The thought struck her, interrupted a separate intention. “It would be just like dear old Max to lock us in,” she said. “He has a sense of fun that would make the Marquis de Sade envious.”
Max came and went, entered the room and exited without the opening of a door.
Marjorie, surveying the landscape, considered the choices before them. “It’ll have to be quick as a wink,” she said, reminding them both. She sucked him with lady-like dispatch, a woman of passionate constraints, restored his tower the moment it began to lean. Then she sat on him, facing away, encouraging him to push forward as if he meant to dislodge her. “I always think of it as riding a horse,” she said.
She made quick work of him as promised; he was gone before he had so much as arrived. He dreamed someone was in the house, was walking deliberately up the steps, gun in hand. He would have gone to sleep, how easy that was, how right-seeming, but she pulled on his arm until he climbed out of bed. Of course, the door needed opening, required his touch.
“This is the way you do it,” he said. He pushed the door in, leaned his shoulder against the frame, then turned the handle down and pulled sharply toward him in one precise infallible gesture.
“It didn’t open,” she said, laughing nervously. “Is it panic time?”
He tried again without measurable success, embarrassed at his failure. Marjorie walked back and forth from bed to door, generating energy.
“Is someone downstairs?” Marjorie asked, hearing the echo of her own steps.
“It could be Isabelle,” he said.
“Will she make a fuss, do you think? I’ll say you were showing me the house and the door got stuck.” Marjorie threw his clothes at him, worked at straightening the bed. “Don’t just stand there,” she shouted in a mock-whisper, “Oh, God, I broke a fingernail.” Holding the finger to her mouth, sucking on it. A single tear escaped her eye and made its way down her cheek.
Adriano is trying to say something, is marshalling his strength for one last effort. “Trust no one,” he mutters. There are footsteps at the door to the terrace and Berger points his gun at the narrow passageway. A gun comes through the terrace door followed by an arm, followed by the figure of a uniformed police officer. “No trouble,” says Henry Berger. The old friend in his arms is unconscious, and he puts him down, never for a moment letting the armed policeman out of his sight.
Terman sat at the edge of the bed, picking at a knot in one of his shoelaces, while Marjorie had her ear to the door. From the vantage of the ceiling mirror, they presented a study in angles. “Whoever it is, walks like a cat burglar,” she said.
He heard something or thought he did, the exaggerated breathing of someone who had run too fast or was in a state of severe anxiety.
“Will you please get yourself together,” she said.
Terman had one shoe on and hefted the other, thought of throwing it at Marjorie.
She caught his eye in the wall mirror and winked. “Whoever it is, I don’t believe it’s Max,” she whispered. “Max has a distinctive step as I should imagine you’ve noticed.”
“I’ve felt it on my neck,” he said.
“Have you?” she said. “I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Mon ami, I really have to be on my way.”
The shoelace knot opened in his fingers like a flower. Not all frustrations were without remedy.
“It’s not as if I had a choice,” she said. “I really have to be somewhere. It’s an irreversible commitment.”
“I understand that you have to be somewhere,” he said.
Terman stood behind her at the door, listening to the news on the other side. The intruder had found his way to the staircase and was coming up the steps.
“Do you have any idea who it is?” she asked. “It’s not a housebreaker, is it?”
Imagining that it was his son, Terman declined comment, indicated with a shrug an unlimited set of possibilities.
“Hallo,” Marjorie called. “We’re locked in a room on the third floor. Could you let us out?”
There was no apparent response and she repeated her request, emboldened to raise her voice so that it seemed to echo through the large house, returning to them like a muted scream. “Please please please,” she added.
A door opened and closed below them, a gesture of indifference or contempt. “You say something,” Marjorie said to him.
“Who’s there?” he yelled in an unused voice. A sudden rage took him. “Damn you,” he yelled.
“I hope to god you haven’t frightened the person,” Marjorie said, banging on the door with her fists. “It’s queer, isn’t it, that he or she hasn’t answered. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Max had sent someone here to murder us both. I should never have mentioned to him that I was coming to your house for tea.”
“You mentioned to Max that you were coming here?”
“I wanted to give him back a little of his own,” Marjorie said. “I can see now that it was an error of judgment.” She tried the door again. “I think I’m getting it, luv. If we both pulled at the same time, don’t you think it might make all the difference?”
“We’ve rounded them all up,” says Colonel Lindstrom, putting the gun in his coat pocket as he might a pair of gloves. “All of them except the woman and Adriano.” He comes over to check on Adriano’s condition, puts his ear to the dead man’s chest. “He made you do it, I suppose,” he says to Berger.
“I suppose,” says Berger.
“Whatever you want to say about his character,” Lindstrom says, “he was a man that lived and died by the rules. I suppose he said a few thinks, did he? before he went.”
“Only that he regretted dying.”
Lindstrom is looking over the ratling, his hand in his gun pocket. “Quite a view I should say. What?”
Another man in a uniform comes on to the terrace. “No signs of the woman, sir,” he says. “We’ve taken the place apart with nothing to show for it.”
“Keep at it, lad,” says Lindstrom. “That attractive young lady is a veritable nest of scorpions. Let’s go inside, Berger, before the late afternoon chill gets into the bones.”
We cut to the woman, as she’s called, letting herself into a crawl space under the lip of the roof.
Marjorie was working on the door, pulling and pushing, making imperceptible progress. “Come over, why don’t you, and give us a hand.”
Terman went to the window and looked out, saw someone that might have been his son go into the park across the street.
An hour passed and Marjorie wondered out loud whether they oughtn’t to break down the door. If they both threw their shoulders into it, she thought, it might do the trick.
“The door is too thick,” he said.
“Won’t you try even once?” she asked. “You just might be stronger than you think.”
To set an example, Marjorie rushed her shoulder into the door and came away in pain. She was looking at the reflection of her martyrdom when she said, “My time spent with you has been the occasion of crippling injuries.” For the next few minutes she appeared inconsolable.
Terman thought he heard the outside door open and he mentioned it to her, which eased the pain in her bruised shoulder if only for that moment of illusion.
Henry Berger doesn’t like the present business, likes it less and less as it ramifies before him.
“What’s your opinion, Henry?” Lindstrom asks him, while his men disassemble the villa. “Are we going about this the wrong way?”
“Why do you want her?” he asks.