Strangers on a Train

Forty

A few moments later that morning, Guy stepped out of the director’s office at Hanson and Knapp Drafters, happier than he had felt in weeks. The firm was copying the last of the hospital drawings, the most complex Guy had ever supervised, the last okays had come through on the building materials, and he had gotten a telegram early that morning from Bob Treacher that made Guy rejoice for his old friend. Bob had been appointed to an advisory committee of engineers for the new Alberta Dam in Canada, a job he had been looking forward to for the last five years.

Here and there at one of the long tables that fanned out on either side of him, a draftsman looked up and watched him as he walked toward the outer door. Guy nodded a greeting to a smiling foreman. He detected the smallest glow of self-esteem. Or maybe it was nothing but his new suit, he thought, only the third suit in his life he had ever had made for him. Anne had chosen the gray-blue glen plaid material. Anne had chosen the tomato-colored woolen tie this morning to go with it, an old tie but one that he liked. He tightened its knot in the mirror between the elevators. There was a wild gray hair sticking up from one black, heavy eyebrow. The brows went up a little in surprise. He smoothed the hair down. It was the first gray hair he had ever noticed on himself.

A draftsman opened the office door. “Mr. Haines? Lucky I caught you. There’s a telephone call.”

Guy went back, hoping it wouldn’t be long, because he was to meet Anne for lunch in ten minutes. He took the call in an empty office off the drafting room.

“Hello, Guy? Listen, Gerard found that Plato book… . Yeah, in Santa Fe. Now, listen, it doesn’t change anything….”

Five minutes had passed before Guy was back at the elevators. He had always known the Plato might be found. Not a chance, Bruno had said. Bruno could be wrong. Bruno could be caught, therefore. Guy scowled as if it were incredible, the idea Bruno could be caught. And somehow it had been incredible, until now.

Momentarily, as he came out into the sunlight, he was conscious again of the new suit, and he clenched his fist in frustrated anger with himself. “I found the book on the train, see?” Bruno had said. “If I called you in Metcalf, it was on account of the book.

But I didn’t meet you until December…” The voice more clipped and anxious than Guy had ever heard it before, so alert, so harried, it hardly seemed Bruno’s voice. Guy went over the fabrication Bruno had just given him as if it were something that didn’t belong to him, as if it were a swatch of material he indifferently considered for a suit, he thought. No, there were no holes in it, but it wouldn’t necessarily wear. Not if someone remembered seeing them on the train. The waiter, for instance, who had served them in Bruno’s compartment.

He tried to slow his breathing, tried to slow his pace. He looked up at the small disc of the winter sun. His black brows with the gray hair, with the white scar, his brows that were growing shaggier lately, Anne said, broke the glare into particles and protected him. If one looks directly into the sun for fifteen seconds, one can burn through the cornea, he remembered from somewhere. Anne protected him, too. His work protected him. The new suit, the stupid new suit. He felt suddenly inadequate and dullwitted, helpless. Death had insinuated itself into his brain. It enwrapped him. He had breathed its air so long, perhaps, he had grown quite used to it. Well, then, he was not afraid. He squared his shoulders superfluously.

Anne had not arrived when he got to the restaurant. Then he remembered she had said she was going to pick up the snapshots they had made Sunday at the house. Guy pulled Bob Treacher’s telegram from his pocket and read it again and again: JUST APPOINTED TO ALBERTA COMMITTEE. HAVE RECOMMENDED YOU. THIS IS A BRIDGE, GUY. GET FREE SOON AS POSSIBLE. ACCEPTANCE GUARANTEED. LETTER COMING. BOB

Acceptance guaranteed. Regardless of how he engineered his life, his ability to engineer a bridge was beyond question. Guy sipped his martini thoughtfully, holding the surface perfectly steady.

Forty-one

“We wandered into another case,” Gerard murmured pleasantly, gazing at the typewritten report on his desk. He had not looked at Bruno since the young man had come in. “Murder of Guy Haines’ first wife. Never been solved.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I thought you’d know quite a lot about it. Now tell me everything you know.” Gerard settled himself.

Bruno could tell he had gone all the way into it since Monday when he had the Plato book. “Nothing,” Bruno said. “Nobody knows. Do they?”

“What do you think? You must have talked a great deal with Guy about it.”

“Not particularly. Not at all. Why?”

“Because murder interests you so much.”

“What do you mean, murder interests me so much?”

“Oh, come, Charles, if I didn’t know from you, I’d know that much from your father!” Gerard said in a rare burst of impatience.

Bruno started to reach for a cigarette and stopped. “I talked with him about it,” he said quietly, respectfully. “He doesn’t know anything. He didn’t even know his wife very well then.”

“Who do you think did it? Did you ever think Mr. Haines might have arranged it? Were you interested maybe in how he’d done it and gotten away with it?” At his ease again, Gerard leaned back with his hands behind his head, as if they were talking about the good weather that day.

“Of course I don’t think he arranged it,” Bruno replied. “You don’t seem to realize the caliber of the person you’re talking about.”

“The only caliber ever worth considering is the gun’s, Charles.” Gerard picked up his telephone. “As you’d be the first to tell me probably.—Have Mr. Haines come in, will you?”

Bruno jumped a little, and Gerard saw it. Gerard watched him in silence as they listened to Guy’s footsteps coming closer in the hall. He had expected Gerard would do this, Bruno told himself. So what, so what, so what?

Guy looked nervous, Bruno thought, but his usual air of being nervous and in a hurry covered it. He spoke to Gerard, and nodded to Bruno.

Gerard offered him his remaining chair, a straight one. “My whole purpose in asking you to come down here, Mr. Haines, is to ask you a very simple question. What does Charles talk with you about most of the time?” Gerard offered Guy a cigarette from a pack that must have been years old, Bruno thought, and Guy took it.

Bruno saw Guy’s eyebrows draw together with the look of irritation that was exactly appropriate. “He’s talked to me now and then about the Palmyra Club,” Guy replied.

“And what else?”

Guy looked at Bruno. Bruno was nibbling, so casually the action seemed nonchalant, at a fingernail of the hand that propped his cheek. “Can’t really say,” Guy answered.

“Talked to you about your wife’s murder?”

“Yes.”

“How does he talk to you about the murder?” Gerard asked kindly. “I mean your wife’s murder.”

Guy felt his face flush. He glanced again at Bruno, as anybody might, he thought, as anybody might in the presence of a discussed party who is being ignored. “He often asked me if I knew who might have done it.”

“And do you?”

“No.”

“Do you like Charles?” Gerard’s fat fingers trembled slightly, incongruously. They began playing with a match cover on his desk blotter.

Guy thought of Bruno’s fingers on the train, playing with the match cover, dropping it onto the steak. “Yes, I like him,” Guy answered puzzledly.

“Hasn’t he annoyed you? Hasn’t he thrust himself on you many times?”

“I don’t think so,” Guy said.

“Were you annoyed when he came to your wedding?”

“No.”

“Did Charles ever tell you that he hated his father?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he ever tell you he’d like to kill him?”

“No,” he replied in the same matter-of-fact tone.

Gerard got the brown paper-wrapped book from a drawer in his desk. “Here’s the book Charles meant to mail you. Sorry I can’t let you have it just now, because I may need it. How did Charles happen to have your book?”

“He told me he found it on the train.” Guy studied Gerard’s sleepy, enigmatic smile. He had seen a trace of it the night Gerard called at the house, but not like this. This smile was calculated to inspire dislike. This smile was a professional weapon. What it must be, Guy thought, facing that smile day after day. Involuntarily, he looked over at Bruno.

“And you didn’t see each other on the train?” Gerard looked from Guy to Bruno.

“No,” said Guy.

“I spoke with the waiter who served you two dinner in Charles’ compartment.”

Guy kept his eyes on Gerard. This naked shame, he thought, was more annihilating than guilt. This was annihilation he was feeling, even as he sat upright, looking straight at Gerard.

“So what?” Bruno said shrilly.

“So I’m interested in why you two take such elaborate trouble,” Gerard wagged his head amusedly, “to say you met months later.” He waited, letting the passing seconds eat at them. “You won’t tell me the answer. Well, the answer is obvious. That is, one answer, as a speculation.”

All three of them were thinking of the answer, Guy thought. It was visible in the air now, linking him and Bruno, Bruno and Gerard, Gerard and himself. The answer Bruno had declared beyond thought, the eternally missing ingredient.

“Will you tell me, Charles, you who read so many detective stories?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Within a few days, your wife was killed, Mr. Haines. Within a few months, Charles’ father. My obvious and first speculation is that you both knew those murders were going to happen—”

“Oh, crap!” Bruno said.

“—and discussed them. Pure speculation, of course. That’s assuming you met on the train. Where did you meet?” Gerard smiled. “Mr. Haines?”

“Yes,” Guy said, “we met on the train.”

“And why’ve you been so afraid of admitting it?” Gerard jabbed one of his freckled fingers at him, and again Guy felt in Gerard’s prosaicness his power to terrify.

“I don’t know,” Guy said.

“Wasn’t it because Charles told you he would like to have his father killed? And you were uneasy then, Mr. Haines, because you knew?”

Was that Gerard’s trump? Guy said slowly, “Charles said nothing about killing his father.”

Gerard’s eyes slid over in time to catch Bruno’s tight smirk of satisfaction. “Pure speculation, of course,” Gerard said.

Guy and Bruno left the building together. Gerard had dismissed them together, and they walked together down the long block toward the little park where the subways were, and the taxicabs. Bruno looked back at the tall narrow building they had left.

“All right, he still hasn’t anything,” Bruno said. “Any way you look at it, he hasn’t anything.”

Bruno was sullen, but calm. Suddenly Guy realized how cool Bruno had been under Gerard’s attack. Guy was continually imagining Bruno hysterical under pressure. He glanced quickly at Bruno’s tall hunched figure beside him, feeling that wild, reckless comradeship of the day in the restaurant. But he had nothing to say. Surely, he thought, Bruno must know that Gerard wasn’t going to tell them everything he had discovered.

“You know, the funny thing,” Bruno continued, “Gerard’s not looking for us, he’s looking for other people.”

Forty-two

Gerard poked a finger between the bars and waggled it at the little bird that fluttered in terror against the opposite side of the cage. Gerard whistled a single soft note.

From the center of the room, Anne watched him uneasily. She didn’t like his having just told her Guy had been lying, then his strolling off to frighten the canary. She hadn’t liked Gerard for the last quarter hour, and because she had thought she did like him on his first visit, her misjudgment annoyed her.

