I will not conceal my interest from the reader. It was as though I were a miner who had accidentally uncovered a rich vein where he expected nothing. Opening it up, he finds it only leads to greater riches and deeper, purer deposits. The effect upon me of the proximity of so much easily portable wealth made it difficult at times for me to recall that I had come here in large part to change my life.
Self-portrait of a man in conflict: He was simultaneously giving himself a hand-slapping moral lecture even as he staked out the street, keeping an eye on the traffic’s flow to see where the jewels came from and where they went. He got near enough to the women with the best jewels to overhear their conversations, and to his surprise, many of them spoke American English.
Then things got really schizophrenic. On the one hand, he accompanied an English acquaintance to a meeting of a society of Spiritualists, and then to many others. They seemed to have shaken him profoundly, although not so profoundly that he stopped following the best jewelry he saw. He soon found himself focusing on Americans, for an almost triumphantly practical reason.
I realized I would be more capable of breaching the layers of protection between me and the jewels of visitors than I would those of the English. The English, I was certain, would keep their best baubles in homes, large and well-secured establishments with extensive staff who knew the family and its acquaintances by sight, whereas the visitors would likely be housed in hotels. Hotels may have little to recommend them to the home-loving man, but to one such as I was at the time, they possessed a single great advantage: in a hotel, there is no such thing as a stranger. In time, I myself took up residence in a hotel nearby the Strand, which I shall not name. It catered to the richer Americans and was quite dear, but I am almost ashamed to say that I had in mind a strategy of relative simplicity that, if carried out successfully, would add substantial weight to my purse.
Whenever Horton wasn’t scoping out the scene for a jewel heist, he was going to spiritualist meetings with his friend, whose name was Alfred—Alfie—Warwick. And what he glimpsed occasionally in those meetings, as though on the other side of a door just barely cracked open, was suddenly revealed in mind-staggering detail when the door was yanked off its hinges by the blinding light of revelation. This happened not through meetings, but when Alfie gave him a book and a magazine.
Neither was new; both were ten or twelve years old, creased and dog-eared with repeated reading use, but Horton said Alfie handled them as though they were fragile and unique. Horton was, Alfie said in all apparent seriousness, to read the book first and then the magazine, which contained a letter to the editor that Alfie believed Horton would find useful.
It took him days, spent mainly jewel-shopping on the sidewalks and mapping the stones’ destinations, but eventually he settled into his room’s easy chair and opened the book.
I am ashamed to say that I had not read widely since I turned my back on Miss Greening’s schoolhouse, but her instruction to question the trustworthiness of the author came immediately to mind. And, I must confess, there seemed at first to be a great deal to question. The book’s author, F.W.H. Myers, was unknown to me, and its title, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, seemed at first glance to be chosen almost intentionally to encourage doubt. I had heard this issue discussed endlessly, if seldom directly, in the meetings to which my friend took me. But they spoke to each other in a shared vocabulary such as those that are always developed by specialist, whether they are outlaws or plumbers, and many of the words they used, as well as the assumptions behind them, were unknown to me. But seeing the words on a page, their hard black outlines as pronounced as the border of a country against the whiteness of the paper, suggested a kind of metaphor: that black and white, light and darkness, life and death, were absolute and opposite entities rather than the far ends of some sort of spectrum. This was, unfortunately, exactly opposite the view the author was attempting to put forth. I confess that it was a labor for me to battle my doubt as I read the pages. Many times I put it down and returned to my plan to steal a jewel that would support me for life . . .
Well, of course, it’s a jewel. It’s always been a jewel. That had been my first thought, from the moment the Bride of Plastic Man—sorry, Paulette—told me that my target was a doll. What else of great value is small enough to be hidden inside a doll? I’d been thrown off by the rectangular shape of the space cut into the doll’s back, but suddenly it was so obvious to me that I battled an impulse to call myself names. Out loud. The jewel had been in a box.
. . . and yet the book called me back. Time and again it beckoned me to the table in the corner of my hotel room where I had laid it down, I thought, forever. But now I found myself reading it at morning’s first light, ordering my meals delivered so they did not interrupt the flow, rising from my bed in the darkest hours of the night, drawn unerringly to it as though by some magnetic force.
In the face of all we have been taught, the author wrote that the conscious self, the thing we think of as “I” and which we believe to be mortal is, instead “largely an illusion, the rest of the personality being separable from it and superior to it, and connected directly to the soul.” When seen in this way, Dr. Myers said, human beings are not sent alone into the universe, as to a prison, for the limited duration of a lifespan and then sentenced to individual extinction. Instead, they are, rather, “like islands in a stream; and this is proved in the way that certain human beings are able to release themselves from the confines of ordinary thought and establish contact between the islands, and build up connections with personalities who have survived the physical destruction of the brain.”
Personalities who have survived the destruction of the brain. The dead, in short, are not only still among us, but can also listen–and even speak.
