Strange People, Queer Notions by Jack Vance

Author:Jack Vance [Vance, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619470163
Publisher: Spatterlight Press, Oakland, California

Chapter XIII

I awoke, showered, shaved and went down to breakfast with a ravenous appetite. Over bacon and eggs and sliced oranges Giovanni brought me the news.

“You knew them very well, those two English ladies?”

“Not very well. What’s the trouble?”

“Last night —” he flicked up his hands “— they are dead.” He pulled out a chair, seated himself with an expression that conveyed, “Such is what may happen to any of us.”

I laid down my knife and fork. “How did they die?”

Giovanni shrugged. “Who is to say? I was not there; certainly it could not have been a pleasant sight.”

“I don’t mean —” I stopped and started all over again. “What killed them?”

“The pills — a whole bottle of pills for sleeping. They drank it in tea.” Giovanni screwed up his face. “Always tea for the English.”

I heard my voice coming from a long distance. “Both of them?”

“Both of them,” said Giovanni with somber relish. “One, the tall nervous one, she sleeps on the bed; the other, the sick one, she sits in a chair. The mayor has telephoned to Naples for the British Consul.”

“But why?”

“No one knows.”

“There was no letter, no farewell?”

“Nothing.”

I stirred my coffee, seeing the cup with blind eyes. Giovanni jumped up, wandered away; I sat stirring my coffee. I remembered last night; I heard Hester’s voice through the panels of the door. Already she sounded dead, already she had passed that final barrier of decision, already she knew that life for her had been left behind. What was going on in her mind when she heard my voice? I must have seemed like the devil himself standing beyond the thin panel of the door. I had an odd vision: myself through Hester’s eyes, my face glistening, oily yellow-green with evil, my eyes afire, my mouth wet … A wonder she had not flung the door wide and slashed me with a knife. Perhaps I had it coming. Was I not partly responsible for their deaths? Was I not Kex’s paid nightmare? Was I not then a murderer as openly and overtly as Kex himself? I drank some coffee. My throat was numb and constricted; I had difficulty swallowing.

What should I do now? What recompense could I make? Leave Positano, leave Italy, leave Europe? Go back to the States, hide in the remotest badlands, in Idaho, Utah, Arizona? And what would I accomplish then? The damage was done; I had catalyzed Kex’s schemes by my sheer presence.

So I sat huddled over my coffee, feeling as miserable and numb as I have ever felt.

Gradually the numbness thawed; counter-arguments began to form; gradually I began to gather some small comfort to myself. The exact degree of my culpability seemed rather hard to define. In fact, I could not see where I had done any wrong except by the mere fact of association with wrongness.

Certainly I had taken Kex’s money — but I had done my best to defeat his plans, and this I had done openly, with Kex’s knowledge. I told myself with perhaps a shade of sanctimony that I had cheated not even Kex.

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