The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  “Showtime,” she said.

  “Amory Swale?”

  “And he wants to see us now. Or sooner. Actually,” she said, lifting her eyes to mine, “the word he uses is emergency.”

  14

  AMORY SWALE LIVED right off the ocean in a development called Tarheel Estates. The name did nothing to convey the condition of those wooden A-frames. Peeling whitewash and collapsed sashes, sagging clotheslines, heaps and heaps of dead sea rushes—every lot in the full bloom of decay, and none quite so blooming as Number 7, which looked to be atoning for being closest to the ocean. Three-foot chunks of tar paper had been ripped from its flanks, the original steps had been replaced with cinder blocks, and the front yard was a play box of cigarette butts, pulverized seashells, and charred cypress seedlings.

  To look at the place, you’d have figured it long abandoned, were it not for the freshly painted sign that someone had attached to a pediment. Aqua letters on a white background: SWALE’S ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS AND PRINTS.

  We stepped with some care onto the skeleton porch. Clarissa knocked gently, and the door, pockmarked with rot, swung right open, like the entrance to a dream.

  “Mr. Swale?”

  It was past seven now, and the sun was sinking to the other side of the sound, so the interior of the house was inky and humid. From somewhere in the back we heard a soft, tenacious sound, and then a man stepped from shadow into half shadow. The first thing we saw was his bare white feet, and then the rest of him swam into focus.

  “Why, hello,” he said, tendrils of Locust Valley still clinging to his vowels.

  He was wearing a dove-gray suit, only just past its prime, and a tie full of swans, and his mouth had opened into a shy and inviting smile. But the total effect of him—the narrow shoulders and wide womanly hips—the filmy, oversized eyeglasses—the crest of gray hair, shrinking back from his skull in an arc of terror—was so strange I couldn’t return the greeting.

  “You must be Mr. Swale,” said Clarissa.

  “Some tea,” he answered.

  And back he went into the shadows, reemerging a few minutes later with a cracked ceramic pot, smothered in a rooster cozy, and a tray of china teacups, grimy around the rims but angel-white inside.

  “Please,” he said. “Sit down.”

  He gestured toward an antique chintz couch, upholstered in hunting scenes and stained in places with what looked like old cat vomit. (One of the back cushions had tipped forward, as though it were dozing.) There was no coffee table, so he had to place the cups and saucers in our laps and pour the tea straight in.

  “I hope you had a nice trip. I’ve always thought this is the best time of year to come down, when all those wretched tourists have gone. Oh, I suppose you’re tourists, too, but not really. No, I consider you friends, I hope that’s not presumptuous. Sugar, Miss Dale? Be careful, last week, I gave a friend of mine kosher salt instead. She will never drink lapsang souchong again.”

  A bitter, tarry smell rose from our laps. I took one fast sip, then set the cup on the floor.

  “Mr. Swale, sorry, but you mentioned an emergency.”

  “Yes, I should say there was.”

  “Maybe you could explain? Since you don’t seem to be in any peril?”

  He sucked in his lips. His eyes fluttered behind his glasses.

  “I’m not sure it would be … just yet…”

  “Mr. Swale.” Clarissa craned toward him. “I can assure you, all right? We are people to be trusted. The three of us, we have something in common. We were the last people Alonzo Wax talked to before he died.”

  “I suppose so,” he said, sounding half bored.

  “The School of Night is back in session. Isn’t that what he told you?”

  “I suppose he did.”

  “We believe Alonzo’s message may have had something to do with a document he acquired,” said Clarissa. “A letter from Walter Ralegh to Thomas Harriot. We think he may have been killed over this letter.”

  “And unless we find it,” I added, “we believe other people might be in danger, too.”

  “Funny thing,” said Swale, blowing softly on his tea. “About danger, I mean. You don’t always know it when you see it.” A comb of gray teeth budded forth. “Do you remember, Mr. Cavendish, what happened when that first party of English explorers visited the Indian villages? You’ll find it in Harriot’s book. Within days of receiving their visitors, the villagers began dying. In droves. Nobody could explain it. These strange pale men in their iron carapaces. So helpless—so hopeless at the basic acts of survival—and capable of such slaughter. Without even lifting…”

  He held his own finger to the light.

