Crying Wolf (13 page)

Action central. The girl turned abruptly toward the door, toward him. Started to turn would be more accurate, because Freedy, so quick, was out of sight in the hall almost before the movement began.

But why? Shouldn't he have stayed where he was, let her see him? He could have delivered some line, like:
They both look pretty good to me.
How cool was that? Then:
Come in, big boy.
The college girl saying that, not the video girl. His reflexes had gotten the better of him. He was about to make up for it, to step back into the room and hit her with that line, when the door closed. Then the lock clicked. And some kind of fucking bolt slid into place. Not hard, not frantic, she hadn't spotted him, simply noticed the open door. Shut out, just like that, by seconds, or tenths of a second. Bad luck, nothing more.

But Freedy was getting tired of bad luck. Now he was in a bad mood. Idea, plan, stick, stick, stick. They made it seem so easy.

Freedy took a deep breath, a trick he'd learned from Estrella, or maybe from the other waitress, the one who worked days, and got a grip. Stick, stick, stick. Meant doing it again and again. Meant sucking it up, being a man. He knew how to do all that, had learned in high-school football. A fucking leg breaker, a Thanksgiving crackerjack. Freedy dug down deep, stuck his head into the blue-lit room.

No one there. He walked right in, on a mission now, in search of stuff and plenty of it.

The blue light came from a computer, a laptop, sitting on a desk. Dessert, but he was in a bad mood, and the joke had lost its appeal. The laptop's light illuminated another laptop—a second helping, to put it in dessert terms, but he didn't see the humor in that either—this one closed, on the adjoining desk; a sound system, but not the kind that hung on a wall; a cell phone and a regular phone; and something else, reflecting blue light in the corner. He went closer, saw that this something else was a fish tank. In the fish tank hovered a single fish, bigger than a goldfish and not gold. Some other colors—Freedy didn't really notice. What he noticed were its eyes, blue from the reflection, focused on him like it was watching. Freedy wished he had something sharp to stick right through them, but not because he was unkind to animals—he'd owned a dog, a pit bull, for a few months after his arrival in LA, and fed it practically every day. He was in a bad mood, period. Could happen to anyone.

Cheer up,
he told himself. The laptops, the cell phone: a decent night's work. Freedy walked over to the open laptop, read what was on the screen:

To: Phil. 322

From: Prof. L. Uzig

Re: Due to the late arrival of the Kaufman edition of Zarathustra, the assignment due

And other college bullshit that he would have stopped reading even if he hadn't heard a sound. A voice; distant, female. He ripped the plug out of the machine, snapped it shut, glanced out into the hall. Saw nothing, but heard footsteps, faint then less faint, on the stone stairs at the far end. He banged through the exit at his end—
Emergency Only, Alarm Will Sound,
but it didn't, the college kids disabling everything they could—and zoomed down, two, three, even four stairs at a time.

Easy for him. His body handled it; his mind was elsewhere, working on something important. If he had a problem with women, and that was debatable, it had always been getting past the first step or two in meeting a certain type. Only get past that hurdle, begin from a position already inside their lives, as he had been on the point of doing with the college girl in the yellow-lit room, then they'd see him for what he really was, a stud on the road to big success. After that, well who wouldn't jump at the chance to hook up with the CEO of a major pool corporation in Florida, maybe the entire Southeast one day? Freedy reminded himself to keep financial control out of greedy little hands, to draw up one of those agreements—prenups, there'd been an infomercial on that too—if he ever got married. Damn: he thought of everything.

Freedy's bad mood lifted just like that. Out into the night, laptop under his arm. He felt good again.

“Clever people are not credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!” Give one example, citing the U.S. president of your choice.

—Homework assignment, Philosophy 322

“Y
ou caught it?” Nat said.

“Not cleanly,” said Izzie.

