The Hanged Man Read online

  After dinner, she said, more drinks were served in the living room. Eliza Remington, who never drank anything stronger than tea or mineral water, went off to her room around nine o’clock. About fifteen minutes later, Justine Bouvier told me, the argument started.

  To keep its wounded engine happy, I let the Subaru coast at fifty down the long winding run of the Ski Basin Road, past the adobe homes and the clutters of condominiums sprinkled amid the scrub pine. Most of these yuppie haciendas had been built fairly recently, after the California and Texas money flooded into the real estate market and sent prices floating skyward. Twenty years ago this had all been windswept arroyos and sunswept trees. The only occupants had been the coyotes and the rattlesnakes. The coyotes were gone now, and the rattlesnakes had become investment bankers.

  At the bottom of the hill, at the Stop sign, the road met Washington Street, and I crossed this and drove along the asphalt entrance to the Fort Marcy sports complex. I parked the wagon in the lot, the engine coughing twice. It was two o’clock. The air was warm and the sky was blue. A few men and women in shorts and sweatshirts were running doggedly around the damp dirt track that circled the field.

  Inside, I took a shower first, and sudsed myself up like Lady Macbeth on a bad morning, then spent a long time letting the scalding spray sluice off the soap. I didn’t feel dirty, exactly, after my time with Justine Bouvier; but I didn’t feel exactly clean, either.

  The municipal pool was heated just enough to prevent sedentary types from leaping into cardiac arrest after they leapt into the water, and the air that had settled over it was warm and soupy and it held the tang of chlorine. At the moment, the pool was almost empty. A heavyset older woman in a floral one-piece and a floral swim cap wallowed in a tired but determined doggy paddle. A teenage girl, her eyes invisible behind her goggles, her body beneath the gleaming black nylon suit as sleek and graceful as a young seal’s, went sliding in a sturdy and deceptively slow-looking crawl. And in the center lane, a bemuscled lout executed loud and splashy power strokes, arms furiously flashing, feet furiously flailing, flat palms smacking against the water as though hating it, flogging it. Water spattered and splattered, great gouts of silver, into the lanes on either side.

  I chose the lane at the far side of the pool and I dove in.

  My own stroke is a fairly sedate, grandmotherly affair, a kind of aquatic jog. Swimming a mile—seventy-two lengths in a pool that size—is a tedious business if you see it merely as exercise. So what you do, you don’t think about the exercise, or about anything at all. You concentrate on the sensations. The water supporting you and sliding like silk along your flanks. The smooth entry of each arm into its surface, the smooth downstroke against the density of liquid, the smooth exit. The stretch and pull of muscle. The steady suck and hiss of lung, the reassuring pump of heart. It’s a kind of meditation, I suppose. I no longer count the laps. I know that once I’ve found my rhythm and reached my speed, a mile takes me exactly thirty-seven minutes, and now and then—when I remember—I glance at the big one-handed clock on the north wall. When the time is up, I’m done.

  Today, though, my rhythm was off. I couldn’t seem to empty my mind. Justine Bouvier and her story kept intruding.

  “How did the argument start?” I had asked her.

  “I told you,” she said. “It was that Bernardi. We were all sitting around, having a very nice, very quiet conversation, when all of a sudden he gets up from his chair and he starts bellowing at Quentin. “‘Why you want dees card? What you do with eet?’” It was a cruel, mocking burlesque of Bernardi’s accent; and, recognizing my own prejudice in hers, I felt more than a little guilty.

  “He was drunk, naturally,” she said. “So drunk that he could hardly stand upright. But that’s no excuse. Quentin said something to him, I don’t really remember what—”

  According to the reports, what Quentin had said was, “Why don’t you go away, you boring little man.” Quentin had obviously been a better magician than he’d been a diplomat. Even if he’d been a terrible magician.

