Box Nine

Chapter Fifteen

Peirce sits in the Swarms’ library, surrounded by books. The room is in darkness. She hasn’t bothered to turn on a light. She finds herself wondering what will be done with all the books. Will they be donated to some library or one of the city’s colleges? Will they be inventoried and appraised and then sold off to some dealer, the proceeds given to the state?

She’d like to think of the books as orphans, but their size and bulkiness and lack of color prevent her. They have the look of textbooks, tomes that only a dozen people in the world can read the whole of.

The Swanns had no other family. Just each other. Why did two people need such an enormous house? A house like this should be filled with a noisy, multigenerational clan. It should be filled, regularly, with the sound of huge dinners that take hours to prepare and even longer to eat.

The silence in this place must have been awful.

Then again, maybe she’s got it all wrong. Maybe the house was like a huge fortress for the two of them. Leo and Inez locked up in paradise, every need taken care of and plenty of room to spread out.

It’s possible. She can picture herself making a home in a place like this. With Victor. Rolling around on the oriental carpets, foolish in this enormous private palace. The thought makes her reach for the recorder.

A little Alka-Seltzer and the girl is as good as new. You’re not going to believe this but Charlotte is getting hungry again. You’re either home by now or on your way. The Mrs. has supper on the table, right? What’ll it be tonight, Victor? It really doesn’t matter. She’s such a great cook, everything’s wonderful, huh? [Pause] I said I wouldn’t do this. And besides, now that I think of it, you’ve got a City Council meeting. So you’re probably grabbing a quick sandwich in the office with the amazing Carol, secretary of the decade. It’s getting pretty pathetic, Victor, when I’m losing it over your wife and secretary. Swear to me that all you guys are doing right now is going over new budget proposals. [Pause] I’m sitting in the library of the lovely but dead Leo and Inez Swann, in the Swann mansion up on Grimaldi Drive. In the ritzy Windsor Hills section. I knew I should’ve been a real estate broker, boss. Let’s see—“This charming fifteen-room Tudor …” No, wait. “Charming” is the wrong word here. “Stately.” You’d have to use “stately.” I read the Sunday real estate ads. Sometimes they call the houses up here “magnificent.” It’s a kick just walking through a place like this. A little spooky in this case, you know? I was a poor kid, Victor, grew up on the south side of the district, all those good blue-collar folks that return you to office year after year. Now and then, my old man would drive me and my brothers and sisters up around here. We’d take a quick look and bang — out again. You always had the feeling up here that there were servants looking out the windows at your old broken-down station wagon, that there were these butlers, hidden behind enormous drapes or something, with a gold-plated telephone receiver in their hand, calling the cops. Like “Intruder alert. South-siders trespassing in Windsor.” This was where all the Yankee doctors and judges and the publisher of The Spy lived. It was like another world. A place I was always curious about, but scared of at the same time. This place where all the power in the whole city lived. And as a kid, maybe I got this from my dad, I don’t know, but it was never good power. Never something that was going to make things better. At least not for us. And sitting here now, in this house that’s ten times too big for the Swanns, I feel the exact same way. All over again. [Pause] Have you ever been in this house, Victor? Well, I guess you’ve been in a lot like this one. I know you’ve had dinner up at The Spy publisher’s house, what’s his name, Welch. My old man used to say about him, “More money than God and a whole lot slicker.” You know, for a second I thought it was funny that you didn’t live up here. Mayor of Quinsigamond and all. But then it hit me. You’re really just a civil servant like me. We’re in the same class, Victor. There’s one thing we’ve got in common. I felt like a criminal just walking up the path to this place. I clipped my badge to my belt in case any neighbors were watching. We’ve still got the yellow police line practically wrapped around the whole house, roping it off. I ducked underneath instead of breaking it, but I’ll tell you, something about that yellow plastic material. I hate touching it. It’s like it’s infected with death or