The leader, Grigsby realized—he could hear the tinkle of its bell.
The goat came to within five feet and stood there staring at him with those weird yellow rectangular eyes that always seemed to Grigsby more knowing than any animal’s eyes had a right to be.
“You know what, goat?” Grigsby said aloud. “You smell just like a goat.”
The goat was a male and at his forehead were the two small bumps that would one day be horns. It took another few steps toward him and lowered his head.
“They itch, huh?” Grigsby said. He reached out and scratched the goat’s forehead, rubbing his fingertips against the bristly skin stretched taut above the bone. Twisting its neck, the animal leaned its head against his fingers, as insistent as a cat, and Grigsby laughed.
The goat, in its need, reminded him of himself last night, with Mathilde de la Môle.
Damn. She was some kind of a woman.
She knew tricks that Grigsby had never heard of, had never even imagined. She was like eighteen different women all at once, and she made Grigsby feel like eighteen different kinds of men, all of them as horny as billy goats. She moaned and sighed and purred and chuckled deep inside her throat, and she whispered instructions and endearments and breathless little gasps of pleasure into his astounded, disbelieving ear. She offered her body and she took his, sometimes with abandon and sometimes with practiced, almost diabolical skill.
And then afterward, just like she promised, she had given him a back rub. And, just like she promised, she had been damned good at it.
While her strong shrewd hands kneaded the flesh and the muscle above his aching hip, Grigsby sighed happily. From time to time he remembered to close his mouth, so he wouldn’t drool all over her sheets.
“It is good?” the Countess Mathilde de la Môle had asked him after a while. He could hear the smile in her voice.
“Good don’t even come close,” Grigsby said. He sighed again. “My God.”
Her fingers were prodding at the pain, locating it, enclosing it somehow, capturing it and then pushing it deep down below awareness.
“But it don’t hardly seem fair,” Grigsby said. “Me just lyin’ here like a lump on a log while you work at me.”
“Quiet,” she said. “You were not just lying there a while ago. As I recall, you were quite active.”
Grigsby grinned against the pillow, ridiculously pleased with himself. Despite his eagerness (and he had been as eager as an sixteen-year-old buck), he had pleasured her three times before taking his final pleasure himself. And now, inside his head, a small excited thought capered like a circus dwarf: She’s a goddamn countess, from goddamn France, and she’s giving you a goddamn back-rub!
She kissed him gently on the spine, between his shoulders. “Better?”
“Better,” he said. “I thank you.”
She swung herself off his thighs and lay down beside him. With an effort—he was so limp that he felt he might melt into the mattress—Grigsby rolled over onto his side to look at her.
Her right elbow against the pillow, her head propped against her hand, she lay with her tousled blond hair loose along her smooth white shoulders. Her red lips, slightly more pouty now, were parted in a smile. Her skin was misted shiny with sweat, and she wore her naked body as proudly as most women wore a brand new dress.
He grinned. “I’ll tell you one thing, Mathilde,” he said. This time he didn’t blush; nothing like a roll in the hay to smooth the edges off a fellow’s embarrassment. “You surely do take the cake.”
She laughed. “Take the cake? This is good?”
“Damn good.”
Smiling, she inclined her head. “Then I thank you for the compliment.”
“This is the first time,” he said, “bein’ with you, it’s the first time all day I been able to forget about those killin’s.”
She smiled sadly. “And now,” she put her finger to his chin, “you remember them again.”
“Yeah,” said Grigsby. “Well. They ain’t gonna go away.”
She pursed her lips. “It is a pity that you cannot learn something of the childhood of all the men traveling with Oscair.”
“What good would that do?”
She moved her shoulder lightly in a shrug. “It all begins there, does it not? We spend the rest of our lives attempting to make right the wrongs which we suffer in childhood.”
Grigsby grinned; he thought she was joking. “Get revenge, like?”
