The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  “And I shall cherish his first edition until I die,” I said out loud.

  At which point my land-line phone began to declaim at some volume, and as I raised the receiver to my ear Bernard Styles’s gingery baritone came pouring out.

  “Mr. Cavendish! How are we faring?”

  He loomed so near me in that moment I could have sworn he was actually standing over me. Peering over my shoulder.

  “Coming along,” I said. “Coming … sorry, did I give you my home number?”

  “No, indeed.”

  “It’s unlisted, that’s the only reason I ask.”

  “And for very good reasons, I’m sure. Now tell me. Have you seen any sign of my sad little document?”

  “Oh!” I whirled away from the computer. “Sorry. I’ve been so busy with Alonzo’s estate and all. Fiduciary duties—”

  “Naturally.”

  “But I’m bound to come across it sooner or later. I’m really very confident.”

  “Well.” A dry chuckle. “That’s lovely to hear, Mr. Cavendish. Unfortunately, my time here is rather limited.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Charming as your city is.”

  “Sure.”

  There was a silence then of some three or four seconds—I’d begun to wonder if we’d been cut off—and then Styles glided back in.

  “I’ll ring again tomorrow, shall I?”

  “Or I can call you, if you’d—”

  “I must be off, I’m afraid. I’ve promised Halldor he could go to Mount Vernon. Onward, Mr. Cavendish!”

  Onward.

  As I set the phone down, that word pricked me like a bodkin of guilt. I had taken Bernard Styles’s money—spent a small chunk of it—and done so little to earn it. I wasn’t keeping my eyes open. I wasn’t tracking down leads. I was just waiting for that document to drop from a cloud.

  Well, I could do this much. I could search the one place where a document was likeliest to be: Alonzo’s apartment.

  I had the key, after all. What I lacked was the will. The strength, I mean, to sift through Alonzo’s belongings, to smell his traces in old piles of clothing, to feel his spirit badgering me from room to room. It was too much for one executor to bear. I would need company.

  So I rang up Lily, but my call went straight into her voice mail. The best I could do was leave a message, asking her to meet me at the apartment the next day.

  “One P.M., if that works. Let me know.”

  A day’s reprieve. And, God knows, plenty to do in the meantime. Whole edifices of paper to scale: threatening letters and foreshortened projects and quarrelsome e-mail chains and all the other clotted detritus of a human life.

  Debt, most of all. Oceans of debt. At least three mortgages that I could see. Credit cards. Home-equity loans. Unpaid wages (poor Lily). Unpaid dermatologists and travel agents and prosecco importers and, trailing directly behind, a small battery of collection agencies, baring their knuckles to no avail. It was hard to find a single economic sector that didn’t own some small piece of Alonzo Wax.

  As for the assets … well, those were harder to puzzle out. From his grandmother, he had inherited a modest living that would have sufficed for, say, a rent-controlled bachelor apartment on Connecticut Avenue. He had chosen to spring for a double suite in Cathedral Heights, which he had fitted out with his own vault. Virtually all his capital—his life—was tied up in books, and the only idea he’d ever had for bringing in money was to fling more money after it.

  More than once I wondered if being named his executor was some kind of karmic debt for past sins. Especially when, late that night, I found a manila envelope bearing my name in black Magic Marker.

  HENRY

  Inside, a single sheet, with two other names.

  The first, AMORY SWALE, and next to it a number with a 252 phone exchange. No longer in service, as I learned when I dialed it a few minutes later.

  Which left the second name, forming a strange rhyme to the first: CLARISSA DALE.

  From the realm of 904, wherever that was.

  * * *

  I called the next morning, and the reply was immediate—“Hello”—succinct and incisive, as though she’d been keeping vigil. And maybe she had been, for when I told her who I was, she said:

  “I’ve been expecting you.”

  I told her I was trying to reconstruct Alonzo’s affairs on behalf of his estate. I told her I’d found her name in one of his files, and I was curious to know if she’d had any dealings with him in the days before his death.

