Wilde West Part 29

"d.a.m.n good."

Smiling, she inclined her head. "Then I thank you for the compliment."

"This is the first time," he said, "bein' with you, it's the first time all day I been able to forget about those killin's."

She smiled sadly. "And now," she put her finger to his chin, "you remember them again."

"Yeah," said Grigsby. "Well. They ain't gonna go away."

She pursed her lips. "It is a pity that you cannot learn something of the childhood of all the men traveling with Oscair."

"What good would that do?"

She moved her shoulder lightly in a shrug. "It all begins there, does it not? We spend the rest of our lives attempting to make right the wrongs which we suffer in childhood."

Grigsby grinned; he thought she was joking. "Get revenge, like?"

She said seriously, "Sometimes, I think, yes. A child who is beaten by his parents becomes, very often, a parent who beats his child. But I believe that we all suffer, that we all become wounded. Even with the best intentions in the world, our parents cannot always be there when we stumble, cannot always console us when we hurt. And so we grow up, all of us, somehow knowing at the core of our selves that we are completely alone."

"Yeah, well, sure," said Grigsby. "That's just the way of the world."

"But no," she said. "I speak now not of a conscious awareness, a philosophical position. I speak of a flaw, a wound that lies concealed in the structure of the soul. And I believe that throughout our lives we will be attracted to situations, and to people, that will sooner or later cause us pain. And the result will be that the wound, the fundamental pain of the soul, reemerges."

Grigsby frowned. "You're sayin' we pick people who're gonna hurt us?"

"Or who will cause us to hurt them, which will of course hurt us as well."

Grigsby thought then of Clara. Her face twisted in pain, her voice unraveling, ragged, as she shrieked at him: Bob, how could you do this?

He pushed away the image. "That don't make much sense," he said.

"You have read Stendahl?" she said.

He frowned. "That a book?"

She smiled. "An author. He talks about the phenomenon of crystallization. We meet someone-a man, let us say, meets a woman. He is attracted to her, and soon he discovers that all the qualities he most admires in a woman have begun to crystallize around this particular female. She is not only beautiful, but also intelligent, and kind, and loving. She is altogether perfect."

Thinking of Clara, Grigsby said, "Some women can come pretty close to bein' perfect."

"Perhaps," she said. "But the point I make here is that frequently our minds crystallize, they construct, this perfection. And I believe that the mind constructs the perfection around an individual whom the soul, the spirit selects. Someone who is in fact perfect for the spirit's purposes."

"Somebody who's gonna hurt us?"

"I believe that the spirit, the soul, wishes to heal itself of its wound. You cannot heal a wound unless you are aware that it exists. And so the spirit seeks out those people who will, sooner or later, cause us exactly the sort of pain which already we suffer, but at a level below consciousness."

Grigsby smiled. These folks from Europe surely did like their theories. "And you're sayin' everybody does this?"

She smiled at the gentle mockery in his voice, and she tapped him on the chin. "I believe so, yes."

"What about the folks who get married and live happily ever after?"

She smiled again. "Apart from fairy tales, do you know many of these?"

"Some," Grigsby said, but offhand he couldn't think of any. Him and Clara? Gerry and Mary Hanrahan? Dell and Barbara Jameson? He asked her, "And what about this sonovab.i.t.c.h who's killin' the women? How do you work him in?"

She shrugged. "This man, this killer, perhaps in a sense he is trying to heal his wound by the murder of these women. Something quite horrible must have happened to him when he was a child. If you could learn what it was, you might better understand him."

"I don't gotta understand him. All I gotta do is catch him."

"But perhaps you must understand him in order to catch him."

"Hope not," Grigsby said. "I don't reckon I'll ever understand him. Don't reckon I really want to." He frowned.

She smiled. "Perhaps we should try to make you forget this matter again."

Grigsby grinned. "What you got in mind?"

She told him.

Afterward, without intending to, Grigsby had slipped off to sleep. Only to come thras.h.i.+ng out of it, soaked with sweat and crying Clara's name as he scrambled from the horror of Molly Woods. The oil lamps were off; Mathilde must have blown them out. Pale moonlight streamed through the window. For a few minutes, before he could pull himself together, he trembled like a baby against her body, and in the darkness she held him.

At last, his breathing and his heartbeat back to normal, the image of Molly Woods finally fading, he eased himself away from her shoulder. Ashamed at the weakness he had revealed, he forced a hollow chuckle through a throat that was still thick and tight.

"Bad dream," he told her.

She said nothing, only stroked his cheek.

