Black Diamond (4 page)

When he woke up, he didn’t realize where he was. A private nurse had been left with him. She fed him some soup and said, ‘You feeling better now?’ She made it plain that she expected him to answer yes.

‘It was the shock,’ he said.

‘That’s right. You take it easy,’ she told him.

He took it easy. He began to think. He thought for the first time in years about Jean; about how he and she had been tricked, treated with contempt; and how his parents’ hatred – especially his mother’s – had not been satisfied by merely frustrating his
hopes and plans: they had had to destroy his chance of any kind of love for the rest of his life. Jean’s chance, too. What had happened to Jean?

As soon as he was on his feet, he went to her parents’ house. They were there but they wouldn’t let him in. To begin with, they wouldn’t even answer the door. His shouts and sobs convinced them that it would be better to talk him into being quiet than to have the neighbors hearing that old story dragged up again.

Her father opened the door a crack. The safety chain – a recent instalment – prevented entry. ‘We don’t want you here,’ he said. ‘Go away.’

William started to explain – fast, gasping, and doing his best not to yell – that his mother had written forgeries to Jean and to him too: she’d lied to both of them and now he had to find Jean, to ask her to forgive him and to make it up to her.

Her father said, ‘We don’t know where she is. That’s the truth. And it’s on account of you. She was staying with her aunt and she was five, almost six months to – you know. She couldn’t stand the shame. She took some kind of poison.’

William stopped breathing for a moment.

‘She nearly died,’ her father said.

‘But she didn’t?’

‘They had three doctors working on her for twenty-four hours. They couldn’t save the baby: nobody in the family wasted any tears over that. They only just pulled her through. Soon as she was getting better, she ran off. Her aunt says she told Jeannie she’d better behave herself from now on, seeing as how what she did is a crime you can get put in jail for; and she would be, if anybody wanted to arrest her for it. It would be murder. I guess she took it the wrong way, got scared the police were going to come after her. That woman never treated her too kindly, from what I can make out.’

‘Where is she?’ William asked.

‘Like I told you, we don’t know. We haven’t heard from her since that day. We haven’t heard anything about her at all. All we know is, her aunt said her mind was a little unhinged from the
time she took that poison. I reckon you’d better forget about her. That’s what we had to do. It’s like she was dead.’

William was about to ask some more questions when Jean’s mother called out from the hallway, ‘What are you telling him? Don’t you say anything to him.’ She sounded drunk. She raised her voice and screeched, ‘You get away from us. Haven’t you caused enough trouble? Go on, go away!’ William turned and ran down the street.

He believed what her father had told him. He went back to his parents’ house. All night long he howled and wept. He cursed his mother, he called on Jean, talking to her, explaining. He beat his head against the walls. He slept.

When he woke, his madness had developed into quiet
conviction
. He was no longer violent; the thought just kept repeating itself in his mind: that Jean was somewhere waiting for him, and that he had to find her. He’d find her if he had to search the world over. He had plenty of money: he could spend his life on it.

He got into his car and drove to the capital, where he hired a firm of private detectives. There were several clues, he told them: the hospital she’d been admitted to would have her name and address in its files. It would be in the same state where the aunt lived. He could let them have the aunt’s address, but he didn’t want them to go near her. They should concentrate on the medical register; there might even be a record of fingerprints.

He gave the agency approximate dates. Nothing could be learned from her parents, he said. It would be better not to disturb them: they might decide to get in touch with the aunt or somebody, and everyone would clam up. And maybe if the detectives got close to Jean or anyone who knew where she was, they ought to say they were looking for her because of a case that concerned distant relatives. They could pretend it was
something
to do with a legacy.

He couldn’t understand why her mother and father hadn’t tried to find her. Even though they wouldn’t have had the money for detectives, they could have tried the police. It seemed to him that if you looked at the whole story, right through to
where it stood at the moment, her parents hadn’t behaved any better than his – maybe even worse, because Jean was their own child, whereas to his mother she’d been an outsider.

