Росс Макдональд: Dark Tunnel

“Mr. Fenton,” Gordon said, “I’d like you to meet Professor Branch. Professor Branch is a public-spirited citizen who has been very helpful in the Schneider case.”

Fenton smiled a quick, public-spirited smile and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Branch.”

Before I could answer him he was talking to Gordon: “Fisher came home about half-an-hour ago. He’s there now.”

“Anybody with him?”

“No. He came by himself on foot. Do I go and get him?”

“We’ll both go.”

Gordon started to get out on his side of the car and I started to get out on mine. He said:

“You’d better stay here, Branch, if you don’t mind. This Fisher may be dangerous.”

“Not this boy.” Fenton smiled a contemptuous smile that turned down the corners of his wide mouth. “Unless you’re afraid that Professor Branch will be seduced.”

“Eh?”

“I interviewed Rudy a couple of weeks ago. His element is the boudoir. He wants to grow up and be beautiful like Hedy Lamarr. He intimated to me in his subtle feminine way that he could really go for me because I’m such a masculine type, if only I weren’t so coldly professional in my attitude.” Fenton twisted his mouth sideways, rubbed his blue-black chin with a thick rectangular hand, and spat in the road.

“I see.” Gordon got out of the car and I followed him. On the way back to Fisher’s house, Gordon told Fenton about Ludwig Vlathek in a hundred words.

“I underestimated Rudy,” Fenton said. “I thought he was baring his soul to me but the little bastard had this up his sleeve. I guess I don’t understand women.”

When we turned up the narrow concrete walk, I saw a movement behind the Venetian blinds.

“Stay out here, Branch,” Gordon said. “If nothing happens I suppose you can come in.”

Fenton had climbed the porch steps and was knocking on the door. Gordon mounted behind him and stood at his shoulder. The door opened immediately. I couldn’t see who had opened it but I heard a soft contralto voice with a German accent say:

“ Hello, Mr. Fenton. This is an unexpected pleasure. Won’t you come in. And your friends, too, of course.”

Gordon looked at me and I followed them in. Rudolf Fisher held the door for me and I got a good look at him.

His makeup was tastefully applied but it couldn’t stand white daylight. His lips were rich and red like fresh liver. The rouge on his cheek-bones was carefully tapered-off but it was too gaudy against the chalky whiteness of his powdered face. The shadowing around his gentian-blue eyes made them seem ridiculously large and insanely sombre. But the hand-set wave in his light brown hair was a masterpiece, as shiny and as precisely corrugated as a glass washboard.

He said: “Won’t you come into the den, gentlemen? It’s cozier in there.”

He drew his Tyrian-blue dressing-gown closer about his willowy form and tripped ahead of us into the den. He turned on a table-lamp with a scarlet silk shade and a porcelain base decorated with droop-eared Chinamen. I could see the room now: the ivory baby grand with the black fringed drape, the two Persian rugs piled one on the other in front of the ivory mantel, the dead black linoleum on the floor, the ivory-framed Van Gogh reproductions on the ivory walls like windows into a new intense world, the white satin divan with its black and gold and crimson cushions.

Fisher fluttered a white hand towards the divan, said, “Won’t you sit down, gentlemen?” and sat down on a red leather hassock with his black silk ankles crossed in front of him. In the red light, his face looked quite healthy, like any other young chatelaine’s.

Fenton said: “We’ll stand, Rudy. We won’t be long. Where’s Vlathek?”

Fisher’s shoulders came closer together under the purple gown, as if a wind had risen in the room. “He left me. I told you two weeks ago my friend left me. He was an awfully fine person but he just couldn’t stand it when you suspected me of those things. He was terribly disgusted with me.” His lower lip trembled and he touched it with the long pink fingernails of his right hand.

“Peter will be terribly, terribly disgusted now,” Fenton said.

The ivory fingers clenched in the purple lap. “Why do you call him Peter? My friend’s name is Ludwig.” The contralto voice had a soprano range.

Gordon said: “Peter killed his father last night. And he killed another man who told us about you before he died. Talk about Peter.”

The red mouth opened as if gun-barrels had glinted, but the scream that tortured the white face was silent. The red mouth closed and opened again and closed again. Then it said in a babble of words:

“I hate him, too, I don’t like him a bit, he treated me horribly. Peter took my car this morning and all the gasoline coupons that I’ve been saving up to go to Chicago to see the Post-Impressionist exhibition and when I tried to stop him he slapped my face. I used to think he was an awfully nice person but now I don’t like him at all any more, he’s not a fine person at all.”

“You’ll talk then,” Gordon said.

Fisher got to his feet and shook his clasped hands in front of him. “I most certainly will, I’ll tell you all about Peter. Why, I was tremendously fond of Dr. Schneider, he was really a dear man. And I just hate Peter.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me a thing. I haven’t had anything to do with him for weeks and weeks. He was never a true friend of mine. But I’ll tell you everything that I know about him–”

“Not here,” Gordon said. “You can come down to the Federal Building with us and give a full statement.”

“Get your wraps, Rudy,” Fenton said. “It won’t take long.”

It took long enough. An hour later I was still sitting in the black sedan on Lafayette, waiting for Gordon to come out. He had refused to let me enter the field office on the grounds that the agent in charge chewed small change, distrusted superfluous laymen, and spat nickel-plated bullets.

For the first half-hour I went from newsstand to newsstand trying to buy the Toronto Globe and Mail of the day before, but there was none to be had. Then I went back to the car for fear of missing Gordon, and sat and thought with a brain whose contents were as strange and kaleidoscopic as Rudolf Fisher’s den.

Obvious, Rudolf’s attitude to Peter was that of a deserted wife. Did Ruth Esch know her lover was such a versatile amorist? Or didn’t she care? Maybe women in the Third Reich were trained to like that sort of thing. I thought of Roehm, the homosexual chief of the SA whom Hitler murdered with his own talented hands in the blood-bath of 1934. I thought of the elegant Nazi boys I had seen in the Munich nightclubs, with their lipstick and their eye-shadow and their feminine swagger, and the black male guns in their holsters. I thought of the epicene white worms which change their sex and burrow in the bodies of dead men underground.

Something wriggled away from my mental censor and hopped into my consciousness: the name that the hotel detective in the shabby brown suit had called Ruth Esch. White fluorescent light flooded a deep pit in my mind where the albino serpent and the red-headed toad grappled with each other in a nest of worms. The whole thing seemed tragically clear. Nothing real, nothing outside of imagination is ever as real or as painful as that image was. I closed my mind against it for a strange reason: I felt such pity for Ruth.

“Still waiting?” Gordon said. I hadn’t seen him come up but he was standing at the curb beside the car. “We just got a telegram from the Kirkland Lake police. There’s a woman answering to Ruth Esch’s description in the hospital there. She’s badly injured and can’t be moved so they put a guard on her. It must be a bum steer, though.”