Escape the Night (18 page)

“I trust you restrained yourself from saying that.”

“He knows it well enough. I stalled by mumbling that I'd think about it.”

Benevides considered him. “With all that money, and no firm to worry about …”

“I just can't do that, George.”

Benevides shrugged. “Then string him along awhile, and see what happens.”

His smiling uncle held out the red rubber ball to ask if he would play
…

“Phil's not that much of a fool. Oh, maybe a week or two—I showed him enough skepticism to seem like myself.”

“I can imagine.” The grin flashed again. “I'm glad you're not
my
nephew, Peter—you're mean as a snake. To be strung out between you and Barth …”

Phillip had saved him
.

Carey examined his shoes. “Well, that's Phil's misfortune, isn't it. What weaknesses do we have?”

“Not many. As a trustee, Phillip's bound to act in your interests; as an adult five months from taking over, you're presumed to know what they are. Assuming you're not crazy, it would be tough for Phil to sell the firm out from under you, unless Barth backs you off somehow. Now
if
they could show that you were loony tunes …”

Carey looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Simply this: Barth spies on people. It's pop psychology, but maybe it
does
make sense that Clayton Barth would want your firm. Publishing may not be a big moneymaker, but it adds a sort of intellectual and social sheen.” Again, Carey saw the quick flash of teeth. “Barth's a little low on sheen.”

“I still don't get how
his
toads and snakes relate to mine.”

“There's a story, Peter.” Benevides leaned forward. “Barth wanted an oil company that its owner needed to sell. Barth found out the man had acrophobia—unreasoning fear of heights—by somehow getting to his psychiatrist. He insisted on conducting negotiations on the forty-fourth floor of the Gulf & Western Building, in an all-glass conference room. It was winter, and wind and rain kept battering the window. Barth refused to take any breaks. After two hours, the other guy was sweating and nauseated. Barth bought his company for a song.” Benevides paused for emphasis. “If you
do
have any weaknesses, Peter, Barth will try to use them—in or out of court. So when you finally meet him, you'd best not even blink.”

“I'm fine.”

“I never said you weren't.” Once more Benevides looked at him slantwise. “It might help getting some rest, though. You'd probably be less scared of Phillip.”

Carey was nettled. “I never said that, George.”

“Didn't you?” Abruptly, Benevides decided to ease the tension. “Then don't let me scare you about Barth, either. After all, you've got youth, money, a good-looking girl friend and, even better,
me
to represent you. Christ, you're on a roll.” He stood, grin abruptly wide and cocky, and spread his arms in a parody of Lady Justice. “The
law
is on your side, Peter. All you have to do is keep being yourself.”

A moment after Peter Carey ducked into the Lion's Head, Noelle Ciano knew that they would not be making love: Carey stared at her through the crush of drinkers as if she were not there.

She had been hunched at the end of the bar, drawing warmth from Irish coffee and smiles that did not threaten. Outside it was cold; she had stepped quickly from the subway, looking to the right and left, yet meeting no eyes. Here no one tried to hustle her, or force conversation. She felt her body relax, its easy balance on the barstool, and realized that the city, which assaulted her nerves and heightened her sense of danger, also made her sensual. Her legs had absorbed the metallic clatter of the train, bitter wind had stung her face as she hurried across Sheridan Square, a snowflake, falling in darkness, had melted on her lips. Now the coffee was a centrifuge of warmth in her hand, the bar a cocoon of smoke and beer and argument, the press of known faces and bodies. The conversation swirling around her had begun long ago, its ends and pieces, beery contentions and outrageous Irishisms, all tended by the same crowd of writers and reporters and those who wished to be, or might be again, seeing their lives in one another's faces and in the dust jackets of their own half-forgotten books, still framed and hanging on the wall, the scraps of dreams.