Not cleanly, but she'd caught the matchbook in the dark, with the last match inside, and now a candle burned, down in the hole. Not a hole, Nat could now see, but a room, a bedroom, and as far as he could tell in the dimness, a bedroom of the kind he'd encountered only in stories set in English country houses. Grace and Izzie were sitting on a bed, a red-canopied bed like Scrooge's except that the canopy had been torn off by Izzie's fall. Nat could make out something of the intricately carved bedposts, and beyond that, darkpaneled walls and the glint of gilt-framed paintings hanging on them.

“What is this place?” he said.

“Like in that expression,” said Grace.

“Sanctum sanctorum,” said Izzie.

“Yeah,” said Grace. “Sanctum sanctorum. You joining us, Nat?”

Nat paused. There was still the problem of getting back up, of course, candle or not, a problem no one else seemed to recognize. And other problems: he had the feeling there were other problems, but couldn't think what they were.

“Just jump,” Grace said.

“It's safe,” said Izzie.

They got off the bed, Grace holding the candle, their faces tilted up at him. He hesitated. The jump itself was no big deal, not with a bed to land on. Then what was stopping him?

“What's it going to be?” Grace said, and Izzie started smiling as though she knew what was coming. “Man or Superman?”

He jumped.

A long fall, surprisingly long, maybe a bigger deal than he'd thought; a long fall, with those faces tilted up at him and the candlelight catching the gold flecks in their eyes; long enough for an odd image to pop up in his mind: Lorenzo falling out of his aquarium.

A surprisingly long fall, feet first until the thought of Lorenzo broke his concentration, and he dipped out of the perpendicular, landing on the bed, but on his back and hard. He bounced right off, out of control, and caromed into Grace, pinning her to the floor.

“Well, well,” she said.

Izzie picked up the candle, dropped by Grace, peered down at them. “Everyone all right?”

Nat got off quickly. “I'm fine.”

Grace rose more slowly. “He's heavier than he looks.”

Izzie nodded, an expression that could have meant anything on her face. Grace took the candle, held it up, gazed at what remained of the chandelier: thousands of cut-glass crystal teardrops still shimmering from the impact, and twenty or thirty fat candles like the one Grace held, set in glass holders.

“No electricity?” she said. She turned to the lamp on the bedside table, an oil lamp, Nat saw, with a chimney and a wick. He examined it, found the reservoir dry. Underneath lay a book, coated with dust; everything in the room was thick with it. Grace picked up the book, blew off the dust; she and Izzie blew it off simultaneously. A leather-bound book. With Nat and Izzie looking over her shoulder, Grace leafed through. A French book, probably a novel because of all the dialogue, but he could pick out only a few words—
fesses, jolie,
and one he didn't know,
couilles—
before a picture flashed by.

“Whoa,” said Grace, paging back to it.

The picture: a black-and-white drawing, pornographic, of a woman wearing nothing but one black stocking, in the lap of a mustached man sitting on a piano stool and wearing nothing at all, both of them gazing out at the reader in a matter-of-fact way. A second woman, fully dressed, leaned against the keyboard, gazing down at them.

Silence.

Then Grace said: “This is better.”

“To say nothing of the dress,” said Izzie.

“Better than what?” said Nat.

“
Playboy,
” said Izzie. And to Grace: “What's the pub date?”

Grace turned to the front of the book:
Mon Jardin,
published by Editions Bleues in 1919. She leafed through again, finding a few more illustrations, all featuring the mustached man with different women. “Remind you of anyone?” she said.

“Not funny,” said Izzie.

And Nat knew they were talking about Paolo. He also wondered whether on their little journey under Inverness they would keep unearthing porn. He was about to ask if anyone knew the year the college had gone coed when Izzie said, “What's that?”

“What's what?”

“Shh.”

They listened, heard nothing.

“I thought I heard something.”

But there was nothing to hear except the candle flame sizzling in a pool of wax. “I didn't hear anything,” Grace said. “And I've got better hearing.”

“Is that even possible?” Nat said.

“She does,” said Izzie.

“How do you know?”

“We know,” Grace said, closing
Mon Jardin
and putting it on the table. She moved toward the nearest wall, ran her hand over the paneling. The light shone on an ornate picture frame. They examined the painting, a nude bathing in a stream. Even in the poor light, Nat could see it wasn't very good; compared to the Renoir, not worth looking at. There were other paintings, much the same.

