Wilde West Part 8

The driver, Oscar saw as the vehicle approached, was swathed in a long black topcoat and m.u.f.fled about the face with a long black scarf that concealed his face and trailed over his shoulder. A black hat, flat-crowned and flat-brimmed, was pulled low over his head, its shadow masking his face.

Just before the carriage reached Oscar, the man reined in the horses and pushed down the wooden brake lever with a booted foot. Silently he nodded, tapped the gloved forefinger of his left hand against the brim of his hat, and then indicated, by a curt swing of his whip, that Oscar should enter the cab.

"Ah," said Oscar. Elizabeth McCourt Doe had apparently laid on transport.

But he hesitated. He peered inside the carriage. Empty. He looked up at the driver. Extremely romantic, to be sure, bundled up like d.i.c.k Turpin; but what guarantee was there that the woman had sent this chap? Who knew what sort of villain he might be? A genuine Turpin, perhaps: a real highwayman. Plotting to cart Oscar off and plunder him at gunpoint in some dusky deserted alleyway.

But highwaymen, if memory served, didn't drive carriages. Carriages were what they robbed. They rode horses, or they bounded out of bushes.

Perhaps this was something else they arranged differently in American cities. A lack of suitable bushes.

The driver leaned over and impatiently slapped the carriage door with the tip of his whip.

"Are you quite sure," Oscar asked the man, "that you've found the right party? Mr. Oscar Wilde?" The impoverished and entirely harmless poet, he almost added.

The driver nodded, a single brusque movement, and then again, brusquely, smacked his whip against the carriage side.

My heart and hand I will give to thee ...

Sighing sadly, Oscar opened the door and stepped into the cab.

Even before his other foot had left the ground, the driver cracked the whip and the horses bolted forward. Oscar's shoulder slammed onto the seat's back as his knee smashed against its front. His breath suddenly gone, he wrenched himself awkwardly around, clutched for handholds along the carriage's side. The carriage lurched to the left and he was thrown against the door, which sprang open and, for a frantic moment before he jerked it shut, revealed an expanse of dark, disagreeable roadway racing away below.

The carriage bounced and bucked, leaped and bounced as it plunged along. Oscar attempted to support himself, hands braced against the sides of the vehicle, feet braced against the opposite seat, while the darkened city of Denver hurtled by the windows. Dry goods stores, blacksmiths' stables, laundries, warehouses, small obscure factories, even a church or two skittered past. Conceivably, someone out there witnessed this mad dash through the empty streets; but no one called out, no one tried to save him.

At last, in a dark and dismal neighborhood of small, mean wooden houses shouldering each other along the narrow street, the carriage began to slow. Frowning out the window at the desolation around him, Oscar rearranged his cravat.

The vehicle stopped before a house that seemed somewhat larger than the rest, a two-story building looming up out of the starlit shadows. Its windows unlighted, its facade dark and blank, the place appeared abandoned.

Which showed, Oscar felt, excellent judgment on the part of the abandoners, whoever they might have been.

The carriage dipped as the driver vaulted to the ground. Peering out the window, Oscar saw the man's dark form glide through the gloom to the front door.

There must be some mistake. Surely Elizabeth McCourt Doe would never orchestrate a meeting in a place like this.

Suddenly a pale yellow strip of light pitched across the weedy lawn. Silhouetted against the opened door, the driver waved an impatient, beckoning arm.

Once again, Oscar hesitated.

The place could be thick with desperadoes. Thieves, thugs, cutpurses and, worse, cutthroats.

And if she were there? Surrounded by a.s.sa.s.sins, gunmen, skulking felons?

Enough of this.

Perhaps these louts imagined that an Irishman, and a poet, would be easy pickings. They deceived themselves. The blood of Cuchulain surged in his veins. And he knew a thing or two about the Manly Arts. Self-defense was something a poet quickly learned in an Irish public school.

He did rather wish, however, that he possessed somewhere on his person a small but powerful handgun.

He unlatched the carriage door, pushed it open, stepped down. Head held high, he stalked across the lawn to the house.

The driver watched him approach, then turned and entered the building.

Oscar trailed resolutely behind.

Just to the left of the door, startling Oscar by his presence, stood a small Chinese man in sandals, black silk pants, a black silk top, and a round, black silk skullcap. He might have been thirty years old; he might have been fifty. Grinning with enormous enthusiasm, bowing as rhythmically as a metronome, he shut the door behind Oscar and gestured for him to follow the driver.

Oscar did so, feeling as disoriented as if he had somehow entered into another universe. The hallway was broad and airy. The floor was oak, spotlessly clean, draped along its center with a runner of Oriental carpet, black and scarlet, so perfect in its elegance and simplicity that it must be authentic. Bra.s.s sconces along the walls provided a soft gentle light. The walls themselves, unadorned, were wainscoted with some dark, rich wood, teak or mahogany.

There was a smell in the air of jasmine-incense, doubtless-and of something else, something darker, heavier, more penetrating.

