The Secret History - Donna Tartt [220]
I was so appalled that for a moment I couldn’t speak. “Why, for God’s sake?” I said at last.
He drew deeply on his cigarette. “The FBI men came to see him that afternoon,” he said. “Not long after they’d taken Cloke into custody. They told Henry they had enough probable cause to arrest half a dozen people, including himself, either for conspiracy or withholding evidence.”
“Christ!” I said, dumbfounded. “Half a dozen people? Who?”
“I don’t know exactly. They might’ve been bluffing but Henry was worried sick. He warned me they’d probably be coming over to my place and I just had to get out of there, I couldn’t sit around waiting for them. He made me promise not to tell you. Even Camilla didn’t know.”
There was a long pause.
“But they didn’t arrest you,” I said.
Charles laughed. I noticed that his hands still shook a little. “I think we have dear old Hampden College to thank for that,” he said. “Of course, a lot of the stuff didn’t tie up; they figured that out from talking to Cloke. But still they knew they weren’t getting the truth and they probably would’ve kept after it if the college had been a little more cooperative. Once Bunny’s body was found, though, the administration just wanted to hush it up. Too much bad publicity. Freshman applications had gone down something like twenty percent. And the town police—whose business it was, really—are very cooperative about such things. Cloke was in a lot of trouble, you know—some of that drug stuff was serious, they could’ve thrown him in jail. But he got off with academic probation and fifty hours of community service. It didn’t even go on his school record.”
It took me some moments to digest this. Cars and trucks whooshed past.
After a while Charles laughed again. “It’s funny,” he said, pushing his fists deep in his pockets. “We thought we were putting our ace man up front but if one of the rest of us had handled it it would’ve been much better. If it had been you. Or Francis. Even my sister. We could have avoided half of this.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s over now.”
“No thanks to him. I was the one who had to deal with the police. He takes the credit, but it was me who actually had to sit around that goddamned station all hours drinking coffee and trying to make them like me, you know, trying to convince them we were all just a bunch of regular kids. Same with the FBI, and that was even worse. Being the front for everybody, you know, always on guard, having to say exactly the right thing and doing my best to size up things from their point of view, and you had to hit exactly the right note with these people, too, you couldn’t drop it for a second, trying to be all communicative and open yet concerned, too, you know, and at the same time not at all nervous, though I could hardly pick up a cup without being afraid of spilling it and a couple of times I was so panicky I thought I was just going to black out or break down or something. Do you know how hard that was? Do you think Henry would lower himself to do something like that? No. It was all right, of course, for me to do it but he couldn’t be bothered. Those people had never seen anything like Henry in their lives. I’ll tell you the sort of thing he worried about. Like if he was carrying around the right book, if Homer would make a better impression than Thomas Aquinas. He was like something from another planet. If he was the only one they’d had to deal with he would have landed us all in the gas chamber.”
A lumber truck rattled past.
“Good God,” I finally said. I was quite shaken. “I’m glad I didn’t know.”
He shrugged. “Well, you’re right. It all came out okay. But I still don’t like the way he tries to lord it over me.”
We walked for a long time without saying anything.
“Do you know where you’re going to spend the summer?” said Charles.
“I haven’t thought about it much,” I said. I hadn’t heard anything about the situation in Brooklyn, which tended to make me think it had fallen through.