by Peter Straub
Tom leaned forward and peered at his right arm. He saw nothing except the black sleeve.
“I guess it’s impossible to see it,” von Heilitz said, “even with excellent eyes. But it’s there.”
“What?”
“A mourning band,” von Heilitz said. “He told Bishop that those letters were about you.”
Tom looked back at the heavy white-headed man smoking a long cigar at the window overlooking the terrace, and even though he could not see it, he did: he saw it because he knew von Heilitz was right, it was there, a black band Mrs. Kingsley had cut from an old fabric and sewn on his sleeve.
His grandfather turned away from the window and picked up the yellow paper and the red envelope. He carried them to the wall behind the desk, swung out a section of paneling, and then reached in to unlatch some other, interior door. The note and the envelope disappeared into the wall, and Upshaw latched the interior door and swung the paneling shut. He took one tigerish glance through the window and left the study.
“Well, that’s what we came for,” von Heilitz said. “You don’t have any more doubts, do you?”
“No,” Tom said. He got to his knees. “I’m not sure what I do have.”
Von Heilitz helped him to his feet. The couple reading magazines on their terrace had fallen asleep. Tom followed the detective to the white concrete wall, and von Heilitz stooped and held out interlaced fingers for him. Tom put his right foot into von Heilitz’s hands, and felt himself being propelled upward. He landed on the other side of the wall with a thud that jarred his spine. Von Heilitz went over the wall like an acrobat. He dusted off his hands, and brushed rimes of sand from the front of his suit. “Let’s go back to the hotel and call Tim Truehart,” he said.
Tom trudged after the detective on legs that seemed to weigh a hundred pounds each. His shoulder still hurt, and his burned hand ached, and sand in his shoes abraded his toes. The old man’s suit hung on him like lead. Von Heilitz looked at him over his shoulder. Tom yanked at his lapels, trying to wrestle the suit into a more comfortable accommodation with his body.
When they got into the cane field, von Heilitz turned around. Tom stopped walking. “Are you all right?” von Heilitz asked.
“Sure,” Tom said.
“You don’t like me very much right now, do you?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Tom said, and that was true too: he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t say anything at all.
Von Heilitz nodded. “Well, let’s get back to town.” He started walking toward the row of willows, and Tom followed, unable to make himself shorten the distance between them.
The old man was waiting beside the battered red car when Tom came around the first of the trees, and as soon as he saw Tom he opened his door and got in. Tom got in the other door and sat squeezed against it, as if there were two other people in the back seat.
“Everything go all right, Lamont?” Andres asked.
“We saw what we had to see.”
Tom closed his eyes and slumped down in the seat. He saw his grandfather inhaling all the air in the study as he read a little yellow note; he saw him turn instinctively toward the window, like a lion that has felt the first arrow in his side.
Tom did not speak during the drive back to the middle of town, and when von Heilitz held open the door of Sinbad’s Cavern for him, he hurried past as if fearing that the old man would touch him.
They rode up in the elevator in black silence.
Von Heilitz opened the door to his room, and Tom walked around him to unlock his own door. A maid had straightened the bed and organized the things on the table. The papers and envelopes were stacked on a chair, and the cheese and sausage had been put back in their bags. He picked up the novel about the Blue Rose murders, and threw himself on the bed. From the adjoining room came the sounds of von Heilitz speaking into the telephone. Tom opened the book and began to read.
A few minutes later von Heilitz came into his room. Tom barely glanced up from his book. The old man spun a chair around and straddled it backwards. “Do you want to know what Truehart’s been doing?”
“Okay,” Tom said, reluctantly closing the book.
“He knows of a man that Jerry could have hired—a guy named Schilling who makes a shaky living brokering used rifles, old cars, even a few motorboats, whatever he can get his hands on. He did a two-year stretch in the Wisconsin state prison for receiving stolen goods a few years ago, and ever since he’s been living in a little place near a run-down tourist attraction outside Eagle Lake. Near that machine shop where they kept the stolen goods, too. Two people saw this Schilling talking with Jerry Hasek in a bar. The night of the fire, he disappeared.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Tom said.
