Peter Straub - Magic Terror

‘They also said you’d give me the best education in the world,’ N told him.

‘Christ, kid, you must be pretty good if they want me to polish your rough edges.’ He swallowed wine and smiled across the table in what even the young N had sensed as a change of atmosphere. ‘Was there something else they wanted you to do?’

‘Polishing my rough edges isn’t enough?’ asked the suddenly uncertain young N.

Sullivan had stared at him for a time, not at all drunkenly but in a cold curious measuring fashion. N had known only that this scrutiny made him feel wary and exposed. Then Sullivan relaxed and explained what he was going to do and how he planned to do it.

Everything had gone well – better than well, superbly. Sullivan had taken at least a half dozen steps that would have unnerved the crew-cut man in the strip mall, but each one, N took pains to make clear during his reports, had saved time, increased effectiveness, helped bring about a satisfactory conclusion. On the final day, N had called Sullivan to see when he was to be picked up. ‘Change of plans,’ Sullivan had said. ‘You can drive yourself to the airport. I’m spending one more night with the descendants of the Atlanteans.’ He wanted a farewell romp with the waitress. ‘Then back to the civilian life. I own thirty acres outside Houston, think I’ll put up a mansion in the shape of the Alamo but a hundred times bigger, get a state-of-the-art music room, fly in the best cellist I can get for weekly lessons, hire a great chef, rotate the ladies in and out. And I want to learn Chinese. Only great language I don’t already know.’

On a rare visit to headquarters some months later, N had greeted the man from the strip mall as he carried stacks of files out of a windowless office into a windowless corridor. The man was wearing a small, tight bow tie, and his crew cut had been cropped to stubble. It took him a couple of beats to place N. ‘Los Angeles.’ He pronounced it with a hard g. ‘Sure. That was good work. Typical Sullivan. Hairy, but great results. The guy never came back from France, you know.’

‘Don’t tell me he married the waitress,’ N had said.

‘Died there. Killed himself, in fact. Couldn’t take the idea of retirement, that’s what I think. A lot of these Billy the Kid-type guys, they fold their own hands when they get to the end of the road.’

Over the years, N now and again had remarked to himself the elemental truth that observation was mostly interpretation. Nobody wanted to admit it, but it was true anyhow. If you denied interpretation – which consisted of no more than thinking about two things, what you had observed and why you had observed it – your denial was an interpretation, too. In the midst of feeling more and more like Sullivan, that is, resistant to absurd nomenclature and the ever-increasing paperwork necessitated by ‘mainstreaming’, he had never considered that ‘mainstreaming’ included placing women in positions formerly occupied entirely by men. So now he had a female backup: but the question was, what would the lady have done if M. Hubert had noticed that N was following him? Now there, that was a matter for interpretation.

A matter N had sometimes weighed over the years, at those rare times when it returned to him, was the question Sullivan had put to him before he relaxed. Was there something else they wanted you to do?

In institutions, patterns had longer lives than employees.

The parking lot was three-quarters full. Hoping that he still might be able to get something to eat, N looked at the old stable doors as he took a spot against the side wall. They were closed, and the dining room windows were dark. He carried the satchel to the entrance and punched the numerical code into the keypad. The glass door clicked open. To the side of the empty lobby, the dining room was locked. His hunger would have to wait until morning. In the low light burning behind the counter, his key dangled from the rack amid rows of empty hooks. He raised the panel, moved past the desk to get the key, and, with a small shock like the jab of a pin, realized that of the thousands of resource personnel, information managers, computer jocks, divisional region controllers, field operatives, and the rest, only he would remember Sullivan.

The switch beside the stairs turned on the lights for a carefully timed period which allowed him to reach the second floor and press another switch. A sour, acrid odor he had noticed as soon as he entered the staircase intensified on the second floor and worsened as he approached his room. It was like the smell of rot, of burning chemicals, of a dead animal festering on a pile of weeds. Rank and physical, the stench stung his eyes and burrowed into his nose. Almost gasping, N shoved the key into his lock and escaped into his room to discover that the stink pursued him there. He closed the door and knelt beside the bed to unzip his laptop satchel. Then he recognized the smell. It was a colossal case of body odor, the full-strength version of what he had noticed six hours earlier. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said aloud. In seconds he had opened the shutters and pushed up the window. Someone who had not bathed in months, someone who reeked like a diseased muskrat, had come into his room while he had been scrambling around on a mountain. N began checking the room. He opened the drawers in the desk, examined the television set, and was moving toward the closet when he noticed a package wrapped in butcher paper on the bedside table. He bent over it, moved it gingerly from side to side, and finally picked it up. The unmistakable odors of roast lamb and garlic penetrated both the wrapper and the fading stench.

He tore open the wrapper. A handwritten sheet of lined paper had been folded over another, transparent wrapper containing a thick sandwich of coarse brown bread, sliced lamb, and roast peppers. In an old-fashioned girlish hand and colloquial French, the note read: I’m hoping you don’t mind that I made this for you. You were gone all evening and maybe you don’t know how early everything closes in this region. So in case you come back hungry, please enjoy this sandwich with my compliments. Albertine.

N fell back on the bed, laughing.

The loud bells in the tower of the Montory church that had announced the hour throughout the night repeated the pious uproar that had forced him out of bed. Ignoring both mass and the Sabbath, the overweight young woman was scrubbing the tiled floor in the dining room. N nodded at her as he turned to go down into the lounge, and she struggled to her feet, peeled off a pair of transparent plastic gloves, and threw them splatting onto the wet floor to hurry after him.

Three Japanese men dressed for golf occupied the last of the tables laid with white paper cloths, china, and utensils. N wondered if the innkeeper’s drunken friend might have been right about the Brasserie Lipp serving sushi instead of Alsatian food, and then recognized them as the men he had seen at the auberge in the mountains. They were redistributing their portion of the world’s wealth on a boys-only tour of France. What he was doing was not very different. He sat at the table nearest the door, and the young woman waddled in behind him. Café au lait. Croissants et confiture. Jus de l’orange. Before she could leave, he added, ‘Please thank Albertine for the sandwich she brought to my room. And tell her, please, that I would like to thank her for her thoughtfulness myself.’

The dread possibility that she herself was Albertine vanished before her knowing smile. She departed. The Japanese men smoked in silence over the crumbs of their breakfast. Sullivan, N thought for the seventh or eighth time, also had been assigned a backup on his last job. Had he ever really believed that the old pirate had killed himself? Well, yes, for a time. In N’s mid-twenties, Sullivan had seemed a romantic survivor, unadaptable to civilian tedium. Could a man with such a life behind him be content with weekly cello lessons, a succession of good meals, and the comforts of women? Now that he was past Sullivan’s age and had prepared his own satisfactions – skiing in the Swiss Alps, season tickets to Knicks and Yankees games, collecting first editions of Kipling and T. E. Lawrence, the comforts of women – he was in no doubt of the answer.