“Yes,” Emmett said. “I slept all right.”
“That’s more than I did,” Mr. Nicholson said. “I’m glad you got here. I’ve got to go to Washington and have my wrist slapped and I wanted to have a talk with you first. Drink?”
“No, thanks,” Emmett said. He watched the gray-haired man pour himself a stiff one. “What’s the matter in Washington, Mr. Nicholson; if it’s any of my business?”
“I don’t know,” Ann’s father said. “They don’t know. I guess they don’t like a man to make money. Every so often they have to stand up on their hind legs and come out against making money. We’re supposed to be in business for the fun of it, I guess.” He tasted his drink. “Oh, hell, boy, don’t look so goddamn righteous. So I’m a bloated war profiteer. What the hell have you got to brag about? You sat on your can in a laboratory and pulled down your monthly check, didn’t you? At least I fought in one war, young man!”
Even as he felt anger flare in him, Emmett realized that the older man facing him was dead tired, a little drunk, and rather frightened at the idea that he might be held up to contempt as a man who had made a profit on his country’s suffering, even if the final result would be, as he had said, no more than a slap on the wrist. Emmett was silent, watching Mr. Nicholson turn wearily away from him.
“I take that back,” Ann’s father said without looking around. “Pass up that remark, John.”
“Sure.”
“What are you going to do about this marriage?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” said Mr. Nicholson, “is it or ain’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Emmett said.
Mr. Nicholson turned back to look at him, nursing the glass between his hands. Then he put it aside and, leaning over the telephone table, wrote a name and address on a card which he gave to Emmett.
“When you find out,” he said, “either way, and if you want that South American job, which is a hell of a fine opportunity for a man your age, incidentally, this is the lad you contact.” He held up his hand quickly. “Don’t answer now. Maybe your heart will be broken and you’ll want to get away. Maybe she loves you and you’ll want to take her into new surroundings for a while. I think I’d like to see that. But I’m going to be pretty damn busy for the next couple of months, and God only knows how this mess is going to turn out; so I thought I’d get you fixed up before I left. There it is. Take it or leave it.” He picked up his glass and stared into it. “John, tell me, did she do it?” he asked softly. “Did she betray them?”
“I don’t know,” Emmett said. “I don’t know any more than you do, Mr. Nicholson.”
“Well,” said Mr. Nicholson, “the war’s been over a long time. I think I’d rather just leave it at not knowing.”
“Yes,” Emmett said.
Ann’s father looked up. The two men stared at each other for a measurable length of time. Then Mr. Nicholson jerked his head toward the connecting door.
“I guess you can go in,” he said.
She was sitting on a low stool by the dresser when Emmett looked up from closing the door behind him; and for a moment he was afraid that he had made a mistake, that he had not heard her voice tell him to come in, that she was not aware that he was in the room. Then she laid the emery board aside.
“It’s shocking how disgraceful your hands can get in a week,” she said lightly. “I seem to have broken half my fingernails.”
He watched her rise and come toward him, and he knew suddenly that he had never seen this girl before, even though he was married to her. Always before she had been fleeing something; always before she had been a little hot or tired or mussed or frightened. He was seeing her for the first time on her own terms, among her own surroundings.
She was wearing white sandals and a light print dress of a shade of pale violet that gave the illusion of matching her eyes, although he knew that her eyes were gray. It was hard to reconcile her appearance with anything he remembered of her; she even seemed to have become taller than could be accounted for merely by the high heels of her sandals. He tried to find a phrase to tell her, without betraying himself, that she looked very nice. While he was still groping among the inadequate words in his mind, she had held out her hand to him.
“I’m glad you could come before we left,” she said. “I wanted to thank you, Mr. Emmett.”
He thought he took it without flinching. “You’re leaving?” he asked flatly.
“Yes,” she said. “With Dad.”
“He didn’t say—”
She smiled. “He doesn’t know yet.”
He felt her fingers press his hand lightly and release it. “Thank you,” she murmured.
“For what?”
She smiled at him again. “I’d forgotten you were like that,” she said. “Why, for helping me.”
“I didn’t get very far,” he said. “It was rather inconclusive.”
“You didn’t have very much to work with,” she said. She walked past him to the window. “Dad’s lawyers are Fairman and Bannister, Chicago,” she said without turning her head.
“Check.”
She asked, “How much did you know? Did you know that man was going to turn out not to be Dr. Kissel? You might have told me.”
It was all settled, he realized. Her lawyers were Fairman and Bannister, and that was taken care of; now he could just explain a few things before he went out, closing the door behind him like a gentleman.
He said, “No, I didn’t know.”
“But you must have known something,” she insisted. “You were so intent on having me meet him.”
Emmett said, “You’d started out to see him. I figured I’d help you go through with it.”
“Was that the only reason?”
