Nemesis Page 15

  Calvin continued to praise the museum, the exhibit. “I wouldn’t have driven up here, I’m afraid, except for Naomi’s insisting, and now I’m certainly glad that I did”—words that seemed to Maggie purposefully ambiguous: for he was looking so intently at her.

  Maggie said, laughing, “I’m grateful sometimes just to get away from home. From—certain obsessive thoughts.”

  Thus they began to speak of the subject uppermost in both their minds. Like a magnet, its attraction was irresistible.

  In an undertone, as if he believed someone in the gallery might be listening, Calvin told Maggie that he had reason to believe, from something Detective Miles had said the other day—“We keep in frequent contact; he’s a good, reliable man I think”—that the case might soon be resolved; an arrest might soon be made.

  Maggie said, “An arrest?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But who?”

  “I don’t believe I can say.”

  Maggie stared at him searchingly. “I certainly hope so,” she said, slowly, “for Brendan Bauer’s sake.”

  “Ah, yes—for Brendan Bauer’s sake.”

  “It would be such a relief to him. To be truly free.”

  Calvin was regarding Maggie attentively, with a look she could not interpret. This was not, she realized, the Calvin Gould of old, but a man both uneasy and expectant, frowning, smiling, tense with feeling. Did he feel concern for her? Even, in his somewhat stiff way, a kind of affectionate worry? But why?

  He touched her arm: Maggie felt the subtle shock of it radiate through her.

  He said hesitantly, as if to spare her feelings, “Maggie, you’ve been wonderfully kind to that young man, and supportive of him. But—”

  “Yes?”

  “Brendan Bauer may not be after all the person you think he is.”

  “What do you mean?” Maggie smiled, perplexed. Her tone was disbelieving and frightened.

  Calvin seemed reluctant to continue, embarrassed. He sighed and drew a hand rapidly through his hair, in a gesture of distraction and frustration Maggie had often seen him make, in faculty meetings for which he was chair, when confronted with obtuse or obfuscatory persons. He said, “It’s just that, Maggie, some of us—your friends—think you should be prepared for the possibility of—a disappointment.”

  “I—I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Patiently, kindly, his fingers still on her arm, exerting a pressure almost of constraint, Calvin was saying extraordinary things, things not to be absorbed, though Maggie stood tall and calm, at her full height, listening attentively. It was as if—a detached sort of delirium!—she were hearing jarring notes, incomprehensible errors in rhythm, even as her fingers continued to play flawlessly, precisely, at the outermost limits of their skill. “We all know how generous you’ve been to Brendan, and how he has depended upon you. You seem to have felt personally responsible for him. But from the first, when he came to me that morning, with his account of having been mistreated by Rolfe Christensen, I seemed to sense that something wasn’t quite right. I don’t mean, of course, that I didn’t believe that something had happened to him—certainly, it was obvious that something had happened. But there are such things as sadomasochistic affairs. And self-inflicted injuries. And what might be called an almost willful hysteria, if that isn’t somehow a contradiction in terms. The capacity, in any case, for somehow not knowing what one clearly knows.”

  Still Maggie continued to stare at Calvin. Her heart beat slow and hard and heavy in her chest.

  When she spoke her voice was hoarse, almost harsh. “But Calvin—you did believe him. You did. I know you did. You believed me. And you were angry too. When we first spoke, on that Monday morning—”

  Calvin shook his head impatiently. “But since then many things have come to light. His death threats, for instance. Before witnesses. His history of emotional instability. His habit of exacting revenge.”

  “Exacting revenge? But how? Where?”

  Calvin removed a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped at his upper lip fastidiously. Maggie saw now that he was warm—perspiring. “There is a history. There are facts. I am not supposed to be repeating them.”

  “But Calvin, you must tell me.”

