The Secret History - Donna Tartt [150]
Nobody said anything for a moment. Henry glanced up. His eyes without the glasses were blind, unwavering, strange. “Does Marion know about this?” he said.
“No,” said Cloke. “And I’d just as soon you didn’t tell her, okay?”
“Do you have any other reason for thinking this?”
“No. Except where else could he be? And Marion told you about Rika Thalheim seeing him at the bank on Wednesday?”
“Yes.”
“That’s kind of weird but not really, not if you think about it. Say he went down to New York with a couple hundred dollars, right? And talking like he had a lot more where that came from. These guys’ll chop you up and put you in a garbage bag for twenty bucks. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe they told him to go back home and close out his account and come back with all he had.”
“Bunny doesn’t even have a bank account.”
“That you know of,” Cloke pointed out.
“You’re perfectly right,” said Henry.
“Can’t you just call down there?” Charles said.
“Who’m I gonna call? The guy’s unlisted and he doesn’t hand out business cards, all right?”
“Then how do you get in touch with him?”
“I have to call a third guy.”
“Then call him,” said Henry calmly, putting the handkerchief back in his pocket and hooking the glasses back over his ears.
“They’re not going to tell me anything.”
“I thought they were such good chums of yours.”
“What do you think?” said Cloke. “You think these people are running some kind of a scout troop down there? Are you kidding? These are real guys. Doing real shit.”
For one horrible instant I thought that Francis was going to laugh aloud but somehow he managed to turn it into a theatrical battery of coughs, hiding his face behind his hand. With barely a glance Henry slapped him, hard, on the back.
“Then what do you suggest we do?” Camilla said.
“I don’t know. I’d like to get into his room, see if he took a suitcase or anything.”
“Isn’t it locked?” Henry said.
“Yes. Marion tried to get Security to open it for her and they wouldn’t do it.”
Henry bit his lower lip. “Well,” he said slowly, “it wouldn’t be so very hard to get in in spite of that, would it?”
Cloke put out his cigarette and looked at Henry with new interest. “No,” he said. “It wouldn’t.”
“There’s the ground floor window. The storm windows have been taken off.”
“I know I could handle the screens.”
The two of them stared at each other.
“Maybe,” Cloke said, “I should go down and try it now.”
“We’ll go with you.”
“Man,” said Cloke, “we can’t all go.”
I saw Henry cut his eyes at Charles; Charles, behind Cloke’s back, acknowledged the glance. “I’ll go,” he said suddenly, in a voice that was too loud, and tossed off the rest of his drink.
“Cloke, how on earth did you get mixed up in something like this?” Camilla said.
He laughed condescendingly. “It’s nothing,” he said. “You have to meet these guys on their own ground. I don’t let them give me shit or anything.”
Inconspicuously, Henry slipped behind Cloke’s chair to where Charles stood, and leaned over and whispered something in his ear. I saw Charles nod tersely.
“Not that they don’t try to fuck with you,” said Cloke. “But I know how they think. Now Bunny, he doesn’t have a clue, he thinks it’s some kind of a game with hundred-dollar bills just lying on the ground, waiting for some stupid kid to come along and pick them up.…”
By the time he stopped talking, Charles and Henry had completed whatever business they’d been discussing and Charles had gone to the closet for his overcoat. Cloke reached for his sunglasses and stood up. He had a faint, dry smell of herbs, an echo of the pothead smell that always lingered in the dusty corridors of Durbinstall: patchouli oil, clove cigarettes, incense.
Charles wound the scarf around his neck. His expression was at once casual and turbulent; his eyes were distant and his mouth was steady, but his nostrils flared slightly with his breathing.
“Be careful,” Camilla said.
She was talking to Charles, but Cloke turned and smiled. “Piece of cake,” he said.
She