20

by John Edgar Wideman

  “Mrs. Klein, when did you arrive here? Exactly how long have you been up here?”

  “Always.”

  “You've always been up here—with no food or water.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I'm not interested in manners of speaking. I'm interested in facts, times of arrival and departure, confirmed and witnessed events; facts concerning your husband's disappearance.”

  “I don't doubt that,” she said. “I don't doubt that at all. It makes perfect sense that you should. You're the detective and the detective believes in facts; the detective sees what he sees.”

  “Well, then, perhaps you'd like to give me some facts to believe in. For example, was your husband here at the house last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was here?”

  “He's always here.”

  “He's not here now, Mrs. Klein; that's a fact I believe in.”

  “You see what you see when you see it.” She tilted her head, considered him. “You do think he's dead, don't you? That's your subjective view of the objective truth.”

  Curiosity again; the wrong mood at the wrong time—always. The Detective watched her helplessly and felt that she was toying with him, that she had become the interrogator and he the suspect.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “And perhaps you believe that I killed him. But then, you can't be sure about that, can you? You must be skeptical, mustn't you?”

  The Detective sighed—no, he hadn't the endurance any longer; the mockery, the convolutions of their conversation exhausted and confused him, made him impatient. His bad leg, stationary since the others had left, its already poor circulation pinched by the hard edge of his lucite chair, had gone numb, radiating needles of pain. He winced from it, cried out from its suddenness and surprise, reaching down with both hands and squeezing his thigh just above the knee. Mrs. Klein leaped from her chair in a panic of concern and hovered over him, a confusing form on the periphery of his attention, for he could only focus on the pain, the pain and the fear that his heart, erratically racing, would burst or simply stop, too exhausted to go on. Slowly, though, as the pain ebbed, as his heart regained a steadier rhythm, the Detective became aware of her presence above him: her fingers, weightless spots of cold, touched his brow in a healer's gesture, a priest's blessing; her voice lapped over him, gentle waves of some deep, embracing calm.

  “Don't worry, Descartes,” she said over and over again. “Something will turn up. Don't worry, Descartes, your accomplice is here.”

  The Detective straightened up, releasing his thigh, drawing his forehead away from her icy touch while avoiding her eyes. His frailty fully revealed now, he was ashamed and afraid, feeling that their relationship had changed, sensing that a kind of equality had been reached, a parity of pain: widow and widower, teammates in suffering, caught up in this mystery by the fact of their survival; lost together. And for the first time, he believed her without qualification; accepted the sincerity of her offer without understanding its meaning.

  “I'll help you,” she said. “I'll be your accomplice.”

  There was a pause; she waited there silently above him—for confirmation, he knew, for a commitment on his part, some visible sign of his willing participation. The Detective waited, too; and then, without understanding why, he felt himself nod.

  “All right,” Mrs. Klein said, her sarcasm instantly returning, mockery of the Chief's methodical style, “let's start from the top.” She turned and began pacing. “Last night at about five o'clock, a local fisherman named Dexter saw what he saw. And what he saw was a body falling from the promontory point into the cove. Now who could this body be, we ask ourselves? The property from which said body fell belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Klein, Nobel prize-winning physicist and obscure medieval historian respectively, and a thorough check has revealed that Mr. Klein, despite his Nobel prize, is missing. Tentative conclusion: Mr. Klein is what the local fisherman named Dexter saw when he saw what he saw. Am I right so far?”

  The Detective nodded.

  “So the question is, how do we proceed from here? Now what would Andy do, I ask myself? How would Andy, who has been a detective in a manner of speaking all his life, approach the problem of the disappearance of one Andrew Klein?”

  “Possibilities,” the Detective said. “List all the possibilities and then analyze them, eliminating the unlikely ones.”

  “That's it, that's what Andy would do: proceed scientifically. We believe in the scientific method. The possibilities…”

  “Accident, murder, suicide, fake death,” the Detective interrupted, seeing his hand trace the letters on a smudged slate blackboard.