  “We should talk, Henry.”

  “Aren’t we—I mean, we’re talking now.…”

  “In person might be best.”

  “See, the problem is I’m in D.C.—”

  “So am I.”

  I raised myself to a seated position. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Are you home, Henry?”

  “Um…” I dragged a hand down my face. “Sort of.”

  “Where would that be?”

  “It’s—do you know Capitol Hill?”

  “Of course. I’m happy to stop by if that’s convenient.”

  Pausing, I surveyed the carnage about me. Alonzo’s papers: I could at least put those back into piles. The funerary heap of flies by the window: I could sweep them up, couldn’t I? (Though I hadn’t touched them in two weeks.) But there was nothing to do about the refrigerator’s death rattle or the green bruises of plaster on the living-room wall.

  “You know what?” I said. “The cleaning lady’s here, and the vacuum gets kinda loud. Once she gets going. Why don’t we meet somewhere? Tomorrow or—”

  “Maybe you know Bullfeathers,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s meet there. Today at noon. I’ll make reservations.”

  She clicked off before I could say anything.

  I squinted at my clock radio. Forty minutes to become human.

  The shower helped. Shaving, too. But I still smelled of Evan Williams, so I gobbled down a handful of breath mints and dabbed my wrists with Scope and then, for good measure, sprayed Febreze on one of my two good Oxfords.

  I got to Bullfeathers five minutes after noon. It was an odd meeting place to suggest: a midscale burger joint with Bull Moose trappings. Frequented mainly by Capitol Hill staffers and their lobbyists, plus the occasional family of tourists dragging their heat-wracked bodies off the Mall.

  In that context, Clarissa was easy to pick out. She was wearing a yellow sundress, she had positioned herself against the wall, and she was looking at me as intently as she had answered the phone.

  “Henry,” she said.

  My hand stopped in the act of meeting hers.

  It was the woman from Alonzo’s funeral.

  My earlier take had been necessarily incomplete. She was a little older than I’d thought—thirty-one, thirty-two. And seen in direct light, her fair skin was more freckled than I remembered, her black hair a good deal more tangled—a swarm of warring ends. And the eyes, they were the color not of toffee but of something left much longer in the pan.…

  Or ebony, I thought, suddenly recalling the King of Navarre’s words. Black as ebony … the hue of dungeons …

  And with that, I was back in the Annex with Alonzo, and the theme of our conversation was coming back at me in a slow arc.

  “The School of Night,” I murmured.

  “Exactly,” said Clarissa Dale.

  6

  HERE’S HOW IT was. Alonzo Wax used to go broke on the order of once or twice a year. A certain pattern would then ensue. Alonzo would sell off some of his inventory (at modest profit but at great emotional cost). He would switch from Grey Goose to Svedka, he would give up his table at Chef Geoff’s in favor of Korean takeout, and, more to the point, he would become better disposed to lecture invitations that otherwise would have been sent to the flames.

  This was not lost on the public libraries and writer’s centers and genealogical societies and independent-living facilities th
at all craved a moment with him. Word soon got around that Alonzo Wax, nationally recognized collector and scholar, could be had. If you paid his travel. And threw in an honorarium and a free meal. And didn’t stint on the wine.

  Somebody was always up for that bargain. And so it came that, on a Thursday night in February of 2009, Alonzo held forth to the Civitan Club of St. Augustine, Florida.

  To hear Clarissa tell it, the only thing more remarkable than his being there was her being there. She’d seen a notice strictly by chance in a local shopper, and she’d nearly missed the lecture altogether because, at some critical moment, she took a wrong turn on San Marco Avenue. Arriving fifteen minutes late, she tried to shrink into the back row, but Alonzo’s voice seemed to find her there. Seemed actually to tap her on the arm.

  “The suppressed unconscious of the Elizabethan age,” he was saying.

