Джон Краули - New Haven Noir

By now Harkwood was full of pride and information, and she hadn’t had anyone to talk to for days. She took me all over the house: every bedroom (they each had their own, each with a big double bed, which didn’t tell me much), and the spare rooms, and the sewing room, and even the linen closet, which Harkwood informed me was very large for a London house. I took notes on everything. We ended up in the kitchen again, and I was beginning to hear the stories for the second time.

“Could I look again at the photographs?” I asked. “I’d like to take pictures of them with my camera.”

We went back in and this time I picked up each one and asked about it. One showed a pretty, laughing woman with dark eyes, wearing a full-skirted dress, with a hat and gloves.

“Is that Miss Mays?” I asked.

“Miss Ricks,” said Miss Harkwood.

“I thought she had blue eyes.” Surely the jacket photographs showed her with blue eyes?

Miss Harkwood shook her head. “Miss Ricks had very dark eyes, nearly black,” she said. “They were strange, they looked as though they were solid black. No student.”

“Pupil,” I said, trying to process this. Suddenly I remembered the story I’d been writing when I’d come to the house: it was on the Chelsea Flower Show, and that was 2008. Mays had died by then, so the woman who had answered the door must had been Alison Ricks herself. But I’d have recognized her, even thirty years older than the photographs I’d seen. I’d memorized her features, I knew them from poring over those books.

“Are Miss Ricks’s books here?” I asked, glancing around the room.

Miss Harkwood shook her head virtuously. “Miss Mays said it was poor form to keep your own books on the shelf. She wouldn’t have a single one on the premises.”

I turned back to the table again, thinking of the woman who had opened the door to me. Those black eyes, the thin white hair. The nick from the earlobe. I picked up another photograph, this one a close-up from the sixties. The same smiling, black-eyed woman, with a flirty smile. This was a three-quarters view, and it showed her right ear. There was no nick in it. Surely this was the same woman: maybe she’d gotten the nick later on?

“This is Miss Mays,” I said, to see if she’d agree.

Miss Harkwood shook her head again, smiling. “No, Miss Ricks. Here’s Miss Mays.”

She held up another picture from the sixties, a woman with her hand over her forehead against the sun, smiling into it, at the camera. It was the picture I knew from the dust jacket of Stone Caveat , and I felt that electric jolt.

“I see,” I said. “Is there another close-up of Miss Ricks?”

Miss Harkwood picked up another. This was taken from the other side, and the nick in the lobe was visible: I’d seen her in real life, but the camera had reversed the image. The nick was on her left ear.

“Thank you,” I said, closing up my notebook. “You have been very kind.”

Back in New York, jetlagged and exhausted, I called Jake. “I got it,” I said. “You won’t believe what happened. I’ll come in and tell you.”

We sat on either side of his desk and I held the cup of cold coffee again as I explained what had happened.

“I’m pretty certain she was gay,” I began. “Which is why people were so closemouthed about her, and why those files were sealed.”

He waved his hand.

“Wait,” I said. “That’s just the beginning. She moved to London so she could live with her girlfriend. But once she was there they switched identities. She stopped publishing, and she never gave interviews or allowed photographs, even when she won prizes. She had no copies of her books in her house, and over the years the new identity became real.”

Jake stared at me, leaning back in his chair, his long arms sticking out at angles. “Switched? But what about Mays? She was English. People would have known her. How could she change her identity?”

“I found out more about her. She wasn’t English but Irish. She must have arrived in London with Ricks and the two of them did it together.”

“But why?”

“Ricks did it because she had dried up as a writer. You can see it in the letters to her editor at the end of the decade. She couldn’t write, and it was painful to be asked about her work, and what she was doing, when she knew she couldn’t do it anymore. Remember poor Hemingway, trying to walk into the airplane propeller because he couldn’t write? I think she wanted to put that part of her life behind her, not be that person anymore.”

Jake nodded slowly. “I like it,” he said. “And then what about the new book?”

“Mays wrote it. I don’t know when. It’s probably in those secret X-files in the staff room. Then after Ricks died she got up her nerve and published it.”

Jake whistled. “Zowie. And then of course she kept the house that had been Ricks’s.”

“It had gone on for thirty years,” I said. “Kind of genius. All their London friends knew them as each other.”

Jake nodded. “I like it,” he said again. “But how fast can you get it down? Because I have some news for you.” I waited. “It’s not good. Wareham’s book is on her publisher’s spring list. Next year.”

“What?” How could she be done? I’d been writing as I was researching, but I was only halfway through. How could she be finished? Well, I knew how. She’d been writing all day while the Weasel was reading the letters, then calling her to tell her what she’d found. It would be trash, pure trash, and full of clichés. And also, what was the secret she had mentioned on the phone? Was there something else I didn’t know about? What had she discovered that was so amazing?

“It’s going to be the lead nonfiction book,” Jake said.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” Jake said. “Yours has to come out in the next six months or we’re lost.”

The next day I was back at the Beinecke. The Wolverine wasn’t there, but the Weasel was, wearing a cream silk blouse and a gold bracelet, sitting at their table. In the middle of the afternoon the Wolverine appeared. She very ostentatiously did not see me, and she walked over to the Weasel and whispered something. The Weasel stood and the two of them started for the door.

I spent the afternoon going over the latest files I could get, letters from the seventies. I saw plenty of evidence of what I was looking for. When Jens asked about her next book, or even her next story, she resisted more and more. Don’t ask , she said finally.

It killed me that I didn’t have another six months to work all this together properly.

When I got up for a break, out in the hall I saw the Wolverine again. She was headed toward the staff room, though this time alone. In her clothes and style she tried to imitate the Weasel, but because she was squat and dark she couldn’t. She was one of those women who throws a big scarf around her neck to appear rakish, but since she has no neck she looks as though she’s drowning in textile. Today she was wearing one of those scarves, and it came up to her ears and nearly down to her waist.

She was walking away from me, down the hall, and on an impulse I followed her. I moved silently, keeping my heels from hitting the floor. I wanted to see what was behind that door. She pulled it open fast and slipped inside, but I could see through a narrow slit: several long tables, chairs standing messily about. High metal shelves against the wall held a hodgepodge of file boxes. Then the door shut and I was left out in the hall, standing on my tiptoes, wondering what she was looking at.

I had the feeling that those X-files held the fact that she was gay — which would have been a big deal decades ago, when she gave her papers to Yale, but a small deal now. So what had the Wolverine learned that was so amazing? Was it Ricks’s confession, during the eighties, that she couldn’t write anymore? Was it the secret of the switched identities? Or was it the secret that Pauline Mays had written the idiotic book which had been on the best-seller list for forty-eight weeks now, and which might — who knew? — mean a claim of fraud, if the publisher had presented the work of a clumsy amateur under the golden name of Alison Ricks?