This vision of a world in which the dead remain with us, and one in which, later, we will remain with the living, was impossible for me to believe, but it was also impossible to reject. The great cruel joke of the world is and always has been death. All our lives, all our struggles, for nothing, for ashes, for an eternity spent in the damp, chill earth, a banquet for undiscriminating worms, the good being devoured alongside the bad. But what if that terrible fate is a deception? What if that iron door never actually closes? What if the islands in the stream are actually one and are never extinguished? What if dark and light are simply opposite ends of some unimaginable rainbow?
What if someday I could speak my heart to my mother? What if somewhere there still exists the spirit of Hermann Wendt, whom all called The Kraut, and whom I shot to death in an ill-planned attempt to steal his gold as he carried it into Virginia City? Until he pulled his gun I hadn’t known he was armed, but that was no balm to my soul; I had accosted him to do him wrong. What if, in this new order of things, I could drop to my knees and plead for pardon from Hermann Wendt?
It went on in this vein for quite a few pages. He couldn’t believe but he couldn’t not believe, either. And in the meantime, an American woman living on the third floor of the hotel in which he was staying owned a sapphire of at least thirty carats that she wore as a kind of pendant. The stone had been cut in a peculiar way that rounded its top, rather than the more conventional approach of incising facets into it, so that it didn’t sparkle but instead glowed like some impossibly clear, impossibly deep pool. Horton had already struck up a speaking acquaintance with the woman, whose raw Texas accent had been a surprise, and he had successfully picked the locks on enough of the hotel’s unoccupied rooms to know he could open hers in less than half a minute. As the days went by and his purse, as he put it, began to shrink, he oscillated between the book, on the one hand, with its taunting, unverifiable vision of infinite life, where sins could be undone, and on the other, the hard certainty that he could take the stone easily and that he would not have to steal again for years to come. Finally, in agony that he had read nothing to assure him that this new world of enduring spirit was somehow verifi
able, he laid the book aside and picked up the newspaper.
It had about it the smell of a document that has for a long, long time been someplace damp. The ink was blurred with handling and faded with time, and the margins were fingerprinted by those who had read it while the ink was still new and not fully set. The publication, printed on a coarse and flimsy paper, was a kind of magazine; it was called “Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research,” published by a group that proclaimed itself to be the Spiritualist Alliance, several of whose meetings I had attended. My friend had circled a letter to the editor on the third page that said, in part:
“I believe that it has been found a useful practice among revivalists for each member to give the assembled congregation a description of the manner in which they attained the often vague result known as ‘finding salvation.’ Among Spiritualists there is really a good deal to be said for such a practice, for the first steps of the inquirer after truth are along such a lonely and treacherous path that it must always be of interest to him to hear how some other wanderer has stumbled along it, uncertain whether he was following a fixed star or a will-o’-the-wisp, until at last his feet came upon firmer ground and he knew that all was well.”
This letter, which I read over and over, spoke to me as though its writer had seen straight through me to all the doubt at my core. Certainty, he was saying, WAS POSSIBLE. I looked to the end of the letter and saw, for the first time in my life, the name of the man who had written it: A. Conan Doyle, M.D.
30
The Stink of People
A car, its headlights bringing the rain into sharp relief, pulled past me and into the driveway of Eduardo’s little bungalow. It was an old Chevy, the finish here and there patched with primer, and I could hear the springs squeal as it took the little bounce up from the street.
I was out of my car and walking before he had his door open. He must have seen me in the rearview mirror, but he climbed out as though he was all alone in the world, without so much as a glance over his shoulder. When he’d completely unfolded himself, he was about three inches taller than I, which made him about six-three, and broad-shouldered, with a bristling shock of short-cut white hair. Without turning, he said, “Who are you?”
I said, “I called you.”
“Back up,” he said. “I need to close the door.” Only a soft “s” on the verb “close,” rather than the “z” in the common American pronunciation, suggested that he wasn’t a lifelong English speaker. I took a step back, and he slammed the door and fit a key into the lock, and when he turned to face me, I saw a face as sharply lined as a crumpled piece of paper, dark eyes set deep in a nest of wrinkles, and, a bit lower down, a snub-nosed little belly gun of some kind pointed at the center of my gut.
“Hello,” I said, raising my hands.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“I want your side of what happened at Horton House.”
“My side,” he said scornfully. “There is no my side and your side. Just sadness and slow dying.”
“What happened to all—” I put my hands halfway down. “Before I go any further, let’s get one thing straight. I’m not on anyone’s side. I don’t want to punish anyone or give anyone an award. I just want to know what happened—”
“To?” he said.
The question took me off-balance. “Okay, for starters, all the stuff that was in the house.”
“Of course,” he said. “Furniture is always more interesting than people.” He put the gun in his belt, where it looked right at home. “I don’t want to be rude and the rain is falling on me, too, so we’ll postpone why you are asking until we’re inside, where it’s dry. Come with me.”
I followed him through the slanting rain and over a badly tended lawn, to the front door. “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “if you haven’t done anything wrong, why the gun?”
