CHAPTER NINE

After Walt told Willie he had to go to New York, Mr. West called Walt to say that two psychiatric nurses would be standing by to return with him, but until they got there, how did Walt think his wife could best be protected from herself? Walt said Mayra was quite calm, that she reacted marvelously to sedation, and that he thought the best plan would be to post a security officer in the hall outside her door.

Walt and Mayra spent Sunday inside their apartment. They ate only unpeeled fruit. They talked about fashioning weapons, but Mayra said she wouldn’t know how to use them and that she would rely on her own agility to defend herself.

“That’s not enough. We have to hide you.”

“Where?”

“This is an enormous hotel. I’ll get a set of skeleton keys from the desk late tonight and sometime before dawn we’ll plant you in one of the smaller hotel rooms and you’ll stay right in there until I get back.”

“I can’t hide until the mail comes tomorrow. I’ve got to have Mama’s scrapbook because it’s a tremendous weapon. The best defense is an offense. Man, that scrapbook is really an offense.”

“How is it a weapon?”

“No use trying to tell you unless you see it. But it’s what he did to women a long time ago. Mama knows. She worked for the women. He thinks it’s all blown over. He thinks nobody ever connected him with what happened. If he can get the idea that somebody knows he killed a woman—yes, he did, baby, yes, he did”—Mayra held her hand over Walt’s mouth as he started to press for more explanation. “I say, if he knows somebody knows he murdered that woman, then his head is gonna be so full of the fear of that that he isn’t gonna come for me—man, not the first night anyhow, he’ll be so shook up—and you’ll be back here before the second night, and then it will be over.”

“But how are you going to tell him? How can you tell him you know and expect to get away from him, to hide from him?”

“I’m going to tape pages from that scrapbook up on his door, then I’m going to be out of there before anyone knows I’ve ever been there.”

“But why? How can that help anything?”

“Baby, how can I make it clearer? Suppose you were the safest man in the world, then all of a sudden everywhere you looked there was a big poster that told everybody you had killed a woman. Suppose you knew, all of a sudden, that somebody near you knew you were a killer. What would you do? I’ll tell you. You’d start thinking only about yourself and stop playing games with black girls until you could get this first bad thing all straightened out. Dig?”

The scrapbook came from Mama as promised, and because Willie had cleared it days before, after West had played back the tapes of Mayra’s call to Mama, it was handed right over by Gubitz, unopened. Walt called Willie’s room. He was told Willie was in the lobby waiting for him.

“Why do we want Willie?” Mayra asked. Walt said he had been told that Willie would be riding with him to New York and that Smadja and Herr Zendt would be riding with Willie. “The explanation is,” Walt said in a thin, shaking voice, “that we’re coming to the time in the staff contracts when one-third of them are revolved back to Switzerland, and they are going into New York to line up replacements. But that’s better than it’s bad. I’ll get you a key to Willie’s room so that you’ll have a second place to hide if he flushes you out of the first.”

They couldn’t use the elevator because of the sound it made. They ran together along the carpeted corridor to the red light over the exit staircase at the end of the hall on the top floor. Mr. West’s apartment was directly below theirs. He took her to a single room at the end of the long hall on the floor below his father’s. “You know where Willie’s place is?” Walt asked her at the door to the small room. “The floor below this? Placed the same as our apartment and my father’s, directly facing the stairs?” She nodded. He kissed her desperately. She locked herself in the room, then Walt sprinted two floors up, then along the corridor to his apartment. He telephoned his father to say he was leaving and that he’d like to be sure a security guard would be posted outside Mayra’s suite before he left. “How does she seem this morning?” his father asked.

“She’s fast asleep. She promised to take the same medicine when she wakes up.”

“Good.”

Walt waited until the security man knocked at the door, then he left the apartment and locked the door behind him. The man carried his suitcase to the lift, and Walt told him that Mrs. West was resting easily and that undoubtedly she would be as quiet as a mouse all day.

Willie, Smadja and Herr Zendt were waiting in the lobby. They were all driven to the helicopter pad. As he said goodbye to his father in the hotel lobby Walt had difficulty in controlling his trembling. He looked as though he were going to be sick.

“What’s the matter with you?” his father asked. “You look terrible.”

“My breakfast must have disagreed with me,” Walt said. “How do you feel, Father?”

“Never better.” Mr. West looked remarkably fit and quite sane. Walt stared into his father’s face, examining every part of it, peering into his father’s clear, rational eyes. He was overcome with the conviction that what he was doing was all wrong, that Mayra could be just as ill as the three doctors had said and for the reasons the doctors had said. Her stories were calm and cool but what they said were wild. That scrapbook. His father appearing on the mountaintop when he knew himself—had seen with his own eyes—that his father was with him in Chicago. This was all as crazy as both of them were working so hard to prove it was. One of them had to be right. If Mayra was mad, perhaps it was she who had decided, in this terrible insanity, that it was her duty to kill his father, just as she had proved to him so craftily that his father had decided to murder her—working step by step as she developed her case against his father while he developed his case against her, as though they had become the synthesis of all white Americans opposing through riot and fire unto death all black Americans. Just as all blacks had been driven mad in their desperate need to defend themselves and their meaning and, by the force of a collective, murderous syndrome, had set out simultaneously to destroy.

Insanity was irrational. White against black was irrational. Could both his father and his wife have gone mad? But he stared into his father’s face and knew it could not be so. And he saw the great roll of honor that was his father’s history and America’s history and he knew it could not be so. But he could remember Mayra too. He could see her face and hear the strong, sure rhythms of her voice and knew, too, that she could not be mad. He could remember too much, too many moments of her ever to be able to believe that she was mad. What was the right thing to do? Where should he stay?

“Helicopter’s waiting, Walt,” his father said.

“I’ve been thinking hard all day yesterday, Father. I think I’ll let Derek wait in New York and I’ll take Mayra out to a New York hospital today.”

“That is out of the question.”

“I don’t think so. And as her husband, I’ll decide these things if you don’t mind.”

“No.”

“You can continue to say no, but it is my decision.”

“It was the decision of three distinguished, experienced doctors. They decided that it could be fatally dangerous for her to travel, and she is not going to travel. You have your job to do. Go and do it.”

“Yes, Father,” Walt said grimly. “I have my job to do.” He turned away without farewell and began to descend on the helicopter.