by Peter Straub
“Who may or may not be real.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But there was another reason I wanted to find William Writzmann.”
John Ransom sat slouched into his chair, his feet up on the table, drink cradled in his lap. He watched me, waiting, still not sure how interesting this was going to be.
I told him about seeing the blue Lexus beside the Green Woman. Before I finished, he lifted his feet off the table and pushed himself upright.
“The same car?”
“It was out of sight before I could be certain. But while I was looking up Elvee Holdings, I thought I might as well find out who owned the Green Woman.”
“Don’t tell me it’s this Writzmann character,” he said.
“Elvee Holdings bought the bar in 1980.”
“So it is Writzmann!” He put his glass down on the table, looked at me, back at the glass, and picked it up and bounced it on his palm, as if weighing it. “Do you think April was killed because of the damn history project?”
“Didn’t she talk to you about it?”
He shook his head. “Actually, she was so busy, we didn’t have that much time to talk to each other. It wasn’t a problem or anything.” He looked up at me. “Well, to tell you the truth, maybe it was a problem.”
“Alan knew that it had something to do with a crime.”
“Did he?” John visibly tried to remember the conversation we’d had in the car. “Yeah, she probably talked more to him about it.”
“More to him than to you?”
“Well, I wasn’t too crazy about these projects of April’s.” He hesitated, wondering how much he should say. He stood up and began yanking his shirt down into the waistband of his trousers. After that he adjusted his belt. These fussy maneuvers did not conceal his uneasiness. John bent down and grabbed the glass from the table. “Those projects got on my nerves. I didn’t see why she’d take time away from our marriage to do these screwy little things she’d never even get paid for.”
“Do you know how she first got interested in the Blue Rose business?”
He frowned into the empty glass. “Nope.”
“Or what she managed to get done?”
“No idea. I suppose Monroe and Wheeler took away the file, or whatever, this morning, along with everything else.” He dropped his hands and sighed. “Hold on. I’m going to have another drink.”
After John had taken a couple of steps toward the kitchen, he stopped moving and twisted around to say something else. “It’s not like we were having trouble or anything—I just wanted her to spend more time at home. We didn’t fight.” He turned the rest of his body and faced me directly. “We did argue, though. Anyhow, I didn’t want to talk about this in front of the cops. Or my parents. They don’t have to know that we were anything but happy together.”
“I understand,” I said.
John took a step forward, gesturing with his glass. “Do you know what it takes to put together an art collection like this? When April had a lull in business, she’d just hop on a plane to Paris and spend a couple of days hunting down a painting she wanted. It was the whole way she was raised—there were no limits for little April Brookner, no sir, April Brookner could do anything that came into her head.”
“And you’re angry with her because she left you,” I said.
“You don’t get it.” He whirled around and went into the kitchen. I heard rattles and splashes, the big freezer door locking on its seal. John came back and stopped at the same point on the rug, holding his glass out toward me, his elbow bent. Clear liquid slid down the sides. “April could be hard to live with. Something in her was off-balance.”
John saw the dark spots on the carpet, wiped the bottom of the glass with his hand, and drank to lower the level. “I was the best thing that ever happened to April, and somewhere inside that head of his, Alan knows it. Once she married me, he relaxed—I did him a real favor. He knew I could keep her from going off the deep end.”
“She was a gifted woman,” I said. “What did you want her to do, spend all day baking cookies?”
He sipped from the drink again and went back to his chair. “What was this gift of hers? April was good at making money. Is that such a wonderful goal?”
“I thought she didn’t care much about the money. Wasn’t she the only postmodern capitalist?”
“Don’t fool yourself,” he said. “She got caught up in it.” He held the glass before his face in the tips of his fingers and stared at it. A deep vertical line between his eyebrows slashed up into his forehead.
John let out a huge sigh and leaned forward to rest the cold glass against his forehead.
“I’m sure she was grateful for the stability you gave her,” I said. “Think of how long you were married.”
His mouth tightened, and he clamped his eyes shut and leaned over, still holding the glass to his forehead. “I’m a basketcase.” He laughed, but without any cheer. “How did I ever make it through Vietnam? I must have been a lot tougher then. Actually, I wasn’t tougher, I was just a lot crazier.”
“So was everybody else.”
“Yeah, but I was on a separate track. After I graduated from wanting to put an end to communism, I wanted something I hardly understood.” He smiled, wryly.
“What was that?”
“I guess I wanted to see through the world,” he said.
3
HE EXHALED with what seemed his whole being, making a sound like one of Glenroy Breakstone’s breathy final notes. “I didn’t want any veils between me and whatever reality was. I thought you could sort of burst out into the open.” He let out that long, regretful sound again. “You understand me? I thought you could cross the border.”
“Did you ever think you got close?”
He jumped up from the chair and turned off the lamp nearest him. “Sometimes I thought I did, yeah.” He picked up his glass and turned off the lamp on the far side of the couch. “It’s too bright in here, do you mind?”
“No.”
