The Vanished Child Page 2

  The porter came by. “Monsieur, your train is boarding.”

  The two walked out onto the platform. It was grey dawn. The wind had risen and the snow stung their faces. Beyond the city rose snow clouds, coming in fast, and the black shadows of the high Alps, tunneling the wind and cutting off the light of day. They were taller than anything should be. They filled half the sky, massive and fragmented, like vicious dreams.

  I would like to live in a low country, Reisden thought.

  The wind bit at their faces. Soon the passes would close for the winter. The Simplon Tunnel would not be finished this year; it would be hard to get to Paris, or Genoa, or anywhere. “My love to Jeanne,” Reisden said.

  “Hers to you, Reisden.” Louis put his foot on the train step, turned around. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Louis.” Louis would worry over him, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Louis’ coat passed in a blur behind the windows of the railroad car; Louis’ face peered out at him. Being insane is like losing one sense, whatever it is that keeps other people sane. One cannot explain its loss. One can only feel unbalanced and wrong. Reisden sighed, out of an inaccuracy of feelings that was not quite amusement and was not quite despair.

  Of course one could go to Paris. One was not a chemist if one didn’t. And, for all practical purposes, he was quite sane.

  Louis rattled the window down. “You could come to visit at New Year’s—”

  “I’ll send you the results from the end of this series at New Year’s. The pass will be closed.”

  “Not quite yet; we could talk—” Louis suddenly leaned forward, half through the window, and squinted through the snow.

  “Sacha, who’s that?”

  On the platform across the tracks from theirs, a man was looking at them. An old man, about sixty—a short, shabby-looking man, wearing a badly cut suit and a comic small hat perched foreign-style on the back of his head. There was nothing unusual about him, nothing to draw the eye, but Reisden felt caught in that stare, the intensity of his look, as if the old man were seeing death, or a ghost, or God: something familiar, lovely, and terrible. It was a look like the moment before death, something to be avoided.

  “He knows you,” Louis said.

  “No. ” But the stranger raised his hand tentatively, half hailing Reisden and half not, as a man does when he is not sure whether he is approaching the right person. Reisden flinched, appalled. The man began to stumble forward, not looking where he was going, and Reisden wanted to be somewhere else, not seeing whatever was going to happen.

  The platforms were a meter or so higher than the tracks set in a well between them. A woman caught the old man’s elbow at the edge of the platform. He said something to her and kneeled arthritically to sit on the brink, carefully let himself down into the well, and began picking his way across the iron tracks and the ties.

  Down the track, like melodrama, a train was gliding into the station. The wheels gave a thin mournful shriek, the banshee sound of wheels on snow; the locomotive glided forward, crying warning, seeming not to slow at all. Somebody on the other platform screamed.

  Reisden could have jumped down into the well and pulled the old man out of the way. There was time, but he did not move, he stood completely still, not so much as breathing, while two railway guards ran past him, took the old foreigner by the elbows, and pushed him up onto the near platform. And, staggering to his feet, the old man kept coming toward him.

  “Richard, do you know me?”

  I would have let him fall under the train, Reisden thought.

  “I am Alexander Reisden,” he said violently. “I have never seen you in my life.” The worst was that so far as he knew it was true.

  ‘‘Sacha, qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” Louis called from the train.

  “He says I am someone called Richard.” Reisden’s voice was abruptly shaking; he steadied it.

  “Then Jay really killed him,” the old man said, and suddenly he paled until his lips blued and his eyes rolled up. His legs sagged and he slumped suddenly between the two guards. They laid him down on the platform, in the falling snow and the slush.

  Louis butted his way through the people who were beginning to gather.

  “You’ll miss your train.” Reisden leaned against one of the pillars of the platform, feeling odd and cold, and stared at the old man.

  “Who is Richard?” Louis asked. Reisden shook his head. The guards were putting a blanket over the old man, but not over the face. “Not dead,” Louis said. The comic hat had fallen off; Reisden picked it up and read the stamping inside the crown. “Dr. Charles Adair. Boston.”

  The name meant nothing. Reisden knelt in the snow and put his hand on the man’s throat, feeling for a pulse. It jumped weakly against his fingers. He stood up quickly, brushing his hand against his coat.