  Being new to Alonzo’s world, she couldn’t have known he’d been rehearsing the same theme since undergraduate days. The School of Night, in his mind, was Tudor England’s psychic shadow. Looking out from the leaded casements of Sherborne Castle, Ralegh’s Dorset home, the School’s savants saw terror walking in broad daylight. They saw murderous intrigue, state-sponsored torture. Catholic citizens executed. Intellectual dissent violently suppressed. And surrounding all this terror, a vast and troubled silence. Only at Sherborne could the silence be lifted. Only in the blackest hours of night could the dayspring of truth emerge.

  “From the night came the light,” Alonzo told the Civitan Club.

  And there was in Clarissa, too, a kind of dawning. As she remembered it, the people on either side of her appeared to melt away. The world itself dissolved. All that was left was her and Alonzo and this invisible cord, weaving around them.

  And so Clarissa Dale did something she had never done before, not in grade school or high school or even college. She stayed after class.

  “I wanted him to know how I felt,” she said.

  “And when you explained it, how did he respond?”

  “You mean, did he run out the door?”

  The slightest trace of Spanish moss on her vowels. Doh-er.

  “Actually, he was very polite,” she said. “God knows why, I was just blathering at him. He had this—funny little pickled smile that never went away. I figured he must be pretty happy, but then I realized it’s just the way his mouth curves.”

  “Accident of birth,” I agreed.

  And then I made the mistake of looking down at my cheeseburger. God knows why I even ordered it, I was in no state to eat, and after one look, I had to shroud it with my napkin.

  “So after that,” said Clarissa, “we exchanged a few friendly e-mails, he sent me some interesting articles, and then last May—May the twelfth—he sent me this strange voice mail. The School of Night…”

  “… is back in session,” I echoed faintly.

  “You got the same message.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” she said, “here we are.”

  Her lips trembled then—the beginnings of a smile, quickly quashed. But enough to emphasize the natural redness of her lips.

  “Okay,” I said, willing myself back into focus, “here’s what I still don’t get. Why did you go listen to Alonzo in the first place? Are you…”

  And even as I posed the question, I recoiled before the possible answer.

  “Are you in the field?”

  She scowled softly. “What field?”

  “English lit. Or history. Academic something or other.”

  “Oh!” she cried. “God, no! Please!”

  And now she really did smile. I’m not sure I can convey the change this produced in her. A kind of translucency, let me start there, calling the planes of her face into unexpected relief. No, it was more than that. From that smile, somebody entirely new emerged. Only she’d been there the whole time.

  “I was never much of a reader,” she said. “I mean, I was a business major at Central Florida. I think I’ve been to one Shakespeare play my whole life. It’s embarrassing how little I know about that stuff.”

  “Then why were you there?”

  “Well, see, that’s hard to explain.” She twirled her fork through a tangle of salad greens and blue cheese. “I guess I have a personal stake in Alonzo’s subject.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “The thing is, I’ve seen it. In person.”

  “Seen what?”

  And here the skin around her cheekbones began to pink.

  “I’ve seen the School of Night,” she said.

  “Like … in a picture?”

  “Like in my head. Like a dream, except I’m not dreaming.”

  “Does it happen a lot?”

  “You have no idea, Henry.”

  Shrugging, she picked up her fork and scooped up a little pile of blue cheese. The very sight of it made my stomach lurch.

  “So how long has this been going on?” I asked. “The visions and all.”

  “I don’t know, almost a year? Maybe more.”

  “Every night?”

  “Once or twice a week. Although sometimes I’ll get them three or four nights in a row.” She lowered her head a fraction, gave me a sheepish smile, and said, “I mean, I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging or anything, Henry, but the School of Night? It’s my very own personal curse.”

  Her eyes were dry and alert as she studied me.

  “You’re skeptical,” she said.

  “Um … yeah. Well … yeah.”

  “I would be, too.” She nodded to herself. “I would. The point is, whether you believe me or not, something happened to Alonzo. And now, whether we like it or not, we’re bound up in it, too.”