They came to a leather-padded door studded with brass. Grace opened it. On the other side, a much bigger room, full of shadows.

“It's like that club,” Izzie said.

“Except more lively,” said Grace. Izzie laughed.

“What club?” said Nat.

“Some old-farts club in New York we had to go to once. Just like this, the furniture, the rugs, the paintings, everything. Except for dust.”

“And the spiderwebs.”

Nat walked into one at that moment; it clung to his eyelashes. He wiped it away, and as he did noticed Greek writing high on one wall—he knew some of the letters from math—painted in gold.

“Were there fraternities here?”

“Something like that,” said Grace. “Didn't Leo mention it?”

“They kicked them out,” Izzie said. She was opening a glass cabinet full of bottles. “During Prohibition.”

Grace held the candle near the bottles, dust-free in the cabinet: scotch, bourbon, gin, rum, cognac, Armagnac, many still sealed. “This looks good,” she said, taking out a heavy, square bottle: Bas Armagnac, Domaine Boingnères, 1913. She chipped off the wax seal, found a tarnished silver corkscrew on the top shelf, drew the cork. The scent reached Nat a moment later and grew and grew: a heady smell, fiery, sweet, strange; as though France, which he'd never seen, and a long-ago time, when he'd never lived, could be kept in a bottle.

Grace tilted it to her lips, drank. “Ah,” she said, and passed it to Izzie. Then to Nat. He took a sip and decided not to romanticize too much. It was just booze, after all, the very best quality, but just booze. Then the aftertaste hit him and he changed his mind again: yes, France and a long-ago time, in a bottle. He took another drink.

“He likes it,” Izzie said. Nat saw she was watching him closely.

“What else does he like?” said Grace.

The girls looked at each other in silence, their expressions beyond his power of interpretation. But an awkward moment, certainly. Was this the time to bring everything into the open? But what was everything? He and Izzie hadn't been together alone for more than a few minutes since that one time on the beach at Aubrey's Cay. More guests had arrived the next day, and Nat had had to share his room with a banker from Singapore. And Grace had always been around. But the biggest impediment was this need for secrecy. It was almost as though that in pretending nothing was happening between them, they were making it reality. Maybe nothing
was
happening: there was lots of hooking up at Inverness, or at least some, that neither party intended to repeat, if not before it happened, then after. Were he and Izzie like that? And what about Patti? Nat realized he had to do some clear thinking, but down here in this strange place, that wasn't easy. He found himself taking another drink.

“Hey,” said Grace, “my turn.”

The bottle went round again.

“What's this?” Izzie said.

“A record player,” Nat said. He'd seen one of these before, probably at a lawn sale. Opening the top, he found a record on the turntable.
Victor,
read the label:
Caro Nome (Rigoletto—G. Verdi), sung by Amelita Galli-Curci.

“Turn it on,” Grace said.

Nat wound a crank at the back, moved a switch beside the turntable. The record began to spin. He lowered the needle onto it.

A little musical intro, almost lost in the fuzziness and scratchiness of the recording, and then came a voice, high, light, penetrating, strange, that made Nat forget about the recording quality. If anything, it made it better. The room, the drink, the music: all from a long-ago time. He'd heard of Verdi, was pretty sure that
Rigoletto
was an opera, but otherwise knew nothing, had no idea what the song was about, couldn't understand a word. Still, he stood motionless until it was over.

“Play it again,” Izzie said.

“Isn't there anything else?” said Grace.

Nat checked a compartment at the base of the player, found a bill from a record store in Albany for $4.45, dated October 6, 1919, and more records, a few by Caruso, the others by singers he'd never heard of. They played them all, Nat operating the machine while Grace and Izzie sat in high-backed purple chairs they dusted off and drew up. The candle burned down, the bottle went around and around until it was empty.

“Time travel happens,” Izzie said.

“Whenever we want,” said Grace, “if we keep this our little secret.”

“But what's it all about?” Nat said. “No one's been here in eighty years.”

