“Look, Ricky,” he heard Don saying, and the voice was compelling enough to make him turn his head. When he saw what was happening on the floor of the apartment, he sat up. “Peter did it,” he heard Don say beside him.
The boy was standing six feet away from them, his eyes intent on the body of the woman lying some little way from them. Don was on his knees, rubbing his neck. Ricky met Don’s eyes, saw both horror and pain there, and then both of them looked back down at Anna Mostyn.
For a moment she looked as she had when he had first seen her in the reception room at Wheat Row: a young woman with a lovely fox face and dark hair: even now the old man saw the real intelligence and false humanity in her oval face. Her hand clutched the bone handle protruding out just below her breastbone; dark blood already poured from the long wound. The woman thrashed on the floor, contorting her face; her eyes fluttered. Random flakes of snow whirled in through the open window and settled down on each of them.
Anna Mostyn’s eyes flew open, and Ricky braced himself, thinking she would say something; but the lovely eyes drifted out of focus, not seeming to recognize any of the men. A wave of blood gushed from her wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across her body and touching the knees of the two men; she half-smiled, and a third wave rushed across her body and pooled on the floor.
For an instant only, as if the corpse of Anna Mostyn were a film, a photographic transparency over another substance, the three of them saw a writhing life through the dead woman’s skin—no simple stag or owl, no human or animal body, but a mouth opened beneath Anna Mostyn’s mouth and a body constrained within Anna Mostyn’s bloody clothing moved with ferocious life: it was as swirling and varied as an oil slick, and it angrily flashed out at them for the moment it was visible; then it blackened and faded, and only the dead woman lay on the floor.
In the next second, the color of her face died to chalky white and her limbs curled inward, forced by a wind the others could not feel. The dead woman drew up like a sheet of paper tossed on a fire, drawing in, her entire body curling inward like her arms and legs. She fluttered and shrank before them, becoming half her size, then a quarter of her size, no longer anything human, merely a piece of tortured flesh curling and shrinking before them, hurtled and buffeted by an unfelt wind.
The tenement room itself seemed to exhale, releasing a surprisingly human sigh through whatever was left of her throat. A green light flashed about them, flaring like a thousand matches: and the remainder of Anna Mostyn’s body fluttered once more and disappeared into itself. Ricky, by now leaning forward on his hands and knees, saw how the particles of snow falling where the body had been spun around in a vortex and followed it into oblivion.
Thirteen blocks away, the house across the street from John Jaffrey’s on Montgomery Street exploded into itself. Milly Sheehan heard the crack of the explosion, and when she rushed to her front window she was in time to see the facade of Eva Galli’s house fold inward like cardboard, and then break up into separate bricks flying inward to the fire already roaring up through the center of the house.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Peter asked. “It’s all over now. We did it all.”
“Yes, Peter,” Ricky said. “It’s all over.”
And for a moment the two men exchanged glances of agreement. Don stood up and walked as if idly to the window and saw only a slackening storm. He turned to the boy and embraced him.
“He asks how I feel,” Ricky said, supported by pillows on his bed in the Binghamton hospital. “Pneumonia is no fun. It affects the system adversely. I advise you to refrain from getting it.”
“I’ll try,” Don said. “You almost died. They just got the highway open in time for the ambulance to bring you up here. If you hadn’t pulled through, I’d have had to take your wife to France this spring.”
“Don’t tell that to Stella. She’ll run in here and pull my tubes out.” He smiled wryly. “She’s so eager to get to France she’d even go with a pup like you.”
“How long will you have to stay in here?”
“Two more weeks. Apart from the way I feel, it’s not too bad. Stella has managed to terrify all the nurses, so they take excellent care of me. Thank you for the flowers, by the way.”
“I missed you,” Don said. “Peter misses you too.”
“Yes,” Ricky said simply.
“It’s a funny thing about this whole affair. I feel closer to you and Peter—and Sears, I guess I have to say—than anyone since Alma Mobley.”