  He glanced around as if, in this place of affable strolling strangers, he might be purposefully overheard. But no one was close by; the dark-haired woman in the black cloth coat who was his wife was nowhere near and, for the moment, obscured from Calvin and Maggie by gallery visitors. If from time to time people glanced at them, in passing, it was perhaps because they were an attractive yet enigmatic couple: with their air of being lovers confounded by the fact of each other, utterly stymied. An observer might have believed them lovers who had inadvertently fallen into an intense conversation in a public place, in a place of extreme impropriety, without yet knowing how to extricate themselves from the issue between them, or from each other. Almost miserably, with an intimacy Maggie had never before heard in him, Calvin said, “I—I’m violating confidentiality, Maggie, by telling you these things. At least—before the arrest is made. If it is made. You must know—of course you know, yet it is so easy to forget—that not all crimes are successfully prosecuted, for want of evidence; not all crimes are even charged against criminals, though it’s known by police that they are guilty. Unless there is enough solid, substantial evidence to bring before a grand jury, it’s pointless for a district attorney to take steps. This you know, surely? Didn’t you tell me once that your father had been a public prosecutor?”

  Maggie made an effort to keep her voice low. But she was trembling badly. “Please, Calvin, you must tell me. What kind of revenge?”

  “At the seminary, in St. Louis. There were accidents. Including a fire of suspicious origin.”

  “Oh, but I can’t believe—”

  “Bauer was a suspect—that is, the suspect. Yet not a formal, official suspect—there is nothing on any official record. No charges were ever made against him, and naturally he denied everything, and in the end it was enough for the seminary to simply expel him. He has no record anywhere. David Miles has made a thorough investigation, and each time it was seemingly the same—no official record.”

  “What do you mean, each time? Have there been other times? Where?” Maggie asked.

  By degrees Calvin had been edging backward; and by degrees Maggie had been following him, unconsciously, gazing up into his face with her immense, wondering eyes. She had taken hold of his arm—her fingers bunching the material of his sleeve—and seemed about to tug at him in desperation, or in anger.

  “Revenge? Where? What kind of revenge? What do you mean?”

  Calvin said grimly, “I am not at liberty to tell you, Maggie. All that I’ve told you already, it was—it is—unconscionable on my part. But I like you too much to allow you to continue to risk yourself. I—I like you much too much—to allow anything to happen to you.”

  At this statement, surely unanticipated on both sides, Calvin Gould and Maggie Blackburn fell abruptly, confusedly silent, for in the context of Calvin’s customary demeanor, the undercurrent of powerful feeling in his words, very nearly anguish, was the more extraordinary. Does he love me? Maggie wondered, astonished. But why—now? For she was so dazed, so genuinely confused, she could not think: as if having absorbed the shock of one blow to the head she could not summon her strength, or yet her vision of herself, to absorb, or even to acknowledge, the fact of a second.

  All this while, seemingly oblivious to them, Naomi Gould remained at the far end of the gallery, about forty feet away, contemplating one or another of the tall sculpted figures. Afterward Maggie would recall, unless in recalling she imagined, how the woman—her high-held head, her defiant back in the black cloth coat—exerted an unmistakable pressure upon them; so that even as Calvin appealed to Maggie Blackburn, even as, so uncharacteristically, he touched her, he was all the while glancing in Naomi’s di
rection—all the while nervously, even fearfully, aware of her. But Naomi Gould did not so much as once look around.

  As Calvin was about to leave Maggie, he said, as if incidentally, “I … I’m under a bit of a strain in another way too. And this too is confidential … though it’s surely not important to very many people. Naomi is entering the Medical Center for surgery next week, next Monday, the sixteenth. The doctor has been encouraging; he has said that it—the growth—is probably benign … chances are no more than one in one hundred that it would not be benign. But …” His words faded; Maggie could see his mouth tremble.

  She said, “I’m so sorry, Calvin!”

  “Yes. Well. We—she has been putting it off, I’m afraid. The surgery. She’s fearful of hospitals … doctors. She had a bad time, once. As a girl of twelve. I didn’t know her then, of course. I … I don’t know what happened to her precisely because she refuses to talk about it, but it was a trauma of some kind and it affected her memory for a while. I’ve tried to assure her that this time things will be much different,” Calvin said. Again he glanced in his wife’s direction. “But of course we’re under a bit of a strain.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Thank you, Maggie, but I don’t think so.”

  “Has Naomi spoken with anyone who has had surgery of this kind, any woman? I assume it’s a—”

  “No,” Calvin said quickly. “No, Naomi isn’t that sort. She dreads the very idea of people talking about her, even in sympathy. She has always been that way; very proud, you might say intransigent. It is, yes, a gynecological problem, but we’re hoping not a serious one; she’ll enter the Medical Center on the morning of the sixteenth and if all goes well, as our doctor seems to think it will, she’ll be home again by the eighteenth; possibly even sooner.”

