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Chapter 6 6 страница
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'What? '
'Well, they painted it with a dado, sort of, those awful Gucci stripes. It was in all kinds of magazines. Rouse Beautiful had it in some ridiculous article they did on Whimsy in Decorating or some absurd idea – you know, where they tell you to paint a giant lobster or something on your bedroom ceiling and it's supposed to be very witty and attractive. ' He lit a cigarette. 'I mean, that's exactly the kind of people they are, ' he said. 'All surface. Bunny was the best of them by a long shot but even he '
'I hate Gucci, ' said Francis.
'Do you? ' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand. '
'Come on, Henry. '
'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity. '
'I don't see what you think is grand about that. '
'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale, ' said Henry.
I was walking home that night, paying no attention to where I was going, when a large, sulky fellow approached me near the apple trees in front of Putnam House. He said: 'Are you Richard Papen? '
I stopped, looked at him, said that I was.
To my astonishment, he punched me in the face, and I fell backwards in the snow with a thump that knocked me breathless.
'Stay away from Mona! ' he shouted at me. 'If you go near her again, I'll kill you. You understand me? '
Too stunned to reply, I stared up at him. He kicked me in the ribs, hard, and then trudged sullenly away – footsteps crunching through the snow, a slamming door.
I looked up at the stars. They seemed very far away. Finally, I struggled to my feet – there was a sharp pain in my ribs, but nothing seemed broken – and limped home in the dark.
I woke late the next morning. My eye hurt when I rolled on my cheek. I lay there for a while, blinking in the bright sun, as confused details of the previous night floated back to me like a dream; then I reached for my watch on the night table and saw that it was late, almost noon, and why had no one been by to get me?
I got up, and as I did my reflection rose to meet me, head-on in the opposite mirror; it stopped and stared – hair on end, mouth agog in idiotic astonishment – like a comic book character konked on the head with an anvil, chaplet of stars and birdies twittering about the brow. Most startling of all, a splendid dark cartoon of a black eye was stamped in a ring on my eye socket, in the richest inks of Tyrian, chartreuse, and plum.
I brushed my teeth, dressed, and hurried outside, where the first familiar person I spotted was Julian on his way up to the Lyceum.
He drew back from me in innocent, Chaplinesque surprise.
'Goodness, ' he said, 'what happened to you? '
'Have you heard anything this morning? '
'Why, no, ' he said, looking at me curiously. 'That eye. You look as if you were in a barroom brawl. '
Any other time I would have been too embarrassed to tell him the truth, but The was so sick of lying that I had an urge to come clean, on this small matter at least. So I told him what had happened.
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I was surprised at his reaction. 'So it was a brawl, ' he said, with childish delight. 'How thrilling. Are you in love with her? '
'I'm afraid I don't know her too well. '
He laughed. 'Dear me, you are being truthful today, ' he said, with remarkable perspicuity. 'Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn't it? Just like a fiction… By the way, did I tell you that some men came round to see me yesterday afternoon? '
'Who were they? '
'There were two of them. At first I was rather anxious – I thought they were from the State Department, or worse. You've heard of my problems with the Isrami government? '
I am not sure what Julian thought the Isrami government terrorist state though it is – should want to do with him, but his fear of it came from his having taught its exiled crown princess about ten years before. After the revolution she'd been forced into hiding, had ended up somehow at Hampden College; Julian taught her for four years, in private tutorials supervised by the former Isrami minister of education, who would occasionally fly in from Switzerland, with gifts of caviar and chocolates, to make sure that the curriculum was suitable for the heir apparent to his country's throne.
The princess was fabulously rich. (Henry had caught a glimpse of her once – dark glasses, full-length marten coat – clicking rapidly down the stairs of the Lyceum with her bodyguards at her heels. ) The dynasty to which she belonged traced its origins to the Tower of Babel, and had accumulated a monstrous amount of wealth since then, a good deal of which her surviving relatives and associates had managed to smuggle out of the country.
