You think I don’t know you? I know you, Wells. I was just like you once.
I sat at my desk with the hard, cheap light of the triplex marquee blinking at the night window. I sat and I drank my scotch and I found myself thinking, for no reason at all it seemed, about Wilfred Campbell. Wilfred Campbell in his urban aerie with his rifle and the waves and waves of panicked people below him rising and falling at the pull of his trigger finger.
Because I loved her that much.
I could remember what the place looked like before Chandler hung the pictures. I could remember Chandler casting her eyes over it and saying: “It looks like you’re just passing through, John. It looks like no one lives here.”
The phone was on the table before me. I came forward in my chair, setting down my glass, pushing the scotch bottle aside as I reached for the receiver. I dialed Chandler at home.
“Hello,” she said.
“This is John.”
There was a short silence. “I called. I called earlier,” she said. She had a deep, warm voice. But it was a hesitant voice, too. Her words proceeded as if they were shuffling forward in the dark. They were careful, wary of pitfalls. “I—I heard about you on the radio. I was worried. Are you all right?”
“I’ll do. The doctor says I’m going to die if I don’t stop smoking and drinking so much.”
“Yes. Yes, the doctor is right.”
There was a pause. “I got beat up bad, Chandler,” I said.
“Yes.” She nearly hid the quaver on the word. “Yes, that’s what I heard.”
“I’m gonna be okay, but I got beat up pretty bad.”
She said nothing. I did not know if she was crying. I did not know if she was angry.
I said: “I’m sorry I haven’t called you.”
“It’s all right,” she answered softly. “I’ve seen the paper. It’s a busy time.”
I nodded without speaking. The silence drew out over the seconds. I could picture her sitting there alone in her apartment. Sitting erect in her chair, the phone held to her ear. Staring directly before her, while the cat wound around her ankles. Her expression pensive, her mouth tight. All of her motionless in the silence as it dragged on. I could picture her round, serious face, white cheeked and sad eyed, her hair dull brown. I could picture her pale lips. They were soft lips when you kissed them. Her body was lush and soft to the touch.
“Come down,” I heard myself say finally. “Come down this weekend. Friday. Can you?”
The line crackled.
“What?” I said.
“Yes. Okay.”
“Okay,” I said.
She waited for me to go on. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I miss you, John,” said Chandler Burke finally.
My lips parted. I said nothing. My lips closed.
“See you Friday,” she said.
She hung up. I laid the receiver down in the cradle. I stared at it. It was silent. He knows who I am, Chandler, I thought. He knows I can identify him. He’s sure to come back for me. He’s sure to.
I reached for my glass. I raised it. I watched the theater’s red and gold lights expand in a line around the outside of it, encircling the amber scotch. With my other hand, I pulled a cigarette from the pack in my pocket. I put it between my lips and lit it.
I sat in my chair and I stared out the window.
I loved her that much, Wilfred Campbell had said.
I thought about Chandler Burke. I thought about Timothy Colt.
I thought about Wilfred Campbell.
“Why did you want to see me, Wells?”
“I want to know more about Timothy Colt.”
Donald Wexler sat in a wing chair of red leather. I sat in another, facing him. We were in the library of Wexler’s town house. There were bookshelves on two of the walls. They were filled with ribbed, leather-bound volumes. And there was a huge leather reading chair with an ottoman before it and a standing lamp behind. To my left was a window partly covered with red velvet drapes. The window looked onto the swank brownstones of East Ninetieth Street.
It was quite a place. A place fit for a man with an elegant background and an elegant job and an elegant Pulitzer Prize. When I’d walked in the front door, I’d entered an expansive hall. The floor was tiled with squares of black and white marble. The light of a crystal chandelier glinted off them. A winding staircase led up to the second story past a wall lined with portraits.
