The School of Night Page 3

  “Why?”

  “Because they talked about things no one could talk about. They questioned Jesus’ divinity. They questioned God’s very existence. They practiced dark arts. Alchemy, astrology, paganism … satanism … nothing was off the table, Henry. They dared to—to imagine a world without creed, without monarchy. With only the human mind as anchor. They were this quiet little knife in the heart of Elizabethan orthodoxy.” His eyes gleamed; his voice darkened. “And they all paid dearly for it.”

  With unmistakable relish, he outlined their various ends. Marlowe, murdered in a saloon. (“Over a bill? I think not, Henry.”) Ralegh executed. Warner, dead under mysterious circumstances. The Wizard Earl, shut away in the Tower for seventeen years. Roydon, reduced to abject poverty.

  “And the only one standing at the end,” I said, half dazed, “was the outsider. Shakespeare.”

  For the first time in our acquaintance, I think, Alonzo’s eyes glowed with fellow feeling.

  “You’ve hit on it! The sweetest, the bitterest irony of all. This hayseed actor with the grammar-school education, the guy who couldn’t have gotten in Ralegh’s school even if he’d wanted to (and he probably did) was the one who weathered every change of ministry, from Elizabeth the First to James the First. The School of Night had to close its doors, but Shakespeare lived on.”

  “His own little academe,” I murmured.

  Slowly, Alonzo sank back in his seat.

  “Exactly,” he said, a long stream of Dunhill smoke forking from his nostrils. “The School of Night gives way to Shakespeare. The School of Day.”

  * * *

  I’d guess it was two in the morning when we finally settled our bill. Alonzo paid, as usual, and for a tip he left behind a neat little pile of bills. God knows how many, but the bartender was smiling.

  “Henry,” said Alonzo. “I believe I’m snockered.”

  Now I’m convinced that snockered is, by its nature, a funny word. Coming from Alonzo Wax’s mouth, it became quite exorbitantly funny. He couldn’t understand why this was, any more than I could explain it, but he came around to my way of thinking.

  “Snockered!” he shrieked. “Shhhh-nockered!”

  The bartender was no longer smiling by the time we left. Stepping with great care, Alonzo and I filed down the pavement and then, by common impulse, dashed across the street, our arms windmilling. We paused before the gates of Nassau Hall and stared up at its white tower, which held a special terror against the night’s black purple. A mass of blue clouds was sweeping in from the south, and a hush lay upon every casement window, every arch, and every gargoyle.

  “Henry.”

  Alonzo’s voice came at me from a vast distance.

  “What?”

  “Let’s have our own school.”

  “We’re already in school.”

  Never before, never since, have I seen him grin like that. His mouth pulled open like a sluice gate, and an entirely new Alonzo came flooding through.

  “A School of Night,” he said. “Our very own. Let’s begin.”

  4

  THE DAY AFTER Alonzo’s funeral service, I deposited Bernard Styles’s check in what was left of my bank account. As promised, it cleared the next day. A good thing, because that morning I paid my landlord three months in back rent and took out two hundred dollars in good hard cash, which felt like Christmas and Easter in my jeans pocket as I strolled to Union Station to meet Lily Pentzler for lunch.

  Lily had chosen a multilevel restaurant called America, which, in addition to having a big name, has a big menu, the size of an exit sign. It has to be, I guess, to hold all that Cajun dirty rice and Navajo fry bread and Idaho shoestring fries and New England pot roast, and yet the menu was nothing beneath the weight of Lily’s stack of accordion files, which rose between us like Hadrian’s Wall. High enough to block Lily from view but powerless to stop her voice.

  “So you’ve got the spare key to Alonzo’s apartment, right? Good. Now listen. This packet contains three copies of the will, stamped and notarized. You’ll have to file in probate, but there shouldn’t be any court proceedings. Alonzo lawyered everything. This folder lists all his leases and credit cards; you’ll have to terminate those. Here’s a bunch of contact info: Social Security, the post office, subscriptions, professional memberships. Don’t forget to set up a bank account for the estate; Bank of America’s probably the best since that’s where Alonzo’s money market fund is. He’s also got two mortgages on the Mass. Ave. condo, so you’ll have to keep up those payments for now. And, come spring, you’ll have to file a personal tax return, but don’t worry; I know an excellent accountant in Cleveland Park.”

