Chapter 6

“Mr. Corcoran had it on but somebody switched channels before it was over,” said Camilla.

“How’d it end?”

“What’s the last part you saw?”

“They were in the mountain laboratory. The young enthusiastic scientists had all ganged up on that cynical old scientist who didn’t want to help.”

I was explaining the dénouement when Cloke Rayburn abruptly shouldered through the crowd. I stopped talking, thinking he was

headed for the twins and me, but instead he only nodded to us and walked up to Henry, who now was standing on the edge of the porch.

“Listen,” I heard him say. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you last night. I got hold of those guys in New York and Bunny hasn’t been there.”

Henry didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said: “I thought you said you couldn’t get in touch with them.”

“Well, it’s possible, it’s just like a big headache. But they hadn’t seen him, anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“What?”

“I thought you said you couldn’t believe a word they said.”

He looked startled. “I did?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, listen to me,” said Cloke, taking off his sunglasses. His eyes were bloodshot and pouchy. “These guys are telling the truth. I didn’t think of this before—well, I guess it hasn’t been that long—but anyway, the story’s all over the New York papers. If they really did something to him, they wouldn’t be sticking around their apartment taking phone calls from me.… What is it, man?” he said nervously when Henry didn’t respond. “You didn’t say anything to anybody, did you?”

Henry made an indistinct noise in the back of his throat, which might have meant anything.

“What?”

“No one has asked,” said Henry.

There was no expression on his face. Cloke, his discomfiture evident, waited for him to continue. Finally, he put on his sunglasses again in a slightly defensive manner.

“Well,” he said. “Um. Okay, then. See you later.”

After he’d gone Francis turned to Henry, a bemused look on his face. “What on earth are you up to?” he said.

But Henry didn’t answer.

The day passed like a dream. Voices, dogs barking, the whap of a helicopter overhead. The wind was strong and the roar of it in the trees was like an ocean. The helicopter had been sent from the New York State Police headquarters in Albany; it had, we were told, a special infrared heat sensor. Someone had also volunteered something called an “ultra-light” aircraft which swooped overhead, barely clearing the tops of the trees. There were real ranks now, squadron leaders with bullhorns, we marched over the snowy hills wave upon wave.

Cornfields, pastures, knolls heavy with undergrowth. As we approached the base of the mountain the land took a downward slope. A thick fog lay in the valley below, a smoldering cauldron of white from which only the treetops protruded, stark and Dantesque.

By degrees, we descended, and the world sank from view. Charles, beside me, stood out sharp and almost hyper-realistic with his ruddy cheeks and labored breaths but further down, Henry had become a wraith, his large form light and strangely insubstantial in the mist.

When the ground rose several hours later, we came up on the rear of another, smaller party. In it were some people I was surprised and somehow touched to see. There was Martin Hoffer, an old and distinguished composer on the music faculty; the middle-aged lady who checked IDs in the lunch line, looking inexplicably tragic in her plain cloth coat; Dr. Roland, the blares of his nose-blowing audible even at a distance.

“Look,” said Charles. “That’s not Julian, is it?”

“Where?”

“Surely not,” said Henry.

But it was. Rather characteristically, he pretended not to see us until we were so close it was impossible for him to ignore us any longer. He was listening to a tiny, fox-faced lady whom I knew to be a housekeeper in the dorms.

“Goodness,” he said, when she had finished talking, drawing back in mock surprise. “Where did you come from? Do you know Mrs.

O’Rourke?”

Mrs. O’Rourke smiled shyly. “I seen all of you before,” she said.

“The kids think the maids don’t notice them, but I know you all by

sight.”

“Well, I should hope so,” said Charles. “You haven’t forgotten me, have you? Bishop House, number ten?”

He said this so warmly that she flushed with pleasure.

“Sure,” she said. “I remember you. You was the one was always running off with my broom.”

During this exchange Henry and Julian were talking softly. “You should have told me before now,” I heard Julian say.

“We did tell you.”

“Well, you did, but still. Edmund’s missed class before,” said Julian, looking distressed. “I thought he was playing sick. People are saying that he’s been kidnapped but I think that’s rather silly, don’t you?”

“I’d rather one of mine be kidnapped than out in this snow for six days,” said Mrs. O’Rourke.

“Well, I certainly hope that nothing has happened to him. You know, don’t you, that his family is here? Have you seen them?”

“Not today,” said Henry.