A maid in a black uniform had led me across the hall and through a draped doorway. We went through a living room. There were marble statues there. Greek youths and maidens rose from behind sofas and chairs. Their sleek lines were reflected in gilt-framed mirrors. We passed on into the library.
Wexler was waiting for us. He rose to meet me, extending his hand. He was dressed smartly in a gray suit, a maroon tie. He was getting ready to head off to work, I guess. It was 9:30 in the morning. I had phoned an hour earlier to ask if I might drop by.
We sat down in the wing chairs. He called for coffee. We drank it. We talked. Wexler asked after my health. I told him it would do. I told him about the assassin, about how Colt had died. He listened silently, gazing out the window. His face sagged; he looked weary, depressed. His damp eyes seemed to be looking at something very far away.
And that’s when he turned and asked me: “Why did you want to see me, Wells?”
“I want to know more about Timothy Colt.”
“Oh? I wouldn’t think they’d let you cover this one.”
“I’m not. Not the investigation. Lansing’s on that.”
“I see. You’re doing the side angles?”
“I guess. I don’t know. A man gets killed in front of you, it kind of makes you curious, that’s all.”
He gave me a wintry smile. He considered it for a long moment. “The funeral is tomorrow, you know,” he said softly. “Up in Valhalla. Will you be there?”
“I’m not sure. It’s kind of strange to first meet a man on the night he dies.”
“Yes,” Wexler said. “Yes, I suppose it is. It’s too bad, really. He would have liked you, too. You’re his sort. Oh, go ahead, there’s an ashtray somewhere.”
I had taken out a cigarette. He rose and went to an antique rolltop desk against the wall behind him. He took a tiny china ashtray from one of its compartments. Set it next to the silver coffeepot on the small round table that stood between us. I practically filled it with the first tip of ash. Wexler took his chair again.
“Who was Eleanora?” I asked him. I watched his face carefully when I said it. The name registered there. The pouches of flesh above his cheeks gathered as his eyes narrowed. His thin lips tightened till they nearly disappeared. He didn’t try to hide his reaction. He looked down at the table, still smiling that cold, sad smile.
“He must have been very drunk,” he said.
I nodded. “He was. We both were.”
“He never mentioned her unless he was. Not to me, anyway. But then, he and I, you know, we met by sheer accident. We became close … well, merely due to our circumstances. You, as I say, were more his type. Still, he was fascinating.”
“Was he?”
“Yes. At least, I thought so. He was … big. Bigger than life, I guess you’d say. He had a way of making you feel your own life was insufficient. Drab. Everything about him seemed a little more—exciting than the rest of us. He had a quality of—vitality? Some kind of yearning in him. I don’t know. Something, though. Something most of us forget eventually, or learn to do without.”
I knew what he meant. I thought of Colt on the edge of the Oklahoma plains, watching that freight train roll and roll into the endless grass. “All right,” I said. “Then why? Why was he like that? What did he have that the rest of us don’t?”
Wexler studied me. He seemed to come to a decision. He laughed once and said, “Eleanora, for one thing.”
I nodded slowly. “So who was she, Wexler? I came to you because he told me he was with you the day the capital of Sen
tu fell. He said you went back to cover the story, and he went back for her. Who was she?”
As he answered me, his attention drifted. Into his memories of Africa and revolution. They couldn’t be far from the surface of his mind just now.
“Eleanora?” he said. “She was a missionary. English, I think. An Anglican missionary.” He shook his head. “No, I don’t suppose that’s entirely fair. She was something of a legend even then. Even before Colt made a legend of her in his mind. We heard about her now and then, the reporters. We spent most of our time, of course, in the Hotel Victoria, in the bar there. We traded stories. You know how it is. There were several about her.’’
I listened. I imagined the reporters gathered at the bar’s round table. I imagined their voices murmuring.
