by Kate Wilhelm
Cluny nodded and they remained silent until the waiter had left again.
“Tell me,” Zach said then.
Cluny reported everything. He took a quick look about the restaurant, withdrew the slender envelope from inside his shirt pocket, and handed it across the table to Zach, who held it below the level of the table and opened it. For a long time no one said anything as he studied the pieces of gold. The film was in a separate opaque envelope.
“Thirty-six shots,” Cluny said. “Sid took care of that part. He’s a damn good photographer. And Joe O’Brien got a roll of it before he hauled it aboard his scooter.”
“Right. I know who can analyze the metal. Where will you be, Cluny, three days from now?”
“I don’t know. Here or back in Chapel Hill.”
“Delay it if you can. Stick around. We’ll run into you again. Or arrange something else. Once is a coincidence, but again . . . ? We’ll arrange something. You’ll hear from me.”
He returned the gold pieces to the envelope. “It’s got to be a hoax, but goddamn it, how?”
“Who and why?” Murray added. “It could blow up in our faces, whichever way it goes from here.” He drank. “Let’s split. See you, Cluny. Thanks, old buddy. Thanks a whole bunch.”
Cluny took a taxi and when it got stuck in traffic a block from his hotel, he left it and walked the rest of the way. There was a police car double-parked outside the hotel, and a large crowd of people, including a dozen or more yelling refugees. As he got closer he saw that the doorman and a bellhop were arguing with a refugee, and another man was sprawled on the sidewalk. Two policemen were there, one kneeling by the man on the sidewalk, the other handling the crowd. Cluny edged around the crowd and entered the hotel, feeling sickened by the incident. Panhandlers, desperate enough to try to get past the doorman. No one was in the lobby; they had all gone to watch the excitement, probably. He took an elevator up.
Lina opened the door to him, then turned her back and flounced away before he could embrace her, kiss her. He followed her to the bedroom.
“Oh, Cluny, how could you do that to me? Pretend we’re on a vacation and arrange a rendezvous like that? Send her away in a taxi—is that what you told them you’d do when they just happened to run into us?” She swept through the bedroom to the bathroom. She was dressed in a filmy negligee and was barefoot.
“I didn’t expect to see,them tonight.”
“You’re lying! If you could have seen your face in the restaurant! Didn’t expect to see them! And that little package?” She came to him in a quick motion and ran her hands over his chest. “Gone, isn’t it? That mysterious little package is gone. Hadn’t you better call the police, Cluny, or the FBI or someone? Isn’t it robbery? All that gold must be valuable!”
“You opened it?”
“Don’t be an idiot! Of course I opened it. Oh, not the film. Even I could tell it was film. Are you some kind of smuggler these days, is that it?”
She was moving between the bedroom and the bathroom as she talked, walking in fast sweeps of motion back and forth, brushing her hair, her voice rising and falling as she advanced and left.
“Lina, stand still a minute. Let me tell you about it. . . .”
“Tell me nothing, Cluny! You dragged me away from those poor little children who need me so you can play cops and robbers. I’m going home tomorrow.”
“I didn’t tell you to leave. You suggested it yourself. I never would have thought of it.”
“One of them would have suggested it. I saw them look at each other when I took the words right out of Zach’s mouth. You think I don’t notice things like that, but let me tell you, Arthur Cluny, there isn’t much happening around me that I don’t notice. The look on your face, the way they looked at each other. It was all set up, wasn’t it, every bit of it?” Behind her the bathroom was getting steamy; she had drawn a bath and perfumed clouds were forming. “I’m going home to those little orphans where I belong and you can stay here or come back or do whatever you want. Play cops and robbers if that’s fun for you, it isn’t fun for me. I have certain duties, responsibilities—”
“Lina, stop the pretense! Just be honest with me. You don’t give a damn about those children? You pick up and drop charities as if they were pretty toys to play with for a short time until you get bored. What do you plan to do with them when you get tired of this new role? Leave them with my mother while you go have fun on your father’s yacht, meet a couple of new men to amuse you?”
