And how could he sit at his desk thinking of murder, when in less than ten days he would be with Anne on a white ship? Why had he been given Anne, or the power to love her? And had he agreed so readily to the cruise only because he wanted to be free of Bruno for three weeks? Bruno, if he wanted to, could take Anne from him. He had always admitted that to himself, always tried to face it. But he realized that since he had seen them together, since the day of the wedding, the possibility had become a specific terror.
He got up and put on his hat to go out to lunch. He heard the switchboard buzz as he crossed the lobby. Then the girl called to him.
“Take it from here if you like, Mr. Haines.”
Guy picked up the telephone, knowing it was Bruno, knowing he would agree to Bruno’s seeing him sometime today. Bruno asked him to have lunch, and Guy promised to meet him at Mario’s Villa d’Este in ten minutes.
There were pink and white patterned drapes in the restaurant’s window. Guy had a feeling that Bruno had laid a trap, that detectives would be behind the pink and white curtain, but not Bruno. And he didn’t care, he felt, didn’t care at all.
Bruno spotted him from the bar and slid off his stool with a grin. Guy walking around with his head in the air again, he thought, walking right by him. Bruno laid his hand on Guy’s shoulder.
“Hi, Guy. I’ve got a table the end of this row.”
Bruno was wearing his old rust-brown suit. Guy thought of the first time he had followed the long legs, down the swaying train to the compartment, but the memory brought no remorse now. He felt, in fact, well-disposed toward Bruno, as he sometimes did by night, but never until now by day. He did not even resent Bruno’s evident gratification that he had come to lunch with him.
Bruno ordered the cocktails and the lunch. He ordered broiled liver for himself, because of his new diet, he said, and eggs Benedict for Guy, because he knew Guy liked them. Guy was inspecting the table nearest them. He felt a puzzled suspicion of the four smartly dressed, fortyish women, all of whom were smiling with their eyes almost closed, all of whom lifted cocktail glasses. Beyond them, a well-fed, European-looking man hurled a smile across the table at his invisible companion. Waiters scurried zealously. Could it all be a show created and enacted by madmen, he and Bruno the main characters, and the maddest of all? For every movement he saw, every word he heard, seemed wrapped in the heroic gloom of predestination.
“Like ’em?” Bruno was saying. “I got ’em at Clyde’s this morning. Best selection in town. For summer anyway.”
Guy looked down at the four tie boxes Bruno had opened in their laps. There were knitted, silk and linen ties, and a pale lavender bowtie of heavy linen. There was a shantung silk tie of aqua, like a dress of Anne’s.
Bruno was disappointed. Guy didn’t seem to like them. “Too loud? They’re summer ties.”
“They’re nice,” Guy said.
“This is my favorite. I never saw anything like this.” Bruno held up the white knitted tie with the thin red stripe down the center. “Started to get one for myself, but I wanted you to have it. Just you, I mean. They’re for you, Guy.”
“Thanks.” Guy felt an unpleasant twitch in his upper lip. He might have been Bruno’s lover, he thought suddenly, to whom Bruno had brought a present, a peace offering.
“Here’s to the trip,” Bruno said, lifting his glass.
Bruno had spoken to Anne this morning on the telephone, and Anne had mentioned the cruise, he said. Bruno kept telling him, wistfully, how wonderful he thought Anne was.
“She’s so pure-looking. You certainly don’t see a—a kind-looking girl like that very often. You must be awfully happy, Guy.” He hoped Guy might say something, a phrase or a word, that would somehow explain just why he was happy. But Guy didn’t say anything, and Bruno felt rebuffed, felt the choking lump traveling from his chest up to his throat. What could Guy take offense at about that? Bruno wanted very much to put his hand over Guy’s fist, that rested lightly on the edge of the table, just for a moment as a brother might, but he restrained himself. “Did she like you right away or did you have to know her a long time? Guy?”
Guy heard him repeat the question. It seemed ages old. “How can you ask me about time? It’s a fact.” He glanced at Bruno’s narrow, plumpening face, at the cowlick that still gave his forehead a tentative expression, but Bruno’s eyes were vastly more confident than when he had seen them first, and less sensitive. Because he had his money now, Guy thought.
“Yeah. I know what you mean.” But Bruno didn’t, quite. Guy was happy with Anne even though the murder still haunted him. Guy would be happy with her even if he were broke. Bruno winced now for even having thought once that he might offer Guy money. He could hear the way Guy would say, “No,” with that look of drawing back in his eyes, of being miles away from him in a second. Bruno knew he would never have the things Guy had no matter how much money he had or what he did with it. Having his mother to himself was no guarantee of happiness, he had found out. Bruno made himself smile. “You think Anne likes me all right?”
“All right.”
“What does she like to do outside of designing? Does she like to cook? Things like that?” Bruno watched Guy pick up his martini and drain it in three swallows. “You know. I just like to know the kind of things you do together. Like take walks or work crossword puzzles.”
“We do things like that.”
“What do you do in the evenings?”
