Innocence: A Novel (29 page)

“Aren’t you?” she asked.

After a hesitation, he nodded. “Yes. I’m afraid that I think you’re right.”

“The fact that you called me today with this information, that it has at last come into my hands—it’s confirmation.”

From a coat pocket, Mr. Hanlon withdrew a key on a stretchy green plastic coil. He gave it to Gwyneth. “There are two in his retinue who know precisely what he is. His secretary is one of them. He has a room at the back of the first floor, but he won’t participate.”

“He doesn’t need to. He’s done enough.”

I wondered whom they were talking about, but I didn’t feel that it was my place to ask. If I needed to know, she would tell me.

Mr. Hanlon said, “The security system is armed. The audio function has been disabled, so the alarm won’t sound in the house, and the keypad won’t emit tones when you enter the disarming code.”

Gwyneth accepted from him a piece of paper on which were printed four numbers and a symbol.

“Although no siren will sound in the house, a signal will be sent to the security company’s monitoring station. You have just one minute to enter the numbers and the star key in order to prevent an armed response from them.”

Although I was accustomed to going into locked places where I wasn’t supposed to venture, I never did so with the intention of committing a crime. Listening to Mr. Hanlon, I grew uneasy, though I had to assume that Gwyneth likewise harbored no criminal intent. I loved her with such devotion that I could not do otherwise than trust her. In mere hours, trust had ceased to be a choice and had become, with love, the foundation of all my hopes for the future.

Mr. Hanlon said, “His private apartment occupies the entire third floor. You’ll find what you need in the living room. He usually takes a tablet of Lunesta before bed. He should be sound asleep, down a long hallway, in his bedroom. If you’re reasonably quiet, he won’t know you’re there.”

Sensing that the meeting had reached an end, I looked down at the floor, worried that Mr. Hanlon would forget his promise to me and would turn to say good-bye, quite naturally looking straight into my eyes.

Perhaps I needn’t have been concerned. He said, “Addison, you take care of this girl.”

“I’ll do my best, sir. But I suspect she’ll end up taking care of me.”

I could hear his smile in his words. “You’re probably right. Our Gwynie is a force of nature.” He said to her, “I’ll see you in a little while?”

“That’s the plan.”

“You’re really sure you must do this?”

“Very sure.”

“May God be with you, child.”

“And with you.”

Mr. Hanlon accompanied us across the lobby, where we trod upon the hieroglyphics, which included silhouettes and symbols of some Egyptian gods: Osiris, Horus, Isis, Neph, Amen-Ra, Anubis. He let us out, and as we hurried to the Land Rover, he locked the theater doors.

By the time Gwyneth started the engine and switched on the headlights, her guardian was nearing the end of the block, shoulders hunched and head lowered into the wind.

I said, “Shouldn’t we give him a lift?”

“He doesn’t have far to go. If they’re watching his place, we don’t want to get anywhere near it.”

She drove away from the curb, into the iced city as white as a wedding cake. That image sparked another, and into my mind came the figure of a groom standing on the top layer of such a cake. He was the tuxedoed marionette. Imagination is a wonderful but occasionally disturbing gift. In my mind’s eye, no bride stood with the groom, but he smiled as if he anticipated her arrival at any moment.

I said, “Why did you tell him there were things you preferred he not say to me? What things were they?”

“You’ll know soon enough.”

“Do you have some … illness?”

“Illness? Why would you think so?”

“You said you’d give all your money away if it would change things. You said it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You worry too much, Addison. I have no illness. Truly. And you know I never lie.”

“I never lie, either. But sometimes I evade. And so do you.”

After a silence, she said, “You’re an interesting guy.”

“I am?”

“Yes, and you better be.”

“Better be what?”

“Interesting.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Doesn’t matter. I understand. Now, hush. I need to think.”

The streets were at last deserted except for us and the plows. The bright yellow beacons swiveling on the roofs of those vehicles alchemized snow to gold, and on the walls of nearby buildings, waves of sulfurous beacon-cast light chased wolfish beacon-cast shadows.

