The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  “Bernard,” said Clarissa in a tight voice. “Please.”

  “I believe it was Alonzo who said I had no hold over him. I am merely endeavoring to correct his assumption. His presumption, really.”

  The knife went deeper on the second jab, drawing out a rill of blood that dribbled all the way to Alonzo’s clavicle.

  “Extraordinary thing, the neck,” said Bernard Styles. “Powerful and fragile in somewhat equal measure. I fully believe, if we let evolution take its course, the carotid artery and trachea will very sensibly retreat an inch or two. So as not to be so fearfully exposed.”

  As if to demonstrate, Halldor drew a circle around the exposed area. And by now the blood was no longer a dribble.

  “Just tell the bastard where it is!” I cried.

  Alonzo’s chest heaved and swelled. A gurgle rose from his larynx. A single tear rolled down his white cheek. But the expression in his eyes, that didn’t change.

  And I was helpless to save him. One move from me, and Halldor’s knife would strike home.

  “I know where it is!” I shouted.

  Styles’s head glided in my direction.

  “Is that so, Mr. Cavendish? Where?”

  “In his room.”

  “Which room?”

  “At our hotel. The Dragon’s Tongue. It’s the—fuck, it’s—the Disraeli room.”

  Styles gave me a sad smile.

  “How kind of you to jog Alonzo’s memory. I hope you’ll understand, though, that in a case of this urgency I will need to hear it from the horse’s mouth.”

  One more rake of the knife, straight down. And now the blood was washing like finger paint across Alonzo’s neck.

  “Technically speaking,” mused Bernard Styles, “I’m not certain that killing a legally dead man even qualifies as murder.”

  What happened next still strikes me as something beyond the reach of physics. One moment Halldor was standing there, his arm coiled around Alonzo. The next moment he was on his knees—then on all fours—and his knife was skittering into the darkness. And there, where he had once been, stood Clarissa, swinging Thomas Harriot’s age-hardened perspective trunk like a truncheon.

  Released from Halldor’s grip, Alonzo staggered toward me. I yanked off my Earl of Essex cloak and wrapped it around his neck.

  “Just hold it there, okay?”

  “Mr. Cavendish.”

  Bernard Styles’s position had not changed a fraction. The one difference was that he was now holding a Webley 38, antique in its own way but primed for modern use.

  With his other hand, he swung the light toward us, illuminating us one by one. First Alonzo … then me … finally, lingering with special relish on Clarissa.

  “Oh, my dear,” he said. “You appear to have come down with a nasty case of Stockholm syndrome. Too much time with the enemy, I expect.”

  Her eyes were as hard as his pistol.

  “The enemy was right, Bernard.”

  “The enemy is never right.”

  “You’re a killer.”

  “Pish, I’m a businessman. Entirely a businessman.”

  “Well, you’d better shoot clean then,” she said. “Because you won’t get all of us.”

  “I won’t?”

  And here is where I plead guilty to underestimating Alonzo Wax. He was not simply tending to his wounds, as I’d first assumed, he was awaiting his moment. The exact moment when his captor’s eyes ticked away. At which point he flung his cloak-bandage straight at Styles.

  The strategy was better than the aim, for the cloak only brushed Styles’s temple and settled on his shoulder. It was the blood, I think, that made the difference—Alonzo’s blood, smearing the old man’s skin and clothes and hair, unsettling him just long enough for Alonzo to fling his entire bulk at him.

  The flashlight fell to the floor, and Styles followed right after, with the force of a felled maple. But Styles’s right hand, though pinioned, kept a firm grip on the revolver and fired two quick rounds into the nearest wall. To my bruised skull, the sound was like a summons from hell. I clapped my hands over my ears and waited until the ringing had passed, and it was in the act of recovering my senses that something massive and undeniable caught me in my midsection and flattened me to the ground.

  Stunned, I stared up into the panther eyes of Halldor. And read my own destiny.

