The Nicholas Linnear Novels (3 page)

“Haven’t we met before?” he said.

Her lips jerked in a quick quirky smile. “You can do better than that, can’t you?”

“No. I mean it. I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

Her eyes darted for a moment over his shoulder. When they again alighted on him she said, “I don’t think—”

He snapped his fingers. “In Sam Goldman’s office. The fall or the winter.” He cocked his head. “I’m not mistaken.”

Her eyes seemed to clear as if, with Sam’s name, some almost invisible curtain had been raised within them. “I know Sam Goldman,” she said slowly. “I’ve done some freelance jobs for him.” Now she put one long forefinger up to the center of her lips, the clear-lacquered nail burnished by the light. The inconstant sound of the voices down the beach seemed to swell like the roar of a crowd at the advent of a grand-slam home run or a bit of defensive heroics in the outfield.

“You’re Nicholas Linnear,” she said, and when he nodded she pointed at him. “He talks about you all the time.”

He smiled. “But you don’t remember our meeting.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, really. When I’m involved in my work …” Her shoulders lifted, fell again.

Nicholas laughed. “I might have been somebody important.”

“Judging by your reputation, you are. But you just walked away from all of it. I think that’s odd.”

Squinting up at him, sunglassless, she looked no more than a college girl, as if the sunlight passing through her had somehow illuminated some previously hidden inner innocence. At last her eyes slid away from him. “What’s going on up there, anyway?”

“They found a body in the ocean.”

“Oh? Whose?”

He shrugged. “I’ve no idea.”

“Haven’t you just come from there?” Her gaze slid back from the distance over his left shoulder, touching his face. It was like a cool summer’s breeze after sundown. “You must’ve seen them pull it out.” Her eyes were better than arms, keeping him at a carefully measured distance. There was something peculiarly childlike in that, he thought. A hurt child—or scared. It made him want to reach out and touch her reassuringly.

“I left before it happened,” he said.

“Aren’t you in the least bit curious?” She seemed unmindful of the wind that flicked at the thick mane of her dark hair. “It could be someone from around here. You know how incestuous this place is—we’re all from the same business.”

“I have no interest in it. No.”

She unfolded her arms, put her hands in the front pockets of her cut-off jeans. She wore a plain, sleeveless Danskin top. It was turquoise and set off her eyes. Her firm breasts swelled with her breathing, the nipples visible points. Her waist was narrow, her legs long and elegant. She moved like a dancer.

“But you
do
have interests, I see,” she said flatly. “How would you feel if I looked at
you
that way?”

“Flattered,” he said. “I’d certainly feel flattered.”

Justine was an advertising art designer, living four houses down the beach, who found it convenient to work out of the city during the summer.

“I loathe New York in the summer,” she told him the next afternoon over drinks. “Do you know that I once spent the entire summer in my apartment with the air conditioning on full and never once moving out of the door? I was deathly afraid I’d get overwhelmed by the stench of dogshit. I’d call D’Agostino and have them send up the food and, once or twice a week, the office would send up this big brawny fag—who was doing the director under the desk during coffee breaks—to take my designs and bring me my checks. But even with that, it wasn’t enough and I was forced out. I threw some stuff in a bag and took the first flight out to Paris. I stayed two weeks while the office went batshit looking for me.” She turned her head half away from him, sipping at her manhattan. “However, when I got back, the only thing that had really changed was that the fag was gone.”

The sun was coming down, the sea devouring its crimson bulk; color lay shimmering on the water. Then, quite abruptly, it was dark: not even the little lights bobbing far out to sea.

It was like that with her, he reflected. Brilliant color, stories of the surface, but what lay beneath, in the night?

“You’re not going back to Columbia,” she said, “in the fall.”

“No, I’m not.”

She said nothing, sat back on the Haitian cotton couch, her slender arms spread wide along the back; they went out of the pools of lamplight, seemed dark wings, hovering. Then she cocked her head to one side and it seemed to him as if the ice floe had cracked, coming apart.

