'
'Dark?'
They now were tugging him down the steps, and he glanced back over his shoulder, as if sharing a confidence. 'Arabs,' he said.
'You know.'
Liz Ocavello, behind her glasses and her big anchorwoman hairdo, accepted this disclosure so blandly that I thought I'd heard it wrong. Thank you, Mr Hundy,' she said, turning away, as Mr Hundy and his friends disappeared down the steps. This is Liz Ocavello at the Hampden County Courthouse.'
Thanks, Liz,' the newscaster said cheerily, swiveling in his chair.
'Wait,' said Camilla. 'Did he say what I thought he said?'
'What?'
'Arabs? He said Bunny got in a car with some Arabs'?'
'In a related development,' the anchorman said, 'area churches have joined hands in a prayer effort for the missing boy. According to Reverend A. K. Poole of First Lutheran, several churches in the tri-state area, including First Baptist, First Methodist, Blessed Sacrament and Assembly of God, have offered up their '
'I wonder what this mechanic of yours is up to, Henry,' said Francis.
Henry lit a cigarette. He had smoked it halfway down before he said: 'Did they ask you anything about Arabs, Charles?'
'No.'
'But they just said on television that Hundy's not dealing with the FBI,' Camilla said.
'We don't know that.'
'You don't think it's all some kind of setup?'
'I don't know what to think.'
The picture on the set had changed. A thin, well-groomed woman in her fifties – Chanel cardigan, pearls at the neckline, hair brushed into a stiff, shoulder-length flip – was talking, in a nasal voice which was oddly familiar.
'Yes,' she said; where had I heard that voice before? The people of Hampden are ever so kind. When we arrived at our hotel, late yesterday afternoon, the concierge was waiting for -'
'Concierge,' said Francis, disgusted. 'They don't have a concierge at the Coachlight Inn.'
I studied this woman with new interest. 'That's Bunny's mother?'
'That's right,' said Henry. 'I keep forgetting. You haven't met her.'
She was a slight woman, corded and freckled around the neck the way women of that age and disposition often are; she bore little resemblance to Bunny but her hair and eyes were the same color as his and she had his nose: a tiny, sharp, inquisitive nose which harmonized perfectly with the rest of her features but had always looked slightly incongruous on Bunny, stuck as it was like an afterthought in the middle of his large, blunt face. Her manner was haughty and distracted. 'Oh,' she said, twisting a ring on her finger, 'we've had a deluge, indeed, from all over the country.
Cards, calls, the most glorious flowers -'
'Do they have her doped up or something?' I said.
'What do you mean?'
'Well, she doesn't seem very upset, does she?'
'Of course,' said Mrs Corcoran reflectively, 'of course, we're all just out of our minds, really. And I certainly hope that no mother will ever have to endure what I have for the past few nights. But the weather does seem to be breaking, and we've met so many lovely people, and the local merchants have all been generous in so many little ways…'
'Actually,' said Henry, when the station cut to a commercial, 'she photographs rather well, doesn't she?'
'She looks like a tough customer.'
'She's from Hell,' Charles said drunkenly.
'Oh, she's not that bad,' said Francis.
'You just say that because she kisses up to you all the time,'
Charles said. 'Because of your mother and stuff.'
'Kiss up? What are you talking about? Mrs Corcoran doesn't Wc. f up to me.'
'She's awful,' Charles said. 'It's a horrible thing to tell your kids that money's the only thing in the world, but it's a disgrace to work for it. Then toss 'em out without a penny. She never gave Bunny one red -'
'That's Mr Corcoran's fault, too,' said Camilla.
'Well, yeah, maybe. I don't know. I just never met such a bunch of greedy, shallow people. You look at them and think, oh, what a tasteful, attractive family but they're just a bunch of zeros, like something from an ad. They've got this room in their house,' Charles said, turning to me, 'called the Gucci Room.'
'What?'
'Well, they painted it with a dado, sort of, those awful Gucci stripes. It was in all kinds of magazines. Rouse Beautiful had it in some ridiculous article they did on Whimsy in Decorating or some absurd idea – you know, where they tell you to paint a giant lobster or something on your bedroom ceiling and it's supposed to be very witty and attractive.' He lit a cigarette. 'I mean, that's exactly the kind of people they are,' he said. 'All surface. Bunny was the best of them by a long shot but even he '
'I hate Gucci,' said Francis.
'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.'
'Come on, Henry.'
'Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.'
'I don't see what you think is grand about that.'
'Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale,' said Henry.
I was walking home that night, paying no attention to where I was going, when a large, sulky fellow approached me near the apple trees in front of Putnam House. He said: 'Are you Richard Papen?'
I stopped, looked at him, said that I was.
To my astonishment, he punched me in the face, and I fell backwards in the snow with a thump that knocked me breathless.
'Stay away from Mona!' he shouted at me. 'If you go near her again, I'll kill you. You understand me?'
Too stunned to reply, I stared up at him. He kicked me in the ribs, hard, and then trudged sullenly away – footsteps crunching through the snow, a slamming door.
I looked up at the stars. They seemed very far away. Finally, I struggled to my feet – there was a sharp pain in my ribs, but nothing seemed broken – and limped home in the dark.
I woke late the next morning. My eye hurt when I rolled on my cheek. I lay there for a while, blinking in the bright sun, as confused details of the previous night floated back to me like a dream; then I reached for my watch on the night table and saw that it was late, almost noon, and why had no one been by to get me?
