The Books of Fell (18 page)

All I wanted to do that night was eat my sandwich in peace and study for the test on medieval history coming up Monday. I’d be expected to explain, in an hour, how a scruffy army of illiterate soldiers, chomping on hunks of raw meat between battles, could bring down the whole Roman Empire.

Sevens House was dead. It seemed as though everyone but Mrs. Violet, our housemother, was still over at The Tower. I looked at my watch. It was almost eight. They were finished with dessert by now, those who hadn’t left for the weekend. Some were still hanging around over coffee, or starting to play chess and backgammon in the library. Others were on their way into Cottersville, to meet the bus from Miss Tyler’s or to go to the movies, bowling, the play at the Civic Center.

I got my mail. That was when I noticed someone else abroad in Sevens House. Creery. Behind me in the phone booth. He wasn’t dining at The Tower these nights. He looked like he’d just come in from the cold, too.

I could hear him telling someone, “I waited over an hour for you. Ask Lowell. Where were you?”

I opened a club bill for the gold 7 I’d already sent to Mom. OVERDUE was stamped across it.

“Then I’ll come there tomorrow morning,” Creery continued…. “Not too early because I’ll be up late.”

I didn’t have any personal letters. I never opened my box that I didn’t hope I’d see one from Delia. I was going to hear from Delia the day they discovered something that would rhyme with orange, but that never stopped me looking for the tiny handwriting with the long loops and the ? bars flying off the handles.

I had the usual junk mail: Save the Seals and Support National Arbor Day. Your Christmas subscription to
Esquire
will be up next December so renew in March. A catalog from The Sharper Image promising that a Shotline Putter would release the pro golfer within me.

I tossed it all in the wastebasket while Creery told whoever he was talking to that he had to cram for the same history test. I decided to keep him in mind if we were called on to describe Alaric the Goth, the one who plundered Rome and got everyone eating each other instead of the parrots’ tongues they were fond of baking into pies.

I did wonder who Creery’d have in his life to complain to, since it wasn’t his stepbrother on the phone. And I thought about who he might be meeting “there” the next day … maybe the same one who arranged for Lowell Hunter to stay at number 6 Playwicky.

“How are you, Fell?” said Mrs. Violet. “Long time no see.”

Our housemother was always in white, always gorgeous, usually stationed nights in the wing chair near the reception room.

“I’m fine, thanks. What are you reading tonight?”

She closed the book in her lap so I could see the cover.
Hunted Down
by Charles Dickens.

“You want to hear something extraordinary?” she said, not waiting for my answer. “Listen. I
have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honestly out of countenance, any day in the week.
She pushed a strand of blond hair away from her forehead and looked up at me. “And I always judge boys by whether or not they can look you in the eye.”

“Maybe Dickens didn’t mean boys,” I said. “My dad used to say a really good con man always looks you in the eye.”

So had Delia had that skill. So did Nina.

“I’ll have to think about that,” Mrs. Violet said.

Creery was going up the staircase in a long gabardine overcoat, the blue-and-white wool Sevens scarf wrapped around his neck, the tail behind his head.

It wasn’t like him to greet Mrs. Violet. It wasn’t like his eyes to see the people around him. His eyes saw La La Land, little blue and red pills, joints and smoke.

“Fell? That friend of yours from the dorm was in your room earlier this evening. He said he had permission.”

“He does, ma’am.”

“Sidney Dibble.”

“Yes.”

“And your mother called. She said it wasn’t important. Just a hello.”

Mom had probably received the gold 7 for her birthday.

I thanked Mrs. Violet and kept going. In a while her freshman groupies would come over from The Tower. A score of them. Healthy young boys who turned into groveling lackeys, eager to do any chore she could dream up. Or they simply sat at her feet while she read to them. It didn’t matter what. She’d call them “darling” or “dear” — words most of them never heard from any lips but hers, unless they called home.

