must soon return to my duties. You have a headquarters in this city, do you not?”
“I don’t have a headquarters, no. Why would I?”
“Then perhaps you wish me to go to a police station and report your friend’s murder. Or perhaps I should go to the offices of the
“I don’t know what to do. Maybe they’re looking for this cab.”
And it goes on from there—Willy is right: a police officer driving up the West Side Highway sees the cab, there’s a cop anyhow, and we know he’s calling in their location. Patel shoots around the corner, gets to Broadway, and drops her off. It is no longer safe for her to stay in his taxi; she must fend for herself. For the rest of the book, Willy is on the road, running toward knowledge she has been kept from all her life.
Now I must reluctantly climb out of my sandbox and begin to prepare for tonight’s reading at the Upper West Side B&N, which is on 82nd and Broadway, about a million miles from here. My publicist and the bookstore event managers work out these decisions between them; nobody ever asks me where I’d like to read. How about the Astor Place store, that’s pretty hip? How about Union Square, with that nice big reading space? For that matter, what’s wrong with the one on Broadway in the East Village? But 82nd and Broadway is where they want me to read, so that’s where I’ll go.
For about five minutes I’ll pander shamelessly for laughter, then read bits and pieces of
Right after I saved my document and checked my e-mail—three new messages from mixed-up, unhappy dead people, deleted the way you’d wipe a stain off a wall—who should walk in but Cyrax, frend & gide, appearing as usual in a big blank blue rectangle on my screen. Apparently Cyrax expects unusual things to happen at my reading, and he wants me to brace myself.
Underdone, yr gr8 moment comes 2nite
u must do rite & b strong & brave
tho
it is not e-z 4 a slug like u
(LOLOL!)
rede yr boke, rede the 1 with-in
the 1 u wrote
& hear the brush of gr8 WINGS!
u have no choice, my deer,
yr time is come to make re-pair,
& re-pair u must!!! the lyfe u knew
is no mor b-cuz U MUST CO-RECK THE ERROR!!
What in the world does this gabby busybody expect to happen? Jasper Kohle, probably—I’ll warn the staff to keep an eye out for him.
Tim Underhill Sails
to Byzantium/
So Does Willy
PART FOUR
21
On the second floor of the big Barnes & Noble bookstore on Broadway and Eighty-second Street, Katherine Hyndman from the community-relations department glanced up from the podium before her and said, “And after all that, I’m sure you are as eager as I am to hear tonight’s guest, so here he is . . . Timothy Underhill.”
She looked to her side and smiled at him through her outsized black-framed glasses, and Underhill walked out from cover and into full view of the thirty or forty people occupying the rows of chairs in front of him. Katherine Hyndman stepped back and motioned him toward the podium with a comically exaggerated sweeping gesture that got a few laughs.
It was a few minutes past 8:00 P.M. The enormous windows on the street side of the readings area showed a thorough darkness washed by light upon light. Cars swept up and down the length of Broadway. The few people standing on that side of the room could look down to see pedestrians wearing sweaters and jackets. Autumn—or at least this presage of the autumn and winter to come—seemed to have arrived overnight.
“Wasn’t it just summer?” Underhill asked. He was rewarded by a little more laughter than had greeted his presenter’s parodic courtliness—which had masked a real courtliness, he knew, designed to soothe the touch of anxiety Ms. Hyndman had mistakenly perceived as stage fright. Underhill had been doing readings, panels, symposia, and public talks for so long he had forgotten what stage fright felt like.
“I mean, like yesterday?” he said, to renewed laughter. “All of a sudden, the world turned harsh on us. I think we should try an experiment. Stick with me on this. I know, I know, you came here for a reading, and I
Tim was improvising. He’d had no idea he was going to say these things, but he figured he might as well keep rolling. Most of the people looking up seemed amused, expectant, interested in what he would ask them to do.
As he let the words come out of his mouth, Underhill scanned the audience, row by row, for Jasper Kohle. He would be peering out from beneath his ratty hood, or leaning forward in his chair; standing hunched against the window; peering out goblinlike from behind a rank of bookshelves. He might be gripping a heavy-looking brown bag, and the weight in that bag could be anything at all: a book, a Chinese take-out dinner, a gun.
“Let’s clap our heels together and see if we can get another month of nice weather. It rained all of June, so we were cheated out of the best month of the year in New York. August was the usual fish fry. This month, it really
For some reason, two people in the middle rows had raised their arms and seemed to be trying to attract his attention. Underhill went on scanning his audience, moving from face to face.
“I’m warning you, if you don’t go along with me on this, you risk putting us in a kind of Evil Punxsutawney Phil situation, with arctic gales around Halloween. So all together now, let’s click our heels together three times and say—”
“It’s the
Behind him, one of the women with her arm in the air flapped her hand at him, smiled, and said, “That’s what I was going to say. You’re talking about
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Tim asked. “
“No,” the woman said, “you said—”
But Timothy Underhill did not need these people to remind him of what he had said. In the form of his sister, April, little Alice Blue-Gown was watching him from the seat on the far left end of the last row. In the gap between two nouveau hippies, only her head and trunk were visible. April had made another trip back through the rabbit hole or the mirror, but her gaze lacked the ferocious urgency of her most recent appearance on Grand Street and the silent clamor of her first. He wondered what she had come to tell him. Undoubtedly, it had something to do with
