Innocence: A Novel (5 page)

I heard the man cursing loudly even before he reached the top of the exterior steps. I didn’t have enough time to reach the stacks across what seemed to be an acre of marble. The moment he arrived at the open door, he’d see me. I darted to the left and vaulted the wraparound counter at the main desk, which was not simply a desk but instead a spacious librarian station appointed with exquisite mahogany moldings, at which patrons could be served from four sides. I crouched below the counter, hopeful that I had not been spotted.

I listened as the bronze door boomed shut, as the primary deadbolts were engaged, and as the drop bolt rang softly as it was seated in the bronze-rimmed hole in the floor. His footsteps seemed to approach my hiding place directly, but then he walked past, so close that I could smell his spicy cologne. In passing, he snarled “bitch” and worse, alternating vicious epithets, as if in fact he hated
her enough to kill her. He faded into silence. A door closed in the distance.

After a while, the lights went off.

I got to my feet but didn’t leave the shelter of the main desk.

The thirty-foot-tall windows in the south wall began above ten feet of bookshelves and arched to a keystone within ten feet of the deeply coffered ceiling. One of the charms of the city is its night glow, which is never less than romantic, sometimes magical. On this occasion in December, the metropolis shone into the library not with an eerie milkiness, as earlier, but with a convincing imitation of snow light, like a Christmas moon reflecting from a landscape cloaked by a recent blizzard. The
EXIT
signs above the doors were as red as clusters of holly berries, though I marveled at myself for thinking such a thing and wondered what had possessed me that I should be so light of spirit only minutes after cowering in fear.

Of course, it was the girl. Her gracefulness, her fleetness, her balletic sprint, and the sheer mystery of her presence in the library inspired in me the pleasant expectation that I might be witness to—if not a party to—an exciting adventure.

Although my life was by any standard unconventional, it wasn’t full of sparkling encounters and dazzling exploits. I hid by day, reading, listening to music through the earphones of my CD player, thinking, wondering, and from time to time sleeping. By night I skulked through the city, seeking the essentials for survival, as well as a few moments of beauty in places like this, where great culture and fine art came together in sublime architecture. But considering the all-consuming hatred and fury that I inspired on sight, if I sought to participate in an adventure, I would be as unwise as a hemophiliac juggling hatchets.

Books had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wanted
their lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal. Even I, in my terrible difference, wanted nothing less than purpose and meaning.

Intuition told me that this girl might be different from other people in her attitude toward me, that she might be at least as tolerant as my mother had been, that she might be a touchstone by which I could test my value as a person without suffering torture and a violent death. I suspected that she might need help and that I, in spite of my limitations, might be of service to her.

I expected no relationship, only a memorable encounter in which I might contribute something that would make a vital difference in her life. Father often said that we are here to learn and give. But how could one give while in hiding, six years alone?

A few minutes after the lights went out, a recorded voice issued from speakers throughout the building:
“Perimeter is armed.”

The angry man must be leaving by the rear entrance, which opened onto an alleyway. An alarm keypad was positioned by that door.

In a building as elaborate as this one, motion detectors tended to report too many false alarms, and therefore they weren’t employed. Because of the paper-preserving climate-control system, the windows were fixed, and their bronze stiles and muntins would not be easily penetrated by thieves. Besides, the current criminal class was even dumber than those in centuries gone by, unaware that books had value. And the vandals who might once have enjoyed hiding in here to deface and destroy after hours were, these days, able to get away with such bold in-the-open mayhem that tearing books apart or even urinating in them was boring compared to the assaults on civilization that could be made elsewhere, anywhere. By comparison, the doors were easily alarmed, the perimeter secured; and within the walls, I was free to roam.

I switched on my flashlight and left the librarian station by its gate.

During the eighteen years that I’d been visiting, the grandeur of this building, for hours at a time, had been mine alone, as if I were the king of books and this my palace. In spite of my familiarity with its every nook, I never tired of the place, but now it offered something new. Why was she here? Why hadn’t she fled when she had the chance? Who was her enraged pursuer? I hadn’t found the library so exciting since the first few times that I had come here with Father.

I hurried across the enormous reading room, toward the door through which the girl had gone. I knew a few hiding places that she might have found, sanctums that even the longest-tenured employees of the library might never have discovered.

If she didn’t prove to be as tolerant as my mother, she was at least much smaller than I was and unlikely to be able to harm me before I could flee from her. The memory of her running with great poise, all but gliding through the stacks, still enchanted me, but I reminded myself that people who seemed to be no threat at all had sometimes been those who almost cut me down. Even a rapidly dying man, with nothing left to lose, had been overcome with such loathing that, when I knelt to help him, he used his last breath to curse me.

EIGHT YEARS OF AGE, A BOY BUT ALSO SOMETHING
far different from other boys, I looked for a place where I might belong.

For five days following my banishment from the little house on the mountain, I traveled overland, mostly by the first two hours of light after dawn and the last hour before nightfall, when those who might venture into woods and meadows for a pleasant hike or a bit of off-season hunting were less likely to be afoot. I slept by night and remained hidden but watchful during the larger part of the day.

Because I soon left the forest that was familiar to me and passed into one I had never seen before, I tried to stay as near to one road or another as possible without moving too often in the open. There were more trees in that part of the world than anything, trees I could name and many kinds that I couldn’t, so that I was able more or less to remain within sight of blacktop while trees screened me from those who traveled on it.

I set out that morning before the sun crested the horizon, but already the feathery clouds in the east blazed more pink than blue, the very pink of flamingos that I had once seen in a nature book.

