Читать книгу White Jade - V. J. Banis - Страница 8

CHAPTER FOUR

It was evening when I came through the vaulted waiting room at Grand Central and out into the cold air again. There was no snow falling here. It was a chilly autumn evening. The raucous after-work traffic had begun to thin.

Ordinarily I would take the subway home, but I was tired from the long trip and from the strain of anxiety. I got into a cab and gave the driver the address of my little apartment in the village.

The city that should have been familiar to me appeared jangled and strangely alien. I had a sense of disassociation that I could neither understand nor set aside. I leaned forward and said to the driver, “Take 42nd over to Eighth and down Eighth.”

It was a slower route but there was no reason why he should mind. We inched our way through Times Square and then we were moving along Eighth Avenue.

“Wait, stop here for a moment,” I said. He gave me a dubious look in the mirror but he pulled over to the curb.

The drugstore was still a drugstore, its brick front recently whitewashed. I did not remember clearly the man who had bought it. He had been soft spoken and placid of expression. I had only a vague image of white hair and spotted hands.

I could remember all of the store, however, with the worn, thin flooring and the old cabinets, some of them dating back before my birth. The big old fans at the ceiling spun lazily during the summer, little more than rippling the warm air.

The soda fountain with its black marble top and dilapidated fixtures had always been crowded in the hour or so after school let out. The pharmacy counter, with its apothecary jars of colored water had so fascinated me as a child.

Behind the prescription counter stairs went up to our apartment above, small and ordinary, but comfortable. A little balcony opened off the living room. I could look up from the taxi window and see the railing still. I had kept potted geraniums on it. It was here that Jeff had proposed to me, standing in the blending light of moon and neon. He had slipped the white jade about my neck and told me he loved me.

No geraniums graced the balcony now. A wet rug hung over the wrought iron to dry.

“Drive on,” I said, leaning back against the seat again.

How had I come to have the past so suddenly thrust upon me again? I had worked hard to rid myself of it—moving into a place of my own, breaking all the old ties, losing myself first in school and then in work.

At first it had seemed hopeless, as if I would never be relieved of that weight of unhappiness, losing first Jeff and then my father so soon after. Gradually, however, the wounds healed, as they must. I had begun to feel like and less like misery’s child and more and more my own servant.

I had rediscovered the great joy to be found in little things—the laughter of a child, the scent of a rose, the sound of distant singing as someone passed beneath my window. I had learned to laugh, and to laugh at myself, and even to sing as I passed under windows.

One day I had awakened to discover to my surprise that I was happy, that I loved life, that I was one with the world again. The past was dead and buried—or so I had thought.

Now that dead past had risen from the grave to haunt me. I would have liked to turn my back on it, ignore it, let it die again, but in my purse I felt the weight of that jar I carried. It might have been all the tea ever brewed, it weighed so heavily.

* * * *

In the morning I took the bottle to have the tea analyzed. I did not go to the shop that had been my father’s, although of course that kindly old man who had it now could have done what I needed.

That was another of the ties from the past that I had severed, and when I had need of a pharmacy I went to a little one near my apartment where the pharmacist, only a year or two out of school, flirted a bit half-heartedly. This shop was all chrome and glass and sparkle. It had no soda fountain. It had no romance, but at least it inspired a certain confidence.

“Hello,” Jerry, the young pharmacist, greeted me when I came in. “How’d the job interview go?”

“Still undecided.” I gave him a wan smile. I had slept poorly.

I took my ominous burden from my purse and set it atop the counter. “I want to have this analyzed,” I said. “Can you take care of that sort of thing for me?”

He picked up the jar and looked at it. “What’s in it?”

“That is why I want to have it analyzed.”

He unscrewed the lid and sniffed. “Smells like tea.” At my impatient sigh, he said, quickly, “Okay, okay, it’s not really up my alley, you understand, but I know a man.... Got any ideas yourself what to look for?”

I hesitated for a moment before shaking my head. It was no use making guesses. For all I knew—and I hoped it would be so—it was nothing but tea with a dash of lemon and maybe some sugar.

“Fine, be mysterious,” he said, grinning as he replaced the lid. “I’ll give you a call when I find out, unless you’re in some sort of hurry.”

“I am, a little, actually.” I might be, or I might not, depending entirely upon what he found in that brownish liquid, but there was no use trying to explain that.

