Wilde West (32 page)

But Oscar had been alone on several occasions since his visit to Shantytown: walking to the opera house last night, walking back to the hotel. Surely if the giant had wanted to attack him, he could have done so then.

And the fellow was hardly likely to attack him on a train station platform that held a hundred witnesses.

No, even if the half-glimpsed figure
had
been Biff the Behemoth—and, really, what was the likelihood of that?—Biff represented no threat whatever here. In only an hour or so Oscar would be putting Denver, and Biff and his bad temper, behind him.

Satisfied that he was perfectly safe (although, of course, had he actually been attacked by the oaf, he would have given him a sound thrashing) Oscar began again to stroll alongside the train.

And then he saw her.

Suddenly everything else, the station, the train, the milling crowd, the earth, the sky, became mere backdrop: cardboard props and painted sets.

She wore a long fox cape, dark and lush; but that thick cascade of titian hair, gleaming in the limpid sunlight, made the fur seem dull and drab. Beneath the cape she wore a long dress of silk, light green at the bodice, dark green at the skirt. The fabric—loose, cut on the bias—shimmered as it shifted across those superb proud breasts. (Along the palms of Oscar's hands, remarkably, he could still feel their porcelain texture.)

Tabor marched beside her, the balding top of his egg-shaped head barely reaching the level of her sculpted jaw, his hands clasped behind him, his round vested belly jutting importantly between the opened front of his vicuna coat.

Tabor saw him. “Oscar!” he called and, grinning, he held out his stubby arm in greeting.

Smiling pleasantly (an outstanding performance, considering that this bloated dwarf had kept Elizabeth McCourt Doe to himself for a full day now), Oscar shook the beastly little hand and then turned to Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

The glance from her eyes came as two uncanny beams of violet light that pierced to the center of his being, melting it. His breath left him and so, very nearly, did his panache.

He wanted more than anything in the world to sweep her into his arms. This pretense of mere friendship made him curiously uneasy: he feared that by denying their love they might somehow lose it; that the pretense might become, against both their wills, the reality.

“Oscar,” she said, and offered him her hand. “You look wonderful today.”

He bent over her hand, inhaled its dusky moonlit scent, and gazed up at her. “If so, madam, this is because I look upon yourself.”

Tabor laughed—brayed, more like it:
haw haw haw
—and said, “Watch out, Baby. Pretty soon he'll be trying to take advantage. You can't trust these poetic types.”

Oscar stood upright and lightly laughed. You twit. You insufferable clod. “Indeed you cannot,” he said to Elizabeth McCourt Doe. “No form of beauty is safe from us.”

“Haw haw haw. Come on, Oscar. Let me show you the car. Nothing like it anywhere in the world.”

About that Oscar had no doubts.

Her hand still lay in his. With a small smile she squeezed gently at his fingers and slipped it free.

Oscar turned to Tabor. “By all means.”

The interior of the carriage was predictably vulgar. Gold wallpaper, red carpets, red plush furniture tasseled at the hem with strands of gold rope. The gas lamps were frosted glass torches held out from the wall by human hands, realistically molded in brass, which gave one the impression that their muscular brass owners stood on the other side of the panel, rolling their eyes in stupefied boredom.

“Whatta ya think?” Tabor asked him proudly.

“The mind boggles,” Oscar told him.

“Ten thousand dollars,” Tabor grinned, “and worth every penny. Grab a seat,” he said, indicating the chair that stood opposite the divan. “Want a drink? What'll ya have? A coniac? We've got sherry, too, if you want it. You name it, we've got it.”

“A small glass of sherry, then.” He glanced at Elizabeth McCourt Doe. Except (perhaps) for the small smile playing about her red lips, she gave no indication, none at all, that only two nights ago the two of them had rolled one atop the other for hours.

Grinning, Tabor took her hand in his. The two of them sat down on the divan and Tabor plopped both their hands into his broad lap. “What about you, Baby?”

She smiled. “A sherry.”

“Right. Three sherries, Peters,” Tabor told the butler, who had been standing off to the left, as still and silent and stiff as a plank. “Sit, Oscar, sit,” said Tabor. “Make yourself at home.”

As the butler glided toward a mahogany sideboard, Oscar lowered himself into the red plush chair. He had just realized, abruptly, and with a startling quiver of nausea, that he didn't want to be here; that he didn't want to see her slender hand ensnared in Tabor's pink meaty paw. Didn't want to see any part of her anywhere near the vicinity of Tabor's lap.

For the first time, looking at Tabor, he realized that this lumpish pygmy who totally lacked taste and style and wit was lying, night by night, in the same bed with Elizabeth. This pompous
dwarf
was making
love
to her.

Intellectually, he had known this before: he had packed the information away in that obscure attic of the mind where he stored the odds and ends in which he had no immediate interest. (The island of Zanzibar produces twenty thousand tons of cloves per annum. The expenses for this tour were gnawing away, as relentless as rats, at the profits.)

But now, suddenly, he understood it emotionally. And the realization struck him with the force of a blow to the chest.

“So how was your stay in Denver?” Tabor asked him, grinning.

“I found—” Oscar's voice was threaded; he cleared it. “I found parts of it extremely interesting.”

Every night, night after night, those fleshy lips went crawling like garden slugs down the peerless skin of her throat …

“Manitou Springs is a whole different story,” Tabor grinned. “A real one-horse town. But wait'll you see Leadville.”

That bushy mustache, every night, hovered over the splendor of her breasts …

“Leadville,” Oscar said. “Yes. I look forward to it.”

He glanced at Elizabeth McCourt Doe. She sat regally, regally smiling.

Did she do with Tabor the things she had done with him?

Did her smiling mouth move down the length of that roly-poly body?