  The only thing that stemmed the flow was the arrival of the waiter, who asked us if we’d looked over the menu.

  “No, we have not,” she snapped. “And I need another fifteen minutes before I can think about eating. Fifteen minutes. At which point I would love a Negroni. Dry. Splash of soda. Thanks much.”

  From the other side of the pile, a small white hand fanned him away as if he were an odor. Pure Alonzo, that gesture.

  “Now, where was I? Oh! In this folder is a list of Alonzo’s creditors. Ranked in order of how long he’s been stiffing them. I recommend paying the Calvert-Woodley Wines and Spirits account immediately. Alonzo was also being sued by a drywall contractor whose name escapes me, but it’s in this file, along with the case’s disposition in Small Claims.”

  Below us lay Union Station’s main hall, the marble tiles bouncing back the echoes of plates and silverware—and, beneath the clatter, the dull roar of human traffic. Commuters, shoppers, train passengers. All bound for somewhere.

  “Henry, I can’t tell. Are you paying attention?”

  “I’m just wondering why Alonzo didn’t make you his executor.”

  Her floury face craned around the pile. “Me…”

  “You’d be so much better at it. You have all the records, you know where all the bodies—I mean, you’re like the world’s leading Alonzo expert.”

  “Henry,” she said. “Look at me. Do I resemble someone who has the time to be an executor?”

  And it was true, her date book was full for the next six weeks. I know this because she rattled off every entry. Auction at Maggs. The Beijing book fair. Appointments with dealers in London, San Francisco. A conference at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville. Some promising leads in Milan. On and on it went, and each new item carried with it the same overtone: Henry’s got nothing in his date book.

  “Anyway,” she went on, in a milder tone, “you shouldn’t underrate yourself. You know Alonzo never did. He was always wondering what you’d think of some quarto or letter whenever it dropped in his lap. Oh, Henry’d love this. I can’t wait to show it to Henry. He respected you; he did.”

  I paused then to consider: Was it respectful to phone someone just a few hours before killing yourself? Was that, in fact, a larger honor than it appeared?

  I remembered that morning quite well. The twelfth of May: fitfully wet, smoky with pollen. I was sitting on the patio of Peregrine Espresso, just south of Eastern Market, with a $2.20 cup of Finca Nueva Armenia and a laptop and a stack of ruled paper. Children’s compositions. I was being paid three hundred dollars to judge a creative-writing contest for a country day school in Herndon, Virginia. The theme of the competition was “Wow.” All in all, I considered myself lucky to have the gig, but I hadn’t read a single entry—the prospect of all that earnestness was chilling—and I spent most of that morning composing an ad for craigslist. My third of the year.

  DWM, 44, hwp, clean and professional, looking for fun/companionship, with possibility of long-term …

  From there, things always got trickier. Big into reading … midnight phone conversations a must … have not ruled out kids. Every line grew clammy with embarrassment, until at last I found myself veering toward pure nonfiction. Academic pariah … sketchily employed … faint odor of shame … haunted by the memory of two dead marriages, maybe not ha
unted enough …

  It was still a marvel to me then how gently failure could steal over you. One minute, you’re a young man, loose in limb and high in sperm count, striding down the avenue, inhaling pollen. The next minute, you’re one of those guys walking home from the Tunnicliff ’s bar. Walking very slowly, the better to conceal your condition and never realizing until you’re home that no one was really monitoring you. Whatever holes you thought you were punching into the world’s exoskeleton have long since been absorbed.

  It was in the midst of these thoughts that my cell phone began to vibrate. Actually crawled toward me across the tabletop, as if it were answering my ad.

  I scanned the caller ID: UNKNOWN. That was how Alonzo always registered on my Nokia. I think it pleased him. I watched the phone go still before kicking back into life with a message. And even then I waited a good five or ten minutes to play it back.

