“We done all the searching in this town that there is to do. We been over the Clinic with a comb. We got Island Hill covered.” Daugherty chuckled. “I sent some guy down the outhouse hole with a flashlight. He wa’n’t best pleased, I can tell you. Standin’ there in his undershirt and waders, plowin’ up old lye with a stick.” Daugherty sighed and went over to the ice chest. “Beer makes you hot,” he commented. “Think I’ll have another. Want one?” He grunted as he knelt down to get his beer.
Reisden shook his head. Daugherty took a long swallow, sat down at the table again, scratched his neck, and began making circles in water on the table with the bottom of the beer bottle.
“You been talkin’ to people,” Daugherty mused out loud, “and not come up with anythin’ yet. Anythin’ from Anna Fen?”
“In no way. Is there any place you haven’t tried except the woods?”
“Got to get to the barn attic this weekend. I sent a guy up there beginnin’ of this summer, he come back and said there was about four tons of moldy hay and the floor was crunchy with mouse droppings, and could we please leave it till last? You know that hay, underneath the top, it’s going to be pure compost. Four tons a mice and compost.” Daugherty took another swig of beer. “I do purely hate mice, Reisden. Anyway, we got to do it this weekend, ’cause all the little Shakespeare Club folks are going off to some dance and we can tromp around and make a smell. Bob Gosselin and his crew goin’ to come in and start shiftin’ it Saturday. I’d find someplace else to be if I were you, ’cause you’re going to have mice sittin’ on the edge of your plate come breakfast Saturday.”
“Send the mice to the dance. ”
“They roped you in for dancin’?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Daugherty swabbed his neck with his handkerchief. “Me, I’m goin’ fishin’ with my boys.” Daugherty was a divorced man and had two sons in Massachusetts.
“Reisden, when’s your man going to write back with his information about the Knights?”
“Victor Wills? I don’t know. I told you he was interested; he even wants to write about the Knight case, assuming we find something. But he hasn’t written me at all this summer, which isn’t like him.”
🙚🙚🙚
In the next day’s mail, the last day of July, came the news that finished all news of Victor forever.
II mio più respettato e caro Amico è morto— Victor’s Italian waiter wrote with a sputtering black pen, on the kind of black-bordered mourning paper that Victor would have called simply deliciously Catholic. The spelling was uncertain and the paper was scented; but this last of Victor’s waiters had nursed him, and stayed with him, while he died.
Victor was dead. They had never been as close as they should have been. In the beginning Reisden had been drawn to Victor’s literary talk but put off by Victor’s only too obvious other interests. But Reisden had got from that relationship so much more than he could give without being misunderstood. Victor had widened his horizons, teaching him that being creative was important, whether it was in bad poetry or chemistry. If it had not been for knowing Victor at fourteen, Reisden would not have started acting at sixteen, and he would never have joined Louis and done chemistry. When Reisden had known him in more recent years, Victor had diminished into a charming, gossipy old man who had barely known Tasy, and Reisden had been so sunk in his own unhappiness that he had paid little attention to Victor’s. Victor had suffered from heart disease for several years, the waiter Marco wrote; but the end had been very quick, a stroke, a few days when Victor had struggled to stay alive, then reconciliation with the Church and death. He spoke con gran’Amore of a man named Oscar, the waiter Marco wrote; but what he said to me contented me.
Victor had been dead nearly a month.
I should have given you what you wanted, Reisden thought, knowing that in that way he had never been capable of being either loving or sincere.
The letter from Reisden, asking for Knight materials, had come during Victor’s last illness. Marco had gone through Victor’s files and was enclosing everything that related to Reisden or the Knights, since that was what Victor had apparently wanted.
There was a heavy box of materials with the letter. Half of them were Knight materials; but there were letters from him to Victor as well, the two mixed together.
Reisden took the box and letter up to his room and spread the Knight material out on the floor. He kept finding bits of his own life mingled with them: the same stack would contain newspaper clippings, a copy of the coroner’s report on William Knight, and then a letter from him to Victor, describing an experiment or a visit to a play. The letters dated from his public school and university days and sounded as if they had been written with a cigaret dangling from one comer of the mouth, offhand and scornful of everything that didn’t match his eighteen-year-old high standards. Reisden remembered polishing some of the phrases to what seemed now an excessively high buff. He put them off in a comer by themselves, to be burned.
