by Paul Monette
He was shaken and not in the mood. He’d spent the last ten minutes brooding alone, and it made him sadder than he’d been all winter. But he caught her in his arms and let out a hoot and took it all as a joke. For both their sakes, he didn’t question if she was playing sexy, consciously or not. Her unconscious was none of his business. Meanwhile, Peter had put in a day and a half drawing the lines in the sand with a pointed stick, but if Rita thought they could roughhouse around, somehow it didn’t matter how much they messed it up. Rita was the only one with the necessary radar to get a bead on Peter’s designing.
There was a moment when all they could do was scuffle to try to sit up again. They sprayed the sand as if they’d come down from a pole vault. Rita reeled back to get the space to tell him what she could. Nick held on because he didn’t understand. He thought he might get a clue if he listened closely. It may have been they were still at the same cross-purposes where they always were, but they could do better than this. And since she’d had the shot of power from climbing through the hill, it was all on Rita to fix it. She wanted to bury her head in his neck and let it go. Instead, she sprang away and landed on her feet.
“Everything’s ruined,” she managed to say by way of generalization. “We have no time. Come on.” She backed away in the direction of the hall, beckoning him with both hands as if she was hauling rope. She noticed how all the trail of pretty things had been wiped out. Sam had bothered to pause long enough to get rid of the traces. Rita tried not to think how long it might have taken Nick to guess where they’d gone to. She wasn’t even sure she’d ever told him the trick to getting in.
“Not yet,” he said playfully, sprawled in the sand. “You wait. Somebody has to tell me first what this means.” And he held up the unmistakable ring of Peter’s keys. He didn’t seem to understand she was desperate. It all came across to him as a mock attack of hysteria—so much so that it had the effect of lifting his own bad mood. The keys were the sign that Peter promised Rita to leave behind. Nick had noticed Peter’s car cheek by jowl with Rita’s when he parked his own, and naturally he figured they were home. But then he’d called their names and poked about, and from the texture of the silence, he could tell he was all alone. He didn’t think anything. He supposed they were both plumped up in the back of a client’s limo. Or Hey would know, but Nick didn’t want to disturb him. He was asleep every day, punctually, from one till three, as if he still lived in an equatorial country.
“Hey’s all shot up,” she said, and when she saw the light go out of his eyes, she dropped her voice and said as little as she could about the rest. “Peter’s gone. I’m sorry.”
He stood up and followed her instantly, and something like shame came over them both. They couldn’t seem to look at each other as they made their way along the hall to her room. Nick didn’t have to ask. It was Sam, of course. When he’d found the key ring fifteen minutes before, on the floor at the bottom of the spiral stairs, it didn’t make him scared, but it made him want to cry. He’d sat right down on the garden ledge and thought about Peter without his keys. Nothing was wrong—Nick would have known if there was, he thought—but the keys led him to wonder how easy it was to strip a man of his apparatus, leaving him out in the cold. The way to the house, two cars, the shop, and the pickup was narrow as hell and fit in the palm of his hand. And altogether it made him think of Peter alone some day and himself dead—and then, like a flipped coin spinning in the air, it was him alone and Peter dead, but it didn’t get any nicer, whichever way he looked. So life was feeling mean and comfortless when Rita blew in and tackled him. It always made him feel guilty to waste his time on death. Besides, it tempted fate. He was ready to hear the ordinary story that went with Peter losing his keys. Ever since getting rid of Sam, he’d needed all he could get of minor matters.
Now he walked through Rita’s room in a daze while she went along the windows checking the locks. He stopped in the closet and waited. In the corner where the marble hands had been was the pile of things that Rita had put out that morning to make the trail. Everything was thrown in a jumble, but Nick’s eye picked out the cracked lens at the wide end of the telescope and the crumpled Cézanne askew in its frame. So he knew the trove had suffered the same upheaval as all of them, even though Rita had not yet mentioned the Rembrandt by name. She joined him in the closet. As she closed the door, she reached out one hand and touched his shoulder and locked the lock with the other hand. The mirrored door clicked open, but Nick held back. Not Rita. Though she’d lost the miner’s cap when they fell in the sand, the dark didn’t hold any terror for her anymore. Heedless of gunfire, she rushed in first and called Hey’s name.
Nick lit a match and made his way more haltingly. He could hear their voices up ahead in the office, already deep in conversation. He didn’t see anything different, and then, just as he shook the match out, glimpsed the candles lying on the floor. On the second match, he bent down and retrieved them both, held them together in one hand to light and, as the room brightened, saw a long smear of blood at his feet. From there he could have found Hey merely by following the line of crimson spots as far as the sofa. He came forward with the light, and Rita and Hey looked up at him expectantly—partly, it seemed, to beg him to take control, partly to gauge if he could handle it. He did what he could. The sight of Hey with his front all bloody nearly made him heave, but he sat on the arm of the sofa and joined the group, all for one and one for all. Not that he was squeamish in the least, but he had a sudden horror of what it meant about Peter.
“He says we have to get him out of here,” Rita explained. “He has to go back in the house.”
