Pale Betrayer (12 page)

The house was all stillness when Marks had finished. He found Louise asleep in a wing chair, her shoes tossed aside. The others had all gone away, perhaps to the funeral parlor. He stooped down and put the shoes side by side beneath the chair, and then let himself out of the apartment, the door automatically locking behind him.

M
ATHER PREPARED HIS NEXT
day’s classes in the few cubic feet of space he called his office. It was actually a desk in the Department’s common room, a room generally avoided by the faculty except as a place to drop off odd encumbrances picked up throughout the day, a belatedly returned book, a picture frame, a tie that should better have gone to the cleaner’s. He put his lecture notes in comprehensible order for the substitute teacher who would take the Victorian Novel, a class scheduled for the hour at which he would be attending the memorial service for Peter Bradley.

His desk cleared, he rummaged through a drawerful of books for one that might fit his pocket and came out with a small volume of Auden’s poems. Then, repeating a habit with him since childhood, he closed his eyes, concentrated for a moment—(his grandmother had taught him the practice in connection with Bible reading)—and opened the book at random. He had opened it to a poem in memory of Yeats which in itself seemed an omen. Or so his grandmother would have said. He scanned the page avidly seeking the deeper message.

“But for him it was his last afternoon as himself …”

Mather had found what he sought, a sort of poetic jolt that enabled him to contact truth. The stabbing poignancy of the words cut through him: death’s denial of life’s greatest gift, a personal, inviolate identity. He pocketed the book and walked out through the building deep within his own thoughts and with no consciousness of whom he met or what that person thought of him, with no quip on his tongue, no falseness.

He waited outside the laboratory building for Anne Russo, having checked the sign-in book to know that she was there. It was the last frantic hour of the business day and he could feel the fire hydrant on which he sat reverberate with the rolling, throbbing traffic. Why, he wondered, had he ever allowed the city to prison him? He knew of course: the search for anonymity, the attempt to lose himself. As though one were ever lost until entirely exposed and beyond caring as only death could make him. He took the book from his pocket and opened it. A police car rolled slowly up to the curb. Aware of it at the margin of his vision, he looked up and down at the book again. Detectives, he knew, though he had not recognized them. All day he had been waiting, fearing, yet somehow craving that next encounter with the liquid-eyed Lieutenant.

Two of the detectives got out of the car and went into the building, scarcely glancing at him as they passed. The car moved on. A moment later Anne came out of the building alone.

“Carry your books, Miss?” he said, getting up.

“Eric.” Anne often vacillated between Eric and Mr. Mather. Today there was no hesitancy.

He said: “Let me buy you dinner. I want to talk.”

“I’m dirty,” Anne said, “but I guess that doesn’t matter.”

“We’re all dirty,” Mather said, “and it matters very much, but the question is: what can we do about it?”

They walked to the corner and toward the park, the cursed park that was his preserve on the ridge of hell. Anne was carrying a shoulder bag of tightly woven wool, colors as vivid as the Greek flag. If he were not mistaken, it was Greek-made. “Can I carry that for you?”

“It’s fine really,” Anne said. “I’m used to it.”

“It looks new.” Mather could have bit his tongue.

Anne’s color flared up and her black eyes snapped. She said nothing. Then a few seconds later at the park gate she stopped. He took her arm and gently propelled her along. “Please don’t say you’ve changed your mind. I too am under suspicion. The police still have the shoes they took off my feet last night.”

“What would they want with them I wonder.”

“They often tell the truth of where a man has been I should suppose. Or perhaps of where a man has not been.”

He chose a small restaurant with decent food and very little early custom. He asked Anne if she would have a drink.

“You bet.”

He ordered two very dry martinis. “Right?”

Anne nodded.

“Anne, when you went through the police files or whatever, did you find a face you recognized?”

She shook her head. “It was impossible. The more I think about him the less I remember what he looked like.”

“Was there something terribly American about him?”

Anne looked puzzled. “What’s terribly American?”

Mather shrugged. He had hoped to spark something, and he had not even bothered to cover himself. He offered Anne a cigarette and took it himself when she refused.