He found a photograph of himself as a schoolboy in England, very young, thirteen or fourteen. He didn’t remember its being taken (and how had Victor, of all people, got a photograph of him at that age?). He was dressed in the school uniform and looked appallingly dewy and charming. That was embarrassing; otherwise the picture interested him, because Reisden had thought no one had bothered to photograph him before he had started acting in earnest; the schoolboy was a stranger. Could Victor possibly have got the photograph from him? Reisden hoped not. He hesitated, then took out his billfold and put the small photograph in it, feeling as if he were keeping pornography.
There were drafts of some of Victor’s poems. One he knew from Les Amourettes; it had been dedicated to Tasy and the draft was fairly complete, written in Victor’s spidery hand and violet- tinged ink.
Une des voix qui muent et qui volent,
Mouette jouante au grand ciel
Belle des belles . . .
Beauty of beauties, who is all beauty, and not beautiful for me or for yourself. . . Victor had written that on meeting Tasy once, in London for a weekend, fussing over every line.
Would there be a picture of her? There was. It was the two of them on Brighton Pier in March. A Sunday, it must have been; she had been down there singing in the chorus of something, he forgot what, and he had taken the train there to see her. They had their arms around each other; she was clutching a stick of Brighton rock and her brown coat was blowing in the wind. She looked young enough to make one cry. Since her death she had grown a little older in his mind, but there she was, eight months before everything would end for her, her hair whipping like flags in the sea wind, round-chinned as a child. He had burned all her pictures after she died, because he had needed nothing to keep her alive then. He held the picture over the group of letters to be burned, and then held back and slipped the picture into his pocket with Victor’s scrap of poetry. Someday he would be an old bachelor of forty, and he would think his wife had had grey in her hair when she died.
The next photograph—
He took one look and turned it picture side to the floor, sickened and angry. It was Tasy, dead on the leaves by the car in the New Forest. He remembered exactly the position of the body. Her head had drifted, somehow, behind the body, sunk on her left shoulder, so oddly angled that he had knelt down and turned her over to see what was wrong. “No,” he said aloud, the way he had then; but it was too late not to remember everything, the blood from her smashed face all over his hands, feeling through the blood the little sharp splinters of bone. He could never stop realizing that she was dead. She is dead, she is dead still, she is dead. And he had been glad. He clamped his hand over his eyes to shut it out, but everything was still with him, he felt he had smeared her blood on his face.
Victor could not have that photograph. He took his hand down, still smelling blood. He had seen her on the ground and turned her over. What photograph could there have been?
Reisden set his jaw, gazed at its blank back, flipped the picture over, and looked.
Not Tasy. Of course it had not been. He recognized the downstairs carpet with its clashing diamonds. William Knight lay on that carpet. His head was bent ludicrously on his neck at the same eccentric angle that Tasy’s had been, so that one wanted to protest and straighten it out. The face was turned away. The top of his head had been scratched out on the photographic plate, as was done sometimes when a very unpleasant picture was to be shown to laymen. The left side of the head looked curiously flat and under it the carpet was discolored to an uneven, white- speckled darkness. William Knight’s left hand was under his body, but the right was flung out in an almost comic disarray on the carpet. Reisden looked at that photographed hand for a long minute, recognizing from other photographs the long fingers, big knuckles, and spatulate thumb. They had always grasped something firmly; now they lay loose. William Knight was dead.
Reisden took the photograph downstairs into the murder room. In the photograph were the sprawled body, a section of carpet, and the leg of a chair, and in the white room now were only holystoned oak boards and plastered walls. He stood in the white room and mentally fit the body into various places in it. He took the photo out into the hall and gazed at the long flight of front stairs going up into darkness. Richard would have come out into the hall and stood looking over the banisters. Reisden climbed halfway up the stairs and looked down through the door of the white room onto its plain scrubbed floor. Richard would have seen the front half of the room, the windows and whatever was near them. Where had William Knight been shot? Would Richard have seen William dead?
The picture still looked like Tasy.
In the dimly lit hall it was easier to see: the lifeless angle of the neck, one hand flung wide.
Reisden sat down on the stairs, swept by anger and desolation. He wasn’t the right person to investigate William Knight’s death. He didn’t want to suffer for it by seeing Tasy here.
