The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  I looked back upriver, across the water meadows, to the point where Syon House’s towers rose.

  “Start with this,” I said. “You were drowning in debt. I know because, as your executor, I had the privilege of going through your books. You were maxed out on five credit cards. You were being dragged through small-claims courts. You were running tabs everywhere you went—the liquor store, the corner grocery, the dry cleaner. You hadn’t paid your rent in something like a year. All told, I’d say you were at least a million in the hole, and maybe more.

  “You know what, Alonzo? I’m guessing those two goons at the airport—Officers Mooney and Milberg, remember them?—I’m guessing they weren’t working for Styles at all. More like your garden-variety loan-shark collectors, demanding their boss’s money. Debt has a way of following a man around, doesn’t it?”

  Alonzo was silent.

  “But the thing is,” I said, “you had one big asset. Your library, as we all know, was worth a lot more than a million. And you wouldn’t even have to sell it off if you could just make it disappear.

  “Of course, you’d have been the prime suspect—insurance companies get a little weird about that stuff—so you had to do something else first. You had to make yourself disappear. Because a dead man can’t steal his own books, can he? Or collect on them, which meant you needed an insurance beneficiary. Someone you could depend on to keep the money safe until it was needed. That would be—well, me, apparently. Though you didn’t get around to telling me.

  “As for the rest, well, I’m guessing it was Lily who shipped the books to a safe house, God knows where. And you—hell, you had all the freedom you could want now. You could slip on down to North Carolina and hang out in Amory’s shack and chase your dream. Your million-to-one, shoot-the-moon gambit.

  “It’s true no one ever accused you of thinking small, Alonzo. Or getting outsmarted. You had to know Bernard Styles would be on to you. He’d want his document back, wouldn’t he? And sooner or later, he would come calling, and being a really smart fella, you saw how you could use that to your advantage. By making him your very own scapegoat.”

  Nothing had changed about Alonzo but the angle of his head, which was very slowly tilting to one side.

  “That’s where Clarissa came in,” I said. “You saw through her early on, but you let her go on making her reports to Styles because you knew they’d bring him running. And you knew how well he’d fill the part—the part you created for him. Come on, all you have to do is spend a minute with the guy and the shades of death start creeping in.

  “No, you cast him very well, Alonzo, and better still, he played along, and me, I ate up the whole show. When those two thugs showed up at Heathrow, I figured it had to be Styles who sent them. When Amory was killed, I ignored the most salient fact, which was that you were the only one in that house with him. The only one who would have had complete liberty to … well, come to think of it, how did you kill him, Alonzo? Poison? Suffocation?”

  His mouth pulled down at the corners.

  “Well,” I said, “I can at least guess why you did it. Amory needed money, that much was clear. He was easily bought. Maybe you caught him trying to cut a deal with another collector. Maybe even Styles. Don’t misunderstand me, Alonzo, I can’t approve of what you did, but I can—I can get it at some level.”

  I paused.

  “Lily, though.”

  I moved a step closer.

  “The woman who served you all those years, Alonzo. How could you do that?”

  And here was the truest measure of the change between us: He couldn’t scoff me into submission. The Waxian high-handedness would no longer fly, so he had to grope for new registers.

  “It wasn’t Lily’s fault,” he murmured. “She was just weak.”

  I stared at him. For a very long time.

  “What does that even mean, Alonzo?”

  “It means she couldn’t carry it off.”

  And now his entire two-hundred-and-forty-pound frame was shaking with rage.

  “She told me, Henry! How close she came to blabbing the whole works to you. And that was just after a couple of drinks! You think she’d have made it through a police interrogation? No. Patently no.” He shook his head to underscore the verdict. “I needed more time. She couldn’t give me that.”

  I pressed my hands against my head.

  “Oh, God. Alonzo.”

  Somewhere, I suppose, the world was still turning on its spit. Here, it wasn’t moving at all.

