Innocence

“No, he didn’t. He wouldn’t. But he’s on a leash, you know, and more than he realizes. If he ever slips loose, well, then I would have to meet with him and explain the leash laws. Now that I know you’re not in a sanatorium and never have been, we should have a date. I’m very attracted to you, mousie.”

“I am not alone,” she repeated, and in the near dark, I thought but could not be certain that she was looking toward me.

“How brave you are. An orphan, hopelessly neurotic, isolated by your own neurosis, inexperienced. And yet so brave. Brave little mouse, do you ever fantasize about being filled by two men at once? Real men, I mean, not like your precious guardian.”

She terminated the call without further comment.

I expected the phone to ring at once, but it did not.

Her wineglass glimmered with candlelight as she raised it to her lips.

I said, “What are we going to do?”

“Have dinner.”

“But if he finds this place—”

“He won’t. I’ll make dinner, we’ll eat dinner, and then I’ll play the piano for you. I might even have a second glass of pinot grigio.”

The kitchen was too small to accommodate two cooks when one of them could not be touched and the other must hide his face.

I returned to the wall of windows and looked down into the street. The snow lay deep enough that tires carving through it no longer exposed the bare black pavement in their wake. The man with the German shepherd was most likely home by now.

Across the street, the three Clears were gone from the roofs on which they had stood. I wondered if they had crossed to this building. I considered sliding open a window, leaning out, and looking up for their telltale glow.

Befitting a tower meant to keep safe a priceless treasure, the windows didn’t open. When I rapped my knuckles lightly on a pane, the glass sounded unusually thick. I wondered if it might be bulletproof.

42

FATHER DEAD ONLY MINUTES, THE HAUNTED CITY shrouded in pale cascades, and no safe way to convey a corpse off the hill and through the city other than perhaps by the secret route accessible only through the great church…

The imposing Gothic facade of St. Saturnius faced onto Cathedral Avenue, and the north flank lay along East Halberg Street.

As bent as a troll and with an apelike gait, the necessity of urgent action keeping despair at bay, I carried the body of my father across my shoulders, turning left onto East Halberg.

Contiguous with the church, a high stone wall encircled three sides of the square-block property. Entrances at strategic points allowed access to the various buildings that were integrated with the wall along its perimeter. All of those ingresses featured arched openings, and above each a statuary figure stood solemn sentinel, inset in the wall. Surmounting the particular archway to which I carried my father’s body stood Saint John the Divine, whose expression of awe was that of a man who saw worlds beyond East Halberg Street.

The wall was so wide that within its uppermost eight feet ran a corridor that connected all the buildings along its perimeter. Here at the base, a seven-foot-deep vestibule lay beyond the archway, illuminated by a single bulb, and at the end of it stood a plain teak-plank door, which would be locked until just before daybreak.

As gently as possible, I lowered Father to the floor of the vestibule and arranged him sitting up with his back to a wall, hands gloved, face wrapped in a scarf. His clothes might have been stuffed with old tattered garments and threadbare towels and socks full of holes, and he a ragman from a children’s story in which he had been becharmed and had come alive and had known great adventures, until he stepped out of fiction into this world, whereupon the magic went out of him.

Sewn into the lining of his raincoat were long pockets in which he kept the gate key that allowed us to enter the library and other buildings from below and the combination hook/prybar with which we could manipulate a manhole cover with ease. These things were mine now, and they were precious to me not merely because they made it easier to move around the city but also, and most of all, because they had belonged to him.

In the center of the vestibule ceiling, a wire cage protected a light bulb. Although it was vandalism, though I regretted the damage, in the interest of survival, I worked at the wire with the prybar until I made an opening wide enough to thrust it through and shatter the bulb. Most of the broken glass remained within the cage, but a few tiny fragments sifted through the sudden darkness, thinner than eggshells, crunching underfoot as I returned to the archway and stood just inside it, gazing out at the street.