“Of course, of course,” said Julian hastily. He disliked the Corcorans. “I haven’t been to see them either, it’s really not the time to intrude.… This morning I did run into the father quite by accident, and one of the brothers as well. He had a baby with him. Riding it on his shoulders as if they were on their way to a picnic.”

“Little one like him had no business being out in this weather,” said Mrs. O’Rourke. “Hardly three years old.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I agree. I can’t imagine why anyone would have a baby along on something like this.”

“I certainly wouldn’t have let one of mine yell and carry on like that.”

“Perhaps it was cold,” murmured Julian. The tone he used was a delicate cue that he had tired of the subject and wished to stop talking about it.

Henry cleared his throat. “Did you talk to Bunny’s father?” he said.

“Only for a moment. He—well, I suppose we all have different ways of handling these things.… Edmund looks a great deal like him, doesn’t he?”

“All the brothers do,” said Camilla.

Julian smiled. “Yes! And so many of them! Like something from a fairy story.…” He glanced at his watch. “Goodness,” he said, “it’s late.”

Francis started from his morose silence. “Are you leaving now?”

he asked Julian anxiously. “Do you want me to drive you?”

This was a blatant attempt at escape. Henry’s nostrils flared, not so much in anger as in a kind of exasperated amusement: he gave Francis a dirty look, but then Julian, who was gazing into the distance and quite unaware of the drama which hinged on his reply, shook his head.

“No, thank you,” he said. “Poor Edmund. I’m really quite worried, you know.”

“Just think how his parents must feel,” said Mrs. O’Rourke.

“Yes,” said Julian, in a tone of voice which managed to convey at once both sympathy with and distaste for the Corcorans.

“I’d be wild if it was me.”

Unexpectedly, Julian shuddered and turned up the collar of his coat. “Last night I was so upset I could hardly sleep,” he said. “He’s such a sweet boy, so silly; I’m really very fond of him. If anything should have happened to him I don’t know if I could bear it.”

He was looking over the hills, at all that grand cinematic expanse of men and wilderness and snow that lay beneath us; and though his voice was anxious there was a strange dreamy look on his face. The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing.

Henry saw it, too. “Like something from Tolstoy, isn’t it?” he remarked.

Julian looked over his shoulder, and I was startled to see that there was real delight on his face.

“Yes, ” he said. “Isn’t it, though?”

At about two in the afternoon, two men in dark overcoats walked up to us from nowhere.

“Charles Macaulay?” said the shorter of the two. He was a barrel-chested fellow with hard, genial eyes.

Charles, beside me, stopped and looked at him blankly.

The man reached in his breast pocket and flipped out a badge.

“Agent Harvey Davenport, Northeast Regional Division, FBI.”

For a moment I thought Charles might lose his composure. “What do you want?” he said, blinking.

“We’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.”

“It won’t take long,” said the taller man. He was an Italian with stooped shoulders and a sad, doughy nose. His voice was soft and pleasant.

Henry, Francis, Camilla had all stopped and were staring at the strangers with varying degrees of interest and alarm.

“Besides,” said Davenport snappily. “Good to get out of the cold for a minute or two. Bet you’re freezing your balls off, huh?”

After they left, the rest of us were bristling with anxiety, but of course we couldn’t talk and so we continued to shuffle along, eyes on the ground and half afraid to look up. Soon it was three o’clock, then four. Things were far from over, but at the first premature signs that the day’s search was breaking up we headed rapidly and silent for the car.

“What do you suppose they want with him?” said Camilla for about the tenth time.

“I don’t know,” said Henry.

“He gave them a statement already.”

“He gave the police one. Not these people.”

“What difference does it make? Why would they want to talk to him?”

“I don’t know, Camilla.”

When we got to the twins’ apartment we were relieved to find Charles there, alone. He was lying on the couch, a drink on the table beside him, talking to his grandmother on the telephone.

He was a little drunk. “Nana says hi,” he said to Camilla when he got off the phone. “She’s all worried. Some bug or something has got up into her azaleas.”

“What’s that all over your hands?” said Camilla sharply.

He held them out, palms up, none too steadily. The tips of the fingers were black. “They took my fingerprints,” he said. “It was kind of interesting. I’d never had it done before.”

For a moment we were all too shocked to say anything. Henry stepped forward, took one of his hands and examined it beneath the light. “Do you know why they did it?” he said.