“I’m letting everybody down I know,” Anne said. “But I’m no good at this free-association bit. I’m a simple-minded, up and down, black and white thinker. I only know what I see and I didn’t really see him.”

The martinis came. They touched glasses and Anne took a sip. “Why, Eric? Why did it happen?”

He just stared into the glass. A little golden bead of lemon oil was floating within the crest of rind.

“Because somebody was afraid?” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

Anne shook her hair back over her shoulders. “I don’t know how anybody kills if he’s not afraid. But how could you be afraid of Peter?”

“Weren’t you ever afraid of him—intellectually?”

“No,” she said with utter frankness.

Mather grinned wryly. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s from Shakespeare …”

“I know that,” she interrupted. “What do
you
mean by it? That’s what I want to know.”

“Are you always so devastatingly forthright?” Mather took a deep pull at his drink. He could feel it right down through his loins.

“I am direct,” she said, somewhat subdued.

Mather laughed at the understatement. He said: “I think what I meant was that when one’s mind is the match for another person’s, the two people can make contact without all the hypocritical subterfuge in which we disguise inadequacy.”

“What do you mean by contact?”

Mather threw up his hand. “Nothing dirty certainly!”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to make clear,” Anne said. “There was nothing like that between Peter and me.”

“If there had been something, would you have thought it dirty?”

“That’s a silly question, Eric.”

“I don’t see why you should think so.”

“Any question based on a false assumption is pointless.”

“Mathematically speaking,” Mather said, “but the human heart is a vast hunting ground, and the only guideposts are such hypotheses. Don’t you forget it. Now finish your drink and we’ll have another while we order dinner.”

Anne grinned at him. “Gee,” she said, “you’re great.”

And that reaction quite unnerved him. It was a straight and impulsive compliment from the girl. He had not sought it and he unquestioningly believed it to be sincere. The sadness he felt coming over him was unutterable: it was as though that which he had loved most had to die before he had been able to live. He thought then, looking at the blackening rind in the bottom of his empty glass, that his own sickness, like the ancient plague, had only death for its curative.

He leaned back in the booth, watching Anne, while he said: “He’s about five feet, ten inches tall, stocky build, with a small round face going flabby in the cheeks. You can see the flesh wriggle about the jowls when he chews gum. His nose, flat at the nostrils, fleshy at the tip, looks as though he had been picked up by it as a child. He has two small black buttons for eyes and his eyebrows run together like a black gash across his forehead.”

Anne, her eyes wide, moistened her lips. “Where did you see him?”

“Is that he?”

She nodded.

“Outside Bradleys’ as I was leaving.” He was there, Mather knew.

“Did you tell the police? I mean they could make a picture of him from a description like that, Eric. I didn’t see him that well, but now it’s just like you’d frozen him in front of me at that second I saw him.”

“More live than life,” Mather mocked.

“You must tell Lieutenant Marks,” Anne persisted. “Or I will. Only I’d mess it up.”

“Lieutenant Marks,” Mather repeated. “He’s a very clever fellow.”

“He’s great,” Anne said. Then seeing Mather’s look of pained distaste: “I mean he isn’t square. He knows things in a way like you do—you know, starting from a hypothesis that makes people think out loud.”

Mather smiled. “You’d better say it in algebra, Annie.”

She sipped the fresh drink, glanced at the menu and then laid it aside. “Eric … I guess this is the martini talking, but when you asked if I’d have thought it dirty, you know, something between Peter and me?”

He nodded when she waited to see if he had followed her. Then trying to proceed she faltered entirely and took a cigarette out of the package he had left on the table. “Forget it.”

“For heaven’s sake, Anne, don’t string me up like a Chinese goose.”

She put the cigarette back in the package. “You’re fond of Janet, aren’t you, Eric?”

He remembered Janet at the window as he gave the signal, the Judas signal, and he remembered Anne coming up behind her.

“You don’t miss much, do you?” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry. I won’t tell anyone.”

“There is nothing to tell. There never was anything beyond what you could have seen with your own eyes. Except my fantasy and I demand the right of privacy in that domain.”

