Pressure Drop (25 page)

Brock shook his head. “Can't really call that a blue hole, can you? It's not even blue.”

“All the inland ones are that way.”

“You dove it?”

“Years ago.”

“Yeah? I've never seen the point.” He glanced at Matthias. “What's down there?”

“Nothing.”

They fell silent. Small, quick brown flies appeared and descended on Hew. Then came slow fat black ones. They found his nostrils right away, then his lips, then his open eye. “Maybe we should cover him up,” Brock said. But then they saw Constable Welles making his way steadily up the path. News could still travel on Andros without electronic aid.

Constable Welles climbed the steps to the terrace. He paused at the top and took a deep breath. Constable Welles was a tall old man with tightly curled white hair, a long bony face and a big frame that suggested he had once been very strong. He wore his summer uniform all year long: black shorts with red stripes down the sides, black knee socks, black shoes cracked but highly polished, white shirt with red trim. He nodded to Matthias and Brock, then gazed down at the body. “That be Sir Hew?” he said. Constable Welles had a bass voice, not frayed and rumbling, like Nottage's, but smooth and musical, like Paul Robeson's. His knees cracked as he knelt to examine the body. The quick brown flies darted away; the fat black ones took to the air with more reluctance.

Matthias told him how Hew had been found and why they had moved him, about the night before and the overturned bottle. The constable acknowledged this explanation with a deep sound from his chest, longer than a grunt, shorter than a hum: it resisted interpretation. Then he picked the seaweed out of Hew's hair and rose. The flies descended.

The constable bent over the snifter and smelled its contents. “Anyone be touching this?”

“I did,” Matthias said. “But that's where it was.”

Constable Welles made his deep sound again. He gazed down where the Armagnac bottle had fallen. It had drifted away, or filled with water and sunk out of sight. The constable pulled a clean white handkerchief from the pocket of his shorts and carefully wrapped the snifter in it, spilling nothing.

“Do you want the bottle too?” Brock asked.

“It be gone,” Constable Welles said.

“We could look for it,” Matthias told him.

The constable shook his head. “Too late, mahn.” He stood before Brock and Matthias, but looked between them rather than at either one. “Sir Hew has no kin,” he said.

Was it a question? Matthias said: “I'm not sure.”

“No kin,” Constable Welles repeated, like a mournful theme sounded on the lowest string of the bass violin. He stared down at the seaweed in his hand. Time passed. The flies buzzed; waves began slapping the base of the cliff; a third buzzard rose out of the pine trees and went into an orbit of its own, not as high as the other two. Brock yawned.

At last Constable Welles looked up. “I don' like to dirty the name of a dead man,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Matthias asked.

“If a man take his own life.”

“Is there evidence of that?”

Constable Welles was watching the cockroach in the Ritz crackers. “That wall be plenty wide,” he said quietly. Then there was a silence until Reverend Christie came on the terrace with a few men from Blufftown.

Reverend Christie was a fat man with a clerical collar, a stained white suit and a heavy gold watch which he consulted frequently. He gazed down on the body. “Poor sinner,” he said. “What happened to him?”

“Death by accident,” replied Constable Welles without hesitation. “Give him a Christian burial.”

“May he rest in peace,” said Reverend Christie. The men from Blufftown gazed at the objects in the constable's hands: seaweed and a crystal glass wrapped in a white handkerchief.

“No kin,” said Constable Welles.

Reverend Christie frowned. “No kin anywhere?”

“No kin.”

“Then, my good friend,” said the reverend, “who shall pay for the Christian burial?”

Not I, said the pig
. “I'm sure his estate will cover it,” Matthias said. “In the meantime, I'll pay whatever's necessary.”

“God bless you,” said Reverend Christie.

The men from Blufftown carried Hew away. Reverend Christie poked his head through the open sliding glass door, glanced quickly into the house and followed. Constable Welles walked to the balustrade, poured the contents of the snifter into the sea and set the glass down where he had found it. Then he left, taking only the seaweed.

“What was that all about?” Brock asked.

“He liked him,” Matthias said.

“Yeah?”

