The Throat

by Peter Straub

  Despite his name, which suggests a bulky middle-aged frame, a tweed jacket, and a tattersall vest, this Bough was a skinny person in his twenties with sagging jeans and a wrinkled chambray shirt. Forlorn black hair drooped over his thick eyeglasses as he looked down to switch on his tape recorder. “Could you give us any information about how Mr. Ransom is reacting to the news of his wife’s death? Does he have any knowledge of how Dragonette first met his wife?” I shut the door in his face and went back to Dick Mueller, April Ransom’s co-worker at Barnett and Company, who said, “My God, what was that?” He spoke with an almost comically perfect Millhaven accent.

  “Reporters.”

  “They already know that, ah, that, ah, that …”

  “They know,” I said. “And it’s not going to take them long to find out that you were Dragonette’s broker, so you’d better start preparing.”

  “Preparing?”

  “Well, they’re going to be very interested in you.”

  “Interested in me?”

  “They’ll want to talk to everybody who ever had anything to do with Dragonette.” Mueller groaned. “So you might want to figure out ways to keep them out of your office, and you might not want to enter or leave by the front door for a week or so.”

  “Yeah, okay, thanks,” he said. He hesitated. “You say you’re an old friend of John’s?”

  I repeated information I had given him before Geoffrey Bough and the others had interrupted us. Through the narrow windows on either side of the front door I saw another car pull up and double-park in front of the house. Two men, one carrying a cassette recorder and the other a camera, slouched out and began walking toward the door, grinning at Bough and his two colleagues.

  “How is John holding up?” asked Mueller.

  “He had a couple of drinks and went to bed. He’s going to have a lot to do over the next couple of days, so I think I’ll stick around to help him out.”

  Someone metronomically pounded his fist against the door four times.

  “Is that John?” Mueller asked. He sounded worried, even alarmed.

  “Just a gentleman of the press.”

  Mueller gasped, imagining a gang bawling his name while pounding at the brokerage doors.

  “I’ll call you in the next few days.”

  “When my secretary asks what you’re calling about, tell her it’s the bridge project. I’ll have to start screening my calls, and that’ll remind me of who you are.”

  “The bridge project?” More bawling and banging came through the door.

  “I’ll explain later.”

  I hung up, opened the door, and began yelling. By the time I finished explaining that John was asleep in bed, my picture had been taken a number of times. I closed the door without quite slamming it. Through a slit of window I watched them retreat down to the lawn, munch on their goodies, and light up cigarettes while they worked out what to do. The photographers took a few desultory pictures of the house.

  A quick check from the bottom of the stairs disclosed no movement upstairs, so John had managed either to sleep through the clamor or to ignore it. I picked up The Nag Hammadi Library, switched on the television, and sat on the couch. I turned to “The Treatise on the Resurrection,” a letter to a student named Rheginos, and read only a few words before I realized that, like most of Millhaven, the local television had capitulated to Walter Dragonette.

  I had been hoping that a combination of gnostic hugger-mugger and whatever was on the afternoon talk shows would keep me diverted until John surfaced again, but instead of Phil Donahue or Oprah Winfrey there appeared on the screen a news anchorman I remembered from the early sixties. He seemed almost eerily preserved, with the same combed-back blond hair, the same heavy brown eyeglasses, and the same stolid presence and accentless voice. With the air of unswerveable common sense I remembered, he was repeating, probably for the twentieth or thirtieth time, that regular programming had been suspended so that the All-Action News Team could “maintain continuous reportage of this tragic story.” Even though I had seen this man read the evening news for years, I could not remember his name—Jimbo Somehow or Jumbo Somebody. He adjusted his glasses. The All-Action News Team would stay with events as they broke in the Walter Dragonette case until evening programming began at seven, giving us advice and commentary by experts in the fields of criminology and psychology, counseling us on how to discuss these events with our children, and trying in every way to serve a grieving community through good reportage by caring reporters. On a panel behind his face a mob of people occupying the middle of North Twentieth Street watched orange-clad technicians from the Fire Department’s Hazardous Materials Task Force carry weighty drums out of the little white house.

  Rheginos’s teacher, the author of “The Treatise on the Resurrection,” said “do not think the resurrection is an illusion. It is the truth! Indeed, it is more fitting to say that the world is an illusion, rather than the resurrection.”

  The news anchor slipped from view as the screen filled with a live shot of the multitude spilling across Armory Place. These people were angry. They wanted their innocence back. Jimbo explained: “Already calls have been heard for the firing of the chief of police, Arden Vass, the dismissal of Roman Novotny, the police commissioner, and the fourth ward’s aldermen, Hector Rilk and George Vandenmeter, and the impeachment of the mayor, Merlin Waterford.”

  I could read the lettering on some of the signs punching up and down in rhythm to the crowd’s chants: WHERE WERE YOU, MERLIN? and DISMEMBER HECTOR AND GEORGE. At the top of the long flight of marble steps leading to the front of police headquarters, a gray-haired black man in a dark double-breasted suit orated into a bullhorn. “… reclaim for ourselves and our children the safety of these neighborhoods … in the face of official neglect … in the face of official ignorance …” Seedy ghosts with cassette recorders, ghosts with dandruff on the shoulders of hideous purple shirts, with cameras and notebooks, with thick glasses sliding down their noses, prowled through the crowd.