She said seriously, “Sometimes, I think, yes. A child who is beaten by his parents becomes, very often, a parent who beats his child. But I believe that we all suffer, that we all become wounded. Even with the best intentions in the world, our parents cannot always be there when we stumble, cannot always console us when we hurt. And so we grow up, all of us, somehow knowing at the core of our selves that we are completely alone.”
“Yeah, well, sure,” said Grigsby. “That’s just the way of the world.”
“But no,” she said. “I speak now not of a conscious awareness, a philosophical position. I speak of a flaw, a wound that lies concealed in the structure of the soul. And I believe that throughout our lives we will be attracted to situations, and to people, that will sooner or later cause us pain. And the result will be that the wound, the fundamental pain of the soul, reemerges.”
Grigsby frowned. “You’re sayin’ we pick people who’re gonna hurt us?”
“Or who will cause us to hurt them, which will of course hurt us as well.”
Grigsby thought then of Clara. Her face twisted in pain, her voice unraveling, ragged, as she shrieked at him: Bob, how could you do this?
He pushed away the image. “That don’t make much sense,” he said.
“You have read Stendahl?” she said.
He frowned. “That a book?”
She smiled. “An author. He talks about the phenomenon of crystallization. We meet someone—a man, let us say, meets a woman. He is attracted to her, and soon he discovers that all the qualities he most admires in a woman have begun to crystallize around this particular female. She is not only beautiful, but also intelligent, and kind, and loving. She is altogether perfect.”
Thinking of Clara, Grigsby said, “Some women can come pretty close to bein’ perfect.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But the point I make here is that frequently our minds crystallize, they construct, this perfection. And I believe that the mind constructs the perfection around an individual whom the soul, the spirit selects. Someone who is in fact perfect for the spirit’s purposes.”
“Somebody who’s gonna hurt us?”
“I believe that the spirit, the soul, wishes to heal itself of its wound. You cannot heal a wound unless you are aware that it exists. And so the spirit seeks out those people who will, sooner or later, cause us exactly the sort of pain which already we suffer, but at a level below consciousness.”
Grigsby smiled. These folks from Europe surely did like their theories. “And you’re sayin’ everybody does this?”
She smiled at the gentle mockery in his voice, and she tapped him on the chin. “I believe so, yes.”
“What about the folks who get married and live happily ever after?”
She smiled again. “Apart from fairy tales, do you know many of these?”
“Some,” Grigsby said, but offhand he couldn’t think of any. Him and Clara? Gerry and Mary Hanrahan? Dell and Barbara Jameson? He asked her, “And what about this sonovabitch who’s killin’ the women? How do you work him in?”
She shrugged. “This man, this killer, perhaps in a sense he is trying to heal his wound by the murder of these women. Something quite horrible must have happened to him when he was a child. If you could learn what it was, you might better understand him.”
“I don’t gotta understand him. All I gotta do is catch him.”
“But perhaps you must understand him in order to catch him.”
“Hope not,” Grigsby said. “I don’t reckon I’ll ever understand him. Don’t
reckon I really want to.” He frowned.
She smiled. “Perhaps we should try to make you forget this matter again.”
Grigsby grinned. “What you got in mind?”
She told him.
Afterward, without intending to, Grigsby had slipped off to sleep. Only to come thrashing out of it, soaked with sweat and crying Clara’s name as he scrambled from the horror of Molly Woods. The oil lamps were off; Mathilde must have blown them out. Pale moonlight streamed through the window. For a few minutes, before he could pull himself together, he trembled like a baby against her body, and in the darkness she held him.
At last, his breathing and his heartbeat back to normal, the image of Molly Woods finally fading, he eased himself away from her shoulder. Ashamed at the weakness he had revealed, he forced a hollow chuckle through a throat that was still thick and tight.
“Bad dream,” he told her.
She said nothing, only stroked his cheek.
Grigsby rolled over and fished his watch from his vest pocket, struck a match. Three o’clock.
“I gotta go, Mathilde,” he told her.
She nodded. “If you must.”
Grigsby dressed himself, keeping his back to the Countess—acting the fool like that, hollering and shouting in his sleep, had made him feel lumpish and clumsy once more.
