Evening of the Good Samaritan (62 page)

“Schlaacht’s,” Nathan said, observing the sign as they started up again. He sat forward in his seat. The restaurant sign gleamed within a halo of mist. “That will suit us quite as well as the French tonight. We will stop here, driver.”

The driver stepped on his brakes. A car, too close behind them, came to a screaming stop.

In the restaurant the head waiter asked if Reiss had a reservation.

“I do not need a reservation,” Reiss said. His and the waiter’s eyes met, and after the slightest further hesitation, the waiter seated them at an excellent table in an uncrowded part of the room.

When he was gone, Reiss said: “That is how it is done, even in America. You will have a drink, Tad? I prescribe it.”

“Only wine.”

“Champagne, perhaps?”

“If you like.”

“And why not?” Reiss said, “since we are celebrating your maturity—and my discovery. So. The mouse nibbles and the lion claws.” He ordered the wine, and waiting, looked around the room of heavy dark beams and voluptuous panelings. “I am glad they do not bring in manufactured music.” When the wine came he supervised its chilling himself. He read the menu aloud, translating the English into German, and thereby enjoying himself. He called the headwaiter back to inquire particularly about the
pâ
té.

“I remember recommending a certain
pâ
té to your mother once in Vienna—such a long time ago. Who would have supposed?”

With the first sip of wine, he said: “So. You and the Baroness have become friends, do I understand?”

Tad wondered if the Baroness had given him that impression. He said nothing, doubting it.

“And of course you discussed your prognosis concerning your father and Dr. Winthrop?”

Tad resolved to do so at the first opportunity, and he would make his own opportunity.

Reiss was smiling, amused, tolerant, hypocritical. “Believe me, Tad, she is a melodramatic woman.”

Throughout the elaborate service of the first course, Nathan talked in Nathan’s way—smoothly-spoken ambiguities, in which Tad discovered, trying to attend him, to understand him if not his meanderings, there was a sort of glancing relevancy. Tad’s own mind grew keener as he realized this. Nathan was playing with the truth as a child plays on ice he knows to be dangerous, skating ever closer to trouble and growing ecstatic with the crackling of the ice beneath him. Tad began to participate, and with the strain, further exhausted his nerves, trying to provoke the man to the disaster he fervently believed lay beyond the edge.

Suddenly Reiss leaned across the table and said: “Suppose, Tad, I admitted to you that it was sometimes within my power to save—where I have deliberately not saved: if I were to admit that to you now, how would you profit yourself of such an admission? In other words, who would believe you?”

“The Baroness,” Tad said cunningly.

“Very good,” Reiss said, as though Tad had given a correct answer in recitation. “But not your mother.”

“I’m not so damned sure of that, Nathan.”

“I am so damned sure of it. And so, my dear boy, is the Baroness who knows a good deal more about human nature than you or I. I am going to tell you something about your mother, Tad: some day she will go into a nunnery. Mark my having told you. It is the prison to which people like her commit themselves when there is no other way to expiate their guilt—or the guilt of others.”

“I would rather she was in one now than married to you,” Tad said.

“Would you? Shall I tell you the truth? So would I. I am revolted by her patience, her forebearance. It is like an act of contrition every time she takes me to her bed.”

The words went through Tad like so many stabs. He blurted out: “Why don’t you leave her then?”

Reiss shrugged. “She would not permit it. She is Mrs. Nathan Reiss, part and bond of me. Rather she would die than give me up. Do you not believe it?”

Tad fell back in his chair, faint and damp with a cold perspiration. He struggled with himself to hold consciousness, to focus on something to save him from that degradation: hatred—if only he could hate enough. Then, for the first time in fact—or fantasy—he thought: I must kill this man. It is the only way. He said the words to himself and with them, with their challenge, was revived, even presently exhilarated. He was able to sit up straight and ask out boldly for more wine. He even managed the bravura of eating a morsel of bread. He was able then to eat a shrimp.

Reiss scraped the last of his
pâté
from the plate and spread it on a cracker. He ate it, sipped his champagne and signaled the waiter to refill his glass. “I have not been in a German restaurant in America,” he said. “So foolish of me.”