“It was said, you see, that she ran an underground railroad. A sort of rescue operation for those caught up in the fighting, those—targeted, I suppose you’d say, for execution. What made it all so remarkable is that she took no side in the fighting. She had no political point of view.” His slim, well-manicured fingers reached for the silver coffeepot. He refilled our cups. “If you were wanted by the government—which meant you were subject to sudden arrest … I mean, Wells, you have to understand: it meant that you and your wife and your children could disappear silently in the night, that you could be dragged from your home and taken to the cellar of a place they called Imperial House. And in Imperial House, my friend, you could scream your lungs out while they killed you inch by inch. While your neighbors huddled together in fear pretending you’d moved away or never existed….” He paused. He sipped his coffee delicately. “So, as I say, if you were wanted by the government, there was a rumor that Eleanora could hide you, that she had a network of safe houses and guides who could get you out of the country, up the coast possibly to Morocco or down to South Africa. Maybe it was just something people told each other. A hope they conjured up when there was no hope left. At any rate, the same applied—so the story went—if you were being hunted by the rebels. And what a charming bunch they were.” Wexler raised his eyebrows as if he were talking about a group of boorish party crashers. “Oh, they, in the name of liberation and justice, they would come battering down your door with the butts of their machine guns and … I had a friend, a conservative editor named Briley, Joseph Briley. He was vacationing in the countryside when the glorious rebels burst into his house one night. They shoved a gun barrel up one of his nostrils and made him and his two children watch while they raped and murdered his wife. Then they cut one of the children, a little boy, to pieces with a machete while the other child, a girl of three, looked on. I won’t tell you how they killed her.”
“How do you know all this?” I said. My voice was hoarse.
“I was coming over to his house that evening. I arrived ten minutes after the rebels left. Briley was still alive. He was bleeding to death, but he was still alive. He told me what had happened while we waited for the police. Frankly, Wells, I thanked providence when he died in my arms.”
My imagination kept going. I saw the scene. I didn’t like what I saw. I tried to focus on the well-coiffed, well-dressed, well-situated man sitting before me. It seemed impossible he’d ever knelt in the blood and sweat of a massacre to cradle a dying friend.
One corner of Wexler’s mouth lifted, as if he knew what I was thinking. But he only said: “So … if the rebels were looking for you, you could also go to Eleanora. She made no distinction. She would risk her safety, her operation, her life for anyone in need. That’s what they said about her at the Hotel Victoria in Mangrela. That was the story.”
“If it was true, why didn’t anyone stop her?” I asked.
“Ah, my friend, that’s just the point. When I say she was a legendary figure, I mean just that. No one had actually seen her in years. No one who returned to tell about it at any rate. The government couldn’t find her to arrest her. The rebels couldn’t find her to assassinate her. She came—like a good fairy, rather—when you needed her, and not a moment before. In fact, I think that was the aspect of it that tantalized Colt the most.”
“Finding her.”
“Yes. When no one else could.”
I crushed a cigarette. I lit another. I nodded. I understood.
“Once the fever of the thing got into him,” Wexler said, “he couldn’t let it go. At first, whenever the subject of Eleanora would come up, he would wave his hand at us and say it was all nonsense, that if she were real, someone would have found her. All the same, he wouldn’t let the conversation die. He wanted to hear all the stories. He listened to them all.” I heard a clock strike ten in some other room. As Wexler put his cup down, he glanced at the gold watch on his wrist. “I have a meeting in half an hour,” he murmured. “I really should go.”
“Did he find her?”
Wexler glanced up, surprised at the hint of urgency in my voice. The story gripped me. I could see it all.
Wexler inclined his head. A stream of cigarette smoke poured from my mouth as I relaxed. He went on.