“I fell in love with the campus,” he said, deciding to answer her by starting at the beginning. “Of course, it was the beginning of February, but I could imagine the red brick walkways lined with flowering magnolia and dogwood, quince in among the ancient oaks.

“The course itself—Sources of Oriental Thought—wasn’t realty too bad at all. The students at least were inquisitive and, when awake, fairly bright—some of them startlingly so. They seemed surprised that I was interested in them.

“I was curious about this, at first, but as the semester wore on, I came to understand what it was all about. The other professors giving the course had appallingly little time to devote to the students; they were extremely busy researching their latest books. And when they were actually teaching, they treated their students with contempt.

“I remember sitting in on a class just after midterm. Drs. Eng and Royston, who taught the meat of the course, announced at the beginning of the session that the midterm papers had been graded and were ready to be returned. Royston then proceeded to give his lecture. When the bell rang, Eng asked the students to remain seated and, with perfect precision, laid out four piles of papers on the floor at the front of the hall. ‘Those students with last names beginning with letters
A
through
F
will find their papers here,’ he said, pointing to the pile on his right. And so on. Then they had both turned away and left the hall before the first students even had time to kneel, scrabbling through the piles.

“It was degrading,” Nicholas said. “That kind of lack of respect for another human being is something I just cannot tolerate.”

“So you liked teaching.”

He thought that a curious thing to say. “I didn’t mind it.” He made himself another gin and tonic, squeezed a section of lemon before dropping it into the ice-filled glass. “In the end it was the other professors who made the semester seem long to me. I don’t imagine they thought too much of me. After all, the halls of academe are rather closed. Everyone there is bound by the stringency of the situation. ‘Publish or perish’ has become a cliché as a saying, I suppose. But for them it’s a reality which they must face every day.” He shrugged. “I imagine they resented me my status. I had all the best parts of their life without any of the responsibilities.”

“And Royston and Eng. What were they like?”

“Oh, Royston was okay, I suppose. Rather stuffy in the beginning but he thawed a bit later on. But Eng”—he shook his head—“Eng was a bastard all right. He had made up his mind about me before we had ever been introduced. The three of us happened to be in the lounge one afternoon. ‘So you were born in Singapore,’ he said. Just like that. Standing over me, peering down at me through his round wire-rimmed spectacles. That’s what they must have been; they were far too old-fashioned to be called glasses. He had a curious manner of speech, his words emerging clipped, almost frozen, so that you could imagine them hanging in midair like icicles. ‘A disgusting city, if you will pardon my saying so. Built by the British, who had no more regard for the Chinese than they did for the Indians.’”

“What did you say?”

“Frankly, I was too stunned to say much of anything,” he said gloomily. “The bastard had hardly said two words to me all semester. He took me quite by surprise.”

“You had no snappy rejoinder.”

“Only that he was wrong. I was conceived there.” He put down his glass. “I asked Dean Whoolson about it subsequently but he merely brushed it off. ‘Eng’s a genius,’ was how he put it. ‘And you know how that sort is sometimes. I must tell you, we are damn lucky to have him here. He almost went to Harvard but we snared him at the last moment. Convinced him of the superiority of our research facilities.’ He patted me on the back as if I were the department mascot. ‘Who ever knows with Eng?’ he said. ‘Perhaps he thought you were Malay. We all must make allowances, Mr. Linnear.

“I don’t understand that,” Justine said. “You’re not Malay, are you?”

“No, but if Eng thought I was, he might have reason to dislike me. The Chinese and the Malays were constantly at each other’s throats in the Singapore area. No love lost there.”

“What are you?” She seemed abruptly quite close to him, her eyes enormous and very luminous. “There’s an Asian hint in your face, I think. In your eyes perhaps, or in the height of your cheekbones.”

“My father was English,” he said. “A Jew who was forced to change his name so that he could get ahead in business and then, during the war, in the Army. He was a colonel.”

“What was his name? Before he changed it, I mean.”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. ‘Nicholas,’ he told me one day, ‘what’s in a name? The man who tells you that there is some significance in his name is a barefaced liar.’”

“But weren’t you ever curious about it?”

