11 Harrowhouse

by Gerald A. Browne

  They helped themselves, like playing house or being married. They made the bed together. Maren picked up, while Chesser ran the sweeper. They walked to the village to do their own marketing, and Chesser was secretly proud as he stood aside and watched Maren being highly selective about the vegetables and fruits she bought and the way she dominated the butcher. Confidently, she refused to buy bread and spent most of one night and half the next day preparing and baking four loaves. She messed up the kitchen terribly, but Chesser sat and watched and offered encouraging smiles along with sips of Scotch, while the flour flew and the dough stuck.

  Maren definitely would not consult any of the recipe books that were right there, preferring to rely on remembering the ingredients and measures her own mother had used.

  The result was four squat and very heavy, overdone lumps.

  Chesser relished a slice, feigning. Ate a thick one, even without butter. But Maren knew better, tossed away the entire batch and, determined, stayed up all night to produce four more loaves, these high and light and brown, smelling and tasting as delicious as they looked.

  Then Chesser was truly impressed.

  As a little sweet extra, Maren, with easy confidence, also baked some Swedish spice cookies, and Chesser thought he’d never tasted anything that pleased him more. While he devoured, Maren beamed, and they each wondered about the other’s unspoken thoughts, and they both thought they knew.

  At first, Chesser attributed Maren’s domestic displays to her impetuosity, just another of her tangents, genuine enough but not to be taken seriously. She was, after all, one of the fortunates—that is, she could well afford to be waited upon, could demand and have, lavishly, and didn’t need to concern herself with the menial or the trivial, no matter how romantically valuable such things might be. The fact that Maren didn’t really have to perform these tasks, Chesser reasoned, was precisely why she could enjoy doing them. She was amusing herself, that was all, and any moment now he expected her to bring the phase to an abrupt end by summoning a housekeeper or two, and making use of her time with something more practical. Knife throwing, for example.

  However, as the days passed, Maren settled even more into the routine of caring, and taking care. Her mood-range fluctuated only from contentment to exuberant buoyancy. Never below. Not once was she edged on, compelled to seek some adventurous distraction, as before.

  And Chesser missed that.

  Yes, he loved this Maren as much as the other. But he missed the other more than he ever believed he would. Actually, he found himself looking forward to the reversion.

  Changes. Chesser misjudged the change in Maren, because it appeared too abrupt and therefore he assumed it to be superficial. But it had been simmering in her psyche more or less all her life, latently waiting to emerge when the time was ready. In that respect, it was more of a transition than a change.

  Maren herself didn’t realize that until she was into it. She didn’t trust it any more than did Chesser. It required testing, such as the first good batch of bread and cookies and the satisfaction she had felt.

  Reversing roles now, it bothered Chesser that they didn’t have any guns. He felt it only a matter of time before The System or Massey zeroed in on them, came in force and found them defenseless. Every time they went into the village, Chesser anticipated it. He raised the subject several times, but Maren was little interested or concerned. She seemed purposely to avoid discussing the matter, and even when Chesser felt the need to review their recent adventures, she either ignored his starting comments or pointedly veered the conversation in another direction. For example: “Do you have any buttons off anything? I found a small blue one on the carpet today.”

  One morning Chesser got up early and drove to Geneva. He bought two Browning nine-mm. automatics. New his and hers. He brought them back, put them in the top drawer of his wardrobe, and felt much better. He said nothing to Maren about the guns, realizing that it didn’t fit her present mood. But he was sure that when she came out of it she’d be very pleased. They’d go out for some shooting practice, he promised himself. He wondered if he’d lost his eye. He wanted to get more accurate from the hip.

  CHAPTER 27

  MASSEY’S VILLA at Cap Ferrat.

  Like an icon dedicated to luxurious leisure, it was set high on the altar of cliffs above the sea that seemed to wave in worship.

  Massey was there, outside in the sun, the front of his blue velour robe thrown open for exposure. Patches of gauze soaked with a cooling solution comforted his eyes, and each of his hands enclosed a cube of ice, the melt seeping between his fingers, the substance gradually diminishing to nothing in his grasp.

  Lady Bolding was nearby, completely surrounded by portable reflectors, to bake even quicker. Bees from the lime grove were attracted by the sweetness in the oil on her body. Eyes shut she heard them swooping and hovering ambivalently and she wondered if possibly one might light and probe her lower hair, believing it a blossom.

  Toland had just arrived to report on the violent confrontation and the escape of Chesser and Maren. He stood above Massey and grudgingly told it all, admitting he had no idea how Chesser and Maren had managed to get off the Isle de Ste. Marguerite, certainly not via the public ferry, Toland said.

  Lady Bolding was relieved to learn she’d not been seen rescuing them with the Riva. She privately celebrated by imagining the sensation of Maren in her arms. She wished there was no Chesser. Perhaps, she presumed, some day soon there wouldn’t be.

  Throughout Toland’s report, Massey remained unmoved. “You cleaned up the mess?” he finally asked.

  Toland said he had. He’d weighted Hickey’s body and the other two, and dropped them overboard six miles out beyond the tide.

