You Can't Catch Me Page 10

  Wordlessly, guided by a sort of dim impulse, Tristram had removed the artificial eye from his pocket, and held it out for his host to see. It was very like several of the eyes in Grunwald’s collection, even to the tawny-brown-blue color of its iris.

  Grunwald said incredulously, “But it is my eye! One of my Muller-Uri eyes, stolen from this very cabinet a dozen years ago!”

  Tristram said, “Your eye?”

  “Is this what you meant by your telegram? When I had thought you were referring to—another matter?” Grunwald asked, astonished. He had taken the eye out of Tristram’s hand and was now examining it in the lamplight. “It is definitely my eye,” he said, staring at Tristram suspiciously. “How on earth did you come by it?”

  “I found it,” he said defensively, “on a Philadelphia street.”

  “Found it? On a street? When?”

  “Just the other day.”

  “The other day? After so many years?”

  “Am I being interrogated?” Tristram asked, managing a stiff smile. “As I said, I found it on a Philadelphia street; I have forgotten the name. It was lying on the pavement, and I picked it up and put it in my pocket. By the oddest of coincidences—”

  Grunwald interrupted excitedly. “But how did you know it was mine?”

  Tristram’s face flushed. He did not like Grunwald’s peremptory tone. “I don’t really know it is your eye, Mr. Grunwald, do I?”

  Grunwald said, “Of course it’s mine. It was reported stolen to the Philadelphia police, in 1966, along with a number of other items. I have the original bill of sale, from a London dealer; and, in any case, who else in Philadelphia would such a collector’s item belong to? Have you brought it here to sell it back to me? To exact a sort of ransom?” He stared at Tristram as if Tristram were indeed a thief; in a matter of seconds the camaraderie between them seemed to have entirely vanished.

  Tristram said, with dignity, “Certainly not.”

  “Ah, but in your telegram—”

  “I wasn’t referring to—”

  “—you spoke of a collector’s item—”

  “You know what—whom—I was referring to.”

  Grunwald, breathing harshly, said, “Tell me, then: did you, or she, compose the message?”

  Tristram said stiffly, “I composed it myself.”

  “Under whose influence, may I ask?”

  Grunwald had placed the artificial eye atop his desk, where it gleamed and glittered in the lamplight, like a living eye; there was a subtle horror in its flattened sphere, and the bright acuity of its tawny-brown-blue iris. It is watching us, Tristram thought,—it will be a witness. The men quarreled about the telegram; and about Fleur; and about the ownership of the eye; Grunwald went to his filing cabinet, and produced a bill of sale from a London dealer, dated August 20, 1956, describing a cryolite eye, from the workshop of Muller-Uri, which he had purchased that day; and Tristram said stubbornly that the bill of sale did not prove the eye purchased was in fact the eye on the desk; and Grunwald, now quite agitated, but making an effort to speak calmly, said that, if Tristram insisted, they could consult a specialist who would make the identification. And they could call the police: for it was a matter after all of stolen goods.

  Tristram said that he did not acknowledge any fact of “stolen goods”; so far as he was concerned, the eye was his, since he had, merely by chance, found it on the street; and had, merely by chance, brought it along tonight, to show to Grunwald. Grunwald stared at Tristram as if he thought him mad; shook his head; seated himself behind his desk, wearily, with the air of an old man, and pressed his hands against his eyes in a gesture of such bafflement, and fatigue, that Tristram felt his heart soften … for he quite understood the ardor of a collector for one of his prized items. And he thought, I do not really want the glass eye; why have I become so belligerent all of a sudden?

  After a long, pained moment, Grunwald peered at Tristram through his fingers, his right eye bloodshot and damp with moisture. He said, in a subdued voice, “I seem to have forgotten that of course there was a reward for the return of the eye. There is a reward, extant. A negotiable reward.… In my surprise and … upset … I seem to have forgotten my good sense. This business with my wife has affected me terribly but of course that is no excuse. If you would allow me to …”

  Tristram said quickly, “Not at all, Mr. Grunwald. Please accept the eye. I have no use for it, I am not a collector along those lines, I quite sympathize with your predicament, and I am sorry that …”

  “Thank you so much! Thank you enormously!”

