The Secret History - Donna Tartt [179]
The camera jerked away and panned wildly to the side of the set, a tangle of black cables, hooded lights. It wavered in and out of focus and then, with a jerk, a commercial for McDonald’s came on the screen.
“Whooo-hoo,” someone shouted appreciatively.
There was scattered clapping.
“Did you hear that?” said Charles, after a pause.
I had forgotten all about him. His voice was slurred and his hair fell sweaty across his forehead. “Be careful,” I said to him in Greek, and nodded toward the barmaid. “She can hear you.”
He mumbled something, wobbling on his bar stool, all padded glitter-vinyl and chrome.
“Let’s go. It’s late,” I said, fumbling in my pocket for money.
Unsteadily, his gaze locked on mine, he leaned over and caught hold of my wrist. The light from the jukebox caught and glinted in his eyes, making them strange, crazed, the luminous killer eyes that sometimes glow unexpectedly from a friend’s face in a snapshot.
“Shut up, old man,” he said. “Listen.”
I pulled my hand away and swung round on the stool but just as I did it I heard a long, dry rumble. Thunder.
We looked at each other.
“It’s raining,” he whispered.
All that night it fell, warm rain, dripping from the eaves and pattering at my window, while I lay flat on my back with my eyes wide open, listening.
All that night it rained and all the next morning: warm, gray, coming down soft and steady as a dream.
When I woke up I knew they were going to find him that day, knew it in my stomach from the moment I looked out my window at the snow, rotten and pocky, patches of slimy grass and everywhere drip drip drip.
It was one of those mysterious, oppressive days we sometimes had at Hampden, where the mountains that lowered at the horizon were swallowed up in fog and the world seemed light and empty, dangerous somehow. Walking around campus, the wet grass squishing beneath your feet, you felt as if you were in Olympus, Valhalla, some old abandoned land above the clouds; the landmarks that you knew—clocktower, houses—floating up like memories from a former life, isolated and disconnected in the mist.
Drizzle and damp. Commons smelled like wet clothes, everything dark and subdued. I found Henry and Camilla upstairs at a table by the window, a full ashtray between them, Camilla with her chin propped in her hand and a cigarette burning low between her ink-stained fingers.
The main dining room was on the second floor, in a modern addition that jutted over a loading dock in the back. Huge, rain-splashed panes of glass—tinted gray, so they made the day seem drearier than it was—walled us in on three sides and we had a prime view of the loading dock itself, where the butter and egg trucks pulled up early in the morning, and of the slick black road that wound through the trees and disappeared in the mist in the direction of North Hampden.
There was tomato soup for lunch, coffee with skim milk because they were out of plain. Rain pittered against the plate glass windows. Henry was distracted. The FBI had paid him another visit the night before—what they wanted he didn’t say—and he was talking on and on in a low voice about Schliemann’s Ilios, the fingertips of his big square hands poised on the table’s edge as if it were a Ouija board. When I’d lived with him over the winter, he would sometimes go on for hours in these didactic monologues, reeling off a pedantic and astonishingly accurate torrent of knowledge with the slow, transfixed calm of a subject under hypnosis. He was talking about the excavation of Hissarlik: “a terrible place, a cursed place,” he said dreamily—cities and cities buried beneath each other, cities torn down, cities burnt and their bricks melted to glass … a terrible place, he said absently, a cursed place, nests of tiny brown adders of the sort that the Greeks call antelion and thousands and thousands of little owl-headed death gods (goddesses, really, some hideous prototype of Athena) staring fanatical and rigid from the engraved illustrations.
I didn’t know where Francis