“Well,” I whispered, leaning across the four remaining oysters, “what is going on with these guys? Do they know what they’re doing or what?”
“Just a minute. Tony Chalmers? When did he tell you this?”
“Oh-oh,” I said, covering my mouth and reaching for my oyster fork. I slipped one into my mouth, then another, while Hacker sat and stared at me. So I told him the story of my trip to Boston, my visit with Chalmers and—extracting the deepest promise of secrecy—the story of Venables and Sally.
Hacker’s eyes slowly widened. His fork slowly made its way back and forth between the last of the oysters and his mouth and then they were gone and he looked surprised. He’d never known anything about Sally and Venables and he couldn’t quite fit it into the big picture. But he wasn’t sure it mattered.
“And now,” I said, “having been caught because you purposely have plied me with strong drink, I have a question for you. What were you doing skulking around Joy Street two nights ago? What was the nature of this big research trip?”
“What are you, some kind of detective?” He flashed me an admiring glance. “Well, yes, I guess you are. I had a long talk with Tony and that’s what I want to tell you about. I can explain everything, but not here. I think Mike should be in on this, too.”
I finished the bread while Hacker paid the bill.
I prayed for sobriety and deliverance from the past.
Chapter Forty-one
MIKE PIERCE WAS PERSPIRING HEAVILY despite the arctic air conditioning. He was the only man I’d ever known who apparently wore a sport coat while puttering around his own place by himself. But tonight it lay like an exhausted pet on a blue print couch. Mike was turned out in white slacks and a pale yellow shirt, forest-green suspenders, and a gray, unhealthy face. He was making drinks and I shook my head enough to make it ache. Iced tea, please, and he went to the kitchen to make it. He’d given his man the night off and seemed slightly unfamiliar with where things were in the cupboards. He brought me the tall cold glass and we followed him out onto his balcony, which looked northward from Central Park South. The park lay moist and green behind a curtain of humidity. To the left Lincoln Center glowed like the aftermath of a bombing raid.
“Christ, it’s hot,” he mumbled, leaning on the railing. The traffic pulsed below us but the density of the atmosphere killed the sounds. Geraniums, bright red and soft pink, filled windowboxes, and a couple of palm trees sat in large terra-cotta pots.
Hacker lit a cigar and said, “It’s time, Mike old sport. We’re going to tell Belinda and then duck.” He chortled to himself. Mike didn’t seem to hear. I sat down and sipped my tea and wondered what was going on. “You have the floor,” Hacker said.
Mike finally turned around, looked plaintively at me, and hooked his thumbs through the beautiful suspenders, dragging them downward toward his waist. “I told you I wanted to talk to you, urgently, the other day, but then I arrived with Antonelli and I couldn’t talk … and then he told us they’d arrested Jack. That gave me second thoughts—such as, why drag out the dirty laundry if the whole thing is over and life is just going to struggle on? You told me I was lying about not understanding Jack’s diary. Well, hell, I was lying, but in a good cause. Or so I thought. Saving everybody some pain and unhappiness. Then Hacker and I spoke, he told me Antonelli was just fishing around and probably couldn’t hold Jack long, certainly couldn’t make a murder charge stick with the kind of extremely circumstantial evidence he had. No gun, no witnesses, nothing that really added up to anything—except Jack’s blowing off steam and punching a guy for messing around with his wife … well, that made sense, too. If Jack didn’t do it, who did? And Hacker told me what he thought. I damn near fainted. But Hack’s a smart cookie, right? And he’s been digging through old Ruffian crap for the past year.”
Mike took a sip of his drink. Hacker puffed and looked off into space.
“I’m a cowardly man, Belinda,” Mike said. “I wanted to be as little part of this mess as I could. I’m good at picking up the pieces and sweeping everything under the rug and holding people’s hands, but I’m not good at breaking things. Try to understand that.” He looked at me again and I nodded. “You may recall Jack’s accusation that Peter was a thief and that Jack had caught him at it—you wondered what that meant. So did I, so did Hacker … and then I woke up in the middle of the night, jolted out of sleep by a memory. I asked myself if it mattered—I didn’t see how it could. Until Hack told me who he believed killed Peter.” He kept skirting Harry’s name, as if there was no way he could bring himself to mention it in such a context.
