The Horses of the Night (6 page)

“Money.”

“I can live without my own cabernet label. I can live without thoroughbreds. I cannot live without money.” He made a gesture, a man throwing something away. That imaginary object being flung into the silence represented the things he loved.

He continued by changing the subject. “Don't you mind, living in your father's shadow? It might bother me.”

“He was a good man. He cared for people.”

“And so do you.”

Nona had always said that she believed me to be “healthy in mind and soul.” Does a man with a healthy soul want to risk his life? Even here in the club, snugly outfitted in cashmere and worsted, it seemed that I could still feel the chill in my bones.

“I look at you,” Blake was saying, “and I see a man like myself—the way I used to be.”

“I would never dream of comparing myself to you.”

“I was a man of taste. But I wanted more of life. I wanted something grand,” he said, working to keep his voice down, but failing. Someone stirred in a corner, a newspaper rustling.

“Tell me what's wrong,” I said.

He gazed around the room for a moment, studying the shadows. This was a San Francisco copy of a London sanctuary for men, but unlike its British counterparts this place had always seemed pleasant to me. My father had brought me here often. I had first tasted scotch here. My father had not approved of the “pretentious old men of thirty,” but he had taught me that a wealthy man had to be comfortable around all kinds of people, even the wealthy.

The last time I had seen Blake had been some months before, on the steps of Saint Paul's in London. It had been the memorial service for David King, the producer, and Blake had been there because everyone in film wanted to have a look at Blake, everyone wanted to be close to him. Movie people have ersatz respectability. Blake Howard was the real thing. He had paused on the steps as photographers' flashes in the gray day made his eyes spark, giving him a look both knowing and hungry. He had turned to lift a finger to Sarah Miles, a gesture courtly and familiar, and he had winked at me as he passed me. I was there because my father had known David King long ago, and because I was, for an American, old money, with just the extra zip of glamour for being a Californian whose father had seemed to endow every museum and hospital in the Northern Hemisphere.

Blake had returned to San Francisco to help judge the design competition and, the gossip columns said, “support the ballet company.” We had not had a chance to meet since. Now I sat across from a virtual stranger. In these months Blake had altered. He had been robust that day in London, escorting a woman in a sable, a constellation of diamonds, grotesquely overdressed for a daytime ceremony of mourning but so freshly beautiful no one would dream of complaining. She was evidently one of those actresses who will never go anywhere in films but don't have to because they are already at the top, in London with a famous man.

Now he looked into the shadows around us, a fire just beginning its dance in the fireplace. I could think only one thing: He was no longer my friend.

I decided to be direct. “What happened to you?”

“You mean: to my money.”

“What happened?”

“Bad judgment. Bad luck. Worse advice. This façade of ease, this role I play, is not cheap. You know all about that.”

I knew.

Even in the muted lighting of the club, quiet drinkers and distant white-coated waiters all hushed, nearly silent, Blake was only a copy of himself, a reproduction with new lines around the eyes, and a hard glance.

“I don't expect you to forgive me,” he said. “DeVere left me no choice.”

Perhaps Blake had always been like this, and I was just now able to see him as he was. It was a painful thought. “You remember my fiancée? Nona Lyle?”

“How could I forget such a charming person. She's a psychiatrist,” he said. “A delightful woman. You think I need her professional services?”

“Not at all. I want you to see the sort of work she does.”

“I am in no position to make a donation.”

“It might help you to see what real suffering is like—for children.”

“Stratton, be realistic. You yourself have lived a very easy life.”

“DeVere is stubborn, and so am I. I am going to persuade you, Blake.”

Blake's low laugh surprised me. “Do you think we have souls, Stratton?”

I stalled, shifting my snifter to one side, leaning on the table. I could read people fairly well, but I couldn't read Blake just then.

“Immortal souls?” he added.

