Innocence: A Novel (28 page)

“Worried you—why?”

We arrived at the traffic roundabout in Washington Square, where atop a plinth, the first president and legendary warrior sat on his horse, his stone face solemn, as though he issued a challenge to the city, if not to the world, a call to rise to his vision of truth and liberty and honor. Three Clears in hospital whites stood around the statue, looking for whatever it is they seek, waiting for whatever it is they anticipate.

Gwyneth drove three-quarters of the way around the circle before taking one of the avenues that radiated from it. A first-pass plow had cast the snow from the street onto parked cars, which by morning
would be so buried that they would look like a series of igloos along the curb.

Throughout these two nights together, I had feared that if I pressured her too much to reveal her secrets, I would trigger her social phobia, that she would retreat from me or even terminate our friendship. But now I knew that her life and mine shared points of intersection long before we met, beginning in fact on the night she was born. In light of that puzzling discovery, I resolved to press her a bit more insistently.

“Why are you worried about the last two marionettes?”

“I’m not as worried as I was. We have an appointment at one o’clock. We can’t be late.”

“Appointment with whom?”

“You’ll see.”

I returned to the more essential matter: “Why are you worried about the marionettes?”

She hesitated but did not resort again to silence. “Over time, after to some extent I adopted their image, I gradually came to realize … I’d made them aware of me.”

“Aware of you?”

“Yes.”

“The six?”

“I know what I feel, and I know it’s true. But you don’t have to think it makes sense, that’s okay.”

Perhaps right then was the moment to tell her about the Fogs, the Clears, the music box with mismatched dancers, and my conviction that the marionette in the shop window had been aware of me, too. I almost followed that impulse, but then I said instead, “What is there to fear from toys?”

“They were never toys.”

“All right. But what is there to fear from puppets?”

“I don’t know what, and I don’t want to find out.”

The wind found its strength again and hurled the snow at us so furiously that the flakes, smaller now, ticked faintly against the windshield, as if by virtue of their numbers and persistence, they would pit the glass and eventually dissolve it, so that the storm could claim the interior of the Rover and us, as it had claimed the city’s streets.

A thought occurred to me, and I shared it with her. “Earlier, when we were having dinner. The rapping. In the attic.”

“Air in the water pipes.”

“Are there water pipes in an attic?”

“There must be.”

“Have you gone up there to look?”

“No.”

“Is there a way from your apartment into the attic?”

“A trapdoor in a closet. But it’s held shut with two thick bolt latches, and it’s going to stay that way.”

“If you want, I’ll go up there and look.”

She said calmly but firmly, “No. I’m not going up there, you’re not going up there, no one’s going up there tonight, tomorrow night, or ever.”

FOR A BLOCK OR MORE, I LISTENED TO THE METRONOMIC
thump-thump of the windshield wipers, which nearly matched the resting pace of my heart, and I listened to the wind, which at
times shook the Rover as if to get our attention and compel us to understand what it was striving to communicate with its keening, huffing, and quarrelsome blustering.

Although I counseled myself to let her answer it in her own time, I could not help but ask again the question that she had sidestepped. “When you turned thirteen, why did you use the marionette as inspiration for your Goth transformation?”

“I was timid, and I wanted to look tough. I wanted to look edgy. I was afraid of people, and I thought the best way to keep them at a distance might be to act a little scary.”

Although what she said seemed to be explanation enough, I sensed that she had given me only a partial answer.

She must have known what I was thinking, because she elaborated, though the added words were a continuing evasion. “After I realized that I’d made them aware of me, I could have changed my appearance, gone to some other Goth look. But I knew by then, it wouldn’t matter. They were already aware of me, and they wouldn’t forget me merely because I no longer resembled them. I had opened a door that could never be closed again. I guess now you’re convinced I’m kind of crazy.”

“Not as much as you might think.”

Her cell phone rang. She fished it from a pocket, glanced at the screen, put it on
SPEAKER
, but said nothing.

