The Ninth Score

Peter Stelver was a lover of games. When he was eight years old the names Parker and Bradley warmed his blood and rattled his brain in its pan; they moved him as the sight of Monte Carlo from the sea might goad a gambler. His relatives noted his taste, and his toy chest was racked high with bright lithographed layouts of games of skill and chance. He spent hours over them, and he didn't care whether he played with someone or alone. When his middle finger flew off the trigger of his thumb and the little brass arrow spun in a blur, he knew contentment, whether the pointer told him, when it stopped, "You Have Found the Gold Mine!" or "Go to Jail."

In due course he came to checkers, and to chess, and then to "go-maku" and "go." When he first sat down before a square-scribed "go" board and the bowlfuls of white and slate-gray counters, he was a novice-master of many games. I say he was a novice-master because I want to convey that he was good indeed, as a novice. But he did not pursue any one of the games he studied, pursue and exhaust it and truly master it. He learned it well, and went on to another one. He came to each new game in a passion of discovery, a lover trembling with incredulity (she will?), but ultimately he knew disappointment, boredom, distaste.

He had been, during all this time, approaching what he would think of as his own game, but he had not at first known that it was a game. He was twenty when he knew that it was a game, that it was an entity, and could be given a name: murder. He did not give it that name, however. When he thought of it he called it just The Game. That is its proper name.

He came upon The Game by chance, as a boy of ten. He lived in Morton, New York, a small city in the Finger Lakes, a hilly place cut by streams and gorges, wooded land. When Peter was ten he and the knot of friends with whom he moved found themselves in one of the cyclical passions of boyhood: the slingshot. They began with ordinary forked sticks and strips of old inner tube; they went on to wire handles and surgical rubber and steel ball bearings; they had two-inch slingshots that threw single bird shots in ten-second classroom skirmishes and they made what amounted to an arbalest out of a forked apple tree on the edge of an orchard: six of them tugged on each other's waists to stretch the rubbers and it threw a rock as big as a baby's head.

In time Peter and the others developed notable skill. Any one of them could kill a wren at fifty feet. They hunted in the streets, they hunted in their back yards and they went into the woods to hunt. When they had learned to sit still for long enough, they killed squirrels. The best place for squirrels was a hickory grove on the eastern rim of town, where the hills leveled off. You walked up Gregory Street, as steep as anything in San Francisco, past the college campus into Halley's Gorge, along a wide path soft with pine needles. There were two crossing places: a spidery suspension footbridge and, a couple of hundred yards above, where the gorge narrowed slightly, a downed tree, a big pine that had fallen from one bank to the other seventy-five feet above the floor of the gorge, six inches of water on bed rock. Someone had adzed a flat on the tree. It was safe for strong heads in dry weather.

The other kid's name was Benny Turek. It had been his idea to go for squirrels. He was bigger than Peter, a bit older, too, and when they came into the woods he led by natural right. He walked briskly out on the tree. Peter watched him. Afterward, when he thought about it, he realized that he had not known what he was going to do. His slingshot was in his right hand, his thumb and forefinger closed around the ball bearing in the leather pouch; he looked at a place on Benny's head, he pulled quickly, and he saw the shiny steel ball strike and carom off. Benny simply fell off the log, as he would have fallen had he lost his balance. He fell, and turned, and came in like a diver.

Peter Stelver sat down. Benny didn't move. The water lapped around him. There was a great din of sound suddenly new to Peter: the whining and whirring of a million insects, the rattle of leaves, the petulant cry of birds. Panic briefly rose in him. He sat on his heels and looked down at Benny, still and wet. After a while he got up and jogged purposefully along the path toward town.

He was not yet committed to The Game, not completely. He began to be, only began to be, days later, when he realized that not a trace of suspicion attached to him. The log bridge was tried and found guilty. It was cut and thrown into the gorge.

Peter Stelver had found The Game, as hundreds before him had done. It is a peculiarity of The Game that each player must discover the rules for himself. No one will teach him. Peter had found one rule: There must be no motive. And another: Conceal the means. These, of course, are rules for the novice. A master may improvise.

Peter thought a good deal about Benny Turek, down the years. He did not deceive himself. He did not, post factum, make an enemy of the boy. He did not theorize reasons for having killed him. He didn't suffer conscience, either.

I was a long time learning all this. I met Peter when he was twenty, in his junior year at Columbia. I had him in a chemistry section. Except that he was brilliant, there was nothing remarkable to be seen in him. He was ordinary, common in height, in build. He had a face-shaped face and hair-colored hair, one might say. So have I. I incline to the belief that most players are ordinary-looking people—most successful players, that is. I think it's a requirement, as a wrestler should have light legs, a torero narrow hips, a distance-runner a slow heart, and so on. I think that a man six feet six inches in height who attempted The Game would not last long, nor would one who was exceptionally ugly or notably good-looking. One should not stand out. Of course, this is only theory, and of my own origination. One can almost never pick out another player. Peter is the only one I've ever certainly identified. I knew a script girl in Hollywood on whom I would have bet, but I lost contact with her, and never did find out.

