Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Honestly? What did he do? Art fraud? That’s what comes to mind, sitting at an outdoor table in Florence, but he was probably just a stock swindler.”

  “Something white-collar, in other words.”

  “Something flowing-collar, from the looks of him. I give up. What did he do?”

  I’d been looking his way, and our glances caught. I saw recognition come into his eyes, and his eyebrows went up again in that manner that was unmistakably his. He pushed his chair back, got to his feet.

  “Here he comes,” I said. “You can ask him yourself.”

  “Mr. Scudder,” he said. “I want to say Martin, but I know that’s not right. Help me out.”

  “Matthew, Mr. Pollard. And this is my wife, Elaine.”

  “How fortunate for you,” he told me, and took the hand she extended. “I looked over here and thought, What a beautiful woman! Then I looked again and thought, I know that fellow. But then it took me a minute to place you. The name came first, or the surname, at any rate. His name’s Scudder, but how do I know him? And then of course the rest of it came to me, all but your first name. I knew it wasn’t Martin, but I couldn’t sweep that name out of my mind and let Matthew come in.” He sighed. “It’s a curious muscle, the memory. Or aren’t you old enough yet to have found it so?”

  “My memory’s still pretty good.”

  “Oh, mine’s good,” he said. “It’s just capricious. Willful, I sometimes think.”

  At my invitation, he pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat down. “But only for a moment,” he said, and asked what brought us to Italy, and how long we’d be in Florence. He lived here, he told us. He’d lived here for quite a few years now. He knew our hotel, on the east bank of the Arno, and pronounced it charming and a good value. He mentioned a café just down the street from the hotel that we really ought to try.

  “Although you certainly don’t need to follow my recommendations,” he said, “or Michelin’s, either. You can’t get a bad meal in Florence. Well, that’s not entirely true. If you insist on going to high-priced restaurants, you’ll encounter the occasional disappointment. But if you simply blunder into whatever humble trattoria is closest, you’ll dine well every time.”

  “I think we’ve been dining a little too well,” Elaine said.

  “It’s a danger,” he acknowledged, “although the Florentines manage to stay quite slim themselves. I started to bulk up a bit when I first came here. How could one help it? Everything tasted so good. But I took off the pounds I gained and I’ve kept them off. Though I sometimes wonder why I bother. For God’s sake, I’m seventy-six years old.”

  “You don’t look it,” she told him.

  “I wouldn’t care to look it. But why is that, do you suppose? No one else on God’s earth gives a damn what I look like. Why should it matter to me?”

  She said it was self-respect, and he mused on the difficulty of telling where self-respect left off and vanity began. Then he said he was staying too long at the fair, wasn’t he, and got to his feet. “But you must visit me,” he said. “My villa is not terribly grand, but it’s quite nice and I’m proud enough of it to want to show it off. Please tell me you’ll come for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Well . . .”

  “It’s settled, then,” he said, and gave me his card. “Any cabdriver will know how to find it. Set the price in advance, though. Some of them will cheat you, although most are surprisingly honest. Shall we say one o’clock?” He leaned forward, placed his palms on the table. “I’ve thought of you often over the years, Matthew. Especially here, sipping caffé nero a few yards from Michelangelo’s David. It’s not the original, you know. That’s in a museum, though even the museums are less than safe these days. You know the Uffizzi was bombed a few years ago?”

  “I read about that.”

  “The Mafia. Back home they just kill each other. Here they blow up masterpieces. Still, it’s a wonderfully civilized country, by and large. And I suppose I had to wind up here, near the David.” He’d lost me, and I guess he knew it, because he frowned, annoyed at himself. “I just ramble,” he said. “I suppose the one thing I’m short of here is people to talk to. And I always thought I could talk to you, Matthew. Circumstances prevented my so doing, of course, but over the years I regretted the lost opportunity.” He straightened up. “Tomorrow, one o’clock. I look forward to it.”

