The Secret History

'Well, I don't know who wrote this,' said Francis at last, his tone offhand and perfectly casual, 'but whoever they were, they certainly couldn't spell.'

Julian laughed. I knew he didn't have the slightest idea that the letter was real.

Francis took the letter and shuffled ruminatively through the pages. He stopped at the next-to-last sheet – which was of a slightly different color than the rest – and idly turned it over. 'It seems that -' he said, and then stopped.

'Seems that what?' said Julian pleasantly.

There was a slight pause before Francis continued. 'Seems that whoever wrote this needed a new typewriter ribbon,' he said; but that was not what he was thinking, or I was thinking, or what he had been about to say. That had been struck from his mind when, turning the irregular sheet over, the two of us saw, with horror, what was on the back of it. It was a sheet of hotel stationery, engraved, at the top, with the address and letterhead of the Excelsior: the hotel where Bu

Henry told us, later, head in hands, that Bu

I tried not to look at it, but it kept obtruding at the corners of my vision. A palace, drawn in blue ink, with flowing script like the script on an Italian menu. Blue edges on the paper.

Unmistakable.

'To tell you the truth,' said Julian, 'I didn't even finish reading it. Obviously the perpetrator of this is quite disturbed. One can't say, of course, but I think it must have been written by another student, don't you?'

'I can't imagine that a member of the faculty would write something like this, if that's what you mean,' said Francis, turning the letterhead back over. We didn't look at each other. I knew exactly what he was thinking: how can we steal this page? how can we get it away?

To distract Julian's attention, I walked to the window. 'It's a beautiful day, isn't it?' I said, my back to both of them. 'It's hard to believe there was snow on the ground hardly a month ago…'

I babbled on, hardly aware of what I was saying, and afraid to look around.

'Yes,' said Julian politely, 'yes, it is lovely out,' but his voice came not from where I was expecting it but farther away, near the bookcase. I turned and saw that he was putting on his coat.

From the look on Francis's face, I knew he hadn't succeeded. He was turned halfway, watching Julian from the corner of his eye; for a moment, when Julian turned his head to cough, it seemed like he was going to be able to get away with it but no sooner had he pulled the page out than Julian turned around, and he had no choice but to casually place it where it had been, as if the pages were out of order and he was simply rearranging them.

Julian smiled at us, by the door. 'Are you boys ready?' he said.

'Certainly,' said Francis, with more enthusiasm than I knew he felt. He laid the letter, folded, back on the table and the two of us followed him out, smiling and talking, though I could see the tension in the back of Francis's shoulders and I was biting the inside of my bottom lip with frustration.

It was a miserable lunch. I remember hardly anything about it except that it was a very bright day, and we sat at a table too close to the window, and the glare in my eyes only increased my confusion and discomfort. And all the time we talked about the letter, the letter, the letter. Might whoever sent it have a grudge against Julian? Or was someone angry at us? Francis was more composed than me, but he was downing the glasses of house wine one after another, and a light sweat had broken out on his forehead.

Julian thought the letter was a fake. That was obvious. But if he saw the letterhead, the game was up, because he knew as well as we did that Bu

But even assuming he left it there, in a place where we could find it, that meant waiting six or seven hours.

I drank a good deal during lunch, but by the time we were finished I was still so nervous that I had brandy with my dessert instead of coffee. Twice, Francis slipped away to telephone. I knew he was trying to get Henry, to ask him to go over to the office and nip the letter while we had Julian captive at the Brasserie; I knew also, from his tense smiles when he returned, that he wasn't having any luck. After the second time he came back, an idea occurred to me: if he could leave to telephone, why couldn't he just go out the back and get in his car and go get it himself? I would have slipped out and done it myself if I had only had the car keys. Too late – as Francis was paying the check – I realized what I should have said: that I'd left something in the car and needed the keys to go unlock the door and get it.

On the way back to school, in the charged silence, I realized that something we had always relied on was the ability to communicate whenever we wanted. Always, previously, in an emergency we could throw out something in Greek, under the guise of an aphorism or quotation. But now that was impossible.

Julian didn't invite us back up to his office. We watched him going up the walk, waved as he turned at the back door to the Lyceum. It was, by now, about one-thirty in the afternoon.

We sat motionless in the car for a moment after he disappeared.

Francis's chummy, goodbye smile had died on his face. Suddenly, and with a violence that frightened me, he leaned down and banged his forehead on the steering wheel. 'Shit!' he yelled. 'Shit!

Shit!'

I grabbed his arm and shook it. 'Shut up,' I said.

'Oh, shit,' he wailed, rolling his head back, the heels of his hands pressed to his temples. 'Shit. This is it, Richard.'

'Shut up.'

'It's over. We've had it. We're going to jail.'

'Shut up,' 1 said again. His panic, oddly, had sobered me.

'We've got to figure out what to do.'

'Look,' said Francis. 'Let's just go. If we leave now we can be in Montreal by dark. Nobody will ever find us.'

'You're not making any sense.'

'We'll stay in Montreal a couple of days. Sell the car. Then take the bus to, I don't know, Saskatchewan or something. We'll go to the weirdest place we can find.'

'Francis, I wish you would calm down for a minute. I think we can handle this.'

'What are we going to do?'

'Well, first, I think, we've got to find Henry.'

'Henry?' He looked at me in amazement. 'What makes you think he'll be any help? He's so whacked-out, he doesn't know which way -'

'Doesn't he have a key to Julian's office?'

He was quiet a moment. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I think he does.

Or he used to.'

'There you go,' I said. 'We'll find Henry and drive him over here. He can make some excuse to get Julian out of the office.

Then one of us can slip up the back stairs with the key.'

It was a good plan. The only problem was, ru