The Throat (13 page)

"Well, he attracted you."

"Ah, but I'm not even close to Alan's stature. He was one of a kind.
And when other famous religious scholars came out here, they generally
took one look at Arkham and went back to the schools they came from. He
did bring in a lot of good graduate students, but even that's fallen
off a bit lately. Well, considerably, to tell you the truth." John
Ransom shook his head and fell silent for a moment.

Now we were driving past Goethe Avenue's sprawling stone mansions,
long ago broken up into offices and apartment houses. The great elms
that had lined these streets had all died, but Goethe Avenue seemed
almost unchanged.

"I gather that you became quite close to this professor," I said,
having forgotten his name.

"You could say that," Ransom said. "I married his daughter."

"Ah," I said. "Tell me about that." After Vietnam, he had gone to
India, and in India he had turned back toward life. He had studied,
meditated, studied, meditated, courted calm and won it: he would always
be the person who had burrowed through a mountain of dead bodies, but
he was also the person who had crawled out on the other side and
survived. In all of this, he had a Master, and the Master had helped
him see over the horrors he had endured. His Master, the leader of a
small following containing only a few non-Indians like Ransom, was a
young woman of great simplicity and beauty named Mina.

After a year in the ashram, his nightmares and sudden attacks of
panic had left him. He had seen the other side of the absolute darkness
into which Vietnam had drawn him. Mina had sent him intact out into the
world again, and he had spent three years studying in England and then
another three at Harvard without telling more than half a dozen people
that he had once been a Green Beret in Vietnam. Then Alan Brookner had
brought him back to Millhaven.

A month after he began working at Arkham under Brookner, he had met
Brookner's daughter, April.

John thought that he might have fallen in love with April Brookner
the first time he had seen her. She had wandered into the study to
borrow a book while he was helping her father organize a collection of
essays for publication. A tall blond athletic-looking girl in her early
twenties, April had shaken his hand with surprising firmness and smiled
into his eyes. "I'm glad you're helping him with this muddle," she had
said. "Left to his own devices, he'd still be getting mixed up between
Vorstellung
and
vijnapti
, not that he isn't
anyhow." The incongruity
between her tennis-player looks and allusions to Brentano and Sanskrit
philosophy surprised him, and he grinned. She and her father had
exchanged a few good-natured insults, and then April wandered off
toward her father's fiction shelves. She stretched up to take down a
book. Ransom had not been able to take his eyes off her. "I'm looking
for a work of radically impure consciousness," she said. "What do you
think, Raymond Chandler or William Burroughs?" The title of Ransom's
dissertation had been
The Concept of
Pure Consciousness,
and his grin
grew wider.
"The Long
Goodbye,
" he said. "Oh, I don't
think that's
impure enough," she said. She turned over the book in her hands and
cocked her head. "But I guess I'll settle for it." She showed him the
title of the book she had already selected: it was
The Long Goodbye
.
Then she dazzled him with a smile and left the room. "Impure
consciousness?" Ransom had asked the old man. "Watch out for that one,"
said the old man. "I think her first word was
virtuoso
." Ransom asked
if she really knew the difference between
Vorstellung
and
vijnapti.
"Not as well as I do," Brookner had grumped. "Why don't you come for
dinner next Friday?" On Friday, Ransom had shown up embarrassingly
overdressed in his best suit. He had still enjoyed dinner, yet April
was so much younger than he that he could not imagine actually taking
her out on a date. And he was not sure he actually knew what a "date"
was anymore, if he ever had. He didn't think it could mean the same
thing to April Brookner that it did to him—she'd want him to play
tennis, or spend half the night dancing. She looked as if she relished
exertion. Ransom was stronger than he appeared to be (especially when
he was wearing a banker's suit). He jogged, he swam in the college
pool, but he did not dance or play tennis. His idea of a night out
involved an interesting meal and a good bottle of wine: April looked as
if she would follow a couple of hours of archery with a good fast run
up one of the minor Alps. He asked her if she had liked the Chandler
novel. "What a poignant book," she said. "The hero makes one friend,
and by the end he can't stand him. The loneliness is so brutal that the
most emotional passages are either about violence or bars." "Deliver me
from this young woman, Ransom," Brookner said. "She
frightens me." Ransom asked, "Was
virtuoso
really her first word?" "No," April said. "My first words were
senile dementia
."

About a year ago, the memory of this remark had ceased to be funny.

There had been a courtship unlike any Ransom had ever experienced.
April Brookner seemed to be constantly assessing him according to some
impenetrably private standard. April was very sane, but her sanity
transcended normal definitions. Ransom later learned that two years
earlier she had backed out of marriage with a boy who had graduated
from the University of Chicago with her because—in her words—"I
realized that I hated all his metaphors. I couldn't live with someone
who would never understand that metaphors are
real
." She had recognized
the loneliness in the Chandler novel because it echoed her own.

Her mother had died in April's fourth year, and she had grown up the
brilliant daughter of a brilliant man. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa
and
summa cum laude
from
Chicago, she moved back to Millhaven to do
graduate work at the Millhaven branch of the University of Illinois.
April never had any intention of teaching, but she wanted to be near
her father. Ransom sometimes felt that she had married him because she
couldn't think of anything else to do.

—Why me?, Ransom had asked her once.

—Oh, you were obviously the most interesting man around, she said.
You didn't act like a jerk just because you thought I was beautiful.
You always ordered just the right thing in Chinese restaurants, you
were kind of experimental, and my jokes didn't make you mad. You didn't
act like your mission in life was to
correct
me.

