Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'He isn't here, I'm sure,' he said as he unlocked the front door.

'Where is he?'

'With Bunny. He took him to Manchester for dinner and then I think to some movie that Bunny wanted to see. Would you like some coffee?'

Francis's apartment was in an ugly 19705 building owned by the college. It was roomier and more private than the old oak-floored houses we lived in on campus, and as a consequence was much in demand; as a trade-off there were linoleum floors, ill-lit halls, and cheap, modern fixtures like at a Holiday Inn.

Francis didn't seem to mind it much. He had his own furniture there, brought out from the country house, but he'd chosen it carelessly and it was an atrocious mix of styles, upholstery, light and dark woods.

A search revealed that Francis had neither coffee nor tea ('He needs to go to the grocery store,' said Henry, looking over my shoulder into yet another barren cabinet), only a few bottles of Scotch and some Vichy water. I got some ice and a couple of glasses and we took a fifth of Famous Grouse with us into i?7 the shadowy living room, our shoes clicking across the ghastly wilderness of white linoleum.

'So you didn't go,' I said, after we'd sat down and Henry had poured us each a glass.

'No.'

'Why not?'

Henry sighed, and reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette.

'Money,' he said, as the match flared brightly in the dim. 'I don't have a trust like Francis, you see, only a monthly allowance.

It's much more than I generally need to live on, and for years I've put most of it into a savings account. But Bunny's just about cleaned that out. There was no way I could put my hands on more than thirty thousand dollars, even if I sold my car.'

Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money.'

'Yes.'

'Why would you need that much?'

Henry blew a smoke ring half into the yellowy circle of light beneath the lamp, half into the surrounding dark. 'Because we weren't coming back,' he said. 'None of us have work visas.

Whatever we took would've had to last the four of us for a long time. Incidentally,' he said, raising his voice as if I'd tried to interrupt him – actually, I hadn't, I was only making a sort of inarticulate noise of stupefaction – 'incidentally, Buenos Aires wasn't our destination at all. It was only a stop along the way.'

'What?'

'If we'd had the money, I suppose we would have flown to Paris or London, some gateway city with plenty of traffic, and once there to Amsterdam and eventually on to South America.

That way we'd have been more difficult to trace, you see. But we didn't have that kind of money, so the alternative was to go to Argentina and from there take a roundabout course to Uruguay – a dangerous and unstable place in its own right, to my way of thinking, but suitable for our purposes. My father has an interest in some developing property down there. We'd have had no problem finding a place to live,' 'Did he know about this,' I said, 'your father?'

'He would have eventually. As a matter of fact I was hoping to ask you to get in touch with him once we were there. Had something unforeseen happened he would've been able to help us, even get us out of the country if need be. He knows people down there, people in the government. Otherwise, no one would know.'

'He would do that for you?'

'My father and I are not close,' said Henry, 'but I am his only child.' He drank the rest of his Scotch and rattled the ice around in his glass. 'But anyway. Even though I didn't have much ready cash, my credit cards were more than adequate, leaving only the problem of raising a sum large enough to live on for a while.

Which is where Francis came in. He and his mother live off the income of a trust, as I expect you know, but they also have the right to withdraw as much as three percent of the principal per year, which would amount to a sum of about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Generally this isn't touched when it turns up, but in theory either of them can take it out whenever they like. A law firm in Boston serves as the trustees, and on Thursday morning we left the country house, came into Hampden for a few minutes so the twins and I could get our things, and then we all went to Boston and checked into the Parker House. That's a lovely hotel, do you know it? No? Dickens used to stay there when he came to America.

'At any rate, Francis had an appointment with his lawyers, and the twins had some things to straighten out with the passport office. It takes more planning than you might think to pick up and leave the country, but everything was pretty much taken care of; we were leaving the next night and there seemed no way things could go wrong. We were a bit worried about the twins, but of course it wouldn't have posed a problem even if they'd i?9 had to wait ten days or so and follow us down later. I had some things to do myself, but not many, and Francis had assured me that getting the money was a simple matter of going downtown and signing some papers. His mother would find out he'd taken it, but what could she do once he was gone?

'But he wasn't back when he said he would be, and three hours passed, then four. The twins came back, and the three of us had just ordered up some lunch from room service when Francis burst in, half-hysterical. The money for that year was all gone, you see. His mother had checked out every cent of the principal at the first of the year and hadn't told him about it. It was a nasty surprise, but even nastier given the circumstances.

He'd tried everything he could think of – to borrow money on the trust itself, even to assign his interests, which is, if you know anything about trusts, about the most desperate thing one can do. The twins were all for going ahead and taking our chances.

But… It was a difficult situation. Once we left we couldn't come back and anyway, what were we supposed to do when we got there? Live in a treehouse like Wendy and the Lost Boys?' He sighed. 'So there we were, with our suitcases packed and passports ready, but no money. I mean, literally none. Between the four of us we had hardly five thousand dollars. There was quite a bit of discussion, but in the end we decided our only choice was to come back to Hampden. For the time being, at least.'

He said this all quite calmly but I, listening to him, felt a lump growing in the pit of my stomach. The picture was still wholly obscure, but what I saw of it I didn't like at all. I said nothing for a long time, only looked at the shadows the lamp cast on the ceiling.

'Henry, my God,' I said at last. My voice was flat and strange even to my own ears.

He raised an eyebrow and said nothing, empty glass in hand, face half in shadow.

I looked at him. 'My God,' I said. 'What have you done?'

He smiled wryly, and leaned forward out of the light to pour himself some more Scotch. 'I think you already have a pretty good idea,' he said. 'Now let me ask you something. Why have you been covering up for us?'

'What?'

'You knew we were leaving the country. You knew it all the time and you didn't tell a soul. Why is that?'

The walls had fallen away and the room was black. Henry's face, lit starkly by the lamp, was pale against the darkness and stray points of light winked from the rim of his spectacles, glowed in the amber depths of his whiskey glass, shone blue in his eyes.

'I don't know,' I said.

He smiled. 'No?' he said.

I stared at him and didn't say anything.

'After all, we hadn't confided in you,' he said. His gaze on mine was steady, intense. 'You could have stopped us any time you wanted and yet you didn't. Why?'

'Henry, what in God's name have you done?'

He smiled. 'You tell me,' he said.

And the horrible thing was, somehow, that I did know. 'You killed somebody,' I said, 'didn't you?'

He looked at me for a moment, and then, to my utter, utter surprise, he leaned back in his chair and laughed.