I had been playing for nine years and I had a score of six when Peter came into my section. There were twelve people in the section, and I hoped, as one always hopes, that one of them might be bright and two not really stupid. The sickening boredom that is inseparable from the teaching of the young is made bearable only by the occasional appearance of a first-rate mind. If one is lucky, it will be a disciplined, purposeful mind as well. In the first weeks of a new semester one does a lot of shuffling and reshuffling and holding up to the light in the hope of finding such a specimen in the grab bag. Peter Stelver was one. His mind grabbed at new ideas. He was capable of thought, even original thought. He spoke rapidly in English sentences that would parse. If this does not seem to you the description of a brilliant student, a student of the very first rank, I can say only that your knowledge of contemporary academic circles must be limited. I favored him, naturally. I talked to him over the heads of the others, often enough. One day, in the course of a dull little discourse on molecular affinities I mentioned the groupings of the pieces in the game of go. As the pieces are laid down in play, the groupings they make are often reminiscent of molecular structural diagrams. Stelver came to me after class to say that he had taught himself go but had no one with whom to play. There was a small go club at Columbia. I took him around and he began to play regularly. In a short time he was, as I have said, a strong novice, a very strong novice. We played together a good deal. I had played longer, but he had more talent, and we were of almost equal strength. Our styles were similar. We played a cold game, detached, conservative. We accepted no small hazards. We took major risks that had been long planned. It was enjoyable.

I had three sections that year, and a girl in one of them. She was one of those long-legged brown blondes they've been breeding in California for the last two or three decades. She had about as much interest in chemistry as she had in the bloodlines of the kings of Siam, but she was bright enough to cope, and she was oddly honest. When she didn't know something she would say so, but not with that fraudulent sincerity that implies, "So what, sucker?" She would say, "I don't know, and I'm sorry. I should." Then she would try to find out, and she never missed the same point twice. This made her more rare than rubies, and nearly as desirable, in my view. Moreover, she was pretty, and she moved regally, in grace and beauty. She had been reared in sunshine and athletic frenzy and it was possible to believe that she could walk nude and still be enchanting. I believed this, and I was right. Her name was Martine, her parents had had a hostile divorce and she never went home vacations. She dated students, of course, but our arrangement stipulated that I was her lover, that infidelity had to be confessed, and that a beating would be the consequence. This happened twice in the first year or so. It seemed equitable to me. I think that it takes a louse to beat a girl discovered in infidelity, but voluntary admission is license. It is more than license, it's a request.

"I came by your place last night." Peter said to me one day. "When did you get the TV set?"

"I haven't any TV set," I said. "What made you think I had?"

"It sounded like Alfred Hitchcock in there," he said. "Biff-baff, the muffled whimperings and so on."

"If you thought it was TV why didn't you knock?" I said.

"I didn't think it was TV," he said. (continued on page 66)Ninth Score(continued from page 38)

"I thought it was Martine."

"It was Martine," I said.

He snapped a white onto the board in kiru.

"You could have an accident that way," he said.

"No," I said. "Not I."

We finished the game. I won.

"Another?" I said.

He shook his head. We walked through 116th Street to Riverside Drive. There's an apartment building on the corner there that intrigues me, 440, an old building with a real porte-cochere. I made him wait for the space of a red light while I walked through it. I could imagine the hoofs clattering on the close-set bricks, the rasp of the iron carriage tires, the creaking of the harnesses. No one who heard these things is now alive, I told myself. Many died, and some were scored. Some were scored, never doubt it.

The light changed and we went across the street into the park. The air had been warm all during that May. The Jersey shore blinked with white and yellow light. It was after eleven. There were few people about.

"What I said about Martine," Peter began. "I had an accident like that one time. Something like that."

So he's a sick one, I thought, some bloody-handed sadist. "You mean she died?" I said.

"It was a boy," he said. "And the circumstances weren't the same. I wasn't beating him or anything."

"What kind of accident?" I said.

He told me.

"It wasn't an accident," I said. "You wanted to do it. That's why having done it has never bothered you. You wanted to do it."

He didn't react. That was no new idea to him.

"You've wanted to since, too," I said.

"That's right," he said.

"And?"

"Wanted to, that's all," he said. Thirty seconds later he said, "I still want to."

"Nobody's stopping you," I said.

We didn't talk about it any more that night.

