The Secret History - Donna Tartt [79]
“So you didn’t go,” I said, after we’d sat down and Henry had poured us each a glass.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Henry sighed, and reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette. “Money,” he said, as the match flared brightly in the dim. “I don’t have a trust like Francis, you see, only a monthly allowance. It’s much more than I generally need to live on, and for years I’ve put most of it into a savings account. But Bunny’s just about cleaned that out. There was no way I could put my hands on more than thirty thousand dollars, even if I sold my car.”
“Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
“Yes.”
“Why would you need that much?”
Henry blew a smoke ring half into the yellowy circle of light beneath the lamp, half into the surrounding dark. “Because we weren’t coming back,” he said. “None of us have work visas. Whatever we took would’ve had to last the four of us for a long time. Incidentally,” he said, raising his voice as if I’d tried to interrupt him—actually, I hadn’t, I was only making a sort of inarticulate noise of stupefaction—“incidentally, Buenos Aires wasn’t our destination at all. It was only a stop along the way.”
“What?”
“If we’d had the money, I suppose we would have flown to Paris or London, some gateway city with plenty of traffic, and once there to Amsterdam and eventually on to South America. That way we’d have been more difficult to trace, you see. But we didn’t have that kind of money, so the alternative was to go to Argentina and from there take a roundabout course to Uruguay—a dangerous and unstable place in its own right, to my way of thinking, but suitable for our purposes. My father has an interest in some developing property down there. We’d have had no problem finding a place to live.”
“Did he know about this,” I said, “your father?”
“He would have eventually. As a matter of fact I was hoping to ask you to get in touch with him once we were there. Had something unforeseen happened he would’ve been able to help us, even get us out of the country if need be. He knows people down there, people in the government. Otherwise, no one would know.”
“He would do that for you?”
“My father and I are not close,” said Henry, “but I am his only child.” He drank the rest of his Scotch and rattled the ice around in his glass. “But anyway. Even though I didn’t have much ready cash, my credit cards were more than adequate, leaving only the problem of raising a sum large enough to live on for a while. Which is where Francis came in. He and his mother live off the income of a trust, as I expect you know, but they also have the right to withdraw as much as three percent of the principal per year, which would amount to a sum of about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Generally this isn’t touched when it turns up, but in theory either of them can take it out whenever they like. A law firm in Boston serves as the trustees, and on Thursday morning we left the country house, came into Hampden for a few minutes so the twins and I could get our things, and then we all went to Boston and checked into the Parker House. That’s a lovely hotel, do you know it? No? Dickens used to stay there when he came to America.
“At any rate. Francis had an appointment with his lawyers, and the twins had some things to straighten out with the passport office. It takes more planning than you might think to pick up and leave the country, but everything was pretty much taken care of; we were leaving the next night and there seemed no way things could go wrong. We were a bit worried about the twins, but of course it wouldn’t have posed a problem even if they’d had to wait ten days or so and follow us down later. I had some things to do myself, but not many, and Francis had assured me that getting the money was a simple matter of going downtown and signing some papers. His mother would find out he’d taken it, but what could she do once he was gone?
“But he wasn’t back when he said he would be, and three