Set This House on Fire (74 page)

But then another sound possessed his ears, and he raised his head to listen. Faint at first, then swiftly louder, it came from the walls of the town; its initial notes seemed that of a siren or a highpitched horn, then quickly redefined themselves as he recognized the noise, knew what it was—a woman’s wavering cry of alarm, hoarse, heedless, wild. Another cry joined the first one, then another, then another, all crying in unison—then the voices fell silent at once, as if abruptly gagged and muffled. And for a long moment there was only dead silence in the town. Then the cries recommenced, nearer now, and he heard another noise, strange, which made a pattering, steady, percussive rhythm beneath the cries, and this sound, too, defined itself as it became louder and closer—footsteps on the cobblestones outside, rowdy, stumbling, mad with haste. There was a dazzling
cling-clang
as the feet struck a sewer grating; then the sound was repeated, quickly, followed by the screams. And another
cling-clang
like a short sharp collision of iron bars, and now a man’s voice which let out bull-like sounds in a succession of hoarse bellows each of which terminated in a low, quavering, aspirated moan, curiously feminine. And then for a moment the cries, which had been bunched together like the calls of a flock of crows in flight, became dispersed and straggled out and again grew fainter, and all he could hear was the frantic patter of feet going downhill past the palace in a skidding slick pandemonium of shoe leather, and one final stray bringing up the rear in a reticent dogtrot, heavily gasping for air.

Gut churning with fear, somehow forewarned as he leaped from the chair and raced outside, Cass reached the street door of the courtyard and had thrown it open before the straggler had passed the palace, calling out
“Aspett’!”
even as he recognized who it was—Windgasser, his face aflame with exertion and with the look in his sleep-swollen eyes of a man who has heard his own death sentence. Dazed, haggard, doomed, he stood plumply gowned in a bathrobe, his hairless shanks trembling in the chill and peach-hued dawn, and as Cass approached him he drew from his pocket an outsized linen handkerchief and passed it miserably and tremulously across his jowls. “Merthiful heaven,” he said, “oh, Mr. K.!”

“What happened!” he cried, grasping the little man’s sleeve. “What happened? Speak up, Fausto, tell me!”

“That Ricci girl. That peasant girl from Tramonti. Who used to work for
you!
Mr. Flagg’s maid! She has been found—” He began to blubber.

“Speak up, dammit!”

“She has been found—She was found on the path to Tramonti! Beaten! Ravished! My dear sir! Dying!”

“Then how is she!” He was faintly aware that, clutching Fausto’s sleeve, pinioning beneath his hand a rubbery band of flesh, he was making the hotelkeeper wince, and also now that he was roaring at the top of his voice. “How
is
she!” he repeated, releasing his grip. “How
is
she, for Christ sake? Tell me! Dying you said!
Dying?”

“Oh, Mr. K.,” he wept, and his voice died to a whisper, “she is still alive—but the horror! It was only an hour ago that they found her on the upper path—so they do not know. She is unconscious. But the doctor told me—just now—he told me that she cannot live out the day! But the horror of—”

“Who did it!”

“No one knows. Some
beast
of a person! Someone so totally lacking in any sense of
decency
—” He paused, as if to collect his scattered wits. “I mean—Oh, I just cannot bear to tell you. I mean, her
skull
fwactured in two places, bones bwoken all over. I ask you, what sort of a murderous beast is it who would do such a vile and abominable thing, in a quiet town like this which for these past years has enjoyed such unpawalleled peace! With the cinema here! Surely they will leave now! Just when—”

“Scum,” Cass murmured, in a voice partaking of the grief which had swamped him. “Filthy Swiss little faggot.” He raised his arm, saw Windgasser flinch and shrink from him even as he wheeled away from the man and trotted back toward the palace. He felt ice water flowing in his veins. Several more townspeople, rapt, open-mouthed in the hysteria of crisis, rushed past him. A barefooted woman with a baby in her arms stumbled downhill toward the piazza, uttering between white parted lips a series of frustrated shrieks, bubbling forth in weak gasps. And now as he turned toward the door to Mason’s stairs he saw Dr. Caltroni, spectacles reflecting ovals of pink light, astride a rackety motorscooter veering up the hill toward the walls; mounted on the seat behind, a bald young priest swayed, peering with a worried look heavenward while clapping like a chalice to his breast a bottle containing, unmistakably, human blood. Cass turned away, hurried ten short steps down a dark alleyway odorous with garbage, and pulled violently at the doorknob with both hands, nearly collapsing himself back upon the cobblestones as the door—to his vague surprise unlocked—flung itself open with a clatter. Regaining balance, he plunged forward. The stone stairs were slippery with damp, and a musty gray smell as of mice and their excrement hovered over all; he took the steps two at a time, stumbling down once without pain in the half-dark. At the top of the stairs there was another door; this too was now unlocked and he hurled it open, taking a step into Mason’s kitchen. The room was deserted. There was no sound here, save for the steady drip from a leaking faucet. For a moment he stood with his ear cocked, peering through the gloom. Noise from the street rose up through the walls, muffled and indistinct. A clock ticked somewhere and now, from far down the hallway where in their rooms the movie people slept, he heard a prodigious snore, tentative and choked, like the faulty initial burst of an outboard motor. He kept listening, heard springs creak once as the sleeper stirred, then again all was silent. He stepped forward, moving with cautious soundless footfall past the sleepers, past closed doors and doors ajar: through one he caught sight of a short, naked, recumbent Jew, the newspaper snoop whose name he had forgotten, with a hairy abdomen and an enormous ap- pendectomy scar, mindlessly scratching his ribs as he slumbered beneath a buzzing electric fan. Cass moved on. In the windowless hallway it was humid—humid and close; he felt himself sweating, and a prickly chill ran up his back and then up his neck, making his scalp feel suddenly as tight as a drumhead. Yet, sweating, he felt parched, juiceless, dehydrated; his eyes were gritty and dry, as was his throat—a gorge full of sand—and abruptly with a hawking noise, loudly, too loudly, he tried to moisten it. He stopped in his tracks, waiting, listening, expecting someone to stir. Across the hall past a half-opened door three clothed male sleepers lay comatose across a double bed, the mouths of each agape, sprawled together like toppled mannequins.

