Oscar turned back to von Hesse. “Von Hesse. Don’t you see? You can’t escape. There’s nowhere for you to go. We know now. Don’t you see that?”
“Don’t talk,” Holliday said in his uncanny whisper. “Shoot.”
Elizabeth McCourt Doe spoke. Her voice was quite calm. “If anyone’s asking for my vote,” she said, “I’d say shoot the crazy bastard.”
“No!” Oscar said. “Don’t shoot!” He softened his voice. “Wolfgang—”
“You’re spoiling it!,” von Hesse shrieked. Again, he sounded like an angry, frustrated child, and the note of petulance in his voice, which at some other time might have seemed discordant, even comical, was horribly chilling now. “You’re spoiling everything! This is my moment! This is my destiny You stupid, ignorant people!”
“Wolfgang,” Oscar said, “do you remember when we spoke, you and I, about the young corporal you knew in Germany? The one who had dug up the women’s graves? Do you remember what you told me?”
“No! Go away! Leave us!”
“Wolfgang, you told me you believed that at bottom we are all good. Do you remember? You told me that we’re all tiny pieces of the infinite, all of us connected, each to the other, and to everything in creation. Do you remember, Wolfgang?”
Von Hesse shook his head as though clearing it. “You are trying to trick me.”
“I’m not, Wolfgang, I’m not. I’m trying to help you remember who you are. What you are. Wolfgang, you understand me. I know you do. I know that, at basis, you are good. Do you remember what else you told me? You said that we cannot do violence to another without doing violence to ourselves. The other is ourself. Remember, Wolfgang?”
Von Hesse shook his head again. But slowly this time, almost tentatively.
“Wolfgang, I want you to remember who you are. Think, Wolfgang. Each of us is connected, one to the other. Each of us is a piece of the infinite. You are. I am. That woman is.”
Von Hesse’s glance darted round the room.
Very softly, Holliday whispered, “Keep it up, Poet.”
Oscar said, “Wolfgang, the young corporal. You told me you believed that a part of him wanted to be caught, wanted to be stopped. Wolfgang, you wanted to be stopped. Otherwise you wouldn’t have written that letter to Mrs. Doe. A letter that anyone might have found. A letter that I did find.”
Once again, von Hesse shook his head.
Oscar said, “We cannot do violence to another without doing violence to ourselves. You know this. You know that the other is ourselves. Wolfgang—”
Von Hesse closed his eyes for a moment. His shoulders sagged. His body moved slightly forward, forcing Elizabeth McCourt Doe’s to do the same. Then he threw back his head, his face to the moon, and he screamed.
The scream filled the room, filled the night, a scream of horror and dread and endless, agonizing pain. It seemed as though it had gone on forever, it seemed as though it would go on forever: that all of them, all four, would be trapped within that scream, frozen within it, until the end of time.
Finally, slowly, it dimmed, cracked, diminished, died. In the vast, trembling silence, Oscar heard von Hesse’s labored breath.
And then, in a single swift movement, von Hesse released the woman, stepped back, and slashed the knife across his own throat. A bright black gout of blood surged from the wound and reached out like a liquid arm for the shoulder of Elizabeth McCourt Doe. She made a choked, gasping sound and Oscar rushed for her as von Hesse fell to his knees, blood still spurting from his neck and slapping against the snow.
“Elizabeth.”
“I’m all right, I’m all right.” But then she collapsed against him, all her weight in his arms. Oscar embraced her. He realized that he was still holding the gun. He dropped it.
Holliday was kneeling beside von Hesse, the man’s wrist between his fingers.
Oscar said, “He’s dead?”
Holliday nodded. “And then some.”
Holliday stood. He indicated Elizabeth McCourt Doe with a single inclination of his head. “Let’s get her back.”
And so Holliday had untied her hands as Oscar held her, and then the two of them had walked her, each supporting her by an arm, to the carriage. Oscar had driven it back toward Leadville, with her sitting against him in the seat, her head at his shoulder. Holliday had followed on horseback. Along the way, they had met a party of policemen coming from the town. Holliday had sent Oscar on, had remained behind to deal with them.