For a moment, the line spat out static, but then Telford said, “I know you’re there, little mouse.”

“Let me talk to Simon.”

Telford pretended to be confused. “Simon? Simon who?”

“Put him on the phone.”

“You want me to put someone named Simon on the phone?”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“You may be right about that.”

“I saw Goddard tonight,” she said.

“What a loser.”

“Goddard knows it’s over. There’s no point to what you’re doing. It’s over.”

“His associates don’t think it’s over. They’ve been a great help to me tonight, and still are.”

“Let me talk to Simon.”

“There’s a man here, maybe his name is Simon, maybe it’s not, I can’t say. You want to talk to him?”

“Put him on.”

The line hissed faintly, sputtered, and Gwyneth waited.

At last Telford said, “He doesn’t seem to want to talk. He just lies there on the floor, staring at nothing, his mouth hanging open, a disgusting beard of vomit on his chin, and he doesn’t even try to clean himself up. If this was your Simon, let me tell you, he had no manners, no common sense, no survival instinct. You should hang out with a better class of people.”

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.

T
HE 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.

Debris crunched under our feet as we crossed that enormous dark chamber toward an open door in one corner, where milky light spilled across the threshold. Back in the days of newsreels, comedy shorts, and double features, this might have been the manager’s office; but now it lay barren and deserted except for Teague Hanlon.

I entered that chamber with the protection of my gloves, hood, and ski mask. I bowed my head, and I intended to keep it that way, but the girl’s guardian had another idea.

Mr. Hanlon’s voice—gentle yet firm, clear and almost musical but not unserious—reminded me in some ways of Father’s voice, which disposed me to like him. “Addison, I know you have issues, I am not to look at you under any circumstances, and I respect that. I’ve long been accustomed to Gwynie’s rules, and I’m sure she’s told you that I honor them. I won’t look at you, not even sideways. All right?”

“Yes. All right.”

“Gwynie has told me what I may say to you and what she prefers that I not say, and I will abide by her request. But I feel that you should know what I look like, know at least that much of who I am. It’s going to be essential that you trust me in the hours to come. Trust will be easier for you if you look at me and see no deception. From this moment on, I’ll focus my attention only on dear Gwynie.”

Warily, I raised my stare from his zippered boots to his black slacks, to his long overcoat, which was buttoned at his throat, a white scarf partly revealed beneath it. In one gloved hand, he held a navy-blue knitted sailor’s cap.

Gwyneth said, “Telford won’t say it directly on the phone, only imply it, but Simon … they killed him.”

“God be with him,” Mr. Hanlon said. “He didn’t have an easy life, and now a hard death.”

His head was somewhat large at the brow, his chin and jaw a bit small, like a pear standing on its stem. In spite of the slightly odd proportions, his pleasant face served as a recommendation. White thinning hair, disarranged when he pulled off his cap, was tangled and standing up in wispy twists like a fledgling’s feathers. For a man his age, his brow remained remarkably smooth, and a spray of creases at the corner of each eye seemed not to signify a life of much squinting in disapproval, but one of much laughter.

To Gwyneth, her guardian said, “It’s harder every day to hold him off. He wants the larger part of the principal in the primary trust, for his pet projects, and he thinks there has to be a way around the trust provisions. I tell him it’s all yours until you’ve died, but his mind is a riot of schemes, which he keeps pressing on me. He comprehends your legal protections, but he doesn’t respect them. He keeps saying that your father provided for you too lavishly, and even suggests that
the fortune wasn’t fairly earned, which is a slander at the very least, as anyone who knew your dad can attest.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gwyneth said. “I’d give it all to him tomorrow if by giving it I could … change things. You know it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Mr. Hanlon’s sweet face hadn’t been made for anger. But his pleasant features conformed to a solemn sadness that frightened me. Based on what the girl had just said and on her guardian’s grave expression, I thought she must be afflicted not just with social phobia, but also with something worse, an incurable illness without visible symptoms.

He said, “Gwynie, are you still sure that now is the time?”