  “Richard?” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know at all.”

  The story of Richard Knight

  “Dr. Charles Adair,” said Victor Wills, leaning forward fascinated over the cafe table. “Charlie Adair, in this wonderful year of 1906. Think of your seeing the name in his hat. He must be getting old— Heavens, it’s eighteen years since the Knights were killed. August 1887. He didn’t die, I hope,” Victor said.

  “No.” Reisden lit a cigaret and blew out smoke. “But he wasn’t well; I think he went back to his country. Victor, Dr. Charles Adair lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and Louis has got me scheduled to go to a Harvard conference near Boston this spring to deliver a paper. I’m wondering whether I should cancel. I wouldn’t like doing to anyone else whatever I did to him.”

  “He thought you were Jay French?”

  “No, someone named Richard.”

  “A boy,” Victor said absently. “Yes, I know about Jay and Richard and the Knight murder case, and I suppose, dear boy, that you had better know too.”

  Victor Wills and Alexander Reisden were sitting in one of the little cafés by the Piazza San Marco. The glass shutters were up; outside, the New Year’s rain stormed across the plaza and the pigeons and the tourists had taken shelter. The rain would be snow on the Simplon, Reisden thought, wondering why he had taken the chance of traveling to the Italian side. Inside, heat and heavy gilt held back the winter weather. White-haired Victor held his cup of café latte in two hands and stared happily about him.

  Victor was a friend from almost as far back as Reisden could remember, a British Museum gossip-monger now retired to Italy. When Reisden had been at English prep school, the London literary man Victor, who was newly converted to Catholicism, had seen him act in a school play and invited him to his flat to discuss the Trinity. Victor had spoken rather oddly about Catholicism and, with some authority, about Havelock Ellis, Frank Harris, and Wilde. Reisden had been innocent enough then not to see immediately that Victor intended to seduce him; but when he had caught on, a little before Victor’s intentions would have become unmistakable, he had somehow distracted Victor from his initial purpose and got him talking about Wilde, Victor’s own life as a professional writer, and finally about the poems of Mallarmé and the future of the British Liberal Party, about which they could agree. Victor had remained a friend, amusing Reisden inwardly with a succession of episodes involving Italian waiters, lost manuscripts, and the local government board on which Victor titularly had worked. He had retired to Italy in the aftermath of the Wilde affair. The love of Victor’s writing life was poetry—privately published, tinted ink on tinted paper, Beardsleyesque illustrations—but since his retirement, he had become a hack writer “to keep the wolf, dear boy, if not from the door, at least not wholly upstairs with one and sharing the covers.” His bread and butter was True Crime.

  Victor wrote as Detective Sergeant Thomas Butcher (Retired), whose thrilling exploits of famous crimes appeared in the Pink ’Un every week. He was the author of three volumes of Great American Crimes, by a New York Detective, and about thirty other books, including Blood and Diamonds, by A Female Spy.
(“Such fun, my dear boy.”) Such as his profession was, Victor was at the top of it.

  “The infamous Knight case. I warn you, dear Alexander, you may not like it. Jay French was a murderer, dear boy—a multiple murderer, quite as good as dear Lizzie Borden. Jay French the Child Killer. I kept the Knights out of American Crimes, you know. My editor wanted to include the material, and I had photographs. But I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Oh?”

  “I told him it would inconvenience a dear friend. I shall give you quite the worst first. It’s curious,” Victor said delicately, “that Adair thought you were Richard.” Victor pushed a photograph over the table. “John Jay French,” he said. “He and Richard were cousins.”

  The image was small, about the size of a visiting card. Reisden recognized individual features: brow, nose, a jaw like the one he shaved every morning. Suddenly the features were a face and the face was his. Reisden shuddered violently and handed it back.

  “Are you sure you like this, my dear boy?”

  “Curiosity merely startles the cat. Go on.”

  “Quite sure? After ten years writing blood, what shocks me would make a pudding crawl. Well, then, I shall be my usual caustic self and let the chips fall where they may. Here is what happened to the Knights.”