“What’s his name?” Gerard asked.

“Sweetie,” Anne replied. She ducked her head a little, embarrassedly, and swung half around. Her new alligator pumps made her feel very tall and graceful, and she had thought, when she bought them that afternoon, that Guy would like them, that they would coax a smile from him as they sat having a cocktail before dinner. But Gerard’s arrival had spoilt that.

“Do you have any idea why your husband didn’t want to say he met Charles June before last?”

The month Miriam was murdered, Anne thought again. June before last meant nothing else to her. “It was a difficult month for him,” she said. “It was the month his wife died. He might have forgotten almost anything that happened that month.” She frowned, feeling Gerard was making too much of his little discovery, that it couldn’t matter so very much, since Guy hadn’t even seen Charles in the six months afterwards.

“Not in this case,” Gerard said casually, reseating himself. “No, I think Charles talked with your husband on the train about his father, told him he wanted him dead, maybe even told him how he intended to go about—”

“I can’t imagine Guy listening to that,” Anne interrupted him.

“I don’t know,” Gerard went on blandly, “I don’t know, but I strongly suspect Charles knew about his father’s murder and that he may have confided to your husband that night on the train. Charles is that kind of a young man. And I think the kind of man your husband is would have kept quiet about it, tried to avoid Charles from then on. Don’t you?”

It would explain a great deal, Anne thought. But it would also make Guy a kind of accomplice. Gerard seemed to want to make Guy an accomplice. “I’m sure my husband wouldn’t have tolerated Charles even to this extent,” she said firmly, “if Charles had told him anything like that.”

“A very good point. However—” Gerard stopped vaguely, as if lost in his own slow thoughts.

Anne did not like to look at the top of his bald freckled head, so she stared at the tile cigarette box on the coffee table, and finally took a cigarette.

“Do you think your husband has any suspicion who murdered his wife, Mrs. Haines?”

Anne blew her smoke out defiantly. “I certainly do not.”

“You see, if that night on the train, Charles went into the subject of murder, he went into it thoroughly. And if your husband did have some reason to think his wife’s life was in danger, and if he mentioned it to Charles—why then they have a sort of mutual secret, a mutual peril even. It’s only a speculation,” he hurried to add, “but investigators always have to speculate.”

“I know my husband couldn’t have said anything about his wife’s being in danger. I was with him in Mexico City when the news came, and with him days before in New York.”

“How about March of this year?” Gerard asked in the same even tone. He reached for his empty highball glass, and submitted to Anne’s taking it to refill.

Anne stood at the bar with her back to Gerard, remembering March, the month Charles’ father was killed, remembering Guy’s nervousness then. Had that fight been in February or March? And hadn’t he fought with Charles Bruno?

“Do you think your husband could have been seeing Charles now and then around the month of March without your knowing about it?”

Of course, she thought, that might explain it: that Guy had known Charles intended to kill his father, and had tried to stop him, had fought with him, in a bar. “He could have, I suppose,” she said uncertainly. “I don’t know.”

“How did your husband seem around the month of March, if you can remember, Mrs. Haines?”

“He was nervous. I think I know the things he was nervous about.”

“What things?”

“His work—” Somehow she couldn’t grant him a word more than that about Guy. Everything she said, she felt Gerard would incorporate in the misty picture he was composing, in which he was trying to see Guy. She waited, and Gerard waited, as if he vied with her not to break the silence first.

Finally, he tapped out his cigar and said, “If anything does occur to you about that time in regard to Charles, will you be sure and tell me? Call me any time during the day or night. There’ll be somebody there to take messages.” He wrote another name on his business card, and handed it to Anne.

Anne turned from the door and went directly to the coffee table to remove his glass. Through the front window, she saw him sitting in his car with his head bent forward, like a man asleep, while, she supposed, he made his notes. Then with a little stab, she thought of his writing that Guy might have seen Charles in March without her knowing about it. Why had she said it? She did know about it. Guy said he hadn’t seen Charles, between December and the wedding.

When Guy came in about an hour later, Anne was in the kitchen, tending the casserole that was nearly done in the oven. She saw Guy put his head up, sniffing the air.

“Shrimp casserole,” Anne told him. “I guess I should open a vent.”

“Was Gerard here?”

“Yes. You knew he was coming?”

“Cigars,” he said laconically. Gerard had told her about the meeting on the train, of course. “What did he want this time?” he asked.

“He wanted to know more about Charles Bruno.” Anne glanced at him quickly from the front window. “If you’d said anything to me about suspecting him of anything. And he wanted to know about March.”

“About March?” He stepped onto the raised portion of the floor where Anne stood.

He stopped in front of her, and Anne saw the pupils of his eyes contract suddenly. She could see a few of the hair-fine scars over his cheekbone from that night in March, or February. “Wanted to know if you suspected Charles was going to have his father killed that month.” But Guy only stared at her with his mouth in a familiar straight line, without alarm, and without guilt. She stepped aside, and went down into the living room. “It’s terrible, isn’t it,” she said, “murder?”

Guy tapped a fresh cigarette on his watch face. It tortured him to hear her say “murder.” He wished he could erase every memory of Bruno from her brain.

“You didn’t know, did you, Guy—in March?”

“No, Anne. What did you tell Gerard?”

“Do you believe Charles had his father killed?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s possible. But it doesn’t concern us.” And he did not realize for seconds that it was even a lie.

“That’s right. It doesn’t concern us.” She looked at him again. “Gerard also said you met Charles June before last on the train.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Well—what does it matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it because of something Charles said on the train? Is that why you dislike him?”

Guy shoved his hands deeper in his jacket pockets. He wanted a brandy suddenly. He knew he showed what he felt, that he could not hide it from Anne now. “Listen, Anne,” he said quickly. “Bruno told me on the train he wished his father were dead. He didn’t mention any plans, he didn’t mention any names. I didn’t like the way he said it, and after that I didn’t like him. I refuse to tell Gerard all that, because I don’t know if Bruno had his father killed or not. That’s for the police to find out. Innocent men have been hanged because people reported their saying something like that.”

But whether she believed him or not, he thought, he was finished. It seemed the basest lie he had ever told, the basest thing he had ever done—the transferring of his guilt to another man. Even Bruno wouldn’t have lied like this, wouldn’t have lied against him like this. He felt himself totally false, totally a lie. He flung his cigarette into the fireplace and put his hands over his face.

“Guy, I do believe you’re doing what you should,” Anne’s voice said gently.

His face was a lie, his level eyes, the firm mouth, the sensitive hands. He whipped his hands down and put them in his pockets. “I could use a brandy.”

“Wasn’t it Charles you fought with in March?” she asked as she stood at the bar.

There was no reason not to lie about this also, but he could not. “No, Anne.” He knew from the quick sidelong glance she gave him that she didn’t believe him. She probably thought he had fought with Bruno to stop him. She was probably proud of him! Must there always be this protection, that he didn’t even want? Must everything always be so easy for him? But Anne would not be satisfied with this. She would come back to it and back to it until he told her, he knew.

That evening, Guy lighted the first fire of the year, the first fire in their new house. Anne lay on the long hearthstone with her head on a sofa pillow. The thin nostalgic chill of autumn was in the air, filling Guy with melancholy and a restless energy. The energy was not buoyant as autumnal energy had been in his youth, but underlaid with frenzy and despair, as if his life were winding down and this might be his last spurt. What better proof did he need that his life was winding down than that he had no dread of what lay ahead? Couldn’t Gerard guess it now, knowing that he and Bruno had met on the train? Wouldn’t it dawn on him one day, one night, one instant as his fat fingers lifted a cigar to his mouth? What were they waiting for, Gerard and the police? He had sometimes the feeling that Gerard wanted to gather every tiniest contributing fact, every gram of evidence against them both, then let it fall suddenly upon them and demolish them. But however they demolished him, Guy thought, they would not demolish his buildings. And he felt again the strange and lonely isolation of his spirit from his flesh, even from his mind.

But suppose his secret with Bruno were never found out? There were still those moments of mingled horror at what he had done, and of absolute despondency, when he felt that secret bore a charmed inviolability. Perhaps, he thought, that was why he was not afraid of Gerard or the police, because he still believed in its inviolability. If no one had guessed it so far, after all their carelessness, after all Bruno’s hints, wasn’t there something making it impregnable?

Anne had fallen asleep. He stared at the smooth curve of her forehead, paled to silver by the fire’s light. Then he lowered his lips to her forehead and kissed her, so gently she would not awaken. The ache inside him translated itself into words: “I forgive you.” He wanted Anne to say it, no one but Anne.

In his mind, the side of the scale that bore his guilt was hopelessly weighted, beyond the scale’s measure, yet into the other side he continually threw the equally hopeless featherweight of selfdefense. He had committed the crime in selfdefense, he reasoned. But he vacillated in completely believing this. If he believed in the full complement of evil in himself, he had to believe also in a natural compulsion to express it. He found himself wondering, therefore, from time to time, if he might have enjoyed his crime in some way, derived some primal satisfaction from it—how else could one really explain in mankind the continued toleration of wars, the perennial enthusiasm for wars when they came, if not for some primal pleasure in killing?—and because the capacity to wonder came so often, he accepted it as true that he had.

Forty-three

District attorney Phil Howland, immaculate and gaunt, as sharp of outline as Gerard was fuzzy, smiled tolerantly through his cigarette smoke. “Why don’t you let the kid alone? It was an angle at first, I grant you. We combed through his friends, too. There’s nothing, Gerard. And you can’t arrest a man on his personality.”

Gerard recrossed his legs and allowed himself a complaisant smile. This was his hour. His satisfaction was heightened by the fact he had sat here smiling in the same way during other less momentous interviews.

Howland pushed a typewritten sheet with his fingertips to the edge of the desk. “Twelve new names here, if you’re interested. Friends of the late Mr. Samuel furnished us by the insurance companies,” Howland said in his calm, bored voice, and Gerard knew he pretended especial boredom now, because as District Attorney he had so many hundreds of men at his disposal, could throw so much finer nets so much farther.

“You can tear them up,” Gerard said.

Rowland hid his surprise with a smile, but he couldn’t hide the sudden curiosity in his dark, wide eyes. “I suppose you’ve already got your man. Charles Bruno, of course.”

“Of course,” Gerard chuckled. “Only I’ve got him for another murder.”

