Blind Assassin (94 page)

Those main-street stores and businesses that had refused to close down had their windows broken. Then the ones that had closed also had their windows broken. After that, looting took place, and matters got severely out of hand. The newspaper was invaded and the offices wrecked; Elwood Murray was roughed up, and the machines in the printing shop at the back were smashed. His darkroom escaped, but his camera did not. It was a mournful time for him, which we heard all about, many times, afterwards.

That night the button factory caught on fire. Flames shot out the windows on the lower floor: I couldn’t see them from my room, but the fire truck clanged past, going to the rescue. I was dismayed and frightened, of course, but I have to admit there was something exciting about this as well. As I was listening to the clanging, and to the distant shouts from the same direction, I heard someone coming up the back stairs. I thought it might be Reenie, but it wasn’t. It was Laura; she had her outdoor coat on.

“Where have you been?” I asked her. “We’re supposed to stay put. Father has enough worries without you wandering off.”

“I was only in the conservatory,” she said. “I was praying. I needed a quiet place.”

They did manage to put out the fire, but a lot of damage had been done to the building. That was the first report. Then Mrs. Hillcoate arrived, out of breath and bearing clean laundry, and was allowed in past the guards. Arson, she said: they’d found the cans of gasoline. The night watchman was lying dead on the floor. He had a bump on his head.

Two men had been seen running away. Had they been recognized? Not conclusively, but it was being rumoured that one of them was Miss Laura’s young man. Reenie said he wasn’t her young man, Laura didn’t have a young man, he was only an acquaintance. Well, whatever he was, said Mrs. Hillcoate, he’d most likely burnt down the button factory and conked poor Al Davidson on the head and killed him dead as a rat, and he’d better make himself scarce around this town if he knew what was good for him.

At dinner Laura said she wasn’t hungry. She said she couldn’t eat right then: she would make up a tray for herself, to have later. I watched her carrying it up the back stairs to her room. It had double helpings of everything—rabbit, squash, boiled potatoes. Usually she treated eating as a kind of fidgeting—something to do with your hands at the dinner table, while other people were talking—or else as a chore she had to get through, like polishing the silver. A sort of tedious maintenance routine. I wondered when she had suddenly developed such optimism about food.

The next day, troops from the Royal Canadian Regiment arrived to restore order. This was Father’s old regiment, from the war. He took it very hard, to see these soldiers turned against their own people—his own people, or the people he’d thought were his. That they no longer shared his view of them did not require any great genius to figure out, but he took that hard as well. Had they loved him, then, only for his money? It appeared so.

After the Royal Canadian Regiment had got things under control, the Mounties arrived. Three of them appeared outside our front door. They knocked politely, then stood in the hall, their shiny boots creaking against the waxed parquet, their stiff brown hats in their hands. They wanted to talk to Laura.

“Come with me, please, Iris,” Laura whispered when summoned. “I can’t see them alone.” She looked very young, very white.

The two of us sat together on the settee in the morning room, beside the old gramophone. The Mounties sat in chairs. They did not look like my idea of a Mountie, being too old, too thick around the waist. One of them was younger, but he was not in charge. The middle one did the talking. He said that they apologized for disturbing us at what must be a difficult time, but the matter was of some urgency. What they wanted to talk about was Mr. Alex Thomas. Was Laura aware that this man was a known subversive and radical, and had been in the relief camps, causing agitation and stirring up trouble?

Laura said that as far as she knew he had just been teaching the men how to read.

That was one way of looking at it, said the Mountie. And if he was innocent, then he naturally had nothing to hide, and would come forward if required, didn’t she agree? Where might he be keeping himself these days?

Laura said she couldn’t say.

The question was repeated in a different way. This man was under suspicion: didn’t Laura want to help locate the criminal who might well have set fire to her father’s factory and may have been the cause of death of a loyal employee? If eyewitnesses were to be trusted, that is.

I said that eyewitnesses were not to be trusted, because whoever was seen running away had been viewed only from the back, and besides it had been dark.

“Miss Laura?” said the Mountie, ignoring me.