  She set her fork down and laced her hands together.

  “Something larger is at work. You must have felt that, too, Henry. From the moment Alonzo died.”

  But the only thing I was conscious of right now was the swirling within my own body, the epinephrine surge that was kicking my heart into second life and dilating my pupils.

  With a long and labored breath, I shoved my plate away. “You know what, Clarissa? I haven’t felt something larger at work. Apologies and whatever, but the time-travel visions? I think it’s very clear—”

  “I’m crazy.”

  “And know what else? I’m not bound up with you, I’m not bound up with anyone. For which I have a—a certain amount of gratitude. Especially now. And okay, Alonzo? Something didn’t happen to him, he made it happen. That’s what suicides do. They’re not—speaking in the passive voice, okay?”

  And now she was pushing her own plate away. “The man I met in St. Augustine would never have killed himself,” she said. “Not in a million years.”

  Lines of sweat had sprung up behind my ears. My eyes were rocking inside their sockets.

  “You know I’m right, don’t you, Henry?”

  I stared at my watch—12:50. Lily might even now be waiting for me. “Very sorry,” I murmured, staggering to my feet.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve got to go to Alonzo’s place.”

  And suddenly Clarissa was standing, too. Fronting me.

  “I’m coming, too,” she said.

  “Oh.” I put up a shaky hand. “You know what? It would be very boring for you.”

  But she was already hailing our waiter. And when the check arrived, she plucked it free of its glossy leatherette container and said, in a jaunty voice:

  “You don’t mind if I treat, right?”

  She gave me a sidelong glance as she added:

  “You don’t look like the sort of guy who’d mind.”

  * * *

  Alonzo’s place had once been two apartments, but he had bribed the building management into tearing down the dividing wall and creating a master suite, penthousey in its aspirations. To the west lay the bedroom, with its armoire and canopied four-poster and acanthus-leaf scrolls. To the east was the kitchen, pristine with neglect. (The refriger
ator, if memory served, contained only a bottle of champagne and a jar of mustard.)

  And to the south? A balcony, almost as wide as the apartment. That’s where I went now. Below me, in the early afternoon heat, slumbered a courtyard, with a gamely gurgling fountain and a playground, empty as usual, and a row of sycamores that seemed to stand at attention whenever the National Cathedral bells rang.

  “Have you noticed it’s freezing here?”

  Clarissa was standing in the doorway, rubbing her bare white arms.

  “Sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit,” I explained. “And fifty-two percent relative humidity. Optimal environment for book storage.”

  “And for driving up electric bills. Power company must have loved ol’ Alonzo.”

  “Maybe not so much,” I said, remembering the stack of overdue Pepco notices on my apartment floor.

  “You know, Henry, it might be helpful if you told me what we’re looking for.”

  “It’s a paper.”

  “A paper?”

  “A document.”

  “Old? New?”

  “Old.”

  “Well, in that case…”

  No need for her to point. It was the elephant in Alonzo’s apartment. His book vault. A climate-controlled concrete-and-steel bunker, roughly three hundred cubic feet, so massive it seemed to have crash-landed in Alonzo’s living room.

  “Do you know the combo?” Clarissa asked.

  “Unless he changed it.”

  I squared myself against the steel-plated door … but something kept snagging at the edge of my vision. A black faux-alligator handbag, resting on the floor under a marble-top end table. Instantly familiar, as was the BlackBerry Pearl smartphone inside.

  Lily’s.

  The phone she took with her everywhere she went. The phone she’d once likened to a second womb. Taking custody of it now, I stared at the voice-mail icon on the screen. Three messages (one of them mine, presumably). And Lily not here to retrieve any of them.

  A curious numbness stole into my fingertips as I tucked her phone into my pocket.

  Don’t overreact, I told myself. She’s somewhere.

  It wasn’t like I needed her to open the vault for us. All I had to do was recall the date of George Chapman’s death—a date I’d once known as well as my birthday—and then enter the numbers on the keypad.