something. It’s like this glaring symbol, you know. Don’t cross this line, stiff on the other side. [Pause] I’ll tell you one thing, these two had expensive tastes. There had to be money in at least one of their families, and I’m betting Leo. He just looks the type. And you don’t live like this by being a researcher or scientist or whatever. At least I don’t think so. I know there’ve been three different investigations though this place and teams of lab guys and all, but I wanted to take a look for myself. It’s weird, Victor. It’s like living in some old English movie, I swear. How do you live in a place like this? Yeah, I know the answer to that. But it’s like, you walk into this huge, I mean enormous, foyer and it’s all this shining ancient wood everywhere. Walnut or mahogany. I don’t know this kind of crap. But the walls are so glossy you could go blind. And on either side of the foyer are these two stairways, wide enough for about six people across. And they both run up and meet at this balcony. And out in front of the balcony is this gigantic chandelier. I mean they had to have gotten this thing out of some landmark hotel in New York. [Pause] Listen. I got here hours ago, Victor. And I spent the first hour just wandering through. Not touching anything. Not even looking for anything. Just taking it all in. Just trying to see if I can get a better feeling for what kind of people Leo and Inez were. For me, it’s always best to work from instinct. I know you probably disagree with that. You’re the ultimate manager, right? Everything scheduled. Look at all the options. No, all the proposals. Weigh it all. Use a system. See what fits best. Maybe you’re right. I mean, look how far I’ve gotten in this life by following my feelings. I can bitch and moan with the best of them, Victor. I’d like to live in this house for just one week. With you. Like a married couple. Like Leo and Inez. Me, in the gourmet kitchen with the butcher-block island and the overhead copper rack for hanging pots and pans that don’t look like they’ve ever been cooked in, and I’m in a white terry-cloth robe, and I’m packing the kids’ lunches for the day, straightening your tie, giving you a little tip on how to deal with the school committee. [Pause] The Swanns both had a library, a study. I’m in Inez’s right now. I spent an hour in Leo’s. A man’s room. Big power desk. Dark leather chairs. The walls lined with books. Inez’s room is different. In all the ways you’d guess. Pastels. Antiques. Her desk is so small. Too small for me. Prints on the walls. Who’s that guy? French, I think. Painted all the water lilies? Anyway, I’ve been sitting here, my legs curled up underneath me, on this small uncomfortable couch. I’ve been trying to picture them, Leo and Inez, alone, late at night, in this ark of a house. Two people alone in this giant house. They’re in their studies. They’re separated. They’re reading, writing down notes, trying to think. Figuring out work problems. And then I think about Lehmann telling us at the briefing about their dinner with Gennaro Pecci. At Fiorello’s. And it doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t go together. I think Leo and Inez were the type of folks who would have turned up their noses at a local wise guy like Pecci. Even if he is second or third generation. And I know drugs and money make the weirdest kind of bedfellows. But the Pecci angle doesn’t make sense to me. Even if it fills in a lot of holes. [Pause] I pulled every book down off Inez’s bookshelf, Victor. A lot of old books alongside new ones. Some of them might be rare or something. I don’t know books. They have names like A Psycholinguistic Study of the Angkor Wat “Wild Child” and The Berlin Symposium on HyperKinesics and, yeah, here’s a good one, A Statistical Analysis of Leberzunge-Therapy, Buchenwald, 1943. Plus a bunch of stuff in German and French and maybe Russian that I can’t even pronounce. Real page-turners. Best-sellers. Now, I’m taking it for granted that somebody already did this, looked through every book. But in one book, love this name, Deconstructing the Fifth: Advances and Abuses Within the Cohn Group’s use of “J.M.’s Langley-Catacomb Cocktail,” 1949–1950, there was a bookmark, actually just a stub of paper used as a bookmark. It looks like the bottom half of one of those little pink “While You Were Our” slips. Printed, in pencil, in these small, perfect block letters is the word “Paraclete.” I don’t know if that rings any bells for you, but I’ve got nothing. [Pause] It’s getting creepy in here, Victor. I’ll talk to you later.