  Maggie said, not very effectually, “Well, if you or she need any—”

  “It’s kind of you, Maggie, but I don’t think so, thank you,” Calvin said. He smiled, narrowing his eyes as if there were something in Maggie Blackburn’s face almost too bright, or too raw and unmediated, to be confronted directly. “I must leave now, but may I call you? Soon? And the things I’ve told you—please don’t repeat them. Naomi’s upcoming surgery is a minor item, I don’t suppose we can really keep it a secret in a place so intimate as Forest Park, but the other, about Brendan Bauer: please don’t speak of it to anyone, at least not yet. Above all, don’t tell him! Bauer should be considered dangerous even to people who are his friends, but all we can do, I’m afraid, is wait. In the meantime, Maggie, can you keep your distance from him? Will you promise?”

  Calvin spoke earnestly, almost pleadingly. He took Maggie’s hand as if to shake it, in parting; but simply held it instead, squeezing the fingers. Maggie, in a transport of emotion, found herself returning the pressure. Do you love me, Calvin? she wondered, staring at him with her glistening eyes. And if you do—what will come of it?

  Even at this precarious moment, Maggie managed to maintain some of her usual composure. She said, apologetically, “I … I can’t promise, Calvin. I don’t know.” Seeing her friend’s look of disappointment, she added, “I am Brendan’s friend, after all—his only friend, I think, in this part of the world.”

  “Yes,” Calvin said, backing off, with a wincing smile, “I’m afraid that must be true.”

  He turned quickly and walked away, and Maggie Blackburn, deeply agitated, could scarcely bear to watch him—could scarcely bear to watch him make his way to her.

  I am not jealous of her, I do not even envy her.

  I would not want to be her … except to stand in her place.

  Then Maggie Blackburn was herself walking hurriedly, blindly, climbing one of the steep ramps to the second level of the building, gripping a railing in each hand. She had only the most general sense of where she was, for white (white walls, white ramp, white wire mesh railings) is the hue of amnesia, yet this was not (she was certain—she was determined) one of her amnesiac fugues. Not at this most crucial hour of her life.

  Whether by instinct or calculation, Maggie found herself, a minute later, from a vantage point on the second floor, able to observe Calvin and Naomi Gould as they left the museum and crossed the pavement to their car. She saw that Naomi walked ahead of Calvin by a foot or so and that they were not speaking to each other; seemed, strangely, not very much aware of each other, though they maintained the same pace, carried themselves in virtually the same posture. I don’t mean to spy upon these unsuspecting people; I am not the sort of person to spy upon another person—am I? Naomi Gould was wearing, not a black cloth coat of a conventional cut, but a black cape with a skirt that fell past mid-calf. She was bareheaded; her lavish, dense hair whipped heedless in the January wind—she wore no gloves; her small pale hands were balled into fists. From this angle Maggie could not see Naomi’s face, which she remembered as triangular, with a small, strong chin and a fleshy determined mouth; but she could see the woman’s profile, foreshortened from above.

  And then, as he passed below, Maggie could see the top and the side of Calvin’s head, his profile foreshortened as well, and the bizarre thought ran through her with the force of an electric shock—weren’t their profiles identical?

  Subtracting from Calvin Gould and Naomi Gould the most obvious distractions—their hair, their clothing, the superficial characteristics of their respective genders—weren’t their profiles identical?

  The Goulds continued on their way, unaware of Maggie’s scrutiny, headed for Calvin’s metallic-green Mercedes in the parking lot. Maggie stepped back from the window and drew a hand shakily over her eyes. It was absurd, of course—it was bizarre and unacceptable. She had not possibly seen what she believed she had seen; unless, so distressingly, it was the case that she had seen what she was not quite able to believe she had seen.