Buttoning up the sheepskin jacket, he turned to her and said, “Am I gonna be able to see you again?”
She smiled. “But of course. If you wish it.”
“I do. And listen.” He felt his face reddening once more. Too dark for her to see it—good thing. “Well,” he said. “I’m real sorry about all the commotion. Wakin’ you up and all.”
She shook her head. “We all have our terrors, Bohb.”
He looked down at her. He felt suddenly that he was leaving her with something left undone, something left unsaid; but he couldn’t think what they might be. He nodded. “Thank you, Mathilde. I’ll see you soon.”
She smiled again. “Good night, Bohb.”
Out in the hallway, Grigsby remembered that the the hotel’s passkey still lay in his pocket. Quietly, holding his breath, he unlocked each door in turn and peered inside. Vail, O’Conner, Ruddick, and Wilde were all asleep, Wilde snoring away like a sawmill.
Downstairs, when Ned Winters saw Grigsby, he looked like someone who had just been told that he wouldn’t be getting hanged today after all. Breathing an explosive sigh of relief, he took back the passkey. “Thank God, Marshal! Where were you?”
“Pokin’ around.”
“Holy Hannah! When you didn’t come back down, I didn’t know what to think.”
Grigsby nodded. “Listen, Ned. There’s a colored fella travelin’ with Wilde. Servant name of Henry. He move into another room?”
Winters nodded. “He’s in room 201 now. Wally said the manager, Mr. Vail, ordered him a new room.”
“He up there now?”
Winters nodded. “Went out around eight, came back at ten-thirty.”
“You sure? You didn’t maybe have yourself a catnap or two?”
“No sir, Marshal. Not a one. I been awake all night. They were all up in their rooms by midnight.” He leaned toward Grigsby. “But, come on now, Marshal, you sure you can’t tell me what’s goin’ on?”
“Positive. See you.”
From the hotel, Grigsby had ridden the mare back to his house, where he’d cleaned himself up, dressed in fresh clothes, and thrown some spare shirts and an extra union suit into his saddlebag. After leaving the horse at the livery stable, he had set off for the railroad station. He had arrived in Colorado Springs at six in the morning.
And now, as the horse jounced and rocked beneath his aching hip, Grigsby could see, over the tree line, against the bright blue of sky, the smudge of smoke that hung above the chimneys of Manitou Springs.
He realized, abruptly, that he hadn’t had a drink since the apple brandy in Mathilde’s room. Been so tickled with himself, probably, that he hadn’t even thought about it.
He tried to remember the last time he’d gone three or four hours without taking a single drink. Without thinking about a drink. Not since before Clara left.
Damn, he thought. That was cause for a little celebration.
“DAMN FINE LECTURE, Mr. Wilde,” said the mayor of Manitou Springs.
“Don’t cuss, Cleveland,” said his wife.
From over their heads, beyond the now empty chairs aligned in precise rows beneath the glittering chandeliers, Oscar could make out Elizabeth McCourt Doe chatting with Mathilde de la Môle and a gaggle of Manitou Springs luminaries beside the closed French windows that led onto the ballroom’s veranda.
“Good turnout, too,” said the Mayor. “Almost as good as that fella Dickens got.”
This snared Oscar’s attention.
“Dickens spoke here, did he?” he asked, and sipped at his champagne. Appalling stuff, flat and sulfurous.
“Sure did,” said the mayor. “He read from that book of his, about the death of Little Nell. Damn fine writing. Nearly brought a tear to my eye, I don’t mind telling you. Isn’t that right, Mother?”
“Don’t cuss, Cleveland,” said his wife.
“You know Dickens, Mr. Wilde?” asked the Mayor.