And now Grigsby said, “He came to my office, von Hesse, and gave me a story about some corporal in the army. Diggin’ up graves without knowin’ he was doin’ it. Fella’s mind was all jumbled up, von Hesse said. What I wonder is, you reckon he knew what he was doing? Von Hesse? Or was he crazy in the way he was talkin’ about? Killin’ em all without knowing he was doin’ it?”
Oscar had wondered this himself. “The latter, I believe. I believe that the von Hesse we knew was truly a good man, a religious man. At some level, deep within his consciousness, he must have been under a terrible stress. Suffering terrible guilt. Perhaps this was why he felt it was so important to tell us about the young corporal.”
Grigsby frowned. “Maybe. Reckon we’ll never know. There’s one other other thing I’m still not real clear on.”
“Yes?”
“Why would a note from you send Mrs. Doe way out to the Ice Palace at night?”
“Mrs. Doe writes poetry. She had asked me if I might read some of it and give her my opinion. When she received the note, she assumed that I wished for her to bring me her verses.” This was the story that Elizabeth had insisted he tell, a tale which Oscar found utterly absurd.
Grigsby apparently agreed. “To the Ice Palace? At ten o’clock at night?”
“She has, evidently, something of a romantic bent.”
“Uh-huh.” Dubious. “And von Hesse knew about the poetry?”
“He knew that Mrs. Doe and I had become friendly. If he hadn’t seen us talking last night, in Manitou Springs, then he would’ve learned from O’Conner, on the train today. He mentioned the woman.”
Grigsby nodded. He studied Oscar for a moment. “Good thing there won’t be a trial. I wouldn’t want to hear you use that story on a jury.”
“It’s quite true, I assure you.”
Grigsby was studying Oscar again, speculatively. At last, having apparently made up his mind about something, he shook his head. Firmly, definitively. “Don’t matter now. It’s all over. So what’re your plans?”
“Tomorrow we leave for Kansas City.”
“All of you?”
“Except for Countess de la Môle. She told me that she wishes to stay here for several days, and then join with us later.”
Grigsby nodded. “Well. If I don’t see ya tomorrow, you have yourself a good trip.”
“Thank you,” said Oscar.
Grigsby stood up. “Time for me to mosey on.”
“Where you off to, Bob?” Holliday asked him.
“The hotel. Maybe get some rest.” He turned to Oscar. “You take care now, hear?”
“Thank you, yes. You, too, Marshal.”
Grigsby smiled faintly again. “Just Bob’ll do.”
Oscar watched him walk slowly away. Even after the man himself had disappeared among the crowd, the big white hat bobbed for a time over the heads of the women, the miners, the cowboys, the shopkeepers.
Oscar turned to Holliday. “He seems … depressed.” He would never have thought it possible that Grigsby, a monolith, might become depressed.
“He is,” said Holliday. “Like he said, he let himself down.” He poured more whiskey into Oscar’s glass. “What about you, Poet?”
“How do you mean?”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Exhausted. I’m glad, I suppose, that it’s over, that we can all get on with our lives.” All of them, of course, but von Hesse. “But, as I said, I wish it could have ended some other way.”
“Just stick with being glad that it�
��s over.”
Oscar nodded. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his watch. One-thirty in the morning.
And then, abruptly, as he stared at the watch, a thought came to him. He looked at Holliday. “You knew that Darryl had my watch.”
His eyebrows raised ever so slightly, Holliday looked at him.
“This morning,” Oscar said. “Yesterday morning. When you appeared, there in the clearing. As we were leaving, Mrs. Doe and I, you told Darryl to return my watch to me. You could have known that he had it only if you’d been there, watching, all along.”
Holliday smiled that ghost of a smile. “Makes sense.”
“You were there? The entire time?”
Holliday nodded.
“Why didn’t you … intercede before?”
A faint shrug. “You seemed to be doing all right on your own.” A faint smile. “I figured maybe you’d talk him to death.”
“But he could’ve killed us.”
Holliday shook his head. “Not fast enough.”
“And how did you get here so quickly tonight? When we saw you last, you and Darryl were—”
“Didn’t take long to bury him. Darryl did most of the work. I caught the same train you did.”
