened and determined he was. The knife played easily in his hand, balanced and ready to do the terrible thing he had just found so appalling.
Two conflicting thoughts sandwiched him: make it to the road, to the highway. Get help. And the stronger urge: stay here, and fight.
Avenge Clara.
What I need to do, he said to himself, nearly speaking aloud, is get into a very large room. A room where it would be very difficult to have him lunge in at me. This hall, for example, he said, think-talking to himself as though to a child, is a very bad place to be. There are too many doors. Any of the doors, including the swinging door behind him, could burst open at any moment. So you should creep, as he was beginning to creep, and slip into the very large room, the lounge, with its great high ceiling and its calmly bubbling aquarium. A natural fortress. For the moment, however, he stayed where he was.
“Asquith,” he whispered.
There was only the vast, non-answer of the house, silent and solid. Walls are not only refuge, they are also confinement. There was no oxygen in this air. None at all. Something had happened to the atmosphere here in this bad light, in this hall with its doors and silence.
“Asquith,” he said, in a full voice.
It’s worse when you talk, he realized. It really is. It makes the silence deeper, and it shows how really frightened you are, because that’s all you are, and you can’t pretend to yourself. You are all taken over, completely, by fear. Isn’t that right, Ham? Have you ever been more afraid?
The house gave a creak once more, the big structure adjusting just barely to a change in pressure. This was not the weight of a footfall. Outside, in the world under the sky, a wind was rising.
He has Maria. He has her, and he will hurt her.
“Asquith!” he called, a bellow so loud the hall reverberated.
Maria is in league with Asquith. That has been on your mind, Hamilton, admit it. Once you begin to doubt, there is no end to it. You know Asquith can do anything, including seducing any woman he desired. Perhaps you always sensed that your Mouse could as quickly leap from one bed to another. Jealousy is love’s shadow.
What power could Asquith have had over Maria? What control had he exercised for so long?
And why?
Speke surprised himself by slamming through the door into the bar. In one, smooth movement he dragged a massive oak captain’s chair to the door, and wedged it under the knob. To his amazement, when the chair was in place, he realized that the knife was in his teeth, like a pirate’s blade.
The steel had no flavor at all at first, until it warmed to the temperature of his tongue, his breath. Then it did have a flavor, a faint tang, the sullen absolute of steel.
Asquith could descend those steps to the rest of the house, the four steps that led to the dining room, the sitting rooms with their dried lavender and their Degas prints. Perhaps Asquith was even now tearing through his files, cutting up his software, urinating or bleeding or defecating all over everything.
There was no end to what Asquith could do. He was like water, and could take any shape. He was a serpent, who could be any configuration at all.
But you’re safe here, Speke promised himself, here with your old friend, the gleaming piranha.
Aren’t you safe?
Asquith could sprint through the atrium, like a guest in a hurry for that first martini. But otherwise there was no need for concern. All present and accounted for, Captain Speke. I’ll put his head upon the battlements.
But Asquith could do anything. Asquith knew. This was the genius that Speke had recognized in him. He knew that when one character was speaking, the others were silent, and that this silence played and worked upon, supported and shaped the speech of the actor who spoke. Silence itself was a substance, the air intaken before the utterance, and more—the earth upon which language stepped.
It was this silence that held Speke now. This silence that buried him standing upright, sword in hand. The piranha, pale as the knife, took a turn in his quiet world, both imprisoned and liberated from all care.
He hurried through the rooms of the house again, but this time he moved deliberately, confirming the truth. The creak and murmur of the roof was only the wind. The house was empty.
He stood before the front door, and then opened it, letting a gust of dry wind into the hallway, a leaf scuttling at his feet.
Before Sarah comes back. Because it was Sarah he kept returning to in his mind, as the piranha kept nearly stroking the glass of his world with his mouth. Sarah was at once the home he wanted to protect, and the one person he knew he needed to see again in order to remain sane—to remain himself, Hamilton Speke.
The trees swayed in the breeze, and then the breeze ceased, barely stirred, tossed again, alive with light.
Sarah. The thought of her surprised him, this faith in a woman he had come to see as a part of his life like a sun, or moon, or gravity. He had never thought of her this way before.
The rules of the game came clear to him again. Asquith wasn’t coming. Asquith was waiting. Asquith has all the time in the world, an eternity to wrap around your neck. You have to go out there, where he is. Asquith hides, you seek.
He wore the knife in his belt, like a Jacobean courtier. This game was one he had played before, in another age, in another life, with another Asquith. He stood at the front edge of the porch, drinking in the sunlight, the rise-and-fall tumble of the wind. Stay here. This is a position of strength. Show a little military strategy for once in your life. Stop bumbling around. Stand your ground.
Asquith is watching. He holds all the power. The outside belongs to Asquith. The house is a place he can only steal into, trespassing. The house is order, and trust. The woods are chaos, and they belong to the dark.