  “Okay,” I said. “One thing more. What were you going to do about me?”

  He gave me a look of pure, I might even say unfeigned, astonishment.

  “You can’t blame me for wondering,” I said. “I mean, once the treasure was found, I’d have outlived my usefulness, too. No reason to keep me around.”

  The thing is I wasn’t even angry; I just wanted to know. But Alonzo’s reaction was outside the realm of curiosity. His face sprang open, and the voice that came out of him was so violent that a couple of passersby actually flinched.

  “How?” he shouted. “How can you even begin to say that?”

  For a few seconds, his agitation actually got the better of him.

  “Henry, do you—unghhh—do you honestly think I’ve kept you around—all these years!—out of kindness?”

  Fists cocked like a tavern brawler’s, he advanced on me.

  “Do you think I didn’t have better things to do than—bail you out of your fucking career, your fucking marriages? And your funks and your benders, you think people didn’t wonder why I bothered? You think I didn’t wonder? If I could’ve found a way not to—not to give a shit—believe me, if I could’ve found a way, Henry, I would have. I couldn’t pry myself clear. From that first moment in fucking Freshman Week, I lost—I lost me, I lost the ability to conceive of myself without you—being somewhere near. And if that’s not my life’s greatest fucking tragedy, Henry—”

  A gasp caught him mid-sentence.

  “And its greatest joy…”

  I will always remember how terrifyingly young he looked as he stared into my face, waiting for something. What? I was no longer capable of thought. I can only say he started laughing. And it was the saddest laugh I’ve ever heard.

  “I didn’t even mind, you know, all my money going in the crapper. I thought, Well, that just levels the field, doesn’t it? Henry and I are in the same goddamned fix, we can meet on the same ground now. And then Styles showed me that letter—just the second page, that’s all I saw—and I thought, What better gift for Henry? Thomas Harriot’s own words? What better way to bring back all the…”

  He slammed his palms against my chest.

  “All that passion and brightness you used to have, Henry, and you pissed it away, and I hated you for that, and it still didn’t matter.”

  His face seemed to collapse before my very eyes, and something appeared there I had never seen before. Bitter helpless tears.

  He backed away. Gave his face a furious swipe.

  “Listen to me, Henry. It was never about the treasure, it was about what it brings. There are other treasures. The world is lousy with ’em! Sooner or later, that insurance money will come through. No, it will, believe me. And that’s all the seed capital we need to—”

  “What?”

  For a second, he floundered.

  “Christ, to go. Somewhere, anywhere. Wherever we can be, Henry, be the people we wanted to be all along. The life of the mind. I’m not asking for the physical—thing. You know I’m not. That’s not how I…”

  With a stifled roar, he cried:

  “If you want a woman, take a woman! I’ve never complained, have I? Hell, bring Clarissa, see if I care. All I ask is—all I’ve ever asked is—just stick around. That shouldn’t be so hard, should it? There are harder things, aren’t there?”

  The river was moving again: slowly, very slowly. Two seagulls were bending toward us, and a solitary jogger was picking his way along the river trail. From now
here, church bells rang out.

  Sunday.

  I ran my hands through my hair.

  “Alonzo,” I said, “I can’t believe you did all these terrible things for me.”

  “For us,” he corrected.

  “Then I’m sorry. I’m sorry those people had to die for us. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more worthy of them. I wish I could forget about them, but I can’t.”

  His face didn’t look quite so young now.

  “So what are you saying, Henry? After all we’ve been through together, you’re going to—what, a citizen’s arrest? Cuffs and all?”

  I took a step back.

  “I’m flying home this afternoon,” I said. “On the one o’clock plane. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to call Detective Acree. I’m going to tell him everything I know.”

  “And while you’re exorcising all that nasty guilt of yours, Henry, just what do you expect me to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  If I had taken a hatpin and driven it straight into his skull, I don’t think I could have made him flinch as he did then.

  “There’s no sunset to head into, Alonzo. The School of Night is closed.”

