Was Claire — unlike Gilda — wearing lipstick when Incremona killed her? I can’t ask Monty, for on Sub’s phone answered first by Gilda at dawn Sunday, Monty sounds blind except that the eyes staring at a wall in his King Street house do not know what even to imagine out of the zero that has been inserted behind those eyes, and as if from that absence of pulse I find an idea which he assents to — he knows a man on the west river — easy enough to rent a chopper on a Sunday but do it through Monty, when did I want it? — I had not even thought until his call came, I had been asleep in Sub’s bed my skin on someone’s hair — Monty will phone, will phone — nor can I ask if Claire had on no lipstick — I look 900 feet down hours later from a hired crow’s nest and June’s frantic words said to Claire’s late answering service come to me in Gilda’s voice in a delayed translation: Leave Chad out of it, it wasn’t his idea it couldn’t have been, you said you know where and when but not who, only that it’s Chad’s idea. But I don’t even know the idea but it’s not my brother’s please believe me it isn’t Chad, for Christ’s sake it takes a sick mind to blow up a bunch of children Halloween morning — and something makes the surface of Manhattan bulge and instead of the green which city or barren land or industrial area shows up in an infrared aerial photograph there is a blue of Claire’s lips snapped directly without box or emulsion into me like thought.
Whose open end betrays across the East River Brooklyn Heights where trees soften the edge of the promenade below which cars flash softly along that stretch of the Belt Parkway; the St. George Hotel sticks up; I know where there is a wood-frame house, and on the top step of its stoop I tried my tongue upon the corner of Renée’s closed mouth and when she at once turned her head my tongue-tip ran all along the fold where her lips met until my mouth was in her russet hair which we found we liked and under the angled light from the street lamp the russet took on a less soft sheen though hardly that hot San Francisco copper I have made so much of somewhere here — her parents’ house not original New Amsterdam though like it, as the Dutch wood-framing was like the New England and the New England like the Virginian, itself a recollection of Tudor half-timbering — but what those great brick-layers the Dutch thought up was stone masonry construction, first rubble laid in straw-bound clay but ultimately oyster-shell-mortared stone-block walls which with wood-framing inside came to be your common combination in taverns and warehouses; and I know if I can’t quite see where there are a hundred stoops, I know one near my parents’ old apartment house where we played stoop ball which was in those days a matter of angles (unlike London where in any case they don’t play stoop ball) but now is a matter of wide cars oncoming between parked cars like a transistor’s printed circuit. The kids, said Gilda, as we listened in Claire’s foyer and heard steps in the hall and now the phone again, you won’t let anybody blow up some kids.
Alba’s false labor was false. Why did we leave Corsica when we did? Not because she phoned, because she didn’t phone. But why in the first place did Dagger change his mind again and go?
Have I asked that before?
In the long cozy trench of English life I say that the tortoise has come back and Lorna who has got into the habit of not hearing says, What? and I (as they say in the military) say again; but the next day when I say the man from the County Council is coming about the tortoise and Lorna says What? in a servo-circuit which threatens to loop until Doom’s Day, I interest myself by saying the County Council man’s coming about the grass, which exits me even excites me out of that forlorn loop — a service to us both.
LIBERTY, the ’68 poster said in another language, IS THE CRIME WHICH CONTAINS ALL OTHER CRIMES.
I was at liberty, a framed killer of Claire, but only so long (Aut said) as I stayed lost. But how could he call me “someone” and say “lost” if he knew I was collapsed right there in a closet?
What are you doing, said Gilda, for I had sprung into Claire’s room, fallen across her bed and speared the phone on the eighth or ninth ring.
June sounded farther away now than the message Gilda had related.
Did I have the news?
Tragic, I said.
Had I been at Claire’s long?
Two minutes, still out of breath, just long enough (I said) to call the answering service and find out its log was impounded, so it was lucky I hadn’t missed June.
Oh. Did I know their name? the answering service?
I knew where, I knew when, but I didn’t know who (remember?) — only that it was Chad’s plan.
Oh. Yes.
Gilda snuggled her ear in, but for a moment there was nothing to hear; then June asked for the name of the answering service and I said quid pro quo—and I heard nothing, not a breath. I pointed to the bed-table drawer and Gilda moved over and pulled it out so she didn’t hear June say with a matter-of-factness that was not like her: It’s tonight.
But I know that, I said without thinking, at least I figured it out before your brother or someone hit me on the head. But I want to know who.
June got nice. She pleaded. She honestly didn’t know who.
You could say for her that she loved her brother.
I looked in the bed-table drawer and saw the name of the service. I gave it to June, she gave me the time, I said I was going to be held up downtown just south of the warehouse till nine thirty and tonight was in fact more convenient for me. I hung up.
What am I doing here? said Gilda when I blew out Tris and Ruby’s jack-o’-lantern. A light moved one-way between two dark towers and it was a helicopter or a plane. Former Prime Minister Macmillan was on Rose’s indestructible acrylic-fiber carpet which by the light from the new solid-state TV which came on at once and which I hadn’t reimbursed Sub for had changed color from what I recalled as orange and magenta.
George Washington Carver and me — peanuts and peat, for Christ’s sake. I lit a cigarette.
She touched me and I spoke to her. All these things I knew that others didn’t. Gene in effect lied about the Marvelous Country House letting Jack think it didn’t figure on the film. Aut’s so-called man who Claire told Jack had shot the Bonfire was really Dagger. Gene let Jack believe the portfolio on Paul’s table was Jan’s. Gene did not dispute Jack’s assertion that Jan had been at the hut with Paul just before Gene and Jack had come. My eyes caught smoke as if this were my first cigarette and I touched Gilda and I wondered where Aut and John as Aut had said were meeting tomorrow. But all these things I knew that others didn’t left me feeling like a rat whose brain has been somato-mapped so you can predict which cells will show electrical response when a given limb is stroked.
Hair-thin pages of mica flipping now fast as Will’s hand-made movie—