Pale Betrayer (13 page)

“But a man?” Marks suggested.

“I’ve thought about that, and I’d give the nod in his favor.”

“I want to talk to the young lady,” Marks said. “Is she old enough for me to offer to buy her a drink?”

“She’s old enough to buy you one,” the Irishman said. “Take a seat by the wall there and I’ll send her over.”

The girl approached Marks with a saucy swing to her hips. If the boys were interested in either girl or detective, Marks observed, they failed to show it. Marks introduced himself and waited while the young woman settled herself in the booth. He had to ask her her name.

“Sally Nobakoff.”

Marks arched his brows. With her red hair and freckles he was not prepared for the Nobakoff. He wondered which of the boys had given her the name. “Are you a student of Professor Mather’s?”

“No-o-o,” she said, an amiable growl.

“But you are a student?”

“Not exactly. I work in the Records Office.”

“I see,” Marks said, and with a slight nod toward the Edwardians, “you’ve got a boyfriend.”

“A few,” she said and sighed.

Marks cut bait. “What will you have to drink?”

“Johnnie knows—Dubonnet, please.” She looked across to the bartender.

“Dubonnet,” Marks repeated. “You won’t mind if I stick to beer?”

“It’s not good for your bladder.”

Marks could think of nothing he wanted less to discuss at that moment than his bladder, but he was at a loss trying to figure out the girl: she was neither ingenue nor pickup. Fragments of the boys’ talk floated across the room, a discussion of someone named Bergson. The name was remotely familiar, but he did not want to chance showing his own ignorance. “I’m keeping you from the wars,” he said.

Sally laughed throatily. “They won’t even let me talk. But I think they’re cute anyway.”

“And Professor Mather?”

“He’s the most,” she said.

“You like him?”

“Well … I don’t know him very well and I bet he wouldn’t know me if he saw me on the street. But the first time I met him … My friend—he doesn’t come here much any more—but the night he introduced me to Mr. Mather, you’d have thought I was Queen Victoria, and him Sir Walter Raleigh, or somebody like that. Gosh, you know …”

“Queen for a day,” Marks murmured.

“Exactly. The next time and ever after if I even
presumed
to speak to him—drop dead! You know?”

“What’s your friend’s name, the one who introduced you?”

“Jeffrey Osterman. Isn’t Jeffrey a lovely name?”

Marks nodded.

Sally took the Dubonnet off the tray as the bartender leaned down, about to serve them. “Johnnie is my darling,” she said.

“That’s ‘Charlie,’” the Irishman said with a wink at Marks.

“No. It’s Jeffrey,” Sally said.

The bartender, moving away and out of Sally’s sight, made the gesture of holding his nose, Marks presumed at the mention of Jeffrey.

Sally swilled half the wine at one swallow. Definitely the Dubonnet type.

“Last night,” Marks suggested, “was Mather in good form?”

“Last night was the most,” Sally said. “The boys were discussing something—I mean they’re always discussing something—but all of a sudden just as though he was the only person there except me, he started reciting a poem. I mean I liked it—he was getting dramatic and more dramatic, and looking at me because he knew I was understanding it, you see? And the others didn’t know what it was all about.”

Marks grinned in spite of himself. “What was it all about?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly, but it was very patriotic—all about tyranny and blood, and rape. Afterwards the boys said it was a joke he was playing on them. I mean they think Lord Byron is square. But
square
. I was the only one who knew, but gosh, the way he opened his collar, and ran his hands through his hair …”

“Professor Mather?”

Sally nodded, and Marks had been given something to think about: he was remembering the last entry in Peter Bradley’s journal, his trying to explain the poet Byron to the Russian physicist at the monument in Athens. How strange that on the night he died, at the very hour probably, his friend Mather should be spouting the rhymes of the same Lord Byron.

“Sally, how would you like to introduce me to the boys? Or would you rather I introduced myself?”

She nodded with heavy emphasis in favor of his self-introduction. Marks, leaving her, signaled the bartender to give her another drink.

