In the Night Room

Borca was nonplussed by this information. “Uhhh . . . do you have any idea who might have done this? Did you see anyone enter or leave the building?”

“Mais non,” she said.

He turned to Tim. “Presumably, you can give us a description.”

“I can try. White male, about six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds. I have no idea how old he is. The guy kept getting older every time I looked at him.”

The policemen exchanged glances.

“Can you remember what he was wearing?”

“A gray sweatshirt with a hood. Blue jeans. Sneakers, I guess.”

“What do you mean, sir, he kept getting older every time you looked at him?” Beck asked.

“In the beginning, I thought he was a young guy, in his early forties, say.”

Beck and Borca, who were in their early thirties, glanced at each other again.

“But every time I looked at him after that, he seemed to be older. I mean, I saw wrinkles I hadn’t seen before.”

“We have his name,” Borca said. “Mr. Kohle won’t be hard to find.” He handed Tim a card, paused for a second, and gave another to Maggie. “Give me a call if you think of anything else. We’ll be back in touch when we locate your perp. He didn’t steal anything, did he?”

“Apart from my peace of mind?” Tim said.

“Look, it’s not so bad. Get a cleaning company in here, you’ll be good as new. All you lost was a couple of your own books.”

“But how did he get in?” Tim asked.

“When we find your guy, we’ll ask him,” Beck said.

“You should be hearing from us soon,” Borca said.

“Not to make any promises,” said Beck. “But this sort of stuff usually gets cleared up in a day or two.” Like Borca, he was having trouble not staring at beautiful little Maggie. Unlike his partner, he was no longer struggling with the impulse.

The elevator doors closed, and before Tim could say anything, Maggie said, “If I were Mrs. Officer Beck, I could live out on Long Island and give French lessons.”

“Marriage might not be what he had in mind,” Tim said.

“Dommage,” Maggie said. “Now let’s get up as much of that stuff as we can, okay?”

They mopped up what they could with paper towels, and when they ran out, they went to the deli for more. When eight rolls of Bounty and Brawny had been stuffed into a black plastic garbage bag, and the bag sealed up to keep in the stink, they brought out a mop and a bucket and washed the floor in front of the bookshelves, over and over, for half an hour. Tim sprinkled white wine and baking soda—an anodyne of his own invention—over the infected area and scrubbed that into the wood before rinsing it off. The ruined books went into another black bag.

“What do you think?” Maggie asked.

“I can still smell it.”

“Should I call the super-duper-A1 cleaning service?”

“Please do.”

Maggie floated away to the loft she shared with Michael Poole, leaving him attempting to ignore the lingering odor of feline urine, now compounded with the aroma of spilled chardonnay, while he summoned the courage to face his computer. He made himself a cup of peppermint tea. He removed a low-carb no-fat cookie from a container of puritan design and took both to his desk. A flashing little icon at the lower-right-hand corner of his screen informed him that he had received one or more e-mails. Not now, thanks, nope. Dutifully, he evoked his document, clicked to the last page he had written, and did his best to continue. His heroine was about to reach a great turning point in both the book and her life, and to discover the details that would bring breath, air, and light to the scene, Tim had to work with unalloyed concentration.

Over the next hour and a half, he succeeded in writing two paragraphs. The unseen e-mails ticked away at the back of his consciousness, interfering with the process of magical detail discovery. All right, he thought, I give up. He minimized his document and called up the day’s eight new arrivals. Two were from writer-editors inviting him to contribute to theme anthologies. Three were spam; he deleted these. He also deleted the three e-mails from encoded strangers that had arrived bereft of subject lines and domain names. One new e-mail remained in his in-box. Also absent subject line and domain name, it had nonetheless been sent by Cyrax, the most authoritative of all his phantom correspondents. Tim clicked it open and read Cyrax’s message:

now are u ready 2 listn

2 yr gide?

Experimentally, he moved his cursor to Reply and clicked on it. Instead of the conventional e-mail reply form, a large blank rectangle, pale blue in color, appeared at the center of his screen. It reminded Tim of the instant-message windows he had seen on other people’s computers.

All right, he said to himself, let’s give it a whirl. Within the blue box he typed “yes.”

In less than a second these words appeared beneath his acceptance:

Cyrax: good deshizn, student myn, u stpd buttsecks!

(LOLOL!) ok. let me tell u abt deth, fax u will need 2—

or, to speak YOUR language, little buddy, and your language is a bit closer to what mine used to be, it’s time you learned a few facts about death!

Two Voices from a Cloud

PART TWO

14

Merlin L’Duith:

Minor deity though I may be, I am nonetheless the god of Millhaven, Illinois, the god of Hendersonia, New Jersey, and the god of all points in between. Where my gaze happens to fall, there I make the rules. It is I who decides who ends their days on silken sheets surrounded by a competent medical staff, and who expires in a cell, miserable, starving, and alone. And my name is not Merlin L’Duith; rather, within Merlin L’Duith I confine myself.

It is my pleasure now to recount certain latter-day episodes in the life of Willy Patrick, the better to advance the dear girl’s progress toward her great challenge, which is of recognition.

On the day of her appointment at Bergdorf Goodman, Willy spoke to Tom Hartland, her writer friend, and agreed to meet him for a glass of wine at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis. Tom sounded unusually serious when he suggested their get-together and told her that he had been thinking hard about something that concerned her. Willy assumed that it had to do with her agent or her publisher. When, like his boss’s obedient girlfriend, she informed Giles Coverley of this appointment, he suggested that he do the driving for this excursion. One glass of wine could easily lead to two, and there was no sense in courting trouble. In the end, she gave in.

The previous day, the Santolini Brothers had informed her that they really felt they ought to amputate the limb of the big oak tree at the side of the house. Damage suffered years ago could bring it down any day, causing injury to the house—how much they could not say, nor could they guarantee that the limb would fall, but still. Lady, you wanna save money I can’t blame you, but it could wind up costing you a whole lot more later. Is all I’m saying. Following the boss’s orders, Willy deflected them, and off they sloped, shrugging as they went.

She went over and looked at the oak after the Santolinis had wandered away, and although she could not, in fact, see all of it, the long, sculptural limb extending toward, then curving away from the roof of Mitchell’s office did not look damaged to her. Probably Mitchell was right about the Santolinis.