The Horned Man (21 page)

What did occur to me, though, was that I might be able to turn its existence to my advantage.

The word ‘alibi' seemed almost as absurd in relation to the humdrum routines of my life, as ‘Private Investigator' had a week earlier, and yet it struck me that my trip to Corinth (something I had naturally had no intention of discussing with Dr Schrever) had acquired a new significance. It was my
alibi
; at any rate as far as Rosa Vasquez was concerned. Placing myself in Corinth on the night of her murder seemed suddenly much more important than any advantage I might gain by my discretion. And it seemed to me that Dr Schrever's notebook was the natural choice for the document of record.

Departing, therefore, from the policy of caution that had all
but silenced me on her couch earlier that week, I made up my mind to tell Dr Schrever about Trumilcik after all. I would tell her the whole story: how I had come to suspect his presence in my office, how I had found his memoir and then gone on to discover his hiding place. I would tell her about the sheet and the rod, the vile offering he had left me in exchange for my forty dollars, the anonymous note, the Portland poster, the key … I would describe (already I could feel the enormous relief of being able to do all this) my growing suspicion of his involvement in the death of Barbara Hellermann, and I would tell her how, in my attempt to track him down, I had made my strange journey to Corinth last weekend.

Without being obtrusively so, I would be very precise about the timing of my trip and return. I would give a scrupulously accurate account of the journey, describing the bus ride up there, the rest-stop, the town, the shelter itself, all in the kind of minute detail by which reality makes itself felt. I would portray the people I had encountered along the way so faithfully that even if somewhere down the line they should forget or deny they had ever met me, no one would doubt that I had met
them
. Above all, I would be mercilessly honest about my own conduct and feelings: candid to the point of incriminating myself. That way – guilty of fraud and general duplicity – I would be immune to accusations of any more serious crime.

Unfortunately I never had a chance to implement this plan. Before I reached Dr Schrever's office, this too had acquired a kind of protective force-field; one that seemed almost physically to hoist me up and drive me back in the opposite direction as fast as I could move.

I had bought the
Daily News
as I got out of the subway, and was reading it as I walked up along the park. There had been
nothing new on Rosa Vasquez in the
Times
that morning, but the
News
had a development to report, and it was as I was reading about this that I felt myself being turned around and driven back down to the Village, filled with a weird, sickened sense of the ghastly irony with which this fiasco seemed to be working itself out.

She had had a stalker, this woman. The moment I read this, the reason for her reaction to me that afternoon in the park flashed on me with painful clarity. She too had thought I was Trumilcik! What gave it all its peculiar farcical desperateness was that, after seeing me throw something into the lake, she had notified the police, who had retrieved Mr Kurwen's glass eye from the ice floe it had landed on, so that there now existed a possible connection between the woman's assailant and this absurd, orbicular prosthesis. It was like a riddle: what do a glass eye and a motiveless killing have in common? The answer – not the true answer, but the only answer – could be triangulated, I realised, in Dr Schrever's notebook. For all I knew, this had already been done. Hence the radical unapproachability of her office.

My apartment felt emptier and more silent than ever. I moved through it, trying to think clearly what I should do. Turn myself in to the police with a wild, still-unverifiable story about a plot to make me look like a serial murderer? Try to flush out Trumilcik from wherever he was hiding now? (But then what? Ask him politely to please stop this inconsiderate behavior?) Or go somewhere, escape, get on a train or plane till things, as they say, ‘quietened down'?

I was overwhelmed: stressed to the point where my mind simply froze like a stalled engine. In a vague, trance-like state, I gathered a few things together – warm clothes, passport and
Green Card, various papers – and put them in my briefcase, not remotely knowing what I intended to do. Having done that, I immediately succumbed to a heavy, familiar inertia. I stared abstractedly out of the window without moving. So abstracted was I, in fact, that at first I thought the flickering silver light I could see out of the corner of my eye was just a reflection on the revolving ventilator fan across the courtyard. Even when I roused myself from my stupor and moved into the kitchen to throw out the few bits of fresh food I still had, it took me a moment to realise that the flickering spot had come into the kitchen with me and grown a little larger, and that this meant it had nothing to do with the ventilator fan, but was in fact an emissary from the world of pain, come to pay me another call in its familiar metallic livery.

