The Secret History - Donna Tartt [95]
“I thanked her and said no, I was perfectly all right, and then I sort of dunque-dunqued around, trying to think of some explanation for the disturbance, but she seemed perfectly satisfied and went away to fetch our breakfast. Bunny looked rather stunned. He had no idea what it had been about, of course. I suppose it seemed rather sinister and inexplicable. He asked me where she was going, and what she’d said, but I was too sick and angry to answer. I went back to my bedroom and shut the door, and stayed there until she came back with our breakfast. She laid it out on the terrace, and we went outside to eat.
“Curiously, Bunny had little to say. After a bit of a tense silence, he inquired about my health, told me what he’d done while I was ill, and said nothing about what had just happened. I ate my breakfast, and realized all I could do was try to keep my head. I had hurt his feelings, I knew—really, there were several very unkind things in the diary—so I resolved to be as pleasant to him from then on out as I could, and to hope no more problems would arise.”
He paused to take a drink of his whiskey. I looked at him.
“You mean, you thought problems might not arise?” I said.
“I know Bunny better than you do,” Henry said crossly.
“But what about what he said—about the police?”
“I knew he wasn’t prepared to go to the police, Richard.”
“If it were simply a question of the dead man, things would be different, don’t you see?” said Francis, leaning forward in his chair. “It’s not that his conscience bothers him. Or that he feels any compelling kind of moral outrage. He thinks he’s been somehow wronged by the whole business.”
“Well, frankly, I thought I was doing him a favor by not telling him,” Henry said. “But he was angry—is angry, I should say—because things were kept from him. He feels injured. Excluded. And my best chance was to try to make amends for that. We’re old friends, he and I.”
“Tell him about those things Bunny bought with your credit cards while you were sick.”
“I didn’t find out about that until later,” said Henry gloomily. “It doesn’t make much difference now.” He lit another cigarette. “I suppose, right after he found out, he was in a kind of shock,” he said. “And, too, he was in a strange country, unable to speak the language, without a cent of his own. He was all right for a little while. Nonetheless, once he caught on to the fact—and it didn’t take him long—that, circumstances to the contrary, I was actually pretty much at his mercy, you can’t imagine what torture he put me through. He talked about it all the time. In restaurants, in shops, in taxicabs. Of course, it was the off season, and not many English around, but for all I know there are entire families of Americans back home in Ohio wondering if … Oh, God. Exhaustive monologues in the Hosteria dell’Orso. An argument in the Via dei Cestari. An abortive re-enactment of it in the lobby of the Grand Hotel.
“One afternoon at a cafe, he was going on and on and I noticed that a man at the next table was hanging on every word. We got up to leave. He got up too. I wasn’t sure what to think. I knew he was German, because I’d heard him talking to the waiter, but I had no idea if he had any English or if he’d been able to hear Bunny distinctly enough to understand. Perhaps he was only a homosexual, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I led the way home through the alleys, turning this way and that, and I felt quite certain we’d lost him but apparently not, because when I woke up the next morning and looked out the window he was