Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  ‘Tve had mine. Did you want something more than toast and coffee?”

  He shook his head, took the glass of apple juice she handed him and gulped it down like a man dying of thirst. He drank the juice every morning, not really liking it, because he had read in the Medical pages of Time that it acted as an anticoagulant against the previous day’s intake of cholesterol. He had never bothered to check with a doctor if the claim was true; like most men who hated strenuous exercise he was prepared to accept any easy way to health. This morning he would have gulped down hemlock with the same thirst. He had woken from the worst night he had ever spent, lost in nightmare country, to a day that, if superstition meant anything, promised no better.

  “You haven’t eaten a proper meal for two days. You can’t go on like this, darling.”

  “I’d just get the heaves if I tried anything solid.” He spread his toast with honey straight from the comb, another health food: he couldn’t remember what it was supposed to do. “It’s no use, dark I won’t be able to eat a good meal till all this is over.”

  “When will that be?” She sounded resigned, as if she knew what his answer would be.

  “God knows.”

  “Do you think Bixby was the one who killed—her?” She couldn’t bring herself to say Helga: it sounded too familiar, as if she had accepted the girl as part of her own and Walter’s life.

  “I don’t know,” he said despairingly. “He could have. He probably did. But what do we do? Ring up the police and put them on to him?”

  “Why not?”

  But there was no hope in her voice and he recognized it. “Darl, all we can do is pray he’ll be satisfied with the money he wants this afternoon.”

  “I haven’t prayed in years. I’ve forgotten how to.”

  “Well, hope, then. I don’t know how to pray, either. Unless they’re the same thing.”

  “Do you think he might not call this afternoon? I mean, he didn’t call you on Monday when he was supposed to—”

  “He’ll call, all right.” He put down the toast and honey after taking one mouthful.

  He had waited all day Monday for Bixby to call; then all day Tuesday and still no call. He had begun to believe that Bixby had lost his nerve and decided not to go through with the blackmail threat; but, just in case, he had brought home the ten thousand dollars and put them in the safe behind the big wall mirror. There had still been no call from Bixby by the time he had left the Assembly on Wednesday and by then he had been convinced he had nothing more to fear from the man.

  He had come home Wednesday evening with an almost jaunty relief; he had even been looking forward to taking Norma to the police widows’ charity dinner, the sort of function he normally abhorred. They could decently escape from it at ten o’clock, then go on to the Silver Spade, where he had had his secretary book a table. Tony Bennett was singing there and he was Norma’s favourite; he would request Tony to sing C’est Si Bon, which was her favourite song. It would be like old times, the sort of times middle-aged married couples so rarely recaptured.

  Then he had reached home and the two detectives, Malone and Clements, had been there.

  When they had gone he had sunk into the leather chair. Norma came back into the room, sat down in the red empress chair, looked down at her hands clasped in her lap and said without looking up, “Did you know she was dead?”

  “How would I have known? God, darl, do you think I could have kept that from you?”

  “You kept it from me about you and her being—” She shook her head. Then she looked up. “Wally-?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, not nothing,” he said more harshly than he had intended; he could feel himself trembling, coming apart inside. “What were you going to ask me?”

  “No, you couldn’t have—” Her hands writhed in her lap like snakes’ heads battling each other to death.

  “You were going to ask me if I had killed her. Jesus Christ, darl, do you think I’m capable of murder?” He dropped his pipe into the ashtray beside him. His hand clawed at the arm of the chair, his nails scraping against the leather. He stared across at his wife sitting in the chair where Helga, his mistress, had sat only—how long ago was it? It could have been only last night or it could have been a year ago; the image of her came and went in his mind like a tide, sometimes so close he could feel and smell her, other times so distant as to be no more than a ghost. And as he gazed now at his wife she, too, seemed to retreat, became a ghost. He leaned forward, reached out a hand to her: she came back, became real again. “Darl, I couldn’t have killed her! No matter what she was going to do to us—I couldn’t have killed her!”

