Run to Death

by Patrick Quentin

  He held out his hand. “You were planning to catch the ten o’clock plane to New York, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “There’s no need for you to hang around if you don’t want to. Later, we’ll need you. Obviously, you’ll keep this under your hat. You realize its importance to America, and to the world, in fact.” He grinned. “Give my love to your wife.”

  He waved to Vera and left.

  Vera got up. So did I. She was still wearing the tomato-red suit. I couldn’t imagine how anyone who had spent so long trussed up in a bath-tub could look so blooming.

  She was smiling, her warm, generous smile. I moved closer and took her arms.

  “Overwhelming women in bathrooms is not a regular habit of mine,” I said. “I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  She shook back her dark hair. “Forgive? You speak of forgive when all the time I lie and cheat and trick? It is I who say how sorry.”

  “There’s a bouquet for you, too. You certainly put on a performance to end all performances.”

  “Performance?” She looked indignant. “What is it, this performance? You think I am different from what I am?”

  “The accent, the…”

  “Still you speak from the accent?” The temper was gleaming up in her eyes. “Still you think I am the fake? This is the way I talk. Always so. If I could speak different, you think I not want to?”

  “And I guess you’re a ballerina, too?”

  “Of course I am the ballerina. The artiste of the ballet. And the critics, they say, if I work, work…”

  “And you married the old Mexican?”

  “What you think? He is my dream lover? Of course I marry the old man—for his money. And he die. Why you think I take the tuberoses and the lilies?”

  “You’re all that?” I said. “And you’re working for the U.S. Government on the side. What a girl!”

  “Who say I work for the U.S. Government?” Her eyes were still flashing, but she laughed her big, gusty laugh. “You think they hire the girl like me with the brain of the bird? Pouff! Is ridiculous.”

  “Then how do you fit in this picture? I still don’t see.”

  “How I fit?” She shrugged. “Because Mr. Brand he call me up from the telephone in Mexico and say: ‘Vera, I need you to help.’ That is how I fit.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “Mr. Brand?” She looked pleased. “Ah, you are jealous. You think of the foot that talks under the table. Pouff! Is crazy. That I make up. There is no foot under the table from Mr. Brand and me. My mother, you know I speak of her? She, too, is the dancer? The great…”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Then is that way. This mother of mine, a year ago she marry Mr. Brand.”

  I blinked. “So you’re Halliday’s step-daughter?”

  “Step? Is that what you say? Step?” She moved a little closer, Her face was tilted up to mine. “But is nonsense to talk more of such things. You think of New York, I know. You think of this—this sexy woman who waits for you.”

  She was very close and very attractive. I thought of a lot of things that would never be. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I guess I do.”

  “Then you telephone to her,” she grinned. “Always you men who are attractive are beasts to the woman. How she know when you arrive in New York? You tell her? You send the cable? No. Oh, no, she is to sit there and wait till the great big man choose to come.” She brandished her arm toward the desk. “Telephone.”

  Vera, the champion of wives, was something new to me. But the telephone idea was a good one. I went to it and gave our New York number. It was a strange sensation, waiting for the connection—like passing from one world to another.

  And then I heard Iris’ voice: “Hello.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Peter!” Her voice was edged with excitement, and the excitement came tingling through my veins, too. “Peter, where are you? In Mexico?”

  “No,” I said. “New Orleans. I’m catching the ten o’clock plane.”

  “New Orleans. What happened? Get grounded?”

  I glanced at Vera. “No, I didn’t get grounded. It’s quite a story.”

  “A story? You mean something’s happened? Something exciting?”

  “It was. Very exciting.”

  “With nice people?’

  I glanced at Vera again. “Wonderful people. Out of this world.”

  “I can’t wait to hear. I can’t wait for you to come back anyway.”

  I thought of her at the other end of the wire. Just the thought of her was enough to make everything else seem faintly unreal.

  “I can’t wait either, Iris.”

