The Beneficiary

That evening Vane came home to his apartment on Beacon Street and ate without interest, and afterwards, instead of sitting by the window with a book as he did on Sundays, he took a glass of whiskey into the small room he used as an office, unlocked the safe, and took out a sealed envelope from the back of it.

It was marked, in a careful hand, Will — A. Kessler.

The will was in Kessler's own handwriting, which meant something by itself; Vane had been asked to draft it, and had refused, and had been told, with affection, that refusal was noted and overruled. Its provisions were short and monstrous.

Everything Adrian Kessler owned — the house on Kirkland Street, the building on Fenwick Street, the patents, the majority stake in the company that had been valued in the hundreds of millions two years ago — was to pass, at his death, to “my friend and benefactor, Calvin Voss.”

And if Kessler died he did not need to die. If Kessler disappeared, or was absent for any reason, for a period exceeding three months, then Calvin Voss was to step into everything immediately, free of any obligation beyond a handful of small payments to the people who worked in the house.

Vane had carried that document like a stone in his shoe for four years. It offended him as a lawyer, and it offended him more deeply as a man who had staked his life on the proposition that the world is mostly ordinary. He had told himself it was eccentricity. Sitting there that night with Sandoval's story still warm in his head, he found he could not say that any longer.

“I thought it was vanity,” he said aloud, folding the paper. “Now I am afraid it is something else.”

He put on his coat and walked to the Back Bay, where his old friend Nora Aldiss kept a practice and, at seventy-one, still kept office hours until eight.

She was already pouring. Nora Aldiss had known Howard Vane since they were nineteen; she was energetic, blunt, and prematurely gray, and when she saw Vane she stood up and took both his hands in hers, which was her way, and which was entirely sincere.

They talked for a while about nothing. Then Vane said: “I suppose you and I are the two oldest friends Adrian Kessler has.”

“Fifteen years ago I would have agreed with you,” she said. “Now I don't see him at all.”

“I thought you two had a bond.”

“We had one,” said Aldiss. “Then about a dozen years ago he started going wrong. Wrong in the head, Howard. I don't mean he was unpleasant, I mean he had begun to believe things about the human body that no one who has been through a medical education is entitled to believe. I kept reading for the man out of old love for twenty years, and then one evening he explained his ideas to me, in his own kitchen, and I understood that we had nothing left to say to each other.” She stopped, and something went across her face. “Such nonsense,” she said, more quietly. “Such nonsense, from that mind.”

Vane, who had no scientific opinions on any subject, took this as a relief. “Did you ever come across a man named Voss?” he asked. “A friend of his. A protégé, I think.”

Aldiss put her glass down.

“Voss,” she said. “No. Never heard the name.”

“You're certain.”

“I am certain,” said Aldiss, and Vane, who had spent forty years watching people lie about money and never about anything else, decided she was telling the truth, and went home, and lay awake until five.

For the next three weeks Howard Vane haunted Fenwick Street. He went in the early morning with the commuters, at noon when the sidewalks were thick with people, and once, absurdly, at two in the morning, when a patrol car slowed down and looked him over and moved on. He bought a newspaper every day at the same kiosk and never once opened it; by the third week the man at the kiosk had stopped saying good morning to him. He told himself he was looking at a door.

The third Sunday in December he got what he had been waiting for. It was a dry, hard, cold night; the lamps along the street had that steady look they get when there is no wind at all; the shops were dark and the sidewalk rang under every shoe. Vane had been standing in the alley eight minutes when he heard footsteps approaching from the east, coming fast, and heard in them something that made him step back into the shadow.

The man who turned the corner was small, and very plainly dressed, and he crossed the road diagonally to save himself the walk, and as he came he took a key out of his pocket the way a man takes a key out when he is going home.

Vane stepped out and touched his shoulder.

“Mr. Voss, I believe.”

The man pulled back with a hiss of breath. It lasted one second. Then he said, coolly, and without looking up: “That is my name. What do you want?”

“I see you are going in,” said Vane. “I'm an old friend of Adrian Kessler's. Howard Vane. You've probably heard the name. Since I've met you so conveniently, you might let me in.”

“You will not find him in,” said Voss. He was blowing into the key. Then, still without lifting his head: “How did you know me?”

“Will you do me a favor?”

“With pleasure,” said Voss. “What?”

“Will you let me see your face?”

For a moment the man hesitated. Then he turned and squared up to Vane with a kind of defiance, and the two of them looked at each other without any pretense of politeness for perhaps four seconds.

“Now I shall know you again,” said Vane. “It may be useful.”

“Yes,” said Voss. “It is as well we met. And you should have my address.” He recited a number on Fenwick Street.

It took Vane a moment, and then it did not take him a moment at all, because Fenwick Street was in the will. The building on Fenwick Street was one of the four things Adrian Kessler owned outright, and the man who was to inherit all four of them had just handed over his address the way a man hands over a business card.

“Good God,” thought Vane. “He's been thinking about the will too.” He said nothing; he grunted.

“And now,” said Voss, “how did you know me?”

“By description.”

“Whose?”

“We have a friend in common,” said Vane.

“A friend in common,” Voss repeated, hoarsely. “Who?”

“Kessler,” said Vane.

“He never told you,” said Voss, and the anger came up in him all at once and then was gone. “I did not think you would lie to me.”

“That is not fitting language,” said Vane.

Voss laughed — a sound with no pleasure in it at all — and in the next moment, with a speed that Vane could not afterwards account for, he had the door open and was gone.

Vane stood in the alley for a while. He was not a fanciful man. He had drawn up perhaps nine hundred wills and buried three partners and negotiated the sale of a shipyard; he had no equipment for the feeling that was now standing beside him, and no name for it either. Voss was small and pale; he gave an impression of deformity without any deformity that could be pointed to; his smile was unpleasant and he had spoken in a voice that was worn thin and hoarse, and he had carried himself with a mixture of timidity and contempt that was, Vane thought, absolutely murderous.

None of which was enough.

“There is something else,” said Vane, out loud, on the sidewalk. “There is something more, and I can't find the word for it.” He stood there a while longer, looking at a door that somebody had painted the colour of a bruise, on a sidewalk nobody had washed in twenty years, and then he went home.