“No, not exactly, but Tim went to the local bank. Schilling has a little account there, and after Tim had a long talk with the manager, he had a look at the account records. Every summer for the past four years, Schilling has been putting something between eight and ten thousand in his account.” Von Heilitz grinned at him.
Tom didn’t get it.
“Schilling was Jerry’s fence. He went back to his old business when Jerry and his friends started breaking into lodges.”
“What does that have to do with the fire? Or with someone shooting at me?”
“The day before you arrived in Eagle Lake, our hero deposited five thousand dollars in his account.”
“Five thousand dollars,” Tom said.
“It was a half payment, most likely. He would have collected the other half when your body was discovered, but by then Jerry and his friends were in jail, thanks to you.”
“He hired his fence to kill me?”
“Probably Schilling volunteered, once he learned there was ten thousand dollars in it for him. Now, Schilling’s sister lives in Marinette, Wisconsin. She’s married to another con, a friend of her brother’s, who’s in jail on an armed robbery charge. Tim thinks our man might have gone to stay with her for a week or so, and he called the Marinette police to watch her house.”
“So they’ll probably get him,” Tom said. “They should. They should get the person who killed Barbara Deane.” He looked down at The Divided Man, and opened it again.
“Tim thinks that your old friend Nappy LaBarre is getting close to telling him what he already knows. If they arrest Schilling, Nappy’s information isn’t going to do him any good. Nappy’s going to have to sell out Schilling in a hurry, if he wants to turn state’s evidence and have his charges dropped.”
“Okay.”
“Is that all you have to say? Okay? The noose is tightening around your grandfather’s neck, and it’s all because of you.”
“I know.”
“Is part of you sorry about that?”
“I wish I knew,” Tom said. He saw his grandfather again, turning toward the window like a wounded lion.
Von Heilitz stood up and turned the chair around. He sat down facing Tom, put his elbow on his knee, and cupped his chin in his hand.
“It’s just that he’s my grandfather, I guess. I was brought up to think he was really special—a kind of hero. He kept everything safe. Everything depended on him. And now I feel—I feel cut off from everybody.”
“Come with me to talk to David Natchez,” von Heilitz said. “For one thing, you might be able to help us work out where Glen would be likely to go, if he wants to hide somewhere while he gets ready to leave the island. It would help you get over the shock.”
Tom shook his head.
“I’m serious—you have had a shock, a serious one. I know you’re angry at me, and that you don’t want to be. In the past two days, everything you thought you knew turned inside-out, and—”
“Stop,” Tom said. “Maybe I am angry with you, but you don’t know everything I’m feeling.” Saying this made him feel like a sulky child.
“No,” von Heilitz said. “But after all this is over, we’ll be able to get to know each other a lot better.”
“Couldn’t you
have gone after my mother, seventeen years ago?” Tom asked. “When you came back to Mill Walk and found that her father had taken her to Miami? You just let him take her away—you just gave up. You might have lived across the street from us, but I never saw you, except for those two times you came to the hospital.”
Von Heilitz had straightened up in the chair. He looked uncomfortable, and said, “Glen would never have let me see her. Even if he had, she wouldn’t have left with me.”
“You don’t know that,” Tom said. “She was over eighteen. She could have married anyone she wanted. You just let her slip back into—into helplessness. You let her be sold to Victor Pasmore. Or you let Victor be bought for her, or however it worked.” Then it seemed to him that he was talking about Sarah Spence and Buddy Redwing, and another degree of misery entered him. “You didn’t do anything,” he said, and then could not say any more.
“You think I haven’t thought about that?” the old man said. “I was in my forties. I was used to living by myself, and going wherever I liked. I didn’t think I’d make a very good husband. I never pretended not to be selfish, if selfishness means giving yourself permission to concentrate on a few things at the expense of everything else.”
