45

Outside, cop radios jabbered in the darkness. There was a residue of fine ash over the tops of books, and on the dust cover of the computer. Speke had glimpsed the men in suits, dark jackets and dark pants, the men in black shoes and wool blends whose presence meant: a few more minutes and they’ll be done with body bags and have their list of questions.

They would have many questions. Many wonderful questions, and he would sit still and tell them all. Fire and the law. They went together in a kind of visceral logic.

There will be questions, and then handcuffs. Maybe that was logical, too, the theater of the law. They would march him manacled before the flash cameras and the mikes, to the police car. Speke sat in his office, rubbing Pliagel over one of his contact lenses. He rinsed the flexible, collapsible lens with a squirt of saline solution, and lifted the tiny, inverted disk to the surface of his eye.

He blinked. His vision was new again.

It was all theater, all of it a stage, all of it imagery to be consumed. He shot a peek out the big windows of his office and he saw hardhats in the dim distance, around the garage, and heard the snap and bite of yet more flames somewhere in the dark.

He could feel it in his bones: there was a fire somewhere in the house, maybe in the floorboards, maybe in the lath and plaster of the walls. Smoke began to foul the air yet again. You see, he hissed to himself: I told you. You can’t rest. You’ll never be able to rest, ever again. The house is not out of danger yet. And what difference does it make? It might as well burn. They will take it all away from you. They should. It’s only right. After all: you killed.

He pressed the lid over the saline solution, and thought, Which of my lawyers will I call? My contract man will be useless with this sort of case. Thank God my father never lived to see this night.

He had lived a childhood of simple prosperity. It had seemed normal to him, unremarkable, his life drifting just as a childhood should. But as an adult one morning, walking up a ravine near Oaxaca, passing goats and rotting garbage, the rattle of the automated looms in the distance, he had realized that his childhood had been Southern Californian, convenient and without disease or violence. He had washed the dust of newspaper ink from his hands and watched television, waiting for his father to come home from the Hickory Pit with the thick-as-cardboard paper plates laden with pork and potato salad. His small, quiet family had not been rich, but the bicycles leaning against the garage walls were always the newest ten-speeds.

His favorite cartoon character had been Popeye. His brother had preferred the Road Runner. He and his brother had walked along the beach, peeling jellyfish from the wet sand. The dead, glutinous creatures left the trace of a stain on the sand from their purple markings, like those make-believe tattoos one could buy and apply to one’s wet—usually just-licked—forearm. The purple dapples of the jellyfish left a transfer pattern like a starburst, a nova, an exploding sun. It was as though nature could not endure an ugly thing, but even in its randomness and blind reproduction achieved symmetry and hue. His boyhood had been one of unremarkable comfort, a life of late dinners while the sprinklers danced water over the bermuda grass outside. His father had been kind, quiet, always quick to encourage, to help find the puncture in the bicycle’s tire, to up the allowance when the paper route became so successful Hamilton could not squeeze all of the newspapers into his canvas bag and decided to quit.

Why wasn’t I satisfied? Speke asked himself. Why didn’t I plan on becoming a realtor or a car dealer, a lawyer or an engineer? My father could have gotten me a job with Ford or IBM, especially toward the end when Time ran that thumbnail bio of him under “America’s Brain Trust,” next to cardiologists and weapons specialists. Neighbors and friends had always liked me. Any number of friendly neighbors would have given me a start in retailing, distributing, investing. I could have had a wife and kids, a normal wife and normal kids, kids who need braces and break arms playing soccer. Instead I wanted something that life can never offer. A life of magic. And I got it. I got it, and then I lost it, because it was always too much to hope for, too much to want.

But he had wanted life—not to be simply alive, but he wanted that version of immortality, life multiplied, that success can bring.

He avoided the professional voices, the matter-of-fact discussion tones and almost surgical caution of the kitchen. He peeked out one of the upper windows and saw Holub’s car, gleaming amidst all the sooty trucks. Television lights were set up, glaring blue-white beams illuminating the still smoking coals. And there was still a fire to be fought. What a show it must be, carried live.

Like a planned demolition, the garage was consumed. For a few moments it was a scribble drawing of itself in tangerine and scarlet, until it sagged. Someone thoughtful, perhaps Bell, perhaps Brothers, had rolled the Jaguar out of the garage and down the drive, nearly as far as it would go and not be surrounded by fire-stripped trees.

How convenient, thought Speke ironically. That meant that if a last remaining fork of fire should reach the car, turning it inside out with heat, we’ll all be able to watch. It’ll be carried into homes all over Northern California. This news next: The Lives of the Rich and Burned.

Even now he had a sense of humor, an inner, dry laugh, the old itch of something that passed for wit. The fire became a tradition. There had never been a time in which it had not laid seige to the house. There had never been a time before now, the air of each room ripe with smoke. He carried the fire extinguisher from room to room, sure that somewhere, hidden, unseen, there were more flames to fight.