Laura said that even if she could say, she wouldn’t. She said you were innocent until proven guilty. Also it was against her Christian principles to throw a man to the lions. She said she was sorry about the dead watchman, but it was not Alex Thomas’s fault, because Alex Thomas would never have done such a thing. But she could not say anything more.

She was holding on to my arm, down near the wrist; I could feel the tremors coming from her, like a train track vibrating.

The chief Mountie said something about obstructing justice.

At this point I said that Laura was only just fifteen, and could not be held responsible in the way an adult would be. I said that what she had told them was of course confidential, and if it went any farther than this room—to the newspapers, for instance—then Father would know who to thank.

The Mounties smiled, and stood up, and took their leave; they were decorous and reassuring. They may have seen the impropriety of pursuing this line of investigation. Although on the ropes, Father still had friends.

“All right,” I said to Laura, once they were gone. “I know you’ve got him in this house. You’d better tell me where.”

“I put him in the cold cellar,” said Laura, her bottom lip trembling.

“The cold cellar!” I said. “What a stupid place! Why there?”

“So he would have enough to eat, in an emergency,” said Laura, and burst into tears. I wrapped my arms around her, and she snuffled against my shoulder.

“Enough to eat?” I said. “Enough jam and jelly and pickles? Really Laura, you take the cake.” Then we both began to laugh, and after we had laughed and Laura had wiped her eyes, I said, “We’ve got to get him out of there. What if Reenie goes down for a jar of jam or something and comes across him by mistake? She’d have a heart attack.”

We laughed some more. We were very on edge. Then I said the attic would be better, because nobody ever went up there. I would arrange it all, I said. She’d better go up to bed: it was obvious that the strain was telling on her and she was all worn out. She sighed a little, like a tired child, then did as I’d suggested. She’d been living on her nerves, carrying around this immense weight of knowledge like some evil packsack, and now she’d handed it over to me she was free to sleep.

Was it my belief that I was doing this only to spare her—to help her, to take care of her, as I had always done?

Yes. That is what I did believe.

I waited until Reenie had cleared up in the kitchen and turned in for the night. Then I went down the cellar stairs, into the chill, the dimness, the smell of spidery dampness. I went past the door to the coal cellar, the locked wine cellar door. The door to the cold cellar closed with a latch. I knocked, lifted it, went in. There was a scuttling noise. It was dark, of course; just the light from the corridor. The top of the apple barrel held the remains of Laura’s dinner—the rabbit bones. It looked like some primitive altar.

I didn’t see him at first; he was behind the apple barrel. Then I could make him out. A knee, a foot. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s only me.”

“Ah,” he said in his normal voice. “The devoted sister.”

“Shh,” I said. The light switch was a chain hanging from the bulb. I pulled it, the light went on. Alex Thomas was unwinding himself, scrambling out from behind the barrel. He crouched, blinking, sheepish, like a man caught with his pants undone.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said.

“You’ve come to kick me out, or turn me over to the proper authorities, I assume,” he said with a smile.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I certainly wouldn’t want you to be discovered here. Father couldn’t stand the scandal.”

“Capitalist’s Daughter Aids Bolshevik Murderer?” he said. “Love Nest Among the Jelly Jars Revealed? That sort of scandal?”

I frowned at him. This was not a joking matter.

“Rest easy. Laura and I aren’t up to anything,” he said. “She’s a great kid, but she’s a saint in training, and I’m not a baby snatcher.” He’d stood up by now and was dusting himself off.

“Then why is she hiding you?” I asked.

“Matter of principle. Once I asked, she had to accept. I fall into the right category for her.”

“What category?”

“‘The least of these,’ I guess,” he said. “To quote Jesus.” I found that quite cynical. Then he said that bumping into Laura had been a sort of accident. He’d run into her in the conservatory. What had he been doing there? Hiding, obviously. He’d hoped also, he said, to be able to talk to me.

“Me?” I said. “Why on earth, me?”

“I thought you’d know what to do. You seem like the practical type. Your sister is less…”

“Laura seems to have managed well enough,” I said shortly. I didn’t like it when other people criticized Laura—her vagueness, her simplicity, her fecklessness. Criticism of Laura was reserved for me. “How did she get you past those men at the doors?” I said. “Into the house? The ones in overcoats.”