  From the depths of my voice mail came Alonzo’s clenched drawl.

  “Henry. Call me. The School of Night is back in session.”

  How to re-create the effect that old name had on me? I sat there amid the espresso steam and the coffee beans and the iPod tunes, and those words—the School of Night—refused to coalesce with anything else. Until finally there was no way to make them fit except to delete the message altogether.

  And in that moment, a voice inside me said: I’ve graduated.

  Which wasn’t true, but give me this much credit; I was able to flush the call from my mind. And that very evening, a little after nine, Alonzo called a cab (because, of course, he was as averse as any Manhattanite to owning a car) and asked to be taken to the end of MacArthur Boulevard—an area of Maryland he’d almost certainly never visited before. The driver remembered him because, as usual, Alonzo overtipped and because no fare had ever asked to be dropped off in the C&O National Historical Park so far past sunset. The cab pulled away, and Alonzo undertook perhaps the first hike of his life, which ended a fifth of a mile later when he climbed up the Washington Aqueduct Observation Deck and threw himself into the Potomac River.

  He chose well: the exact point at which the river, carrying its freight of mountain water, narrows into the Mather Gorge and then cascades into Great Falls, dropping seventy-six feet in less than a mile.

  Here’s what Alonzo left behind: (1) A Baume & Mercier watch. (2) A pair of cordovan A. Testoni shoes, ready-made. (3) A note, in his own diffuse hand.

  To thy black shades and desolation

  I consecrate my life.

  A Chapman lover to the end. And don’t think I forgot the title of that particular poem—“The Shadow of Night”—or the group of men who may have inspired it.

  And, above all, don’t think I forgot Alonzo’s final message: The School of Night is back in session.

  Two days after he jumped, his black belted Joseph Abboud raincoat washed up on Bear Island, stained with his blood. To those of us who knew him, that raincoat was the closest we would ever get to an actual body. For, of course, he wore it in all kinds of weather, never even went to the bathroom without it. A few weeks later, Judge Wax prevailed on old colleagues in the District’s probate court to grant a petition for presumption of death. An official certificate followed in short order, and now the world was free to grieve Alonzo Wax.

  And I was free to ask myself the same questions, again and again: Who could have reconvened the School of Night? Who were its members? And was this part of its curriculum—Alonzo’s own extinction?

  There was one question, in particular, that wouldn’t go away. How might things have been different if I’d just returned his damned phone call? What would that simple act have cost me?

  All this had been quietly corroding inside me … and then an elderly British gentleman named Bernard Styles pulled me aside at Alonzo’s memorial service and, in a few words, dragged everything from the shadows.

  The School of Night was back in session, and I was still very much in the dark.

  * * *

  “Henry.”

  Lily’s voice coiled around me like a garrote.

  “The reverie thing,” she said. “Maybe you could do that on your own time.”

  Her folders had been pushed to one side, and she sat there with her forearms wedged together like hocks.

  “Tell me about Bernard Styles,” I said.

  She looked at me for a long moment. She said:

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I’m not sure. Is he legitimate?”

  She waved her napkin. “He’s listed with the Grolier Club. He’s richer than a hundred sultans. He’d lay down his life for a Shakespeare quarto. Does that make him legitimate?”

  She told me then that, far from being an obscure figure, Styles was one of Great Britain’s preeminent bibliophiles. His earliest forays had been into Johnson and Boswell but, finding that stock increasingly depleted, he had switched in later life to Elizabethiana. No one was quite clear on the source of his wealth, but he was sufficiently liquid that he had never had to sell off inventory to make new acquisitions. Tens of millions of pounds’ worth of books and illuminated manuscripts supposedly lay sequestered in his Georgian manse, but no one could be sure because the collection was off limits to the public. The queen had once or twice been granted a private tour, and rumor had it that Styles was in line for the Order of the British Empire.

  “The queen is one thing,” I said. “What did the king think of him?”

  “You mean Alonzo.”