  “Well, of course I’m dying to go,” Elaine said. “I’d love to see what his place looks like. ‘It’s not terribly grand but it’s quite nice.’ I’ll bet it’s nice. I’ll bet it’s gorgeous.”

  “You’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know. He wants to talk to you, and three might be a crowd for the kind of conversation he wants to have. It wasn’t art theft you arrested him for, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Did he kill someone?”

  “His lover.”

  “Well, that’s what each man does, isn’t it? Kills the thing he loves, according to what’shisname.”

  “Oscar Wilde.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Memory. Actually, I knew that. Sometimes when a person says what’shisname or whatchamacallit it’s not because she can’t remember. It’s just a conversational device.”

  “I see.”

  She gave me a searching look. “There was something about it,” she said. “What?”

  “It was brutal.” My mind filled with a picture of the murder scene, and I blinked it away. “You see a lot on the job, and most of it’s ugly, but this was pretty bad.”

  “He seems so gentle. I’d expect any murder he committed to be virtually non-violent.”

  “There aren’t many non-violent murders.”

  “Well, bloodless, anyway.”

  “This was anything but.”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What did he do?”

  “He used a knife,” I said.

  “And stabbed him?”

  “Carved him,” I said. “His lover was younger than Pollard, and I guess he was a good-looking man, but you couldn’t prove it by me. What I saw looked like what’s left of the turkey the day after Thanksgiving.”

  “Well, that’s vivid enough,” she said. “I have to say I get the picture.”

  “I was first on the scene except for the two uniforms who caught the squeal, and they were young enough to strike a cynical pose.”

  “While you were old enough not to. Did you throw up?”

  “No, after a few years you just don’t. But it was as bad as anything I’d ever seen.”

  Horton Pollard’s villa was north of the city, and if it wasn’t grand it was nevertheless beautiful, a white stuccoed gem set on a hillside with a commanding view of the valley. He showed us through the rooms, answered Elaine’s questions about the paintings and furnishings, and accepted her explanation of why she couldn’t stay for lunch. Or appeared to—as she rode off in the taxi that had brought us, something in his expression suggested for an instant that he felt slighted by her departure.

  “We’ll dine on the terrace,” he said. “But what’s the matter with me? I haven’t offered you a drink. What will you have, Matthew? The bar’s well stocked, although I don’t know that Paolo has a very extensive repertoire of cocktails.”

  I said that any kind of sparkling water would be fine. He said something in Italian to his house boy, then gave me an appraising glance and asked me if I would want wine with our lunch.

  I said I wouldn’t. “I’m glad I thought to ask,” he said. “I was going to open a bottle and let it breathe, but now it can just go on holding its breath. You used to drink, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “The night it all happened,” he said. “It seems to me you told me I looked as though I needed a drink. And I got out a bottle, and you poured drinks for both of us. I remember being surprised you were allowed to drink on duty.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said, “but I didn’t always let that stop me.”
r />   “And now you don’t drink at all?”

  “I don’t, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t have wine with lunch.”

  “But I never do,” he said. “I couldn’t while I was locked up, and when I was released I found I didn’t care for it, the taste or the physical sensation. I drank the odd glass of wine anyway, for a while, because I thought one couldn’t be entirely civilized without it. Then I realized I didn’t care. That’s quite the nicest thing about age, perhaps the only good thing to be said for it. Increasingly, one ceases to care about more and more things, particularly the opinions of others. Different for you, though, wasn’t it? You stopped because you had to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Now and then.”

  “I don’t, but, then, I was never that fond of it. There was a time when I could distinguish different châteaux in a blind tasting, but the truth of the matter was that I never cared for any of them all that much, and after-dinner cognac gave me heartburn. And now I drink mineral water with my meals, and coffee after them. Acqua minerale. There’s a favorite trattoria of mine where the owner calls it acqua miserabile. But he’d as soon sell me it as anything else. He doesn’t care, and I shouldn’t care if he did.”