“Oh yes. For a time. But after a while I gave up looking.”

“And your mother?”

“Ah. That would depend on whom you spoke to. She always maintained that she was pureblood Chinese.”

“But,” Justine prompted.

“But in all likelihood she was only half-Chinese. The other half was probably Japanese.” He shrugged. “Not that I was ever certain. It’s just that she seemed always to think like a Japanese.” He smiled. “Anyway, I am a romantic and it’s far more exciting to think of her as a mixture. An unusual mixture given the mutual animosity historically between the two people. More mysterious.”

“And you like mysteries.”

He watched the sweep of her dark hair, sliding across one cheek, hiding the eye with the crimson motes. “In a sense. Yes.”

“Your features are all Caucasian,” she said, abruptly switching topics.

“Yes,” Nicholas said. “Physically I take after my father, the Colonel.” He put his head back on the couch, his hair touching her outstretched fingers for a moment before she moved them back, curling them into a fist. He stared up at the patterned pools of light playing upon the ceiling. “Inside, though, I am my mother’s son.”

Doc Deerforth never looked forward to the summer. This was a curious thing, he thought, because it was invariably his busiest time. The influx from the city never ceased to astound him, the migratory pattern of almost the entire Upper East Side of Manhattan, as fixed and precise as the geese flying their arrowhead formations south in the winter.

Not that Doc Deerforth knew all that much about Manhattan, not these days, at least; he had not set foot into that madhouse in over five years and then it had been only to pay a brief visit to his friend Nate Graumann, New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner.

He was quite content to be out here. He had his daughters who, with their own families, visited him regularly—his wife had died of leukemia over ten years ago, turned to a faded photo—and his work as doctor in West Bay Bridge. Then there was his ancillary M.E. work for Flower at Hauppauge. They liked him there because he was thorough and inventive; Flower kept asking him if he would come to work for the Suffolk County M.E. but he was much too happy where he was. There were friends here, plentiful and warm, but most of all, he had himself. He found that, essentially, he was happy with himself. That did not stop the occasional nightmare, however, from creeping through like a clandestine burglar on the loose. He would still wake up, drenched in sweat, the damp sheets twisted clammily about his legs. Some nights he would dream of white blood but he dreamed of other things as well, dream symbols of his personal fright. At those times he would get up and pad silently into the kitchen, making himself a cup of hot cocoa, and would read, at random, from one of Raymond Chandler’s seven novels, finding within that spare inferential prose style a kind of existential calm amid his private storm, and inside of thirty minutes he had returned to sleep.

Doc Deerforth stretched, easing the ache that sat like a stuck pitchfork between his shoulderblades. That’s what comes from working all hours at my age, he thought. Still, he went over his findings once again. It was all there, black on white, the words piling together into sentences and paragraphs, but now he was seeing the meaning for the first time, as if he were an Egyptologist who had, at last, stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone.

Another routine drowning, he had thought, when they had called him out to Dune Road. Of course, he did not mean that. The word
routine
had no place in his vocabulary. Life was the most precious thing in the world to him. But he need not have become a doctor to feel that way. Living through the war in the Pacific Theater had been enough. Day after day, from his disarrayed jungle camp during the bitter fighting in the Philippines, he had seen the cascades of small one-man planes guided by their kamikaze pilots as they plunged headlong with 2,650 pounds of high explosives in their blunt noses into the American warships. The cultural chasm between East and West could be summed up by those aircraft, Doc Deerforth had always thought. The Japanese name for them was
Oka
—the cherry blossom. But the Americans called them
baka
—the idiot bomb. Western philosophical thought had no place for the concept of ritual suicide inherent in the Japanese samurai of old. But that was it, really. The samurai survived, despite all obstacles that had been put in his path. Doc Deerforth would never forget the haiku which, so the story went, had been written by a twenty-two-year-old kamikaze pilot just before his death; this, too, was tradition: “If only we might fall / Like cherry blossoms in the spring—/So pure and radiant!” And that, he thought, was how the Japanese felt about death. The samurai was born to die a glorious death in battle.