“Only one? You always said he was good for four or five.”

“I never said,” Gerard denied quietly. He was smoothing out a number of papers, folded in thirds like letters, on his knees.

“Who?”

“Curious? Don’t you know?” Gerard smiled with his cigar between his teeth. He pulled a straight chair closer to him, and proceeded to cover its seat with his papers. He never used Howland’s desk, however many papers he had, and Howland knew now not to bother offering it. Howland disliked him, personally as well as professionally, Gerard knew. Howland accused him of not being cooperative with the police. The police had never been in the least cooperative with him, but with all their hindrance, Gerard in the last decade had solved an impressive number of cases the police hadn’t even been warm on.

Howland got up and strolled slowly toward Gerard on his long thin legs, then hung back, leaning against the front of his desk. “But does all this shed any light on the case’?”

“The trouble with the police force is that it has a single-track mind,” Gerard announced. “This case, like many others, took a double-track mind. Simply couldn’t have been solved without a double-track mind.”

“Who and when?” Howland sighed.

“Ever hear of Guy Haines?”

“Certainly. We questioned him last week.”

“His wife. June eleventh of last year in Metcalf, Texas. Strangulation, remember? The police never solved it.”

“Charles Bruno?” Howland frowned.

“Did you know that Charles Bruno and Guy Haines were on the same train going South on June first? Ten days before the murder of Haines’ wife. Now, what do you deduce from that?”

“You mean they knew each other before last June?”

“No, I mean they met each other on that train. Can you put the rest together? I’m giving you the missing link.”

The District Attorney smiled faintly. “You’re saying Charles Bruno killed Guy Haines’ wife?”

“I certainly am.” Gerard looked up from his papers, finished. “The next question is, what’s my proof? There it is. All you want.” He gestured toward the papers that overlapped in a long row, like cards in a game of solitaire. “Read from the bottom up.”

While Howland read, Gerard drew a cup of water from the tank in the corner and lighted another cigar from the one he had been smoking. The last statement, from Charles’ taxi driver in Metcalf, had come in this morning. He hadn’t even had a drink on it yet, but he was going to have three or four as soon as he left Howland, in the lounge car of an Iowa-bound train.

The papers were signed statements from Hotel La Fonda bellhops, from one Edward Wilson who had seen Charles leaving the Santa Fe station on an eastbound train the day of Miriam Haines’ murder, from the Metcalf taxi driver who had driven Charles to the Kingdom of Fun Amusement Park at Lake Metcalf, from the barman in the roadhouse where Charles had tried to get hard liquor, plus telephone bills of long-distance calls to Metcalf.

“But no doubt you know that already,” Gerard remarked.

“Most of it, yes,” Howland answered calmly, still reading.

“You knew he made a twentyfour-hour trip to Metcalf that day, too, did you?” Gerard asked, but he was really in too good spirits for sarcasm. “That taxi driver was certainly hard to find. Had to trace him all the way up to Seattle, but once we found him, it didn’t take any jostling for him to remember. People don’t forget a young man like Charles Bruno.”

“So you’re saying Charles Bruno is so fond of murder,” Howland remarked amusedly, “that he murders the wife of a man he meets on a train the week before? A woman he’s never even seen? Or had he seen her?”

Gerard chuckled again. “Of course he hadn’t. My Charles had a plan.” The “my” slipped out, but Gerard didn’t care. “Can’t you see it? Plain as the nose on your face? And this is only half.”

“Sit down, Gerard, you’ll work yourself into a heart attack.”

“You can’t see it. Because you didn’t know and don’t know Charles’ personality. You weren’t interested in the fact he spends most of his time planning perfect crimes of various sorts.”

“All right, what’s the rest of your theory?”

“That Guy Haines killed Samuel Bruno.”

“Ow!” Howland groaned.

Gerard smiled back at the first grin Howland had given him since he, Gerard, had made a mistake in a certain case years ago. “I haven’t finished checking on Guy Haines yet,” Gerard said with deliberate ingenuousness, puffing away at the cigar. “I want to take it easy, and that’s the only reason I’m here, to get you to take it easy with me. I didn’t know but what you’d grab Charles, you see, with all your information against him.”

Howland smoothed his black mustache. “Everything you say confirms my belief you should have retired about fifteen years ago.”

“Oh, I’ve solved a few cases in the last fifteen years.”

“A man like Guy Haines?” Howland laughed again.

“Against a fellow like Charles? Mind you, I don’t say Guy Haines did it of his own free will. He was made to do it for Charles’ unsolicited favor of freeing him of his wife. Charles hates women,” he remarked in a parenthesis. “That was Charles’ plan. Exchange. No clues, you see. No motives. Oh, I can just hear him! But even Charles is human. He was too interested in Guy Haines to leave him alone afterward. And Guy Haines was too frightened to do anything about it. Yes—” Gerard jerked his head for emphasis, and his jowls shook—“Haines was coerced. How terribly probably no one will ever know.”

Rowland’s smile went away momentarily at Gerard’s earnestness. The story had the barest possibility, but still a possibility. “Hmmm.”

“Unless he tells us,” Gerard added.

“And how do you propose to make him tell us?”

“Oh, he may yet confess. It’s wearing him down. But otherwise, confront him with the facts. Which my men are busy gathering. One thing, Howland—” Gerard jabbed a finger at his papers on the chair seat. “When you and your—your army of oxes go out checking these statements, don’t question Guy Haines’ mother. I don’t want Haines forewarned.”

“Oh. Cat-and-mouse technique for Mr. Haines,” Howland smiled. He turned to make a telephone call about an inconsequential matter, and Gerard waited, resenting that he had to turn his information over to Howland, that he had to leave the Charles-Guy Haines spectacle. “Well—” Howland let his breath out in a long sigh—“what do you want me to do, work over your little boy with this stuff? Think he’ll break down and tell all about his brilliant plan with Guy Haines, architect?”

“No, I don’t want him worked over. I like clean jobs. I want a few days more or maybe weeks to finish checking on Haines, then I’ll confront them both. I’m giving you this on Charles, because from now on I’m out of the case personally, so far as they’re to know. I’m going to Iowa for a vacation, I really am, and I’m going to let Charles know it.” Gerard’s face lighted with a big smile.

“It’s going to be hard to hold the boys back,” Howland said regretfully, “especially for all the time it’ll take you to get evidence against Guy Haines.”

“Incidentally—” Gerard picked up his hat and shook it at Howland. “You couldn’t crack Charles with all that, but I could crack Guy Haines with what I’ve got this minute.”

“Oh, you mean we couldn’t crack Guy Haines?”

Gerard looked at him with elaborate contempt, “But you’re not interested in cracking him, are you? You don’t think he’s the man.”

“Take that vacation, Gerard!”

Methodically, Gerard gathered his papers and started to pocket them.

“I thought you were going to leave those.”

“Oh, if you think you’ll need them.” Gerard presented the papers courteously, and turned toward the door.

“Mind telling me what you’ve got that’ll crack Guy Haines?”

Gerard made a disdainful sound in his throat. “The man is tortured with guilt,” he said, and went out.

Forty-four

“You know, in the whole world,” Bruno said, and tears started in his eyes so he had to look down at the long hearthstone under his feet, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here tonight, Anne.” He leaned his elbow jauntily on the high mantel.

“Very nice of you to say,” Anne smiled, and set the plate of melted cheese and anchovy canapes on the sawbuck table. “Have one of these while they’re hot.”

Bruno took one, though he knew he wouldn’t be able to get it down. The table looked beautiful, set for two with gray linen and big gray plates. Gerard was off on a vacation. They had beaten him, Guy and he, and the lid was off his brains! He might have tried to kiss Anne, he thought, if she didn’t belong to Guy. Bruno stood taller and adjusted his cuffs. He took great pride in being a perfect gentleman with Anne. “So Guy thinks he’s going to like it up there?” Bruno asked. Guy was in Canada now, working on the big Alberta dam. “I’m glad all this dumb questioning is over, so he won’t have to worry about it when he’s working. You can imagine how I feel. Like celebrating!” He laughed, mainly at his understatement.

Anne stared at his tall restless figure by the mantel, and wondered if Guy, despite his hatred, felt the same fascination she did. She still didn’t know, though, whether Charles Bruno would have been capable of arranging his father’s murder, and she had spent the whole day with him in order to make up her mind. He slid away from certain questions with joking answers, he was serious and careful about answering others. He hated Miriam as if he had known her. It rather surprised Anne that Guy had told him so much about Miriam.

“Why didn’t you want to tell anyone you’d met Guy on the train?” Anne asked.

“I didn’t mind. I just made the mistake of kidding around about it first, said we’d met in school. Then all those questions came up, and Gerard started making a lot out of it. I guess because it looked bad, frankly. Miriam killed so soon after, you know. I think it was quite nice of Guy at the inquest on Miriam not to drag in anybody he’d just met by accident.” He laughed, a single loud clap, and dropped into the armchair. “Not that I’m a suspicious character, by any means!”

“But that didn’t have anything to do with the questioning about your father’s death.”

“Of course not. But Gerard doesn’t pay any attention to logic. He should have been an inventor!”

Anne frowned. She couldn’t believe that Guy would have fallen in with Charles’ story simply because telling the truth would have looked bad, or even because Charles had told him on the train that he hated his father. She must ask Guy again. There was a great deal she had to ask him. About Charles’ hostility to Miriam, for instance, though he had never seen her. Anne went into the kitchen.

Bruno strolled to the front window with his drink, and watched a plane alternating its red and green lights in the black sky. It looked like a person exercising, he thought, touching fingertips to shoulders and stretching arms out again. He wished Guy might be on that plane, coming home. He looked at the dusky pink face of his new wristwatch, thinking again, before he read the time on its tall gold numerals, that Guy would probably like a watch like this, because of its modern design. In just three hours more, he would have been with Anne twentyfour hours, a whole day. He had driven by last evening instead of telephoning, and it had gotten so late, Anne had invited him to spend the night. He had slept up in the guest room where they had put him the night of the party, and Anne had brought him some hot bouillon before he went to sleep. Anne was terribly sweet to him, and he really loved her! He spun around on his heel, and saw her coming in from the kitchen with their plates.

“Guy’s very fond of you, you know,” Anne said during the dinner.