“Anne sometimes works in the evenings.” His mind slid easily, as it never had before with Bruno, to the upstairs studio where he and Anne often worked in the evenings, Anne talking to him from time to time, or holding something up for him to comment on, as if her work were effortless. When she dabbled her paintbrush fast in a glass of water, the sound was like laughter.
“I saw her picture in Harper’s Bazaar a couple months ago with some other designers. She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”
“Very good.”
“I—” Bruno laid his forearms one above the other on the table. “I sure am glad you’re happy with her.”
Of course he was. Guy felt his shoulders relax, and his breathing grow easier. Yet at this moment, it was hard to believe she was his. She was like a goddess who descended to pluck him from battles that would certainly have killed him, like the goddesses in mythology who saved the heroes, yet introduced an element at the end of the stories that had always struck him, when he read them as a child, as extraneous and unfair. In the nights when he could not sleep, when he stole out of the house and walked up the rock hill in pajamas and overcoat, in the unchallenging, indifferent summer nights, he did not permit himself to think of Anne. “Dea ex machina,” Guy murmured.
“What?”
Why was he sitting here with Bruno, eating at the same table with him? He wanted to fight Bruno and he wanted to weep. But all at once he felt his curses dissolve in a flood of pity. Bruno did not know how to love, and that was all he needed. Bruno was too lost, too blind to love or to inspire love. It seemed all at once tragic.
“You’ve never even been in love, Bruno?” Guy watched a restive, unfamiliar expression come into Bruno’s eyes.
Bruno signaled for another drink. “No, not really in love, I guess.” He moistened his lips. Not only hadn’t he ever fallen in love, but he didn’t care too much about sleeping with women. He had never been able to stop thinking it was a silly business, that he was standing off somewhere and watching himself. Once, one terrible time, he had started giggling. Bruno squirmed. That was the most painful difference he felt separating him and Guy, that Guy could forget himself in women, had practically killed himself for Miriam.
Guy looked at Bruno, and Bruno lowered his eyes. Bruno was waiting, as if for him to tell him how to fall in love. “Do you know the greatest wisdom in the world, Bruno?”
“I know a lot of wisdoms,” Bruno smirked. “Which one do you mean?”
“That everything has its opposite close beside it.”
“Opposites a
ttract?”
“That’s too simple. I mean—you give me ties. But it also occurred to me you might have the police waiting for me here.”
“F’ Christ’s sake, Guy, you’re my friend!” Bruno said quickly, suddenly frantic. “I like you!”
I like you, I don’t hate you, Guy thought. But Bruno wouldn’t say that, because he did hate him. Just as he would never say to Bruno, I like you, but instead, I hate you, because he did like him. Guy set his jaw, and rubbed his fingers back and forth across his forehead. He could foresee a balance of positive and negative will that would paralyze every action before he began it. Such as that, for instance, that kept him sitting here. He jumped up, and the new drinks splashed on the cloth.
Bruno stared at him in terrified surprise. “Guy, what’s the matter?” Bruno followed him. “Guy, wait! You don’t think I’d do a thing like that, do you? I wouldn’t in a million years!”
“Don’t touch me!”
“Guy!” Bruno was almost crying. Why did people do these things to him? Why? He shouted on the sidewalk: “Not in a million years! Not for a million dollars! Trust me, Guy!”
Guy pushed his hand into Bruno’s chest and closed the taxi door. Bruno would not in a million years betray him, he knew. But if everything were as ambiguous as he believed, how could he really be sure?
thirty-four
“What’s your connection with Mrs. Guy Haines?”
Bruno had expected it. Gerard had his latest charge accounts, and this was the flowers he had sent Anne. “Friend. Friend of her husband.”
“Oh. Friend?”
“Acquaintance.” Bruno shrugged, knowing Gerard would think he was trying to brag because Guy was famous.
“Known him long?”
“Not long.” From his horizontal slump in his easy chair, Bruno reached for his lighter.
“How’d you happen to send flowers?”
“Feeling good, I guess. I was going to a party there that night.”
“Do you know him that well?”
Bruno shrugged again. “Ordinary party. He was one of the architects we thought of when we were talking about building a house.” That had just popped out, and it was rather good, Bruno thought.
“Matt Levine. Let’s get back to him.”
Bruno sighed. Skipping Guy, maybe because he was out of town, maybe just skipping him. Now Matt Levine—they didn’t come any shadier, and without realizing it might be useful, he had seen a lot of Matt before the murder. “What about him?”
“How is it you saw him the twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth, and thirtieth of April, the second, fifth, sixth, seventh of March, and two days before the murder?”
“Did I?” he smiled. Gerard had had only three dates the last time. Matt didn’t like him either. Matt had probably said the worst. “He was interested in buying my car.”
“And you were interested in selling it? Why, because you thought you’d get a new one soon?”
“Wanted to sell it to get a little car,” Bruno said obliviously. “The one in the garage now. Crosley.”
Gerard smiled. “How long have you known Mark Lev?”