“Excuse me, gentlemen.” Marks tried to keep the mockery from his tone: they were so young, so apple-cheeked young as their faces turned up to him. “I’m Lieutenant Marks of the police department.” He saw one of the boys glance at his glass of beer. Under-age, Marks thought. Johnnie should watch that. “It’s a routine check—you’ve heard about the homicide last night?” The boys nodded. “Mr. Mather was with Dr. Bradley earlier. I wonder if any of you remember what time he joined you here?”

God help Mather if his life depended on their awareness of time. For Marks it had merely been an opening gambit. “What was the subject under discussion here?”

“T. S. Eliot.”

One of the young pups sniggered at the mention of Eliot to a cop.

Marks said: “Eliot was passé in my day, but the Hollow Men seem to have come into their own again.”

A boy said then, and Marks took it as their acceptance of him: “It was the Sweeney poems we were talking about last night, sir.”

“‘Sweeney among the Nightingales,’” Marks murmured. He was not going to be able to go much further. “Tell me something: is Professor Mather really a Byron enthusiast?”

“No, sir. I know for a fact, he absolutely loathes Byron. I take British Poetry under Mr. Mather, and I know. He thinks Byron was an exhibitionist, a fraud, an adulterer and a bad poet.”

Marks said: “That last is unforgivable, isn’t it?”

The boys laughed.

“Why do you suppose he took off on Byron then last night?”

The boys glanced at one another. The one who had made himself their spokesman said: “We were wondering about that. We thought—well, he doesn’t think much of Sweeney either, and we thought maybe it was his way of saying that what Byron was in his day, T. S. Eliot is now.”

“Eliot and Byron?” Marks said incredulously.

Their hearty agreement set them all to talking at once. Marks listened, amused at the mixture of erudition and pomposity. There was nothing sadder, really, than a pompous child.

Finally the under-aged youngster said to Marks: “He just wings it sometimes, sir, to purposely throw us off. Sometimes he’s spoofy, you know?”

Marks supposed it was as good an adjective as any.

“The thing he said when he took off from here last night …”

“I think it’s bloody unfair to tell that,” one of the others interrupted. “Out of context it could mean whatever somebody wanted it to.”

“It was said out of context, wasn’t it? Agamemnon died tonight—what did it mean to you?”

“What he said was, ‘Live, Sweeney. Agamemnon died tonight.’ To me that meant we’re living in a Sweeney’s paradise, a society of ape-necks with money—the hero, the individual’s been crushed, murdered by them.” The youth’s face flushed with the excitement of his own rhetoric.

“My dear fellow, you are winging,” the protester said. “That isn’t Eliot’s meaning at all.”

“But couldn’t that be what Eric meant, couldn’t it?” he appealed to the group.

Marks took advantage of the pause and gave his place to Sally who was standing beside him, her empty Dubonnet glass in hand. “Poor old Sweeney,” he said, and then nodded to them. “Goodnight, all. Thank you.”

He moved quickly to the bar and paid his bill, getting out of the Red Lantern at about the hour Mather had the night before. Across the street the intermission doors were opening at the Triangle Theater.

He sat in the car for a few moments, thinking. Agamemnon died tonight. Fact? Prophecy? Guilt? Or complete nonsense with no reference to Bradley? It was time to see the one person who could tell him what it meant—or what he chose now to pretend it had meant. In any case Marks had a pair of shoes to return.

He radioed in to Communications, and on the “Over” picked up the information that Miss Russo had telephoned him, leaving her number.

Marks stopped at the nearest public phone booth and called her. She told him how Eric Mather had described a man he had seen near the Bradleys’ who, she was sure, was the same man she had met in her hallway.

“M
Y DEAR LIEUTENANT, UNTIL
I learned that Annie had been trying to describe him, I had no idea of the possible connection.”

Tonight, Marks thought, he was overplaying the nonchalance. In velvet smoking jacket, he had even dressed the part. He sat, his long legs stretched, his feet slippered, one arm draped over the back of the sofa. No matter how you served him, Mather was not his dish.

“How’s the toe?”

Mather described a circle with his foot and flexed the toes: completely healed.

“What time of the day was it, Professor, that you realized we might be interested in this man?”

“Annie and I had a drink this afternoon. Sixish.”

“And she didn’t impress on you how important it might be?”

“If it were important, I expected you would tell me, Lieutenant. I’ve been waiting here for you all evening. I knew you would come.”

“Intuition?”

