Innocence: A Novel (25 page)

The street reminded me of one of those winter paintings by Thomas Kinkade, charming houses and cobbled walkways and evergreens draped with snow as glamorous as bejeweled ermine, the whole infused with warm light expressed in unexpected but convincing ways. The scene was steeped in magic, but magic has two forms—light and dark.

From a pocket of her coat, Gwyneth withdrew a small can of Mace and handed it to me. From another pocket, she took her close-contact Taser.

We crossed the street and passed through the narrow side yard of the dark bungalow next door to Simon’s, into that backyard. A stately monastic evergreen of some kind rose to sixty feet, providing us with a shadowed and sheltered observation point under the hood and habit of its snow-laden boughs.

Simon’s house lay quiet in the white downpour, plucked by this weaker and fitful wind but unmoved, so snug that it seemed to welcome drifts that might bury it and insulate it further from the world. No shadows moved beyond the lighted windows.

The only strangeness was a pale fan of light that repeatedly arced wide and then contracted across the back porch, irregular in its timing, not accompanied by any sound. When we moved out from the tree, toward the low garden wall that separated the properties, we saw that the light came from the house and that it was measured out by an open door, which again and again eased almost shut only to be blown open each time by the changeable wind.

“Not good,” Gwyneth said.

We crossed the garden wall, the yard, and ascended the steps with a wary urgency. On the porch, we heard a voice inside, but it was that of an announcer backed by music and must have come from a television.

With her usual daring, Gwyneth crossed the threshold. Although the only two residences I had ever entered in the city were both hers, and although this bungalow felt like a trap, I followed her without hesitation.

“Close the door,” she whispered.

I wondered if that would prove wise, but I closed it quietly.

We were in an open space, with a small kitchen to the left and to the right a larger area that might have been intended as a family room. Simon evidently lived largely in this back section of the bungalow, for it was furnished with a bed, two armchairs with small tables, an old chifforobe, and a wall-mounted TV currently tuned to a news program. These quarters were nearly as modest as my three rooms, but I supposed that to a man who had lived on the streets and who had slept under bridges for thirty years, the accommodations seemed palatial.

On the TV, an enormous cruise ship lay at anchor near the mouth of a harbor, and the newsreader said something about the authorities denying the captain the right to dock.

Far beneath the city, under countless tons of concrete and steel, radio waves or microwaves could not be received. During my adventures aboveground, every time I had a glimpse of television, it intrigued me. I always reminded myself, however, that Father said we were better off without TV, that it was an instrument of change that could make us into people we would not like to be.

My mother had no television in her remote house, and yet she had become less than she wanted to be. Perhaps she watched a lot of TV as a child in her parents’ home and everywhere else that she lived before she had gone to the mountain house. There was so much that I didn’t know, that I might never know, and many things that I didn’t understand about the psychology of those people who lived their lives openly aboveground.

Anyway, Simon’s quarters were essentially a studio apartment, which he kept spotless. No grime. No dust. As a consequence, the broken vase and the smear of blood on the blond-wood floor were the visual equivalent of a shout.

SHE WAS A GIRL WHO OPENED DOORS, NOT BECAUSE
she wanted to open them, but because she knew that she needed to open them.

The chocolate-brown paneled door between Simon’s living quarters and the other rooms of the bungalow seemed like a monolith to me, a formidable slab beyond which lay something to be feared, either past or future violence. If the choice had been mine, I might have left right then; but the decision was Gwyneth’s.

The door opened to a short hallway. To the left were a bath and a room used for storage, both doors open and lights softly aglow. To the right lay the studio in which Simon created his works. No one, dead or alive, waited for us in those spaces.

At the end of the hall, we entered a gallery that had once been two rooms. Fixed to the rafters of the open-beam ceiling, pin spots brightened walls that were enriched by oil paintings that astonished and amazed, appealing equally to emotion and intellect. He excelled at figurative painting, both portraits of single individuals shown from head to foot and groups of people engaged in communal activities in a variety of exquisitely detailed and rendered locations.

