I Come as a Theif (23 page)

He stood at the deserted corner for several minutes, panting, yearning for another assailant. His clenched fists tingled with the need to make physical contact with an enemy. And then, as nobody came, he recovered himself and walked on.

Judith Eldon was more tactful than he would have thought possible. She made no pretense of not having been to bed, for unlike Jack, who had dressed, she was in her nightgown and robe. She produced hot coffee and drinks and then left the two men alone in the library. Tony gulped down two Scotches without a word and contemplated the near empty decanter.

"There's plenty left where that came from," his host said.

"Oh, two will do me." Looking at Jack's baffled, curious, embarrassed eyes, Tony felt again the impulse of affection. Jack, he thought, was the only friend he had left, the only friend he wanted. The others, all ante-trial, belonged to a lost world. "The last time I was in this room you told me that you couldn't understand my motives. Well, let me tell you something. When Max Leonard confessed, I was about to go to your office to do the same thing. He got in ahead of me and deprived me of all my glory."

Jack jumped up in surprise. "So
that's
the answer! I knew there was something."

"Oh, I was going to be great. I was filled with phony exultation. But life is so damned honest. Just give it a little time and it's sure to puncture your balloon. And so I had to come into court as a nabbed crook. It was better."

"Why, Tony? Why was it better?"

"Because I was better able to face the rottenness in myself when there was no mitigation. It was a wholesome, chastening experience. But it wore off. In a couple of months I was back at my old self-deluding tricks again. Oh, yes, Jack!" Tony threw back his head and laughed bitterly. "When I thought it might have been one of Lassatta's men that had struck at my poor boy's eye, there was a kind of fierce ecstasy in the very agony of it. Like what a martyr feels when the first flames begin to lick at his legs!"

"But you have all the martyr's pain, God knows!" Jack protested. "Don't make it worse for yourself, man."

"I have the pain, yes, but ridiculously. My boy is hurt by some crazy hippies, which has nothing to do with Tony Lowder, who wants to turn the whole universe into his own trial. Oh, I tell you, Jack, there is some crazy plot in the skies to make me humble." Tony got up and went to the mantel and stared at his own wild eyes in the mirror. "Well, I'm humble enough now, ye powers!" he cried. "I can never be humbler than this."

Jack seemed undecided whether to offer him another drink. Taking in his bewilderment in the mirror Tony turned back to him with a smile. "I'm not crazy, Jack. Don't worry."

"But I don't see why it's so important to be humble," Jack insisted. "You seemed quite humble enough to me from the beginning."

"Ah, but you don't know my heresies. After I rejected God, I had to take over his role. I became my own demiurge, creating my own smaller universe. I had to
be
my mother and
be
my father and
be
my wife. I even had to be my mistress, God help me. I had to suffer their sufferings. I had to live everybody's life but my own. Well, the powers above didn't like that. So they threw a thunderbolt!"

Jack put a consoling hand on his shoulder. "I should say they'd thrown the whole arsenal. But we still have to be in court tomorrow." He glanced at his watch. "Today rather. In exactly six hours. You'd better stay here. I'll give you something that'll make you sleep."

Tony shrugged and followed his host to the guest room. He had reached the point where the only sane thing was to lose consciousness.

Joan Conway was lying on her side, huddled up, looking very small in the big canopied royal French bed. She did not move when Lee sat down, as close to her as she could, but their eyes met. Joan's seemed large, for her face was thin and pathetically wasted, but they did not appear to take Lee in. She seemed detached, perhaps even bored.

"I wish I found you better," Lee began conventionally.

"Let's not waste time on that," Joan said in a surprisingly strong voice. "They've given me something, and I'm fine for the moment, but it doesn't last long." She closed her eyes, and after a moment Lee wondered if she had fallen asleep. She looked almost comfortable. Then she opened them. "How's Tony?"

"I haven't seen him."

"That's wrong, you know."

"Don't you think my place has been with Eric?"

"Does Eric think so?"