“Only … Eric, it shouldn’t just be fantasy, not now. Janet needs you. It’d be great really. She’s not like us. She has to feel something and then she can say it in a deep and beautiful way.” The girl leaned back, despairing herself of words. “You’re right. I can only talk in mathematics.”

“When you say ‘she’s not like us’ …”

“That was a silly thing for me to have said.”

“The martini?”

“Maybe.”

“That, my dear, is what martinis are for, to sniggle out the truth,” Mather said. “You are snobs, you know, the lot of you. Towered and walled, you see the scramblers after life like piteous ants beneath you, bearing one another gifts. I used to feel myself crawling up that endless hill …” Suddenly he was tired, bone tired of trying to relate. He did not want to talk about the way he felt. He did not care. “What will you do now? Will you have to start your doctorate over?”

Anne tried to adjust to his change of mood. She felt it might be the drink in him—or even in herself. She said: “I’m going to talk with Dr. Bauer over the week-end. I should think Bob might be able to take over … only … the light’s gone out. You know?”

“I know.”

She tried going back: “And it’s not that we’re snobs, not really, Eric. It’s just that we’re safe in that little world we know best …”

“In that little world of cyclotrons and megaton thrusts, of smashed atoms and hydrogen mixes. It sounds like a party, you know, like you’re having a ball.” He finished off the sentence with his old devastating sarcasm.

“Eric,” she said, trying to reach him with her eyes, to convey to him at least her own humanity.

“Oh, to hell with all of you,” he said, unable to admit to himself, much less to her, that his distress lay in his inability to cope, not with scientists, but with the intimacy of man and woman, with the thought she had tried to share with him of Janet and himself.

Anne gathered her bag. “I’m going to skip dinner if you don’t mind, Eric. But thank you very much for the drinks.”

He started to rise but she was gone. “I don’t mind,” he said, slumping down heavily. “I don’t truly mind.” But he picked up the half-empty glass she had left, turned it in his hand for a moment, and then drank from where her lips had touched.

A
T A FEW MINUTES
past nine, refreshed after a couple of hours of badly needed sleep and a shower, Marks walked into the Red Lantern. He was first struck by the resemblance of the place to a calendar picture of an old English pub. A wheel of candle-shaped lights hung over the bar; the dark paneling, the solid benches, and especially the covey of costumed students gathered at a large table in the rear all fit in the Old World setting. Even the bartender, his shirt open at the throat, his sleeves rolled up, and his face a ruddy moon, belonged where he was. He was drawing dark beer for a couple of men in work shirts at the end of the bar.

Marks studied the youngsters and was impressed by the fact that while one of them talked, earnest, animated, the others were actually listening. He wondered if even the listening was an affectation. His own attention focused then on the one girl amongst them: she was playing her fingers through the long hair of the boy next to her. Her own hair sat like a red beehive atop her head.

The bartender came to him. His small blue eyes were round and sharp as steel. An Irishman, Marks thought, a canny Irishman. He ordered a beer.

“Let’s see your identification,” the Irishman said.

Marks obliged him. He would have shown it in any case, asking questions.

“That’s what I figured,” the bartender said. “A fellow named Pererro was round this afternoon.” He nodded at the table of youngsters. “Them’s your patsies.”

“What’s the costume?”

“Ed
war
dian,” the bartender said, the word lathered with sarcasm. “At the beginning of every year I think I’ve seen everything, and by the end of it I know I’ve seen nothing at all. Still, I’d rather have them than the lousy ones.”

Marks realized he was being literal. “Were they all here last night when Professor Mather came in?”

“I didn’t count them. It’s the usual crowd.”

“The young lady?”

“She was here. She’s their mascot as near as I can figure. Not much up here,” he tapped his head, “but more than enough in the places that count.”

Marks grinned. “Did you talk with Mather last night?”

“No. He was on the run when he went out of here. I figured he’d got a bellyful of the kids and took off. He’s like that, you know. He’ll stand round talking with you for an hour and you’d think you were really into something with him—religion—the old ballads, he’s got a fund of them, but you go down to draw a beer and look round and he’s gone. An unhappy man, I’ve always thought.”