  For, as he pressed his thumbs against my trachea (Extraordinary thing, the neck) he showed not the slightest uncertainty. He would kill me. In the swiftest and, all things considered, the most humane manner possible.

  He worked on me as if I were a bellows, squeezing out the last reserves of oxygen. And just when I thought I had none left to give, another weight piled on top. It was Clarissa, pummeling Halldor’s back and shoulders, clawing his skin, pulling his hair … and all it took for him to resolve the problem was a single backward crack of his fist. Clarissa flew off, and as my vision faded into half-light, I saw her subside into the square of floor next to me.

  Halldor now was perfectly free to carry on his work. He bore down, and to my surprise, my blood thrummed not with panic but peace. My brain, half extinguished, explained the whole process to me:

  This is how it feels, Henry. To die.

  I suppose I would have, too, if some small part of me hadn’t still been burrowing down to essentials. How else would I have remembered the knife?

  The knife Alonzo had handed me at the wedding. The knife that lay even now sheathed against my right flank. Not a rapier but not a bad substitute, either. Easy enough to lay hands on, if my hands had been free. If my limbs weren’t flopping against the cold stone.

  But whatever force remained in my body was concentrating itself in the fingers of my right hand. And these fingers were crawling now down my hip … pausing briefly at the upper thigh … straining with all their might toward the knife’s hasp … teasing it out of its holster, millimeter by millimeter.…

  And it was this, the simple act of freeing the blade, that emboldened me now to take the next step. To wrap my fingers around it and redirect it toward Halldor’s thigh.

  I heard him grunt. I felt his leg pull away. Two inches, no more, but enough to let me draw the blade out and drive it still higher.

  And now Halldor’s upper extremities could no longer ignore the tumult from below. The barest slackening of fingers against my throat, and still the lights inside me were fast dimming. I had one chance left. And so, with all the strength left me, I plunged the blade into his groin.

  Halldor howled and snapped his spine back. And as his fingers sprang away, the inrushing air gave me the last impetus I needed to drive the blade one more time—straight into his solar plexus.

  Not a fierce thrust, to be sure, but this time I had gravity working for me. The faster the life drained from Halldor, the deeper his body sank onto that blade. I was helpless now to do anything but observe it: the fine trail of blood curdling from his lip, the irises rolling higher and higher in their eye sockets.

  He fought all the way to the end. His teeth ground out inaudible oaths, his hands flailed at me, his whole being grew radiant with hatred. If anything, it was the desire to do me harm that helped him stay alive as long as he did. God knows how much time passed—two minutes? twenty? I can only say that, just when I had about despaired of ever rising from that floor, Halldor’s eyes went still and his breath squeaked to a stop and his hands twitched their last.

  I was beyond celebrating: the pain in me was too extraordinary. The influx of air, which I had thought would be a relief, was a worse agony than what had preceded it. Like a baby, I remember thinking, being born. Only no sound came out. I didn’t even have the strength to push the dead man’s body off me.

  And so I lay there—we lay there—until the act of breathing became slightly less unnatural, until my lungs could draw down enough fuel to awaken the rest of me. I gave Halldor one shove, another, a third … and at last had the satisfaction of seeing his long, ponderous frame roll away.

  With noth
ing to hold on to but the air itself, I staggered to my feet. To my right lay Clarissa, facedown. To my left, the prone figures of Bernard Styles and Alonzo Wax, splayed across the floor, half in light, half in shadow.

  Another minute passed. And then one of the men opened his eyes and blinked up toward the ceiling. He gazed at the Webley resting in his hand, at the widening circle of blood on the other man’s chest. He groaned and wheezed and, with great effort, raised himself to a sitting position.

  “Henry,” said Alonzo. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  47

  A BLACK POOL had formed around Clarissa’s eye, and blood was spilling from each nostril … but she was still breathing and, as I knelt alongside her, her eyes quivered open, then winced shut again.

  “God,” she murmured, gingerly touching her nose.

  “Broken?”

  “Mm.”