Oscar followed the driver's back. The hallway ended where it met, perpendicularly, another pa.s.sage. Here a small alcove set into the wall held a wonderfully wrought bronze Buddha.

The man turned to the right, down a hallway longer than the first. His boots thumping on the carpeting, the driver pa.s.sed several closed doors, stopped at one, opened it, and stepped inside.

Behind him, Oscar entered the room.

It was a large, uncluttered s.p.a.ce. White walls, white ceiling, a gaslight softly glowing overhead within a white paper globe. Bleached oak floors, a strategic scattering of Oriental carpets in subtle shades of cream and pearl. Against the far wall, where the window might be hidden, a tall and broad Chinese screen displaying painted vistas of dreamy mountains strung with waterfalls, steep remote valleys draped with mist. Against the wall to the left, a large double bed framed in brilliant red-lacquered wood, covered by a quilt of red embroidered silk. Against the wall to the right, a low, red-lacquered table, atop which sat a slim ivory-colored vase containing (Good Lord!) a single white lily. Lying beside the vase, a teakwood box and a long narrow smoking pipe of elaborate Oriental design. Next to these, a silver salver holding two crystal tulip gla.s.ses and an iced-champagne bucket; inside this, a bottle of Krug.

Very inviting, very charming, all of it. But it lacked, manifestly, one rather important item.

Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

Where was she?

Oscar looked at the driver. Silently, churlishly, shoulders hunched, hands in the pockets of his coat, the man stood with his back to Oscar.

Really, this was too much. The fellow's maniacal steeplechase through the streets of Denver had been bad enough. But this insolence was altogether intolerable. The oaf deserved a thrashing. And unless he produced an explanation, and right now, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was just the person to give it to him.

Abruptly, the man turned and tore from his head the broad, flat-brimmed hat. Rich red glistening curls cascaded down his shoulders, and his bright violet eyes sparkled, and suddenly he was a she, and she was laughing.

Over the course of the next few hours, he had somehow neglected to ask Elizabeth to leave Tabor and come away with him. At first, the hurry of pa.s.sion had distracted them both. She was naked beneath her disguise, no underclothing whatever, her lambent skin once again a revelation; and as soon as he could wrestle the denim trousers from her long elegant legs, the two of them collapsed like felled trees to the red silk quilt.

Later, the novelty of smoking opium had diverted him. With the quilt wrapped around his middle and falling in Neronian folds from his shoulder, Oscar sat plumped against the headboard as Elizabeth McCourt Doe, perched cross-legged atop the mattress, prepared the pipe. She still wore her man's denim shirt-its metal snaps had been ripped apart during the proceedings (by him, by her, who knew?), but the shirt had remained on her shoulders-and in its opened front her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s swayed slightly, teasingly, as she moved.

The smoke from the drug was thick, milky, at once sweet and acrid, and it seemed to insinuate itself almost immediately into the joints and interstices of his body. Soon a warm luxurious languor had settled over his entire frame. His mind was lucid and buoyant and utterly relaxed. The colors in the room, he noticed, had somehow acquired a clarity and an intensity that he had observed before only in dreams, but which he had not realized, till now, that he had observed in dreams.

"You like it?" she asked him.

"Ah well," he said gravely, "I am morally compelled to.

Look at Coleridge. Look at Poe. At Baudelaire. The modern poet must know as much about opium as he knows about dactyls and iambs." He smiled suddenly. "How convenient. Making a vice of necessity."

She laughed and held toward him his gla.s.s of champagne. "Try another vice."

"You tempt me, madam." He took the gla.s.s.

She smiled. "My intention exactly."

"And whatever shall I do with all these new temptations?"

She put her hand along his naked thigh. "I believe that the only way to remove a temptation is to surrender to it."

He laughed.

Another bout of pa.s.sion provided an additional distraction. He had become persuaded that he was too deeply sunk in this marvelous la.s.situde ever to function s.e.xually again, ever to want to; but Elizabeth McCourt Doe, with her cunning fingers and skillful mouth, proved him mistaken. Freddy rose, as it were, to the occasion and performed prodigies of valor and endurance.

Later, drained, growing a bit muddled, he had become distracted by their conversation.

He had said, almost to himself, "But I still fail to understand how all this happened."

"I felt," she said, "when I met you, that I already knew you completely."

He smiled. "To be known completely is what everyone tells himself that he most desires. And what everyone, of course, secretly most dreads. You knew me from my poetry?"

"From your eyes."

Again, he smiled. "Eyes can lie. They often do."

"So does poetry."

He laughed. "And what did you know from my eyes?"

She lifted his hand from her knee, kissed the knuckle of his thumb. "That you carried within you a great sadness."

"Really?" he said, surprised and delighted. "You knew that?"

