The Horses of the Night

by Michael Cadnum

  He shook his head, as though disputing some argument only he could hear. He waved us into chairs, but I preferred to remain standing, as he seemed to. He stepped into one of the beams of light from a hidden lamp. He let me study him, but did not bother looking at me, examining the stunted pine beside the pool.

  “You do look like her,” he said.

  I made no sound.

  “Like your mother,” he said.

  Anna sat, arranging herself like someone getting comfortable for a play. I could not keep myself from experiencing an unpleasant thought: That is where she will be sitting when my bowels spill onto the gravel.

  “When you were younger the resemblance wasn’t so strong,” he said. “But sometimes that is what maturing is all about: becoming what you already are.”

  I don’t know why I sounded so carefree. “Anna thinks I won’t leave here alive.”

  He did not look her way. “And what do you think?”

  “I sold my soul to get here.”

  I could not read his reaction to this words. Perhaps he was assuming that I was speaking metaphorically. He did, however, consider my statement for awhile. “Was that a wise thing to do?” he said.

  We both knew he was not joking.

  “First of all,” he said at last, “I owe you an apology. I did a bad thing, and I’ll make it up to you.”

  I prepared a quick response to this, about to say that I certainly saw no need for an apology, but he flicked my unspoken words aside with a finger.

  He did not continue for awhile, regarding me briefly with dark eyes. “I thought you had killed Ty. Now they tell me otherwise.”

  “Who?”

  “My people.”

  The water made its gentle music.

  He sighed, as though I had made a remark, but he was responding to thoughts of his own. “The man who attacked you in Anna’s office was named Palmer. Mark Palmer. A well-known man in certain circles. He’s still alive.”

  I closed my eyes with relief.

  “I am the person who’s done harm. I killed someone recently,” he said.

  I didn’t understand.

  He went on, “I was rash when I heard about Ty’s death.” He used DeVere’s first name with affection, like the name of a brother. “And Blake. He was like family. He’d fallen on hard times in recent months. But he was on his way back. Ty was going to help him. Ty was like that. Good friend, hard enemy. I’m a man with a certain feeling for people. I had been drinking a little. I said someone ought to teach you a lesson. Some hotheads got the wrong idea. Some baseball bats were used, and harm was done.”

  He patted the pockets of his dressing gown, like a smoker who has forgotten his lighter. “I’m responsible. Nona Lyle was a good woman. Fern was an admired man, a good man the way some cops can be. I financed a special on Nona Lyle once. The Japanese loved it. It played there on television with a title like ‘Warrior Children,’ or ‘Little Sunset Heroes.’ Something like that. I used a pound of Kleenex when I saw it. You ever see it? She did good work with those sick kids. I know how you must feel.”

  What a fool this man was. I nearly said this aloud. And I nearly said these words: A power greater than yours was responsible for that attack.

  I said nothing, however, surprised at something that was only obliquely related to his words. He had spoken Nona’s name, and for an instant I did not know who he was talking about.

  I had forgotten her. I had forgotten the woman I loved. And then I reminded myself of that empty gully in me, that still-fresh void.

  I told myself this, and yet I was cold, far colder than the chilly evening warranted. I was queasy. The man’s words made no sense.

  Renman was quiet, as though speaking used up some power in him. “I’m disgusted with myself,” he said. “You do a bad thing and you can’t undo it. It stays.”

  “Why did you ask me here?”

  He lifted a shoulder, looking at me with surprise or curiosity. “I’m going to let you in.”

  He saw that I did not quite follow him, and added, “As a way of making it up to you. It’s very simple. I feel sorry for you. I do. I feel a very real kind of pity for you.”

  “Pity,” I echoed.

  “That’s right.”

  “You fool,” I said softly, but quite distinctly.

  The words were like a slap. Nothing was said in response. Renman did not flinch, or turn away, but I sensed his reaction.

  “You have no choice,” I heard myself say. “You are forced to give me what I want.”