The regulars packed the dark, wooden bar, facing a brick wall fronted by a shelf of liquor bottles: in caps or peacoats or rimless glasses, contrasting with the suits and skirts of patrons returning from midtown, they looked faintly proletarian, or vaguely Irish. Some were Socialists who know no more of revolution than of exercise; others, like Noelle, had seen wars, cowardice and murder. A few men and women had slept together so long ago that they were friends again, each finding dates for the other. Fewer still were strangers. Three weeks earlier, one had come in from the street looking for a woman to kill and stabbed a cub reporter for the
Daily News
as she reached for her second gimlet; two editors and a composer from NYU had interrupted their argument long enough to chase him down. They had pinned him to the sidewalk until the police came; the woman had recovered and now sat buying them drinks as she explained her assailant's insanity plea, something about necrophilia. Listening, Noelle felt glad of Peter, and of living in a neighborhood …

She had fallen in love with both of them at about the same time, and by accident. At twenty-two—just out of college and looking for a job—she moved from Boston into a walk-up in the West Sixties with a shower in the living room; within six months the building went co-op and Noelle, still repaying student loans, became a refugee. In the West Seventies this happened twice more; Noelle saw Brooklyn yawning before her when a colleague at the
Times
decided to move in with his boyfriend, abandoning a three-room apartment on West 12th Street. He confessed this one afternoon, over drinks; at nine the next morning Noelle appeared at the rental office with his written notice and a certified check, insisting that they accept her application. Only later did she see the apartment.

It, and the West Village, were pleasant changes. She liked returning to a neighborhood of town houses and crooked cobblestone streets, far from the midtown hassle. The apartment on West 12th Street was clean and bright, with a retractable metal screen on the window nearest the fire escape—instead of iron bars—and a closet she used as a darkroom. She met Peter Carey two weeks after moving in; he was the only man who had slept there. Sometimes she would watch him in the mirror, as he dressed …

The coffee warmed her; whiskey coursed through her limbs until she felt each part of her body. She took another sip and knew, with the certainty that grows unexamined in the mind until one knows it all at once, that she was happier than she had ever been. Her photographs were nearer to what she saw and felt; she felt more when Peter touched her. The thought of Peter was like sun on her skin. Her thighs felt warm …

Then Peter Carey entered the bar.

He knifed toward her through the crush, graceful and controlled; the daily gauntlet of exercise that burned all fat from his body made him stand out in the crowd of drinkers. She grinned.

His cobalt eyes were opaque as a cat's. “Long day, Ciano,” he said, easing in next to her.

She knew the look; Peter seemed absent from his body more than any man she knew. Sometimes it amused her; one night at her apartment, where there was no dishwasher, he had wiped the same glass for minutes. “In June,” he had joked when she questioned him, “we can hire Phil to do this …”

“Phillip?” she asked now.

“And Clayton Barth.” He looked around. “I don't much feel like this tonight.”

“A drink, or the Village?”

“Both, I guess.”

Her warmth vanished. “There's a place in SoHo.” She shrugged. “We can eat there.”

They left.

Slipping out, the woman left Clayton Barth to brood in the silent blackness of his office, waiting …

The luminous dial of his wristwatch read 7:04.

Twenty-six minutes left.

Restless, Barth turned to the window: the view was now part of the fantasy which had brought him to this moment. His suite of offices towered above Fifth Avenue: thick panes of glass reduced the skyline to dim, silent rectangles rising from nowhere, etched with patchwork squares of yellow where unseen people worked late at unknown jobs. It had no sound or smell or feel; the only motion was in the headlights of distant cars moving like soldier ants above the black rivers of the city; the sole odd colors the pale-green dome of the RCA Building and a script “Coca-Cola” reflected backwards as a streak of red fluorescence on the dark glass of a high-rise. In Barth's mind, the city became a switchboard to which he held the circuits; he could string the yellow squares together in a pattern, or plunge it into darkness.

Turning from the window, he pulled up his pants and smiled; as always, the choice belonged to the woman.

That was part of its symmetry.