Now, lying in his bed at the hotel, he could recall that he had been so taken by her insight that he had prattled on for an hour, ecstatically, about his great sadness. He had talked about the deaths of his sister, his half sisters, his father; about his loneliness at public school, at Trinity, at Oxford. Finally he had become-how dreadful-almost maudlin. He was still sadly babbling away when they dressed; still babbling as they went back to the carriage.

He had grown silent only when he was alone in the carriage as she drove it-more sedately this time-through the gray light of early dawn. He had, now, only the vaguest memory of that journey; could recollect only in disjointed fragments his actual return to the hotel.

Had he in fact made a fool of himself? This would have been, in any circ.u.mstance, a disaster; in her presence, it would have been a catastrophe.

Or would it? For some reason he couldn't bring himself really to care.

How astounding. Had his love died so quickly?

He searched within himself for the pa.s.sion, the heights and depths of it, that he had felt so strongly last night. He found only a dull lifeless discomfort that might have been merely the residue of the champagne. Or the opium.

Was pa.s.sion like currency? Once spent, forever gone?

Perhaps this was the catastrophe.

Whatever the truth might be, certainly this morning he felt catastrophic. Parts of his body that had never experienced pain before experienced it now: his hair, for example; his eyelashes.

Fortunately he delivered no lecture until this evening. If he wished, and he wished it most fervently, he could stay in bed all day. He could lie there and attempt to reason out the peculiar evanescence of rapture.

Just then, as though to disprove this, a loud unpleasant rapping suddenly sounded at the door.

Henry? But he had told Henry he wouldn't be needing him until this evening.

The rapping came again. So emphatic it was that Oscar felt as though someone were pounding a fist against his temple.

Rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

He sat up, swung his legs off the bed, slipped his feet awkwardly into his slippers, fumbled his arms into the dressing gown.

Who would be so barbaric as to come calling at-he glanced at the clock on the dresser-nine o'clock?

Bang, bang, bang.

"Yes, yes, yes," he mumbled, tying the gown's belt. He shuffled over to the door, unlocked it, jerked it open.

CRIGSBY WALKS INTO MOLLY WOODS'S room and closes the door behind him. The air is heavy with a dank, slaughterhouse stench. He looks around him and for a moment he cannot comprehend what it is he sees. For a moment, his mind is unable, or it refuses, to recognize what lies before it.

Something awesome and fearful sprawled upon the narrow blackened bed. Limp strips and bits of something strewn around the tiny room. Fragments of something clinging to the walls, the oval mirror, the sides of the rickety wooden dresser.

And when, abruptly, it all comes into focus, when he understands, his legs buckle and the blood drains from his face; and he knows, with an absolute conviction, that his life is forever changed. He knows that this room and the horror it holds will be with him, will reappear in sweat-soaked dreams and unbidden memories, until the day he dies.

He closes his eyes. He wants nothing now but to sink into the embrace of his absent wife, bury his face in her neck. He hears himself mutter her name: "Clara."

He forces himself to open his eyes. To look again.

The thing on the bed, its upper half propped against the wall, was once Molly Woods. The thing wears a petticoat, pushed back to its waist, and its legs are drawn up. There is no skin or flesh on the legs: glistening white shinbones, a pair of round white kneecaps, white thighbones. Only the feet, splayed out against the bed, are intact. Each toenail, he notes, is painted red.

The flesh has been stripped, too, from the ribs, and between white arches of bone he can see a dull film of pink tissue.

The arms are peeled as well, from shoulder to wrist. The curled fingers of both hands-these, like the feet, intact-have been placed at the black savage rent in the belly, as though to make it appear, obscenely, that they are drawing back the wide lips of the awful wound.

The face is gone. The thick red hair, falling to the exposed shoulder bones, frames a leering skull from which empty sockets gape.

Grigsby takes a low shallow breath through his mouth. Deliberately, he moves his glance around the room.

The strips lying about are ribbons of flesh. They are everywhere: stuck to the walls, piled atop the mattress, dangling from the k.n.o.bs of the dresser, arranged in careful coils along the floor, Four or five of them hang from the rim of the mirror like meat left to dry.

Grigsby looks at the table to his right. Exactly in its center is a small mound of flesh. It is a woman's breast. On either side of it, stuck to it with blackened dried blood, is a human ear.

Grigsby has seen enough. Has seen far too much. He stumbles to the door.

When he stepped outside, Grigsby sucked in a long deep breath. After Molly Woods's room, even the sooty, sulfurous air of Shantytown tasted as sweet as spring water.

Without a word, Hanrahan held out the tin flask of whiskey. Grigsby took it, unscrewed the cap, raised the flask to his lips and drank, holding his throat open so the liquor could reach his stomach more quickly. He lowered the flask and his body made a small, quick, involuntary shiver.

He could feel the watchful stares of the younger policemen. It was as though they were waiting for the words that would explain the violated thing lying on the bed inside, and the crazed, inhuman violence that had created it.

The words that could explain this, Grigsby knew, didn't exist.

He said to Hanrahan, "Need to talk to you for a minute, Gerry."