Scornful Moon

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘We decided not to run Harold Fine’s review of your niece’s art show. In view of her mother, you know. It was pretty savage.’

  I thanked him. ‘How did Harold take it?’

  ‘Not well.’

  The telephone rang in the chief reporter’s cubicle — Dinny Thompson. Strange in those places when a story breaks: a tremor runs through, a silence falls and only a single voice is heard. Dinny, still holding the phone, put out his head and yelled, ‘Clarry, George, pronto. Get over to Ollie Joll’s office. Someone’s been shot.’

  I did not run with them. My days are over for that. When Dinny came out, I said, ‘Who?’

  ‘He doesn’t know. Not Ollie. He’s all right. It looks like he’s the one who did the shooting though. My man’s not sure.’

  James, I thought. ‘Is someone dead?’

  ‘Looks like it. ’Scuse me, Sam.’

  I went down to the street and walked past the library and the town hall. The police had cleared the bottom of Taranaki Street. Broken glass and a broken chair lay on the footpath by Joll’s door. Men eased out with a stretcher and fed it into an ambulance. I could not see the person’s face but knew enough about how ambulance men behave to realise that he — she? — was still alive.

  Ollie Joll came out with two policemen. He wore his cashmere coat and Homburg hat — immaculate. His face was — how was it? I could not get close — ruined, and shifted to one side, dislocating him from the Ollie I had known.

  The policemen put him in a car and drove away.

  I saw Clarry Foley running for the Dominion and could not stop him. George Stone moved in the crowd, hunting witnesses.

  ‘Who was it, George?’

  ‘They won’t say. But I heard one of the girls in the office. It’s some young bloke — can’t publish it — called Owen Moody.’

  Chapter Nine

  He did not die. The bullet, from a German pistol First Lieutenant Joll had brought home from the war, struck him high on the right side of his chest, nicked his lung and came to rest under his shoulder blade. The surgeon had only to make a cut in Owen’s skin for it to pop out.

  The charge against Oliver Joll, made before JPs the following day, was attempted murder. He was remanded until Monday, then remanded again in the Magistrates Court. It was two weeks before he was able to plead.

  Taranaki Street. The crowd stood gawking, and I gawked along with them. I wanted to know and not know. I thought, It can’t have happened, yet it had. Was Owen Moody a robber? Had Ollie Joll fired his shot in self-defence? That was the simplest explanation. I rejected it. ‘Owen’ and ‘robber’ failed to conjoin. He had the boldness for that role but wasn’t stupid enough. Jealousy then? They had fought over a woman. I could see Joll and Owen in dispute — but over some bit of property, not for love. They were, it came to me, impure. The thing began in adulteration of some sort — with the creature each had made of himself. This shooting was the final act in a history. Neither was an accidental man.

  How had they met … ? So I went on, confusing, tormenting myself. I was stitched into their pattern and should be able to see the story of it all.

  But things hidden there might injure me. Fear made me hesitate a moment. Then I hurried round to the D.I.C, where Taylor Barr worked in the menswear department. Someone quicker had beat-en me with the news. Taylor had mounted his motorcycle and sped away.

  ‘A friend has been in an accident, evidently. Mr Barr has gone to the hospital,’ the head salesman told me.

  I caught the Newtown tram. But why go on — I did this, I did that, it’s not about me. Yet I’ve turned myself into a peg to hang it on. Well then: could not find Taylor at the hospital. Detectives had latched on to him and taken him away to hear his story, which contained neither much nor little: he shared a flat with Owen Moody, they were friends, he knew Mr Joll well enough to say hello, Owen had met him two or three weeks before … He repeated it to Eric and me when we drove around to Oriental Bay to see him that night.

  Taylor had recovered from his shock. He was up in the air, buoyant with the drama and Owen’s escape. The bullet had gone right through him and popped out like an orange pip when the doctor gave a squeeze. A week or two and he would be on his feet and raising Cain. Taylor mimed thanks to heaven, lifting his eyes. ‘The merest half inch,’ he told us, measuring.

  ‘What we want to know, Taylor, is how Owen and Ollie Joll knew each other.’

  ‘I introduced them. Mr Joll comes in and buys his shirts from me. Golly, we’ve lost a customer.’

