Barbary Shore (28 page)

“Ohhh,” Lannie breathed.

“Yes. He then does what one would expect him to. The young man is eliminated. Only, for reasons which I suppose are psychological, he does something very exceptional. He kills the young man himself.”

“What’s exceptional?” McLeod asked flatly.

“Well, you see the boss has never done any of this in the past. There are lots of employees for that. But in this case he goes to see the young man who trusts him implicitly, surprising as that may seem, and after hours of talk, he carries out the orders. And when he goes home he sits down and writes out the whole thing for himself alone, never knowing that eventually it will turn up in our files. What would you say to all this?”

“That’s so cruel!” Lannie exclaimed with a smile.

Hollingsworth shook his head. “He was commended for it, and they were right. That gentleman might have been ready to … deviate, is that the word? But when he alone killed the young fellow, I guess they figured that would straighten him
out. Maybe he did it to straighten himself out. Cause you know he committed another murder after this. All by himself again.”

“What was the condition of this second murder?” McLeod asked hoarsely.

“Oh, a more routine affair.” And Hollingsworth went on at even greater length. There was a friend, a great friend, of the Balkan boss, and they had known each other for years, and had worked together more than once. He was sent on a mission to the very capital of the very Mediterranean country where our protagonist disported, a mission from the mother country as Hollingsworth described it, an important mission, and yet before he had been in the city two weeks, it was obvious that his behavior was odd. He drank, a man who had seldom touched liquor; his hands shook, a man with nerves of steel, veteran of an earlier civil war; and although he had been a big man, none of his clothing would fit. He completed his work, and went to his hotel room, and there he stayed for three days, seeing no one, and only drinking. A passport arrived for his return to the east, and he mailed the passport back to his Balkan friend in the very same city. So the Balkan went to see him, and as Hollingsworth told us with relish, they once again talked for hours, and they had a discussion. “We have sabotaged the revolution,” the old friend said, “and we have eaten ourselves. The trials. Do you know the lie of the trials.? Do you know that equality is a bourgeois principle, and we have cheered for piecework, and our wives wear fur coats. We have put dung in the milk and poison in the honey, and we have retarded socialism a hundred years. For socialist morality is dead, and I have come to the conclusion it is the head of a pin, and unlike angels not a single lie may dance upon it.” And so they argued, or rather the old friend declaimed, and finally the man swore that he would not return unless it were by force, and he dared his old comrade to employ the force.

“At the end of it,” Hollingsworth said, “this idealist fellow
was dead. An extraordinary case. You see the boss overstepped his authority. All he was supposed to do was give him the passport. He should have left the rest to somebody else.”

“I say,” McLeod muttered thickly, the skin of his face drawn back against the bone, “that a man who would perform such acts had become untrustworthy, and divided painfully by his own doubt, could only resolve it by driving himself further, by forcing himself into the position he now dreaded to place his subordinates.”

“I’m sorry to disagree,” Hollingsworth murmured quietly, “but this goes against all the facts. Even by his own admission the fellow remained with the organization through to the end of that Mediterranean ruckus, and then quite a while after that. There is reason to believe he is still with them.”

“I am not that man,” McLeod said desperately.

“One never knows exactly. You defend him.”

“I explain him.” McLeod wiped moisture from his upper lip with a quick motion of his tongue.

“That is possible,” Hollingsworth nodded, “but still it’s interesting. In each case they talked for hours. A lot must have been said in that time.”

High on McLeod’s temple a pulse was throbbing, the vein standing out against the skin. “You assume these acts were done coldly.”

Hollingsworth seemed indifferent. “I’ve discovered in my line of work that it’s actions which count. A fellow, after all, can get to feel one way and then he can feel the other way, but in the long run it’s what he does that keeps me busy. Now, in this particular circumstance, the man we’re discussing goes in with a weapon, he feels it against him, so to speak, all the time he’s talking. Suppose once or twice during all those hours, he even decides he won’t use it after all, he likes the other fellow too much. Still, no matter what he thinks, he ends up by pulling the trigger. He comes with the lethal instrument”—Hollingsworth
was outlining the brief on his fingers— “and he goes away with same said lethal instrument … fired. A lawyer fellow can argue about cold blood or not cold blood, but it seems to me if his mind isn’t made up at bottom, then he doesn’t bring the murderous weapon in the first place. You know, I ask myself a question.”