But there was a price on her head, as a result of which she'd been isolated, overprotected, and largely friendless, even while a I teenager at Hampden. Subsequent years had made her a recluse. «She moved from place to place, terrified of assassins; her whole ™ family – except for a cousin or two and a little half-wit brother who was in an institution – had been picked off one by one over the years and even the old Minister of Education, six months after the princess was graduated from college, had died of a sniper's bullet, sitting in the garden of his own little red-roofed house in Montreux.
Julian was uninvolved in Isrami politics despite his fondness for the princess and his sympathy – on principle – with royalists instead of revolutionaries. But he refused to travel by airplane or accept packages COD, lived in fear of unexpected visitors, and had not been abroad in eight or nine years. Whether these were reasonable precautions or excessive ones I do not know, but his connection with the princess did not seem a particularly strong one and I, for one, suspected that the Isramic jihad had better things to do than hunting down Classics tutors in New England.
'Of course, they weren't from the State Department at all but they were connected with the government in some way. I have a sixth sense about such things, isn't that curious? One of the men was an Italian, very charming, really… courtly, almost, in a funny sort of way. I was rather puzzled by it all. They said that Edmund was on drugs. '
'What? '
'Do you think that odd? I think it very odd. '
'What did you say? '
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'I said certainly not. I may be flattering myself, but I do think I know Edmund rather well. He's really quite timid, puritanical, almost… I can't imagine him doing anything of the sort and besides, young people who take drugs are always so bovine and prosaic. But do you know what this man said to me? He said that with young people, you can never tell. I don't think that's right, do you? Do you think that's right? '
We walked through Commons – I could hear the crash of plates overhead in the dining hall – and, on the pretext of having business on that end of campus, I walked on with Julian to the Lyceum.
That part of school, on the North Hampden side, was usually peaceful and desolate, the snow trackless and undisturbed beneath the pines until spring. Now it was trampled and littered like a fairgrounds. Someone had run a Jeep into an elm tree broken glass, twisted fender, horrible splintered wound gaping yellow in the trunk; a foul-mouthed group of townie kids slid and shrieked down the hillside on a piece of cardboard.
'Goodness, ' said Julian, 'those poor children, ' I left him at the back door of the Lyceum and walked to Dr Roland's office. It was a Sunday, he wasn't there; I let myself in and locked the door behind me and spent the afternoon in happy seclusion: grading papers, drinking muddy drip coffee from a mug that said rhonda, and half-listening to the voices from down the hall.
I have the idea that those voices were in fact audible, and that I could have understood what they were saying if I'd paid any attention, but I didn't. It was only later, after I'd left the office and forgotten all about them, that I learned whom they belonged to, and that maybe I hadn't been quite so safe that afternoon as I'd thought.
The FBI men, said Henry, had set up a temporary headquarters in an empty classroom down the hall from Dr Roland's office, and that was where they talked to him. They hadn't been twenty feet from where I sat, were even drinking the same muddy coffee from the same pot I'd made in the teachers' lounge. 'That's odd, ' said Henry. 'The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you. '
'What do you mean? '
'It tasted strange. Burnt. Like your coffee. '
The classroom (Henry said) had a blackboard covered with I quadratic equations, and two full ashtrays, and a long conference =, table at which the three of them sat. There was also a laptop ™ computer, a litigation bag with the FBI insignia in yellow, and a box of maple sugar candies – acorns, wee pilgrims, in fluted paper cups. They belonged to the Italian. 'For my kids, ' he said.
Henry, of course, had done marvelously. He didn't say so, but then he didn't have to. He, in some senses, was the author of this drama and he had waited in the wings a long while for this moment, when he could step onto the stage and assume the role he'd written for himself: cool but friendly; hesitant; reticent with details; bright, but not as bright as he really was. He'd actually enjoyed talking to them, he told me. Davenport was a Philistine, not worth mentioning, but the Italian was somber and polite, quite charming. ('Like one of those old Florentines Dante meets in Purgatory. ') His name was Sciola. He was very interested in the trip to Rome, asked a lot of questions about it, not so much as investigator as fellow tourist. ('Did you boys happen to go out to the, what do you call it, San Prassede, out there around the train station? With that little chapel out on the side? ') He spoke Italian, too, and he and Henry had a brief and happy conversation which was cut short by the irritated Davenport, who didn't understand a word and wanted to get down to business.