Half an hour later, Matthias was in his office, on the phone to a man named Willoughby at the trust department of Hew's branch of Barclay's Bank in the City of London.

“What did he die of?” asked Willoughby.

“A fall.”

“I see. He lived a long time, considering.” There was a silence. “Well then, Mr. Matthias, thanks so much for getting in touch.”

“Will someone be coming over to handle his estate?”

“His estate?” said Willoughby.

“Yes. I don't know if he has a lawyer, or whether he left a will.”

“May I ask what your relationship was to Sir Hew?”

“We were neighbors.”

“Ah. Did you know him well?”

“I wouldn't say well.”

“Not well,” said Willoughby. “Then perhaps it will surprise you to learn that there is no estate.”

“Hew told me he received monthly income payments from you.”

“Not income, Mr. Matthias. He'd been encroaching on principal for the last decade. Encroaching heavily. The balance in his account is presently … two-hundred-forty-seven pounds, thirty-six pence.”

“That's all he had left?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“There's still the house to be sold.”

“I don't think we need hurry about that,” said Willoughby.

“Why not? There are bound to be some expenses now. The burial, for one.”

“I gather you haven't been apprised of all the facts, Mr. Matthias. Sir Hew hasn't owned the house for a number of years now.”

“Who owns the house?”

“We do. The bank, that is. Sir Hew mortgaged it heavily at one time. He proved unable to maintain the payments. We were forced to foreclose. Naturally we continued to allow him residency, at a very reasonable rent.”

“Which you skimmed off the top of the trust account.”

“I don't quite follow you.”

“Never mind,” Matthias said. The image of Hew subsisting on ant-infested crackers made him angry. “Do you own the contents of the house too?”

“Not me personally, of course. The bank. All contents and furnishings.”

“Including the Gauguin? It must be worth hundreds of thousands all by itself.”

Willoughby laughed, a laugh quickly masked by genteel coughing. “The Gauguin. Did Sir Hew never tell you the story of the Gauguin?”

“What story?”

“I'm taken aback. I would have thought he'd have dined out on it for years.”

“What story?”

“Simply put, the Gauguin is a fake. Sir Hew must have known it all along—he bought it in Paris sometime in the twenties at a rather low price, too low, I'm afraid, for a Gauguin, even then. But it was thoroughly inauthenticated, if you'll pardon the coinage, in the appraisal conducted before he entered into the initial mortgage. He was quite a character, as I'm sure you're aware.”

“What was going to happen when he couldn't pay the rent?”

“Fortunately we'll never have to face that decision.”

“But it's in your interest to maximize your return.”

“Without doubt. I'm glad you understand, and I'm sure Sir Hew would have as well. He was quite realistic, beneath his rather colorful … patina. I met him several times in the late fifties. A most amusing fellow. Thank you so much for your call. We'll be in touch with the local authority.”

“What do you want done with the Armagnac?”

“The Armagnac, Mr. Matthias?”

“Do you want me to send it to you personally, or to the bank impersonally?”

“Armagnac? I'm afraid I don't follow quite.”

“Goodbye, Willoughby.”

Matthias hung up. He went outside. Brock was passing by, a tank on each shoulder.

“Something wrong, Matt?”

“He killed himself.”

“Why d'you say that?”

“Just take my word for it.”

Matthias returned to Hew's house. Piaf, the drinking, the scrapbooks, two-hundred-forty-seven pounds, thirty-six pence: it added up to suicide; and put a different slant on Hew's last words. “
I'll miss your company
.”

Matthias stood before the painting with the Gauguin signature. “Gauguin,” it said, “1897.” It looked like a good painting to him, but he knew nothing about art. He was still gazing at it when he remembered the scrapbooks. Hew had promised to search for all his old scrapbooks. He walked out on the terrace to get the scrapbook Hew had shown him hours before, with the Nijinsky picture, and all the young men, and Dr. Hiram Standish at the University of Heidelberg. It had been on the table, beside the tray of Ritz crackers. The tray was still there, empty now, and so was the flashlight and Matthias's glass. But the scrapbook was gone.