  I gave her my hand and pulled her to a sitting position. She looked first at Styles, then at Halldor, finally at me. Unable to credit, probably, that I would be the one still standing.

  “Jesus,” she said at last.

  With a whir of petticoat, she rose to her feet. Stumbled over to the patch of floor where the remains of Thomas Harriot’s perspective trunk lay bathed in the glow of Halldor’s flashlight. Bending down, she gathered up the shards of glass, arranged them against the canvas of her palm.

  “It died in a good cause,” I suggested.

  The white mask of absorption, the unseeing eyes. She was channeling her visions again. Only she was wide awake.

  “Forgive me for intruding,” said Alonzo. “But I think now might be a good time to take a powder.”

  “Clarissa,” I said. “Are you coming?”

  She shook her head.

  “You can’t stay here,” I said.

  “Henry…”

  “Yes?”

  “Goodbye.”

  A weirdly singsong delivery, and yet it carried such a finality that it stopped me in my tracks. It took an ungentle push from Alonzo to get me moving again, and even as I left the room, I was waiting for her to call after us, to offer a loophole or an escape clause … but in that one word she had said all she had to say.

  * * *

  We had this much to thank Bernard Styles for. He’d left us a perfect blueprint for leaving. We just had to reverse the path he and Halldor had forged. Walk up the basement steps, through the great hall, and out the front door that Halldor had so cunningly jimmied open. The only thing that made us pause in our tracks was the reappearance of Seamus the mountaineer, grim and unsurprisable, his rucksack affixed like a vestigial muscle to his back.

  In our absence, he had simply rappelled down the tower and waited. And if he was the slightest bit curious about what had befallen us, he gave no sign.

  “ ’S late, innit?”

  Yes. It was. Nearly five in the morning by the time we hustled our way back to London Road. The 237 bus wasn’t running, and the more we thought about piling our battered bodies and Tudor garb into a cab, the more it struck us as the wrong kind of publicity. In the end, we walked the mile back to Brentford, and Alonzo, after sending Seamus on his way with a hundred pounds (and promises of much more down the road), led the way back to the hotel.

  With the help of peroxide and Band-Aids from my shaving kit, we performed triage on Alonzo’s neck, and to ease the throb in my head we stole ice from the gastro-pub. After which there was nothing to do but repair to our separate rooms.

  Even after I’d downed four Advils, sleep was hard to come by. I lay on that hard bed, watching the first insinuations of sunlight through the shutters. Then I got up and took a shower and, with my one functioning credit card, booked two tickets on the one P.M. Virgin Atlantic flight for Washington. Then I knocked on Alonzo’s door.

  An hour later, we were downstairs, picking around sausages and stuffed tomatoes. A whole morning lay before us, and what were we to fill it with? Words? Acts? Neither seemed appropriate in light of what had just happened. So this is what we did: We put on our coats and went for a stroll.

  The morning was cold and unusually bright—rain-scrubbed—and each time I met a blade of wind, I couldn’t help longing for the Earl of Essex’s hat and finery, the unbreathing wool with which Elizabethans had met the elements.

  “They’ll be found,” I said.

  “Our late friends, you mean? My guess is they have been found.”

  “Should we be worried?”

  “Ehh.” His mouth folded down. “By the time the police get all their ducks in order, we should be long gone.”

  “But extraditable.”

  “Henry.”

  “I don’t know, there’s fibers. Fingerprints…”

  “Please, this isn’t CSI. No one’s peering into a microscope in a shadowy room. We’ll be fine.”

  We’ll be fine.

  A good enough mantra, but at the sight of Kew Bridge, it died away completely. I couldn’t cross that span without recalling Clarissa. Shivering in her red car coat. Her lips even redder from the wind. The memory was exactly like a wound.

  “Starkers,” I murmured.

  “Sorry?”

  “It was a word Clarissa used. An English word, only she said she’d never been in England before.”

  Alonzo gave me a searching look.

  “You figured her out, too, didn’t you, Henry?”

  I rested my hands against the bridge’s balustrade.