“What?” McLeod croaked.

“Isn’t that fellow still doing the same work right up to this day? That is, unless he can show proof to the contrary. According to my modest opinion, he must be, because nobody could admit they had been that wrong. That’s proved by statistics. None of the bureaucrats, as I have said, turn back to theory. For a fellow to admit all those things and then say he was wrong, why he couldn’t set himself up over anybody. He couldn’t set himself up over me, for example.”

“It is only by admitting your guilt that you can ever judge,” McLeod said slowly.

“Fiddlesticks. You’re a fellow likes to turn everything into a discussion. But it’s facts and not words a fellow like me must accept.”

McLeod’s eyes, burning out of his gaunt face, looked across the desk at Hollingsworth. “I am not a servant of any power.”

“Then you have what we are looking for.”

“I do not.”

“Are you the Balkan gentleman I was referring to?”

“No.”

“What would you say if you were?”

“That one of the two propositions you have outlined would have to be correct.”

“Finally.” Hollingsworth sat back and lit a cigarette. But though his arms were folded neatly in his lap and his shoulders touched the wood of the chair, he was hardly relaxed, and the
sense of continuity he had pursued was so painfully close that he could not contain it.

“Miss Madison,” he said, “will you please leave the room for a moment?”

She stood up without a word and obeyed him, closing the door behind her. Hollingsworth leaned forward and switched on the lamp so it shone directly into McLeod’s face.

“You see,” he murmured, “I have the utmost admiration for you, and it makes a fellow feel bad to have to tell you all these things. There’s no need for you to have to go through all this. Everything would be so simple if only you would accept my offer, and you could go away.”

“The offer has never been definite,” McLeod managed to articulate.

“It is now. I can’t tell you the respect I feel for a gentleman like yourself who commanded so many men, and if he so desired could have supped in the lap of luxury.” Lust marched in Hollingsworth’s speech. “A fellow could buy an army.” And his voice dropping until all feeling was suppressed, he added, “It’s only hard times has come upon you, and one should never aggravate himself for nothing.”

He paused, and in the pause he struck his little lightning. A hand scratched on the door outside as it scratched once weeks before, and continued with mounting hysteria until a finger was crying at the wood and nibbling at our ear. The lamp bulb glared into McLeod’s eyes, the finger scratched and importuned until it might have been beneath our flesh, and all the while Hollingsworth was watching him.

“Stop that sound,” McLeod said.

“It disturbs you?”

“Let it continue.”

But he was gripping the edge of the desk, and across the rigid muscle armor of his mouth, a tremor rippled as though
another mouth long concealed would present its frail credential.

“This was the sound,” Hollingsworth stated, “which the Balkan gentleman employed on certain secret work. It is a password one might say, and he used it the night he visited his old friend. It is obvious from your reaction that this same sound is not unfamiliar to you.”

McLeod made no answer.

“Are you the so-called Balkan gentleman?”

Half a minute might have elapsed, the scratching continued, the lamp burning.

“Yes,” McLeod said.

“Did you really leave that organization?”

McLeod nodded.

“Then you still have the little object?”

“Yes,” McLeod said.

“Where is it?”

“No, that’s enough, that’s enough,” McLeod shouted. “Not today. Give me time.” In his agitation he had come to his feet and was leaning over the desk. I thought he was about to weep.

“All right, that is enough,” Hollingsworth said. “Easy does it, easy does it.” And to my bewilderment he crossed the desk to McLeod’s side and stood patting him on the shoulder with the gentle sympathetic attention of a man who has told another some tragic news. “Yes, easy does it, and pull yourself together,” he murmured in a demulcent voice.

“Go away,” McLeod said thickly.

“We’ll adjourn and continue this upon further notice,” Hollingsworth said quietly, “and may I thank you, sir, for your co-operation.”

With a last soothing touch of his hand on McLeod’s neck, he gathered his papers and quit the room.