“You see, Peter had always been sort of obsessed by you.” His eyes were round, as if he’d peeked into the past and been alarmed by what he saw. “Some men are like that. He hardly knew you, but it was the way you looked, what your appearance said to him. There’s no point in quibbling—write it off to impressionable youth, whatever you like. Fact, these are facts. Peter watched while Harry went with you, and Harry was bound to tell us about some of his … you know, exploits. With you. And it really got to Peter. We used to kid him about how you were his sex object, his centerfold, and he’d just smile, shake his head, and tell us he’d be glad to wait for you. It was just talk, the way guys talk.” He looked desperately at Hacker, as if for help in developing his narrative, but Hacker just smiled and waved his cigar at him—go on, go on.
“Well, Harry was known to keep a journal. He was always telling us how important it was to keep a record of everything important, everything that mattered, so we could remember it when we were old and gray. Harry was always sitting around the room scribbling away and it was his little eccentricity. We got so we didn’t pay any attention … all except Peter, as it turned out. He got the idea that Harry had to be writing down everything that happened between you and him—he didn’t tell us, but apparently he couldn’t get it out of his mind. If only he could read Harry s journal, then he’d get the whole story, every detail.” Mike sighed and took another drink. “Christ, Hack, this is so embarrassing!”
“Press on, lad,” Hacker said. “It’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.” He grinned at me through the smoke and didn’t make me feel any more confident. I didn’t know what was coming next but I’d have bet I wasn’t going to enjoy it.
“Well, to make a long story short. Peter got the journal one weekend when Harry went home and forgot to take it with him. I don’t know the details, maybe nobody does. Anyway, Peter got it and had it for a couple of days, and then had to get it back to Harry’s desk before Harry got back. The upshot is that Jack caught him bringing it back and Jack got very moral about it—you know Jack’s temper—he raised real hell with Peter and it got pretty rough, pretty humiliating for Peter, and Jack wouldn’t let him off the hook. I walked in on them and Jack told me all about it and Peter was so stunned and ashamed—I can see him now, his face absolutely scarlet, then he started to cry, begging Jack not to tell Harry, and Jack was saying: Harry, hell, I ought to tell Belinda what a creep you are, what a pervert—on and on. I played my usual role as peacemaker, sweeping up the wreckage, and we put the damn journal back and, you know how it is, Jack and I sort of had something on Peter ever after. I forgot it, or repressed it, it was so ugly—I mean, I felt humiliated just having seen the way Jack laid into Peter … but Peter went through the tortures of the damned and then some, I guess. Not long after that you and Jack got together and Jack and Harry had their big ruckus …” He let it trail off and turned away from me, looking back out into the night.
“For guys who were so close, such pals,” I said, “you had a hell of a tough time getting along—”
“Well, you’re just hearing about the bad parts, Belinda,” he said. “Ninety-nine days out of a hundred all that was forgotten and we’d have done anything for each other. And that includes Jack for Peter and Peter for Jack. It was forgotten. Totally. Absolutely. When we’d had it out that day and put the journal back, I’d bet my life that Jack never mentioned it
again to Peter, never thought about it again. It didn’t fester, it didn’t infect us. Not until now, not until Venables came back and started paying attention to you … and that was what I wanted to talk to you about the other day, when I chickened out. Why Peter was suddenly back and coming after you.”
He stopped and I knew his recitation was done. Hacker cleared his throat. “Which brings us, dear one, to my research trip to Boston. I had to verify a thing or two, make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me. I had to check Tony’s memory about the goddamn Belinda Pact … Buckle your seat belt, Belinda, and try to remember that boys will be boys.”
The Belinda Pact.