“Well,” he said, “they’d tried to kill you. It seemed to me they were doing their best to stop you. And then I got the impression that Kirkpatrick, in spite of acting dead set against the interview, really wanted his hand forced. Talking to me, he had intimated that it would be nice for you if Kissel were to say you hadn’t betrayed anybody. That sounded like bait to me, when I got to thinking it over. And then he had hinted that if your dad were to put pressure on him, he might have to let you see the man. I didn’t think he’d have let that slip if he’d really thought I was a foreign agent—it sounded kind of like a cue. And then he didn’t stop you when he could have, at Mrs. Pruitt’s place. It might have been some kind of a trap; he could have been working with the Chicago police, for instance, to get the final evidence against you; but I figured it was worth the gamble to play along with him and see what happened.” He went on after a short pause, “Of course, I never suspected that anybody was worried about Kissel. I thought you were the center of interest all along. I figured that somebody, for some reason, didn’t want you to know the truth about what had happened to you in France. That seemed to me to indicate that the truth might be the opposite to what everybody was thinking.” He smiled. “Actually, you weren’t that important, and I hit on what Kissel was going to say merely by a wild coincidence.”
She laughed, glancing at him over her shoulder. “It is rather disconcerting, isn’t it? To find that I’m just a supporting member of the cast. Do you remember when I was seeing it all as a great plot directed against myself? The night we drove away from Mrs. Pruitt’s…”
“Yes,” he said, “I remember.”
“I was very close to the edge that night,” she said. “I wanted to let go and just throw a beautiful scene, completely mad, and you wouldn’t let me. Every time I started to go over, you’d pull me back. I think I hated you.” She looked away abruptly, as if sensing that reminiscences were dangerous. “Mr. Kirkpatrick seems to be quite a clever man,” she said.
“Yes,” Emmett said. “That beef fools you.”
“Did he explain why I had to let you all think that I hadn’t told him about Dr. Kissel not being the right man?” He could see the roofs of the city of Santa Fe beyond her. The sun was very bright beyond
the immediate shadow of the building in which they stood. There was not a cloud in the sky. He felt as if the two of them were standing there by the window, casually putting the last pieces into a jigsaw puzzle in which they had lost interest, but which they could not quite bring themselves to leave uncompleted.
“When did you tell him?” he asked; and, asking, he remembered the terrible ride from Numa to Santa Fe yesterday, sitting beside her wanting to hate her. Wanting to hate, and not being able to, could be as dreadful, he thought, as wanting to love and not being able to.
“When he picked me up after I’d pretended to faint,” she said. “I did think, when I saw it wasn’t the right man, that it might be some kind of a trick, but it was a little too important. But I didn’t want to blurt it out in front of all of you, in case… So I fainted.”
He said, “And you’re the little girl your dad wanted to stick in an asylum because you’re not quite bright enough to cope with the outside world.”
She did not smile. “It wasn’t quite fair to you or Dad, but I had to do it, don’t you see?”
“Sure.”
“Why didn’t he want them to know? What is he going to do about them?”
Emmett said, “Nothing.”
“But they’re murderers!”
“It’s more important than that,” he said. “You see, in order to show that he’s the genuine Kissel, and to prove that he’s worthy of confidence, the guy with the cane back there is apparently revealing a lot of stuff that we didn’t know. Probably his superiors figure it’s worth while. We’re still ahead of them, you know. They figure they can throw us a few tidbits of their research, Kissel of course pretending it’s stuff he picked up in a Nazi lab during the war, on the gamble that we’ll let slip some big gimmick they can use.”
She said, “It’s a horrible game. You’d think grown people would have more sense… I mean, all of us.”
Emmett nodded. After a while he said, “Well, as long as Kissel, Kaufman, Bethke and Co. think they’re unsuspected by the authorities, we keep getting material that at least shows us how far they’ve got. The big brass apparently feel that this takes precedence over a couple of murders that can’t be unmurdered.”
“But what good did I do if they already knew…?
“Oh, this is a recent development, since yesterday morning,” Emmett said. “They didn’t know. Only Kirkpatrick guessed and he wasn’t getting anywhere with proving it. Kirkpatrick got suspicious of Kissel for the simple reason that the man got shot at twice, missed both times. They were apparently trying to convince us how important Dr. Kissel was, but Kirkpatrick seemed to think that their marksmanship is generally better than that; and when they miss twice running, he wants to know why. So he found a few indications, but nothing that could impress the men on top, who were very enthusiastic about what Kissel was revealing to them, and wouldn’t hear anything against him. That’s why Kirkpatrick had to work in double-talk, so that if something blew he could say he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. That’s what he says,” Emmett said. “I think the man likes to talk that way. Anyway, he says that you’ll be contacted discreetly some time in the near future, to make a statement. In the meantime we’re all to walk around with long faces, as if our consciences had a bad toothache.”
She turned away from the window to look at him. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad it’s all worked out so nicely for Mr. Kirkpatrick.” Then she said slowly, “John…”
“Yes.”
“You’ll always remember, won’t you, that I didn’t have to tell.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll remember.”
“I could have let you think that you had heard the truth, couldn’t I? I don’t have to be noble and say that the one man who had testified in my behalf was a fraud.”
“No,” he said.
A small breath of warm air through the window behind her pushed a lock of her hair forward along her cheek. She tucked it back mechanically. “John…”
“Yes,” he said.