“Did you call an ambulance?” Nick asked, only now realizing that he’d come into this thing right in the middle. She nodded. As near as he could tell, Rita must have locked Hey in when she went to get help. But why bother? And if it was Sam who had locked Hey in, why didn’t he put Rita in there with him? Nick tried not to get wrapped up in his own questions. Keep the way clear, he said to himself—at least until they got to Peter. So he turned to Hey, anxious not to leave him out of the talk regarding his best interests. “Don’t you think you’d better wait for them?” he said. “We might hurt you if we do it wrong.”
“It’s not me, Nick,” Hey said impatiently. “It’s this room.” In case Nick thought he was claustrophobic and scared of the dark, he wanted it known that something was more important to him than his health. “I kept it a secret ten years, and I’m not going to let the whole world in until it’s time. When this is over, the four of us can talk it out. We can’t decide anything now.” And when they did decide, he was saying, they’d have to hear him out. He had ten years of views to air on the subject. And Rita, who’d seen in Sam a passion as great as her own for what was here, saw yet another. Everything came in threes.
“It’s gone beyond what we want to do,” she said heatedly. “You can’t just pretend a painting like that was taken off a wall in this house. It isn’t ours. It belongs to the Duke of Argyll, for Christ’s sake. It’s a Rembrandt.”
Everyone knew it was a Rembrandt. They were having a misunderstanding. Rita was going on the assumption that things would have to be investigated in full. Of all of them, she thought, Hey was the one who should have demanded a swarm of sharpshooters fanning out over LA to get the man who’d laid him low. Yet he seemed curiously loath to call in the help he paid his taxes for, though he had less reason than Rita to try to protect Sam. But where Rita was out to solve a crime, salvaging what she could of the secret world that had come apart, Hey had been brooding all this time over the next round of negotiations. Sam would still have to pay for all his murderous acts. If Hey was lucky, he’d be given a moment at the end to do his own business with Sam, one on one. But right now they were still in the game. It was their move. And Hey was the only one who could plot it, Nick the only one who could make it.
“This is the story,” Hey said, and it was apparent he wasn’t going to stand for revision. “I was all alone, and I hea
rd a noise. When I came in the living room, I caught a guy stealing a picture.” He narrowed his eyes at Rita. “You figure out who it was by. But make it sound a little flashy, or they won’t believe a thief would give a shit.”
“How do we come into it?” Nick asked. “Are we supposed to have walked in and found you?”
“Just Rita,” Hey said, putting out his good arm for help. Nick leaned down, and Hey grasped him around his neck and then went on, close to his ear. “You’ll be out of here in a few minutes, Nick. You’ve got to find Sam.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Rita protested, following behind. They went along shoulder to shoulder, like army buddies. “Sam said it specially. Don’t try to find him. He’ll call us tonight.”
Hey retorted irritably, “I know what he said, but it’s not what he meant. He only said one thing that matters.” And Rita, who could hear the twist the pain gave his words, was sorry she’d spoken up. He didn’t say what the one thing was, but it mustn’t have been either of the things she’d just repeated. She tried to think:What was the third thing Sam had said? But she couldn’t retrieve it, and Hey wasn’t telling till he’d got where he was going.
They made a slow progression out of the closet. Then on across Rita’s room to the hall. She and Nick didn’t hesitate to trust Hey’s instincts. After all, he’d heard Sam talk through a filter of pain. He’d been the most assaulted of any of them, and he’d spent the longest time alone in the dark. With so much waste and empty space to do his thinking in, no wonder he got the closest to the truth. It couldn’t hide long from such a naked eye.
They stopped at the doorway into the living room, and Hey directed them exactly where to put him down. Then for a moment he was in agony, grunting and panting, his eyes all clouded, but it passed. He got his equilibrium back. And he lay flat on the floor, eying them both and sweating some, and looked as if he were measuring his words down to the quarter-inch. He didn’t have the strength for an argument. He’d say what he had to say, and that was that. He was on the very spot where, not an hour before, Sam had forced him to his hands and knees. But if he felt the irony, there wasn’t the leisure to indulge it now. The doorbell rang. He nodded to Rita and held up his hand to keep Nick by him.
But I need more time, Rita thought angrily, striding across the room. She had to hear what it was that Sam really said and see if it sounded the same. Maybe Hey was right, and Nick had to go out hunting, but she’d be damned if she’d let him do it alone. The bell rang longer the second time. She wished she could make them wait, whoever they were, and make them nervous. Just now she hated anyone who wanted to separate the people in Crook House, no matter what for. She reached the top of the spiral stairs. But before she opened the door and started the next chain of events, she took a last look down from the rail of the balcony. In the far corner, Nick bent close over Hey, and she had a sense of what she must have looked like a little while ago in the closet, when she was all the doctor they had. But the larger irony wasn’t lost on Rita. They were right on the spot, too, where the coins and the jade and the cigarette case had been, right where she’d waltzed around to get things ready for Peter. Consequently, the scene below her had two faces, the before-and-after of an accident. It was just that pointless, and it filled her with rage. So Hey was right after all, she thought grimly. It would kill her to have to wait all day for Sam to call.
