The Order of Death

by Hugh Fleetwood

  ‘No,’ Fred said. ‘Better not.’

  They were, it occurred to him, like two shy young kids out on their first date together.

  After they had sat in the apartment for three-quarters of an hour, Lenore asked Fred if he would have dinner with her. She was inviting him, mind you.

  ‘Thank you,’ Fred said.

  ‘You’re welcome O’Connor.’

  *

  They went to a restaurant in Chinatown, and Fred let Lenore order for him; he said he didn’t know what was good. In fact, as far as he remembered, he had never eaten a Chinese meal in his life.

  ‘Well, it’s about time you lived O’Connor,’ Lenore said.

  They talked the whole time—about the weather, about the mayor, about politics, about Lenore’s family—and were both— like dolphin trainers ready to toss a fish to their charge as soon as it broke the surface—very quick to bring up a new subject the second there even threatened to be a lull in the conversation; the second it even seemed there was going to be a meaningful silence. And they were both, Fred thought, very conscious of the fact that they were talking about everything except the one thing they wanted to talk about—which was, of course, Bob.

  But they didn’t talk about him—they didn’t even mention his name—until they had finished eating, and were sitting finishing their pale tea, being stared at threateningly by the headwaiter, who wanted their table.

  And then Fred said, lowering his eyes and looking at the delicate little blue-veined teacup in his big red hands, ‘What are you going to do now Lenore?’

  ‘Work,’ the girl said. ‘I want to try and write another novel. I feel I’m ready for it now.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to wait a while?’

  ‘Probably. But without wanting to sound too—’ she curled her upper lip expressively, ‘I want to see if I can get to the truth through fiction rather than fact, if you see what I mean.’

  Fred said he thought he did.

  ‘Just the effort to be objective the whole time, to force myself to be objective, to be absolutely ruthless about it, might get me where I could never get by just thinking about myself and Bob and what I believe is the truth. I—’ the tiny plump fist clenched— ‘must force everything into a pattern, and make it a natural pattern. Like a poet who is forced to find a word, the right word, that rhymes, can maybe express himself better that way, can say exactly—or even more—than he wanted to say, or thought he wanted to say—than if he had used the word that first came into his mind, but didn’t rhyme. If you see what I mean,’ she repeated.

  ‘There are people waiting for the table,’ the headwaiter said.

  ‘So?’ Lenore snapped.

  *

  After she had paid the check, and they were walking—to have an Italian coffee and a pastry—Fred said, ‘What you said about Bob last week—I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s been worrying me. I’—he looked down into Lenore’s face and gave her a deep smile—‘wish I could tell you something. For my own peace of mind, as much as yours,’ he added, truthfully.

  ‘You wish you could but you won’t, or you wish you could but you can’t?’

  ‘Because I can’t,’ Fred said.

  *

  When they had had their coffee—in an empty, sad coffee shop with large marble topped tables with black iron legs—Fred walked Lenore home. When she asked him if he wanted to come up to have another coffee, he said yes; and when they were in the tiny apartment he turned the lights out and started to undress Lenore.

  She said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, O’Connor,’ but she didn’t stop him; and after they had made love she lay in bed with her elaborate hair-do on his chest, and cried.

  And Fred too, as he lay on his back and stared up at the dark cracked ceiling, asked himself what the hell he was doing. But it was a useless question, because he knew quite well. He was trying, in some way, to destroy the past by re-enacting it—to give both Lenore and himself a chance to take, as it were, a different direction from the one they had taken—and also, he was trying, without actually saying the words, to tell Lenore what she wanted to know. He was trying to tell her that he had had a dream of the world very much as she had a dream of the book she wanted to write, and that Bob had learned about it, had stumbled into it, and had tried—at the cost of his life—to bring reality into it; to make it, or see it, as fact, rather than fiction.