Charles wiped his brow with the back of his free wrist. “They’ve sealed off Bunny’s room,” he said. “Some people are in there dusting for prints and putting things in plastic bags.”

Henry dropped his hand. “But why?”

“I don’t know why. They wanted the fingerprints of everybody who’d been in the room on Thursday and touched things.”

“What good will that do? They don’t have Bunny’s fingerprints.”

“Apparently they do have them. Bunny was in the Boy Scouts and his troop went in and was fingerprinted for some kind of Law Enforcement badge, years ago. They’re still on file somewhere.”

Henry sat down. “Why did they want to talk to you?”

“That was the first thing they asked me.”

“What?”

“ ‘Why do you think we want to talk to you.’ ” He dragged the heel of his hand down the side of his face. “These people are smart, Henry,” he said. “A lot smarter than the police.”

“How did they treat you?”

Charles shrugged. “The one called Davenport was pretty brusque.

The other one—the Italian—was nicer, but he scared me. Didn’t say much, just listened. He’s much more clever than the other one.…”

“Well?” said Henry impatiently. “What is it?”

“Nothing. We … I don’t know. We’ve got to be really careful, that’s all. They tried to trip me up more than once.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when I told them Cloke and I had gone down to Bunny’s room around four on Thursday, for instance.”

“That’s when you did go,” said Francis.

“I know that. But the Italian—really, he’s a very pleasant man—

began to look all concerned. ‘Can that be right, son?’ he said.

‘Think.’ I was really confused, because I knew we went at four, and then Davenport said, ‘You’d better think about it, because your buddy Cloke told us you two were down at that room for a solid hour before you called anybody.’ ”

“They wanted to see if you and Cloke had anything to hide,” Henry said.

“Maybe. Maybe they just wanted to see if I would lie about it.”

“Did you?”

“No. But if they’d asked me something a little touchier, and I was kind of scared … You don’t realize what it’s like. There are two of them, and only one of you, and you don’t have much time to think.…

I know, I know,” he said despairingly. “But it’s not like the police.

These small-town cops don’t actually expect to find anything. They’d be shocked to know the truth, probably wouldn’t believe it if you told them. But these guys …” He shuddered. “I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances,” he said. “It’s not that we’re so smart, it’s just that we don’t look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won’t be taken in by that.” He picked up his glass and took a drink. “By the way,” he said, “they asked a million questions about your trip to Italy.”

Henry glanced up, startled. “Did they ask at all about the finances?

Who paid for it?”

“No.” Charles finished off the glass and rattled the ice around for a moment. “I was terrified they would. But I think they were kind of overly impressed by the Corcorans. I think if I told them that Bunny

never wore the same pair of underpants twice they would probably believe me.”

“What about that Vermonter?” Francis said. “The one on television last night?”

“I don’t know. They were a lot more interested in Cloke than anything else, it seemed to me. Maybe they just wanted to make sure his story matched up with mine, but there were a couple of really strange questions that—I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s going around telling people this theory of his, that Bunny was kidnapped by drug dealers.”

“Certainly not,” said Francis.

“Well, he told us, and we’re not even his friends. Though the FBI men seem to think he and I are on intimate terms.”

“I hope you took pains to correct them,” said Henry, lighting a cigarette.

“I’m sure Cloke would have set them straight on that account.”

“Not necessarily,” said Henry. He shook out his match and threw it in an ashtray; then he inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “You know,”

he said, “I thought at first that this association with Cloke was a great misfortune. Now I see it’s one of the best things that could have happened to us.”

Before anyone could ask him what he meant, he glanced at his watch. “Goodness,” he said. “We’d better go. It’s almost six.”

On the way to Francis’s, a pregnant dog ran across the road in front of us.

“That,” said Henry, “is a very bad omen.”

But of what he wouldn’t say.

The news was just beginning. The anchorman glanced up from his papers, looking grave but at the same time very pleased. “The frantic search—thus far a fruitless one—continues, for missing Hampden College student Edward Corcoran.”

“Gosh,” said Camilla, reaching into her brother’s coat pocket for a cigarette. “You’d think they’d get his name right, don’t you?”

The picture cut to an aerial shot of snowy hills, dotted like a war map with pinprick figures, Mount Cataract looming lopsided and huge in the foreground.

“An estimated three hundred searchers,” said the voice-over,

“including National Guard, police, Hampden firefighters and Central Vermont Public Service employees, combed the hard-to-reach area on this, Day Two of the search. In addition, the FBI has launched an investigation of its own in Hampden today.”

