Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (33 page)

If he accepted everything that Sophie had told him, there had been no murder. Assisted suicide, yes—and in such a case, whose law prevailed? The law of the state or the law of the community? That answer was clear to him. The state was an abstraction; the community was made up of live human beings. She was not a murderer.

He sat with Sophie again in front of the fire and pulled the cork from a good bottle of red zinfandel. There was so much he had to know.

“What do you do,” he asked, “if a young person doesn’t agree to the pact? Doesn’t choose longevity and an eventual departure at the age of one hundred?”

“A few have done that,” Sophie said. “They left Springhill.”

“You let them go?”

“This isn’t a prison.”

“You didn’t worry they’d betray you? “

“They left because they didn’t believe what we told them. We asked ourselves: What’s the worst-case scenario? Wherever they went, they would tell people there were these crazy people in the Elk Mountains who believed they’d discovered the fountain of youth. We think that happened once. A dozen fresh-faced long-haired people from Oregon came about six or seven years ago and asked if there was such a place. They used those words: ‘A fountain of youth.’ We laughed at them. Oh, we had a good cackle! We made them feel like fools who’d been sold a bill of goods by kids who’d smoked some mighty powerful dope. The poor people camped over by Indian Lake for a week or so, ate their granola, tried to swim there but nearly froze to death, and then cleared out. They haven’t bothered us since.”

“No one else has ever come to investigate?”

“No one.”

“What about the state of Colorado? The federal government? Haven’t any of you in Springhill ever been caught out on discrepancies?”

“Now and then. The county commissioner can be nosy, and we’ve had a few inquiries from the state Department of Health. They treat us like hillbillies—not very bright people who don’t know how to keep records like good Americans. But we usually come up with whatever documentation is needed. Driver’s licenses have to be renewed in person every five years, and you need to bring a photograph—so if there’s a problem, we send someone else who looks the correct age. And every year we register a few extra births so that we have a supply of backup birth certificates. Grace is the present custodian. The Water Board keeps track of the paperwork.”

Dennis asked, “Has it ever occurred to you that you could be mistaken about the cause of the longevity? That there might be other factors?”

“Of course. We know other things contribute to healthful longevity. Orderliness of life, for one. Farmers live longer than people in any other occupation. Mountain people tend to live longer. There are an unusual amount of centenarians in Kazakhstan and Armenia. For a while it was ascribed to eating yogurt, which of course was nonsense.

The truth is the long-lived Kazakhs were physically active peasants— goatherds and shepherds who climbed mountains seven days a week. That’s a natural form of aerobic exercise. They ate sparingly and they breathed unpolluted air. A few lived to be a hundred. But plenty of them died in their sixties and seventies and eighties too. There was no consistent longevity. What we’ve always had in Springhill is consistency. More than that.
Unanimity
.”

Dennis nodded; he grasped it.

“And remember,” Sophie said, “just down the road in Marble we have a control group, although they’re hardly aware of it. Same genetic stock, same occupations, same altitude and climate. The only difference is they don’t drink from the spring. They’re pretty healthy, but on the average they don’t live more than a few years longer than people down in Carbondale.”

“What about diet? Couldn’t it be a factor?”

“You think my mother’s French cooking with all that home-churned butter is conducive to long life? And my father’s love for chateau-bottled burgundy?”

Dennis frowned.

“You still have a hard time believing it.”

“Yes.”

“What bothers you most?”

“The how and why of it,” he said. “If chemical analysis doesn’t reveal the unique element in the water that produces the phenomenon—then what
does
produce it? And how can it possibly
be?
Don’t you see? Why
here?
Why nowhere else?”

“It might exist somewhere else,” Sophie said, “and in that somewhere else they might have come to the same conclusions that we have—to keep it quiet. But you’re right. We don’t know the how or why of it. If we did, everything would be different. We would share the secret. I told you there’s a theory that a meteorite struck here thousands of years ago and is buried near the spring, and that’s what’s supposed to account for the skewed gravity and the other weird goings-on. Maybe that’s also what affects the water. Maybe not. We don’t know. We’ve come to accept all of it as a kind of miracle, although I personally detest that word because I believe that if we had full knowledge we would see that everything has a logical, chemical cause. I prefer to think of it as a gift. A
blessing
is the word I always use.

