Lying in his pajamas atop his bed, really quite spectacularly alone, he realized that this mission for which he had volunteered, establishing the ident.i.ty of the killer, had actually been a means of busying himself, of distracting himself from the dull aching void within him.

Was there really any likelihood that he could discover who was killing these women? He had spent, after all, an entire hour with that muddle of an old man, and learned nothing more substantial than that the dead woman had possessed red hair. A snippet of information so irrelevant as to be utterly useless.

Could he really credit von Hesse's theory-that one of the men on the tour harbored, without knowing it, a homicidal self? Earlier, the notion had seemed persuasive, so much so that Oscar had appropriated it, made it his own. But now, at the close of a long and dreary day, it seemed as hollow as Oscar felt.

A long and dreary day indeed. He and Henry had gotten drenched when they returned to the hotel. With the wind sweeping great hissing gouts of water around the snapping cover of the carriage, the journey back had seemed to take fully as long as Oscar's crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. At the hotel, his hair sopping wet, his clothes cold and sodden, he had stood elaborately dripping onto the front desk, a minor storm shower himself, to learn that Vail had in fact arranged a change of room for Henry. Afterward, he had dismissed Henry for the day and tramped upstairs, his shoes squeaking, to his own room. There he had stripped, showered, scented himself with rose water, donned dry clothing (gray trousers, powder blue shirt, vermilion cravat, the lune du lac coat) and gone out in search of Vail. It was time, Oscar decided, for a bit of bridge mending.

He had found the business manager in the bar downstairs, slumped in a chair at the corner of the room. A nearly empty bottle of whiskey stood on the table before him, and Vail, glaring glumly off into s.p.a.ce, appeared not to notice as Oscar sat down to his left. Vail's toupee was aslant, the halibut's head contemplating Vail's right eyebrow as though about to peck at it. Oscar found himself wanting to screw the thing round to the front; it was one temptation he was able to resist.

"Vail," he said, "I think we should talk."

His head resting back against the flocked red wallpaper, Vail turned to Oscar an unblinking pair of gla.s.sy gray eyes. "Have you come to attack me again?" he said in a low, resonant voice. "Have you come once more to heap iniquities upon my head? To smother me beneath the weight of your scorn?"

Oscar felt a chill go fluttering down his spine. The voice was so unlike Vail's in timbre and tone that it seemed to be issuing from some sinister stranger buried deep within the business manager. He said, "I beg your pardon?"

Vail blinked, frowned, sucked in his cheeks, and then smiled sadly. "Oscar boy," he said, his voice all at once Vailish again.

"What was that you were saying?" Oscar asked him.

Vail blinked again, like a man having difficulty awakening. "Huh? Oh." He spoke slowly, distractedly. "Something from a play I was in. A real stinker." He smiled sadly once more. "You didn't know, did you, Oscar boy, that I used to be on the boards myself?"

"No," said Oscar.

"No," agreed Vail. His eyes misting over, he sat forward, lifted the bottle, poured the remaining whiskey into his gla.s.s. "Course not. How would you know? Why would you care? Far as you're concerned, I'm just greedy old Jack Vail. Am I right? Sloppy old greedy old insignificant old Jack Vail."

"Come now, Vail, I've never thought anything remotely like that. But I do think that we should-"

"You can't judge a book by its cover, ya know."

Oscar smiled, sensing an opportunity. "Actually," he said, "I've always maintained that a cover reveals more about a book than-"

"I had dreams once too, ya know," said Vail to his whiskey gla.s.s. He turned to Oscar. "I was young once too, ya know."

"I've never doubted that for a moment." Never having for a moment given it a thought.

Vail nodded. "Yeah. Dreams. I wanted to play Hamlet. The Melancholy Dane." He raised the gla.s.s to his lips, swallowed some bourbon. "Alas, poor Yorick," he said.

"You'd have made a capital Hamlet."

"I would of been terrible," Vail said. "Fact is, I wasn't much good in the stinkers." He looked at Oscar. "But at least, ya know, back then I had my dreams. Dreams are important, Oscar boy. You got to hold on to them as long as you can."

"Nicely phrased."

Vail nodded and narrowed his eyes. "You're okay. You're okay, Oscar boy." His eyes misted over again. "But really, ya know, you shouldn't ought to talk to me like you did before. I mean, what I did, I did it for the tour, Oscar boy. The tour's the thing, am I right?"

"Well, yes, up to a point."

"Absolutely," Vail nodded. "I was only thinking of you, see, you and the tour. That's my job, isn't it? I didn't mean anybody any harm."

"Of course not."

"So're we friends again, Oscar boy? Huh?" Vail held out his right hand. Oscar took it, and Vail squeezed his hand and clapped him heavily on the shoulder. "We friends again?"

"Of course we are. But don't you think you ought to get some rest? Tonight's the last lecture here in Denver. Come along, I'll walk with you upstairs."