“Call it that.”

Marks said: “Did your intuition tell you earlier last night that Peter Bradley was going to be killed at, say, a little after nine thirty?”

Mather’s high-boned face showed a twitch of tension. “No. I swear to God I had no intimation of that.”

It was a very earnest protest to come from an innocent man who liked to play it cool. Marks said: “What did you expect to happen? Something. That was obvious from your behavior. Make it easy for both of us and tell me.”

Mather shook his head and shrugged.

“I’ll find it out in time. You can be sure of that.”

“Then you must inform me,” Mather said with a touch of the old bravura. In Marks’s presence he reverted—and all the more quickly it seemed to him for not wanting to—to the kind of snide and supercilious fop he hated most. “As I told Anne today, none of us is altogether innocent.”

Whatever that meant, Marks thought. He did not propose to be led down the garden walk by this phony. He leaned back and folded his arms. The ridge of his back struck the frame of the chair. He smiled to conceal the pain. “I’m an ignorant sort,” he said. “Who was Agamemnon?”

Mather realized at once the source of Marks’s question. “Why, in legend he was the leader of the Greeks during the Trojan Wars. When he returned he was murdered by his wife and her lover …” He stopped, catching the look almost of shock on Marks’s face. “Oh, my God.”

Marks stared at him and waited.

Mather said very quietly: “I am not Janet Bradley’s lover.”

For the first time Marks was touched as by the discovery of something human in the man. He said: “What did you mean in the tavern when you said, ‘Agamemnon died tonight?’”

“It was in the framework of an Eliot poem …”

“I know that,” Marks cut in. He had had enough of poetry for one night. “I’m asking what
you
meant.”

“And I am not going to tell you. The boys didn’t know. I’m not sure I did myself—at the time. I could make up something now and you would have to accept it. It was personal, self-critical, and therefore no one’s business. But I was not thinking of Peter Bradley when I said it. I was thinking of myself.” Mather leaped to his feet. “Christ, man. I’ve told you all I’m going to. You’re not my analyst. Nor my priest. Let me describe this, this beast I saw for you. Then get on with your work and leave me to mine.”

Marks with deliberate casualness took his pen and notebook from his pocket.

Mather repeated to the best of his memory the description of Jerry as he had given it to Anne, including the nose by which he might have been picked up as a child. “Or possibly,” he added to Marks, “he was dropped on it.”

It was, Marks thought, a remarkably vivid picture of a man, one that an artist could work with handily. “Now just where was he when you noticed him, Professor?”

Mather saw the trap he had almost walked into. On a dark street it was not possible to see a man that clearly. “As I was coming down the steps he was standing on the street looking up at the building. He put me in mind of one of the Russian diplomats—I’ve forgotten whom now. But simply in passing I wondered what he was doing in that neighborhood.”

“Where did he go?”

“I wasn’t that curious, Lieutenant, and I quite forgot him until Annie’s description turned up.” God knows, he had tried to forget Jerry in those few hours after leaving the Bradleys’.

“Just what in Miss Russo’s description made you think of him?” Marks asked blandly. Anne’s description had been remarkable only in its failure to describe the man at all.

Mather paused but an instant, then gave a short laugh. “I suppose it was the chewing gum. The fellow I saw was putting a stick of it in his mouth.”

“Very Russian,” Marks said dryly. There was no use trying to get at this man directly. He could lie with the truth, Marks suspected. It would be easier to pick up mercury than to pin him down until you had the goods on him. He had described a man in great detail. A stranger? To the detail of the knob of a nose? But if not a stranger, why conceal the fact? If in complicity with him, why mention him at all?

He put away his notebook and got up. “The first thing in the morning, Professor, come to the Houston Street station. We’ll have a composite picture by then for you and Miss Russo to take a look at.”

“Very Russian.” Mather thought about the detective’s disgusted comment after Marks was gone. He had the feeling that if it weren’t for Anne’s corroboration the detective would have torn up the description at that point and forgotten about it, convinced that Eric Mather was again making a play for attention.

Waiting for Marks to come earlier that night, and knowing that he would come, he had tried to prepare himself to tell the truth. But the sickening image he saw of himself as splashed in the public press in consequence made death seem much to be preferred.