Gwyneth said, “They’ve taken him.”

“Where?”

“Not to Telford’s apartment, not anywhere they would be seen with him. They think they can carve out of him the address of my ninth apartment.”

“You said he doesn’t know where it is.”

“He doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t even know it exists.”

“What can he tell them?”

“Nothing. And even if he knew, he wouldn’t tell them. Clearly, he didn’t tell them I was coming here to take him someplace safe, or they would just have waited for us.”

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

For a moment forgetting the terms of our relationship, she looked
at me, and an instant before our eyes met, I bowed my head, not willing to trust that my ski mask would be sufficient to ensure against her sudden and vehement rejection.

She switched off the pin spots, leaving the gallery faintly illuminated by the inspill of hallway light, and she went to a window to stare out at the snowy night.

Although I didn’t know Simon except through Gwyneth and through his stunning paintings on the surrounding walls, I felt we must do something. I repeated my question: “What will happen to him?”

“They’ll torture him, Addison. And when he gives them nothing, they’ll have to kill him.”

“All just to get to you?”

“I told you, Telford has stolen millions. And there are many millions more to steal from the warehoused collections of the museum and the library, items that won’t be missed for years, especially considering that Telford controls the inventory logs. And he alone decides what paintings, sculptures, rare books, and illuminated manuscripts will be taken out of storage to be featured in special shows. So he won’t be caught easily, as he might be if someone else had that power.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. I was a creature from the deep dark, an outsider who had known but one friend, Father, in the past eighteen years, and no friend at all since he died. I had thought that, with Gwyneth, in spite of her social phobia, I was learning how people were with one another, how they acted and reacted and interacted, what they said and how they said it, what they wanted, what they hoped for—more than I could learn from books alone. I thought that I might eventually discover, through her, how people arrived, if they ever did, at an understanding of the
why
of their lives, because the why of mine weighed heavily on me and seemed unanswerable.
But if I had learned anything in the past twenty-four hours, it wasn’t knowledge that I yet understood how to use. I didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t know. I just didn’t.

I couldn’t hear her crying. She stood there as quiet as the snow falling in the light of the streetlamps, yet I was certain that she wept. Tears had no scent, as far as I knew, but my five senses were not the instruments by which I became aware of her grief, nor was it merely intuition, but instead a perception more profound, one that I couldn’t name.

If I had been allowed to touch this sweet girl, I would have put my arms around her. In her current mood, however, with her emotions raw, she might not just recoil from a touch, but might instead fling herself away from it as if she’d taken an electric shock. And then my violation of the rules surely would have opened a gulf between us that could not be bridged.

She turned from the windows, crossed the gallery. “Come on.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

I hurried after her along the hallway. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know.”

We left the rest of the lights on, the television as well, and we stepped out of the kitchen onto the back porch as the network newsreader said, “—to our reporter Jeffrey Stockwell in Mumbai, India.”

If possible, the snow fell heavier than before, as if the sky were emptying itself, so that when the last clouds shed all their substance, there would be nothing above us but blackness, no moon or stars, no sun in the morning. Right now, all was erratic wind and whirling snow, a beautiful chaos.

As we approached the Land Rover, Gwyneth said, “Death is here tonight. Not just with Simon. Death is with us. Do you feel him?”

I didn’t answer, because the answer wouldn’t have heartened her.

Once again, after six years, I had something to lose, and my fear was great.

THE NIGHT OF LIGHTNING, THE SKY ON FIRE, WHEN
we stood exposed and survived …

During our time together, Father and I explored the city in many fierce storms, not just the one in which a dying man gave me a gold watch. On a night in July, in my sixteenth year, the heavens opened to release a sea, and we went abroad in our high boots, black hooded raincoats, and ski masks. We splashed through torrents and across flooded streets, as if we were mariners washed overboard but, by some sorcery, able to walk on water in search of our ship.

