9

Christopher Bell rolled down the window of his Fiat, and let the smell of the dry hills stream through his hair. He would be there soon, and he laughed at himself for being so pleased.

He had read that even when you knew where to look, the gate was easy to pass by. The house had been designed to be both sturdy and unobtrusive. According to what he had heard, hikers sometimes passed it without seeing that it was there. The house was a secret amidst outcroppings of native basalt and stands of ancient oaks. He thought of it as the sanctuary he had sought for years. He thought of Hamilton Speke as a man both colorful and heroic, a man in love with life.

But Bell was a professional journalist. If Speke turned out to be a flawed giant, then he would be just as happy to write an attack on this successful playwright. It would make no difference to him at all. Besides, scandal sold more books.

Murchison, easily the most noted film scholar in the Bay Area, had lied a bit to get Speke’s attention and sympathy. “I’ll give him a call and mention, say, cocaine and maybe too many trips to Reno. Speke can’t turn down a cripple.”

Bell had protested, briefly and insincerely. He had just arranged a book contract for Murchison, and Murchison owed him at least one fat favor. Bell had been worried that Speke would be too busy to see him, and the lie had seemed necessary.

He loved the spice of the air. The land was rugged, under an open sky. This was country at its best, the dry sun of a California summer, with its golden fields, and a red-tailed hawk skimming a hillcrest.

He had looked forward to this day for months. He had enjoyed, and endured, hundreds of assignments, but this was one which his success allowed him to choose himself, and he was going to savor every minute of it.

He was a man who loved his work. The Olivier book had been a dream come true. Haunting West End pubs for a chance to interview old actors had been exciting, and had allowed him to indulge his fondness for Guinness. Then there had been the television book, which had sold thousands—or was it millions? He had to admit that researching that project had become a grind toward the very end. He was, by nature, an active man. Spending a winter snowbound at Tahoe with grocery bags of Lucy videotapes had made him buy a pair of skis.

But because of those books, his career had blossomed. He even had a gracious letter from Olivier himself, one of the last the great man had penned, thanking him for the flattering if unauthorized Life.

He had worked his way up from the journalistic trenches. In his early days as a reporter he had been, from time to time, under fire. He had covered paramilitary raids on marijuana fields in which backwoods farmers turned out to be armed with Browning automatic rifles. Shotgun pellets had showered on him during gunfire in East Oakland, and a liquor store hostage affair had sent a pistol slug humming past his left ear. The ear still tingled when he thought about it.

Gunplay did not trouble him, although it got his attention. He concentrated on gathering details—what people wore, what the weather was doing, what cars the bank robbers had sideswiped before they slammed into a cement truck. Somewhere between Sir Laurence and Backlot, the story of Hollywood’s happy marriage with recreational chemicals, Bell had become a professional biographer. Talk shows had to be declined after a while, and a secretarial service employed to cope with his mail so that he could get on with new projects, new lives.

People—and this still surprised him—wanted to have Bell “do” their lives, much as aristocratic English women had wanted Reynolds and Gainsborough to perpetuate in pink and silver their smiles and their favorite gowns. Bell intended only to write about people he admired, people who made the world a better place, and Hamilton Speke was such a man.

A vulture slowly circled the road high overhead. He shifted to pass a rusty pickup. This was going to be the beginning of something wonderful. This was going to be the start of a new life. This was a book he was going to relish, the story of a man of unquestioned genius. If it turned out that Speke was a fake, a man who failed to measure up to his reputation, that would be fine, too. He couldn’t lose. Either way, he had a Life that would sell.

He rolled up his window. Two yellow trucks nosed the shoulder of the road. Blue smoke slumped across the two-lane. Ragged flames ate the side of a hill, and foresters worked the fire with shovels. This was much like the fire Speke had helped fight so recently, Bell reflected. This blaze did not seem likely to become a crisis. The flames were no bigger than sparrows, fluttering.

