The Vampire Tapestry (33 page)

“If you really don’t need that kind of contact, I guess I envy you. The emotional heat in the herd can burn you up, and when I feel myself getting blistered, I can’t just cut and run. I’m afraid I’d lose my place in the center—”

The door opened and a student looked in. Irv glanced at the wall clock and jumped up. “Can you come back after lunch?” he called to the student, who said yes and withdrew. “Damn! I have a committee meeting in two minutes. Listen, Ed, please come talk again. We still have those transcripts to go over, and I won’t drop any more gloom on you, I promise. Dorothea phoned to say she’s stopping by today before heading home to Taos. She’s a tonic for my self-pitying moods.”

Late that afternoon walking back toward the office after a seminar session in the Fine Arts Library, Weyland recognized Irv and Dorothea down by the duck pond. He paused by a dark pine grove to watch.

They walked slowly along the edge of the water below, clearly deep in discussion. Irv had opened his collar and rolled up his sleeves. He kept reaching one hand up to smooth back his thinning hair. Dorothea, in jeans and a knitted poncho, stayed close to him. Now and then she touched him, tapping home her words. They walked past the gliding, honking ducks and the young people crossing the fresh, long-shadowed grass. Irv sat down on a bench near the water. Bent over, elbows on thighs, hands dangling between his knees, he talked; Weyland could tell by the way Dorothea held her head cocked slightly, gazing out across the water. She put her hand down on Irv’s slumped shoulder. They stayed that way a while, and once Irv lowered his head and rubbed at his face with both hands. Perhaps he was weeping.

There was no one else in the park now. They got up. Irv, glancing in Weyland’s direction, said something that made Dorothea look also. Both their faces were turned toward Weyland. He thought they would come over the grass to him, and he considered moving on first. But Dorothea took Irv walking again, away from the pond, talking still, out of sight.

Feeling oddly empty but not hungry enough to hunt, Weyland drove home to do some work.

* * *

Returning on foot at a late hour, he approached the anthro building over the grass, keeping to the shadows. Judging by the undisturbed condition of his desk and the jammed lock on his office door this morning, whoever had attempted entry there had failed. Perhaps they would try again tonight. He was not averse to the idea of prey coming here to him.

But why was Irv’s old Pontiac still in the parking lot, the only car? The library was closed, so he couldn’t be working over there. His window was not lit.

Weyland let himself into the building, intending to wait in his own office for whoever might come. Across the hallway, the door was open to Irv’s dark room. On impulse, Weyland entered. His eyes adjusted at once to the darkness and the glow from the corridor. Irv was sitting with his swivel chair turned away from the desk so that he leaned on the sill of the open window, his head down on his folded arms. He made no sound of breathing. Weyland approached, leaned nearer, closer than he would ever have come to the man in life unless for blood. Irv’s outreaching energy, which Weyland had felt as intrusive pressure, no longer held him off.

He looked into Irv’s face. The face was vacant, eyes shut mouth loose, cheeks slack and sunken. In the wastebasket among the crumpled plastic cups was a small medicine bottle. Weyland did not touch it. He could see that the label had been scraped off. Irv had made sure that no one, coming upon him too soon, could telephone the Poison Control Center for an antidote, and he had sat dying in the dark to avoid so late a light attracting the campus police.

Weyland stood over him, hands in pockets to keep from inadvertently touching anything. On the blotter lay a stack of evaluation forms under a typed note that ran: “There will be no final exam in Ethnography 206. These evaluations are based on each student’s entire output of class work, tests, and assignments so far during the term.”

Beside this pile was a yellow legal pad. Weyland’s name was written across the top of the first page in Irv’s quick, strong script, followed by two sentences: “Try starting with these—the asterisks indicate materials on Indians and Spanish raiding each other for slaves. Hope this points in the direction of what you’re looking for.” Then came a column of some fifteen numbers, identifying transcripts in the oral-history series, and his signature. Below this, Irv had added a single line: “I am very tired of being strong.”