ON A WARM JUNE NIGHT WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN
, there were fireflies in the great park, hundreds of them gliding silently through the dark, familiar to me from my time on the mountain but mysterious in the metropolis. I fancied that they were tiny airships aboard which minute passengers were bound from their world to another peopled by their Lilliputian kind, passing through ours and wondering at the strangeness of this place. That was the first and last night we saw fireflies in the city, as if they had not been borne here by Nature’s intention, but instead had materialized at the will of some other power that meant their throbbing lanterns to warn us away from—or guide us toward—something of importance.

Later on the same night, traversing an alleyway, we heard a man calling out to us, his voice weak and tremulous. “Help me. I’m blind. They blinded me.”

We found him lying beside a Dumpster, and trusting in his claim
of blindness, we dared to go to him and examine him by flashlight. He was perhaps fifty, dressed in an expensive but rumpled suit ruined now by bloodstains. He had taken blows to the head. His bruised and swollen face made me afraid for him. Blood oozed from his split lip and from the gums around two broken teeth. His eyes followed not either light or movement, but instead tracked our voices, as he tried to see what he heard. He was strong enough to stand with help, but he was too broken to walk on his own. We were wearing gloves, as usual, and we assisted him, Father to his right and I to his left. A block and a half away, there was a hospital, and in that warm night, our sweat was cold as we risked exposure to get him to those doors.

As he shuffled between us, he said with some bewilderment that this was a safe neighborhood, that he’d had no qualms about walking two blocks even at that late hour. The three men had been waiting in this unlighted alleyway. They stepped out in front of him, thrust a pistol into his abdomen, seized him, and dragged him into the dark. He had twelve hundred in his wallet, credit cards, a watch worth fifteen thousand, a diamond ring worth five thousand, and he thought that if he surrendered all of that without protest, his assailants would not harm him. He knew a man who had, some years earlier, been unfortunate enough to be mugged while carrying little of value, and in frustration, the robbers had beaten him severely. In this case, they were incensed that he had so much, more than they deemed was fair, and they accused him of stealing it from others, one way or another, him in his fancy suit and Gucci shoes, and they beat him in disapproval of his affluence. He lay unconscious, for how long he didn’t know, and when he woke, his skull felt as if it were in pieces, held together by skin and hair, and he was blind.

We assured him that the blindness would be temporary. Although we couldn’t know if that was true, his eyes were without wounds,
and clear. We got him within a few feet of the entrance to the hospital and told him that we couldn’t go inside with him, though we didn’t explain why. “The doors are in front of you,” Father said. “They’re automatic. Just two steps, they’ll open, you’re inside where someone can help you.” En route, the victim had asked our names, and we’d avoided giving them. Now he surprised me by reaching out and touching my face, insisting that he must know what his two Samaritans looked like. A ski mask on a June night would have drawn attention to us; we relied on light jackets with deep hoods and, until called to this task, on discretion. No sooner had his fingers begun to trace my features than he snatched his hand away. Because his face was bruised, bloodied, badly distorted by swelling, I couldn’t easily interpret the nuances of his expression, though it was one kind of horror or another. Without a word, he stumbled away, the pneumatic doors hissed open, he staggered inside, and we sprinted into the night as if we were his assailants, not his rescuers.

Several weeks later, reading the newspaper after midnight in the central library, we came upon a story about a mugging victim who was searching for two men who had assisted him. We recognized him only because the story included two pictures—one taken post-recovery that meant nothing to us, the other taken in the hospital by a police officer. He had regained his sight. His name was Robert Pattica, and he hoped to find us and reward us for our kindness. We neither wanted nor needed a reward. Considering that Mr. Pattica had touched my face and therefore knew something of my difference, we couldn’t help but doubt that his motives were as he claimed.

The most interesting thing in the article was what Mr. Pattica said about fireflies. When he touched my face, though blind, he saw fireflies as he remembered them from his youth in farm country, and though they were familiar, they were also strange, because he thought
of them in a way he never had before; they seemed to him like tiny airships sailing silently through the dark. The vision had been so entrancing that he couldn’t get it out of his mind, and he was in the process of selling his home in the city, changing careers, and moving back to the town where he had been raised, where there were fireflies and wildlife aplenty, which he hadn’t known he missed until now.