She had come to him through the personnel manager of a brokerage house he'd acquired: her broker husband had deserted her and then disappeared, leaving her to support three daughters with no assets save poise and the rudiments of typing. Barth was drawn by her air of refinement and the slender grace of her movements, the haunted, late-thirtyish good looks that suggested a frightened resolve to overcome difficulties for which she had not planned. Her eyes still betrayed the self-doubt of her abandonment …

To her audible surprise, he called to offer the job of receptionist for his Manhattan office; she did not know that he had fired the incumbent. He set the salary high enough to spare her the most scarifying hardships, calculating that she would know that it was more than she would find elsewhere but that inexperience and gratitude might keep her from guessing …

Someday he would force her to admit that she had known what he would ask.

He waited until she took her house back off the market and returned her daughters to parochial school, and then called her in, alone.

Her eyes grew moist as he explained what she must do.

He knew her pride, he told her softly, and so had invented rules. She need perform only once a week while he was in Manhattan and only during business hours; the choice of time and date was his. No one would witness their acts; he would give no hints in front of others. Answering his call, she would lock the door, then stand before him …

Her mouth had trembled as he named the three acts she could choose from.

Any one would please him, he explained; he only asked that she perform them all within each two-month period. Perhaps if she kept a notebook?

Of course, first she must undress.

Right now.

Looking down, he touched the first silver hairs crossing the crown of her head.

Afterwards, she wept at his feet.

It was all right, he soothed her, merely symbolic of the lives of all those helpless strivers clinging with their lips and bodies to the windows of faceless buildings, for the pension plans inside. Her debasement was no less civilized than those of others whose coinage had been devalued by modern life: he would pay her a bonus for each act, scaled in order of his preferences and the ability of her performances. He would not hurt her physically or demand that she scream …

Now his smile returned.

There was so much she did not know.

She had dressed in front of him, squaring her shoulders to retrieve some replica of self as he watched her set mental limits to her humiliation. Her co-workers would not guess …

Barth took to calling her in when they were gathered at her desk, imagining their smiles at the turning of his lock. Humiliated before the others, she still believed his grasp ended at the elevator.

In less than three months she would understand.

Even now, hair combed and lipstick reapplied, she was dining with the man she never spoke of, believing that Barth knew no more of his existence than he did of the services she performed at Barth's demand. She would smile through the candlelight of their favorite restaurant, waiting for the night when he would set her free.

Barth laughed aloud.

The man's name was David Pryor.

He was so perfect it was comic: a wealthy widower so Catholic—so concerned for her children and respectful of her hurt—that he would not touch her body before marriage. He had confided to friends that he would propose on her birthday.

March thirtieth.

Zipping his fly, Barth pondered how tauntingly close to that date he should learn of her debasement, and how.

Suddenly, he remembered for whom he waited: unwelcome and unbidden, the image flashed before his eyes.

He would use the telephone, of course.

When he had found his father lying in a pool of blood, the telephone still dangled above his shattered skull, like a revolver dropping from John Carey's hand.

His voice had been the bullet.

The first thing he had seen was blood and bone and brains spattered on the screen door to the kitchen.

He had walked two miles from school on a sweltering Texas afternoon so airless that he could think of nothing but sweat dripping down an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. Since the bookstore had failed, his father kept two Cokes in the refrigerator for them to drink at the kitchen table after school: his father would joke feebly, “See, Clayton, no whiskey for
me
, either,” and then—the only friend of his only son—he would ask the story of his day. But this day his father had planned to call Mr. Carey in faraway New York; finally he might have a job to talk about again. Clayton crossed the burnt-out lawn …

His mind absorbed the ghastly still life in slow motion: blood caked on the screen, a bourbon bottle next to his father's black notebook of telephone numbers. On the hanging calendar a freckled boy chased a dog with a baseball in its mouth toward a wall telephone with no mouthpiece. Its black horn dangled one foot above his father's staring eyes. His face now stopped at his forehead: the rest was blown off. A fly droned lazily above.