My father had hired the most brilliant tutors, essayists, psychologists. He had dismissed Stanford as too easy, although appropriate, so he had seasoned my education with long interludes in Italy and France. Still, it had been years since I had debated the possibility of miracles with a Jesuit surgeon or a nuclear physicist.

I hesitated to take the question seriously. Like most Americans, I find the big philosophical questions both embarrassing and pointless. There are times, though, I reminded myself—as when someone is dying—when the questions arise naturally.

“This isn't just a philosophical question,” I suggested.

“Stratton, look at me—I'm a lost man.”

“I suppose I really don't believe in the soul. But I don't know.”

“Well, if I had a soul at one time, I no longer possess one. I've used it up, or traded it in. But even so, I'm reasonably happy.”

I tried to joke. “Surely DeVere hasn't made a down payment on your eternal life.”

“I'm not talking about DeVere. I'm talking about the choices I've made, step by step, day after day, all my life.”

“Forgive me for finding this argument just a little bit irritating, Blake.”

“You're angry.” He laughed, and I could see a trace of the Blake I had known, the gentle, ironic man. “You know what the problem is, Stratton? You're likable. I can't help it. I like you. Everybody who knows you does. And it's hard to sit here and tell you the truth. There is idealism, Stratton. And then there is naïveté.”

“I'm not helping my own cause very much, am I?”

“If people disappoint DeVere, they suffer. If they attack DeVere, one way or another, they pay. That CNN critic isn't on permanent holiday in Argentina.”

“Are you telling me that there is danger in crossing DeVere?”

He smiled, with real affection. “You remind me of what I have given up.” Blake took a pull at his brandy, then set the glass down as though the liquor tasted foul. Blake gazed at the table. There was a drop of brandy on the dark wood now, and the drop glowed and shifted with the firelight, a coin alive. “Do you know what one of your greatest flaws will turn out to be, Stratton?”

Blake had always had an avuncular familiarity with me, but even so I wasn't quite ready to hear about my defects.

He continued, “You are ambitious. You have looks and brains, but you want something more.”

It seemed that as long as he talked about my character, and avoided trying to warn me, he was more like the man I used to know.

“What,” I asked, “are you warning me against?”

“I canceled a meeting,” said Blake. “I was supposed to meet with Peter Renman tomorrow morning in Palm Springs. It was going to be a fantastic deal. I'm selling my art.”

“You can do that? Live without your art?”

He did not respond, and I considered what he had just said. “You were going to meet with Peter Renman!”

“DeVere made the meeting possible.”

Renman was a name to dwarf even DeVere's. The man was a Hollywood legend, a force in television, magazine publishing, professional sports, finance. The informed story was that he told presidents what to do, and when, and made sure their favorite liquor was waiting for them in the Renman villa in Palm Springs. If it could be said that DeVere had an empire, then Renman had the world.

“Renman!” I said, still stunned by the name. My father had known Renman, and Renman had some shadowy relationship with my mother's past. The great man had come to my father's funeral. He had been a short, quiet man behind a cordon of hired security.

“I canceled our meeting,” said Blake. “I'm sick of all of it.”

“These men can give you everything you want!”

Blake smiled wearily. “Can they? I think you want these men to be all-powerful because it makes your life simple. To fulfill your dreams, you defeat DeVere. I'm not so sure.

“Why don't you come over to my place tomorrow,” he continued. “Breakfast. I want us to talk further about the power DeVere has, and Renman.”

I saw another chance to win back his friendship, and I accepted. But as we shook hands, I sensed a sadness in Blake, or worse.

“I'm going to fight DeVere,” I said. “You won't persuade me otherwise.”

There was something in the look he gave me that startled me. I became fully aware of an undercurrent that had been present throughout our conversation.

“What is it, Blake? What's wrong?”

“Maybe I'm awake, after sleeping all these years. But just recently—very recently—everything is different for me.”

Words occurred to me, but I did not utter them: Blake was disillusioned. He was depressed. Such emotional shifts were not unusual in thoughtful people. But at the same time I experienced a powerful anxiety. I could not leave Blake alone. Blake was more than a changed man. He was a broken man, a sick individual.

