13 French Street (13 page)

It was Saint-Saëns’
“Danse Macabre”;
the very well-known Dance of Death. I wondered if she had taken time to dust the keys. I remembered how I’d caught myself whistling the melody the first night I’d been in the house. The way she played sounded a little mad, and a chill touched my shoulders. It was foolish and maybe melodramatic, but I felt that this was a house of death, of evil. Standing away from it, I wondered if it would be possible to detect any humor in it. All I could feel was horror at my own faults.

And I knew that I couldn’t leave without telling Verne everything. I wondered how much he knew, how much he guessed.

Cecil Emmetts. The afternoon would go fast, and then the evening, and he would wait beside the bushes on the highway.

I could tell him only one answer. There was only one.

The piano ceased. I looked at Verne. He was asleep, the bottle beginning to slide from his arm. I took the bottle and drank deeply. As I set it on the floor by the couch I knew it was taking hold and it helped. But not much.

I went to the music room. The door was closed. I opened it, went in, and shut the door.

“Hello, darling.”

She was seated at the piano. She still wore the black housecoat, but she also wore stockings now and high-heeled shoes. As she turned and looked at me there was an instant when I couldn’t believe all that had happened. Then I could.

I sat in the chair by the window. The window sill was damp from the rain, but she had closed the window. She rose and came over to me.

“Look,” she said. “I forgot to show you.” She smiled. “Guess you were too busy to notice.”

She undid the belt of the housecoat and, lifting her left leg, placed her foot on the left side of the chair cushion. She unhooked the garters from her stocking and peeled the stocking down her full thigh. “Here,” she said. “See what you did when you grabbed me yesterday?”

There was a large black-and-blue mark on her thigh.

She took my hand and ran the palm across the mark.

“You’re getting excited,” she said. “I can tell.”

I stood quickly and walking over to the piano, felt of the keys. Most of them were still partially gritty with dust. “Why did you play that?” I asked.

“Because I felt like it. It was suitable. Why do you
fight
yourself?” She was fixing the garter on the stocking. Her legs, all of her body was white, voluptuous, and like fire to my heart and blood—just watching. Her eyes gleamed darkly and as yet the fighting within me was no good.

The brandy had gone to my head completely. “Damn you.”

She put her leg down from the chair. The housecoat draped open. She wore nothing beneath it but the garter belt.

She smiled and her scarlet lips glistened. “You love me,” she said. “Why deny it?”

My voice said it. It wasn’t me, yet it was me. “Damn you. Lock that door.”

She did.

“Come here,” I said.

She did. The smile had changed from a smile of amusement to sudden passion.

• • •

“Why can’t we forget it all? You, I mean,” she said. “Why can’t you forget it? We could have fun then. We could be like we should.”

I was sitting in the chair again. She was perched on the arm of the chair, one hip against my shoulder. The housecoat was in a heap on the floor.

“Dress,” I said. I rose and unlocked the door, peered into Verne’s study. The house was silent. I closed the door but didn’t lock it and watched her as she slipped on the housecoat. She did it carelessly. Her breasts were large, perfectly formed, upthrusting, and firm. Her body was flawless, as if she had been carved with some lusty godlike precision from a warm, utterly unblemished slab of pure alabaster.

She drew the black belt tight around her slim waist. “Why can’t we?” she asked again. “We never joke, it’s just fire. Of course, I like the fire, too.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“I won’t. You’re still fighting yourself. How long will it go on? How long before you’ll admit it?”

I didn’t answer aloud but I said, Never, to myself.

“It’s him—it’s Verne, isn’t it? You keep thinking about a foolish friendship that no longer exists. About a man who is no longer a man, but a machine. A machine with a broken part, at that—one that’ll quit any time.”

I rubbed my hand across my face and the smell of her was on my hand like some acid eating into the skin, burning, until it could not be removed—ever.

I left the room, walked through the study, and looked in at Verne on the couch. He was awake. He blinked at me.

“What’d you do with my bottle?” he asked.

“I drank it.”

His hand had dropped down beside the couch. He grinned as his fingers touched the bottle. He took a drink. Then he sat up on the couch.

