In the Night Room

He turned around, thinking only of getting back to his loft. The girl in the tank top gave him a sympathetic smile as he went squelching by. Under the next awning, the boy with furious eyes was peeling off his tight-fitting black shirt. He gave Tim the resentful glare due a voyeur, then bent to take off his boots. After he had tucked the boots under his arm, the boy undid his belt and shoved his pants down to his ankles. He wore no underwear, and his long body was a single streak of shining white. Tim stared at the boy’s smooth, hairless groin, as blank as a Ken doll’s. The young man stepped forward, and Tim stepped back.

That was . . . now, there was some mistake here, he couldn’t see right, the rain was screwing with his vision . . .

With a sound like the crackling of heavy canvas sails, immense wings folded out from the young man’s back. He stepped forward on a beautiful naked foot. Tim thought, I have seen what it is to tread. The being was much taller than he had at first appeared, six-seven or six-eight. Instantly, water ran in shining rivulets down its gleaming and hairless chest. When it glanced at Tim, its eyes, though entirely liquid black, conveyed what Tim’s old Latin teacher would have called “severe displeasure.” Tim had no idea if his heart had gone into overdrive or stopped working altogether. The inside of his mouth tasted like blood and old brass. Creaking, the great wings unfolded another five or six feet and nearly met at their highest point.

The angel was going to kill him, he knew.

Instead of truly stopping his heart, the angel swept past Tim Underhill, turned toward West Broadway, and took two long, muscular strides. The world at large failed to notice this extraordinary event. The traffic crawled by. A man in a parka and a fishing hat ducked out of an apartment building and walked past the angel without a sign of surprise.

Can’t you see that? Tim wanted to yell, then realized, no, he couldn’t see that; he had seen nothing at all.

Two more steps up the street, the angel jettisoned its clothes onto the sidewalk in front of the news boxes, took one more majestic stride forward, raised a knee, and with a great unfolding and unfurling of its wings lifted off the pavement and ascended into the air. Up and up, open-mouthed Tim watched it go, until it dwindled to the size of a white sparrow, and—instantly, as if translated to another realm—disappeared. Tim kept watching the place in the air where it had been, then realized that the man in the fishing hat, who had come almost level with him, was looking at him oddly.

“I thought I saw something unusual up there,” he said.

“Get any more water in your mouth, you’ll drown.” The man shook his head and moved on.

Tim squelched over to the rack of news boxes and saw, between the Village Voice and the New York Press, a yellow plastic bag bearing a cartoonlike caricature of Charles Dickens. The angel’s clothing had, like its owner, traveled elsewhere.

With the half-conscious sense that the bag seemed familiar, he bent down and picked it up. Cold and slippery to the touch, it contained a number of books. Tim’s first impulse was to protect the books, then to see if he might somehow be able to return them to their owner. Carrying the bag, he waited a moment for a break in the traffic, and when one came he moved down off the curb and remembered where he had seen such a bag earlier that morning.

Tim reached the other side of the street and opened the top of the bag as he trotted toward the entrance to his building. When he peered in, a small amount of rain fell through the opening and beaded on the glossy jacket of lost boy lost girl. Two other copies were stacked beneath it.

Tim stepped inside the entry of 55 Grand. Too small to be called a lobby, it held only a row of metal mailboxes, a cracked marble floor, a hanging light fixture that worked half of the time, and, to one side of the stairs, a wooden school chair. This was one of the light fixture’s off days. Tim spun around to prop the door open a couple of inches so that he would be better able to see the condition of the books.

He opened the cover, turned to the front matter, and gasped at what he saw. In spiky, slashing letters three inches high, Kohle had printed FRAUD and LIES all over the page. Tim’s inscription had been crossed out and covered over with UNTRUE AND OUTRAGEOUS. Tim slid the book back into the bag and removed the next. He discovered the same furious graffiti scrawled over the front matter. In the text, individual phrases and paragraphs, sometimes whole pages, had been x-ed out.

A fast-moving thread of water slipped from the bill of his cap onto a violated page, and the R in FRAUD softened and ran into the adjacent letters on both sides. The book seemed to be dissolving in his hands. In horror, Tim slammed it shut, making a soft splatting sound, as if some big insect had been squashed between the pages. The books went back into the shiny bag, and he trotted out into the fierce rain and, with a swooping gesture of his right arm, threw the bag into a garbage bin.

12

In Hendersonia, the rain predicted by Roman Richard Spilka came and went in under an hour, never amounting to much more than a sprinkle. (There was something suspiciously overdetermined about that storm over SoHo.) The sun shone the entire time it rained. The workmen who wore shirts shed them to enjoy the sensation of mild, warm rain falling on their upper bodies. Willy envied them. She wished she could strip naked to the waist and stroll through the sun-gilded rain.

Suddenly, she felt like talking to Mitchell, not just listening to his voice on the answering machine. Mitchell disliked intrusions of his personal life into his work world, and probably wouldn’t like being called back. He especially wouldn’t like it if he were in bed with some woman who worked for the Baltic Group. The thought of her husband- to-be in the embrace of one of his female colleagues gave Willy an entirely unwelcome pang. Sometimes she wondered why he had chosen her, Willy Bryce, Willy Patrick, with her funny little gamine body and clementine breasts. Gently, in a series of little nibbles, despair attempted to draw her downward through a psychic drain. She really did want to talk to Mitchell, and at first hand, not through an exchange of recorded messages.

The Internet soon found the telephone number of the hotel in Nanterre. She dialed for what seemed a frustratingly long time, but was then rewarded with a series of rings that sounded like the wake-up signal of a portable alarm clock. A male, wonderfully clear French voice said something she had no hope of understanding.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but do you speak English?”

“Of course, madame. How may I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to one of your guests, please, a Mr. Mitchell Faber.”

“Moment.” Soon he was back on the line. “I am sorry, madame, Monsieur Fay-bear is no longer a guest of the Mercure Paris La Defense Parc.”

“I must have just missed him. When did he check out?”

“Monsieur Fay-bear checked out this morning, madame.”

“He couldn’t have,” Willy said. “He just left a message on my voice mail, and he was speaking from your hotel.”

“There is some mistake. Unless he called you from a telephone in the lobby?”

“He said he was in his room.” She hesitated. “You said he checked out this morning? What time was that?”

“Shortly before ten, madame.”

“And what time is it there now?”

“It is 4:45 P.M., madame.”

Mitchell had left the hotel almost seven hours earlier. Willy hesitated again, then asked, “I’m calling from New York with a message for his wife. Was Mrs. Faber with him, or did she go ahead to Toledo?”

“We have no record of a Mrs. Faber.”

She thanked him and hung up. Back to the Internet for more information, then back to the telephone to dial another endless series of numbers. When she was connected to the Hotel Domenico in Toledo, she had trouble communicating with the man on the other end of the line, and finally succeeded in replacing him with a hotel employee whose English was less like Spanish.

“Mr. Faber? No, no Mr. Faber is registered here. I am sorry.”

“What time do you expect him?”