He sped through the smoke, and then drove even faster. A small blaze, he consoled himself. Small, and under control. But it was plainly a harsh season for fire. This spare beauty could all vanish in an hour.

He had wanted to meet Speke since he was astounded by Stripsearch in New York. This man cracked the English language like a whip. This man understood his characters. The silence of one character when another was speaking was not simply a period of time when one character jabbered. The silence supported and protected, even illuminated, the dialogue, as silence in a symphony will give space to the cello.

He had come equipped with some interesting artifacts. Jessica Moe, an old journalist friend, had loaned him some early rough mixes from Crystal Sound Studios, and some early tapes that she said, in her dry style, “might prove worth a listen.” Each cassette was reputedly Speke at a very early point in his career. Early songs, Bell assumed, and he wanted to hear them very much. The tapes had arrived yesterday from New York, and he had not taken the time to listen to them yet. He had a good excuse: why listen to recordings when you were about to meet the man himself?

The estate was guarded by a fence of iron spears. The gate, when he reached it, was supported by two blue stone pillars, and it was not locked. “We never lock it,” Speke’s business manager, a woman with a sultry voice and no-nonsense manner, had mentioned on the phone. “Mr. Speke thinks that would be an unpleasant symbol.” He had heard a great deal about Sarah Warren, too, and had once contemplated an article about her until he realized that he didn’t know enough about her, and couldn’t dig up enough.

There was a dead deer near the gate, its eyes gazing up into the empty sky.

He wanted to savor this moment, his first arrival at Live Oak. He rolled the Fiat along the gravel drive as slowly as possible. The great oaks festooned here and there with dried moss, overhung the drive. The crackle of the gravel was harsh, and Bell was afraid that he would disturb the spell of this place, as though the enchanted trees would vanish with the first abrupt sound, the slam of a car door or the bleat of a human voice.

The road was perhaps three or four miles long, but it was rocky, and twitched from side to side. Like the roads to many estates in the West, it was kept primitive, unsurfaced and weathered, perhaps to give the owner the illusion that he inhabited wilderness. It was a road both short and endless, and as Bell drove he felt all the places he had seen, and all the people he had known, recede. Forget everything, this land seemed to say. See for the first time.

And then he glimpsed it.

He stopped the car.

It was grander than it had looked on television, and television so often made small, nervous hucksters into giants. This was a noble house indeed. Bell had virtually memorized last month’s article in Architectural Digest, but even so he was surprised. Built in 1910 by a railroad tycoon turned recluse, it had been sold to Speke just a few years ago. It had a half dozen porches, a sun room, and, the article had added, “enough gables to make it seem a place of exciting secrets.”

He drove carefully, closer to the house. He snapped off the engine, and took a deep breath. He would leave his briefcase in the car. He wanted this experience to be unencumbered. He was about to learn something deep about life from this man, and he wanted to enter his presence without any trappings.

His stomach was fluttery, and he combed his hair quickly, amused at himself for being so self-conscious. He had interviewed ax murderers. He had interviewed heads of state. He hurried up the stepping stones.

The front door opened before he could knock, and he bit his lips. They must have seen him fussing with his hair like a nervous suitor. He made himself smile, and hurried forward, striding through the noon heat.

“I expected you to be on time,” she said, “and here you are—exactly punctual.”

Bell must have responded with something appropriate, because Sarah Warren proceeded to introduce herself.

He was hushed, drinking in the sight of the dark oak wainscoting and the Monet—the two Monets, visons of hills and poppies, a sea and distant ships. The silence of the house was profound, as though the silence itself were a sound that soaked all other noises and left a presence, a heavy, pure peace.

He had expected Sarah Warren to be something of an adversary, perhaps overly defensive of her employer’s bad habits, whatever they might be. This was natural, and he was prepared to respect her for that. What he had not anticipated was how gently she went about her role as commander-in-chief.

“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” he said.