The picture wobbled, then switched abruptly to a lean, white-haired man in a cowboy hat who the caption informed us was Dick Postonkill, Hampden County sheriff. He was talking, but no sound came from his mouth; searchers milled curiously in the snowy background, raising on tiptoe to jeer silently at the camera.

After a few moments, the audio lurched on with a jerky, garbled sound. The sheriff was in the middle of a sentence.

“—to remind hikers,” he said, “to go out in groups, stay on the trail, leave a projected itinerary and carry plenty of warm clothing in case of sudden drops in temperature.”

“That was Hampden County sheriff Dick Postonkill,” said the anchorman brightly, “with a few tips for our viewers on winter hiking safety.” He turned, and the camera zoomed in on him at a different angle. “One of the only leads so far in the Corcoran disappearance case has been provided by William Hundy, a local businessman and ActionNews Twelve viewer, who phoned our TIPS line with information regarding the missing youth. Today Mr. Hundy has been cooperating with state and local authorities in providing a description of Corcoran’s alleged abductors.…”

“ ‘State and local,’ ” said Henry.

“What?”

“Not federal.”

“Of course not,” said Charles. “Do you think the FBI is going to believe some dumb story that a Vermonter made up?”

“Well, if they don’t, why are they here?” said Henry.

This was a disconcerting thought. In the brilliant, delayed-tape noontime sun, a group of men hurried down the courthouse steps.

Mr. Hundy, his head down, was among them. His hair was slicked back and he wore, in lieu of his service station uniform, a baby-blue leisure suit.

A reporter—Liz Ocavello, a sort of local celebrity, with her own current-issues program and a segment called “Movie Beat” on the local news—approached, microphone in hand. “Mr. Hundy,” she said. “Mr. Hundy.”

He stopped, confused, as his companions walked ahead and left him standing alone on the steps. Then they realized what was going on and came back up to huddle around him in an official-looking cluster. They grabbed Hundy by the elbows and made as if to hustle him away but he hung back, reluctant.

“Mr. Hundy,” said Liz Ocavello, nudging her way in. “I understand you have been working today with police artists on composite drawings of the persons you saw with the missing boy on Sunday.”

Mr. Hundy nodded rather briskly. His shy, evasive manner of the day before had given way to a slightly more assertive stance.

“Could you tell us what they looked like?”

The men surged around Mr. Hundy once more, but he seemed entranced by the camera. “Well,” he said, “they wasn’t from around here. They was … dark.”

“Dark?”

They now were tugging him down the steps, and he glanced back over his shoulder, as if sharing a confidence. “Arabs,” he said. “You know.”

Liz Ocavello, behind her glasses and her big anchorwoman hairdo, accepted this disclosure so blandly that I thought I’d heard it wrong. “Thank you, Mr. Hundy,” she said, turning away, as Mr. Hundy and his friends disappeared down the steps. “This is Liz Ocavello at the Hampden County Courthouse.”

“Thanks, Liz,” the newscaster said cheerily, swiveling in his chair.

“Wait,” said Camilla. “Did he say what I thought he said?”

“What?”

“Arabs? He said Bunny got in a car with some Arabs? ”

“In a related development,” the anchorman said, “area churches have joined hands in a prayer effort for the missing boy. According to Reverend A. K. Poole of First Lutheran, several churches in the tri-state area, including First Baptist, First Methodist, Blessed Sacrament and Assembly of God, have offered up their—”

“I wonder what this mechanic of yours is up to, Henry,” said Francis.

Henry lit a cigarette. He had smoked it halfway down before he said: “Did they ask you anything about Arabs, Charles?”

“No.”

“But they just said on television that Hundy’s not dealing with the FBI,” Camilla said.

“We don’t know that.”

“You don’t think it’s all some kind of setup?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

The picture on the set had changed. A thin, well-groomed woman in her fifties—Chanel cardigan, pearls at the neckline, hair brushed into a stiff, shoulder-length flip—was talking, in a nasal voice which was oddly familiar.

“Yes,” she said; where had I heard that voice before? “The people of Hampden are ever so kind. When we arrived at our hotel, late yesterday afternoon, the concierge was waiting for—”

“Concierge,” said Francis, disgusted. “They don’t have a concierge at the Coachlight Inn.”

I studied this woman with new interest. “That’s Bunny’s mother?”