  “They were carriers,” I said.

  “Of the empire virus, yes. But who would have guessed? And who can imagine what we might be carrying right now?”

  Clarissa rose from the couch. “Mr. Swale, with all due respect, I would be happy on most any other occasion to talk history and viruses with you, but, two people being dead, this would be a good time, if I might suggest, to work with us here. And maybe start with what the hell’s going on. Why did you want us down here?”

  He gulped a cup or two of air. Gazed with wild eyes at his watch.

  “Oh, Jiminy Cricket! I’ll be right back.”

  We watched him labor up the steps, push open a door, and then close it behind him.

  “Phew,” said Clarissa, slumping back on the couch. “And you thought I was crazy.”

  “No, what’s crazy are the books.”

  Which, because they were so very visible, were somehow the most invisible part of the house. But there they were, stack upon stack, rimed with dust, sprawling across the linoleum floor, straining toward the cracked-stucco ceiling, overwhelming whatever wood-veneer shelf had been tasked with confining them.

  Hardbacks, most of them. Elderly thrillers, ancient how-to manuals, Reader’s Digest condensed volumes, tips from long-dead golfers … at least five separate copies of The Shoes of the Fisherman. The more towering the book, the more obscure it was likely to be: Modeling with Balsa, Taped Exercises for Basic and Intermediate Italian, Annual of the Rose Society of Ontario 1918. Now and then a jewel might shine forth—a Jane Eyre, for example, with Gothic woodcuts—but nothing like an organizing principle. Only sticky-fingered compulsion.

  But if Amory Swale had skimped on his stewardship, he hadn’t quite abandoned it. The humidity, I noticed, was low, and the air was in the vicinity of sixty-seven degrees. Ideal conditions for the storing of books. Should there be any worth storing.

  At the sound of footsteps, Clarissa and I folded our hands in our laps and composed our faces. My composure held even when it became clear that the man walking down the steps wasn’t Amory Swale. Or anyone I had ever seen before.

  He was big, like a frost-free freezer. A lumberjack’s shirt and a shawl of beard, with paintlike splotches of gray. His waist was an indeterminate swell, and his tread was gentle inside ungentle, steel-capped workman’s boots. It was when he stopped, though, on the bottommost step, and turned out the prow of his chin … it was then I knew him. That attitude of hieratic defiance, never to be snuffed out, no matter how deeply it was buried.

  “I knew you’d come,” said Alonzo Wax.

  15

  “JESUS,” CLARISSA WHISPERED.

  I watched Alonzo totter toward us. I saw the pickled line of his lip gleaming through the thatch of beard.

  “Henry,” he said.

  The distance between us melted away, and before I understood what I was doing I had placed my hand in the center of his chest—I could feel his heartbeat pulsing between my fingers—and pushed him to the floor.

  He fell comprehensively, limbs splayed like rubble across the dirty linoleum floor, tongue pushed out like a clapper.

  I stared at him for a long moment. And then I walked out.

  * * *

  Not far, as it turned out. To Amory Swale’s backyard, a tiny mesa of compacted sand, pocked with beer bottles and c
igarette butts and an empty container of fuel additive and the remains of a basketball net. An old NO PARKING sign flapped on a haggard stretch of chain-link fence. It was evening now, just beginning to shade into night. And through the shivering frame of pampas grass came a fragment of ocean, scaly-silver.

  Even muffled in sand, his tread was unmistakable.

  “Henry.”

  “Go away.”

  “I did.”

  And when I turned around, his arms were raised to either side.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not adequate, Alonzo. That’s not sufficient. You could explain your way into next Tuesday, and it would come not even remotely close to atoning for what you’ve done.”

  “So I was mourned?” He wedged his boots in the sand. “Gee, I hoped, but—”

  And then he looked up to see me advancing on him once more, swatting away his hand and leaning into him and breathing out the two words that were burning in my brain.