  “—and Bernardi just exploded! He threw his drink away and he ran across the room and threw himself at Quentin. He hit me, too, with his arm, and I spilled my own drink. All over myself. It ruined my dress. It was silk, a Versace! And then he had his hands around Quentin’s throat and he was choking him, and Quentin was sort of hitting at him, trying to get him away, and then finally Brad and Peter were there, pulling him off. They dragged him over to the corner, and his face was all red and loose and absolutely crazed. He was practically slobbering, like a dog. Brad was talking to him, probably giving him all that peace-and-love nonsense from the sixties. Brad’s never really gotten over the sixties. And Sylvia was fluttering around the room, chirping away, trying to dry me off with some filthy rag she found someplace.”

  “Where was the card while all this was going on?”

  “Quentin had it in his lap. In its leather folder. It fell when Bernardi attacked him, and I picked it up off the floor.”

  “Has Bernardi ever had any kind of dealings with your husband before?”

  Indignant: “Of course not. Why would you even ask?”

  “Just that it sounds like a fairly extreme reaction on his part.” Even if Quentin had been, as I suspected, a gold-plated asshole.

  “He’s Italian. You know how excitable they are. And he’s a lunatic.”

  Brad had given Bernardi a bottle of sambuca and Bernardi had gone bumbling off. Everyone had gathered around to commiserate with Quentin. (“Except for Leonard Quarry and his wood sprite wife. Leonard just sat there, gloating.”) Shortly afterward, the party had begun to break up. Carl Buffalo had been the first to head for bed, Justine said, and he was soon followed by Leonard Quarry and his wife, Sierra. Then by Peter Jones, who was followed by Carol Masters, the actress. “Carol’s been after poor Peter for ages. It’s a shame she’s not his type. He likes women who are still capable of breathing.” This she said with a self-satisfied smile.

  Veronica Chang had left last, and then Leonard and Justine had said their good nights to Brad and Sylvia, and they’d gone off themselves.

  I said, “And you never saw Giacomo Bernardi again that night?”

  “Not saw him, no. But I could hear that stupid soccer game he was watching. Peter’s bedroom was right next to the library. It was still on when I fell asleep.” She smiled. “You don’t watch soccer games, do you, Joshua?”

  “Every chance I get,” I lied. “Quentin still had the card when you left his bedroom?”

  “Yes. It was on the dresser.”

  “And about what time did you leave?”

  “Oh, elevenish, I guess. Something like that.”

  I flipped my notebook shut. “Okay, Justine. Thanks very much.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  I stood up. “People to do. Things to see.”

  Still sitting, she smiled up at me. “Are you sure you don’t want to try a regression? It wouldn’t take long.”

  “Like I said, maybe some other time. Thanks anyway.”

  Slowly she unfolded herself up from the sofa and slowly, in profile, her eyes shut like a cat’s, she stretched her long slim body. Arms stiff, hands balled in fists below and behind her hips, breasts thrusting outward. She sighed a long weary sigh, slowly rolled her shoulders, and then opened her eyes and saw me watching her. She smiled and turned to face me. “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  She shrugged. “Your loss.”

  The elderly woman in the floral swimsuit had pulled herself up the ladder and padded away, panting happily. The power stroker had burst from the water and swaggered off, dripping elaborately, looking for telephone books to rip up and pig iron to chew on. Or vice versa. The teenage girl still kept up her steady, sturdy crawl, and looked as though she could keep it up from here to China. A few new people had joined us, but I hadn’t paid them much attention. I was too busy thinking about Justine Bouvier and why I had disliked her so much.

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nbsp; She was as predatory, in her way, as a coyote, although she probably lacked a coyote’s depth. For all her talk of spirits and mysticism, she seemed to me about as deep, and as substantial, as a Burger King ashtray. She was selfish. She was a bigot.

  But I had met selfish, shallow people before. I’d met bigots before—even, occasionally, in the mirror. And I didn’t usually react so strongly against them.

  I had reacted so strongly against her, I realized, because I’d reacted so strongly toward her. She was a woman who wanted men to be aware of her sexuality—needed them to be aware of it. And they would be. There was too much promise for them not to be: in the big brown eyes, the knowing smile, the lithe, limber, available body. And probably, if accepted, the promise would be kept. Probably she would be skilled and she would learn exactly what you liked and she would do it exactly as you liked it to be done. That would be important to her. She defined herself, I suspect, and she defined men, by their reactions to her. Their inner lives, and finally her own, didn’t really matter.