Still he waited. Off in the distance someone groaned. He prowled on, turning at last into a corridor toward Mason’s bedroom. With swift silent steps now he reached the door, suddenly drew back, thinking of Rosemarie, thinking that though he might handle Mason easily it would be impossible madness to deal with Mason in combination with his lofty, shrieking consort. But almost at that identical instant, recollecting the numberless times that summer when he had seen Rosemarie, rejected, cast out from Mason’s favor, emerge red-eyed in the morning from some separate boudoir, he knew he must now take a chance on her being absent from his side, and once more he approached the door. As he did so, pressing down on the squeaking handle and groping simultaneously into his pocket, he realized with vexation (this he recalled later: his coolness, his calmness, his grief in abeyance—his passion for retribution dominating him so that even such possibly fateful missteps as this one caused him, instead of panic and anxiety, only a flicker of annoyance) that he had forgotten the key. It was on the table downstairs. But it was too late to go back. Inside he heard a stirring, then the voice, already apprehensive, alert, knowing: “Who’s there?” Pressing his cheek against the door, he listened. The voice spoke again, louder now: “Who’s there?” Still he did not answer, aware now of two lucidly apparent yet baffling and contradictory facts. The first of these was that he was in basic command of the situation, that after months and days of limp and ineffectual bondage when he was unable to break through to prick the cowardice at Mason’s core, he was at last on top—he felt Mason’s fear of his vengeance now even before grappling with him—and he knew that by that terror alone he could imprison Mason within the room. The door was three inches thick, the walls many times thicker, the long corridor iso- lated; let Mason squeal for help at the top of his lungs and nowhere on the sleeping floor would he be heard. Yet time was running out; the whole accursed palace would soon be astir, and he had no key. The other fact, then, which he calmly and coolly considered, was that though he might be able to trap Mason he could not get at him—he could not, furthermore, risk going downstairs to retrieve the key—and it was up to him at this moment to find some satisfactory solution to the problem. After a few seconds he spoke in a flat, literal voice through the door: “Mason, you’re going to die.” He paused, then spoke again: “You might as well open up now, Mason, because I’m going to kill you.” And at this point, as if his words substantiated what he did not need to know, he was aware that he was going to kill him. Even as he spoke he was quietly removing his shoes (there was a crack beneath the door; if you were some intended victim, separated from your pursuer by this door, and, after calling out “Who’s there?” and hearing only silence, you wished to ascertain if the marauder had gone away, allowing you to flee by the door, would you not bend down and peer through the crack, in order to tell whether you could see his feet? That was Cass’ chill immaculate reasoning.) and silently placed them toes foremost against the thin space of light between door and step. He listened. There was only silence in the room. Wheeling without sound, sprinting in his stocking feet up the corridor, he raced through the deserted, party-littered
salone
and out onto the balcony and down the courtyard stairs, conscious of a slight skidding, sideslipping motion in his forward and downward flight but aware too of almost effortless speed as he hit the courtyard on the balls of his feet and bounded in two or three long strides into his living room, where he snatched up the key from the table, lost momentum, reversed motion, wheeled again and traveled noiselessly back across the courtyard and up the marble stairs in swift, choppy, silent steps regaining the corridor and the door—pausing there only to put on his shoes again, which he managed to do with one hand while with the other he turned open the bolt with a soft chunking sound. The whole thing could not have taken more than a minute. He threw back the door, his eyes blinking in the sudden eastward flush of rosy light. No one was in the room. No Mason, no Rosemarie. Nobody. The immense Hollywood bed—sheets an obscene tangle still from Mason’s plunder of the night just past—was empty.