“Surely not. You certainly won’t want to waste any of your time with me. By the way, I enjoyed your Olivier book. You may be the only writer I’ve read who understands his Hamlet.”

Bell was surprised to feel himself blushing. He stammered his thanks.

“Mr. Speke will be a few minutes. He asked me to show you into the office just in case he was late. His real office, not the one he uses for most interviews.”

He was being flattered again, Bell knew. But it worked. This was a woman capable of running a large organization and according to rumor she had turned down top-paying positions to stay where she was. She did, indeed, know everything. He could tell by the way she smiled. She silenced him with her professional kindness, and at the same time promised him that he would learn nothing from her.

She spoke in the tone of a very professional docent. “You know, I imagine, more than enough about this house.”

“It’s fascinating—”

“The first owner shot himself. They found, perhaps you will forgive me for mentioning, the top of his head under one of the poplars. It was during the First World War. Something to do with his health. Or, perhaps, the war. I mention this because some people seem to think this place a sort of cultural Disneyland. But it’s a real place, and has seen real life.”

“Does that mean that the place is haunted?” Bell joked.

“I couldn’t say, Mr. Bell.”

He was trying to keep up with this woman, who had such a brisk step, because he wanted very much to look into her eyes again. Just for a moment. He wanted her to give him that direct, calm look just once more.

“If I could begin by spending some time with you, Miss Warren—”

He could call her Sarah. She said this without glancing at him, and then she turned and looked into his eyes.

Bell had once interviewed a homicide detective with both his own Reeboks and the detective’s Florsheims glued in a pool of blood, and he had never jotted down anything but complete sentences. It was one of his strengths: coherence.

For the moment, however, he had trouble speaking in sentences. “I’m curious about the lack of security here,” he heard himself say, but this was the last thing he wanted to learn. Dumb question, he told himself. He really wanted to know why there seemed to be so much more oxygen here at Live Oak than in any other air he had ever breathed. He wanted to know which room in the vast house was Speke’s favorite, and he wanted to know how a man could work beside such an alluring woman as this manager without becoming her lover.

They entered the office. This was where Speke worked. A dark desk, probably mahogany. A view out bay windows of lush green grass and fuchsias.

He wanted to sit across from her, and listen to her voice. But Sarah had the manner of a busy person being generous with her time. She offered coffee, or tea, or perhaps something stronger.

He suggested black coffee. “What was it about my comments about Hamlet—”

One eyebrow lifted for a moment, as though she realized that he was fishing for yet another compliment. But she also seemed pleased to comply. “You knew that Olivier made a mistake, in order to shorten the play.”

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”

“Taking them out of the play hurts it,” she said. “I think you’re right. When Hamlet loses that touch of treachery, his changing of the message his two supposed friends carry to England, he seems just a little less …”

“Heroic.” He sensed that she had wanted him to complete her sentence. “But the play’s too long, isn’t it?”

She smiled, as though too kind to tell him how stupid this was.

“Of course,” he managed to recover, “that’s our own frailty, a failure of our ability to sit still. Not the playwright’s problem, really.”

When a quiet woman in white brought the tray he found himself staring at the cup as though he had never seen this sort of black fluid before.

“It’s terrible of me to tell you about the suicide. I’ve never done that before, not to a first-time guest. For some reason, I don’t know why, I wanted to shock you.”

“The top of a skull on the lawn is a grim detail, I have to admit. Does the house have a history of violence, aside from that sad event?”

She answered obliquely. “This is not an unlucky place. The original owner took his bad luck with him when he died. The poor man. He must have felt so desperate.” Her eyes found Bell’s gaze once again.

“I imagine that there’s some sort of security arrangement.”

“Guards, that sort of thing? There’s no need for security, according to Mr. Speke. The estate is so isolated, and the occasional hiker can pass right by the house itself and scarcely be aware of it, the trees camouflage it so well.”

She was a small woman, shapely, in a gray sweater and no makeup. Her voice was soft, but so businesslike Bell did not want to interrupt her for fear of wasting her time. How could a man write a word with such a woman around?