Oscar's stomach twisted.

The butler offered her a tray and, regally, she lifted from it a glass of sherry. The butler offered the tray to Oscar; he took a glass.

“Listen, Oscar,” Tabor said, grinning as he took the last glass from the tray and sat back against the divan. “If you're interested, I could let you in on a deal or two in Leadville.” He hadn't let go of her hand. “I've got a lot of irons in the fire. You could double your money in no time flat. Guaranteed.”

“Yes,” said Oscar. “Yes, perhaps.”

Night after night, those pudgy pink hands of his pried and prodded at her white skin …

“You know,” Oscar said, putting his glass down on the end table, “I really should get back and check on the others. Make sure they've all arrived safely.”

D
ON
'
T THINK ABOUT IT
, Oscar told himself.

Beneath the carriage, the wheels of the train clattered and rumbled, rumbled and clattered against the narrow-gauge tracks; outside the window a pine forest slipped past, dark straight tree trunks neatly sliding one around the other in a clever but pointless and ultimately annoying optical illusion.

Simply do not think about it.

But again and again, perverse, willful, a single image would begin to coalesce at the back of his mind: the long lean timeless body of Elizabeth McCourt Doe pinned beneath the stubby provisional bulk of Horace Tabor. Poetry buried beneath Babble.

Think about the forest, he told himself. How deep did it extend?

Hundreds of miles, probably. Thousands, perhaps.

That was the problem with this country. Like Tabor's mansion, it was built on too big a scale. The forests went on forever, or until they reached the prairies, and then the prairies went on forever, or until they reached another interminable forest, and over everything yawned that pitiless blue sky. The size of the place was staggering. It was literally frightful.

No wonder the Americans were such an aggressive lot. The aggression masked the fear at the bottom of their souls: fear of this immensity, those endless forests teeming with disagreeable animals and bloodthirsty savages.

Masked it even from themselves, as the homicidal self theorized by von Hesse masked itself from its hypothetical owner. Of course: what two-fisted, four-square, six-gunned American would admit to fear? An American, almost by definition, was fearless. No doubt even Tabor saw himself as an intrepid Knight of Commerce.

(Tabor's bleak balding head bobs like a babe's at her perfect breast; her slender arms, sinuous as snakes, encircle his blunt bearlike shoulders: No.
No.
Absolutely not.)

And so, yes: and so … denied, disowned, left to itself in the darkness of the American psyche, the fear grew twisted and deformed; but still it grew, like a cancer. Until finally it broke through to the surface. Where it emerged as violence. The violence that the Americans directed at each other, the violence they directed toward the land.

(Bearlike? Why bearlike?)

But this fear …

Oscar sat up suddenly.

This
fear
might prove a partial explanation for these horrible murders.

If one assumed, with von Hesse, that the human mind could indeed be split into secret compartments, then perhaps fear was somehow at the basis of the split.

He looked around the carriage.

The baggage handler had lied about the number of seats. (Typically American; a British baggage handler would have played fair even while he cheated you.) There were six sets of two seats each, making a total of twelve. Those in the first two sets, right aisle and left, faced rearward. The seats of the two middle sets could be swung forward or back, to face front or rear. Both were arranged now to face the front, and it was in the window seat here, on the right side of the aisle, that Oscar sat. Vail sat slumped beside him, still looking worn and haggard.

In point of fact, nearly everyone in the carriage looked worn and haggard.

Young Ruddick lay sprawled along the first left-hand window seat, his eyes closed, his arms folded across his stomach. O'Conner sat opposite him, glowering sourly out the window. Von Hesse and the Countess sat opposite Vail and Oscar, facing them, and only these two seemed relaxed and rested. Von Hesse read quietly from a German translation of Chuang Tsu; the Countess gazed quietly out her own window, apparently lost in some pleasant reverie, for from time to time she smiled softly to herself.

No one had spoken since the train had left Denver. And even then, when they greeted one another, all of them had been subdued, their glances sliding uneasily away—and then furtively, speculatively, sliding back. All of them, of course, but von Hesse, who as a former German officer was seemingly indifferent, was perhaps immune, to the suspicions that troubled the others.

It was not surprising that the rest might be uneasy. This was the first time they had all been together since they had talked with Grigsby. All of them—presumably even the Countess—knew that Grigsby believed that one of them was guilty of a particularly grisly series of murders.

That might make for a difficult trip.

But it also—and here suddenly was another brilliant idea: it might also make for interesting theater.

Not only interesting. Something altogether new, something revolutionary.

One would need only a small stage, rigged out to resemble a train carriage and arranged in such a way that the audience could see all the players.

Bit of a problem there. The seats of the audience would have to rise in tiers, up from the stage, so that their occupants could look
down
onto the set, and so see everyone. Something like the old Greek amphitheaters. Oscar knew of no London theater with such an arrangement.

No matter. One would be found. Or, if necessary, constructed.

The audience would learn, from the passengers conversation, that one of them was a murderer; but, like the passengers themselves, it would not know which.

A Poet, a German Officer, a Countess, a Journalist, a Businessman, another Poet—no, too many poets spoil the broth: make him a Disciple of the Poet.

A nicely representative selection of humanity. Commerce and Art. Europe and America. Aristocracy and Commoner. (Hamlet might be beyond Vail, but surely a Commoner was something he could manage.)

Six different perspectives, six different points of view brought together in a passenger carriage trundling through the vastness of the American West.

It would be the Poet, of course, who dominated the conversation, whose intelligence would illuminate the darkness, whose flashing wit would leaven the obligatory solemnity. And perhaps, by following his brilliant but infinitely subtle lead, so subtle as to pass unnoticed by its participants, the conversation would slowly, inexorably, reveal the identity of the killer?