As it grew, spreading across my field of vision like a great, sunlit shoal of mackerel, I felt a burst of childish self-pity. I found myself thinking of my mother, childishly yearning for the soothing way she had taken up the management of these migraines when I was a boy, entering so intimately into the interstices of my pain, it seemed she might be capable of assuming the burden of it herself, relieving me altogether. And then, when conventional medicine failed to help me, the way she had sought out that homeopath, the old Finn with his tiny, mysterious pills … I wondered again what they were, wished I could call my mother to find out, and as the silvery obstruction vanished and the first wave of pain came crashing into my head, I felt with a pang the sadness of the state of affairs that had arisen between myself and my mother. The truth was I had lost touch with her over the years, and no longer had an address or phone number for her. I had always been aware of something not quite natural about this, but now, for the first time, I seemed to come face to face with its
full, appalling strangeness. What was almost worse was that I had no real idea how it had come about! It was as though some deep rift or faultline existed in the terrain of my psyche, some hidden oubliette of consciousness, into which events – even momentous events like this – could fall without a sound.

The ache pounded in my head, hammering at the inside of my skull. Hearing myself cry aloud with pain, I grabbed my coat and briefcase, and ran downstairs to the street. Now at least I had a specific goal to accomplish. I knew exactly where I was going: 156 Washington Avenue. I'd read the address enough times in the Manhattan Directory over the past week in my attempt to clarify the mystery of an apparent connection between Trumilcik and my wife, though that particular conundrum couldn't have been further from my mind right now, fully occupied as it was by the immense discomfort of its own physical substance; that, and the frailly assuaging memory of a pair of white, cool hands pressing into my temples and forehead.

The building was an old brownstone with chipped black lions on its stoop. The name I was looking for was on a buzzer marked
Apt 5
. I pressed it. To my surprise the door was buzzed open without any preliminaries on the entryphone. I trudged up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to the fifth floor and saw that the apartment door was open, spilling out voices and soft music. Behind it was a small entranceway with a coat-stand draped in winter coats.

Almost immediately – several seconds before I became conscious of what I was looking at – I felt the same sense of being pushed away as I had felt outside Dr Schrever's office earlier that afternoon and at Elaine's house the day before: an invisible peristalsis of space, air, light, urging me – it had begun to seem – out of existence itself.

I was turning, still unaware of what it was I had laid eyes on, when a voice said hello.

I turned back, and there was Melody Schroeder, a glass of red wine in her hand. Her cheeks were pink and soft-looking. Her hair was short, almost shaven, though the effect was also one of softness, rather than toughness. She was looking at me with her odd, mischievous, secretively knowing smile. A delicious smell of cooking had wafted into the air.

‘I'm Lawrence Miller,' I said. ‘You once –'

‘I know who you are.'

‘Well, I was wondering –'

‘Yes but I can't help you.'

I paused, blinking. The slightest effort of thought seemed to intensify the ache in my head.

‘Oh, you mean – no, no, it isn't about Carol. It's – I have a –' I touched my head.

Her eyes roved across my own with an aloof curiosity.

‘You do, don't you?'

‘That was you, wasn't it? Blumfeld?'

She smiled. Only now do I see the cruelty of that smile: the same indolent, foreknowing expression that I note in retrospect as I recall the moment at our table months earlier, when she had first suggested, her husky voice all antic innocence, that expedition to the Plymouth Rock.

‘Here,' she said. She brought a hand to my forehead – just one hand, the other still holding her wineglass. She was wearing a thumb-ring: gold and very thick. My eye rested on it blurrily as she gripped the front of my head and pressed in her thumb. There was something disturbing about it, I caught myself feeling; something delicately, elusively gross …

‘There. Now I'm having a dinner party which I'm afraid I can't –'

‘She's here, isn't she?' I interrupted, conscious suddenly of at least a part of what it was that had caught my eye earlier: half-hidden by the other coats on the rack was the unmistakable royal blue of Carol's cape-like winter coat.

‘Yes she is.'