"Great," said Vail. "Great idea." He released Oscar's hand, started to rise, then sat back and looked at him mournfully. "Tell me one thing, though, Oscar boy."

"What's that?"

"What you said. Upstairs in Henry's room. You wouldn't really of thrown me out the window, would ya? Not your old friend Jack. You wouldn't really of done that to old Jack, would ya?"

Oscar smiled. "Well, yes, Jack, I'm afraid I would."

Vail looked at him for a moment and then he laughed. He slapped his hand down on Oscar's thigh. "That's what I love," he said. "That wit you got."

And so Oscar had escorted Vail up the stairs to his room, the business manager cheerfully bouncing from time to time against the wall, then watched almost fondly as Vail toppled into bed and immediately began to snore. (So helpless and harmless did he seem that Oscar completely discounted the small frisson he had felt when a stranger's voice had rumbled from Vail's mouth.) Oscar had gone back downstairs to eat. After an extremely depressing meal of dismembered chicken drifting in a pasty gray gravy, he had gone to his own room to nap. But sleep did not come. His stomach gurgled and grumbled in protest at the swill fermenting inside it. His brain attempted, and failed, to visualize any of the people on the tour as a deranged murderer. And images of old men in tattered overcoats and of burly bullying giants in buffalo fur blended with the recurring image of a smiling Elizabeth McCourt Doe in nothing at all. Finally, at seven-thirty, he had arisen and returned to Vail's room. No one answered when he knocked, and the door was now locked, so Oscar had proceeded to the Opera House alone.

The lecture had been a disaster. His wittiest sallies stumbled into a blank wall of silence. His most profound observations met with uneasy t.i.tters or, worse, with the pachydermal trumpeting of some dunce emptying his sinuses into a pocket handkerchief. (Or more likely, given the caliber of the crowd, into his fingers.) Throughout the evening, Oscar was unable to prevent himself from glancing over expectantly at the box on his right, as though one of the two desiccated old harpies slumbering there, mouths agape, might magically transform herself into a regal presence swathed in ermine.

After the spotty and perfunctory applause, Oscar had left the Opera House and trudged back to the hotel. He had wanted to see, had wanted to speak with, no one. (Except of course Her.) But his stomach had recovered from its battle with the chicken-curious, and a bit vexing, how it could remain utterly indifferent to its owner's personal tragedy-and he had stopped downstairs for a bite to eat. There had been only a few customers in the bar, but one of them had been O'Conner, sitting with a bottle before him in the same chair that Vail had occupied earlier, and looking every bit as glum. Oscar had joined him.

"What do you recommend tonight?" Oscar asked him.

O'Conner, wearing the brown suit he had purloined from some scarecrow, looked at him balefully and said, "The whiskey."

When the waiter arrived a moment later, however, Oscar ordered the night's special, something called meat loaf. (They had no tea here; he had asked before.) As the waiter left, Oscar asked O'Conner, "You've spoken with Marshal Grigsby?"

O'Conner made a sour frown. "Yeah."

"What do you think of all this? These women being killed?"

O'Conner raised his gla.s.s, drank from it. "Some hookers got killed. Happens all the time." He shrugged. "It's a rough line of work."

Surprised, Oscar said, "You won't be writing about it, then?"

O'Conner shook his head. "Not my kind of thing."

"I should've thought that any reporter would've found the story fascinating."

O'Conner shook his head. "It's not my kind of thing," he said again, then drank some more whiskey and stared off at the nearly empty room.

"What do you think of Grigsby's notion that it's one of us?"

O'Conner looked at him. "Can you see any of us disemboweling a hooker?"

"No," Oscar admitted. "I can't."

O'Conner shrugged.

Oscar said, "Von Hesse had an interesting idea."

O'Conner looked at him. "I doubt that."

"He believes that one of us may be the killer, without being aware of it. That the homicidal side of his nature is as unknown to him as it is to the rest of us."

O'Conner snorted lightly. "Von Hesse is good at believing in things he can't see."

The meat loaf arrived then, and turned out to be a thick slab of parched, overcooked ground meat studded throughout with limp fragments of unidentifiable vegetable and glazed with an oily tomato sauce. Beside it on the plate rose a lumpy mound of mashed potatoes. The waiter also set on the table an empty whiskey gla.s.s.

O'Conner looked at Oscar's plate, frowned, and said, "I wouldn't eat that on an empty stomach, if I were you." He poured bourbon into Oscar's gla.s.s.

Tentatively, Oscar tasted the meat. Execrable was the first word that sprang to mind. It was followed closely by vile.

O'Conner grinned. "That's a pretty hefty portion you've got there. The cook must like you."

"Fortunately," said Oscar, "I've never met the man."

"It's a woman," O'Conner said. "The wife of one of the brothers who owns the hotel. Maybe she's after you. The quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach." He frowned. "Who was it who said that?"

"Lucretia Borgia."

O'Conner snorted.

Oscar took a sip of whiskey. "How are your articles coming along?"