  “Yeah. What kind of relationship did he have with Styles?”

  Lily gave the table a few taps. “Complicated,” she said. “Like his relationship with everybody, only more so.”

  At bottom, she said, the conflict was philosophical. Alonzo hunted books to learn from them; Styles hunted for the pleasure of hunting.

  “They had a few petty squabbles,” said Lily. “And of course, Alonzo never forgave Styles for the Snowden business.”

  “Explain.”

  “Oh, God, this was two or three years ago. Cornelius Snowden. Old friend of Alonzo’s, kept a bookstall near St. Paul’s. Went for a walk in Postman’s Park one evening and never came out again. Alive, anyway.”

  “Robbed?”

  “But not for cash. The only thing they took was his first edition of Stow’s Annales.”

  “And why did Alonzo blame Styles?”

  “Because he knew Styles coveted that particular volume. But then everyone did, you know. And there was no evidence against Styles. The police never even questioned him, it was just—Alonzo and his melodrama.”

  “But it gave Alonzo a motive,” I said, half to myself.

  “Motive for what?”

  And it was then I realized I’d never told her of my encounter with Styles. I pulled the digitized copy of Ralegh’s letter from my shirt pocket. Unfolded it, laid it out on the table, and told her how I’d gotten it—and what had happened to the original.

  “I’ve never seen this before,” she said in a hushed voice. “Are you sure Alonzo took it?”

  “That’s what Styles said.”

  “But that doesn’t—that’s not Alonzo. It’s not.” She drew back from the table. “I don’t get this, Henry.”

  “I don’t either. I mean, even if this document is authentic, it’s going to fetch, in today’s marketplace, what? Fifty thousand? Sixty?”

  “I suppose,” she said faintly. “More or less.”

  “So why would Bernard Styles offer twice that much to have it back?”

  “I don’t…”

  Her white cheeks began to sag. Something swirled in her eyes.

  “I wish…”

  And now the grief she’d been at such pains to hold back came flooding through. Was it a comfort, I wonder, to have me there? One of those men who grow helpless before a woman’s tears? All I could do was shove my napkin toward her and murmur:

  “I know. I know.”

  “No,” she answered. “You don’t.”

  She pressed the napkin over her face and
gave her skin a cauterizing rub. I remembered then that, many years ago, Alonzo had proposed marriage to her. For the first and probably last time in her life, she had told him no. It was a great relief to both of them.

  The mood passed as quickly as it had come, and when her Negroni came, she drained it in short order and ordered another with her Maine lobster roll, and by lunch’s end she was edging dangerously close to mirth. Caressing her strawlike hair, she glanced over the rail and, with a twist of her mouth, said:

  “Friend of yours, Henry?”

  I followed her gaze down to the main hall. To a Doric column, against which a tall man in a black vicuña coat stood staring back at us. Only one thing had changed about Halldor’s appearance since last I’d seen him: his T-shirt. The lettering was visible from thirty yards off: FREEDOM ROCKS.

  He showed no concern at being spotted. Silent as ever, he wheeled around, turned up the flaps of his coat and, in no apparent hurry, merged with the stream of traffic heading toward the Amtrak depot.

  “Styles’s man?” asked Lily.

  “Yep.”

  We watched him go.

  “Henry,” said Lily at last. “Can I give you some friendly advice?”

  By now, her second Negroni was beginning to tell. Vermouth dragged at each syllable.

  “Don’t fuck with gentleman collectors.”

  5

  A TEN-SECOND GOOGLE search was all it took. Up came the Daily Telegraph obituary:

  Cornelius Snowden, who died on December 3 aged 66, was an antiquarian bookseller and collector best known for his eccentric business practices and latterly for his dedication to the works of Elizabethan historian John Stow.

  A scant two-line reference to the circumstances of Snowden’s death (Police are still making enquiries), but I was rewarded in the second-to-last graf with a testimonial from none other than Bernard Styles.

  Cornelius’s passion for the codex was so terribly infectious and such an inspiration to so many of us. He shall be missed beyond all measure.