Matthias searched the entire house. He found drawers full of old love letters, a collection of erotica from the twenties that seemed refined compared with what was available in any American city, and a copy of
Mr. Norris Changes Trains
with the inscription, “To Hew, who remembered the wine, gratefully, Christopher,” but he didn't find the scrapbook, or any other scrapbooks.

Hew had three old suitcases. Matthias put the “Gauguin” in one, for reasons he couldn't explain. The other two he filled with all the bottles of Armagnac that were left because he didn't want Mr. Willoughby to get his hands on them and he didn't think Hew would have wanted that either.

24

Now he was sick.

It was Fritz's fault.

Fritz had let him get cold. He had caught a chill. It made him want to cough, but he couldn't cough. He felt his chest filling with liquid. It was, he thought, like drowning. That struck him as appropriate, somehow, but he couldn't think why. His memory was very bad.

The medical man appeared. “Hi, I'm Dr. Robert. Remember me?”

Certainly, doctor. I even remember when you said I might not remember. You were right
.

Dr. Robert stuck a breathing tube in his nose and hooked him to a respirator. He became a component, one third of a device—IV, respirator, him—designed for a purpose he couldn't figure out. He left out the catheter, which for some reason bothered him most of all.

“This is merely temporary,” said Dr. Robert, leaving. “Not to worry.”

But temporary went on and on. Happy no longer saw the outside. He lost touch with the tingling electromagnetic force and the smell of the living planet. The IV forced nourishment into him, the respirator air. His body accepted them. He watched the white ceiling and the brown spider and longed for painkillers, even though he wasn't in pain. He had caught a chill. Now he was in the white room all the time. But he couldn't blame Fritz. Fritz had always been nice to him and now he was a simple old man. He had always been a simple old man.

There had been a song about a white room. And another about a white rabbit. Or was it the same song? A song about a white rabbit in a white room? He didn't think so, but he wasn't sure. He slept. He woke. He slept. When he woke again he knew they were two different songs. His memory began to stir at last. After a few more sleeps, he could remember all the words to the song about the white rabbit, and soon he could sing the white room song too, sing it in his mind. He spent time singing songs in his mind, not scanning them and realizing he knew them and going on to the next—there was no forgetfulness in that kind of remembering—but singing them in real time. He sang and sang: Rodgers and Hart, the Beatles, the Stones, Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline, children's songs, nursery rhymes, spirituals, Gilbert and Sullivan, Elvis, Cole Porter, Leon Redbone; sometimes in an organized, logical order, sometimes randomly.
Camptown Races, America the Beautiful, Teen Angel, Positively Fourth Street, Fly Me to the Moon, Jailhouse Rock, Bring It on Home to Me, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, The Little Old Lady from Pasadena, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Your Cheatin' Heart, Isn't It Romantic?, Two Sleepy People, The Locomotion, The Flying Purple People Eater, Marie
.

Then one day he just stopped. He didn't want to sing. He didn't even want to hear music, had it been provided for him, which it never was. He just lay there, component number three. But his memory was coming back. It was very sharp. He decided to relive his life.

He began with his first memory.

He sat in the paneled compartment of a train. Outside snow fell, slanting across the window and obscuring the view of forested countryside. Inside his mother wore a black hat with a long hat pin. She sat beside him, but not touching. Opposite sat Fritz, also wearing a black hat. Sometimes Mother and Fritz talked, but he couldn't understand a word they said. Sometimes his mother dabbed at her eyes. He cried. Fritz gave him black licorice. He ate it and stopped crying. The world was black and white, black on the inside, white on the outside.

First memory. Happy took his time with it, going over the details, sleeping, waking, sleeping. He knew it was time to move on to the next memory, but he resisted it. Not because he wasn't going to like it; he could see it coming and knew he would: a piano, beams of sunlight filled with dust motes, a buzzing fly, finger pressing the lowest of the white keys. No: he resisted it because he felt another memory beneath the first memory, waiting, like the bottom layer of an archaeological dig, to be discovered, or struggling, like a smothering creature, to be free. Archaeological dig. Smothering creature. He concentrated on those two images, shifting them, rubbing them together, superimposing them. But they wouldn't mate, wouldn't conceive, wouldn't bring forth what he wanted.