We stood in the great park, which the city surrounded, and all that would be warm and green under the sun was cold and black. The lamplight along the winding walkways silvered the rain and the faint low mist created when the droplets dashed themselves apart on the pavement. Those serpentine paths withered away past shrubs and trees, milky and vaporous before they turned out of sight. On that night, the pathways seemed mysterious and promised to lead to a revelation, but we knew them to their fullest lengths, and they did not lead anywhere except elsewhere in the park.

So near that the crash of thunder came simultaneously, a great blazing bolt of lightning sheared the sky above the mown meadow in
which we stood, angled eastward, and struck the spire—which was a lightning rod—on the roof of a high-rise across the street from the park. The thousand lights of the building fluttered but did not go out, and I was certain that for a moment the spire had glowed red.

I was very afraid and wanted to take shelter, but Father assured me that we wouldn’t be taken by lightning, that no storm would finish us. If we were to die short of old age, the killing blows would come from weapons wielded by the hands of our fellow citizens. Although I did not believe that we enjoyed any dispensation from Nature’s rage, I reined in my fear as best I could and stood beside him, trusting in his wisdom.

The black shell of the sky cracked again and again, and some of the fissures zigzagged toward farther targets that we couldn’t see, while others seemed to leap from point to point in the heavens, as if there were gods who warred with one another.

Between cannonades of thunder, Father spoke of the power of nature: each storm bolt as hot as the molten sun, earthquakes that brought down buildings as if they were as fragile as termite mounds, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis. “Nature is an exquisite machine that is never violent except when contending forces within it need to be rebalanced. And then the violence is nearly always short-lived, a day or two of storm, ten minutes of tsunami, a minute for tectonic plates to shift and accommodate each other. Nature doesn’t make war for years on end, and she has no malice.”

Humankind, on the other hand … Well, that was a darker story. Adam and Eve, he said, hadn’t sought forbidden knowledge so much as they sought power, the power to be as gods. Great power could be a beautiful thing when men and women who had it were inclined to use it wisely and with kindness. But few were so inclined. When a
leader used his power over the ruled for the purpose of settling scores and inflating his self-esteem, for remaking society according to his own grand designs, class warfare and genocide ensued.

I didn’t know his purpose in telling me this, and as I started to ask his meaning, one of the last bolts of the fierce display split a giant oak a hundred feet from us. Flames spurted out of the cleaved trunk, as if the core of the tree had always been molten but contained. Half the oak pulled up steaming roots and toppled, but the other half stood defiant, and the deluge quickly put out the fire.

When the pyrotechnics concluded and the sky brought forth only rain, Father said, “When men in power decide that things need to be rebalanced at any cost, the violence is never brief and never really directed solely at the imbalance that supposedly inspired it. The rule of law becomes the rule of violence. Revenge becomes a synonym for justice. No city is safe from such horror, no nation, no time in all of history. Be ready to recognize the moment. Be always ready.”

I had many questions for him, but he would not answer them. He was finished with the subject, which clearly distressed him. He never spoke of it again in the remaining four years that we were together.

Whenever I looked back on that night and considered what Father had said, I sometimes thought he knew or suspected something that he was loath to share even with me. Perhaps in a dream or in a moment of clarity close to clairvoyance, he had discerned the shape of things to come, and had been in awe of the supreme grandness or the terrible power of those events, to the extent that he could not speak of them, but only hope that he had not in fact seen clearly.

GWYNETH PILOTED THE LAND ROVER AS IF SHE WERE
a Valkyrie, from Viking lore, whose wings had been clipped, as if she needed urgently to find the fallen warrior assigned to her before he died and, in the moment when his soul emerged from his body,
drive
his spirit to Valhalla. Earlier she had seemed reckless behind the wheel. But now, though she drove faster and took corners more sharply than before, she seemed not heedless and not even imprudent, but shrewd, as if she knew where she was going and why, though her route seemed random as she sometimes doubled back upon it.