“Even men in overcoats have to take a leak sometimes,” he said.

I was taken aback by this vulgarity—it was at odds with his dinner-party politeness—but perhaps it was a sample of the orphanish jeering Reenie had predicted. I decided to ignore it. “You didn’t set the fire, I take it,” I said. I meant to sound sarcastic, but it wasn’t received that way.

“I’m not that stupid,” he said. “I wouldn’t set a fire for no reason.”

“Everyone thinks it was you.”

“It wasn’t, though,” he said. “But it would be very convenient for certain people to take that view.”

“What certain people? Why?” I wasn’t pushing him this time; I was baffled.

“Use your head,” he said. But he wouldn’t say any more.

The attic

I got a candle from the stash of them in the kitchen, on hand for power blackouts, and lit it, and led Alex Thomas out of the cellar and through the kitchen and up the back stairs, then up the narrower stairs to the attic, where I installed him behind the three empty trunks. There were some old quilts stored in a cedar chest up there, and I hauled them out for bedding.

“No one will come,” I said. “If they do, get underneath the quilts. Don’t walk around, they might hear the footsteps. Don’t turn on the light.” (There was a single bulb with a pull chain in the attic, just as in the cold cellar.) “We’ll bring you something to eat in the morning,” I added, not knowing how I would make good on this promise.

I went downstairs, then came back up again with a chamber pot, which I set down without a word. It was a detail that had always worried me, in Reenie’s stories about kidnappers—what about the facilities? It would be one thing to be locked into a crypt, quite another to be reduced to squatting in a corner with your skirt hauled up.

Alex Thomas nodded, and said, “Good girl. You’re a pal. I knew you were practical.”

In the morning Laura and I held a whispered conference in her bedroom. The subjects discussed were the procuring of food and drink, the need for watchfulness, and the emptying of the chamber pot. One of us—pretending to be reading—would stand guard in my room, with the door open: we could see the door to the attic stairs from there. The other would fetch and carry. We agreed to take these tasks in rotation. The big hurdle would be Reenie, who was sure to smell a rat if we acted too furtive.

We hadn’t worked out any plan for what we would do if we were found out. We never did work out such a plan. It was all improvisation.

Alex Thomas’s first breakfast was our toast crusts. As a rule, we did not eat our crusts until nagged—it was still Reenie’s habit to say
Remember the starving Armenians
—but this time, when Reenie looked, the crusts were gone. They were actually in Laura’s navy-blue skirt pocket.

“Alex Thomas must be the starving Armenians,” I whispered, as we hurried up the stairs. But Laura didn’t think this was funny. She thought it was accurate.

Mornings and evenings were the times of our visits. We raided the pantry, salvaged the leftovers. We smuggled up raw carrots, bacon rinds, half-eaten boiled eggs, pieces of bread folded over, with butter and jam inside. Once a leg of fricasseed chicken—a daring coup. Also glasses of water, cups of milk, cold coffee. We carted away the empty dishes, stashed them under our beds until the coast was clear, then washed them in our bathroom sink before replacing them in the kitchen cupboard. (I did this: Laura was too clumsy.) We didn’t use the good china. What if something got broken? Even an everyday plate might have been noticed: Reenie kept track. So we were very cautious with the tableware.

Was Reenie suspicious of us? I expect so. She could usually tell when we were up to something. But she could also tell when it was more politic not to know exactly what that something might be. I expect she was preparing herself to say she’d had no idea, in case we were caught. She did tell us, once, not to go filching the raisins; she said we were acting like bottomless pits, and where did we get such hollow legs all of a sudden? And she was annoyed about the quarter of a pumpkin pie that went missing. Laura said she’d eaten it; she’d had a sudden fit of hunger, she said.

“Crust and all?” said Reenie sharply. Laura never ate the pie crusts from Reenie’s pies. Nobody did. Nor did Alex Thomas.

“I fed it to the birds,” said Laura. True enough: that’s what she had done, afterwards.

