John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Thank you very much,” Craine said, bowing, and hurried to the elevator.

Two minutes later, with the number of Terrance Rush’s carrel on a pink slip of paper in his hand, Craine got off the elevator at the fifth floor and hurried along the stacks, hunting for where the carrels began. Half unaware that he was doing it, he read titles as he walked. Abruptly, he stopped, staring at a dark blue book almost in front of him, at eye level: Clairvoyance , it said. For the first time since it had happened he remembered that something had come over him when he was standing at Ira Katz’s door, a kind of dream or maybe a vision, very brief, but powerful: he — or someone — was standing in the dark, under trees, and someone was moving very quietly toward him, hands raised. Craine, remembering, put one hand over his mouth. It was that night — somewhere where there were leaves — that Ira’s friend April had been murdered.

“I said some thing like that,” Ira Katz said, not quite interrupting.

“Whatever,” Craine said, brushing it aside almost angrily. “But you follow what I mean. The writer that wrote the novel may know the story from end to end — he might or he might not, I wouldn’t know about that — but the characters, what do they know? They come in at, say, page a hundred, maybe page two thousand. Before that they didn’t exist. Not a trace of them. What are they to do?”

Ira Katz smiled patiently. His glass was still nearly as full as when he started.

“I’ll tell you what they do if they’re smart, Mr. Katz.” He leaned forward, intense and emotional; he hardly knew why himself. In a minute he’d be crying. “They don’t eat the cake till someone else has tried it and not died of it. They don’t make friends, they don’t make enemies. They don’t go up on rooftops or wander around in the shrubbery or down in cellars. They keep their mouths shut and pay very close attention.”

“It’s a hard way to live,” Ira Katz said, again not quite following, or so it seemed.

“That’s the truth,” Craine said, and shuddered, tears leaping into his eyes, then drank. The thread of his argument had slipped from him. The click of the clocks had a hollow echo. He was drinking much too fast. He stared hard at the cat as if for help. The cat slept on.

Ira Katz said playfully, carefully not making it too clear that he was playing — indeed, there was a chance that he was serious after all, “Some of us have to be the victims, though, and some of us have to be the people left over at the end, the suspects who didn’t do it.”

Craine nodded, petulant, still looking for the thread. Everybody did it , he thought, but that made no sense. He drank again, furiously wishing he’d stayed sober. Then it came to him. He reached out sharply toward Ira Katz, gesturing with his glass, spilling whiskey. “That’s just bad luck, though, that’s the thing — the ones that get killed and the ones that happen not to, the poor dumb bastards that die or have children and never think. It’s the detective we have to watch. He’s the one to think about. The others can be as passionate as they want to — good luck to ’em! But the detective, he’s got to be objective, scientific. No commitments. He’s like a man from outside Time. That’s his secret. Maybe he’s a foreigner, like Hercule Poirot. Maybe he gets stoned on cocaine, like Sherlock Holmes.”

Ira Katz was studying him from deep in his chair, for all the world like Holmes making cunning deductions. “Craine,” he said suddenly, “what are you driving at?” Again he glanced toward the bedroom door.

“Sherlock Holmes,” Craine said, and waved his glass. “Hercule Poirot!”

“I know,” Ira Katz said. “That part I’m hearing.”

Craine sat perfectly still for a moment, his insides overtaken by a curious trembling. Again, for an instant, he’d gotten a flash of the beautiful young woman who was following him. “We’re talking about the man who solves the mystery,” he said. A tear escaped onto his cheek, and quickly, furtively, he wiped it away. “We’re talking about the solitary hunter, cold-blooded as the moon!”

Ira Katz studied him. “Is that what you want to be?” he asked. He spoke too gently, like a psychiatrist.

“As I told you,” Craine said crossly, with dignity, “I never get murder cases. We’re talking theoretically.”

The young man nodded. For a long moment he stared at something just above and behind Craine’s head. At last he dropped his gaze to meet Craine’s and cleared his throat. “I’ll tell you how it seems to me,” he said, and colored slightly. It seemed for an instant that the clocks ticked more softly. Ira Katz looked above Craine’s head again. “It seems to me that the man who’s a lover is more likely to make a good detective than the man who’s not. That’s my impression, anyway, or my impression at this moment.” His smile was, again, apologetic. “We all know the disadvantages. He gets over involved, he’s not objective, he runs a risk of missing things — those are the arguments. But I don’t know. I’m not sure. The detective who’s involved — not just with the woman, if it’s a woman that’s in danger, as in the usual plot, but with everyone, everything — I think that’s the man I’d put my money on. If I were to make up a new kind of detective — a new and different kind of Ellery Queen or Dr. Fell or Perry Mason — I’d use — I don’t know — maybe an Indian guru, some man like Swami Muktinanda — you’ve heard of him? I’d choose a man half crazy with empathetic love for all the universe. Someone who needs an assistant to keep him from walking into freight trains or falling down in trances — some merry-hearted lunatic who understands the language of goats and trees.” He looked at Craine and grinned. “My novels wouldn’t have much suspense, I admit. The minute the detective meets the killer, that’s that, no more mystery. ‘Ah!’ he’d say, ‘so it’s you!’ Big smile from both parties. And my novels might not have much in the way of emotional catharsis, either. My detective would never turn the murderer in, he’d simply cure him by a beatific look, or maybe confirm his existence for what it was, as he would a cobra’s, and send him on his way. But then—” He gestured vaguely, smiling, letting it go. After a moment his expression clouded and, glancing down at his glass, he said, “Or then again I might choose just the opposite, some rolling-eyed, half-crazy paranoid. They too have their involvement — involvement of a kind, anyway. They can be wonderfully shrewd.” Craine’s mind flashed an image of Dr. Tummelty talking of the woman who walks down the street unconsciously scanning. Craine leaned forward, raising his glass to object, but Ira Katz, looking over his head again, seemed not to notice.

“I’ll tell you the problem with existentialists,” he said seriously. His voice became teacherish, as if he’d said this many times and had a good deal invested in it. “They begin with the assumption that we’re free—‘existence precedes essence’ and all that. The trouble is, it’s not true. You remember Jean-Paul Sartre’s image, the man who stands on a cliff looking down. He feels dizzy, a little nausea. That’s the experience of freedom, Sartre claims — the man’s sense that he could throw himself into the abyss if he chose to. The trouble is, most people don’t —they step back. If we were really free, about fifty percent of us would jump.”

“But surely that’s just fear, Mr. Katz,” Craine broke in. “If they dared to face up to their freedom and act—” His voice came out unexpectedly loud. It wasn’t so much the whiskey outrunning him as the speed with which Ira Katz hurried from thought to thought, dropping names, queer images — the man on the cliff — as if Craine should have heard of them a hundred times, which perhaps he had; he was too foggy to remember. “The mere fact that we don’t jump, even if we’re miserable,” Craine began.