By chance the weather brightened the day after he appeared—which fact did nothing to harm his reputation as a man of power among the townspeople—but the scene from the windows of his house—the clouds steadily sculpted to nothingness by the wind, the sea glittering in the sun—gave him no pleasure. He’d seen it all before. This, and every other glory. There was nothing new to watch for; no surprises left in earth or heaven. He could close his eyes forever, and pass away without regret, knowing he’d seen the best of things.
Oh, and the worst. He’d seen the worst, over and over again.
He wandered from one stagnant room to the next, and up the stairs and down; and everywhere he went, he saw visions of things he wished he’d never witnessed. Some of them had seemed like brave sights at the time. In his youth, bloody business had excited him; why did its echoes now come to bruise him the way they did?
Why when he lay down on the mildewed bed did he remember a whorehouse in Chicago, where he’d chased down two men and slaughtered them like the cattle they made such profit from? Why, after all these years, did he remember how one of them had made a little speech as he lay dying, and thanked his murderer for the ease of it all?
Why when he sat down to empty his bowels did his mind conjure up a yellow dog, which had shit itself in terror, seeing its master with his throat cut on the stairs, and Galilee sitting at the bottom of the flight, drinking the dead man’s champagne?
And why, when he tried to sleep—not in the bed but on the threadbare sofa in the living room—did he remember a rainy February night and a man who had no better reason to die than that he’d crossed the will of one mightier, and he, Galilee, no better reason to commit murder than that he served that same will? Oh that was a terrible memory. In some ways—though it was not the bloodiest of his recollections—it was the most distressing because it had been such an intimate encounter. He remembered it so clearly: the car rocking as gusts of wind came off the ocean; the rain rattling on the car roof; the stale heat of the interior, and the still staler heat that came off the man who died in his arms.
Poor George; poor, innocent George. He’d looked up at Galilee with such confusion on his face; his lips trying to form some last coherent question. He’d been too far gone to shape the words; but Galilee had supplied the answer anyway.
“I was sent by your father,” he’d said.
The confounded look had slipped away and George’s face had become oddly placid, hearing that he was dying at the behest of his father; as though this were some last, wretched service he could render the old man, after which he was finally free of Cadmus’s jurisdiction.
Any ambition Galilee might have entertained of fathering a child had gone at that moment: to be the father’s agent in the murder of a son had killed all appetite in him. Not simply the appetite for parenthood—though that had been the saddest casualty of the night at Smith Point Beach; the very desire to live had lost its piquancy at that moment. Destroying a man because he stood between your family and its ascendance was one thing (all kings did it, sooner or later); but to order the death of your own child because he disappointed you: that was another order of deed entirely, and to have been obliged to perform it had broken Galilee’s heart.
And still, after all this time, he couldn’t get the scene out of his head. The hours of the whorehouse in Chicago, and his memories of the yellow dog shitting on the stairs, were bad enough; but they were nothing by comparison with the memory of the look on George Geary’s face that rainy night.
And so it went on for a week and a half: memories by day and dreams by night, and nothing to do but endure them. He ventured out of the house at evening, and went down to check that all was well with The Samarkand but even that journey became harder as time passed; he was so exhausted.
This could not go on. The time had come to make a decision. There was no great heroism in suffering, unless perhaps it was for a cause. But he had no causes, nor ever had; not to live for, not to die for. All he had was himself.
No, that wasn’t true. If he’d just had himself he wouldn’t have been haunted this way.
She’d done this to him. The Geary woman; the wretched, gentle Geary woman, whom he’d wanted so badly to put out of his heart, but could not. It was she who’d reminded him of his capacity for feeling, and in so doing had opened him up as surely as if she’d wielded a knife, letting these unwelcome things have access to his heart. It was she who’d reminded him of his humanity, and of all that he’d done in defiance of his better self. She who’d stirred the voice of the man on the whorehouse floor, and roused the yellow dog, and put the sight of George Geary before him.