In addition to whiskey, pills, and the white powder that she sniffed, about the only thing my mother liked was nature, and she had maybe a hundred picture books about birds and deer and other animals. She said that people weren’t worth spit, none of them. She said that my true father was a shiftless piece of trash, like all the rest of them, and she wasn’t ever going to lie with another man or a woman, either, since they were all selfish perverts when you really got to know them. But she loved animals. Even though she loved them, she wouldn’t have a cat or dog or anything in the house, because she said she didn’t want to own any living thing or to be owned by it.

The flamingo-pink turned darker, almost orange, and I knew that the fiery colors would quickly burn away, as they always did, and the clouds that were so flamboyantly painted now would soon be as colorless as one kind of ashes or another, and the sky behind them all
blue. While the orange was still up there, before the sun showed itself directly and slanted as sharp as glass into the woods, the morning shadows were so black among the trees that I could almost feel them sliding over me, as cool as silk.

In the high orange light of dawn, the car came along that lonely road, which was four or five feet above the woods. A gentle slope of wild grass led down from the blacktop to where I hid. Confident that I could not be seen among the trees and their silken shadows, I did not drop flat to the ground or crouch, not even when the car stopped and the men got out of it. I knew somehow that they were engaged in a piece of business that had their full attention; for them, the whole world had shrunk down to what they had come here to finish.

Three of the men were joking with the fourth. I could hear the laughter in their voices though not the words, but the guy that two of them were holding up didn’t seem to be in a mood to be amused. At first he looked weak and sick, maybe drunk, but then I realized he’d been badly beaten. Even from a distance of fifteen feet, his face looked all wrong, distorted. His pale-blue shirt was streaked with blood.

While two men held the one, the fourth man punched him in the stomach. I thought it was a punch, but when he punched the guy again, I saw the knife in his hand. They dropped the stabbed and beaten man off the side of the road, and he slid on his back, headfirst, to the bottom of the little grassy slope, where he lay very still.

The three by the car laughed at the way the dead man slid down through the dew-wet grass, and one of them unzipped his pants as if he might pee on the corpse, though maybe that was only another joke. Just then the one who had done the stabbing hurried around to the driver’s door, shouting, “Let’s go, you douche bags,
let’s go
!”

The car flashed away, the engine noise quickly swallowed by the
yawning forest, and the sun came up in the deepest quiet that I had ever heard. I watched the dead man for a while and waited for the car to return, but by the time the colorful clouds had faded to an ashy white, I knew the killers weren’t coming back.

When I went to the body, I discovered life in it. The victim’s face was horribly battered, bruised. But he still breathed.

A knife with a fancy carved-bone handle protruded from his gut, buried to the hilt. Where not slick with blood, the man’s right hand looked as white as the bone around which his fingers folded.

I wanted to help him but didn’t know how. Nothing that I could think to say seemed adequately comforting. In my awkward silence, I wondered if I would ever be able to talk to anyone but my mother, for I had never exchanged a word with anyone but her.

Busy with dying, the job almost done, he at first seemed unaware of me. His left eye was nearly swollen shut, the right eye wide and staring as if at something astonishing that winged across the morning sky.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

His gaze refocused. He made a low thick sound that seemed to be more an expression of revulsion than an expression of pain.

I wore my knitted gloves, yet when I touched him, he shuddered and clearly would have kicked out and scrambled away from me if he’d not been so weak.

In his raw and desperate voice, words came with bubbles of blood that popped between his lips. “Get away. Get. Get away.”

Then I realized not only that had I neglected to pull the scarf over my face, but also that the hood had slipped off my head.

Mother warned me that by my eyes alone I would be known, and the dying man couldn’t look away from them. His pallor worsened
quickly when he met my stare, as if my eyes did more damage to him than had the bone-handled knife.

With a sudden burst of energy, he snarled a word I didn’t know but delivered it with such viciousness that I realized it must be both an insult and a curse. On the repetition of that word, he found within himself a hatred so great that it anesthetized him against the searing pain of disembowelment. He ripped a wider wound as he pulled the knife out of his abdomen, and he slashed at my face, as if to blind the eyes that so offended him.

I pulled back, the blade cut only air, it fell from his hand, his arm dropped to the ground, and he lay dead.

BEYOND THE DOOR THROUGH WHICH THE GIRL HAD
vanished, a wide hallway with a groin-vaulted ceiling served four rooms that housed specialty collections. One of those was a seven-thousand-volume collection of first editions of important detective fiction, valued at many millions and donated by a famous writer who resided in this city.

Crossing the threshold, I switched off my flashlight. I stood in the dark room, listening.

In any large building designed both for functionality and to please the eye, dead spaces exist here and there behind walls, not needed for plumbing or electrical chases. Some are as large as walk-in closets. If included in the room that they adjoin, these nooks and coves would
deform the shape of that chamber. In the interest of eye-pleasing harmony, such cavities are lost behind walls.

A clever architect with a romantic streak and an appreciation for mystery will sometimes find ways to make those spaces accessible through a secret door well concealed in a paneled wall or by some other means. Often, these recovered dead spaces serve as storage, but some architects with a sense of fun and a love of things arcane will make other use of them.

If the fleet-footed girl had taken refuge here among the storied pages full of FBI agents, homicide detectives, private investigators, and amateur crime-solvers of a thousand kinds, she was as quiet as the cadavers that also filled those pages.

The original blueprints for the central library, more than a century old, were archived in the basement. My love of the building’s beauty and its books had motivated me to study the plans during numerous visits, years earlier, and I had found two dead spaces of generous proportions.

One was indeed concealed behind a secret door in a paneled wall, elsewhere in the building. It measured eleven feet wide, six deep, and it was beautifully finished with several exotic woods and exquisite millwork. I thought the architect—John Lebow of the firm Lebow and Vaughn—himself had designed and secretly performed the finish work in both hidden rooms, though not in a spirit of fun.