He turned to search the closet when, at this instant, something told him where Mason was. And he jerked round then and stood there, waiting. A shout rose up from the distant street, a motorscooter sputtered in an alleyway. Then for a long moment all was quiet. Did Mason really believe he would overlook his farcical hiding place? Ensconced within the classic refuge of miscreants, Mason had given himself away: the barest patch of a pair of green Bermuda shorts had moved—no more than a centimeter—but it was enough, and Cass slowly crouched low until he was eye to eye with his prey, who was cowering belly-down underneath the bed. For long seconds, like a hound dog in quizzical encounter with a trapped coon, he gazed at Mason, his own nose inches from the floor. No words passed between them; they breathed heavily, simultaneously, and when he blinked, Mason blinked, out of a face leached of blood and misshapen with terror. Then Cass spoke. “Mason,” he said again, in a voice soft and even, somewhat tutorial, almost disciplinary. “Mason, you’re going to die.” Cass heard a shudder, a prolonged expiring breath like wind through a pine tree, and very slowly now he put forth his hand to grasp Mason’s wrist, drawing back partly when Mason essayed his first move, whimpered slightly, and shimmied sideways out of reach. “Look here, Mason,” he heard himself saying, in those strange level laconic tones, “you might as well just come on out of there. I can’t move this here bed. I’m going to kill you, see? Now that’s the bleeding fact of the matter. So come on out of there, hear?” There was another whimper, though now, mingled with some different sound—a sob, or a savage gulp for air—and at this point, too late, Cass realized he had made a crucial miscalculation. For in his coon-dog stance—rump upended, nose to the ground, one paw still outstretched in its vain foray beneath the mattress—he was considerably off-balance; dominating the situation from no substantial eminence, attacking weakly from the flank instead of from the center (the foot of the bed, where he could have swiftly extracted him by the heels), he was at a clumsy disadvantage, and it was while he was pondering a new angle that Mason seized the bit and from the other side suddenly rose like a rocket in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. “Buh-WAH!” he cried as Cass heaved to his feet. “WAH!” The sound echoed out of all childhood, a fearful, exacerbated, stricken wail—the cry of a four-year-old, terrified by dragons, thunder, or the dark. And before Cass, lunging across the huge playground of a bed, could get to him, he had bolted through the open door and out into the hallway, speeded by that same terror which had drained all color from his flesh, and which had made all his outcries congeal like faint bird calls in his throat as he scuttled along the corridor past the oblivious sleepers. He ran downstairs and out the back door, away from all help.

Outside in the garden, lumbering far behind Mason, Cass came to a halt and regained his breath. There was not a soul in sight. The town, save for those first few heralds of disaster he had seen on the street, was still sleeping. The garden was empty; beyond it, the valley stretched sleeping and misted in the dawn, devoid of life or motion. Yet as he looked at the wide trampled-down swath cut through the iris and poppies he could tell the direction of Mason’s flight as easily as if he had seen it charted, and plunged wetly through the flower banks heedless of the crowd of fat honeybees which stormed up angrily in his path. He reached the end of the garden; here a high, white, wooden picket fence barred his way, and as he mounted it with a single leap, two things occurred almost at once: he saw a bottle-green scrap of cloth where his quarry, moments before, had impaled himself and, dreamily trying to gain altitude in flight so that he might avoid the same mishap, found himself impaled, skewered through the pants upon the identical paling. He struggled for a moment, wriggling loose, saw Mason far up the valley path even as with a ripping noise at the seat of his pants he freed himself and dropped to the stony ground below, hard, sending a shock of pain from his toes to his knees. He was puffing and heaving; not nearly Mason’s equal in general vigor, he was dimly conscious that that fact alone might prevent him from doing what he had set out to do, yet even as this occurred to him he felt his legs and thighs moving powerfully beneath him in a resistless gallop, impelled as if by the urgency of some tightly wound clockwork beyond his control. As he ran he sensed the dawn lifting, a new lightness, shadows fading from their cups and hollows on the slopes. Lizards darted near him along the walls, skittering dryly among the dewy vines and lichen. The last dwellings of the town passed above and behind him; along this unpopulated cliffside, in the dust of the path, Mason’s footprints were fresh and clear, and now several hundred yards ahead he saw once again the bottle-green flash as Mason, emerging from behind a stretch of wall, slid to a stop at a fork in the path and stood there for an instant, wildly hesitant, elbows working from side to side in indecision. A palace-dweller, he was ignorant of these outskirts; his ignorance was costing him seconds, and it was the right-hand path he must take, Cass knew,
the right-hand path,
the one which went lazily down then up—up the cliff toward the Villa Cardassi—not the left one sloping formidably but briefly up then down again to the safety of the town. He would take the right-hand path, because it looked easier. Sweating, sighing, heart thundering, Cass stumbled and sprawled out against the wall, canceling out his second’s gain. As he found his balance and recaptured momentum he saw the green of Mason’s shorts receding off to the right, into the deceptive, the proper path.