The School of Night (40 page)

“Except he can't. It's funny, when we were hanging out last night in the Syon Park woods, I got to thinking about something. Something you said to me back at the Outer Banks. You asked me how Lily could possibly have dropped a lit cigarette in a book vault.
Lily
, with her ungodly command of detail.”

“That was my point exactly.”

“My point is something else. My point is how did you know about the cigarette?”

From the edge of my vision, I saw his mouth cinch into a bud.

“Jesus, Henry, it was in the papers.
The Washington Post
—”

“See, I read the
Post
article. I even looked it up online just now to be sure. It mentions your books being stolen, but it doesn't breathe a single word about how Lily died. Not the cigarette, not the vault—nothing.
Suspicious circumstances
, that's as far as it goes, because that's as much as the police were willing to say.”

And now, at last, I shifted my gaze from the river to him.

“Such a dumb mistake, Alonzo. And me, how dumb was
I
not to pick up on it? Encyclopedia Brown would've kicked me out of his tree house.”

His voice never wavered.

“You're quite right, Henry. I didn't read it at all.”

“Then how did you know?”

“Someone told me.”

“Who?”

“I hate to betray confidences, Henry.…”

“Could you please? Just this once?”

I closed my eyes. And then I heard him say:

“Joanna.”

I opened my eyes.

“Joanna?”

“Lily's stepsister. Lord, Henry, she called in a perfect frenzy.
Slow down,
I said
. I can't hear a thing you say.
I should have been nicer, it's true. She was distraught, although I'm not sure why, she and Lily were never close.”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding ruminatively. “Except, according to you, Joanna was in Cinque Terre when Lily died. With her new neck. The one you paid for.”

Under ordinary circumstances, I would have taken great pleasure in rendering Alonzo Wax speechless. But I wasn't savoring this: the sag of his face and shoulders, the constriction in his hands.

“I know,” I said, soothingly. “The confessional mode, that's not your bag. But we don't have a lot of time here, so how's about I take a run at it?”

I looked back upriver, across the water meadows, to the point where Syon House's towers rose.

“Start with this,” I said. “You were drowning in debt. I know because, as your executor, I had the privilege of going through your books. You were maxed out on five credit cards. You were being dragged through small-claims courts. You were running tabs everywhere you went—the liquor store, the corner grocery, the dry cleaner. You hadn't paid your rent in something like a year. All told, I'd say you were at least a million in the hole, and maybe more.

“You know what, Alonzo? I'm guessing those two goons at the airport—Officers Mooney and Milberg, remember them?—I'm guessing they weren't working for Styles at all. More like your garden-variety loan-shark collectors, demanding their boss's money. Debt has a way of following a man around, doesn't it?”

Alonzo was silent.

“But the thing is,” I said, “you had one big asset. Your library, as we all know, was worth a
lot
more than a million. And you wouldn't even have to sell it off if you could just make it disappear.

“Of course, you'd have been the prime suspect—insurance companies get a little weird about that stuff—so you had to do something else first. You had to make
yourself
disappear. Because a dead man can't steal his own books, can he? Or collect on them, which meant you needed an insurance beneficiary. Someone you could depend on to keep the money safe until it was needed. That would be—well,
me
, apparently. Though you didn't get around to telling me.

“As for the rest, well, I'm guessing it was Lily who shipped the books to a safe house, God knows where. And you—hell, you had all the freedom you could want now. You could slip on down to North Carolina and hang out in Amory's shack and chase your dream. Your million-to-one, shoot-the-moon gambit.

“It's true no one ever accused you of thinking small, Alonzo. Or getting outsmarted. You had to know Bernard Styles would be on to you. He'd want his document back, wouldn't he? And sooner or later, he
would
come calling, and being a really smart fella, you saw how you could use that to your advantage. By making him your very own scapegoat.”

Nothing had changed about Alonzo but the angle of his head, which was very slowly tilting to one side.

“That's where Clarissa came in,” I said. “You saw through her early on, but you let her go on making her reports to Styles because you knew they'd bring him running. And you knew how well he'd fill the part—the part
you
created for him. Come on, all you have to do is spend a minute with the guy and the shades of death start creeping in.

“No, you cast him very well, Alonzo, and better still, he played along, and me, I ate up the whole show. When those two thugs showed up at Heathrow, I figured it had to be Styles who sent them. When Amory was killed, I ignored the most salient fact, which was that
you
were the only one in that house with him. The only one who would have had complete liberty to … well, come to think of it, how
did
you kill him, Alonzo? Poison? Suffocation?”

His mouth pulled down at the corners.

“Well,” I said, “I can at least guess
why
you did it. Amory needed money, that much was clear. He was easily bought. Maybe you caught him trying to cut a deal with another collector. Maybe even Styles. Don't misunderstand me, Alonzo, I can't approve of what you did, but I can—I can
get
it at some level.”

I paused.

“
Lily,
though.”

I moved a step closer.

“The woman who served you all those years, Alonzo. How could you do that?”

And here was the truest measure of the change between us: He couldn't scoff me into submission. The Waxian high-handedness would no longer fly, so he had to grope for new registers.

“It wasn't Lily's fault,” he murmured. “She was just weak.”

I stared at him. For a very long time.

“What does that even mean, Alonzo?”

“It
means
she couldn't carry it off.”

And now his entire two-hundred-and-forty-pound frame was shaking with rage.

“She
told
me, Henry! How close she came to blabbing the whole works to you. And that was just after a couple of drinks! You think she'd have made it through a police interrogation? No. Patently no.” He shook his head to underscore the verdict. “I needed more time. She couldn't give me that.”