“Two nights ago… she said… on the desert… She flushed. “There’s no really… comfortable way of referring to it, is there?” He did not say anything. She went on after a pause, without looking at him, stiffly: “I don’t want you to feel that… that you took advantage of an overwrought little girl whom you had already forced into marriage. It wasn’t… I mean, I wanted…You can’t know what it’s like,” she breathed. “Not to dare let yourself be a human being for years and years. Holding your breath. Waiting to be accused. Not daring to let yourself think or feel or… or live, because you know that sooner or later you’re going to have to face this thing… you don’t want to build up something just to see it smashed; you don’t dare love anybody, or let them love you, because you couldn’t bear to see them change to hating you, when…” She turned abruptly away from him. “You know I did it, don’t you?” she gasped.
“Yes,” he said.
“Whe… how long…?”
“I had a little hope,” Emmett said, “that everybody would prove to be wrong, until I knew you’d identified that man as not being Kissel. Here was a man you’d seen only once,” he said, explaining it in detail just to keep talking. “You’d seen him only once after he’d been beaten severely. Probably the light was poor. You weren’t feeling very well yourself. Five years later you meet a substitute who’s even undergone plastic surgery to make him resemble the original Dr. Kissel, and you spot him as a fake on the spot.” He grimaced. “It didn’t wash, Ann. Therefore you must have detected him, not from the way he looked, but from what he said. He must have said something the real Kissel wouldn’t have said, and that tipped you off.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “He said I was innocent.” After a while she said, “John, I saw them executed. They made me stand in a window and watch.”
He said slowly, “I thought you didn’t remember.”
He saw her force herself to turn slowly to face him. “What can you do?” she asked, “when you’ve done something so dreadful that… that you can’t even admit it to yourself? You haven’t got the courage to confess, but you can’t quite make yourself lie about it. It’s so easy to pretend to forget. Sometimes…” She closed her eyes and shivered and opened them again. “Sometimes you can even almost fool yourself.”
“If you remembered,” he said, “why did you want to see Kissel? Why did you bring Kissel into it at all? If you knew you’d done it?”
She drew a long breath, bracing herself against the high windowsill behind her. “Have you ever really thought of how hard it can be to confess, John? Dr. Kissel was the beginning of my confession; I was going to remember other things and gradually… and then I couldn’t go any further. Can you see yourself facing people you’ve known all your life, your parents…” Her throat worked. “And then someone comes and throws your guilt in your face. Before you’ve managed to confess it. Stevens. I pleaded with him to wait a few days. I told him I knew a man who had proof I was innocent. All I wanted was time, but he wouldn’t listen. So I went anyway, hoping that I could see Dr. Kissel before… I thought that the paper he went to would want to check on a story like that, and it might take several days. And in the meantime I would have seen Dr. Kissel, of my own free will, and he would have accused me, and I would have pretended to remember everything. Somehow it didn’t seem as if it would be quite as nasty that way, doing it myself, as being driven out of hiding like an animal.”
“I see,” he said.
“I wanted to tell you,” she whispered. “There were so many times I almost… But I needed you so badly, and I was afraid you’d leave me if you knew.” Her eyes searched his face for a moment. Then she said, “I could have let you believe what that man said yesterday. Doesn’t that help a little?” Then her voice became low and breathless, “It’s hard to—to become reconciled to the thought that sometimes—sometimes you only get one chance and if you muff that you can’t ever atone… just a little more courage,” she whispered. “Have you any idea how often
I’ve wished that I’d had just a little more to give just then? Just to hold out another day. Maybe they’d have given up. But there wasn’t any more. You just have so much and that’s all there is and then you’re through if you can’t manage to kill yourself. Anyway you’re through.”
The breeze displaced the vagrant lock of hair again. She tossed her head to put it back into place. Then she walked past him into the middle of the large, light hotel room and turned.
“I just wanted to thank you,” she said. “I can’t really blame myself for letting you marry me; after all, you hardly gave me any choice. But we can let the lawyers work that out; I don’t think there’ll be any trouble.” Her voice became harsher. “I don’t really need you or anybody else, John Emmett. Don’t feel that you owe me anything because… because I let you make love to me. Don’t feel that you have to be sorry for me. I’m all right. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m alive, aren’t I? That’s more than you can say for a lot of people who were supposed to be cleverer or nobler or braver or stronger—”
“Don’t,” he said sharply.
“Why don’t you go?” she gasped. “Do you have to make a speech at me, too? Can’t you just leave? Don’t you think I know what kind of a coward and hypocrite I am without being told?”
He reached her and took her by the shoulders. “Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t, Ann.”
He saw that her eyes, looking up at him, had become darker than the color of her dress.
“You mustn’t touch me,” she said childishly. “I told you once before, you mustn’t touch me unless you—”
Then she was in his arms, crying softly. He stroked her hair back with the tips of his fingers. A conventional part of his mind had made the conventional judgment, saying harshly that what she had done was unforgivable, but the voice did not carry conviction. You could not live in a world where weakness was unforgivable, when you did not know how strong you yourself were.
The Steel Mirror Page 21