You Can't Catch Me

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Grunwald is not above the law!”

  “‘I am Law. I am all that is.’”

  “We’ll see about that. The bastard.”

  Zoe laughed. “Who has spoken?”

  “—The man must die.”

  She drew the robe closer about her, as if chilled. “Who has spoken?” she repeated, more urgently.

  “I have spoken.”

  “And ‘I’ is—?”

  Tristram scarcely hesitated. “Angus Markham.”

  “And ‘I’ is brave enough, strong enough, hard enough, for such a task?”

  Zoe spoke doubtfully; yet hopefully. She was lying in the chair with her head at a slant, observing Tristram along the curve of her cheekbones. Again she beckoned him to her and again Tristram knelt before her, trembling with desire, gathering her in his arms (how small she was! how slight! how easily subdued!) and covering her face, her eyes, her neck, her bosom, with ravenous kisses. Her arms closed tight about his neck; the sensation ran through him like a wave. She murmured, “Says He, ‘I name love.’”

  Tristram half shut his eyes, feeling he might faint. He said, softly, “Love.”

  He kissed Zoe’s moist parted lips; pressed his eager weight against her; and Zoe arched herself against him, as if overcome suddenly with his very desire. Then, to Tristram’s horror, she cried out sharply, in pain. “Oh! Angus! The needle has left me too raw—”

  “The needle?”

  “His needle,” Zoe said, wincing. She examined with her fingertips, and gently rubbed, a tender reddened area on her belly, extending into the ashy-golden halo of pubic hair below, where the tattooing—lines of cuneiform verse in fierce orange ink—appeared to be fresh. The ink glowed as if incandescent.

  “The monster’s most recent ‘charm,’ done only last week!”

  Tristram, by this time both weak with desire and wildly energized by it, did not know what to do. The blood beat hot in his face, and in his penis, which was stiff to the point of pain; swollen near to bursting. He told himself, You must not force your lust upon the poor woman … you must not.

  So he stood, and adjusted his clothing, and made an effort to speak calmly. “Will you allow me to take you to a doctor?”

  Zoe shook her head without seeming to hear. She examined the tattoo, poking her flesh rather rudely, impatiently. She said bitterly, “It has not healed. How he would laugh at me now, at me, and at you, seeing us, now!”

  She stood, and closed the robe about her; weeping angrily; saying, “It has not healed. It has not healed. I was certain it had healed and it has not.”

  Tristram said, “I love you, Zoe. I would do anything for you. Let me take you, now, to a—”

  “Go away! You must go away, now! If you love me,—if you love her—you must go away now, before she returns. Pain and self-pity will bring her back; she is always close by, waiting; I feel her returning even now; poor piteous doomed woman! You must leave, Angus, if you love me, before she undoes all that we have done; and sends you away forever.”

  Before Tristram could protest, Zoe ran from the room; and Tristram was left alone. The fire burned behind him in the marble fireplace; out on Delancy Street, a single automobile passed quietly. Tristram whispered aloud, “It is not to be believed.” He saw something gleaming on the carpet, and went to pick it up; an old-fashioned mother-of-pearl comb, shaped like a bow.

  He turned the comb in his fingers and whispered, like a man under a spell, “It is to be believed.”

  III

  1

  Tristram left Delancy Street in a trance of oblivion; yet charged with purpose. For he knew now why he had come to Philadelphia: to kill a man named Otto Grunwald, a stranger to him; and to bring back with him, to Richmond, to his ancestral home, a beautiful young woman named Fleur Grunwald … Fleur, or Zoe … who was scarcely more than a stranger to him too.

  Now I know my destiny, Tristram thought, impassioned. Now I know why I was born.

  That night, he walked for hours; scarcely knowing where he was; bombarded with thoughts, plans, flashes of dreamlike scenes,—rehearsals of the moment when he would raise his hand against Grunwald and strike him down. Would he use a knife? (He had no knife.) Would he use a gun? (He had no gun.) Perhaps, overcome with fury and loathing of his enemy, he would simply use his hands … his strong hands. (Tristram flexed his fingers and examined them in surprise. The fingers were strong; stronger than he recalled. Their backs were covered with white-blond hairs and the knuckles seemed enlarged. These were hands certainly capable of choking another man to death, and of taking pleasure in it!)

