Death Sentences

by Otto Penzler

  “There’s an anniversary coming up,” I said.

  She nodded. “It’s part of a series for him. Another documentary.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Literary culture in the 1890s—The Naughty Nineties, I think that’s the working title. There’s going to be a book, too.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It’s going to be revisionist,” she went on. “In the sense that they’re arguing the really influential figures aren’t the obvious ones like Wilde and Henry James.”

  “Hence Youlgreave?”

  “I suppose. I don’t really know. Tony—it’s awfully nice to see you, of course, but is there a particular reason for you coming? Like this, I mean, out of the blue.”

  “This is a bit difficult,” I said. I wanted so much to be honest with her. “I saw Adam today—at the London Library. I didn’t even know he was a member.”

  “So he knows you’re here?”

  “No—I don’t think he saw me. But I … I happened to see his phone—he’d left it lying around. There was a text.”

  She sat up sharply, her cheeks coloring with a stain of blood. “A text—what do you mean? You’re telling me you’ve been reading Adam’s texts?”

  “I didn’t mean to, not exactly.” I knew I was coloring too. “But, Mary, I think you should see it. That’s why I’m here.”

  I took the iPhone from my pocket and handed it to her. She stared at the screen. I couldn’t see her face.

  I miss you more and more every moment we’re apart. J xxxx.

  “He’s having an affair, isn’t he?” I said. “Did you know?”

  She didn’t look up. She shrugged.

  “Did he hit you, too?”

  “If you must know, yes.” Mary put down the phone on the arm of the sofa. She stared at me. “We’re getting a divorce. We—we can’t agree about who gets what. The old story.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Her expression softened. “I really think you are. Bless you.”

  “I know what it’s like. I was married for a while but it didn’t take. Who’s ‘J’? Do you know?”

  “She’s called Janine—she used to be his PA. About ten years younger than me.” She swallowed. “Nice woman.”

  “Not that nice.”

  She stood up suddenly. “I’m going to make some tea. Will you have some now?”

  “Is it OK me being here? What if Adam comes back?”

  “He’s meeting his agent for dinner at Wilton’s at nine o’clock. That’s what his diary says, anyway. He was going to work in the library until then.”

  I followed her into the kitchen. She put on the kettle and then stood, arms folded, looking out of the window at the back garden.

  “This is going to be so bloody awful,” she said. “He’s got most of our assets tied up in a couple of companies. One of them is offshore, which makes it even more complicated. And he controls the companies; that’s the real problem. I was so naive, you wouldn’t believe. I just signed where he told me when he set them up.”

  I thought of the Post-it note I had found in Adam’s library book. You’re such a complete shit. You won’t get away with it. But it looked as if he would get away with it.

  “You’ve talked to a solicitor?”

  “Yes. For what it’s worth. If I fight Adam for my share, it’ll cost a fortune. But I haven’t got a fortune. I’ve hardly got anything. I shouldn’t be telling you this—it’s not your problem.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Anyway, the odds are I’ll lose if we go to court.”

  “What will you do?” I said.

  “God knows.”

  She turned to face me. I couldn’t see her face clearly; the window was behind her and the winter afternoon was fading into dusk. Neither of us spoke for a while. The kettle began to hiss quietly at first and then with steadily rising urgency. At last there was a click as it turned itself off.

  “I normally have green tea in the afternoon,” she said, as if this was a normal conversation on a normal day. “But there’s ordinary tea if you prefer, or herbal—”

  “Green tea’s fine,” I said.

  She picked up a packet of tea and a spoon. Then she stopped moving and the conversation wasn’t normal any more. “I made a mistake, Tony, didn’t I?” she said. “I wish …”

  “What do you wish?” My voice was little more a whisper.

  “I wish I could put time back,” Mary said. “To when it was just you and me in the garden. Do you remember? At that stupid party? It all seemed so simple then.”

  On Tuesdays, the London Library stays open until nine p.m. When I got back it was nearly six o’clock. The Burberry was still hanging in the cupboard. I hung my own coat beside it.

  I had asked Mary if I should take the phone back and leave it where I had found it. She told me not to bother. Adam often left his phone at home or mislaid it—he wouldn’t be surprised if he couldn’t find it in his coat. He was careless about his possessions, she said, just as he was careless about people.

  The library was much emptier than it had been. I liked the place especially on a winter evening, when the only people there seemed to be a few librarians and a handful of members like me. In the stacks—and most of the place consists of the stacks—each run of shelves has its own set of lights. Members are encouraged to turn off any lights that are not in use. So, on a February evening like this, most of the library consists of pools of light marooned in the surrounding gloom. Sounds are muted. The spines of the books stretch away into an infinity of learning.

  Adam wasn’t in any of the reading rooms. I guessed that he was either searching for books or working at one of the little tables scattered around the stacks. It didn’t matter because I didn’t want to find him. I didn’t want to see him ever again or hear his voice. I didn’t want to think of him.

  I sat down and tried to work, which was how I had always intended to spend this evening. But my mind was full of Mary and I couldn’t concentrate. I had a pencil in my hand and I wrote the words the long sonata of the dead on the inside cover of my notebook. I looked at them for a long time and wondered whether even Francis Youlgreave or Samuel Beckett had known what they meant.

