The Secret History (27 page)

I stood staring at Judy’s door, which was adorned with photographs of automobile crashes, lurid headlines cut from the
Weekly World News
, and a nude Barbie doll hanging from the doorknob by a noose. By now it was one o’clock. I walked back to my pristine white door at the end of the hall, the only one in the suite unobscured by taped-up religious propaganda and posters of the Fleshtones and suicidal epithets from Artaud, and wondered how all these people were able to put up all this crap on their doors so fast and why they did it in the first place.

I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling, trying to guess when Judy would return, trying to think of what to do in the meantime, when there was a knock at the door.

It was Henry. I opened the door a little wider and stared at him and said nothing.

He gazed back at me with a fixed and patient unconcern. He was level-eyed and calm and had a book tucked under his arm.

“Hello,” he said.

There was another pause, longer than the first. “Hi,” I said, after a while.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“That’s good.”

There was another long silence.

“Are you doing anything this afternoon?” he said politely.

“No,” I said, taken aback.

“Would you like to go on a drive with me?”

I got my coat.

Once well out of Hampden, we turned off the main highway and onto a stretch of gravel road that I had never seen. “Where are we going?” I said, rather uneasy.

“I thought we might go out and take a look at an estate sale on the Old Quarry Road,” said Henry, unperturbed.

I was as surprised as I’ve ever been at anything in my life when the road finally did bring us out, about an hour later, to a large house with a sign in front that said
ESTATE SALE
.

Though the house itself was magnificent, the sale turned out not to be much: a grand piano covered with a display of silver
and cracked glassware; a grandfather clock; several boxes full of records, kitchen implements, and toys; and some upholstered furniture badly scratched by cats, all out in the garage.

I leafed through a stack of old sheet music, keeping Henry in the corner of my eye. He poked around unconcernedly in the silver; played a disinterested bar of “Träumerei” on the piano with one hand; opened the door of the grandfather clock and had a look at the works; had a long chat with the owner’s niece, who had just come down from the big house, about when was the best time to put out tulip bulbs. After I had gone through the sheet music twice, I moved to the glassware and then the records; Henry bought a garden hoe for twenty-five cents.

“I’m sorry to have dragged you all the way out here,” he said on the way home.

“That’s all right,” I said, slouched down in my seat very close to the door.

“I’m a bit hungry. Are you hungry at all? Would you like to have something to eat?”

We stopped at a diner on the outskirts of Hampden. It was virtually deserted this early in the evening. Henry ordered an enormous dinner—pea soup, roast beef, a salad, mashed potatoes with gravy, coffee, pie—and ate it silently and with a great deal of methodical relish. I picked erratically at my omelet and had a hard time keeping my eyes off him as we ate. I felt as though I were in the dining car of a train and had been seated by the steward with another solitary male traveler, some kindly stranger, someone who didn’t even speak my language, perhaps, but who was still content to eat his dinner with me, exuding an air of calm acceptance as if he’d known me all his life.

When he’d finished he took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket (he smoked Lucky Strikes; whenever I think of him I think of that little red bull’s-eye right over his heart) and offered me one, shaking a couple out of the pack and raising an eyebrow. I shook my head.

He smoked one and then another, and over our second cup of coffee he looked up. “Why have you been so quiet this afternoon?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t you want to know about our trip to Argentina?”

I set my cup in its saucer and stared at him. Then I began to laugh.

“Yes,” I said. “
Yes
, I do. Tell me.”

“Don’t you wonder how I know? That you know, I mean?”

That hadn’t occurred to me, and I guess he saw it in my face because now he laughed. “It’s no mystery,” he said. “When I called to cancel the reservations—they didn’t want to do it, of course, non-refundable tickets and all that, but I think we’ve got it worked out now—anyway, when I called the airline they were rather surprised, as they said I’d called to confirm only the day before.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Who else could it have been? You had the key. I know, I know,” he said when I tried to interrupt him. “I left you that key on purpose. It would have made things easier later on, for various reasons, but by sheer chance you happened in at just the wrong time. I had only left the apartment for a few hours, you see, and I never dreamed that you’d happen in between midnight and seven a.m. I must have missed you by only a few minutes. If you’d happened in an hour or so later everything would have been gone.”

