In the ascending elevator, Charlie Pelz smiled at Willy and said, “Welcome to the Pforzheimer, miss. We hope you enjoy your stay with us.” Having dispensed with the preliminaries, he turned to his old acquaintance and said, “Peddling another book, huh? I see this time, your title’s all lowercase, like some beatnik wrote it. You gonna give me a copy, or do I have to buy one?”
“Oh, you don’t want to read this one, Charlie,” Tim said. “Hardly anybody gets killed in it.”
“You must be outta your mind,” Charlie said. “Who wants to read something like
Charlie Pelz escorted them down the wide ocher corridors and over the rose-patterned carpet and around a corner to Room 511. Tim experienced a rush of nostalgia he explained to Willy only after Charlie had been pacified with a ten-dollar bill and sent back to his station.
“In 1983, I wrote about four pages of the book I was working on in this room.”
“Which book?”
“I liked that one,” Willy said. “Can you remember which pages?”
“Of course.” Yes, he could remember what he had written in this room. And he could remember what he had seen while writing them: a dark lake ringed with expensive lodges, and a boy walking through dying sunlight to a clubhouse overlooking the water. He remembered how he had felt at each moment of the boy’s progress.
“Good. You
“In the next room down, my friends Michael Poole and Maggie Lah went to bed together for the first time, and they’ve been together ever since. They love each other. It’s marvelous to be with them. They don’t exclude you; you’re part of the circle.”
“
“Oh, Willy,” Tim said, and put his arms around her. A wave of emotion ignited by the mingled losses and gains of both the past and the present blazed through him, and he was not sure that in the end it might not be more than he could really handle. For a moment it was exactly that, and he wept, shamelessly, holding her, also weeping, as closely as he could.
It was Willy who returned them to a state in which they could do things other than cry and hold on to each other. She moved a fraction of an inch away, ran a hand beneath her nose, and for all time proved the immensity of her worth by saying, “You should write books that Charlie Pelz wants to read, or your career’s down the drain.”
“From now on, I’ll send Charlie everything I write, so he can give me his critical opinion.”
“Actually,” Willy said, “nuts to Charlie Pelz. Could we go to bed now? I know it’s not very late, but I feel sort of wrung out and exhausted. And I want to
They undressed; like newlyweds, they brushed their teeth side by side before the sink; they went into the bedroom and, first naked Willy, then enchanted Tim, mounted the three wooden steps that, as in a fairy tale, led them upward to the surface of the bed, into which they fell, open-armed and open-hearted. Locked in motionless embrace, great figures on stone friezes gazed down through a tangle of vines; a panther’s eye gleamed, and wing beats troubled the air. They had passed over, Tim felt, into another realm altogether, where miracles were commonplace but fleeting, leaving behind echoes of things lost and half-remembered.
At six o’clock in the morning, Willy said, “I feel different. Something’s happening.” She could not be more specific.
Later that morning, showered, dressed, and still feeling enveloped in the atmosphere of Willy Patrick, Tim called his brother. After a little thought, he made a second telephone call, to the Millhaven Foundling’s Shelter. Soon he found himself speaking to Mercedes Romola, the shelter’s matron, who confirmed the idea that had entered his head a moment before: that the real Lily Kalendar had probably passed into the same hands and endured the same process as his dear Lily. Both Philip and Ms. Romola invited him to visit them that afternoon.
29
Willy had swallowed something like half a pound of confectioner’s sugar and washed it down with a nice, sugary soft drink while Tim made his calls, and as they drove south and west through the city, she was in a relatively unruffled frame of mind. Tim, however, seemed to grow darker and more troubled the closer they came to his old neighborhood. By the time he turned on to Teutonia Avenue and homed in on Sherman Park, he was actually driving with one hand and propping up his chin with the other, as if he were leaning on a bar.
“What’s wrong?” Willy asked him. “Are you upset with your brother, or are you ashamed to introduce me to him?”
“No, of course I’m not ashamed. But I am always upset with Philip,” Tim said, considerably shading the truth. He did have wildly conflicting feelings about introducing Willy to his brother. In some ways, it seemed like the worst idea in the world.
“That I’m always upset with him is what makes us a family. I think he’s comically selfish, way too cautious, and unbelievably hidebound, and he thinks I’m a flashy spendthrift who turned his back on him.”
“I bet he’s proud of you.”
“Somewhere down in that grudging heart of his, maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” Tim removed his hand from his chin and reverted to driving an automobile instead of a bar. He wished not to continue this particular conversation, and he was getting dangerously near Philip’s house. The tidy green space of Sherman Park floated by on his left; the unhappy little house at 3324 North Superior Street filled with his parents’ shabby old furniture lay only two blocks away. He regretted bringing Willy into the former Pigtown. Some disaster would inevitably occur. Also, he dreaded the possibility of meeting China Beech. She was a catastrophe that had already happened.
Tim found a parking space two doors down from his brother’s house. He and Willy left the car simultaneously, and Willy immediately reached back in to pick up half a dozen Baby Ruths.
As she ducked into the car, Tim looked idly up toward the next corner, which was located on a little rise, and saw something he first took for mere eccentricity. A large man built like a plow horse and wearing a long black coat that fell past his knees stood up there, silhouetted against the pale blue sky and staring down at him. He was the sort of man who looks like an assault weapon, and he appeared to be holding his hands over his face in an ugly, complicated pattern that allowed him to see through his fingers while concealing his face.
The knowledge of this bizarre figure’s identity came to him almost immediately, and Tim was never sure if his sense that the world had stopped moving began with him seeing the apparition or at the moment he realized it was Joseph Kalendar. Either way, the world froze in place: birds hung motionless in the sky, men turned to statues in midstride, a pot falling from a mantel stopped in midair, and a frozen cat watched it not fall. Willy’s head and torso hung motionlessly over the front seat. Kalendar was playing his new book back to him, as he had done on Crosby Street, and the old monster had all the success he could have wished for. In life, Joseph Kalendar had gotten a great deal of pleasure out of frightening people; he must have been immensely pleased at how thoroughly he had succeeded in scaring Timothy Underhill.
Without seeming to change in any obvious way moment by moment, and certainly without moving so much as a finger, Kalendar then demonstrated that Cyrax had known what was coming. Inch by inch, cell by cell, and hair by hair, Kalendar mutated into a sleek, smooth black-haired man with a gambler’s mustache and extremely white teeth. Kalendar hated showing his face, and good old Tim had kindly stepped in to provide a handsome alternative. Faber was wearing a tuxedo, but he looked nothing like a headwaiter. Grinning like a dog, Mitchell Faber took a step toward Underhill, whose foremost response was the impulse to turn and run.
Tim refused to give him what he wanted, a show of fear, although fear now occupied the entire center of his body. He was incapable of speech. Faber advanced another gliding step and then was gone, leaving an insolent vacancy where he had been. The air moved again. Willy came up from out of the car and closed the door. When she