Bruno looked at her, having already forgotten what they had been talking about. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him! I feel a tremendous tie with him, like a brother. I guess because everything started happening to him just after we met each other on the train.” And though he had started out to be gay, even funny, the seriousness of his real feeling for Guy got the better of him. He fingered the rack of Guy’s pipes near him on an end table. His heart was pounding. The stuffed potato was beautiful, but he didn’t dare eat another mouthful. Nor the red wine. He had an impulse to try to spend the night again. Couldn’t he manage to stay again tonight, if he didn’t feel well? On the other hand, the new house was closer than Anne thought. Saturday he was giving a big party. “You’re sure Guy’ll be back this weekend?” he asked.

“So he said. ” Anne ate her green salad thoughtfully. “I don’t know whether he’ll feel like a party, though. When he’s been working, he usually doesn’t like anything more distracting than a sail.”

“I’d like a sail. If you wouldn’t mind company.”

“Come along. ” Then she remembered, Charles had already been out on the India, had invited himself with Guy, had dented the gunwail, and suddenly she felt puzzled, tricked, as if something had prevented her remembering until now. And she found herself thinking, Charles could probably do anything, atrocious things, and fool everyone with the same ingratiating naivete, the same shy smile. Except Gerard. Yes, he could have arranged his father’s murder. Gerard wouldn’t be speculating in that direction if it weren’t possible. She might be sitting opposite a murderer. She felt a little pluck of terror as she got up, a bit too abruptly as if she were fleeing, and removed the dinner plates. And his grim, merciless pleasure in talking of his loathing for Miriam. He would have enjoyed killing her, Anne thought. A fragile suspicion that he might have killed her crossed her mind like a dry leaf blown by the wind.

“So you went on to Santa Fe after you met Guy?” she almost stammered, from the kitchen.

“Uh-huh.” Bruno was deep in the big green armchair again.

Anne dropped a demitasse spoon and it made an outrageous clatter on the tiles. The odd thing, she thought, was that it didn’t seem to matter what one said to Charles or asked him. Nothing would shock him. But instead of making it simpler to talk to him, this was the very quality that she felt rattling her and throwing her off.

“Have you ever been to Metcalf?” she heard her own voice call around the partition.

“No,” Bruno replied. “No, I always wanted to. Have you?”

Bruno sipped his coffee at the mantel. Anne was on the sofa, her head tipped back so the curve of her throat above the tiny ruffled collar of her dress was the lightest thing about her. Anne is like light to me, Bruno remembered Guy once saying. If he could strangle Anne, too, then Guy and he could really be together. Bruno frowned at himself, then laughed and shifted on his feet.

“What’s funny?”

“Just thinking,” he smiled. “I was thinking of what Guy always says, about the doubleness of everything. You know, the positive and negative, side by side. Every decision has a reason against it.” He noticed suddenly he was breathing hard.

“You mean two sides to everything?”

“Oh, no, that’s too simple!” Women were really so crude sometimes! “People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.” It thrilled him to say Guy’s words, though he hadn’t like hearing them, he remembered, because Guy had said the two people were mortal enemies, too, and Guy had meant him and himself.

Anne brought her head up slowly from the sofa back. It sounded so like Guy, yet he had never said it to her. Anne thought of the unsigned letter last spring. Charles must have written it. Guy must have meant Charles when he talked of ambush. There was no one else beside Charles to whom Guy reacted so violently. Surely it was Charles who alternated hatred with devotion.

“It’s not all good and evil either, but that’s how it shows itself best, in action,” Bruno went on cheerfully. “By the way, I mustn’t forget to tell Guy about giving the thousand dollars to a beggar. I always said when I had my own money, I’d give a thousand to a beggar. Well, I did, but you think he thanked me? It took me twenty minutes to prove to him the money was real! I had to take a hundred in a bank and break if for him! Then he acted as if he though I was crazy!” Bruno looked down and shook his head. He had counted on its being a memorable experience, and then to have the bastard look practically sore at him the next time he saw him—still begging on the same street corner, too—because he hadn’t brought him another thousand! “As I was saying anyway—”

“About good and evil,” Anne said. She loathed him. She knew all that Guy felt now about him. But she didn’t yet know why Guy tolerated him.

“Oh. Well, these things come out in actions. But for instance, murderers. Punishing them in the law courts won’t make them any better, Guy says. Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough. In fact, every man is just about everything to Guy!” He laughed. He was so tight, he could hardly see her face now, but he wanted to tell her everything that he and Guy had ever talked about, right up to the last little secret that he couldn’t tell her.

“People without consciences don’t punish themselves, do they?” Anne asked.

Bruno looked at the ceiling. “That’s true. Some people are too dumb to have consciences, other people too evil. Generally the dumb ones get caught. But take the two murderers of Guy’s wife and my father.” Bruno tried to look serious. “Both of them must have been pretty brilliant people, don’t you think?”

“So that have consciences and don’t deserve to get caught?”

“Oh, I don’t say that. Of course not! But don’t think they aren’t suffering a little. In their fashion!“He laughed again, because he was really too tight to know just where he was going. “They weren’t just madmen, like they said the murderer of Guy’s wife was. Shows how little the authorities know about real criminology. A crime like that took planning.” Out of the blue, he remembered he hadn’t planned that one at all, but he certainly had planned his father’s, which illustrated his point well enough. “What’s the matter?”

Anne laid her cold fingers against her forehead. “Nothing.”

Bruno fixed her a highball at the bar Guy had built into the side of the fireplace. Bruno wanted a bar just like it for his own house.

“Where did Guy get those scratches on his face last March?”

“What scratches?” Bruno turned to her. Guy had told him she didn’t know about the scratches.

“More than scratches. Cuts. And a bruise on his head.”

“I didn’t see them.”

“He fought with you, didn’t he?” Charles stared at her with a strange pinkish glint in his eyes. She was not deceitful enough to smile now. She was sure. She felt Charles was about to rush across the room and strike her, but she kept her eyes fixed on his. If she told Gerard, she thought, the fight would be proof of Charles’ knowledge of the murder. Then she saw Charles’ smile waver back.

“No!” he laughed. He sat down. “Where did he say he got the scratches? I didn’t see him anyway in March. I was out of town them.” He stood up. He suddenly didn’t feel well in the stomach, and it wasn’t the questions, it was his stomach. Suppose he was in for another attack now. Or tomorrow morning. He mustn’t pass put, mustn’t let Anne see that in the morning! “I’d better go soon,” he murmured.

“What’s the matter? You’re not feeling well? You’re a little pale.”

She wasn’t sympathetic. He could tell by her voice. What woman ever was, except his mother? “Thank you very much, Anne, for—for all day.”

She handed him his coat, and he stumbled out the door, gritting his teeth as he started the long walk toward his car at the curb.

The house was dark when Guy came home a few hours later. He prowled the living room, saw the cigarette stub ground on the hearth, the pipe rack askew on the end table, the depression in a small pillow on the sofa. There was a peculiar disorder that couldn’t have been created by Anne and Teddy, or by Chris, or by Helen Heyburn. Hadn’t he known?

He ran up to the guest room. Bruno wasn’t there, but he saw a tortured roll of newspaper on the bed table and a dime and two pennies domestically beside it. At the window, the dawn was coming in like that dawn. He turned his back on the window, and his held breath came out like a sob. What did Anne mean by doing this to him? Now of all times when it was intolerable—when half of himself was in Canada and the other half here, caught in the tightening grip of Bruno, Bruno with the police off his trail. The police had given him a little insulation! But he had overreached now. There was no enduring much longer.

He went into the bedroom and knelt beside Anne and kissed her awake, frightenedly, harshly, until he felt her arms close around him. He buried his face in the soft muss of the sheets over her breast. It seemed there was a rocking, roaring storm all around him, all around both of them, and that Anne was the only point of stillness, at its center, and the rhythm of her breathing the only sign of a normal pulse in a sane world. He got his clothes off with his eyes shut.

“I’ve missed you,” were the first words Anne said.

Guy stood near the foot of the bed with his hands in the pockets of his robe, clenched. The tension was still in him, and all the storm seemed gathered in his own core now.“I’ll be here three days. Have you missed me?”

Anne slid up a few inches in the bed. “Why do you look at me like that?”

Guy did not answer.

“I’ve seen him only once, Guy.”

“Why did you see him at all?”

“Because—” Her cheeks flushed as pink as the spot on her shoulder, Guy noticed. His beard had scratched her shoulder. He had never spoken to her like this before. And the fact she was going to answer him reasonably seemed only to give more reason to his anger. “Because he came by—”

“He always comes by. He always telephones.”

“Why?”

“He slept here!” Guy burst out, then he saw Anne’s recoil in the subtle lift of her head, the flicker of her lashes.

“Yes. Night before last,” her steady voice challenged him. “He came by late, and I asked him to stay over.”

It had crossed his mind in Canada that Bruno might make advances to Anne, simply because she belonged to him, and that Anne might encourage him, simply because she wanted to know what he had not told her. Not that Bruno would go very far, but the touch of his hand on Anne’s, the thought of Anne permitting it, and the reason for which she would permit it, tormented him. “And he was here last evening?”

“Why does it bother you so?”

“Because he’s dangerous. He’s half insane.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason he bothers you,” Anne said in the same slow steady voice. “I don’t know why you defend him, Guy. I don’t know why you don’t admit he’s the one who wrote that letter to me and the one who almost drove you insane in March.”

Guy stiffened with guilty defensiveness. Defense of Bruno, he thought, always defense of Bruno! Bruno hadn’t admitted sending the letter to Anne, he knew. It was just that Anne, like Gerard, with different facts, was putting pieces together. Gerard had quit, but Anne would never quit. Anne worked with the intangible pieces, and the intangible pieces were the ones that would make the picture. But she didn’t have the picture yet. It would take time, a little more time, and a little more time to torture him! He turned to the window with a tired leaden movement, too dead even to cover his face or bow his head. He did not care to ask Anne what she and Bruno had talked of yesterday. Somehow he could feel exactly what they had said, exactly how much more Anne had learned. There was some allotted period of time, he felt suddenly, in this agony of postponement. It had gone on beyond all logical expectation, as life sometimes did against a fatal disease, that was all.

“Tell me, Guy,” Anne said quietly, not pleading with him now, her voice merely like the tolling of a bell that marked another length of time. “Tell me, will you?”