His Rachel. His beautiful Rachel, whom he tried not to conjure but who was there all the time, holding his hand, touching his arm, telling him she loved him.
Damn her to hell for tormenting him this way! Nothing was worth this pain, this constant gnawing pain. He no longer felt safe in his own skin. She’d invaded him, somehow; possessed him. Sleeplessness made him irrational. He began to hear her voice, as though she were in the next room, and calling to him. Twice he came into the dining room and found the table set for two.
There was no happy end to this, he knew. There would be no escaping her, however patiently he waited. She had too strong a hold on his soul for him to hope for deliverance.
It was as though he were suddenly old—as though the decades in which time had left him untouched had suddenly caught up with him—and all he could look forward to now was certain decline; an inevitable descent into obsessive lunacy. He would become the madman on the hill, locked away in a world of rotted visions; seeing her, hearing her, and tormented day and night by the shameful memories that came with love: the knowledge of his cruelties, his innumerable cruelties.
Better to die soon, he thought. Kinder to himself, though he probably didn’t deserve the kindness.
On the sixth evening, climbing the hill to the house, he conceived his plan. He’d known several suicides in his life, and none of them had made a good job of it. They’d left other people with a mess to clear up, for one thing, which was not his style at all. He wanted to go, as far as it were possible, invisibly.
That night, he made fires in all the hearths in the house, and burned everything that might be used to construe some story about him. The few books he’d gathered over the years, an assortment of bric-a-brac from the shelves and windowsills, some carvings he’d made in an idle hour (nothing fancy, but who knew what people would read into what they found here?). There wasn’t a lot to burn, but it took time nevertheless, what with his state of mind so dreamy and his limbs aching from want of rest.
When he had finished, he opened all the doors and windows, every one, and just before dawn headed down the hill to the harbor. His neighbors would get the message, seeing the house left open. After a couple of days some brave soul would venture inside, and once word spread that he’d made a permanent departure the place would be stripped of anything useful. At least so he hoped. Better somebody was using the chairs and tables and clocks and lamps than that they all rot away.
The wind was strong. Once The Samarkand was clear of the harbor, its sails filled; and long before the people of Puerto Bueno were up and brewing their morning coffee or pouring their breakfast whiskies their sometime neighbor was gone.
His plan was very simple. He would sail The Samarkand a good distance from land, and then—once he was certain neither wind nor current would not bear him back the way he’d come—he’d surrender his captaincy over both vessels, his body and his boat, and let nature take its course. He would not trim his sails if a storm arose. He would not steer the boat from reef or rocks. He would simply let the sea have him, whenever and however she chose to take him. If she chose to overturn The Samarkand and drown him, so be it. If she chose to dash the boat to pieces, and him along with it, then that was fine too. Or if she chose to match his passivity with her own, and let him linger becalmed until he perished on deck, and was withered by the sun, then that lay in h
er power too, and he wouldn’t lift a hand to contradict her will.
He had only one fear: that if hunger and thirst made him delirious he might lose the certainty that moved him now, and in a moment of weakness attempt to take control of the vessel again, so he scoured the boat for anything that might be put to practical use, and threw it all overboard. His mariner’s charts, his life jackets, his compass, his flares, his inflatable life raft: all of it went. He left only a few luxuries to sweeten these last days, reasoning that suicide didn’t have to be an uncivilized business. He kept his cigars, his brandy, a book or two. Thus supplied, he gave himself over to fate and the tides.
III
i
Most murder, as you’re probably aware, is domestic. The conventions of popular fiction tell an untruth: the person most likely to take your life by violence is not some anonymous maniac but the man or woman with whom you breakfasted this morning. So I doubt that I’m spoiling any great mystery if I confirm here that the man who murdered Margie was Garrison Geary.
He didn’t do it because he despised her, though he did. He didn’t do it because she had a lover, though she had. He did it because she refused him knowledge, which may seem like an obscure reason for slaughtering your spouse, but will probably be one of the lesser strangenesses ahead.
