28

Maria clung to his arm, and she was weeping.

“I’ve done something terrible to you, Hamilton.”

Speke wondered at her words. Had she been unfaithful to him? “It’s all right,” he tried to reassure her. “Whatever you’ve done, I’ll make it all right.”

It was hot. The sunlight had weight, like a radiologist’s lead blanket. The heavy sun draped over his shoulders, and made it hard to do more than stand, absorbing what she was saying.

This should be a happy moment. His own life had returned with the fact that somewhere his old friend was still alive. There was no guilt, there was only the sunlight and a landscape restored to hope. He understood that Maria was frightened, and he forced himself to be receptive to what she was so desperately trying to communicate.

“He told me I could never trust you, Hamilton. But I do trust you. Please believe me—you should leave this place.”

She was afraid of Asquith. That was clear, and yet Speke wanted to laugh. Asquith! Why be afraid of a man he had nearly killed?

Death had been vanquished. Nothing else mattered.

And yet, Maria was afraid of Asquith, and Speke himself could not shake this peculiar chill that wended upward in his bones. “He wants to destroy you,” Maria wept.

When Speke interrupted her, he was surprised that his voice was reasonably steady. “Where is he?”

She did not answer. Instead she replied, “Don’t you see what’s happening? He’s going to destroy everything.”

She spoke with authority, as though she had seen all of this coming. The color of the sunlight faded for a moment. His voice was a rasp. “You—” It was impossible. He could not say a thing like this. “You knew, all along.”

She wept.

He ran his fingers through her hair. He held her for a moment. “Where is he?”

Now he was beginning to feel his feet anchor themselves into the ground, his boot heels digging in. Maria turned away, and would not answer. He folded his arms. His entire past would have to be reconsidered. Maria and Asquith were a team he would never have imagined. It wasn’t possible, even now. Could they have become lovers? At night, when he was watching old movies? Once reality unravels, anything is possible.

His voice was calm. “I’ll protect you, Maria. Whatever has happened, and whatever you’ve done. I won’t let him hurt you.”

“Hamilton—” She turned back to him. There is so much you should know, her expression said. “He used me.”

Ugly words. With ugly implications. “He’s a deceiver,” Maria went on. “He uses people. It’s his way. He can’t help it, because he really doesn’t have a life of his own.”

She continued, “He made me meet you. He encouraged me to marry you. It was all his idea. Your whole life the way it is right now—it was all his plan.”

These words made him close his eyes for a moment. Speke felt her words, and understood them, and when he opened his eyes again he felt the world flicker, as though he would faint. Asquith the mastermind, Asquith the magician, had deceived him in every way.

The air was stone. Each breath was acid. He could taste the strength of Asquith’s envy. He, Speke, had fulfilled the dream: he had lived, his name in bright lights, his words treasured. He had achieved what amounted to immortality, a life that extended not into eternity but around the world. He was Someone. And Asquith had never lived, in a sense, choked off from even ordinary, private pleasure. Speke had spent too much time on the telephone, too much time giving interviews, too much time sitting for publicity stills while strangers fussed with his hair and adjusted the lights that cascaded over him. But he had been offered life, and he had taken it.

He bit his knuckle, hard, wishing for enough pain to force him to concentrate. He felt concussed, lost to his senses. Isn’t it astounding, he found himself thinking, that even now my heart goes on thudding away in my chest? Don’t deceive yourself. Your life with Maria was an illusion. Reality, that steady rod of iron, is twisting out of shape, alive and writhing, a serpent.

“I forgive you,” he said. “Whatever he made you do, I love you, Maria.” It was funny, in a bitter way. Asquith had known the sort of artsy, mysterious woman he would find irresistible, and had turned his life inside out.

“Stay here,” Maria said. “Please don’t do anything. Wait!”

She left him, the sound of her footsteps receding to silence.

I must have been so easy to trick, he thought. So simple—blinded by my own faith, my own ceaseless belief that all would be well.

He had the strangest impression that Asquith was everywhere at once. He had the impression that Maria had gone to bring Asquith forth to take a bow, that an invisible audience would burst into applause as Asquith, dressed as Pan, as a Jack o’ the Green, as the very devil of the woods himself bounded nimbly to take a long curtain call.