It lay there at the bottom of everything for all these years. No one had ever told me, no one had ever hinted, not until Peter Venables took me out for drinks and dinner and set his foot upon the road to death.
They had all been a little in love with me. College-boy love. And they loved to make commitments. Hacker said he thought it was Harry who had started it. After he and Jack had beaten the hell out of one another and Jack had won me. The idea was that there wouldn’t be any more opposition, no more stealing of girlfriends, no more bullshit.
“You were the turning point,” Hacker said. The lamps in the living room cast shadows toward us on the darkened balcony. I smelled Hacker’s cigar. I was conscious of my senses, felt my scalp tingle and gooseflesh rise along my arms as he talked, telling me about the secret life I’d had without knowing it.
“You were the turning point and we were all different after we decided what to do about you. You were the golden girl. If that’s corny, and it is, well, we were corny guys, I guess. But you were it. You became something less than a woman, but also something more than a woman. To all of us. We made you a kind of icon, the woman we wanted. It sounds pretty sick now, but what can I tell you? It wasn’t sick then. …” Hacker took a deep breath and I smelled the jet of cigar smoke.
My own thoughts squirmed around inside me. I remembered Hacker at another time, telling me something else. She doesn’t make them swine. I think they were already swine. …
“You became a kind of trophy in our minds,” Hacker continued. “I can remember Peter saying something, he made some remark about a traveling trophy. Anyway, when you had passed from Harry to Jack and Jack reported that he not only loved you, he’d finally slept with you, we had a party. A Belinda party. We took food down to the banks of the Charles at midnight one night and drank some beer and ate and celebrated. Oh, God, it was all in good fun, a ritual was being established, and we wondered if we’d ever live to see another Belinda party. Tony Chalmers said that it would make a wonderful novel, the story of a group of men loving the same woman, and through the passing years by whatever turn of events that might befall them … passing the woman from one of them to another. That’s how we looked at it. You had passed from Harry to Jack. You’ve got to realize, Belinda, it was because we all cared so much about you …”
I bit my lip and clung to the chair. I wouldn’t have wanted to see myself in a mirror. Wrath of God.
“We all began to wonder,” Hacker said, “who would have Belinda next. We talked about it quite solemnly. Mike remembers, I remember. Tony remembered.”
Mike interrupted, still with his back to us. “We were kids, for God’s sake … it was crazy.”
“But we were in earnest,” Hacker said. “We weren’t joking about it anymore.”
I listened to Hacker talk about me as if I were a statue, something that couldn’t hear, something to be admired and valued and passed from one owner to another. They had jointly monitored the situation, solemnly congratulating Jack when he told them he’d decided to marry me. It was Venables who had said that he knew he spoke for all of them when he said they had found an archetypal woman. So he wanted with their permission to suggest a long-term plan—that they make an oath, a pact, that Belinda would remain a kind of Ruffian herself, the last Ruffian, that they would always see to her welfare, that she would never be allowed to pass into the hands of anyone but a Ruffian.
“But I suppose we’d all forgotten it as the years went on,” Hacker said almost wistfully. “I sure as hell did. I know Mike did. You and Jack got married and stayed married and we all went on with our lives. No one ever mentioned the Belinda Pact again. So far as I know, not until now, tonight, here. But Peter didn’t forget. When he got word of the show he also got word from Harry that you and Jack had broken up. And the bell rang. The Belinda Pact, the last Ruffian. Was he crazy, Belinda? Or just one of love’s fools? Well, whatever he was, he came back to get Belinda … he told Jack and predictably Jack went crazy and slugged him and threatened him and broke a blood vessel in general. Peter also told Harry, and I’ll bet the world that Harry didn’t say much, just started to think. Because that was Harry’s way. Old Harry just started figuring out what he was going to do about it … because he’d already decided he wanted Belinda for himself. He wanted her back … and Peter wanted his turn.”