  Tristram regretted for the moment that he was not home in Richmond since, there, it would be no difficult task to poke about in his father’s things; the things his father had willed him; fishing and hunting knives … rifles … shotguns … several collector’s handguns, including a German luger in working condition, souvenir of the War. Like most of the male Heades, Tristram’s father had been a sportsman of a kind, with a gentlemanly and seasonal interest in killing wild creatures; he had strongly encouraged Tristram to accompany him to the family hunting camp in the Monongahela mountains, but Tristram had always demurred. Now, for the first time in his life, Tristram regretted his solitary, bookish boyhood. I might have been baptized in blood, he thought. My forehead dampened with blood from my first deer kill.

  The thought made him shudder.

  And yet: wasn’t it easily done? For after all it is done all the time. Glancing through the Philadelphia newspaper delivered to his hotel room, Tristram had been appalled by the number of local crimes recorded. Most of the articles were brief, no more than a paragraph or two beneath a laconic headline, buried in the interior of the paper amidst advertisements for women’s fashions and lingerie: gunman shoots down victims in street … husband kills estranged wife, four-year-old child, and himself … drug-dealers executed “gangland style” … six “badly decomposed” corpses, of indeterminate sex, discovered in tenement apartment in South Philadelphia. There was a spirit of madness in the very air perhaps!

  Of course, Tristram’s “crime” would be no crime at all in the usual sense of the word, and he did not consider it such. It would be a purely disinterested act of justice and necessity: the monster-madman Grunwald must die that lovely Fleur might live. So simple an equation as that.

  Tristram seemed to know too that he would never be caught. The very concept of being “caught” for so selfless a deed was unthinkable; even vulgar. I will kill the man before he knows who I am, and what my purpose is, he thought, excited. Blood pulsed through his body like the fierce hot purposeful blood of carnal desire. For the first time in his life Tristram understood why men died for love. When he thought of poor Fleur … poor Zoe … her lovely body disfigured as it was … and the threat of an unspeakable disfigurement, indeed mutilation, to come … he was overcome with rage. The man must die. The man must die. The man must die. To throw one’s life away in the service of love did not seem to him so extreme … though, prior to this, it had to be confessed that Tristram had encountered the motive only in books. He wondered if he had spent his youth collecting books, perusing them with an almost religious awe, in order that, one day, in the prime of his manhood, he would realize himself as a living breathing human being with the motive, the passion, and the zeal of an imagined being, whom love for a woman inhabited like a Fury of antiquity.

  “How happy I am!”

  He looked up startled to see the facade of the Hotel Moreau, its marquee still lighted though it was dawn; a splendid fresh golden-glowing dawn; the newly budded trees in the Square illuminated with light and moisture, like a nimbus surrounding the entire park. Had he walked all night? Where had he walked? The uniformed doorman hurried to open the door for him, murmuring, “Good morning Mr. Markham,” and Tristram nodded, smiling, in reply. He would sleep; he would gather his strength; and, sometime within the next forty-eight hours,—he would give himself two days, which seemed more reasonable than merely one—he would murder Otto
Grunwald.

  2

  Tristram slept; slept for six hours; so deep, profound, and wonderfully restorative a sleep, that, waking, he could scarcely remember where he was; or why.

  Only that he had come a long distance; and had a very long distance to go.

  Lying abed in his paralysis of sleep, as one struck dumb, or enchanted, he had heard the telephone ringing but had made no move to answer it; and eventually of course it had stopped ringing. Had it been Fleur? Markham himself? Someone from his past life?

  “But no one must interrupt me now.”

  Tristram did not think it strange but, in its way, utterly natural, blessed as he was by Fleur Grunwald’s love, that he seemed to have wakened with the outline of a strategy in his head; not a fully realized plan, for the details would have to be worked out in medias res, but a plan with which to begin. One of the antiquarian dealers with whom he had spoken the day before had mentioned that Otto Grunwald too was a collector: less of rare books and manuscripts than of antiquarian medical paraphernalia—including, coincidentally, yet, it almost seemed, naturally, ophthalmic prostheses, or glass eyes.

