The Eye: A Novel of Suspense (11 page)

He finished his coffee, still worrying a little over that jerk-off Kennebank, and then left the cafeteria and headed back to rendezvous with Elliot Leroy.

THE COLLIER TAPES

Who am I?

Who is Lewis B. Collier?

Someday, perhaps, after my death—for even gods must eventually perish—these tapes will become a matter of public record. It is with that possibility in mind that I now offer the essential answer to the question of who I am.

To begin with, we must consider the famous insane and now dead American poet, X. I will call him only X.
All
poets are X. They find that out slowly and painfully, but I divined it from the beginning and exercised caution.

X began his academic life as a twenty-two-year-old instructor at Harvard, and within three years he became a tenured associate professor. That was impressive, especially since X did not even have a graduate degree. Of course, that was in the forties, when things in academia were somewhat looser.

Five years later, under rather strained circumstances, X resigned and went to the University of Michigan as an associate professor. With him went the redheaded bitch temptress who had prompted his troubles at Harvard. At Michigan, X missed tenure by an eyelash after three years of probation and subsequently went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, again as an associate professor. Drink had by this time begun to affect him in ways tragic and visible, and the redhead had been traded for a blonde, two brunettes, and finally a bearded graduate student. X left Iowa and went to the University of Alabama on a three-year contract. At the end of that time, and of several hundred bottles of whiskey, he traveled to Drexel on a one-year adjunct. And after that, he went to Colby College as the assistant to the head of the writing program.

By this time X was no longer young or a poet of promise. He had returned to his two true loves—another redhead and Bombay gin.

In the early sixties, after his thunderous dismissal from Colby, X ended up teaching in the extension division of New York University, a night course in creative writing. And then—ah, this many people might remember—X ended his descent in spectacular fashion, immolating himself and his woman in a Times Square hotel.

The point is, I learned from X; I vowed to become a poet of a different sort. I thought I understood the problem. If you
stayed
at the adjunct level you had no heights from which to fall and you tended to make less trouble for yourself; also, you were outside the politics of the department and, unlike X, your social life could be your own business.

So I obtained my Master’s Degree and settled into what I liked to think of as the underside of academia. I had slight standards, but those standards were absolute. And that was the key. X’s problem had been that he was a promising poet and a classic alcoholic, a sexual adventurer of catholicity if not precision; he had adhered to no standards, not in his rhyme scheme, not in his sexual or his professional life, and at last it had destroyed him.

I spent my days marking freshman themes written by disadvantaged youths with burning eyes who were fixated on computer programming, and I worked on my unpublished novel while I lived modestly, and I thought I had my life under control.

I made two mistakes, however.

One was not foreseeing the withdrawal of federal funding of many of the programs through which I was hired. The other mistake was Darlene.

The contraction of the universities I might have dealt with, but Darlene was beyond my powers to cope. She was an intense girl with a yearning for self-improvement of the creative sort. Soon after our marriage she became pregnant, had an abortion, and then informed me
ex post facto
of these two occurrences. She also informed me that I was a pig and a liar and an exploiter, among other things, and left me and the New York metropolitan area itself to live in a feminist collective in San Francisco. Years later, the collective became a news story in the
Times
because it had been found to harbor several sixties fugitives who had operated a bomb factory. Darlene was among those arrested. But that was her problem, not mine.

My problem was that I was turned down by the Columbia School of General Studies, then dropped after a one-semester engagement by a federal arts program funded through NYU. In short, I was out of a job and quite bitter about it.

It was the trust fund that bailed me out. My mother had hoarded it in New York’s Chemical Bank, as she had hoarded love in the vault of her heart until her death, and on my thirty-fifth birthday I received enough money not to have to worry about finances for years to come. She who had been the first of X’s redheads, and with him sown the seed that was to be Lewis B. Collier, warned me of the doom and dissolution of all poets, and provided for me.

