Escape the Night (24 page)

Twenty-three years ago, he had lost his freedom: now he needed to run. Perhaps to the South of France; he remembered Nice, the slim lithe bodies of young men and women, the intensity of their gazes, so foreign to Americans …

Peter pitied him; this was the sum of his sad attempt to take the place of Charles.

Twenty years later, Peter's screams still rang in his ears. If only he had been left alone, their lives might have been different …

Self
-pity, he thought savagely, for the lifetime he had earned. He cut it off, and probed for causes of this sharp new fear, focused by one click of a telephone.

Barth's obsession with Black Jack Carey.

Phillip felt the same suspicions he read in Peter: Barth could have
any
firm more easily than Peter Carey's. It was unnatural …

Phillip stopped himself: for once, he had no ugliness to hide. His motive was one any man could share—money. There was nothing for some listener to exploit.

The secret other half of him was surely dead.

Still perspiring, he again reached for the telephone.

The telephone rang.

On its second ring, Benevides glanced at his watch. It was 12:15; his secretary had gone to lunch and he was stuck with the telephone. He put down his dictaphone and answered crisply: “George Benevides.”

“You may not be aware,” the flat voice said, “that your client is meeting with Clayton Barth.”

The monotone was so pronounced that Benevides assumed it a disguise. “Who is this?”

“There are certain things which might be helpful. You might ask young Mr. Carey if his
grandfather
ever spoke of a Clayton Barth. A review of John Carey's correspondence may enlighten him.”

“Who
is
this?”

The line went dead.

Benevides stabbed out Peter Carey's number without putting down the phone.

Ruth Levy slid open another dusty drawer: in the airless basement of Van Dreelen & Carey, she rummaged through Black Jack's files, at Peter's request …

“Why me?” she had asked him.

“I'm meeting with Barth tomorrow.” His voice was cool. “I don't want Phil to catch me doing anything unusual.”

“Isn't that a little …”

“Paranoid?” Peter tilted his head. “You don't find anonymous calls unsettling?”

“I've begun to
solicit
them, to lighten up my evenings.” She hesitated. “You really don't trust Phillip, do you?”

Peter looked steadily back at her. “Do you?”

Once more, Ruth sensed that they were nibbling at the edge of something neither wished to speak of, or even acknowledge …

“It's more that I trust
you
.” Breaking the silence, Peter's voice was soft. “I've always sensed you'd help me, if I needed it.”

Through the inner ear of memory, Ruth heard Charles Carey ask, “Suppose she gave me custody?” “And now you want me to help dig out files.” she told his son. “Your father always said that I'd go far …”

She riffled another musty sheaf of papers.

There were five cabinets' worth: John Carey's business letters had been preserved since 1946, at the request of his biographer. After his death, his secretary had shipped those he deemed suitable to Boston University, which kept his papers, and left the rest sequestered here, where he once had shoveled coal. Alive, Ruth had thought him a bastard and closet anti-Semite; now, with the grudging admiration of one whose own heritage had not been easy, she acknowledged that he had left his mark.

She opened the fourth drawer. Like the others, its files were carefully labeled, including the one marked simply, “Clayton Barth.”

Snatching it up, Ruth began reading.

On the third page, in an unconscious echo of Charles Carey, she murmured, “
Sweet Jesus Christ
.”

Clayton Barth dismissed his secretary from the new task that he had set for her, and finished dressing. Walking to the door of his office, he locked it.

He wanted to be alone.

At last, he felt the hope that he might feel complete, the owner of John Carey's firm; Peter Carey would look him in the face, and see that he must yield.

Slowly, he unlocked the top drawer of his desk, and reached inside.

From the tattered cover of an old
Time
magazine, John Carey's face stared back at him.

Pale, Peter Carey looked up from the file. “Does Phillip know, I wonder?”

Ruth shrugged. “I doubt
Barth
knows that Black Jack paid for his education.”

