Colonel Rutherford's Colt (20 page)

The sight of the colonel roused no special feeling in Aaron's breast. He must be, he thought, brimful of hate. The only change he detected in himself was a reduction in perspective from the abstract to the strategic. The colonel shouted again, listened, then with a profane outburst slammed the door and entered the room wherein Aaron was sitting. He turned the switch of a lamp. “Shit!” he said when the lamp failed to provide a light. He tried a second lamp, a third. Muttering, he went to stand in front of the hearth and warmed his hands, doubtless thinking injurious thoughts about the man who lay dead on the sofa behind him.

Cautiously, Aaron came to his feet and walked toward Colonel Rutherford, hiding the Colt behind his hip. The colonel gasped to see him and staggered to the side, his arms outflung in shock. “Jesus!” he said on recovering. “You scared the crap out of me!” Then: “What's going on? Why didn't Randy tell me you were here?”

Aaron could think of no response he wished to extend.

“Did you bring the gun?” the colonel asked.

His hand shaking slightly, Aaron aimed the Colt at the colonel's chest. “On your knees.”

Disdain firmed the colonel's features. “What the hell is this?”

“On your knees!” The shout exploded from out of Aaron's lungs, as if it had been building inside him for a long time.

The colonel went stiffly to his knees; his expression retained an element of scorn. “What do you want?”

“I want you to lie down . . . on your face.”

The colonel made no move to comply until Aaron fired above his head; then he dropped onto his belly. The bullet shattered glass in the darkness across the room, and the detonation set up a ringing in Aaron's ears. He kneeled and bound the colonel's hands behind his back with a lamp cord. A mild fragrance of bath oil arose from the man. His breath came hugely, as if from the bellows-sized lungs of a horse. Aaron urged the colonel to his feet and sat him down in a chair facing the hearth. Then he pulled a second chair around so he could himself sit and watch him. This accomplished, the object of his errand essentially achieved, he felt somewhat at loose ends. He had no desire to prolong things, but it was as if a gulf had materialized between the fortress of his intent and the army of his will. He was content to bide his time. Sooner or later, the colonel would supply him with the inspiration to act.

“I'm not alone here, you know,” the colonel said.

Aaron chose not to disabuse him of the notion that help was at hand. He had withdrawn from the moment, become an observer, though he was not sure either of what had compelled him to this distance or what, in fact, he should observe. The colonel presented no great puzzle. As a specimen of mankind he was in no sense extraordinary, his character informed by a typical mixture of animal needs and human perversions. But what if this were not the case? Looking at the colonel, at the belly protruding from his bathrobe, the foolish mustaches, it was difficult to credit him with other than the most banal ration of evil; but perhaps this was a disguise, a shabby sheath enclosing a black knife of a soul. Aaron decided to question him.

“Why have you treated her so?” he asked, and was amazed by the soundness of his voice.

The colonel grimaced. “Oh, God! What has she been telling you now?”

“Of threats, rape, the suffocation of her spirit . . . no more than is your general custom.”

“How many times do I have to say this? The woman is a user. A manipulator. She . . .”

Aaron pointed the Colt at the colonel, and he did not complete his accusation.

“I will not hear you speak against her,” Aaron said. “Whatever she is, you have made her so with your maltreatment. When I knew her she was unstained in her devotion to the good.”

The colonel looked with bewilderment at Aaron, then winced as he struggled to shift his bound hands to a more comfortable position. “You're not letting me defend myself,” he said. “If I can't comment on what she's said about me, how do you expect me to answer your questions?”

“You misunderstand,” Aaron said. “I am not asking you to offer a defense. You have no defense. I am interested in an explanation of your behavior. But if your explanation involves nothing more than an attack upon my cousin, there is no need to continue.”

“Your cousin?” The colonel laughed.

“Yes, my cousin. Do you find the term inaccurate?”

“Are you telling me she's actually your cousin?” With an impassioned confusion that might have persuaded a less cynical witness than Aaron, the colonel said, “I didn't know. I . . . Why didn't you tell me?”