Her eyes stupified him into asking the worst question he could have chosen. It was inevitable. His excitement, his delight in sitting in Speke’s office, had confounded him. And the sight of this woman in gray, this brilliant adversary, finished off whatever chance he had of sounding like anything but an oaf.

“He hasn’t been writing very much recently, has he?”

Terrible question, he told himself. Terrible, rude, clumsy.

Her smile told him everything: I will tell you absolutely nothing of any importance. “Mr. Speke doesn’t discuss work in progress. Not his plays, and not his music. He keeps it to himself.”

“That was a stupid question.”

She was sitting across from him, however, in no apparent hurry to leave, like a fellow student sitting in an office, waiting for the principal to arrive. It was kind of her to be so generous with her time. It was only his reputation that made her linger, he imagined. He doubted that he had made a very good impression on her so far.

“It’s your profession,” she said. “But I know what you’re thinking. You suppose I know all sorts of juicy gossip, and you’ve made up your mind I won’t tell you.”

“Will you?”

She laughed. “Tell you all sorts of gossip?”

He astounded himself—once again, he was blushing.

“I know nothing of any interest. At least, nothing that will help sell books. But I’ll try to be helpful in any way I can.”

“That’s why you told me about the suicide. A lurid anecdote to give me the impression that you were giving me inside information. Because you do, after all, know quite a bit. Maybe more than you think.”

How would he describe her tonight when he wrote up his notes? He supposed he would have to describe her as quietly beautiful, and this only showed how flimsy language was. He found himself listening, waiting for her to say more.

But she only smiled, and said, “When Mr. Speke is late he can be very late indeed.”

He was grateful for the coffee because it gave him something to do with the two clumsy hands he seemed to have at the ends of his arms.

“He’s been looking forward to this for a long time,” she said, and then Bell realized that there was something wrong.

Sarah pushed a button on the table beside her, and listened, as though the air itself were going to make an announcement. And there was just a fraction of a second when she was distracted by something like worry.

Bell was an experienced reporter, a man who had interviewed generals and had been allowed a private moment with the Pope himself, one windy afternoon in Monterey. He had an ability one editor called the “read between the lies” canniness, which he supposed cops and real estate salesmen also developed.

Sarah was stalling. He guessed she had buzzed Speke on the intercom when his car pulled under the gigantic oak in front of the house. Something was wrong. Perhaps the intercom hadn’t worked, perhaps Speke had been in the midst of some dialogue—you got used to this in working with artists.

It was very nearly undetectable under her airline stewardess calm, her executive secretary smile, and her cool eye. But she was not pleased. She did not know why Speke was tardy for this important meeting. She covered up for him with a delightful description of the wine cellar “which you must see—even though the only light there is candlelight. Mr. Speke won’t allow a flashlight. Violates the virgin air, he says.”

“You’ve been with Mr. Speke since the beginning, some fifteen—”

“Fourteen years,” she said.

“When does he do most of his work?” What he really wanted to know was: do you live here, too? What would you be doing if you were not masterminding the schedule of this busy man? And what is it that makes you smile so calmly? Such a smile could only mean there was something troubling her.

He also wanted to know: how do I look to you? He wasn’t bad-looking, and while his athletic build and casual clothes made some subjects underestimate him, that was often exactly what he intended. He wore a tie today, and hand-sewn oxfords, but Sarah was not one to be fooled by a costume. She saw into him, and for some reason what she saw there made her stand, and apologize. “I really want to remind Mr. Speke.”

She offered him a leather-bound notebook. “Mr. Speke treasures those—letters from George Bernard Shaw to everyone from Charlie Chaplin to John Dos Passos.”

She left him alone, and he did not open the notebook with its embossed gold “GBS.”

He leaned forward in his chair, listening.

He heard nothing. Or was it, in truth, complete silence? Perhaps he did hear something, after all.