This was so shrewd a thrust that Lee was taken aback. She was about to confess that Eric had indeed wanted her to go to Tony when she saw that Joan seemed unconscious again. So she sat and waited and thought of Eric as he had looked that morning, sitting up in the hospital bed that she had brought back to their cottage, one eye concealed under a huge bandage, the other peering bleakly at her. He had become more his old self since the accident, less brooding. But at the same time he seemed resentfully to suspect that she was planning to dedicate her life to becoming his other eye. Eric wanted to get on with the ordinary business of living. He had no time for such exhilarations.

"Will you see Daddy in New York?" he had asked.

"I hadn't planned to. I'm going in to see Mrs. Conway."

Eric had ignored Mrs. Conway. "Don't you think you should?"

"I have some things to work out in myself first."

"You make too much of my eye, Mummie. It wasn't Daddy's fault. And, anyway, they say I'll have partial vision in it. The thing is that we've had enough emotion in this whole business. I've hated Daddy, too. We can't go on hating him forever."

"Eric, there are things about women you can't understand yet. Your father hurt me terribly."

"You mean women don't have to forgive?"

But Lee had not wanted to release her anger. She had not wanted to give up this new occupation of the heart. She had not wanted to share Eric with the man who had let this happen to his son. She had locked the door of herself against Tony and redecorated the interior. It was too early, too trivial, to fling down the bars and cry "all is forgiven!"

She saw now that Joan was looking at her again, and she was ashamed of her preoccupation in the presence of death.

"Why is everyone on Tony's side?" she complained to Joan. "If you heard his mother go on about him, you'd think he was a saint."

"Perhaps he is."

"It's funny you should both think that. I can't imagine two more different women than you and Mrs. Lowder."

"We may have things in common you don't suspect. Desperation, for example. I doubt that Mrs. Lowder ever really believed in anything, not even Tony. I know I didn't."

"Joan, that's absurd! You always believed in all kinds of things: in yourself, in your looks, in your pictures, in your wonderful parties."

"But those were all false gods. Isn't that a classic truth? They fell to bits the moment I got cancer. That was the time when Mother Lowder and I became spiritual twins. When we were down. Bereft. Shorn. It's easier for people like us to be converted than people like you."

"People like
me!
" Lee exclaimed in surprise. "What kind of people are people like me?"

"People who still have false gods."

"And what are mine?"

"Tony. Or your ideal of Tony. Or love." Joan pronounced the word with a mocking emphasis that must have tired her, for she closed her eyes again. Lee, again waiting, found herself struck by the implications of Joan's idea. For who had encouraged her resentment of Tony's behavior more than her father and who had more false gods than he? When she thought of the mantelpiece of his mind, it seemed crowded to the choking point with little waxen lares and penates.

"Do you want me to go?" she whispered at last.

Joan appeared to smile. "Not yet."

"Oh, Joan, isn't it terrible?" Lee exclaimed in sudden shame. "Here I should be consoling you, and I'm the one who's asking for help!"

"Why not?
I
don't have to do anything."

"You're really reconciled to dying?" When Lee had spoken, she could hardly believe that she had been so crude, but Joan's eyes showed no resentment. She was obviously beyond any power that Lee might have to create doubt or confusion. Her voice took on a note of amused speculation.

"I'm like poor Lucy in that poem of Wordsworth's," she murmured, her eyes still closed. "I'm rolling round and round, with rocks and stones and trees."

"I see. It's wonderful!" Lee had lost the last shred of the superiority of the living. "But how has Tony helped you?"

Joan opened her eyes and looked at Lee with more focus now. "It was that Sunday. When you came to Long Island. Tony convinced me that he was unhappier than I was."

"And that did it?"

"Well, don't you see, if he was unhappier than I was, he had to be in hell. And if there was a hell, didn't there have to be a heaven?"

"For you, you mean?"

"Oh, and for Tony, too. He wouldn't have to stay in hell. It was the sign I'd been looking for. Like that chalice in the Cloisters. A sign that something else existed."

"And that was enough?"

Again there was a trace of a smile on Joan's lips. "It was enough for me. I've grown humble."

This time she seemed really to go to sleep. Lee rose and stood at the end of the bed.