“He hid it well enough.” Peter's face was set. “What Barth
does
know is that he sent this letter.”

Once more, Ruth winced at its terse message:

Dear Clayton,

You seem to hold me responsible for your father's tragedy, the last in a series of choices made by him alone. Be assured that each choice pains me deeply, the more so for his choice of death. Regrettably, our insurance policy does not apply to suicides.

Very truly yours,

[Dictated, but not read, by Mr. Carey]

“And now Barth's on your doorstep.” Ruth shook her head. “Your grandfather dies harder than any man I've known. Someone should have followed him around.”

“
I
did,” Peter murmured softly.

He had so little of the men he loved, she thought, and not all of that was good. “So what will you do?”

“Look for reasons.” Peter kept staring at the letter. “First, who would point this out to Benevides?”

“A disgruntled employee?”

“But who could know something that far back? And what do they gain by telling me?”

“You can't know until the meeting.”

“I wish there
were
no meeting—no good will come of it, not now.” Abruptly, Peter looked up again. “I want you to come. Specifically, I want your impression of Barth.”

“Why? You're not thinking of selling to him, are you?”

Peter's eyes went cold. “I wouldn't sell to him now,” he answered, “at the point of a gun.”

When the telephone rang, Noelle Ciano was cooking pasta sauce and uncorking their favorite Chianti Classico.

“I can't make it,” Peter began. “I just found out something about Barth.”

Mechanically, Noelle kept stirring the sauce. “Did it kill your appetite?”

“Barth blames the Careys for his father's death. It's fairly complex, but the short of it is that we're meeting tomorrow, and I have to plan how to handle him.”

“Maybe a quiet dinner would help.”

“I'd be no good.”

Noelle heard him slipping beyond reach. “What do I do with the fucking sauce?”

“Save it for later. Look, Barth's interest in the firm makes sense only as psychodrama. I think he's unstable, maybe dangerous. Wherever you go in the next few weeks, be careful, please …”

“‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it …'”

“I'm serious.”

His tone was so anxious that she felt a moment's worry. “Why don't you at least sleep here?”

“And wake you up again?” He hesitated. “I'm afraid that's all that would happen.”

Noelle felt her body slump. “Okay,” she said casually, “talk to you later,” and hung up.

Cleaning dishes, she had a few distracted tastes of the sauce. The worst kind of love affair, she thought, is one in which you didn't know whether to feel sympathy or anger, until you've given far too much for too little in return. She stalked to the bedroom.

Framed in her window, a shadow moved on the warehouse roof.

She went closer to the window, and stared.

There was only darkness.

She went to the living room, checked the screen protecting the window near the fire escape, and then came back. Hastily, she jerked down the blind.

Peter must be affecting her.

Suddenly, she felt alone. Walking to the mirror, she undressed, staring at her body.

Peter had not touched her for eight days.

Book in hand, she crawled beneath down covers, in search of warmth. She closed her eyes.

Lightly, she touched herself, as Peter would.

Crouched on the roof, Martin imagined Noelle Ciano's movements in the room behind the blinds.

She would have seen him as a shadow, to carry in the back of her mind. Still, they were connected now: she sensed him with her. He felt his groin stir.

Perhaps she was naked.

Perhaps she would call the police.

Slowly, he went limp.

The small man had demanded every tape of Peter Carey, right up to the meeting.

Martin had never seen him so compulsive. For three weeks, his mentor had retreated with each tape from the psychiatrist, to listen and to ponder: it was as though Carey's analysis threatened some delicate balance in the air he breathed.

Kneeling, Martin cat-walked toward the fire escape.

Pacing his apartment, Levy stopped abruptly; there was something missing.

He resolved to go early to the office, and review his notes on Phillip Carey.

Weary, he sat on the edge of his bed. The decision stopped his pacing, but did not truly soothe him.

Like an echo, Peter Carey kept repeating, “My father hated him …”

Levy snatched up the telephone and dialed. “How would you like to fix me dinner tomorrow?”