  Norma got up from her chair, crossed to him, took his head in her arms and pressed his face against her bosom. He leaned forward into her, putting his arms round her waist, and began to weep. She, too, began to cry. They were locked together like that in an agony of despair when they heard the footsteps of the maid on the tiles of the entrance hall.

  “Signora? Oh, scusi—”

  “No, it’s all right, Rosa.” Norma moved away from her husband, wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Mr. Helidon and I—we just heard of the death of an—an old friend.”

  “Oh, signora, I am so sorry—” The maid had lost her embarrassment at once; she had the Italian affinity for grief, understood the emotional release of tears. “You will not be going out, then?”

  “Yes.” Helidon’s voice was again unintentionally harsh. He stood up and felt his legs ready to collapse beneath him;

  he held on to the back of his chair like an old man. “We’ll be going, Rosa. We have to—” The last sentence was addressed to Norma. Her face was blank for a moment, then she understood and nodded.

  “Lay out my things, Rosa. Mr. Helidon and I will go to the dinner.”

  The maid uttered more condolences on the death of their old friend, then went through into the bedroom. As she did so the phone rang in the study. Helidon walked stiff-legged through into the smaller room and picked up the phone. Norma followed him to the doorway, stood there waiting as if she expected every phone call from now on to concern both of them, to be important to them.

  This one was: “Helidon? It’s your mate here. Sorry I ain’t been on to you before. I hadda go outa town Monday unexpectedly.”

  “What sent you?” The rasp in Helidon’s voice was intentional this time; he felt the gathering of an unexpected strength. He motioned to Norma to come into the study and close the door. “You read about Helga’s murder?”

  There was just a moment’s silence on the line: “Don’t start talking like that, sport. How would I know about that? It ain’t even in the papers tonight. It’s just come over on the news. That’s the first I heard of it.”

  “It was in the papers on Monday, when they found her down at the Opera House.” The clipping of her death had been lying on his desk for two days and he had not known it was Helga. Again there was the feeling of sadness, of something lost forever. Then he saw Norma looking at him with pain and fear in her eyes, and he tasted his treachery like bile.

  “I read that bit, but I never connected it with Helga. It didn’t mention her name, like. Not till tonight’s news on the radio and TV.” There was another short silence; then Bixby

  said, “I was coming to see you tonight. Got as far as your front gate. Then I seen you had visitors.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “It don’t matter. I’m not gunna come and see you now, not tonight, anyway. Did you get the money on Monday?”

  “Yes.” Helidon’s legs were still weak; he sat down at the desk. But there was nothing wrong with his voice now: “You don’t sound very upset about—about Helga’s murder. Not for an old friend.”

  “I ain’t laughing about it, sport, you know what I mean? I ain’t the weepy sort, but I’m gunna miss her.” Again there was the silence. Then: “I’d just like five minutes alone with the bastard who done her in. Wouldn’t you?”

&n
bsp; Helidon looked at his wife standing with her back pressed against the door: aged, afraid and all he had left in the world.

  “No,” he said. “Now what do you want? Are you still thinking of blackmail?”

  “What’s to change my mind?”

  “Well— this. What’s happened to Helga.”

  Something that could have been a chuckle or a bad connection came over the wire. “I don’t think she’d want me to back out now. Someone will have to buy a headstone for her. You wouldn’t want her buried in a pauper’s grave, would you?”

  “You bastard,” said Helidon, and almost wept again. Norma crossed from the door and put her hand on his shoulder; he could feel the clutch of her fingers through his jacket. He looked up at her and shook his head; but, thankfully, he saw she misunderstood the reason for the pain in his face.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, Helidon. At your office, sometime after lunch. If you’ve got the money, hang on to it, don’t take it back to the bank. It’ll be safe enough till I come for it. Hooroo, sport. It’s a shame about Helga, but I wouldn’t lose too much sleep about it. You still got your missus.”