  Tristram considered: as a riding horse has a “good” and a “bad” side by which he is approached so a man has a “good” and a “bad” side, and Tristram Heade, well versed in the obsessions of collectors, had no doubt but that he knew what Grunwald’s “good” side might be.

  Though it was not an easy task to speak with Otto Grunwald in person, nor even to locate a number by which the millionaire philanthropist might be reached, Tristram shrewdly persisted through a dozen or more telephone calls. (As he ate, with distracted pleasure, but pleasure nonetheless, a lavish breakfast of eggs Benedict, Canadian bacon crisply fried, strawberries, honeydew melon, and blueberries topped with cream, elegantly presented by room service.) First, he called the antiquarian dealer, who claimed not to have Grunwald’s private number; the man communicated with his customer solely by mail, he said, sending brochures and the like to Grunwald’s office in the city. Several other dealers, whom Tristram called next, told him the same thing. He then called his lawyer cousin, who seemed surprised to hear Tristram’s voice so soon again, though the man was genial enough in explaining, with regret, that, though the firm surely had Grunwald’s private number listed somewhere, he really could not give it out, “even to a blood relative—even for a very good reason.” Tristram said quietly, “This is a slap in the face,” and hung up before his cousin could reply.

  Next, though guessing it hopeless, he called one of the numbers listed for Grunwald & Sons, Inc., and was told by a motherly sounding receptionist, that, if the situation was really “a sort of emergency” as Tristram said, he might send a telegram to Mr. Grunwald’s home on Burlingham Boulevard, with the request that Mr. Grunwald respond.

  “Of course,” Tristram said. “The very thing.”

  So excited was he, so inspired, the wording of the telegram came easily, even as he dialed Western Union to dictate it. Have precious collector’s item belonging to you. Will negotiate. He hesitated over which name to use: Tristram, or Markham. Fleur knew him as Markham, but did Grunwald know Markham? Did he even know the name? Better to use Tristram Heade, a name of absolute innocence, unsullied. But for the telegram he would simply use his initials, and ask Grunwald to telephone him here in the hotel if interested.

  So confident was Tristram that Grunwald would respond, that, being the man he was, Grunwald could not not respond, he finished his breakfast in high spirits, and began his toilette in preparation for going out. As he shaved he whistled loudly, a cheery military tune, whose title he could not have named.

  And the call, from a man who identified himself as Grunwald’s personal secretary, did come, within the hour.

  3

  The appointment was set for 6:30 P.M. at Grunwald’s home. It was now 3:15 P.M.

  Tristram arranged for two dozen red roses to be sent to Fleur at Delancy Street, with the accompanying note: My dearest darling, do not despair! I love you and I vow I will remove from your life any and all impediments to your happiness. When next you hear from me you may be a free woman. Your loving—

  He saw no alternative but to sign himself Angus.

  (Thinking that, when he and Fleur were safely removed to Richmond, and to another, happier life, he would tell her who he really was.)

  He then reread the note, and changed may for will. His fingers, gripping the pen, had begun to tremble.

  Quite by chance, in a zippered compartment in Markham’s suitcase which he had missed the other day, Tristram found, to his amazement, a sheathed dagger—a cruel-looking weapon with a ten-inch steel blade and a carved wooden handle.

  Of course! The very thing!

  He weighed it in his hand; stood before a mirror brandishing it; making short quick stabbing motions in the air; a bit awkwardly at first, then with more assurance. So I will not be forced to use my hands after all, he thought.

  The dagger did not look new, yet its blade shone clean and razor-sharp. Tristram wondered to what purpose Angus Markham had employed it and his heart gave a little lurch of anticipation.

  He also found, in the same compartment, a gold tie-clasp engraved with the initials A T M, a pair of gold cuff links, and three women’s rings—a ruby, an opal, and a diamond-studded wedding band. The inside of the band was engraved E S F. “And what is one to make of all this?” Tristram wondered aloud. “Someday, perhaps, ‘Angus’ will explain.”

