Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

The next morning Graves did his laundry, threw away the few perishables that had accumulated in his refrigerator, then arranged for Wendy, the young woman who lived next door, to pick up any mail he might receive while at Riverwood. She hadn’t bothered to look through the peephole before she’d opened it, and for a long time after he returned to his own apartment, Graves found himself considering the things that might have been done to her had some other man been at the door, pressed his dusty boot against it, then pushed it open. He’d even briefly envisioned Sykes at work while Kessler sat nearby, barking orders- Use that. Stick it there -delighted by the horrors he could instruct another to perform.

To escape the mood such visions called up, Graves busied himself with the last of his chores, then packed a single suitcase-the same one he’d brought from North Carolina over twenty years before-and placed it beside the door. He put his typewriter in its carrying case and placed it beside the suitcase. That was it. There was nothing more to do. No plants to water. No animals to care for. No friends to notify of his move to Riverwood. He had nothing to nurture, nothing to protect. No one to whom anything of value should be entrusted. He’d given Wendy the key to his mailbox and the key to his apartment so that she could leave his mail on the kitchen table. He knew that when he returned, the usual accumulation of bills and third-class flyers would be waiting for him. There’d be no personal letters, however, no notes from relatives or friends. It was the path he’d chosen-a conscious choice-to live so stripped of human connection that when he died there would be no grief.

He read for the rest of the day, shifting from the sofa to the chair, from his desk to the small table by the window. At around six he made dinner, ate it quickly, then walked out onto the terrace and watched night fall over the city. In recent books Slovak had taken up the same twilight vigil, a lonely figure perched on a rusting fire escape, staring out over the jagged field of spires and chimneys. This merging of Slovak’s habits with his own did not trouble Graves, however. It seemed the inevitable consequence of the life they’d lived together. But while Slovak brooded about Kessler as he peered out over the city, working to unearth the force that drove the latter to such awesome acts of harm, Graves worked only to empty his mind of thought.

Once the darkness had settled over the city, Graves returned inside, stretched out on the sofa, and began to read again. The book was a huge nineteenth-century novel peopled with scores of characters, plots and subplots, a work whose vast sweep made his own novels appear puny, repetitive, limited in theme. And yet he could not write anything other than what he wrote, could not portray a single aspect of the human experience beyond Kessler’s evil, Sykes’ cowardice, and Slovak’s futile effort to bring them down.

He read for nearly two hours, then rose from the sofa, walked into the bedroom, and crawled into bed. He had just reached for the light, when he heard a hard thump on the other side of the wall. He knew that it came from Wendy’s bedroom, and for a time he listened anxiously for some other sound, a low moan, a cry of pain. Or something worse. A sound he recalled from the depths of his past, the soft, rhythmic pleading of a young woman, begging, however hopelessly, to live.

The next morning Saunders arrived at Graves’ apartment right on time. He was dressed more formally than before, white shirt, dark blue jacket, gray tie, but his manner remained no less casual.

“You look beat,” he commented as he placed Graves’ suitcase and typewriter in the trunk of the Volvo.

“I didn’t sleep much,” Graves told him.

Saunders opened the rear door and waited for Graves to get in. “Well, you can take a nap on the way to Riverwood if you want. I’ll turn on the air-conditioning, a little music. You’ll sleep like a baby, believe me.”

But Graves had not been able to nap, and so, after they’d been on the road awhile, Saunders glanced back toward him and laughed. “We made bets, you know. The staff, I mean. On whether you’d come back. Most of us figured you wouldn’t.”

Mention of the staff at Riverwood gave Graves a way of beginning his work.

“The people who work at Riverwood now,” he said. “Were any of them there the summer Faye Harrison was murdered?”

“Only Greta Klein,” Saunders answered. “She was one of the housekeepers then.”

Graves took the small notebook he’d purchased in a drugstore the day before, flipped back its cover, and wrote her name.

“Greta came to Riverwood right after the war,” Saunders added. “From Germany. Just sixteen and pretty as a picture.”

Graves saw a young girl with bright blue eyes and blond hair she’d painstakingly braided, two thick braids hanging neatly down the back of her carefully pressed blouse. She held a bulky suitcase in her hand, and in his mind Graves envisioned her standing on the steps of the main house, ringing the bell, waiting apprehensively for the door to open.

“She’d been through a lot, Greta had,” Saunders went on. “She was a refugee.” His eyes swept over to Graves. “She’d been in one of the camps, you know.”

Graves’ imagination immediately revised the story. Now Greta was dark, her hair straight and raven black. The white blouse was gone, along with the shiny black shoes. Instead, she was dressed in the tattered makeshift clothes of a Jewish refugee.

“I remember the day she arrived.” Saunders spoke so freely, with so little need of prompting, Graves felt sure he’d been instructed to do just that. “The whole family met her at the door. I took her upstairs and showed her the room we’d gotten ready for her.”

Graves saw a youthful Frank Saunders take Greta’s suitcase and guide the girl up the long flight of stairs that led to her tiny room, Warren Davies watching them from the foyer, the rest of his family gathered around him, all staring silently at the strange young creature who’d just come into their midst.

“Do you know how she happened to come to Riverwood?” Graves asked.

The question appeared to derail the progress of Saunders narrative, add a curve to the road. “No, not really,” he replied. “I guess she had some sort of connection to Mr. Davies. She had a picture of him. I remember that. She kept it in her room. On a little table by her bed.”

Graves instantly envisioned the photograph, Mr. Davies in an elegantly tailored suit.

“It was the only picture she had,” Saunders went on. “All her other pictures were destroyed, Greta told me. Gone up in smoke, she said. Like her mother, I guess. In the camp.”

In his mind Graves saw Greta’s mother huddled before a brick wall, naked, shivering. A Polish snow fell all around her, blanketing the burial pits. A river ran sluggishly in the background, its surface coated with a film of gray ash.

“Anyway, Greta was all alone in the world. I felt sorry for her. We all did. She tried hard to be accepted. She wanted to be the family favorite, you might say. But it never worked. That place was already taken.”

“By whom?”

“Faye Harrison,” Saunders replied. “Everybody loved Faye.”

The unexpected mention of Faye Harrison in connection with Greta Klein instantly generated a story in Graves’ mind. He envisioned Greta as she began to fashion a new life for herself at Riverwood. Alone, her family dead, he saw Greta as she made her first halting efforts to be accepted at Riverwood, cautiously approaching each member of the Davies family, but particularly Allison, a girl her own age and in whom she hoped to find not just a friend, but perhaps a sister. For a while it had seemed possible, and as he continued to imagine it, Graves saw the two girls together, Greta speaking haltingly in her heavily accented English, Allison listening quietly, the vastly privileged life of the one embracing the unspeakably tragic life of the other, their friendship steadily growing deeper and more intimate as the weeks passed, Allison now moving toward the idea that Greta should not live at Riverwood as a servant, but as a full-fledged member of the Davies family, the sister she had always wanted and never had.