It had been ages, it seemed, since they had left Erika Spyri’s office, but they sat there in silence while Bell did nothing but jot down his thoughts. Erika had ushered them into the street, whispering, darting her eyes from side to side, and then she had left them, plainly relieved to be ascending once more to the routine of her office. Even as she sat there in the lounge Sarah felt a current of compassion for Erika. It was a terrible thing to be afraid.
Bell’s black notebook was cluttered with jottings. His pen made the slightest whisper on the paper.
“We can’t stay,” she said.
He said, without looking up, “Let me finish my drink.”
She was about to agree: of course. Finish your drink. Maybe he was right. His manner said: What’s the rush? But inside, she seethed. She was motionless, but she knew that she was very close to throwing her glass of sherry at the far wall.
She usually loved the sound of a piano. Music almost always lay calm, warm hands on her, like a homecoming. But today the music was like unwanted affection, reassurance she did not believe or want.
“For someone who refused to divulge a secret, she managed to tell us volumes,” said Bell. He snapped his notebook shut.
As much as she was charmed by his presence, his voice, and the way he moved, she could not sit still.
Everything is wonderful, said the music. The rest of the world is a dream. It was one of those outdated and yet potent pop tunes she could never quite name. “Stormy Weather,” perhaps, or “Cry Me a River,” something before her time and yet a part of it, too.
“You don’t like it here,” Bell said.
She could have loved it here, actually. Salted nuts, muted lighting. She felt the frisson she had experienced here once, years before, as a teenager when she had considered that some day she might fall in love. This was romance, of a sort she had long ago imagined to be the stuff of teenage novels and ads for champagne.
But now she wanted to run from this place. This was not the moment to smile prettily, and Sarah knew she had a pretty enough smile. There was a warning signal bleating somewhere in her marrow. An alarm, insistent, painful.
The pianist ended one song with a glissando, and then his fingers began toying with another tune. You see how delightful life is? said the music.
Don’t believe it, the alarm said. Warning warning warning.
The alarm said: Maria Asquith.
The alarm said: Ham is in trouble.
“I think well here,” Bell explained, nearly an apology. “I’ve interviewed mayors, senators, and gangsters here. A Columbian druglord sat right where you’re sitting and talked about the Cal/Stanford game.”
Certainly Bell would feel exactly as she felt. Certainly he would understand what was happening. But her fear was so visceral that she couldn’t articulate it, and thoughts which cannot be verbalized tend to slip away.
“I don’t see what there is to think about at all,” she said.
He misunderstood. “Maybe not. A man might naturally be attracted to the sister of an old friend—”
“Ham doesn’t know who Maria is.”
“He married her—”
“She lied to him.”
“This doesn’t quite fit together, Sarah. Why would she do that? I mean, think about it: most of what Erika just told us is purest conjecture.”
“Believe me, I’m right.”
He frowned, earnest, deliberate. “But how can you be sure?”
It was difficult to keep her voice steady. “It’s pretty obvious. Ham doesn’t understand Maria.”
Bell leaned forward. His posture said: Go on, I’m listening.
“I saw it happen,” Sarah continued. “I saw. But I didn’t really know what I was seeing.” Her inner voice said: fly. She silenced it with an effort. “Ham was ecstatic when he first met her, out of control, practically, with—well, with love. He introduced me to Maria as though he were allowing me to at last meet the Good Fairy herself, as though I would faint dead away from the sheer honor of it.”
“You’re jealous.”
“This isn’t some giddy hunch, Chris. I know Ham.”
“And how did Maria seem when you met her?”
“As she always seems. The sort of look and soft laugh that stuns men and that women find less than consistently charming.” But, she told herself, you were fooled by Maria, too.
“Do I seem slain?”
“Ham wouldn’t have been able to keep a secret under such circumstances. He blurted out everything he knew about her. He can’t really control his feelings that well. He’s too full of life. If he had known that Maria was Asquith’s sister, he would have said something, or let something slip.”
