“It’s the old story, Henry. We want her because she is there.”
Berger and Colonel Lindstrom and one of the Colonel’s aides, a Chinese sumo wrestler named Yin, go up the stairs to the entrance to the roof, Berger in the advance. Lindstrom says his men have already checked the roof but if Berger wants to take a second look he has no objection. Yin follows him up the ladder to the roof while the Colonel and Sergeant Clark wait below, their guns drawn. Who can tell what Henry Berger is thinking as he walks across the tiled roof, moving methodically from one side to the other, concentrating on the sounds his steps make? “You were right,” he shouts down to Lindstrom, stopping at the hollow place where the woman is hiding. “She must have gotten away while you were rounding up the others.”
There were moments when Marjorie didn’t think about being imprisoned but they had only limited duration. Mostly, she struggled for self-possession. If one didn’t panic and went with the flow, she told herself, eventually a way out would present itself. “A situation like this makes one reevaluate one’s entire life,” she said. “Or do you think that’s taking it a bit far?”
Terman looked out the window to avoid being mimicked by his own image, his sense of himself undermined by overstatement. At the last extreme, he could always get the attention of a passerby and ask whoever to notify the police of their entrapment. It hadn’t yet reached that moment of urgency. Oddly, in the extended period he had spent at the window, no one had come by on his side of the street.
The urge to account for himself overwhelmed him. “I’ve been treading water for too long,” he said over his shoulder. “Everytime I reevaluate my life, it seems to have fallen off from the year before. I age without getting wiser, tend to forget more than I learn. My relationships with people are as tentative and incomplete as they ever were. More so than ever.”
“You need to break with Max,” she said, “and go back to your own writing.”
“The fact is, I like working with Max,” he said. “If I didn’t have a screenplay to write, I might sit around drinking beer and staring at the walls. I don’t even enjoy going to the movies any more.”
“It’s not an adult pleasure, is it?” she said. “The first step for you, Terman, is to get away from Max and on to something else.”
Marjorie tried the door for what must have been the tenth time, felt it yielding just a little, nothing the eye might acknowledge, but enough to let her entertain a whisper of hope.
Terman had been saying the word “father” to himself. “Father father father father father father father father father father father father father father…” At some point the word evolved from “father” to “farther.”
“I felt something,” Marjorie said.
He took an andiron from the fireplace and went to the door to see if he could help. The room echoed a sense of contrition.
Henry Berger is standing a few feet away from the downslope of the roof. “You can come out,” he says. “Lindstrom and his men have gone.”
After a moment or two, a voice comes from the crawl space under the eaves. “I have a gun trained on you,” it says. “Throw your gun across the roof and do it quickly. It would please me to kill you.”
“I promised your husband I’d keep you from being caught,” he says.
“I don’t trust you. Throw away your gun.”
“Wouldn’t I have given you away before if that’s what I wanted to do?” When she doesn’t answer he says, “I’m going to walk away. If you shoot me it will attract the attention of Lindstrom s men who are sitting in a parked car at the edge of the woods. I’m going now to walk to the ladder at the other side of the roof.” Henry Berger turns around and walks slowly toward the other side of the roof.
A trap door opens at the lip of the roof and the woman, not a little crumpled, emerges without attracting Berger’s notice. She holds an unusually small handgun and is pointing it at Berger’s back when he turns instinctively to face her.
“Will you take me with you?” she asks. “You’ll find me a resourceful companion.”
They go out the back door of the pensione and move through tall grass towards Berger’s car, which is obscured by two large trees. When they reach the car, when Berger unlocks the door to the passenger’s side, she presses her handgun to his hack. “Take off your jacket and trousers for me, please.”
“Are you serious?”
“If you test me,” she says, “you’ll never know how serious I was.”
He undresses without further protest, keeping one hand behind his head as instructed. The widow of his old friend puts his clothes on over her own, while Berger leans against the side of his car with hands behind his head.
“I ought to kill you,” she says, “but I don’t want to attract attention if I can help it. I want you to open the driver’s door with your left hand, keeping the other behind your head. Don’t make any moves you’ll regret.”
“You’ll be better off with me than without me,” he says. “I’m really quite good at avoiding the police”
“I’ve already got the better part of your identity,” she says. “Take your left hand from behind your head and open the door. When the door is opened, drop the key on the seat, then turn around, take three steps and throw yourself face down on the grass.”
“Adriano was lucky to have a woman like you,” he says.
“Not lucky enough. Are you opening the door or do I have to shoot you?”
Trying to unlock the car with his left hand, he drops the key to the ground.
“I hate the sight of you,” she says. “I despise the way you do things. I hate your preposterous self-satisfaction.”
Henry Berger bends down to retrieve the key. As he comes up he turns as if to hand it to her. We see the shadow of his arm moving through the air, followed by the sound of a shot. There is a second shot shortly after the first, then a third.
Dressed again, Berger carries the dying woman back toward the villa.
“I should have killed you the first time I saw you,” she says.
“You misjudged my intentions,” he says. “I would have helped you get away if you had let me.”
“You’ve done that; I’m away.” A thin stream of blood comes from the side of her mouth, keeps coming like a scarf in a magician’s trick. “The pain is gone,” she whispers. “It just went somewhere else.”
Berger puts her down on the grass and sits alongside her, holding her hand. Three cars drive up in short succession. He continues to hold the dead woman’s hand, staring into the distance as several men, including Colonel Lindstrom and Sergeant Clark, approach.
They had been trapped in the room for almost five hours and Terman had reached the point where the sight of his own face, no matter the angle of distortion, sickened him. He sat on the bed with his hands over his eyes, besieged by other selves at every turn.
Marjorie had talked non-stop for a time and then, as though her quota of words had run out, had fallen into a protracted silence. Although she heard something, the front door unlocking and someone (a man, she thought) stepping almost noiselessly into the front parlor, she withheld report of the news, superstitious about false alarms.
This time they both heard it, the almost noiseless entry, the hesitant steps in the living room, the uncertain movement of someone who didn’t know the house.