Father and I didn’t know what to make of that.

We were certain that, if Mr. Pattica had seen my face, he would have either fled in terror or, in spite of his injuries, attacked me. We endured too much over the years to believe that, upon revealing ourselves, we would be embraced. The only abovegrounder who had been kind to Father was the friend who’d given him a key to the food bank, and even that individual found it difficult to meet with him more than once every year—and briefly—to confirm that he remained well.

But what about the fireflies? How could Mr. Pattica have seen the fireflies to which I had stood witness earlier that night, and how could he have arrived at the same simile that had occurred to me—tiny airships in the dark? We could conclude only that the blows he had taken to the head had not only temporarily blinded him but had also conferred upon him an equally temporary clairvoyance.

We were fortunate because his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face.

Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however, is so abstruse, so deep and complex, most explanations that people embrace to make sense of moments of strange experience are inadequate. Our very existence as thinking creatures is an astonishment that can’t be solved. Every human cell, with its thousands of protein chains, is more complex than a 747 or the largest cruise ship, in fact
more complex than the two combined. All life on Earth, in its extravagant variety, offers itself for study, but though we probe to ever deeper layers of its structure, the meaning eludes us.

There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, pinhead eggs that become caterpillars that dissolve into genetic soup from which arise butterflies, that some hearts are dark and others full of light.

AT 1:40 IN THE MORNING, GWYNETH PARKED AT THE
curb on the south side of the cathedral complex, steps from the break in the compound wall that served the residence of the archbishop.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Visiting.”

She turned, reached over the console, groped for something on the floor behind her seat, and snared a laundry bag with a drawstring closure.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Convenience.”

The frozen and crumbling sky, the countless shoals of crystals swimming down the night, the street a quiet sea of white …

We climbed a snowbank compacted by a city plow, forged across a buried sidewalk, and disturbed the pristine white coverlets on the
steps leading up to a much broader doorstep under a columned portico.

When she took from a pocket the key on the stretchy coil of green plastic, I said, “Not really?”

“What?”

“This isn’t the place I was expecting.”

“What place were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Just not this.”

“Well, this is the place,” she said.

“Wow. We should take off our boots.”

“We didn’t take them off when we went into Simon’s place.”

“It was just a bungalow, there was an urgency to the moment.”

“There’s an urgency to this moment,” she said, “and who’s to say this place is more sacred than poor Simon’s bungalow?”

Nevertheless, I unzipped my snow-caked boots and shucked them off, and so did she. We were both still wearing athletic shoes, and hers were the silver ones on which she had flown like Mercury through the library stacks.

The key worked, the deadbolt retracted, and we went into the spacious foyer, which was round and paved with marble. Next to the door, the numbers on the keypad of the security panel glowed a soft green. The audio function had been disabled, as promised, and the indicator light above the words
PERIMETER ARMED
blinked silently to announce a violation of the premises. Having stripped off her gloves and shoved them in a jacket pocket, Gwyneth held in her left hand the paper that her guardian had given her. I shone my flashlight on the code, and with her right hand she entered the four numbers and the star symbol. The indicator light stopped blinking and went dark.

Trust. Our relationship hinged on trust. And I
did
trust her. But I was nevertheless nervous. My mouth went dry with apprehension.

The stairs were not an architectural feature and did not open into the foyer. We ventured into the large drawing room, probing left and right with our flashlights. This was one of the chambers in which the archbishop entertained, for among his responsibilities was the work of establishing bonds with the leaders of the city’s political, business, arts, and faith communities. Several elegantly furnished seating areas, Persian carpets, and exquisite antiques were balanced by marvelous paintings of scenes from Scripture, marble statuary of Biblical figures, including one of the Holy Mother, and small icons on various tables and consoles. There was also a large portrait of Christ by an artist unusually observant of detail and superbly skilled at creating an illusion of depth, so that the image appeared three-dimensional, and for a moment I could not breathe.