The Outsider (52 page)

Early that evening a bailiff showed up with a summons demanding their presence the following morning at the hearing to be held over the bodies of Gil and Herndon at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

“Will it be awful, Lionel?” she asked.

“I'm afraid so, darling. But you must brace yourself for it.”

“Lionel,” she called.

Tenderly she caught hold of his hand, turned his face to her, smiled faintly, then let her lashes rest upon her wan cheeks.

“Yes, Eva,” he prompted her; yet quailing for fear that she would ask him about his confessional eruption.

“Tell me, darling,” she inquired in a whisper, “is it wrong to love so soon like this?”

Dismay made his lips tremble. “Trust is the heart of life,” he whispered and felt he wanted something to strike him dead. “How can one's trusting another be bad?”

She opened her hazel eyes full on him. “I trust you,” she said simply. “I wanted to help you and I saw a way to do it…”

“Bless you, Eva,” he said, averting his face, feeling a constriction in his throat.

“Sarah'll be here in the morning to help me. I must find a black dress—”

“Will you need to buy any clothes?”

“No, honey. I've plenty. Look, you must rest. I'll handle this,” she smiled.

How wrapped up she was in her love! How demurely happy! He wandered into the living room, his hands trembling. Could he let her go on like that? But how could he undo it? He sat, his mind roving back over the deaths of Gil and Herndon and Hilton, his feelings protesting against the whole, wild nightmare; but he could think of no concrete move to make. He recalled having bought a newspaper. Had there been anything in it about the deaths of Gil and Herndon? He found the folded copy of the newspaper jammed into his overcoat pocket. When he had bought it in the lobby of the Hotel Albert right after leaving Hilton sprawled and bloody on the bed, he had been too harassed and frightened to read it. He opened it and was amazed to see an
artist's pen-and-ink drawing covering the entire front page under a tall, black headline:

DOUBLE TOTALITARIAN MURDER

The picture showed two tall, popeyed, hawk-faced young men in their shirt sleeves—in truth, both men had worn coats and Herndon had been fifty-eight years of age and Gil had been thirty-six—lamming each other in a savage rage; one was flaying a fire poker and the other was wielding a huge table leg which he held high in the air and was about to crash it down upon the head of the other. Cross's lips twitched in a smile at the expressions of exaggerated hatred which the artist had injected into the facial features of both men; their long, unruly hair was matted and falling almost into their eyes; they were unshaven and their skins were pimply; their teeth were bared, long, and pointed, resembling the fangs of wolves or dogs; and the fingers of their hands were gnarled, lumpy, with long, curving nails suggestive of animal claws. The background depicted by the artist was not the fascist Herndon's chastely furnished study, but a filthy den whose ceiling was cracking and peeling, showing the laths. The corners of the room revealed dense spiderwebs; several empty whiskey bottles lay on the floor. Tacked to the torn wallpaper were several photographs of nude women in various erotic postures, each carrying at the bottom legends such as: FREE LOVE—JOY AND MADNESS—NIGHT OF ABANDON, etc.

Cross blinked in disbelief, not knowing whether to laugh or curse. He lowered the paper and sat in deep reflection. Then he muttered out loud:

“But this is a kind of inverted pro-communist and pro-nazi propaganda. They've so distorted these men that no one could ever recognize their psychological
types…A Gil or a Herndon might be working at the City Desk of the
Daily News
this very moment…What kind of people make up these papers? There couldn't be a better way of disguising totalitarian aims than this.”

He lifted the paper again and read the long caption running beneath the drawing:

Cross tossed the paper aside in disgust; then he remembered that Eva might get hold of it and become upset. He took it into the kitchen and dropped it into the incinerator. He paused; oh, God, that goddamned handkerchief that had brought so much trouble! It was
still
in his pocket! He looked around; he was alone in the kitchen. He took the balled, reddish handkerchief
from his pocket and stared at the burns, then once again he dropped it into the incinerator, hoping that this would be the last time he had to get rid of it.

Still brooding over the garbled newspaper story, he went back into the living room. What protection did men have against the Blounts and the Herndons of this world if newspapers could give no better interpretation of what they were after than what he had read? Was it that you could not understand the totalitarians unless you partook of their malady? He understood them; but, of course, he was akin to them, differing from them only in that he did not have a party, the sanction of ideas, a gang to aid him and to abet his actions by the threat of force. Both Gil and Herndon were so much more intelligent than the men who had written the news story that it was pathetic. Did that mean that the future was in the hands of men suffering from this terrible sickness? And that the shape of that future would be determined by which of these monsters would be triumphant…? Did the arrogant confidence of these two monsters stem from their secret knowledge that they knew that those who sought to defeat them would have to become like them, have to turn into the very kind of monsters they wanted to destroy? Was it that the totalitarians
knew
that, historically, no matter if they won or lost battles, that the war against individuality and for the subjugation of freedom was bound to be won by their side? Cross shook his head in wonder.

Could they eventually trace Hilton's death to him? Now that he longed to plot out a future with Eva, he could not let his mind stray too far into the realms of hope; he might be accused at any time…

He sighed, rose, strode restlessly about. Eva came in and looked anxiously at him.

“How are you, darling?”

“I'm fine,” he lied.

She sat at Gil's desk and began sorting papers.

“You have no more fever?”

“None at all. I'm all right.”

She rose and went to him; he knew that she had not come into the room to look for papers, but to be near him, to see that he was not fretting.

“Why don't you relax. It's better for you.”

“I'll try, Eva,” he said and stretched out on the sofa.