“I’m not so sure,” Bell said. “It would be a natural way to get his old collaborator to spend more time with him. The brother-in-law as partner—it makes sense.”
“That’s not what happened. Ham was deceived.”
“How do you know?”
She did not answer.
“And why would Maria deceive him? There’s no reason. And if Maria deceived Ham, then so did her brother. And yet you say that Asquith and Ham are probably heads together right now working on Strip-search II.”
Sarah took a deep breath. Bell was, despite his good sense, a calm thinker of the worst sort. Not a clumsy thinker, and a natural skeptic. For this reason, conclusions did not come quickly to him. This, no doubt, made him an excellent journalist, each fact a pinch of ore to be mentally weighed. Assaying the truth was not Sarah’s habit. She was either ignorant, or enlightened. And now, without a doubt, she knew the truth.
“I think we’ve been outfoxed,” Bell was saying, “all of us, including you. I don’t know whether to laugh at Ham’s cunning, or tear up my notes in exasperation. Except, I’m too stubborn to quit. How can I write a biography about such a wily fake? A charming charlatan. Unless he expects me to hide the truth, which I have no intention of doing. I’m capable of writing a hostile biography, if that’s what it turns out to be.”
She had trouble controlling her voice. “He deserves your affection. And some of your faith. There’s some kind of trouble. Something wrong.”
“Okay, fine—you may be right. Even when I trust your judgment, I find myself balking. Professional habit, I suppose. I need more information.” Bell, sure-footed, calm, frowning with the responsibility of what they had discovered, seemed to wish he had a map he could unfurl on the table before them, a chart he could study. “All that whispered wild talk about the homicidal brother is completely unsubstantiated. It could be nothing but Erika’s imagination. I can’t believe it.” He shrugged an apology.
Sarah detested the sound of the piano.
Bell selected a salted almond. “I need to know more about Asquith. He’s probably nothing more than a very bright guy with an ego that really isn’t very hungry. He doesn’t mind Speke getting all the glory, and all the paychecks.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sarah said. “Maria is trouble.”
Bell interlaced his fingers. He had to admit that he didn’t understand Hamilton Speke anymore. And Asquith—who was this mysterious eminence grise? But Sarah had just said something that he understood. “She is trouble. Don’t worry,” he added with a laugh. “She’s not my type.”
“What type is yours, exactly, Mr. Bell?”
“I hope you’re never mad at me, Sarah. You have a glance that would lay a tank battalion to waste.”
“Then I suppose you wouldn’t stand much of a chance.”
“Not a ghost.” Then, “There was a strange, mechanical quality about her interest in me.”
“Mechanical,” Sarah repeated, drily.
“As though she wanted to charm me simply to distract me.”
“Tell me one thing, Chris. Are we going to sit here forever?”
“I’m trying to absorb what I’ve heard.” He added something that should have been a warning. “Erika has started me off on a very interesting path and I want to take my time.”
�
��I can’t stand it here.”
“So,” said Bell, “we’ve established that Maria slithers and licks the air and in every other way acts like a serpent.”
“A legless lizard,” Sarah agreed.
“But what does this mean?”
Sarah pushed aside her drink, so hard that sherry spilled across the table. Its scent was nutlike, the odor of oak and something else, something both tantalizing and poisonous. She apologized, but then said, “I can’t sit here any more.”
She was on her feet, and was about to leave without him when she saw him thrust currency just beyond the small lake of wine. His movements were slow. His words, though, when he reached her were reassuring.
“You’re right,” he said. “We have work to do.”
28
Maria clung to his arm, and she was weeping.
“I’ve done something terrible to you, Hamilton.”
Speke wondered at her words. Had she been unfaithful to him? “It’s all right,” he tried to reassure her. “Whatever you’ve done, I’ll make it all right.”
It was hot. The sunlight had weight, like a radiologist’s lead blanket. The heavy sun draped over his shoulders, and made it hard to do more than stand, absorbing what she was saying.