  ‘Introduced them in the shop?’

  ‘Oh, no. Oh, no. At the football. We were playing at the Hutt Recreation Ground. You often see Mr Joll at games, and Hutt is sort of next door to his electorate. It could be for votes, I never thought of that. Anyway, Owen was there watching me play. He doesn’t like football, he’s always saying that muddied oafs thing.’

  ‘Another bit is flannelled fools,’ Eric said.

  ‘Yes. Owen says all the fools are on the other side. We were talking and Mr Joll came up and wished me luck, so I introduced them. I didn’t think Owen would like him much, but they got on like a house on fire. We went and had dinner with him at the St George Hotel.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘One night that week. And Owen had dinner with him again, later on. He told me he’d asked him for a job and Mr Joll said he’d think about it.’

  ‘What sort of job?’

  ‘Well, Owen had worked it out that Mr Joll needs someone to run his business when he goes into Parliament. So he told Mr Joll he’d like to do it.’

  ‘That’s absurd. Owen can’t run a business, he’s a clerk.’

  Taylor was offended. ‘Owen’s smart. He’s smarter than all three of us put together, I’d say.’

  ‘Is that what they quarrelled about? A job?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what went on. All I know is Owen had an appointment to go and see him. He told me he had a good chance. It would be good pay.’

  ‘And Ollie shot him?’

  ‘High up. Here.’ Taylor embedded his finger in his chest. ‘He’ll have a scar. Two scars. Front and back.’

  ‘Ollie must have turned him down and Owen got upset.’

  It was more believable than robbery.

  Driving home, Eric said, ‘You know who’s going to take Joll’s place in the Melling electorate?’

  ‘James’s lucky day,’ I said.

  ‘Good luck or bad?’

  James did not want to talk about it. The whole thing had a bad smell. I could not very well reply that his party had no one else to turn to; said instead that people would understand if under the circumstances … I could not go on. But he chose to be offended by what I had said rather than what I had not.

  ‘Circumstances?’

  ‘I just mean —’

  ‘There are no circumstances involving me. I stand completely aside from this — event. It’s another country. The man is gone. He doesn’t exist.’

  ‘I see that —’

  ‘And I won’t have it said that I’m taking someone’s place.’

  ‘You remember Moody, though, the man who was shot?’

  ‘The fellow on the motorcycle. You can tell Taylor to sever that connection.’

  ‘James, your rule doesn’t extend that far.’

  ‘I’m busy, Sam. Please don’t telephone me again.’ He hung up.

  After that, quietness from him, stillness out in the Hutt. But chatter, chatter everywhere else. The questions, speculations, mistaken ‘facts’, bits of false knowledge I heard in the two weeks before the true story came out — if I’d shovelled them up they would have filled the tray of a lorry. Some were as dull as puddles: Joll had caught Owen Moody hunting for cash in his desk drawer. Others cut like bits of broken glass: Owen was having an affair with Ollie’s wife. Variations on the theme of money and sex. A kind of Joll-o-mania, Moody-mania, seized the town. Two of the questions asked were: Who is this Owen Moody? Where’s he from? I learned that he wa
s an American, that he was an unsuccessful actor, that he played the clarinet in a dance band, that he sponged off women, was a gigolo, that he was the son of an English earl — seriously, all of that, and more: that he raced motorbikes on the Isle of Man, that he ‘fixed’ racehorses for crooks. Bits of truth came out — he was a clerk at Barnhill Importers, a better-than-average cricketer, a would-be poet. I kept silent. I did not want it known that he was part of a group of men engaged in writing a detective story. Got hold of my fellow scribblers, told them to keep mum.

  I sat at my desk reading our chapters: poor Roy’s with its pomposities, so unlike him; Eric’s full of neat dead sentences (unlike him), and its untraceable poison that left the victim smiling; Euan’s cut and dried, balanced and clear, but shying away from the blood that should have flowed and the screams that should have rent the air; my own, ditto, shying away; Tom Gow’s, fourth form stuff; Fred Scanlon’s, butterfat and wool; and last, chapter eight, Owen Moody’s.