He lay with closed eyes, but relaxation was impossible. Eva knelt at the side of the sofa.

“Come to bed, darling. You need sleep…”

“Let me just lie here and think a little—”

“You're not worrying? Tell me the truth.”

“I'm not worrying, Eva,” he lied despairingly.

She kissed him, gazed long into his dark, brooding eyes.

“Everything'll be all right,” she said cheerfully. “You'll see.”

“As long as you are there, I'll be all right,” he told her.

“I'm all in; I'm going to bed.”

“Do that, Eva. I'll be along in a little while—”

“And don't go out into that cold again. We'll soon be free from all this terror…We'll be where a big, blue sky stretches over our heads, with the wind blowing through the high pine trees…They tell me that the lakes in the Gatineau are blue and deep and clear…”

“Yes.”

“And all this deception'll be at an end,” she murmured hopefully. “Things'll be as clear, as sharp as mountains on the horizon…” She sighed. “I want to paint again…This time I want to create images com
mon to everybody, symbols that can link men together…Rest now, Lionel.”

She was gone. He closed his eyes. Despair was in him so sharply that he was not aware of the room's four walls about him. What could he do for Eva…? His obsession was with him again. How much time did he have before his foolish world caved in?

Oh, yes; the radio…What time did the evening news come on? He turned the dial on the radio, keeping the tone barely audible, and listened to the impish notes of blue-jazz leap and cavort in freedom…At ten-thirty there was a pause in the outpouring of jazz and a sonorously masculine voice recited a medley of political news items, and then:

The second Communist leader in twenty-four hours has been found shot to death by a .32, calibre revolver under baffling circumstances in a Greenwich Village hotel room late today. The body, that of John Hilton, 32, ex-school teacher, a militant Communist leader and a recently elected member of the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party, was discovered by a colored cleaning maid as she was making her rounds early this evening
.

John Hilton died as a result of a fatal bullet wound in his left temple. Death, according to the Medical Examiner, was instantaneous. The death scene showed no signs of violence or physical struggle save for a slight abrasion on the forehead of Hilton
.

Though all present indications point to suicide, police are continuing their investigation. Murder has not been ruled out
.

Hilton's death comes a few hours after that of Gilbert Blount, another member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, whose place on the Central Committee had already been taken by John Hilton. In labor circles spec
ulation is rife as to whether Hilton was killed by some recently expelled member of the Communist Party
.

That was all; Cross switched off the radio and stood up. He had not been mentioned, and whether the police would find some trail leading to him was problematical. He went to the window and stared into the winter night; traces of snow and ice showed on the pavements and sidewalks. A heavy mist hung over the city and the houses on the opposite side of the street were dim and ghostly. Occasionally a man or a woman hurried past.

Now that the news of Hilton's death was public, what would Eva think when she heard it? Would she still believe that he had been babbling senselessly when he had come in earlier that evening? Or would the news of Hilton's death plant a tiny seed of doubt in her mind, a doubt that would grow until she regarded him with fearfully questioning eyes? Though Eva was sleeping, he felt driven to know what she would say; it was much better to learn her reaction now than later. The anxious tension of waiting to see if she would suspect him without his telling her was greater than the dread of what she would say when she knew that at least some part of his incoherent outpourings was true.

As though being guided by some imperious influence, he walked slowly toward Eva's bedroom and stood hesitantly in the partially opened doorway, listening to her quiet, regular breathing in the dark. Would it not be better for her to die now and be spared the pain and shock which he knew he had to bring yet to her? Had he not told Hilton that death was better than prolonged and inflamed suffering? Did he not owe it to her to kill her and thereby guard her from the monstrousness of himself? He advanced to the bed and his
right hand lifted itself above her head and hovered there. God, no; no more of this killing whose logic led on and on into the grey, deadening reaches of inhuman meaning…! His damned habit of relentless thinking was mangling the very tendons and nerves of the flesh of life! Eva stirred uneasily on the bed and gave forth a profound sigh, a sigh that told him that the destiny of the soul from which it came could not be encompassed by his churning mental processes alone. As he stood there in the dark straining at a decision, he could see that the grinding mechanisms of man's thought could destroy all of life on earth and leave this watery globe bare of the human beings who had produced the thinking…

Living thus tensely in his thoughts, Cross knew that this executing of the sentences of thought on life was a kind of continuous madness whose logical end was suicide. No matter how hot and furious the degree of his thinking, he could not convince himself that to kill Eva to ward off the suffering that the future would bring into the world for her was right. By snatching her life he could stave off the suffering, the pain that
he
thought would be hers, but did
his
insight into what the future held justify his killing her on that basis? The answer to that question was beyond his reach. To slay Gil and Herndon and Hilton in a fit of cold rage because they had outraged his sense of existence was one thing; but only if he were
outside
of life itself, beyond existence, could he make such a judgment about Eva whom he loved. How could he ever be able to tell, after killing Eva, that his judgment had been a correct one? Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively toward days that had yet to come. If he killed himself, his processes of thought stopped. Or did they? How could he ever tell after hav
ing killed himself that his judgment-act had been the right one…?

His hand was still trembling in the air; he was not feeling, just thinking…Logic sustained by love could lift future suffering from her, but love informed by hope could keep her with him to live out the unpredictable chances of life. For life's sake, he would spare Eva. For Eva's sake, he would spare her life. Time alone made this teeming world gush and roar like a Niagara with its richness of unforeseeable events; it was only by plunging rashly onward that one could see at all. And even if a god could exist he would have to be bound to some extent by that…