• • •

The New York Times ordinarily registers the deaths in the city of a hundred-odd people a day. Most of them have come naturally to the ends of their life spans. Many are noted as having died violently, in accidents or otherwise. I believe that for the most part these statistics are correct. I think that comparatively few players score in New York. In the matter of this game, as in most others, New York is the big league. It's true that there is a lot of opportunity in New York, but there are balancing factors: a sharp police department and a functioning coroner's office. Big scores are run up in the provincial bush leagues, where post-mortem is almost unknown, and where a verdict of "heart failure" can cover anything short of a cut throat. In some states I imagine The Game is so easy as to be almost dull—almost, almost. It can never really be dull. After all, it's The Game. But in New York one can read the papers very carefully, and I do, without noticing, more than once in three months or so, an obituary that just might be a score. I kept looking for a score of Peter's.

He ordinarily kept his women to himself, but one night in June he did bring a girl, a Barnard sophomore, to a Stadium concert with Martine and me. We fed them afterward and took them home, first Martine, who lived farthest away, then his girl. Then Peter and I walked up the Drive to the church. High in the huge bell tower a slit of orange light burned in the gray stone, an apprentice carillonneur copying arrangements, or beating his blistered hands on the practice clavier, working for the leathery toughness and the blacksmith's strength. Or it might have been Lefébure himself. We sat on the grass a hundred yards away and waited for the great bells to speak. They did not. We went into the park.

"I feel much better than I did last time we were here," Peter said.

"Calmer, I suppose," I said.

"That's right," he said. "Calmer."

"The first time it happened to me," I said, "I slept for thirty-six hours. I was a freshman. This was in Chicago, in 1951. I had rented a car for a fraternity party and I took it back to the garage about one in the morning. There was one man on duty. I turned in the car and paid for it and all that. The rental place was on the fourth floor of the garage and you could drive the car up the ramp. I had left it standing where I'd got out of it, close to the elevator shaft, and I was just ready to go when I remembered I'd put a scarf behind the seat. I got in to find it and I was stuffing it into my pocket when I saw the attendant standing there in front of the empty shaft, waiting for the elevator. There was no gate or anything. He was about three feet from the edge. I put the thing in first—it was a Plymouth coupe—and hit the starter, the gas and the brake all practically together. It was just a nudge I gave him. I stopped the car two feet from the edge. I suppose he yelled, but I never heard him. I just parked the car in the farthest corner and went home. As I said, I slept for thirty-six hours."

"I suppose they asked you some questions," he said.

"Sure," I told him. "But it was no problem."

"I suppose not," he said. "Still, there was a connection, wasn't there."

Dig this supercilious son of a bitch, I told myself. I suppose there was no connection in his first score, when he knocked his buddy off the log.

"There usually is, the first time," I said.

He felt the thin edge in my voice. "Certainly there was in my first," he said. "Not in my second, though, and I suppose not in yours?"

"No," I said. "Not in the second. Not in the third."

"The fourth?"

"No, not in the fourth, the fifth, the sixth."

"The seventh?"

"I hope not."

He laughed. "You should give me a handicap," he said. "We're six to two."

"Take it up with the committee," I told him.

I could have written the next line for him. I knew what he was going to say.

"Have you ever told anyone else?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Obviously you can tell somebody else only if he's a player, and there's no way for us to pick each other out. It would spoil it all, anyway, if every player wore a red-enamel ax in his buttonhole, or shook hands with his little finger curled, like a charter member of the Noble Society of Sanskrit Speakers or something."

"The Thugs knew each other," he said.

"The Thugs were organized," I said. "Togetherness. They were fortified by conviction, held up by each other. They killed with purpose. To kill with purpose makes it pointless, don't you see? Soldiers kill with purpose, and policemen, out of duty. That's work, that's labor, that's not a game. What am I telling you all this for? If you don't know that this is a game, that it's The Game, you don't know anything. It's just the ultimate game, that's all: the highest stakes, the greatest odds. Life. You on one team, you all of one team, the population of the civilized world on the other."

"You never knew anyone else?" he said.

"Not certainly. I thought I was close, five or six years ago. A woman."

"Still there must be many."

"I saw a criminologist quoted as saying that there were twenty-thousand concealed murders a year in this country, France and England. I believe it."

We leaned on the fence and watched a tug hauling four barges upstream, imperceptibly, slowly. The barges were unladen, high in the water, they looked bigger than houses, and the line was (continued on page 148)Ninth Score(continued from page 66) taut. We could see it thin and black against the Jersey lights.

"It's odd, finding you," he said. "I suppose it's like taking a slow boat to Australia, and coming across someone, the fourth day out, with a go board under his arm."