By the time Rachel got back to New York, Garrison had confessed. Not to cold-blooded murder, of course, but rather to an act of self-defense in the face of his wife’s crazed attempt on his life. According to his testimony it had happened like this: he’d come home to find Margie in a drunken state, wielding a Colt .38. She was sick of their life together, she’d told him, and wanted an end to it all. He’d tried to reason with her, but she’d been in far too inflamed a state to be talked down. Instead she’d fired at him. The bullet had missed, however, and before she could fire a second time Garrison had attempted to disarm her. In the struggle the gun had gone off, wounding Margie. He’d called the police instantly, but by the time medical help arrived it was too late. Her body—weakened by years of abuse—had given up.
There was a good deal of evidence in support of Garrison’s account. The first and most potent piece was this: the gun was Margie’s. She’d bought it six years ago, after one of her drinking circle had been attacked on the street, and died in the resulting coma. Margie hadn’t concealed her pleasure in the weapon; it was a “pretty gun,” she’d said, and she’d have not the least hesitation in using it should the occasion arise.
According to Garrison, she had. She’d intended to kill him, and he’d done what anybody would have done under the circumstances. He didn’t make any false show of grief. His marriage to Margie had been little more than a duty for years, he freely admitted. But if he’d wanted her out of his life, he pointed out, there were less foolhardy ways to engineer that than to shoot her in his own bathroom. Divorce, for instance. It didn’t make any sense for him to murder her. It only jeopardized his liberty.
Portions of his testimony appeared on the front pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, along with quotes from a number of sources that suggested his arguments carried weight. Nor could most of the commentators refrain from reporting some unflattering anecdote about Margie’s alcoholism, which had been public knowledge (and on occasion a public spectacle) for a decade or more. Of course there was also no scarcity of gossip pieces, both in magazines and on television, raking up some of the less savory stories from Garrison’s past. Two of his former mistresses consented to be interviewed, as did a number of sometime employees. The portraits they drew weren’t particularly flattering. Even if only half of what they were remembering was true Garrison still emerged as self-centered, autocratic and on occasion sexually compulsive. But when each of them was asked the important question—in your opinion, was this self-defense or murder?—they were all of the opinion that the man they’d known would not have shot his wife in cold blood. One of the mistresses even added that “Garrison was very sentimental about Margie. He’d always be telling me how it had been when they were first in love. I used to tell him I didn’t want to hear about all that, but sometimes I think he couldn’t help talking about her. It used to make me a little jealous, but looking back I think it’s sort of sweet.”
The other subject that came under close scrutiny during this period was the family itself. The Garrison Geary Murder Case gave the press across the country, from the most high-minded journals to the lowliest gutter rags, a perfect excuse to dust off all their old stories about the Gearys. “As rich as the Rockefellers and as influential as the Kennedys,” the piece in Newsweek began, “the Geary family has been an American institution since the end of the Civil War, when its founding fathers came to a sudden and impressive prominence which has not diminished since that time. Whatever the demands of the age, the Gearys have been their equal. Warmongers and peacemakers, traditionalists and radicals, hedonists and Puritans; it has sometimes seemed that within the ranks of the Geary clan an example of every American extreme could be found. With the police investigations into the murder of Margaret Geary ongoing, a cloud of doubt hangs over the family’s reputation; but however those investigations are concluded one thing may be reliably predicted: the family will survive, as will the American public’s endless fascination with its affairs.”
ii
Rachel had not told anybody she was on her way back, but she didn’t doubt that word would precede her, courtesy of Jimmy Hornbeck. She was right. The Central Park apartment was adorned with fresh flowers, and there was a note on the table from Mitchell, welcoming her home, and thanking her for coming. It was a curiously detached little missive, not that far removed from a hotel manager’s note of thanks to a returning guest. But nothing about Mitchell surprised her any more. She was perfectly sanguine about what lay before her. Whatever new grotesqueries she was about to witness she was determined to view them with the same amused detachment that she’d seen in Margie.
