“I’m ready,” said Speke.
Humorless, but not without compassion. “You better go inside and wait,” Holub said. “We don’t really have to talk out here. I just thought you could help us with something. Something that doesn’t make sense to us.”
Speke found himself still holding the fire extinguisher. He let the weaponlike object dangle at the end of his arm.
Perhaps Holub expected him to offer some advice, or further comment. But Speke only stared, and Holub read the stare like a ringside physician gazing into the eyes of a boxer. “I’m sorry we troubled you. After what I’ve seen,” Holub added, “you’re lucky to be alive.”
Speke did not understand. The sequence of events did not make sense. Luck, he mused, had not been a major factor in recent hours.
“Wait,” called a voice. “Wait, Ham, don’t go in yet.” A bright light, a germicidally blinding light, raked him, then found him, then held him, and he was, momentarily, unable to see.
“Look back here, Ham, and look up at the sky with a real—wait, Ham, don’t go in. Please, Ham, you look terrific.”
He should be surprised at the sound of his voice, his brain told him, but he was not. He could barely croak, “How did you get here, Scamp?”
“Saw it on television in L.A. What a deal! It’s on CNN, Ham. Everybody feels so awful about this. Stand there just a sec.”
“What is it, Scamp? What do you want?”
The big man was a silhouette, snapping orders in his Eastern European/Bugs Bunny accent. “Standing there and looking. Just standing and looking. You’re surveying the disaster manfully. Talk about grit. It’s wonderful! Mr. Strong. Mr. Life. That’s it, Ham. We just want you.”
The black cat had not quite resembled a cat, in Speke’s eyes. Asquith had insisted it resembled a cat, so that is what they agreed to imagine it was. It may or may not have been authentic. What it was, however, as a prize, as a souvenir of hard work in the sweat-slime, made it something to treasure. Authorities he had questioned about it years later, sitting in first class or sipping martinis in stylish cocktail lounges, had been inconclusive. The Mayan pantheon was complex. The black jaguar may have been a pre-Columbian treasure, or it may have been something altogether different, a hoax, or a more recent carving lost or tossed away as worthless.
The jungle heat had been oppressive. Oppressive, and unending, a permanent strata of heat underlying the day. When night fell, the lower, more enduring heat remained. The air had been saturated with futility and dead power, like something left over to be claimed or ignored entirely. The coconut groves were weedy and cluttered with downed fronds. The sand was sugar-bright, the parrot fish easily visible in the clear water. Indians slept on the beach beside the half-constructed hotels, their camps rolled blankets and sores of ash on the white sand.
Day had weight, and night an even greater presence, a smell, the funk as of rotting cheese of decay and the sharp, almost citric, odor of garbage fires from town. The top ten single from what was to be the album First Cut paid for all of it, and they could have lingered for months, or even years, turning record company checks into pesos.
But they had that moment, that instant of affection and rebuff. Speke’s rejection of Asquith led to the cat being hoisted high over Timothy’s head, both of them so drunk they were at once slow and clearheaded, intoxicated to the point of sanity.
Asquith had held the cat high, and it glittered in the sunlight. And he threw it down, with full strength, against a coral boulder. It should not have shattered. Coral is soft, and the cat’s shape was rounded, spheres and jagged arcs.
It broke, with a strange lack of sound. Bits rolled, came to rest, each one smaller than a human tooth.
Asquith had sunk to his knees, and then entered a long period of virtual catatonia, a trance that lasted for over an hour as dawn advanced to full day.
They had never discussed it. Speke cleaned up the broken black glass and walked all the way to the road, where he scattered it in a ditch, white cows observing him from the pavement.
At times he had assumed Asquith had forgotten the act, lost it in the drunkenness, blacked it out. But he could tell, at other times, that Asquith was already bidding farewell, leaving for the rest of his life, and to what was to be the dissolution of his promise. As an artifact it may or may not have been valuable. The broken cat was the end of their friendship, and it marked the end of youth for both of them, so much fragmented volcanic glass attended by cows.
Speke sat in his office, at his desk, and Holub sat before him, in his moonlight-bright suit. There was, now, just the slightest smudge of ash on one shoulder, small enough to be a cigar crumb. Holub gave a quick smile, the briefest flash of brown tooth.
This was exactly as they had sat one thousand years before, on Holub’s first visit.
Speke closed his eyes for a few heartbeats. I should have listened to this man. I should have believed the truth about Asquith.
“Miss Warren has told me,” Holub began.
Speke was in no shape for a verbal chess match. “I killed him.”
“She told me exactly what happened.”
“I strangled him.”
“After he had killed your wife.”
“It’s all my fault.”
Holub hesitated. “Why don’t you have a drink or something, Mr. Speke. I can see how drained you are.”
Why so much compassion? Speke eyed Holub. “I’m okay.” It sounded like a lie.
Holub thought over his words. He picked them carefully. “How did you happen to kill Asquith?”
Holub had hesitated over the word “kill.” Since when did detectives choose their verbs so carefully? Speke had always assumed that policeman kept to the safe side of language, both laconic and factual, but, at the same time, had no qualms about being blunt. “I used my hands.”
