Waltz Into Darkness (32 page)

He
stopped for lack of breath, and there was a moment of silence.

Durand
was standing there, head bowed, looking downward before himself.
Perhaps to the floor in implicit capitulation, perhaps to the
outthrust drawer from which the strongbox had come. He was breathing
with difficulty; his chest rose and fell with visible labor at each
intake and expulsion.

"Do
the official police know about this ?" he asked finally, without
raising his head.

"Not
yet, but they will when I get her back there with me."

"You'll
never get her back there with you, Downs. She's not going to leave
this house. And neither are you."

Now
his head came up. And with it the pistol his hand had fallen upon,
long ago, long before this.

Shock
slashed across Downs's face; it mirrored fear, collapse, panic, for a
moment each, in turn; all the usual and only-human reactions. But
then he curbed them, and after that he bore himself well.

He
spoke for his life, but his voice was steady and reasonable, and
after the first abortive step back, he held his ground sturdily. Nor
did he cringe and bunch his shoulders defensively, but held himself
tautly erect. He did not try to disguise his fear, but he mastered
it, which is the greater bravery of the two.

"Don't
do anything like that. Keep your head, man. You're still not
involved. There's nothing punishable as yet in your taking up with
this woman. The crime was committed before you met her. You were not
a party to it. You've been foolish but not criminal so far-- Don't,
Durand-- Stop and think before it's too late. For your own sake,
while there's still time, put that down. Put it back where you got
it."

Durand,
for the first time during the entire interview, seemed to be
addressing, not the investigator, but someone else. But who it was,
no one could have said. He didn't know himself. "It's already
too late. It's been too late since I first met her. It's been too
late since the day I was born. It's been too late since God first
created this world!"

He
looked down, to avoid seeing Downs's face. He looked down at his own
finger, curled about the trigger. Watching it with a sort of detached
curiosity, as though it were not a part of him. Watching as if to see
what it would do.

"Bonny,"
he sobbed brokenly, as though pleading with her to let him go.

The
detonation stunned him briefly, and smoke drew a transient merciful
curtain between the two of them. But that thinned again and was
wafted aside long before it could do any good.

Then
he looked up and met the face he hadn't wanted to.

Downs
was' still up, strangely.

There
was in his face such 'unutterable, poignant rebuke that, to have had
to look at it a second time during a single lifetime would have cost
Durand his reason, he had a feeling then.

A
hushed word hovered about them in the sudden new stillness of the
room, like a sigh of penitence. Somebody had breathed "Brother,"
and later Durand had the strange feeling it had been he.

Downs's
legs gave abruptly, and he went with a crash. More violently, for the
delay, than if he had fallen at once. And lay there dead. Dead beyond
mistaking, with his eyes open but viscid opaque matter, with his lips
rubbery and slightly unsealed.

The
things he did then, Durand, he was slow in coming to, as though it
were he and not Downs who was now in timeless eternity; and even as
he did them, though he saw himself doing them, he was unaware of
doing them. As though they were the acts of his hands and his body,
and not of his brain.

He
remembered sitting for a while on a chair, on the outermost edge of a
chair, like someone uneasy, about to rise again at any moment, but
yet who fails to do so. He only saw that he had been sitting when he
finally did stand and quit the chair. He'd been holding the pistol in
his hand the whole time, and tapping its muzzle against the cap of
his knee.

He
went over to the desk and returned it to where he'd taken it from.
Then he noted the cash box still standing there on top the desk, with
its lid up and some escaped bank notes lying about it. These he
returned to it, and then closed and locked it, and then he put it
away too. Then he locked the drawer and pocketed the key.

Yes,
he thought dazedly, I can repair everything but one thing. There is
one thing I cannot return to, what it was before. And he swayed,
shuddering, for a moment against the corner of the desk, as if the
thought were a strong cold wind assailing him and threatening to
overbalance him.

The
situation seemed timeless, as if he were going to stay in here
forever with this dead man. This dead thing that had been a man;
dressed like a man, but not a man any longer. He felt no immediate
urge to get out of the room; instinct told him it was better to be
here, behind its concealing walls, than elsewhere. But he wanted not
to have to look at what' lay on the floor any longer. He wanted his
eyes not to have to keep returning to it every other moment.

Downs
lay upon an oblong rug, and he lay transverse upon it, so that one
upper corner protruded far out past his shoulder, one lower far down
below his foot. There was in this violation of symmetry, too, an
irritant that continually inflamed his nerves every time his gaze
fell upon the high relief offered by the floor.

He
went over at last and dropped down by the dead face, and, folding
over the margin of rug, covered it, as with a thick, woolly winding
sheet. Then noting in himself symptoms of relief or at least
amelioration, shifted rapidly down by the feet of the corpse--without
standing, by working his upended feet along under his body--and
turned over that corner, swathing the feet and lower legs. All that
lay revealed now was a truncated torso.

Suddenly,
inspired, he turned the body over, and the rug with it. And then a
second time, and the rug still with it. It was gone now, completely
hidden, disappeared within a cocoon of roughspun rugback. But he did
it still once more, and the rug had become a long, hollow cylinder.
No more than a rolled rug; nothing about it to amaze or attest or
accuse.