  Lunch was simple but elegant—a green salad, ravioli with butter and sage, and a nice piece of fish. Our conversation was mostly about Italy, and I was sorry Elaine hadn’t stayed to hear it. He had a lot to say—about the way art permeated everyday Florentine life, about the longstanding enthusiasm of the British upper classes for the city—and I found it absorbing enough, but it would have held more interest for her than for me.

  Afterward Paolo cleared our dishes and served espresso. We fell silent, and I sipped my coffee and looked out at the view of the valley and wondered how long it would take for the eye to tire of it.

  “I thought I would grow accustomed to it,” he said, reading my mind. “But I haven’t yet, and I don’t think I ever will.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Almost fifteen years. I came on a visit as soon as I could after my release.”

  “And you’ve never been back?”

  He shook his head. “I came intending to stay, and once here I managed to arrange the necessary resident visa. It’s not difficult if there’s money, and I was fortunate. There’s still plenty of money, and there always will be. I live well, but not terribly high. Even if I live longer than anyone should, there will be money sufficient to see me out.”

  “That makes it easier.”

  “It does,” he agreed. “It didn’t make the years inside any easier, I have to say that, but if I hadn’t had money I might have spent them someplace even worse. Not that the place they put me was a pleasure dome.”

  “I suppose you were at a mental hospital.”

  “A facility for the criminally insane,” he said, pronouncing the words precisely. “The phrase has a ring to it, doesn’t it? And yet it was entirely appropriate. The act I performed was unquestionably criminal, and altogether insane.”

  He helped himself to more espresso. “I brought you here so that I could talk about it,” he said. “Selfish of me, but that’s part of being old. One becomes more selfish, or perhaps less concerned about concealing one’s selfishness from oneself and others.” He sighed. “One also becomes more direct, but in this instance it’s hard to know where to start.”

  “Wherever you want,” I suggested.

  “With David, I suppose. Not the statue, though. The man.”

  “Maybe my memory’s not all I like to think it is,” I said. “Was your lover’s name David? Because I could have sworn it was Robert. Robert Naismith, and there was a middle name, but that wasn’t David, either.”

  “It was Paul,” he said. “His name was Robert Paul Naismith. He wanted to be called Rob. I called him David sometimes, but he didn’t care for that. In my mind, though, he would always be David.”

  I didn’t say anything. A fly buzzed in a corner, then went still. The silence stretched.

  Then he began to talk.

  “I grew up in Buffalo,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been there. A very beautiful city, at least in its nicer sections. Wide streets lined with elms. Some fine public buildings, some notable private homes. Of course the elms are all lost to Dutch Elm disease, and the mansions on Delaware Avenue now house law firms and dental clinics, but everything changes, doesn’t it? I’ve come round to the belief that it’s supposed to, but that doesn’t mean one has to like it.

  “Buffalo hosted the Pan-American Exposition, which was even before my time. It was held in 1901, if I remember correctly, and several of the buildings raised for the occasion remain to this day. One of the nicest, built alongside the city’s principal park, has long been the home of the Buffalo Historical Society, and houses their museum collection.

  “Are you wondering where this is leading? There was, and doubtless still is, a circular drive at the Historical Building’s front, and in the midst of it stood a bronze copy of Michelangelo’s David. It might conceivably be a casting, though I think we can safely assume it to be just a copy. It’s life-size, at any rate—or I should say actual size, as Michelangelo’s statue is itself considerably larger than life, unless the young David was built more along the lines of his adversary Goliath.

  “You saw the statue yesterday—although, as I said, that too was a copy. I don’t know how much attention you paid to it, but I wonder if you know what the sculptor is supposed to have said when asked how he managed to create such a masterpiece. It’s such a wonderful line it would almost have to be apocryphal.