She threw open the door, suddenly eager to get this part over with so she and Nick could get on to the chase. Two men in white, wheeling a stretcher, pushed by her. They barely glanced at Rita, since it was clear enough that she was in one piece. But if they expected to zip from room to room till they came upon a body, the balcony and the spiral stairs brought them up short. They could see the man they were after, down below, and they turned to Rita for a better route. “Is this the only way?” one of them asked in disbelief. Annoyed at Rita, somehow, as if she’d been the architect herself. For her part, Rita stayed cool. She opened the elevator door and acted a bit superior, only too glad to lead them around by the nose. She let them pile in with the stretcher upright. Then, when she squeezed inside and pressed the “down” button, she was closer to them than she wanted to be. They were too clean. She couldn’t tell them apart. All the same, she relished the sidelong looks they gave to the trompe l’oeil balloon painted around them.
But even in this, her mood went on going up and down. Oh, they were all right, she thought to herself expansively. They just didn’t know their way around. And with the tunnel through the hill just added to her own repertoire of passages, Rita was feeling bold enough to find her way anywhere. Let the medics through to do their work. As a secret agent regularly dropped behind enemy lines, Rita appreciated that she couldn’t always go it alone. She was part of a team. Taking the optimistic view of the current mission, she was glad to note that everyone was on the team but Sam.
They hit bottom. She opened the door and backed out, holding it wide to give them room. When they went ahead, she decided to run up the stairs and wait to do the same at the front door. Let Nick deal with them for a while. But when she got back up on the balcony and came to the edge to watch, Nick wasn’t there. It was just a fallen man, all by himself on the floor. The two carriers made ready and went into position, one at the head, the other at the feet. They must have thought she was crazy to run away upstairs.
“Hey,” she called, panicky again, wondering if she ought to race to the cars and head Nick off. She shouted just at the moment they lifted Hey, and a muffled cry of pain was all the answer he gave. He writhed on the stretcher. The two men looked at Rita blackly, figuring the “Hey” was meant for them, ready to backtalk it she tried to tell them how to do their job. She shrank from the railing, frightened by his suffering still. Then they picked up the stretcher, and the cry came unmuffled, but Rita was already bolting. She raced up the outside stairs, even though she knew it would be too late. Nick’s car was gone. He must have slipped out by the kitchen garden and climbed around to the front. The very same way Rita slipped in.
Now, going back tensely to the house, she understood for the first time where it all led: She was about to be left alone. She could go to the hospital, of course, and hold Hey’s hand in the back of the ambulance, letting her mind go blank to the tune of the sirens wailing. In case Nick didn’t get lucky, somebody ought to stay home by the phone. What if Sam shot Peter because they ignored the directions Rita thought she heard? She’d wait if she had to. Really, she told herself, all she cared about was getting them back together again and safe. But she wouldn’t admit the most curious thing, that she suddenly couldn’t bear to be by herself. She, who had gotten so good at it. Back in New York, it meant nobody could hurt her too much, because she could always hole up with the scissors and a pile of magazines and plot a course of self-improvement. The talent for being alone had put her on the plane to LA in the first place. And then it insured the single-mindedness of the work she’d done for weeks in Varda’s room. The reason she was a great opener and closer of doors was that she’d always been glad to go off by herself, almost from the time she could walk.
She stood on the landing outside the door and listened to them struggle out of the elevator. The feeling of panic persisted. But maybe she ought to call it something else, because it wasn’t unfocused, and it told her things. The only way she could describe it was to think of the feeling that grew enormous in a good ghost story. She’d read the canon from cover to cover. There comes a moment of the purest isolation. Somebody realizes that whatever it is is trying to separate the group, to pick them off one by one. Here at Crook House, of course, it was all quite different. Sam was not the agent or anything interplanetary or abstract. He was merely Sam, and he had no power to damage the way they all stuck together. But they’d been through too much today, and if they all got to feeling as lonely as Rita, she thought, they might do the damage themselves. Any one of them might decide that all the chaos started and ended with him alone and so withdraw. One right after another, they’d begin to
take the blame. Then, like the brokenhearted simps in soap operas, they’d see where the sins of the past had brought them. Rita knew how quick nice people were to punish themselves. They had to head it off fast before it took hold.
And though at the moment Hey was the worst-off, he was also the one who was just about to be stabilized. He was down as far as he was going to go. He came out of the house feet first, and the two men at the stretcher talked across him in a workers’ shorthand. She saw that they’d strapped him on at the knees and hips, presumably so they could stand the stretcher up in the elevator, but Rita shivered as if it were a straitjacket. Then the rest of him passed by her, and she saw his face all colorless and sick. Worse than she thought. She didn’t even understand how he could have gone so long and kept so alert, only to fall apart in the last ten minutes. But he managed a slit of a smile when he saw who it was. He reached toward her with his good hand. While she stood there dumbly, the stretcher went on upstairs, and she had to scramble to catch up. She got crushed against the branches because the rescue operation took all the room, but finally they reached the top, and she was able to bend down for a bit and talk in his ear.
“I’ll go with you if you want,” she said, though she hoped he’d say no and leave her free.