His detectives also had the clue of Jean’s illness – her reported illness, anyway, which meant that she could have been in hospitals afterwards. Her father had specifically cited mental instability, so the investigation could start there, with a check on all the public asylums and private clinics in the general area. She might have changed her name; the detectives should concentrate on anyone who was the right age. He had photographs but he knew, as the agency men undoubtedly did too, that people sometimes changed radically in a short space of time, especially if they’d been sick. The expression of the face, the look in the eyes, could become like those of another person. A gain or loss in weight could also make someone unrecognizable. Thirty-five pounds either way was a better disguise than a wig and glasses.

William said, ‘I guess maybe the thing for you to do is to go through all those places, get the possible names and then, if you think you’re on the right track, I should go see for myself.’

One of the partners in the firm, a Mr McAndrew, presented William with a businesslike sheet of facts and figures, plus an estimate of costs. ‘Those are the short-term calculations,’ he explained. ‘This could take a long time. But if it does, our charges would drop significantly. We believe in keeping our customers happy.’

William said that all sounded fine. He hoped they’d phone soon, because he was eager for news. He got up from his chair jerkily and lurched towards the door. Ever since finding the letters, his movements had become slightly uncoordinated. And he’d fallen into the habit of looking off into space, as if searching or remembering. Mr McAndrew might have considered William a fit subject for the clinics himself, if the princely retainer he’d pushed across the desktop hadn’t proclaimed his sanity.

Weeks went by. William kept himself busy with the house. He couldn’t decide whether or not to sell it. He took a leave of absence from the office. His hands healed. He hired painters to
clean up the house, inside and out. And he got other workmen in to repair the damage he’d done.

Mr McAndrew found four patients in public wards whom he described as ‘possible suspects’. Two of them were in the same hospital. If William wanted to go look for himself, one of their operatives could take him along. William said yes, he’d like that.

The detective called early. He was driving a company car. He was young, about thirty – only a couple of years older than William. He looked tough enough to deal with the rougher side of detective work, if he had to. He introduced himself as Harvey Corelli.

‘Like the tenor?’ William asked. ‘Franco Corelli?’

‘Don’t know him. Call me Harvey, okay?’

‘Sure. I’m Bill.’

‘Yeah, but you’re the client. You’re supposed to be Mister.’

‘If I call you Harvey, you call me Bill,’ William said. People had started to call him Bill as soon as he got to college.

‘Right,’ Harvey said. ‘That suits me fine.’ He’d noticed the sudden far-off look his boss had mentioned. He got behind the wheel.

On that first trip they spent a week going from one hospital to another. Harvey handled the receptionists and doctors; William took a quick look at the patient and shook his head. Sometimes it was enough just to have her pointed out in the distance.

Two weeks later they started out on a second trip. They visited three institutions, all no good. While they were still travelling, McAndrew came up with some more names. Harvey passed on the information after he’d made his routine call to check in. ‘You want to leave them till another time?’ he asked.

William said no – he’d rather keep going, and follow up as many leads as possible. They could stay in motels and go down the whole list in a few days, unless Harvey had another case he was working on.

‘Only this one at the moment,’ Harvey said. One, to his mind, was usually one too many. He had always found it less easy to sympathize with his clients than with the people who had run out on them, cheated them, or otherwise let them have what
they deserved. William was no exception to that rule, but he seemed like such an idiot that he actually had possibilities. Harvey knew the area. He could speed up the chase or slow it down. He figured that he could spin it out for a long time; he could be collecting a salary practically forever, if he played his hand right. He didn’t like taking orders from McAndrew. He’d been bawled out in front of other people once: he hadn’t appreciated that. He wasn’t going to forget it. William, he thought, could turn out to be a pretty good meal ticket; he wasn’t up to much in the way of fun, but Harvey knew the ropes: he’d get William interested somehow. It might be a good idea for all concerned to give old William something to think about besides his quest for the holy bride. There were a lot of moneybags in the family vault; Harvey could think of several uses for them.