  “Not with empirical certitude. It’s just … she came in that room with Styles and Halldor, and she wasn’t a victim, she was a ghost. She was haunted.”

  “As well she should be. I can’t understand why you’re not angrier about it.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, with a wan smile. “When you’re forty-four years old, you’re disposed to overlook things. However inconveniencing.”

  A tapering hiss came out of Alonzo’s mouth as he squared himself toward the river.

  “I’d be the last person to tell you how to feel, Henry, but please keep in mind she was deceiving us from the very start. And using us. And at the risk of being tasteless, she was an accomplice to theft and murder.”

  “Oh. Actually, she wasn’t, Alonzo.”

  He crossed one hand over the other.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because Bernard Styles wasn’t guilty of theft. Or murder. At least not Lily Pentzler’s murder. And maybe not Amory’s, either.”

  I made a special point of keeping my eyes fixed westward.

  “Last night,” I said. “Detective Acree called.”

  “The policeman you mentioned.”

  “Seems they found something interesting when they were reviewing the security tapes for your old building. The day of Lily’s death.”

  “Oh?”

  “Walking up the southeastern steps was someone—well, he was a good deal younger than the widows who live there. Larger, too.”

  I paused.

  “From a certain angle he resembled you, Alonzo.”

  I wouldn’t look at him now. Not even if I could.

  “Now, of course, Detective Acree couldn’t be sure because—okay, he’s never met you. And then there was the problem of your being dead. By court order. And, all right, let’s say you weren’t dead … why would you run the risk of being spotted by that camera?”

  “Why indeed?”

  “Well, here’s an interesting wrinkle. This particular camera had been broken for more than a year, and it was only, oh, three weeks ago that management finally got around to fixing it. But you wouldn’t have known that, would you, Alonzo?”

  He folded his arms across his chest.

  “Security cameras,” he sneered. “I can’t even find words, Henry, to—I mean, why do I need words? I was in North Carolina when Lily died. Which you know perfectly well.”

  “Oh, you know what? I don’t. Know that.”

  “Well, then, Amory could tell you.”

  “Except he can’t. It’s funny, when we were hanging out la
st night in the Syon Park woods, I got to thinking about something. Something you said to me back at the Outer Banks. You asked me how Lily could possibly have dropped a lit cigarette in a book vault. Lily, with her ungodly command of detail.”

  “That was my point exactly.”

  “My point is something else. My point is how did you know about the cigarette?”

  From the edge of my vision, I saw his mouth cinch into a bud.

  “Jesus, Henry, it was in the papers. The Washington Post—”

  “See, I read the Post article. I even looked it up online just now to be sure. It mentions your books being stolen, but it doesn’t breathe a single word about how Lily died. Not the cigarette, not the vault—nothing. Suspicious circumstances, that’s as far as it goes, because that’s as much as the police were willing to say.”

  And now, at last, I shifted my gaze from the river to him.

  “Such a dumb mistake, Alonzo. And me, how dumb was I not to pick up on it? Encyclopedia Brown would’ve kicked me out of his tree house.”

  His voice never wavered.

  “You’re quite right, Henry. I didn’t read it at all.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  “Someone told me.”

  “Who?”

  “I hate to betray confidences, Henry.…”

  “Could you please? Just this once?”

  I closed my eyes. And then I heard him say:

  “Joanna.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “Joanna?”

  “Lily’s stepsister. Lord, Henry, she called in a perfect frenzy. Slow down, I said. I can’t hear a thing you say. I should have been nicer, it’s true. She was distraught, although I’m not sure why, she and Lily were never close.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding ruminatively. “Except, according to you, Joanna was in Cinque Terre when Lily died. With her new neck. The one you paid for.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, I would have taken great pleasure in rendering Alonzo Wax speechless. But I wasn’t savoring this: the sag of his face and shoulders, the constriction in his hands.

  “I know,” I said, soothingly. “The confessional mode, that’s not your bag. But we don’t have a lot of time here, so how’s about I take a run at it?”