“How do you know that?”

“The booze would be gone. The question is, who left it like this, and why?”

“Maybe there was an earthquake or something,” Izzie said.

“In New England?” Grace said.

“Possible, isn't it, Nat?”

“Who cares?” said Grace before he could answer; a good thing because he didn't know. “The point is we've made an amazing discovery.”

Nat found himself nodding in agreement. He didn't know exactly what the discovery was, or its implications, but he knew she was right.

“Let's try another bottle,” Grace said.

They tried another bottle, found a few more candles, lit them, put “Caro Nome” back on the turntable, explored. There were no other rooms, and just one other door, directly under the Greek writing. They opened it, saw a stone staircase, followed it up ten steps—Nat counted them for some reason—came to another leather-padded door with brass studs. “This is so much fun,” Grace said, turning the knob, “like one of those interactive-theater evenings, only for smart people.”

The leather-padded brass-studded door opened onto a brick wall.

Izzie did something then that made an indelible impression in Nat's memory. She gave the wall a push with the fingers of one hand, just a little push, as though it were a prop that would topple at the slightest touch. The bricks were real; it didn't.

There, at the top of the stone stairs, the bottle went around again. Grande Champagne Cognac, Berry Bros. & Rudd, 1908. Nat, trying to remember what furniture he'd seen, building a mental tower that would allow them to climb out of the hole in the bedroom ceiling, realized he was a little drunk.

Grace said: “I could get on your shoulders and Izzie could get on mine.”

“That's not as easy at it sounds,” Nat said.

“Let's try it,” said Izzie.

Nat smiled. There was something about her that made him smile, smile right at her in a way he didn't think he'd ever smiled at anyone else. But she didn't smile back, didn't even meet his eye for more than an instant before looking at Grace. Grace was looking at him.

Nat stopped smiling, was about to mention the furniture idea, when he felt a current of warm air flowing past his face. He glanced around, noticed a square metal grate high up in the wall opposite the bricked-in doorway. A big grate, but the wood around it was old and rotted. He got a grip on the bars and tugged. The grate came free in his hands.

Grace laughed, that excited little laugh of hers, full of pleasure. Nat took a candle, stood on his tiptoes, peered into the square hole. He felt the warm air—it fluttered the candle flame—saw down a tin-lined duct, perhaps just big enough for him to squeeze into. Standing the candle on the floor of the duct as deep in as he could reach, he pulled himself up and inside. Just big enough. He felt one of them giving him a little push from behind, heard them talking:

“Did something like this happen in those
Alien
flicks?”

“It was James Bond.”

But there was nothing frightening about this, and it didn't require courage. Nat had already spotted a little pool of light not much farther ahead. He wriggled toward it with the candle in front of him.

The light came from above. Nat reached it, squirmed over onto his back, looked up through another grate. High above he saw a dark wooden ceiling, laid out in squares and decorated with carved scrollwork and bunches of grapes. It seemed familiar. Nat was trying to place it when he heard voices. He blew out the candle.

Silence. Then footsteps approached, two sets of footsteps, Nat thought, on a hardwood floor. A foot came into view above him, and another, shod in Birkenstocks with heavy socks underneath; the Birkenstock feet walked over the grate and out of sight. Then came two more feet, these in tassel loafers. A woman said, “I only want to do the right thing.” She stepped forward, a wiry woman with long hair, gray and frizzy.

The tassel loafers stopped, planted right on the grate. Paper rustled. The woman said, “Oops,” and something fluttered down, came to rest on the grate: a hundred-dollar bill. The tassel loafers shifted slightly, and the man wearing them stooped to retrieve it. His face, his furious face, came within two feet of Nat's: Professor Uzig. He picked up the bill, thrust it at the woman. The footsteps, both sets, moved off. A heavy door opened and closed. Nat waited for a minute or two, heard nothing more, then pushed up the grate and raised himself into the ground-floor lounge of Goodrich Hall. Through the tall windows he saw the night sky, full of stars. The clock on the wall said 3:30. That wouldn't have been his guess.