  Mrs. Klein sat down abruptly, crossed her legs, folded her arms, her head craned forward—wound energy about to explode. “But surely you've forgotten one.”

  The Detective shook his head. “I don't think…”

  “Sacrifice, what about a sacrifice?”

  “I don't understand,”

  “A human sacrifice. An appeasement to the gods, to nature. Diving into the volcano's mouth in order to prevent the catastrophe. A symbolic act. A ritual of penance. An atonement.”

  “An atonement for what?”

  “For going where he was forbidden to go; for knowing what he was forbidden to know; for killing what he cared about most without even being aware of it. For hubris. A man who has violated the secrets of those tiny pieces of matter in motion, a man who has worked on the atomic bomb, has a great deal to atone for, wouldn't you say?”

  The Detective didn't reply, endured her sarcasm as it reached a peak of purity and then surpassed it, becoming anger. Her voice shook, dropped to a husky, wavering accusation.

  “But no, no, you're the detective, aren't you? You're one of us and we don't believe in guilt, do we? It's subjective; we leave atonement for the judges and juries to decide. All we care about is what happened, something definite, the objective truth. We see what we see when we see it, and nothing more, don't we?”

  “No, I don't think that's true,” the Detective said. “We wouldn't know very much if it were—only ourselves, only our own lives. We can deduce, we can listen to others, we can make educated guesses. We can from our past experience suggest possibilities and then analyze them.” The Detective paused, tempted, excited by the ideas, drawn once again into the impulse to philosophize; but he resisted it, this desire to generalize, to expand and connect, and instead began to dissect.

  “For example, the fake death possibility. Its motive is almost always an escape: from debt, from an unhappy marriage, from punishment for a crime already committed; sometimes it's accompanied by a large life insurance policy, and the benefactor is his accomplice. But does that scenario fit the facts? Does it fit the particular features of this particular case? One advantage to this possibility: it does explain the second person, the one who the eyewitness saw at the railing. If a dummy had been thrown off the promontory point, that other person could have been Mr. Klein himself. And that, in turn, would explain the absence of a car here—Mr. Klein drove away in it after faking his own death. But then we turn to the liabilities. In order to fake a death, in order to convince police officials and insurance investigators, he would need a witness, someone he had fooled into thinking that he had actually died. True, we do have Dexter, but Dexter was in a boat a thousand yards away or more, in poor light. There's no way Mr. Klein could have assumed that Dexter would even be looking in the right direction at the right moment. Not unless Dexter is his accomplice, which, on the surface at least, would seem highly unlikely.”

  The Detective felt himself expanding, a lifetime of intelligent work, of specialized thinking, unfolding from him effortlessly. And he began to feel as well that controlled joy of mastery, that self-consciousness of one's own competence in the midst of the action itself, which had propelled him into case after case and had kept him preoccupied, despite the hours, the fatigue—despite his wife and child.

  “So what we hav
e, then, is a possibility, but an unlikely one. So we push that to the side for a moment. We don't eliminate it. We still check on insurance policies and personal debts; we still make sure that Dexter hasn't come into a sudden fortune. But for the moment, we push it to the side and look for a more probable solution. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Klein said, her voice suddenly gone flat again. “Probability. We proceed according to probability; that makes perfect sense.”

  “Okay. We have three other possibilities then: accident, suicide, murder. But if we look at the facts—the facts, Mrs. Klein, the few pieces of information available to us—if we consider them, letting our minds stretch to meet their implications, one specific fact stands out from all the others; seems to tell us more, to hint at a solution. And do you know which fact that is, Mrs. Klein?”

  Mrs. Klein didn't look at him, seemed to have lost her interest in the case. “The other person,” she said in a monotone, “the one at the railing.”

  “That's right, Mrs. Klein. Fact: the person seen at the railing did not report the fall. Now if it had been an accident or suicide, why wouldn't the person have called the Coast Guard or the police or run to a neighbor's house? There are possibilities, of course, but are they likely ones, are they probable? Do you see what I mean, Mrs. Klein?”