“Darryl is all right? He’s still alive?”
Another faint smile. “As much as he ever was.”
Oscar sipped at his whiskey. “Tell me something, Doctor.”
“The name’s John.”
“John. Yes. Tell me. Marshal Grigsby—you know, I’ll never be able to think of him as anything but Marshal Grigsby—in any event, he told me that you’d been following the lecture tour in order to arrange poker games with the men who attended. Is that true?”
Holliday smiled. “Partly,” he said.
“Partly?”
Holliday finished the whiskey in his glass, refilled it from the bottle. “The games were the icing on the cake.”
“What, then, was the cake?”
Holliday’s black empty eyes looked levelly into Oscar’s. “You were.”
Oscar frowned. “I was? I don’t know what you mean.”
Below the handlebar mustache, the quick ghost of a smile flickered once. “Sure you do, Poet.”
And suddenly Oscar did. And suddenly, astonishingly, so did. Freddy Phallus, who stirred slightly, like a child beneath the blankets about to awaken from a long slumber.
“Ah,” Oscar said. “Ah. Well. I see.”
Holliday’s stare hadn’t wavered.
“Well,” said Oscar. “Yes. Well. Doctor. John. If I understand you aright—”
Holliday nodded. “You do.”
“Yes. Well, then of course, yes, I’m very flattered. Very flattered. Of course. But you see, I’m not, well, I don’t … As it happens, you see, I’m very much attached to a particular person. A young woman, actually.”
Holliday nodded. “Mrs. Doe.”
“Well, let us simply say a young woman. And you know, well, it’s my loss, probably, but I’ve never actively engaged in … the other.”
Another flicker of a smile. “So far.”
“Indeed. So far, yes, exactly. Who knows what the future may bring, eh?”
Holliday nodded. He lifted his glass, drank it down in a single swallow, set the glass back on the table. He smiled once again. “Well,” he said, “when you change your mind, you let me know.”
“Absolutely,” said Oscar. “The very instant.”
“Like I said,” Holliday said, “when I find something I like, I stick with it.”
He stood, looked down at Oscar, nodded. “Be seeing you, Poet.”
As he walked away, a dark, slim, lithe figure moving with the grace of a toreador, the crowd parted to let him pass—out of respect, or awe, or simply out of fear.
What an extraordinary man.
What an extraordinary few days these had been.
Had it truly been only five days since he had met Elizabeth McCourt Doe in Denver?
Between then and now, he had fallen in love. He had been battered about inside a madly driven carriage, been given opium to smoke, been bored by drunken old men, been hurled into sawdust and then stalked for days by a bearlike buffalo hunter. He had watched the bearlike buffalo hunter die. He had suffered a broken heart. He had been at the receiving end of two revolvers, and at the discharging end of one. He had been propositioned by a legendary gunman. He had learned that a man he had liked and respected was a killer, and he had seen him open his own throat with one savage swipe of a knife.
Perhaps it was the sheer number of events, or perhaps it was the velocity with which they had arrived. Or perhaps it was his horror at von Hesse’s death. Whatever the reason, Oscar was too worn and weary now to worry about his betrayal by Elizabeth McCourt Doe. She was a beautiful woman, and very probably, at some time in the future, he would mourn the death of his love, and of his hopes.
Farewell my love, and remember me …
Just now, Oscar wanted, he needed, a respite.
Grigsby was right. The best thing to do was put it all behind him. Everything. Elizabeth McCourt Doe. Biff. Von Hesse.
And what of the brooch that still lay in his pocket, the brooch he had purchased for Elizabeth McCourt Doe?
Give it to Mother.
Put the rest behind.
Think of it as a book. One chapter closes and another begins. Tomorrow, and in the tomorrows which followed, there would be new cities, new adventures, new people. Perhaps new women.
No. No new women for a while, if you please.
Perhaps he should take up Dr. Holliday’s offer.
Extraordinary man. He ought to meet Wilbur.
“Sure you do, Poet.”
Fancy that.
Enough. This chapter is over.
It was, as Grigsby said, time to mosey on.