William was lonely, so it wasn’t hard, despite his mania, or obsession, or – as he preferred to think of it – love. One evening Harvey suggested that they call up a couple of girls: he knew one or two in the neighborhood. William said no, he didn’t feel like it.

‘Do you carry on like this all the time?’ Harvey asked.

‘Carry on?’

‘No
thanks,
I
don’t
feel
like
it?’

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘Never?’

‘I’ve got other things on my mind.’

‘Mind isn’t what I’m talking about, Bill. Come on.’ He called up a woman he knew. He poured William a few drinks. When the woman arrived, she dropped her coat on the bed and said, ‘Hey Harve, just like old times.’ She then whipped off her dress and underclothes. William jumped to his feet. He intended to go to his own room, but he was too drunk. He fell over the corner of the bed. Harvey picked him up and slung him on top of the bedspread. The woman threw her arm over him. His buttons were being undone, his belt was being unbuckled. He heard Harvey going out of the room.

In the morning the woman was gone. Harvey knocked on the door. He dragged William into the bathroom and gave him two
Alka-Seltzers. He said, ‘Now you’ve got the hang of it, you won’t have to get so plastered. Next time, we’ll have a party.’

‘I feel god-awful,’ William muttered. He had such a headache that he had to wear a pair of sunglasses all day, except for the moments when he looked at the hospital patients who might have been Jean, but weren’t.

They kept traveling for another week. William talked to Harvey about his story. He explained why it was so important to find Jean. Harvey didn’t seem to think the story was anything special. He said it was a tough break, but it happened all the time. ‘You got to move on in life,’ he told William. ‘You got to move forward.’

William was sorry he’d said anything. That was another thing loneliness did to people – they’d spill out all the most secret, private details of their lives to complete strangers: they’d get drunk and try to obliterate themselves for a time, to get rid of the past and of themselves too, by transforming everything into talk. You could always change events by describing the truth another way, remembering it differently. It was a method of controlling your life, of understanding it.

Harvey, in his turn, talked. He had dozens of schemes for becoming famous, making money, cornering the market on something nobody else had thought of. He had ideas about travel, international finance, import–export. He wanted to buy a boat some day and trade between Florida and the islands, like everybody else: that was where the big money was.

William nodded and said, ‘Yes, I see,’ and, ‘That’s interesting.’ He was looking into the distance again. Harvey phoned two girls. He wanted an evening where he’d trade girls with William; after they’d tried out their own, they’d swap. William said all right: he didn’t mind.

‘Picking up some tips, kid?’ Harvey asked.

‘I hope that’s all I’m picking up,’ William told him.

Harvey began to wonder how far he could push William. He’d gotten him in with the girls; the next step could be a couple of other, more expensive habits. He didn’t want to take things too
fast. William looked nearly ready to crack. Harvey thought hard about how to get him lined up just right.

Before he could do anything, they came to a sanatorium called Green Mansions. It wasn’t green and it didn’t look like a mansion: a three-story brick and concrete building that lacked the architectural charm of some of the older asylums. It was privately run.

There were three candidates for inspection – young women of the right age. Harvey saw at a glance that none of the three would fit the photographs. The women were seated around a table at the far end of a large hall that – on the evidence of the drawings, announcements and other pieces of paper tacked to the walls – was the patients’ recreation room. It was the room where they’d be taught gymnastic exercises and would take part in dances. Scuffed linoleum covered the floor. There was a piano in one of the corners. The lid was down over the keyboard. In a place like that, it would have to be locked, too.

Right at the back, a line of folding chairs ran around three sides of the room. Patients and possibly nurses sat together in groups. There were no white uniforms. Many people were sitting quietly on their own, or standing. One man who tried to sit on the floor was immediately pulled to his feet by two other men: he didn’t appear to be pleading for attention – it was as if he’d temporarily forgotten that people were supposed to sit on chairs instead.