Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'This is Mr Henry Winter,' I told the operator. 'I'm calling, um, to confirm my reservation.'

'Just a moment, Mr Winter. Your reservation number?'

'Uh,' I said, trying to think fast, pacing back and forth, 'I don't seem to have my information handy right now, maybe you could just -' Then I noticed the number in the upper right-hand corner.

'Wait. Maybe this is it.219?'

There was the sound of keys being punched in on a computer.

I tapped my foot impatiently and glanced out the window for Henry's car. Then I remembered, with a shock, that Henry didn't have his car. I hadn't taken it back to him after I borrowed it on Sunday and it was still parked behind the tennis courts where I'd left it.

In a panicky reflex, I nearly hung up – if Henry didn't have his car I couldn't hear him, he might be halfway up the walk that instant – but just then the operator came back on. 'All set, Mr Winter,' she said briskly. 'Didn't the agent who sold you the tickets tell you it wasn't necessary to confirm on tickets purchased less than three days in advance?'

'No,' I said impatiently, and was about to hang up when I was struck by what she'd said. 'Three days?' I repeated.

'Well, generally your reservations are confirmed at date of purchase, especially on non-refundable fares such as these. The agent should have informed you of this when you purchased the tickets on Tuesday,' Date of purchase? Non-refundable? I stopped pacing. 'Let me make sure I have the correct information,' I said.

'Certainly, Mr Winter,' she said crisply. 'TWA flight 401, departing Boston tomorrow from Logan Airport, gate 12., at 8:45 p.m., arriving Buenos Aires, Argentina, at 6:01 a.m. That's with a stopover in Dallas. Four fares at seven hundred and ninety-five dollars one way, let's see' – she punched in some more numbers on the computer – 'that comes to a total of three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars plus tax, and you chose to pay for that with your American Express card, am I correct?'

My head began to swim. Buenos Aires'? Four tickets? One way?

Tomorrow?

'I hope you and your family have a pleasant flight on TWA, Mr Winter,' said the operator cheerily, and hung up. I stood there, holding the receiver, until a dial tone came droning on the other end.

Suddenly something occurred to me. I put down the telephone and went back to the bedroom and threw open the door. The books on the book shelf were gone; the padlocked closet stood open, empty; the unfastened lock swung open from the hasp.

For a moment I stood staring at it, at the raised Roman capitals that said yale across the bottom, and then went back to the spare bedroom. The closets there were empty, too, nothing but coat hangers jingling on the metal rod. I turned quickly and almost stumbled over two tremendous pigskin suitcases, strapped in black leather, just inside the doorway. I picked one of them up, and the weight nearly toppled me.

My God, I thought, what are they doing? I went back to the hall, replaced the paper, and hurried out the front door with my book.

Once out of North Hampden I walked slowly, extremely puzzled, an undertow of anxiety tugging at my thoughts. I felt as if I needed to do something, but I didn't know what. Did Bunny know anything about this? Somehow, I thought not, and somehow I thought it better not to ask him. Argentina. What was in Argentina? Grasslands, horses, cowboys of some sort who wore flat-crowned hats with pom-poms hanging from the brim. Borges, the writer. Butch Cassidy, they said, had gone into hiding there, along with Dr Mengele and Martin Bormann and a score of less pleasant characters.

It seemed that I remembered Henry telling a story, one night at Francis's house, about some South American country – maybe Argentina, I wasn't sure. I tried to think. Something about a trip with his father, a business interest, an island off the coast… But Henry's father traveled a good deal; besides, if there was a connection, what could it possibly be? Four tickets? One way?

And if Julian knew about it – and he seemed to know everything about Henry, even more so than the rest – why had he been inquiring about everyone's whereabouts only the day before?

My head ached. Emerging from the woods near Hampden, into an expanse of snow-covered meadow that sparkled in the light, I saw twin threads of smoke coming from the age-blacked chimneys at either end of Commons. Everything was cold and quiet except for a milk truck that idled at the rear entrance as two silent, sleepy-looking men unloaded the wire crates and let them fall with a clatter on the asphalt.

The dining halls were open, though at that hour of the morning there were no students, only cafeteria workers and maintenance men eating breakfast before their shifts began. I went upstairs and got myself a cup of coffee and a couple of soft-boiled eggs, which I ate alone at a table near a window in the empty main dining room.

Classes started today, Thursday, but my first class with Julian wasn't until the next Monday. After breakfast I went back to my room and began to work on the irregular second aorists. Not until almost four in the afternoon did I finally close my books, and when I looked out my window over the meadow, the light fading in the west and the ashes and yews casting long shadows on the snow, it was as if I'd just woken up, sleepy and disoriented, to find it was getting dark and I had slept through the day.

It was the big back-to-school dinner that night – roast beef, green beans almondine, cheese souffle and some elaborate lentil dish for the vegetarians. I ate dinner alone at the same table where I'd had my breakfast. The halls were packed, everyone smoking, laughing, extra chairs wedged in at full tables, people with plates of food roaming from group to group to say hello.

Next to me was a table of art students, branded as such by their ink-grimed fingernails and the self-conscious paint spatters on their clothes; one of them was drawing on a cloth napkin with a black felt marker; another was eating a bowl of rice using inverted paintbrushes for chopsticks. I had never seen them before. As I drank my coffee and gazed around the dining room, it struck me that Georges Laforgue had been right, after all: I really was cut off from the rest of the college – not that I cared to be on intimate terms, by and large, with people who used paintbrushes for cutlery.

There was a life-or-death attempt being made near my table by a couple of Neanderthals looking to collect money for a beer blast in the sculpture studio. Actually, I did know these two; it was impossible to attend Hampden and not to. One was the son of a famous West Coast racket boss and the other was the son of a movie producer. They were, respectively, president and vice-president of the Student Council, offices they utilized principally in order to organize drinking contests, wet-T-shirt competitions, and female mud-wrestling tournaments. They were both well over six feet – slack-jawed, unshaven, dumb dumb dumb, the sort who I knew would never go indoors at all after daylight savings in the spring but instead would lounge bare-chested on the lawn with the Styrofoam cooler and the tape deck from dawn till dusk. They were widely held to be good guys, and maybe they were decent enough if you lent them your car for beer runs or sold them pot or something; but both of them – the movie producer's kid in particular – had a piggish, schizophrenic glitter about the eye that I did not care for at all. Party Pig, people called him, and not entirely with affection, either; but he liked this name and took a kind of a stupid pride in living up to it. He was always getting drunk and doing things like setting fires, or stuffing freshmen down chimneys, or throwing beer kegs through plate glass windows.

Party Pig (a. k. a. Jud) and Frank were making their way to my table. Frank held out a paint can full of change and crumpled bills. 'Hi, guy,' he said. 'Keg party in the sculpture studio tonight.