Wilde West (19 page)

Grigsby nodded. “And that's how come he's traveling with Wilde? The two of them together?”

Vail frowned. “What?” He sat back suddenly and he laughed. “You think Oscar's a swish?” He laughed again. “Nah. That's just part of the act. It fooled me too, the first time. I thought, jeez, whatta we got here? What kinda pansy-pants is this guy? But you should see him with the women, Marshal. They eat that stuff up. They're crawling all over him, like snails on a tomato. And Oscar, I'm telling you, he loves it.” He leaned forward confidentially again. “The fact is, I happen to know personally that Oscar gets more beaver than John Jacob Astor.”

Grigsby frowned. The idea offended him. Not because it meant he was wrong about Wilde. (Wilde was a nance, whatever Vail said.) But because it suggested that he was wrong about women. Grigsby would bet his life savings—not much of a wager, admittedly—that real women didn't go for the lah-di-dah sissy types. Society women, maybe. All stiff and dried up, like last year's roses. Smelling of dust and talcum powder. Them, maybe. And them, Wilde was welcome to.

But not real women.

He said, “So you figure I oughta talk to Ruddick?”

Vail held up a hand. “Don't get me wrong. Like I say, hear no evil, speak no evil. All I'm telling you, he's a strange one.”

Grigsby nodded. “What about this Countess?”

Vail lowered his head skeptically, multiplying his chins. “Hey. Come on. You don't think a woman could of done that?”

Grigsby shook his head. “She's travelin' along with the rest of you. Maybe she saw somethin'.”

Vail pursed his lips. “Well. Maybe. But lookit, Marshal, if you talk to her, could you do me a personal favor and break it to her gentle like? I mean, she's a real lady. A real aristocrat. She's not used to all this kinda stuff.”

Who was? Grigsby wondered. “She's travelin' with von Hesse?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Vail, “but nothing like you think. He's her escort, like. They're friends, is all.”

Grigsby nodded. For the first time, he found to his surprise that he was almost liking Vail. At least the little man tried to look out for this Countess of his. “How's she get along with Wilde?”

“They're friends. Really, Marshal, she's not that kind. She's a real lady.”

Vail reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a gold watch. “I don't wanna rush you, Marshal—like I say, I'm happy to help out any way I can. But is that it, pretty much? I mean, there's some things I got to take care of.”

“I need a list of all the places where Wilde gave his talks. Since he left New York.”

“Sure,” said Vail. “No problem.”

H
ANDS IN THE POCKETS
of his overcoat, lips puckered, Oscar pondered his way down the wooden sidewalk of Main Street. He had been unable to remain in his room. After Grigsby's visit, the place had become abruptly smaller; he had felt hemmed in, oppressed. Quickly, ignoring the bright filaments of pain that trembled and twitched against the inside of his skull, he had done his toilet and dressed himself. In basic black, as seemed fitting—although, having no suitably somber topcoat, he had been obliged to wear the ankle-length green velvet coat he had brought from London. Its collar and cuffs, at least, were black.

What he had wanted to do, still wanted to do, was trot off to Elizabeth McCourt Doe. His strange, traitorous doubts had vanished. The dull vacuum he had discovered within himself when he awoke—this had suddenly been filled, swollen, by an almost overwhelming need.

But she might not be at the mansion. Or Tabor might be. And so might the servants …

And so Oscar was, once again, alone.

Curious how aloneness could remember only itself. The easy, commonplace joys of friendship, the wild joys of love: it could recall none of these. One felt, experiencing it, as though aloneness were the fundamental reality; as though the rest were mere illusions.

He looked around him.

Within the few minutes since he left the hotel, the sun had vanished. The sky now was overcast, crowded with gray brooding clouds so close to the earth that they seemed to scrape along the rooftops of the bleak brick buildings.

Appropriate. Nature mirroring a state of mind. The clouds a reflection of the clouds that lay over his tour. Over his life.

He walked on, looking down again at the sidewalk, oblivious to the passersby.

Four women killed. Mutilated. What kind of madman could do that?

Grigsby was wrong. He must be wrong. Impossible that one of the others could be responsible. A madness so extreme, a madness so patent, surely by now it should have revealed itself in a word, a glance, a gesture?

“Ah, Mr. Wilde.”

Oscar stopped, looked up from the gray wooden slats at his feet.

Colonel von Hesse stood before him, as military as ever in a long gray topcoat and sharply pressed gray slacks. Under his left arm, holding it at an angle of forty-five degrees from the horizontal, he carried a large book with a worn brown leather cover.

“What excellent luck,” said von Hesse. “I was hoping to meet with you. Tell me, how would you translate the word
abgeschiedenheit
?”

Oscar frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

“
Abgeschiedenheit.
You would translate it how?”

Translating from the German was perhaps the last thing Oscar wished to do at the moment. But the good Herr von Hesse was, as always, so relentlessly earnest that Oscar found it difficult to dismiss him. (He had often suspected that this earnestness was something that good people relied upon, in much the way that beggars relied upon their rags.) “Detachment, I should say. As in a dwelling. Isolation. Separateness.”

“Ah,” said von Hesse, nodding. “In the spatial sense, yes? I would translate it in this manner also. But Eckhart, you see”—he tapped the book with the forefinger of his right hand—“uses the word in quite a different manner. I should translate his use of it as meaning
disinterest.
He puts it into the psychological, eh? And it is fascinating, I find, that he ranks this
abgeschiedenheit
higher even than love in the scales of virtues. The highest of all, he ranks it, in terms of approaching to God.”