“Feel a lot better,” he said.

I stood in the doorway.

“Since you’ve been here,” he went on, “I’ve felt better, somehow. A lot has happened, but maybe it’ll calm down now. Maybe everything’s ironed out.”

I didn’t answer right away. Calmed down, ironed out. “It’s been fine,” I said. “Only don’t let anything get you down.” He looked better, all right.

“I feel good with you here,” he said. “Like old times. It’s good to know you can depend on somebody.”

His words slashed me, cut into me, dug at me. And he didn’t know. There was nothing I could say or do. If I’d never met despair before, I had now. And what in hell was I to do? You weak-willed coward, I told myself. You gutless wonder. Not alone taking your friend’s wife, but murder, too, and now blackmail, and all that wonderful clean world of yours gone.

“Alex, is something troubling you? You don’t look right, the past couple of days. Somehow.”

“Nothing. I’m all right. A little tired, maybe.” A little tired, I thought. A little tired.

“I know it’s been rough. I’ll make it up to you.”

I laughed. It sounded like the last note of a funeral dirge. “Forget all of that, will you? I’m going up and take a nap.”

He didn’t say anything this time, just stared at me, puzzled, maybe.

I went on upstairs to my room and closed the door and stared at the bed.

Panic was nothing to what I began feeling now. Panic was like a mosquito bite on a dying leper.

I went and washed my hands, then smelled of them. The odor of her wouldn’t go away. I poured rubbing alcohol on them, then suddenly looked at myself in the mirror on the medicine cabinet. Something lurked in my eyes that I’d never seen there before.

“You’re going crazy, you damned fool!” I said. “You’re out of your head.”

But the smell was gone from my hands.

I
WAS
well on the way to being good and drunk by eight-forty-five. It was the first time I’d seen Petra slightly worried. The more she frowned and watched me, the more I drank.

We were in the living room. Verne was still resting on the couch. He had drunk some, but sparingly, and was quite sober.

“Alex,” Petra said, “you’re getting pie-eyed.”

Verne said, “He’s on vacation. He ought to stay drunk all the time.”

Only it wasn’t that kind of drunk. Things kept getting clearer and I knew I’d have to drink a lot before I reached the stage where I could forget, or become careless enough not to give a damn about what I thought.

Petra said, “It’s ten to nine already,” and threw me a meaningful glance.

“So what?” Verne said. “I’m not going to work tomorrow. Let the damned job take care of itself for a few days. I’ll handle it by telephone. Least I can do for Alex.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’ll be good for you, too.” I rose a bit unsteadily. “Think I’ll get some air, take a walk.”

“Sure,” Verne said. “I’m lazy, myself. Go ahead with him, Petra.”

I cut her a look that said, No!

“No,” she said. “But don’t get lost and don’t be long, Alex. It’s still drizzling. Verne’s raincoat is in the hall.”

I was already in the hall with the raincoat half on. I walked toward the rear of the house and found an unopened pint of whisky on the liquor shelf in the kitchen. I put it in the deep raincoat pocket and went out the back door.

In the back yard I opened the pint and took a good drink, capped it, and put it away again. Then I went out to the highway and started walking down toward the bend. The rain was still a mist, but slightly heavier, and it felt good on my face and on my bare head. It was clean. It came straight down from the sky without touching anything at all.

I kept thinking, Maybe it will wash out my brain, get the smell off my brain. That had been bothering me. My hands didn’t smell of her right now, but how could I wash my brain? I decided the rain couldn’t do it because it couldn’t get inside.

It was very dark and the hills blended into the dark but the trees didn’t. The trees were like flat deformed black hands against the streaming sky. Actually the sky was not black but more of an extremely dark violet, and somewhere there was a radiance because the vibrant puddles in the road gleamed. A single bird piped fitfully up in the brambles on the hill.

Cecil Emmetts. It didn’t bother her at all. It didn’t reach her. Murder didn’t. So nothing would. That’s what I knew now.