“Look at this estreet,” he said, the little eh preceding “street” also a Hispanic verbal tag. “The gun is for realtors. Every day, every night, there’s some asshole with a business card who wants to knock down my house and build one of those.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the starter mansion across the way. “You know what I call them?”
“No. What do you call them?”
He stuck a key into the lock and turned it. “Man-eating houses,” he said. “They eat the people who think they own them and then they chew them up to make them easier for the bank to swallow when it takes everything back. You’ve heard the pendejos on the radio who talk about flipping houses?”
“Sure.”
“You notice they never say flipping homes. Never.”
“Hadn’t thought of it,” I said as he pushed the door open. The scent of good wood rolled out at us. “And I probably know why. ‘Homes’ says people. ‘Houses’ says money.”
“Maybe I’ll let you live,” he said, and then he laughed. It was a two-syllable laugh, but it relaxed me a little. “When the realtors knock on the door, I just lift my shirt and they go away fast.” He reached around the door and the hall was bathed in light.
The wonderful fragrance came from a gorgeous, palace-quality, three-drawer cedar table, obviously Chinese, probably early nineteenth or late eighteenth century. Small but concentrated, deeply lacquered in a dark red, and highly polished, it had the characteristic that many old, beautiful things suggest, of being more present, more there, than anything else in the room, as though their physical mass were enhanced by the sheer weight of time. He saw me staring at it, nodded, and said, “Come in here,” and turned left. Just ahead of me, he flicked on the overhead light to reveal a small dining room that might have been a curated space in a furniture museum: in the center, a gleam of darkness, an oval ebony table for eight, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and ringed by matching chairs. Ebony, now endangered, is not only one of the hardest woods in the world—hard enough to be paired with ivory in piano keyboards intended for decades of use—but also one of the heaviest, so moving this dining room set must have been an ordeal.
Crowded as the room was, against the wall to my far left stood a tall hutch with a china cabinet, almost certainly British, from the early nineteenth century, that looked like it had been dusted for decades by people carefully blowing on it, and polished with kind words; it had been supernaturally well cared for. From where I stood, I couldn’t see a scratch or a ding of any kind.
“I was going to sell it,” Eduardo said. “I was supposed to sell all of it, that’s what Rosa and Henry did. But some of it was too beautiful to let it go. The old man, whatever Miss Daisy said about him, he had a good eye for things.”
“What did she say about him?”
“Why do you care?”
Well, he had to ask sooner or later. But the question was much easier to ask than to answer. “It’s complicated,” I said. “A couple of nights ago a friend of mine, a young woman, was killed. She had been interested in the house and the—the animosity between Miss Daisy and the heirs, the not so long ago. She wanted to go in and take a look.”
“Many people would.”
“But she did. And she was killed. Shot.”
Eduardo looked into my eyes long enough to make me uncomfortable. “You coming here,” he said, “will it put me in danger?”
“Not any more than you already were. Someone wants something that’s in that house. But if I can figure out who killed my friend, I’m going to . . . fix things so that none of us will be in danger.”
He nodded slowly and said, “You do not seem like someone who could make a threat like that.”
“I know,” I said. “And thanks for the compliment. So, what did Miss Daisy say about her father?”
“Mostly, that he could not keep it in his pants.”
“She was talking about the mistress?”
“The mistress has been dead a long time. The mistress’s daughter was poison to her. The world
was poison to her, and I think it began with her father. She hated easily, but she hated her father most.”
“You and Rosa and Henry were at the house, you said.”
“We were all that was left, at the end,” he said. “Miss Collins finally died. Miss Daisy said she died so she couldn’t be kicked out of the house. With Miss Collins gone, Miss Daisy just pushed everybody else away. Wanters, she called them. Want, want, want. At the end it was just us and the doctors.”
“More than one doctor?”
“She didn’t like them, either. She didn’t like anybody.”
“Except you.”
He looked around the room and let a sigh escape. “I wouldn’t say she liked us. Why don’t we sit down?”
“Where?”
He ran a finger over the back of one of the ebony chairs. “I never sit in here,” he said, “Isn’t that stupid, to have these things in my life and not to use them? Please.” He turned away from me and I followed him across the narrow hallway with its thin, worn carpet. “Here,” he said. “We can sit in here.”
The living room was small and over-furnished: two plumped-up sofas where there was room for one, tables here and there with bric-a-brac on them—a plaster bird house, votive candles in painted glass cylinders, a miniature of the Eiffel Tower, tarnished enough to be sterling, bouquets of too-colorful plastic flowers, plus a scrum of miscellaneous items: car keys, reading glasses, change, folded bits of paper, the kind of stuff that people take out of their pockets and drop just anywhere. There was nothing to suggest that anyone else lived here.
He sat on one couch and waved me to the other. The sofas were from Sofas R Us or someplace like that, but the matching tables were very fine, possibly Amish. When I’d been seated, he leaned back and regarded me for a moment or two, and then he said, “So. Your friend who was killed—did she have something to do with the heirs?”
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