Wilde West Part 37

Upstairs in his room, Oscar saw that Henry had already packed everything. An hour remained before he had to catch the train to Leadville. He spent most of it retching into the toilet; and he did not know, he could not tell, which sickened him the most: his horror at the death of Biff, or his grief at the loss of Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

WHAT HAD FALLEN AS rain three days ago in Denver had fallen here, in the jumbled heights of the mountains, as snow. Alongside the railroad tracks it lay dingy and dirty, peppered by the cinder and grit sprayed from the smokestacks of pa.s.sing trains; along the steeply sloped ground before the steeply sloped pine forest, it lay a brilliant white, dazzling in the late afternoon sun. It draped the drooping boughs of the trees and it lay blue and gray beneath them and, even muted by shadow, it turned the tall s.h.a.ggy trunks to silhouettes.

The carriage was climbing at an impossible angle, the trees all leaning drunkenly in the direction of the train's pa.s.sage, the entire world atilt. This seemed to Oscar, after the events of the morning, altogether appropriate. A universe that so easily admitted, so easily permitted, betrayal and sudden death was a universe which was patently askew. He would not have been surprised to look out the window and see the trees dangling, topsy-turvy, from the sky.

He glanced around the carriage. Once again, most of the others had withdrawn into themselves and their silences. Opposite him, von Hesse and the Countess were reading: von Hesse, his Chuang Tzu; the Countess, Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma.

Sitting in the left front seats, facing back, were O'Conner and Rudd.i.c.k. Rudd.i.c.k was scribbling across the pages of his notebook; at the window a subdued O'Conner was playing gin rummy with a subdued Vail, who sat opposite him in the window seat to Oscar's left.

Oscar sighed. (Discreetly; he had no wish to advertise his distress.) All the others, even the perpetually inebriated O'Conner, appeared complete within themselves. Whole. Entire. Sound. None of them seemed to be, as Oscar felt, adrift and rudderless, storm-shattered, bobbing and yawing mindlessly, helplessly, hopelessly. Le Bateau Ivre.

He looked out the window at the crazed, canted trees of the forest as they dropped down the slope behind the slowly moving train. Perhaps he should retreat to some hermitage in those woody depths. Perhaps he might find, deep within the hushed forest, a lasting peace. He could build himself a small comfortable cell amid the pines, and there, surrounded by only a very few beautiful objects-his Bokhara rug, his Meissens, possibly a lovely bra.s.s samovar like the one he had seen last year at that cunning little shop in Belgravia-he could commune with nature. He would have for company only the birds and the squirrels.

And the bears. The dead bears.

Once again, Biff's battered hat sprang skyward and a third eye winked open in wonderment at his forehead. (The Eye of Wisdom this was called in certain Oriental traditions which at the moment Oscar was unable, precisely, to identify.) And now, buried (presumably) beneath damp earth and brown pine needles, that unblinking eye stared up at ... what?

At nothing. At the Void.

It stared at the Void and the Void stared back. One mirror contemplating itself in another.

"Oscar?"

Rudd.i.c.k, looking up from his notebook.

"Yes?"

"When we're in Leadville, will you be going to see the Ice Palace?"

"I beg your pardon?"

Evidently pleased to be the bearer of good (or at any rate hitherto unborne) tidings, Rudd.i.c.k enthusiastically fluttered his long eyelashes. Sometimes, truth to tell, Rudd.i.c.k could be a bit much. "You mean you don't know? Oh, well, really, I heard all about it in Manitou Springs, and it sounds wonderful. It's a real palace, with rooms and towers and courtyards, like a Norman castle, but it's all made out of ice. They cut the blocks out of the lake up there, and they had a big celebration, ice sculptures and a band and everything. That's all over, naturally, but the palace is still there. It's huge, I heard, absolutely enormous-three whole acres of it. Can you imagine? A whole great big castle made out of ice? It's definitely the first thing I'm going to go see tomorrow."