  A younger blond male head, as square as Jimbo’s but attached to a sweating neck and a torso wrapped in a tan safari jacket, buried the speaker’s words under the announcement that the Reverend Clement Moore, a longtime community spokesman and civil rights activist, had called for a full-scale investigation of the Millhaven Police Department and was demanding reparations for the families of Walter Dragonette’s victims. Reverend Moore had announced that his “protest prayer meetings” would continue until the resignations of Chief Vass, Commissioner Novotny, and Mayor Waterford. In a matter of days, the Reverend Moore expected that the protest prayer meetings would be joined by his fellow reverend, Al Sharpton, of New York City.

  Back to you in the studio, Jimbo.

  Jimbo tilted his massive blond head forward and intoned: “And now for our daily commentary from Joe Ruddier. What do you make of all this, Joe?”

  I perked up as another gigantic and familiar face crowded the screen. Joe Ruddier, another longtime member of the All-Action News Team, had been instantly celebrated for his absolute self-certainty and his passionate advocacy of the local teams. His face, always verging toward bright red and now a sizzling purple, had swollen to twice its earlier size. Ruddier had evidently been promoted to political commentary.

  “What do I make of all this? I’ll tell you what I make of this! I think it’s a disgrace! What happened to the Millhaven where a guy could go out for a beer an’ a bratwurst without stumbling over a severed head? And as for outside agitators—”

  I used the remote to mute this tirade when the telephone rang.

  As before, I picked it up to keep the ringing from waking John Ransom, and as before, it was necessary to establish my identity as an old friend from out of town before the caller would reveal his own identity. But this time, I thought I knew the caller’s name as soon as a hesitant voice asked, “Mr. Ransom? Could I speak to Mr. Ransom?” A name I had heard on the answering machine came immediately into my mind.

  I s
aid that John was sleeping and explained why a stranger was answering his telephone.

  “Oh, okay,” the caller said. “You’re staying with them for a while? You’re a friend of the Ransoms?”

  I explained that, too.

  Long pause. “Well, could you answer a question for me? You know what’s happening with Mrs. Ransom and everything, and I don’t want to keep disturbing Mr. Ransom. He never—I don’t know if—…”

  I waited for him to begin again.

  “I wonder if you could just sort of fill me in, and everything.”

  “Is your name Byron Dorian?”

  He gasped. “You’ve heard about me?”

  “I recognize your style,” I said. “You left a message on John’s machine this morning.”

  “Oh! Hah!” He gave a weak chuckle, as if he had caught me trying to amuse him. “So, what’s happening with April, with Mrs. Ransom? I’d really like to hear that she’s getting better.”

  “Would you mind telling me your connection to the Ransoms?”

  “My connection?”

  “Do you work at Barnett?”

  There came another uneasy laugh. “Why, is something wrong?”

  “Since I’m acting for the family,” I said, “I just want to know who I’m talking to.”

  “Well, sure. I’m a painter, and Mrs. Ransom came to my studio when she found out what sort of work I was doing, and she liked what she saw, so she commissioned me to do two paintings for their bedroom.”

  “The nudes,” I said.

  “You’ve seen them? Mrs. Ransom liked them a lot, and that was really flattering to me, you’ve probably seen the rest of their collection, all that great work, you know, it was like having a patron, well, a patron who was a friend …”

  His voice trailed off. Through one of the glass panels beside the front door I watched the reporters tossing crumpled candy bar wrappers toward the hedge. Five or six elderly people had taken up places on the steps and sidewalk across the street and settled in to enjoy the show.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”

  “Oh, no,” said Dorian.

  “Mrs. Ransom died this morning.”

  “Oh, no. Did she ever recover consciousness?”

  “No, she didn’t. Byron, Mrs. Ransom did not die of her injuries. Walter Dragonette managed to find out that she was in Shady Mount and that her condition was improving, and he got past the guard this morning and killed her.”

  “On the day he got arrested?”

  I agreed that it seemed almost unbelievable.

  “Well, what—what kind of world is this? What is going on? Did he know anything about her?”

  “He barely knew her,” I said.

  “Because she was, this was the most amazing woman, I mean there was so much to her, she was incredibly kind and generous and sympathetic …” For a time I listened to him breathing hard. “I’ll let you go back to what you were doing. I just never thought—”

  “No, of course not,” I said.

  “It’s too much.”

  The reporters were gathering for another siege of the door, but I could not hang up on Byron Dorian while his grief pummeled him, and I peered out the slit of window while listening to his stifled moans and gasps.

  When his voice was under control again, he said, “You must think I’m really strange, carrying on like this, but you never knew April Ransom.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about her sometime?” I asked. “I’d like to come to your studio and just have a talk.”

  “That would probably help me, too,” he said, and gave me his phone number and an address on Varney Street, in the sad part of town, once a Ukrainian settlement, that surrounded the stadium.