Weyland sat down in the corner chair. He looked across the room at Irv’s motionless torso in the rectangle of the window frame. Here was Irv at his last resort, despite his students’ needs, despite Alison’s cheer, despite Dorothea. Each little life had disasters in corresponding scale waiting to erupt from its secret depths.

No deep wisdom was required for Weyland to guess that Irv was dead as a consequence of his intensely emotional life at the center of the herd. He had died true to the logic of his nature, pressed past bearing by the strength of his own feelings—though what the feelings had been about might never be known. Was it what they called a “broken heart”? In any case, this life and death seemed proper for Irv and the very archetype of the brief, incandescent human span.

My inept picklock may arrive
, Weyland thought,
and if he finds me here I’ll be mired in endless
complications and explanations.

Yet he sat looking at Irv’s corpse, and he put a riddle in his mind to the dead man:
Now that you do not
seek after me, why do I stay for you?

A fly buzzed in the room. Weyland left.

* * *

In the anthro parking lot next day he recognized the tall woman sitting in the pickup truck as Letty, so he was not entirely surprised to find Dorothea Winslow waiting for him at his office.

“Miss Winslow, may I—”

“I want to talk to you,” she said. She entered behind him and left the door wide open. He said, “May I express my sympathy—I know Irv was a close friend of yours.”

“But not of yours?” She stood across the room from him.

“We were colleagues, little more.”

“People say you two sometimes walked to work together.”

“Yes, sometimes,” he said.

“He talked to you.”

Weyland was tired. Class today had proven more strenuous than he had foreseen. This on top of a harrowing session of questions with the police in the morning had worn his temper thin. He said irritably,

“He talked to everyone.”

“He must have said something to you,” she persisted.

“You mean about killing himself? If he had, I would naturally have taken some action, Miss Winslow—I’d have telephoned you, for instance.” He wanted to sit, but the woman had so clearly gathered herself for confrontation that he felt more secure facing her on his feet. Why was she angry with him? “Irv and I had a professional relationship, amiable but not close. He had, as you know, many good friends, many demands on his personal time, and I am myself a busy man.”

She pointed out the open doorway. “His office is right there, right across the hall. You saw him every day, he saw you.”

He set down the books he was carrying and spread his hands on the surface of the desk, bracing himself across from her. “Miss Winslow, what do you want?”

“I want to know why it happened, how he came to do such a desperate thing.”

He shook his head. “We had no intimate conversation. If he confided in anyone, it was in people like yourself, people he was fond of.”

She turned away from him slightly, her hot gaze fixed on empty space. “To people like me, he said that he had some bad trouble but that it would pass, he would handle it, he had the problem under some kind of control.” Again the flashing glare at him, this time from reddened eyes. “He was used to us coming to him for comfort and encouragement, not the other way around. He turned to you.”

“No,” he said.
She blames me
, he thought,
because she thinks Irv said something that should have
warned me of what he intended
. He wished she would go away.

“Damn it,” she said with open rage and pain, “he wrote his suicide note to you! Nothing to anyone else, not a word, not a call, except to you. That line about being strong—I saw it; the police showed me the note when they talked to me.”

He thought,
She’s jealous
. “Please, Miss Winslow—sit down, listen to me. I can’t help you. If you saw the note, you know that it was actually about business, some source materials we’d been discussing. The rest—I don’t know why he added that sentence.”

“He added it because he had warm feelings for you,” she said. “He turned to you for the support one man should be able to give another. But you’re not a man, and you gave nothing. You were no goddamn good to him.”

The hallway was empty. He could stride over and slam the door shut, and then—

No, not her death on top of another death, and with her friend waiting for her outside! Ignore
what she said. Keep calm. Give her something, divert her, placate her.
He said, “Irv did make overtures of friendship to me. I’m afraid I wasn’t very responsive. He told me no secrets, I assure you.”

“You wouldn’t know if he had,” she retorted. “But I might, if I knew what he said to you. Tell me about your last conversation with him. Tell me what he said.”

She would not be fobbed off with a two-sentence summary, repeated in endless variations, as the police had been. Irv standing with lowered head, furrowed brow, lower lip thrust out as he thought, came clearly to mind, but his words were gone, hidden in a blank mental silence. Weyland felt threatened, somehow, by his own inability to remember.