We sat quietly for a long time. I didn’t trust myself to say a word. I don’t know if I was angry. I don’t know what I felt. But I think it went way, way beyond anger. What they had done—for whatever reason—was so monstrous, so incalculably perverted. They had used me as an excuse. They had suffered a kind of group madness and they had used me as their justification and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t go back and undo any of it. What I felt more than anything else was a kind of grief-stricken frustration. Helpless … and one of them was dead and there was another who had killed him and I was the excuse.
I wasn’t entirely aware of having gotten out of the chair and gone back through the living room. Not one word, they didn’t say one word.
I realized I was crying as the elevator descended. I couldn’t see. I was making awful stupid sounds. The doors slid open and I went into the lobby. I must have looked drunk and disorderly and then I began to run. Blinded by tears of rage and frustration, I ran. I ran directly into someone coming in the door and I felt strong hands grab me to keep me from falling.
I was sobbing and I heard someone calling my name and I wiped at my eyes and my runny nose and looked up gratefully into a pale, haggard face I knew.
“Harry!”
I don’t know if anyone could even understand me.
But I began to scream something, maybe his name. I yanked away from him, pushing him, pulling away at the same time. He held on to me. I don’t know what he wanted to do with me. Maybe he’d have killed me there and then. … My mind wasn’t working. I was going on adrenaline.
“No, no, don’t come near me, you stay away—”
He looked like a man having a heart seizure.
“I know what you did, I know all about it, it was you, it was all of you—”
“What, Belinda? What are you saying?” He looked like a man of sixty. A sick man. I began to cry again, trying to get away from Harry. Good old Harry. He looked like a dead man.
I backed into someone, a doorman in a brown uniform with gold braid and epaulet’s. He didn’t look happy.
“Get me a cab! Please!” I clung to his arm.
“Are you okay, lady?”
“Keep him away from me, just keep him away, don’t let him get me. …”
Harry stood there with his arms out in front of him, palms up, frozen.
Then I was in the back of a cab and it was dark and we were pulling away from the curb and Harry had come outside and was standing alone, staring after me, a zombie.
And I just let go. I couldn’t stop crying. It seemed as if there were nothing left. Nothing and no one.
Chapter Forty-two
I GOT MYSELF WELL UNDER with two sleeping pills and slept dreamlessly, but I came awake with a startled cry, heard it in the echoing loft, and the image before me was Harry’s terrible, agonized face, the staring eyes. I blinked and blinked until they faded, then reached over and turned on the radio to help drive the fear away. I was groggy still, lay quietly under the single damp sheet, the
n finally forced myself up and into the bathroom.
It was a dark day, no sun anywhere, clouds low and streaky gray. The humidity felt like a clammy hand and the radio said it was eighty-three heading for ninety-five. I showered and thought about Harry, lowering myself into the muck of last night with considerable care. Something had slipped all the way out of kilter inside him: I saw it in his face. Something wasn’t working anymore in there, but it wasn’t that he looked crazy. It was pain. I don’t think I’d ever seen so much pain in anyone’s face before.
I had to stay calm, I had to think. I made toast and filled the coffeemaker and let myself think about the Belinda Pact. I had to proceed carefully. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it or I’d lose it, just the way Jack was so prone to do. I had to keep a clear head. How hateful was it, anyway, this Belinda Pact? How ambiguous was their concern for me? They had wanted to protect me, they had thought they were my insurance policy, swept up in the romantic idiocy of their youth and passions.
But that wasn’t the way it had worked out, was it? No, twenty years later it was something else altogether. Something evil, something wicked. Twenty years later they were prisoners, victims of their own mindless obsession about a girl who didn’t even exist anymore, a girl who had turned into a woman and had a life of her own. But that hadn’t mattered, not to some of them, and there had been a murder.
Murder. Tony Chalmers had been worrying about it for a long time, this seed growing in the heart of the Ruffians. It had grown like a tumor for two decades, eating away at their senses of proportion and decency, devouring their respect for me … But how could there ever have been any respect? They had never seen me for what I was. They had only fed on their obsession. I remembered C. P. Snow writing about obsessive love, how people were consumed and destroyed by it, both the lovers and the loved.
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