“That’s right,” said Henry. “I keep forgetting. You haven’t met her.”

She was a slight woman, corded and freckled around the neck the way women of that age and disposition often are; she bore little resemblance to Bunny but her hair and eyes were the same color as his and she had his nose: a tiny, sharp, inquisitive nose which harmonized perfectly with the rest of her features but had always looked slightly incongruous on Bunny, stuck as it was like an afterthought in the middle of his large, blunt face. Her manner was haughty and distracted. “Oh,” she said, twisting a ring on her finger,

“we’ve had a deluge, indeed, from all over the country. Cards, calls, the most glorious flowers—”

“Do they have her doped up or something?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she doesn’t seem very upset, does she?”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Corcoran reflectively, “of course, we’re all just out of our minds, really. And I certainly hope that no mother will ever have to endure what I have for the past few nights. But the weather does seem to be breaking, and we’ve met so many lovely people, and the local merchants have all been generous in so many little ways.…”

“Actually,” said Henry, when the station cut to a commercial, “she photographs rather well, doesn’t she?”

“She looks like a tough customer.”

“She’s from Hell,” Charles said drunkenly.

“Oh, she’s not that bad,” said Francis.

“You just say that because she kisses up to you all the time,”

Charles said. “Because of your mother and stuff.”

“Kiss up? What are you talking about? Mrs. Corcoran doesn’t kiss up to me.”

“She’s awful,” Charles said. “It’s a horrible thing to tell your kids that money’s the only thing in the world, but it’s a disgrace to work for it. Then toss ’em out without a penny. She never gave Bunny one red—”

“That’s Mr. Corcoran’s fault, too,” said Camilla.

“Well, yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I just never met such a bunch of greedy, shallow people. You look at them and think, oh, what a tasteful, attractive family but they’re just a bunch of zeros, like something from an ad. They’ve got this room in their house,” Charles said, turning to me, “called the Gucci Room.”

“What?”

“Well, they painted it with a dado, sort of, those awful Gucci stripes. It was in all kinds of magazines. House Beautiful had it in some ridiculous article they did on Whimsy in Decorating or some absurd idea—you know, where they tell you to paint a giant lobster or something on your bedroom ceiling and it’s supposed to be very witty and attractive.” He lit a cigarette. “I mean, that’s exactly the kind

of people they are,” he said. “All surface. Bunny was the best of them by a long shot but even he—”

“I hate Gucci,” said Francis.

“Do you?” said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. “Really? I think it’s rather grand.”

“Come on, Henry.”

“Well, it’s so expensive, but it’s so ugly too, isn’t it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.”

“I don’t see what you think is grand about that.”

“Anything is grand if it’s done on a large enough scale,” said Henry.

I was walking home that night, paying no attention to where I was going, when a large, sulky fellow approached me near the apple trees in front of Putnam House. He said: “Are you Richard Papen?”

I stopped, looked at him, said that I was.

To my astonishment, he punched me in the face, and I fell backward in the snow with a thump that knocked me breathless.

“Stay away from Mona!” he shouted at me. “If you go near her again, I’ll kill you. You understand me?”

Too stunned to reply, I stared up at him. He kicked me in the ribs, hard, and then trudged sullenly away—footsteps crunching through the snow, a slamming door.

I looked up at the stars. They seemed very far away. Finally, I struggled to my feet—there was a sharp pain in my ribs, but nothing seemed broken—and limped home in the dark.

I woke late the next morning. My eye hurt when I rolled on my cheek. I lay there for a while, blinking in the bright sun, as confused details of the previous night floated back to me like a dream; then I reached for my watch on the night table and saw that it was late, almost noon, and why had no one been by to get me?

I got up, and as I did my reflection rose to meet me, head-on in the opposite mirror; it stopped and stared—hair on end, mouth agog in idiotic astonishment—like a comic book character konked on the

head with an anvil, chaplet of stars and birdies twittering about the brow. Most startling of all, a splendid dark cartoon of a black eye was stamped in a ring on my eye socket, in the richest inks of Tyrian, chartreuse, and plum.

I brushed my teeth, dressed, and hurried outside, where the first familiar person I spotted was Julian on his way up to the Lyceum.

He drew back from me in innocent, Chaplinesque surprise.

“Goodness,” he said, “what happened to you?”

“Have you heard anything this morning?”

“Why, no,” he said, looking at me curiously. “That eye. You look as if you were in a barroom brawl.”