  And yet, despite her emptiness, perhaps even partly because of it, I’d found myself attracted to the package that held it. She might be, ultimately, dislikable. Probably she was. But that wasn’t why I’d disliked her. I’d disliked myself for the attraction, and I’d projected the dislike onto her.

  I’ve never thought that I would one day achieve a total lack of flaws. But occasionally I find myself thinking that it might be nice to stop discovering new ones.

  Bennett Hadley lived to the west of town. From Fort Marcy, I took Washington to Paseo de Peralta, turned right up the Old Taos Highway, slipped between the traffic onto St. Francis, then quickly slipped off at Camino La Tierra. This area was newer even than the east side, and the homes were bigger and farther apart, riding the ridges of the rolling hills like castles and palaces. The sky was an upturned porcelain bowl, pale blue, its rim running all the way around the distant horizon. Patches of snow lay in purple shadows beneath the gnarled pinon and juniper. In the clearings, damp gray grasses lay flat against dark brown earth.

  I drove on pavement for a couple of miles, then turned left onto a road that in better times would be dirt, but that today, with the thaw, was mud. The Subaru began to drift, and I flicked it into four-wheel. The engine coughed. I came to another mud road and turned right.

  Bennett Hadley’s was one of the newer houses. Although broad and handsome, it was a bit less grand than most of the others, and, because no landscaping had been done, a bit more stark—one tall story of khaki brown, buttressed adobe rising from what had obviously been, only recently, a construction site. Where the dank earth showed between clumps of snow, it was stripped and empty.

  I parked the car, got out, hiked up the cement walkway, pushed the doorbell. After a few moments, it opened.

  He was somewhere in his forties and he was an inch or so above six feet tall. His gray hair was parted on the left, above a ruddy, good-looking face that was, at the moment, smiling in welcome. He wore a plaid flannel shirt, gray slacks, white cotton socks, expensive running shoes. In his left hand he held an amber bottle of Pacifico beer by its neck. He didn’t look like an expert in the occult. He looked like an actor, the kind of actor who plays the dependable family doctor in a soap opera. A sensitive and caring man, but still a manly man. And his voice, too, was an actor’s baritone as he said, “Croft?”

  “Yes. Bennett Hadley?” I put out my hand.

  “The one and only.” We shook hands. His grip was unnecessarily firm; but manly men, in the midst of ritual, can sometimes forget themselves. “Come on in. You drink beer?”

  “I’ve been known to.”

  “This way.”

  I followed him down a tile-floored passageway into the kitchen. A high ceiling with square wooden beams and clerestory windows. More tile on the floor. A big butcher block table in the center. Oak cabinets all around. Hadley set his beer bottle on the table, opened the door to a large refrigerator, took out another bottle, used a church key to snap off the cap, handed the bottle to me. I thanked him, and he lifted his own bottle by the neck and said, “Let’s go outside. Nice out there today. No wind.”

  Once again I followed him. Down another tiled passageway and then through a glass door, out onto the semicircular flagstone patio. Hadley shut the door behind us and waved his bottle toward a wooden picnic table and two wooden benches. “Grab a pew.”

  The patio was warm and dry because it took the southern light and because it was mostly enclosed, a viga ceiling overhead and two low adobe walls that would cut off any wind from west or east. It was bisected, south to north, by a line of three upright, stripped pine logs that served as pillars. Hadley positioned himself against one of these, the outermost, three or four feet from where I sat. He leaned back against it, in profile to me, his arms folded across his chest, the beer bottle dangling loose. He narrowed his eyes and looked out across the unfolding hills. “Beautiful here, isn’t it?” In his voice was the same comfortable pride of possession you sometimes heard in Ben Cartwright’s voice when he gazed out at the Ponderosa.

  “It’s a mighty fine spread,” I said.

  He nodded. He hadn’t heard the irony. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “an old Sufi master once told me that there was nothing so wonderful, and nothing so mysterious, as the world. Turns out he was right.” He nodded again, pleased with the notion, or pleased with himself for appreciating it.

