The Secret History (87 page)

Now that the first, horrible shock was over, I was starting to breathe a bit easier. “What sort of a letter is it?” I asked him.

Julian shrugged. “You can have a look at it, if you like.”

I picked it up. Francis looked at it over my shoulder. It was single-spaced, on five or six small sheets of paper, some of which looked not unlike some writing paper which Bunny used to have. But though the sheets were roughly the same size, they didn’t all match. I could tell, by the way the ribbon had struck a letter sometimes half-red and half-black, that it had been written on the typewriter in the all-night study room.

The letter itself was disjointed, incoherent, and—to my astonished eyes—unquestionably genuine. I skimmed it only briefly, and remember so little about it that I am unable to reproduce it here, but I do remember thinking that if Bunny wrote it, he was a lot closer to a breakdown than any of us had thought. It was filled with profanities of various sorts which it was difficult, even in the most desperate of circumstances, to imagine Bunny using in a letter to Julian. It was unsigned, but there were several clear references which made it plain that Bunny Corcoran, or someone purporting to be him, was the author. It was badly spelled, with a great many of Bunny’s characteristic errors, which fortunately couldn’t have meant much to Julian, as Bunny was such a poor writer that he usually had someone else go over his work before he handed it in. Even I might have had doubts about the authorship, the thing was so garbled and paranoid, if not for the reference to the Battenkill murder: “He”—(Henry, that is, or so the letter ran approximately at one point)—“is a fucking Monster. He has killed a man and he wants to kill Me, too. Everybody is in on it. The man they killed in October, in Battenkill county. His name was McRee. I think they beat him to death I am not sure.” There were other accusations—some of them true (the twins’ sexual practices), some not; all of which were so wild that they only served to discredit the whole. There was no mention
of my name. The whole thing had a desperate, drunken tone that was not unfamiliar. Though this didn’t occur to me until later, I now believe he must have gone to the all-night study room and written it on the same night that he came drunk to my room—either directly before or after, probably after—in which case it was a pure stroke of luck we didn’t run into each other when I was on my way to the Science Building to telephone Henry. I remember only one other thing, which was its closing line, and the only thing I saw which struck a pang at me: “Please Help me, this is why I wrote you, you are the only person that can.”

“Well, I don’t know who wrote this,” said Francis at last, his tone offhand and perfectly casual, “but whoever they were, they certainly couldn’t spell.”

Julian laughed. I knew he didn’t have the slightest idea that the letter was real.

Francis took the letter and shuffled ruminatively through the pages. He stopped at the next-to-last sheet—which was of a slightly different color than the rest—and idly turned it over. “It seems that—” he said, and then stopped.

“Seems that what?” said Julian pleasantly.

There was a slight pause before Francis continued. “Seems that whoever wrote this needed a new typewriter ribbon,” he said; but that was not what he was thinking, or I was thinking, or what he had been about to say. That had been struck from his mind when, turning the irregular sheet over, the two of us saw, with horror, what was on the back of it. It was a sheet of hotel stationery, engraved, at the top, with the address and letterhead of the Excelsior: the hotel where Bunny and Henry had stayed in Rome.

Henry told us, later, head in hands, that Bunny had asked him to buy him another box of stationery the day before he died. It was expensive stuff, white cream laid, imported from England; the best they had at the store in town. “If only I’d bought it for him,” he said. “He asked me half a dozen times. But I figured, there wasn’t much point, you see.…” The sheet from the Excelsior wasn’t quite so heavy, or fine. Henry speculated—probably correctly—that Bunny had got to the bottom of the box, so he rooted around in his desk and found that piece, roughly the same size, and turned it over to use the back.

I tried not to look at it, but it kept obtruding at the corners of my vision. A palace, drawn in blue ink, with flowing script
like the script on an Italian menu. Blue edges on the paper. Unmistakable.

“To tell you the truth,” said Julian, “I didn’t even finish reading it. Obviously the perpetrator of this is quite disturbed. One can’t say, of course, but I think it must have been written by another student, don’t you?”

“I can’t imagine that a member of the faculty would write something like this, if that’s what you mean,” said Francis, turning the letterhead back over. We didn’t look at each other. I knew exactly what he was thinking:
how can we steal this page? how can we get it away?

To distract Julian’s attention, I walked to the window. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I said, my back to both of them. “It’s hard to believe there was snow on the ground hardly a month ago.…” I babbled on, hardly aware of what I was saying, and afraid to look around.

“Yes,” said Julian politely, “yes, it is lovely out,” but his voice came not from where I was expecting it but farther away, near the bookcase. I turned and saw that he was putting on his coat. From the look on Francis’s face, I knew he hadn’t succeeded. He was turned halfway, watching Julian from the corner of his eye; for a moment, when Julian turned his head to cough, it seemed like he was going to be able to get away with it but no sooner had he pulled the page out than Julian turned around, and he had no choice but to casually place it where it had been, as if the pages were out of order and he was simply rearranging them.