I pressed my hands against my head.

“Oh, God. Alonzo.”

Somewhere, I suppose, the world was still turning on its spit. Here, it wasn't moving at all.

“Okay,” I said. “One thing more. What were you going to do about
me
?”

He gave me a look of pure, I might even say unfeigned, astonishment.

“You can't blame me for wondering,” I said. “I mean, once the treasure was found, I'd have outlived my usefulness, too. No reason to keep me around.”

The thing is I wasn't even angry; I just wanted to know. But Alonzo's reaction was outside the realm of curiosity. His face sprang open, and the voice that came out of him was so violent that a couple of passersby actually flinched.

“How?”
he shouted.
“How can you even begin to say that?”

For a few seconds, his agitation actually got the better of him.

“Henry, do you—
unghhh
—do you honestly think I've kept you around—all these years!—out of
kindness
?”

Fists cocked like a tavern brawler's, he advanced on me.

“Do you think I didn't have better things to do than—bail you out of your fucking career, your fucking
marriages
? And your funks and your
benders,
you think people didn't wonder why I bothered? You think
I
didn't wonder? If I could've found a way not to—not to give a shit—believe me, if I could've found a
way,
Henry, I would have. I couldn't pry myself clear. From that first moment in fucking
Freshman
Week, I lost—I lost
me,
I lost the ability to conceive of myself without
you
—being somewhere near. And if that's not my life's greatest fucking
tragedy,
Henry—”

A gasp caught him mid-sentence.

“And its greatest joy…”

I will always remember how terrifyingly young he looked as he stared into my face, waiting for something. What? I was no longer capable of thought. I can only say he started laughing. And it was the saddest laugh I've ever heard.

“I didn't even
mind,
you know, all my money going in the crapper. I thought, Well, that just levels the field, doesn't it? Henry and I are in the same goddamned fix, we can meet on the same
ground
now. And then Styles showed me that letter—just the second page, that's all I saw—and I thought, What better gift for Henry? Thomas Harriot's own words? What better way to bring back all the…”

He slammed his palms against my chest.

“All that
passion
and
brightness
you used to have, Henry, and you pissed it away, and I hated you for that, and it
still
didn't matter.”

His face seemed to collapse before my very eyes, and something appeared there I had never seen before. Bitter helpless tears.

He backed away. Gave his face a furious swipe.

“Listen to me, Henry. It was never about the treasure, it was about what it
brings
. There are
other
treasures. The world is lousy with 'em! Sooner or later, that insurance money
will
come through. No, it will, believe me. And that's all the seed capital we need to—”

“What?”

For a second, he floundered.

“Christ, to
go
. Somewhere,
any
where. Wherever we can
be,
Henry, be the people we wanted to be all along. The life of the mind. I'm not asking for the physical—
thing.
You know I'm not. That's not how I…”

With a stifled roar, he cried:

“If you want a woman,
take
a woman! I've never complained, have I? Hell, bring Clarissa, see if I care. All I ask is—all I've
ever
asked is—just stick
around.
That shouldn't be so hard, should it? There are harder things, aren't there?”

The river was moving again: slowly, very slowly. Two seagulls were bending toward us, and a solitary jogger was picking his way along the river trail. From nowhere, church bells rang out.

Sunday.

I ran my hands through my hair.

“Alonzo,” I said, “I can't believe you did all these terrible things for me.”

“For
us,
” he corrected.

“Then I'm sorry. I'm sorry those people had to die for us. I'm sorry I couldn't be more worthy of them. I wish I could forget about them, but I can't.”

His face didn't look quite so young now.

“So what are you saying, Henry? After all we've been through together, you're going to—what, a citizen's
arrest
? Cuffs and all?”

I took a step back.

“I'm flying home this afternoon,” I said. “On the one o'clock plane. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to call Detective Acree. I'm going to tell him everything I know.”

“And while you're exorcising all that nasty guilt of yours, Henry, just what do you expect me to do?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't care.”

If I had taken a hatpin and driven it straight into his skull, I don't think I could have made him flinch as he did then.

“There's no sunset to head into, Alonzo. The School of Night is closed.”

He nodded, twice. His head dropped. Then he reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a rolled-up sheet of paper.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Harriot's map, what else?”

“Not the original.”

“Of course the original.”

My finger vibrated toward it, then stopped an inch short.

“Don't be a goose, Henry. Styles can't use it anymore. If someone's going to keep it safe, it might as well be you.”

And then, with a giggle of profound strangeness, Alonzo added:

“I'd just lose it.”

Two impulses warred within me as I took that paper in my hands. One was to thank him for the gesture. The other was to tear the thing up on the spot. And because neither impulse prevailed, I just stood there dumbly, staring at the piece of paper that had made all this trouble.

“You've got a plane to catch,” Alonzo said.

I nodded, briefly. I started to speak.

“Goodbye, Henry.”

A strange resonance to his words. For, of course, this was the second goodbye I'd received that day.

And as I walked north along Kew Bridge, it was part of my pathetic fallacy that England itself was saying goodbye. Thomas Harriot and Margaret Crookenshanks and Walter Ralegh and Henry Percy … all those figures of the past sailing off to haunt someone new.

I shivered in the wind and pulled my coat more tightly around my neck. All the exhaustion of the past twenty-four hours was sweeping over me at last, and I wanted nothing more than to be inside, in a warm bed. My
own
bed, pathetic as that sounded. I had a very clear vision of it, in all its disarray.