Aldiss

Time went on. Two hundred thousand dollars was posted in reward, because the death of a judge is resented as a public injury, and Calvin Voss vanished out of the world as though he had never been in it.

Much of his past came up, and none of it was respectable. A woman in Revere said he had put her dog in a dumpster, and she told it the way people tell a story they have told before. A contractor who had done work on Fenwick Street said he had once been paid for six weeks with a check and a threat. Eight years of that, and not one person who would say a good word for him, and not one who could say where he had gone.

And as the weeks went by, Adrian Kessler came back to life.

Vane watched it happen the way you watch weather change. In November Kessler came back to his board; in December he gave a dinner; and in January Vane sat three tables from him at a fundraiser in a hotel ballroom and watched him work a room of four hundred people. He had always been good at it. Now he was better. He stood forty minutes in the middle of the largest crowd in the hall holding a glass he never drank from, and the crowd came to him the way water comes downhill, and two of the people who came to him that night had been at Merritt Ashby's funeral. Vane watched him take both of them by the arm and mean it. Then Kessler walked over to Vane's table and stood there a moment and said, quietly, so that nobody else could hear: “You were right to make me promise. I have been keeping it.” And then he went back into the crowd, and Vane sat for another hour with his coat on and could not afterwards have told you one thing anybody said to him.

Then, on the twelfth of January, Kessler's door was shut.

Vane called on the thirteenth and was told that Mr. Kessler was unwell and seeing no one. He called on the fifteenth and was told the same. He wrote. The answer came back in Kessler's own hand, two pages long, and it was the strangest document Vane had ever received from anyone, and he had spent forty years reading the letters of people in trouble.

The letter said that the breach with Nora Aldiss was permanent and incurable, and that Kessler did not blame her. It said that he intended from now on to lead a life of extreme seclusion, and that Howard must not be surprised, and must not doubt his friendship, when the door was shut even to him. It said: You must let me go my own dark way. I have brought upon myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name to you. If I am the chief of sinners, I am also the chief of sufferers. I did not think the world contained a place so dark as the one I now live in. There is only one thing you can do for me, and it is to respect my silence.

Vane, who had never in his life been afraid, was afraid. Eight weeks earlier, everything had been beginning again; the man had been coming out of it, whatever it was. And now, in a fortnight, the whole of an honorable life had gone down.

A week later Nora Aldiss took to her bed. Vane would not understand the connection for another month, and when he did it would come out of her own handwriting; at the time he had only the sequence, which was quite enough to frighten him — the estrangement, the seclusion, the collapse, in that order, inside a fortnight.

Vane went to see her on the fourth day, and was shocked by what he found. She had been a strong, red-faced, impatient woman. What sat up in the bed and greeted him was a woman whose face had been emptied out. She was fifty pounds lighter and she looked twenty years older, and it was not the illness that stopped him in the doorway — it was the look in her eye.

“Nora. What has happened to you?”

“I have had a shock,” she said. “I am not going to recover. It's a matter of weeks. That's not self-pity, it's a prognosis; I have read my own scans.” She smiled at him. “I used to like being alive. I sometimes think that if we knew everything, we would be a great deal gladder to go.”

“Kessler is ill too,” said Vane. “Have you seen him?”

Her whole body changed. She put up a hand, shaking, as though to keep the words out of the room.

“I want to hear nothing more about Adrian Kessler,” she said, in a voice that was loud and unsteady. “I am finished with that man. I am asking you, Howard, as an old friend, to spare me any mention of a person I now regard as dead.”

“Nora—”

“Ask him yourself.”

“He won't see me.”

“No,” said Aldiss. “I am not surprised.” She turned her face to the window. “Some day, after I'm dead, you will come to know the rights and wrongs of this. I can't tell you. And if you can sit here and talk to me about something else — literally anything else — then please stay and do it. If you can't, then go, because I cannot bear it.”

He stayed an hour, and they talked about a trip they had taken in 1994, and when he left he stood in the corridor outside her door with his back against the wall like a man who has been told he has six months himself.

Nora Aldiss died nine days later. Vane was at the funeral. Three dozen lilies stood on the coffin with no card on them; the shop on the corner had been paid in cash by a man who did not want a receipt and who, the girl behind the counter said, had waited outside in a car until she had finished writing it up. Vane never learned who sent them, and he had a very good idea who sent them, and he did not ask.

The evening after the funeral, Vane locked the door of his office, and turned off all the lights but the desk lamp, and took out of his safe the envelope she had left him. Across the face of it, in her big medical handwriting, were the words: TO BE GIVEN TO HOWARD VANE. TO BE OPENED ONLY IN THE EVENT OF THE DEATH OR THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ADRIAN KESSLER. IF I DIE FIRST, HOWARD KEEPS IT UNOPENED.

Vane sat looking at that for a long time. He remembered the will, which had said the same thing in worse company. He thought about what it would cost him to obey her, and what it would cost him not to, and he did what he usually did, which was to put the envelope back in the safe and go home.