Aaron felt that to answer would be to encourage the colonel's pretense of insanity—such, he believed, was the man's intention in denying knowledge of the blood bond between Susan and himself.

His anxiety increasing, the colonel asked how could he have known, how could he have possibly known? When Aaron remained silent, the colonel railed against the silence, insisting that he be told what was happening. And when this failed to bestir Aaron, he resorted to threats. “I have friends . . . due any minute,” he said. “They'll be armed, and I can assure you, they won't hesitate to use their weapons.”

“You have no friends,” Aaron told him. “Only sycophants and servants and seekers after influence. I doubt they will expend any significant effort in your salvation.”

Bewilderment once again surfaced in the colonel's face, only to be replaced by a veneer of confidence. “Randy's probably lining you up right this second,” he said. “He may not look like much, but he's a hell of a marksman.”

“Is he?” Aaron stood and slipped the Colt into his pocket. He stepped behind Colonel Rutherford's chair and wrestled it around so the colonel could see the couch upon which his servant rested. “It seems his shooting eye is not what it once was.”

The colonel took a moment to absorb the sight, then twisted his neck about so he could see Aaron's face. “What do you want?” he asked in a tone markedly less demanding than that he had used to phrase the question originally.

Aaron turned the colonel's chair back toward the hearth. “As I said. I want you to explain your treatment of my cousin.”

“If you're talking about what she calls rape. . . .” The colonel bit the end off of his sentence; then, as Aaron went to stand beside the hearth, he went on. “I . . . I don't think your cousin's recollection of the incident is unclouded. She's a very devout woman, and I believe she's devised a false memory to shield her from the guilt she feels—quite unnecessarily, to my mind—at having had relations outside the matrimonial bed.”

“I fail to see how an affair could inhibit memory.”

“We were being passionate,” said the colonel. “Extremely passionate. She made a protest at one point, but then she consented. She gave me no reason to think she hadn't been party to the act.”

Aaron moved the ironwork screen aside and stirred the fire with a poker that been resting in a stand beside the hearth; he set a fresh log atop the newly blazing remains.

“It's the truth . . . I swear!” said the colonel.

“And the threats?” asked Aaron, setting a second log in place. “Your restriction of her movements? These, too, are the result of a faulty memory?”

“I was angry. Disappointed. My God, I was in love with her! I still am! I didn't always act properly. I admit it. People are never at their best when they're in love . . . especially when the relationship is in trouble.”

“In her letters to me, my cousin describes a life of unrelenting oppression, a husband whose insensitivity is tempered only by cruelty. Now you wish me to believe that this was all an act of the imagination? Give me some credit, sir. I'm not one of the hounds milling about your supper table, ready to pounce should a crumb fall their way. My cousin would not lie.”

“Hold on!” said the colonel. “What do you mean, ‘husband'?”

Aaron ignored him. The last words he had spoken had seeded him with doubt. He wondered now if everything Susan had related, and not merely the tale of her affections, could be a lie. No, it was impossible! She had been provoked to lie, steeped in the duplicitous substance of the marriage, her virtues eroded by the acids of the colonel's malignancy.

“Tell me about Carrasquel,” Aaron said. “I would like to hear your justification of the act.”

Dazedly, the colonel said, “What are you talking about?”

“Am I to understand you are denying knowledge of my cousin's lover? His murder?”

The colonel's manner became infected with hysteria. “What are you talking about? What in the hell is wrong with you?”

A ringing issued from another quarter of the house; the colonel glanced sharply in the direction of the sound.

“That'll be my friends,” he said. “Probably calling to say they're on their way.”

“In that case,” Aaron said, aiming the Colt, “it might be best to conclude our interview.”

“Wait,” said the colonel. “No one's coming.”

The ringing stopped.

“Yes,” said Aaron. “But whoever called might worry that you have been injured. They might investigate.” He picked up strips of lamp cord from the floor beside his chair. “I really should go.”