“How would
you
like to take me out?”

“We'll need some privacy.” He paused. “I want you to tell me about Peter Carey.”

“Peter? That's not so easy, Bill. Tell you
what
, exactly.”

Once more, Levy hesitated. “He mentioned a photograph …”

Hanging up, Ruth wondered why she never spoke of Peter with her brother.

Perhaps it was that Peter aroused feelings both sexual and maternal: looking at his face, she would remember Charles Carey inside her body. Today this feeling had been truly painful: once more, she wondered if Peter
knew
she had been his father's lover.

Had Charles lived, Peter might have been her son.

She gulped three aspirin and went to bed.

Sleeplessly writhing, she pondered the photograph, until she faced the thing that she had never told her brother.

Fire ate the skin from Charles Carey …

In terror, his son awakened.

The man Peter Carey was alone.

His father's cry echoed in his mind; sweat mingled with tears on his face. Gripped by an impulse he could not stop, he went to the telephone and dialed.

“George?”

“Peter? What time is it?”

“I need some information, before tomorrow.”

“Listen, you woke up two people, all right?” There was quiet; finally, Benevides said, “Well, maybe
she
knows. What's so urgent?”

“I want to know where Barth was in April of 1959.”

“What's so magic about …”

Peter Carey cut in softly, “Just find out, George. Please.”

CHAPTER 6

Across from Peter Carey's apartment, Martin waited for the doorman.

The night before, after listening to the final tape, the small man had altered his instructions: when Carey left the building, Martin did not follow.

Motionless, he watched the doorman's rhythms—smiling, whistling, flagging taxis like the conductor of a symphony—until a second man relieved him for his coffee break.

The doorman started down the sidewalk; across the street, Martin moved with him, in silent tandem.

The doorman ducked into the coffee shop of a hotel.

He was munching on a roll when Martin approached his table. The doorman looked up, startled; Martin flipped open his wallet to show a typed identification card with his picture on it. “We should confer, Arthur,” he said softly. “Concerning Peter Carey.”

Reviewing his notes on Phillip, Levy pondered the ambivalence which tore through Peter Carey.

He heard it even in Peter's speech. His voice, when he discussed Phillip, was so toneless it seemed brutal; the same tonelessness, discussing Allie, reminded Levy of fearing his own father; as he recalled the time when John Carey first took him to the bindery, Peter's flatness hinted at amused affection, vanishing in the memory of a guilty child, watching an old man stumble, stricken, from beneath a small red kite. But only for Charles Carey did Levy hear the lyric melancholy Peter held within him.

At seven, there was only Phillip left.

Lonely, Peter had vacillated between an almost craven desire to make Phillip his new father, and an anger which even now he could not explain. Phillip could not long please the child Peter: he would smile at Phillip's presents, then abandon them, loathing his own pleasure. Imagining himself as Phillip, Levy cringed at his rejection by a nephew whose very face, so much like that of Charles, must daily have reminded him of John Carey's final judgment.

In his notes Levy had written: “Does Peter blame Phillip?”

Now, staring at these four words, he saw Phillip at his brother's funeral.

Gradually, he had begun to cast the death of Charles Carey as the fault line running through the lives of Phillip and his nephew, dividing them irrevocably: the loss of all that Peter loved freed Phillip from the past he had despised. Phillip sold the Greenwich house and kept Peter from the funeral; Peter's father vanished without a trace. Phillip moved Peter from Charles Carey's home into his town house on East 61st Street; Peter would never take him to the lake or fountain. Saying that he preferred the warmer weather, Phillip auctioned their home in Maine to buy another in Palm Beach; John and Charles Carey died once more in Peter's mind. As he hastily remade John Carey's firm in his own image, Phillip took no time to discuss this change with the child; Peter saw him as a thief. Phillip spoke of his dead brother only when forced, until Peter, aching for the smell and feel of him, strained to remember …

But Peter could remember nothing, neither as a child, nor as an adult, for Levy …