"You
are
humble," she half-whispered. "I think I envy you."

"You needn't." Lee heard what she thought was almost a chuckle from the bed. "There's nothing that's going to happen to me that isn't going to happen to you."

Was it really a new, a redeemed Joan Conway talking? Or was it the old Joan Conway, with a greater ego than ever, the Joan Conway who had to have everything better than anyone else's, who would help herself, like a barbaric czarina, to as many slices of Lee's husband as she wished? The Joan who now demanded heaven as her birthright? But Lee was not to find out, for the trained nurse came in now and indicated with a severe little smile and a sharp nod that the visit was over.

On the last day of the defense's case in
United States
v.
Lassatta et al.
Max watched Tony's final appearance in the witness chair. It varied little from his others. He was patient, courteous, relentless in his consistency. Lanigan's small bag of tricks was emptied, refilled and emptied again before this unmovable witness. But Max's reaction was now different from what it had been. He was not bitter or angry or even afraid.

He had been careful to avoid Tony. Even in court recesses he had turned away from the latter's friendly smiles. If betrayal were a laughing matter to Tony, it was not so to him. Both he and Tony had betrayed and been betrayed, and he was not so superficial or so macabre as to want to pick the white bones of friendship out of the ashes of
that
grate. And now he had awakened to the sudden discovery that love and hate seemed all at once to have expired and that he could watch Tony testify without the least apparent emotion. The man in the witness chair struck him as simply futile. Was
that
the secret of the great Tony? That he was a bit of an ass?

The day was bitterly cold outside, but the heat in the courtroom was high, and Max, who loved to be warm, stirred luxuriously under his sweater and jacket. He felt a torpor spreading through his limbs and body that made him think of his conscious spirit as detached from the flesh, as if he were a kind of Ariel watching, unseen, the watchers in that terrible courtroom. The idea of his future, which up until then had been little better than a nightmare, seemed almost agreeable, almost pleasantly exciting. It had been arranged that he should work in a liquor store in Panama City under the name of Howard Lamb. He would have an apartment only a block from where he worked, near a beach. Max knew a little Spanish, and he now had a vision of a life of sunbathing in a town of white stucco and red roofs by a sapphire sea. All right, suppose this
were
euphoric. What was wrong with euphoria? Particularly in his case. Might not Panama be a heaven attained without dying, a paradise with all the desperate pressures of his old life removed? He would not even be able to contemplate making a success of business there, for success would destroy the anonymity that was the very point of his new life. Howard Lamb would not have to be anything. He would not even have to be a man. He could pick up his harp and wander, caroling, through the golden streets of the new Jerusalem!

And he could make new friends. Max's mind raced ahead now. He could have love affairs. He could implement all his dirtiest thoughts. He could lie on a beach, naked in the mild breeze, with his arm around the neck of a dark Panamanian boy. He could...

There was a rustle of rising about him as the court recessed. Max jumped up with sudden energy and strode out to the corridor to smoke. Then he started in fear as somebody touched his elbow, but he relaxed when he saw it was a woman. It took him several seconds to realize that it was Lee Lowder.

"What's wrong, Max? Don't you know me?"

He continued to stare at her. Her face was oddly expressionless. "I didn't think you'd still speak to me."

Lee's blank gaze conveyed her indifference. "After all that's happened to us, there can't be any more enemies."

"Only survivors?"

"Have we survived?"

"I heard you were going to divorce Tony."

"Wouldn't it be wise?"

"Oh, when a ship is sinking..." He shrugged.

"One shouldn't mind being called a rat?" she finished for him.

"Why should you be called any name but the one you pick? I'm going to take a new one."

She nodded. "I see. You can do that. And Joan can die. And I can become Mrs. Bogardus. So there'll be nobody left but Tony."

"He asked for it. His whole life has been a bungle. Going from one hack to another in quest of his soul. When did he think of us?"

"How you say that! As if you were some god sneering down at a poor fool of a human being."

"I don't sneer at Tony. I don't even pity him. I see him. That's all. He made the wrong choice. He made the wrong choice and destroyed us all."