I was waiting for something. Every day. What was it? Strength? Will? The driving will that had always kept me on the straight and narrow, forsaking me like a lost hat when I most needed it? I was waiting.

Something was going to happen. It had to. Because it kept on mounting and getting worse all the time. Something had to break. I had a feeling it would be me.

It was getting a lot colder now. This was the coldest night since I’d been here. I got out the bottle and had a good one. Then I was by the bushes.

I walked around the bushes on the soggy pasture grass. He wasn’t here yet. I went and stood on the shoulder of the road. A car hissed by, whipping a spray of rain and exhaust into my face. I thought of Chicago. I wrote a letter in my mind to Madge.

I began to laugh. Finally I stopped and had another long drink from the bottle. I looked at my watch and it was nine-fifteen. I laughed at nine-fifteen.

It began to rain harder, hissing on the highway.

All I wanted was to get away, back to Madge. Get away from the house and Petra. But now there was more to it than just that. Whatever way the dice turned, I had to stand up to their reading. It wasn’t enough now just to get away and exhibit some bones and relics in Chicago. And not only murder, either. Somehow I had to face Verne and tell him. It was the only way for my own freedom.

I had another drink.

When I next glanced at my watch, it was nine-thirty and I was pacing in the rain. “Hell with Cecil Emmetts,” I said aloud. I started off down the highway.

“All right, mister. Stay put.”

I stopped, turning. Emmetts came out from behind the bushes. He lounged up to where I stood and snorted through his nose. “Been watchin’,” he said, punctuating his words with a stream of tobacco juice from the side of his mouth.

“You’ve been here all the time?”

“Not quite. Just thought I’d figure to give you a worry.”

I started walking off again. He grabbed my arm. “Set tight,” he said. He wore a poncho and his hat, and he was very wet, but his eyes and mouth laughed. His shoulders hitched and hunched beneath the poncho.

In my left raincoat pocket I had one hundred dollars, just in case. I kept crumpling the money between my fingers.

“Give me a drink,” he said. “I seen the bottle.”

I didn’t move.

“Y’hear?”

I handed him the bottle. He uncapped it. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he said. “You ain’t holdin’ out nothin’ from now on.” He drank and smacked his lips, then he threw the bottle cap away.

“You’re worried, ain’t you?”

“This will be the last time you ever pull a stunt like this,” I said.

“Think so? I don’t figure you got much to say ‘bout that, mister.”

“What if I go to the police?”

He grinned. His teeth gleamed. He tilted the bottle.

“Bet you must’ve felt funny carryin’ the old woman to her grave, hey?” He blew air through his nose and slapped rain from his hat brim with his left hand. His eyes were like wet agates.

“Well,” I said.

“Must feel dandy,” he said. “Your friend’s wife, too. Figure mebbe I’m doin’ him a turn, this way. Trusts ya like a brother, don’t he? Ol’ Herb says Verne told ‘im you’re th’ one man in the world he can depend on.” He made a noise through his nose.

“You better shut up,” I said. I wasn’t going to be able to stand much more of this. It was hell. Every bit of it was hell and inside me I was cramped up.

“Ain’t ya got no shame? Figure mebbe the gal had reason, plenty reason, t’ shove the ol’ gal out the window. Cooped up like she was. Had t’ carry the ol’ woman ever’-place she went. I seen it comin’ in her eyes. Could tell what would happen someday. You show up an’ things pop, hey? Bet she’s red hot, hey?”

The whisky had worn off. I trembled beneath the raincoat and my guts knotted and writhed like a nest of snakes. Nobody could ever know how it was. It was something you read about in the old novels, where the hero crawled white-faced and weak back to his mistress’ bed—throwing honor and pride and courage in the gutter, then crawling in after them, not even trying to find them again. You laughed at it today, because things had changed. You laughed if there was laughter with it. Only when it turned sour and you saw it was really evil, you were scared stiff. But you still crawled back toward those wanton gleaming eyes.

And maybe she was like the gatekeeper Milton wrote about, with the scales and the hell hounds running in and out of her womb, snarling and snapping, and you didn’t care. Maybe that was it. Maybe you were subduing the hell hounds.