Maria’s studio, the cottage he had promised never to enter uninvited, was airless and warm, a room scented with the sap of still-moist pine and the electric presence of clean, perfect paper. Her flowers were scattered, tumbled here, pinned to a board there, and all of it seemed like a tomb unsealed after three thousand years.
Asquith had been here. He could not guess how he knew, but the hunter in him sensed it. Asquith had been here, sitting on this chair, drinking soup from this mug, perhaps.
He had to force his way into Sarah’s cottage, and before he had the door broken away from its frame he knew how pointless it was. Asquith wasn’t going to screw his way between the floorboards like a silverfish or a spider.
Speke’s legs were strong. The door was redwood panel and forged brass, but it splintered, and he entered Sarah’s refuge, and stood there, well aware that what he was doing was both futile and important. He was claiming the cottages, one by one. I am master here, he was saying. I belong here, and you, Asquith, do not.
There were two cups, washed and turned upside down on a clean white towel beside the sink. One of the cups was decorated with the emblem of a whale. Speke stood in the doorway to the bedroom, gazing at the well-made bed, the ordered beauty of the simple, even spartan, bedchamber.
The two names were linked now in his mind: Bell and Sarah. Of course. It could hardly be a surprise. But he put his hand out to the file cabinet to steady himself.
It sounded like the squeak of a screw in metal at first.
A squeal, and he had a thought he must have plucked from the collective memory, from a book he had read, or a movie: something being slaughtered, some beast.
A beast was in agony, death agony, far off, beyond the trees, somewhere in the woods. It was the nature of the estate to distort the sound, and make it come from every direction at once.
He sprang from the cottage. He sprinted down the path toward the Outer Office. It was a long run, and when he burst into the office it was empty. There was the desk, and the naked floor where the rug had once decorated the office, the gleam of the mantelpiece and the never-used poker.
Again—a scream, somewhere in the woods.
This was not a farmyard shriek. This was human. That’s what humans were when you slaughtered them, when you butchered them alive. They were hurt animals.
But he did not know where to run. The screams had stopped, and the trees writhed in their unmoving contortions, the forest enigmatic, a place of secrets.
Asquith had Maria. Out there somewhere, almost too far away for the cry to carry. This was not the sound of someone feigning agony. This was not the sound of someone pricked with a knife.
A woman was being killed.
33
“Isn’t there some other way we can go?” asked Sarah.
Five trucks had double parked on Geary street, and traffic in downtown San Francisco had halted. Two traffic helicopters rattled overhead, hidden, except for an occasional glimpse, by the buildings.
“I don’t think so,” said Bell ruefully.
“There has to be.”
“This is the way,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t stand it, either.”
It was the way, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. She realized that. But there was something strange about his manner. He was keeping something from her, she could tell. And it wasn’t only the information he had gleaned from the telephone. There was something else going on behind his smile, a secret intention that made him guarded.
Bell braked—it took no effort, since they were barely rolling—to let a parked Volvo work its way out in front of them.
Sarah clenched her fists. She couldn’t believe how slow they were going. His courtesy struck her as untimely, at the very least. But she began to reprove herself. It was possible, after all, that she was being unfair, suffering nothing more than an emotional hiccup. Her father had believed in the stakeout, and if the suspect fled, in going through the motel trash cans, if need be, to find out where he might be going. She could easily imagine him telling her to let things happen and not get upset. “Slow sometimes gets you where you want to go,” he would tell her.
But, she asked herself, wasn’t Chris absurdly slow, painfully deliberate? Even now he was letting cars drift before him, waving politely. He was making even less progress than anyone else on the entire street.
It was strange how someone so charming could seem so plodding. She tried to say it nicely. “We could go a little faster, don’t you think?”
“Are you saying that through clenched teeth?”
“It seems to me you aren’t really trying.”
“I can’t, really do much about that taxi right there. And that double parked—whatever that is, that truck full of rolls of paper.”
“Try.” They were rolls of paper, she saw. Giant rolls of what looked like shelf paper.
“I am trying. This is me making every earnest effort to travel forward. See—look.” He shifted out of first and then back again as a string of pedestrians jaywalked before them. “I’ve never known a woman who made me feel so—”
She guessed that he had been about to say “inadequate,” but had not been delighted by the word’s broader implications. “So I begin to irritate you,” she said, as though in mock despair. “After such a short affair.”
She wasn’t despairing, but she was continuing to see her relationship with him in a new, afternoon light.
“My mind,” he said, “isn’t on my driving.”
She could not say a civil word, so she made no sound.
“I spoke to a woman named Jessica Moe,” Bell was saying, trying to saw the Fiat into a new lane. “We used to get along pretty well.”
“And?”
“There was some sort of murky story. I didn’t get the entire tale. But I got enough. I called her, and lo and behold she talked.”
And talked, Sarah did not say.
“The thing with Jessica is: she’s very reliable.”