N
OW
, in the short time that remained, in the evening after their audience and the next evening, McLeod came to my room and talked for hours. And like a man who carries his mortal illness within him, and obsessed with the death he contains, must constantly exhume it, he would pace my floor through the middle of the night and relate from his incalculable necessity a list of the crimes he had performed. Fluvial, torrential, he could have dammed it no more than I could have stopped my ears, and while the night air stagnated in the attic room and insects battered themselves in frenzy against the wall looking for the window from which they had entered, it poured forth over my head in a storm of recrimination and justification, of places I had never known and names I could hardly untangle. He would lacerate himself, searching deeper and deeper into the mesh of motive until each successive reason for what he had done became more frightful than the one which had preceded it, and when he had finally, to his satisfaction if not to mine, exposed the last festering cocci of the sore, he would close the incision only to open another. And if, at last, I could begin to shift from the mystification of such an ordeal to the first perception of its extent, he would halt me, before I had even succeeded, to demonstrate with what desire he could hardly support that in such an
instance, all perfidy granted, he had nonetheless … he had made efforts, he had tried … he had even … So through one night and most of another I listened to him, not knowing what to say, while he continued, half for himself and half for me, defense combined with prosecution, the moralist and the criminal brought to dock and each arguing at odds, for even as I, the judge, would pardon the accused he was delivering himself to execution.

“You, of course, would have been unaware of this,” he was going on, “but I watched you during the entire time, and there was one expression on your face. It was disbelief. You couldn’t accept the fact that the corporeal face and body of McLeod could ever have performed such capers. All the while you were waiting for me to deny it, I could sense that. You still don’t accept it completely. For you, there’s a magic word, and I’ve only to utter it and the explanations fall into line. And I could tell it to you, I could show you with dates and facts that I am not the Balkan gentleman as Leroy puts it in all his humor, but what would that avail? Because you see the truth is that there are deep compacts between Leroy and myself, you might almost say we are sympathetic to each other, and there was your presence and the girl’s, and who knows what she’ll babble, and then there are his artistic qualifications for the job which must not be discounted—whether it’s organizational insight or more probably an accident, I must say that from their point of view they couldn’t have chosen a better man because I can assure you that all through it, all through the fiction and fancy of all the things I was alleged to have done in Mediterranean waters, there was not a word of legal truth and all the parallel truth in the world because if it were not one act I committed it was another, and you must notice his devilish cleverness, unconscious I’m certain, for his instincts are perfect. He knew how I would react if the specifics were given. I’ve covered that over for myself these many years, oh, aware what I did, but none
the less there’s a certain crutch to the name of a thing, it all seems more reasonable and possible until you put it figuratively, until the metaphorical end, which is always the muzzle if you come down to it, blasts you in the face. And all the while, the detached portion of my brain which feeds on ice water, and that’s true, was admiring him for an aesthetic performance, so that you see no matter how I suffer there’s a counterfeit touch, and even at this moment I find a basic amusement because I’m not suffering at all, I’m merely trying to suffer and with such exertion that I suffer from the effort, and that’s how cold my tit has proven.”

He ceased talking, but the transition was only external, for he continued to pace back and forth, the latest of the continual cigarettes he smoked drooping from his mouth and laying its trail of ash beside him. In his head the words undoubtedly continued, jostling, burbling, stewing until the pot must have rattled, and from the force of the soliloquy his lips formed a soundless equivalent of what he might have said.

With no more reason he was speaking aloud again. “Yet I ask myself if it is entirely a swindle that you should have had such confidence in me, or whether it is an indication that I have altered in these past years and could have given an impression of personal integrity and the capacity for theoretical speculation, for you’ve involved yourself on my account. May it be that the potentiality I possessed once as a revolutionary has not been completely dissipated, and there is still hope for me if only I can slough the hundred crimes upon my head, shake free once and for all, and strike out again with vigor instead of by the half-crippled steps I have employed? But, no!”—and here he struck one hand against the palm of the other—“this is rationalization, and I can be trusted to scrape the meat off the last rotten bone, looking for anything to find my out, and even enlisting you with all your poor sad dependencies to make my brief.”