  “ ‘I looked at the marble,’ Michelangelo is said to have said, ‘and I cut away the part that wasn’t David.’ That’s almost as delicious as the young Mozart explaining that musical composition is the easiest thing in the world, you have merely to write down the music you hear in your head. Who cares, really, if either of them ever said any such thing? If they didn’t, well, they ought to have done, wouldn’t you say?

  “I’ve known that statue all my life. I can’t recall when I first saw it, but it must have been on my first visit to the Historical Building, and that would have been at a very early age. Our house was on Nottingham Terrace, not a ten-minute walk from the Historical Building, and I went there innumerable times as a boy. And it seems to me I always responded to the David. The stance, the attitude, the uncanny combination of strength and vulnerability, of fragility and confidence. And, of course, the sheer physical beauty of the David, the sexuality—but it was a while before I was aware of that aspect of it, or before I let myself acknowledge my awareness.

  “When we all turned sixteen and got driver’s licenses, David took on new meaning in our lives. The circular drive, you see, was the lovers’ lane of choice for young couples who needed privacy. It was a pleasant, parklike setting in a good part of town, unlike the few available alternatives in nasty neighborhoods down by the waterfront. Consequently, ‘going to see David’ became a euphemism for parking and making out—which, now that I think of it, are euphemisms themselves, aren’t they?

  “I saw a lot of David in my late teens. The irony, of course, is that I was far more drawn to his young masculine form than to the generous curves of the young women who were my companions on those visits. I was gay, it seems to me, from birth, but I didn’t let myself know that. At first I denied the impulses. Later, when I learned to act on them—in Front Park, in the men’s room at the Greyhound station—I denied that they meant anything. It was, I assured myself, a stage I was going through.”

  He pursed his lips, shook his head, sighed. “A lengthy stage,” he said, “as I seem still to be going through it. I was aided in my denial by the fact that whatever I did with other young men was just an adjunct to my real life, which was manifestly normal. I went off to a good school, I came home at Christmas and during the summer, and wherever I was I enjoyed the company of women.

  “Lovemaking in those years was us
ually a rather incomplete affair. Girls made a real effort to remain virginal, at least in a strictly technical sense, if not until marriage then until they were in what we nowadays call a committed relationship. I don’t remember what we called it then, but I suspect it was a somewhat less cumbersome phrase.

  “Still, sometimes one went all the way, and on those occasions I acquitted myself well enough. None of my partners had cause to complain. I could do it, you see, and I enjoyed it, and if it was less thrilling than what I found with male partners, well, chalk it up to the lure of the forbidden. It didn’t have to mean there was anything wrong with me. It didn’t mean I was different in any fundamental way.

  “I led a normal life, Matthew. I would say I was determined to lead a normal life, but it never seemed to require much in the way of determination. During my senior year at college I became engaged to a girl I’d known literally all my life. Our parents were friends and we’d grown up together. I graduated and we were married. I took an advanced degree. My field was art history, as you may remember, and I managed to get an appointment to the faculty of the University of Buffalo. SUNY Buffalo, they call it now, but that was years before it became a part of the state university. It was just plain UB, with most of its student body drawn from the city and environs.

  “We lived at first in an apartment near the campus, but then both sets of parents ponied up and we moved to a small house on Hallam, just about equidistant between the houses each of us had grown up in.

  “It wasn’t far from the statue of David, either.”

  He led a normal life, he explained. Fathered two children. Took up golf and joined the country club. He came into some family money, and a textbook he authored brought in royalties that grew more substantial each year. As the years passed, it became increasingly easy to believe that his relations with other men had indeed been a stage, and one he had essentially outgrown.

  “I still felt things,” he said, “but the need to act on them seemed to have passed. I might be struck by the physical appearance of one of my students, say, but I’d never do anything about it, or even seriously consider doing anything about it. I told myself my admiration was aesthetic, a natural response to male beauty. In youth, hormone-driven as one is, I’d confused this with actual sexual desire. Now I could recognize it for the innocent and asexual phenomenon it was.”