“I shall tell you,” he replied, still looking at the window, but hearing himself say it now, believing himself, such a lightness filled him, he was sure Anne must see it in the half of his face, in his whole being, and his first thought was to share it with her, though for a moment he could not take his eyes from the sunlight on the window sill. Lightness, he thought, both a lifting of darkness and of weight, weightlessness. He would tell Anne.

“Guy, come here.” She held up her arms for him, and he sat beside her, slipped his arms around her, and held her tight against him. “There’s going to be a baby,” she said. “Let’s be happy. Will you be happy, Guy?”

He looked at her, feeling suddenly like laughing for happiness, for surprise, for her shyness. “A baby!” he whispered.

“What’ll we do these days you’re here?”

“When, Anne?’

“On—not for ages. I guess in May. What’ll we do tomorrow?”

“We’ll definitely go out on the boat. If it’s not too rough.” And the foolish, conspiratorial note in his voice made him laugh out loud now.

“Oh, Guy!”

“Crying?”

“It’s so good to hear you laugh!”

Forty-five

Bruno telephoned Saturday morning to congratulate Guy on his appointment to the Alberta Committee, and to ask if he and Anne would come to his party that evening. Bruno’s desperate, elated voice exhorted him to celebrate. “Talking over my own private wires, Guy. Gerard’s gone back to Iowa. Come on, I want you to see my new house.” Then, “Let me talk to Anne.”

“Anne’s out right now.”

Guy knew the investigations were over. The police had notified him and so had Gerard, with thanks.

Guy went back into the living room where he and Bob Treacher were finishing their late breakfast. Bob had flown down to New York a day ahead of him, and Guy had invited him for the weekend. They were talking of Alberta and the men they worked with on the Committee, of the terrain, the trout fishing, and of whatever came into their heads. Guy laughed at a joke Bob told in French-Canadian dialect. It was a fresh, sunny November morning, and when Anne got back from her marketing, they were going to take the car to Long Island and go for a sail. Guy felt a boyish, holiday delight in having Bob with him. Bob symbolized Canada and the work there, the project in. which Guy felt he had entered another vaster chamber of himself where Bruno could not follow. And the secret of the coming child gave him a sense of impartial benevolence, of magical advantage.

Just as Anne came in the door, the telephone rang again. Guy stood up, but Anne answered it. Vaguely, he thought, Bruno always knows exactly when to call. Then he listened, incredulously, to the conversation drifting toward the sail that afternoon.

“Come along then,” Anne said. “Oh, I suppose some beer would be nice if you must bring something.”

Guy saw Bob staring at him quizzically.

“What’s up?” Bob asked.

“Nothing.” Guy sat down again.

“That was Charles. You don’t mind too much if he comes, do you, Guy?” Anne walked briskly across the room with her bag of groceries. “He said Thursday he’d like to come sailing if we went, and I practically invited him.”

“I don’t mind,” Guy said, still looking at her. She was in a gay, euphoric mood this morning, in which it would have been difficult to imagine her refusing anybody anything, but there was more than that, Guy knew, in her inviting Bruno. She wanted to see them together again. She couldn’t wait, even today. Guy felt a rise of resentment, and said quickly to himself, she doesn’t realize, she can’t realize, and it’s all your own fault anyway for the hopeless muddle you’ve made. So he put the resentment down, refused even to admit the odium Bruno would inspire that afternoon. He determined to keep himself under the same control all day.

“You could do worse than watch your nerves a bit, old man,” Bob told him. He lifted his coffee cup and drained it, contentedly. “Well, at least you’re not the coffee fiend you used to be. What was it, ten cups a day?”

“Something like that.” No, he had cut out coffee entirely, trying to sleep, and now he hated it.

They stopped for Helen Heyburn in Manhattan, then crossed the Triboro Bridge to Long Island. The winter sunlight had a frozen clarity at the shore, lay thin on the pale beach, and sparkled nervously on the choppy water. The India was like an iceberg at anchor, Guy thought, remembering when its whiteness had been the essence of summer. Automatically, as he rounded the corner of the parking lot, his eye fell on Bruno’s long, bright blue convertible. The merrygo-round horse Bruno had ridden on, Guy remembered Bruno saying, had been royal blue, and that was why he had bought the car. He saw Bruno standing under the shed of the deckhouse, saw everything of him except his head, the long black overcoat and the small shoes, the arms with the hands in the pockets, the familiar anxiety of his waiting figure.

Bruno picked up the sack of beer and strolled toward the car with a shy smile, but even at a distance, Guy could see the pent elation, ready to explode. He wore a royal-blue muffler, the same color as his car. “Hello. Hello, Guy. Thought I’d try and see you while I could.” He glanced at Anne for help.

“Nice to see you!” Anne said. “This is Mr. Treacher. Mr. Bruno.”

Bruno greeted him. “You couldn’t possibly make it to the party tonight, Guy? It’s quite a big party. All of you?” His hopeful smile included Helen and Bob.

Helen said she was busy or she would love to. Glancing at her as he locked the car, Guy saw her leaning on Bruno’s arm, changing into her moccasins. Bruno handed Anne the sack of beer with an air of departure.

Helens blond eyebrows fluted troubledly. “You’re coming with us, aren’t you?”

“Not exactly dressed,” Bruno protested feebly.

“Oh, there’s lots of slickers on board,” Anne said.

They had to take a rowboat from the dock. Guy and Bruno argued politely but stubbornly about who should row, until Helen suggested they both row. Guy pulled in long deep strokes, and Bruno, beside him on the center thwart, matched him carefully. Guy could feel Bruno’s erratic excitement mounting as they drew near the India. Bruno’s hat blew off twice, and at last he stood up and spun it spectacularly into the sea.

“I hate hats anyway!” he said with a glance at Guy.

Bruno refused to put on a slicker, though the spray dashed now and then over the cockpit. It was too gusty to raise sail. The India entered the Sound under engine power, with Bob steering.

“Here’s to Guy!” Bruno shouted, but with the odd hitch of repression and inarticulateness Guy had noticed since he first spoke that morning. “Congratulations, salutations!” He brought the beautiful, fruit-ornamented silver flask down suddenly and presented it to Anne. He was like some clumsy, powerful machine that could not catch its proper timebeat to start. “Napoleon brandy. Five-star.”

Anne declined, but Helen, who was already feeling the cold, drank some, and so did Bob. Under the tarpaulin, Guy held Anne’s mittened hand and tried not to think about anything, not about Bruno, not about Alberta, not about the sea. He could not bear to look at Helen, who was encouraging Bruno, nor at Bob’s polite, vaguely embarrassed smile as he faced front at the wheel.

“Anybody know ‘Foggy, Foggy Dew’?” Bruno asked, brushing spray fussily off a sleeve. His pull from the silver flask had pushed him over the line into drunkenness.

Bruno was nonplussed because no one wanted any more of his specially selected liquor, and because no one wanted to sing. It also crushed him that Helen said “Foggy, Foggy Dew” was depressing. He loved “Foggy, Foggy Dew.” He wanted to sing or shout or do something. When else would they all be together again like this? He and Guy. Anne. Helen. And Guy’s friend. He twisted up in his corner seat and looked all around him, at the thin line of horizon that appeared and disappeared behind the swells of sea, at the diminishing land behind them. He tried to look at the pennant at the top of the mast, but the mast’s swaying made him dizzy.

“Some day Guy and I are going to circle the world like an isinglass ball, and tie it up in a ribbon!” he announced, but no one paid any attention.

Helen was talking with Anne, making a gesture like a ball with her hands, and Guy was explaining something about the motor to Bob. Bruno noticed as Guy bent over that the creases in his forehead looked deeper, his eyes as sad as ever.

“Don’t you realize anything!” Bruno shook Guy’s arm. “You have to be so serious today”?”

Helen started to say something about Guy’s always being serious, and Bruno roared her down, because she didn’t know a damned thing about the way Guy was serious or why. Bruno returned Anne’s smile gratefully, and produced the flask again.

But still Anne did not want any, and neither did Guy.

“I brought it specially for you, Guy. I thought you’d like it,” Bruno said, hurt.

“Have some, Guy,” Anne said.

Guy took it and drank a little.

“To Guy! Genius, friend, and partner!” Bruno said and drank after him. “Guy is a genius. Do you all realize that?” He looked around at them, suddenly wanting to call them all a bunch of numbskulls.

“Certainly,” said Bob agreeably.

“As you’re an old friend of Guy’s,” Bruno raised his flask, “I salute you also!”

“Thank you. A very old friend. One of the oldest.”

“How old?” Bruno challenged.

Bob glanced at Guy and smiled. “Ten years or so.”

Bruno frowned. “I’ve known Guy all his life,” he said softly, menacingly. “Ask him.”

Guy felt Anne wriggle her hand from his tight hold. He saw Bob chuckling, not knowing what to make of it. Sweat made his forehead cold. Every shred of calm had left him, as it always did. Why did he always think he could endure Bruno, given one more chance?

“Go on and tell him I’m your closest friend, Guy.”

“Yes,” Guy said. He was conscious of Anne’s small tense smile and of her silence. Didn’t she know everything now? Wasn’t she merely waiting for him and Bruno to put it into words in the next seconds? And suddenly it was like the moment in the coffee shop, the afternoon of the Friday night, when he felt he had already told Anne everything that he was going to do. He was going to tell her, he remembered. But the fact he hadn’t quite yet told her, that Bruno was once more dancing around him, seemed the last good measure of excoriation for his delay.

“Sure I’m mad!” Bruno shouted to Helen, who was inching away from him on the seat. “Mad enough to take on the whole world and whip it! Any man doesn’t think I whipped it, I’ll settle with him privately!” He laughed, and the laugh, he saw, only bewildered the blurred, stupid faces around him, tricked them into laughing with him. “Monkeys!” he threw at them cheerfully.

“Who is he?” Bob whispered to Guy.

“Guy and I are supermen!” Bruno said.

“You’re a superman drinker,” Helen remarked.

“That’s not true!” Bruno struggled onto one knee.

“Charles, calm downl” Anne told him, but she smiled, too, and Bruno only grinned back.

“I defy what she said about my drinking!”

“What’s he talking about?” Helen demanded. “Have you two made a killing on the stock market?”

“Stock market, cr—!” Bruno stopped, thinking of his father. “Yee-hoo-oo! I’m a Texan! Ever ride the merrygo-round in Metcalf, Guy?”

Guy’s feet jerked under him, but he did not get up and he did not look at Bruno.

“Awright, I’ll sit down,” Bruno said to him. “But you disappoint me. You disappoint me horribly!” Bruno shook his empty flask, then lobbed it overboard.