From what or from whom, I don’t dare speculate. What I do know is that gifts and blessings can be used wisely or foolishly. I believe— given the fact that we’re human, and limited in our knowledge—we’ve used ours wisely.”

That night, in bed, Dennis set all debate aside and made love with his beautiful sixty-four-year-old wife. Numbers were abstract, and Sophie was touchable, real. Her body glowed in the April moonlight as it had two years ago when for the first time they made love in this same bed. He heard her wild cry, felt her body tremble under his. Into her he poured the full measure of his passion.

In her arms, drifting toward sleep, he murmured, “It will be all right.
We
will be all right. No matter what.”

He woke in the morning with a feeling that he had crossed a bridge. What he had said was true. Sophie’s words came back to him. You can choose. Go back into the world and take your chances with biology. Or stay with me in Springhill, in this world, our world, and live to be a hundred.

And then die voluntarily.

It’s true, he thought. It’s not a fantasy. I believe it. I’ll stay, drink the water, swear whatever oaths have to be sworn. I’ll live to be one hundred years old, and so will my children. How can that be wrong?

Later that day Dennis remembered his promise to Harry Parrot. After the trial was over, he’d said, they would talk. He would call friends in the East, prepare the way for Harry’s trip. He also remembered what Sophie had told him: Harry was at the end of his hundred years. They were going to plan the departure ceremony this week. So much was working in Dennis’s mind that the significance of this penetrated only slowly. Harry was slated to die—but Harry had told him that he wanted to go to New York to show his paintings.

Dennis left the office early and drove straight to Harry’s house, the first house as the road entered Springhill. It had begun to snow again. Every day in the warm April sun the snow turned to mush, and every evening it iced. County snowplows were working overtime. Dennis had four-wheel drive and studded snow tires, but his big red Jeep skidded on the packed ice as he entered Harry’s driveway.

There was no doorbell. When Dennis knocked loudly, Harry yelled from afar: “Come in!”

In the overheated living room Harry was sunk into an old leather chair near the fire, one paint-stained, big-knuckled hand maintaining a firm grip on a half-empty bottle of vodka.

“Knew it was you. You want a drink? Get yourself one. You been here before. You know where I keep the glasses.”

Dennis brought a tumbler from the kitchen and sat down on the gnarled pine coffee table in front of Harry.

“I know everything,” he said. “Sophie told me about the water. The pact. The whole story of Springhill. It’s a little hard to believe.”

“Well, it’s true, my friend. All of it. She tell you about boning?”

“That too.”

“That’s what they’re doing to me now. Go gracefully, your wife says. They all say it. They’ve got a right to say it. I agreed to it a long time ago. And they’ve been good to me. Couldn’t have been better.” Harry grunted; he even laughed. “The sons of bitches.”

“You told me you were going to New York.”

“To the big city. Never been there. Take my work. Slides. Meet the right people. You know them, don’t you? Wha’d you say once? ‘Pity if you blushed unseen the rest of your life.’ I thought about that. Rest of my life’s not a hell of a lot of time, though. I’m a good painter—I might damn well be a great painter. Hard to say. Not up to me. You know when it was I turned a hundred?”

“No, Harry, I actually don’t.”

“Yesterday. I came into this world April 14,1895. You know I was in the First World War? Damn right I was. I couldn’t tell you that before. Wanted to tell you, knew you’d been in Nam and you’d get a kick out of where
I’d
been. Corporal, Sixth Infantry—-went to France, to Cháteau-Thierry. Ten minutes in the trench first fucking day and I’m crapping in my pants, waiting to go over the top and get killed, and then I get hit in the shoulder by shrapnel from some goddam Kraut artillery shell. Luckiest thing ever happened to me. They sent me back to a hospital in Paris. Never saw action again. Got laid in Paris ten days in a row. Ginette, Marie … can’t remember the others.
‘Voulez-vous coucher avec mois, mam’selle?’They
always said,
‘Oui, chéri
.’ That was really something. You believe it?”

“I wouldn’t have believed it a week ago,” Dennis said, “but I do now.”

“Sorry I had to shut up about it. Jumped out of your car the other day, felt like a goddam fool. I couldn’t tell you.”

“I understand.”