  Renman surprised me with his calm as he said, “What will happen if I don’t?”

  “They’ll destroy you.”

  He nodded as though in complete agreement with me. Then his eyes flicked to Anna.

  “I told you he was crazy,” she said.

  “Did you?” said Renman thoughtfully, sadly.

  “He’s great fun to be around,” said Anna with a laugh. Her voice was bright, unkind.

  “Go inside,” snapped Renman.

  The sky was empty, except for the pinpoint lights of the stars. The stars, and the empty black. My chest was heaving.

  He waited for her to leave, enter a sliding door, and vanish into the house.

  A fish splashed.

  “She knows a lot,” he said. “And she works hard. I’ve never thought knowledge was that important. And work …” He made a silent, thoughtful chuckle. “Anyone can work hard. Work’s not that important.”

  I was distracted by the wriggling lights of the fish pond. “What is important?” I asked, my voice rough.

  “I know what you want,” said Renman. “I know what kind of emptiness eats at a person who feels that his life doesn’t add up to anything.” He knelt, perhaps to get a better look at the fish.

  “I may be more disturbed than you realize.”

  “You mean I might be too late?”

  I could not tell him how right he was.

  He straightened. “You can’t live to punish people. You can’t breathe hate, or eat it. You can despise me because I want to help, and all I can say, Stratton, is that I am not a good man. I’ve done some bad things. But maybe I’ll do something right where you’re concerned. I’m going to try to help you. Call it a gamble.”

  My words flowed without any awareness on my part. My tone was one of wonder. “You don’t have any choice. I see how it’s working. Perhaps you sold your soul, too, a long time ago. I’ve won. I have what I want.”

  He took my arm, kind, gentle. “I think maybe you came here thinking you would kill me.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “I know your family.”

  50

  When the shore is reached, the life-pocked surface, what do we call out, what claim do we make, possessing the newfound land? Without king, without emperor, carrying a flag of no country, the discovered continent is land, so much earth, nothing more than another home.

  I no longer knew what I wanted.

  I could kill him. I could kill him and get away with it. He had admitted responsibility for harming Fern and Nona, and justice would forgive my wrath. And weren’t there, after all, powers belonging to me, whether satanic or the more subtle reins of fortune? With the help of my own good luck, I could make this villa, and Renman’s empire with it, my own.

  Was there danger here for me? This would be a perfect moment for that knife in my throat, I thought. Talk me into a pensive mood and then strangle me on my guts. My bruises hurt for a moment. My throat was raw, my arm aching where the bat had struck it. The pretty splashing of the pool would hide a footfall perfectly.

  Destroy Renman. Take his life.

  You don’t want his “help.” What will you do? Design clothes? Produce movies? Control a president, manipulate a government? What you wanted, all along, was more life.

  And how can Renman give you that? On the other hand, how can killing Renman give you what you want? Is that what it comes to—if you can’t do anything else, do harm?

  Renman tied
the sash about his waist a little tighter. “Did you know your maternal grandfather?” he asked.

  This question was a surprise. “He died before I was born.”

  “Heart trouble?”

  “Both sides of my family have had weak hearts. Imperfect valves. Murmurs, squeaks.” I was trying to make a mild joke.

  “But not you. And not your mother.”

  This subject made me feel just slightly uncomfortable. “Maybe this is why I’ve always been so interested in being in top condition. My heart’s healthy, and I want to keep it that way.”

  “Your father had a bad heart?”

  “This was a family secret. I think he had trouble with a defective mitral valve.”

  “That killed him?”

  “His heart did.”

  “That sort of death is such a shock,” he said sympathetically. “There was no autopsy?”

  “No.”

  “I attended his funeral. I admired your family, from a distance. You were in many ways what one of those jeweled mavens, those society witches, called ‘one of the first families of America.’ My own background was simpler.”