Tad’s one thought was to get away as quickly as he could, to walk the streets, to think, to plan. If he could go out now and make his way to the haunts of the city’s hunted, among the degraded, the degenerates and the vicious, if he could go among them and yet remain himself apart, unsullied—where better learn the art of killing and the ease to practice it? To kill, but not to die: that was his wish; to live free and strong, in some distant place if necessary, and to be the kinder to all God’s creatures for having done so dreadful but inescapable a duty. There was no other freedom possible for him until he freed his mother and himself from this obsessive man. While his thoughts ran thusly, he toyed with the food set before him, and pretended to attend Nathan’s new tirade.

Had he been less involved in his own dire dream, he might have realized that Nathan Reiss—in his revelation of his true feeling about Martha and now in his derision of the Conference of Jewish Women—had skated far beyond the edge of safety. But Tad was himself beyond that state of comprehension.

Abruptly, as though testing his power to act, he laid his silver down neatly on the plate, and rose from the table.

“Good night, Nathan,” he said, and with the exuberance born of freedom he walked buoyantly from the room.

Everything now was a test. Nathan had their coat checks, but Tad demanded of the check-room girl the right to find his own coat and was given it.

But once he was upon the street everything changed. He found the fog a wall into which he seemed constantly about to crash, and he would draw up suddenly, even throwing up his arm in self-protection. Other people came through it, but they came at him like spirits which disappeared as soon as he was sure that they were real. The foghorns groaned incessantly, complaints from the shores of hell. Loneliness enveloped him and he became afraid, even of himself. He groped his way toward light, the company of neon nobodies on drugstore stools, at bookstore stalls, who nonetheless were flesh and blood and voices. Where he was—what street—he did not know. He thought he had been walking in the angled straightness of the Greenwich Village streets for a long time. And when he found himself once more within a few feet of Schlaacht’s he was confounded. Fear abated. How ironic that he should have walked so boldly—in a circle. Self-contempt returned. Where could he turn to ease this agony of self-derision? He thought again of the Baroness who he believed, as did Nathan, knew more of human nature than anyone he had ever known. Had the cab drawing up to the restaurant at that moment not been caught by emerging diners, he would have taken it directly to her house.

Nathan Reiss came out of the restaurant. Tad moved instinctively into the shadows at the corner of the building. Reiss walked past him within touching distance and on into the fog, his step sure, his direction set. The few seconds Tad hesitated, uncertain whether to follow Nathan or to try to call the Baroness from the phone inside the restaurant door were sufficient for Reiss to disappear. A car drove close to the curb and went on in the direction Reiss had taken, but it was not a taxi. Tad went into the restaurant, looked up the number and dialed. He got a busy signal. The bartender was mixing drinks in manual expertise, the hat-check girl chewing gum, reading a magazine as fast as she could chew: all New York was a busy signal. He dialed again, and again got a busy signal.

He went out then and walked in the direction Nathan had gone. He did not expect to catch up with him, he did not want to, and yet he began to run. He was not aware of passing a soul within the block. He almost stumbled over the feet of a man slumped against a building whom he thought at the instant to be groaning drunk. He was startled, slowed down, shying away from the figure, and then glanced back, for something lay on the ground that caught and reflected light. Tad hesitated and went back knowing, he afterwards thought, before he had seen what it was: a surgical knife smeared all but a small star-bright part of it with blood. He would not remember touching Nathan except that he became aware of the warmth and blood-wetness of him, and his sudden dead limpness and the silence when the moaning had ceased. Nothing else of those few moments was ever clear again to him until the hat-check girl’s scream when he returned to Schlaacht’s Restaurant.

M
UCH OF THE CONVERSATION
in the faculty lounge that night turned upon the weather. One man or another would rise every few minutes and go to a window. The mists rolled in from the East, surge upon surge across the green, like the swells of a slow sea. It was not Covington’s habit to linger so late among his fellows—an hour after dinner perhaps before settling down to the night’s work. But he knew that he was not able to work and he knew that he would meet the last train from New York if Hogan had not reported in before midnight. He had left a message with Tad’s house mother to have the boy call him when he came in.