“So many questions have already been asked,” he said. “I’m worn out with questions, Miss Winslow; my powers of recall are exhausted. The man is dead. What good—”

“Tell me!”

He straightened up. “This is very painful and quite useless. I must ask you to leave now. Perhaps another time, when the shock has diminished—”

“Ye gods,” she said, “and he left you his last message!”

She was gone. He sank into his seat and leaned back, shutting his eyes. He could feel a vein jumping hectically in his temple. A feeling of defeat overcame him. He had fumbled the challenge, he had lost. Dorothea was maddened by loss. Eventually her sight would clear again, but in the meantime her hostility might draw other attention to him—that of the authorities, of Irv’s friends, relatives, colleagues, who could tell, even enemies, agents of whatever calamity Irv himself had fled. Irv’s note had ensnared Weyland, and Dorothea, flailing about for a remedy for her own suffering, would undoubtedly embroil him more deeply still.

He could not afford the lightest scrutiny or inquiry into his own life. No spotlight, not even the outer edge of one meant to illuminate Irv’s death, must fall on him. Therefore, he must not be found where such light would fall.

When he left the building the pickup truck was still there. Dorothea was sitting on the lawn. Letty knelt behind her, kneading her friend’s neck and shoulders. They were facing away from Weyland. He slipped around the corner of the building.

* * *

He never liked to drive up to his own garage, observable by any lurking watcher. He preferred always to park at a comfortable distance and walk home, alert to unusual signs which he would not notice from behind the wheel.

Tonight he stopped the car in a deep pool of shadow under a sycamore three blocks from home. Turning off lights and motor, he sat a while with the windows open looking out on the night. The car was a decent machine—a Volvo sedan he had bought secondhand—though nothing like the beautiful Mercedes lost to him in the East. This one he could give up with much milder regrets, and give it up he must, along with the rest of the identity of Edward Lewis Weyland—he had made up his mind to it. He reflected on the sour humor in the situation: at last that other woman, Katje de Groot, the huntress whom he had so disastrously hunted at Cayslin College, was to have her way. Weyland would die. What a pity, to discard the pleasures and perquisites of a well-paid and respected career, the rewards of demanding work well done. The book on predation would never be finished now. That career was ended.

The first steps were taken. His errands this afternoon—laundry, groceries, the shoemaker—had enabled him to break the several large bills he kept by him into traveling money of smaller denominations. Yet he found himself oddly reluctant to go home and begin his final evening as Weyland. The trouble was that an identity so well tailored as this one induced an inevitable reluctance to cast it aside. The fit was too perfect: the irascible, hard-working, brilliant scholar had expressed too many aspects of his real nature.

However, Dorothea had left him no real choice. She had seen through Dr. Weyland with her art-beyond-art, and her knowledge coupled with her lacerated feelings over Irv’s death made her dangerous.

Fortunately, he was not without resources. He was in his own way an artist, a practitioner of the art of self-invention. Dorothea had seen him as the stylized performance of a man, and she had seen well. He would now set about redrawing himself as someone else, and he took wry pleasure in the thought that he could borrow his new role from Dorothea’s friend—from Letty.

He had thought it all out during this afternoon of errands. If Letty could hit the road, so could he. He would be for a while, literally as well as metaphorically, one of Irv’s taciturn drifters, someone who casually turns up cleaning out a dairy barn, digging sewer lines, working a loading dock, or sweeping a warehouse floor for his keep. He’s heading for Seattle to see the Space Needle, this quiet, undemanding fellow with no attachments except to his battered old Panama hat. The sort who keeps to himself, perhaps he hints at a family deserted because of unnamable pressures. That would account for his avoidance of all forms of red tape and official questions. Maybe he has abandoned some career too commonplace to provoke curiosity: bookkeeping, something like that. A name—a fitting name would occur to him.

In a way he looked forward to this rougher life—too few baths, too much weather, too little money—because he knew that in such hard country he could hold his own. He was far stronger than the human beings whom its rigors often destroyed. And meanwhile all the impossible complications accreted around the person known as Weyland would be left behind.