“Listen!” said the colonel in a tone that must have quailed the women of his house. “This stuff about a lover . . . a murder. If she told you I was involved with that, with anything of the sort, it's just not true!”

“I'm going to tie your feet now,” said Aaron. “If you thrash about or try to kick me, I will shoot you. Do you understand?”

The colonel's stare was an article of mystification. “What's going on? What's wrong with you? This is not . . .”

“I can shoot you now,” said Aaron. “If you don't understand.”

The colonel said, “I understand.”

As Aaron bound the colonel's feet, he experienced a thrill of fear connected neither to the violence he was about to perpetrate, nor to any comprehensible antecedent. It seemed rather that fear itself had decided to lend a hand and was leaning in over his shoulder, a phantom mimicking his form, his movements, reminding him that he was soon to enter a sphere where many before him had traveled and few had thrived. He tucked the loose ends of the cords beneath the loops lashing the colonel's ankles and went back toward the hearth where flames were now snapping and leaping high. Seams of sap glowed molten on the fresh logs.

“Will you listen?” The colonel leaned toward Aaron, a picture of foolish entreaty, eyes wide, lips puffing. “You need to listen to me. You're making a mistake!”

“It was Susan who made the mistake.” Aaron gave the fire another poke. “I am merely correcting it.”

“Susan? Who's Susan?” Then the colonel shouted it: “Who in God's name is Susan?”

“Spare yourself, Colonel,” Aaron said. “This is not a workable stratagem.”

After a pause the colonel said, “Who do you think I am?”

Aaron continued to poke at the fire. The heat from the hearth stung his face, yet his bones were cored with ice. The bed of embers brightened and faded, drawing his eye with a hypnotic rhythm.

“It's major,” said the colonel. “Major. Raymond. Borchard. That's who I am. My name. Who do you think I am?”

“How modest of you to give yourself a demotion! I wouldn't have expected such self-effacement.” He turned to the colonel. “Who do I think you are? I think you're a monster of the most ordinary, yet the most dangerous variety. One incapable of perceiving his own monstrous nature.”

“Try to listen to me. All right? Try to understand me.” The colonel edged forward in his chair and spoke with extreme deliberation. “Something's wrong with you. The way you're talking, these names . . . You're not responding to what I'm saying! You may be having some kind of episode!”

Aaron laughed. “My cousin is a liar, and I'm . . . What? Deluded? Demented? These are tactics unworthy of an Academy graduate.”

“I didn't attend the academy!” said the colonel excitedly. “I was at the Citadel! Don't you see? I'm not who you think!”

“You know nothing of Susan? Nothing of her family, the Lisles of Buckingham? Of Aaron, her cousin?”

“No,” said the colonel dully; then, louder: “No!”

“Yet earlier tonight, you recognized me, did you not?”

If the colonel's hands had been free, Aaron thought, he would have clapped them to his head in frustration, unable to counter this argument. He threw himself about in the chair, grunting and fuming. “You're fucking out of your mind!” he said.

A voice, not the colonel's, though it was saying much the same thing, commanded Aaron's attention. It seemed to be issuing from within him, perhaps the voice of conscience or that of a wise shadow prompting him from the wings of consciousness, urging him to break from the character of this little drama and recognize the wrongness of his part. The voice, or rather its owner, pressed forward, and Aaron felt a winnowing, an imminent dissolution that threatened to wash him away. He heard himself say, “I just want you to leave her alone,” speaking in a yokel accent that was altogether different from his usual cultivated tone.

“I will!” the colonel said eagerly. “I swear before God, I will leave her alone!”

“How the hell I'm gonna trust you?” asked the voice. “You can't give me no guarantees I can trust.”

“I can sign something. Write whatever guarantee will satisfy you. I'll sign it!”

“That ain't gonna do it. You'll just tell your cop friends you signed under duress.” After an interval, the voice said, “You got a camera?”

The colonel, somewhat less eagerly, said, “Yes, I have a digital camera. In my study. Next to the computer.” A pause. “Why . . . what do you want it for?”

“I think I might got a way to keep you under control.”