The Secret History - Donna Tartt [78]
When he’d finished he took his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket (he smoked Lucky Strikes; whenever I think of him I think of that little red bull’s-eye right over his heart) and offered me one, shaking a couple out of the pack and raising an eyebrow. I shook my head.
He smoked one and then another, and over our second cup of coffee he looked up. “Why have you been so quiet this afternoon?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t you want to know about our trip to Argentina?”
I set my cup in its saucer and stared at him. Then I began to laugh.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do. Tell me.”
“Don’t you wonder how I know? That you know, I mean?”
That hadn’t occurred to me, and I guess he saw it in my face because now he laughed. “It’s no mystery,” he said. “When I called to cancel the reservations—they didn’t want to do it, of course, non-refundable tickets and all that, but I think we’ve got it worked out now—anyway, when I called the airline they were rather surprised, as they said I’d called to confirm only the day before.”
“How did you know it was me?”
“Who else could it have been? You had the key. I know, I know,” he said when I tried to interrupt him. “I left you that key on purpose. It would have made things easier later on, for various reasons, but by sheer chance you happened in at just the wrong time. I had only left the apartment for a few hours, you see, and I never dreamed that you’d happen in between midnight and seven a.m. I must have missed you by only a few minutes. If you’d happened in an hour or so later everything would have been gone.”
He took a sip of his coffee. I had so many questions it was useless to try to sort them into any coherent order. “Why did you leave me the key?” I said at last.
Henry shrugged. “Because I was pretty sure you wouldn’t use it unless you had to,” he said. “If we’d actually gone, someone would eventually have had to open the apartment for the landlady, and I would have sent you instructions on who to contact and how to dispose of the things I’d left, but I forgot all about that damned Liddell and Scott. Well, I won’t say that. I knew you’d left it there, but I was in a hurry and somehow I never thought you’d come back for it bei Nacht und Nebel, as it were. But that was silly of me. You have as much trouble sleeping as I do.”
“Let me get this straight. You didn’t go to Argentina at all?”
Henry snorted, and motioned for the check. “Of course not,” he said. “Would I be here if we had?”
Once he’d paid the check he asked me if I wanted to go to Francis’s. “I don’t think he’s there,” he said.
“So why go there?”
“Because my apartment is a mess and I’m staying with him until I can get somebody in to clean it up. Do you happen to know of a good maid service? Francis said the last time he had someone from the employment office in town, they stole two bottles of wine and fifty dollars from his dresser drawer.”
On the way into North Hampden, it was all I could do to keep from deluging Henry with questions, but I kept my mouth shut until we got there.
“He isn’t here, I’m sure,” he said as he unlocked the front door.
“Where is he?”
“With Bunny. He took him to Manchester for dinner and then I think to some movie that Bunny wanted to see. Would you like some coffee?”
Francis’s apartment was in an ugly 1970s building owned by the college. It was roomier and more private than the old oak-floored houses we lived in on campus, and as a consequence was much in demand; as a trade-off there were linoleum floors, ill-lit halls, and cheap, modern fixtures like at a Holiday Inn. Francis didn’t seem to mind it much. He had his own furniture there, brought out from the country house, but he’d chosen it carelessly and it was an atrocious mix of styles, upholstery, light and dark woods.
A search revealed that Francis had neither coffee nor tea (“He needs to go to the grocery store,” said Henry, looking over my shoulder into yet another barren cabinet), only a few bottles of Scotch and some Vichy water. I got some ice and a couple of glasses and we took