  It did not seem so very good now. Yet it stayed alive through the physical conviction driving it and the black counterflow of fear. I read it closely. I tried to lift stones. Who was this man with the scar that shone like a silver smile? Owen had met him in his dreams — and then drawn back from admitting more. But don’t we all ‘know’ that our dreams reveal truths about ourselves that the daytime mind suppresses? Is that the latest word? Do I have it right? Well then, this scarred man with his unearthly beauty and the hatred that makes him kill, was he Owen’s alter ego, the Mr Hyde to his cricket-playing Dr Jekyll? Had he emerged in Ollie Joll’s office and forced poor Ollie to shoot?

  I worked and worried at it but the stone would not shift. I circled around the way hyenas circle prey, but instead of closing in was pushed by lack of courage further away, and was able at last to resume my role as editor, give a mental tick to this bit of his chapter, purse my lips at that, and decide that Owen was really not so clever after all, for wouldn’t the cigarette butt Rufus had picked up turn soggy on his swim to the motorboat and become useless as evidence?

  I smiled with relief. Owen was taped. I bundled him up with the others, made him fast with a bulldog clip, and locked him in the bottom drawer of my study desk.

  Eric was lecturing in Christchurch and could not come to the court. I would have preferred to remain alone but people I knew were all about. I sat down at last with two of my defaulters, Euan Poynter and Tom Gow — no getting away. Dudley Aimer was several rows in front, already drawing furtively on a pad — which Freddie Barr, two along, peered to see. Taylor stayed outside with the witnesses, although he was unlikely to be called.

  The magistrate was J. W. Mander, a man who likes no sound but soft breathing in his court. He looks up frowning if a seat creaks or a pencil drops. A shout of agreement or disbelief makes him clear the room; yet I saw him send his handkerchief once — so clean and white, it sparkled — to a woman sobbing in the witness stand.

  He had to put up with creaking seats, exhaled breath, indrawn breath when the court guards brought Ollie Joll to the prisoner’s box. Ollie stood straight. We needed confrontation, and peered around, dabbing our heads this way and that, for Owen Moody. Without Ollie’s victim — his antagonist? his partner? — there was a great lacuna in proceedings. It was like a wedding without the bride, a wrestling match where one of the contestants fails to show up.

  Ollie was dressed in his usual natty way, but did not seem to fit his skin. ‘Seem’, I say, because our perception was at fault. He was steady, he was square. He kept still. He meant to give no satisfaction. Yet we shrank him, darkened him; we blurred his image with the suppositions we held and the half-truths we knew.

  ‘Where’s Moody?’ Euan Poynter whispered.

  ‘I remember him from school. He was pretty iffy even then,’ Tom Gow said.

  ‘Is he still in hospital?’

  ‘No, he’s home,’ I said, knowing it from Taylor, who had taken time off work to look after him. (Owen’s mother, Taylor informed me with a grin, had come steaming up from Christchurch ‘like the royal yacht’, but Owen had got rid of her ‘toot sweet’.)

  ‘He’s well enough to be here, I’ll bet,’ Tom Gow said. ‘He was always doing a bunk from things at school.’

  ‘Shhh,’ Euan said. The magistrate was frowning.

  I frown. I wrinkle my brows at the problem I face: how to put it down. I’ve got clippings from the Dominion and the Evening Post and Truth to help me if my memory fails, and I’ve got my (unfailing) memories of that day. The path I need to follow lies between them or I’ll end up on scaly ground or sinking in a bog. Where’s the path? I see it running on, but where does it begin; and when it has led me as far as it goes, isn’t there a second path that carries on, a harder one, a crueller one, clinging to a cliff-face where I dare not look down?

  I must put this stuff out of my mind.

  Colin Brookes, a Harbour Board employee, was walking on the footpath opposite Joll’s office in Taranaki Street when he heard a gunshot. The time was 1.55 in the afternoon. He stopped with several other passers-by, wondering if the sound might be a truck backfiring. A carrier, Mr Sidley, working in a loading bay, said no, he was a returned soldier and he knew a pistol shot when he heard it. They were trying to work out where the sound had come from when the glass shattered in Joll’s window across the street and a chair came hurtling out and landed on the pavement. A young man appeared in the window. ‘Help me, I’ve been shot,’ he cried. As Brookes crossed the street, he saw two men struggling in the room. Five more gunshots sounded.

