Wilde West (38 page)

While her strong shrewd hands kneaded the flesh and the muscle above his aching hip, Grigsby sighed happily. From time to time he remembered to close his mouth, so he wouldn't drool all over her sheets.

“It is good?” the Countess Mathilde de la Môle had asked him after a while. He could hear the smile in her voice.

“Good don't even come close,” Grigsby said. He sighed again. “My God.”

Her fingers were prodding at the pain, locating it, enclosing it somehow, capturing it and then pushing it deep down below awareness.

“But it don't hardly seem fair,” Grigsby said. “Me just lyin' here like a lump on a log while you work at me.”

“Quiet,” she said. “You were not just lying there a while ago. As I recall, you were quite active.”

Grigsby grinned against the pillow, ridiculously pleased with himself. Despite his eagerness (and he had been as eager as an sixteen-year-old buck), he had pleasured her three times before taking his final pleasure himself. And now, inside his head, a small excited thought capered like a circus dwarf: She's a goddamn
countess
, from goddamn
France
, and she's giving you a goddamn
back-rub!

She kissed him gently on the spine, between his shoulders. “Better?”

“Better,” he said. “I thank you.”

She swung herself off his thighs and lay down beside him. With an effort—he was so limp that he felt he might melt into the mattress—Grigsby rolled over onto his side to look at her.

Her right elbow against the pillow, her head propped against her hand, she lay with her tousled blond hair loose along her smooth white shoulders. Her red lips, slightly more pouty now, were parted in a smile. Her skin was misted shiny with sweat, and she wore her naked body as proudly as most women wore a brand new dress.

He grinned. “I'll tell you one thing, Mathilde,” he said. This time he didn't blush; nothing like a roll in the hay to smooth the edges off a fellow's embarrassment. “You surely do take the cake.”

She laughed. “Take the cake? This is good?”

“Damn good.”

Smiling, she inclined her head. “Then I thank you for the compliment.”

“This is the first time,” he said, “bein' with you, it's the first time all day I been able to forget about those killin's.”

She smiled sadly. “And now,” she put her finger to his chin, “you remember them again.”

“Yeah,” said Grigsby. “Well. They ain't gonna go away.”

She pursed her lips. “It is a pity that you cannot learn something of the childhood of all the men traveling with Oscair.”

“What good would that do?”

She moved her shoulder lightly in a shrug. “It all begins there, does it not? We spend the rest of our lives attempting to make right the wrongs which we suffer in childhood.”

Grigsby grinned; he thought she was joking. “Get revenge, like?”

She said seriously, “Sometimes, I think, yes. A child who is beaten by his parents becomes, very often, a parent who beats his child. But I believe that we all suffer, that we all become wounded. Even with the best intentions in the world, our parents cannot always be there when we stumble, cannot always console us when we hurt. And so we grow up, all of us, somehow knowing at the core of our selves that we are completely alone.”

“Yeah, well, sure,” said Grigsby. “That's just the way of the world.”

“But no,” she said. “I speak now not of a conscious awareness, a philosophical position. I speak of a flaw, a wound that lies concealed in the structure of the soul. And I believe that throughout our lives we will be attracted to situations, and to people, that will sooner or later cause us pain. And the result will be that the wound, the fundamental pain of the soul, reemerges.”

Grigsby frowned. “You're sayin' we pick people who're gonna
hurt
us?”

“Or who will cause us to hurt them, which will of course hurt us as well.”

Grigsby thought then of Clara. Her face twisted in pain, her voice unraveling, ragged, as she shrieked at him: Bob, how could you
do
this?

He pushed away the image. “That don't make much sense,” he said.

“You have read Stendahl?” she said.

He frowned. “That a book?”

She smiled. “An author. He talks about the phenomenon of crystallization. We meet someone—a man, let us say, meets a woman. He is attracted to her, and soon he discovers that all the qualities he most admires in a woman have begun to crystallize around this particular female. She is not only beautiful, but also intelligent, and kind, and loving. She is altogether perfect.”

Thinking of Clara, Grigsby said, “Some women can come pretty close to bein' perfect.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But the point I make here is that frequently our minds crystallize, they
construct
, this perfection. And I believe that the mind constructs the perfection around an individual whom the soul, the spirit selects. Someone who is in fact perfect for the spirit's purposes.”

“Somebody who's gonna hurt us?”

“I believe that the spirit, the soul, wishes to heal itself of its wound. You cannot heal a wound unless you are aware that it exists. And so the spirit seeks out those people who will, sooner or later, cause us exactly the sort of pain which already we suffer, but at a level below consciousness.”

Grigsby smiled. These folks from Europe surely did like their theories. “And you're sayin' everybody does this?”

She smiled at the gentle mockery in his voice, and she tapped him on the chin. “I believe so, yes.”

“What about the folks who get married and live happily ever after?”

She smiled again. “Apart from fairy tales, do you know many of these?”

“Some,” Grigsby said, but offhand he couldn't think of any. Him and Clara? Gerry and Mary Hanrahan? Dell and Barbara Jameson? He asked her, “And what about this sonovabitch who's killin' the women? How do you work him in?”

She shrugged. “This man, this killer, perhaps in a sense he is trying to heal
his
wound by the murder of these women. Something quite horrible must have happened to him when he was a child. If you could learn what it was, you might better understand him.”

“I don't gotta understand him. All I gotta do is catch him.”

“But perhaps you must understand him in order to catch him.”

