Ritual (5 page)

‘Did they ever
find what happened to all those kids?’

Christopher
Prescott shrugged. ‘They dragged the Quas-sapaug. They searched the hills for
fifteen miles in all directions. But I reckon those kids went to New York City;
or maybe to Boston, Massachusetts. They never found one of them, not even a
trace.’

A
silver-coloured Cadillac appeared at the far corner of the green. Abruptly, the
deputy snatched at Charlie’s arm. ‘You listen here now, move that vehicle of
yours. That’s the bank president, coming back from lunch.’

‘Where does he
eat?’ asked Charlie sarcastically.

‘He sure as
hell doesn’t eat at
Le Reposoir
,’
Oliver T. Burack put in. ‘He said to me the other day that Mr Musette was the
closest thing he’d ever met to a goat that walks on its hind legs.’

‘I thought your
friend was deaf,’ Charlie said to Christopher Prescott. ‘I also thought that
neither of you had ever heard of
Le Reposoir
.’

‘Oh, Oliver’s
deaf all right,’ smiled Christopher Prescott. ‘He knows what people are talking
about, though. He has a sixth sense. What do you call it?
Intuition.’

‘Are you
talking bullshit about me again?’ Oliver T. Burack said.

‘Please,’ the
deputy asked Charlie, as the Cadillac came dipping over the last corner of the
green.

But Charlie
persisted. He was beginning to get the measure of these people, and he wanted
to know what was going on.

‘The restaurant,’
he said. ‘How come you wouldn’t admit that you knew about the restaurant?’

Christopher
Prescott stared up at him with watery eyes. ‘Sometimes it’s better to hold your
peace, better to say nothing at all than to say something malign.’ ‘What’s so
malign
about
Le
Reposoir
?’ The deputy came back two or three paces and pulled again at
Charlie’s arm. The bank president’s car had arrived outside the bank, and the
bank president was leaning forward and peering through its windshield at
Charlie’s car as if he were seeing a mirage.

‘You want me to
book you for obstructing justice?’ the deputy demanded, almost panicking.

Christopher
Prescott said to Charlie, ‘You’d better get along, fellow. I wouldn’t want to
get you into trouble.’

‘All right,’
Charlie agreed. He didn’t want to cause too much of a disturbance. MARIA
inspectors were supposed to be ‘discreet and inconspicuous in their behaviour
at all times’. He followed the deputy back up the grassy
slope,
and across the road to his automobile. The bank president was sitting with his
Cadillac’s engine running. His face was hidden behind a geometric reflection of
sky and trees on his windshield, but all the same Charlie gave a cheerful,
insolent wave.

Martin took his
seat beside Charlie and slammed the Olds-mobile’s door. ‘You realize you’re
copping out again,’ he said. ‘Who’s copping out?’ Charlie protested, starting
the engine. I made a deal.’

‘Some deal,’
said Martin scornfully. ‘You could have found out where that stupid restaurant
is without having to ask him.’

‘Oh, really?
How?’

‘You could have
asked me.’

‘You?
You don’t know where it is any more than I do.’

Martin reached
into the pocket of his jacket and produced a small white card. He passed it
over to Charlie without a word. Charlie took it and held it up to the window,
ignoring the contorted face of the deputy outside, who was still desperately
waiting for him to move.

At the top of
the card there was
an
heraldic emblem of wild boars,
embossed in gold, with the copperplate caption ‘Les Celestines’. Underneath
were the words ‘
Le Reposoir
.
Societe de la Cuisine Exceptionelle.
6633
Quassapaug Road, Alien’s Corners, CT.’

Charlie turned
the card over. The reverse side carried the pencilled word ‘Pain’.

‘What the hell
is this?’ Charlie asked Martin. ‘First of all
those
geriatrics try to pretend that they’ve never heard of the place. Now you give
me this. Where did you get it, for Christ’s sake?

And why the
hell didn’t you show it to me before?’

The deputy
tapped on the window with his knuckles. ‘Sir,’ he mouthed, ‘will you please
move?’

Charlie let
down his window and held up the card. ‘Is this the address? Sixty-six
thirty-three Quassapaug Road?’

The deputy
stared at him. After all, if Charlie had known the address all along, why had
he kicked up such a fuss about it? ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

Charlie said,
‘Okay. At least we’re making some progress.’ He was about to shift his car into
drive and pull away when the president of the First Litchfield Savings Bank
approached him – a tall, wide-shouldered, white-haired man with a head as large
as a lion. He bent down beside Charlie’s open window, and said, ‘Good
afternoon. I hope you don’t feel that I’m being autocratic here.’