  “Then hurry. You don’t have much time. Get off the phone quick. Good-bye, darling.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I put the receiver back on the stand. Vera had crossed to my side. Under the black, woolly lashes her eyes were almost wistful.

  “Wonderful people,” she repeated. “Is me?”

  I smiled at her. “Is you.”

  A shadow of suspicion crossed her face. “But what is it, this Out of This World?”

  I put my arms around her and kissed her. It was a sad kind of kiss remembering things that had never happened.

  “Out of this world,” I said, “is marvellous, beautiful, charming, clever—the greatest artiste of the ballet in four hemispheres….”

  Two weeks later Iris and I were lying in bed together, eating breakfast and playing with the Sunday paper. As Iris leaned across me to reach for the drama section and the announcement of the casting of my play, I noticed a small paragraph at the bottom of the page I was reading.

  American Archæologist returns from jungle, it said. It went on to announce that Joseph Brand, well-known Finnish-American archæologist had mysteriously showed up again at the camp of his expedition. That was all it said, but I could read a lot more into it. The Peruvian Government had been busy. Liddon’s associates were almost certainly in the bag.

  “Darling,” said Iris, brandishing the drama section, “there’s a wonderful picture of me. Look. It’s one of the new ones. Hasn’t it come out well?”

  I slid my arm around her and looked, “Lindissima,” I said.

  She glanced at me suspiciously. “What’s that? Lindissima?”

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Peter Duluth Mysteries

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a Saturday morning and I was still in bed. Leora, the maid, who liked to mother me now I was alone, had brought me some breakfast on a tray. I don’t enjoy eating in bed, but I’d done so because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I had read the mail and was glancing at one of the novel manuscripts I had brought home from the office. I could hear Leora tidying the living-room on heavy tiptoe. To her a publisher was a sensitive creature who was inevitably “working,” even when lying in bed, and whose inspiration could vanish before the too vigorous flick of a duster.

  “When you work with your head, Mister Duluth, that’s real difficult. That takes concentration.”

  The phone rang for the first time that morning. I picked up the receiver and it was Bill. In spite of myself, a foolish joy, denying all the trouble there’d been between us, rose in me.

  “Hi, Pop.”

  “Hi, Bill.”

  There was silence again. I could feel my son’s awkwardness as if he were in the room. I wanted to help him out but suddenly I was awkward, too. “Well, Pop, how are you?”

  “I’m fine. And you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  It had been four months since I had heard his voice. I had imagined this moment many times, hoped for it, even planned optimistically how to attempt a reconciliation. Now all I could say was: “Where are you?”

  “Here. In the apartment. Been busy, Pop?”

  “Pretty busy. Ronnie’s still in England, you know. But I’m expecting him back soon.”

  Usually when I mentioned my senior partner Bill ma
de some sarcastic remark about my “lord and master,” but now all he said was: “Oh.” There was the empty gap again and then: “You doing anything right now, Pop?”

  “No.”

  “Well, something’s come up. It’s kind of important.”

  I felt the old, familiar anxiety. “Nothing wrong?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.” In his voice I could hear the old, familiar impatience. There lie is fussing again. But he was trying to keep it in control. For some reason, he was being terribly polite. “Pop, could I maybe come up right away?”

  “Of course.”

  “I wouldn’t be butting in on anything?”

  “What would there be to butt into?”

  “Okay, Pop. Thanks. Well—be seeing you.”

  He paused again as if the conversation had not been satisfactory and he was thinking of something to add. Then I heard the click of his receiver dropping back on the stand.

  For a moment, I lay in bed. My joy had subsided or, if it was still there, it was neutralized by a feeling of inadequacy to face what I knew, somehow or other, would turn out to be an ordeal. Bill wasn’t going to ask to come back. I was almost sure of that from his voice. And, even if he had been, I wasn’t certain that I wanted it any more.

