Innocence

She took a moment to blink back tears, biting her lip so hard that I expected real blood to flow around the bright bead of faux blood. In spite of her emotional turmoil, she handled the Land Rover as well as ever. Finally she said, “It’s over, and you better make your peace with that.”

“Oh, are you going to the police?”

She didn’t reply.

“Three things, little mouse. One, I don’t think you can really tolerate being put in a room for questioning, to have all those big burly policemen around you, touching you. Two, the way you look and the way you are won’t give you a lot of credibility. You’re a tasty little bitch, but you’re also a freak.”

“You said three things. That’s two.”

“Three, those associates that Goddard lent to me? Now that he’s turned coward, they work for me. And you know what, little mouse, both of them are former policemen. Isn’t that interesting? They have friends in the department. Lots of friends, little mouse.”

I admired her aplomb as she said, “You can still save yourself. There’s always time to save yourself until there’s no time left.”

“Brilliant, little mouse. In addition to all your other fine qualities, you’re a philosopher. There’s always time until there’s no time left. I will write that down and study it. When I see you, maybe you can elucidate.”

“You won’t be seeing me.”

“I’ve got considerable resources, little mouse. I’m certain that I’ll find you.”

She terminated the call and returned the phone to a pocket of her coat.

She’d lost a friend in Simon. I couldn’t think of anything to say that might be consoling. Perhaps there had been a time when death was not in the world, but it was here now, with a vengeance, and it would come for us as it had come to Simon, if not this very day, then the day following, or a year from now, or in ten years. When we say “I’m sorry for your loss,” we may mean it, but we are also sorrowing for ourselves.

I said, “This one-o’clock meeting that you mentioned—it’s ten minutes to one.”

“We’re almost there.”

Initially the snow had been beautiful, but not so much now. The softness and sparkle still charmed, but the storm occluded the sky, denying us the stars. At the moment, I needed to see a firmament of stars, needed to gaze past the moon and through the constellations, needed to see what can’t be seen—infinity.

56

THE 1930S ART DECO MOVIE THEATER—THE Egyptian—had been an architectural wonder in its heyday. All these years later, abandoned and in a state of decay, the building still possessed a little magic. A suggestion of glamour remained in spite of its deteriorated facade, even in spite of the defacing graffiti, a Joseph’s coat of luminous paints. The vandalism glowed in neon shades of green and orange and yellow and blue: the initials of the perpetrators; acronyms that meant nothing to me; crudely drawn snakes and fish and zombie faces; symbols that I could not interpret but also a swastika and a crescent moon embracing a five-point star. According to Gwyneth, in the final phase of its commercial life, the Egyptian had run X-rated movies. Its marquee, which once enticed with the titles of films that later became American classics, instead boldly trumpeted titles that were crude double entendres or as blunt as SEX CRAZY. That business model had a short life, viable only until porno films became an in-home entertainment option, and these days the Egyptian was nothing more than a message board for barbarians. Now the only word on the marquee was CLOSED. Those large black letters were ominous to me. I thought a day might come when that one-word declaration would be hung across every entrance to this once-shining city fallen into ruin.

As Gwyneth parked at the curb in front of the theater, she said, “They were going to tear it down and build a hospice. But new health-care regulations—they’re a swamp, and every bureaucrat a gator.”

“Seems a strange place for a meeting.”

“They might be watching his house, so I didn’t dare go there.”

“If he’s being watched, maybe they followed him here.”

“When he was young, he had a career in the Marine Corps. He was an intelligence officer. If they tried to tail him, he’d know. He’d have called me to switch the meeting somewhere else.”

We hurried through the snow to the center pair of eight doors, which she knew would have been unlocked for this rendezvous. The lobby smelled of mold and stale urine and rancid popcorn oil so ancient that cockroaches would decline to feed upon it.

In the beam of Gwyneth’s flashlight, the golden-marble floor, inlaid with patterns of Egyptian hieroglyphics in black granite, was cracked and filthy. We might have been archaeologists who’d dug into a tomb long buried under desert sand, where the body of a pharaoh, well-cured in tannin and wrapped in linen, waited for Anubis to send its spirit back from the House of the Dead.