When I got up to my room, I saw that Dib had left a red 7 hanging on my doorknob. All Sevens were issued one, which we could hang there when we didn’t want to be disturbed. No one in Sevens House went through a door with one on it.

I pocketed it as I went inside.

The living room was dark, but I could see through to the bedroom, where there were green letters lit up on the face of the word processor.

I switched on a light and got out of my coat. I grabbed a Soho lemon spritzer from the refrigerator.

I supposed Dib had left me a message For My Eyes Only, probably something against Sevens … me and Sevens.

I wanted to relish the corned beef sandwich before I read it. I wanted to think a minute about Nina. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, someone wrote. Not the same one who wrote Duty before pleasure.

There was just enough Dijon on the bread. I was too hungry to care that the bread was white and fell into the empty-carbohydrate category, too ravenous to regret it wasn’t rye or pumpernickel. Too starved to miss a fat dill-and-garlic pickle.

I began demolishing it, still standing, which is the only honest position for rationalizing. All I’d agreed to do was report back to David Deem if Nina tried to see Dragon. Technically, she hadn’t tried to
see
him, only Dragonland … Chances were that what she’d found there
would
be enough to discourage her from ever wanting to see him again.

I played it back a few times and it didn’t have a discordant note.

My dad would have said it was too pat.

But my dad hadn’t arrived at his judgments when he was seventeen, horny, and far from Brooklyn.

I finished the sandwich and carried my bottle of lemon spritzer in toward the green letters.

Lasher’s letter had been written three days before his death.

I reached up and switched on my desk light.

Dib had left a note on my blotter.

I called him.

“What do you think Creery’s letter could have said, Fell?”

“How would I know?”

“And what about The Sevens Revenge? You said it was a myth.”

“I thought it was. It’s news to me, too.”

“Sure. Surprise, surprise.”

I couldn’t convince him that I was as much in the dark as he was, but we made a date to meet in the morning.

I fell asleep reading about the Crusades and dreamed that Nina was handing me Creery’s letter. Then her face turned into Delia’s, and she said, “Surprise, surprise, Fell.”

Saturday morning.

Nobody’d ever warned me about winters in Pennsylvania. The cold sky hung heavy above me, like some enormous net over a ballroom loaded with balloons waiting to be freed with the jerk of a rope, only snow would pour down. Everyone walking along the streets had little white clouds puffing out of them, their postures bent and huddled into benumbed bones. I had the heater going full blast; ditto the radio: warming up with INXS, Big Pig, and John Cougar Mellencamp.

I cruised up and down Playwicky Road. It was narrow and twisting, with few trees save for the oak I’d stood behind the night I’d seen Lowell Hunter come out of number 6.

Anyone on foot would be seen immediately in the daytime.

Most of the apartment houses had parking lots behind them. There were few cars. Those that parked out front were also too conspicuous for any serious surveillance.

I headed for the nearest supermarket, where you were most likely to find boxes of all shapes and sizes.

Dib was standing in front of the dorm when I pulled up at eight. He hadn’t expected me to arrive in a car. I had to beep the horn. He ran toward me layered in a turtleneck, a shirt, a crew-neck sweater, a parka. Levi’s, boots, his old navy-striped Moriarty hat pulled down over his ears.

“Where’d you get the wheels?”

While I told him, and he interrupted to say he
had
to have something cold to drink, I got the first blast of a breath that could probably have killed little flying things as easily as anything Black Flag made.

“There’s a store down on Main near the bus stop. You can get a Coke there.”

“And aspirin,” said Dib.

“How did you tie one on in the dorm?”

“I went out for an hour after your call.”

“With your gang?”

“Just Little Jack. You don’t mind if I have a little fun too, do you? … Where are we headed?”

“The only thing I can think to do is follow the one lead we have, while I have a car.”

“Lasher’s letter is the one lead we have.”

“I’m talking about Playwicky Road now.”

“Let’s talk about why Lionel Schwartz didn’t mention that letter to the police.”

