Fraser endured. And he who endures, he was fond of saying, became the eventual winner because he was the one who had not only the chance to write the rules of the game but also the last chance to write the history of the game after it is played.
On December 4, it snowed in New York City.
Henry L. Fraser was running behind schedule, as his secretary had reminded him at least four times. It had been a busy and full day, as all of his days were, and now it was to be climaxed by a dinner to be held in his honor at the Patrician Club on East Fiftieth Street. Fraser was to be honored for his strenuous efforts during the past year to “raise the level of international understanding” and “provide succor” for those refugees in Southeast Asia whose hope of survival depended on “relief, generosity, and understanding from the private as well as the public sector of American life.” So read the award he would be given.
Shortly before eight o’clock, he left the InterComBank offices and descended to the lobby of the massive building on Madison Avenue. To his annoyance, his automobile was not ready at the curb; he ordered the building security chief to call the garage and find out what was wrong.
The chagrined driver reached at the garage said an absurd thing had happened. Someone had stolen the battery in the limousine and it would be a half hour before another could be found to replace it. It was a kid’s trick, the work of a petty street thief.
Fraser decided to walk to the Patrician Club and meet the car there after the dinner. He was late as it was. Perhaps he could hail a cab on the way.
Curiously, the streets were empty. The day had been full for a number of New Yorkers besides Henry L. Fraser. Christmas decorations were in place in the stores. For a moment Henry L. Fraser paused on the street and glanced up at the Pan Am Building, which squatted over the low-rise splendor of Grand Central station. He thought that a city is like a civilization, built upon itself, layer by layer, each tower on the ruins of a tower. The past is beneath our feet, thought Henry L. Fraser, and he decided he would utter this profound remark tonight during his speech.
Garbage bags and cans of garbage were already piled at the curbs, waiting for the morning sanitation trucks; taxis sped in yellow rivers down the cross streets; gases rose from vents in the sewers. Henry Fraser saw none of these things; he thought of the past and of the solidity of life and he was filled with an enormous sense of well-being.
In the darkness of the cross street, he did not even see the hand that held the knife. Or hear the voice behind him.
How soothing.
He fell back as the knife slid smoothly between the third and fourth ribs on the left side of his back, pushing easily into the old, tired heart.
Without pain. That was what surprised him at first.
Blood filled the chest cavity in a moment; the hemorrhage spread, choking the lungs with blood. And he was dying.
But without pain, he thought wonderingly.
Death was a curtain parting before him. His eyes were wide open.
Like a play, he thought — it must be a dream. There would be applause in a moment, he thought. All the applause of the years.
But this was absurd, Henry L. Fraser said to himself. He could not actually die, not in this way, on this street. Victim of a common street mugging, a street attack in this city that he knew, had known all his life. Not die on this night, in the falling snow.… No. It was not believable.
His body clattered into the row of garbage cans and Devereaux stood still and let it fall, pulling the knife slowly and easily out of the body as it fell, sliding down on the street, into the wet walkway. Henry L. Fraser was dead before his body stopped falling.
38
For a very long time he watched the car from the brow of the mountain, behind the house.
Devereaux wore a flannel shirt, which he always wore in the mountains, and he had been chopping at the cord of wood behind the house, splitting the oak and birch. He had worn a jacket at first because it was cold and snow lay on the mountain; but in the past half hour of work, he had removed his jacket and his face was covered with a fine sheen of sweat.
He had watched the car come down the old road from Front Royal, which he could see from the mountain. The car had turned in at the sign posted against trespassers and it was switching back and forth up the cuts of the dirt road up the mountain. There was one point, halfway up the mountain, where a car could stop and turn around and descend, in case the driver had taken the dirt road by mistake. This car did not turn around.
Devereaux reached for the pistol that was in his jacket and he opened the chamber and he saw the bullets waiting in the cylinders. He cocked the hammer and put the gun down carefully on top of the woodpile and he stood in the open and watched the car ascend.
He had been alone in the mountains for two weeks. He had not spoken to another person, except during one trip down to the town of Front Royal, where he had purchased groceries. In the evenings, in the house on the mountain, he had sat alone watching the flames in the immense stone fireplace, slowly drinking chilled vodka, not speaking, not listening to music, not reading. He had spent the evenings in utter silence before the flames and felt their warmth. He had slept for long periods of time; slept so much that the dreams began to fade and sometimes he would awake and not remember dreaming at all.
The car made the last turn a hundred yards below the house and came slowly up the dirt road, the tires sliding and spinning in the snow. Even in summer, the road was treacherous, purposely so; but now, in the early Virginia winter, the road was very dangerous.
The car stopped fifty feet from the house and the woodpile.
Devereaux glanced down at the pistol waiting on the woodpile and then looked at the dirt-streaked automobile. The door opened on the driver’s side.
“You don’t make it easy,” Rita Macklin said.
Devereaux did not speak for a moment and then he reached for the pistol and gently lowered the cocked hammer. He put the pistol back in his jacket hanging from a peg on the side of the house.
“It took a little trouble to find you,” she said, still standing by the car.
“You’re going to have trouble getting down the mountain. That road isn’t designed for a two-wheel-drive car.”
“Now you tell me.”
Silence between them; snow began to fall, a lazy snow that came quietly down between the trees and settled around them.
“Well,” Rita said.
Devereaux did not speak.
“You told me to come to see this place when I first met you, in Clearwater. You weren’t kidding, were you?” She smiled then.
“I didn’t expect you to come,” he said at last. “I didn’t think I would see you again.”
“Well,” she said.
He did not speak. He looked at her for a long time without speaking.
“You can help me. I want to bring some wood inside.”
She closed the car door then and came across the pathway to him. She held out her arms and he piled them with logs and he filled his own arms and he led her around the side of the house to the door. He pushed open the door with his foot and they carried the logs into the big room and piled them on the brick shelf next to the fireplace. The fireplace was already crackling with flames and flames and blowers were circulating the heat through the room.
That night, in silence, they ate and drank a bottle of wine and sat for a long time together on the couch in front of the fireplace and watched the flames until they were sleepy and the wine made them see faces and stories in the fire.