  Massey stood abruptly. The soggy gauze patches fell from his eyes. It was expected that he would exhibit his fury, but, without a word, he walked into the villa, the robe hanging loose, its ties dragging, melt dripping from his fists. A heavy walk, as though all the blood in his body had gone to his legs.

  Upstairs in his master suite, he locked the thick door. To enclose himself as much as to exclude anyone, everything. He’d not been struck like this in years. Actually, not since he’d lost to The System off the mouth of the Orange River. An overload of rage, too much for anything so commonplace as a tirade. Inside his skull a paroxysm of anger so potent there was no adequate human way to express it, so he could only turn it on himself, where it was converted into the dreaded black word. Death. His own.

  He closed the double drapes over all the windows, preferring not to see living because there was dying in it, evading the sun which now only illuminated how ephemeral he was.

  Letting the robe drop off, he turned the temperature control dial of his sauna to two hundred degrees, and went in. He lay face up and focused on the inconsequential grain of the wood ceiling, trying for the advantage of any distraction, hoping the heat would, meanwhile, sweat all the edges out of him. But quickly the sauna space became as small as an old coffin.

  He fought that impression, not entirely sure it wasn’t true, until he shocked himself with the squirt of icy water that ran reassurance down between his buttocks.

  With less strength, and his anxiety increased, he left the sauna, went out and fell slick with sweat on the silk spread of his huge bed.

  Helplessness.

  His long-time, all-time, enemy.

  The killer of power.

  Helplessness.

  The fear of being at anyone’s, anything’s, mercy.

  Chesser, he pictured, trying to direct and spend his anger. But Chesser became immediately vague, inconsiderable, compared to the fatal black word that was now lodged immovably between Massey’s mind and Massey’s eyes. He tried again for Chesser, but the force of his wrath betrayed him, was diverted to the image of his own slippery, worn internal organs. Pumping, filtering, pulling. So personal and yet unpredictable.

  He put a finger, then, to his pulse.

  Found it rapid staccato, as though it
was striving not to stop. Additional alarm from that evidence made Massey crawl up and insert himself into the bed.

  Perhaps if he slept, he thought. He closed his eyes to try, but his anxiety made sleep seem like death, the blackness, the aloneness, the complete loss of control. So he remained awake in order to know he remained alive. He lay there for hours, with time tightening him more and more. Suffering sequences of hysteria. Throat constriction, unable to take a deep breath. Ordinary tension headache suspected into the first symptoms of a stroke, accompanied by blurred vision and extremity tinglings. Vertigo.

  Helplessness.

  Knocks on his door and several more insistent, followed by Lady Bolding’s voice speaking his name like a question, twice.

  “Are you all right?” he heard her inquire and imagined that he answered, “No.”

  He lay there, cramped, and thought, with certain futility, that medical science eventually would announce the discovery of a simple solution, a mere pill or injection that would insure any man who could afford it another hundred years of life. But along with the announcement of that discovery there would also be the print of his obituary. He would die a fragment of time too soon.…

  Lady Bolding knocked and called again, apparently afraid for him, seemingly corroborating the truth of his hopeless condition.

  CHAPTER 28

  “DO YOU know how they get married in Bora Bora?” asked Maren.

  “Where?”

  “Bora Bora,” she repeated, as though it were the capital of the world.

  Chesser guessed by the sound that it was somewhere in the South Pacific, although phonetically it was an appropriate name for a lot of places he’d been.

  “To be married,” informed Maren, “the woman builds a huge fire, and then runs away and hides.” She paused to measure Chesser’s attentiveness.

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  “Of course not. When the fire burns down to a glow, the man picks up some of the red hot coals with his bare hands and goes looking for his woman. If he finds her before he drops the coals, they’re automatically married. Otherwise they just drop the whole idea.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “No, really. I read about it. Imagine, having to endure that.”

  “Getting burned before marriage, that’s a switch.”

  She disregarded his male pessimism. “I suppose the woman helps.”

  “How?”

  “By not hiding too well or too far away.”

  “That’s the least she could do.”

  Maren agreed.

  “How do they get divorced?” he asked.

  A shrug from her. “Maybe they just never do.”

  “Or maybe what happens is one morning like every other morning the woman builds a big roaring fire and the man pisses it out.”

  “You’re horrible.” She laughed.

  “Opposites attract,” he declared.

  They were in the high grass about two thirds of the way up Egli, one of the ski-sloped mountains around Gstaad. The town far below looked like a cluster of residue in a deep bowl. Little farms were scattered, patching the landscape with related shades of yellow-to-green crops, and the roads resembled minor stream beds, running, wandering.

  Maren and Chesser had climbed up. The last half mile was a steeper climb, which made Chesser’s legs complain some, and he was grateful that Maren hadn’t wanted to go up all the way. They sat facing one another, apart by six or seven feet. She’d brought a book on psychic phenomena in Russia, which she now opened to any page and seemed immediately absorbed. Until she said, “They eat flowers in Bali.”

  “We had some in Munich,” he said. “Remember?” They actually had—some special mountain flowers, fried and sprinkled with powdered sugar. A Bavarian delicacy, they’d been told.

  “I mean in Bali they get married by eating certain flowers. That’s romantic, isn’t it?”