She stopped in the bathroom doorway, her hand raised, with the brush in it. “Why did you say that? Who’s been talking about me? It was your mother, wasn’t it? She never did like me and now she’s trying to make you turn against me! I knew she would. I just knew it. And what are you going to do about it? Put on a big act? Be the injured husband? It isn’t natural for anyone to be alone half the time, not for me or for you. I have feelings, emotions, needs. I feel things, Cluny, I really do.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. I’m not blaming you for anything.”
“Don’t you dare act like you’re forgiving me! I won’t have that from you! I haven’t done anything that needs your forgiveness!”
He moved to her, no longer hearing the words. They had become a great rising and falling sound without content, without meaning. He reached for her and she backed away from him, her mouth opening, closing, opening. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her toward him, wanting only to hold her, to silence her, to feel the warmth of her body against his. She lifted the brush and hit him on the side of the head and he pushed her away, staggered back blindly, turned and ran through the bedroom, through the sitting room, out of the suite and down the corridor.
All he could think of was getting away. He had to get away. Over and over he saw her furious face, the hand sweeping upward, the brush. . . . He had to get away, get away. He felt as if something delicate had snapped in half, something had broken that could never be repaired; something beautiful and precious was now dead.
His thoughts made no sense to him; there was only the need to run away. Once, when he was six or seven, he had seen a fire consume a warehouse, and then too he had run. He had kept going until someone had found him staggering, trying to run farther, and had put him in a car and had taken him home. He had not known why he was running, where he had been trying to go, .why he had needed to run away, but he was doing it again now, driven with the same urgency, the same undeniable need. He had to run away.
He stopped running when he nearly fell, and his legs refused to support him any longer. Leaning against the wall, he stared down the corridor. He did not know where he was. He had passed the elevators, had turned a corner, or more than one, and now he was in an unfamiliar section of the hotel. Ahead of him was an exit sign and he stumbled toward it. There were stairs; next to them was a service elevator. He pushed the button and waited blankly until it came. At the street level he left the hotel through a service door that opened at a touch. He walked a block, another block, he didn’t know how far. He could feel his heart pounding, and his legs were so weak that each new step required intense concentration. He lurched and his foot slipped on a curbing; he plunged headlong into the street and dimly heard a squeal of brakes.
He had to tell them the car had not hit him, he thought, but he didn’t move. He could fall asleep here, now, with all those people standing around him, talking, watching. He heard a woman’s voice saying she had not hit him, she knew she had not hit him, and he thought again he should reassure her that she had not. Finally he knew he could not sleep there and he began to push himself up. Hands tried to hold him down.
“An ambulance is coming. Just stay still until it gets here, okay?”
“I’m all right,” he mumbled. “I fell down. I’m all right.”
Now the hands were helping him, and he sat up. A policeman was there, holding his arm, looking at him anxiously. “You’re sure, Dr. Cluny? Just take it easy and wait for the ambulance.”
He blin
ked. They had had time to find his wallet, identify him? “I don’t need an ambulance,” he said, sounding the words slowly, with great care. “I slipped on the curb and fell. Must have knocked the wind out, or bumped my head, or something. But I’m all right now. Help me stand up, will you?”
The officer helped him and he stood upright, swaying just a little bit. He looked at the woman who had not hit him and said apologetically, “It was entirely my fault. Sorry.” Then he asked the officer, “Is there anything I should do, sign, anything to show I don’t blame anyone?”
“Guess not, sir.” He nodded to the woman, who got inside a low cream-colored Porsche and drove away very slowly through the crowds of people who had collected.
“If you could help me get a taxi, I’ll go on to my hotel,” Cluny said.
“Which one?”
“Park Plaza.”
“It’s just around the corner,” the officer said. “Come on, we’ll take you.” Another officer had appeared.
