The Hellfire Club (11 page)

Paddi said, “Don’t you think all this Shorelands business is like some huge plot that you can’t quite see?”

Davey began to laugh. “Well, if you’re looking for a sinister plot, Lincoln Chancel is your man. He was a tremendous crook, I’m sure. It’s like the big secret in my family—the thing we don’t talk about. On the way up, my dad’s dad obviously stabbed everybody he met in the back, he must have stolen with both hands whenever he had the chance, he raped his way into a huge fortune...”

Davey stopped talking for a moment, a meaningless smile stuck to his face, as the crowded darkness in the center of the room seemed to thicken. He glanced down, and his eye found propped on the sofa the photograph from Shorelands. Lincoln Chancel was suddenly before him, beaming undimmed fury, rage, and frustration into his soul.

Paddi stroked his cheek with a cool finger and then stood up, held out her hand, and stepped back to lead him across the room.

“She insulted my grandfather, didn’t she? That girl who disappeared.”

“Maybe your grandfather insulted her.”

Moving backwards, she drew him toward a mural in which

Lord Night stood guard at the black opening of a cave, came up to the wall, and instead of bumping into it, slipped into the cave. Davey followed her through the opening.

And that, Davey said, was the end of his story.

26

“HOW CAN THAT
be the end?” Nora was trying not to yell. “What happened?”

“This is the part that’s hard to talk about.”

Davey had not finished talking about Paddi Mann. He had merely finished talking in that way.

“You remember what we saw today? Where we went?”

Nora nodded, almost dreading whatever he would say next.

He gave her no help. “That’s the point.”

“Did you ever find the manuscript? What happened to her? Oh no, you’re not going to tell me she was killed, are you?”

“I never did find the manuscript. Anyhow, my father told me that he’d decided against doing a scholarly edition of
Night Journey.
”

“That must have upset Paddi.”

Davey went back to smoothing out the bedcover, and Nora tried again. “She was so committed to that project.”

Davey nodded, looking down and pushing his lips forward in the way he did when forced into an uncomfortable situation.

“Just tell me what happened.”

“We had that Thursday night, when I gave her the picture. On Monday, I never saw her at all, and when I got back to my apartment all the coke caught up with me and I slept for two straight days. I just conked out. Woke up barely in time to shower and put on new clothes before I went back to the office.”

“Where Alden told you he wasn’t going through with your pet project. And you had to break the news to Paddi.”

“She was hanging around in the hallway when I got up to the fifteenth floor, like someone had told her what was going to happen. We didn’t really have time to talk before I went in, and she said, ‘Seven-thirty?’ or something like that, and I nodded, and then I went in and saw Dad. She was still there when I came out, and I gave her the bad news. She didn’t say a word. Just turned around and left. So at seven-thirty, I went to her place.

“When I got up to the loft, she wasn’t there, so I walked around for a little bit. I thought she might have been asleep or in the bathroom or something. I looked at her books. You know what they were? Nothing but editions of Driver novels. Hardbacks, paperbacks, foreign languages, illustrated editions.”

“That’s not too surprising,” Nora said.

“Wait. Then, of course, I had to go through the opening in the mural and look at the only other place in the whole loft I’d ever seen. So I walk into the cave. And my eyes bug out and my heart just about stops and I’m stuck. And after about a hundred years go by, I’m unstuck, I realize I’m not going to faint after all.”

He looked at Nora, who did nothing but look back at him. This, too, had the tone of one of Davey’s inventions.

“It was like a slaughterhouse. There was blood everywhere. I was so
scared.
I was pretty sure you couldn’t lose that much blood and still be alive, and I was gritting my teeth until I saw her body. I got to the other side of the bed, where this big smear of blood went all the way across the floor and halfway up the wall. And that almost made me puke, because I’d been sure I was going to see her there. I even looked under the bed.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”
And why do I want to believe this? He’s describing Natalie’s room.

“I didn’t know where the phone was! I don’t even know if there was a phone!” Davey looked wildly around the bedroom and opened and closed his mouth several times, as if trying to swallow this remark.

“Weren’t you afraid that whoever did it was still there?”

“Nora, if I’d even
thought
of that, I would have had a heart attack on the spot.”

“Where did you find her body?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, where was it? It must have been somewhere.”

“Nora, that’s what I’m saying. Nobody found it. It wasn’t there.”

“Somebody took it?”

“I don’t know!”
Davey yelled. He pressed both hands to his face, then let them drop.

“Oh. It was like Natalie, you mean. The body was gone, like Natalie.”

He nodded. “Like Natalie.”

Nora struggled to regain a sense of control, of a world in which things made sense. “But there can’t really be any connection, can there?”

“You think I know?”