The idea of a castle constructed of ice-cold, bleak, and transient: like life-nicely complemented Oscar's mood. Perhaps whoever owned the thing would lease him a room. The dungeon, perhaps.

"Wilde's got better things to do with his time," said O'Conner, looking up with a comfortable leer from his cards.

Oscar turned to him. "Have I, indeed. And what might they be?"

Still leering, O'Conner said, "I saw you last night, after the lecture. I couldn't help noticing that you were getting along real well with Baby Doe."

"Mrs. Doe," Oscar said, "is an acquaintance only. And scarcely even that."

"Yeah," said O'Conner, nodding with mock earnestness, d.a.m.nable man. "Right. Then I guess you didn't know that Tabor's carriage is hooked up to the train we're on, and that she's in it, but he isn't. He's staying over in Manitou Springs. And I guess you didn't know that she's got a permanent room at the Clarendon Hotel, room 303. And I guess you didn't know that the third floor of the hotel, her floor, is connected by a pa.s.sageway to the Opera House, where you'll be lecturing tonight." He nodded again. "I guess you didn't know any of that, right?"

Vail was glaring over at Oscar, a scowl on his round pink face.

"No," said Oscar. "As a matter of fact, I didn't. And if I had, I should have utterly forgotten it. But tell me. How did you learn so much about Mrs. Doe?"

O'Conner shrugged. He produced a variation on his leer, an extremely irksome smirk. "I'm a reporter. I ask people for information, they give it to me."

"Ah." Pity he hadn't asked, with the same success, for lockjaw. Or coma.

Still smirking, O'Conner said, "You ever notice that when people say as a matter of fact, they're usually not telling the truth?"

Oscar smiled. "No," he said. "As a matter of fact, I haven't."

O'Conner nodded. "So you're saying there's nothing between the two of you?"

"Only distance. Which is as I prefer it." As soon as he said this, he knew he had said too much.

"Oh yeah?" said O'Conner, looking interested. "Why's that? She turn you down?"

"Excuse me, gentlemen," said the Countess. Heads turned.

"I do not wish to interrupt, but I find myself suddenly quite hungry. Oscair, would you be so good as to accompany me to the dining car?"

"With great pleasure," he said, and realized that this was the first true statement he had made in some time.

"Now, Oscair," said Mathilde de la Mole as she sat down opposite him, across the white linen of the dining table and facing the rear of the train, "you must tell me what is wrong. You look entirely disconsolate." She sat back in her seat and put her hands in her lap.

"It's nothing," he said. "Something I ate must have disagreed with me." This was, he realized sadly, yet another statement of fact-although several days had pa.s.sed between the occasion of his eating and the occasion of Elizabeth McCourt Doe's disagreeing.

"Oscair," she said, gently chiding, "Come now. Mr. O'Conner was not the only person to see you with the beautiful Madame Doe last night. You seemed so happy then, both of you. What has happened?"

" Ah," he said sadly. If only he could unburden himself, accept her sympathy, halve his pain by sharing it. Impossible, of course. A gentleman never complained about a lady.

"Get you folks some food?" The Negro waiter hovered beside their table, looking as resplendent in his whites as a society surgeon about to perform wonders in the operating theater. Teeth agleam, eyes asparkle in the friendly black face, he was really quite appallingly cheerful.

"Only some coffee, please," said the Countess.

"Have you any tea?" Oscar asked him.

"No sir, we surely don't."

"Coffee, then."

As the waiter left, Oscar looked back at Mathilde. "Ah," he sadly said again.

She smiled softly. "Tell me, Oscair. Perhaps I can help."

Well, after all, Elizabeth McCourt Doe was no lady ...