  Part III

  16

  For years afterward, speaking of his friend Nicholas Reickmann’s death, and so hideous a death, Rory Carter would shut his eyes and shudder and say, “The frightful thing was, Nicky had no premonition of what was to come. He prided himself on his powers of intuition, as he called them, his ability to read others’ souls, and those of us who knew him well—let’s say those of us who Nicky in his sweet dear but rather princely manner allowed to know him well—were continually struck by his ability, yes, almost to read us; it was more than just sympathy, it was empathy, that strange, mysterious gift given to some, a very few, and altogether alien to others. So to think that Nicky Reickmann of all people entertained his killer after we left, that night—that the poor man didn’t sense, in the other, what his purpose was!—it’s really quite unsettling, it leaves me bewildered, yes, rather vexed, and cross, about the intuitive powers of the sensitives among us, of whom Nicky Reickmann was decidedly one. Ah, to hear him play his clarinet, to hear him play piano, to hear him (when he could be coaxed into doing so, among friends) sing: what a privilege! We all have our talents, of course, of course of course, but Nicky Reickmann was the real thing. Yet Nicky didn’t know and couldn’t escape. Wouldn’t you have thought he might have had a premonition?

  “But there we were, Nicky and Dabney Sloane and me, having an uproarious time, a few drinks, a joint or two—of course we did feel, at least initially, some awkwardness, some reserve, about being in Rolfe Christensen’s house (that is, Dabney and I felt that way: we’d never set foot in it before, but Nicky had been spending a good deal of time over there, sometimes spent the night, sorting through Christensen’s papers and such, trying to catalogue things—‘My Augean stables!’ Nicky would say, screwing up his pretty face as if smelling a foul odor, but Nicky didn’t mean it truly; Nicky didn’t mean it entirely, I’m sure; he was fond of the old boy, as he’d say, and Nicky Reickmann of all people was no hypocrite), but we—well, I must confess, it seems a bit shameless of us, doesn’t it, we did enjoy ourselves as we invariably did in one another’s company, for what are close dear friends but the persons in all the world with whom you can r
elax and make an absolute fool of yourself should you so wish, knowing they won’t be critical, and won’t judge. So Nicky served us drinks, and we smoked a bit and sat there in the great man’s music studio listening to these extraordinary tapes Nicky had discovered among Christensen’s things, of which I suppose I should not speak: the tapes weren’t of music, or weren’t of music primarily, but had—well, how shall I put it, other elements, vocal elements—unrehearsed, ‘aleatory,’ you had to listen closely to figure out what in heaven’s name was going on—it seems that Christensen, the sly old fox, recorded certain of his amorous sessions—or bouts—but oh dear I’d better not drift off onto that subject right now.

  “In any case, Nicky was quintessentially himself that night. Perhaps he knew another friend was coming over to see him later in the evening and that was why he didn’t care to join us for dinner and eased us out around ten o’clock but I can’t be sure; I mean, how could I know? I simply don’t know. Or perhaps the killer just showed up and Nicky let him in, knowing him, indeed being on quite friendly terms with him, so it was unplanned, an accident—poor Nicky had no suspicion, I gather, at all. It you didn’t know Nicholas Reickmann I don’t believe I can describe him adequately; even his photographs don’t do him justice. Though there’s one of him holding his clarinet, his big moony thick-lashed eyes, his mouth, that sort of shivery Arabic look to him he’d have sometimes; I can’t bring myself to look at it and then, if I do, I can’t bring myself to look away. Nicky was—princely. Yet at the same time sweet, and generous, and yes modest; some thought him coy and manipulative, and very very cold behind that dazzling smile, but I never did, and I knew Nicky like a brother. Now I don’t mean to suggest that Nicky Reickmann, our Nicky, was a world-class musician, for of course he wasn’t—he’d gone to Juilliard at thirteen and very quickly, as he said, sized up the competition and knew he’d never be great, or even almost great; he’d say, making a joke of it, ‘You miss greatness like you miss a train: you glance up and it’s gone’—but he was gifted, damned gifted, and hearing him play you’d absolutely fall in love with him, and half his students were mad for him; it wasn’t just his musical ability, or even his exotic good looks, but his gift of empathy, as I’ve said, his ability to ‘intuit’ others’ motives, as he used to boast, and was justified in boasting, for a man of such spectacular charisma must be very very cautious whom he allows near, not just in his bed but, simply, near; and Nicky Reickmann did seem to have that ability—or so we thought.