“You strangled him?”
Speke’s lungs failed to operate. A weight squeezed his chest. “That’s what I said.”
Holub shouldn’t be sitting here by himself. This wasn’t right at all, Speke thought. There should be at least one or two other detectives, or a stenographer—this wasn’t going the way he had anticipated. Shouldn’t there be at least a recording. He was, after all, making a confession.
“You didn’t consider stabbing him?”
Speke was puzzled.
“We found a charred knife. A butcher knife.”
Speke flexed his hands. He shook his head. “No, I took his life with these.”
“That’s doing it the hard way,” said Holub drily.
Wonderful, thought Speke. A cop with a sense of humor. This sort of humor was leaden, crushing. “Maybe I should have used a weapon. I didn’t think.” Almost apologetically, but also dismissively: don’t toy with me.
“It’s hard to strangle someone, you know.”
Speke said nothing.
“It takes a good deal of strength if you use your bare hands.” There was the most peculiar kindness in Holub’s voice. “It doesn’t happen often.”
“I’m not a weak man.”
“Because the truth is, Mr. Speke, we have looked for quite a while now.” Holub stopped. “A lot of us, for quite a while, under very bright lights. Sometimes—I hate to mention this—when a body is burning it moves around a little. So we had to be sure.”
Be sure, Speke echoed to himself.
“We can’t find Asquith’s body anywhere.” Holub paused, grasping one hand with the other and leaning forward. “We can’t find him at all.”
Speke made no sound.
“He’s gone.”
46
It was dawn, and the air tasted of burn.
A sea wind, from the Pacific far beyond the Coast Range, stirred Speke’s hair. The sky was ripe with summer overcast, and a fine drizzle hung in the air, hesitated, and drifted down. Black paste coated shoes, and crept up pant legs, tracked across what remained of the lawn’s green.
Speke stood on the porch of the house answering the questions, the ques
tions he had already answered, and would, he knew, answer again, perhaps years from now. He told them how much he owed to Asquith. I was nothing more than a man who wanted to live. I was ambitious for that life made of light.
He knew that he was not believed, or believed and given credit for his modesty. No one cared who inspired the plays. Did he hurt you, they wanted to know. Had Speke felt personally threatened “like anyone else would have under the circumstances?”
Hamilton Speke was all that mattered. And Speke knew even he could no longer tell what the truth was. Had Asquith been able to write a single line of dialogue? Had he really been able to understand what would make a character laugh or weep? Asquith would never have been able to write the play about the black cat. Speke knew that. He knew that Asquith’s silence, the weight of blank pages he was unable to fill, was what brought him forth from his living sleep.
Perhaps, Speke thought, Asquith is listening, even now.
The thought made it true, the fine rain drifting slowly like the breath of someone listening in the cool, curing morning air. The mikes thrust at him, and the faces around him were both eager and professionally sated, the eyes of airline pilots or oral surgeons pleased with the results of their new equipment. Hamilton would always look good on the news. He would look good on the noon news today, giving this shadow from his past credit for his songs and his plays. Even as he told the truth he knew that the truth would slip away, and become another story entirely. Hamilton Speke was being humble in his triumph.
He was telling the truth, and the truth meant nothing. Hamilton Speke was a hero yet again.
That noon he sat in his office. Sarah had just been explaining, in her capable German, that Hamilton was not available for any further interviews today.
She hung up the phone.
“I want to talk to them,” said Speke, meaning it, and sounding determined. He was watching one of his many backup televisions, this one a prototype Sony had loaned him “to see if it was adequate.”
The remote would not work. Speke squeezed it and shook it, but nothing happened.
The sound was off. There were ten-year-old black and white photos of Asquith on the screen, Asquith appearing both younger and overweight. And then there were shots of Speke, manly, spade over his shoulder, cheeks smudged, as though by one of Scamp’s makeup artists, with a touch of ash. “My most notable creation,” said Speke, gazing at his image. “The character I worked hardest to bring to life.”
“You shouldn’t answer any more questions,” said Sarah.
“I want them to know everything.”
“They won’t care. They love you.”
“I owe them the truth.”
“You don’t owe them anything more.”
“You are always so sure of yourself, Sarah.”
She touched his face, his lips, his eyelids, with her cool, sure fingers. “You owe something to yourself, Hamilton,” she said at last.
“And to you,” he began.
“No, there is something you owe to yourself, something you’ve long ago given up.”
“I’m the most self-centered person you’ll ever know.”
She put a finger across his lips.
On the soundless television there was a sequence of two men and a dog climbing from the back of a pickup, and then the news flowed on to other subjects, a riot in what looked like a European city, and the faces of what appeared to be government officials speaking without sound on the screen.
Outside, men searched.
Speke watched from the window until he felt confined by the house and had to join the searchers. Dogs stretched their leashes. The paw and footprints ripped the soft, pale silt of the ash. The figures of the men were bright colors, orange nylon jackets, yellow kerchiefs, among the blackened trees.
One of the men spoke into a radio. Another took a coffee break, leaning against a green pickup. He straightened as Speke passed and wished him a good morning. Speke returned his greeting without thinking, thankful for the company of capable people. The burned grass was crisp beneath his feet. Each step was like pressing his boots into burned toast.
