The old man shrugged, and again looked as if he were thinking a thousand thoughts at once. “She went out at night,” he finally said. “Everybody at Eagle Lake drank a lot in those days.” He looked down at the hem of his suit jacket, lifted it, and crossed his left hand over his waist to flick away a blemish invisible to Tom. Then he looked up. “I’m worn out. You’d better be getting home.”
The two of them stood up together. It seemed to Tom that Mr. von Heilitz communicated in two separate ways, and the way in which he said the important things was silently. If you didn’t get it, you missed it.
Von Heilitz walked him through the files and past the lamps like stars and moons in the night sky. He opened his front door. “You’re better than I was at your age.”
Tom felt the old man’s nearly weightless arm on his shoulders.
Across the street, one light burned in a downstairs window of his house. Down the block in the Langenheim house, every light blazed. Long cars and horse-drawn carriages stood at the curb. Uniformed drivers leaned and smoked against their cars, set apart from the carriage drivers who would not look at or speak to them.
“Ah, the night is so beautiful,” the old man said. He stepped outside.
Tom said goodbye, and the Shadow waved a dark blue glove, nearly invisible in the crystalline moonlight.
For the next few weeks, the Friedrich Hasselgard scandal and a series of revelations about the Treasury filled the nightly broadcasts and the headlines of the Eyewitness. The Finance Minister had misappropriated funds, misdirected funds, buried funds, misplaced funds in transfers from one account to another and from ledger to ledger. Through a combination of criminality and incompetence he had lost or stolen an amount of money that multiplied with each new investigation until it appeared to add up to the almost unthinkable sum of ten million dollars. “Criminal associates,” not terrorists, were now supposed to have shot the Minister’s sister. By the time Dennis Handley told Katinka Redwing at a dinner party that he had not been following the stories about the scandal and was not at all interested in that kind of thing, few other adults on the island of Mill Walk would have been able to utter such a statement.
One day, Dennis Handley asked Tom to see him after the end of school.
As soon as Tom walked into his room, Dennis said, “I suppose I know the answer to this question, but I have to ask it anyway.” He looked down at his desk, then out of the classroom window, which gave him a fine view of narrow, treelined School Road and the headmaster’s house, opposite the school. Tom waited for the question.
“That car you wanted to find—the Corvette in Weasel Hollow. Did that car belong to the person I think it belonged to?”
Tom sighed. “It belonged to the person it obviously belonged to.”
Dennis groaned and pressed his palms against his forehead.
“Why don’t you want me to say his name? Do you think you might get in trouble?”
“A couple of weeks ago,” Dennis said, “I wanted to have a friendly talk with you—your mother asked me to bring something up with you, a minor thing, but it was my idea to invite you to my apartment in order to see that manuscript, which I thought you might enjoy. Instead, you pretended to be sick and made me drive you all the way back across the island to a crime scene. The next day, the gentleman who owned that car disappears. Another man is gunned down. Blood is shed. Two lives are lost.”
Dennis raised his hands in theatrical horror.
“Did you write that letter the policeman mentioned at his press conference?”
Tom frowned, but did not speak.
“I feel sick,” Dennis said. “This whole situation is unhealthy, and my stomach knows it. Can’t you see that you had no business meddling in that kind of thing?”
“A man got away with murder,” Tom said. “Sooner or later they would have executed some innocent man and declared the whole thing solved.”
“And what happened instead? Do you call that a tea party?” Dennis shook his head and gazed out the window again, rather than look at Tom. “I am sick. You were my hope—you have gift enough for two.”
“For you and me both, you mean.”
“I want you to concentrate on the things that matter,” Dennis said in a slow, furious voice. “Don’t throw yourself away on garbage. You have a treasure within you. Don’t you see?” Dennis’s broad, fleshy face, suited to jokes and confidences and ruminations about novelists, strained to express all he felt. “There is the real world and the false world. The real world is internal. If you’re lucky, and you could be, you sustain it by the right work, by your responses to works of art, by loyalty to your friends, by a refusal to be caught up in public or private falsehoods. Think of E. M. Forster—two cheers for democracy.”
“I’m not going to run for office, Mr. Handley,” he said.
Dennis’s face closed like a trap. He looked down at his thick, pale hands, locked together on top of his desk. “I know things are difficult for you at home, Tom. I want you to know that you can always come to me. I don’t suppose I’ll ever say this to another student, no matter how long I might teach, but you can call me any time.”
A flash of perception that seemed to come from the adult he would be told Tom that Dennis would make a similar speech to a particularly favored student once every four or five years for the rest of his life.
“There’s nothing wrong with my home life,” he said, and heard his mother’s almost unemotional screams.
“Just remember what I told you.”
“Can I go now?”
Dennis sighed. “Listen, Tom—I just want you to know who you are. That’s what I care about—who you are.”
Tom could not stop himself from standing up. His breath had caught in a hot little pocket deep in his throat, and could not move up or down.
Dennis sent him a complicated look that combined resentment, surprise, and a desire to repeat everything he had just said. “Go on.” Tom took a step backwards. “I won’t keep you.”
Tom left the room and found Fritz Redwing sitting in the hallway with his back against the plate glass window overlooking the school’s courtyard. Fritz had been kept back at the start of what should have been his freshman year, and had been in Tom’s class ever since.
“What’d he do?” Fritz scrambled to his feet.
Tom swallowed the burning air in his throat. “He didn’t do anything.”
“We can still make the cart to dancing class—the kids who had sports are still down in the locker room.”
The two boys began moving down the corridor.
Fritz Redwing’s hair was a thick blond thatch, but in most other ways he was a typical Redwing—short, broad-shouldered, with short thick legs and virtually no waist. Fritz was a kind and friendly boy, not very highly regarded by his family; he had been pleased to find his old friend Tom Pasmore back in the class into which failure had thrown him, almost as if he imagined that Tom kept him company in his disgrace. Tom knew that when people spoke of the stupidity of the younger Redwings, it was Fritz they had most in mind, but Fritz seemed merely slow to him, and for that reason not much inclined to thought. Thinking took time, and Fritz tended to be lazy. When he bothered to think, Fritz generally did all right. The top of his blond head came only to the middle of Tom’s chest. Next to Tom, he resembled a small, shaggy blond bear.
Tom and Fritz came out of the school’s side door and walked toward the parking lot in hot steady sunlight. The cart stood at the far end of the parking lot, and from it a hum of high-pitched voices, pierced now and then by a shriek, came to the two boys. Tom instantly saw Sarah Spence’s blond head in the second of the four front rows, which had been filled with girls. The cart’s fluttering cover cast a greenish shade over the rows of girls. For different reasons, both Tom and Fritz Redwing slowed their pace and turned off the path to stand in the darker shade at the side of the school building.