Ritual (14 page)

‘Arthur?’ said
the lean deputy. ‘How are you doing?’

‘I was doing
all right before I was woken up,’ said Arthur harshly.

‘One of those
dreams, huh?’ the lean deputy gibed.
‘A desert island and you
and forty naked women and no rescue imminent for at least six months.’

Arthur looked
away dismissively. It was quite obvious that he had no respect for anything or
anybody – his employers, his customers, or the law.

‘Arthur,’ said
Charlie, ‘do you remember that woman who was sitting in the lounge with me?
The woman in the blue dress?’

Arthur stared
at Charlie, and then looked in perplexity from the lean deputy to the
manager,
and back again. ‘What kind of a question is that?’
he asked.

The lean deputy
said, ‘It’s simple enough. Do you remember a woman in a blue dress sitting in
the lounge with this gentleman last night?’

Arthur shook
his head in apparent disbelief. ‘If there was a woman there, she was the
Invisible Woman. I didn’t see any woman.’

‘You mean that
Mr McLean here was sitting
on his own
?’

‘Well, that’s
right. He looked kind of fed up and lonesome so I made sure we gave him a
cognac on the house.’

Charlie jabbed
a finger at him. ‘I was sitting talking to Velma Farloe and you damned well
know it! Velma Farloe – she was right in front of your face.’

The maitre d’
frowned at the manager for moral support. ‘Velma Farloe? I don’t know anybody
called Velma Farloe.’

‘Oh, she knew
you all right,’ said Charlie. ‘She said your nickname was Bits. Now, isn’t that
true?

Bits, that’s
what she said, because you used to have the habit of saying for two bits you’d
do this, or for two bits you’d do that. Now – how could I possibly have known
that unless Velma Farloe was real and I’d met her?’

The maitre d’
stared at Charlie for a long time and then turned appealingly toward the two
deputies. ‘Bits?’ he asked, in complete disbelief. ‘What is this guy, some kind
of a fruitcake, or what? I mean, Bits?

Charlie glanced
at the manager and then at the deputies. Their faces all wore the same
expression of caution. We’ve got a funny one here, guys. Let’s just play along
with him until he runs out of steam.

‘All right,’
said Charlie. ‘If you don’t want to believe me, you don’t want to believe me.
But I can warn you here and now that I’m going to the sheriff, and if I don’t
get any satisfaction from the sheriff I’m going to the FBI. I have friends,
don’t you make any mistakes about that. I have influential friends.’

‘Well, we’re
sure you do,’ said the manager. ‘But you have to see the situation from our
point of view, Mr McLean. You checked in here yesterday on your own, you ate
dinner on your own and, as far as I can understand it, you slept on your own. I
guess the best thing we can do for the time being is to put the whole incident
down to exhaustion, maybe, or to over-excitability.’

Charlie was so
angry at that instant that he could have punched the manager in the face.
Instead, however, he closed his eyes and clenched his fists and waited for the
fury to die down inside of him. When he opened his eyes again, he caught the
manager winking conspiratorially at the bell captain, and the lean deputy
shuffling his feet as if he were practising his ballroom dancing. The pudgy
deputy was eating the end of his pencil and staring out of the window.

‘Okay,’ said
Charlie. ‘Okay. Just give me some time to think this through. It happened
because it happened and because I know that it happened. But I don’t have any
evidence to prove it and you guys obviously aren’t going to break your asses in
any kind of effort to help me prove it.’

‘Mr McLean,’
the lean deputy appealed to him, ‘we aren’t going to break our asses because so
far we haven’t seen any evidence that your son was actually here, let alone any
evidence that he disappeared.’

Charlie said,
‘Don’t worry about it, okay? I said not to worry about it. Let me think it all
through by myself. Then I’ll call you, when I’ve worked something out.’

‘We don’t want
you to think that we’re failing in our duty,’ the lean deputy said. ‘But the
simple fact is that we don’t have anything that looks like a legitimate
complaint here. I mean, this looks like your common-or-garden misunderstanding,
which in a district like this is what occupies most police time. Maybe your son
was here, maybe he wasn’t. If he was here, he sure isn’t here now, and he sure
didn’t leave any kind of evidence that he was. These good people here didn’t
even see him, didn’t even check him in. So where is he now? Or more to the
point, was he ever here at all?’

