“Don’t you write any real books anymore?” he imagines Tom asking him.
“As a matter of fact,” Terman says. “I have a draft of a new novel in the bottom of this desk. Is that what you mean by real books?”
Henry Berger and Colonel Saracen meet as if accidentally at Waterloo Bridge. A light rain falling, a mist of rain.
Saracen: Seven men — seven at least that we know of — met once a week in a two room flat on Belsize Park Road in Folkestone. All of them except one were distinguished men in their respective fields. We have some idea why they met and what their ties were to one another. Five of these men have died unnatural deaths. It stands to reason that one of the two (or three) survivors — there may have been an eighth member of the society — is the killer of the others and that the remaining survivor or suvivors is in immediate danger.
Berger: Two other men have died who have no connection to that secret society and apparently at the hand of the same killer or killers. How does that work into your theory, Colonel?
Saracen: They knew too much or got in the way. Irrelevances, boyo. My money is on our French nobleman, André Lange, alias Pierre de Chartres, the man in the dark raincoat you saw running away in the catacombs. Lay your hands on him, boyo, and we can all take a vacation in the sun.
Berger: And what about the seventh man?
Saracen: Inspector D’Agostino, retired police officer. Legs impaired. Has a bodyguard at his side night and day. Not likely. Not bloody likely. Be a dear boy and bring in Monsieur Lange.
He thought he heard the key turning in the lock, the slightest noise reverberating in the large house. If someone were coming in, he would hear the door open and shut like a muffled cough. If it were Isabelle, she would make her presence known almost immediately, calling to him from the base of the stairs.
Although he heard no further sounds, Terman came out of his study and hurried down the carpeted stairs, aware of the thump of his own step as if it were coming from somewhere else. No one was in the front room waiting for him. He opened the door to look outside and saw Isabelle coming up the walk. His silhouette, larger than life, waited for her in the doorway.
“You frightened me,” she said when she saw he was there.
It was only afterward, after he had persuaded her to go to bed, after they had made love in a desultory way, imitating the gestures of former passion, that he asked her if she had been at the door with her key five or ten minutes before he actually saw her.
The question, he could tell, offended her, though she made no more of it than necessary. He trusted her denial and assumed that he had imagined the sound — such a small sound anyway — of someone turning a key in a lock. It came to him later on that if someone had let himself in, he(whoever) was still skulking somewhere in the house.
Terman slept fitfully, heard from time to time some unaccountable movement in the house, recorded almost every unseen tremor.
Isabelle woke in a irritable mood, accused him of contriving at every turn to defeat her. They had a brief fight which resolved itself in silences. Terman accompanied her to her flat after breakfast, despite her assertion that she preferred to go alone. When they got to her place, she apologized and invited him in and they pressed against each other savagely though fully clothed, then Terman went home, though not before asking her if she had Tom’s address. She said no, that she knew the street but not the number, knew the phone number but not the address, which he suspected was a lie. “I care for you,” she called after him. “Don’t you know that?”
The phone rang any number of times that first evening at the Kirstner’s cottage in Ramsgate, but the call was never the one Terman was waiting for.
“The trouble with you Americans,” Max was saying to an audience, “and it’s great worry to us all, is that you’re so bloody child-centered. In Britain, we set the babies an example — we send them to boarding school until they’re beaten into ploughshares.”
“He’s not even English,” Marjorie said to no one in particular.
Terman had two glasses of red wine in front of him, clarets of rival claim, one half-filled, the other as yet untouched. Max opened another bottle he wanted Terman to try, a ‘74 Graves from an obscure chateau and set a third glass in front of him. Isabelle had her hand on his arm, a temporary restraint.
At some point Isabelle got up and moved to another part of the room, provoked at something he had said or done, an unwitting transgression. A prematurely white-haired man, who had money or was a source of money (he’d forgotten what Max had said about him), occupied Isabelle’s place on the couch next to him. It was the man, who, at Max’s office, had announced himself as an admirer.
“This seat’s already spoken for,” Terman said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to find one of your own.”
The man, who looked like a youngish Wilfred Hyde White, smiled broadly. “It is, is it?” he said. “Well, I’ll just keep it warm until the young lady returns. Name’s Tumson, point of fact. Edward Tumsun.”
“Your reputation trails you like a shadow, Tumsun,” he said in a loud voice, winking at Marjorie Kirstner who was sitting across from him.
Tumsun took a business card from his wallet and slipped it into the breast pocket of Terman’s jacket. “I’ll let my card speak for me,” he said.
That Tumsun presumed to invade his space irritated him beyond reason. “So you have a talking card?” he said. “Does it speak in tongues?” He noticed the director watching him from across the room, framing the scene. “Does it speak the language of money?”
“Hard cash,” said Tumsun.
“I have the idea that the card’s the ventriloquist,” he said, “and you’re just pretending it’s the other way around.”
“I wouldn’t advise making an enemy of me,” Tumsun said, getting up, his unshakable smile etched into his face.
Isabelle came over a few minutes after Tumsun had vacated the seat. “You’re not still sulking about Tom, are you?” she asked.
“I’m tasting wines,” he said. He engaged the three glasses on the glass table in front of him, each in its turn.
She sat down next to him and put her arm around his shoulders. “I’m sorry you feel so awful,” she whispered. “If Tom needs you, he’ll get in touch.”
He kissed her ear. “Let’s go upstairs to one of the bedrooms.”
“You’re mad,” she said.
Max came by and filled one of his empty glasses with a ‘67 Burgundy that he guaranteed would knock him on his ear. “What did you and Tumsun talk about?” he asked out of the side of his mouth.
“He let his card do his talking,” Terman said in a voice that seemed to extend itself into every corner of the room. “The language it talked of was not one of mine.”
Max gave him a severe look. “That card talks everyone’s language,” he said. “It is universally articulate. Not advisable to make an enemy of the man.”
“He said the same thing.”
He noticed that Max looked elsewhere while talking to him, seemed to be counting the house.
“Are we going upstairs or not?” he asked Isabelle when Max was gone. Everything irritated him.
“We really can’t, can we?” she said. “It would be so rude.” She turned her face away.
He sipped the Burgundy with no sense of its distinction, rued his failure to make connection. “If you won’t go with me, I’ll go alone,” he said.
On the way to the bathroom, moving through a narrow hallway, a twilight landscape of betrayal and deception, he bumped into a marble sculpture, dislodging it from its pedestal with his shoulder. A chip split off on contact with the floor, a large earlike shape. He lifted the ambiguous sculpture (a woman with her head seemingly between her legs, hair streaming), wrestled it onto its pedestal, but had no success in disguising the statue’s wound. Each time he replaced the broken fragment, it would slip loose again. Marjorie passed him in the hall, said she was going to sleep, then stayed on to observe his efforts.