Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

His eyes focused on mine but in that restless way of darting back and forth, back and forth, from one eye to the other.

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you for understanding, Josef.”

It had been the right thing to say.

He moved past me.

I turned.

In my periphery something caught my eye on the floor, where he’d been standing. He’d dropped the scarf.

Stockman wanted both hands.

He opened the bedroom door. The light was still on.

He stepped in and I followed, as quietly as I could.

He went first to the wardrobe. I stopped in the doorway.

He twisted the handle and opened the wardrobe door. Slowly now. He was using his right hand, his pistol hand. Good. It would mean a few moments of delay for him to be able to shoot.

I took another small step toward him, determined not to seem threatening, ready to lunge at him.

The door was swinging wide.

No rustling in the wardrobe.

No words.

He closed the wardrobe door and turned.

We looked at each other.

I offered him a gentle smile. “Whatever you need to do,” I said.

He turned away from me. Looked across the room.

I followed his eyes.

The drapes at the balcony door.

He knew. I knew. The other likely place.

He moved past me once more.

I edged my way toward the night table and the Mauser.

He reached the drapes, hesitated.

The temptation in my fingertips was to ease the drawer open. But the room was quiet. The sound would make him turn and what he would see could be understood in only one way.

I stayed put. If he stepped out and there were sounds, I could have the Mauser pretty quick anyway.

He put his hand to the drape. Still he hesitated. He loved her. He did not want this to be true. But he loved her. So the possibility of this was roaring in his head.

He wrenched the drapes aside.

The door was open.

He stepped out.

He vanished to the right.

There were no sounds.

He crossed by the open window and vanished to the left.

Nothing.

He appeared in the doorway.

Even across the room I could sense the quaking in him.

My own mind was roaring now. There was only one other possible place. But could she even fit under the bed? I did not let my eyes go there. I knew that the sheets and the light quilt were untucked and hung low. I thought I even remembered a dust ruffle down to the floor.

Would Stockman go so far as to get down on his hands and knees to make sure about this last possible place?

He stepped into the room.

He stopped.

I tried to read his body. There was an aura of release about him: his shoulders had gone slack; his hands, which were prepared moments ago even to kill, hung limp at his sides.

“Can I get you that drink now?” I said. Very softly.

He hesitated.

Surely he wanted to believe what his hands and his shoulders already believed.

My last gesture of innocent confidence would be to step out of the bedroom before him. If he did energize his hands in a final burst of suspicion and he got down on his knees after I left, there would be sounds at the discovery — Mother would surely engage him — and only then would he come after me. I could maybe get back into the room in time to prevent his weapon coming into play.

“Yes, you can,” he said.

I turned. I stepped from the room.

The drink table was against the wall just to the side of the bedroom door. I put my hand to the bottle of Scotch. I did not take the top off. I turned my hand and grasped it by its neck. A weapon.

But almost at once I heard Stockman’s footsteps approaching from inside the bedroom.

I let go of the bottle and he emerged and passed on across the floor.

I glanced over my shoulder.

He was collapsing into the scroll-armed chair.

I poured two sizable shots of whiskey and crossed to him.

He took one with a murmured thanks.

I sat on the divan.

We did not toast. He shot his down. I sipped only a very little bit of mine.

“She’s in her room,” he said.

I waited for more.

“She must be in her room,” he said.

“I’m sure she’s safe,” I said.

“She left my bed,” he said. “We can speak as men together, you and I, can we not?”

“Of course,” I said. Now I shot my whiskey down, and before he could say any more I rose and moved toward the side table. I needed a refill.

“For me too,” he said.

I awaited Albert’s men-together talk in much the same mood as his when he approached the balcony a few moments ago. I had to throw the drapes back but I really did not want to find what was on the other side.

I picked up the bottle of whiskey, a fine old Dundee, though it could have been a Chicago-saloon, two-bits-a-shot, squirrel whiskey for all either of us cared at that moment.

I returned to Stockman and poured us some more and I sat down.

My only revenge was that she was probably in the next room listening to every word.

“I woke,” he said. “We had been man and woman together, you understand.”

I understood. I pushed him along. I said, “She was gone?”

“She was.”

I glanced across the floor to the apricot-colored pile of silk.

I had an inspiration.

“If she were going to another man, she would have taken her lovely scarf,” I said.

He looked over his shoulder and then back at me. Then back at the scarf. Then he looked me in the eyes as if he’d suddenly realized it was me he was in love with.

“Josef,” he said, in a commensurate tone of voice. “You are right , my friend.”

I realized how tightly coiled a metal spring there’d been in my chest, because it now suddenly eased. I didn’t have to hear his man-talk so he could convince himself he was still okay in bed with my mother.

“Of course,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“It was simply evident,” I said.

“She is in her room. But she must be angry with me.”

“Which is why she did not answer when you knocked.”

“Exactly,” he said. He looked at the drink in his hand, which he’d not yet touched. He took about a third of it now, as if it were his own choice and not a physical necessity.

“Yes,” he said. “She must think she has cause to be angry.”

He lifted his shoulders and let them fall as if to say, What can you do?

“You heard the issue tonight,” he said. “I have to go south for a while. I don’t know for how long exactly. A few days. A week. She has her play, after all.”

I took a good bolt of my whiskey. Maybe half of it. Not from choice but from necessity. So I wouldn’t choke on the irony of having to now say the things I needed to say. “But she has something more important to her than Hamlet .”

His drunken brow furrowed in puzzlement. The dope.

“She has you,” I said.

I wanted to keep on drinking while he figured this out. But I was already feeling a little too warm in the face, a little too reconciled with the stuff that had to come out of my mouth.

I looked for a place to put my glass down.

I may even have remarked at this point at the inappropriate absence of a table near this chair and divan.

If I did, the remark was lost on Stockman, whose face was crimped in thought.

I placed the glass on the floor.

All right , I thought. Say it. “She’s a woman in love. When she told you she couldn’t bear to be away from you, she meant it. She aches. You understand, Albert? She aches, my brother. For you.”

I’d raised my voice for this whole proclamation. Grandly. So she could clearly hear that I knew what I knew.

I’d stopped drinking in time to manage the important things. I was coherent. I knew I’d remember everything we said. I was in control of my words and focused on their hidden rhetorical intent. Perhaps, though, the theatrical flourishes had a bit of a life of their own.