‘It’s all
right,’ said Charlie, as apologetically as he could. ‘I guess I made a genuine
mistake. I guess I thought that my son was here when all the time he wasn’t. I
guess that’s it.’

‘It has been
known,’ the lean deputy prompted him. ‘You know, like mirages, all that kind of
stuff. You’re walking through the desert and what do you see but cans of cold
Pabst. It’s something you want, and because you want it so much, you think that
you can actually see it in front of your eyes. That’s what happened to you. You
wanted to have your son with you, but you couldn’t. So instead you imagined he
was with you, but now he’s gone, even though he wasn’t there in the first
place.’

Charlie raised
his head and stared at the deputy with level eyes. The deputy was gazing eagerly
at him, like a dog anticipating a reward. Charlie said, ‘How dare you talk such
bullshit to me? I’ve just lost my son.’

The deputy
coughed and shuffled and looked embarrassed.

‘I have to keep
every possible option open, sir. You must understand that. And that includes
the option that your son wasn’t here at all – that he was only riding along
with you inside of your own mind.’

Charlie knew
then that there was only one way in which he was going to be able to find
Martin, and that was by
himself
. These people might be
right. Perhaps Martin hadn’t come along with him at all. Perhaps the stress of
his job at MARIA had all grown too much for him, and he had driven to
Connecticut under the illusion that his son was with him. But he could live his
life only by his own perceptions, and by his own reality, and he remembered
Martin coming with him as clearly as he could see these people standing in
front of him now. All he could think was,
If
they
don’t believe me, that’s too bad.
Til go look for Martin on
my own.

He was aware,
however, how unwise it would be tell them that. The best course of action would
be for him to apologize for being hasty; to make out that he was confused by
everything that had happened; and to leave the Windsor with an idiot smile on
his face. He knew that Martin had been with him. He knew just as distinctly
that he had slept with Velma Farloe. The only possible reason why the manager
and the bell captain and the maitre d’ and these Laurel-and-Hardy deputies were
pretending that he was deluded was because they knew where Martin had gone, and
why.

And the only
possible reason why they were keeping up the pretence was because they had been
ordered to; or paid to; or because they were in fear of their lives if they
told him what had really happened.

Charlie found
it completely unreal that he was thinking this way. Yet his instinct for
survival had always been strong. It had enabled him to travel around the
continental United States year after year, testing and tasting, sleeping in
unfamiliar beds, and to endure the long-drawn-out agonies of his divorce from
Marjorie and everything that had happened in Milwaukee.

Stiffly, he
raised his hand, and said,
Til
leave it to you, then,
deputy. If anybody calls and says they’ve seen my son -well, I hope that you’ll
let me know. I’ll leave a forwarding number at the desk here, and I’ll call you
regularly so that you know where I am.’

The lean deputy
nodded, and said, ‘That’s a real sensible way of going about it, Mr McLean.

Come on – I
know you’re upset. Maybe disoriented, too. But we’ll do everything we can to
clear this little problem up pronto. You won’t have to worry about a thing.
Believe
me,
your son is probably home with his mother
right now, watching television and eating popcorn and totally oblivious to all
of your worries. We’ll check into it. The very worst that could have happened
is that he’s decided to light out for a day or two. So many kids do it these
days.’

Charlie reached
into his coat and took out his wallet, and said to the manager, ‘How much do I
owe you?’

The manager
shook his head. ‘Let’s call this one a gimme, shall we? You’ve had a bad time
at the Windsor. I don’t want anybody to drive away from here with a sour taste
in his mouth, for whatever reason.’

Charlie wasn’t
in the mood to argue. It made no difference to him, after all. MARIA picked up
all of his tabs. And he had the feeling that he wouldn’t be filing a report on
the Windsor Hotel; nor on any of the restaurants
he had
visited on this trip. In fact, he had the feeling that his time at MARIA was
already over; that his career had vanished overnight, like the mist over the
Connecticut River.

