The Secret History (40 page)

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a sheet of paper covered with numbers. “I hate to involve you in this, but no one else knows a thing about math and I’m far from reliable myself. Will you have a look?”

Vomiting, jaundice, convulsions
. Mechanically, I took the sheet of paper from him. It was covered with algebraic equations, but at the moment algebra was frankly the last thing on my mind. I shook my head and was on the point of handing it back when I looked up at him and something stopped me. I was in the position, I realized, to put an end to this, now, right here. He really did need my help, or else he wouldn’t have come to me; emotional appeals, I knew, were useless but if I pretended that I knew what I was doing I might be able to talk him out of it.

I took the paper to my desk and sat down with a pencil and forced myself through the tangle of numbers step by step. Equations about chemical concentration were never my strong point in chemistry, and they are difficult enough when you are trying to figure a fixed concentration in a suspension of distilled water; but this, dealing as it did with varying concentrations in irregularly shaped objects, was virtually impossible. He had probably used all the elementary algebra he knew in figuring this, and as far as I could follow him he hadn’t done a bad job; but this wasn’t a problem that could be worked with algebra, if it could be worked at all. Someone with three or four years of college calculus might have been able to come up with something that at least looked more convincing; by tinkering, I was able to narrow his ratio slightly but I had forgotten most of the little calculus I knew and the answer I wound up with, though probably closer than his own, was far from correct.

I put down my pencil and looked up. The business had taken me about half an hour. Henry had got a copy of Dante’s
Purgatorio
from my bookshelf and was reading it, absorbed.

“Henry.”

He glanced up absently.

“Henry, I don’t think this is going to work.”

He closed the book on his finger. “I made a mistake in the second part,” he said. “Where the factoring begins.”

“It’s a good try, but just by looking at it I can tell that it’s insolvable without chemical tables and a good working knowledge
of calculus and chemistry proper. There’s no way to figure it otherwise. I mean, chemical concentrations aren’t even measured in terms of grams and milligrams but in something called moles.”

“Can you work it for me?”

“I’m afraid not, though I’ve done as much as I can. Practically speaking, I can’t give you an answer. Even a math professor would have a tough time with this one.”

“Hmn,” said Henry, looking over my shoulder at the paper on the desk. “I’m heavier than Bun, you know. By twenty-five pounds. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?”

“Yes, but the difference of size isn’t large enough to bank on, not with a margin of error potentially this wide. Now, if you were fifty pounds heavier, maybe …”

“The poison doesn’t take effect for at least twelve hours,” he said. “So even if I overdose I’ll have a certain advantage, a grace period. With an antidote on hand for myself, just in case …”

“An antidote?” I said, jarred, leaning back in my chair. “Is there such a thing?”

“Atropine. It’s in deadly nightshade.”

“Well, Jesus, Henry. If you don’t finish yourself off with one you will with the other.”

“Atropine’s quite safe in small amounts.”

“They say the same about arsenic but I wouldn’t like to try it.”

“They are exactly opposite in effect. Atropine speeds the nervous system, rapid heartbeat and so forth. Amatoxins slow it down.”

“That still sounds fishy, a poison counteracting a poison.”

“Not at all. The Persians were master poisoners, and they say—”

I remembered the books in Henry’s car. “The Persians?” I said.

“Yes. According to the great—”

“I didn’t know you read Arabic.”

“I don’t, at least not well, but they’re the great authorities on the subject and most of the books I need haven’t been translated. I’ve been going through them as best I can with a dictionary.”

I thought about the books I had seen, dusty, bindings crumbled with age. “When were these things written?”

“Around the middle of the fifteenth century, I should say.”

I put down my pencil. “Henry.”

“What?”

“You should know better than that. You can’t rely on something that old.”

“The Persians were master poisoners. These are practical handbooks, how-tos if you will. I don’t know of anything quite like them.”

“Poisoning people is quite a different matter from curing them.”

“People have used these books for centuries. Their accuracy is beyond dispute.”

“Well, I have as much respect for ancient learning as you do, but I don’t know that I’d want to stake my life on some home remedy from the Middle Ages.”

“Well, I suppose I can check it somewhere else,” he said, without much conviction.

“Really. This is too serious a matter to—”

“Thank you,” he said smoothly. “You’ve been a great help.” He picked up my copy of
Purgatorio
again. “This isn’t a very good translation, you know,” he said, leafing through it idly. “Singleton is the best if you don’t read Italian, quite literal, but you lose all the
terza rima
, of course. For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn’t know the language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.”

“Henry,” I said, in a low, urgent voice.

He glanced over at me, annoyed. “Anything I do will be dangerous, you know,” he said.

“But nothing is any good if you die.”

“The more I hear about luxury barges, the less terrible death begins to seem,” he said. “You’ve been quite a help. Good night.”

