The Gold Diggers (43 page)

But Nick wasn't conscious of any of it. Peter was lying below him, untouched and fast asleep, and finally he was free to fall apart. How did he know it was sleep and nothing worse? Simply this: Peter sleeping was his longest-standing definition of nothing wrong. He just
knew
. When at last he called Peter's name, it fell over into a sob. And once he'd begun, he couldn't stop crying.

He never did know how he stumbled down the splintering slope of rock to get to him. “Peter, Peter,” he said with delight, as if he'd figured out the missing piece of a wonderful puzzle. But the feeling wasn't mutual. Peter woke in terror when he heard his name echoing over the stone behind the music. Nick was still only halfway down. He felt his way numbly with his feet and couldn't see through the blur of his tears. And Peter waved one hand and hissed, “Wait!” He might as well have answered back and called Nick's name himself, completing the duet. It was certainly too late for waiting. He stood up and held out his arms to this reunion, though to him it seemed the saddest thing in the world that they were together again. Now Nick clung to him and wept on his shoulder. Peter had no choice. He held Nick just as tight and comforted his most unfounded fears, all the while not knowing how to tell him hope was lost. And he stared up at Sam as if to say “You win,” but he summoned up enough disdain to cut the resignation. As if to add: “He's mine. No matter what you do, you can't have this. You only thought you had it.”

“Hurry,” Nick said brokenly, “we have to run.” But he said it in a way that was oddly formal. He seemed to know, perhaps from the force of Peter's arms, how still they stood, that they weren't going anywhere yet. And as he became aware of the music again and placed the source of it just above their heads, telling them
Why not dance
, it snapped abruptly off.

“You think that's why I lit all those candles, Nick? So you can run?”

Nick pulled away from Peter, feeling clumsy as a kid. A little ashamed to be watched in the arms of another man. Scared to look at Peter because of Sam, because Sam was all Nick's fault. And then, just as suddenly, old instead of young—because he knew Sam thought of him and Peter as a pair of aging queens. He didn't answer right away. He looked up and saw him first, sitting high on a ledge with a doorway behind. His shirt was off, and he glistened with sweat. The gun was slack in his hand. Even now, Nick saw, the heat of sex was the only thing real about Sam, though they couldn't be farther removed from a bedroom. No wonder desire was the simplest way to think of him. Even now.

“We can run if we want,” he said slowly, trying to soften the sting of defiance, “because
you've
got to get away. You just lost your place to hide. Cops may be dumb, but how far behind me can they be?”

Sam gave a short laugh and then spoke fast: “You found me because I let you, baby, and you know it.” Let's get on with it, he seemed to say. And to back that up, he threw himself off the ledge and skidded down the angle of the wall as if he were a surfer riding on a wave. In a moment he was close enough to touch them. “By my calculations,” he said, “you're twenty minutes late. So don't think anything
you
do is any big deal. I know every fucking thing in your head.”

Then he started to walk in a circle around them. They couldn't keep his face in focus, and they didn't dare move. So Nick began to take in the litter that lay about in the domed and egg-shaped room. Piles of Sam's clothes. A half-dozen pairs of boots in a line. An unplugged television set. He'd lived with Peter too long in a house devoted to clutter to really believe these things could be all of Sam's worldly goods. But anyone could see that Sam must have been here time and time again. The Rembrandt, propped against a boulder ten feet away, hadn't ended up in neutral territory after all. It wasn't as if they'd met in a field or out on a strip of deserted beach, where they were all on equal footing. They were clearly on Sam's ground.

“You thought I came up here with you to suck your dick,” Sam said in a mocking voice. “All I was looking for was a place to take Varda's money. And you know what? You handed it to me as easy as anything else I wanted.” He stopped his circling to stare in Nick's eyes a moment, and he seemed in some way unable to place him any longer. Nick looked too much like the dozens of people Sam saw only once. “This mine isn't yours, you know, because you didn't find it. You didn't even believe it was here.”

“You want it?” Nick asked dryly. “You can have it.”