  “Fuck … you.”

  Tottering backward, Alonzo steadied himself against an overturned garbage can.

  “Henry,” he said. “Knowing me as you do, please tell me. Would I have gone to all this trouble just to mess with you?”

  “Oh. Oh, the least of it is me. If I may jog your memory, there’s your family. You have, I believe, parents; you have a sister, remember? Not to mention Lily—”

  “I know,” he said. “I know about Lily.”

  “Then you know what reward she got. For all her years of service.”

  “Henry, you can’t legitimately think—”

  “No, tell me what to think. An hour ago, you were dead. Two days ago, Lily was alive. So tell me what to think.”

  “That I’d sooner have cut off my right arm than harm Lily. Or allow her to be harmed. You know that.”

  “You still ran off,” I said, jerking away from him. “And you left her with your mess.”

  When I turned around again, he was sitting on that damned trash can, his head lolling slightly to one side, his strangely small feet weaving parabolas in the sand.

  “Lily knew the consequences,” he said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Henry, she was in my confidence. Right from the start.”

  “So she lied for you.”

  “Of course.”

  “And her cousin. She lied for you, too.”

  “Joanna? Well, first of all, the paper got it wrong, she’s a step-cousin. She’d been estranged from Lily for, I don’t know, millennia. Joanna needed money for plastic surgery—all her other sources were dried up, her ex-husband included—so … she called Lily.”

  “And Lily told her she could have the money if she pretended to see something that never happened.”

  “Something like that.”

  “And where is she now, this step-cousin?”

  “In Cinque Terre. With her new neck. I hope she enjoys it; it cost me an original of Lyly’s Endimion.”

  I thought then of Alonzo’s vault, stripped bare of John Lyly and John Donne and John Stow and everybody else.

  “Your books,” I said, faintly.

  “I know about them, too.”

  There were no chairs, so I dropped straight to the ground. Rested my elbows on my knees and raked my fingers across my skull.

  “Why in hell would you want to fake your own death?” I asked.

  “Henry,” he said. “If I hadn’t taken my own life, it would have been taken for me.”

  He stood up and beckoned me toward the house.

  “Come. You’ll hear all.”

  But I just sat there in the sand, feeling the cold inch up my legs. And thinking, with a kind of aching wonder, that I could leave. Leave everything. Climb the dune … trundle down the beach … make straight for the sea.

  I should say I had no intention of killing myself. (I’d abandoned those thoughts a long time ago.) No, it was escape I was after. I could very clearly imagine the cradle of the waves, the track of the moon, my skin flashing like a dolphin’s. And yet here I was, ten minutes later, no closer to making it happen. What was keeping me?

  The answer was already fastening me around. I’d never even seen it coming.

  “Henry!” Alonzo’s voice, like a cornet summons. “We don’t have all night!”

  * * *

  Two bare forty-watt bulbs were burning now in Amory Swale’s house, and moving through the pools of light was Clarissa, sweeping her broom like a censer.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” I said. “What the hell made you think Bernard Styles was going to kill you?”

  “What makes me think the sun will rise in the morning? It’s done the same thing before, that’s all.”

  “So Styles is some kind of serial killer? Just ’cause one poor guy in London got his book taken?”

  “One poor guy? Oh, Jesus, Amory, tell him already.”

  And there was Amory. In an apron that read BBQ NAKED, carrying a plate of Milano cookies freshly sprung from a Pepperidge Farm bag.

  “Alonzo’s quite right, you know. It wasn’t just Cornelius Snowden. There was that poor librarian in Philadelphia—”

  “Maisie Hartzbrinck.”

  “Tossed under a bus. And where was the Ben Jonson’s Works that was Maisie’s pride and joy? Nowhere, that’s where it was. And just last fall, that specialist in metaphysical poetry—University of Southampton—what was his name, Alonzo?”

  “MacGrath.”

  “Wrote a paper on George Herbert that made grown men weep. Fell from the School of Humanities roof. Didn’t jump … fell. And where was John Donne’s letter to Sir George More of March the seventh, 1602? The one he kept locked in his credenza?”