"Fine," O'Conner said, and swallowed some whiskey of his own.

"When will we get a opportunity to read them?"

The reporter shrugged dismissively. "I asked Horner, the editor, to send copies to Chicago. They should be waiting for me there."

Oscar tasted the mashed potatoes. Or rather, attempted to, for they had no taste at all. "And so you're really not going to write about these killings?"

O'Conner scowled. "Jesus, Wilde, I already said so, didn't I?" Abruptly he pushed back his chair and stood up. "I've got to get some work done. I'll see you at the train station tomorrow." And lifting his bottle and tucking it under his arm, he had stalked from the room.

Leaving a puzzled Oscar to finish what he could of his meal by himself.

After dinner, he had climbed up the stairs to his room and, dispirited, dejected, climbed out of his clothes and into his pajamas, then flopped with his cigarette case and his notebook onto the bed.

Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow he would present himself at Tabor's mansion, using the excuse that he wished to say goodbye. He must see her. Even if disguised as merely a polite visitor, even if only for a few moments, he must see her.

As for this murder business, the more one thought about that, the less probable the whole thing seemed. It had been the novelty of von Hesse's theory, rather than its plausibility, that had attracted; and the novelty now had worn off. And having used the theory to fill up the emptiness within him, Oscar now felt, without it, doubly empty.

And yet those poor women had been killed in towns where the tour had stopped. How to explain that?

An itinerant madman. This was the only possible explanation.

Still, it would do no harm to keep an eye opened. All the men were innocent, certainly; but a.s.suming, simply for the sake of argument, that one of them could be guilty, then it might be wise to remain alert.

O'Conner had acted oddly tonight. Brusque and moody. Quite unlike himself. And how could a reporter ignore the journalistic possibilities of these murders?

And what of that queer voice emerging from Vail's mouth?

But perhaps once you set out to discover secrets, you discovered that there was no end of them. Each of us had his own; each of us had another face hidden behind the mask.

Who would've thought that Vail had once been an actor? That once he had, good Lord, wanted to play Hamlet?

To be or not to be, that's the question, am I right?

But Vail a madman, a murderer? Or O'Conner? Or any of them? Absurd.

One should keep alert, however. If any of them were a madman (which was of course impossible), then surely he must finally reveal himself to the alert mind. To the alert, penetrating mind of a poet.

Oscar lit a cigarette.

Where was she? Just now, just at this moment, what was she doing?

Her white b.r.e.a.s.t.s are perfectly rounded at the bottom, and they slope down along their upper surface in a graceful arc to broad, pale pink, puckered aureoles and stiff fragrant nipples the thickness of fingertips; and, kneeling upright and naked on the bed, she offers them to him ...

Oscar's hand drifted down his stomach.

Ah, Freddy. Tonight we have only each other.

Tonight, naked, once again he was dancing.

Twirling, spinning, silently wheeling, feet darting, arms loose and free.

It had been better last night, yes, it had been oh so wonderful last night when the red came flying off those streamers of flesh at his fingertips and sailed through the air and pattered bright shining patterns along the wall. It had been glorious then, afloat in the brilliant tumbling spate of divine light ...

... he was on the bed now-another of those disconcerting shifts, those inexplicable folds in the fabric of Time, but never mind, never mind, he was beyond Time now. He held the pillow to his face (a whisper of camphor uncoiling from the cotton, and the sour musty shadows left behind by each of the countless heads that over the years had rested there) and he giggled as he remembered oh yes red fingertips capering down the slickness of bone There will be another.

and prying open oh yes the wet red secrets of flesh Another. Soon.

... up again, dancing again, reeling, swaying. On the cast-iron wood stove before him sat the porcelain washbasin, filled nearly to the brim with brownish water. He pranced forward, dipped his fingers into the warm water, fished out the limp slippery lump of flesh, and slumped to his knees, not in supplication, oh no, but in bliss and grat.i.tude, and he There will be another soon.

sank his teeth into the meat and tore away a chunk of it and chewed, his body shuddering with pleasure Soon.

while the silence trembled like the wings of angels behind him in the room.

Grigsby walks into the room and closes the door behind him. The air is heavy with a dank, slaughterhouse stench.

The thing on the bed, its upper half propped against the wall, was once Molly Woods. The thing wears a petticoat, pushed back to its waist, and its legs are drawn up. There is no skin or flesh on the legs: glistening white shinbones, a pair of round white kneecaps, white thighbones. Only the feet, splayed out against the bed, are intact. Each toenail is painted red.

The flesh has been stripped, too, from the ribs, and between white arches of bone he can see a dull film of pink tissue.

The arms are peeled as well, from shoulder to wrist. The curled fingers of both hands have been placed at the black savage rent in the belly, as though to make it appear, obscenely, that they are drawing back the wide lips of the awful wound.

The face is gone. The thick red hair, falling to the exposed shoulder bones, frames a leering skull from which empty sockets gape.