The Edge of Doom (17 page)

And then it occurred to me, she told Reed, that Charles was also seventy or a bit more. He was the same age as Jay.

Charles began to speak, slowly, taking his time, as though he had been planning for a long time what he would say if he ever got the right chance to say it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

How say you?
My prisoner or my guest? by your dread
“verily” one of them you shall be.

“Jay and I were at college together. We were roommates. He was best man at my wedding. That’s where he met your mother. So far, that’s what he told you, yes?”

This time he didn’t wait even for a nod but went right on. He was talking to Kate, but he was talking for Jay; he was telling Jay his version, he was making Jay listen to Kate listening to his, Charles’s, version. That was his pleasure. Kate could only hope it would complete his pleasure, that shooting or other violence would not be required; that talking would suffice.

“So Jay met your mother at my wedding,” Charles continued, “and it was instant love, across a crowded room, fireworks—in short, passion. My guess is that Jay met an older woman who wanted his love rather than alcohol, and your mother, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it, hadn’t been made proper love to and was smart enough to know it and to want it. Or maybe she was enchanted, too, and just wanted the experience of a younger man; who knows? Anyway, lo and behold, you appeared a year or so later. And after that, your mother does not wish to run off with Jay here; in fact, she wants him out of her life, particularly since no one’s noticed that this baby girl doesn’t exactly resemble the other Fanslers. But then, she’s a girl, which nicely explains everything. As for your mother, passion is one thing; practicalities quite another. Jay felt like shit, and I for one don’t blame him. Not,” he paused, as though Kate had interrupted him, “not that I blame your mother either. But it did complicate matters between Jay and me. To put it mildly. In fact, it screwed things up in a really big way.”

Kate glanced to her right to see how the second man, gun still at the ready, was taking all this. Evidently he wasn’t paid to listen, just to be present and on the alert with his gun. He probably thought all this nonstop talking was for types like Charles and Jay, who couldn’t do much else in the way of action, and had to hire types like him for backup. That, at least, was what Kate was pretty sure Fred was thinking.

“Don’t worry about Fred,” Charles said, as though he could read her thoughts, and not for the first time, Kate noticed. Am I that obvious, she wondered, or is this an easy situation to read? The latter, I think.

“What had it to do with me, Charles? you are asking yourself. What did I care about whether or not Jay hung around on the outskirts of the Fansler world? Good question.” Kate in fact had not thought of that question; her cognitive processes had definitely slowed down. She seemed to stay on the right side of fear, even hysteria, by thinking only on a rather superficial, partially attentive level; she knew herself to be incapable of complex or cogent thought.

“Well, as Jay’s daughter and as a Fansler yourself—and keeping that name rather than taking your husband’s made it much easier to find you, for which many thanks—as a Fansler you will, I know, be shocked to learn that I am an art thief and was, even then, though very few people knew that; not even the wife I was married to at the time had a clue; we’ve since gone our separate ways. Would you like another glass of water? Fred here will get it for you.”

Kate said she would appreciate more water. Fred, whose head had come up at his name, rather as Banny’s did, Kate thought, went off to get the water. Kate drank most of it when the glass was handed to her.

“This may get even thirstier,” Charles said. “Sorry I can’t offer you a more interesting drink. Your father doesn’t drink, as you may know. I guess that’s why he wanted a mother-figure like your mother, a woman who was a lady and didn’t drink. Where was I?” But of course he remembered exactly where he had got to.

“I’d been Jay’s roommate; I’d been his friend. He was my best man. But the truth of the matter, dear Ms. Fansler, is that it wasn’t until Jay was in your mother’s bed and out of his mind with amorousness that I told the poor chap what I wanted from him. You were on the way by then, which put even more power into my hands. Are you taking all this in?”

Kate nodded, and then proclaimed that she was indeed listening most carefully, which, she later said to Reed, was the most absolutely inexact statement she had ever uttered. The best she could manage at the time, she told Reed, was to catch the drift.

“Right,” Charles continued. “Well, not to beat about the bush, I was by the time of my wedding not only an art thief, I was a very accomplished practitioner in that calling, top of the field you might say. And there was Jay all lost to passion with Madame Fansler, who moved in the richest of circles, amid a most efficient and happy group of art collectors. Do you begin to get the idea?”