The picture still looked like Tasy.
It was the angle, and more than the angle; he could almost see one in the other. He closed his eyes, trying to clear them of what was after all only a coincidence; but it was in his eyes, he couldn’t stop seeing it. In a moment he would think it had been Tasy down in the white room, dead on the floor.
But it had been the other way around, hadn’t it?
He sat on the stairs, shocked out of thought, waiting for the moment to pass, the way it had when he had seen Gilbert’s bloody hands, or before that, much before, when he had seen Richard Knight’s face in a photograph. Just a moment ago, upstairs, he had seen Victor’s files, with Richard Knight’s materials and Alexander Reisden’s mixed together, as if they had always been together. He remembered Victor’s nervous chatty trivialities the last time he had seen him. Victor had kept the Knights out of American Crimes, Victor had said. For Reisden’s sake, he had said; and Victor had not known whether to tell him to go to America or keep away.
He held his head in his hands, dizzy, not daring to touch or hear or see what he thought he knew.
Not Tasy dead on the floor downstairs. William Knight dead on the leaves in the New Forest.
Sitting on the stairs, he was back in the New Forest again, on a cold November morning, kneeling by a smashed auto. But he was looking this time at someone he couldn’t focus on, only a scrawled dead agony among the leaves. And he let himself feel what he had not dared to for years, exactly what he had felt then, a wild and almost hysterical relief, because everything was all right now.
Because he was Richard Knight.
There, on the stairs, he knew for certain who he was. And it was the wrong answer.
He could not possibly be Richard. How could it have happened? Richard would have had to get from New England to Africa. Graf Leo would have had to adopt Richard.
And he would have known; oh my God, he would have known.
“You are hoffähig. To be court-presentable opens doors,” Graf Leo had said. That was all. The Loewensteins had never made a secret that presentability was important, descent was important. When Reisden had married Tasy, outside the court circle, he had lost all value to the Loewensteins until Tasy died.
Reisdens don’t adopt. No. Not even if he were the last male Reisden; not if he were the one after the last, Graf Leo wouldn’t have adopted an unknown boy as a Reisden. Reisden hadn’t been close to his guardian, but that was true. No one had more of a sense of family than Graf Leo, or had tried harder to give it to Reisden.
He was Alexander von Reisden. Baron Alexander Josef Jászai von Reisden. His father was the Baron Franz Eugen Joachim von Reisden; his mother, Charlotte-Elisabeth Adelaîde von Loewenstein, cousin of the Graf Leo von Loewenstein. He had had two aunts who lived in Salzburg; they were both dead now. He had gone to university and got degrees. He had published articles. He had a profession and a stock portfolio and an address in Lausanne.
He knew who he was.
And after a moment Reisden took out of his billfold the first picture, the one of himself at thirteen or fourteen, which, far more clearly than himself now, was Richard Knight.
General amnesia cures itself within weeks or not at all.
Could Graf Leo have foreseen that Reisden would meet Charlie Adair on a train platform in Lausanne, at four o’clock in the morning, a lifetime later?
It is not true, Reisden thought. I’m not Richard Knight.
An elephant trumpeted and spread its ears. “. . .the son of my friend Franz von Reisden. That is who you are. You understand that.” Graf Leo’s remembered voice went on inexorably. “You are Alexander von Reisden.”
He had been named that day.
The house was very quiet and he sat for some time in the near-dark, drained and empty, missing Victor, whom he wanted to talk to more than he ever had in his life. He felt bad physically, punched-out and tired. He didn’t want to go upstairs; he would have to clean up those papers before he went to bed, and he didn’t want to face any of them. He wanted to burn them all without touching them again. Victor had left him a legacy, Richard Knight, for whose story Victor would have got three hundred pounds. How many months’ salary to Victor? It would have been a big book, and Victor would have wanted to write it; look at the way he had told it. Reisden knew exactly what Victor’s temptations would have been.
And you didn’t do it, did you, Victor, and left me with the questions.
Now what?
The long clock in the downstairs hall rattled like bones and chimed midnight.
And Gilbert Knight came out of the door from the library, carrying a wooden crate of books, and moved furtively down the hall to the kitchen.