John walked around the table and switched off the lamp at my end of the couch. Now the one light left burning was in a tall brass standard lamp near the entrance to the foyer, and the flared, belllike shape of the lamp threw its illumination into a yellow circle on the ceiling. Dim silver light floated in from the windows across the room.
“There was this time I was doing hard traveling, going way incountry. I was with another man, Jed Champion, superb soldier. We’d been traveling on foot, mostly at night. We had a jeep, but it was way back there, way off the trail, covered up so it’d still be there when we got back.”
He was moving to a complicated pattern that sent him from the window to the mantel to his chair, then past the wall of paintings to the open floor near the brass lamp, and finally returning to the window, carving the shape of an arrow into the darkness with his body.
“After two or three days, we stopped talking entirely. We knew what we were doing, and we didn’t have to talk about it. If we had a decision to make, we just acted together. It was like ESP—I knew exactly what was going on in his mind, and he knew what was going on in mine.
“We were working through relatively empty country, but there had been some VC activity here and there. We weren’t supposed to make any contact. If we saw them we were supposed to just let them go their sweet way. On our sixth night, I realized that I was seeing better than I had the night before—in fact, all of my senses were amazingly acute. I heard everything.
“I could practically feel the roots of the trees growing underground. A VC patrol came within thirty feet of us, and we sat on our packs and watched them go by—we’d heard them coming for about half an hour, and you remember how quiet they could be? But I could smell their sweat, I could smell the oil on their rifles. And they couldn’t even see us.
“The next night, I could have caught birds with my bare hands. I was beginning to hear something new, and at first I thought it was some noise made by my own body—it was that intimate. Then, right bef
ore dawn, I realized that I was hearing the voices of the trees, the rocks, the ground.
“The night after that, my body did things completely by itself. I was just up there behind my eyes, floating. I couldn’t have put a foot wrong if I tried.”
Ransom stopped talking and turned around. He had come back to the window, and when he faced into the room, a sheet of darkness lay over his features and the entire front of his body. The cold silver light lay across the top of his head and the tops of his shoulders. “Do you know what I’m talking about? Does this make any sense to you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Maybe the next part won’t sound totally crazy to you.”
For an uncomfortably long time, he stared at me without saying anything. At last he turned away and went toward the fireplace. Cold light from the window touched his back. “Maybe I wouldn’t even want to be that alive anymore. You’re right up next to death when you’re that alive.”
He reached the fireplace, and in the darkness of that part of the room, I saw him raise an arm and caress the edge of the marble. “No, I’m not saying it right. Being alive like that includes death.”
He turned from the mantel and walked back into the silver wash of light. He looked as dispassionate as a bank examiner. “Not long before this, I lost a lot of people. Tribesmen. We had two ‘A’ teams in our encampment, one under me, the other under an officer named Bullock. Bullock and his team went out one night, and none of them ever came back. We waited an extra twelve hours, and then I took my team out to look for them.”
He had stepped into the darkness between the windows. “It took three days to find them. They were in the woods not far from a little ville, about a hundred feet off the trail, in only moderately thick growth. Bullock and his five men were tied to trees. They’d been cut open—slashed across the gut and left to bleed to death. One more thing.”
He moved past the far window without turning to look at me, and the light turned his shirt and skin to silver again. “Their tongues had been cut out.” John began moving toward the brass lamp, and now did turn, half in and half out of the soft yellow light. “After we cut down the bodies and made litters to carry them back, I wrapped their tongues in a cloth and took them with me. I dried them out and treated them, and wore them everywhere after that.”
“Who killed Bullock and his team?” I asked.
I saw the flicker of a smile in the darkness. “VC cut out tongues, sometimes, to humiliate your corpse. So did the Yards, sometimes—to keep you silent in the other world.”
Ransom walked around the lamp and began heading back to the windows and the wall of paintings.
“So it’s about the eighth night out. And then something says Ransom.
“I thought it must have been my partner, but I tuned to his frequency, you know, I focused on him and he wasn’t making any more sound than a beetle. He sure as hell wasn’t talking.
“Then I hear it again. Ransom.
“I came around the side of a tree about twenty feet wide, and standing off a little way under a big elephant fern like a roof, standing up and looking right at me, is Bullock. Right next to him is his number one guy, his team leader. Their clothes are covered with blood. They just stand there, waiting. They know I can see them, and they’re not surprised. Neither am I.”
Ransom had made it past the windows again, and now he was stationed before the fireplace, in the darkest part of the room. I could barely make out his big figure moving back and forth in front of the fireplace.
“I was in the place where death and life flow into each other. Those little tongues felt like leaves on my skin. They let me pass through them. They knew what I was doing, they knew where I was going.”
I waited for more of the story, but he faced the fireplace in silence. “You’re talking about going to bring Bachelor back.”
I could hear him smiling. “That’s right. He knew I was coming, and he got out way ahead of me.” He was softly beating a hand on the fireplace, like a mockery of self-punishment. “That way I was? He was like that all the time. He lived in the realm of the gods.”
I was still waiting for the end of the story.
