The Secret History

'Why?'

He laughed. 'Well, Henry looks a bit too good to be true, doesn't he? They couldn't believe someone his age, a college student, would pay so much for a place that big and isolated, just to live all by himself and study the Twelve Great Cultures.'

'What? They thought he was some kind of a crook?'

'They thought he wasn't entirely above-board, let's put it that way. Apparently the men from the FBI thought the same thing.

They didn't think he killed Bu

They even tricked me into admitting it, though I didn't tell that to Henry. If you ask me, I think what they really thought was that he and Bu

People remembered them everywhere they went. I mean, you know Henry, that's just the way he is but you have to look at it from their point of view. That illness of his must've looked pretty suspicious, too. Wiring a doctor in the States for Demerol. Plus those tickets to South America. Putting them on his credit card was about the stupidest thing he ever did.'

They found out about that?' I said, horrified.

'Certainly. When they suspect somebody is dealing drugs, the financial records are the first thing they check – and good God, of all places, South America. Luckily Henry's dad really does own some property down there. Henry was able to cook up something fairly plausible – not that they believed him; it was more a matter of their not being able to disprove it.'

'But I don't understand where they got this stuff about drugs.'

'Imagine how it looked to them. On one hand, there was Cloke. The police knew he was dealing drugs on a pretty substantial scale; they also figured he was probably the middleman for somebody a lot bigger. There was no obvious co

And during those last months Bu

Henry just looks suspicious. The way he acts. Even the way he dresses. He looks like one of those guys with horn-rimmed glasses and armbands in a gangster movie, you know, the one who cooks the books for Al Capone or something.' He lit another cigarette. 'Do you remember the night before they found Bu

'Yes.'

That was one of the worst nights of my life. It looked pretty bad for both of us. Henry was almost sure he was going to be arrested the next day.'

I was so appalled that for a moment I couldn't speak. 'Why, for God's sake?' I said at last.

He drew deeply on his cigarette. The FBI men came to see him that afternoon,' he said. 'Not long after they'd taken Cloke into custody. They told Henry they had enough probable cause to arrest half a dozen people, including himself, either for conspiracy or withholding evidence.'

'Christ!' I said, dumbfounded. 'Haifa dozen people? Who?'

'I don't know exactly. They might've been bluffing but Henry was worried sick. He warned me they'd probably be coming over to my place and I just had to get out of there, I couldn't sit around waiting for them. He made me promise not to tell you. Even Camilla didn't know.'

There was a long pause.

'But they didn't arrest you,' I said.

Charles laughed. I noticed that his hands still shook a little. 'I think we have dear old Hampden College to thank for that,' he said. 'Of course, a lot of the stuff didn't tie up; they figured that out from talking to Cloke. But still they knew they weren't getting the truth and they probably would've kept after it if the college had been a little more cooperative. Once Bu

Too much bad publicity. Freshman applications had gone down something like twenty percent. And the town police – whose business it was, really – are very cooperative about such things.

Cloke was in a lot of trouble, you know – some of that drug stuff was serious, they could've thrown him in jail. But he got off with academic probation and fifty hours of community service. It didn't even go on his school record.'

It took me some moments to digest this. Cars and trucks whooshed past.

After a while Charles laughed again. 'It's fu

'It doesn't matter. It's over now.'

'No thanks to him. I was the one who had to deal with the police. He takes the credit, but it was me who actually had to sit around that goddamned station all hours drinking coffee and trying to make them like me, you know, trying to convince them we were all just a bunch of regular kids. Same with the FBI, and that was even worse. Being the front for everybody, you know, always on guard, having to say exactly the right thing and doing my best to size up things from their point of view, and you had to hit exactly the right note with these people, too, you couldn't drop it for a second, trying to be all communicative and open yet concerned, too, you know, and at the same time not at all nervous, though I could hardly pick up a cup without being afraid of spilling it and a couple of times I was so panicky I thought I was just going to black out or break down or something. Do you know how hard that was? Do you think Henry would lower himself to do something like that? No. It was all right, of course, for me to do it but he couldn't be bothered. Those people had never seen anything like Henry in their lives. Ill tell you the sort of thing he worried about. Like if he was carrying around the right book, if Homer would make a better impression than Thomas Aquinas. He was like something from another planet. If he was the only one they'd had to deal with he would have landed us all in the gas chamber.'

A lumber truck rattled past.

'Good God,' I finally said. I was quite shaken. 'I'm glad I didn't know.'

He shrugged. 'Well, you're right. It all came out okay. But I still don't like the way he tries to lord it over me.'

We walked for a long time without saying anything.

'Do you know where you're going to spend the summer?' said Charles.

'I haven't thought about it much,' I said. I hadn't heard anything about the situation in Brooklyn, which tended to make me think it had fallen through.

'I'm going to Boston,' Charles said. 'Francis's great-aunt has an apartment on Marlborough Street. Just a few doors from the Public Garden. She goes to the country in the summer and Francis said if I wanted to stay there, I could.'

'Sounds nice.'

'It's a big place. If you wanted, you could come too.'

'Maybe.'

'You'd like it. Francis will be in New York but he'll come up sometimes. Have you ever been to Boston?'

'No.'

'We'll go to the Gardner Museum. And the piano bar at the Ritz.'

He was telling me about a museum they had at Harvard, some place where they had a million different flowers all made of colored glass, when all of a sudden, with alarming swiftness, a yellow Volkswagen swooped from the opposite lane and ground to a stop beside us.

It was Judy Poovey's friend Tracy. She rolled down her window and gave us a brilliant smile. 'Hi, guys,' she said. 'Want a ride?'