“You liked being alone,” Tom said.
“Of course I did, but that wasn’t the most important reason. I think I was just another kind of father to Gloria. You can’t have a real marriage on that basis. Not only that, what I wanted to do would have half-killed her. I couldn’t marry Glen Upshaw’s daughter. Can’t you see that? Just after you were born, I began to realize that he had killed Jeanine Thielman. I wanted to destroy him. Things turned out the way they did because we were all the people we were—Gloria and Glen and me. The only good thing that came out of it was you.”
“You only came to see me twice,” Tom said again.
“What do you think it would have done to your mother if I had insisted on seeing you?”
“That’s not why,” Tom said. “You were too busy being shot at and eating lizards and looking through windows and solving murders.”
“You can see it that way, if you like.”
“The only time you wanted to really spend time with me was when you saw that you could use me. You wanted me to get interested in what happened to Jeanine Thielman. You wound me up like a clock and turned me loose. And you’re pleased because I did just what you wanted me to.”
“And you did it because of who you are,” von Heilitz said. “If you’d been another sort of kid, I …”
“You wouldn’t have done anything at all.”
“But you’re not another sort of kid.”
“I wonder what I am,” Tom said. “I wonder who I am.”
“You’re enough like me to have met me next to Hasselgard’s car,” von Heilitz said. “And to have turned up at the hospital on the day Michael Mendenhall died.”
“I’m not sure I really want to be like you,” Tom said.
“But you don’t want to be like your grandfather, either.” Von Heilitz stood up and looked down at Tom, sprawled on the St. Alwyn’s double bed with a paperback book beside him. Tom felt strong and conflicting currents of emotion—the old man wanted to come near him, put his hand on his cheek, hug him, and what he had said made it impossible.
“What I told you in that clearing was the truth, Tom. I do love you. And we’re going to accomplish something great. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re going to do it—together.” He put his hand on the bottom of the bed, and hesitated.
Tom thought, I don’t want any speeches, and what von Heilitz saw in his face made him back away from the bed. “You don’t have to come over to Hobart’s with me. I’ll check in with you before I go.”
Tom nodded, scarcely knowing what he wanted anymore and too unhappy to think about it clearly. He did not see von Heilitz walk out of the room. The connecting door closed. He picked up his book and began reading. He could hear von Heilitz pacing around his room. In the book, Esterhaz drove along the shore of a steaming lake. It seemed to Esterhaz that another person, a barely visible person of terrifying strength, lived inside him, and that this other person was someone he had once been. Von Heilitz began speaking into his telephone. Why did I talk to him like that? Tom wondered; it’s like I expect him to be an ordinary father. Victor Pasmore was an ordinary father, and one of those was enough. Tom nearly got off the bed and went into the other room, but his enduring unhappiness, an unhappiness that tasted like anger, kept him nailed to the bed and the book.
There was a lot of invisibility in the world, Esterhaz thought. He took another pull from the pint bottle between his thighs. A lot of people disappeared into it, and other people barely noticed they were gone. Sorrow played a role, humiliation played a role. It was a foretaste of death, death in advance of death. Being left behind by the world was a big part of it. Drunks, wastrels, and murderers, combat soldiers after a war, musicians, detectives, drug addicts, poets, barbers, and hairdressers … as the visible world grew more and more crowded, so did its invisible counterpart. Esterhaz pulled up at a stoplight, and for a moment willed himself to see the invisible world he had just imagined, and a mob of shuffling, indifferent Invisibles, dressed in rags and old clothes, pulling on bottles like his own or leaning against lampposts, lying down on the snowy sidewalks, slid effortlessly into view.
Tom looked up from the book, awakened by a memory that seemed to come from some version of himself hidden within him—a memory of having seen himself here in this shabby room, alone and reading the book he was reading now. He had looked at the self he was now, the almost grown Tom. A nearly abstract violence surrounded this memory—an explosion of smoke and fire—as it surrounded Esterhaz.