  In preparation for that evening Tristram tried on several outfits; settling finally upon a light tweed sports coat of Markham’s, with leather elbow patches, that gave him, he thought, just the right air of the intellectual and the casual. He chose a white cotton shirt that might have been his own, and a necktie of alternating dark green and pale green stripes, very possibly his own. He regarded his mirrored reflection with guarded approval: a tall broad-shouldered handsome man with hair so pale as to appear white, a slightly flushed skin, and bright, hard, canny eyes, framed by rather scholarly glasses. An intelligent man, perhaps a university professor; certainly bookish; “sensitive”; a person of high integrity, not easily dissuaded from any mission. Extending his right hand to be shaken he said, smiling, “Hello. My name is—”

  He sheathed the dagger without further examination, and slipped it into a pocket, where its bulge might be mistaken for a pipe, or a small book.

  All the while, the glass eye was lying in the marble ashtray atop the dresser; unmoving; blind; yet staring, it almost seemed, in Tristram’s direction. Tristram was uneasily aware of it, and did not neglect, before he left, to wrap it up carefully in a handkerchief, and place it in his inside breast pocket. “For safekeeping.”

  Time seemed to be passing with unnatural slowness, so Tristram decided to take a taxi to within a few miles of Grunwald’s home, and walk, at his leisure, the remainder of the distance. Otherwise he feared he would find himself on Delancy Street, staring up at her windows, like any lovelorn suitor.

  You must not return to that woman empty-handed: your man’s pride will not allow it.

  Thus, strolling in Fairmount Park, on an embankment high above the Schuylkill River, Tristram thought of Fleur; and of Zoe; his thoughts oscillating helplessly between the two. He felt an almost unbearable tenderness … or did he feel desire so swift and violent it brought tears to his eyes. How sweet Fleur was, and how innocent!—how beautiful, how voluptuous, how seductive, Zoe! As in a vision Tristram saw again poor trembling Fleur in the doorway of his hotel room; as in a forbidden dream he felt again Zoe’s arms around his neck and the surprising force of her lips against his … and, not least, her barbarously tattooed body. Of course, this body was Fleur’s too. “I must keep that in mind.”

  Tristram checked his watch and discovered to his surprise that it was only 5:08 P.M. Was his watch working? He could not believe that time was passing with such excruciating slowness.

  Surely it had been many hours since Grunwald’s secretary had called?

  But a
passerby confirmed the time: in fact, the man’s watch read 5:03.

  So Tristram sat on a park bench beside a lagoon, to rest, and to wait; he was no more than a mile from Burlingham Boulevard, and did not want to waste his energy in purposeless tramping about, however attractive Fairmount Park. This was no pleasure outing after all: he had come to kill a man … a man whose name he had not known only a few days before … and whose face, even now, he did not know.

  The curiosity of the situation rose before Tristram, suddenly. Had he not come to Philadelphia merely to buy two or three antiquarian books? Among them, Mr. Lux’s “rare” folio edition of … whatever the title. It was a trip he had made numerous times, always by Pullman, and always, excepting the usual minor dislocations of travel, pleasurable. And now!

  My dearest darling, do not despair, I will do anything anything anything for you I love you I adore you I vow to protect you with my life.… Tristram’s fingers slipped inside his coat pocket, to touch, to caress, to confirm, Markham’s splendid dagger.

  But how would he use it? How, precisely?

  The thought came to him that the most expeditious method of committing murder is probably, simply, to commit it; at an unexpected moment; at a moment, wayward-seeming, unpremeditated, when the agent himself (that is, the “murderer”) does not expect to act. One gets into position; into what might be called the context of murder; and then,—“Taking yourself by surprise you take your quarry by surprise as well.” Tristram shaped these remarkable words aloud though they were altogether new to him, so far as he knew.

  Unless of course his father had passed this wisdom along to him, years ago, in Tristram’s callow youth; when he had imagined himself immune to love, and to the consummation of manly honor.

  “Excuse me, sir!”

  Tristram glanced up to see before him on the path a white-haired old man in a panama hat and soiled, shabby clothing, a knapsack on his back and what appeared to be wires poking out of his collar; he blocked Tristram’s way, smiling a kindly if strained smile, and extended for Tristram’s perusal, or his purchase, a pamphlet titled in stark red letters ARMAGEDDON: ARE YOU PREPARED? The Selected Wisdom of Bruno Love, Ph.D.