At a few minutes after eleven he was called to the telephone. Person to person, the operator said, and Covington wondered if Tad were calling him from New York, perhaps having purposely missed the last train.

Covington identified himself.

“Go ahead, Traders City,” the operator said.

“Mr. Covington, this is Martha Reiss, Tad Hogan’s mother.” Her voice was quite clear but a slight tremor ran through it.

“Yes, Mrs. Reiss.”

“You have not heard … from Tad?”

“Not since he went off campus at four this afternoon.”

She was a few seconds going on as though waiting for him to say something further. Then: “Doctor Reiss was murdered in New York tonight. The police have arrested Tad.”

Over and over again going back to the moment afterwards Covington would feel that he had known what she was going to say before he heard the words. He said only: “God Almighty.”

“I can’t get transportation to New York except the train at midnight. Will you go to him, Mr. Covington?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t let him talk too much.”

Covington began to recover his senses. “Shall I get a lawyer?”

“Please do. I am most beholden to you.” And she hung up.

Someone from the president’s office was waiting for him when he got off the phone. The news of the murder had been broadcast at eleven o’clock. Covington called the dean of the law school at home and got the name and phone number of Thomas Andrew Dobbs, one of the foremost criminal lawyers in the country and an alumnus of Rodgers University. Covington was fortunate in reaching Dobbs at once.

“They’ll have to arraign him in night court if we get onto it immediately,” Dobbs said, and from his competent matter-of-factness, Covington supposed that was good. “They’ll try for a confession first, of course.” He was thinking aloud. “Redmond will be our man for it, I think. He’s got the connections.”

It was almost dawn when Covington reached the city, his nerves taut, his eyes strained from concentration on the Turnpike road. He reached the court before Tad had been called. He saw him sitting on a bench between two policemen—an undistinguished looking trio among the discoverers and perpetrators of one night’s crime on the city streets. The low-ceilinged room was fairly crowded still. Beneath the naked light bulbs and against the green, sweating walls of Magistrate’s Court, all men and women, black or white, bore a greenish tinge. The monotonous hum of charges, dismissals, remands, was constant as was the scraping and shuffle of feet on the cement floor. Tad did not see the teacher, not looking to see anyone, just staring straight ahead.

But almost at once Redmond spotted him and came up to introduce himself: Dennis P. Redmond. The two men shook hands. P. for Patrick, surely. He had the smile of a politician, the hand shake of a hurler, and the moment Tad was called up, Covington was grateful he had such counsel. When they stood before the magistrate, they seemed the very caricature of lawyer and client, the one confident, vigorous, a champion, and Tad, his narrow shoulders slumped, only his head defiant, a small, close-cropped knob shooting up as though telescoped out of his collar.

The charge against Thaddeus Marcus Hogan was read in a quick monotone, much of which Covington could not hear. He heard enough, however, to understand that Tad was alleged to have assaulted his stepfather on a lightly trafficked street in Greenwich Village a few minutes after they had quarreled and parted at the restaurant where they had dined. The weapon was a surgical knife, part of a set given to Dr. Reiss at a testimonial luncheon that day.

Hogan pleaded “Not guilty.” But that was the instant when Covington was first able to see the boy’s eyes. He looked sullenly, almost defiantly at Redmond before he said the words.

Hogan was ordered held without bail on suspicion of murder, and remanded to the custody of the police. Covington was shocked at the dispatch with which so portentous a thing was accomplished.

Covington was shocked also at the undisguised satisfaction the uniformed police showed in taking charge of the prisoner. Hogan had never been a boy for making obeisance to authority, and the authoritarians here were going to have it one way or the other. Covington asked the lawyer if he could be allowed to talk to Hogan.

It was so easily accomplished by Redmond’s affable persuasion Covington wished the boy might take notice and example: a vain wish. If Hogan were more of that character he might have made the compromises long ago that would have halted him far short of this disaster. And it was, perhaps, his uncompromising nature which had recommended him to the teacher’s affection. On all sides that day was the prevalence of such friendly persuasion as Redmond’s. Unfriendly witnesses automatically bore testimony against themselves.