“He’s crying,” Helen said.

Bruno stood up and stepped out of the cockpit onto the deck. He wanted to take a long walk away from all of them, even away from Guy.

“Where’s he going?” Anne asked.

“Let him go,” Guy murmured, trying to light a cigarette.

Then there was a splash, and Guy knew Bruno had fallen overboard. Guy was out of the cockpit before any of them spoke.

Guy ran to the stern, trying to get his overcoat off. He felt his arms pinned behind him and, turning, hit Bob in the face with his fist and flung himself off the deck. Then the voices and the rolling stopped, and there was a moment of agonizing stillness before his body began to rise through the water. He shed the overcoat in slow motion, as if the water that was so cold it was merely a pain had frozen him already. He leapt high, and saw Bruno’s head incredibly far away, like a mossy, half-submerged rock.

“You can’t reach him!” Bob’s voice blared, cut off by a burst of water against his ear.

“Guy!” Bruno called from the sea, a wail of dying.

Guy cursed. He could reach him. At the tenth stroke, he leapt up again. “Bruno!” But he couldn’t see him now.

“There, Guy!” Anne pointed from the stern of the India.

Guy couldn’t see him, but he threshed toward the memory of his head, and went down at the place, groping with his arms wide, the farthest tips of his fingers searching. The water slowed him. As if he moved in a nightmare, he thought. As on the lawn. He came up under a wave and took a gasp of water. The India was in a different place, and turning. Why didn’t they direct him? They didn’t care, those others!

“Bruno!”

Perhaps behind one of the wallowing mountains. He threshed on, then realized he was directionless. A wave bashed the side of his head. He cursed the gigantic, ugly body of the sea. Where was his friend, his brother?

He went down again, deep as he could, spreading his ridiculous length as wide as he could. But now there seemed nothing but a silent gray vacuum filling all space, in which he was only a tiny point of consciousness. The swift, unbearable loneliness pressed him closer, threatening to swallow his own life. He stretched his eyes desperately. The grayness became a brown, ridged floor.

“Did you find him?” he blurted, raising himself up. “What time is it?”

“Lie still, Guy,” Bob’s voice said.

“He went down, Guy,” Anne said. “We saw him.”

Guy closed his eyes and wept.

He was aware that, one by one, they all went out of the bunkroom and left him, even Anne.

Forty-six

Carefully, so as not to awaken Anne, Guy got out of bed and went downstairs to the living room. He drew the drapes together and turned on the light, though he knew there was no shutting out the dawn that slithered now under the Venetian blinds, between the green drapes, like a silvery-mauve and amorphous fish. He had lain upstairs in the darkness awaiting it, knowing it would come for him finally over the foot of the bed, fearing more than ever the grip of the mechanism it set in motion, because he knew now that Bruno had borne half his guilt. If it had been almost unbearable before, how would he bear it now alone? He knew that he couldn’t.

He envied Bruno for having died so suddenly, so quietly, so violently, and so young. And so easily, as Bruno had always done everything. A tremor passed through him. He sat rigidly in the armchair, his body under the thin pajamas as hard and tense as in the first dawns. Then on the spasmic snap that always broke his tension, he got up and went upstairs to the studio before he actually knew what he intended to do. He looked at the big sleeksurfaced sheets of drawing paper on his work table, four or five lying as he had left them after sketching something for Bob. Then he sat down and began to write from the upper left-hand corner across, slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. He wrote of Miriam and of the train, the telephone calls, of Bruno in Metcalf, of the letters, the gun, and his dissolution, and of the Friday night. As if Bruno were still alive, he wrote every detail he knew that might contribute to an understanding of him. His writing blackened three of the big sheets. He folded the sheets, put them into an oversized envelope, and sealed it. For a long while he stared at the envelope, savoring its partial relief, wondering at its separateness now from himself. Many times before he had written passionate, scribbled admissions but, knowing no one would ever see them, they had never really left him. This was for Anne. Anne would touch this envelope. Her hands would hold the sheets of paper, and her eyes would read every word.

Guy put his palms up to his own hot, aching eyes. The hours of writing had tired him almost to a point of sleepiness. His thoughts drifted, resting on nothing, and the people he had been writing about—Bruno, Miriam, Owen Markman, Samuel Bruno, Arthur Gerard, Mrs. McCausland, Anne—the people and the names danced around the edge of his mind. Miriam. Oddly, she was more a person to him now than ever before. He had tried to describe her to Anne, tried to evaluate her. It had forced him to evaluate her to himself. She was not worth a great deal as a person, he thought, by Anne’s standards or by anyone’s. But she had been a human being. Neither had Samuel Bruno been worth a great deal—a grim, greedy maker of money, hated by his son, unloved by his wife. Who had really loved him? Who had really been hurt by either Miriam’s death or Samuel Bruno’s? If there were someone who had been hurt—Miriam’s family, perhaps? Guy remembered her brother on the witness stand at the inquest, the small eyes that had held nothing but malicious, brutal hatred, not grief. And her mother, vindictive, as vicious of spirit as ever, not caring where the blame fell as long as it fell on someone, unbroken, unsoftened by grief. Was there any purpose, even if he wanted to, in going to see them and giving them a target for their hatred? Would it make them feel any better? Or him? He couldn’t see that it would. If anyone had really loved Miriam—Owen Markman.

Guy took his hands down from his eyes. The name had swum into his mind mechanically. He hadn’t thought of Owen at all until he wrote the letter. Owen had been a dim figure in the background. Guy had held him of less value than Miriam. But Owen must have loved her. He had been going to marry her. She had been carrying his child. Suppose Owen had staked all his happiness on Miriam. Suppose he had known the grief in the months afterward that Guy himself had known when Miriam died to him in Chicago. Guy tried to recall every detail of Owen Markman at the inquest. He remembered his hangdog manner, his calm, straightforward answers until his accusation of jealousy. Impossible to tell what really might have been going on in his head.

“Owen,” Guy said.

Slowly, he stood up. An idea was taking form in his mind even as he tried to weigh his memories of the long, dark face and tall, slouching figure that was Owen Markman. He would go and see Markman and talk with him, tell him everything. If he owed it to anyone, he owed it to Markman. Let Markman kill him if he would, call the police in, anything. But he would have told him, honestly, and face to face. Suddenly it was an urgent necessity. Of course. It was the only step and the next step. After that, after his personal debt, he would shoulder whatever the law put upon him. He would be ready then. He could catch a train today, after the questions they were supposed to answer about Bruno. The police had told him to be at the station with Anne this morning. He could even catch a plane this afternoon, if he was lucky. Where was it? Houston. If Owen was still there. He mustn’t let Anne go with him to the airport. She must think he was going to Canada as he had planned. He didn’t want Anne to know yet. The appointment with Owen was more urgent. It seemed to transform him. Or perhaps it was like the shedding of an old and worn-out coat. He felt naked now, but not afraid any longer.

Forty-seven

Guy sat on a jumpseat in the aisle of a plane bound for Houston. He felt miserable and nervous, as out of place and wrong, somehow, as the little lump of the seat itself that clogged the aisle and spoilt the symmetry of the plane’s interior. Wrong, unnecessary, and yet he was convinced that what he was doing was necessary. The difficulties he had hurdled in getting this far had put him in a mood of stubborn determination.

Gerard had been at the police station to hear the questioning on Bruno’s death. He had flown over from Iowa, he said. It was too bad, Charles’ end, but Charles had never been cautious about anything. It was too bad it had had to happen on Guy’s boat. Guy had been able to answer the questions without any emotion whatever. It had seemed so insignificant, the details of the disappearance of his body. Guy had been more disturbed by Gerard’s presence. He didn’t want Gerard to follow him down to Texas. To be doubly safe, he had not even canceled his ticket on the plane to Canada, which had left earlier in the afternoon. Then he had waited nearly four hours at the airport for this plane. But he was safe. Gerard had said he was going back to Iowa by train this afternoon.

Nevertheless, Guy took another look around him at the passengers, a slower and more careful look than he had dared take the first time. There was not one who seemed the least interested in him.

The thick letter in his inside pocket crackled as he bent over the papers in his lap. The papers were sectional reports of the Alberta work, which Bob had given him. Guy couldn’t have read a magazine, he didn’t want to look out the window, but he knew he could memorize, mechanically and efficiently, the items in the reports that had to be memorized. He found a page from an English architectural magazine torn out and stuck between the mimeographed sheets. Bob had circled a paragraph in red pencil:

Guy Daniel Haines is the most significant architect yet to emerge from the American South. With his first independent work at the age of twenty-seven, a simple, two-story building which has become famous as “The Pittsburgh Store,” Haines set forth principles of grace and function to which he has steadfastly held, and through which his art has grown to its present stature. If we seek to define Haines’ peculiar genius, we must depend chiefly upon that elusive and aery term, “grace,” which until Haines has never distinguished modern architecture. It is Haines’ achievement to have made classic in our age his own concept of grace. His main building of the widely known Palmyra group in Palm Beach, Florida, has been called “The American Parthenon”…

An asterisked paragraph at the bottom of the page said:

Since the writing of this article, Mr. Haines has been appointed a member of the Advisory Committee of the Alberta Dam project in Canada. Bridges have always interested him, he says. He estimates that this work will occupy him happily for the next three years.

“Happily,” he said. How had they happened to use such a word?

A clock was striking 9 as Guy’s taxi crossed the main street of Houston. Guy had found Owen Markman’s name in a telephone book at the airport, had checked his bags and gotten into a taxi. It won’t be so simple, he thought. You can’t just arrive at 9 in the evening and find him at home, and alone, and willing to sit in a chair and listen to a stranger. He won’t be home, or he won’t be living there anymore, or he won’t even be in Houston anymore. It might take days.

“Pull up at this hotel,” Guy said.

Guy got out and reserved a room. The trivial, provident gesture made him feel better.

Owen Markman was not living at the address in Cleburne Street. It was a small apartment building. The people in the hall downstairs, among them the superintendent, looked at him very suspiciously and gave him as little information as possible. No one knew where Owen Markman was.

“You’re not the police, are you?” asked the superintendent finally.

Despite himself, he smiled. “No.”

Guy was on his way out when a man stopped him on the steps and, with the same air of cautious reluctance, told him that he might be able to find Markman at a certain cafe in the center of town.

