Mystery

“After the first two, I think. I was supposed to be the third, as I guess you know by now. Scarcely my favorite memory. Lamont must have told you about my connection to all that.”

Tom said that he had.

“Of course there’s no connection between my encounter with a maniac and Boney’s throwing me out of his practice—I’m still not convinced that Damrosch was the person who attacked me, but I can tell you one thing—I’m damn sure it wasn’t Boney!”

“No,” Tom said, though at this moment almost anything would have seemed possible to him.

They said good-bye a few seconds later. Tom jittered around the room, thinking about what Buzz had told him, and then could no longer stand the tension of being alone, and let himself out into the hallway and walked downstairs to the bar and grill. He drank two Cokes and stared out the window past the flashing neon scimitar. A battered red taxi slid up to the curb.

Tom ducked down in the back seat when Andres turned east on Calle Drosselmayer. “Now what?” Andres said. “You think some fellow is watching you?” He chugged coffee from a plastic cup with an opening in its lid and chuckled. “How do you come to think this fellow is watching?”

Tom slowly straightened up. They were a block east of the hotel. Two hundred yards ahead lay the glossy shops which had seemed a paradise of earthly things from Sarah Spence’s little car. “Did you see a man in sunglasses and a white shirt across the street from the hotel?”

“I might have seen that man,” Andres said. “I won’t say I didn’t.”

“Lamont saw him when we first came to the St. Alwyn. He’s been there ever since, just watching the front of the hotel.”

“Well, careful does no harm,” Andres admitted. “But there’s no sense in what we are doing now. Get me out of my bed, look for Lamont. When Lamont does not want to be seen, nobody on earth can find him. I know Lamont forty years, and I know that man can drive you crazy. He does not explain himself. This is true! He say, I will be here, and is he? Sometimes. He say, I will see you in two hours, and when does he come? Maybe two days. Does Lamont care, I get out of bed after sleeping two hours? He does not. Does Lamont care, you worry when he stays out? I assure you, my friend, he does not. This is Lamont. Lamont is always working, he goes here, he goes there, he stands in the rain twelve hours, and when he is done he says, ‘Very few men on Mill Walk are wearing purple socks.’ He has a different music in his head.”

“I know, but—”

Andres was not through yet.

“And now we are going to his house! Do you have a key? Do you think he left the door open? You cannot think a circle around Lamont, you know.”

“I’m not trying to out-think him, I just want to find him,” Tom said. “If you want to go back to bed, I’ll walk.”

“You’ll walk. You think just like he does. You’re so worried about Lamont you stay awake a whole night, and you want me to go back to bed. What do you think happens, if I go home? My wife asks me, did you find Lamont? I say, no, I need my sleep. She says, you sleep after you find Lamont!” He shook his head. “It’s not so easy, being his friend. Who do you think found him when he was nearly killed in back of Armory Place? Who do you think took him to the hospital? You think he did that himself?”

“You’re worried too,” Tom said, having just understood this.

“You have not been listening to me,” Andres said. “That is my lot, worrying about Lamont von Heilitz. So let us go to his house, and you will walk in and find him making a cup of tea and he will say, ‘Your grandfather’s horse has thrown its right front shoe,’ and you will go back to the hotel and think about it, and I will go back to bed and not think about it. Because I know better than to think about the kind of things he says.”

Andres turned off Calle Berlinstrasse into Edgewater Trail. Waterloo Parade, Balaclava Lane, Omdurman Road. The houses spread apart and grew larger. Victoria Terrace, Stonehenge Circle, Ely Place, Salisbury Road. Now he was back in the peaceful landscape of his childhood, where sprinklers whirred over long lawns and bright sunlight fell on bougainvillaea and hibiscus trees with lolling red blossoms. Here every child attended Brooks-Lowood School, and a traffic jam was one servant riding a bicycle into another servant’s bicycle, spilling clean laundry into the clean street. Yorkminster Place. Some of the houses had red-tiled roofs and curving white walls, some were of smooth white marble that ate the sunlight, some of grey stone piled into turrets and towers, others of shining white wood, with broad porches and columns and verandas the size of fields. Sprays of water played on the broad green lawns.

Andres turned into The Sevens and pulled up to the curb. He turned around and laid an arm along the top of his seat. “Now I sit here, the way I always did for Lamont, and you go to his place, okay? And see what you see. Then you come back and tell me about it, and we’ll decide what to do after that.”