  “Simpler and more fortunate, you mean. You were the one I admired. I thought of you as Olympian.”

  “Godlike?” He tilted his head, considering the possibility with apparent amusement. He put his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown. “Maybe this is how gods really are—distracted, worried about people, always saying or doing something stupid. And then regretting it. I always thought of the Greek gods as eternally working on their tans.”

  Even now, when I tried, I could recall little of my father’s funeral. For some reason—perhaps the weight of my shock and grief—I had a streak of amnesia regarding the aftermath of my father’s demise.

  Was that a figure in the shadows? Was that a step on the gravel? I kept my voice steady. “I’ve enjoyed this visit tremendously.”

  “Good manners,” he said. “You have manners, I’ll admit, despite your troubles. Do you know that I used to be very fond of your mother?”

  I stiffened. I did not like this man mentioning my mother again. Besides, many people loved my mother from afar. She had graced society columns for years. “You have a good deal to say about my family.”

  “And it bothers you, doesn’t it? It must bother you that everybody knows the truth—everybody who matters—but you.”

  “You were saying that you loved my mother.”

  “A bit of the old Fields anger. Yes, it suits you well. That sharp glance, the barely controlled desire to throttle me. Go ahead. Give it a try, Stratton. You won’t be able to accomplish much, and I won’t blame you.”

  He chuckled, observing me. “Love? Well, that’s hardly the way to put it. Maybe it would be more true to say that I worshipped her. Her father was a rancher here. He owned nearly all the Coachella Valley at one time, a sweet-tempered man, from Virginia. I don’t think he liked desert. I think he was one of those men who look out at all this aridity and see one of nature’s mistakes. He tried to irrigate it, and turn it into another sort of land entirely. He made a small fortune, and I bought land from him and made a very big fortune.”

  I was skeptical regarding what he was telling me, but I knew that it was probably true. My mother had always skipped over certain details of her parents’ life. I had been handed the “gentleman from Virginia” lore. There had been no details such as lettuce growing, if that is the crop he raised, or irrigating.

  He turned to me. His expression was serene. “What did your father do, to make her so miserable?”

  I tried to say it with a laugh. “You despise us.”

  “If you killed DeVere it wouldn’t be like me paying someone to finish off a crook in some alley. It would be—how would you put it? A lord’s right, a ducal visitation, complete with a sword.”

  He caught my expression and laughed. “You’re surprised that I know how you think.”

  I tried to change the subject. “Everyone confuses me with my father.”

  “I never would. He was the most selfish man in North America.”

  “He was a good man. He endowed hospitals.”

  “Oh, sure. So he would be loved by everybody. He was a glutton for love. He ignored your mother, I believe. Treated her like a piece of pretty furniture. Am I right?”

  “Absolutely wrong. He was a loving man, affectionate, good-humored.”

  “Is that what you really think? That explains a great deal. I think the bad things you’ve been pretending never really happened have come back. To haunt you.”

  He left me in the hands of “a few helpful people” while he slipped away to make some calls.

  I was held in a benign sort of arrest, imprisoned and pampered at the same time. Renman’s villa was not a place that knew night or day. Windows were lit up, security gates were clicking shut, even under starlight. I was ushered into a room DeVere must have decorated himself, a hideway of timber-browns and cinnamon red, Argentine leather and redwood everywhere I looked.

  As though to underscore the western motif, there was an etching of a cowboy on one wall, a Borein in a handsome wooden frame. There was a video camera above the dresser. I wanted out. I could feel the invisible eyes of security guards watching me.

  I sat in a sauna, and then in a spa scented with a fragrance I could not place, peppermint, I thought, or some other mildly astringent herb. I was joined by two men with muscular shoulders and arms, both men looking like slightly over-the-hill lifeguards. They wore identical blue shorts, and while these two men were plainly unarmed I did not mistake their purpose.