After they married, April left graduate school and took a job in a
brokerage house. Ransom had thought she would quit within six months,
but April astounded him by the speed and pleasure with which she had
learned the business. Within eighteen months, she knew minute details
of hundreds of companies—companies of all sizes. She knew how the
division presidents got on with their boards; she knew which factories
were falling apart; she knew about new patents and old grudges and
unhappy stockholders. "Really, it isn't any harder than learning
everything there is to know about sixteenth-century English poetry,"
she said. "These guys come in drooling with greed, and all I have to do
is show them how they can make a little more money. When I do that,
they give me a chunk of their pension funds. And when that does well,
they fall down and kiss my feet."

"You have corrupted my daughter," Brookner said to him once. "Now
she is a money machine. The only consolation is that I will not have to
spend my declining years in a room with a neon sign flashing outside
the window."

"It's just a game to April," Ransom had said to him. "She says her
real master is Jacques Derrida."

"I spawned a postmodern capitalist," Brookner said. "You understand,
at Arkham it is an embarrassment suddenly to possess a great deal of
money."

The marriage settled into a busy but peaceful partnership. April
told him that she was the world's only ironic Yuppie— when she was
thirty-five, she was going to quit to have a baby, manage their own
investments, learn to be a great cook, and keep up her elaborate
research projects into local history. Ransom had wondered if April
would ever really leave her job, baby or not. Certainly none of her
customers wanted her to abandon them. The Millhaven financial community
had given her their annual Association Award at a dinner April had
privately ridiculed, and the
Ledger
had run a photograph of the two of
them smiling a little shamefacedly as April cradled the huge cup on
which her name was to be inscribed.

Ransom would never know if April would have left her job. Five days
after April had won the hideous cup, someone had stabbed her, beaten
her, and left her for dead.

He still lived in the duplex he and April had rented when they were
first married. Twenty-one Ely Place was three blocks north of Berlin
Avenue, a long walk from Shady Mount, but close to the UI-M campus,
where April had once been enrolled, and only a ten-minute drive to
Millhaven's downtown, where he and April had both had their offices.
April's money had allowed them to buy the building and convert it into
a single-family house. Now Ransom had a book-lined office on the third
floor, April an office filled with glittering computers, stacks of
annual reports, and a fax machine that continued to disgorge papers;
the second floor had been converted into a giant master bedroom and a
smaller guest room, both with bathrooms; the ground floor contained the
living room, dining room, and kitchen.

"How is your father-in-law handling all this?"

"Alan doesn't really know what happened to April." Ransom hesitated.
"He, ah, he's changed quite a bit over the past year or so." He paused
again and frowned at the stack of books on his coffee table. All of
them were about Vietnam—
Fields of
Fire,
The Thirteenth Valley,
365
Days, The Short Timers, The Things They Carried.
"I'll make some
coffee," he said.

He went into the kitchen, and I began to take in, with admiration
and even a little envy, the house Ransom and his wife had made
together. Extraordinary paintings, paintings I could not quite place,
covered the wall opposite the long couch that was my vantage point. I
closed my eyes. A few minutes later, the clatter of the tray against
the table awakened me. Ransom did not notice that I had dozed off.

"I want an
explanation
,"
he said. "I want to know what happened to
my wife."

"And you don't trust the police," I said.

"I wonder if the police think
I
did it." He threw out his arms,
lifted them, then poured coffee into pottery mugs. "Maybe they think
I'm trying to mislead them by bringing up all the old Blue Rose
business." He took his own mug to a tufted leather chair.

"But you haven't been charged with anything."

"I get the feeling that the homicide detective, Fontaine, is just
waiting to pounce."

"I don't understand why a homicide detective is involved in the
first place—your wife is in the hospital."

"My wife is dying in the hospital."

"You can't really be sure of that," I said. He started shaking his
head, misery and conflict printed clearly on his face, and I said, "I
guess I'm confused. How can a homicide detective investigate a death
that hasn't happened?"

He looked up, startled. "Oh. I see what you mean. The reason for
that is the other victim."

I had completely forgotten the other victim. "The assault on April
falls into an ongoing homicide investigation. When and if she dies, of
course, Fontaine will be in charge of that investigation, too."

"Did April know this guy?"

Ransom shook his head again. "Nobody knows who he is."

"He was never identified?"

"He had no identification of any kind, nothing at all, and nobody
ever reported him missing. I think he must have been a vagrant, a
homeless person, something like that." I asked if he had seen the man's
body. He shifted in his chair. "I gather the killer scattered pieces of
the guy all over Livermore Avenue." i

Before I could respond, Ransom went on. "The guy who's doing this
doesn't care who he kills. I don't even think he needed an actual
reason. It was just time to get to work again."

One reason John Ransom had wanted me to come back to Millhaven was
that he had been talking nonstop to himself inside his head for weeks,
and now he had to let some of these arguments out.

"Tell me about the person who did this," I said. "Tell me who you
think he is—the kind of person you see when you think of him."

Ransom looked relieved.

"Well, I
have
been
thinking about that, of course. I've been trying
to work out what kind of person would be capable of doing these
things." He leaned toward me, ready, even eager, to share his
speculations.

I settled back in my own chair, all too conscious of the disparity
between what Ransom and I were discussing and our setting. It was one
of the most beautiful private rooms I had ever seen, beautiful in a
restrained way centered in the paintings that filled the room. I
thought that one of these must be a Vuillard, and the others seemed
oddly familiar. The soft colors and flowing shapes of the paintings
carried themselves right through the room, into the furniture and the
few pieces of sculpture visible on low tables.

"I think he's about sixty. He might have had an alcoholic parent,
and he was probably an abused child. You might find some kind of head
injury in his history—that turns up surprisingly often, with these
people. He is very, very controlled. I bet he has a kind of inflexible
inner schedule. Every day, he does the same things at the same time.
He's still strong, so he might even exercise regularly. He would
probably seem to be the last person you'd suspect of these crimes. And
he is intelligent."