Unseen behind the banister, Reisden watched him. The box was piled high with books. Gilbert had trouble with the kitchen door, which was set at an awkward angle behind the dining room. Reisden heard the creak of one door, the rattle of a knob, and a startlingly loud wooden clap as the swinging kitchen door hit the dining-room door. Gilbert was in the kitchen at midnight with a crate full of books.
Through the door Reisden heard the heavy crate being put down. A minute later he heard the distinctive sound of scraping. A shovel, scooping the ashes from the firebox of the kitchen stove. Gilbert was unbanking the fire.
Coal stoves were convenient for getting rid of awkward objects. The fire was never out, not even in summer, because everything hot in the house depended on it, from coffee to bathwater. At night the fire was banked down to coals under ashes, but one needed simply to remove the covering layer of ashes, add newspapers and pine kindling, and then add more coal. The fire was ready in a few minutes.
Reisden heard the scrape of the shovel, then a little ripping sound, then a dry snap as Gilbert broke some kindling. The kindling crackled as the fire caught; Gilbert rattled coal into the firebox.
Books? Reisden had once seen him rescue a book from an empty lot, smooth the pages, and carry it until they passed an open-air bookseller’s, when Gilbert had slipped it apologetically among the five-cent secondhands.
Gilbert would not burn books.
There was a small glass window at head height in the kitchen door. Gilbert had not turned on any lights and the roller blinds were pulled down over the windows. He had built the fire up high, so that flames were shooting out of the top of the stove. Gilbert’s pale, dim face was shiny from the heat. He had his reading glasses on, and in the red blaze from the stove, he took one book after another from the crate, read each title page, and put the book into one of two piles, a very small pile of books away from the flames, a large one close by the roaring stove. He took the top book of the pile, ripped the pages from the cover, and threw it into the stove.
“Gilbert, what are you doing?”
His voice was much sharper than he had meant it. Gilbert jumped, stared at Reisden stricken, and sat down in a chair. Still, he put his hand on the top of the large pile of books, as if to say These are mine, and he edged forward in his chair as if to put himself between them and Reisden.
“Let me see.”
“Richard—”
“Let me see, d—n it.” Reisden took Gilbert’s hand from the top of the pile. Gilbert’s eyes widened; he stammered something.
“You don’t tell me anything; don’t you think I have a right to know when something odd goes on in this house?”
Gilbert’s hand dropped and he sank down in his chair, his eyes following Reisden, like a rabbit mesmerized by headlights. Reisden flipped open the first book and looked at the title page, but he had already recognized it. It was one of the books that had been shelved next to Richard Knight’s desk.
True to the End, a Story of School Life, by a Rev. Theodore Peter Codlington. The flyleaf was inscribed “To His Beloved Grandson, Richard H. Knight, from William H. Knight, October 6,1885. ” Pluck and Luck, by Horatio Alger, “to His Grandson, Richard H. Knight—William H. Knight, March 1886.” History of the American Settlement; Elementary Mathematics. To Richard, to Richard, to Richard. Gilbert was burning all Richard’s books.
Gilbert the librarian angel had saved only two undistinguished collections of Bible stories, Through the Looking Glass, R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, and Huckleberry Finn. The last three had been given Richard by Gilbert.
Gilbert had put the stove lids back on the stove, closed the damper, and opened the windows. He had set the lids back on too soon; one cracked with a loud ping from the heat of the fire below. Gilbert fussed and, using the lifter, moved the broken pieces to the back of the stove.
“Why?”
Gilbert pushed the two broken pieces with the lifter, trying to fit them back together.
“Stop that.” Reisden threw the book he was holding into the crate again. He took Gilbert by both shoulders and shook him. Gilbert stared up into his eyes, hypnotized by fear. “I’m not eight years old, Gilbert, I came here to find out and not to be lied to. What’s in these, that you want to burn them rather than let me see?”
Gilbert shook his head, flinching.
“I won’t hurt you.” Reisden let him go. Gilbert dropped back into the chair. “Please. Gilbert. Please talk.”
Gilbert kept on shaking his head, but his cheeks flushed. “You say you aren’t Richard,” he trembled. “If you aren’t Richard then it is of no consequence to you. You don’t want to remember any of this. Don’t make me tell you. Richard, please.”
Gilbert turned and almost ran out of the kitchen.