  Since that morning four months ago, after our last, most bitter and most futile argument, when he had finally packed every one of his possessions and left, I had grown used to the calm of being without him. I knew it was a sterile calm. Without my son, my life, at forty-three, had become an emotional blank, adding up to nothing but my work at the publishing house, my complex relationship with Ronnie, my casual affection for my younger brother, Peter, and his wife, Iris, and my memories of Felicia which were more of a nightmare than anything else. But there is something to be said for even a sterile calm after three years of passionate conflict with a son whom I could neither understand nor help and who had been able, with an expertness frightening at his age, to keep me in a constant state of humiliation.

  Leora had started to use the vacuum cleaner in the living-room. I could hear its boring drone. I put on a bathrobe and went out to her.

  “Leora, Bill called. He’ll be here pretty soon.”

  She bent ponderously and switched off the vacuum cleaner. “What’s that, Mister Duluth?”

  “Bill’s going to be here in about half an hour.”

  Her face darkened. “He gonna come back?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then what’s he after?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She stood looking at me, with her large fist around the handle of the cleaner.

  “Now don’t you go letting him get around you again, Mister Duluth. You done more than enough for that boy already. Fixing him up with an apartment, giving him fifty dollars a week. Fifty dollars! And him an ungrateful little snot just nineteen years old with no more respect for his—”

  I didn’t feel up to one of Leora’s loyal tirades. She had only seen the Bill of the last three years. She didn’t know or care about how he had been before his mother died or what that death had done to him. But I knew, all too well. That was why, even at my angriest and most hurt, I could never really blame Bill for something that was Felicia’s fault. Fault? Was that too definite a word? Then—something of which Felicia had been the cause.

  I patted Leora’s arm. “Okay, Leora. Just let him in. That’s all. I’m going to take a shower.”

  “Let him in! Sure I’ll let him in. This ain’t my house. Ain’t nothing to me who comes into this house—”

  Her scolding, loving voice followed me back into the bedroom. I passed Felicia’s photograph in its silver frame on my way to the bathroom. I glanced at it, as I always glanced at it, no longer trying to guess the secret behind the dark, ambiguous eyes and the tense elegance of the tilted head, but just noticing it, recording, again, the fact that it was there.

  Many people, I’m sure, wondered why I didn’t put it away. Some of them perhaps imagined I was still in love with her. Only I—and maybe Bill—knew that it had all gone far beyond love or hate. It wouldn’t have done any good to put the picture away. Felicia would still have been just as oppressively there. She had insured that immortality for herself on the sunny June morning, three years before, when she had thrown herself out of the window.

  I had been in California fixing up some contract with an author. It was Bill, coming home unexpectedly from a weekend with a school friend, who had found the apartment filled with policemen.

  That—which had been the start of Bill’s troubles—had made Felicia a very memorable wife and mother.

  As I took a shower, I thought about Felicia with that dull bitterness which had outlived love and even curiosity. At first when the news had been wired to me and I was on the plane coming home, it had, in a way, been easier to bear because I had been blindly sure that the fall must have been an accident. But the five witnesses who, from opposite apartments, had seen her sitting on the sill, smoking a cigarette for a full minute before she jumped, put an end to that—and a humiliating end to my belief that my wife had been as happy with me as I had been with her.

  Now I no longer speculated why a woman, adored by her husband and son, should have chosen, in one sunny June moment, to render meaningless all the years of her marriage and motherhood. I just accepted it as a fact. The Fact. The poison which, although neither of us would mention it, would soon be infecting yet another interview between Bill and me.

