“He’s not a criminal. Asquith had a fine mind.” Speke’s lapse into past tense silenced him for a moment.
Holub did not seem to notice. “You remember him well.”
Speke’s voice was hoarse when he said, “He was a good friend.”
“Maybe you can help us understand him.”
Speke considered this statement. “He had many talents. He was an actor, did a little stage magic, wrote some songs.”
How much do I owe him, he asked himself. How much of my life belongs to Timothy Asquith?
“Do you realize,” he said, unable to stop himself from speaking, “how few remarkable people there are—how few people are really alive?”
Perhaps Holub felt just a bit awkward for a moment. There was a pause, and then he said, “If he should call you, or drop by for a visit—”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
“I didn’t want to mention this, because I didn’t want to make you nervous.”
“I’m not a nervous sort of person.”
“We have reason to believe he has more than a casual interest in you. He’s not another fan and not just an old acquaintance. We think it’s pretty obvious that he has some sort of fixation on you, if you really want to know. He’s not just another crank.”
The cop’s turn of phrase was coarse, Speke thought. Holub was quick but, at the same time, ordinary. “We were friends—” He silenced himself. “We knew each other well,” he added at last.
“I’m still not telling you everything. I hesitate to mention this.”
Speke wanted to pick the little man up and hurl him through the window. Instead he crossed his legs and tried to look polite but very slightly bored.
“The questions we have for him.”
“Tell me!” Speke wanted to scream.
“He’s wanted for murder.”
Speke knew that he was expected to respond, but he could only croak, “What?”
“Cut some people up in the East. Pretty badly. Real badly. Women. Always women. So what we have is a criminally insane homicide with a fixation on Hamilton Speke.”
Speke stared.
Asquith, he thought. It couldn’t be true. You were never really dangerous. Not to anyone else. Only to yourself. He said, quietly, “You have to feel sorry for him.”
It couldn’t possibly be true, he told himself again.
Could it?
“Maybe a little compassion is in order. I wouldn’t know.” Holub slipped his pen into the folder, but continued to watch Speke as though trying to understand him. “I’d get some security. Someone around the clock. Famous people are sitting ducks. A man like that is unpredictable. He might show up here and be a whole lot of trouble. We aren’t sure. But I have a feeling, personally, that he’ll show up here eventually, and that he might be dangerous.”
“I’m not worried.”
“I got a fax last night from Elmira, New York. He wasn’t your average mental patient. Maybe I’ll leave you a copy.”
“I feel sorry for him,” said Speke, his voice dry, shaken.
He took the manila envelope, but did not look inside. “I’ve never worried about that kind of thing in my life. And Asquith is the last person I’m going to worry about now.”
“It’s just a personal opinion, not professional. But I think this man wants to destroy you.” There was an edge to Holub’s voice now, an urgency that had been missing. People often adopted an artificial ease when they met Speke for the first time, wanting to make a good impression on such a well-known man.
“That’s a little strong, isn’t it. ‘Destroy’?”
“A lot of people want to talk with this man.” Holub’s eyes were hard. He was trying to communicate without stepping out of his cop manner, his detective diction. “He isn’t wanted for traffic tickets.” He flicked a hand at the envelope. “Go ahead. Take a look at that fax.”
Speke smiled, and felt the beginnings of genuine warmth toward the cop. After all, he was trying to be helpful. “Of course I will. And I really appreciate your visit.”
“Be very cautious, Mr. Speke. This is a very sick man.”
16
Christopher Bell did not believe. No god nudged the helm of his craft, and no gray-eyed goddess overshadowed his battles. His life had been a tangle of lucky breaks, accidents he had just blundered upon as a cub reporter, shrapnel that tinkled at his feet, but he did not feel he owed any special thanks to fortune. He was always punching numbers into a telephone, or hurrying across the tarmac to catch a plane.
He paced his cottage. The air conditioning exhaled neutral, cool air, and the television was on with the sound off, CNN jerking one image after another, dead bodies, heads of state, multicolored maps, yet more bodies, sodden images littering a foreign street.
I won’t leave, he promised himself. There’s a story here, and I’ll find out what it is.
Breakfast had been a peculiar affair, muesli and moist delicious muffins and excellent coffee. Everyone was avoiding each other. Sarah had apparently breakfasted before he arrived, and Maria did not make an appearance, so he had glanced through the baseball scores, and stalled a while, hoping Speke would eventually arrive. Nothing had happened.
A beige Chevrolet had sat beside the front lawn for nearly an hour, and Bell had seen enough such cars to be able to guess that this was an unmarked police vehicle. Perhaps Speke was consulting the police about his security, or lack of it. Perhaps an old friend was an inspector and he and Speke sat around swapping crime stories.
Everyone on the estate was encapsulated within their own privacy. He had seen such behavior in the more pleasant wings of Vacaville, the prison for psychiatric maintenance and evaluation, in which placid killers and baby rapers worked crossword puzzles and read paperback westerns waiting for their medication.
Everyone here is hiding something.