Any other time I would have been too embarrassed to tell him the truth, but I was so sick of lying that I had an urge to come clean, on this small matter at least. So I told him what had happened.

I was surprised at his reaction. “So it was a brawl,” he said, with childish delight. “How thrilling. Are you in love with her?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know her too well.”

He laughed. “Dear me, you are being truthful today,” he said, with remarkable perspicuity. “Life has got awfully dramatic all of a sudden, hasn’t it? Just like a fiction.… By the way, did I tell you that some men came round to see me yesterday afternoon?”

“Who were they?”

“There were two of them. At first I was rather anxious—I thought they were from the State Department, or worse. You’ve heard of my problems with the Isrami government?”

I am not sure what Julian thought the Isrami government—terrorist state though it is—should want to do with him, but his fear of it came from his having taught its exiled crown princess about ten years before. After the revolution she’d been forced into hiding, had ended up somehow at Hampden College; Julian taught her for four years, in private tutorials supervised by the former Isrami minister of education, who would occasionally fly in from Switzerland, with gifts of caviar and chocolates, to make sure that the curriculum was suitable for the heir apparent to his country’s throne.

The princess was fabulously rich. (Henry had caught a glimpse of her once—dark glasses, full-length marten coat—clicking rapidly down the stairs of the Lyceum with her bodyguards at her heels.) The dynasty to which she belonged traced its origins to the Tower of Babel, and had accumulated a monstrous amount of wealth since then, a good deal of which her surviving relatives and associates had managed to smuggle out of the country. But there was a price on her head, as a result of which she’d been isolated, overprotected, and largely friendless, even while a teenager at Hampden. Subsequent years had made her a recluse. She moved from place to place, terrified of assassins; her whole family—except for a cousin or two and a little half-wit brother who was in an institution—had been picked off one by one over the years and even the old Minister of Education, six months after the princess was graduated from college, had died of a sniper’s bullet, sitting in the garden of his own little red-roofed house in Montreux.

Julian was uninvolved in Isrami politics despite his fondness for the princess and his sympathy—on principle—with royalists instead of revolutionaries. But he refused to travel by airplane or accept packages COD, lived in fear of unexpected visitors, and had not been abroad in eight or nine years. Whether these were reasonable precautions or excessive ones I do not know, but his connection with the princess did not seem a particularly strong one and I, for one, suspected that the Isramic jihad had better things to do than hunting down Classics tutors in New England.

“Of course, they weren’t from the State Department at all but they were connected with the government in some way. I have a sixth sense about such things, isn’t that curious? One of the men was an Italian, very charming, really … courtly, almost, in a funny sort of way. I was rather puzzled by it all. They said that Edmund was on drugs.”

“What?”

“Do you think that odd? I think it very odd.”

“What did you say?”

“I said certainly not. I may be flattering myself, but I do think I know Edmund rather well. He’s really quite timid, puritanical, almost.… I

can’t imagine him doing anything of the sort and besides, young people who take drugs are always so bovine and prosaic. But do you know what this man said to me? He said that with young people, you can never tell. I don’t think that’s right, do you? Do you think that’s right?”

We walked through Commons—I could hear the crash of plates overhead in the dining hall—and, on the pretext of having business on that end of campus, I walked on with Julian to the Lyceum.

That part of school, on the North Hampden side, was usually peaceful and desolate, the snow trackless and undisturbed beneath the pines until spring. Now it was trampled and littered like a fairgrounds. Someone had run a Jeep into an elm tree-broken glass, twisted fender, horrible splintered wound gaping yellow in the trunk; a foul-mouthed group of townie kids slid and shrieked down the hillside on a piece of cardboard.

“Goodness,” said Julian, “those poor children.”

I left him at the back door of the Lyceum and walked to Dr.

Roland’s office. It was a Sunday, he wasn’t there; I let myself in and locked the door behind me and spent the afternoon in happy seclusion: grading papers, drinking muddy drip coffee from a mug that said RHONDA, and half-listening to the voices from down the hall.

I have the idea that those voices were in fact audible, and that I could have understood what they were saying if I’d paid any attention, but I didn’t. It was only later, after I’d left the office and forgotten all about them, that I learned whom they belonged to, and that maybe I hadn’t been quite so safe that afternoon as I’d thought.

The FBI men, said Henry, had set up a temporary headquarters in an empty classroom down the hall from Dr. Roland’s office, and that was where they talked to him. They hadn’t been twenty feet from where I sat, were even drinking the same muddy coffee from the same pot I’d made in the teacher’s lounge. “That’s odd,” said Henry.