But
it was in the way. It blocked passage in or out of the doorway.

He
scrambled downward upon all fours and began to roll it across the
room, toward the base of the opposite wall. It rolled lumpily and a
little erratically, guided by the weight of its own fill rather than
his manipulations. He had to stop and straighten, and move ahead of
it to get a chair out of the way.

Then,
tired, when he had returned to it, he no longer got down and used his
hands to it. He remained erect and planted his foot against it and
prodded it forward in that way, until at last he had it close up
against the wall base, and as unobtrusive as it would ever be.

A
small mother-of-pearl collar button had jumped out of it en route and
lay there behind it on the floor. He picked that up, and returned to
it, and tossed it in freehand at one of the openings; but no longer
sure which one of the two it was, whether at head or at feet.

Exhausted
now, he staggered back across the room, and found the wall nearest
the door-opening, the farthest one from it, and sank back deflated
against that, letting it support him at shoulders and at rump. And
just remained that way, inert.

He
was still there like that when she came in.

Her
arrival now was anticlimax. He could give it no import any longer. He
was drained of nervous energy. He turned listlessly at the sound of
her entrance, back beyond sight in the hall. A moment later she had
arrived abreast of him, was standing looking into the room, busied in
taking a glove off one hand.

A
little flirt of violet scent seemed to reach him; but perhaps more
imagined by the sight of her, recalled to memory from former times,
than actually inhaled now.

She
turned her head and saw him there, propped upright, splayed hands at
a loss.

Her
puckered mouth ejaculated a note of laughter. "Lou! What are you
doing there like that? Flat up against--"

He
didn't speak.

Her
gaze swept the room in general, seeking for the answer.

He
saw her glance halt at the transverse dust patch coating the floor.
The rug's ghost, so to speak.

"What
happened to the rug?"

"There's
someone in it. There's a man's body in it." Even as he said it,
it struck him how curious that sounded. There's someone in it. As
though there were some miniature living being dwelling in it. But
what other way was there to say it?

He
turned his head to indicate it. She turned hers in accompaniment, and
thus located it. A rounded shadow secretively nestling along the base
of the wall; easy for the eye to miss, the legs of chairs distracting
it.

"Don't
go over--" he started to say. But she had already started
swiftly for it. He didn't finish the injunction, more from lack of
energy than because she had already disobeyed it.

He
saw her crouch down by the oval, stovepipe-like opening, her skirts
puddling about her. She put her face close and peered. Then she
thrust her arm in, to feel blindly if there was indeed something in
there. He saw her grasp it by its edges next, as if to partially
unroll it, or at least stretch the aperture.

"Don't--"
he said sickly. "Don't open it again."

She
straightened and came back toward him again. There was an alertness
in her face, a sort of wary shrewdness, but that was all; no horror
and no fear, no pallor of shock. She even seemed to have gained
vitality, as if this were-not a moral catastrophe-but a test to put
her on her mettle.

"Who
did it? You?" she demanded in a brisk whisper.

"It's
Downs," he said.

Her
eyes were on him with bright insistency; there was a singleminded
intentness to them that almost amounted to avidity; insistency on
knowing, on being told. Hard practicality. But no emotional dilution
whatever.

"He
came here to get you."

He
wouldn't have gone ahead. His head dipped in conclusion. But she
urged the continuation from him by putting hand to his chin and
tipping it up again.

"He
found out you were here."

She
nodded now, rapidly. The explanation sufficed, that seemed to mean;
she accepted it, she understood it. The act, the consequence stemming
from it, was a normal one. None other could have been expected. None
other could have been desired. A nod or two of her head spoke to him,
saying these things.

She
gripped his upper arm tight. He hadn't known she possessed so much
strength, so much burning heat, in her fingers. He had the curious
impression it was a form of commendation.

There
was 'an intimacy tincturing her next remark, a rapport, none of their
love passages had ever had before.

"What'd
you do it with? What'd you take?"

"The
gun there," he said. "The one in the desk."

She
turned and looked at the rug. And while she stood turned thus, she
struck him lightly on the chest with the back of her hand. And the
only thing he could read in the gesture was rakish camaraderie, a
sort of flippant, unspoken bond.

Then
she looked back at him, and looked him in the face long and well.
Lazily half smiling the while, as if discovering in the familiar
outlines of his face, for the first time, some new qualities, to be
appreciated, to be admired.

"You
need a drink," she said with brittle decisiveness. "I do
too. Wait a minute, I'll get us one."

He
watched her go to it, and pour from the decanter twice, and put the
glass stopper back in, and give it a little twist as if it were a
knob.

He
felt as if he were venturing into a strange new world. Which had had
its well-established customs all along, but which he was only now
encountering for the first time. That was what you did after you took
a life; you took a drink next. He hadn't known that, it wouldn't have
occurred to him, but for her. He felt like a novice in the presence
of a practised hand.

She
put one of the two glasses into his hand, and continuing to clasp
that same hand about the wrist, as if in token of affection, poked
her other hand wildly, vertically, up into the air.