Bell considered himself methodical. He tried to hide this character strength from casual acquaintances. He wanted people to think him casual and spontaneous. But he was deliberate and careful, and knew how to avoid mistakes. As a boy, he had always finished his homework as soon as he got home, before watching cartoons on television, before playing outside. He had always done any possible extra credit assignment, the plaster of Paris volcano, the collection of shells, the scrapbook of clippings about UFOs. If they studied South America in class, he raided the travel agents in town for pamphlets about Rio. He had worked hard and had developed, he thought, a certain ability.
He had learned to glean information. He was, at heart, a worker, an ant, a bee. Something told him that this would be a bad time to bother Sarah. He should wait for her to make the first move or he would alienate her. For the moment, he wanted to stay well away from Maria.
That left Clara, the silent, small woman who seemed to run the house, and a leathery gardener who passed among the trees carrying at one moment a rake, and at another a long, twisted branch as Bell watched through the window.
He sat at his laptop computer and typed up a few notes. “Must talk to Sarah. She knows everything.” After a few paragraphs, he deleted everything but the words “She knows.”
He wished, more than anything, that he could see her now.
There was a tap at the door, a tap so plainly feminine that Bell was speechless when he opened the door and gazed down at the wrinkled, smiling face of the gardener. “I hate to bother you, Mr. Bell. I just wanted to warn you. There’s going to be an explosion.”
Bell was hard to disturb. He had seen gas mains and gasoline trucks blow up, and had once seen an entire bomb squad blasted to red bits in Mexico City.
But something about the silence of this place, and his own impatience, made the gardener’s words especially unsettling. The words took on an uneasy, unliteral connotation, a prophecy of emotional havoc. Or, even worse, the announcement of a nuclear detonation that would evaporate them all.
“An explosion?” Bell asked.
“Nothing to worry about. I’m going to blow up the stump with a little bit of dy
namite.”
Bell was so relieved he could not respond.
Brothers had the careful gentleness of a man used to a certain degree of violence, like a kindly infantry colonel. “I’m going around warning everyone. So it won’t be a shock.”
“This is such a quiet place,” said Bell.
“Most people like that,” Brothers responded, detecting his subtle complaint.
“It’s very peaceful,” Bell said, but his chance to win a confidant was slipping away.
He sat at his computer waiting for a stick of high explosive to go off, and his fingers would not move.
He jumped, unable to identify the source of the sudden, electronic trilling at his elbow.
His hand fell on the telephone.
It was Speke, sounding jovial and relaxed. “Why don’t you come on up and we can get started?”
It was this imperial tone, the easy confidence, that made Bell realize how deeply he envied Speke. It was stronger than envy—Speke had everything, and Bell could not deceive himself. He was a man who relied on wits and energy, while Speke relied on something more lasting, something endowed by nature. He was a man the Greeks would have considered beloved of one god or another, a man carved of light.
And what am I, Bell found himself wondering. I am a man who likes his name on a by-line. I am a man with something to prove, women to win, debts and a string of former friends, people I no longer have time to see.
The unmarked car was gone. That was how things were at Live Oak. Things did not simply come and go. They appeared. They vanished.
Bell hurried toward the big house.
He’s going to ask me to leave, he thought. He’s going to try to get rid of me somehow, and I’m not going anywhere.
The sky was empty, flat blue. But Bell did not find himself able to step confidently. There was, he reminded himself, going to be an explosion.
“Where do you like to start?” asked Speke. “First memories? I would think that asking someone to describe his first memory would be a very good place to start, don’t you?”
He wore a green silk shirt, and looked both slightly tired and unusually handsome, rough-hewn and cheerful. He presented Bell with a dish of chocolate chip cookies. The cookies were still warm.
There was a smell of scotch in the air, and Speke did not want to sit in his usual desk chair, but lounged in the chair Sarah had used the day before.
“I have the sense,” Bell began, “that my presence here makes people just a little bit uncomfortable.”
Strangely, he found himself sitting behind the desk. Feeling out of place, an employee behind the boss’s desk while the boss looked on, Bell switched on his tape recorder.
“Maria is moody,” Speke said.
“You do want to continue working on the biography?”
There was the slightest of pauses, a tick of psychological time in which it was plain that Speke would not be unhappy if Bell had an appointment tomorrow in, say, Washington. “I want to help you,” said Speke.
He believes that if I leave this assignment I will return to gambling and drugs. Bell felt the itch of guilt regarding this falsehood. Speke was a good man. “This book is very important to me,” he said.
“My Life,” Speke said with a wistful smile, and Bell did not know whether he was referring to the biography, or something much broader and more troubling.
He could change his mind at any moment, Bell saw. He could say, abruptly, that he was very sorry but Bell would have to come back next month, or next year.
“My own first memory,” he said, “was watching my father mow the lawn.”
“Was it a push mower or power mower?” asked Speke.
“Push. He kept it sharp with a file.”
“Really? He filed his own blades?” Speke put a finger to his lips. “A careful man.”
Bell did not say: just like his son.
“I love the smell of grass when it’s just cut,” Speke was saying. “Brothers has a ride-on mower, and the smell gets mixed up with gasoline exhaust. The lawn here is just so big.…”
“It’s a beautiful lawn.”