I looked over Melody's shoulder, but the corridor from this vestibule turned a corner, and the guests were not visible. From a flicker of shadow on the wall, I saw that they must be sitting in candlelight. That Carol was there, around that corner, where the voices and music and the smell of cooking were coming from, was a thought large enough to obliterate all sense of the pain in my head, and for a moment I thought Melody's touch had worked another miracle. I tried to make out Carol's voice in the drifting murmur of conversation. Just the sound of her voice would have been something to carry away with me. I could have lived on that and nothing else for days! Life itself – all I wanted of life – seemed just around that corner. A few steps and I could be a part of its candlelit, warm circle again.

‘You'd better go,' Melody said.

I nodded. There seemed a deep, unintended judiciousness to her words, as if she were telling me, rightly, that that unseen, golden image required precisely my own absence from it as the condition for its continued existence. As I turned to leave, I saw that the coat all but covering Carol's was also familiar, and I realised with a jolt that it was
this
: the sight of the two of them together – this black coat with its split tails joined at the stylised rectangle of raised fabric, lying over Carol's blue coat – that had created the strange force-field I had felt propelling me away from here when I had first reached the doorway, and felt again now, like a great blast of cold wind ushering me back out into the night.

Bruno!

It was Bruno Jackson's coat!

He should have liv'd
, Angelo says after reneging on his promise to spare Claudio's life in return for a night with Isabella;
He should have liv'd, save that his riotous youth, with dangerous sense, might in the times to come have ta'en revenge
…

Like the guests on
Desert Island Discs
, I have my Shakespeare and my Bible: Barbara Hellermann's Shakespeare; Trumilcik's Bible, which, as you would expect, is no conventional Bible. Between these books I have been trying to make sense of the events of these past weeks. And it seems to me that far from overestimating the scale and complexity of the campaign launched against me (as an obdurately skeptical part of me suspected I was, even to the end), I had been fatally underestimating these things.

That I was confronting not one, but
two
antagonists, allied against me in the implementation of a kind of vast pincer movement – motivated, on Bruno's part at least, by revenge (I have yet to understand Trumilcik's motive) – was still far from clear to me as I stumbled down the stairs of Melody's building, and out on to the street.

Instead of curing me, Melody's one-handed touch seemed to have made my head even worse. And added to the physical pain was that sight – an image to pierce the soul – of Bruno Jackson's coat embracing Carol's. It was about all I could do to examine the memory then of what I had had no doubt a deep vested interest in forgetting: that Bruno and Carol had met, had spent time together under the same roof as Fellows at the Getty Institute in California three years earlier. This fact had come to light last fall, when Bruno and I had first met, and were sounding each other out over coffee in the Faculty
Dining Room, cautiously trading selections of our life histories. ‘The Getty Institute?' I remembered saying, ‘my wife was there a couple of years ago. Carol Vindler.'

‘Carol Vindler's your wife?'

As I dragged myself through the streets of the West Village, I tried to burrow back in time to that moment. Had there been any particular glint in Bruno's eye, any suggestion in his voice or demeanor of sensitive information in his possession; of a split-second's decision to withhold it? I couldn't be sure, and yet the possibility itself was enough to set my mind reeling. Bruno and my wife?
No!
I wanted to shout out the word; blast its veto indelibly on to the past, the present and the future. Certain turns of event are simply incompatible with the continuation of one's life …

I controlled myself as best I could, tried to come to a cooler, more rational appraisal of things. They had met; that was for sure. Perhaps she had found him attractive, as women seemed to. But even if she had, I doubted whether anything would have happened. The whole light-filled edifice of Carol's personality, her emotions as precise, as diamond-bright as her intelligence, was built on honesty. Deception would have been as little tolerable in there as a spitball in a Swiss watch. But now – now that she was a free agent again … Might she not have resumed contact? Even the most contented spouses keep a few names and faces at the back of their minds for a rainy day – former lovers, someone they might have slept with if circumstances had been different, chance acquaintances their stray gaze held a second longer than a purely social contact required, leading them both somewhere they stepped back from but never forgot … And when the moment comes, the rainy day, the partner gone, how easy it is all of a sudden, how natural it feels, to pick up the phone … But on reflection
even
that
I couldn't quite see Carol doing. Even that had something base about it; an admission of latent duplicity during the time we were together, which her pride in her own integrity, if nothing else, would find offensive.