“The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It tasted strange. Burnt. Like your coffee.”

The classroom (Henry said) had a blackboard covered with quadratic equations, and two full ashtrays, and a long conference table at which the three of them sat. There was also a laptop computer, a litigation bag with the FBI insignia in yellow, and a box of maple sugar candies—acorns, wee pilgrims, in fluted paper cups.

They belonged to the Italian. “For my kids,” he said.

Henry, of course, had done marvelously. He didn’t say so, but then he didn’t have to. He, in some senses, was the author of this drama and he had waited in the wings a long while for this moment, when he could step onto the stage and assume the role he’d written for himself: cool but friendly; hesitant; reticent with details; bright, but not as bright as he really was. He’d actually enjoyed talking to them, he told me. Davenport was a Philistine, not worth mentioning but the Italian was somber and polite, quite charming. (“Like one of those old Florentines Dante meets in Purgatory.”) His name was Sciola. He was very interested in the trip to Rome, asked a lot of questions about it, not so much as investigator as fellow tourist. (“Did you boys happen to go out to the, what do you call it, San Prassede, out there around the train station? With that little chapel out on the side?”) He spoke Italian, too, and he and Henry had a brief and happy conversation which was cut short by the irritated Davenport, who didn’t understand a word and wanted to get down to business.

Henry was none too forthcoming, with me at least, about what that business actually was. But he did say that whatever track they were on, he was pretty sure it wasn’t the right one. “What’s more,” he said,

“I think I’ve figured out what it is.”

“What?”

“Cloke.”

“They don’t think Cloke killed him?”

“They think Cloke knows more than he’s telling. And they think his behavior is questionable. Which, as a matter of fact, it is. They know all kinds of things that I’m sure he didn’t tell them.”

“Like what?”

“The logistics of his drug business. Dates, names, places. Things that happened before he even came to Hampden. And they seemed to be trying to tie some of it up with me, which of course they weren’t

able to do in any kind of satisfactory way. Goodness. They even asked about my prescriptions, painkillers I got from the infirmary in my freshman year. There were file folders all over the place, data that no single person has access to—medical histories, psychological evaluations, faculty comments, work samples, grades.… Of course, they made a point of letting me see they had all these things. Trying to intimidate me, I suppose. I know pretty much exactly what my records say, but Cloke’s … bad grades, drugs, suspensions—I’d be willing to bet he’s left quite a little trail of paper behind him. I don’t know if it’s the records per se that have made them curious, or if it was something Cloke himself had said when he talked to them; but mostly what they wanted from me—and from Julian, and from Brady and Patrick Corcoran, to whom they spoke last night-were details of Bunny’s association with Cloke. Julian, of course, didn’t know anything about it. Brady and Patrick apparently told them plenty. And I did, too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, I mean, Brady and Patrick were out in the parking lot of the Coachlight Inn smoking pot with him night before last.”

“But what did you tell them?”

“What Cloke told us. About the drug business in New York.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Oh, my God,” I said. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Of course,” said Henry serenely. “It was what they wanted to hear.

They’d been circling around it all afternoon, when finally I decided to let it slip, they pounced.… I expect Cloke is in for an uncomfortable day or two but really, I think this is very fortunate for us. We couldn’t have asked for anything better to keep them busy until the snow melts—and have you noticed how bright it’s been the last couple of days? I think the roads are already starting to clear.”

My black eye was the source of much interest, speculation, and debate—I told Francis that the FBI men had done it just to watch his eyes get round—but not nearly so much as was an article in the Boston Herald. They’d sent a reporter up the day before, as had the

New York Post and the New York Daily News, but the Herald reporter had scooped them all.

DRUGS MAY BE INVOLVED

IN VERMONT DISAPPEARANCE

Federal agents investigating the April 24 disappearance of Edmund Corcoran, a twenty-four-year-old Hampden College student who has been the subject of an intensive manhunt in Vermont for the past three days, have found that the missing youth may have been involved with drugs. Federal authorities who searched Corcoran’s room discovered drug paraphernalia and heavy cocaine residue. Though Corcoran had no known history of drug abuse, sources close to the boy say that the normally extroverted Corcoran had become moody and withdrawn in the months prior to the disappearance. (See “What Your Child Won’t Tell You,” p. 6.) We were puzzled by this account, though everyone else on campus seemed to know all about it. I got the story from Judy Poovey.