  The phone went dead and Helidon put it slowly back on the desk. When he let go of it, his fingers remained clamped

  in a claw; he had not realized he had been gripping the instrument so tightly. There was a knock at the door and he jerked his head up in shock. But it was only the maid, not Bixby.

  “Signora? Shall I make some tea? You and the signore, it would help you—” The maid’s voice was full of sympathy: death, even that of someone she did not know, had made her one of the family.

  “Thank you, Rosa. We’ll be out in a moment.” Norma looked down at Helidon still sitting cramped and stiff at his desk. “What did he want, Wally?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, if he wants more. We haven’t lost him, darl—he’s still with us.” Then he looked up. “She’ll have to go. We can’t have her around—not now. We’ll have to be on our own till this is over.”

  “But I can’t get rid of her like that. I can’t run a place like this on my own—” But she saw the agony in his face and then she nodded. “All right, I’ll tell her in the morning. Do you still want to go to this dinner?”

  “No. But we’d better.” He stood up, easing his body out of the chair. “Outside—I mean out of the house—we’ve got to go on as if things were normal. If we suddenly cancelled tonight, those two detectives would hear about it and they’d be back in the morning to find out why.”

  The next morning, Thursday, the police came back anyway. That afternoon Bixby rang him at his office. “I see you had some visitors again. The bulls. They seem pretty interested in you, ain’t they?”

  “How did you know? Have you been watching my house?”

  “Well, let’s say I was driving by, eh?” Bixby’s humour died somewhere down the line; it came through to Helidon as a threat. “Then they went over to the Opera House to see you, too, didn’t they? Looks like they got you tabbed for something, sport. I don’t think we better meet today. I’ll give you a call tonight at home.”

  The rest of the day had been a blur to Helidon, one in

  which he was vaguely aware of being rude and irritable with his secretary, offhanded with a fellow Minister and then, at the last minute, cancelling a meeting with his Department chief. He went home early, sitting cramped in the corner of the back seat of the official car and looking over his shoulder every time the car pulled up at a traffic light.

  “You expecting someone to be following us, Mr. Helidon?” the driver asked.

  “What? No.”

  “I thought maybe Mrs. Helidon. I mean, she had your car. You know, doing a bit of Christmas shopping and that.” The driver was a small sharp-featured man with a tireless tongue and an equally tireless curiosity. Helidon had tolerated him in the past because such men were invaluable as sources as to what was going on in government circles; White Papers and official memoranda never told half of what one could find out from an inquisitive, talkative official driver. The trick was to see that you never gave him anything he could pass on about you. “I was a bit surprised when you sent for me this morning. I mean, Thursday you usually drive yourself. You want me Mondays and Thursdays from now on?”

  He had forgotten this was Thursday, Helga’s day. “Yes, I think so, Wilf. It’s getting to be too much, battling the traffic every day.” He looked over his shoulder again, but in the charge of traffic behind them there was no sign of anyone who looked like Bixby. Or the two detectives, Malone and Clements. He turned back, saw the itchy eye of the driver in the rear-vision mirror. “I’m just looking at it, the traffic, I mean. Wondering why a man chooses to live in the city.”

  “Not thinking of retiring, are you, sir?” The sharp little face was as alert as that of a hunting dog.

  Norma had brought that up again this morning. “No, Wilf,” he said, and somehow managed a smile. “This is my life.”

  When he let himself into the house Norma was siting out on the loggia staring at the smoke-clouded sky to the north. “Twenty homes have been burnt up there at Terrey Hills. I

  was listening on the radio. The people lost everything they had.”

  “Yes,” he said, only half-hearing what she had said. He sat down, picked up the small bell on the glass-topped table and rang it. “I had no lunch. Rosa can get me a sandwich and a cup of tea.”

  Norma stood up. “I’ll get it. Rosa left this morning. You asked me to—” Even the dark glasses did not hide the ravaging of the last twenty-four hours. I’ve made an old woman of her, he thought, and put his hand up to take hers. “There’s only some corned silverside. I didn’t feel up to going shopping today.”