Finally, Guy found him in a drugstore, sitting at the counter with two women whom he did not introduce. Owen Markman simply slid off his stool and stood up straight, his brown eyes a little wide. His long face looked heavier and less handsome than Guy remembered it. He slid his big hands warily into the slash pockets of his short leather jacket.

“You remember me,” Guy said.

“Reckon I do.”

“Would you mind if I had a talk with you? Just for a little while.” Guy looked around him. The best thing was to invite him to his hotel room, he supposed. “I’ve got a room here at the Rice Hotel.”

Markman looked Guy slowly up and down once more, and after a long silence said, “All right.”

Passing the cashier’s desk, Guy saw the shelves of liquor bottles. It might be hospitable to offer Markman a drink. “Do you like Scotch?”

Markman loosened up a bit as Guy bought it. “Coke’s fine, but it tastes better with a little something in it.”

Guy bought some bottles of CocaCola, too.

They rode to the hotel in silence, rode up in the elevator and entered the room in silence. How would he begin, Guy wondered. There were a dozen beginnings. Guy discarded them all.

Owen sat down in the armchair, and divided his time between eying Guy with insouciant suspicion, and savoring the long glass of Scotch and CocaCola.

Guy began stammeringly, “What—”

“What?” asked Owen.

“What would you do if you knew who murdered Miriam?”

Markman’s foot thudded down to the floor, and he sat up. His frowning brows made a black, intense line above his eyes. “Did you?”

“No, but I know the man who did.”

“Who?”

What was he feeling as he sat there frowning, Guy wondered. Hatred? Resentment? Anger? “I know, and so will the police very soon.” Guy hesitated. “It was a man from New York whose name was Charles Bruno. He died yesterday. He was drowned.”

Owen sat back a little. He took a sip of his drink. “How do you know? Confessed?”

“I know. I’ve known for some time. That’s why I’ve felt it was my fault. For not betraying him. ” He moistened his lips. It was difficult every syllable of the way. And why did he uncover himself so cautiously, inch by inch? Where were all his fantasies, the imagined pleasure and relief of blurting it all out? “That’s why I blame myself. I—” Owen’s shrug stopped him. He watched Owen finish his glass, then automatically, Guy went and mixed another for him. “That’s why I blame myself,” he repeated. “I have to tell you the circumstances. It was very complex. You see, I met Charles Bruno on a train, coming down to Metcalf. The train in June, just before she was killed. I was coming down to get my divorce.” He swallowed. There it was, the words he had never said to anyone before, said of his own will, and it felt so ordinary now, so ignominious even. He had a huskiness in his throat he could not get rid of. Guy studied Owen’s long, dark attentive face. There was less of a frown now. Owen’s leg was crossed again, and Guy remembered suddenly the gray buckskin work shoes Owen had worn at the inquest. These were plain brown shoes with elastic sidepieces. “And—”

“Yeah,” Owen prompted.

“I told him Miriam’s name. I told him I hated her. Bruno had an idea for a murder. A double murder.”

“Jesus!” Owen whispered.

The “Jesus” reminded him of Bruno, and Guy had a horrible, an utterly horrible thought all at once, that he might ensnare Owen in the same trap that Bruno had used for him, that Owen in turn would capture another stranger who would capture another, and so on in infinite progression of the trapped and the hunted. Guy shuddered and clenched his hands. “My mistake was in speaking to him. My mistake was in telling a stranger my private business.”

“He told you he was going to kill her?”

“No, of course not. It was an idea he had. He was insane. He was a psychopath. I told him to shut up and to go to hell. I got rid of him!” He was back in the compartment. He was leaving it to go onto the platform. He heard the bang of the train’s heavy door. Got rid of him, he had thought!

“You didn’t tell him to do it.”

“No. He didn’t say he was going to do it.”

“Why don’t you have a straight shot? Why don’t you sit down?” Owen’s slow, rasping voice made the room steady again. His voice was like an ugly rock, solidly lodged in dry ground.

He didn’t want to sit down, and he didn’t want to drink. He had drunk Scotch like this in Bruno’s compartment. This was the end and he didn’t want it to be like the beginning. He touched the glass of Scotch and water that he had fixed for himself only for politeness’ sake. When he turned around, Owen was pouring more liquor into his glass, continued to pour it, as if to show Guy that he hadn’t been trying to do it behind his back.

“Well,” Owen drawled, “if the fellow was a nut like you say—That was the court’s opinion finally, too, wasn’t it, that it must have been a madman?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, sure I can understand how you felt afterwards, but if it was just a conversation like you say, I don’t see where you should blame yourself so awful much.”

Guy was staring at him incredulously. Didn’t it matter to Owen more than this? Maybe he didn’t entirely understand. “But you see—”

“When did you find out about it?” Owen’s brown eyes looked slurry.

“About three months after it happened. But you see, if not for me, Miriam would be alive now.” Guy watched Owen lower his lips to the glass again. He could taste the sickening mess of CocaCola and Scotch sliding into Owen’s wide mouth. What was Owen going to do? Leap up suddenly and fling the glass down, throttle him as Bruno had throttled Miriam? He couldn’t imagine that Owen would continue to sit there, but the seconds went by and Owen did not move. “You see, I had to tell you,” Guy persisted. “I considered you the one person I might have hurt, the one person who suffered. Her child had been yours. You were going to marry her. You loved her. It was you—”

“Hell, I didn’t love her.” Owen looked at Guy with no change whatever in his face.

Guy stared back at him. Didn’t love her, didn’t love her, Guy thought. His mind staggered back, trying to realign all the past equations that no longer balanced. “Didn’t love her?” he said.

“No. Well, not the way you seem to think. I certainly didn’t want her to die—and understand, I’d have done anything to prevent it, but I was glad enough not to have to marry her. Getting married was her idea. That’s why she had the child. That’s not a man’s fault, I wouldn’t say. Would you?” Owen was looking at him with a tipsy earnestness, waiting, his wide mouth the same firm, irregular line it had been on the witness stand, waiting for Guy to say something, to pass judgment on his conduct with Miriam.

Guy turned away with a vaguely impatient gesture. He couldn’t make the equations balance. He couldn’t make any sense to it, except an ironic sense. There was no reason for his being here now, except for an ironic reason. There was no reason for his sweating, painful self-torture in a hotel room for the benefit of a stranger who didn’t care, except for an ironic reason.

“Do you think so?” Owen kept on, reaching for the bottle on the table beside him.

Guy couldn’t have made himself say a word. A hot, inarticulate anger was rising inside him. He slid his tie down and opened his shirt collar, and glanced at the open windows for an airconditioning apparatus.

Owen shrugged. He looked quite comfortable in his open-collared shirt and unzipped leather jacket. Guy had an absolutely unreasonable desire to ram something down Owen’s throat, to beat him and crush him, above all to blast him out of his complacent comfort in the chair.

“Listen,” Guy began quietly, “I am a—”

But Owen had begun to speak at the same instant, and he went on, droningly, not looking at Guy who stood in the middle of the floor with his mouth still open.”… the second time. Got married two months after my divorce, and there was trouble right away. Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse. Louisa up and left two months ago after damn near setting the house on fire, a big apartment house.” He droned on, and poured more Scotch into his glass from the bottle at his elbow, and Guy felt a disrespect, a definite affront, directed against himself, in the way Owen helped himself. Guy remembered his own behavior at the inquest, undistinguished behavior, to say the least, for the husband of the victim. Why should Owen have respect for him? “The awful thing is, the man gets the worst of it, because the women do more talking. Take Louisa, she can go back to that apartment house and they’ll give her a welcome, but let me so much—”

“Listen!” Guy said, unable to stand it any longer. “I—I killed someone, too! I’m a murderer, too!”

Owen’s feet came down to the floor again, he sat up again, he even looked from Guy to the window and back again, as if he contemplated having to escape or having to defend himself, but the befuddled surprise and alarm on his face was so feeble, so halfhearted, that it seemed a mockery itself, seemed to mock Guy’s seriousness. Owen started to set his glass on the table and then didn’t. “How’s that?” he asked.

“Listen!” Guy shouted again. “Listen, I’m a dead man. I’m as good as dead right now, because I’m going to give myself up. Immediately! Because I killed a man, do you understand? Don’t look so unconcerned, and don’t lean back in that chair again!”

“Why shouldn’t I lean back in this chair?” Owen had both hands on his glass now, which he had just refilled with CocaCola and Scotch.

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I am a murderer, and took a man’s life, something no human being has a right to do?”

Owen might have nodded, or he might not have. At any rate, he drank again, slowly.

Guy stared at him. The words, unutterable tangles of thousands and thousands of words, seemed to congest even his blood, to cause waves of heat to sweep up his arms from his clenched hands. The words were curses against Owen, sentences and paragraphs of the confession he had written that morning, that were growing jumbled now because the drunken idiot in the armchair didn’t want to hear them. The drunken idiot was determined to look indifferent. He didn’t look like a murderer, he supposed, in his clean white shirtsleeves and his silk tie and his dark blue trousers, and maybe even his strained face didn’t look like a murderer’s to anybody else. “That’s the mistake,” Guy said aloud, “that nobody knows what a murderer looks like. A murderer looks like anybody!” He laid the back of his fist against his forehead and took it down again, because he had known the last words were coming, and had been unable to stop them. It was exactly like Bruno.

Abruptly Guy went and got himself a drink, a straight threefinger shot, and drank it off.

“Glad to see I’ve got a drinking companion,” Owen mumbled. Guy sat down on the neat, green-covered bed opposite Owen. Quite suddenly, he had felt tired. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he began again, “it doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”

“You’re not the first man I seen that killed another man. Or woman.” He chuckled. “Seems to me there’s more women that go free.”

“I’m not going free. I’m not free. I did this in cold blood. I had no reason. Don’t you see that might be worse? I did it for—” He wanted to say he did it because there had been that measure of perversity within him sufficient to do it, that he had done it because of the worm in the wood, but he knew it would make no sense to Owen, because Owen was a practical man. Owen was so practical, he would not bother to hit him, or flee from him, or call the police, because it was more comfortable to sit in the chair.

Owen waggled his head as if he really did consider Guy’s point. His lids were half dropped over his eyes. He twisted and reached for something in his hip pocket, a bag of tobacco. He got cigarette papers from the breast pocket of his shirts.

Guy watched his operations for what seemed like hours. “Here,” Guy said, offering him his own cigarettes.

Owen looked at them dubiously. “What kind are they?”