He took a sip of his coffee. I had so many questions it was useless to try to sort them into any coherent order. “Why did you leave me the key?” I said at last.

Henry shrugged. “Because I was pretty sure you wouldn’t use it unless you had to,” he said. “If we’d actually gone, someone would eventually have had to open the apartment for the landlady, and I would have sent you instructions on who to contact and how to dispose of the things I’d left, but I forgot all about that damned Liddell and Scott. Well, I won’t say that. I knew you’d left it there, but I was in a hurry and somehow I never thought you’d come back for it
bei Nacht und Nebel
, as it were. But that was silly of me. You have as much trouble sleeping as I do.”

“Let me get this straight. You didn’t go to Argentina at all?”

Henry snorted, and motioned for the check. “Of course not,” he said. “Would I be here if we had?”

Once he’d paid the check he asked me if I wanted to go to Francis’s. “I don’t think he’s there,” he said.

“So why go there?”

“Because my apartment is a mess and I’m staying with him until I can get somebody in to clean it up. Do you happen to know of a good maid service? Francis said the last time he had someone from the employment office in town, they stole two bottles of wine and fifty dollars from his dresser drawer.”

On the way into North Hampden, it was all I could do to keep from deluging Henry with questions, but I kept my mouth shut until we got there.

“He isn’t here, I’m sure,” he said as he unlocked the front door.

“Where is he?”

“With Bunny. He took him to Manchester for dinner and then I think to some movie that Bunny wanted to see. Would you like some coffee?”

Francis’s apartment was in an ugly 1970s building owned by the college. It was roomier and more private than the old oak-floored houses we lived in on campus, and as a consequence was much in demand; as a trade-off there were linoleum floors, ill-lit halls, and cheap, modern fixtures like at a Holiday Inn. Francis didn’t seem to mind it much. He had his own furniture there, brought out from the country house, but he’d chosen it carelessly and it was an atrocious mix of styles, upholstery, light and dark woods.

A search revealed that Francis had neither coffee nor tea (“He needs to go to the grocery store,” said Henry, looking over my shoulder into yet another barren cabinet), only a few bottles of Scotch and some Vichy water. I got some ice and a couple of glasses and we took a fifth of Famous Grouse with us into the shadowy living room, our shoes clicking across the ghastly wilderness of white linoleum.

“So you didn’t go,” I said, after we’d sat down and Henry had poured us each a glass.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Henry sighed, and reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette. “Money,” he said, as the match flared brightly in the dim. “I don’t have a trust like Francis, you see, only a monthly allowance. It’s much more than I generally need to live on, and for years I’ve put most of it into a savings account. But Bunny’s just about cleaned that out. There was no way I could put my hands on more than thirty thousand dollars, even if I sold my car.”

“Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

“Yes.”

“Why would you need that much?”

Henry blew a smoke ring half into the yellowy circle of light beneath the lamp, half into the surrounding dark. “Because we
weren’t coming back,” he said. “None of us have work visas. Whatever we took would’ve had to last the four of us for a long time. Incidentally,” he said, raising his voice as if I’d tried to interrupt him—actually, I hadn’t, I was only making a sort of inarticulate noise of stupefaction—“incidentally, Buenos Aires wasn’t our destination at all. It was only a stop along the way.”

“
What?
”

“If we’d had the money, I suppose we would have flown to Paris or London, some gateway city with plenty of traffic, and once there to Amsterdam and eventually on to South America. That way we’d have been more difficult to trace, you see. But we didn’t have that kind of money, so the alternative was to go to Argentina and from there take a roundabout course to Uruguay—a dangerous and unstable place in its own right, to my way of thinking, but suitable for our purposes. My father has an interest in some developing property down there. We’d have had no problem finding a place to live.”