EPILOGUE
From the Grigsby Archives
November 7, 1890
MY DEAR GRIGSBY,
It was with great surprise and greater pleasure that I learned, in a letter sent by Mr. Jack Vail, that he had seen you recently in San Francisco, at a lecture given by Vail’s current charge, someone called Lysander Richards (which must be, surely, a nom de route?). According to Vail, you were accompanied by a lovely wife and two lovely, nearly grown children, all of whom you successfully concealed from us when we met you eight years ago in Denver.
Vail says that you’ve become something of a luminary in the San Francisco Police Department. I’m delighted for you, of course; but somehow I shall always think of you astride a noble palomino, with the serried, snowbound peaks of Colorado looming magnificently in the background. To bring you up to date on myself, I should tell you that I am married also, and also to a lovely woman, and also the father of two lovely children. My writing career has proceeded rather well of late. I’ve a novel coming out this month—The Picture of Dorian Gray, I shall send you a copy when I receive some—and I’ve been toying with an idea or two for a play. So it seems that, despite some early setbacks, I shall become something of a luminary myself. He who laughs, lasts. He who lasts, laughs.
But to come to my reason for writing you. You will remember, of course, the terrible events of that March in 1882, when you and I met. Two years ago, on a trip to Germany, I was in the town of Kürten, not too many miles from Berlin. This was, so I recalled being told by Wolfgang von Hesse, the town in which he had been born and raised. Now, one might have thought that after so many years, no one remaining there would have any memory of Herr von Hesse, who, so he told me, had left it back in 1836. But, still curious about the man, I initiated enquiries.
To make a long story short, something I seldom do, I discovered a woman who had lived next door to the von Hesse family. A bitter old thing of some eighty years, blind as a bat and smelling rather like one as well, she had been a young girl then.
Wolfgang’s mother, I was told, died in childbirth and he, an only child, was raised for several years solely by his father. The father was a sort of unordained minist
er. He was quite mad, according to my bat-woman—all hellfire and brimstone, one of those Christians who discover in the Bible license for bitterness, bigotry, and warped brutality. “The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose.” (The Merchant of Venice, I, iii)
In any event, apparently he beat the boy, severely and often. Wolfgang kept—or was kept, by his father—very much to himself, but when he was old enough to attend school, the other children noticed on his wrists terrible scars that could only have come from ropes.
It was about this time that the father brought back with him from Berlin a female who, said my bat-woman, was obviously a prostitute. She was blowsy, slovenly, and her hair was bright red. She lived with father and son until 1836. In February of that year—bat-woman cannot be more precise—the neighbors were awakened by dreadful screams coming from within the von Hesse house. Investigating, following the screams, they found all three in a tiny attic room. The boy—it was he who was screaming—was tied to a narrow cot. Both the father and the woman were lying on the floor, dead. Her throat had been cut—by the father, presumably, before he had committed suicide by plunging the knife into his own heart. The father and the woman had been dead for at least a day. No one ever understood why the boy had not screamed earlier.
The boy, who fell into a kind of faint when he was untied, was put under a doctor’s care. He remained in a vegetative state for several days, and, when he recovered, had no recollection of anything that had occurred in the attic. Later, evidently returned to normalcy, he was sent to live with a distant relative in Berlin. The bat-woman had heard nothing further of him since.
It occurred to me when I learned all this that one day I should write to you and inform you of it. None of this, of course, in any way provides a pardon for what von Hesse did in the United States. (And perhaps—who knows?—elsewhere.) None of it reveals whether he committed his murders consciously and deliberately. (Although I am more than ever inclined to believe that he did not.) But all of it does, I think, provide the beginnings of an explanation. I have a theory that children, when brutalized, become brutal themselves. Von Hesse’s history seems instructive in this regard.
As for the others whom you met that fateful March, Vail, as you know, is still managing his touring artistes. O’Conner, you may have heard, disappeared when we arrived in Chicago. It transpired, much to everyone’s surprise, that he was not working for the New York Sun after all, and had been traveling with us under false pretenses for some unknown reason of his own. No one, so far as I know, has ever seen, him again.
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