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Show •271 "Who else? What about Alice?" "Just Morgan. I wouldn't tell Alice. She's a bitch." "Why did you do it?" I said. He watched the gulls. "People kill people and it's not always crazy," he said finally. "There were private reasons. People have to do what they have to do." You have to be tough, is what I told myself while we drove back over the mountains to Marysville. Tough, rational and precise, because this is a very difficult situation. Was Carlo mad? I looked at him, slumped in the passenger seat, absorbed in his thoughts as I was in mine, oblivious to the exaggerated natural beauties all around us. Not mad like the smelly stumbling ones Father Ragni had made me look at in Butte State Hospital, that was certain. This thin handsome kid beside me was a genius, capable of the greatest things. He was walking-around mad, maybe. Touched, as they say. But by what? I remembered a passage out of Malraux's memoirs, about Paris during the second world war. Like Malraux's tortured men Carlo had been driven to his extremity, and out of his dark cellar had come not a child's scream, but a child's act: killing the father. "A little-boy fantasy, killing the father," I said to Jacob the next morning while we drove to Brady's office. |