Alex Thomas was at first appreciative of our efforts. He said we were good pals, and that without us his goose would have been cooked. Then he wanted cigarettes—he was dying for a smoke. We brought him some from the silver box on the piano, but warned him to limit himself to one a day—the fumes might be detected. (He ignored this stricture.)

Then he said the worst thing about the attic was not being able to keep clean. He said his mouth felt like a drain. We stole the old toothbrush Reenie used for cleaning the silver, and scrubbed it off for him as best we could; he said it was better than nothing. One day we brought him a wash basin and a towel, and a jug with warm water. Afterwards he waited till nobody was underneath and threw the dirty water out the attic window. It had been raining, so the ground was wet anyway and the splash was not noticed. A little later, when the coast seemed clear, we allowed him down the attic stairs and shut him up in the bathroom the two of us shared, so he could have a proper wash. (We’d told Reenie we’d help out by taking over the cleaning of this bathroom, on which her comment was:
Wonders never cease.
)

While Alex Thomas’s washing-up was going forward Laura sat in her bedroom, I sat in mine, each guarding a bathroom door. I tried not to think about what was going on in there. The image of him with all his clothes off was painful to me, in some way that did not bear contemplating.

Alex Thomas was featured in newspaper editorials, not only in our own paper. He was an arsonist and murderer, it was said, and of the worst kind—one who killed from cold-blooded fanaticism. He had come to Port Ticonderoga to infiltrate the working force, and to sow seeds of dissension, in which he had succeeded, as witness the general strike and the rioting. He was an example of the evils of a university education—a smart boy, too smart for his own good, whose wits had been turned through bad company and worse books. His adoptive father, a Presbyterian minister, was quoted as saying that he prayed every night for Alex’s soul, but that this was a generation of vipers. His rescue of Alex as a child from the horrors of war was not passed over: Alex was a brand snatched from the burning, he said, but it was always a risk to take a stranger into your home. The implication was that such brands were better left unsnatched.

In addition to all of that, the police had printed a Wanted poster of Alex, and had stuck it up in the post office, and in other public places as well. Luckily it wasn’t a very clear picture: Alex had his hand in front of him, which partly obscured his face. It was the photo from the newspaper, the one Elwood Murray had taken of the three of us, at the button factory picnic. (Laura and I were cut off at the sides, naturally.) Elwood Murray had let it be known that he could have printed a better picture from the negative, but when he went to look, the negative was gone. Well, that was no surprise: a number of things had been destroyed when the newspaper office was wrecked.

We brought Alex the newspaper clippings, and one of the Wanted posters too—Laura had purloined it from a telephone pole. He read about himself with rueful dismay. “They want my head on a platter,” was what he said.

After a few days, he asked if we could bring him some paper—writing paper. There was a stack of school exercise books left over from Mr. Erskine: we brought him those, and a pencil as well.

“What do you think he’s writing?” Laura asked. We couldn’t decide. A prisoner’s journal, a vindication of himself? Perhaps a letter, to someone who might rescue him. But he didn’t ask us to mail anything, so it couldn’t have been a letter.

Tending Alex Thomas brought Laura and me closer together than we had been for a while. He was our guilty secret, and also our virtuous project—one we could finally share. We were two good little Samaritans, lifting out of the ditch the man fallen among thieves. We were Mary and Martha, ministering to—well, not Jesus, even Laura did not go that far, but it was obvious which of us she had cast in these roles. I was to be Martha, keeping busy with household chores in the background; she was to be Mary, laying pure devotion at Alex’s feet. (Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

Laura carried the food scraps up the attic stairs as if they were a temple offering. She carried the chamber pot down as if it were a reliquary, or a precious candle on the verge of flickering out.

At night, after Alex Thomas had been fed and watered, we would talk him over—how he’d looked that day, whether he was too thin, whether he’d coughed—we didn’t want him to get sick. What he might need, what we should try to steal for him the next day. Then we would climb into our respective beds. I don’t know about Laura, but I would picture him up there in the attic, directly above me. He too would be trying to sleep, tossing and turning in his bed of musty quilts. Then he would be sleeping. Then he would be dreaming, long dreams of war and fire, and of disintegrating villages, their fragments strewn about.