Exhaustion that seemed to come from every cell in his body pulled him downward, and Tom thought, I have to get up, but the book slipped from his hand, and he saw the caged animal that was his grandfather snapping his heavy body sideways toward a window as the arrow pierced his haunch. He reached for the book. His fingers touched the dark half of the face on the cover, and his grandfather looked up from the yellow note into his eyes, and he was asleep.
Or not. He looked at the window once, and saw darkening air. Some time after that he heard Lamont von Heilitz come through the connecting door and walk up to the side of the bed. I’ll come with you, he said, but the words stayed inside him. The old man untied Tom’s shoes and slipped them off his feet. He turned off the light. “Dear Tom,” von Heilitz said. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about anything you said.”
“No,” Tom said, meaning, no, don’t go, I have to come with you, and von Heilitz stroked his shoulder and leaned over in the darkness and kissed his head. He moved backwards, moving away, and a line of light came into the room from the door, and he was gone.
Tom was moving down a hazy corridor toward a small blond boy in a wheelchair. When he touched the boy’s shoulder, the boy looked up at him from a book in his lap with a face darkened by rage and humiliation. “Don’t worry,” Tom said.
Dimly aware of the presence of a crowd of hovering figures, Tom leaned closer to the boy and saw that he was looking into his own, now barely recognizable, boyhood face. His heart banged, and he opened his eyes to a dark room in the St. Alwyn Hotel. The yellow glow of a street lamp lay on the window, and a filmy trace of light touched the ceiling. He reached for the bedside lamp, still seeing in his mind the face of the child in the wheelchair. Sudden light brought the room into focus. Tom rubbed his face and moaned. “Are you back?” he called. “Lamont?” It was the first time he had used the old man’s first name, and it felt uncomfortable as a stone in his mouth. No response came from the other room.
Tom looked at his watch and saw that it was ten-fifteen. He thought he must have been asleep for three or four hours. He swung his legs off the bed and walked on stiff legs to the connecting door. “Hello,” he called, thinking that von Heilitz might have come back from the meeting at Hobart’s and gone to bed. There was no answer. Tom opened the door. Her
e was another dark room, identical to his own—two chairs at a round table by the window, a double bed, a couch, a closet, and a bathroom. The bed was made, and a depression in the pillow and wrinkles in the coverlet showed where von Heilitz had lain.
Feeling as if he were trespassing, Tom walked through the dark room to the window. One carriage rolled up Calle Drosselmayer, the headlights of the cars behind shining on the muscular flanks of a pair of black horses. A few people paraded down the sidewalk in the warm night air, and a flock of sailors ran across the street. The grille had been pulled down over the pawnshop window. An overweight man in a white shirt and tan trousers leaned against the wall beside the entrance to The Home Plate, smoking and looking across the street to the steps of the hotel. The man looked up, and Tom stepped back from the window. The man yawned, crossed his arms over his chest, flipped his cigarette into the street.
Tom went back to his own room to wait until the Shadow came back from his meeting with David Natchez. He ate bread and cheese and slices of salami, and read twenty pages of The Divided Man. When had von Heilitz left for the meeting at Hobart’s? Two hours ago? Nervous, Tom laid the book open on the table and paced the room, listening for noises in the hall. He opened the door and leaned out, but saw only the empty corridor and a long row of brown doors with painted-over metal numbers. Someone down at the end of the hallway played scales on a tenor saxophone, someone else listened to a radio. Footsteps came toward him from around the corner leading to the stairs, and Tom ducked back behind his door. The footsteps rounded the corner, came nearer, went past his door. He peeked out and saw a small, dark-haired man with a ponytail carrying a trumpet case and a brown paper bag moving toward a door at the end of the hall. He knocked, and the saxophone abruptly inserted two honks into the E-minor scale. “Hey, Glenroy,” said the man at the door. Tom leaned his head out into the hall, but saw no more than the door opening wide enough for the trumpet player to slide into the room.