I got up, and as I did my reflection rose to meet me, head-on in the opposite mirror; it stopped and stared – hair on end, mouth agog in idiotic astonishment – like a comic book character konked on the head with an anvil, chaplet of stars and birdies twittering about the brow. Most startling of all, a splendid dark cartoon of a black eye was stamped in a ring on my eye socket, in the richest inks of Tyrian, chartreuse, and plum.
I brushed my teeth, dressed, and hurried outside, where the first familiar person I spotted was Julian on his way up to the Lyceum.
He drew back from me in innocent, Chaplinesque surprise.
'Goodness,' he said, 'what happened to you?'
'Have you heard anything this morning?'
'Why, no,' he said, looking at me curiously. 'That eye. You look as if you were in a barroom brawl.'
Any other time I would have been too embarrassed to tell him the truth, but The was so sick of lying that I had an urge to come clean, on this small matter at least. So I told him what had happened.
I was surprised at his reaction. 'So it was a brawl,' he said, with childish delight. 'How thrilling. Are you in love with her?'
'I'm afraid I don't know her too well.'
He laughed. 'Dear me, you are being truthful today,' he said, with remarkable perspicuity. 'Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn't it? Just like a fiction… By the way, did I tell you that some men came round to see me yesterday afternoon?'
'Who were they?'
'There were two of them. At first I was rather anxious – I thought they were from the State Department, or worse. You've heard of my problems with the Isrami government?'
I am not sure what Julian thought the Isrami government terrorist state though it is – should want to do with him, but his fear of it came from his having taught its exiled crown princess about ten years before. After the revolution she'd been forced into hiding, had ended up somehow at Hampden College; Julian taught her for four years, in private tutorials supervised by the former Isrami minister of education, who would occasionally fly in from Switzerland, with gifts of caviar and chocolates, to make sure that the curriculum was suitable for the heir apparent to his country's throne.
The princess was fabulously rich. (Henry had caught a glimpse of her once – dark glasses, full-length marten coat – clicking rapidly down the stairs of the Lyceum with her bodyguards at her heels.) The dynasty to which she belonged traced its origins to the Tower of Babel, and had accumulated a monstrous amount of wealth since then, a good deal of which her surviving relatives and associates had managed to smuggle out of the country.
But there was a price on her head, as a result of which she'd been isolated, overprotected, and largely friendless, even while a I teenager at Hampden. Subsequent years had made her a recluse. «She moved from place to place, terrified of assassins; her whole ™ family – except for a cousin or two and a little half-wit brother who was in an institution – had been picked off one by one over the years and even the old Minister of Education, six months after the princess was graduated from college, had died of a sniper's bullet, sitting in the garden of his own little red-roofed house in Montreux.
Julian was uninvolved in Isrami politics despite his fondness for the princess and his sympathy – on principle – with royalists instead of revolutionaries. But he refused to travel by airplane or accept packages COD, lived in fear of unexpected visitors, and had not been abroad in eight or nine years. Whether these were reasonable precautions or excessive ones I do not know, but his connection with the princess did not seem a particularly strong one and I, for one, suspected that the Isramic jihad had better things to do than hunting down Classics tutors in New England.
'Of course, they weren't from the State Department at all but they were connected with the government in some way. I have a sixth sense about such things, isn't that curious? One of the men was an Italian, very charming, really… courtly, almost, in a funny sort of way. I was rather puzzled by it all. They said that Edmund was on drugs.'
'What?'
'Do you think that odd? I think it very odd.'
'What did you say?'
'I said certainly not. I may be flattering myself, but I do think I know Edmund rather well. He's really quite timid, puritanical, almost… I can't imagine him doing anything of the sort and besides, young people who take drugs are always so bovine and prosaic. But do you know what this man said to me? He said that with young people, you can never tell. I don't think that's right, do you? Do you think that's right?'
We walked through Commons – I could hear the crash of plates overhead in the dining hall – and, on the pretext of having business on that end of campus, I walked on with Julian to the Lyceum.
That part of school, on the North Hampden side, was usually peaceful and desolate, the snow trackless and undisturbed beneath the pines until spring. Now it was trampled and littered like a fairgrounds. Someone had run a Jeep into an elm tree broken glass, twisted fender, horrible splintered wound gaping yellow in the trunk; a foul-mouthed group of townie kids slid and shrieked down the hillside on a piece of cardboard.
'Goodness,' said Julian, 'those poor children,' I left him at the back door of the Lyceum and walked to Dr Roland's office. It was a Sunday, he wasn't there; I let myself in and locked the door behind me and spent the afternoon in happy seclusion: grading papers, drinking muddy drip coffee from a mug that said rhonda, and half-listening to the voices from down the hall.
I have the idea that those voices were in fact audible, and that I could have understood what they were saying if I'd paid any attention, but I didn't. It was only later, after I'd left the office and forgotten all about them, that I learned whom they belonged to, and that maybe I hadn't been quite so safe that afternoon as I'd thought.
The FBI men, said Henry, had set up a temporary headquarters in an empty classroom down the hall from Dr Roland's office, and that was where they talked to him. They hadn't been twenty feet from where I sat, were even drinking the same muddy coffee from the same pot I'd made in the teachers' lounge. 'That's odd,' said Henry. 'The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you.'
'What do you mean?'
'It tasted strange. Burnt. Like your coffee.'
The classroom (Henry said) had a blackboard covered with I quadratic equations, and two full ashtrays, and a long conference =, table at which the three of them sat. There was also a laptop ™ computer, a litigation bag with the FBI insignia in yellow, and a box of maple sugar candies – acorns, wee pilgrims, in fluted paper cups. They belonged to the Italian. 'For my kids,' he said.
Henry, of course, had done marvelously. He didn't say so, but then he didn't have to.