Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'But I don't understand where they got this stuff about drugs.'

'Imagine how it looked to them. On one hand, there was Cloke. The police knew he was dealing drugs on a pretty substantial scale; they also figured he was probably the middleman for somebody a lot bigger. There was no obvious connection between that and Bunny, but then there was Bunny s best friend, with all this money, they can't tell quite where it's coming from.

And during those last months Bunny was throwing around plenty of money himself. Henry was giving it to him, of course, but they didn't know that. Fancy restaurants. Italian suits. Besides.

Henry just looks suspicious. The way he acts. Even the way he dresses. He looks like one of those guys with horn-rimmed glasses and armbands in a gangster movie, you know, the one who cooks the books for Al Capone or something.' He lit another cigarette. 'Do you remember the night before they found Bunny's body?' he said. 'When you and I went to that awful bar, the one with the TV, and I got so drunk?'

'Yes.'

That was one of the worst nights of my life. It looked pretty bad for both of us. Henry was almost sure he was going to be arrested the next day.'

I was so appalled that for a moment I couldn't speak. 'Why, for God's sake?' I said at last.

He drew deeply on his cigarette. The FBI men came to see him that afternoon,' he said. 'Not long after they'd taken Cloke into custody. They told Henry they had enough probable cause to arrest half a dozen people, including himself, either for conspiracy or withholding evidence.'

'Christ!' I said, dumbfounded. 'Haifa dozen people? Who?'

'I don't know exactly. They might've been bluffing but Henry was worried sick. He warned me they'd probably be coming over to my place and I just had to get out of there, I couldn't sit around waiting for them. He made me promise not to tell you. Even Camilla didn't know.'

There was a long pause.

'But they didn't arrest you,' I said.

Charles laughed. I noticed that his hands still shook a little. 'I think we have dear old Hampden College to thank for that,' he said. 'Of course, a lot of the stuff didn't tie up; they figured that out from talking to Cloke. But still they knew they weren't getting the truth and they probably would've kept after it if the college had been a little more cooperative. Once Bunny's body was found, though, the administration just wanted to hush it up.

Too much bad publicity. Freshman applications had gone down something like twenty percent. And the town police – whose business it was, really – are very cooperative about such things.

Cloke was in a lot of trouble, you know – some of that drug stuff was serious, they could've thrown him in jail. But he got off with academic probation and fifty hours of community service. It didn't even go on his school record.'

It took me some moments to digest this. Cars and trucks whooshed past.

After a while Charles laughed again. 'It's funny,' he said, pushing his fists deep in his pockets. 'We thought we were putting our ace man up front but if one of the rest of us had handled it it would've been much better. If it had been you. Or Francis. Even my sister. We could have avoided half of this.'

'It doesn't matter. It's over now.'

'No thanks to him. I was the one who had to deal with the police. He takes the credit, but it was me who actually had to sit around that goddamned station all hours drinking coffee and trying to make them like me, you know, trying to convince them we were all just a bunch of regular kids. Same with the FBI, and that was even worse. Being the front for everybody, you know, always on guard, having to say exactly the right thing and doing my best to size up things from their point of view, and you had to hit exactly the right note with these people, too, you couldn't drop it for a second, trying to be all communicative and open yet concerned, too, you know, and at the same time not at all nervous, though I could hardly pick up a cup without being afraid of spilling it and a couple of times I was so panicky I thought I was just going to black out or break down or something. Do you know how hard that was? Do you think Henry would lower himself to do something like that? No. It was all right, of course, for me to do it but he couldn't be bothered. Those people had never seen anything like Henry in their lives. Ill tell you the sort of thing he worried about. Like if he was carrying around the right book, if Homer would make a better impression than Thomas Aquinas. He was like something from another planet. If he was the only one they'd had to deal with he would have landed us all in the gas chamber.'

A lumber truck rattled past.

'Good God,' I finally said. I was quite shaken. 'I'm glad I didn't know.'

He shrugged. 'Well, you're right. It all came out okay. But I still don't like the way he tries to lord it over me.'

We walked for a long time without saying anything.

'Do you know where you're going to spend the summer?' said Charles.

'I haven't thought about it much,' I said. I hadn't heard anything about the situation in Brooklyn, which tended to make me think it had fallen through.

'I'm going to Boston,' Charles said. 'Francis's great-aunt has an apartment on Marlborough Street. Just a few doors from the Public Garden. She goes to the country in the summer and Francis said if I wanted to stay there, I could.'

'Sounds nice.'

'It's a big place. If you wanted, you could come too.'

'Maybe.'

'You'd like it. Francis will be in New York but he'll come up sometimes. Have you ever been to Boston?'

'No.'

'We'll go to the Gardner Museum. And the piano bar at the Ritz.'

He was telling me about a museum they had at Harvard, some place where they had a million different flowers all made of colored glass, when all of a sudden, with alarming swiftness, a yellow Volkswagen swooped from the opposite lane and ground to a stop beside us.

It was Judy Poovey's friend Tracy. She rolled down her window and gave us a brilliant smile. 'Hi, guys,' she said. 'Want a ride?'

She dropped us off at Charles's place. It was ten o'clock. Camilla wasn't home.

'God,' said Charles, shouldering off his jacket. It fell, in a heap, on the floor.

'How do you feel?'

'Drunk.'

'Want some coffee?'

'There's some in the kitchen,' Charles said, yawning and running a hand through his hair. 'Mind if I have a bath?'

'Go ahead.'

'I'll be out in a minute. That cell was filthy. I think I might have fleas.'

He was more than a minute. I could hear him sneezing, running the hot and cold taps, humming to himself. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice and put some raisin bread in the toaster.

While looking through the cabinet for coffee, I found a half-full jar of Horlick's malted milk. The label stared at me like a reproach.

Bunny was the only one of us who ever drank malted milk.

I pushed it to the rear of the cabinet, behind a jug of maple syrup.

The coffee was ready and I was on my second batch of toast when I heard a key in the lock, the front door opening. Camilla stuck her head into the kitchen.

'Hi, you,' she said. Her hair was untidy and her face pale and watchful; she looked like a little boy.

'Hi yourself. Want some breakfast?'

She sat down at the table beside me. 'How did it go?' she said.

I told her. She listened attentively, reached out and took a triangle of buttered toast from my plate and ate it as she listened.

'Is he all right?' she said.

I didn't know exactly how she meant it, 'all right.'

'Sure,' I said.

There was a long silence. Very faintly, on a downstairs radio, a sprightly female voice sang a song about yogurt, backed by a chorus of mooing cows.

She finished her toast and got up to pour herself some coffee.