  To put myself in a better mood, I made myself think of Ronnie in England. Ronnie Sheldon was not merely the millionaire who had hired me straight out of college and set me up in equal partnership in the publishing house of Sheldon and Duluth. Ronnie was my one real friend. Most of the people who knew him were dazzled by his charm, his vitality, and the impression of great assurance with which his wealth endowed him. These same people, I knew, thought of me as his shadow, his stooge, his expensive doormat. But I have never particularly cared about what other people think. I played Court Chamberlain to Ronnie’s Emperor because I knew how much he needed me in the role. Apart from his sister and maybe his butler, I was the only person who was allowed to see behind the façade to his touching, almost childlike insecurity—to Ronnie Sheldon, the lonely little rich boy, always fearful that the world would turn on him, never really convinced that he was acceptable. It is flattering, I suppose, when someone who is generally admired picks you for their anchor. But it wasn’t a one-sided relationship. Ronnie was my support, too. He’d never been at ease with Felicia because she’d always kept herself aloof from him, but, after her suicide, it had been Ronnie, and only Ronnie, who had got me on my feet again through infinite patience, tenderness, and affection—human qualities which don’t always belong with the very rich and courted.

  It was typical of Ronnie suddenly to have taken six months off “leisurely to study the literary climate of England, old boy.” Ronnie was like a child, too, with his enthusiasms. Once he got a new one, he plunged into it like a nine-year-old hand plunging into a candy box. He’d made the decision to go to Europe and acted on it in a couple of days, leaving me in full charge of Sheldon and Duluth. Apart from a flurry of cables about the American rights to some British novelist called Basil Leighton, I’d hardly heard from him. That meant things were going well. The moment anything went wrong, the transatlantic telephone would have been shrilling.

  “For God’s sake, Jake, take the next plane . . . It’s disaster, old boy . . . Why do I ever leave you? . . . You know what always happens when your back is turned. . . .”

  The thought of Ronnie in his Clinging Vine characterization made me smile as I finished drying myself and put on my robe. I suppose I was still smiling as I went back into the bedroom.

  Bill was sitting on my bed.

  For a moment he didn’t notice me and, sitting there half turned from me, fingering the pages of the strewn novel manuscript, he looked so absurdly like the reflection of myself I had just seen in the bathroom mirror, that the r
esemblance, as so often before, touched me and disarmed me. The same straight fair hair, the same broad forehead, the same blunt nose, the same jaw which, from the side, looked deceptively self-confident. It was as if, by some confusion of time, twenty years had been rescinded and there I was, stubborn, undaunted by doubts, green as a reed, in my first Manhattan furnished room, determined to conquer the world on the strength of the editorship of the college paper and two seasons on the football team.

  When he saw me, he got up quickly, smiling and nodding the flap of hair back from his forehead. Instantly the resemblance was blurred. The smile and the tilted head were Felicia—and the brown, ambiguous eyes were, frighteningly, Felicia, too.

  He said in his “charm” voice, “Leora tried to bar the bedroom door like an angel with a flaming sword. But I didn’t think you’d mind. My coming in—I mean.”

  We were standing close together. Both of us were acutely conscious that this was a difficult moment, and then suddenly we were shaking hands. I don’t think we’d ever done it before. It wasn’t a good idea. It made the mood even more artificial.

  Trying to slacken the tension, I asked banal questions about his new Greenwich Village life. He answered politely but guardedly, making it plain by his manner that he hadn’t come for a reconciliation or even to suggest any closer relations. He’d never told me the address of his apartment and he didn’t now. He merely said it was small but he liked it; he’d met quite a few interesting people; his novel was going okay, he guessed.

  Bill had decided to be a writer. At the time, he’d been in his freshman year at Columbia, doing very badly through restlessness and lack of interest. Then he’d decided that college was a waste of time anyway. It was sterile and suffocating. So was my life and everything about my influence. He could only breathe, only “find himself” if he got away from everything on his own.

  I hadn’t for a moment believed in his talent for writing or even in his sudden desire to be a novelist. This was just another plunge, another attempt to escape from himself and the horror, whatever it was, with which Felicia’s suicide had impregnated him. But his childish arguments had worn me down like water drops. At last, when that look half of contempt, half of pity, showed in his eyes and I knew he was thinking: You failed Mother and now you’re failing me, I was automatically defeated. That was how he had won his independence, his apartment, and the fifty dollars a week which were such a thorn in Leora’s flesh.