Innocence: A Novel (19 page)

The elevator opened, revealing a vestibule. The formidable steel door
between that small space and the rest of the apartment could be unlocked only by entering a four-digit code and the star sign into a keypad.

I said, “Such heavy security.”

“I’m embarrassed to tell you, but Daddy called me a priceless treasure. This is my vault.”

In the living room, she switched on a lamp and then went to set out candles, in the light of which I would be more comfortable. The room was nearly as minimally furnished as the one in the apartment where we had eaten scrambled eggs and brioche, except that this one contained a grand piano.

At the wall of windows, I discovered three Clears on the roofs of the two buildings across the street, a woman and two men, glowing softly. The falling snow, all of it vaguely luminous as it reflected the ambient light of the city, was brighter in their vicinity, but it appeared to pass through them, and it wove no lace mantillas in their hair. One of the men gazed into the sky, and the other two peered down into the street along which we had recently arrived.

The heavens offered nothing but the sea of snow. In the street, on the farther sidewalk, a man bent into the wind, two lengths of his long scarf trailing behind him as if he were a walking weather vane. Also trailing behind him on a leash was a German shepherd, judging by its deep chest, straight back, and sloping hindquarters.

As they passed out of shadow and under a lamppost, the shepherd raised its bowed head and turned its face out of the wind-driven snow to look up as if suddenly aware of me at the window high above, its eyes radiant in the lamplight. I didn’t step back from the glass. The Fogs may take tenancy in bad people and sleep dreaming in certain objects, but I have reason to trust dogs.

In the living room behind me, Gwyneth finished strategically placing candles in ruby-glass cups and turned off the lamp.

She said, “I’ve put a glass of pinot grigio on a coaster on the piano. You do drink wine?”

Turning away from the window, I said, “Father and I would from time to time have a glass or even two.”

“I want to hear all about your father.”

Not ready to open that door yet, I said, “And I want to hear all about you.”

“There’s not that much to me.”

The most that I could clearly see of her in the lambent ruby glow of isolated votives was her right hand as it gripped a wineglass, in the bowl of which glimmered the reflection of a nearby flame.

“For every small thing I’ve learned about you,” I said, “I’m sure there are a thousand things of greater importance.”

“You are a hopeless romantic.”

“For instance, do you play the piano?”

“I play and I compose.”

“Will you play something for me?”

“After dinner. Music is a better brandy than it is an aperitif.”

Her cell phone rang, and she fished it from a jacket pocket.

The ring tone was a bar or two of lovely music, but somehow I knew that the call was bad news.

SIX YEARS EARLIER, IN ANOTHER NIGHT OF HEAVY
snow …

The windows of the performing-arts center and the museum were
blind dark, and to the south the towers of St. Saturnius thrust high into a night that had become as Gothic as their finials, crockets, spires, and belfries.

Kneeling beside my father, I looked into his ruined face, that I might always remember how cruel had been his martyrdom and what he had endured to save me. One of his eyes was lost beneath a pool of blood, the socket like a cup and, in that light, the blood as dark as cabernet.

I half expected cathedral bells to ring out across the city in memoriam, a carillon of joyous bells that said
Someone is free at last
, and simultaneously a monody of heavy bells, iron bells, as solemn as those rung for heroes and for statesmen, bells that said
He is gone who was much loved
. But the night was empty of all bells. There were no bells for such as us, no funerals, no crowd of mourners around our graves.

The distraught policemen might return at any moment. Although in part motivated by regret, they were likely to repeat with me the violence visited upon my father.

After rolling up the ski mask that he had taken off and putting it in a pocket of my coat, I slipped the scarf from his neck. I wound that length of wool around his head, covering his face, and secured it with the hood, which I tied beneath his chin, cinching up his sagging, broken jaw.

Snow fell so heavily now through the windless night that, from this midpoint of the block, I couldn’t see past either corner. The strike by workers in the Street and Sanitation Department had led to the deserted avenues that enticed us aboveground for a night of play, and now the same strike all but ensured that, here atop the most treacherous slopes in the metropolis, hours past midnight, no one would happen upon me in the next few minutes.