Julian smiled at us, by the door. “Are you boys ready?” he said.

“Certainly,” said Francis, with more enthusiasm than I knew he felt. He lay the letter, folded, back on the table and the two of us followed him out, smiling and talking, though I could see the tension in the back of Francis’s shoulders and I was biting the inside of my bottom lip with frustration.

It was a miserable lunch. I remember hardly anything about it except that it was a very bright day, and we sat at a table too close to the window, and the glare in my eyes only increased my confusion and discomfort. And all the time we talked about the letter, the letter, the letter. Might whoever sent it have a grudge against Julian? Or was someone angry at us? Francis was more composed than me, but he was downing the glasses of house wine
one after another, and a light sweat had broken out on his forehead.

Julian thought the letter was a fake. That was obvious. But if he saw the letterhead, the game was up, because he knew as well as we did that Bunny and Henry had stayed at the Excelsior for a couple of weeks. Our best hope was that he would simply throw it away, without showing it to anyone else or examining it further. But Julian liked intrigue, and secrecy, and this was the sort of thing that could keep him speculating for days. (“
No
. Could it have been a faculty member? Do you think?”) I kept thinking about what he’d said earlier, about showing it to the Dean. We would have to get hold of it somehow. Break in his office, maybe. But even assuming he left it there, in a place where we could find it, that meant waiting six or seven hours.

I drank a good deal during lunch, but by the time we were finished I was still so nervous that I had brandy with my dessert instead of coffee. Twice, Francis slipped away to telephone. I knew he was trying to get Henry, to ask him to go over to the office and nip the letter while we had Julian captive at the Brasserie; I knew also, from his tense smiles when he returned, that he wasn’t having any luck. After the second time he came back, an idea occurred to me: if he could leave to telephone, why couldn’t he just go out the back and get in his car and go get it himself? I would have slipped out and done it myself if I had only had the car keys. Too late—as Francis was paying the check—I realized what I should have said: that I’d left something in the car and needed the keys to go unlock the door and get it.

On the way back to school, in the charged silence, I realized that something we had always relied on was the ability to communicate whenever we wanted. Always, previously, in an emergency we could throw out something in Greek, under the guise of an aphorism or quotation. But now that was impossible.

Julian didn’t invite us back up to his office. We watched him going up the walk, waved as he turned at the back door to the Lyceum. It was, by now, about one-thirty in the afternoon.

We sat motionless in the car for a moment after he disappeared. Francis’s chummy, goodbye smile had died on his face. Suddenly, and with a violence that frightened me, he leaned down and banged his forehead on the steering wheel. “Shit!” he yelled. “Shit! Shit!”

I grabbed his arm and shook it. “Shut up,” I said.

“Oh, shit,” he wailed, rolling his head back, the heels of his hands pressed to his temples. “Shit. This is it, Richard.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s over. We’ve had it. We’re going to jail.”

“Shut up,” I said again. His panic, oddly, had sobered me. “We’ve got to figure out what to do.”

“Look,” said Francis. “Let’s just go. If we leave now we can be in Montreal by dark. Nobody will ever find us.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“We’ll stay in Montreal a couple of days. Sell the car. Then take the bus to, I don’t know, Saskatchewan or something. We’ll go to the weirdest place we can find.”

“Francis, I wish you would calm down for a minute. I think we can handle this.”

“
What are we going to do?
”

“Well, first, I think, we’ve got to find Henry.”

“Henry?” He looked at me in amazement. “What makes you think he’ll be any help? He’s so whacked-out, he doesn’t know which way—”

“Doesn’t he have a key to Julian’s office?”

He was quiet a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think he does. Or he used to.”

“There you go,” I said. “We’ll find Henry and drive him over here. He can make some excuse to get Julian out of the office. Then one of us can slip up the back stairs with the key.”

It was a good plan. The only problem was, running Henry down wasn’t so easy as we’d hoped. He wasn’t at his apartment, and when we went by the Albemarle, his car wasn’t there.

We drove back to campus to check the library, then back to the Albemarle. This time Francis and I got out of the car and walked around the grounds.

The Albemarle had been built in the nineteenth century, as a retreat for rich convalescents. It was shady and luxurious, with tall shutters and a big, cool porch—everyone from Rudyard Kipling to FDR had stayed there—but it wasn’t much bigger than a big private house.

“You tried the desk clerk?” I asked Francis.

“Don’t even think about it. They’re registered under a phony name, and I’m sure Henry gave the innkeeper some story, because when I tried to talk to her the other night she clammed up in a second.”

“Is there any way we can get in past the lobby?”

“I have no idea. My mother and Chris stayed here once. It isn’t that big a place. There’s only one set of stairs that I know of, and you have to walk past the desk to get to them.”