  A little after eight-fifteen, I decided I’d had enough. I packed up my work and went downstairs. As I reached the issue hall I nearly bumped into Adam. He had come out of the catalogue room.

  We both pulled back at the last moment before a collision became inevitable. We muttered reciprocal apologies. But his words were no more than a polite reflex. He looked through me. I didn’t exist for him.

  He went over to the enquiries desk. I turned aside and pretended to study a plan of the library on the wall.

  “I found a book in the old printed catalogue but I can’t see it on the shelves,” he said to the librarian. “Can you check if it’s out?”

  “What is it?” the librarian asked.

  “It’s by Francis Youlgreave.” Adam spelt the surname. “It’s called The Voice of Angels.”

  A moment later the librarian said, “I’m afraid it’s out. Due back on March the sixth. Would you like to reserve it?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Afterwards Adam went upstairs, glancing at his watch. After a moment I followed him. I was wearing trainers and I made very little noise. He turned into one of the older stacks and walked steadily towards the back. I couldn’t see him because the lines of bookcases were in the way. But I heard his footsteps ringing on the iron gratings of the floor. You can look down at the floor below and up at the floor above. I suppose they had to make the floors of iron in order to bear the weight of all the books.

  There was a further stack beyond this one, part of the History section. Very few lights were on. I waited near the archway leading into the rear stack. I stood in the shelter of a bookcase containing books on gardening.

  The levels on the older stacks are connected internally with steep, narrow iron staircases in a sort of biblio
graphic snakes and ladders. Some of the staircases still have their original signs—an elegant silhouette of a hand with a pointing finger accompanied by a legend saying something like “Up History” or “Down Society.” One of these was nearby, which gave me the reassuring sense that I could slip away if someone else came up behind me.

  I listened to Adam’s footsteps until they stopped. Then, for several minutes, I heard nothing else except the hum of the strip lighting and a faint crackling sound that might have been rain on a distant skylight or window.

  He came out at last. I watched him approaching through the slit between the top of a row of books and the bottom of the shelf above. He had both arms full with a pile of four or five heavy books, a folder of notes and a slim silver laptop. He was wearing a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses that gave him a scholarly air he didn’t deserve.

  He passed very close to me. He began to descend the iron stairs. He was in a hurry.

  At first, all I did was touch him, rest my hand on his shoulder.

  When I touched him, Adam began to turn towards me. But too quickly.

  That was the thing: it happened so very quickly. His own momentum still carried him forward. He was encumbered with the weight in his arms. His awareness of the fragility of the books and the laptop perhaps made it harder for him to protect himself.

  Then I pushed his shoulder. Not hard, not really—barely more than a gentle nudge, the sort of gesture you might make when you meet an old friend. If you could translate the gesture into words, it would say something like, “Hey—good to see you after all this time.”

  Except it wasn’t good to see him. It wasn’t good at all, not for me and not for him.

  Adam overbalanced and fell with a terrible scraping crash. The laptop and other objects skipped and clattered down the stairs, making a sound that might have been a form of hard, atonal music.

  The long sonata of the dead.

  I ran down the stairs. Adam was lying on his front with his books and notes around him. He wasn’t moving. He made no sound at all. His head was bleeding. I wondered if the blood would drip through the iron grating and fall to the level beneath. I hoped it wouldn’t damage any books.

  I listened for sounds elsewhere, for running footsteps, the sound of voices. I heard nothing but the hum and the crackling and, loudest of all, my own rapid breathing.

  The laptop had skidded across the floor and come to rest against the base of a bookcase. It looked undamaged. Adam’s glasses were beside his head. They were unbroken, too. I remember thinking how easy it is to miss your footing if you forget to take off your reading glasses. Especially if you are going down a flight of stairs.

  There was a phone on the floor, just inches from his hand as if he had been carrying that as well.

  I picked it up. It was another iPhone. The screen was shattered. Without thinking, I pressed the control button. Nothing happened. The phone was dead. But why was there a phone in the first place?

  A dead phone, I thought: What dead things know.

  I left the library, walked through the rain across the park for the third time and caught a train to Kew.

  At this hour, and on a night like this, the train wasn’t crowded. Someone had left a copy of the evening’s Metro on the seat next to mine and I pretended to read it as we trundled wearily westward.

  There were four other passengers in the carriage. All of us avoided eye contact. One of them was a thin-faced woman sitting diagonally across the carriage from me. She was younger than I, in her early thirties perhaps, and looked like a character in a Russian novel. She ought to have been travelling by troika rather than London Underground, despite the fact that she was reading something on her Kindle.

  When the train stopped at Kew, I hung back, letting the other passengers leave the station first. Three of them took the eastern exit in the direction of Mortlake Road. I left a decent interval and then followed.

  It was raining harder than ever. One of the people ahead had turned off. The second one went into a house on the right. That left the thin-face woman, striding down the rainslicked pavement in her long black coat and long black boots, sheltered by an umbrella. She turned into Rowan Avenue.