  I checked on the reporters, who had settled down to enjoy their third or fourth meal of the day under the appreciative eyes of a growing number of neighbors. Every now and then, some resident of Ely Place tottered through the litter to speak to Geoffrey Bough and his colleagues. I watched a bent old woman with a laden silver tray make her way down the steps of the house across the street, mount Ransom’s lawn, and present the various lounging men with cups of coffee.

  From my post by the door I saw Jimbo too retrace his steps, reminding his viewers of the extent and nature of Walter Dragonette’s crimes, the public outcry, Mayor Waterford’s assurances that all would continue to be done to ensure the safety of the citizens. At some point I did not quite mark as I kept watch on Bough and the others, April Ransom’s murder passed into the public domain—so John too missed the appearance on the television screen of the Ledger photograph, minus himself, of his wife cradling a gigantic trophy. I know approximately when this happened, four o’clock, because at that time the gathering across the street suddenly doubled in size.

  All afternoon, I alternated between watching television, poking through the gnostic gospels, and peering out at the crowd and the waiting reporters. The faces of Walter Dragonette’s victims paraded across the screen, from cowboy-suited little Wesley Drum on a rocking horse to huge leering Alfonzo Dakins gripping a beer glass. Twenty-two victims had been identified, sixteen of them black males. Hindsight gave their photographs a uniformly doomed quality. The unknown man found in Dead Man’s Tunnel was represented by a question mark. April Ransom’s Ledger photograph had been cropped down to her brilliant face. For the few seconds in which she filled the screen, I found that I was looking at the same person whose picture I had seen earlier, but that my ideas about her had begun to change: John’s wife seemed smart and vibrant, not hard and acquisitive, and so beautiful that her murder was another degree more heartless than the others. Something had happened since the first time I had seen the photograph: I had become, like John, Dick Mueller, and Byron Dorian, one of her survivors.

  A little while later, John came charging down the stairs. Wrinkles crisscrossed his shirt and trousers, and a long indentation from a sheet or pillowcase lay across his left cheek like a scar. He was not wearing shoes, and his hair was rumpled.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Some asshole threw stones at my window,” he said, and moved toward the door.

  “Hold on,” I said. “Did you look out the window before you came down? Do you know what’s going on out there?”

  “I don’t care what’s going on,” he said.

  “Look,” I said, and pointed at the television. If he had bothered to look at the screen, he would have seen the façade of his own house from the perspective of his front lawn, where a good-looking young reporter with the strikingly literary name of Isobel Archer was doing a stand-up on the career of the Meat Man’s most successful victim.

  He shoved the door open.

  Then for a second he froze, surprised by the camera, the reporters, and the crowd. It must have been like waking up to a bright light shining in his eyes. A low noise of surprise and pleasure came from the people assembled on the sidewalk and porches across the street. Ms. Archer smiled and thrust a microphone into his face. “Mr. Ransom, what was your immediate reaction to the news that Walter Dragonette had made a second, successful attempt on your wife’s life?”

  “What?”

  Geoffrey Bough and the others circled in, snapping pictures and holding their tape recorders in the air.

  “Do you feel that Mrs. Ransom was given adequate protection by the Millhaven Police Department?”

  He turned around and looked at me in exasperation.

  “What are your thoughts about Walter Dragonette?” Geoffrey Bough shouted. “What can you tell us about the man?”

  “I’d like you people to pack up and—”

  “Would you call him sane?”

  Other reporters, including Ms. Archer, shouted other questions.

  “Who’s the man behind you?” Bough yelled.

  “What’s it to you?” John yelled back, pushed over the edge at last. “You people throw rocks at my window, you ask these moronic questions—”

  I moved alongside him, and cameras ma
de popping gunfire noises. “I’m a family friend,” I said. “Mr. Ransom has been through a great deal.” I could dimly hear my own voice coming through the television set behind me in the living room. “All we can say now is that the case against Walter Dragonette, at least in regard to Mrs. Ransom, seems weaker than it should be.”

  A confused tangle of shouted questions came from all the reporters, and Isobel Archer jammed her microphone under my nose and leaned forward so that her cool blue eyes and tawny hair were so close as to be disorienting. It was as if she were leaning forward for a kiss, but if I had kissed anything, it would have been the nubby head of the microphone. Her question was hard-edged and direct. “So it’s your position that Walter Dragonette did not murder Mrs. Ransom?”

  “No, I don’t think he did,” I said. “And I think the police will reject that portion of his confession, in time.”

  “Do you share that view, Mr. Ransom?”

  The microphone expertly zipped in front of John’s mouth. Ms. Archer leaned forward and widened her eyes, coaxing words out of him.

  “Get the hell out of here, right now,” John said. “Take your cameras and your tape recorders and your sound equipment and get off my lawn. I have nothing more to say.”

  Isobel Archer said, “Thank you,” and then paused to smile at me. And that would have been that, except that something in the moment moved John a crucial step farther over the edge into outrage. The red wrinkle blazed on his cheek, and he started down the steps and went after the nearest male journalists, who happened to be Geoffrey Bough and his photographer. Isobel signaled to her own assistant, already swinging the camera toward John as he stiff-armed Bough exactly as he had stiff-armed me on the football field in the autumn of 1960.