  “Some flowers are poisonous,” he said. “Even some of the prettiest ones.”

  “I guess,” she said vaguely, irritated.

  She lighted two cigarettes. Chesser readied himself for an impossible catch. But she came to him, on her knees. She brought his cigarette to his lips. Then she placed her cheek on his chest and wordlessly requested an arm around. They were silent for a long moment. She was thinking back. He was wondering ahead.

  “Remember the first time?” she asked.

  He thought she meant their first lovemaking. He hadn’t forgotten any of it, especially how he’d felt after, as though he’d reached a destination. But the first to which she was now referring was the time when they’d met.

  “Your eyes were a different color then,” she told him.

  “Not true.”

  “They’re browner now. They were more of a hazel.”

  “You just wanted them to be hazel. That’s what you were looking for.”

  “I wasn’t looking for anything.” Accent on the next to the last word.

  They’d met in Rome, in the Borghese Gardens. During a summer rain, large drops but not cold, and, while everyone else was inside avoiding it, they were outside, separately, strolling as if under sunshine. Chesser, drenched, the sky’s water streaming from his chin and ears and nose, Maren, her long Viking hair matted wet, her dress soaked to her skin, clinging, defining. Although the Gardens were spacious, they had walked right into one another.

  “It wasn’t by chance, you know,” she now claimed. “We were supposed to be there.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “It was our karmas.”

  Chesser suspected luck, or at best good, old-fashioned fate.

  “What an advantage we have,” she said, “knowing the reason we’re here on earth, what our lesson is this time.”

  He wanted to talk out the Massey episode, particularly the killings. But he let her have her way. “Do you really know?” he asked, leading.

  “Sure.” No doubt.

  “You’ve always known?”

  “Possibly. But I haven’t always known I’ve known. Every day now I get more psychic.”

  Every day, thought Chesser, I get edgier.

  Maren lay back on the grass. As though revealing news she’d been withholding, she hold him, “I’ve been in touch with Jean Marc again. On my own.”

  “Really?” He tried to sound impressed rather than tolerant.

  “I had some help,” she admitted, “but not much. From Billie Three Rocks and my Chinaman.”

  “Isn’t it about time Jean Marc came back as somebody new or something?”

  “He can. Whenever he wants. He told me he was happy we came here to Gstaad.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say.” She brightened suddenly. “But you know what else I was told?”

  “What?” Chesser felt like a straight man.

  “That there’s a little girl, a beautiful child spirit, waiting on the other side for us. She wants to come over and be ours if we give her the chance. She’ll be a ballerina.”

  “Jean Marc told you that?”

  “No. Somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  “I didn’t ask who. Just somebody.”

  Chesser scoffed inside; a sigh came out.

  “What day is today?” asked Maren, as though it were relevant.

  “What’s the difference?”

  No reply from her.

  He told her, “I think it’s Monday. Because there were church bells yesterday.”

  “I mean what day of the month.”

  “Around the fifteenth or sixteenth, I think.”

  “You know what we’re supposed to do next?” she asked.

  He translated the invitation in her eyes and sensed that she was asking him to kiss, as a prelude to more when they returned home. Or right there, perhaps. Quite possibly right there, he thought, as impulsive as she’d always been.

  He brought his kiss to hers, found her lips soft, compliant, and open. Right there also appealed to him.

  “I love you,” she said in
to him.

  They were eye to eye, exchanging.

  She told him, “Next what we’re supposed to do is get married.”

  “People don’t usually do what they’re supposed to do.”

  “No. But they always do what they want to do most.”

  “As in Bora Bora?”

  She nodded. “You’ve already carried your coals.”

  She meant it. He realized that, gave her a brief reassuring kiss, and sat up to think. It came to him that if they got married it would be the most costly wedding of all time, and, by some standards, probably the most foolish. He decided to keep it light, told her, “Maybe those French lawyers hired a telepath to do a number on your mind?”

  She wasn’t amused, didn’t think so, said so.

  “What about the money?”

  She was waiting for that. She grinned. “Fuck the money.”

  Which made Chesser think of Massey. “We’ll talk about it,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You’re being impetuous.”

  “I don’t want to analyze it.”

  “I’m trying to look after your interests.”

  She waited a moment for emphasis. “Mine?”

  Her inflection hurt, hitting in him where he was most vulnerable. For another moment he stopped loving her. He looked at her and started again.

  “Don’t you want to?” she asked.

  I do, he swore to himself, but said nothing.

  She asked, measuring each word, “Will you marry me?”

  “No,” was his answer.

  She left him there, picked up her book, and ran barefoot down the slope, and he watched the stream of her nutmeg hair and wanted very much to run after her, but he remained as though it were impossible for him to move. Soon she was only the speck of yellow that was the dress she was wearing, far down the mountainside, far away and going.

  He told himself he’d done the right thing, the practical thing, for them. And she’d been wrong, her insinuation that he placed some ulterior importance upon her money. It was just that he wasn’t going to allow her to chuck it all for something as unnecessary as marriage. Things were fine as they were. They were the same as married. What difference would a legal piece of paper make? Certainly not worth hundreds of millions.