  “So you think it's murder; that's your subjective view of the objective truth.”

  No sarcasm this time, but no real interest either—just a tepid curiosity. The Detective was disappointed; yes, it was his tentative view of the facts that they seemed to point to murder, but he realized suddenly that the conclusion itself wasn't what mattered to him. Instead, he had wanted to prove the philosophical point; had wanted to demonstrate that we can know more than what we see, extending ourselves beyond the moment of our experience. No, more than that, he had wanted to defend a state of mind, a way of thinking, his profession, his life in fact; had wanted her to withdraw the accusing glances and sarcasm, and then, acceptance won, to stand over her, victorious in his detective's competence—vindicated. And when he realized this, when he realized that he cared more about Mrs. Klein's opinion of himself than he cared about the case, more about his own guilt or innocence than hers, all of his professional enthusiasm seemed nothing more than a plea for…for what—affirmation? An old man begging someone he barely knew, a murder suspect, to tell him that his life had been worthwhile?

  Years ago, before her death, only Sadie's opinion had mattered to the Detective; and now, as he stared at Mrs. Klein's emotionless profile, he was reminded again of his wife. How often he had tried to convince her; how often he had tried to have her openly affirm his life, his career, and she, too, would deny him victory with the same silent elusiveness: losing every argument but never submitting; letting him talk on but never agreeing, just sitting there quietly in her passive, feminine indomitability. And he sees her now: the high cheeks, the blank stare, the black eyes averted and brushing him out, now and forever brushing him out; the impenetrable veil of her physical silence protecting some secret self which she had always denied him, that self untouched—by him, by anyone…or was there someone? The letters. The Detective rubbed his legs and turned slightly in his chair toward the gray spray of sky, its spiraling gulls.

  “You'd be surprised,” he started to say. His voice seemed far away from him and small, as if a muted cry for help from beyond the glass, from that opposite world. “You'd be surprised what can be deduced from just a few facts.”

  There was no reply; silent, they waited, trapped in their separate worlds—Mrs. Klein hidden behind a lifeless exterior, all emotions withdrawn; the Detective slumped in his chair and drained of will. The mobile spun above them, a chaotic clockwork of twisting wire and speeding propellers, a manic unwinding of a hundred separate time frames all at once, while outside the room, the ocean, caught in its tide, and the sky, rotating through the filtered sunlight, changed in degrees too immense and gradual to be discerned.

  “You believe,” Mrs. Klein finally said, “you believe it's murder, but can you be sure?” She nodded to herself. “Yes, how can you be sure? It might be an accident, or a suicide, or even a little of them all. Yes, that's right, a little of them all, 33.33 percent of each. Perhaps all murders are accidents…and suicides, too. Perhaps each murder victim is, to a degree, a co-conspirator, an accomplice in his own death. A man walks the city streets late at night and is killed by a thief, and who's to say—does he himself even know—if he chose to walk those streets because he secretly wished it to happen? And how many times, at the last crucial moment, have people hesitated to rescue themselves from some accidental or murderous danger—isn't that suicide, too?”

  “There's the law,” the Detective said.

  “Oh yes, the law. We believe in the law, don't we? First degree and second degree; felony and misdemeanor; murder, suicide, and accidental death. The coroner's inquest. The declaration. But tell me this—does the law ever say, ‘We don't know; it's a mystery and we simply don't know’? Not our law. We can't abide an unsolved mystery, can we? We don't believe in it so we make a declaration anyway: first degree or second degree; murder, suicide, or accident. But does the declaration make it so? Can every death be summed up by just one of three words? Does legal terminology, a court's declaration, tell you what actually happened—ever? Is it ever equal to the event itself?”

  The Detective said nothing, but he sympathized with the idea, understood it implicitly—that organic quality, the formal beauty he found in every crime, a wholeness that could not be defined, only sensed viscerally. He had always tried to sketch that organism, that almost living form that was the crime, a form which, in some amoral way, he could appreciate aesthetically. The law, though, devoured subtlety, his complex sketch, his solution, with its ambiguities and shadings, with its own formal beauty, inevitably reduced into crude categories of guilt or innocence. There had been times when he had resented it, this profaning of his art; times when he would have agreed with Mrs. Klein's argument—but he wasn't about to admit that now. Not while still trying to solve the case, not while she mocked his lifelong profession.