Cathedral Hill was the highest point in the city, which meant the
drains were the smallest, because no higher culverts existed to feed them. I could not bring Father’s body at once down into our world below the street, for there was no entrance here to a tunnel large enough to accommodate us.

I had only two options, but I didn’t like the first. I could drag or carry the body through one of the long, steep streets that led down from this high plateau, block after block, until I reached a largely horizontal neighborhood that would offer entrances to storm drains through which I could travel upright. Even in this feathery downpour, with visibility diminished, the longer that I stayed aboveground, the more likely that I would be seen either by the returning policemen or others. Besides, I could not carry Father that far, not in snow halfway to my knees, and I was loath to drag him, as a hunter might drag a deer carcass from the woods.

My second option was St. Saturnius. In the full block occupied by the cathedral complex, there were associated buildings, including not just the archbishop’s residence and the offices of the diocese, but also a monastery with chapter house, refectory, and a cloister surrounding a garden. There was a secret passage off the great hill, but to access it, I had to get Father into St. Saturnius.

Already in those days, and in fact years earlier, churches were locked tight after vespers or any lay activity that might be the last meeting of the day. Previously, they had been open around the clock, and any troubled soul was free to enter and sit or kneel alone. But for a few decades, an unsecured church door in the night had been an invitation to vandalism and to desecration of the altar; such was the modern world.

The various entrances to the cathedral complex were unlocked at daybreak, and I knew of a place where I might remain concealed from anyone on the street until I could gain access. I was twenty and very
strong, but my resources were tested as I got the body across my shoulders and carried it toward St. Saturnius.

To take my father to his final resting place, soon after first light, I would have to carry him into the realm of the dead, and then down into deeper places.

THE VOTIVE ON THE PIANO HAD A THICK CLEAR-GLASS
base and a ruby-red bowl the size of a teacup. In the high-gloss black finish of the Steinway, a halo of reddish light darker than blood surrounded the glass, shimmering in the lacquered ebony, as if it were a faint fire burning underwater.

My sense that the call might be bad news must have been matched by Gwyneth’s intuition, because she set her cell phone on speaker mode before she said, “Hello,” so that I could be witness to whatever conversation might ensue.

During the chase in the library the previous night, I’d heard Ryan Telford shout only a few words at her. Although I didn’t recognize his voice, I knew that he was the caller because of what he said.

“I was led to believe that you were in a sanatorium following your father’s untimely passing, some ultra-expensive asylum, hiding under the bed and sucking your thumb, mute and beyond curing.”

In the nearly dark room, I stood by the keyboard, and she stood at the heel of the piano, which was a safe though not great distance, but the light of the cell-phone screen was insufficient to reveal her expression.

She said nothing, and after a moment, Telford said, “You’re a neurotic little mouse. Afraid of people, geeked up in Goth, scurrying from one little-mouse nest to another, but delicious in your way.”

“Murderer,” she said calmly.

“What a twisted imagination you have, little mouse. You probably also imagine that more than one of your sad little nests have been visited by a pest-control expert, and that all eight will soon be.”

Again, Gwyneth chose silence.

Telford said, “My current business model requires a partner. Did you know? He’s as disappointed in the recent turn of events as I am. Too bad you don’t have a partner, little mouse. It grieves me that you’re alone in this cruel world.”

“I’m not alone,” she said.

“Ah, yes, your guardian. But he’s not reliable anymore.”

“He didn’t give you this number or those addresses.”

“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.

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.

I had never known such stillness in the city. Stripped of wind, the unseen sky quietly shed insulation, as if trillions of cold dead stars, severely shrunken in their dying, descended now and brought with them the perfect silence of interstellar space. The eerie hush raised a dread in my heart that I couldn’t name. East Halberg was a wide, white, timeless sward, and I could almost believe that before me lay a vision of a distant era when the city still stood, but when its streets and plazas and parks were drifted over with the finely powdered bones of its former inhabitants.