He helped Cluny into the squad car, radioed a report and canceled the ambulance, and drove around the corner, to stop again. “You in any shape to get up to your room?”
“It’s space fatigue,” Cluny said. “It hits you in the legs, makes them turn to rubber. We’ve been walking too much, I guess.”
“Yeah, I read about that. I’ll just see you to your room, and then I won’t have to worry about whether or not you made it. How’s that?” The second officer nodded his approval.
Cluny was not at all certain he could walk alone through the lobby to the elevators, and then to his room after he got to the fifth floor. The doorman came now to investigate the police car and exclaimed over Cluny, making a big fuss. Cluny found he needed no support, only steadying. It was as if he were back on the station again, he thought, reeling into walls, unable to walk a straight line. He was telling the officer about that when they got to his door and he opened it.
“Thanks,” he said then. “I guess I wouldn’t have made it alone. Tomorrow I think we’ll take it easy, watch television.”
“Forget it, Dr. Cluny. I wonder if I could bother you for your autograph, though. If you feel up to it, I mean. My kid would love to have it. All he thinks about is going off to space someday. He’d sure love it.”
Cluny motioned him inside. “Sure thing. Wait a minute. I’ve got some station maps. . . .” He went to the bedroom door and opened it cautiously.
“Lina? It’s me.” The room was lighted, the bed still made up with the spread in place. He frowned, then saw that the bathroom door was not closed. He went to it and looked in. Lina was draped over the bathtub, half her body inside it, her legs drawn out in a twisted way on the floor.
It was handled very quietly and expeditiously. The officer who had been with Cluny gave his testimony. Murray and Zach came forward to give theirs. The doorman testified that no one had entered the hotel unnoticed; no stranger could have entered. The service door opened one way only, from the inside. No signs of a struggle, nothing taken, no forced entry, all indicated it was the simple accident it appeared to be. She must have been brushing her hair, turned to adjust the water, or feel it, and slipped. Her bare foot on the wet tile . . . They found a smear of blood on the tiled wall where she had hit her head when she stumbled; her hairbrush was in the tub. Lina’s father came and claimed Cluny as his son and wept openly.
Through it all, even the funeral in Jacksonville, Cluny moved and walked and talked like a zombi. Deep shock, a doctor said, and prescribed complete rest. Mr. Davies gave Murray keys to a house on a small island he owned in the Florida Straits, and Murray and Cluny were flown there in Mr. Davies’ private airplane.
Mr. Davies had called a housekeeper, who would be there every day from ten until after dinner, and besides her, there would be no one but the two men and the caretaker on the island for as long as Cluny needed it. When the plane left them, Cluny started toward the house, with Murray following. In the shade of a grove of black cypress trees Murray caught Cluny’s arm.
“You can’t keep this up, old friend,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, say something.”
“I killed her.”
“I know,” Murray said.
CHAPTER
11
CLUNY stopped. “Why didn’t you tell them? Were you and Zach having me followed? That’s how you happened to meet us?”
“Sure we were. Look, Cluny, if that scroll is a fake, someone else might be following you, and if so, we’d like to know about it. Our man, Zach’s man actually, watched you go inside and thought you were down for the night. Then he saw you go inside again. No one else saw you the first time; you couldn’t have been there more than five minutes. I don’t know how it happened and I don’t give a shit. It was an accident.”
“We were arguing about something, meeting you and Zach, I think, and I tried to touch her, just to hold her. She hit me with her hairbrush, and I don’t know what I did. I was lost in the hotel after that, and then I was walking and trying not to crash into windows. I missed the curbing and fell down. . . . I don’t know what I did, Murray. It was like being hit by your mother, or being struck down by your God. I don’t know what I did!”
“Nothing,” Murray said. “Maybe you gave her a little shove, a reflex. There weren’t any footprints on the tiles, Cluny. Only her bare feet. The tiles were wet; footprints would have shown up, left some kind of mark, either on the tiles or that fluffy rug. Hers were on it, no one else’s. Believe me, old friend, they looked for prints.”