  Michael O’Meara, a storeman, was talking with the typiste, Miss Bird, in Joll’s ground-floor office when a shot sounded from upstairs. He ran to the door and saw Joll appear on the landing. ‘Fetch an ambulance, O’Meara. Mr Moody has shot himself,’ Joll cried. At that moment a crashing sound came, and pieces of broken glass fell on the pavement outside, followed by a chair. Joll ran back into his office. O’Meara heard cries and a struggle, then the sound of further gunshots. He told Miss Bird to call the police, then started up the stairs, hesitating.

  Brookes and Sidley ran past O’Meara. It was like going over the top at Flers, Sidley said. Joll appeared on the landing and stood aside to let them pass. ‘Be careful of him, he’s badly hurt,’ he said.

  Moody was sitting on the floor, with his back resting against Joll’s desk. He held a pistol in his lap and his head was slumped forward. The front of his shirt was covered in blood. As the men approached, he looked up and said, ‘Mr Joll has shot me. Get a car and take me to a doctor.’ Sidley took the pistol and laid it on Joll’s desk. Moody appeared to faint. He lay on his side.

  Joll said, ‘I was showing him my pistol and it accidentally went off and he shot himself.’

  The two men carried Moody downstairs, where he recovered consciousness and said, ‘I have discovered a scandal. Give my love to my mother.’ He fainted again.

  Miss Bird, who knew first aid from the Girl Guides, used the office scissors to cut open Moody’s shirt. She examined the wound in his chest. Moody woke again and said he was dying. Miss Bird told him the injury was not that bad and that he should lie still and not talk.

  Seeing the wounded man was in good hands, Brookes went upstairs to check if Joll was all right. He found him putting some papers into his safe. Joll said he was tidying up and asked if ‘young Moody’ was going to ‘make it’. Brookes told him he had better come downstairs. Miss Bird had made Moody comfortable. Joll said, ‘Guns are dangerous things. He didn’t have any experience.’

  They waited for the ambulance to arrive.

  When Constable David McAndrew arrived at Joll’s office he found Moody lying at the foot of the stairs, with Miss Bird supporting his head. The accused, Joll, was standing nearby. He had his hands in his pockets and appeared calm. Several other people were present, including the previous witnesses.

  McAndrew asked Joll if the shooting was an accident. ‘Of course it was. He was playing with my Mauser and it went off. Then he fell against the wind
ow and it broke.’

  Sergeant Peter Burrell arrived with three more constables. They questioned witnesses while an ambulance took the wounded man away. Joll waited in the downstairs office.

  Burrell examined the room upstairs, where he took possession of a pistol. He locked the door and drove Joll to the police station. On the way Joll said, ‘Good God, Peter, what a mistake. He was an amateur. I should never have let him fiddle with that thing. I brought it back from the war, you know.’ He also said, ‘I believe that poor young man will die.’

  Senior Sergeant Trevor Dowling questioned Joll at the station. Joll repeated that Moody had been playing with the pistol; he was spinning it on his finger ‘like Tom Mix’ when it went off. The shot threw him back against the window, which broke. When Joll was trying to help him, Moody pulled the trigger several more times, by some sort of automatic action of his finger.

  Joll asked if there was any news from the hospital.

  Dowling said, ‘I have abundant evidence that a serious disturbance took place in your office. Before the shots were heard, a chair was thrown through the window on to the street.’

  ‘What chair? Who says?’

  ‘The carriers on the stand across the street.’

  ‘My God,’ Joll said.

  Dowling charged him with attempted murder.

  How long can I keep on in this way? It is like demonstrating that one and one makes two, when the real question is being not number. What is ‘one’, who is he, who is the other, and when they’re brought together, what is the nature of ‘two’?

  In one of his talks, Eric described the ‘whirling coalescence’ that results when two stars approaching each other become so deeply involved that gravitation prevents their escape. Their velocity increases; their paths change from rectilinear to hyperbolic, with the focus of each orbit at the centre of the other star. Then comes the tidal distortion, the flinging out of mass that makes our planets, which take form about the new sun …