I don’t know at what point these dreams of his changed to dreams of pursuit and escape; I don’t know at what point I joined him in these dreams, fleeing with him hand in hand, at dusk, away from a burning building, across the furrowed December fields, the stubbled earth in which the frost was now beginning to set in, towards the dark line of the distant woods.

But it wasn’t his dream really, I did know that. It was my own. It was Avilion that was burning, its broken pieces that were scattered over the ground—the good china, the Sèvers bowl with rose petals, the silver cigarette box from the top of the piano. The piano itself, the stained-glass windows from the dining room—the blood-red cup, Iseult’s cracked harp—everything I’d been longing to get away from, true, but not through destruction. I’d wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.

One day, when Laura was out—it was no longer dangerous for her, the men in overcoats had gone away and the Mounties as well, the streets were orderly again—I decided to make a solo trip to the attic. I had an offering to make—a pocketful of currants and dried figs, snatched from the makings for the Christmas pudding. I scouted—Reenie was safely occupied with Mrs. Hillcoate, in the kitchen—then went to the attic door and knocked. We had a special knock by then, one knock followed by three more in quick succession. Then I tiptoed up the narrow attic stairs.

Alex Thomas was crouched beside the small oval window, trying to take advantage of what daylight there was. Evidently he hadn’t heard my knock: his back was turned towards me, and he had one of the quilts around his shoulders. He seemed to be writing. I could smell cigarette smoke—yes, he was smoking, there was his hand with the cigarette in it. I didn’t think he should be doing this so near a quilt.

I did not quite know how to announce my presence. “I’m here,” I said.

He jumped, and dropped the cigarette. It fell onto the quilt. I gasped, and dropped to my knees to put it out—I had the now-familiar vision of Avilion going up in flames. “It’s all right,” he said. He was kneeling too, both of us searching for any remaining sparks. Then the next thing I knew we were on the floor, and he had hold of me and was kissing me on the mouth.

I hadn’t expected this.

Had I expected this? Was it so sudden, or were there preliminaries: a touch, a gaze? Did I do anything to provoke him? Nothing I can recall, but is what I remember the same thing as what actually happened?

It is now: I am the only survivor.

In any case, it was just as Reenie had said, about the men in movie theatres, except that what I felt was not outrage. But the rest of it was true enough: I was transfixed, I could not move, I had no recourse. My bones had turned to melting wax. He got almost all of my buttons undone before I was able to rouse myself, to pull myself away, to flee.

I did this wordlessly. As I scrambled down the attic stairs, pushing back my hair, tucking in my blouse, I had the impression that—behind my back—he was laughing at me.

I didn’t know exactly what might occur if I let such a thing happen again, but whatever it was would be dangerous, at least for me. I would be asking for it, I would get what was coming to me, I would be an accident waiting to happen. I couldn’t afford to be alone in the attic with Alex Thomas again, nor could I confide in Laura the reason why. It would be too hurtful to her: she would never be able to understand it. (There was another possibility—he might have been doing a similar kind of thing with Laura. But no, I couldn’t believe that. She never would have allowed it. Would she?)

“We have to get him out of town,” I said to Laura. “We can’t keep this up. They’re sure to notice.”

“Not yet,” said Laura. “They’re still watching the train tracks.” She was in a position to know this, as she was still doing her work with the church soup kitchen.

“Well, somewhere else in town then,” I said.

“Where? There isn’t anywhere else. And this is the best place—this is the one place they’d never think to look.”

Alex Thomas said he didn’t want to get snowed in. He said a winter in the attic would drive him buggy. He said he was going stir-crazy. He said he would walk a couple of miles down the tracks, and hop a freight—there was a high bank there that made it easier. He said that if only he could get as far as Toronto, he could hide out—he had friends there, and they had friends. Then he’d get across to the States, one way or another, where he’d be safer. From what he’d read in the papers, the authorities suspected he might be there already. They certainly weren’t still looking for him in Port Ticonderoga.