“Wouldn’t mind seeing Paris again after I get my fill of New York. Maybe they say ‘
Oui
,
chéri
to an old goat of a hundred.”

Dennis smiled. “You’ll find out.”

“I will? How will I? They won’t let me go.”

Dennis had thought about this all day. “They’re not going to stop you with force, Harry. They want you to go through with the departure ceremony. But if you refuse, they certainly won’t kill you. These are civilized people, not barbarians.” As he said that, he remembered what had happened to him and the driver of the delivery van on the road from Springhill to Redstone, but with some effort he set that memory aside; it had nothing to do with what was happening now.

“If you tell them you’re going,” he said to Harry, “that will be that. They’ll have to accept it.”

Harry tilted the vodka bottle to his lips. When he had swallowed, he shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“Sophie told me everything.”

“About old Henry and Susie?”

“That too.”

“Suppose Henry and Susie had said, ‘No way. Fuck you, and fuck the horse you rode in on.’ What do you think would have happened?”

He hadn’t thought about that, Dennis realized. If the Lovells had balked, Sophie had said, “some sort of force, however mild, would have been used … that’s what we were trying to avoid at almost any cost.”

But he hadn’t dwelled on that; he had blocked that too from his mind.

Harry said, “The needle would still have gone into their arm, my friend. Bet your paycheck on it. And they’d do that to me too. They got people who deal with just that kind of situation, and you know who they are. Don’t look so innocent and so shocked. They’d throw me off a goddam mountain if they had to.”

“I can’t believe that,” Dennis said.

“You don’t
want
to believe it.”

He couldn’t afford to believe it. Because then Sophie was part of a system that would commit murder if it had to. The end justified the means.

“Harry, what if you just walked away? Got into your truck in the middle of the night and drove down to Carbondale and then up I-70 to Denver. Simply never came back?”

“Henry and Susie Lovell tried to do that,” Harry said.

Dennis said slowly, “The people here knew where to look for the Lovells. What if they hadn’t found them up at Pearl Pass?”

“They would have kept looking. Years ago there was a guy named Julian Rice. He got away. They hunted him down in Mexico. It took them two years, but they found him. They killed him.”

In her recounting, Sophie had left out the time element, the dedication to the hunt.

“They went down to Mexico and harped with Rice to convince him,” Dennis said. He was defending them now, he realized. Once a defense attorney, always a defense attorney.

“Julian Rice didn’t want to harp,” Harry said. “He wanted to drink margaritas in Puerto Vallarta and have fun with his sexy old girlfriend, and
live.”

“They won’t find you,” Dennis said.

“You don’t know that. I’d have to be looking over my shoulder all the time. That’s some fucking way to live.”

“They won’t know where you went.”

“If I get a show in New York they’ll sure as hell know. And if not, they’ll know that you know, and you’ll tell them.”

“I would never do that,” Dennis said sharply.

“You will if you’re one of them.”

“I wouldn’t, Harry. I swear it to you.”

“You’d have to do it.”

Harry sounded so certain that Dennis hesitated. “Why?”

“They wouldn’t let you live here if you didn’t.”

He paced the room. He saw the dilemma. The village made no exceptions. They couldn’t. But unless Harry submitted meekly … they had to.

“What are you going to do?” Dennis asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Harry said. “I was kind of hoping you’d come round and drop some pearls of wisdom in my ear. If not wisdom, then some plain old good advice. I was using willpower, and I guess it worked, ‘cause here you are. You’re a lawyer. You been around the block a few times, and I get the feeling you don’t take shit from too many people. And you’re a friend. So what should I do? What would
you
do?”

Dennis sat down and faced the old painter. “Why do you want to live?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters a lot.”

“Then I’ll tell you. I want to live a while longer to get my work out there where it’s meant to be. I can’t leave that job to anyone else because it takes all your energy full-time and no one else will do it right. I don’t want to live to be two hundred, or a hundred and twenty, or even a goddam hundred and five. I don’t care about the numbers so long as I can get some recognition for what I’ve done in there.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of his studio. “For sixty-five years of sweat. Sixty-five years of pouring out my guts on canvas. That ain’t the purest of motives, I know that. But it’s the only motive I’ve got, and I’m stuck with it.”