  It also occurred to him that perhaps it was just as well Bob was dead, because he was quite sure that even if he hadn’t died, Lenore would have realized, quite soon, that their relationship was ‘meaningless’, and would have written her book anyway. And as soon as she had done so she would have discarded the empty chrysalis of the real Bob for the magic butterfly she had created.

  He lay there, and wanted to tell Lenore this, and wanted to tell her to give up her dream, as he had given up his; that otherwise slowly, but surely, just as he had been dead in a way before, so she too would die.

  And finally, he thought that after all Lenore and he, in their different ways, were—or had been—alike; that they had had something fundamental in common. Which was why she had made love with him the first time, why she had rejected him so totally right after, and why she had made love with him again now. She understood him—or at least, she had understood him —and it made her, at least in part, understand herself. And so she rejected him.

  She had understood him … but did she understand him now, he wondered. Did she think he was still the same Fred as of old; or did she realize how far, how very far he had gone? No. Probably not. That would have been too much to expect….

  She got up and started to dress; and as Fred too got up, she turned on the light and said, ‘You better get out of here O’Connor.’

  It was what she had said four years ago; word for word. And her expression was the same expression she had worn four years ago. Fred wanted to stand up and shake her and say, ‘no, every­thing’s different now’. But he didn’t; because the past wasn’t, couldn’t be, so easily disposed of; and because, he repeated to himself as he dumbly dressed, and left the apartment without a word, to have expected Lenore to have understood everything would have been too much to expect. Far, far too much….

  *

  He realized he was trembling as he opened the door of the apartment. What would Smith say to him? What would he do? Punish him? Or merely admonish him?

  He went into the living room and stood in front of the boy

  Smith looked him up and down, and then laughed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘did you have a nice evening with her?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Oh Fred. I’m not a fool. As soon as I saw you getting dressed up earlier I knew where you were going.’ Then, with his white monkey hand, the boy waved him aside. ‘I can’t see the television through you, you know.’

  Fred walked away, out of the room. He hung up the jacket of his suit, went into the kitchen and made himself some coffee, then returned to the living room, sat down, and waited for Smith to talk to him again. Because he was sure the boy hadn’t finished.

  He had to wait till the film was over. Then Smith got up, turned off the television, sat down again, looked at him with a disdainful smile, and repeated, ‘Well?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Fred said. ‘I didn’t tell her anything. You needn’t worry.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not worried,’ Smith laughed—and then looked at Fred anxiously, as if he had said what he shouldn’t have, and wondering whether Fred had noticed it.

  He had. The boy had finally admitted it. He wasn’t worried about being arrested for Bob’s murder. He knew he could get out of it, by telling the truth, and with the aid of a good lawyer whom his grandmother would pay. He was staying here for reasons of his own; staying, as Fred thought when he had come back, crying, the day after Bob’s death, to see the end of the drama. To, even, as it were, write the end of the drama himself.

  And there was nothing Fred could do about it. Not any more.


  ‘You realize,’ Smith drawled lazily on, ‘that when you do tell her you’ll have to kill her.’

  How easily he said it! As if he were telling Fred to go out and buy some milk. He was mad.

  ‘And there’s no need to look at me like that. I’m not mad. You will have to kill her, unless you want to go to prison for the rest of your life. I mean—I guess you’ll have to kill her anyway now. You’ve gone too far.’

  Fred didn’t say a word. It was as if he were listening to a murder mystery on the radio, he thought, that he could have got up and turned off whenever he liked. Only he didn’t, because he was, in spite of himself, fascinated, and enthralled; and because the names of the characters in the radio play were names he recognized; were his own name and Lenore’s name.

  Smith suddenly stood up and went over to the window and said softly, looking out into the dark park, ‘If you kill her, I’ll go away. I’ll go back to my grandmother’s and risk—whatever there is to be risked. I’ll leave you in peace, Fred. And you’ll have this place all to yourself again. It’ll be just like it was before—only more so. Because then there’ll be nothing to disturb you. There’ll be no danger, no risk at all. There’ll be no one to threaten you, no one to menace you. You’ll be all alone in your dream.’