‘This won’t
adversely affect your report, I hope?’ the manager asked him, taking hold of
his elbow and smiling at him from close quarters.

‘I can’t think
why it should, can you?’ Charlie replied. The manager’s smile gradually faded,
and he turned toward the bell captain and said, ‘Bring the gentleman’s bags,
would you?’

Charlie stood
by the door and waited while a black bellboy was sent to find his suitcase. The
two deputies made
themselves
comfortable up against
the reception desk and discussed football with the bell captain. When Charlie’s
suitcase eventually arrived, the lean deputy said, ‘
Don’t
you worry, sir, we’ll make sure we keep in touch. Remember that ninety-nine per
cent of all those kids reported missing return to their parents within
seventy-two hours.’

Charlie said,
‘What about the other one per cent?’

The lean deputy
made a face. ‘You want better chances than ninety-nine out of a hundred?’

Charlie stowed
his case in the trunk of his car and then climbed behind the steering wheel.
For a moment he regarded his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Goddamn it, Charlie
McLean, sometimes you’re hopeless, he told himself. Then he started up his
engine, drove out of the parking lot, and headed towards Alien’s Corners.

He was going
right back to the moment when things had started going off at a tangent. Back
to the Iron Kettle, back to Mrs Kemp’s boarding house, and back to the place
which seemed to be exerting a dark and ever-increasing influence over him:
Le Reposoir
.

H
e reached the Iron Kettle shortly after ten o’ clock. The front
door was locked, so he walked around the house on the wet stone pathway until
he reached the kitchen. The door was open and Charlie could hear the brisk,
sharp sound of scrubbing. He knocked on the door frame and stepped inside.

The kitchen was
small but professionally equipped with stainless steel Jenn-Air hobs and Amana
ovens. Mrs Foss, wearing a large floral pinafore, was down on her hands and
knees scrubbing the brown quarry-tiled floor.

‘Mrs Foss?’
asked Charlie.

Mrs Foss raised
her head like a penitent who had been interrupted in her prayers. She didn’t
recognize him at first, but then she said, ‘Ah, you. Yes, well, hello there.
I’m afraid we’re not open until twelve-thirty.’

‘Mrs Foss, I
need to ask you some questions,’ said Charlie.

‘Questions?
What kind of questions?’

‘You remember I
came here with my son? He went missing this morning.’

Mrs Foss
grasped the edge of the kitchen table to help herself up. She reached for a
towel and dried her hands, keeping her eyes on Charlie all the time. ‘How did
it happen?’ she wanted to know. Charlie, briefly, told her – omitting the fact
that he had spent the night with Velma. Mrs Foss listened, and nodded, and then
said, ‘Come through to the parlour.’

The parlour was
a small gloomy room smelling of potpourri and damp. Mrs Foss obviously used it partly
as an office and partly as a sitting room. There was a desk with invoices and
bills arranged neatly on top of it, and two wheelback chairs with tapestry seat
cushions. The window gave a view of the garden in which Martin had first seen
the small, hooded dwarf-person; or claimed he had.

‘Sit down,’
said Mrs Foss. ‘Would you care for a cup of coffee?’

Charlie shook
his head. ‘I want to track down my son, that’s all.’

‘So why did you
come here?’ Mrs Foss looked at Charlie directly and he could see the curved
reflection of his own face in her upswept spectacles.
Two
desperate moon-faced Charlies searching for the same son.

‘We had lunch
here, during that electric storm – remember? –
and
Martin said he saw somebody in the garden. Well – I thought I saw somebody,
too. I don’t know what it
was,
maybe it was one of the
neighbourhood children. Maybe it was nothing at all, just two tired
imaginations playing tricks on each other. But from that moment on, things
began to go wrong between Martin and me, and this morning he’s gone.’

‘You’ve talked
to the police?’

‘I talked to
two deputies at West Hartford. They weren’t exactly the Brains Brothers. They
said that most runaway kids returned to their parents after seventy-two hours.’

Mrs Foss took
off her spectacles and studiously polished them on the bodice of her pinafore.

‘You have some
suspicions, don’t you?’