“The shop, you mean?” He smiled and lifted her hand to his lips in an obviously warm and spontaneous gesture that elicited in her a response of tenderness that she had not felt for him before. “I had decided long ago that you should have your shop in any event. Did I neglect to tell you that?”
“I’m afraid you did.”
“Perhaps I should not be telling you now.”
“Why?”
“That should be apparent. I’m not the most astute man in the world, but neither am I naive. I am well aware that the shop has been from the beginning my principal negotiable asset. Perhaps my only one.”
“No. In the beginning it may have been your only one, but now it is not.”
“Nevertheless, since you know that you are going to get anyway what you set out to get, I may have weakened my position.”
“You could always change your mind about the shop.”
“No. Like most men with few virtues, I make great issue of the few. I don’t break my promises, and I promise that you shall have your shop. Now will you give me the direct answer to my direct question?”
“You may stay, of course.”
“Because you’re grateful?”
“Not only that.”
“Good enough. I’m wise enough not to press it any further. And now it’s time I was leaving, and I wish it weren’t.” He lifted her hand to his lips in a repetition of the warm gesture. “Would you like me to take you some place?”
“No, thank you. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll have one more drink before leaving.”
“In that case, I’ll see you tonight.”
He went away, and she watched him go, and she continued to feel for him the new tenderness that seemed to have nothing to do with his generosity. The man in the rear of the bar kept playing Lisbon Antigua; she ordered another Martini and sat drinking it, and she thought that it was really very strange how things eventually culminated so quietly, for better or for worse. She had schemed for the shop and had felt intensely that the shop was absolutely essential to all that she wanted to do and be, that failure to acquire it would somehow be a disaster from which she could never recover completely. Now that she was successful and had achieved all that she wanted through her own efforts and the exploitation of herself, she should have been filled with tremendous excitement and satisfaction, but instead she was only quiet and acceptant of things as they had turned out. She knew that she would have been the same way, exactly the same way, if they had turned out bad instead of good. But she also knew that this was something that would change, that she was now caught in a kind of recuperative lethargy in which she would gather again her emotional energy. Excitement would come in its own time, as despair would have come if she had failed.
After finishing her second Martini, she left the bar and walked several blocks to the restaurant where she had gone previously with Tyler. She ate alone in the restaurant, and then she returned to her apartment, and it was almost eight o’clock when she arrived. She wondered what she could do until midnight, when Tyler would come, and she thought that perhaps she would sleep for two or three hours. She actually did set the alarm and lie down on the bed in the bedroom, but it was impossible to sleep after all. Lying there, she began to review in her mind all that had happened in the last hundred days or so since the death of Aaron, but this involved things about which she would rather not think. After half an hour she got up and went out into the living room and began to read a book called The Sleepless Moon, which she had bought only a few days earlier, about a man and a woman, married to each other, who shouldn’t have been. At first it was difficult to get into the book, and her own thoughts kept interfering with the symbols on the pages, but after a while the symbols became dominant. She continued to read without stopping until the buzzer sounded at the door.
She looked at her watch and saw that it was ten o’clock, much too early for Tyler unless something had happened to change his plans, which wasn’t likely. And even if his plans had been changed, it wasn’t likely that he would simply come along early without calling first. Having considered and discarded the possibility of its being Tyler, she thought at once of Enos Simon, that it might be he at the door. If it was, which would be unfortunate to say the least, she had better see him and get rid of him quickly before Tyler came. While this was in her mind, she was aware also of a kind of subversive hope that he had indeed returned, was standing at that moment outside the door, and that she could somehow devise a way of salvaging him and making him compatible with the plan of her life, but this was impossible, as she knew very well, and was not to be seriously thought of.
But it was not Enos. It was a slender man, almost slight, neatly dressed in a dark brown suit with brown shoes and a brown knit tie, and he held in his right hand a brown hat that had covered, before he removed it, a head of short-cut light brown hair. At first she could not place him, though he seemed familiar, and then she remembered who he was, but she still couldn’t remember his name, and this was possibly because it was a name she preferred not to remember.
“Good evening, Miss Buchanan,” he said. “Do you remember me?”
“I remember who you are,” she said, “but I don’t remember your name.”
“It’s Daniels. The last time we met, which was also the first, I said that I would enjoy seeing you again, but we agreed that it would be impossible.”
“Apparently we were wrong.”
“Yes. Apparently. I hope you are not distressed about it.”
“Why should I be? Are you here on police business?”
“In a way I am. In a way I’m not. The fact is, I’m delivering mail.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I have a letter for you. A note. May I come in for a few minutes?”
“If it’s necessary.”
“I regret that it is.”
She stepped back and aside, still holding to the knob of the door. It was something of consequence, of course, that brought him here at this hour, and the chances were that it was unpleasant or possibly disastrous, though she couldn’t think what it might be. What surprised her even more than his presence was the quiet readiness with which she would surely accept whatever it was that brought him. She watched him come past her into the room, feeling in her readiness a certain pride.
“Won’t you sit down?” she said.
“Thank you.”
He drifted across to the chair in which she had been sitting. Seeing her book, which was turned face down on the chair’s arm, he turned toward her with the thin smile that she remembered well, now that she saw it again.
“I see that you are reading The Sleepless Moon,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I haven’t read it yet myself, but I’ve read a review. In the Atlantic, I think.”
“The Atlantic?”
The question had an inflection of skepticism, and she regretted it as soon as it was spoken, not so much because it was a rudeness to him as because it suggested in her a naive snobbishness that discredited automatically the claim of a policeman to read anything superior to comic books. Sensitive to the inflection, he permitted his smile to return briefly.
“Anyhow,” he said, “I’m sure you have no desire to discuss books with me at this hour of the night, or any hour at all. As I said, I have brought you a note, and here it is.”
He took an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to her, and she took it and looked at it, and there was nothing on the outside except her name. She had not seen Enos Simon’s handwriting for years, not since the letters from college, and she didn’t recognize it. But she knew just the same that the letter was from Enos and that he had written to her before dying and was by this time surely dead. This was knowledge that involved her awareness of the possibility, plus the presence of Daniels, and it was incontrovertible. Removing the note from the envelope, she read it quickly, the few lines, the simple statement of regret and gratitude.