He gave a mock grimace and a shrug of resignation. “I’ll see if I can find out anything today. That suit you better?”

I managed a grateful smile. “Yes.” Then, growing sober, I added, “There is one more thing. I don’t know how this works, but if you could exercise a little discretion....”

“Sure,” he said, too quickly. I saw the guarded look that came into his eyes and I knew this was becoming a bit suspicious looking. Why should I want to have something whose properties were completely unknown to me analyzed so quickly and so quietly? I searched my mind for some excuse.

“Someone recommended it to me as a home remedy.” That story sounded lame even to my own ears. “I thought better safe than sorry.”

He looked unconvinced but for the moment he accepted my story.

“How about dinner somewhere tonight?” I asked with false brightness.

Which successfully changed the subject. His easy grin returned. “Sure. How about Mamma’s? At eight?”

“Fine. I’ll meet you there.” A customer waited behind me and I could step aside with a last friendly smile and a nod, and make my escape while he temporarily forgot my mysterious bottle.

I had only to endure a day of anxious waiting and wondering, trying to convince myself that the passing minutes were not grating upon my nerves as if they were hours.

He was already there when I arrived at the restaurant. He looked happy and unconcerned and I tried to match my mood to his. I did not want to seem too anxious by asking what, if anything, he had learned and since he did not volunteer any information, I vowed to spend a quiet, pleasant evening in his company as if there was nothing of importance on my mind.

Mamma herself greeted us as we left the bar for the dining room, her shy, sweet smile making us welcome at once and dispelling the chill from the cold winds outside.

“Winter is here, no,” she said, leading us to one of the romantic little nooks in the rear.

‘It’s close,” Jerry said. I found myself thinking of Elsinore, where yesterday it had been snowing. “What’ll it be?” he asked me when we were seated.

“You order for me.” I didn’t say that I could not concentrate my attention long enough to decide on food.

For all of that, though, the food did help. I took strength from the Barolo wine he ordered and I ate with gusto the steaming soup, tender leaves of spinach simmered in a rich chicken broth.

“The secret of good pasta,” Jerry said when that was being served, “is the right degree of doneness. I had a friend who tested it by throwing strands against the wall. It was his theory that when the pasta was at just the right state, it would stick to the wall.”

“And did it?” I asked, amused. Jerry fancied himself something of a food expert. At least he managed to make meals more interesting with his stories.

“Never did when I was around. We threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall one night and ended up with very little to eat. He thought maybe something was wrong with the plaster.”

We were having tagliatelle, the pale, noodle-like pasta. “According to legend,” he said, adding a dash of grated cheese, “this was inspired by the flaxen hair of none other than Lucrezia Borgia.”

“I hope the color of her hair was her only contribution. Wasn’t she the one so notorious for poisoning...?” I stopped midsentence, a sudden, awful image of Mary Linton popping into my mind. She too had pale yellow hair, so in contrast to my dark-haired plainness.

Our eyes met across the table. It was no good pretending. I put my fork down and drank a little of my wine.

“You’d better tell me,” I said.

“I spent an hour or so this afternoon fielding some rather peculiar questions,” he said, looking down at his plate and twirling a fork idly in the tagliatelle. “Tell me something, just what was this friend of yours trying to cure with this little brew?”

I was too impatient to play games. “What was in it, Jerry?”

“Oh, a little tea, a little lemon, a little arsenic....”

I caught my breath sharply and said, too loudly, “Arsenic?”

He motioned me to lower my voice and glanced around, but no one seemed to have noticed my startled exclamation.

“Was there...very much arsenic?” It sounded, even as I asked it, a particularly foolish question. What did it matter just exactly how much arsenic there was in a cup of tea, when there oughtn’t to be any there at all?

“Do you want it in scientific terms?”

“No, no, just...how dangerous would it be?”

He was silent for a moment, still toying with his pasta. The scent of food drifted upward from my neglected dinner. A few minutes before it had been a delicious aroma. Now it sickened me.

“Any arsenic is dangerous,” he said finally. “There wasn’t enough in that tea to kill anybody....”

I breathed a sigh of relief—prematurely as it turned out.

“Not with just that one dose, at least.”

It took a minute for the implication to become clear. “Can arsenic be given over a period of time?” I asked hesitantly. “I mean, if it were given that way, would it eventually prove fatal, even though the individual doses were small?”