Henry was none too forthcoming, with me at least, about what that business actually was. But he did say that whatever track they were on, he was pretty sure it wasn't the right one.
'What's more, ' he said, 'I think I've figured out what it is. '
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'What? '
'Cloke. '
They don't think Cloke killed him? '
'They think Cloke knows more than he's telling. And they think his behavior is questionable. Which, as a matter of fact, it is. They know all kinds of things that I'm sure he didn't tell them. '
'Like what? '
'The logistics of his drug business. Dates, names, places. Things that happened before he even came to Hampden. And they seemed to be trying to tie some of it up with me, which of course they weren't able to do in any kind of satisfactory way. Goodness.
They even asked about my prescriptions, painkillers I got from the infirmary my freshman year. There were file folders all over the place, data that no single person has access to – medical histories, psychological evaluations, faculty comments, work samples, grades… Of course, they made a point of letting me see they had all these things. Trying to intimidate me, I suppose.
I know pretty much exactly what my records say, but Cloke's… bad grades, drugs, suspensions – I'd be willing to bet he's left quite a little trail of paper behind him. I don't know if it's the records per se that have made them curious, or if it was something Cloke himself had said when he talked to them; but mostly what they wanted from me – and from Julian, and from Brady and Patrick Corcoran, to whom they spoke last night – were details of Bunny's association with Cloke. Julian, of course, didn't know anything about it. Brady and Patrick apparently told them plenty.
And I did, too. '
'What are you talking about? '
'Well, I mean, Brady and Patrick were out in the parking lot of the Coachlight Inn smoking pot with him night before last. '
'But what did you tell them? '
'What Cloke told us. About the drug business in New York. '
I leaned back in my chair. 'Oh, my God, ' I said. 'Are you sure you know what you're doing? '
'Of course, ' said Henry serenely. 'It was what they wanted to hear. They'd been circling around it all afternoon, when finally I decided to let it slip, they pounced… I expect Cloke is in for an uncomfortable day or two but really, I think this is very fortunate for us. We couldn't have asked for anything better to keep them busy until the snow melts – and have you noticed how bright it's been the last couple of days? I think the roads are already starting to clear. '
My black eye was the source of much interest, speculation, and debate -1 told Francis that the FBI men had done it just to watch his eyes get round – but not nearly so much as was an article in the Boston Herald. They'd sent a reporter up the day before, as had the New York Post and the New York Daily News, but the Herald reporter had scooped them all.
DRUGS MAY BE INVOLVED IN VERMONT DISAPPEARANCE
Federal agents investigating the April 24 disappearance of Edmund Corcoran, a twenty-four-year-old Hampden College student who has been the subject of an intensive manhunt in Vermont for the past three days, have found that the missing youth may have been involved with drugs.
Federal authorities who searched Corcoran's room discovered drug paraphernalia and heavy cocaine residue.
Though Corcoran had no known history of drug abuse, sources close to the boy say that the normally extroverted Corcoran had become moody and withdrawn in the months prior to the disappearance. (See 'What Your Child Won't Tell You, ' p. 6. )
We were puzzled by this account, though everyone else on campus seemed to know all about it. I got the story from Judy Poovey.
'You know what it was they found in his room? It was, like, this mirror that belonged to Laura Stora. I bet everybody in Durbinstall has done coke off that thing. Really old, with little grooves carved in the side, Jack Teitelbaum used to call it the Snow Queen because you could always scrape up a line or two if you were desperate or something. And sure, I guess it's technically her mirror, but really it's kind of public property and she said she hadn't even seen it in about a million years, somebody took it from a living room in one of the new houses in March.