“Not exactly,” Kate said, which was the simple truth.

“And here I thought you were a clever girl, a professor and all. Well, if needs must, I’ll draw you a clearer picture. Are you concentrating?”

Kate nodded. She felt a slight urge to defend herself by pointing out that to be sitting on a stool, surrounded by two strange men with guns as well as one’s newly discovered father was not a situation exactly conducive to clear, perceptive thinking. But to say that required more energy than she wished to expend at that moment, so she just said “Do go on.”

“What I wanted of Jay and your mother was some guidance to their world of the rich, especially those who bought art and kept it at home on their walls to pretend they knew how to judge art. Of course, what they knew how to judge was the dealers who found the art for them, and those dealers knew what was hot and what would become even hotter. Sometimes, though not often, these rich friends of the Fanslers got a chance to buy something old and valuable and just a teeny bit foggy as to its provenance. I wanted to know where the art was, what the situation was, and then I wanted to steal it. I didn’t put it that way exactly to Jay; not at first. I said that I could sell the information, which would earn me credit in my professional circles. I didn’t mention right away that I planned to steal the pictures myself.”

“I’m following you,” Kate said, since he seemed to want some indication of her attention. If he expected her to become upset by what she was hearing, he would have to be patient. Given the chance, she would have liked to suggest that conversations taking place under pleasanter, less constrained circumstances were likelier to evoke more satisfactory responses. In truth, Charles was certainly getting more and more of her astonished concern as his story proceeded, but she considered it wiser not to reveal this.

“Well, dear Kate, your papa was not very quick about getting his newfound love, your mother-to-be, to cough up the information I wanted. I was getting slightly impatient, as you may imagine, but I didn’t want to put on too much pressure and perhaps ruin the whole plan. And then, just as I was about to tell Jay that I would go to Mr. Fansler and reveal the whole affair between his wife and Jay, you were born. And within a very short time, or so it seemed to me, Jay had been handed his hat and told to get lost, though doubtless this was hedged in more delicate language with many explanations and persuasions being offered. The upshot was that Jay took off. He left full of anger, resentment, despair and a wish to put himself as far away as possible from his lost lady love—i.e., your mother.”

“Go on,” Kate said.

“Ah, encouragement,” Charles said. “I may safely assume that you are indeed heeding my words.”

“Yes,” Kate said. “I am.”

“Good. I got hold of Jay just before he cleared out and told him either he went to his lady love for the information I wanted, and convinced her to continue providing that information, or I would go to her, threatening of course to tell her husband about all the hanky-panky in his very own house with his very own wife. Jay was, as you might expect, furious and refused my request in an exceedingly rude fashion. To say he was insulting hardly represents his words or manner.”

Kate glanced over at Jay. “In short,” she said to Charles, “he told you to publish and be damned, the only possible words in which to answer a blackmailer.”

“We are waking up, I see. Well, you are right. He said if his affair had to come out, then let it, though I knew he didn’t mean that for a moment. He was bluffing, of course. He said he wasn’t going to play any part in thieving and he doubted Louise, your mother, would either. Would you like another glass of water? I wouldn’t mind having one myself. Do you think you could find another glass Fred?”

Fred departed presumably to look for another glass. He returned to say he couldn’t see any other glass, and they were damn lucky to have that one which someone must have left by mistake. He proffered the one glass now filled with water to Charles.

“No,” Charles said. “Offer it first to the lady. Drink all you want, my dear. Fred can always fill it again.” But Kate, not wishing to aggravate Fred, drank only half of the water in the glass and then handed the glass to Fred to hand to Charles. Not much action in this play, she thought. Even Beckett had more action than this, not to mention better dialogue or monologue as the case might be.