  He turned, now, and faced Fred. ‘Are you trying to tell her, or at least trying to make her understand, just so you can—I mean—just so you have to kill her? Are you trying to find an excuse? A justification?’

  Fred stared at the boy, hypnotized. He was mad, mad, mad. Talking about killing people. About killing plump, sour little Lenore. It was unthinkable. It was impossible. One couldn’t kill people in real life. One could only kill people in dreams. As he had killed Bob….

  ‘I’m offering you your freedom,’ Smith said.

  Fred went on staring at the boy for some time; and then, finally, he whispered, ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why do you want me to kill her?’

  ‘I don’t want you to kill her. You have to.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go away now, and let me decide what I have to do?’

  ‘Because if you tell this Lenore everything—’ the boy shrugged. ‘Okay, I guess I could get off any murder rap or anything. I could say you were keeping me prisoner here all this time, and forced me to help you kill Bob—or get rid of his body, anyway— and that though I ran away you chased after me and found me and brought me back here—but—when I leave here I want to leave all this behind forever. I’ve been thinking a lot these last few days. I want to go back to school and get some good degree, and get a good job—one of my uncles is president of a bank in Los Angeles. You might have heard of him.’ Smith men­tioned a name that Fred had heard of. ‘He could get me some good job, I guess, and then I could settle down and get married and forget about all this—or at least put it down as a sort of boyhood adventure. And I’d know that the only person in the world who knew about it’—he laughed now—‘because I figure you’re right—no one does suspect me, so it’s very unlikely there’d be any charges at all—would be you. And you’d be safely here in New York, keeping the peace and locked up in your dream palace. But if I leave you now, that cunt’ll end up knowing everything, and—apart from the scandal and the court case and everything, which wouldn’t do my career or reputation any good, though I guess I could survive—she’ll make copy out of it. She’ll write some goddam book, or some of her articles, and I’ll keep on cropping up in them, and she’ll chatter to all her friends about me, and she’ll always be after me, wanting details, wanting to know how I felt when I cut her precious husband’s throat, and—I don’t want any of that. I want the past to stop here, now, in New York. I want everything to come to a nice, tidy con­clusion. My God, I’m not asking much. I’m offering you your freedom.’

  ‘Why don’t you kill her yourself?’

  ‘Because I’ve never killed anyone in my life, and I’m not about to start now. I wouldn’t be able to go through with it.’

  ‘And if I just say no. If I let everything just ride—come to a natural end?’

  ‘Then—’ Smith shrugged again, ‘I guess I would just stay here. But anyway, that’s impossible. You know I’m right. You want to tell Lenore. Okay, fine. She already knows or suspects every­thing I bet, even if she doesn’t know what everything is. So you might as well tell her. Otherwise she’ll pester and torment you until you do. But as soon as you have—you’ve got to kill her. I know that, and you know that, and maybe even she knows that. But if she wants to learn the truth that badly, that’s her affair. But—you’ve got to kill her Fred, or go to prison for life. You’ve got to. And you know it.’

  Fred put his hands over his face, and muttered, ‘Will you turn out the light please. It hurts my eyes.’

  Smith obliged.

  And then Fred, in the dark quiet room, lowered his hands and said softly, ‘How do you think I should kill her?’

  *

  Two days later, according to plan, Fred called Lenore again. This time she didn’t sound surprised at all, but merely as sour and sharp as ever, with just a little extra something to let him know she wasn’t ashamed of having made love with him—by God, why should she be?—but that he’d better not try again; or even allude to the fact that they had.

  ‘I can tell you what you wanted to know,’ he said, when Lenore asked him why he wanted to see her.

  That seemed to embarrass her. She said, ‘What about?’

  ‘About Bob.’

  ‘Oh.’ That seemed to embarrass her even more. ‘Well, can’t you tell me now?’

  ‘No,’ Fred said. ‘I—I’d like to tell you in person. Over the phone sounds sort of—’ he stopped. How dramatic he sounded. How melodramatic. How absurd.

