“I’m not an innocent any longer. I know what’s going on. Not all of it, but enough. I’ve seen things I pray I never see again; I’ve heard stories . . . Christ, I understand.” How could he impress it upon her forcibly enough? “I’m shit-scared. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“You’ve got reason,” she said coldly.
“Don’t you care what happens to you?”
“Not much.”
“I’ll find you dope,” he said. “If that’s all that’s keeping you here; I’ll get it for you.”
Did a doubt cross her face? He pressed the point home. “I saw you looking for me at the funeral.”
“You were there?”
“Why were you looking if you didn’t want me to come?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d gone with Papa.”
“Dead, you mean?”
She frowned at him. “No. Gone away. Wherever he’s gone.”
It took a moment for her words to sink in. At last, he said: “You mean he’s not dead?”
She shook her head. “I thought you knew. I thought you’d be involved with his getaway.”
Of course the old bastard wasn’t dead. Great men didn’t just lie down and die offstage. They bided their time through the middle acts-revered, mourned and vilified-before appearing to play some final scene or other. A death scene; a marriage.
“Where is he?” Marty asked.
“I don’t know, and neither does Mamoulian. He tried to get me to find him, the way I found Toy; but I can’t do it. I’ve lost focus. I even tried to find you once. It was useless. I could scarcely think my way beyond the front door.”
“But you found Toy?”
“That was at the beginning. Now . . . I’m used up. I tell him it hurts. Like something’s going to break inside me.” Pain, remembered and actual, registered on her face.
“And you still want to stay?”
“It’ll be over soon. For all of us.”
“Come with me. I’ve got friends who can help us,” he appealed to her, gripping her wrists. “Gentle God, can’t you see I need you? Please. I need you.”
“I’m no use. I’m weak.”
“Me too. I’m weak too. We deserve each other.”
The thought, in its cynicism, seemed to please her. She pondered it a moment before saying, “Maybe we do,” very quietly. Her face was a maze of indecision; dope and doubt. Finally she said: “I’ll dress.”
He hugged her, hard, breathing the staleness of her hair, knowing that this first victory might be his only one, but jubilating nevertheless. She gently broke his embrace and turned to the business of preparing to go. He watched her while she pulled on her jeans, but her self-consciousness made him leave her to it. He stepped onto the landing. Out of her presence, the hum filled his ears; louder now, he thought, than it had been. Switching on his flashlight he climbed the last flight of stairs to Mamoulian’s room. With each step he took the whine deepened; it sounded in the boards of the stairs and in the walls-a living presence.
On the top landing there was only one door; the room beyond it apparently spread over the entire top floor. Mamoulian, the natural aristocrat, had taken the choicest space for himself. The door had been left open. The European feared no intruder. When Marty pushed,- it swung inward a few inches, but his reluctant flashlight beam failed to penetrate more than an arm’s length into the darkness beyond. He stood on the threshold like a child hesitating in front of a ghost-train ride.
During his peripheral association with Mamoulian he had come to feel an intense curiosity about the man. There was harm there, no doubt of that, perhaps terrible capacities for violence. But just as Mamoulian’s face had appeared beneath Carys’, there was probably a face under that of the European. More than one, perhaps. Half a hundred faces, each stranger than the one before, regressing toward some state that was older than Bethlehem. He had to have one peep, didn’t he? One look, for old times’ sake. Girding his loins, he pushed forward into the living darkness of the room.
“Marty!”
Something flickered in front of him, a bubble burst in his head as Carys called up to him.