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Bram Guernsey said that Cloke said it wasn't in Bunny's room when he was there before, that the Feds had planted it, but then Bram said that Cloke thought this whole thing was some kind of a setup. A frame. Like in " Mission: Impossible, " he meant, or one of those paranoia books by Philip K. Dick. He told Bram he thought the Feebies had a hidden camera planted somewhere in Durbinstall, all this wild stuff. Bram says it's because Cloke is afraid to go to sleep and been up on crystal meth for forty-eight hours. He sits around in his room with the door locked and does lines and listens to this song by the Buffalo Springfield, over and over… you know that one? " Something's happening here… what it is ain't exactly clear…" It's weird. People get upset, all of a sudden they want to listen to old hippie garbage they would never listen to if they were in their right mind, when my cat died I had to go out and borrow all these Simon and Garfunkel records.
Anyway. ' She lit a cigarette. 'How did I get off on this? Right, Laura's freaking out, somehow they traced the mirror to her and she's already on probation, you know, had to do all this community service last fall because Flipper Leach got in trouble and ratted on Laura and Jack Teitelbaum – oh, you remember all that stuff, don't you? '
'I never heard of Flipper Leach. '
'Oh, you know Flipper. She's a bitch. Everybody calls her Flipper because she flipped over her dad's Volvo, like, four times freshman year. '
'I don't understand what this Flipper person has to do with this. '
'Well, she doesn't have anything to do with it, Richard, you're just like that guy in " Dragnet" that always wants the facts. It's just that Laura is freaking out, okay, and Student Services is threatening to call her parents unless she tells them how that mirror got in Bunny's room, which she doesn't even have a rucking clue, and, get this, those FBI men found out about the Ecstasy she had at Swing into Spring last week and they want her to give up the names. I said, " Laura, don't do it, it'll be just like that thing with Flipper and everybody'll hate you and you'll have to transfer to another school. " It's like Bram was saying -'
'Where is Cloke now? '
'That's what I was going to tell you if you'd shut up a minute.
Nobody knows. He was really wigged out and asked if he could borrow Bram's car last night, to leave school, but this morning the car was back in the parking lot with the keys in it and nobody's seen him and he's not in his room and something weird is happening there, too, but for sure I don't know what it is… I just won't even do meth anymore. Heebiejeebieville. By the way, I've been meaning to ask you, what did you do to your eye? '
Back at Francis's with the twins – Henry was having lunch with the Corcorans – I told them what Judy had told me.
'But I know that mirror, ' said Camilla.
'I do, too, ' said Francis. 'Spotty old dark one. Bunny's had it in his room for a while. '
'I thought it was his. '
'I wonder how he got hold of it. '
'If the girl left it in a living room, ' said Charles, 'he probably just found it and took it. '
This was highly probable. Bunny had had a mild tendency towards kleptomania, and was apt to pocket any small, valueless articles that caught his eye – nail clippers, buttons, spools of tape.
These he hid around his room in jumbled little nests. It was a vice he practiced in secret, but at the same time he had felt no compunction about quite openly carrying away objects of greater value which he found unattended. He did this with such assurance and authority – tucking bottles of liquor or unguarded boxes I from the florist under his arm and walking away without a backwards glance – that I wondered if he knew it was stealing. I once heard him explaining vigorously and quite unselfconsciously to Marion what he thought ought to be done to people who stole food from house refrigerators.
As bad as things were for Laura Stora, they were worse for the luckless Cloke. We were to discover later that he had not brought Bram Guernsey's car back of his own volition, but had been impelled to do so by the FBI agents, who had had him pulled over before he was ten miles out of Hampden. They took him back to the classroom where they had set up headquarters, and kept him there for most of Sunday night, and while I don't know what they said to him, I do know that by Monday morning he had requested to have an attorney present at the interview.
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Mrs Corcoran (said Henry) was burned up that anyone had dared suggest Bunny was on drugs. At lunch at the Brasserie, a reporter had edged up to the Corcoran table to ask if they had any comment to make about the 'drug paraphernalia' found in Bunny's room.
Mr Corcoran, startled, had lowered his eyebrows impressively and said, 'Well, of course, haw, ahem, ' but Mrs Corcoran, sawing at her steak au poivre with subdued violence, launched without even looking up into a tart diatribe. Drug paraphernalia, as they chose to call it, was not drugs, and it was a pity the press chose to level accusations at persons not present to defend themselves, and she was having a hard enough time as it was without having strangers imply that her son was a drug kingpin. All of which was more or less reasonable and true, and which the Post reported dutifully the next day word for word, alongside an unflattering picture of Mrs Corcoran with her mouth open and a headline which read: mom sez: not my kid.