He seemed to read my thoughts. His smile was forced. “I'm fine,” he said. “Too late wise—but perfectly all right.”

The warning repeated itself in me.
Don't go
.

Don't leave Blake alone
.

8

It is only afterward that we are aware of certain things. Only after the music has ended are we aware of how greatly it moved us, and only after a conversation has ended do we realize how strongly it has changed our sense of things.

My own family history has made me wary of the psyche's weather. People are not constant landscapes, paintings that age relatively unaltered from new to dusky to the point that they must be cleaned.

Blake was in trouble. He needed my help.

As I slipped into the cab that carried me from the club I was aware of a sensation that I did not quite understand. There was something in my jacket pocket, over my heart.

I had to smile. It bent with my movements, and as I stepped from the cab outside my home I felt it there, a wire, a fluted shaft of bone, but not dead, something else, something nearly alive.

When I was upstairs, in my office, the room with its clutter of pencils, T-squares and flat files, I hurried into my bedroom and pulled the big old Milton from the shelf. This large, calfskin-sheathed volume had been used by Rick and myself to press clover and coltsfoot blossoms. Certain passages of “Paradise Regained” were still stained with chlorophyll. I had learned to regret my youthful carelessness, but now the phrase “subtle thief of youth” was concave with the old imprint of a milkweed flower.

I sat on the bed with the book open on my lap. The treasure fluttered from my hand when I withdrew it from my inner pocket, and spun in the air. Silently, it fell to the bed. For some reason, I found it almost too beautiful to look at directly, like sunlight off crystal.

An azure plume. Or was it white? I couldn't tell. The eye prized the sight of this feather as it prized nothing else in the world. Surely it was white, perfect, steel and ice and quicksilver in a glance. I closed the book, pressing it around the light.

Nona's voice was on the answering machine, with bad news. She was coming, but she did not know when. “Tonight, I think. But, at the rate things are going, maybe a year from tonight.”

That afternoon, I called Fern. He lived in a duplex in the Sunset District with a potted ficus and a VCR, and he answered the phone in the middle of the first ring. Fern was one of those men who use a laconic, vigorous manner to protect them from intimacy. I suggested that he drop by Blake's house, not for a visit, just a check.

“A check,” said Fern.

“Make sure …” What? I had nothing but an uneasy hunch. “Make sure no one is after him.”

He didn't respond. He was plainly waiting for the sort of anecdote he knew too well: homicidal fan, or someone bent on blackmail.

“What makes you think someone's after him?”

Intuition was something that Fern would trust. But when it came to bothering someone like Blake Howard, Fern would scoff at anything so nebulous as my feelings of anxiety. To think too much is to make mistakes. “I think someone wants to do Blake harm.”

I was relieved when Fern said, “Okay.” Meaning: I know all about harm.

“Just make sure he's home.”

“And?”

“Don't disturb him.”

Fern gave me a couple of ticks of silence, allowing me to see that I had stung his pride just a bit. “He won't know I'm there.”

“The fact is,” I said, trading a bit of confidence to soothe Fern's pride, “I think the trouble may be in his mind.”

I had meant this to sound lighthearted, cheering. But as I hung up the phone I knew that the mind can be an assassin.

And I realized that I might be simply projecting my own anger with Blake onto the vague, shifting darkness of the City.

I was angry with Blake, that was true. But not so angry I wanted him to be hurt.

I reassured myself: I was not angry at all, really.

He was an old friend.

I adjusted the crook-neck lamp over my drafting table, and touched the pencil to the sketch of a roof garden, a drawing much like the one I had entered into the Golden Gate Park competition.

Collie tapped on the doorjamb with the back of her fingernails, a tap-tap-tap I would not have heard if I had not known it, and recognized it, as one of the subtle, dependable sounds of my life.

“Going to go,” whispered Collie, cautious about disturbing me.