  Although it meant shattering what was clearly a deep mystical communion between man and real estate, I said, “I wonder if I could ask you a few questions, Mr. Hadley.”

  He roused himself from his contemplative state, looked over at me, and smiled. “Ask,” he said, “and you shall receive.” He leaned away from the pillar and came and sat down opposite me, sideways, then swung his legs over the bench to face me, beer bottle on the table and held between both hands, fingers interlocked around the neck.

  I said, “Do you think Giacomo Bernardi killed Quentin Bouvier?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Bernardi’s killing him was appropriate. Killing him that way, hanging him. In Bernardi’s eyes, anyway.”

  “Appropriate?”

  He took a sip from his bottle of beer and eyed me speculatively. “Do you know anything about the Tarot?”

  “Not much.”

  “All right.” He leaned forward, into the story he was about to tell. Like Justine Bouvier, he enjoyed explaining things. “There’s a Major Trump called The Hanged Man. It shows a man hanging upside down from a gibbet, with the rope tied around his left ankle. In the Italian Tarot tradition, which is historically the earliest, this card is called El Gobbo. But it’s also called Il Trattore. The Traitor. Italy’s got a long history of hanging traitors by their heels. Goes back to the Renaissance, and probably beyond. And look at World War Two. That’s exactly what the partisans did to Mussolini after they caught him.”

  “Quentin Bouvier wasn’t hung by his heels.”

  Hadley shook his head, abrupt, impatient. “That’s not the point. The point is that from Bernardi’s point of view, Bouvier was a traitor. The distinction between black and white magic is a great deal more arbitrary than most people think, certainly more so than Bernardi tends to think. But the fact is that Bernardi saw himself as a white magician, and he saw Bouvier as a black magician, a man who dealt with spirits and devils. Bernardi’s not sophisticated enough to realize that these devils, more often than not, are merely metaphors, symbols for certain mental processes and certain hidden aspects of the self. For him, they’re real. And for him, anyone who deals with them is by definition evil. By definition a traitor to the ideals he cherishes. He didn’t want Bouvier to have that card.”

  “And so he killed him.”

  “Exactly.” He sipped at his beer. “Death by hanging. The perfect death for a traitor. From Bernardi’s point of view, that is. He saves one card, and he turns the black magician into another card.” He nodded, more to himself than to me, a
s though satisfied by his exposition. “Appropriate.”

  “If you’re right,” I said, “why didn’t Bernardi hang Bouvier by his heels?”

  Hadley shrugged. “Who knows? Too drunk, probably. He was drinking like a fish from the time he arrived at the house.”

  “If he was so drunk, how did he manage to sneak into Bouvier’s room, knock him out with a lump of quartz, hoist him to the rafters, steal the card, and then leave the house and hide the card?”

  As I spoke, Hadley had begun to frown slightly. He let go of the beer bottle and began to rub his right temple lightly with the fingertips of his right hand. When I finished, he said, almost curtly, “Look. I can’t speculate about that. You asked me what I thought. I told you.”

  Testy. A man who was happy, who was delighted, to provide answers, but only so long as he was personally pleased by the questions.

  I nodded. I asked him, “What would Bouvier have done with the card?”

  Hadley suddenly grinned. This was a question he liked. “Nothing. That’s the terrific part. Oh, no question, he would’ve used it in one of those idiotic ceremonies of his. He would’ve chanted his Latin chants and invoked the demons—Astaroth and Baphomet and the rest. And the same thing would’ve happened that happened whenever he conducted a ceremony. Nothing. A big flat zilch.”

  “You don’t believe in magic,” I said.

  “I don’t—I didn’t—believe in Quentin Bouvier. As I say in my book, I believe that magic, like any other belief system, properly understood, provides a channel through which an individual can focus his energies. But in order to focus them, you’ve got to develop them. In order to become a mage, a master, a sadhu, a yogi, whatever, you’ve got to bring to bear enormous amounts of self-discipline. Quentin didn’t have that. Never had it. He was a dilettante.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “Hah!” He grinned. “The Dilettante’s Apprentice. You talked to her? She lay her Egyptian number on you?”