There are many things I don’t know, old friend, Speke said, addressing the presence of Asquith, the ozone sting in the air around him, the still platinum stalks of the foxtails beside the path. But there are things you don’t know about me, which you know only how to ape. I love. I love Maria, I love this place, I love the people here. I love Sarah—yes, it was true. I am a man of heat.

And this gives me a strength you can not share, old colleague. And yet he was afraid, too, even as he was certain. If Asquith could do so much, if he could craft Speke’s life so the very vessel of his days began to sink around him, then Asquith was like night itself.

Maybe, he told himself, Asquith was not the man he once was. Maybe he had changed. Maybe this new adversary was not spite, not envy, not vengeance, but something worse. Maybe it was the hatred the lifeless must always feel for the passionate.

She was back, panting, struggling for the breath to speak. “He’s done what I was afraid he’d do—”

“What?” he heard his voice ask.

“The telephone doesn’t work,” she said.

He had never seen her like this—tear-stained, wild-eyed. He wanted to utter something soothing about the telephone, about how funny phones were. Nothing to get excited about, he wanted to say. “Of course it doesn’t work. That’s the first thing Asquith would do, and the easiest.” Think like Asquith, he told himself. What else will he do?

But something hard stabbed his palm. The car keys. She was forcing the keys into his hand. She dragged him by the arm. “Get into the car and get out of here. Go!” Her fingernails dug into his flesh.

“He’s done something to the car, too,” said Speke. “Go see.”

She snatched the keys from his hand, and streaked toward the garage, wrestled with the door, and, somewhere in the dark of the garage, flung open the car door.

She cried out.

He caught her in his arms, at the edge of the shadow of the garage. “It can hardly be a surprise, can it? Don’t worry, Maria. I know the way he thinks.”

He knew without even slipping the key into the slot in the half-light of the garage. He knew before he even turned the key. He did it only to assuage Maria, looking back at her with an I-told-you-so expression. It was useless. All twelve cylinders were silent iron. Speke settled into the leather seat, and the ignition that always coughed power gave a metal click. A dry, steel cluck. The single tick of a large, broken clock that meant: nowhere. Nothing.

The car was dead.

“I would do the same thing,” Speke offered, with a grim lilt in his soul. This was a game Asquith was playing, and he was beginning to recall the rules. He gazed under the hood for a moment, but the cavern of the engine, and the expensive, cold-iron intricacies could hold a dozen severed cables. His untutored hands groped in the dark for an obvious sliced connection, but the car was not going to be coaxed to life by him. A sheepdog has more mechanical talent than I have, he told himself. It had always been a sort of comfort. He had always turned to a mechanic and said: as long as it’s fixed. He had never had to wrestle with the details of solenoids and distributors, except as words on his copy of the bill.

Asquith’s game was an ugly one, but wasn’t he, in the long run, Asquith’s equal? Couldn’t he beat him, even now?

Let us see what else our old adversary has been up to, thought Speke, with a sickening certainty that he knew exactly what would happen next. Brothers wasn’t due to come today, but Clara’s bronze-brown Buick was parked under the pepper tree, where she always parked it, where summer after summer of pink seeds and leaf litter and bird droppings had gradually worn the finish to the same basalt tan of the stones of the estate.

Maria seized his hand. “Go up to the road. Hurry. Try to flag down a car.”

Clara’s car would be disabled, too. He was sure of that much.

Her car was always unlocked, and the keys hung in the ignition, a metal Saint Christopher on the key chain. The keys tinkled, but nothing happened. Speke fumbled for the hood release and pulled the small black handle.

Wasn’t this going a bit far? To hurt my car is one thing. It made a sort of rough-and-ready sense. Speke recycles cars like Budweiser empties. Trash his Jag.

But this was an assault on Clara, and Speke did not like that. Clara was innocent. The hood gave a rusty creak, like the alarm of a beast, the distant note of a bull elephant. The old car smelled like so much stone: old petroleum, old rust. Clara didn’t deserve this. The bright copper gleam contrasted with the glaze of aging rubber and road grease.

Speke slammed the hood, very hard. The radio antenna quivered.

