Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [106]
—What were you thinking?
—What was I thinking? I was thinking, why don’t you mind your own fucking business?
It was all going wrong. He reached into his pocket and took out the envelope again anyway. They were standing face-to-face now.
—Here, he said with his best conciliatory tone. Take it. Then let’s get out of here. We can go get a drink.
Hank didn’t look at the money.
—I don’t want it.
—Take it Hank.
—You earned it. You keep it.
—Come on, Hank. I earned it for the both of us.
As soon as he said it, he knew he shouldn’t have.
Here it comes, he thought. He watched Hank’s torso rotate and his arm extending from the shoulder. It knocked him off his feet.
It began to rain more heavily.
Hank always had a good cross, he thought to himself, tasting the iron on his lips.
Hank leaned over him, but it wasn’t to give him a hand. It was to tell him off.
—Don’t you put that money on me. I didn’t tell you to make it. I’m not living on Central Park. That’s your business, brother.
He sat upright and wiped the blood from his lips.
Hank stepped away and bent over to pick something up. He assumed it was the money, which had spilled from the envelope. But it wasn’t the money. It was the hat.
Hank walked away, leaving him on Twenty-second Street, sitting on the cement in the pouring rain with the Panama hat shrinking on his head.
FALL
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hell Hath No Fury
I read a lot of Agatha Christies that fall of 1938—maybe all of them. The Hercule Poirots, the Miss Marples. Death on the Nile. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Murders . . . on the Links, . . . at the Vicarage, and, ... on the Orient Express. I read them on the subway, at the deli, and in my bed alone.
You can make what claims you will about the psychological nuance of Proust or the narrative scope of Tolstoy, but you can’t argue that Mrs. Christie fails to please. Her books are tremendously satisfying.
Yes, they’re formulaic. But that’s one of the reasons they are so satisfying. With every character, every room, every murder weapon feeling at once newly crafted and familiar as rote (the role of the postimperialist uncle from India here being played by the spinster from South Wales, and the mismatched bookends standing in for the jar of fox poison on the upper shelf of the gardener’s shed), Mrs. Christie doles out her little surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care.
But I think there is another reason they please—a reason that is at least as important, if not more so—and that is that in Agatha Christie’s universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve.
Inheritance or penury, love or loss, a blow to the head or the hangman’s noose, in the pages of Agatha Christie’s books men and women, whatever their ages, whatever their caste, are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them. Poirot and Marple are not really central characters in the traditional sense. They are simply the agencies of an intricate moral equilibrium that was established by the Primary Mover at the dawn of time.
For the most part, in the course of our daily lives we abide the abundant evidence that no such universal justice exists. Like a cart horse, we plod along the cobblestones dragging our masters’ wares with our heads down and our blinders in place, waiting patiently for the next cube of sugar. But there are certain times when chance suddenly provides the justice that Agatha Christies promise. We look around at the characters cast in our own lives—our heiresses and gardeners, our vicars and nannies, our late-arriving guests who are not exactly what they seem—and discover that before the end of the weekend all assembled will get their just deserts.
But when we do so, we rarely remember to count ourselves among their company.
That Tuesday morning in September, when Mason Tate showed his concerns for my health, I didn’t bother trying to apologize. I certainly didn’t bother trying to explain. I just sat down in my wheelchair and started typing. Because