‘Don’t worry
about it,’ Charlie replied. ‘I’m just about to pull out. My friend the deputy
tells me you have squatter’s rights on this parking space.’

The bank
president stared at Charlie level-eyed, and then smiled. ‘You could call them
squatter’s rights, I suppose. My
family have
lived in
this town since 1845. We own most of it, and hold mortgages on the rest. So
you’ll forgive me if I tend to regard this parking space as private property.’

‘I’m only
passing through,’ Charlie told him.

The bank
president’s pale grey eyes focused on Martin.
‘You and your
boy?’

‘That’s right.
A single parent’s tour of hospitable New England.’

‘Listen, I
apologize,’ the bank president said. ‘You stay right there. I’ll have Clive
park my car for me. Alien’s Corners is a friendly town. I certainly don’t
expect its law officers to hassle visitors on my behalf.’

He reached his
hand into the car, and said, ‘Walter Haxalt. Welcome to Alien’s Corners.’

‘Charlie
McLean. And this is Martin McLean.’

‘Happy to know
you,’ said Walter Haxalt. ‘Please feel free to stay here as long as you want.’

‘As a matter of
fact,’ we’re on our way to Quassapaug Road.’

Walter Haxalt
glanced around at the deputy,
then
turned back to
Charlie. ‘I don’t know that there’s anything of interest to a tourist up there.
Quassapaug Road is just a road. Not much of a road for driving on, either. It’s
all hairpins from begining to end.’

‘We want to
visit
Le Reposoir
,’ said Charlie. He
held up the card that Martin had given him.

Walter Haxalt’s
expression went through a subtle but distinct change. It looked almost as if
his face had been modelled out of pink wax, and an oven door had been opened
close by, melting and shifting it. ‘I suppose Clive has told you that
Le Reposoir
is completely private.’

Charlie reached
forward and switched off the Oldsmobile’s engine.

‘All right,’ he
said hotly. ‘Would somebody mind telling me what in the hell is going on?’

‘I’m sorry, I
don’t understand,’ Walter Haxalt replied. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you in any
way.’

Tm talking
about this restaurant,
Le Reposoir
,’
said Charlie. ‘Mrs Foss back at the Iron Kettle warned me against visiting it.
Those two good old boys on the bench there said they’d never heard of it, when
they obviously had. And your pet deputy here did everything he could to tell me
that I wouldn’t be welcome.
Now you.’

Walter Haxalt
said nothing. Clive the deputy stroked his moustache as if it were a small
furry pet.

‘What I want to
know is what’s so darned off-putting about this place?’ Charlie appealed.
Walter Haxalt’s refusal to reply was quickly defusing his temper, and making
him feel embarrassed. ‘Is the food really that bad?’

Walter Haxalt
stood up straight. ‘I’m sorry, Mr McLean, I don’t think that Alien’s Corners
can really give you the kind of welcome you expect. My suggestion is that you
drive right on to Bethlehem. There’s a good New England-style restaurant there.
They serve home-made hams and excellent boiled beef.’

Martin said,
‘Dad, come on. Please.’

Charlie
hesitated, biting his lip. Then he twisted the key in the ignition again, so
violently that he made the starter-motor screech. He was just about to pull
away from the kerb, however, when he glimpsed something moving behind the maple
trees on the far side of the green. It could have been nothing more than a
cloud shadow, or a wind-blown sheet of newspaper. It had vanished in an instant.
But Charlie was sure that he had seen a small figure, dressed in grubby white.
A figure with the body of an infant and the fully developed head of
a man.

T
hey drove north-westwards out of Alien’s Corners past two rows of
white wooden houses.

They saw nobody
at all, nobody walking by the roadside, no other cars. After a quarter of a
mile, they were back amongst the woods again, surrounded by the rusting funeral
of yet another lost summer. Although it was still early, the sun had already dropped
below the treeline, and glittered at them tantalizingly, always out of reach
behind the branches.

Charlie said
nothing for a while, but when Martin reached forward to switch on the tape
player, he took hold of his wrist and said, ‘Not now. I want to talk.’

Martin folded
his arms and sat back in his seat.

‘I want to know
where you found that card.’