She tried again. “I don’t suppose Natalie Weil quoted Hugo Driver at you and had you rummaging around for lost manuscripts . . .” In the midst of this, Nora remembered the books in Natalie Weil’s bedroom, and the sentence trailed off.

“No, I don’t suppose,” Davey said, still not looking up.

The moment of silence which followed seemed extraordinarily crowded to Nora.

“What did you do when you realized that she wasn’t there?”

Davey inhaled deeply and looked over her shoulder. “I was too scared to go home, so I walked all the way to midtown and took a hotel room under a phony name. Around noon the next day, I called Rod Clampett and asked if Paddi had turned up yet. He said he hadn’t seen her all day, but he’d tell her to give me a call when she showed up. Of course, she never did.”

“I guess you couldn’t exactly look for her,” Nora said. “But, Davey, excuse me, what’s the point of all this?”

“I have to get up and move around a little. Could you make some coffee or something?”

“I could make decaf,” she said, looking at the digital clock on the bedside radio. It was 2:00 A.M. She took from the couch a pale yellow robe, slipped it on, and tied its sash. Davey was sitting up in bed and staring at nothing. For a second, he looked like someone Nora had never seen before, an ineffectual man who would always be puzzled by life. Then he glanced up at Nora and was again her husband, Davey Chancel, trying to seem less distressed than he was.

“Nora,” he said, “do you know where that blue silk bathrobe is, the one from Thailand?”

“On the hook in the bathroom,” she said, and padded out to make coffee.

27

DAVEY SIPPED HIS
decaffeinated French Roast and winced at the heat. “A little kümmel would go nicely with this mocha java, don’t you think?”

Nora shook her head, then changed her mind. “What the hey.”

Davey went to the cupboard and took out a bottle of Hiram Walker kümmel, all Nora had been able to find on her last visit to the liquor store. He frowned at the label to remind her that she should have gone to another liquor store, if not to Germany, to find decent kümmel, and filled his cup to the brim. Then he moved behind Nora and tipped perhaps half an inch of the liquid into her cup. A smell of caraway and drunken flowers filled the kitchen.

“Well?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?” She sipped what tasted like a poison antidote with an accidental similarity to coffee.

“Yes, there is more. Yes, I’m kind of leery of telling you about it.”

She found herself taking another sip of the mixture, which seemed less ghastly than before.

“I left out one thing about the last time I was in Paddi’s loft.”

“Oh, no.”

“It wasn’t anything I
did,
Nora. I’m not
guilty
of anything.”

Then why do you look so guilty?
she wondered.

“Okay, I did something.” He drank again and tilted back his head as if, like a bird, he had to do that to swallow. Then he lowered his head and folded his hands around his cup. “I told you about looking under her bed.”

Nora suddenly felt that whatever Davey said next would forever change the way she felt about him. Then she thought that his story about Paddi Mann had already changed the way she thought about Davey.

“I saw something under there.”

“You saw something,” she said.

“A book.”

Is that all?
Nora thought.
No severed head, no million dollars in a paper bag?

“After I fished it out, I thought she might even have left it for me. What do you think it was?”

“The Egyptian Book of the Dead? The, uh, that Lovecraft thing, the
Necronomicon
?”

“
Night Journey.
A paperback.”

“Forgive me,” she said, “but that doesn’t actually seem too startling.”

Davey held her eyes with his own and took another swig of his doctored coffee. “Uh huh. I opened it up. You know, maybe there was a note or something in it for me. But there wasn’t anything in it except what was supposed to be there. And her name.”

“Her name,” Nora said, feeling like an echo.

“Written on the flyleaf. At the top. Paddi Mann.”

“She wrote her name in it.”

“That’s right. I shoved the book in my pocket and took it away with me. A few days later I tried to find it, but the damn thing was lost.”

“It fell out of your pocket.”

“Here we go,” he said, and set his cup down. “Hold on. I’ll be right back.” Davey stood up and walked out of the kitchen, nervously straightening his blue robe.

Nora heard him return to the bedroom. A closet door opened and closed. In a moment, he reappeared holding a familiar black paperback. As if reluctant to surrender it, he sat down and held it up before him in both hands before offering it to Nora.

“Well, I don’t suppose this is . . .” Nora noticed that she was as reluctant to take the book as he was to let go of it. She stopped talking and accepted it. Printed on the flyleaf, which had become slightly discolored, in small clear letters with a ballpoint pen, was PADDI MANN
.
Beneath her name, Davey had signed his own.

“So it turned up,” Nora said.

“Where, do you suppose?”

“How should I know?” She took her hands off the book, thinking that she did not actually care where the book had surfaced, and for some reason hoping that she would not have to find out. She braced herself for another of Davey’s inventions.