“Well, you know my thoughts about that. I blurted them all out when that young doctor doped me to the gills. The Chowder Society is dead, long live the Chowder Society. Sears once said to me that he wished he wasn’t so old. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but I agree with him now. I wish I could see Peter Barnes grow up—I wish I could help him. You’ll have to do that for me. We owe him our lives, you know.”
“I know. Whatever we don’t owe to your cold.”
“I was completely befuddled, back in that room.”
“So was I.”
“Well, thank God for Peter. I’m glad you didn’t tell him.”
“Agreed. He’s been through enough. But there is still a lynx to be shot.”
Don nodded.
“Because,” Ricky continued, “otherwise she’ll just come back again. And keep on coming back until all of us and most of our relatives are dead. I’ve supported my children for too long to want to see them go that way. And as much as I hate to say it, it looks like it’s your job.”
“In every way,” Don said. “It was really you who destroyed both Gregory and Fenny. And Peter killed their boss. I have to take care of the remaining business.”
“I don’t envy you the job. But I do have confidence in you. You have the knife?”
“I picked it up off the floor.”
“Good. I’d hate to think of it being lost. You know, back in that terrible room I think I saw the answer to one of the puzzles Sears and I and the others used to talk about. I think we saw the reason for your uncle’s heart attack.”
“I think so too,” Don said. “Just for a second. I didn’t know that you saw it too.”
“Poor Edward. He must have walked into John’s spare bedroom, expecting at the worst to find his actress in bed with Freddy Robinson. And instead she— what? Threw off the mask.”
Ricky was now very tired, and Don stood up to go. He put a stack of paperback books and a bag of oranges on the table beside Ricky’s bed.
“Don?” Even the old man’s voice was grainy with exhaustion.
“Yes?”
“Forget about pampering me. Just shoot me a lynx.”
The schools reopened; businessmen and bankers went back to work, taking down their shutters and facing the mounds of paperwork that had accumulated on their desks; slowly, the joggers and walkers began to appear on Milburn’s streets again. Annie and Anni, Humphrey Stalladge’s two good-looking barmaids, grieved for Lewis Benedikt and married the men they were living with; they conceived within a week of one another. If they had boys, they’d name them Lewis.
Some businesses never did open up again: a few men had gone bankrupt—you have to pay rent and property taxes on a shop, even if it is buried under a snowdrift. Others closed for more somber reasons. Leota Mulligan thought about running the Rialto by herself, but sold the site to a franchise chain and married Clark’s brother six months later: Larry was less a dreamer than Clark had been, but he was a dependable man and good company and he liked her cooking. Ricky Hawthorne quietly closed down the law office, but a young attorney in town persuaded him to sell him the firm’s name and goodwill. The new man took back Florence Quast and had new nameplates made for the door and the front of the building. Hawthorne, James was now Hawthorne, James and Whittacker. “Pity his name isn’t Poe,” Ricky said, but Stella didn’t think that was funny.
During all this time, Don waited. When he saw Ricky and Stella, they talked about the travel brochures that now covered the enormous coffee table; when he saw Peter Barnes, they talked about Cornell, about the writers the boy was reading, about how his father was adjusting to life without Christina. Twice Don and Ricky drove to Pleasant Hill and placed flowers on all the graves which had come into being since John Jaffrey’s funeral. Buried together in a straight line were Lewis, Sears, Clark Mulligan, Freddy Robinson, Harlan Bautz, Penny Draeger, Jim Hardie—so many new graves, separate piles of earth, still lumpy. In time, when the earth had settled, they would have their headstones. Christina Barnes was buried farther off beneath another heap of raw earth, on half of the double plot Walter Barnes had bought. Elmer Scales’s family had been buried closer to the top of the hill, in the Scales family plot first purchased by Elmer’s grandfather: a weatherworn stone angel guarded over them. There too they put flowers.
“No sign of a lynx yet,” Ricky said as they drove back to town.
“No lynx,” Don answered. Both of them knew that when it came, it would not be a lynx; and that the waiting might take months, years.