Martin
shrugged. ‘I picked it up at that Iron Kettle place.’

‘Where?
I didn’t see any cards there.’

‘I found it on
the floor.’

Charlie lowered
his sun visor. ‘You’re not telling me the truth, Martin. I don’t know why, but
you’d better start explaining yourself pretty darned quick, otherwise this trip
is over here and now and you go off to the Harrisons.’

Martin said,
‘It’s the truth, Dad. I found it.’

‘We were
talking about
Le Reposoir
and you
just happened to find one of their cards? For Christ’s sake, what do you take
me for?’

Martin sulkily
lowered his head.

‘It’s over,
have you got that?’ Charlie told him. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to call the Harrisons
and then I’m going to drive you right back to New York.’

Martin said
nothing. ‘Have you got that?’ Charlie repeated. ‘Yes, I’ve got it,’ said
Martin, in his best ‘anything-to-keep-the-old-man-quiet’ voice.

Charlie slowed down
as they approached a steeply sloping intersection with a sign saying Washington
in one direction and Bethlehem in the other. He stopped the car by the side of
the road and opened up his map. ‘This should be Quassapaug Road right here.’

He took a right,
and cautiously steered the Oldsmobile up a tight corkscrew gradient, under
overhanging oaks and American beeches. The sun danced behind the leaves.
Somewhere behind the thicket fence of tree trunks, there were creamy clouds and
pale blue sky; but here in the woods, C harlie began to feel strangely
imprisoned and claustrophobic.

‘All right,
admitted, I haven’t been much of a father to you,’ he told Martin. ‘But I never
told your mother one single lie. I was never unfaithful, and I always sent
money.
Always.’

‘Well, Saint
Charlie McLean,’ said Martin.

Charlie swerved
the car off the side of the road and jammed his foot down on the parking brake.
He tried clumsily to smack Martin’s head, but Martin ducked and wrestled away,
and the two of them found themselves panting and glaring at each other, hands
clasped tightly, a fit fifteen-year-old fighting a tired forty-one-year-old.

‘Listen,’ said
Charlie. ‘Either we try to get along together like father and son, or else
that’s the finish. And I mean the finish. You’re old enough to survive without
me,
if that’s the way you want it. I don’t mind.’

Martin released
his father’s wrists and turned his face away. Charlie knew that he was crying.

Someone else
had once cried like this, in the passenger seat of his car, a very long time
ago, in Milwaukee. Charlie felt as if the world was an ambush of endlessly
repeated agonies, and here it was again.
The argument, the
tears, the temporary reconciliation that both of them knew woune.
He
squeezed Martin’s shoulder but there was no love between them. He might just as
well have been squeezing an avocado to make sure that it was ripe.

‘I’m sorry,’ he
said, although he wasn’t.

He continued
driving around the roller-coaster curves of Quassapaug Road. A wild turkey
scrambled across the blacktop in front of them, and Charlie swerved towards it
in a feigned attempt to run it down. ‘You ever eaten wild turkey, barbecued
with new season’s squash?’

Martin said,
‘We never have turkey, even at Thanksgiving. Marjorie doesn’t like it.’

‘Marjorie,
Marjorie! Why the hell can’t you call me Charlie?’

‘Because you’re
Dad, that’s why.’

They passed the
entrance to
Le Reposoir
so
unexpectedly that they overshot it by a hundred feet. Charlie caught a flash of
wrought-iron gates, painted black, and a discreet black signboard.

The
Oldsmobile’s tyres slithered on the tarmac. Then Charlie twisted around in his
seat and backed up all the way to the gates, with the car’s transmission
whinnying.

‘That’s it,
Le Reposoir
. Societe de la Cuisine Excep-tionelle.’

Martin stared
at the sign unenthusiastically. ‘Yes, and look what else it says. No visitors
except by prior arrangement. These grounds are patrolled by guard dogs.’

‘We can talk to
them, at least,’ said Charlie. He parked the car right off the road, in the entrance-way
in front of the gates, and then climbed out. There was an intercom set into the
bricks of the left-hand gatepost. He pushed the button, and then turned to
Martin, who was still sitting in the car, and smiled in what was the nearest he
could manage to encouragement. Martin pretended that he hadn’t noticed, and in
the end Charlie turned away. God, he thought, they’re like prima-donnas, these
teenage boys. You only have to raise your voice to them, and they start sulking
and pouting and bursting into tears.