“Now you’re simply being dramatic.”
“Blackmail is a crime. You can be sent to prison for it.”
“There’s no danger. Your family are cowards, like all people who think the world will end if their precious respectability is compromised. They won’t risk any publicity, darling.”
“Suppose they don’t pay. Would you do as you threatened?”
“Tell their friends about you? I’m afraid I’d have to.” Bella removed the cigarette from her mouth and crushed it in a tray and laughed shortly. “Let me tell you something, darling. You had better quit being so concerned about your family, for all they wish for you in their hearts is that you had never been born or had died before you became what you are. They hate you and can’t understand you and will consider you a menace as long as you are alive, and the only hope for you and me on earth is to be found in one another and in others like us.”
“Did you talk with my brother?”
“Yes. He was quite indignant.”
“Carl can be very hard when he wants to be. He may go to the police.”
“I tell you that he won’t. The risk is too great. He said he would come here tonight with the money, and he will.”
“I don’t want to see him.”
“Well, you’ll have to reconcile yourself to it. It was part of the agreement. Apparently he wants to talk with you, and I had to promise that you would be here in order to get him to come.”
“You had no right to do it.”
“So you have told me at least a dozen times. You even concealed your family’s wealth from me for a long time, didn’t you, darling, in fear that I would be tempted do do something like this? I’m still a little angry about it. And now you have threatened to leave me and you’re afraid that you must do it, even though you don’t want to. Well, I will tell you something that you may not know. I will tell you that you are making me a little sick to my stomach, and perhaps I would be better off without you.”
Lisa turned and looked down again into the narrow street. Her depression was now so complete and unqualified that it afforded her a kind of sickly immunity, and Bella’s words, deliberately cruel, were no more than a sequence of sounds with no particular significance or effect. The snow had accumulated, she noticed, on the sill outside, and had drifted in places across the street. Looking down, aware of details with a peculiar detachment that was part of her depression, she saw a man cross under the light at the corner, leaving behind him in the snow the prints of his passing. Shoulders hunched into his overcoat collar upturned against the wind and falling snow, he came on at an angle across the street and was swallowed by the shadow of the building in which Lisa stood.
It was her brother Carl. She had not seen him or heard from him for a very long while, and now, seeing him from above against the cold white earth, she thought that he looked small and pitiable and somehow vulnerable. And she was sorry that she had brought him trouble and was now, though she didn’t wish it, bringing him trouble again. A sudden nostalgia stirred in the gray stillness of her depression, an intense longing for a status long lost in a time long past, and she wondered if it would be possible to regain, not physically but mentally and emotionally, the particular point and condition in time when she had started becoming what she was instead of what she might have been. If this were possible, she thought, the person that she was might be rejected and left dead in a very real way, and the person she might have been could at last start becoming. This thought appealed to her; it was something to support her in the tense waiting for her brother’s approach, and she did not release it until she heard his footsteps on the stairs outside.
Turning, she said, “It’s Carl. I saw him under the light in the street.”
Bella leaned forward in her chair, listening to the footsteps ascend the stairs and approach in the lull, sitting fixed through a hiatus of silence until there was a sudden knocking at the door. Then, with a sigh, she stood up. There was a surety, a fluid ease of motion in her hard body.
“Perhaps I was wrong,” she said. “Perhaps he wants to save you after all.”
Her voice was colored by a curious mixture of irony and anger, and she stared at Lisa intently, as if she thought Lisa’s reaction might be tremendously significant. But Lisa was still supported by the despair that is acquired in the ruins of the last sanctuary, and there was no discernible reaction at all. Bella shrugged, her thin lips shaping in her dark face a smile that was decisive and cruel.
“You can go to hell,” she said. “You can bloody well go to hell.”
The knocking was repeated, and she went quickly to the door and opened it. Carl Sheridan, across the threshold, looked at Bella and beyond her, his eyes probing the room. He was wearing a navy blue overcoat, the shoulders frosted with snow, and he was holding a gray homburg squarely before him, much in the manner of a man standing uncovered in respect or reverence. His face was drawn stiffly over its bones. His blond hair was thinning and receding and lay limply on his skull. Lisa, seeing him from her place by the window, thought that he looked as if he had been very ill and was at this moment very tired.
Bella retreated and said, “Come in. You see that I’ve kept my word. Lisa is here to meet you.”
Carl stepped into the room two precise paces and stopped, his eyes finding Lisa. Still holding his homburg, he stood for a moment watching her, and then he made the kind of formal little bow from the waist that he might have made in acknowledging an introduction to someone he had never seen before.
“Hello, Lisa.”
“Hello, Carl,” she said.
His lips worked, and she thought at first that he was trying to speak again and couldn’t, but apparently it was only a kind of nervous reaction, for he turned abruptly to Bella and spoke without difficulty.
“I’ve brought the money. Five thousand dollars.”
She walked across to a small table beside the chair in which she had been sitting and picked up a pack of cigarettes. She extracted a cigarette and dropped the pack and began tapping the cigarette on a thumb nail.
“It’s what we agreed on,” she said.
“Yes. Exactly. Before I give it to you, however, I want to warn you against trying this again. It won’t work. You are a blackmailer, guilty of a crime, and next time I’ll see that you are sent to prison. I’m prepared to accept whatever publicity you can give to this affair, and if it means trouble for Lisa, she must be prepared to accept it too.”
“All right. A lecture is not necessary. I’ve already told you that I don’t believe in making a bad thing out of a good one.”
“I see. Well, then...” He released the homburg with one hand and removed a thin sheaf of bills from an inside pocket of his coat. Extending the bills, he said, “Probably you will want to count it.”
“No.” She shrugged her indifference. “You would hardly try to cheat me in a transaction like this. Just put it down somewhere.”
He tossed the money at the chair by which she stood, and it struck the overstuffed cushion and bounced off onto the floor. Bella did not stoop to pick it up but struck a match and lit her cigarette and drew smoke into her lungs deeply. Expelling the smoke, she watched it rise and thin, and appeared to have lost all interest in what went on in the room.
“So it has come to this,” Carl said. “To blackmail. To crime. Is this what you wanted, Lisa?”
He was not looking in her direction when he began talking, and Lisa was a little startled to discover that he was talking to her. She was conscious of the heaviness of his words, their almost comic ponderousness, as if he were reading lines from a bad melodrama, but she was not impelled to laugh.
“I didn’t want it, Carl. The blackmail. I tried to stop it.”