Cluny shook his head helplessly. “But I don’t know.”
“Okay. You don’t know. So you live with it. Now listen to me, Cluny. No talk like this in the old man’s house. No talk about the scroll, nothing at all. Get me?”
“Davies?” Cluny stared at Murray and then nodded. “Right.”
“We talk on the beach, out under the swaying palm trees, but not inside. And for the next week or so, we don’t do much of that, not until those marbles in your head turn into eyes again. Let’s go see our digs. It looks like a hell of a vacation coming up. Look at that house!”
It was days before Cluny actually saw the house and by then he had grown used to it without awareness and he accepted it without awe. The house was low, white, with a red-tiled roof. It was a large U shape, with a swimming pool between the two wings. Every room had a view of the ocean or the pool and many looked out on both. The rooms were spacious and cool, with only enough modern furniture to be functional; there was nothing extra anywhere.
By the end of the first week Cluny’s heart no longer pounded when he swam the length of the pool, and he could even snorkel a little without being afraid he would sink and never rise again.
Murray turned off all talk about the scroll during this time. At the end of the second week he began to talk about the new wave of hostility that had become evident on the space station; even the daily papers were starting to print stories about that.
“Sid says his room’s been searched a dozen times or more. The Russians are complaining about our intelligence interfering with their work. The French and English are at each other’s throats over intrusions. The Russians asked for a new security precaution: a complete search of everyone arriving and leaving.”
Both men stared out at the sparkling blue water. In the distance there was a traffic lane, and ships passed continually—tankers, freighters, fishing boats, yachts. In the other direction they could see the Keys, a low irregular horizon not identifiable as islands at all. Between them and the Keys pelicans were diving in the shallow water, plummeting in bone-jarring falls to hit with great splashes that sent waves high into the air. , .
“It has to be a hoax then, or how would anyone have known anything was up?” Cluny asked finally.
“Not sure. But Sid says the scissors he used to snip off pieces of the scroll and the container have vanished. No doubt they had traces of gold on them. Might make someone wonder a little.”
“It’s actually gold?”
“Yeah. The contai
ner’s hardened a little with silica and ferrous manganese.”
Cluny turned to study him. “Even that doesn’t clinch it?”
“ ’Fraid not. There’ve been several hundred people in and out of space in the past twenty-five years or so. One of them could have brought back raw materials, or could have made it on one of the satellites, in fact. The scroll has minor impurities; any of them could have been from Earth or the moon, a meteorite, or an asteroid. Back to Go and start over.”
Cluny bit his lip. The analysis should have settled it, he thought aggrievedly.
“Do you have the reports?” he asked then.
“Nope. Zach has them. I saw them. You’ve got to be a metallurgist to read them. The computer is doing a rundown on the possible locations of that particular gold, assuming it came from Earth. And they’re doing an analysis of lunar rocks that were brought back, checking to see if anyone swiped one of them, stuff like that. But how it looks right now is just what I’ve told you. A draw at best.”
“Did the Russians do it?” Cluny asked, not as if expecting Murray to answer, but as if he had put off the question as long as he could until now it emerged of its own volition.
“Could be. The scenario goes like this: We can’t disprove it’s legitimate and we announce the first extraterrestrial message. Their boys come up with the definitive proof that it’s from Earth and accuse the U.S. of skulduggery. Their hard-noses get sore and heat up the old cold war to a boil and start the shortest war ever to be started.”
“Yeah,” Cluny agreed. “That’s the one I kept coming up with. But it’s pretty crude, maybe too crude for them.”
“Maybe. Try this one: We announce it, as before, and get linguists busy on it. They come up with something like the aliens are communists and want a unified one-world government to greet them when they arrive in x number of years.”
“Good God,” Cluny said in disbelief. “Who dreamed that one?”