The Secret History - Donna Tartt [181]
Flashbulbs went off everywhere and there was a riot of microphones and camcorders in our faces.
“How long had you known him?”
“… drug-related incident?”
“… traveled across Europe, is that right?”
Henry passed a hand over his face; I’ll never forget the way he looked, white as talc, beads of sweat on his upper lip and the light bouncing off his glasses … “Leave me alone,” he muttered, seizing Camilla by the wrist and trying to push through to the door.
They crowded forward to block his path.
“… care to comment …?”
“… best friends?”
The black snout of a camcorder was thrust in his face. With a sweep of his arm Henry knocked it away and it fell on the floor with a loud crack, batteries rolling in all directions. The owner—a fat man in a Mets cap—shrieked, stooped partway to the floor in consternation, then sprang up, cursing, as if to grab the retreating Henry by the collar. His fingers brushed the back of Henry’s jacket and Henry turned, surprisingly quick.
The man shrank. It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book (why does no one ever see that “bookish” Clark Kent, without his glasses, is Superman?). Or maybe it was a question of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible—in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialize at will—and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer.
The ambulance had gone. The roads stretched out slick and empty in the drizzle. Agent Davenport was hurrying up the steps to Commons, head down, black shoes slapping on the wet marble. When he saw us, he stopped. Sciola, behind him, climbed laboriously up the last two or three steps, bracing his knee with his palm. He stood behind Davenport and regarded us for a moment, breathing hard. “I’m sorry,” he said.
An airplane went by overhead, invisible above the clouds.
“He is dead, then,” said Henry.
“Afraid so.”
The buzz of the airplane receded in the damp, windy distance.
“Where was he?” said Henry at last. He was pale, pale and sweaty at the temples but perfectly composed. There was a flat sound in his voice.
“In the woods,” said Davenport.
“Not far,” Sciola said, rubbing with a knuckle at his pouchy eye. “Half a mile from here.”
“Were you there?”
Sciola stopped rubbing his eye. “What?”
“Were you there when they found him?”
“We were at the Blue Ben having some lunch,” said Davenport briskly. He was breathing heavily through the nostrils and his ginger brush cut was beaded with droplets of condensed mist. “We went down for a look. Right now we’re on the way to see the family.”
“Don’t they know?” said Camilla, after a shocked pause.
“It’s not that,” said Sciola. He was patting his chest, fumbling gently with long yellow fingers in the pocket of his overcoat. “We’re taking them a release form. We’d like to send him down to the lab in Newark, have some tests run. Cases like this, though—” his hand closed upon something, very slowly he drew out a crumpled pack of Pall Malls—“cases like this, it’s hard to get the family to sign. Can’t say I blame them. These folks have been waiting around a week already, the family’s all together, they’re going to want to go ahead and bury him and get it over with.…”
“What happened?” said Henry. “Do you know?”
Sciola rummaged for a light, found it, got his cigarette lit after two or three tries. “Hard to say,” he said, letting the match fall, still burning, from his fingers. “He was at the bottom of a drop-off with a broken neck.”
“You don’t think he might have killed himself?”
Sciola’s expression did not change, but a wisp of smoke curled from his nostrils in a manner subtly indicative of surprise. “Why do you say that?”
“Because someone inside said