I laughed. "Hidden," I said. "A board wrapped in newspaper, with a book on each side to hide the shape."

"Still, we did find each other," he said. "So we can play, and see who wins."

"That's usually what happens," I said. I thought we were talking about the same things. I didn't know the boy had delusions of grandeur.

I was willing to play. I wanted to make an easy score, but still I was willing to play. The next day I went to Stern's on 42nd Street and bought a pair of black silk socks. That night I put one of them inside the other. I had a stone in a bureau drawer, the size of an egg, beach-polished, a paperweight kind of stone. I put it into my pocket and went out just after midnight. I walked in the park, moving downtown. It was not a warm night. Opposite 113th Street or so I found him: an old man sitting alone on a bench. I sat down two benches away and began to look carefully around. I did this for fifteen minutes. I paid no attention to the old man. If he got up and went away, that would be too bad, but the important thing was to look. We were shielded from the street by heavy bushes. The path was straight, and I could see as far as I could be seen. I sat. I listened. After a bit I knew there was a couple on the ground forty or fifty feet to the left. Kids, they would be. I listened and followed their progress in what they were doing. They finally got up and went away. If there was anyone now within two hundred feet he was alone and lying silent as snow on the ground. I considered this, and the corollary that the old man was a decoy, a police setup against muggers. I decided against the proposition, mostly on the ground that he really was an old man, not a strong young or middle-aged cop acting like an old man. I put the stone into the toe of the doubled socks and walked briskly toward him, putting him on my right. As I came up to him I turned half away and swung, totally committing myself, just as hard as I could, tight diaphragm, breath out in a great grunt. I caught him just under the brim of his hat. I walked briskly on. I rolled the rock out into my hand and flipped it into the bushes. I wadded the socks into an empty cigarette package, ready for the first sewer grating I came to. I walked along home.

When I saw Peter next time I said to him, "Your move."

• • •

The first weekend after the fourth of July, Martine and I went to Fire Island. It was a long-standing date. The people we saw were her friends, two couples who'd taken a house for a month. It was pleasant enough. We came back early Sunday night. I was warm with soaking in the sun, surfeited, content, talked out. I drove up Broadway to 110th, pointing toward Martine's house.

"We'd better go to your place," she said.

"Why?" I said. I was surprised. I couldn't think of anything else to say.

"I have to tell you something," she said.

"Maybe it can wait," I said. "It's late. We're both tired."

"No, it can't wait," she said.

"Tell me here."

She shook her head. "You'd get arrested," she said, "beating me here."

We went to my place. When I was through with her I asked her who it had been.

"Peter Stelver," she said.

I saw him at the go club the next night. I didn't say hello.

"What's the matter?" he said.

"The television was on again last night," I said.

"Oh," he said.

"I'm waiting for you to say something more," I said.

"All right," he said, after a bit. "I'll say it. It's your move."

I thought about it for a couple of days. It would have been easy enough to take him straight off. I know ways he'd never heard of. It's laughable. Hell, I once scored with a rolled-up copy of The New Yorker. He'd know he was losing, that part would be all right. But he wouldn't know for long enough.

There was another consideration, too. One's either a novice or one's not. I'm not. The Game has certain standards. One's obliged to keep them up.

I went around to see Martine. I told her she had badly hurt me. The other two, I said, the first two, are in the past, they don't matter. Peter Stelver does matter. Let me show you what I mean, I said. I took three slips of paper from her desk. I gave one of them to her.

"Write on this," I said, "Jonathan Burry did it."

She stared at me.

"Do it!" I said.

She wrote. I read it, folded it, tore it to pieces, put them into my pocket. I gave her another slip.

"Write on this," I said, "Gale Browne did it."

She wrote and I tore it up. I gave her the third one.

"Write on this," I said, "Peter Stelver did it."

I dropped it to the floor and as she looked down, surprised, I put a handkerchief over her mouth and hit her in the chest with a short knife. I kept her from scratching me or anything.

I looked at the note. She had written it standing, holding the paper in the palm of her hand. The writing was wavy and irregular. It looked fine. I faced up to the unavoidable hazard, getting out, and made it. No one saw me. It was past six-thirty and most people were eating.

I was playing with Peter when they came for him. They were uniformed cops. He was baffled, the more so because all they would say in front of the rest of us was that they wanted to talk to him at the station house.

"You might as well run along and find out what they want," I said. I nodded toward the go board. "You've lost the game."

His eyelids flickered. I knew I had been blessed by fortune. I had seen the exact beginning of awareness in him. I walked to the door with him. I whispered in his ear.

"Never mind telling them about the fellow in the garage," I said. "It didn't happen quite that way. And not in that town. And not in that year."

After all, one's either a novice or one's not. I'm not.