  He nodded, twice. His head dropped. Then he reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a rolled-up sheet of paper.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Harriot’s map, what else?”

  “Not the original.”

  “Of course the original.”

  My finger vibrated toward it, then stopped an inch short.

  “Don’t be a goose, Henry. Styles can’t use it anymore. If someone’s going to keep it safe, it might as well be you.”

  And then, with a giggle of profound strangeness, Alonzo added:

  “I’d just lose it.”

  Two impulses warred within me as I took that paper in my hands. One was to thank him for the gesture. The other was to tear the thing up on the spot. And because neither impulse prevailed, I just stood there dumbly, staring at the piece of paper that had made all this trouble.

  “You’ve got a plane to catch,” Alonzo said.

  I nodded, briefly. I started to speak.

  “Goodbye, Henry.”

  A strange resonance to his words. For, of course, this was the second goodbye I’d received that day.

  And as I walked north along Kew Bridge, it was part of my pathetic fallacy that England itself was saying goodbye. Thomas Harriot and Margaret Crookenshanks and Walter Ralegh and Henry Percy … all those figures of the past sailing off to haunt someone new.

  I shivered in the wind and pulled my coat more tightly around my neck. All the exhaustion of the past twenty-four hours was sweeping over me at last, and I wanted nothing more than to be inside, in a warm bed. My own bed, pathetic as that sounded. I had a very clear vision of it, in all its disarray.

  And so I was utterly unprepared for the vision that actually greeted me on the northern side of the bridge: Agents Mooney and Milberg.

  Wearing the same bespoke suits they’d worn at Heathrow but looking decidedly less affable. Striding toward me with intractable purpose.

  And there I stood, watching them come, every last protest frozen inside me. They could have hoisted me in a single swoop and carried me off, and I wouldn’t have made a peep.

  But, as it turned out, I didn’t need to. They swept past me without so much as a sidelong glance and kept walking in the same hard, sweet, implacable rhythm. And I remembered then what Agent Mooney had been trying to tell me earlier. You’re not even in this, he’d said.

  Alonzo had been their quarry all along. And this time there would be no escape. The high-wire leveraging act he’d been carrying off all these years—borrowing piled upon borrowing, creditor played off against creditor—it was all about to come crashing down.

  And the thought of Alonzo underneath that rubble was enough, in the end, to rouse me. I wheeled around. A warning cry rose up from within me and forced my mouth open.…

  Only there was no one to warn. Alonzo wasn’t there.

  Which is to say he wasn’t where I’d just left him. I had to shift the angle of my vision to find the large man, surprisingly nimble in his trench coat, clambering onto the bridge’s parapet. A man with not a second to waste.

  Even as I sprinted toward him, I knew it was too late. He jumped without a word, without a sign, without a backward glance. By the time I got there, he’d vanished beneath the river’s surface.

  * * *

  On the occasion of his second death, Alonzo Wax had plenty of witnesses. A mother pushing her young daughter in a pram. An Anglican priest, pausing briefly to adjust his iPod shuffle. Two teenage girls with shaved heads, pushing their skateboards. An old gentleman in an ascot, dragging his knotted-wood cane behind him like a leash.

  I heard a scream, a pair of answering cries. I saw strangers rushing to the parapet, squinting down with a philanthropic zeal as though they might coax the jumper back to the surface.

  I saw Agents Mooney and Milberg pause for the barest second and keep walking.

  None of it mattered now, for Alonzo was beyond all care. He had sunk as truly as a meteorite, and the pewter-colored water had folded around its newest freight and carried it toward sea.

  Part Four

  O eloquent, just, and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou have perswaded; what none hath dared, thou have done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only have cast out of the world and despised. Thou have drawne together all the farre stretchèd greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!