Oscar told her slowly at first, elliptically, avoiding specific details; and then gradually, as though for some curious reason he needed to feel his own pain even more acutely, as though he needed in fact to flaunt it, he began to elaborate and embellish his grief and humiliation (pausing only to accept the coffee when it arrived, and then impatiently to thank the smiling waiter). He told her of the house in Grosvenor Square and in the telling he made the cherished dwelling seem so real-its extensive and expensive wooden furnis.h.i.+ngs all gleaming with beeswax and lemon oil, its mortgage paid off-that its loss now was as crus.h.i.+ng as if he had sipped sherry beside its cozy fireplace for a lifetime. He told her of those splendid trips to Italy and France and Germany; and to Greece, where, although he had not realized it before this moment, he and Elizabeth McCourt Doe would have sat on the steps of the Erectheum and gazed in mutual love and shared awe at the sun-soaked pillars of the Parthenon.

Finally, omitting any mention of Darryl and Dr. Holliday and the (presumably) buried Biff, he told her of the woman's treachery. Of how, all along, she had kept Tabor informed about her relations.h.i.+p with Oscar. Of how she had permitted Oscar to lose himself, his heart, his soul, in visions of their future together when, all along, from the very beginning, they had had no future together.

"And not much of a present, either," he said forlornly. "A few stolen hours here and there. And those, as it turned out, had not been stolen at all. They had merely been borrowed, with his consent, from Tabor."

The Contess had listened in silence, merely nodding her head sympathetically now and then; or, from time to time, pursing her lips thoughtfully. Now she said, "But Oscair, of what, exactly, do you complain?"

"Mathilde," he said, "how on earth can you ask that? I loved the woman. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her."

"But you barely knew her, n'est-ce pas?"

"I barely knew her, yes. Now I know her all too well."

She leaned forward and put her hand over his. "Oscair, do not judge her so harshly. Did she ever promise to share your life with you?"

"She never promised not to." He took a sip of coffee, sadly shook his head. "You know, Mathilde, in matters of the heart, I've always been able to rely upon the fact that deep down, I'm rather a shallow person. If a particular flower were unavailable, forbidden, promised to another, why then, I could always wander on and pluck the next. The fields are full of lovely flowers, are they not? But somehow this wretched woman has managed to worm her way beneath my superficiality. I find even her treachery less disturbing than this. Treachery, after all, one expects. Elephants grow tusks, dogs chase cats, human beings betray each other. I'm sure this is precisely what Jesus was trying to convey to poor Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper. But to penetrate into the core of my being the way she's done-that is something that I doubt I can ever forgive."

"But Oscair, you placed her there yourself."

"But I wouldn't have placed her there, couldn't have placed her there, if she hadn't been the sort of woman she was."

"Or the sort of woman you believed she was."

"Exactly."

"Oscair," she said, "you are in pain now-"

"In agony," he corrected.

With a small smile, she nodded. "In agony, if you like. But it will pa.s.s."

"But when? The woman has moved into my mind and taken up residence, like some dreadful relative who arrives for Christmas dinner and never leaves. I cannot stop thinking about her. It's absolutely intolerable."

"Will you be seeing her again?"

"You heard O'Conner? What he said about her private room at the Clarendon? Well, she had the nerve to suggest that I visit here there tonight, after the lecture." He reached into his pocket, fished out the key. "You see? She gave me her key. Room 303."

"Will you be seeing her?"

"Of course not," he said, slipping the key carefully back into his pocket. "Seeing her is the last thing in the world I intend to do. No, what I must do now is forget her entirely. I must find some way to remove her from my mind, my heart, my life."

"You know, Oscair," she said, "the only way to remove a pain is to suffer through it."

"Rubbish. The only way to remove a pain is to ignore it. To divert oneself. Write a poem. Climb up an Alp. Or, better still, fall off one. Or catch a cold. Catching a cold is probably the best diversion of all. Who can worry about a broken heart when his nose is bright red and stoppered with phlegm?"

She was gently smiling. "Oscair, do you really believe everything you say?"

He smiled sadly. "I should be exceedingly credulous if I did. But I do believe, Mathilde, that I need a diversion of some kind. Any kind."

She shrugged. "Then you must discover one."

"But I can't, you see. My mind is stoppered with Elizabeth McCourt Doe."

She pursed her lips. "Wolfgang told me that you were attempting to discover who among us might have committed these horrible murders."

