The Last Night

Ostrow's note had said: he said, bring the lawyer now, and the note was five words long because Walt Ostrow had never in ten years trusted himself with a sixth in writing, and by half past four Marsh was at the green door, and Ostrow let him in with a lamp because the hall lights were off, which Marsh had never seen, and the two men stood in the dark hall and Ostrow talked the way a dam talks before it goes, in short pressured sentences with long silences.

Walt Ostrow had come to the annex at thirty-one, out of a decade of hospital security and a marriage that had not survived the night shifts, and he had stayed nineteen years because the building suited him. It was quiet. It had a rhythm. The doctor traveled nine months of the year and the building held its breath and Ostrow kept it breathing: the filters changed on the first of the month, the backup generator tested weekly, the freight door oiled so that its snap stayed soft, the groceries logged, the deliveries signed, the few visitors announced up and admitted, and the one instruction of the master, given in the first year and repeated never, which was that the corridor cabinet at the north end of the laboratory floor was to hold a fire axe and a crowbar and that the cabinet was to be checked, monthly, by Ostrow personally, and that the check was never to be discussed. For nineteen years the cabinet had held its tools and the instruction had held its silence, and Ostrow had grown old in the comfortable belief that the strangest thing about his employment was the pay.

The week before the note, the building had taught him otherwise. It began with the voice, which he heard first at two in the morning on a Tuesday, through two doors and a fire wall, and which he told himself was the ductwork. It was not the ductwork. The ductwork did not say his name. By Thursday he had made a chart, in the grid-ruled notebook he had kept for nineteen years, of the hours the voice spoke, and the chart showed a thing he did not put into words even to himself: the voice spoke at night and slept by day, and in the day, through the food slot, when he swept the corridor, he could hear, faint and wrong-footed, the other sounds, the pacing, the reagent fridge, the tap running, that belonged to the doctor's days. Two residents, the chart said, in one apartment. The chart said nothing else. Ostrow was a man who wrote down what was and let the documents do the interpreting, and it was this, this trained and terrible patience, that the master had known he was hiring, all those years ago, and that the master's note was counting on now.

"Nine days, Mr. Marsh. Nine days since he has been seen by any eye in this house, mine included. I hear him. That is the horror of it, I hear him, day and night, and the voice is not his voice and it comes from behind the reinforced door of the laboratory, and he will not let me in. In the first week I still believed it was him. The voice was wrong but the words were his words, all lawyer words, time is of the essence, execute the instrument, I made him laugh once and the laugh was wrong too. He slides notes under the door. They are in his hand, all of them, I would swear to it, I have carried his lists for ten years and I know his hand like my own. Buy this, fetch that, leave it at the slot, tell no one. And the money, Mr. Marsh, the money. There is a cash box in my office he had me prepare, and notes come out under the door directing me to pay it out, and I pay it, into the slot, and the notes come back with the cash drawn out, and the writing is getting worse. That is the word I want you to have first, because you are the documents man. The writing is getting worse. It is still his hand but the hand is losing its mind. The e's are going. The tails go the wrong way. Last Tuesday a note asked me for arsenic, and when I did not move fast enough a second note came that unasked it, and said, forgivable, Walt, I was not myself, and Mr. Marsh, I read that sentence forty times and I am reading it still."

"Show me the notes."

Ostrow brought the box. There were forty notes in it, all in the hand that Lantz had matched to a forged letter and a settlement deed, and Marsh went through them with his heart going like a trapped bird, and the last note but one was the five-word note he had received at his own door, and the last note of all said only: the end is near, thank God, go home at ten, come with the lawyer at four, and bring the fire axe from the corridor cabinet, and leave it in the hall, and God forgive us all, it is Wick.

Marsh set that note down on Ostrow's desk with a hand he was surprised to find steady.

"Mr. Ostrow. Ten years you have kept this building. I am going to ask you to do the last thing, the thing the notes themselves instruct, and I am going to put my own hand on the axe with yours, because there is no version of the instrument I can draft after this that does not begin with opening that door."

They went up together. At the end of the corridor the reinforced door stood in the lamplight with its slide bolt and its food slot, and Marsh knocked for the tenth time that year, and said, "Julian. It is Alden. I am coming in."

The voice that answered was not Voss's, and it was not Wick's either, and it was both, and it said, "For God's sake, Alden, have mercy," and then it said, in another register, flat and pleased and small, "Come in and be audited," and then Ostrow's axe came down and the frame cracked like a rifle shot, and the third blow went through, and the bolt tore out of the jamb, and the two of them stood in the doorway with the lamp up, and the laboratory lay open before them.

The man at the far end, in the untidy corner where the machines gave way to a cot and a chair, was struggling at a cabinet with a ring of keys, and the sight of him did the thing that fifteen pages of Adler and forty notes and a season of nightmares had failed to do: it made the whole account of it true at once, in the body, in the room. He was small. He wore Voss's clothes, Voss's very clothes, the gray suit Marsh had seen at dinners, and they hung off him like sails off a wrecked mast, and the hands at the keys were quick and fine and terrible, and he turned at the light with the whole dark face of Ezra Wick arranged into an expression of lost time, of a man wakened on a train one station past every station he knew.

He looked at the axe. He looked at Marsh. And the face of Ezra Wick did the last thing it ever did in the sight of living witnesses: it broke, all of it, at once, like ice in a warm glass, and under the broken face another face surfaced, and the mouth that had swerved toward a child and beaten a senator and signed a dead man's will with a dead man's ease said, in the voice of Julian Voss, every syllable of it, "God forgive us. God forgive us all," and the small body turned and went at the cabinet with the keys, and neither Ostrow nor Marsh moved fast enough, because there was nothing in the room to move fast against, and the keys found the drawer at the moment the two men found him.

The drawer held the laboratory's stock of reagents, and one compartment of it held a squat brown bottle with a modern cap and a very old label, and Wick's hand was around it when Marsh reached him, and the hand was already at the mouth of it, and Marsh had a wrist in his grip and then he did not, because the hand was quicker, and the smell came up out of the open bottle into the lamplight, bitter, like a coin held too long in the mouth, and the small man in the big clothes put the neck of the bottle against his teeth as a man puts a key against a lock, and turned it.

It was over in four minutes, and Ostrow was sick in the corridor, and Marsh stood in the middle of the laboratory with the lamp shaking in his own hand, looking at the dead man on the floor in Julian Voss's clothes, and there was nothing in the room that was not evidence, and no part of him that was still an officer of anything.

On the desk lay paper. There was a codicil, in the failing hand, signed and dated that morning, and the codicil named the same two names the will had named, and beside the codicil lay a long envelope, and on the envelope, in the hand that was losing its mind, was written: FOR ALDEN MARSH. NOT FOR THE POLICE. NOT FOR THE PRESS. FOR THE MAN WHO HOLDS MY SIGNATURE.

Marsh put the envelope inside his coat with the lamp in his other hand, and he said to Ostrow, whose face was the color of the envelope, "Call no one. Give me one hour," and he carried the last statement of Dr. Julian Voss out through the black passage and the dead lane into the four o'clock dark, and the padlock, when he tried the freight door behind him, was already in his pocket, and he had no memory of having taken it.