“Just like this painting isn't yours,” Sam went on, dropping back and giving a tap to the gilded frame with the barrel of the gun, “because Varda would have given it to me. I would have had it all.”

“But what would you do with it?You got a gallery to hang it all in?” Now he knew Sam had nowhere else to run if all he could talk about was how it might have gone. For Nick, who stood so close to Peter that they touched now and then, there wasn't anything scary here at all except the gun. And what he wanted in exchange for being unafraid was to taunt Sam till he cried uncle. “Maybe you ought to live right here and put it all up around the rocks.”

Sam cut him off: “I
do
live here.” He turned aside and got busy looking for something in a carton full of junk. “I sleep up there on that ledge. I got a battery tapedeck. And a clock and a flashlight.”

“It sounds real plush,” Nick said. More and more, he said whatever he wanted. This was the part where he counted on not getting shot. “Maybe they'll let you serve out your term down here. If they give you a little pick, you might tap into a vein the size of Fort Knox and make us all rich.”

“Just so you know what I mean,” Sam said, preoccupied with his digging as if he hadn't heard. He pulled out a screwdriver and held it up to the painting like a pointer. He might have been about to give a lecture. But he dug it into the paint, ripping it down along Rembrandt's cheek, smiling coldly all the while. The painting crackled, and chips flew off. The right eye was practically gone. Nick heard Peter make a low, low groan, and his own stomach lifted and turned over as if he'd just seen somebody die. It would take a month to fix it right. Even then it wouldn't be perfect again.

“
I
decide about Varda's things,” Sam said. He didn't look away, even when he flipped the screwdriver and caught it so he gripped it like a dagger. He jabbed it right through the canvas. And again, and again. Nick and Peter looked away. There wasn't the least trace of reproach on Rembrandt's face. He gazed at the world as patiently out of one eye as he had out of two, searching for something more than an honest man. But they felt they'd failed him all the same.

“Why don't you just say what you want?” Nick said. He still wasn't scared, but he started feeling sad again, the way he had when he'd sat alone with Peter's keys. As if he'd stared down into the pit of all the irrevocable things that could happen, any one of which was enough to kill.

“Money,” said Sam flippantly, “the same as everyone else.”

“How much?” Nick asked, preparing himself at last to go through the established forms of the negotiation. It didn't matter how much, of course. He'd get whatever it was. But Sam must have followed the train of thought his own way, because he laughed as if Nick had told him a dirty joke. He dropped the screwdriver, and it clattered on the stone. He was bored with being a vandal.

“All the money in the world,” he said, “is what I've got coming to me. Varda would have given me everything he had, except we ran out of time.”

“Is that so? Then tell me, why did you kill him?” Things he couldn't say before, during all the time he loved him, he found the words for now. He got louder and louder. “Maybe he refused to put it in writing. Is that when the time ran out?” He didn't expect any answer, and he was ready to follow it up with an angry little speech about who owned what. But Sam ran up and raised the gun and whipped him hard across the face. Just once, and then he resumed his pacing. Nick's mouth went sweet with blood from a tooth that cut into his cheek. He held the side of his face and turned to Peter. But if he expected a kiss to make it better, he'd barked up the wrong tree.

Peter said grimly, “Stop acting so goddam smart. He'll tell you if you'll just shut up.”

And Nick was so shocked that the pain did stop, or at least he didn't seem to have room for it anymore. He'd been heated up since he first saw Sam, and he hadn't even noticed Peter standing so silent. If he'd thought about it, he probably would have said he was fighting a battle for both their sakes. Now he saw what Peter saw. Somehow, he'd gotten turned around, and he'd started to have a lover's quarrel with Sam. Not to do with love, of course, but how would Peter know? Nick was letting fly with a cheating husband's noises of annoyance: How dare you try to wreck my home, you bitch. Terrible things had been happening all day long in Crook House. Parallel lines had crossed like fences in an earthquake. And what was Nick doing? Getting mad because he couldn't stand it that he'd thrown his love away for weeks on something as vile as this.