“Canadian. They’re quite good. Try one.”

“Thanks, I—” Owen drew the bag closed with his teeth—“prefer my own brand.” He spent at least three minutes rolling the cigarette.

“This was just as if I pulled a gun on someone in a public park and shot him,” Guy went on, determined to go on, though it was as if he talked to an inanimate thing like a dictaphone in the chair, with the difference that his words didn’t seem to be penetrating in any way. Mightn’t it dawn on Owen that he could pull a gun on him now in this hotel room? Guy said, “I was driven to it. That’s what I’ll tell the police, but that won’t make any difference, because the point is, I did it. You see, I have to tell you Bruno’s idea.” At least Owen was looking at him now, but his face, far from being rapt, seemed actually to wear an expression of pleasant, polite, drunken attention. Guy refused to let it stop him. “Bruno’s idea was that we should kill for each other, that he should kill Miriam and I should kill his father. Then he came to Texas and killed Miriam, behind my back. Without my knowledge or consent, do you see?” His choice of words was abominable, but at least Owen was listening. At least the words were coming out. “I didn’t know about it, and I didn’t even suspect—not really. Until months later. And then he began to haunt me. He began to tell me he would pin the blame for Miriam’s death on me, unless I went through with the rest of his damned plan, do you see? Which was to kill his father. The whole idea rested on the fact that there was no reason for the murders. No personal motives. So we couldn’t be traced, individually. Provided we didn’t see each other. But that’s another point. The point is, I did kill him. I was broken down. Bruno broke me down with letters and blackmail and sleeplessness. He drove me insane, too. And listen, I believe any man can be broke down. I could break you down. Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going? Or do you ever stop to wonder about things like that, Owen? Anyway, that’s what I’ll tell the police, but it won’t matter, because they’ll say I shouldn’t have broken down.

It won’t matter, because they’ll say I was weak. But I don’t care now, do you see? I can face anyone now, do you see?” He bent to look into Owen’s face, but Owen seemed scarcely to see him. Owen’s head was sagged sideways, resting in his hand. Guy stood up straight. He couldn’t make Owen see, he could feel that Owen wasn’t understanding the main point at all, but that didn’t matter either. “I’ll accept it, whatever they want to do to me. I’ll say the same thing to the police tomorrow.”

“Can you prove it?” Owen asked.

“Prove what? What is there to prove about my killing a man?”

The bottle slipped out of Owen’s fingers and fell onto the floor, but there was so little in it now that almost nothing spilled. “You’re an architect, aren’t you?” Owen asked. “I remember now.” He righted the bottle clumsily, leaving it on the floor.

“What does it matter?”

“I was wondering.”

“Wondering what?” Guy asked impatiently.

“Because you sound a little touched—if you want my honest opinion. Ain’t saying you do.” And behind Owen’s fogged expression now was a simple wariness lest Guy might walk over and hit him for his remark. When he saw that Guy didn’t move, he sat back in his chair again, and slumped lower than before.

Guy groped for a concrete idea to present to Owen. He didn’t want his audience to slip away, indifferent as it was. “Listen, how do you feel about the men you know who’ve killed somebody? How do you treat them? How do you act with them? Do you pass the time of day with them the same as you’d do with anybody else?”

Under Guy’s intense scrutiny, Owen did seem to try to think. Finally he said with a smile, blinking his eyes relaxedly, “Live and let live.”

Anger seized him again. For an instant, it was like a hot vise, holding his body and brain. There were no words for what he felt. Or there were too many words to begin. The word formed itself and spat itself from between his teeth: “Idiot!”

Owen stirred slightly in his chair, but his unruffledness prevailed. He seemed undecided whether to smile or to frown. “What business is it of mine?” he asked firmly.

“What business? Because you—you are a part of society!”

“Well, then it’s society’s business,” Owen replied with a lazy wave of his hand. He was looking at the Scotch bottle, in which only half an inch remained.

What business, Guy thought. Was that his real attitude, or was he drunk? It must be Owen’s attitude. There was no reason for him to lie now. Then he remembered it had been his own attitude when he had suspected Bruno, before Bruno had begun to dog him. Was that most people’s attitude? If so, who was society?

Guy turned his back on Owen. He knew well enough who society was. But the society he had been thinking about in regard to himself, he realized, was the law, was inexorable rules. Society was people like Owen, people like himself, people like—Brillhart, for instance, in Palm Beach. Would Brillhart have reported him? No. He couldn’t imagine Brillhart reporting him. Everyone would leave it for someone else, who would leave it for someone else, and no one would do it. Did he care about rules? Wasn’t it a rule that had kept him tied to Miriam? Wasn’t it a person who was murdered, and therefore people who mattered? If people from Owen to Brillhart didn’t care sufficiently to betray him, should he care any further? Why did he think this morning that he had wanted to give himself up to the police? What masochism was it? He wouldn’t give himself up. What, concretely, did he have on his conscience now? What human being would inform on him?

“Except a stool-pigeon,” Guy said. “I suppose a stool-pigeon would inform.”

“That’s right,” Owen agreed. “A dirty, stinking stool-pigeon.” He gave a loud, relieving laugh.

Guy was staring into space, frowning. He was trying to find solid ground that would carry him to something he had just seen as if by a flash, far ahead of him. The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn’t the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. “And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn’t even that. Or maybe it is collectively,” he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he came to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.

“Hmm-m?” Owen murmured. His head was back against the chair, his black hair tousled over his forehead, and his eyes almost closed.

“No, people collectively might lynch a murderer, but that’s exactly what the law is supposed to guard against.”

“Never hold with lynchings,” Owen said. ‘“S not true! Gives the whole South a bad name—unnec’sarily.”

“My point is, that if society hasn’t the right to take another person’s life, then the law hasn’t either. I mean, considering that the law is a mass of regulations that have been handed down and that nobody can interfere with, no human being can touch. But it’s human beings the law deals with, after all. I’m talking about people like you and me. My case in particular. At the moment, I’m only talking about my case. But that’s only logic. Do you know something, Owen? Logic doesn’t always work out, so far as people go. It’s all very well when you’re building a building, because the material behaves then, but—” His argument went up in smoke. There was a wall that prevented him from saying another word, simply because he couldn’t think any further. He had spoken loudly and distinctly, but he knew Owen hadn’t been hearing, even if he was trying to listen. And yet Owen had been indifferent, five minutes ago, to the question of his guilt. “What about a jury, I wonder,” Guy said.

“What jury?”

“Whether a jury is twelve human beings or a body of laws. It’s an interesting point. I suppose it’s always an interesting point.” He poured the rest of the bottle into his glass and drank it. “But I don’t suppose it’s interesting to you, is it, Owen? What is interesting to you?”

Owen was silent and motionless.

“Nothing is interesting to you, is it?” Guy looked at Owen’s big scuffed brown shoes extended limply on the carpet, the toes tipped inward toward each other, because they rested on their heels. Suddenly, their flaccid, shameless, massive stupidity seemed the essence of all human stupidity. It translated itself instantly into his old antagonism against the passive stupidity of those who stood in the way of the progress of his work, and before he knew how or why, he had kicked, viciously, the side of Owen’s shoe. And still, Owen did not move. His work, Guy thought. Yes, there was his work to get back to. Think later, think it all out right later, but he had work to do.

He looked at his watch. Ten past 12. He didn’t want to sleep here. He wondered if there was a plane tonight. There must be something out. Or a train.

He shook Owen. “Owen, wake up. Owen!”

Owen mumbled a question.

“I think you’ll sleep better at home.”

Owen sat up and said clearly, “That I doubt.”

Guy picked up his topcoat from the bed. He looked around, but he hadn’t left anything because he hadn’t brought anything. It might be better to telephone the airport now, he thought.

“Where’s the John?” Owen stood up. “I don’t feel so good.”

Guy couldn’t find the telephone. There was a wire by the bed table, though. He traced the wire under the bed. The telephone was off the hook, on the floor, and he knew immediately it hadn’t fallen; because both parts were dragged up near the foot of the bed, the hand piece eerily focused on the armchair where Owen had been sitting. Guy pulled the telephone slowly toward him.

“Hey, ain’t there a John anywheres?” Owen was opening a closet door.

“It must be down the hall.” His voice was like a shudder. He was holding the telephone in a position for speaking, and now he brought it closer to his ear. He heard the intelligent silence of a live wire. “Hello?” he said.

“Hello, Mr. Haines.” The voice was rich, courteous, and just the least brusque.

Guy’s hand tried unavailingly to crush the telephone, and then he surrendered without a word. It was like a fortress falling, like a great building falling apart in his mind, but it crumbled like powder and fell silently.

“There wasn’t time for a dictaphone. But I heard most of it from just outside your door. May I come in?”

Gerard must have had his scouts at the airport in New York, Guy thought, must have followed in a chartered plane. It was possible. And here it was. And he had been stupid enough to sign the register in his own name. “Come in,” Guy echoed. He put the telephone on the hook and stood up, rigidly, watching the door.

His heart was pounding as it never had before, so fast and hard, he thought surely it must be a prelude to his dropping dead. Run, he thought. Leap, attack as soon as he comes in. This is your very last chance. But he didn’t move. He was vaguely aware of Owen being sick in the basin in the corner behind him. Then there was a rap at the door, and he went toward it, thinking, wouldn’t it have to be like this after all, by surprise, with someone, a stranger who didn’t understand anything, throwing up in a basin in a corner of the room, without his thoughts ordered, and worse, having already uttered half of them in a muddle. Guy opened the door.

“Hello,” Gerard said, and he came in with his hat on and his arms hanging, just as he had always looked.

“Who is it?” Owen asked.

“Friend of Mr. Haines,” Gerard said easily, and glancing at Guy with his round face as serious as before, he gave him a wink. “I suppose you want to go to New York tonight, don’t you?”

Guy was staring at Gerard’s familiar face, at the big mole on his cheek, at the bright, living eye that had winked at him, undoubtedly had winked at him. Gerard was the law, too. Gerard was on his side, so far as any man could be, because Gerard knew Bruno. Guy knew it now, as if he had known it the whole time, yet it had never even occurred to him before. He knew, too, that he had to face Gerard. That was part of it all, and always had been. It was inevitable and ordained, like the turning of the earth, and there was no sophistry by which he could free himself from it.

“Eh?” Gerard said.

Guy tried to speak, and said something entirely different from what he had intended. “Take me.”