  The words came out in a whisper. For a moment Grunwald looked as if he might cry in sheer gratitude; or was his expression, Tristram thought, one of greed, and incredulity that that greed was to be satisfied …?

  He wiped his face with his handkerchief, and said, smiling a strained smile up at Tristram, who loomed very tall over him, “But won’t you allow me to give you something? An honorarium of a kind?”

  “Not at all, Mr. Grunwald,” Tristram repeated.

  Grunwald fell to contemplating the eye, framing it reverently with his hands as if it were a rare, exquisite jewel. “Ah, how beautiful it is! And how extraordinary, that it should be returned to me, after so many years!” He beckoned Tristram to come closer, and Tristram did so, leaning over the desk, and staring at the gleaming object which both was, and was not, a recognizably “human” eye; his gaze drifting to the top of Grunwald’s head … an altogether handsome, even noble head … with silvery-fine hair, thinning at the crown so that one could see the pink-toned vulnerable scalp beneath. As Grunwald hunched forward, the collar of his velvet smoking jacket pulled back, to expose his neck; a pale, finely-creased, but quite solid neck, upon which small curls and wisps of hair grew, of a generally darker hue than the rest. “Do you see how cleverly the artist has simulated the ‘ambituity’ of the iris?” Grunwald asked, as much of himself as of Tristram. He indicated, but did not touch, the glittering glass. “How extraordinary it is, and what a coincidence, that all this has come about.…” With the ease of an actor who has played his role countless times, so that the “artificial” has become transmogrified into the “natural,” Tristram reached in the right-hand pocket of his coat, and—

  At that moment there was a loud knocking at the door. And Grunwald looked up startled; and Tristram quickly stepped aside; and whatever was to be, was not, at least at that moment, to be.

  5

  “This is my nephew Hans,” Grunwald said, making an effort to speak genially, “—and this, Hans, is Tristram Heade, a fellow collector—”

  “Hello, how d’you do,” Hans said, his words so perfunctory, and his handshake so minimal, Tristram might, in other circumstances, have felt slighted. But Grunwald’s nephew—nearly as tall as Tristram, and big-shouldered, with a head of reddish curly hair that looked oiled, and a little-boy face both angelic and pouting—was not a young man from whom one might reasonably expect courtesy; his rudeness was simply part of his manner, like his rapid, dazzling, immediately fading dimpled smile, and the well-practiced level gaze of his brown eyes. A man attractive to women, Tristram thought. In his younger days, in Virginia, Tristram had so frequently encountered such men—spoiled, vain, “charismatic”—capable of extraordinary acts of derring-do and courage (as in a football game: for such men were often football players in college) and capable of extraordinary acts of callowness and cruelty (as in their dealings with women, or men judged as weak)—that he had acquired a social manner with which to deal with them: simply to say very little, and to step aside as soon as the protocol of handshaking was finished. For, beyond a quick, instinctive assessment of Tristram’s probable physical prowess, and that quiddity understood as “masculinity,” such men had very little interest in him. He was of course big; and surely strong; but there was the matter of his face, his eyes, his characteristic “sensitive” expression.…

  Tonight, however, for a prolonged moment, Hans Grunwald did stare at Tristram; almost, to Tr
istram’s distress, as if he knew him. The brown eyes narrowed; the mouth twitched; then Hans looked away, and did not so much as glance at Tristram again, as if Tristram had ceased to exist. If he had troubled to note the artificial eye on Grunwald’s desk he had as unthinkingly, if not contemptuously, dismissed it too.

