Pale Betrayer

Pale Betrayer Read Free Page A

Book: Pale Betrayer Read Free
Author: Dorothy Salisbury Davis
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Steinberg said to no one in particular, simply a despairing statement of fact: “Wouldn’t you know they’d go to the laboratory, even tonight?”
    Yes, Mather thought, one would.
    “Damn you, Peter,” Louise added, but without malice. Louise was getting plump. She liked comfort and was both proud and possessive of her husband who was finally making a comfortable living as well as a reputation in physics under Bradley.
    “It won’t take long,” Bradley said. “I haven’t seen Janet in a week.
    “Eric, come look at some pictures with us. They’re Russian.”
    It was Anne Russo who said it. Her purpose, Mather thought, was to forestall his interrupting her moment with Peter. Possibly she was single-minded enough to think the pictures might actually mean something to him. Anne, studying for her doctorate with Bradley, adored him. Most of the women in his classes did. Not that he had many—Anne was the only one in graduate work—and he did his best to discourage those he had. To make it in science a woman had to be able to take discouragement. The little beasts loved Peter for giving it to them. Anne did not look like a female scientist: more the social register sort. Quite tall, she had a good body, Mather supposed, but he doubted that any of this crew was aware of it.
    “I haven’t seen a Russian picture in years. They’re much too hammy,” he said, playing the scientists’ clown. He sometimes thought it why they tolerated him, for they were snobs to the last man of them.
    He put his hand on Bradley’s shoulder. Peter was getting gray at the temples—at thirty-five—the burden of premature success. “How much of Athens did you see?”
    “The Acropolis and the Plaka, like any week-end tourist.”
    “And the Byron monument?”
    “We had a hell of a time finding it …”
    We, Mather thought. He had supposed that Bradley walking in Athens even as at home would insist upon his solitude. He did not like to think Bradley might again break that pattern in the next few minutes.
    But Bradley was true to habit. He picked up a magazine from the side-table waiting for the others to leave before him. Janet said he did much of his reading in such odd moments, able to absorb a page at a glance. And he had the remarkable faculty of doing it without giving offence, a sort of social sixth sense. As Mather reached the door and glanced back, Peter waved and called out, “We’ll talk, Eric!”
    Mather waited for a car to pass before crossing the street. There was the sound of water to the wheels’ whine over the pavement. But it was heat only. It had been too hot a day for May. He tried to think about the heat, the children playing—if you could call it play, their deadly stalking of one another among parked cars and the shattering bray of their make-believe guns. Darkness had come, the murky darkness of ill-lighted streets over which the city brightness hung, a neon-tinted nebula of smoke and fume sealing in the night below. Mather took up his self-arranged vigil beneath a street lamp and looked up at the Bradley second-floor windows. As he gave the sign to his co-conspirators who were watching—from where he did not know; he could not even be sure they were watching—the kissing of his fingertips toward the house he had left, he saw Janet in the window facing him. How extraordinary that she should be there! It brought full circle the wheel within the wheel. She abruptly turned her back so that he supposed she had seen him and taken the gesture to her own heart. Good! So much the better if something should go wrong. It was the first time he had permitted himself even fleetingly that fear. Anne Russo was with her now, shaking back her dark long hair as she spoke to Janet. Had she seen him too? He could not be sure.
    In the street directly below the windows, the three male students—Mather could not keep their names straight—were hallooing up to Anne. Steinberg joined them and the party started to move up the

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