Acts of Mercy

Fifteen

Moonshine.

The night is radiant with it as we make our way through the gardens. It paints the darkness with luminous yellows and golds, it softens the shadows and gives them a velvet gloss, it creates an almost religious aura of beauty and peace. It touches us, bathes us with its brilliance, and yet it does not reach us at all. Beauty and peace are strangers to us now. We knew them once, but no more-no more.

There is no moonshine in our soul; there is only warm black.

When we near the southernmost guest cottage we see that there are lights showing faintly behind drawn front-window shades. But of course we have expected to find him awake; it is only a few minutes past eight o’clock. Is he alone? We will have to take the chance that he is, and return later if he is not.

We walk through the moonshine to the door, putting our hand in our coat pocket to conceal the bulge of the heavy glass ashtray we have placed there. A moment after we knock the door opens, and he peers out at us with listless eyes: the cool Harvard intellectual is gone and in his place stands a derelict. Is it because his sins weigh heavily on his mind? No matter. Treason is treason; remorse means nothing.

“What do you want?” Harper says in a wooden voice.

Behind him we can see most of the room, and it is empty. “We… that is, I’d like to talk to you,” we say.

“Talk about what?”

“May I come in?”

It is obvious that he does not want to be alone with us, and just as obvious that he does not care enough to refuse. He shrugs finally and says, “I suppose so, if you make it brief.”

“Oh I will. Very brief.”

He steps aside, and we enter past him and walk three careful paces into the room. We turn as he closes the door. He stands with his back to it and hides his hands inside the slash pockets of the dressing gown he wears. The dressing gown is rust-hued, the color of dried blood. We wet our lips; the ashtray is warm against our palm.

Harper says, “Well? What is it you came to say?”

We move over in front of him, close enough so that we can smell the faint sour odor of his breath. He avoids our eyes. “Just good-bye,” we say. “Good-bye, Maxwell.”

And we bring the ashtray out of our coat and club him with it across the bridge of the nose.

But it is a glancing blow, a sharp corner penetrates the skin and brings a spurt of blood, we have attacked with too much haste this time-and he screams. The others did not scream but Harper shrieks in a thin shrill voice, like a woman, and the sound of it-God, the awful sound of it! — fills us with a kind of wild desperate confusion. We hit him again as he staggers, but his hands are clapped to his forehead, blood streaming over the hands, and the ashtray strikes only his knuckles and he screams again, reels off a table and falls to his knees, screaming, still screaming. We know we have to shut off that sound before someone is alerted, before the pitch of it shatters our brain like crystal, and we rush forward and drive the ashtray against the back of his head, drive him flat to the floor, fall beside him and hit him again and then it stops, at last it stops, and he is still and silent and we know he is dead.

The confusion still has control of us; our head has begun to ache intolerably. We’re afraid, for the first time we’re terrified.

And inside us something seems to be happening We stand again, panting, and stare down at Harper. The back of his skull is crushed and bloody. We can’t make this one look like an accident, they’ll, know it’s murder. But there is nothing we can do now, and — we’re losing the fusion, that’s what is happening inside us, we’re losing control-Still holding the ashtray. When we look at it we see our fingers smeared with crimson, Harper’s blood on our hand. We fling the ashtray away from us, hear it bounce and clatter across the floor, then frantically scrub my fingers — our fingers, scrub our fingers clean on the tail of his dressing gown. Then I back away

We back away, we do it. But I is trying to take over and we mustn’t let me do it. Get out of here before I realizes the truth! We turn blindly and stumble to the door, pull it open. Moonshine engulfs me

Us. Engulfs me us me

Moonshine-and then darkness…

He was standing in the guest-house doorway.

He could not seem to remember walking here, he could not seem to remember opening the door; he was simply standing in the doorway, blinking away a wetness that dimmed his vision. In his mind there was upheaval, as though he were just starting to emerge from some sort of dreamlike state. Malignant pain in his head, too. Perspiration encasing his body, warm and mucilaginous like that caused by high fever.

Fuzzy thoughts: What’s happening to me? I was all right a little while ago, I didn’t feel sick And he saw the body.

His vision cleared and he saw the body of Maxwell Harper lying bloody and twisted on the cottage floor.

Shock. Horror. The pain in his head magnifying, manufacturing the illusion of sound in his ears, like the whine of a high-speed drill. Upheaval filling all the spaces of him; pieces of his mind seeming to fragment, cohesive thought, all rationality breaking up into a swirl of bright shards.

Look at his head, Maxwell’s head, no accident somebody killed him murdered him Justice was right, psychopath killing people Briggs and Wexford it’s true, but who, why does my head ache like this why can’t I remember, psychopath, no, psychopath…

Vertigo assailed him and he leaned hard against the doorjamb to keep from falling, clung to the wood there with his right hand. The hand was up in front of his face and he saw it like a claw, a fat white claw with dark spots on it, liver spots, and something else too, something adhering in the skin ridges on the backs of his knuckles, something that might have been dirt and might have been coagulated fluid, blood-blood! He ripped the hand down, thrust it behind him to hide it from his eyes, to hide it from — the other eyes. There were other eyes close by, tyes that watched him in the night.

He jerked his head up in panic. In the room’s north wall, beyond Harper’s body, was another window, and the shades were not drawn across it, and a face peered in at him there. Frozen behind glass, eyes enormous, mouth open with incredulity. Familiar, agonized, accusing.

Justice’s face.

The implacable face of Justice.

The panic consumed him and he turned, Nicholas Augustine turned, the President of the United States turned and fled into the night.