Oscar decided that the two of them could discuss God some other time. “Look, Herr von Hesse, obviously you haven't heard about these murders.”

Von Hesse blinked, startled. “What? Murders?”

Oscar glanced around, suddenly realized that the sidewalk was crowded with people. He took von Hesse by the arm. In German he said, “Come along. I'll explain.”

“But this is horrible,” said von Hesse.

The two of them sat over cups of muddy coffee at a corner table in a small gray restaurant
(EATS,
the sign outside had grimly promised). The floor here, like the floors of most of the saloons and cafes in Denver, was ankle-deep in sawdust. Only two of the remaining five tables were occupied: one by an elderly man drooped inside a limp black suit, the other by a pair of grizzled, dour, and spectacularly dusty cowboys.

“Yes,” said Oscar, “but perhaps the most distressing aspect is that this Grigsby is firmly persuaded that one of us is responsible.”

Von Hesse, sitting as usual with his spine perfectly vertical, nodded thoughtfully. “Well, of course, this is possible.”

Oscar sat back in his uncomfortable chair. “Come now. It would mean that one of us is not only a madman, but a madman capable of masking his madness so well as to make it undetectable.”

“But perhaps,” said von Hesse, running a hand along his scalp, over the furze of closely cropped white hair, “perhaps he masks it so well that even he cannot detect it.”

Oscar frowned. “Which means what, exactly?”

Von Hesse took a sip from his coffee cup. “May I tell you a story from my life?”

Oscar shifted slightly in his chair; other people's accounts of their lives often seemed to last as long as the lives themselves. “Yes, certainly.”

“Once,” said von Hesse, “when I was in the army, it came to my attention that graves in the nearby area were being desecrated. Not far from Coblenz, this was, in a small town. The mayor came to me and asked me for my help. The graves were always those of women. Their coffins had been disinterred and broken open, and the condition of the corpses indicated that they had been assaulted.”

“Assaulted?”

“Sexually assaulted.”

“Good Lord.”

Von Hesse nodded. “It was horrible, yes.”

“The women had died recently? They were young?”

Von Hesse cocked his head slightly. “This would make a difference?”

Oscar frowned. “Well, if they
had
been young, and beautiful, then perhaps understanding the man's motives might not require such a leap of the imagination.”

“It requires, always, a leap of the imagination to understand the motives of another. This is what compassion is, no?”

“Ah, well. I should say, rather, that compassion is the recognition that another is as important an entity as we are ourselves.” Oscar smiled. “
As
important, perhaps, but not more so. Sympathizing with the pain of another is one thing. Sympathizing with his success is something quite different.”

“But this recognition,” von Hesse said, “this is the leap, I believe. It is a leap inward, into ourselves. We contain within ourselves, all of us, heaven and hell, angels and devils. In order to understand the devils of another, we must perceive them in ourselves. For this, imagination is required.”

“Yes, well,” said Oscar, who felt that they were going rather far afield, “these women. They were young?”

“There had been three violations, which had all occurred within a week or so of burial. One of the women was young. The others were not.”

“Which would lead one to believe,” Oscar said, “that the attacks had less to do with the women themselves than with the fact that they were dead.” Would've made a better tale otherwise, however. Reality proving itself, once again, an inept storyteller.

Von Hesse nodded. “In any event, as the mayor explained to me, the townspeople were very concerned. Very frightened, yes? They are in this part of Germany a superstitious folk, and already there was much talk of demons and evil spirits. I agreed to help. I agreed that, should another woman die, I would secretly assign a squad of men to guard the cemetery.”

“Why secretly?” Oscar sipped at his coffee. The stuff was so thick that, after one blew on it, ripples remained for a time on its surface.

“I recognized the possibility that the person responsible could have been one of the men under my command. It was, in fact, more than a possibility—it was a likelihood. We had been stationed near the town for only ten months, you see, and the attacks had begun some three months after our arrival.”

Von Hesse sipped at his coffee. “For a month nothing happened.”

Oscar removed the cigarette case and the box of matches from his coat pocket. No one nearby pulled out a revolver and pointed it at his head.

“And then,” von Hesse said, “a young girl died. A fall from the family barn. It was a particularly tragic accident, because so easily avoidable, and the reports of her death quickly circulated among the troops and within the town. She was said, this girl, to be very beautiful. She was fifteen years old.”

Oscar tapped a cigarette against the case, placed it in his mouth.

“She was buried, I remember, on a Sunday evening. I assigned a squad of men to watch the cemetery that night. No one approached the grave.”

Oscar lighted the cigarette, exhaled.

“The next night, I assigned a second squad, rotating them, yes? The same thing happened. Nothing. On the third night, when the first squad returned, there came a storm. The rain fell very hard, so thickly that one could not see one's own hand before one's face. The men in the cemetery were gathered together behind a large oak tree. You must picture it, Mr. Wilde. This was autumn, and the tree was empty of its leaves. Its bare branches disappeared above them in the darkness and the torrent. They sat beneath their greatcoats, soaked to the skin and of course very cold. No doubt, among themselves, they cursed me for keeping them there. For it was inconceivable that anyone would go out on a night such as this.”