Don read, looked forward to his dinners with Ricky and Stella, watched entire sequences of movies on television (Clark Gable in a bush jacket turning into Dar Duryea in a gangster’s nipped-in suit turning into graceful, winning Fred Astaire in a Chowder Society tuxedo), found he could not write; waited. Often he woke himself up in the middle of the night, weeping. He too had to heal.
He threaded his uncle’s projector and set up the screen and discovered that his hands were trembling so badly that it would have taken him three tries to light a cigarette. Just the sequence of setting up Eva Galli’s only movie brought back the apparition of Gregory Bate in the Rialto, where all of them could have died. And he found that he feared that Eva Galli would have Alma Mobley’s face.
He had attached the speakers in case someone had added a musical sound track: made in 1925, China Pearl was a silent film. When he switched the projector on and sat back to watch, holding a drink to help his nerves, he discovered that the print had been altered by the distribution company. It was not just China Pearl, it was number thirty-eight in a series called “Classics of the Silent Screen”; besides a soundtrack, a commentary had been added. That meant, Don knew, that the film had been heavily edited.
“One of the greatest stars of the silent era was Richard Barthelmess,” said the announcer’s colorless voice, and the screen showed the actor walking down a mock-up of a street in Singapore. He was surrounded by Hollywood Filipinos and Japanese dressed as Malays—they were supposed to be Chinese. The announcer went on to describe Barthelmess’s career, and then summarized a story about a will, a stolen pearl, a false accusation of murder: the first third of the film had been cut. Barthelmess was in Singapore looking for the true murderer, who had stolen “the famous Pearl of the Orient.” He was aided by Vilma Banky, who owned a bar “frequented by waterfront scum” but “as a Boston girl, has a heart the size of Cape Cod …”
Don turned the speakers off. For ten minutes he watched the lipsticked little actor gaze soulfully at Vilma Banky, topple villainous “waterfront scum,” run about on boats: he hoped that if Eva Galli would appear in this butchered version, he would recognize her. Vilma Banky’s bar housed a number of women who draped themselves over the customers and languorously sipped tall drinks. Some of these prostitutes were plain, some of them were stunning: any of them, he supposed, could have been Eva Galli.
But then a girl appeared framed in the doorway of the bar, studio fog boiling behind her, and pouted at the camera. Don looked at her sensual, large-eyed face, and felt his heart freeze. He hurriedly switched on the soundtrack.
“… the notorious Singapore Sal,” crooned the announcer. “Will she get to our hero?” Of course she was not the notorious Singapore Sal, that was an invention of whoever had written the inane commentary; but he knew she was Eva Galli. She sauntered through the bar and approached Barthelmess; she stroked his cheek. When he brushed her hand away, she sat down on his lap and kicked one leg in the air. The actor dumped her on the floor. “So much for Singapore Sal,” gloated the announcer.
Don yanked out the speaker leads, stopped the film and backed it up to Eva Galli’s entrance, and watched the sequence again.
He had expected her to be beautiful, and she was not. Beneath the makeup, she was just a girl of ordinary good looks; she looked nothing like Alma Mobley. She had enjoyed the business of acting, he saw, playing the part of an ambitious girl playing a part had amused her—how she would have enjoyed stardom! As Ann-Veronica Moore, she had played at it again; even Alma Mobley had seemed fitted for the movies. She could have molded that passive beautiful face over a thousand characters. But in 1925, she had miscalculated, made a mistake: cameras exposed too much, and what you saw when you looked at Eva Galli on screen was a young woman who was not likable. Even Alma had not been likable; even Anna Mostyn, when truly seen—as at the Barnes’s party—seemed coldly perverse, driven by willpower. They could for a time evoke human love, but nothing in them could return it. What you finally saw was their hollowness. They could disguise it for a time, but never finally, and that was their greatest mistake; a mistake in being. Don thought he could recognize it anywhere now, in any nightwatcher pretending to be man or woman.