“Natalie Weil’s bedroom.”

“But—” Nora closed, then opened her mouth. No longer able to bear the expression in Davey’s eyes, she looked down at her fingers spread on the edge of the table as if she were about to play the piano. “This book, the same book.”

“This same book. I saw it when we went in, and after that big cop took us out, I went back, remember? I opened it up and just about passed out. Then I shoved it in my pocket.”

“What made you go back in? Did you suspect that it might be—?”

“Of course not. I wanted to take a closer look at it.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“You don’t know how it got there.”

“I didn’t put it there, if that’s what you mean.”

“You never gave Natalie a copy of
Night Journey.
”

He looked at her in real exasperation. “Do I have to spell it out for you?”

Nora guessed he did.

“Someone took it from me. He killed Paddi and left the book for me to find. Later that week he stole it from me. And the same person killed Natalie and left it in her bedroom.”

“The wolf killed Paddi Mann?” Nora asked, too confused to speak clearly.

“Lord Night? What does he have to do with it?”

“No, sorry, I mean
our
wolf—the Westerholm Wolf.” She waved her hands in front of her, as if she were erasing a blackboard. “That’s what I call the... the guy. The man who murdered Natalie and the others.”

“
Our
wolf.” Davey seemed disturbed, and Nora feared that his disturbance was caused by her appropriation of an animal sacred to Hugo Driver. “Yeah. It was the same guy. Okay. It has to be. He’s not much like Lord Night, though.”

“Davey,” she said, “not everything is related to Hugo Driver.”

“
Night Journey
is. Paddi Mann was certainly interested in Driver.”

She had made him defensive. “Davey, all I meant is that he couldn’t have left Paddi Mann’s copy of
Night Journey
in Sally Michaelman’s bedroom, or in Annabelle Austin’s, or any of the others. And maybe he didn’t steal yours. He probably found it.”

Davey was vigorously shaking his head. “I bet there’s some correspondence between the women he killed and certain parts of the book. In fact, that’s obvious.”

“Why is it obvious?”

“Because of Paddi,” he said. “Paddi was obviously Paddy, don’t you think?”

“Paddi was Paddi,” she said. “I don’t get it.”

“In the book. The mouse. The mouse named Paddy, who tells Pippin Little about the Field of Steam. Jesus, don’t you remember
anything
? Paddy is... Sometimes I wonder if you ever even read
Night Journey.
”

“I read parts of it.”

“You lied.” He was looking at her in absolute astonishment. “You told me you finished it, and you were lying to me.”

“I skipped around,” she said. “I apologize. I realize that this is important to you—”

“Important.”

“—but aren’t you maybe a little upset that a man who killed five women is—”

“Is what?”

“—somehow connected to you? I don’t know how to say it, because I don’t really understand it.” A flash of pain exploded behind the right half of Nora’s forehead and sent a hot tendril down into her pupil. She leaned back in her chair and placed her hand over her eye.

“I’ll never be able to get to sleep. I think I’ll go down to the family room and put on some music.”

Nora waited to be invited into the family room, so that she could refuse. She heard him push back his chair and stand up.

He told her that she could try lying down. He advised aspirin.

Nora removed her hand from her face. Davey tilted the square brown bottle over his cup and poured out several inches of amber liquid that reeked of caraway seed.

“You said you had that manuscript you found in the conference room, the Clyde Morning book? Would you mind if I took a look at it?”

“You want to read Clyde
Morning
?”

“I want to see the first new Blackbird Book,” Nora said, but Davey acknowledged this conciliatory sally only with a frown and a shrug of his shoulders. “Would you get it for me?”

Davey tilted his head and rolled his eyes. “If that’s what you
want.” He went into his “office.” Nora could hear him talking to himself as he worked the catches on his briefcase. He came back into the kitchen, awkwardly holding a surprisingly slim stack of typing paper held together with rubber bands. “Here you are.” He set the typescript on the table. “Tell me if you think it’s any good.”

She said, “You doubt the great Clyde Morning?”

Already at the kitchen door, Davey turned to give her a look that pretended to offer her sympathy for being left alone, and escaped.

She removed the rubber bands and tapped the bottom edge of the manuscript on the table. Then she folded over the last page and looked at the number in the top right-hand corner. Whatever miracles of the narrative art the hope of Blackbird Books had performed in
Spectre,
he had contained them within 183 pages.

From downstairs floated the eerie sound of Peter Pears singing words from a Britten opera Nora had heard many times but could not place. The voice seemed to come from an inhuman realm located between earth and heaven.
Death in Venice
, that was what Davey was listening to. She picked up the slim manuscript, carried it into the living room, switched on a lamp Sally Michaelman had sold her, and stretched out on a sofa to read.