On Monday night, about two in the morning, Camilla asked me to walk her home from Francis's. Henry had left around midnight; and Francis and Charles, who'd been drinking hard since four o'clock, showed no signs of slowing down. They were entrenched in Francis's kitchen with the lights turned out, preparing, with what I felt was alarming hilarity, a series of hazardous cocktails called 'Blue Blazers' which involved ignited whiskey poured back and forth in a flaming arc between two pewter mugs.
At her apartment Camilla – shivering, preoccupied, her cheeks fever-red from the cold – asked me upstairs for a cup of tea. 'I wonder if we should have left them there, ' she said, switching on the lamp. 'I'm afraid they're going to set themselves on fire. '
'They'll be all right, ' I said, though the same thought had occurred to me.
We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean conveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book; opportunities which I would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures.
The teacup was too hot; it burned my fingertips. I set it down and looked at her – oblivious, smoking a cigarette, scarcely two feet away. I could lose myself forever in that singular little face, in the pessimism of her beautiful mouth. Come here, you. Let's shut the light out, shall we? When I imagined these phrases cast in her voice, they were almost intolerably sweet; now, sitting right beside her, it was unthinkable that I should voice them myself.
And yet: why should it be? She had been party to the killing of two men; had stood calm as a Madonna and watched Bunny die. I remembered Henry's cool voice, scarcely six weeks earlier. There was a certain carnal dement to the proceedings, yes.
'Camilla? ' I said.
She glanced up, distracted.
'What really happened, that night in the woods? '
I think I had been expecting, if not surprise, at least a show of it. But she didn't blink. 'Well, I don't remember an awful lot, ' she said slowly. 'And what I do remember is almost impossible to describe. It's all much less clear than it was even a few months ago. I suppose I should have tried to write it down or something. '
'But what do you remember? '
It was a moment before she answered. 'Well, I'm sure you've heard it all from Henry, ' she said. 'It seems a bit silly to even say it aloud. I remember a pack of dogs. Snakes twining around my arms. Trees on fire, pines bursting into flames like enormous torches. There was a fifth person with us for part of the time. '
'A fifth person? '
'It wasn't always a person. '
'I don't know what you mean. '
'You know what the Greeks called Dionysus. no Xveidri^. The Many-Formed One. Sometimes it was a man, sometimes a woman. And sometimes something else. I – I'll tell you something that I do remember, ' she said abruptly.
'What? ' I said, hopeful at last for some passionate, back-clawing detail.
'That dead man. Lying on the ground. His stomach was torn open and steam was coming out of it. '
'His stomach"! '
'It was a cold night. I'll never forget the smell of it, either. Like when my uncle used to cut up deer. Ask Francis. He remembers, too. '
I was too horrified to say anything. She reached for the teapot and poured a bit more into her cup. 'Do you know, ' she said, 'why I think we're having such bad luck this time around? '
'What? '
'Because it's terrible luck to leave a body unburied. That farmer they found straightaway, you know. But remember poor I Palinurus in the Aeneid~› He lingered around and haunted them ^^^ for the longest time. I'm afraid that none of us are going to have ^B a good night's sleep until Bunny's in the ground. '
That's nonsense. '
She laughed. 'In the fourth century b. c., the sailing of the entire Attic fleet was delayed just because a soldier sneezed. '
'You've been talking too much to Henry. '
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: 'Do you know what Henry made us do, a couple of days after that thing in the woods? '
'What? '
'He made us kill a piglet. '
I was not shocked so much by this statement as by the eerie calm with which she delivered it. 'Oh, my God, ' I said.