  With an emphatic smack, Swale set the plate on the floor.

  “Gone. That’s what it was.”

  “And in each case,” said Alonzo, prying a cookie free, “Bernard Styles had offered to buy the book or manuscript in question. In each case, he’d been turned down. In each case, he was somewhere in the vicinity when the person died. Along with that mongrel goon of his.”

  With those words, the image of Halldor came wafting back once more. Standing at attention in the Union Station gallery. I strode to the window, thrust the sash up as far as it would go.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t buy it. This is the stuff of dreams, this is—biblio-myth.”

  “Myth,” said Alonzo, stiffly, “is not the same as a lie.”

  “Thank you, but if you really, truly feared for your life, why didn’t you call the police?”

  “The police?” he repeated, incredulous. “And tell them what? That a kindly, elderly British gentleman sent oblique threats in my direction? I wouldn’t have gotten past the receptionist.”

  He swallowed the last fragment of cookie, methodically sucked each finger clean.

  “Henry. I know you’ve talked to Styles.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  “Lily told me, how else? No, don’t explain, there’s no need. I can’t blame you in the least for taking his money—I’d have done the same in your shoes. But you have to understand who you’re dealing with. Bernard Styles is a rotten scholar, he’s a hack and a fraud, but he’s a genius at leaving no traces. If he’d gotten around to killing me, no one would have been a jot the wiser. Kindly consider what happened to Lily. Do you honestly think she dropped a lit cigarette in a book vault? With her ungodly command of detail?” He gave his head two mighty shakes. “Never in a thousand lifetimes.”

  “Allegations aside,” said Clarissa, propping her broom against the staircase. “From a strictly legal standpoint, Styles has a beef against you, Alonzo. You swiped his document.”

  “Easily half the books in his collection have been swiped. Now that he’s got his mitts on mine, we can raise that estimate to two-thirds.”

  “But not the Ralegh letter,” I said. “That he came by—”

  “Don’t.” Alonzo put up a hand. “I forbid you to say ‘fair and square.’ You mean he didn’t regale you with how he out
witted that poor backward law firm? Paid them probably a hundredth, a thousandth, of what the thing’s worth? Gloating the whole time like a miser with his golden hoard. If you don’t think that’s thievery, Henry, if you don’t think that’s against every ethic of book collecting, then I resign my place in humanity’s rolls.”

  “So that makes it okay for you to steal from him?”

  “More than that, it lifts the whole enterprise into the category of sport.”

  I pictured Halldor. Lily. Some sport.

  “So where is it?” asked Clarissa. “This precious document.”

  “It’s right by Henry’s elbow.”

  As if by sleight of hand, a hall table had materialized. Crescent-shaped, with a rose granite top that bore the pot prints of long-dead plants. A single article rested there: a FedEx envelope, svelte and reticent.

  The World on Time.

  I had to smile. The purloined letter … hiding in plain sight.

  * * *

  Less than a quarter-inch thick, that package, but it seemed to acquire dimension the longer I watched it.

  “Go ahead,” Alonzo said. “I’m sure you washed your hands at some point today.”

  “Doesn’t he need gloves?” Clarissa whispered.

  “Shush! Gloves tear. Go on, Henry.”

  I pulled the tab. I wormed my index finger into the opening, swiveling it softly in the darkness until it settled on something hard and ridgelike. An edge, recoiling ever so slightly at my touch.

  Taking it now between my fingers, I gave it the barest breath of a tug.

  It moved, grudgingly at first and then obligingly. A second later, it was free: a cerement of bubble wrap.

  “Keep going,” murmured Alonzo.

  Moving more ruthlessly now, my fingers tore at the Scotch tape. The wrap parted to reveal two sheets of archival-quality mat board. These in turn fell away, and now there was nothing against my skin but the thing itself.

  Other men give their hearts to vellum or parchment. Me, I’m a rag-paper man. Paper in its most brutish and plebeian form, fashioned from linen pulp. I love everything about it: its translucency, its frangibility, its ragged edges, its bruises and discolorations.