  “Forget it. I’m not really hungry. Indeed, I’m—” Then he stopped. “Sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “Indeed.”

  “That’s the least of my worries now.” But she smiled and kissed the top of his head. “There are other people worse off than us, I suppose. Those people up there.” She nodded towards the north and the threatening clouds of smoke.

  “Yes,” he said, and felt ashamed that he had no real sympathy left to bestow on other people.

  They stayed home that night and at ten o’clock, worn out waiting for Bixby to call, Helidon went to bed. At ten-thirty the phone rang at last. “I think we better get together to-morra, sport. I’m gunna need a bit more money.”

  “How much?”

  “Wuddia say to twenty thousand?”

  Helidon closed his eyes: irony brought its own pain. Norma, lying beside him, reached for his free hand and held it tightly. “That’s too much-”

  “I don’t think so. Look, Helidon, things don’t look too bright for you. The bulls are on to you, all right. I’d lay even money you’re their number one suspect. Now if I just rung ‘em up and said I could send ‘em Helga’s diary—”

  “What’s in the diary? You haven’t told me a thing yet—”

  “And I’m not gunna. That’s what you’re buying, a pig in a poke. All I’ll tell you is, you’re gunna get your money’s worth. Twenty thousand dollars, in cash. I’ll ring you at your office again tomorra, say four-thirty, and tell you where we can meet. Have a good night’s sleep, sport.”

  Helidon held the phone against his ear for a moment, deaf even to the dial tone. Norma spoke to him, but he didn’t hear her. Then he felt her nails digging into him and he came out of the wide-eyed coma that had gripped him. He put the phone down, scrawled a note on his bedside pad that Bixby would call him at four-thirty; then he slid down in the bed, gathered Norma in his arms and held her to him. They lay there in the expensive shelter of their bed like two people in an air raid who knew that the bomb to hit their house was already on its way.

  And now it was Friday the thirteenth, the day for disasters. He put aside the breakfast tray and got stiffly out of bed. It was years since he had been vigorously athletic, but over the past week it seemed to him that he had become old and infirm. He stood up on
legs that felt awkward and painful in the knees; Norma took hold of him as a nurse might take hold of a patient getting out of bed for the first time in weeks. They looked at each other in the wall mirror and Norma struck a spark of wry humour. “Mr. and Mrs. Dorian Gray.”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  The official car called for him an hour later and he drove into the city in silence: Wilf, the driver, talked all the way but Helidon heard nothing of what he said. His office was in the State Government block, a beautiful dark grey tower that the citizens, with the local talent for belittling anything that embarrassed them with its pretensions, had dubbed the Black Stump.

  When he got out of the car the driver noticed the two briefcases for the first time, the full one and the empty one.

  “Expecting a heavy weekend, sir?” When Helidon looked blank, he nodded at the briefcases. “Paperwork. You gunna be taking stuff home?”

  “That’s all government is these days, paperwork. Isn’t that what they say, Wilf?” But the ten thousand dollars in one of the briefcases dragged him down more than all the paperwork of all his years in parliament.

  He rode up in the lift to one of the upper floors, silently nodded good morning to his secretary, went straight through into his office and immediately decided he had done the wrong thing in leaving the house at all. He was too sick and abstracted to be able to go through today’s programme; Cultural Development, never an urgent matter in this State, would not suffer for another day’s delay. He called in his secretary, told her to cancel all appointments for the day, assured her there was no more wrong with him than an upset stomach; then he took the empty briefcase, went down to his bank, drew out ten thousand dollars and did his best to remain oblivious of the teller’s enquiring eye. But he could read the question in the teller’s mind: why would a Cabinet Minister, for the second time in a week, want ten thousand dollars in cash? Other people drew amounts as large as that, but they were usually cranks of some sort or bookmakers. Why would a Minister want twenty thousand in cash? And Helidon was sure he could read the second question in the man’s mind: was it to pay off blackmail?