Asquith was not playing an extended joke. Asquith was playing for life, and for death. Speke could feel it now—Asquith was watching, as the tragedian might watch from stage left, in the shadows among the drapes and cables, waiting for his cue.

I am an actor, too, he thought. In my way, without your polish, Asquith, without the acid you could deliver with each consonant. My gift was always instinctive, knowing what the characters would say because I was a human being and had wept and laughed. Asquith had always known only wit. Cunning Asquith had understood only the mind diseased. Asquith had understood why the arsonist in Flash—the play Variety proclaimed was “still burning records in New York and London”—worshipped fire. The arsonist in the play loved fire so deeply he eventually burned alive.

Don’t run, Speke counseled himself. Don’t even consider such a thing. This is your land. You are master here. You know he’s watching.

He couldn’t keep himself from gazing along the line of trees, over the concrete block of the wellhead, over the bottlebrush and the toyon and the buckeye, the silver-dollar eucalyptus and the Russian olive. To the California bays in the dry creek and everywhere beyond, everywhere with their huge, still, wrestling branches, the live oaks.

Beyond the garage, far down through the woods, glittered the lake. A quail far away twisted off one of his calls. The air was hot, and redolent with the exhaled flavors of the wild oats and the foxtails, the thistles and the thyme. The dry perfection, the hills in their summer coma.

I’m trapped here. Caged within a spotlight, an airless zero.

Then he knew how ridiculous he was being. Of course he could walk the few miles to the road. But why should he? He was master here! This was his land. He wasn’t going anywhere.

He turned to his wife. He thought of her this way, as an extension of his body, a deep, vital organ. Asquith had failed. She was his.

“No, don’t go in there, Hamilton, please don’t go. You don’t know how he is,” she gasped. She was hyperventilating, eyes wide. “You don’t know what he wants to do. He wanted to do much worse things to you than try to trick you and deceive you. He wanted to do everything he could to wreck everything that was yours. Hamilton, please don’t go into the house.”

He cupped her head in his hands, and kissed her tears. What power Asquith must have, he thought, to capture a woman and keep her like this. “If he’s in there, I want to see him.”

“I hated you, too. I hated you!” Her voice was like a leak in an airhose, a hiss that was more scream than whisper. Speke could not move for a moment. “But I know you don’t deserve this, Hamilton. I can’t hate you any more.”

There was a thought as sickening as a snapped bone: madness was not impending. It was upon him. There had never been an Asquith. Asquith had never visited, and Speke had buried a road-killed buck in a psychotic delusion, a holiday from reality. Maria wasn’t saying the things he heard her saying. He was having a complete, sunlit hallucination.

Stunned, staring straight ahead, Speke strode through the heat, into the cool vault of the house.

Was it possible that he could have so completely lost his mind? What test was there, what way to determine what was real. Once he had eaten some very bitter mushrooms, curled fungi black and withered as dead tadpoles. “Powerful stuff,” a fellow partygoer had said, sprinkling them into his palm. “Powerful” was an understatement. They had been crippling. He had spent the day watching television simply because he could not trust himself to go outside where there was traffic. Better to stay inside, he had told himself, although to this day ads for certain detergents made him feel a giddy horror.

Asquith had never been strong enough to wear the heavy cape of fame—the love of strangers. Asquith could hide, and he could poison a life he could never have captured and kept. But Speke knew his own strength. He was sunlight. He was laughter. He could feel it in his lungs, his bones—he could save Maria from all that had happened, He loved her.

Asquith had lost his mind. Lost his mind, and his power to love, long ago. Early one morning in North Beach, he had walked naked along Columbus Avenue. So early only pigeons and a street sweeping machine stirred on the street, along with Asquith, blood streaming down his arm, trickling from a bite he had taken out of his own flesh.

I don’t know, Speke told himself, what is real. This is what Asquith must have wanted: he wanted to strip everything away. So let it be stripped, Speke thought, all illusion, to an empty stage set, a landscape of stark light and cutting dark. Let it be simple: this was a contest between faith and hope over spite and cruelty. Light was stepping forward to battle the dark.

Speke had no weapon.

Nothing but his anger, and his love.