“He’s going to blow up the stump,” said Speke.
Bell said that he had been warned.
“I wish he had just gone ahead and blown it up. I don’t know about you, but my stomach’s very unsettled. I sit here waiting for an explosion.”
Bell admitted that he, too was nervous.
“I just had a visit from the police.”
“I thought so.”
“Another sharp-eyed person,” said Speke.
“Nothing serious, I hope.”
“What could be serious, out here in such a wonderful place? Tell me: did he say how long it would be before the detonation?”
“Not really.”
“Not even a hint?”
Bell smiled, shrugged.
“I wish he hadn’t told everyone. I’m sitting here, waiting for this horrible blast. This could go on all day. I can’t sit still.”
Bell found himself fidgeting, too.
“I’m a wreck. I can’t even concentrate on what I did this morning, much less the first thing I ever saw in my life.”
They both listened in silence.
At last Speke burst out, “I can’t think. I’m hopeless.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair.
“It looks like you have a blister on your hand,” said Bell. “From your bout with the stump.”
Speke closed his fists. “I’m not nearly as stiff as I thought I’d be, after my exertions.”
Bell warned himself: keep the questions coming. At any moment Speke could decide that the interview was over, that all interviews were over indefinitely. “Do you find yourself reading other playwrights?”
A quick change of subject was often rewarding. But Speke merely attempted to smile, and said, “Of course. There is so much talent out in the world. I hate people who only read dead playwrights.” Something stopped him. Perhaps it was the anticipation of Brothers’ dynamite, making both of them stare toward the window.
“Things keep going wrong around here.” Speke lowered his voice, as though confessing. “Little things. There was a videotape I was going to watch. It’s been sitting on the television for days. Suddenly, I can’t find it.”
Bell caught himself about to say, “Someone moved it.” No need to sound flippant, he warned himself.
“I keep turning over things in my mind. The stump, I mean. I keep thinking about the taproot. I think I probably made a fool of myself.”
“It was very entertaining.”
“You think I’m asking you to reassure me, but please don’t. Please. Let’s be honest. Christ, I don’t want to sit in here. I feel as though the ceiling is lowering itself down on me.”
Bell began to reassure him, when Speke said, “Don’t most people—most successful people—have security guards these days?”
There was something boyish about Speke’s need to know, about his need to hear advice, that touched Bell. “Maybe,” he suggested, “we should go outside.”
When they were in the sunlight, Speke forged ahead, as though stump fragments could rain down any moment.
“I’m not usually so nervous,” he said, pausing so Bell could catch up with him. “Not usually. I used to be an emotional mess, of course.”
Bell had noticed how people use the phrase “of course” as a way of diffusing information that was usually not a matter of “course” at all. “I know the feeling,” he offered.
“Ha! You don’t know the kind of shape I was in.” Speke said this nearly with pride. “I was a wreck.” He spun and seemed about to grab Bell. “Do you know what I want to know? I want to know is Brothers a malicious man of criminal intent, or what? Telling everybody an explosion’s coming. ‘Hey, I’m going to blow up a big thing.’ And then—nothing. I’d like to wring his neck.”
Speke put both hands to his mouth and bellowed, “Brothers—blow it up!”
They both listened, but there was
no answer, and no sound but the birds.
“What sort of man is Brothers?” asked Bell.
“I can’t stand this,” Speke said, spinning again to confront him. “Can you stand this?”
Bell began to say something like: it is a little unnerving.
“I think I’m going to lose my mind.” Speke said this very slowly. Then, suddenly, “He killed a man. Brothers. In Korea.”
They entered what looked like a larger version of one of the guest cottages. Inside was some weight lifting equipment, an old-fashioned barbell and a wall-length mirror above a gray wrestling mat.
“I bet you think I’m still a wreck.” Speke unlooped a jumprope from a hook. His feet were quick. He was plainly in decent shape, and the rope was a white blur. He was also, Bell thought, as close to some sort of emotional collapse as anyone he could recall.
“So you don’t think,” said Speke at last, panting heavily, letting the rope fall. “So you don’t think I’m a complete ruin of a man. But I feel like one. You want to know how theatrical I felt when I knew you were coming? I didn’t know how to act. That was the problem—I didn’t know which version of me you would like most. Hearty Speke. Philosophical Speke. Speke the athlete.”
He tossed what looked like two large, red plastic teddy bears tied together. Bell caught them.
“Speke as tough guy. Put them on.”
This wasn’t exactly Bell’s usual interviewing technique, but he had done a story on Olympic boxing, and had gone a few rounds with a bronze medal light heavyweight without feeling too clumsy. “I boxed a little in college,” he said. “Middleweight. I’m more light heavy, now.”
Speke stiffened. “What was that?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“No explosion?”
Bell shook his head apologetically.
Speke said, “Let’s box.”
He was apparently one of those men who simply had to be doing something, every single moment. Bell was wary of such men. He did not want to trade jabs with this big, lively, nervous genius. He hated the sound of his own voice. “I will if you want to, but I’m really not that interested.”
“You feel sorry for me. You think I have to act like something—that I can’t just be myself.”
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