The mayor of Manitou Springs—Mr. Mudds, or Muggs, or something equally glum—was a jolly personage in a poorly tailored but extravagantly tailed dress coat who seemed utterly unaware that in the center of his round red face, roughly where his nose should have been installed, there bloomed an entity the size of a pomegranate, veined and gullied and carbuncled. He was short and portly, with skin as taut as a sausage casing. Mrs. Mudds (or Muggs) was a small desiccated woman, prodigiously creased, like a gnome left too long in a pickling vat. She wore a low-cut dress which flaunted an expanse of what probably she believed to be décolletage, but which to Oscar more nearly resembled erosion.
A scrum of Manitou Springians stood huddled about, all of them leaning slightly forward, as though Oscar were standing at the bottom of a shallow crater in the parquet floor. All of them wore evening dress, and all of them looked at least as well fed as Mr. Muggs. No watercress and celery for this lot, except perhaps by the troughful.
They were all wealthy enough to have paid twenty dollars apiece for the lecture and for this “intimate” champagne party. With the others milling about the ballroom, they were the elite of Manitou Springs—according to Vail, everybody who was anybody in the town. (“In other words,” Oscar had said, “nobody.”) And at the moment none of them, alas, was Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
“Not personally,” Oscar said to the mayor. “Although of course I know his works. I find them admirable. But I do sometimes wonder at the unusual number of pathetic little waifs he dispatches. In a novel by Mr. Dickens, one has only to come upon a pathetic little waif to know that the poor moppet is doomed. Sooner or later, usually after wasting away for several months, and for several chapters, he will breathe his last wretched little breath.” Oscar frowned thoughtfully. “Do you suppose it possible that Mr. Dickens secretly dislikes children?”
The mayor turned to his wife, she evidently being the authority on literary matters.
“But I thought I read,” she said, frowning, “that he’s got children of his own? A lot of them, I believe. A big family.”
“Ah,” said Oscar. “Perhaps that explains it.”
As Mrs. Muggs (or Mudds) assimilated this (or failed to), and as a few uneasy chuckles, all of these male, sputtered through the crowd, a female voice to Oscar’s right asked him, “Do you mean to tell us, Mr. Wilde, that you dislike children?”
Oscar turned. Beneath a sculpted mass of blue-white hair which possessed the dull seamless glow of a conquistador’s helmet, the woman’s jowly face was eloquently puckered in distaste. She was all combative shoulders and cannon-barrel breasts, and for a moment he felt like the owner of a skiff who looks up and discovers that a frigate is bearing down upon him on a collision course.
“On the contrary, ma
dam. I think they are one of life’s great treasures. A joy to us when we are in our prime, and a solace in our decline. As soon as I can afford to do so, I intend to hire several of them.”
More laughter this time, some of it shocked. The frigate’s face remained shuttered.
Oscar glanced over at Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
Still gaily smiling with her entourage.
The least she could do was look over in this direction.
He swallowed some champagne. What was it that Holliday, the dentist-gunman, had called that bourbon? Donkey piss.
“Mr. Wilde?”
Oscar turned. A small silver-haired man, warm brown puppy eyes peering out from a tracery of amused crinkles. “Jim Cathcart, editor of the Sentinel. I’ll bet you’ve heard this before”—he smiled an engaging deprecatory smile—“but I guess you can understand that I’ve got to ask you anyway. What are your feelings so far about America?”
Oscar beamed down at this pleasant little man. “I can scarce describe my feelings. And of course I can scarce describe America. How could one describe a thing which by its very nature is indescribable? The vastness, the richness, the splendor—they boggle the mind and beggar even my own powers of description.”
Around him, heads nodded in complacent agreement. His puppy eyes shining, Cathcart asked him, “Would you like to comment on which parts of it you’ve liked best?”
“I can answer you without hesitation,” said Oscar. “More than any other I’ve enjoyed this Colorado country of yours, filled as it is with splendid vistas and noble prospects.” Not likely that anyone in this flock knew Johnson’s comment to Boswell.
Clearly not. The remark had set more heads abob, and had apparently even taken some of the wind from the frigate’s sails. Her jowls had unclenched appreciably.
“Does that mean,” casually asked Cathcart, his brown eyes still warm and shining, “that you don’t care for the cities of America?”
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