Grigsby rolled over and fished his watch from his vest pocket, struck a match. Three o'clock.

"I gotta go, Mathilde," he told her.

She nodded. "If you must."

Grigsby dressed himself, keeping his back to the Countess-acting the fool like that, hollering and shouting in his sleep, had made him feel lumpish and clumsy once more.

b.u.t.toning up the sheepskin jacket, he turned to her and said, "Am I gonna be able to see you again?"

She smiled. "But of course. If you wish it."

"I do. And listen." He felt his face reddening once more. Too dark for her to see it-good thing. "Well," he said. "I'm real sorry about all the commotion. Wakin' you up and all."

She shook her head. "We all have our terrors, Bohb."

He looked down at her. He felt suddenly that he was leaving her with something left undone, something left unsaid; but he couldn't think what they might be. He nodded. "Thank you, Mathilde. I'll see you soon."

She smiled again. "Good night, Bohb."

Out in the hallway, Grigsby remembered that the the hotel's pa.s.skey still lay in his pocket. Quietly, holding his breath, he unlocked each door in turn and peered inside. Vail, O'Conner, Rudd.i.c.k, and Wilde were all asleep, Wilde snoring away like a sawmill.

Downstairs, when Ned Winters saw Grigsby, he looked like someone who had just been told that he wouldn't be getting hanged today after all. Breathing an explosive sigh of relief, he took back the pa.s.skey. "Thank G.o.d, Marshal! Where were you?"

"Pokin' around."

"Holy Hannah! When you didn't come back down, I didn't know what to think."

Grigsby nodded. "Listen, Ned. There's a colored fella travelin' with Wilde. Servant name of Henry. He move into another room?"

Winters nodded. "He's in room 201 now. Wally said the manager, Mr. Vail, ordered him a new room."

"He up there now?"

Winters nodded. "Went out around eight, came back at ten-thirty."

"You sure? You didn't maybe have yourself a catnap or two?"

"No sir, Marshal. Not a one. I been awake all night. They were all up in their rooms by midnight." He leaned toward Grigsby. "But, come on now, Marshal, you sure you can't tell me what's goin' on?"

"Positive. See you."

From the hotel, Grigsby had ridden the mare back to his house, where he'd cleaned himself up, dressed in fresh clothes, and thrown some spare s.h.i.+rts and an extra union suit into his saddlebag. After leaving the horse at the livery stable, he had set off for the railroad station. He had arrived in Colorado Springs at six in the morning.

And now, as the horse jounced and rocked beneath his aching hip, Grigsby could see, over the tree line, against the bright blue of sky, the smudge of smoke that hung above the chimneys of Manitou Springs.

He realized, abruptly, that he hadn't had a drink since the apple brandy in Mathilde's room. Been so tickled with himself, probably, that he hadn't even thought about it.

He tried to remember the last time he'd gone three or four hours without taking a single drink. Without thinking about a drink. Not since before Clara left.

d.a.m.n, he thought. That was cause for a little celebration.

"d.a.m.n FINE LECTURE, Mr. Wilde," said the mayor of Manitou Springs.

"Don't cuss, Cleveland," said his wife.

From over their heads, beyond the now empty chairs aligned in precise rows beneath the glittering chandeliers, Oscar could make out Elizabeth McCourt Doe chatting with Mathilde de la Mole and a gaggle of Manitou Springs luminaries beside the closed French windows that led onto the ballroom's veranda.

"Good turnout, too," said the Mayor. "Almost as good as that fella d.i.c.kens got."

This snared Oscar's attention.

"d.i.c.kens spoke here, did he?" he asked, and sipped at his champagne. Appalling stuff, flat and sulfurous.

"Sure did," said the mayor. "He read from that book of his, about the death of Little Nell. d.a.m.n fine writing. Nearly brought a tear to my eye, I don't mind telling you. Isn't that right, Mother?"

"Don't cuss, Cleveland," said his wife.

"You know d.i.c.kens, Mr. Wilde?" asked the Mayor.

The mayor of Manitou Springs-Mr. Mudds, or Muggs, or something equally glum-was a jolly personage in a poorly tailored but extravagantly tailed dress coat who seemed utterly unaware that in the center of his round red face, roughly where his nose should have been installed, there bloomed an ent.i.ty the size of a pomegranate, veined and gullied and carbuncled. He was short and portly, with skin as taut as a sausage casing. Mrs. Mudds (or Muggs) was a small desiccated woman, prodigiously creased, like a gnome left too long in a pickling vat. She wore a low-cut dress which flaunted an expanse of what probably she believed to be decolletage, but which to Oscar more nearly resembled erosion.