The Hemingway letter had already burned in the Outer Office, along with the leather-bound Goethe. Speke loathed the thought that flames could consume the Monets here in the house. Those paintings were more than stretched canvas on frames. They were portions of a man’s soul.

The tube of the extinguisher dangled, its nozzle a brass sleeve that swung wide and knocked against maple bedposts and mahogany wainscoting as he hurried from room to room.

When her voice interrupted his search it paralyzed him and he could not respond. “They want to talk to you,” she said.

He didn’t even understand her for a moment.

She looked radiant, peaceful. He tried not to look broken. Yes, he thought, of course they do. A nice long talk, Mr. Speke. A couple of things you can help us with. His breath caught. It was all so cruel to Clara. And Maria, and Asquith. All, fundamentally, his fault. He squared his shoulders. He would not embarrass himself.

“That’s fine,” he said. His voice sounded solid, serious but not overly concerned. It’s good to know, Speke thought, that I know how to keep up appearances. Then he added, “Stay with me, Sarah. Please.”

He was by her, hurrying outside. It was time.

The wind was dead, and the lawn was trampled wet in the spotlights. There was a lunar look to the woods, in the opening-night lights. The landscape resembled another, more foreign moon, the moon of a distant planet.

He sensed the eyes watching him. People had always watched him. Both men and women had always found him the one to follow with their eyes. He waited on the porch. Sarah joined him, and a tiny thread of calm took its place in his soul. He could not make out where the knot of cops waited, the ones that would arrest him. A phrase came to him, perhaps something out of an old gangster movie: facing the music.

Poor Sarah—she had no idea what the world was really like. Good calm Sarah expected cops to be like she was, steady and understanding.

But her father had been a policeman, Speke reflected. Perhaps she had seen this sort of arrest before.

They stepped off the porch, into the heat of the lights. He had done all he could. His eyes were two sores in his face, and he could not take a deep breath without giving a great cough.

The crush of people made progress difficult, although the crowd made way for them. A camera flashed, and another. Someone asked a question. He was quiet, and merely gazed at the charcoal-dusted lawn. It did not seem to be day, or night. They stood on an island that had no time, smashed lawn crisscrossed with TV cables.

There were atolls of ash, pure, carbon black. There was a new smell, too, of clean, empty air. Black grass smoldered. Feet left white footprints that curled with smoke.

He endured what he knew was only the beginning of his new, ugly public role. Even now he could sense it: people saw him and believed in him. He was strong, broad-shouldered, important to the people around him even in defeat.

A figure stepped to his side. “I don’t think you need to worry about these people, Mr. Speke.” The man’s tone was respectful, reassuring. “I’ll tell them everything they need to know.”

Speke gazed at the gray-haired man wonderingly. He was the only man here in a glowing, pale suit. It was a well-cut suit with black buttons, and there was not a single ash anywhere on it. The man smiled, showing a brown canine in his otherwise perfect teeth. His tie was silk, green lizard patterns, Speke noted dumbly. Or were they iguanas?

“It’s Inspector Holub,” Speke said, his memory working with the jerky determination of a steam shovel. “Come forth to tell all.”

He had meant it, in his numb state of mind, half ironically, but Holub gave a short, quick nod. “I’ll do that,” he said, in his crisp, humorless cop voice.

“I’m ready,” said Speke.

Humorless, but not without compassion. “You better go inside and wait,” Holub said. “We don’t really have to talk out here. I just thought you could help us with something. Something that doesn’t make sense to us.”

Speke found himself still holding the fire extinguisher. He let the weaponlike object dangle at the end of his arm.

Perhaps Holub expected him to offer some advice, or further comment. But Speke only stared, and Holub read the stare like a ringside physician gazing into the eyes of a boxer. “I’m sorry we troubled you. After what I’ve seen,” Holub added, “you’re lucky to be alive.”

Speke did not understand. The sequence of events did not make sense. Luck, he mused, had not been a major factor in recent hours.

“Wait,” called a voice. “Wait, Ham, don’t go in yet.” A bright light, a germicidally blinding light, raked him, then found him, then held him, and he was, momentarily, unable to see.

“Look back here, Ham, and look up at the sky with a real—wait, Ham, don’t go in. Please, Ham, you look terrific.”

He should be surprised at the sound of his voice, his brain told him, but he was not. He could barely croak, “How did you get here, Scamp?”

“Saw it on television in L.A. What a deal! It’s on CNN, Ham. Everybody feels so awful about this. Stand there just a sec.”

“What is it, Scamp? What do you want?”

The big man was a silhouette, snapping orders in his Eastern European/Bugs Bunny accent. “Standing there and looking. Just standing and looking. You’re surveying the disaster manfully. Talk about grit. It’s wonderful! Mr. Strong. Mr. Life. That’s it, Ham. We just want you.”