After receiving my inheritance, I stopped sending resumes and studying the Sunday
Times
section advertising faculty positions. I moved into this high rise apartment on the wrong side of the Hudson. Like X, I began to drink. Like X, I began to atrophy.

And then one day, on an impulse I now know was fate, I bought the telescope I saw displayed in the window of one of those difficult to categorize shops on East Fifty-seventh Street.

Soon afterward, I realized that I wasn’t like X, who is rather famous in the academic world for his long downward odyssey to oblivion. X fell a long way and learned little; I, on the other hand, moved within a very narrow range and learned quite a lot.

Unlike X, I have not dwindled nor will I dwindle to nothingness. It is not death which I embrace, which fascinates me. The pleasure I derive from bestowing death on the wicked is quite apart from the physical sensations during and after the act. Only the smallest of mortals would think otherwise. It is not that with the death of Charles Unger I discovered that I enjoy ending life—the sensual absorption of the powerless by the powerful, the ultimate communication with the victim.

No, not at all. Unlike X, whose poetry is that of the futile and the impotent and the damned, I can act out not only my own destiny but the destiny of others. Because unlike X, I
am
destiny. I have been transformed and gifted with true and total freedom and command.

I do
not
kill because I enjoy it.

I have proved that, haven’t I?

12:35 P.M. — MARIAN SINGER

She had not gone to Brooklyn to visit her sister; she’d lied to Wally about that, the first major lie she had ever told him. Instead she had gone to Otto Kreig’s flat on East Ninth in the Village.

Marian had never done anything like this before, not once in all the years she had been married, and she’d been very tense. Her fidelity hadn’t been a matter of morals—she had helled around quite a bit in her college days—and it hadn’t been that she’d felt any great loyalty to Wally. God knew, he had given her enough provocation: the way he mistreated her, ignored her physical and emotional needs; the fact that at the best of times he simply was not a very good lover. No, she had remained faithful because she had never met anyone else who interested her. And after she started to put on weight … well, she was afraid of rejection. She doubted if anyone would want an overweight, sagging-breasted woman pushing forty.

Then she had found out Wally was seeing another woman, that ripe doe-eyed bitch who lived across the street. She’d seen them together in Riverside Park one day, holding hands, snuggling up to each other. At first she’d been hurt, then angry, then resigned. What good would it do to confront him? He might actually walk out on her, as he’d been threatening to do for years, and then where would she be? She needed a man, even a poor excuse for one like Wally. Too much time had passed; she would not do well alone. So she had determined to grin and bear it, let the affair run its course. Wally knew which side his bread was buttered on. He wouldn’t willingly leave her for a cheap waitress with no money and no prospects.

Even knowing about his affair, she might have remained faithful if she hadn’t met Otto two weeks later. It had been at a showing downtown of a prominent sculptor’s work that she had gone to alone because Wally wasn’t interested. Otto was a German immigrant who had moved to New York from Dusseldorf a few years before—a big powerful man in his forties, with enormous hands and sad blue eyes and a pleasant smile. Like her, he was a sculptor, although he didn’t have to eke out a living at it the way she did; he was independently wealthy, the son of a successful furniture manufacturer. He had shown surprising interest in her that day, and later, when she brought some samples to his flat, he had shown equally surprising interest in her work.

A reciprocal affinity had developed in her. She felt flattered by his attention and his praise. He was such a kind, gentle man, self-effacing about his own work—unnecessarily so, she felt. His sculptures, mostly of animals with a touching aura of sadness about them, may have been a little crude, but they showed a sensitivity that she had never been able to capture in her abstracts and commercial pieces.

At first her feelings for Otto hadn’t been sexual. Then, one night, she’d had an erotic dream about him, and after that she found herself wondering at odd moments what it would be like to sleep with him. But he had never made a pass at her, never touched her in any way; he was always the perfect gentleman. And of course she could never bring herself to take the initiative. Whenever she saw him—no more than once a week, sometimes at his flat for coffee, sometimes at this or that cafe in the Village—they talked about art, about neutral topics. Once in a while he seemed to look at her in a special way, as if he, too, wished there could be something more between them, but she could never be sure. She kept telling herself that her fantasies were silly and girlish, classic maunderings of a fat, unfulfilled woman in mid-life, almost laughable. She was lucky to have a friend like Otto, and his friendship was all she had a right to expect.