  Lenore sighed. ‘Okay. When and where?’ She no longer seemed embarrassed; just irritated now. Was this the way people always made appointments for their own deaths, Fred wondered; and thought about what Smith had said: ‘maybe even she knows.’ Was it possible?

  He said, ‘Can I come round to your place this morning? In an hour or so.’

  ‘Yes. Okay.’

  ‘I’ll be round about twelve then.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lenore repeated. Then, as Fred was about to hang up, she said, ‘Hey, listen O’Connor. Do me a favour.’

  ‘What?’ Fred murmured.

  ‘Don’t ask me to marry you.’

  *

  At twelve o’clock precisely Fred pressed the doorbell outside Lenore’s house, and was buzzed in without being asked who he was. And then, as he climbed the stairs, and fingered Bob’s gun, that was in his pocket, and was loaded now, he remembered Smith’s instructions.

  ‘Perhaps after all you shouldn’t speak to her,’ the boy had said. ‘Don’t tell her anything. Don’t say a word. If you do, you’re lost. I know you. Just wait till she’s closed the door be­hind you, get out the gun, and shoot her in the right side of the head—holding the gun as close to her head as you can. And then—well, the rest’s obvious. Put her hand round the gun and get the hell out. And try to make sure no one sees you. Though even if they do I guess it doesn’t matter. As long as they don’t see you actually going in or coming out her door. You could always say you found the street door open, went up, rang her bell, and didn’t find anyone at home. Anyway, no one’s going to ask too many questions. Her husband gets killed, she can’t stand it—she kills herself with her husband’s gun. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Fred remembered that he had replied.

  But it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay at all. Here he was on a damp, misty morning in April, while the rest of the world was shopping or working or sleeping, climbing the stairs to go and shoot a plump girl, with a moustache, in the head. And shoot her, what was more, without even letting her speak, or say a word; without even explaining to her why she was dying. She was going to die in the penultimate chapter of her life as it were, and would never know how the book ended. Maybe, Fred thought, it was the way we all die. But that didn’t
make it any better. It was horrible. It would be like stopping a piece of music just before it came to its climax, so that afterwards all those unresolved notes and chords jangled about inside one, screaming, crying out for completion. It was horrible. It was madness. But he was going to do it. He had to. Smith had told him that he had to….

  How long it took to climb so few stairs! How long and long and long, when those stairs were real stairs, but one was pre­tending that they were only stairs in a dream. And how hard and steep they were. Oh, but he mustn’t let himself think. He mustn’t. He hadn’t for the last two days, ever since Smith had told him what to do, and he musn’t now. This was all a dream, and soon it would be over.

  But it was madness….

  ‘Are you okay O’Connor?’

  She was above him, on the landing, in front of her open door, in her blue jeans and a grey sweater, and her grey eyes looking defiantly at him. She had a pen in her hand.

  What was he doing, he asked himself. What was happening? A boy called Smith had casually suggested that he go and kill a girl called Lenore, and he, just as casually, was going to do it. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t—he felt himself swaying on the stairs, and only heard through a sort of veil Lenore’s sharp voice saying, ‘For Chrissake don’t faint on the stairs. I couldn’t hold you if I wanted to.’

  The voice only came to him veiled; but it was enough to stop him fainting. He clung on to it as if it were something palpable, material, and managed to steady himself on it. Then he stood there—only three steps below Lenore—and smiled up at her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m all right now.’ Then he climbed the last three stairs and put his hand on his forehead and murmured, ‘I guess I’m still sicker than I thought.’

  Lenore grabbed his arm, led him into the apartment, and closed the door behind him. He smiled at her again, but foolishly now, and thought that this was supposed to be it. But it wasn’t, of course, because he still couldn’t control himself, and could only let himself be led across the tiny room and pushed into the green armchair.

  ‘Put your head between your legs,’ Lenore ordered. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water.’