“Dib, we went over that last night. He might have mentioned it, and they might have their reason for keeping it quiet.”

“I think Sevens is keeping it quiet.”

“You told me what you think. Now let me take a look at number six Playwicky and see who’s meeting Creery there.”

“I’m not in any shape to sit around watching an apartment when we don’t know what we’re looking for.”

“You don’t have to watch it. You have to help set me up. Then you can go back to the dorm and sack out.”

“I might even have to puke,” he said.

He wasn’t kidding. He looked pale. He was rubbing his stomach the way you’d soothe some frightened animal.

“What’s the big box in back?” he asked.

“I’ll explain that later…. Dib, you look and stink like something died in you.”

“Cork it, Fell! I’m just hung over.”

“What’s going on with you? Do you drink a lot, or was last night a first?”

“We go out.”

“Where do you go when you go out?”

“Around, Fell. What difference does it make to you? I have to have other friends.”

“You can get yourself expelled — that’s the difference it makes to me.”

“Unlike you, hmmm?”

“Maybe I can’t get expelled, but I can’t get away with drinking either. We’re self-regulatory, but the bottom line’s the same.”

“‘Just a song at twilight.” Dib sang off-key.

“Well, it’s better than getting the boot. You’re asking for it, Dib.”

“You’ve swallowed Sevens hook, line, and sinker, Fell.”

“I don’t even hang out with them! I’m so busy tutoring a townie, it took
you
to bring that letter out of the machine.”

“What about the gold 7 you got your mom?”

“I got it for
her,
not for me.”

“My mom wouldn’t wear one of those things, even if I was in Sevens. She doesn’t buy designer clothes, either, and not because she can’t afford to. She says she’s not a walking advertisement for Calvin Klein or Gucci.”

“Yours has been around more than mine. Mine’s easily impressed, maybe.”

“You’re
easily impressed, Fell.”

“I’m not easily asphyxiated, or your breath would have killed me two blocks back.”

We both began to laugh.

The tension that had started crowding us was broken. At Main Pharmacy he bought some Binaca for his breath and a couple of cans of cold Sprite.

• • •

A block before Playwicky Road, I pulled over to the curb.

“I learned this from my father,” I said. “He’d do this when he was staking out some place they were dealing drugs. We’re going to put that big box back there up where you’re sitting, and I’m going to get inside it. See where I cut the holes?”

He gave a look. “What am I going to do?”

“After I get inside the box, you’re going to drive up in front of the house. You’re going to leave me under the box. You can catch a bus back near the pharmacy.”

“So it’ll just look like a car with a box in it.”

“Right…. When my father’d be watching a crack house, sometimes he’d be stuck inside for a whole afternoon. He’d take along a wide-neck water bottle to piss into.”

“Neat, Fell! And you’ll be all right by yourself?”

“Why not? I’m just going to watch the place. Maybe I won’t see anything important. But I want to try and find out who’s there besides Creery and Lowell Hunter.”

“It’ll be a Sevens, for sure, and what’ll that tell you?”

“I’ll know when I know.”

“And you’re going to tell me when you know?”

“Yes. I’m going to tell you.”

“Is that a promise?”

“It’s a promise.”

“Because it’d be easy for you to lie.”

“I’m not going to. We’re in this together.”

Dib chugalugged a Sprite.

He said, “What happens when you’ve seen what you came down here to see?”

“I slip out from under and drive off. I don’t care so much about being seen
after
I find out who the third party is, I don’t think…. But this way I can choose my time to exit the scene.”

We got out of the BMW and began putting the plan into action.

Before I got up under the box, I said, “Anything you’ve got to say to me, say now. When you pull up and park, you get out fast and walk away.”

“I’ll meet you back at the dorm. What time?”

“Hard to say. I have to return the car.”

“I’m going to sack out anyway, so I’ll be in my room all afternoon.”

“I’ll call you when I’m back on The Hill.”

It was twenty minutes to nine.

“You’re going to freeze your ass,” said Dib.