All that had changed this morning. She had awakened next to Wally, looked at him snoring beside her, and remembered the nasty things he had said to her yesterday; then she thought about the killings on the block, the suppressed fear that was in her and that she had seen in the faces of her neighbors. An overwhelming need to get away from there, away from Wally, had seized her, followed by an acute desire to see Otto. As soon as Wally awoke, she had made up the story about visiting her sister, left the apartment, and taken the subway straight to the Village.

Otto had seemed pleased at her unexpected arrival. He’d made a breakfast of hotcakes and sausages for her, listened to her pour out her fears, comforted her. She felt better after that and asked to see his latest sculpture. Now they were standing in his workroom under the skylight, close together but not quite touching, looking at the half-finished fawn with its sad eyes.

When he turned to her finally, the look in his eyes was like that of the fawn, but tempered with something more, something deep and tender. “
Liebchen,
” he murmured.

She couldn’t believe her ears.
Darling
, the word meant
darling
. Wally had never called her darling; he had never called her anything except bitch and fat cow. Inside her there was a sudden sensation of melting, and the next thing she knew she was in Otto’s arms, kissing him, clinging to him.

When the kiss ended she was trembling with a mixture of fear and tension and desire. “Otto,” she whispered, “take me to bed …”

“No. No, Marian.”

At first she thought it was a rejection. She was a fat woman and nobody’s darling, he’d let her kiss him only because he felt sorry for her … fitful thoughts, turning her as rigid as one of her abstracts. But his big hands remained on her—gentle, so gentle. And he was whispering to her again, saying other things she could scarcely believe.

“I want you so much,” he was saying, “but it must not be this way. You are upset,
meine Teure
, you only turn to me because of your anguish. It is not me, Otto Kreig, you truly want.…”

“But it is, Otto, it
is
you.”

“I am so afraid it is not.”

“Afraid?”

“Dear Marian,
schöne
Marian … I want you always, not just for today. I—I love you.”

The tension left her suddenly and completely; so did the doubts about him and about this moment. It was the truth, and she felt limp with it, a little awed by it. This was what she had wanted all her life, only this. The tenderness, the gentleness, the genuine caring, all the things Wally had never given her, all the things she had never known and never hoped to know.

“Yes,” she said, weeping now, “love me, please just love me.…”

1:00 P.M. — E.L. OXMAN

He spent the last twenty minutes of the noon hour comparing notes with Tobin. Neither of them had turned up anything new; they kept walking into blank walls no matter who they talked to. It wasn’t a conspiracy of silence, an unwillingness of people to get involved with the police. It was simply that nobody knew anything about the homicides. The psycho, whoever he or she was, had so far done his killing with impunity and without making any apparent mistakes. It was frustrating, and a little frightening even to Oxman. He could understand how the people who lived here felt. A thing like this frayed everybody’s nerves, made even the fittest in this little corner of the jungle glance over their shoulders and start jumping at shadows.

Tobin recounted his briefing session with Jack Kennebank, and Oxman didn’t blame him for being worried. He didn’t like hot dogs any better than Artie did. They would have to keep a tight rein on Kennebank, make sure he didn’t screw up. The way feelings were running on the block, one bad blunder could unleash a chain reaction of panic.

Just before they split up again, Oxman phoned the Twenty-fourth to see if Lieutenant Smiley had anything new. He didn’t. A computer check of known criminals and individuals with a history of mental disorders who might have lived on the block at one time had turned up a few names; another team of detectives was checking them out. But none of the individuals looked promising. It was a longshot anyway, Oxman thought. Why would a former resident of West Ninety-eighth decide to start shooting people in his old neighborhood?