Hunter and the Trap (6 page)

“He'll make a run for it tonight, won't he?” the manager said.

“I guess so.”

Out on the dark street, there was a cool breeze. The summer was almost done. It was a pleasant night. I thought about getting drunk, but the thought was not too pleasant. I thought about calling someone to have dinner with me, but first I called Liz. She wasn't home. Then I called a few people, but everyone knew about Andy being the quarry, and I was close enough to Andy for the people I knew not to desire closeness with me. Not on that evening anyway. I walked downtown and then I went into one of the flicks on Third Avenue, and I sat through a picture without knowing what went on in front of me and without being able to remember any of it; and then I walked over to the Oak Room at the Plaza and had a few more drinks and hoped that someone would happen by, but no one did. I went home then.

15

I slept badly. I dreamed and the dreams were not good, and then I woke up and lay in the dark and heard Liz come in; and then I must have dozed a little, because the telephone woke me at about six in the morning. It was O'Brian, from the Twenty-third Squad, and he told me about Andy.

“When?”

“Maybe twenty minutes ago. On Fifth Avenue, just south of the 56th Street corner.”

“I'll be there.”

“Good. That's good. I'll wait for you.”

“What son of a bitch—” Liz began.

I put away the telephone and told her that Andy was dead.

“Oh, my God—”

It was no use to hurt her, and anything I would have said would have hurt her. It was never any use to hurt her; the world hurt her too much, and you would have to be a psychopath to add to it. I dressed and got down to 56th Street, and then I was sorry that I had been in such a damned hurry.

The hunt had finished there, and there was nothing recognizable left of Andy. What had been him was spread in a bloody smear halfway across Fifth Avenue, and the men from the morgue were trying to gather it up and make something in the way of remains out of it.

At this hour, on a Sunday morning, Fifth Avenue was all but deserted. The one or two citizens who came by did not stop. The smear was not something that anyone would want to stand around and look at.

O'Brian, who was supervising things, spotted me and came over with a handkerchief filled with the few possessions that had survived Andy—keys for doors I had never stepped through, some bills and some change, a crushed card case, a penknife, cufflinks bent shapeless, a broken pen—what could have belonged to Andy or to any other mortal man.

“I'm going to throw up,” I said to him.

O'Brian nodded and led me over to a cardboard container that was conveniently waiting. Evidently, others had felt the same way.

“Too much to drink last night.”

“Sure,” O'Brian said. “When did you see him last, Monte?”

“Last night at the Carlyle. At about eight or so, I guess.”

“Did you know he would make a run for it?”

“He told me.”

“Did you try to stop him?”

“Andy?”

“All right, but why did he stay in the city? Why didn't he break clear?”

I shook my head.

“Who are the next of kin, Monte?”

“One wife is dead. Another lives in Paris. The third lives in San Francisco and hates his guts.”

“How about that Spanish dame and the little creep with the black polish hair?”

“They worked for him.”

“Well, someone has to come over to the precinct with me,” O'Brian said, “and sign papers and then go to the morgue and make arrangements.”

“I'll do that.”

“Funeral arrangements?”

“I'll start the ball rolling. I'll do what I can.”

“My God,” O'Brian said, “Andy Bell had enough friends. We certainly won't have any trouble in that department.”

16

We didn't. Andy had been part Episcopalian, and the Rector of St. John the Divine suggested that the services be held there. Over three thousand people turned up, and the front part of the Cathedral contained about five percent of the best names in
Who's Who,
not to mention the
Blue Book.
Liz and I patched things up, and I dutifully put out two hundred and twenty-five dollars for the black ensemble she wore. She looked very attractive. I suppose a hundred people mentioned to me how attractive Liz looked. Diva and Jose were not there. They took off the same day Andy died, and no one ever saw them again or heard of them again, and the talk around was that they had robbed Andy of every nickel he had. But the truth of it was that every nickel he had was on him when he died, and his estate was deeply in debt, even though the royalties would pay off the debts in due time and show a handsome income eventually.

Andy's third wife's father had established a family plot in an Episcopalian cemetery out in the Hamptons. Strangely, with all that great crowd at the cathedral, only a handful drove to the cemetery: his third wife, her mother, myself and some cameramen. It was a pleasant day, and the cemetery was on a high, pretty, windy knoll. Liz was going to go out with me, but at the last moment she developed a migraine headache and had to go to bed.

The Trap

Chapter One

Bath, England
October 12, 1945

M
RS
. J
EAN
A
RBALAID
W
ASHINGTON
, D. C.

My dear Sister:

I admit to lethargy and perhaps to a degree of indifference—although it is not indifference in your terms, not in the sense of ceasing to care. I care for you very much and think about you a good deal. After all, we have only each other, and apart from the two of us, our branch of the Feltons has ceased to exist. So in my failure to reply to three separate letters, there was no more than a sort of inadequacy. I had nothing to say because there was nothing that I wanted to say.