“Since he was Mark Levitski,” Bruno retorted. “Go back a little farther and you’ll find he killed his own father in Russia.” Bruno glared at Gerard. The “own” sounded funny, he shouldn’t have said it, but Gerard trying to be smart with the aliases!
“Matt doesn’t care for you either. What’s the matter, couldn’t you two come to terms?”
“About the car?”
“Charles,” Gerard said patiently.
“I’m not saying anything.” Bruno looked at his bitten nails, and thought again how well Matt matched Herbert’s description of the murderer.
“You haven’t seen Ernie Schroeder much lately.”
Bruno opened his mouth boredly to answer.
thirty-five
Barefoot, in white duck trousers, Guy sat cross-legged on the India’s forward deck. Long Island had just come in sight, but he did not want to look at it yet. The gently rolling movement of the ship rocked him pleasantly and familiarly, like something he had always known. The day he had last seen Bruno, in the restaurant, seemed a day of madness. Surely he had been going insane. Surely Anne must have seen it.
He flexed his arm and pinched up the thin brown skin that covered its muscles. He was brown as Egon, the half-Portuguese ship’s boy they had hired from the Long Island dock at the start of the cruise. Only the little scar in his right eyebrow remained white.
The three weeks at sea had given him a peace and resignation he had never known before, and that a month ago he would have declared foreign to him. He had come to feel that his atonement, whatever it might be, was a part of his destiny, and like the rest of his destiny would find him without his seeking. He had always trusted his sense of destiny. As a boy with Peter, he had known that he would not merely dream, as he had somehow known, too, that Peter would do nothing but dream, that he would create famous buildings, that his name would take its proper place in architecture, and finally—it had always seemed to him the crowning achievement—that he would build a bridge. It would be a white bridge with a span like an angel’s wing, he had thought as a boy, like the curving white bridge of Robert Maillart in his architecture books. It was a kind of arrogance, perhaps, to believe so in one’s destiny. But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate? The murder that had seemed an outrageous departure, a sin against himself, he believed now might have been a part of his destiny, too. It was impossible to think otherwise. And if it were so, he would be given a way to make his atonement, and given the strength to make it. And if death by law overtook him first, he would be given the strength to meet that also, and strength besides sufficient for Anne to meet it. In a strange way, he felt humbler than the smallest minnow of the sea, and stronger than the greatest mountain on earth. But he was not arrogant. His arrogance had been a defense, reaching its height at the time of the break with Miriam. And hadn’t he known even then, obsessed by her, wretchedly poor, that he would find another woman whom he could love and who would love him always? And what better proof did he need that all this was so than that he and Anne had never been closer, their lives never more like one harmonious life, than during these three weeks at sea?
He turned himself with a movement of his feet, so he could see her as she leaned against the mainmast. There was a faint smile on her lips as she gazed down at him, a half-repressed, prideful smile like that of a mother, Guy thought, who had brought her child safely through an illness, and smiling back at her, Guy marveled that he could put such trust in her infallibility and rightness and that she could still be merely a human being. Most of all, he marveled that she could be his. Then he looked down at his locked hands and thought of the work he would begin tomorrow on the hospital, of all the work to come, and the events of his destiny that lay ahead.
Bruno telephoned a few evenings later. He was in the neighborhood, he said, and wanted to come by. He sounded very sober, and a little dejected.
Guy told him no. He told him calmly and firmly that neither he nor Anne wanted to see him again, but even as he spoke, he felt the sands of his patience running out fast, and the sanity of the past weeks crumbling under the madness of their conversing at all.
Bruno knew that Gerard had not spoken to Guy yet. He did not think Gerard would question Guy more than a few minutes. But Guy sounded so cold, Bruno could not bring himself to tell him now that Gerard had gotten his name, that he might be interviewed, or that he intended to see Guy strictly secretly from now on—no more parties or even lunches—if Guy would only let him.
“Okay,” Bruno said mutedly, and hung up.
Then the telephone rang again. Frowning, Guy put out the cigarette he had just lighted relievedly, and answered it.
“Hello. This is Arthur Gerard of the Confidential Detective Bureau....” Gerard asked if he could come over.
Guy turned around, glancing
warily over the living room, trying to reason away a feeling that Gerard had just heard his and Bruno’s conversation over tapped wires, that Gerard had just captured Bruno. He went upstairs to tell Anne.
“A private detective?” Anne asked, surprised. “What’s it about?”
Guy hesitated an instant. There were so many, many places where he might hesitate too long! Damn Bruno! Damn him for dogging him! “I don’t know.”
Gerard arrived promptly. He fairly bowed over Anne’s hand, and after apologizing for intruding on their evening, made polite conversation about the house and the strip of garden in front. Guy stared at him in some astonishment. Gerard looked dull, tired, and vaguely untidy. Perhaps Bruno wasn’t entirely wrong about him. Even his absent air, heightened by his slow speech, did not suggest the absent-mindedness of a brilliant detective. Then as Gerard settled himself with a cigar and a highball, Guy caught the shrewdness in the light hazel eyes and the energy in the chunky hands. Guy felt uneasy then. Gerard looked unpredictable.
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