Early the next afternoon, Charles dropped by for a visit. “Gosh, it’s hot in here,” he said, shouldering off his wet coat and throwing it over the back of a chair. His hair was damp, his face flushed and radiant. A drop of water trembled at the end of his long, fine nose. He sniffed and wiped it away. “Don’t go outside, whatever you do,” he said. “It’s terrible out. By the way, you haven’t seen Francis, have you?”

I ran a hand through my hair. It was a Friday afternoon, no class, and I hadn’t been out of my room all day, nor had I slept much the night before. “Henry stopped by last night,” I said.

“Really? What did he have to say? Oh, I almost forgot.” He reached in the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a bundle wrapped in napkins. “I brought you a sandwich since you weren’t at lunch. Camilla said the lady in the dining hall saw me stealing it and she made a black mark by my name on a list.”

It was cream cheese and marmalade, I knew without looking. The twins were fanatical about them but I didn’t like them much. I unwrapped a corner of it and took a bite, then set it down on my desk. “Have you talked to Henry recently?” I said.

“Just this morning. He drove me to the bank.”

I picked up the sandwich and took another bite. I hadn’t swept, and my hair still lay in clumps on the floor. “Did he,” I said, “say anything about—”

“About what?”

“About asking Bunny to dinner in a couple of weeks?”

“Oh, that,” said Charles, lying back on my bed and propping his head up with pillows. “I thought you knew about that already. He’s been thinking about that for a while.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I think he’s going to have a hell of a hard time finding enough mushrooms to even make him sick. It’s just too early. Last week he made Francis and me go out and help him, but we hardly found a thing. Francis came back really excited, saying, ‘Oh, my God, look, I found all these mushrooms,’ but then we looked in his bag and it was just a bunch of puffballs.”

“So you think he’ll be able to find enough?”

“Sure, if he waits a while. I know you don’t have a cigarette, do you?”

“No.”

“I wish you smoked. I don’t know why you don’t. You weren’t an athlete in high school or anything, were you?”

“No.”

“That’s why Bun doesn’t smoke. Some clean-living type of football coach got to him at an impressionable age.”

“Have you seen Bun lately?”

“Not too much. He was at the apartment last night, though, and stayed forever.”

“This isn’t just hot air?” I said, looking at him closely. “You’re really going to go through with it?”

“I’d rather go to jail than know that Bunny was going to be hanging around my neck for the rest of my life. And I’m not too keen on going to jail, either, now that I think about it. You
know,” he said, sitting up on my bed and bending over double, as if from a pain in his stomach, “I really wish you had some cigarettes. Who’s that awful girl who lives down the hall from you—Judy?”

“Poovey,” I said.

“Go knock on her door, why don’t you, and ask her if she’ll give you a pack. She looks like the sort who keeps cartons in her room.”

It was getting warmer. The dirty snow was pockmarked from the warm rain, and melting in patches to expose the slimy, yellowed grass beneath it; icicles cracked and plunged like daggers from the sharp peaks of the roofs.

“We might be in South America now,” Camilla said one night while we were drinking bourbon from teacups in my room and listening to rain dripping from the eaves. “That’s funny, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, though I hadn’t been invited.

“I didn’t like the idea then. Now I think we might’ve got by all right down there.”

“I don’t see how.”

She leaned her cheek on her closed fist. “Oh, it wouldn’t have been so bad. We could have slept in hammocks. Learned Spanish. Lived in a little house with chickens in the yard.”

“Got sick,” I said. “Been shot.”

“I can think of worse things,” she said, with a brief sideways glance that pierced me to the heart.

The windowpanes rattled in a sudden gust.

“Well,” I said, “I’m glad you didn’t go.”

She ignored this remark and, looking out the dark window, took another sip from the teacup.

It was by now the first week of April, not a pleasant time for me or anyone. Bunny, who had been relatively calm, was now on a rampage because Henry refused to drive him down to Washington, D.C., to see an exhibit of World War I biplanes at the Smithsonian. The twins were getting calls twice daily from an ominous B. Perry at their bank, and Henry from a D. Wade at his; Francis’s mother had discovered his attempt to withdraw money from the trust fund, and each day brought a fresh volley of communication from her. “Good God,” he muttered, having torn open the latest arrival and scanned it with disgust.

“What does she say?”

“ ‘Baby. Chris and I are so concerned about you,’ ” Francis read in a deadpan voice. “ ‘Now I do not pretend to be an authority on Young People and maybe you are going through something I am too old to understand but I have always hoped you would be able to go to Chris with your problems.’ ”

“Chris has a lot more problems than you do, it seems to me,” I said. The character that Chris played on “The Young Doctors” was sleeping with his brother’s wife and involved in a baby-smuggling ring.