  I didn’t want to give her the impression I was stalking her so I waited before following. I took shelter under a tree but there wasn’t much point. I was already soaking wet.

  A moment later, I turned the corner. Number 23 was on the other side of the road. The lights were on in the hall and behind the blinds of a ground-floor room at the front with a bay window. I had no idea what I would say to Mary. Or even if I would have the courage to ring the bell. But it didn’t matter. It would be good to know she was there, in that house. It would be good to know she was alive.

  The woman ahead crossed the road. I hesitated. She was approaching the gate of Mary’s house. She opened it.

  I darted after her and took cover beside a black SUV so absurdly large it would have concealed an elephant. I edged sideways. I could now see her standing in the little porch by the front door. She had closed her umbrella and left it on the tiled floor.

  A light was on above her head and she might have been standing on a miniature stage. She glanced over her shoulder. I saw her face, all bones and shadows and glaring white skin.

  The door opened. There was Mary. She had changed into a dark blue dress since this afternoon.

  “Janine,” she said. “Janine.”

  The women embraced. But it wasn’t as friends embrace.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mary said. “He took my phone, would you believe?”

  “So does he know?” Janine said.

  “He must have seen the texts. Anyway, come here.”

  Mary drew the younger woman inside. She was smiling as if she would never stop. The door closed.

  I closed my eyes. The rain fell. The raindrops tapped on the dark, shiny roof of the SUV. A car hooted on the Mortlake Road. Traffic grumbled. Tires hissed over wet tarmac. A door opened down the street and, for a moment before it closed again, I heard a piano playing the saddest tune in the world.

  My eyes were closed. I listened to the long sonata of the dead.

  XIII

  Rides a Stranger

  David Bell

  MY FATHER DIED slowly.

  In his early sixties, after a lifetime of vigorous health and strength, he contracted a rare neurological disorder that killed him inch by inch. First, he couldn’t walk. Soon after that, he couldn’t dress himself or feed himself. Eventually he was confined to bed, wearing adult diapers. A nurse came and changed him several times a day, rolling him from one side to the other with the detached and practiced care of the medical professional.

  My dad’s eyes remained sharp and intelligent. He was in there. We all knew that. But his body deserted him, like an electrical device with a failing battery. He slowly wound down, losing motion and control. A slow unraveling.

  The last thing to go was his ability to speak.

  For several months, his voice became a raspy whisper. Every word cost him effort. To say something as simple as “yes” could take five minutes and reserves of precious energy he just didn’t have.

  I didn’t visit as much as I should have. I lived four hours away in a small college town where I taught American Literature to the indifferent and unwashed masses of middle-class kids at a public university deep in the heart of Kentucky. It was a good job and mostly fulfilling, and I told myself it left little time for regular trips to my hometown to see my father wasting away in a hospital bed. The truth is—I didn’t know what I could do for him. Even when my father was at his healthiest and in full voice, we didn’t have much to say to each other. We didn’t see eye-to-eye politically. His facts came from Fox News, mine from MSNBC. He spent his life working in business, selling auto parts to distributors around the Rust Belt. I spent my life in the ivory tower.

  We couldn’t even agree when it came to books. I wrote my dissertation on Fitzgerald, specifically The Great Gatsby. Dad’s reading h
abits remained more pedestrian. He read anything that landed on the bestseller list. When I was a child, he read Alistair Maclean and Jack Higgins. Later he switched to Tom Clancy and James Patterson. Big dick books, my ex-wife—also an English professor—used to call them. Big dick books.

  And Dad’s favorite big dick genre of them all—the western. Oaters. Horse operas. Shoot ‘em ups. He read them all. Max Brand. Will Henry. Luke Short. And his favorite of them all—Louis L’Amour. Dad read every Louis L’Amour book ever written. He read and reread them. He bought multiple copies of them. He’d wear one out from re-reading, and then he’d go out and buy the same book and wear that one out as well. It seemed like strange behavior for a man who grew up in Vermont, lived most of his life in Ohio, and never once ventured west of the Mississippi River.

  So, we didn’t talk about books either.

  But I did hear the last words he ever spoke.

  This happened about three weeks before his death. I made one of my infrequent visits. The university I teach at had a fall break, and my mother had been calling me, obliquely warning me that the old man didn’t have much time left. She’d say things like, “Well, your father isn’t as strong as he used to be.” Or she’d say, “Well, we all just have to do what we have to do.” I understood. Mom was telling me to come and say good-bye.

  So I made the trip. I went into their bedroom, the bedroom in which I was conceived, and which was now filled by a large hospital bed. My dad looked small beneath the tucked in sheets, almost like a sick child. He had lost close to sixty pounds, and when I saw him that day, he looked like a sketch or an outline of himself, something without substance or heft.

  I took the seat next to the bed and held his hand. I didn’t like holding his hand. My dad had acquired the habit of reaching down beneath the bedclothes, trying to fiddle with or even remove the diapers he wore. I never knew if this was out of discomfort or because he rebelled against the idea of wearing a diaper at all. But his hands were often busy beneath the sheets, and while I never saw anything gross on his hands, I always wondered. Was I touching feces? Or worse? And I never failed to wash my hands when I left his bedside.