The black cat had not quite resembled a cat, in Speke’s eyes. Asquith had insisted it resembled a cat, so that is what they agreed to imagine it was. It may or may not have been authentic. What it was, however, as a prize, as a souvenir of hard work in the sweat-slime, made it something to treasure. Authorities he had questioned about it years later, sitting in first class or sipping martinis in stylish cocktail lounges, had been inconclusive. The Mayan pantheon was complex. The black jaguar may have been a pre-Columbian treasure, or it may have been something altogether different, a hoax, or a more recent carving lost or tossed away as worthless.

The jungle heat had been oppressive. Oppressive, and unending, a permanent strata of heat underlying the day. When night fell, the lower, more enduring heat remained. The air had been saturated with futility and dead power, like something left over to be claimed or ignored entirely. The coconut groves were weedy and cluttered with downed fronds. The sand was sugar-bright, the parrot fish easily visible in the clear water. Indians slept on the beach beside the half-constructed hotels, their camps rolled blankets and sores of ash on the white sand.

Day had weight, and night an even greater presence, a smell, the funk as of rotting cheese of decay and the sharp, almost citric, odor of garbage fires from town. The top ten single from what was to be the album First Cut paid for all of it, and they could have lingered for months, or even years, turning record company checks into pesos.

But they had that moment, that instant of affection and rebuff. Speke’s rejection of Asquith led to the cat being hoisted high over Timothy’s head, both of them so drunk they were at once slow and clearheaded, intoxicated to the point of sanity.

Asquith had held the cat high, and it glittered in the sunlight. And he threw it down, with full strength, against a coral boulder. It should not have shattered. Coral is soft, and the cat’s shape was rounded, spheres and jagged arcs.

It broke, with a strange lack of sound. Bits rolled, came to rest, each one smaller than a human tooth.

Asquith had sunk to his knees, and then entered a long period of virtual catatonia, a trance that lasted for over an hour as dawn advanced to full day.

They had never discussed it. Speke cleaned up the broken black glass and walked all the way to the road, where he scattered it in a ditch, white cows observing him from the pavement.

At times he had assumed Asquith had forgotten the act, lost it in the drunkenness, blacked it out. But he could tell, at other times, that Asquith was already bidding farewell, leaving for the rest of his life, and to what was to be the dissolution of his promise. As an artifact it may or may not have been valuable. The broken cat was the end of their friendship, and it marked the end of youth for both of them, so much fragmented volcanic glass attended by cows.

Speke sat in his office, at his desk, and Holub sat before him, in his moonlight-bright suit. There was, now, just the slightest smudge of ash on one shoulder, small enough to be a cigar crumb. Holub gave a quick smile, the briefest flash of brown tooth.

This was exactly as they had sat one thousand years before, on Holub’s first visit.

Speke closed his eyes for a few heartbeats. I should have listened to this man. I should have believed the truth about Asquith.

“Miss Warren has told me,” Holub began.

Speke was in no shape for a verbal chess match. “I killed him.”

“She told me exactly what happened.”

“I strangled him.”

“After he had killed your wife.”

“It’s all my fault.”

Holub hesitated. “Why don’t you have a drink or something, Mr. Speke. I can see how drained you are.”

Why so much compassion? Speke eyed Holub. “I’m okay.” It sounded like a lie.

Holub thought over his words. He picked them carefully. “How did you happen to kill Asquith?”

Holub had hesitated over the word “kill.” Since when did detectives choose their verbs so carefully? Speke had always assumed that policeman kept to the safe side of language, both laconic and factual, but, at the same time, had no qualms about being blunt. “I used my hands.”

“You strangled him?”

Speke’s lungs failed to operate. A weight squeezed his chest. “That’s what I said.”

Holub shouldn’t be sitting here by himself. This wasn’t right at all, Speke thought. There should be at least one or two other detectives, or a stenographer—this wasn’t going the way he had anticipated. Shouldn’t there be at least a recording. He was, after all, making a confession.

“You didn’t consider stabbing him?”

Speke was puzzled.

“We found a charred knife. A butcher knife.”

Speke flexed his hands. He shook his head. “No, I took his life with these.”

“That’s doing it the hard way,” said Holub drily.

Wonderful, thought Speke. A cop with a sense of humor. This sort of humor was leaden, crushing. “Maybe I should have used a weapon. I didn’t think.” Almost apologetically, but also dismissively: don’t toy with me.

“It’s hard to strangle someone, you know.”

Speke said nothing.

“It takes a good deal of strength if you use your bare hands.” There was the most peculiar kindness in Holub’s voice. “It doesn’t happen often.”

“I’m not a weak man.”

“Because the truth is, Mr. Speke, we have looked for quite a while now.” Holub stopped. “A lot of us, for quite a while, under very bright lights. Sometimes—I hate to mention this—when a body is burning it moves around a little. So we had to be sure.”

Be sure, Speke echoed to himself.

“We can’t find Asquith’s body anywhere.” Holub paused, grasping one hand with the other and leaning forward. “We can’t find him at all.”

Speke made no sound.

“He’s gone.”