He couldn't even speak to say he was sorry. He would have spit blood if he talked right now. He could only flush and look at the ground and hate himself. But Peter wasn't trying to put him through more than it was worth. He reached across the space between them. He tapped Nick lightly on the breastbone as if he were knocking at a door. They smiled a fraction of an inch. Or not even that. They gave one another a certain look. And though Sam didn't watch them as he wandered around, he did seem to wait to let them adjust before he went on. Then he stopped walking and stood behind the painting, leaning on the frame like a podium. He was never quite still, even then. He stretched his naked shoulders and flexed the muscles in his chest, his body in constant motion, however slight. It was like watching a horse shiver and twitch.

“There's no point telling you the truth about me and Varda,” he said, as if he'd mulled it all over in a quiet corner and finally thrown up his hands. Almost as if he didn't want to make any friction. “The spic's told you
his
version, right? I know it makes things simpler for all of you to
see
it that way.” He shrugged very deeply like a man lifting weights. “It doesn't matter. Not to me, anyway. It's just too bad for you that you'll never know what Varda was really like. He's the only guy I ever met who didn't want to go to heaven.”

He seemed to be shaking his finger at both of them, trying to smarten them up. In a way, given the time and place, it was the most perplexing thing of all to Nick and Peter, hearing him show off the range of his wisdom and experience. They had his type pegged from their two different angles, and they would have sworn he'd never known
anyone
“really.” Nick thought:That's the fiction we've put behind us in Crook House, isn't it, that we have to go after what people are really like? “People are really like everyone else” is how he might have put it to Sam. But they were much better off not dwelling on it. Nick could have shaken his own finger, after all, and told him off with blood on his teeth, but Peter was right. Shut up. Nick took all the strength he needed from seeing that he and Peter knew better. Otherwise, though the side of his face had started swelling up till it would be by morning fat as an apple, he had left in him still the faint trace of a strange desire. He didn't know why, but now he didn't want to spoil
Sam's
version of the story. It made him feel a little crazy. Maybe the leap of violence, back and forth, had made him remember something delicious that lay between them. He was glad he didn't have to be alone with Sam and follow it out. For once, he didn't want to know why.

“I'm going to let Peter tell you where we are now,” Sam said, very businesslike, as if Peter were his apprentice. Nick turned and saw the contempt in Peter's eyes. Apparently, he and Sam had had their own little cold war going before he got here. Peter hadn't started out silent, either.

“What?” Nick asked. He heard it, but he hoped he'd heard it wrong.

“I said: He's planted a case of dynamite.” Then Peter went on, but he was stingy with the details, trying to diminish it. “All through the mine, like a string in a cave. He's got the end of the fuse in his sleeping bag.”

“Why?”

“That I don't know,” Peter said, an edge of boredom in his voice that must have maddened Sam. “He's sending me out and keeping you in. I've told him everything we know about Varda's collection. And then about all our money, yours and mine.” He paused and looked at Nick, wondering how he would have done it instead. “It seemed better just to tell the truth.”

“But why?” Nick asked again, confused by the fact that there seemed to be a plan. He left the question open so Sam could answer, too.

“All right,” Sam said to Peter, “now get out of here.”

Nick didn't have a moment to think. Peter hugged him and kissed his hair, and that brought the tears up again. Which locked his voice at the crucial moment. All he could manage was Peter's name. The thing he would have said was too complicated, anyway. In the fullness of the hour, he might have implied that he'd solved at last the dream of the cowboy lover. It wasn't true. It was only that he'd never found himself face to face before with a man he'd broken off with. Five days ago in Santa Monica, he actually felt his temperature drop as he walked away to the car he had no further use for. Before the day was out, Sam was no longer in his system. And that was the way it always was, until now. Before
five
days were out, he was most likely to be found at the baths when not available by phone. So what he'd like to have gotten across to Peter here was something about the timing of desire. How it didn't die fast at all. How it lingered and changed its shape. When he stared it in the face again, everything he'd ever felt about Sam came back at once. It was as if he finally understood what he went through in all his furtive, minor loves. There was more to these things than beginning, middle, and end. And though he couldn't yet put it into words, he knew it meant at the very least that he and Peter were fine. Nothing would ever split them up.