You knew where I was, and I asked Sister Dorcas to write you a postcard or something to the effect that I had mended physically even if my brain was nothing to shout about. I have been rather depressed for the past two months—the doctors here call it melancholia, with their British propensity for Victorian nomenclature—but they tell me that I am now on the mend in that department as well. Apparently, the overt sign of increasing mental health is an interest in things. My writing to you, for example, and also the walks I have taken around the city. Bath is a fascinating town, and I am rather pleased that the rest home they sent me to is located here.

They were terribly short of hospitals with all the bombing and with the casualties sent back here after the Normandy landing, but they have a great talent for making do. Here they took several of the great houses of the Beau Nash period and turned them into rest homes—and managed to make things very comfortable. Ours has a garden, and when a British garden is good, it has no equal anywhere else in the world. In fact, it spurred me to make some rather mawkish advances to Sister Dorcas one sunny day, and she absolutely destroyed my budding sexual desires with her damned understanding and patience. There is nothing as effective in cutting down a clean-cut American lad as a tall, peach-skinned, beautiful and competent British lady who is doubling as a nurse and has a high-bridged nose into the bargain.

I have been ambulant lately, pottering around Bath and poking my nose into each and every corner. The doctor encourages me to walk for the circulation and final healing of my legs, and since Bath is built up and down, I take a good deal of exercise. I go to the old Roman baths frequently, being absolutely fascinated by them and by the whole complex that is built around the Pump Room—where Nash and his pals held forth. So much of Bath is a Georgian city, perhaps more perfect architecturally than any other town in England. But there are also the baths, the old baths of the Middle Ages, and then the Roman baths which date back before that. In fact, the doctors here have insisted that I and other circulatory-problem cases take the baths. I can't see how it differs from an ordinary hot bath, but British physicians still believe in natural healing virtues and so forth.

Why am I a circulatory problem, you are asking yourself; and just what is left of old Harry Felton and what has been shot away and how much of his brain is soggy as a bowl of farina? Yes, indeed—I do know you, my sister. May I say immediately that in my meanderings around the town, I am permitted to be alone; so apparently I am not considered to be the type of nut one locks away for the good of each and everyone.

Oh, there are occasions when I will join up with some convalescent British serviceman for an amble, and sometimes I will have a chat with the locals in one of the pubs, and on three or four occasions I have wheedled Sister Dorcas into coming along and letting me hold her hand and make a sort of pass, just so I don't forget how; but by and large, I am alone. You will remember that old Harry was always a sort of loner—so apparently the head is moderately dependable.

It is now the next day, old Jean. October 13. I put the letter away for a day. Anyway, it is becoming a sort of epistle, isn't it? The thing is that I funked it—notice the way I absorb the local slang—when it came down to being descriptive about myself, and I had a talk with Sister Dorcas, and she sent me to the psychiatrist for a listen. He listens and I talk. Then he pontificates.

“Of course,” he said to me, after I had talked for a while, “this unwillingness to discuss one's horrors is sometimes worn like a bit of romantic ribbon. You know, old chap—a decoration.”

“I find you irritating,” I said to him.

“Of course you do. I am trying to irritate you.”

“Why?”

“I suppose because you are an American and I have a snobbish dislike for Americans.”

“Now you're being tactful.”

The psychiatrist laughed appreciatively and congratulated me on a sense of humor. He is a nice fellow, the psychiatrist, about forty, skinny, as so many British professionals are, long head, big nose, very civilized. To me, Jean, that is the very nice thing about the English—the sense of civilization you feel.

“But I don't want you to lose your irritation,” he added.

“No danger.”

“I mean if we get to liking and enjoying each other, we'll simply cover things up. I want to root up a thing or two. You're well enough to take it—and you're a strong type, Felton. No schizoid tendencies—never did show any. Your state of depression was more of a reaction to your fear that you would never walk again, but you're walking quite well now, aren't you? Yet Sister Dorcas tells me you will not write a word to your family about what happened to you. Why not?”

“My family is my sister. I don't want to worry her, and Sister Dorcas has a big mouth.”

“I'll tell her that.”

“And I'll kill you.”

“And as far as worrying your sister—my dear fellow, we all know who your sister is. She is a great scientist and a woman of courage and character. Nothing you can tell her would worry her, but your silence does.”

“She thinks I've lost my marbles?”

“You Americans are delightful when you talk the way you imagine we think you talk. No, she doesn't think you're dotty. Also, I wrote to her a good many months ago, telling her that you had been raked by machine-gun fire across both legs and describing the nature of your injuries.”

“Then there it is.”

“Of course not. It is very important for you to be able to discuss what happened to you. You suffered trauma and great pain. So did many of us.”

“I choose not to talk about it,” I said. “Also, you are beginning to bore me.”

“Good. Irritation and boredom. What else?”

“You are a goddamn nosey Limey, aren't you?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Never take No for an answer.”

“I try not to.”

“All right, doc—it is as simple as this. I do not choose to talk about what happened to me because I have come to dislike my race.”