This should be a happy moment. His own life had returned with the fact that somewhere his old friend was still alive. There was no guilt, there was only the sunlight and a landscape restored to hope. He understood that Maria was frightened, and he forced himself to be receptive to what she was so desperately trying to communicate.
“He told me I could never trust you, Hamilton. But I do trust you. Please believe me—you should leave this place.”
She was afraid of Asquith. That was clear, and yet Speke wanted to laugh. Asquith! Why be afraid of a man he had nearly killed?
Death had been vanquished. Nothing else mattered.
And yet, Maria was afraid of Asquith, and Speke himself could not shake this peculiar chill that wended upward in his bones. “He wants to destroy you,” Maria wept.
When Speke interrupted her, he was surprised that his voice was reasonably steady. “Where is he?”
She did not answer. Instead she replied, “Don’t you see what’s happening? He’s going to destroy everything.”
She spoke with authority, as though she had seen all of this coming. The color of the sunlight faded for a moment. His voice was a rasp. “You—” It was impossible. He could not say a thing like this. “You knew, all along.”
She wept.
He ran his fingers through her hair. He held her for a moment. “Where is he?”
Now he was beginning to feel his feet anchor themselves into the ground, his boot heels digging in. Maria turned away, and would not answer. He folded his arms. His entire past would have to be reconsidered. Maria and Asquith were a team he would never have imagined. It wasn’t possible, even now. Could they have become lovers? At night, when he was watching old movies? Once reality unravels, anything is possible.
His voice was calm. “I’ll protect you, Maria. Whatever has happened, and whatever you’ve done. I won’t let him hurt you.”
“Hamilton—” She turned back to him. There is so much you should know, her expression said. “He used me.”
Ugly words. With ugly implications. “He’s a deceiver,” Maria went on. “He uses people. It’s his way. He can’t help it, because he really doesn’t have a life of his own.”
She continued, “He made me meet you. He encouraged me to marry you. It was all his idea. Your whole life the way it is right now—it was all his plan.”
These words made him close his eyes for a moment. Speke felt her words, and understood them, and when he opened his eyes again he felt the world flicker, as though he would faint. Asquith the mastermind, Asquith the magician, had deceived him in every way.
The air was stone. Each breath was acid. He could taste the strength of Asquith’s envy. He, Speke, had fulfilled the dream: he had lived, his name in bright lights, his words treasured. He had achieved what amounted to immortality, a life that extended not into eternity but around the world. He was Someone. And Asquith had never lived, in a sense, choked off from even ordinary, private pleasure. Speke had spent too much time on the telephone, too much time giving interviews, too much time sitting for publicity stills while strangers fussed with his hair and adjusted the lights that cascaded over him. But he had been offered life, and he had taken it.
He bit his knuckle, hard, wishing for enough pain to force him to concentrate. He felt concussed, lost to his senses. Isn’t it astounding, he found himself thinking, that even now my heart goes on thudding away in my chest? Don’t deceive yourself. Your life with Maria was an illusion. Reality, that steady rod of iron, is twisting out of shape, alive and writhing, a serpent.
“I forgive you,” he said. “Whatever he made you do, I love you, Maria.” It was funny, in a bitter way. Asquith had known the sort of artsy, mysterious woman he would find irresistible, and had turned his life inside out.
“Stay here,” Maria said. “Please don’t do anything. Wait!”
She left him, the sound of her footsteps receding to silence.
I must have been so easy to trick, he thought. So simple—blinded by my own faith, my own ceaseless belief that all would be well.
He had the strangest impression that Asquith was everywhere at once. He had the impression that Maria had gone to bring Asquith forth to take a bow, that an invisible audience would burst into applause as Asquith, dressed as Pan, as a Jack o’ the Green, as the very devil of the woods himself bounded nimbly to take a long curtain call.