  Grunwald was on his feet, demanding of his nephew with surprising anger why he had come, at this hour, uninvited, to disturb the peace of the house, and to talk of a matter both of them knew to be closed.

  Sullenly, Hans said that he’d come because he had no choice: “You don’t return my telephone calls, Uncle.” His lips twisted about the word “uncle” as if it were a playful sort of obscenity.

  Tristram quickly offered to leave the men alone together, since the hour was late; but Grunwald would not hear of it. “Hans and I will have our conversation elsewhere, and briefly,” he said, taking the young man by the arm, and almost forcibly leading him from the room.

  Grunwald’s nephew was half a head taller than Grunwald, and far more muscular, but he obeyed with the alacrity of a certain sort of killer-dog, who needs only to be taken in hand by his master to be restrained.

  At least, Tristram thought, for the moment.

  They quarreled in the hall, then in an adjacent room, a dispute over money, Tristram gathered; the words gambling, loan, interest rate, debts, allowance, insubordination penetrated the wall. At least at the start of the argument the elder man’s voice was the louder; Tristram could only hear the low, muffled, furious sound of Hans’s voice, not individual words.

  Alone in Grunwald’s study! The prospect was enormously exciting, as if, without quite knowing it, Tristram had been waiting for this moment all evening.

  (He was still quite heated from the exchange over the artificial eye; his heartbeat remained pleasurably fast. That moment when Grunwald had sat at his desk, and framed the eye with his hand, and leaned forward … what an exquisite moment that had been! Tristram’s fingers had moved of their own volition to his pocket, to the handle of Markham’s dagger, and the command Strike, strike, strike! had rung in his ears.)

  Of course there was no time now for Tristram to search the room, or the house, but, acting quickly, and boldly, he went to one of the several windows in the room and, using Markham’s knife, in quick, unhesitating, practiced strokes, cut through the burglar-alarm wire. This had the effect—startling but not surprising—of tripping the burglar alarm; and causing a good deal of noise. Tristram thought, There. That’s done.

  For though the household was, for a few minutes, in an upset, the apparent cause of the alarm—Tristram having innocently opened a window—was quickly detected; and the alarm system turned off. Tristram apologized to Grunwald, saying that he’d simply wanted some fresh air, and Grunwald, whose good eye was now quite threaded with blood, and a very poor match for its healthier-appearing mate, said irritably, “Of course it’s nothing, please don’t concern yourself, the wretched ‘security system’ goes off all the time, I am sick to death of it and would just as soon dismantle it permanently.” He gazed at Tristram as at an old friend whose name he could not recall, and excused himself another time, saying that he and his nephew had not yet finished their conversation.

  Tristram, feeling wonderfully emboldened,—for one unit of success always stirs in us the energy, no less than the will, for another—this time put himself in a position to eavesdrop. The men were in a room immediately to the left; Tristram simply tiptoed along the corridor, his head inclined, until he stood at the closed door, where the men’s voices were quite audible. If the black butler discovered him he would invent on the spot some sort of excuse, but the black butler did not discover him, nor did Grunwald and his nephew, embattled as they were on the other side of the door.

  The argument had shifted from its original subject, which seemed to have been whether Grunwald would lend Hans money to pay gambling debts; now they were talking heatedly of Fleur Grunwald. Grunwald asked if Hans had had anything to do with Fleur’s disappearance and Hans said he hoped he knew enough to stay out of domestic affairs. His laughter was rude and jeering, and struck Tristram to the heart. “I hope I am not so deprived as to be forced to content myself with another man’s well-used property,” he said.

  Grunwald responded furiously. “If you have failed to force your attentions on Fleur, it is because you are too taken up by the manic crowd with which you run, and by the loathsome women in it. And by the fact of your own supreme, really quite extraordinary self-infatuation—”

  “Look, Uncle, I am not you. I respect you as a businessman but I don’t share your taste for women, as you must know. Enslaved, masochistic, failing, fainting, whining, whimpering, much-abused women.… Not for me: I prefer my women lusty and full-bodied and healthy.”