“Have you ever experienced anything like that? Are you qualified to judge it?”
“Something like that,” I said. “But I don’t know if I’m qualified to judge it.”
John pushed himself off the fireplace like a man doing a standing push-up. He switched on the lamp on the end table, and the room expanded into life and color. “I felt extraordinary—like a king. Like a god.”
He turned around and gazed at me.
“What’s the end of the story?” I asked.
“That is the end.”
“What happened when you got there?”
He was frowning at me, and when he spoke, it was to change the subject. “I think I’d like to take a look inside the Green Woman Taproom tomorrow. Want to come with me?”
“You want to break in?”
“Hey, my old man owned a hotel,” John said. “I have a lot of skeleton keys.”
4
THE NEXT MORNING I learned that while John Ransom and I had talked about seeing death moving through life, Mr. and Mrs. David Sunchana of North Bayberry Lane, Elm Hill, had nearly died in a fire caused by a gas explosion. I remembered the propane tanks and wondered what had caused the explosion. The thought that I might have caused it sickened me. Maybe the person who had followed me to Elm Hill had wanted to keep Bob Bandolier’s old tenants from talking to me so badly that he had tried to kill them.
5
RALPH AND MARJORIE had gone back upstairs after their breakfast to pack for the return to Arizona, and John had gone out. Ralph had left the Ledger folded open to the sports pages, which crowed about the 9 to 4 victory of the Millhaven team over the Milwaukee Brewers. I flipped the paper back to the front page and read the latest dispatches from Armory Place. Local civic and religious leaders had formed the “Committee for a Just Millhaven” and demanded a room at City Hall and secretarial help.
The Reverend Clement Moore was leading a protest march down Illinois Avenue at three o’clock in the afternoon. The mayor had issued a permit for the march and assigned all off-duty policemen to handle security and crowd control. Illinois Avenue would be closed to traffic from one-thirty until five o’clock.
A two-paragraph story on the fifth page reported that the previously unknown man murdered on Livermore Avenue had been positively identified as Grant Hoffman, 31, a graduate student in religion at Arkham College.
I turned the page and saw a small photograph of what looked like a farmhouse that had been half-destroyed by fire. The left side of the house had sunk into a wasteland of ashes and cinders from which protruded a freestanding porcelain sink surrounded by snapped-off metal pipes. The fire had blackened the remaining façade and left standing the uprights of what must have been a sort of porch. Beside the house stood a windowless little garage or shed.
I did not even recognize it until I saw the name Sunchana in the caption beneath the photograph. My breath stopped in my throat, and I read the article.
An Elm Hill patrolman named Jerome Hodges had been driving down North Bayberry Lane at the time of the explosion and had immediately radioed for a fire truck from the joint Elm Hill-Clark Township station. Patrolman Hodges had broken into the house through a bedroom window and led Mr. Sunchana back out through the window while carrying Mrs. Sunchana in his arms. The fire truck had arrived in time to save some of the house and furniture, and the Sunchanas had been released from Western Hills hospital after examination had proven them unharmed. The explosion was not suspected to have been of suspicious origin.
I carried the newspaper to the counter, looked up the number of the Millhaven police headquarters in the directory, and asked to speak to Detective Fontaine. The police operator said she would put me through to his desk.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when he answered, but I was.
After I identified myself, he as
ked, “You get anything out of Damrosch’s old records?”
“No, not much. I’ll get them back to you.” Then something occurred to me. “Didn’t you tell me that someone else had been looking through the Blue Rose file?”
“Well, the little case, whatever, was sitting on top of the files down in the basement.”
“Did you remove anything from the file?”
“The nude pictures of Kim Basinger will cost you extra.”
“It’s just that it was obvious that the records had been held together by rubber bands—they were ripped that way—but the rubber bands were gone. So I wondered if whoever looked at the file before me went through it, trying to find something.”
“A forty-year-old rubber band was no longer in evidence. Do you have any other gripping information?”
I told him about going out to Elm Hill to talk to the Sunchanas, and that I had seen someone following me.
“This is the couple who had the fire?”
“Yes, the Sunchanas. When I was on the porch, I turned around and saw someone watching me from a row of trees across the street. He disappeared as soon as I saw him. That doesn’t sound like much, but someone has been following me.” I described what had happened the other night.
“You didn’t report this incident?”
“He got away so quickly. And John said he might have been just a peeping Tom.”
Fontaine asked me why I had wanted to talk to the Sunchanas in the first place.
“They used to rent the top floor of a duplex owned by a man named Bob Bandolier. I wanted to talk to them about Bandolier.”
“I suppose you had a reason for that?”
“Bandolier was a manager at the St. Alwyn in 1950, and he might remember something helpful.”
“Well, as far as I know, there wasn’t anything suspicious about the explosion out there.” He waited a second. “Mr. Underhill, do you often imagine yourself at the center of a threatening plot?”
“Don’t you?” I asked.
Overhead, the Ransoms squabbled as Ralph pulled a wheeled suitcase down the hall.