“An old girlfriend?” suggested Sarah. What did she care? she told herself. Her romantic interest in Chris was suddenly muted. She could think only of Ham. But she knew what “reliability” meant to Chris. Reliable meant believable. It meant: facts.
“I worked with Jessica briefly,” he said. “There was a big drug story in Oakland. Enough cocaine to fill Squaw Valley was intercepted at the Port of Oakland. There was gunfire, drug-sniffing dogs, everything but flying elephants. But that wasn’t the story. One-third of the cocaine was missing a month later, and that got everyone’s attention for about two days. During one of those two days I met Jessica.”
How interesting, said Sarah to herself, grinding her teeth.
“Jessica has a knack for digging up the secret everyone else misses. Someone pilfered hundreds of kilos of warhead-quality cocaine that was supposed to be state’s evidence.” Bell was attempting a breezy tone but failing for some reason. “She was free-lancing at the time, but she had been working for Newsweek, and right afterward she worked for UPI, which was I think a little bit of a desperation move for her. She’s one of those people who get cold sores from worrying.”
Perhaps he was hoping for some conversational encouragement from Sarah. She offered none. Still, she sensed that Jessica was, in truth, a source of information, and she had the strangest prickling sensation in her stomach.
“Well, I liked her. She was very serious and smart in a way that’s good to be around. She made everyone else work hard, just to keep up. But she irritated me, too. She was so slow and deliberate about everything. She was so painfully methodical, running after bleeding gunshot victims to make sure she had the name spelled right. And she was always on the phone. It drove me crazy. She was good at her job, though. In fact, she encouraged me to write the Speke book. And she sent me some artifacts, the old tapes I mentioned.”
Sarah nearly rolled her eyes. She had never known such a prosey human being in her life. “You knew her fairly well.”
“I knew her professionally. We had a beer together now and then.”
She gritted her teeth because of the green and white cab insinuating itself in front of the Fiat. Bell had the good sense to lean on his horn, and the cab seemed to take this as express, written permission to force its way even farther.
“She knew Speke and Asquith,” Bell continued, “in the early days, when they all lived in North Beach. She developed a theory, all by herself, that the solid, energetic and compassionate Hamilton Speke might not be—just might not be—the playwright who penned Stripsearch. She had known them both, and she had remembered Asquith as being shy to the point of agony, and Speke being very protective of him and, at the same time, very outgoing. Asquith was the genius, she thought, and Speke was the man who could get things done. She had a hunch, the sort of guess that might end up as a snappy six inches in a book review tabloid or Book-of-the-Month Club selection, or might end up as nothing. Her thesis was: what if Speke hadn’t written the plays?”
“She thought up this theory out of a vacuum?”
“She’s smart.”
“She sounds more than smart. She sounds psychic.”
“She says that it’s a thought that would occur to anyone who had known the two of them. She didn’t think it too much insight to at least be able to wonder. Apparently one or two people have even written about the possible collaboration—”
“Where? Who?”
He shrugged. “This is what Jessica says.”
Traffic churned forward, a crude imitation of progress. “During t
he last few years,” Bell said, “she’s been living in New York. She did some reading—the New York Public Library has several cubic meters of Speke. The Asquith bibliography was a blank sheet. What happened, she wondered, to the man so sensitive that seeing people gave him sunburn?”
Then, as a light turned green, traffic quickened, cars skittering from lane to lane. At last they reached the freeway, but as soon as they ascended the onramp, traffic clogged again. Sunlight glittered off back windows, and the Fiat wedged into another lane, only to be stuck behind a beer truck.
“Jessica is methodical,” Bell continued. “She found Asquith, living in rural Pennsylvania with his sister, and phoned them to beg an interview. The sister was very much against it. But when Jessica begs, she gets. Asquith, when he heard her theory, was delighted. More than delighted. Too eager—in fact, he came to see her before she even had a chance to plan a trip to see him. He came uninvited.”
A large arrow composed of flowing spots of light directed cars left, into one lane.
“She didn’t enjoy the interview?” Sarah prompted. All of this was, despite her exasperation, fascinating, vital.
Bell was being deliberately laconic on this point. “Not too much.”
“What happened?”
“She didn’t say, but knowing Jessica—”
He hesitated, aware that he was telling Sarah how well, in fact, he knew this fellow reporter. At the moment Sarah didn’t care if Jessica Moe were Bell’s secret wife.
“I got the impression,” he said, “that he was very strange. Possibly even dangerous.”
“In what way?”
He shrugged. “Her conclusion was that Asquith was brilliant enough, but that he could not have written the coherent plots, the consistent characters, the stunning dialogue in any of the plays. He was too—I think her word was ‘twisted.’ She decided that Speke was the playwright, and dropped the project as a dead end.”
Traffic had stopped. Sarah folded her arms.
“Then she began to hear from Asquith again, and when she explained her decision—and she is very forthright—he began to ask if he could pay her a visit. And the basic point is—Jessica is terrified of him.”
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