She called Mitchell in the early evening to announce her arrival. He suggested she come to the mansion for some supper. Loretta would like to see her, he said; and so would he. She agreed to come. Good, he said, he’d send Ralphie to pick her up.
“There are reporters outside the home all the time,” he warned.
“Yes, they were waiting for me when I came back here.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Who the hell’s telling them our business, that’s what I want to know. When all this is over, I’m going to find out who the fuck these people are—”
“And do what?”
“Fire their asses! I’m so sick of having cameras everywhere and people asking stupid fucking questions.” She’d never heard Mitch exasperated this way before; he’d always accepted scrutiny as the price of living the high life. “You know some sonofabitch got a photograph of Garrison in jail, sitting on the can. And some fucking rag printed it! A picture of my brother taking a dump in a cell. Can you believe that?”
The outburst shocked her; not because somebody had taken a picture of Garrison relieving himself, but because until this moment she hadn’t imagined his being behind bars. She’d just assumed that Cecil, or the phalanx of lawyers the family had hired to defend Garrison, had secured his release on bail.
“When does he get out?” she asked him.
“We’re pressing for that right now,” Mitch said. “I mean, he’s innocent. We all know that. It was a horrible accident and we all wish it hadn’t happened, but it’s ridiculous keeping him locked up like he was a common criminal.”
A common criminal: that went to the heart of it. Whatever else Garrison might have been, Mitchell seemed to be saying, he was American royalty, and deserved to be treated with appropriate respect. It was an impression Rachel had reinforced when she went over to the mansion: the atmosphere was one of besiegement, the drapes closed against the curious eyes of the hoi polloi, while the noble Gearys debated their response to the crisis. Loretta set the tone for these exch
anges. The imperiousness was intact, but it was shaded now with a certain bruised melancholy, as though some martyrdom had been visited upon her which she was bearing with fortitude. She welcomed Rachel back with a dry kiss.
They gathered for supper around the dining room table, with Loretta at one end and—rather pointedly positioned, Rachel thought—Cecil at the other. Besides Deborah, Rachel and Mitch three other members of the clan were present. Norah was there, tanned and brittle; George’s brother Richard had come up from Miami, where he’d just successfully defended a man who’d cut up a hooker with an electric carving knife, and Karen, flown in from Europe. She was the one member of the group Rachel had not met; she’d been out of the country during the wedding. She was a contained woman, her body, her gestures and her voice neat and unassuming. Rachel had the impression that she’d not come back out of love for either Garrison or the family, but because an edict had gone out, demanding her presence. She certainly had little to contribute to the debate. In fact she said scarcely a word throughout the supper, seldom even looking up from her plate.
There was no doubt as to the star of the evening: it was Loretta. She made a statement of intent the moment they all sat down.
“We’re going to start acting like a family again,” she said to everyone. “This business with Garrison is a wake-up call, to us all. It’s time to put our differences aside. Whatever problems we have with one another—and they’re bound to come along in the best of circumstances—this is the time to forget about them and show people what we’re made of. Cadmus, as I’m sure you know, is now bedridden, and I’m afraid he’s very weak. In fact, some of the time he doesn’t even know who I am, which is of course very painful. But he has periods when his mind’s suddenly very lucid, and then he can be astonishingly acute. Earlier this evening he started talking about hearing voices in the house. And I told him that yes, we were having a little family gathering. I didn’t tell him why, of course. He doesn’t know about . . . what happened . . . and I don’t intend to tell him. But he did say to me, when I explained to him that we were. all gathering together, that he was going to be here with us. And I think in a very real sense he is. He should be our inspiration right now.” There were murmurs of assent around the table, the loudest coming from Richard. “We all know what Cadmus would say if he knew what was going on,” Loretta said.