“What happened is this. We were drinking one night in the hotel bar. Just as usual, only later than usual and more than usual. I had the feeling Colt was doing it on purpose, building himself up to something. Not that he needed an excuse to drink, God knows, but there was something feverish about it that night. I’m not just saying that now, either. I thought so at the time. He drank and he drank, scotch after scotch. Even the usual gossip and complaining died after a while and it became so quiet we could hear the small-arms fire on the other side of the city.” Wexler looked at me, but he wasn’t seeing me. He was gone again, back to that bar, back where they told the stories of Eleanora while the flash of small arms lit the night like fireflies. I was there with him. “And he said—Colt, I mean, he said: ‘I’m going to find her, Don. I swear it. I have to find her.’ Those were his words. He staggered to his feet. I was too drunk to stop him. I just sat there, watching, openmouthed. I can see him to this day, his khaki pants all rumpled, the back of his white shirt gray with sweat, his jacket gripped in his hand. And while I sat there and watched, he stumbled through the folding doors, out into the lobby, out into the night.”
I did not ask again, but the question hung there between us: Did he find her?
“He was gone for two weeks,” Wexler said. “He was gone so long, I put an official inquiry in motion to see if he’d gotten himself arrested or killed. Somehow, I must admit, I didn’t think so. Not Colt. That wasn’t …” He coughed. Then he finished it: “That wasn’t the way he was destined to die. No, he turned up again. One morning. I came down with a few of the others—Charlie Oberkfell was there, Jack Mars—do you know them?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“I came downstairs,” Wexler said. “They served breakfast in the bar in the morning and we all went in for our coffee and cruller. And there was Colt. He was at the table we’d been drinking at when he left. He was drinking scotch as he had been. He was drunk—just as drunk as he was before. So help me, Wells, it seemed like the intervening weeks had never occurred. We sat down with him, ordered our coffees. Colt, I remember, was studying the depths of his scotch. And he looked up. He looked up directly at me. And he said, ‘She’s real, Donny.’ The look on his face …” Wexler turned away. He peered out at Ninetieth Street as if something fascinating were out there. I followed his glance. All I saw were a few fur-coated matrons passing along the sidewalk, down through a lane carved between drifts of dirty snow. But Wexler kept staring. “‘She’s real, Donny.’ And he said—he said she was beautiful. Beautiful in the English way, he said, with the swan’s neck and the pale blue eyes. The golden hair piled high on top. He talked about the way strands of her hair fell on her cheeks when it was hot. When it was hot and she moved among her people, her refugees, touching them, whispering to them, giving them, Colt said, a portion of her courage.”
Wexler blinked, turned from the window. “It was then, of course—when he told me how the gold strands of her hair fell
onto her cheeks in the heat and all that—that’s when I first realized he was in love with her.”
I waited, thinking he would go on. He continued to gaze at me in that bland, open way. The heat from my cigarette brought me around. It had burned down to my fingers. I put it out.
“Was that it? Did he see her again?”
Wexler made a vague motion with his hand. “I imagine so. I believe he did at the very end. You have to realize this was only a month or so before Mangrela fell. Much of that month I spent in the city of Jacobo to the north.”
“But what about Lester Paul? Did he have anything to do with it? With her? What the hell was that all about in the restaurant last night?”
“That I can’t tell you. Whatever was between Colt and Lester Paul, there was only one other person who knew about it. That was Robert Collins, the British journalist. And I believe he was killed when the rebels entered the city.” Wexler straightened the front of his jacket. “And now, Wells, I’m sorry … you must excuse me. I’ll be late.”
At the same moment he stood, a woman appeared at the library door. Wexler smiled fondly at her.
“Darling,” she said, “don’t you have a board meeting this morning?”
“Yes, my dear,” Wexler said gently. And to me: “John Wells, this is my wife Anne.”
I shook hands with her. She was a woman in her early forties. A fine, sculpted creature who’d been well cared for her whole life. She had short, carefully crafted auburn hair. A thin precise face softened by bright, kindly blue eyes. I’d seen that face before. In the society columns. Vaguely, I even remembered the pictures that appeared there seven or eight years ago. Society queen weds prizewinning journalist from mainline Philadelphia.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said as I released her hand. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
I mumbled something.