  “For example,” Mrs. Klein said, “what if…what if the body that Dexter saw when he saw what he saw, the body we have tentatively identified as Andrew Klein, what if its fall were the result of not one of the possibilities, but all three? What if the body…”

  “Mr. Klein?” the Detective suggested.

  “All right. What if Mr. Klein were to a degree, but only to a degree, a participant in his own demise? Let's assume…yes, let's assume that at the time under question, about five o'clock yesterday evening, Mr. Andrew Klein, sitting in his living room, was suddenly struck by the notion that he'd like to take a walk. And who can say why? Perhaps his legs were stiff; perhaps he felt too warm in the living room or wished to watch the sea birds more closely, a particularly passionate hobby of his; perhaps he had a difficult problem to consider and needed to walk it out. Or perhaps it was just a whim, nothing more than the need to do something, anything, and with the cove before him, a walk was the first thing to come to mind. It could have been any of those reasons or a combination of some or all of them, or something else entirely, and very probably Mr. Klein himself couldn't say for sure. Perhaps it was simply an accident that he should have decided to take a walk, but regardless of our ignorance of his exact motivation, let's assume that Andrew Klein did decide to take that walk. And let's further assume that he took someone along with him, someone close to him, someone who understood him as well as, and perhaps better than, he understood himself.”

  “His wife perhaps?” the Detective said.

  He watched her closely now, sensed a change in her manner—an uneasiness, a tension—the first step perhaps on the road to confession. It was true, he well knew, what they said about criminals wanting to confess; lying by its very nature created a state of anxiety that begged for release. The interrogator, then, was merely guide, midwife, to a natural event; his job at all times to offer up
peace of mind in exchange for the truth: the detective as priest.

  Mrs. Klein stared at him. “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps it was his wife.”

  “Let's assume that it was, shall we?”

  She hesitated, tugging nervously on the border of her fisherman's sweater. “All right,” she finally said. “For the sake of the detective, we will assume that it was his wife…Mr. and Mrs. Klein strolling along the walkway of their dream house in Maine, their country retreat, chatting about this and about that as they approached the promontory point overlooking the cove. Who can say what a Nobel prize-winning physicist and his medieval historian wife would talk about on such a walk on such a day? The weather, perhaps? The Uncertainty Principle? The death of the American novel?” She stood up and turned her back to him, facing the cove. “Divorce, perhaps?”

  The Detective twisted in his chair, struggling to get a view of her face; every nuance was crucial now, every subtle facial expression could qualify the meaning of her words. But she rotated away from him and hid herself until the moment had passed.

  “Just a middle-aged couple strolling along the edge of the cove's cliff, their cove, their cliff; they are silly enough to think that they own them. Just a middle-aged couple chatting about this and about that. It's a January day in Maine, a cold and windy day as all January days in Maine are; there's a blustery wind, fickle, now pushing, now pulling, a challenge to their balance as they walk along the cliff's edge, ernes rising from within the cove helplessly, inevitably, like air trapped in water. A blustery January day in Maine, a middle-aged couple, a promontory point rimmed by a walkway and its railing—do you get the picture?”

  The Detective momentarily glanced out through the glass wall, then turned back to Mrs. Klein. “Yes,” he said.

  “All right, then. Mr. and Mrs. Klein are standing at the promontory point within the walkway's cul-de-sac, leaning right against the railing there, a low railing really, waist high so that it doesn't obstruct the view. And then it happens, the provocation: a gust of wind perhaps, a slip of the foot, some accidental agent; the precipitator, pushing them into this moment, pushing him against the railing and over it, Andrew Klein dangling for an instant on a fulcrum, back arched over the railing, hands cast into the air, balanced, time suspended…”