  “I won’t hear of you insulting my wife! My poor Fleur!”

  “‘Poor’ Fleur indeed! What a joke! Who has made her ‘poor,’ but you, with your—”

  “You know nothing of my marriage! How dare you! You know nothing, nothing of the happiness of the years Fleur and I have spent together—”

  “Damn it, Uncle, I haven’t come here to discuss Fleur; I don’t even know that I knew she’d left you again,—what in God’s name have I to do with that? My purpose in coming here is—”

  “Is purely mercenary.”

  “—is pure, but not mercenary. I have certain debts which are gathering interest, and they must be paid, and will be paid, whether you—”

  “Get out of my house! How dare you! Abusing my wife to my very face, and begging for money! You do not deserve to live, a wretch like yourself—”

  “And you, Uncle, deserve to live? Is that it? What a laugh! How do you dare—?”

  “Get out of my house or I will call the police!”

  Even so, the argument did not end; but continued, wide-ranging, bitter, and repetitious, for another fifteen or twenty minutes. By that time Tristram had prudently retreated to Grunwald’s study, and was in the act of writing a note to his host,—I hope you will excuse me but I thought it best to leave: perhaps we might speak at another time—when Grunwald finally returned. He was trembling and white-faced but still indignant.

  “My nephew means to destroy me with his spendthrift ways,” he said bitterly, “but what am I to do?—he has youth on his side.”

  By now it was so late,—Tristram saw to his astonishment that it was nearly two o’clock in the morning: he had been in Grunwald’s house almost seven hours—that Grunwald decided to curtail their visit after all. He was too exhausted and upset to continue, he said.

  “But I hope we can meet again, soon, under more pleasant circumstances?” he said, as the men shook goodbye at the door. “For we have a good deal, I think, yet to discuss.”

  Tristram felt both relief and disappointment. But his handshake was firm, and his smile almost happy. “Yes, Mr. Grunwald,” he said. “Soon.”

  6

  The telephone was ringing. Close beside his head, ringing. And though he lay trapped in sleep heavy and dense as a block of ice Tristram could yet hear the woman’s small gentle melodic voice, beseeching, pleading. Why is the monster still living? Why, when you were within striking range? Why, if you claim to adore me as you do?

  With an enormous effort, as of one hurtling himself through a barrier, Tristram managed to wake; and fumbled to pick up the telephone receiver.

  “Yes? Hello? Who is it? Hello?”

  “Is this Tristram?—Tristram Heade?”

  The voice was high-pitched, but male; an old man’s voice, Tristram thought; and teasingly familiar. Guardedly Tristram said, “But who is this?” He had wakened groggily to a hotel room blazoned with light; his eyes watered, and his head began to throb, at first slowly, then with gathering violence. He had but the dimmest and most inchoate memory of the night before, at Otto Grunwald’s house.…

  “Is this my nephew Tristram Heade?”

  “But who—who is speaking?”

  “Tristram, is that you? It is you, is
n’t it?”

  “But who are you?”

  “Tristram?”

  Even as the elderly man at the other end of the line identified himself as “Morris Heade,”—Tristram’s great-uncle, whom he had been meaning to call for days—Tristram recognized his voice; and winced with guilt. Yet he said, calmly, “I’m afraid you have the wrong number, sir. There is no ‘Tristram Heade’ here.”

  “What? No Tristram there? But they told me at the desk—”

  “There is no ‘Tristram Heade’ in this room.”

  “But you sound very like him. I would swear to it, you sound very like him.” There was a brief silence. Tristram could hear the old man’s labored breathing. “Tristram, is it you? I have been waiting for you to call, as you had promised. What on earth has happened?”

  “I’m afraid, sir,” Tristram said carefully, “you have the wrong number. My name is—well, it is not ‘Tristram Heade.’”