  —SIR WALTER RALEGH,

  Preface to Historie of the World

  ISLEWORTH, ENGLAND 1603

  48

  HARRIOT IS UP at dawn. Dressing quickly, he hurries down to the Syon landing and tries to flag a boat. But there’s not a waterman alive who will consent to travel to London now. It is an insult even to ask them.

  —What do you take me for?

  —There’s death that way.

  This, then, is what Thomas Harriot is forced to do on this September morning. Digging deep in his purse, he must purchase an entire wherry, climb into it unaided, and row himself downriver.

  His mission is urgent but the tide is against him, and rather than fight it he forces himself to relax into the river’s rhythm. An hour and a half later, he sees Westminster’s roofs clawing through the midmorning fog. All the old sights pass by in their accustomed order: the Abbey, the Star Chamber, the gates of Whitehall, the marble upswelling of Charing Cross. It takes Harriot upward of a minute to realize what’s missing.

  Boats.

  The Thames is empty.

  Downriver fleets and upriver farmers are holding themselves free of contagion, and so Harriot, much as he did in the old days in Virginia, drives his oars through untraveled waters, hearing only the slap of waves against his hull.

  No one hails him from the jetties. The Old Swan stairs have not a single welcoming torch. No horses are to be had for love or charity. If Harriot is to find St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, he will have to do it on foot.

  He takes a reading from his compass. Pulls his cloak around him—the air is still cool—and takes the first long strides up Fish Street.

  Less than a year has passed since Harriot had last wandered through London, but it could be another city altogether. Not a single whore waylays him. All feasts and assemblies have been canceled; all fairs have been banned within fifty miles. Inns are boarded up, guildhalls sit idle. There are no ballad singers, no street cryers. Not even a barking dog, for city officials, believing dogs to be the main agents of infection, have slaughtered them by the thousands.

  How uncanny it is, how ungodly, to hear wind in a London street. Wind rattling through the abandoned houses, browsing through alleys. Wind and church bells, which ring out at punctual intervals from every parish, tolling more and more souls to heaven.

  On he walks, through the web
s of damp air, sipping from a flask of Devon cider, breaking open walnuts and tossing the shells behind him, pausing only when something actually blocks his path: an abandoned dray, a dead horse (its nostrils still stuffed with herb-grace). Just past the Cross Keys Inn, he nearly stumbles over a human skull, its eye sockets fixed on the sky. Hurrying on, he finds a human thighbone, split down the middle, its marrow sucked out.

  Near the corner of Grace Church and Aldgate Street, a beggar staggers past him. The first human being Harriot has seen in blocks—and just a few steps shy of being bones himself.

  —Alms, sir.

  But when Harriot offers him a shilling, the man stumbles on, unseeing.

  —Alms … alms …

  * * *

  The sun is just past its meridian when Harriot comes, heavy-legged, to St. Helen’s Bishopsgate. No bells are ringing here. The parallel naves are empty and dark, and Harriot is about to sit in one of the pews and grab a few minutes’ rest when he sees a corona of light around the sacristy door.

  A young vicar is there. His sleeves are rolled up, as though he were on the verge of polishing the thuribles that lie all around him, but his hands sit idle in his lap. His beard is long, his surplice sodden and gray, and there is a kind of wild hollowness in his eyes that dissipates slowly at the sound of another voice.

  —Crookenshanks?

  —That is the name.

  —Bless me, she was buried some four days past. We reported it to the parish clerk.

  —I know. Her daughter has asked me to see to her belongings.

  —Not many of those, I can assure you.

  His mouth creases as he studies Harriot.

  —You are newly arrived in London?

  —This very morning.

  —Then you will pardon me speaking so openly with you, sir. If the Lord has seen fit so far to spare you, He would wish you to quit this place at once.

  And then, as if he has been guilty of some intolerable rudeness, the vicar hastens to add:

  —Notwithstanding I should be glad of the company.

  —You are most kind. As is He. I fear, however, that my duty calls me, and I am bidden to answer. If you would be so good as to tell me where I might find the Crookenshanks house?