Mystery

The old man shrugged, and again looked as if he were thinking a thousand thoughts at once. “She went out at night,” he finally said. “Everybody at Eagle Lake drank a lot in those days.” He looked down at the hem of his suit jacket, lifted it, and crossed his left hand over his waist to flick away a blemish invisible to Tom. Then he looked up. “I’m worn out. You’d better be getting home.”

The two of them stood up together. It seemed to Tom that Mr. von Heilitz communicated in two separate ways, and the way in which he said the important things was silently. If you didn’t get it, you missed it.

Von Heilitz walked him through the files and past the lamps like stars and moons in the night sky. He opened his front door. “You’re better than I was at your age.”

Tom felt the old man’s nearly weightless arm on his shoulders.

Across the street, one light burned in a downstairs window of his house. Down the block in the Langenheim house, every light blazed. Long cars and horse-drawn carriages stood at the curb. Uniformed drivers leaned and smoked against their cars, set apart from the carriage drivers who would not look at or speak to them.

“Ah, the night is so beautiful,” the old man said. He stepped outside.

Tom said goodbye, and the Shadow waved a dark blue glove, nearly invisible in the crystalline moonlight.

For the next few weeks, the Friedrich Hasselgard scandal and a series of revelations about the Treasury filled the nightly broadcasts and the headlines of the Eyewitness. The Finance Minister had misappropriated funds, misdirected funds, buried funds, misplaced funds in transfers from one account to another and from ledger to ledger. Through a combination of criminality and incompetence he had lost or stolen an amount of money that multiplied with each new investigation until it appeared to add up to the almost unthinkable sum of ten million dollars. “Criminal associates,” not terrorists, were now supposed to have shot the Minister’s sister. By the time Dennis Handley told Katinka Redwing at a dinner party that he had not been following the stories about the scandal and was not at all interested in that kind of thing, few other adults on the island of Mill Walk would have been able to utter such a statement.

One day, Dennis Handley asked Tom to see him after the end of school.

As soon as Tom walked into his room, Dennis said, “I suppose I know the answer to this question, but I have to ask it anyway.” He looked down at his desk, then out of the classroom window, which gave him a fine view of narrow, treelined School Road and the headmaster’s house, opposite the school. Tom waited for the question.

“That car you wanted to find—the Corvette in Weasel Hollow. Did that car belong to the person I think it belonged to?”

Tom sighed. “It belonged to the person it obviously belonged to.”

Dennis groaned and pressed his palms against his forehead.

“Why don’t you want me to say his name? Do you think you might get in trouble?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” Dennis said, “I wanted to have a friendly talk with you—your mother asked me to bring something up with you, a minor thing, but it was my idea to invite you to my apartment in order to see that manuscript, which I thought you might enjoy. Instead, you pretended to be sick and made me drive you all the way back across the island to a crime scene. The next day, the gentleman who owned that car disappears. Another man is gunned down. Blood is shed. Two lives are lost.”

Dennis raised his hands in theatrical horror.

“Did you write that letter the policeman mentioned at his press conference?”

Tom frowned, but did not speak.

“I feel sick,” Dennis said. “This whole situation is unhealthy, and my stomach knows it. Can’t you see that you had no business meddling in that kind of thing?”

“A man got away with murder,” Tom said. “Sooner or later they would have executed some innocent man and declared the whole thing solved.”

“And what happened instead? Do you call that a tea party?” Dennis shook his head and gazed out the window again, rather than look at Tom. “I am sick. You were my hope—you have gift enough for two.”

“For you and me both, you mean.”

“I want you to concentrate on the things that matter,” Dennis said in a slow, furious voice. “Don’t throw yourself away on garbage. You have a treasure within you. Don’t you see?” Dennis’s broad, fleshy face, suited to jokes and confidences and ruminations about novelists, strained to express all he felt. “There is the real world and the false world. The real world is internal. If you’re lucky, and you could be, you sustain it by the right work, by your responses to works of art, by loyalty to your friends, by a refusal to be caught up in public or private falsehoods. Think of E. M. Forster—two cheers for democracy.”

“I’m not going to run for office, Mr. Handley,” he said.