Lawrence Block
Hope to Die
Matthew Scudder 15
This one's for JOHN B. KEANE
Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud- and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word. But, in the night of Death, Hope sees a star, and listening Love can hear the rustling of a wing.
– Robert Green Ingersoll,
at the grave of his brother,
Ebon Clark Ingersoll,
June 1879
Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
– Robert Green Ingersoll,
speaking at the
ManhattanLiberal Club,
February 1892
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author is pleased to acknowledge the considerable contribution of the Ragdale Foundation, inLake Forest, Illinois, where this book was written.
ONE
It was a perfect summer evening, the last Monday in July. The Hollanders arrived at Lincoln Center sometime between six and six-thirty. They may have met somewhere- in the plaza by the fountain, say, or in the lobby- and gone upstairs together. Byrne Hollander was a lawyer, a partner in a firm with offices in the Empire State Building, and he might have come directly from the office. Most of the men were wearing business suits, so he wouldn't have had to change.
He left his office around five, and their house was on West Seventy-fourth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, so he had time to go home first to collect his wife. They may have walked to Lincoln Center – it's half a mile, no more than a ten-minute walk. That's how Elaine and I got there, walking up from our apartment at Ninth and Fifty-seventh, but the Hollanders lived a little further away, and may not have felt like walking. They could have taken a cab, or a bus down Columbus.