“Hope not,” Grigsby said. “I don't reckon I'll ever understand him. Don't reckon I really want to.” He frowned.

She smiled. “Perhaps we should try to make you forget this matter again.”

Grigsby grinned. “What you got in mind?”

She told him.

Afterward, without intending to, Grigsby had slipped off to sleep. Only to come thrashing out of it, soaked with sweat and crying Clara's name as he scrambled from the horror of Molly Woods. The oil lamps were off; Mathilde must have blown them out. Pale moonlight streamed through the window. For a few minutes, before he could pull himself together, he trembled like a baby against her body, and in the darkness she held him.

At last, his breathing and his heartbeat back to normal, the image of Molly Woods finally fading, he eased himself away from her shoulder. Ashamed at the weakness he had revealed, he forced a hollow chuckle through a throat that was still thick and tight.

“Bad dream,” he told her.

She said nothing, only stroked his cheek.

Grigsby rolled over and fished his watch from his vest pocket, struck a match. Three o'clock.

“I gotta go, Mathilde,” he told her.

She nodded. “If you must.”

Grigsby dressed himself, keeping his back to the Countess—acting the fool like that, hollering and shouting in his sleep, had made him feel lumpish and clumsy once more.

Buttoning up the sheepskin jacket, he turned to her and said, “Am I gonna be able to see you again?”

She smiled. “But of course. If you wish it.”

“I do. And listen.” He felt his face reddening once more. Too dark for her to see it—good thing. “Well,” he said. “I'm real sorry about all the commotion. Wakin' you up and all.”

She shook her head. “We all have our terrors, Bohb.”

He looked down at her. He felt suddenly that he was leaving her with something left undone, something left unsaid; but he couldn't think what they might be. He nodded. “Thank you, Mathilde. I'll see you soon.”

She smiled again. “Good night, Bohb.”

Out in the hallway, Grigsby remembered that the the hotel's passkey still lay in his pocket. Quietly, holding his breath, he unlocked each door in turn and peered inside. Vail, O'Conner, Ruddick, and Wilde were all asleep, Wilde snoring away like a sawmill.

Downstairs, when Ned Winters saw Grigsby, he looked like someone who had just been told that he wouldn't be getting hanged today after all. Breathing an explosive sigh of relief, he took back the passkey. “Thank
God
, Marshal! Where
were
you?”

“Pokin' around.”

“Holy Hannah! When you didn't come back down, I didn't know
what
to think.”

Grigsby nodded. “Listen, Ned. There's a colored fella travelin' with Wilde. Servant name of Henry. He move into another room?”

Winters nodded. “He's in room 201 now. Wally said the manager, Mr. Vail, ordered him a new room.”

“He up there now?”

Winters nodded. “Went out around eight, came back at ten-thirty.”

“You sure? You didn't maybe have yourself a catnap or two?”

“No sir, Marshal. Not a one. I been awake all night. They were all up in their rooms by midnight.” He leaned toward Grigsby. “But, come on now, Marshal, you sure you can't tell me what's goin' on?”

“Positive. See you.”

From the hotel, Grigsby had ridden the mare back to his house, where he'd cleaned himself up, dressed in fresh clothes, and thrown some spare shirts and an extra union suit into his saddlebag. After leaving the horse at the livery stable, he had set off for the railroad station. He had arrived in Colorado Springs at six in the morning.

And now, as the horse jounced and rocked beneath his aching hip, Grigsby could see, over the tree line, against the bright blue of sky, the smudge of smoke that hung above the chimneys of Manitou Springs.

He realized, abruptly, that he hadn't had a drink since the apple brandy in Mathilde's room. Been so tickled with himself, probably, that he hadn't even thought about it.

He tried to remember the last time he'd gone three or four hours without taking a single drink. Without
thinking
about a drink. Not since before Clara left.

Damn, he thought. That was cause for a little celebration.

“D
AMN FINE LECTURE,
Mr. Wilde,” said the mayor of Manitou Springs.

“Don't cuss, Cleveland,” said his wife.

From over their heads, beyond the now empty chairs aligned in precise rows beneath the glittering chandeliers, Oscar could make out Elizabeth McCourt Doe chatting with Mathilde de la Môle and a gaggle of Manitou Springs luminaries beside the closed French windows that led onto the ballroom's veranda.

“Good turnout, too,” said the Mayor. “Almost as good as that fella Dickens got.”

This snared Oscar's attention.

“Dickens spoke here, did he?” he asked, and sipped at his champagne. Appalling stuff, flat and sulfurous.

“Sure did,” said the mayor. “He read from that book of his, about the death of Little Nell. Damn fine writing. Nearly brought a tear to my eye, I don't mind telling you. Isn't that right, Mother?”

“Don't cuss, Cleveland,” said his wife.

“You know Dickens, Mr. Wilde?” asked the Mayor.

The mayor of Manitou Springs—Mr. Mudds, or Muggs, or something equally glum—was a jolly personage in a poorly tailored but extravagantly tailed dress coat who seemed utterly unaware that in the center of his round red face, roughly where his nose should have been installed, there bloomed an entity the size of a pomegranate, veined and gullied and carbuncled. He was short and portly, with skin as taut as a sausage casing. Mrs. Mudds (or Muggs) was a small desiccated woman, prodigiously creased, like a gnome left too long in a pickling vat. She wore a low-cut dress which flaunted an expanse of what probably she believed to be décolletage, but which to Oscar more nearly resembled erosion.