There are many things I don’t know, old friend, Speke said, addressing the presence of Asquith, the ozone sting in the air around him, the still platinum stalks of the foxtails beside the path. But there are things you don’t know about me, which you know only how to ape. I love. I love Maria, I love this place, I love the people here. I love Sarah—yes, it was true. I am a man of heat.
And this gives me a strength you can not share, old colleague. And yet he was afraid, too, even as he was certain. If Asquith could do so much, if he could craft Speke’s life so the very vessel of his days began to sink around him, then Asquith was like night itself.
Maybe, he told himself, Asquith was not the man he once was. Maybe he had changed. Maybe this new adversary was not spite, not envy, not vengeance, but something worse. Maybe it was the hatred the lifeless must always feel for the passionate.
She was back, panting, struggling for the breath to speak. “He’s done what I was afraid he’d do—”
“What?” he heard his voice ask.
“The telephone doesn’t work,” she said.
He had never seen her like this—tear-stained, wild-eyed. He wanted to utter something soothing about the telephone, about how funny phones were. Nothing to get excited about, he wanted to say. “Of course it doesn’t work. That’s the first thing Asquith would do, and the easiest.” Think like Asquith, he told himself. What else will he do?
But something hard stabbed his palm. The car keys. She was forcing the keys into his hand. She dragged him by the arm. “Get into the car and get out of here. Go!” Her fingernails dug into his flesh.
“He’s done something to the car, too,” said Speke. “Go see.”
She snatched the keys from his hand, and streaked toward the garage, wrestled with the door, and, somewhere in the dark of the garage, flung open the car door.
She cried out.
He caught her in his arms, at the edge of the shadow of the garage. “It can hardly be a surprise, can it? Don’t worry, Maria. I know the way he thinks.”
He knew without even slipping the key into the slot in the half-light of the garage. He knew before he even turned the key. He did it only to assuage Maria, looking back at her with an I-told-you-so expression. It was useless. All twelve cylinders were silent iron. Speke settled into the leather seat, and the ignition that always coughed power gave a metal click. A dry, steel
cluck. The single tick of a large, broken clock that meant: nowhere. Nothing.
The car was dead.
“I would do the same thing,” Speke offered, with a grim lilt in his soul. This was a game Asquith was playing, and he was beginning to recall the rules. He gazed under the hood for a moment, but the cavern of the engine, and the expensive, cold-iron intricacies could hold a dozen severed cables. His untutored hands groped in the dark for an obvious sliced connection, but the car was not going to be coaxed to life by him. A sheepdog has more mechanical talent than I have, he told himself. It had always been a sort of comfort. He had always turned to a mechanic and said: as long as it’s fixed. He had never had to wrestle with the details of solenoids and distributors, except as words on his copy of the bill.
Asquith’s game was an ugly one, but wasn’t he, in the long run, Asquith’s equal? Couldn’t he beat him, even now?
Let us see what else our old adversary has been up to, thought Speke, with a sickening certainty that he knew exactly what would happen next. Brothers wasn’t due to come today, but Clara’s bronze-brown Buick was parked under the pepper tree, where she always parked it, where summer after summer of pink seeds and leaf litter and bird droppings had gradually worn the finish to the same basalt tan of the stones of the estate.
Maria seized his hand. “Go up to the road. Hurry. Try to flag down a car.”
Clara’s car would be disabled, too. He was sure of that much.
Her car was always unlocked, and the keys hung in the ignition, a metal Saint Christopher on the key chain. The keys tinkled, but nothing happened. Speke fumbled for the hood release and pulled the small black handle.
Wasn’t this going a bit far? To hurt my car is one thing. It made a sort of rough-and-ready sense. Speke recycles cars like Budweiser empties. Trash his Jag.
But this was an assault on Clara, and Speke did not like that. Clara was innocent. The hood gave a rusty creak, like the alarm of a beast, the distant note of a bull elephant. The old car smelled like so much stone: old petroleum, old rust. Clara didn’t deserve this. The bright copper gleam contrasted with the glaze of aging rubber and road grease.
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