"Ah." In fact, he had been so preoccupied by Elizabeth's treachery, and by the murder he had witnessed that he had very nearly forgotten the murders of the prost.i.tutes. "Well. I did take a stab at that." He heard the words after he spoke them, and added, "No pun intended, I a.s.sure you." He shook his head. "I wasn't terribly successful."

"But what did you do?"

He told her of his wasted trip to Shantytown, his fruitless conversation with the c.r.a.pulous old man. "All he was able to tell me about the dead woman, this Molly Woods, was that she had red hair."

The Countess nodded, then slightly narrowed her lovely brown eyes. "But perhaps, you know, this is significant."

"I shouldn't think so. Quite a lot of woman have red hair." He frowned, remembering the tumbling t.i.tian tresses of Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

The Countess was smiling. "Like your Mrs. Doe."

"Hardly my Mrs. Doe."

Her face serious now, she looked off for a moment, toward the rear of the train, and then said, "But Oscair, red hair is not so commonplace after all. Perhaps you should discuss this with Marshal Grigsby."

"Whatever for? Presumably he already knows she had red hair. And besides, he's still back in Manitou Springs."

"Indeed he is not. Here he is now."

"Howdy," said Grigsby, still wearing his battered sheepskin jacket and his silly Kilimanjaro hat and looming over their table like a ... like a burly forest animal of some indeterminate sort.

Oscar was suddenly awash in sweat and guilt. He was absolutely certain that Grigsby had come here to cart him off to the federal lockup-masked jailers, iron shackles dangling from damp stone walls, rats squeaking with hunger-for the murder of Biff the Behemoth. He leaped up and shot out his hand. "Marshal Grigsby," he said, his own voice a bit squeaky; and, as Grigsby grabbed Oscar's right hand, nearly pulling him off balance, Oscar put out his left for support and smacked the head of the pa.s.senger sitting in the seat behind him.

He looked down, reflexively muttered "Terribly sorry," and turning, saw the long black expressionless face of Henry Villiers.

"Henry! Good Lord! Sorry about that."

Henry nodded. "That's okay, Mistuh Oscar."

Oscar turned to Grigsby. Perhaps an exuberant show of friends.h.i.+p would convince the marshal that he had the wrong man; or would at least confuse him. "Well, Marshal Grigsby, fancy meeting you here! Join us, won't you?"

Grigsby, who did seem mildly confused, or at least uncertain, or at least not actively hostile, took off his twenty-gallon hat and turned to the Countess. "If that's okay with you, ma'am."

"But of course," she said, smiling. She moved over to the window and patted the seat she had just vacated. "Please."

As Grigsby sat, Oscar watched him carefully. The marshal hadn't arrested him yet, but perhaps this was in deference to the feelings of the Countess. Or perhaps he was playing at cat and mouse, deliberately trying to put Oscar at his ease before he attacked.

Well, it would take more than these b.u.mbling efforts to hoodwink Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

He noticed that Grigsby was looking rather more wholesome today than he had at their first, memorable, meeting. Beneath the sheepskin jacket and the leather vest, his red plaid s.h.i.+rt was clean and seemed freshly pressed. The whites of his eyes so longer displayed, at their corners, the deltas of tiny red Niles. He no longer gave off the penetrating reek of stale alcohol. Instead, he smelled of something herbal and faintly sweet, perhaps the fragrance of whatever grease he had used to slick his gray hair back into a s.h.i.+ny skullcap.

Possibly the marshal had a sweetheart in Leadville. Some earnest little thing in gingham, some cowgirl hausfrau redolent of baked bread, steamed apples, and outdoor plumbing.

Grigsby and the Countess were exchanging pleasantries: Quite well, thank you, and you? Mighty fine, ma'am. Then Grigsby turned to Oscar. "Wanted to talk to ya," he said.

"Yes?" said Oscar, blinking only once and keeping his face superbly bland.

Grigsby nodded. "I found out it couldn'ta been you, killed off them ... women. Just wanted to tell ya. I reckon I came on a little strong, that time up in your room."