Sometimes a burning body will move around, one of the searchers explained. The heat of the fire will thrash a corpse one way and another. Arm here. Cranium there. All over the place. “But I’ve rarely known a fire to make bones disappear,” said the man, a young man, all earnestness and sinew. “There’s usually something left.”
There were stipples of drizzle in the ash.
There is always, Speke reminded himself, something left.
He searched with them. One or two of the black knots of brush still streamed smoke. The smoke was elegant, a fine, scribbling signature in the air. The men were polite to Speke, and stepped aside for him. “Don’t worry,” said one of the searchers, a deputy sheriff in a denim shirt. “If he’s here he’s ours.”
Each gnarl of oak, each bole of sage, looked like human death. Asquith, Speke thought. You’re still here. Somewhere. You are too magic to let the fire burn you, but you are not so magic that you can become invisible.
He wanted them to find Asquith alive. He wanted them to find him dead. He wanted them to find some trace of his old friend, and he wanted them to find nothing. The men searched, the dogs snuffling the gray dust.
An airplane banked under the low clouds. It circled slowly. The searchers watched it, and Speke watched with them. His heart pumped hard in his chest, constricting his breath. The plane banked and circled again, a tight circle.
“He sees something,” said a searcher.
The plane’s flight was a spiral of ever-increasing focus. The pilot saw something. He saw, and he wanted to see more. The plane surged, its engine finding a new, higher song. The aircraft banked again, nearly standing on one wing.
Asquith, Speke found himself breathing: they found you.
No one moved. Even the dogs panted, waiting. The plane throttled-up, lifted its nose, and described a long half circle in another direction. In a few moments it was gone.
The searchers relaxed. One of them scraped a stone to one side with his workboot.
Speke patted one of the dogs, and the creature had that open, cheering smile that dogs give so often, that acknowledgement of a fellow creature’s greeting.
Two nights later Speke stepped before the mirror and saw the face of scalded corpse.
His own face was blistered, broken, reddened. His entire epidermis was painful. Taking a step hurt.
He returned to bed, not as shakily as he might have expected, took three more antihistamines, yet another Darvon, and punched the pillow.
The smell of fresh paint was everywhere. The bouyant odor of newness cheered him, in a minorkey, half-distracted way. He told himself that he still had faith in the future. He told himself that Sarah would continue to love him as he found himself loving her.
Endure—wasn’t that what mattered? Or is there something more important than surviving? Otherwise, Speke thought, the cockroach would be the most admired of all creatures.
What sort of creature was I on those plain, suburban evenings listening to my father’s lathe or his Sears electric drill? What did I believe in, even then, but the same empty life I believed in until just a few days ago? I have been a child too long. These childish things must fall away.
Leaving me—what?
Where in me, he wondered, is that stone which is still alive, that outcropping which will be what is left of me, the mesa that is my soul? Even so, the smell in the air was not the stink of death. There was something like perfume from the charred bay trees, from the black wires of the sage.
From territory that belonged to Asquith.
AFTER
47
They soaked in the sun of Samos, and strolled among fallen columns of marble like two people discovering a civilization that was not dead, but only in hiding, trembling in the tomato red blossoms of poppies.
He found himself taking her hand, and holding it, like a man pulling a treasure from its refuge in
the darkness so he could reassure himself that it had not yet been stolen. It was a simple enough act, but in the sudden cool dark of a chapel in an olive grove, or on the sun-bleached road of a village, he found himself taking her hand as though just discovering her, and wanting to stay just as he was forever.
One evening in Istanbul, the domes of a dozen mosques before them, the sounds of geese, dogs and children rising toward their balcony from the street, Speke said, “We won’t waste any more time.”
“We didn’t,” she said, offering her hand.
He took it, and studied it as though he would read her palm.
“But we really didn’t,” Sarah said. “I think you are one of those people who have never wasted a single day.”
This time when they made love it was the conjugation of a new human speech, the speech within the words that fill the air, and clutter the pages. It was the shadow speech flowering and filling each fingertip, each cleft and nipple with knowledge, and with faith.
It was only on their return, the drive already breaking new green along either side of the ruts, that Speke felt it rise around him, both the old enchantment of this place, like being able to descend again to childhood, and the old threat.
He stepped from the car, and the trees, in leaf that disguised the char-weathered bark, stood still like forms which had been, just moments before, in flight.
He could smell it with each breath, not an odor, certainly not the scent of death, but something sure and dry in the empty spaces between leaves.
Asquith is here somewhere.
He is still here.
48
It was morning, and the house, and the land around the house, was hushed. There was a chill in the air, and the warmth of the stove warmed Speke’s outstretched hands. The smell of baking made the light into something he wanted to eat, as though time itself were a food.
Sometimes he found himself gazing into his hands. Were these, he found himself wondering, the two hands that took the life of my old friend?
He had never believed in palmistry. It was an archaic, irrational holdover from a time of superstition and fear. And yet, he found himself these days wondering how much of human life might be fixed, fated from birth. He found himself studying the lines of his palm.
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