  Their eyes crinkled pleasantly when I greeted them. They both watched me when I departed the steaming water, rubbing myself with a fresh white towel, a deliciously crisp towel, nearly big enough to be worn as a robe. Another man watched me from the shadows.

  I returned to the room I was beginning to think of as Cowboy Country. I dressed in a clean chambray shirt from my black carry-on, and felt that never again would I need to sleep, not even for a minute.

  I stepped outside, into the cool, sterile air, feeling a kind of sadness foreign to me. I no longer wanted anything that Renman could offer me. My face smiling down from the billboard in South San Francisco—was this the triumph I had wanted? My gardens in cities I would never visit, my signature on bars of soap—was this the long-sought prize?

  Anna was there, her shoes in her hand. She had been dangling her feet in the carp pond, and now she drew herself close to me. “You’re a lucky man,” she said. “Renman likes you. I’ve been listening to him on the phone. No one will ever say no to you again.”

  Her arm was around me, and she was wearing a scent I could not identify as one of DeVere’s.

  “What I want to know is,” she was saying, “how will I be able to help?”

  From time to time one of the fish would splash, or perhaps it was the sound of something falling into the water. Once I had the definite impression an animal was lapping the water, splashing with its tongue. That was entirely impossible, I told myself, because we were in a courtyard, the buildings of the villa forming an enclave around us.

  Renman reappeared with his hands in the pockets of his robe.

  It was still night—dawn was hours away. The water made its music. “You know the story of the goldfish,” said Renman. “You put a goldfish in a pool this big, and it’s supposed to be able to grow and grow. And get big. As big as these.”

  The fish floated unwavering, splashed with color, like creatures which had been wounded.

  “But I don’t know.” He was silent. “I don’t know if it’s true,” he said. He stirred himself. “I’ve told Anna what to do. You’ll need all the help I can give you. You are not a well man, Stratton.”

  I wanted to laugh. He was the one who looked shrunken, drained, reserving for himself a residue of peacefulness.

  “As a young woman your mother came here once or twice a year. She had a great deal of contempt for all of us parvenus. She’d drive out from
San Marcos and stay a weekend during the season, in February. We deserved her contempt. This was just after the war, and all kinds of useless people had a lot of money. But I remember riding with friends to look at the palms in one of the canyons here. It was quite a ride. Rocky. Dead scorpions, or maybe just their exoskeletons. Dry. Unbelievable how dry it can be.”

  He laughed wistfully. “I was a would-be cowboy, with silver-chased chaps. What a young dandy I was. A silly kid. Born in New Jersey, taught the alphabet in a public school, and there I was in the saddle next to Gary Cooper. Of course, I paid his salary, but still—he had that look. And we came upon your mother in a dry creek of that rough canyon, all boulders and dead things—lizard skin, dried-up rattle-snake rattles. And she was speaking sweetly to the canyon air.”

  I blinked.

  “I mean she was talking,” he said. “To nobody. To herself? Maybe. Talking like someone holding conversation with an invisible being.”

  I chose my words. “I find that hard to believe.”

  He considered this. “My father made his money selling shipping pallets. And then cardboard containers. And then he owned railway cars, and refrigerated trucks, and he seemed to own people. People who could get things done. He did harm to get where he was. He was a feared man.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Go home, Stratton. Give your mother my regards, if and when you see her. I’m going to help you.”

  “Who killed DeVere?” I asked.

  “An old evil,” he said.

  He turned to Anna, who was several steps away drinking from a glass filled with ice and what looked like chartreuse.

  “Anna, you look like an angel,” he said. “Take Stratton away before he asks too many questions.”

  51

  People tell the same stories, over and over again, and it is both a pleasure and a minor source of impatience to realize that one is about to hear once again an anecdote, a dream, a scene from an old movie, which one had heard many times before. One of my father’s favorite stories was dusted off over port at least three times during my childhood. It was a bit of musical history, a story from the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, that had caught my father’s imagination as a boy, and encouraged him to study the piano.