“So there was our Jay, taking off in a cloud of dust and despair, and I was left to consider what my next move might be. After a time, I decided to visit the lady herself—your mother, my dear. Getting to see her was no great problem; we had met at my wedding and she knew me to be a friend of Jay’s. Perhaps she even wanted to see someone who reminded her of Jay, brought him to mind so to speak. Her complete innocence and pleasure at the thought of seeing me demonstrated clearly enough that Jay had told her nothing of my plan, or indeed anything about me, let alone that I was a purloiner of art. I didn’t mention my nefarious scheme at our first little chat—she served me tea, and let me google at you in your cradle. But at my second visit, some weeks later—it never pays to rush this sort of thing—I confessed the truth of my profession, as I called it; she was shocked, but a smart lady, no doubt of that. Her first question was, did Jay know? You still with me, dear?”

Kate assured him that she was, paying heed to every word she might have added, but didn’t.

“Here I made an important and, as I came to think, clever decision. I told her that Jay knew nothing of this, that unlike me he was boringly straight and honorable, as I was not. In fact, I added, I had hoped that she might be willing to help me in my less-than-honest endeavors. Doing so, I pointed out, might add a certain element of adventure and danger to her rather overmeticulous and mundane life. I was in high hopes this idea would appeal to her, and had she shown the slightest inclination to consider that challenge, I would have left her to ponder it and, I might have hoped, to persuade herself to add this touch of spice to her daily round. But no such luck. She flatly refused even to contemplate so dishonest a scheme, and ordered me to depart, in the most formal and ladylike if unmistakable manner. You, no doubt, would have responded in the same way: stiff, dismissive, but not obviously rude.”

“Perhaps,” Kate said. I would certainly like to say something exceedingly rude at this very moment, Kate thought, but did not utter the words. After all, her mother had not had a gun pointed at her at that particular moment, to say nothing of the other men present.

“Even with so definite a refusal,” Charles continued, “I decided to leave it a while. The more certain upright types are of refusing to be dishonest or illegal, the more attractive the opportunity to be just that often becomes upon reflection, when they’ve had time to convince themselves they wouldn’t be doing anything really wrong. But not with your mama, as I discovered upon my return visit.

“Of course, she didn’t want to see me, and told the servant to tell me she did not care to see me. I, however, had come prepared for this rejection, had asked the servant to return to her with a note I had written in advance for just such an eventuality. The note said—well, naturally I can’t remember the exact wording but it conveyed that she would certainly find herself acutely unhappy if she continued in her refusal to allow me an audience with her. It was a nice, formal, threatening note.

“She let me come into her presence after that, and the odd thing is that I now suspect she thought it was Jay I was threatening to harm. But that didn’t occur to me at the time. So I took a seat across from her—she was making some sort of tapestry thing, I remember, needle being pulled way out on a long thread, then pushed through to the other side and pulled out again—and I promised her that if she didn’t agree to help me, I would go to her husband and offer him a similar bargain. In that case, of course, I would threaten to make public the fact that his daughter was not his. We didn’t have DNA then, so I could not have proved it, but I was certain once the idea was in his head, he would find plenty of reason to believe me. You didn’t exactly look like his other children, as you may have noticed.”

Kate said that she had hardly in her youth paid much attention to any such dissimilarities between herself and her brothers, but certainly could both notice and remember the differences now.

“And what did my mother say in answer to that?” Kate asked. By now she was altogether attentive, not to say transfixed.

“Here’s the funny part,” Charles said, looking over at Jay. “She said that I should go right ahead and do whatever I had to do. She would play no role of any sort in any of it. Now that surprised me, so I went away and had a little think. And you know what I concluded, Jay old boy?” Charles turned toward Jay, who did not move. “Look at me when I talk to you,” Charles said, raising his gun a slight bit. Jay sat upright then and looked at Charles.

“That’s better,” Charles said. “What I concluded was that, for the most part, your mother simply didn’t believe I would do it, would go to Mr. Fansler and tell him all about his wife’s hanky-panky, not to mention the fetching, hardly legitimate result now making a legitimate claim on his fortune and his sacred honor. Maybe that’s what she figured. But you know what else I think she figured, Jay old boy? Maybe not consciously, not altogether consciously, but figured all the same: that if the truth about her love affair was revealed, that if she was thrown out into the cold without a cent and her daughter cast off with her, well, then she would have to find you, wouldn’t she Jay, and make a life with you after all? Maybe she hadn’t been quite so certain about her decision to stay with Fansler; maybe she wanted to give fate one more chance to intervene. What do you think, Jay?”