“Is it cumulative, you mean? Yes. This dosage is quite small, as a matter of fact. A strong, healthy person wouldn’t really suffer much ill effect from it. A bit of queasiness, some fatigue. He’d probably think of himself as a bit ‘out of it,’ and go about his business as usual.”

“But if he took repeated doses?”

“If he took several like this over a period of say a few weeks, he would gradually become sick. So long as he kept taking this tea, assuming it had the same surprising ingredient in it, he would just keep getting sicker and sicker without knowing why. It’s the kind of symptom that is vague enough, he might not even get around to seeing a doctor, particularly with all the mysterious viruses and touches of something going around today.”

“What symptoms would he have, exactly?” I was seeing Jeff’s pale, drawn face, thinner than it ought to have been.

“Headaches, nausea, maybe vomiting as it went along, some muscular cramps, a general debilitation—all getting progressively worse.”

“Until...?”

“Until he died.” He paused. “Of course, I’m not expert on poisons. I could refer you to a toxicologist, if you like.”

I shook my head. “No, that won’t be necessary.” It didn’t matter greatly if some of the fine points of what he told me were inaccurate. The important thing was that the poison was there, in the tea, and that it could make someone sick, and eventually kill them.

“Chris, look.” He reached across the table to take my hand. “Is there something you want to talk about? Are you in any kind of spot? Because if someone really gave you this stuff as a remedy, something is rotten in Denmark.”

In Denmark? I was thinking, in Elsinore. And hadn’t that been the name of Hamlet’s castle? Yes, something was very rotten in Denmark.

Aloud, I said, “No, it isn’t anything, really. I know it all sounds very mysterious and dramatic, but it’s only one of those mistakes that occur.”

I gave him a forced smile. He did not believe me, of course.

“Okay.” He let go of my hand. “Only remember, I’m close by if you need me.”

But you won’t be close by, I thought later, staring across my living room at a cheap brown and blue copy of the Picasso woman, you’ll be here and I will be in Elsinore. If I go.

And there was the rub. Need I go at all?

It might, after all, be nothing more than some bizarre mistake. What did people use arsenic for, anyway? Rat poison? Or some sort of cleaning job? Might it not have gotten accidentally onto the tea leaves, soaked in, so that a truly innocent and devoted act on the part of Mary Linton was causing her husband to be poisoned?

Then I had only to write to Jeff and tell him what I had learned. He could discover for himself if the tea leaves were accidentally soaked with arsenic (was arsenic liquid, I wondered. And if powder, wouldn’t it be noticed on the leaves when the tea was brewed. )

Of even if his fears were true, if Mary was trying to murder him, then my letter would confirm the fact. He had only to leave.

Except, he had looked really awful that day—was it only two days ago? And how did a man as sick as he obviously was justify wanting to go out for a stroll in winter snow.

I went impatiently into the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee. Usually at this time of evening I drank tea, but I had tried that earlier and found it unpalatable.

All right, look at in the worst possible light, I told myself. Suppose Mary Linton was trying to murder Jeff. Suppose he were already sick enough that he could do nothing about it, couldn’t escape, had no one to whom he could turn for help (he had said that, hadn’t he?)

So what did that have to do with me? I wasn’t in love with him. He wasn’t, I was quite sure, in love with me. We had not seen one another for five years and at that time, when I had been in love, he had jilted me. Coldly, cruelly, not caring at all if I nearly died from heartache. I owed him nothing.

Which of course was utter nonsense. Nearly dying from heartache was a far cry from literally dying from arsenic poisoning.

And I did owe him, in the same sense that Jerry owed me some concern and his friend owed Jerry some concern, and so on and on through the whole structure that man had built up for himself and called civilization.

Because we are, in some measure at least, our brother’s keepers. Because there are the dues we have to pay as part of the entire scheme, part of the human race. Because it is necessary to balance the ledger sheet against all the acts of concern and kindness that other people had done to me and would do again.

I went into my tiny bedroom, to my closet. The little overnight case was on the shelf. I took it down, carrying it to the bed. It had a film of dust on it and I got a cloth from the kitchen and dusted it carefully. Then I opened it and began to put things into it.

There was a train shortly after midnight that, with connections, would put me into Elsinore about dawn.

I could not help wondering what time of day Jeff usually had his tea.