“You know what it was they found in his room? It was, like, this mirror that belonged to Laura Stora. I bet everybody in Durbinstall has done coke off that thing. Really old, with little grooves carved in the side, Jack Teitelbaum used to call it the Snow Queen because you could always scrape up a line or two if you were desperate or something. And sure, I guess it’s technically her mirror, but really it’s kind of public property and she said she hadn’t even seen it in about a million years, somebody took it from a living room in one of the new houses in March. Bram Guernsey said that Cloke said it wasn’t in Bunny’s room when he was there before, that the Feds had planted it, but then Bram said that Cloke thought this whole thing was some kind of a set-up. A frame. Like in ‘Mission: Impossible,’ he meant, or one of those paranoia books by Philip K. Dick. He told Bram he thought the Feebies had a hidden camera planted somewhere in Durbinstall, all this wild stuff. Bram says it’s because Cloke is afraid to go to sleep and been up on crystal meth for forty-eight hours. He sits around in his room with the door locked and does lines and listens to this song by the Buffalo Springfield, over and over … you know that one? ‘Something’s happening

here … what it is ain’t exactly clear.…’ It’s weird. People get upset, all of a sudden they want to listen to old hippie garbage they would never listen to if they were in their right mind, when my cat died I had to go out and borrow all these Simon and Garfunkel records.

Anyway.” She lit a cigarette. “How did I get off on this? Right, Laura’s freaking out, somehow they traced the mirror to her and she’s already on probation, you know, had to do all this community service last fall because Flipper Leach got in trouble and ratted on Laura and Jack Teitelbaum—oh, you remember all that stuff, don’t you?”

“I never heard of Flipper Leach.”

“Oh, you know Flipper. She’s a bitch. Everybody calls her Flipper because she flipped over her dad’s Volvo, like, four times freshman year.”

“I don’t understand what this Flipper person has to do with this.”

“Well, she doesn’t have anything to do with it, Richard, you’re just like that guy in ‘Dragnet’ that always wants the facts. It’s just that Laura is freaking out, okay, and Student Services is threatening to call her parents unless she tells them how that mirror got in Bunny’s room, which she doesn’t even have a fucking clue, and, get this, those FBI men found out about the Ecstasy she had at Swing into Spring last week and they want her to give up the names. I said,

‘Laura, don’t do it, it’ll be just like that thing with Flipper and everybody’ll hate you and you’ll have to transfer to another school.’

It’s like Bram was saying—”

“Where is Cloke now?”

“That’s what I was going to tell you if you’d shut up a minute.

Nobody knows. He was really wigged out and asked if he could borrow Bram’s car last night, to leave school, but this morning the car was back in the parking lot with the keys in it and nobody’s seen him and he’s not in his room and something weird is happening there, too, but for sure I don’t know what it is.… I just won’t even do meth anymore. Heebiejeebieville. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you, what did you do to your eye?”

Back at Francis’s with the twins—Henry was having lunch with the Corcorans—I told them what Judy had told me.

“But I know that mirror,” said Camilla.

“I do, too,” said Francis. “Spotty old dark one. Bunny’s had it in his room for a while.”

“I thought it was his.”

“I wonder how he got hold of it.”

“If the girl left it in a living room,” said Charles, “he probably just found it and took it.”

This was highly probable. Bunny had had a mild tendency towards kleptomania, and was apt to pocket any small, valueless articles that caught his eye—nail clippers, buttons, spools of tape. These he hid around his room in jumbled little nests. It was a vice he practiced in secret, but at the same time he had felt no compunction about quite openly carrying away objects of greater value which he found unattended. He did this with such assurance and authority—tucking bottles of liquor or unguarded boxes from the florist under his arm and walking away without a backwards glance—that I wondered if he knew it was stealing. I once heard him explaining vigorously and quite unselfconsciously to Marion what he thought ought to be done to people who stole food from house refrigerators.

As bad as things were for Laura Stora, they were worse for the luckless Cloke. We were to discover later that he had not brought Bram Guernsey’s car back of his own volition, but had been impelled to do so by the FBI agents, who had had him pulled over before he was ten miles out of Hampden. They took him back to the classroom where they had set up headquarters, and kept him there for most of Sunday night, and while I don’t know what they said to him, I do know that by Monday morning he had requested to have an attorney present at the interview.