worried suddenly that it might be the very middle of the night in America, and then realizing suddenly that indeed it was.
Rude and terrible mistake, whatever the circumstances. Someone had answered. It was a voice he knew but could not place.
“I’m calling from England. I’m so sorry. I’m trying to reach Mona Mayfair,” he said. “I hope I haven’t waked the house.”
“Yuri?” asked the woman.
“Yes!” he confessed without obvious surprise that this woman had recognized his voice.
“Yuri, Aaron Lightner’s dead,” said the woman. “This is Celia, Beatrice’s cousin. Mona’s cousin. Everybody’s cousin. Aaron’s been killed.”
There was a long pause in which Yuri did nothing. He didn’t think or visualize anything or rush to any conclusion. His body was caught in a cold, terrible fear—fear of the implications of these words, that he would never, never see Aaron again, that they would never speak to each other, that he and Aaron—that Aaron was forever gone.
When he tried to move his lips, he found trouble. He did some senseless and stupid little thing with his hand, pinching the telephone cord.
“I’m sorry, Yuri. We’ve been worried about you. Mona’s been very worried. Where are you? Can you call Michael Curry? I can give you the number.”
“I’m all right,” Yuri answered softly. “I have that number.”
“That’s where Mona is now, Yuri. Up at the other house. They will want to know where you are and how you are, and how to reach you immediately.”
“But Aaron …” he said, pleadingly, unable to say more. His voice sounded puny to him, barely escaping the burden of the tremendous emotions that even clouded his vision and his equilibrium, his entire sense of who he was. “Aaron …”
“He was run over, deliberately, by a man in a car. He was walking down from the Pontchartrain Hotel, where he’d just left Beatrice with Mary Jane Mayfair. They were putting Mary Jane Mayfair up at the hotel. Beatrice was just about to go into the lobby of the hotel when she heard the noise. She and Mary Jane witnessed what happened. Aaron was run over by the car several times.”
“Then it was murder,” said Yuri.
“Absolutely. They caught the man who did it. A drifter. He was hired, but he doesn’t know the identity of the man who hired him. He got five thousand dollars in cash for killing Aaron. He’d been trying to do it for a week. He’d spent half the money.”
Yuri wanted to put down the phone. It seemed utterly impossible to continue. He ran his tongue along his upper lip and then firmly forced himself to speak. “Celia, please tell Mona Mayfair this for me, and Michael Curry too—that I am in England, I am safe. I will soon be in touch. I am being very careful. I send my sympathy to Beatrice Mayfair. I send to all … my love.”
“I’ll tell them.”
He laid down the phone. If she said something more, he didn’t hear it. It was silent now. And the soft pastel colors of the bedroom lulled him for a moment. The light filled the mirror softly and beautifully. All the fragrances of the room were clean.
Alienation, a lack of trust either in happiness or in others. Rome. Aaron coming. Aaron erased from life—not from the past, but utterly from the present and from the future.
He didn’t know how long he stood there.
It began to seem that he had been planted by the dressing table for a long, long time. He knew that Ash, the tall one, had come into the room, but not to detach Yuri from the telephone.
And some deep, awful grief in Yuri was touched suddenly, disastrously perhaps, by the warm, sympathetic voice of this man.
“Why are you crying, Yuri?”
It was said with the purity of a child.
“Aaron Lightner’s dead,” said Yuri. “I never called to tell him they’d tried to kill me. I should have told him. I should have warned him—”
It was the slightly abrasive voice of Samuel that reached him from the door.
“He knew, Yuri. He knew. You told me how he warned you not to come back here, how he said they’d come for him at any time.”
“Ah, but I …”
“Don’t hold on to it with guilt, my young friend,” said Ash.
Yuri felt the big, spidery hands close tenderly on his shoulders.
“Aaron … Aaron was my father,” Yuri said in a monotone. “Aaron was my brother. Aaron was my friend.” Inside him the grief and the guilt boiled and the stark, awful terror of death became unendurable. It