'We cut its throat. Then we took turns holding it over each other, so it bled on our heads and hands. It was awful. I nearly got sick. '
It seemed to me that the wisdom of deliberately covering oneself with blood – even pig blood – immediately after committing a murder was questionable, but all I said was: 'Why did he want to do that? '
'Murder is pollution. The murderer defiles everyone he comes into contact with. And the only way to purify blood is through blood. We let the pig bleed on us. Then we went inside and washed it off. After that, we were okay. '
'Are you trying to tell me, ' I said, 'that '
'Oh, don't worry, ' she said hastily. 'I don't think he plans on doing anything like that this time. '
'Why? Didn't it work? '
She failed to catch the sarcasm of this. 'Oh, no, ' she said. 'I think it worked, all right. '
'Then why not do it again? '
'Because I think Henry has got the idea that it might upset you. '
There was the fumble of a key in the lock, and a few moments later Charles plunged through the door. He shouldered his coat off and let it fall in a heap on the rug.
'Hello, hello, ' he sang, lurching inside and shedding his jacket in the same fashion. He had not come into the living room, but made an abrupt turn into the hallway which led to bedrooms and bath. A door opened, then another. 'Milly, my girl, ' I heard him call. 'Where are you, honey? '
'Oh, dear, ' said Camilla. Out loud, she said: 'We're in here, Charles. '
Charles reappeared. His tie was now loosened and his hair was wild. 'Camilla, ' he said, leaning against the doorframe, 'Camilla, ' and then he saw me.
'You, ' he said, not too politely. 'What are you doing here? '
'We're just having some tea, ' said Camilla. 'Would you like some? '
'No. ' He turned and disappeared into the hall again. 'Too late.
Going to bed. '
A door slammed. Camilla and I looked at each other. I stood up.
'Well, ' I said, 'better be heading home. '
There were still search parties, but the number of participating townspeople had shrunk dramatically, and almost no students remained at all. The operation had turned tight, secretive, professional.
I heard the police had brought in a psychic, a fingerprint expert, a special team of bloodhounds trained at Dannemora.
Perhaps because I imagined that I was tainted with a secret pollution, imperceptible to most but perhaps discernible to the nose of a dog (in movies, the dog is always the first to know the suave and unsuspected vampire for what it is), the thought of the bloodhounds made me superstitious and I tried to stay as far away from dogs as I could, all dogs, even the dopey Labrador mutts who belonged to the ceramics teacher and were always r running around with their tongues hanging out, looking for a j IB game of Frisbee. Henry – imagining, perhaps, some trembling Kassandra gibbering prophecies to a chorus of policemen – was far more concerned about the psychic. 'If they're going to find us out, ' he said, with glum certainty, 'that's how it's going to happen. '
'Certainly you don't believe in that stuff. '
He gave me a look of indescribable contempt.
'You amaze me, ' he said. 'You think nothing exists if you can't see it. '
The psychic was a young mother from upstate New York. An electrical shock from some jumper cables had put her into a coma from which she emerged, three weeks later, able to 'know' things by handling an object or touching a stranger's hand. The police had used her successfully in a number of missing-person cases. Once she had found the body of a strangled child by merely pointing to an area on a surveyor's map. Henry, who was so superstitious that he sometimes left a saucer of milk outside his door to appease any malevolent spirits who might happen to wander by, watched her, fascinated, as she walked alone on the edge of campus – thick glasses, suburban car coat, red hair tied up in a polka-dot scarf.
'It's unfortunate, ' he said. 'I don't dare risk meeting her. But I should like to talk to her very much. '
The majority of our classmates, however, were thrown into an uproar by the information – accurate or not, I still don't know – that the Drug Enforcement Agency had brought in agents and was conducting an undercover investigation. Theophile Gautier, writing about the effect of Vigny's Chatterton on the youth of Paris, said that in the nineteenth-century night one could practically hear the crack of the solitary pistols: here, now, in Hampden, the night was alive with the flushing of toilets. Pillheads, cokeheads staggered around glassy-eyed, dazed at their sudden losses. Someone flushed so much pot down one of the toilets in the sculpture studio they had to get somebody in from the Water Department to dig up the septic tank.
About four-thirty on Monday afternoon, Charles showed up at my room. 'Hello, ' he said. 'Want to get something to eat? '
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