A scrum of Manitou Springians stood huddled about, all of them leaning slightly forward, as though Oscar were standing at the bottom of a shallow crater in the parquet floor. All of them wore evening dress, and all of them looked at least as well fed as Mr. Muggs. No watercress and celery for this lot, except perhaps by the troughful.

They were all wealthy enough to have paid twenty dollars apiece for the lecture and for this "intimate" champagne party. With the others milling about the ballroom, they were the elite of Manitou Springs-according to Vail, everybody who was anybody in the town. ("In other words," Oscar had said, "n.o.body.") And at the moment none of them, alas, was Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

"Not personally," Oscar said to the mayor. "Although of course I know his works. I find them admirable. But I do sometimes wonder at the unusual number of pathetic little waifs he dispatches. In a novel by Mr. d.i.c.kens, one has only to come upon a pathetic little waif to know that the poor moppet is doomed. Sooner or later, usually after wasting away for several months, and for several chapters, he will breathe his last wretched little breath." Oscar frowned thoughtfully. "Do you suppose it possible that Mr. d.i.c.kens secretly dislikes children?"

The mayor turned to his wife, she evidently being the authority on literary matters.

"But I thought I read," she said, frowning, "that he's got children of his own? A lot of them, I believe. A big family."

"Ah," said Oscar. "Perhaps that explains it."

As Mrs. Muggs (or Mudds) a.s.similated this (or failed to), and as a few uneasy chuckles, all of these male, sputtered through the crowd, a female voice to Oscar's right asked him, "Do you mean to tell us, Mr. Wilde, that you dislike children?"

Oscar turned. Beneath a sculpted ma.s.s of blue-white hair which possessed the dull seamless glow of a conquistador's helmet, the woman's jowly face was eloquently puckered in distaste. She was all combative shoulders and cannon-barrel b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and for a moment he felt like the owner of a skiff who looks up and discovers that a frigate is bearing down upon him on a collision course.

"On the contrary, madam. I think they are one of life's great treasures. A joy to us when we are in our prime, and a solace in our decline. As soon as I can afford to do so, I intend to hire several of them."

More laughter this time, some of it shocked. The frigate's face remained shuttered.

Oscar glanced over at Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

Still gaily smiling with her entourage.

The least she could do was look over in this direction.

He swallowed some champagne. What was it that Holliday, the dentist-gunman, had called that bourbon? Donkey p.i.s.s.

"Mr. Wilde?"

Oscar turned. A small silver-haired man, warm brown puppy eyes peering out from a tracery of amused crinkles. "Jim Cathcart, editor of the Sentinel. I'll bet you've heard this before"-he smiled an engaging deprecatory smile-"but I guess you can understand that I've got to ask you anyway. What are your feelings so far about America?"

Oscar beamed down at this pleasant little man. "I can scarce describe my feelings. And of course I can scarce describe America. How could one describe a thing which by its very nature is indescribable? The vastness, the richness, the splendor-they boggle the mind and beggar even my own powers of description."

Around him, heads nodded in complacent agreement. His puppy eyes s.h.i.+ning, Cathcart asked him, "Would you like to comment on which parts of it you've liked best?"

"I can answer you without hesitation," said Oscar. "More than any other I've enjoyed this Colorado country of yours, filled as it is with splendid vistas and n.o.ble prospects." Not likely that anyone in this flock knew Johnson's comment to Boswell.

Clearly not. The remark had set more heads abob, and had apparently even taken some of the wind from the frigate's sails. Her jowls had unclenched appreciably.

"Does that mean," casually asked Cathcart, his brown eyes still warm and s.h.i.+ning, "that you don't care for the cities of America?"

Oscar smiled again. So: not a puppy after all: a fox. Ah well, Reynard, no nasty quotations from me tonight. "Not at all," he said. "I found Denver, for example, altogether fascinating."

Heads nodded, indicating that this was not an unpopular opinion. Everybody seemed (rather annoyingly) content to let Cathcart continue playing the part of inquisitor.

"Is it true, Mr. Wilde," Cathcart asked him, "that you're traveling with a servant and two steamer trunks packed with clothes?"

Probably none of the Manitou Springs gentry gathered round would be in any way ruffled by the idea of Oscar's traveling with a servant. Those who didn't employ servants themselves doubtless envied those who did. Some of them, possibly most of them, doubtless looked back with fondness to the good old days of slavery. Cathcart was plainly pursuing some plum he could present the rest of his readers.h.i.+p, the simple untutored yeoman, the honest untutored laborer.