said, 'Who's the client?'
I could see the disappointment flood Sissy's eyes. She continued to look up at me, but it was a sad look now, wistful. She pressed her lips together. She brushed the back of her hand regretfully against my cheek. I knew exactly what she was thinking. She was thinking that her baby was not mature enough to make a commitment. She was thinking I was still too much of a boy to realize how in love with her I was. Also, she was thinking she would wait for me to come around; she would wait no matter how long it took.
And yes, yes, all this made me despise myself even more, if that was possible. But at the same time, I really did want to get the lowdown on this new client. My first client.
'I just thought I ought to be prepared,' I told her.
Sissy took a deep breath. She gave a deep sigh. She tugged herself away from me. I released her. She turned and bent over a folder open on her desk. The sunlight coming in behind her touched on wisps of her golden hair and made them shine.
'He's a professor out at Berkeley,' she said. Her tone was a little more distant suddenly.
I nodded. Professors were becoming something of a specialty with me, probably because of my Agency reputation as an overeducated egghead.
'Oh, and you should like this,' Sissy went on drily. 'He's a novelist too. It says here he won the Pulitzer prize.'
A thought fluttered at the edge of my mind like sparrow wings at the corner of my eye, but it flew off before I could catch it. It's odd about things like this. We modern types, we're so trained in skepticism, so immersed in our faithless climate of opinion, that we sometimes stare right through our own destiny when it's smack in front of us. If this were fiction-I mean, the ordinary sort of fiction made up entirely out of my head-I couldn't even tell you what came next. You'd complain; you'd say: That's pure coincidence; that would never happen. But, of course, pure coincidence of the most fateful kind happens all the time, every day. Why should we let our theories about life override our experience of it? Why should I waste time wallowing in reasonable ex- planations? Why can't I simply tell you: it happened as if it were meant to be.
Sissy said, 'His name is Patrick McNair.'
Even then there was a moment when I stood by the window as if I hadn't heard her, as if I were still waiting for her to speak. There was a moment more when I understood what she said but didn't realize, couldn't bring myself to realize, what it meant.
My client-my first client-was Patrick McNair. The English professor. The prize-winning novelist.
Emma's father.
10.
It was two hours before McNair arrived. A good thing too; I needed that time to recover my senses. At first, after Sissy spoke his name, I couldn't think at all. My head was filled with a noise like wind rushing through a tunnel. I was stunned by a whirling sense of mystic impossibilities.
Of course, like most amazing coincidences, this one was not as amazing as all that. I had met Emma while working on a case involving a lady professor. The lady professor probably knew McNair and recommended Weiss to him. That's what I told myself, in any case. Still, the wind roared in my head.
I left Sissy and made my stumbling way back down the hall, back through the glassed-in reception area, back past the smirking Amy, and down the farther hall to my alcove, my desk. I sat there a long time, making copies, typing reports, doing whatever the hell I did-I wasn't sure then and I don't remember now. Mostly, I think I watched the digital clock on my desk. With every minute that ticked away, a sensation grew inside me, a feeling between dread and panic. I could think about nothing but my meeting with Patrick McNair.
Why was he coming? What could he want? Could it have anything to do with me? There were no answers in the manila case folder Sissy had given me. A name, a brief description, an address. I kept turning back to it, opening it, scanning the two typed pages inside, but there was nothing else.
The time of our appointment approached. I got up from my desk with the folder in my hand. I stepped with the tread of a condemned man down the last stretch of hall to Weiss's office at the end. I opened the door slowly. I stepped gingerly across the threshold.
I shut the door. For a long time, I simply stood there, stood where I was. I looked at the place with what I would have to call reverence. Weiss's office. Somehow, just being there began to calm me down.
Weiss was my hero. Bishop was my hero, too, in his own inimitable mad-dog way. But Weiss… there was something about Weiss that had completely captured my youthful imagination. His solitude, his sorrow, his worldly wisdom, his nearly mythic acceptance of life as it was. Just standing there in that empty office-in his spiritual presence, as it were-the wind-tunnel roar in my head grew fainter; my mind grew quieter, grew still.
I didn't turn the lights on-not yet-but the sun through the wall of large arched windows made the place bright enough to see clearly. It was a large room, as Weiss himself was large, a cavernous space with a vast desk on the far side of it, two huge blocky armchairs for the clients, and, of course, the famous swivel chair itself with its high, high back and its thick arms flanking an impossibly spacious seat. The wall to my right was made up almost entirely of those windows, the apex of their arches rising to just beneath the ceiling. They seemed to open the room up into the city and to bring the city right inside the room. They showed a sweeping, vertiginous view of the ornately carved stone buildings across the street and the jagged, gleaming rise and fall of modern towers beyond.
After a while, when I had settled down, I turned the light on. I moved forward, still holding McNair's folder. I went around the enormous desk to stand beside the great chair. I had to take a deep breath before I could bring myself to sit in it.
Then I sat, sat silently awhile, swiveling slightly back and forth. Without thinking, I propped my elbow on the chair arm and rested my cheek against my fist-exactly as I had often seen Weiss do. What would he have made of this, I wondered. My first client, Emma's father. What would a down-to-earth ex-cop like Weiss have made of such a wild improbability?
I considered the question and sat and swiveled and leaned my cheek against my fist. Soon I found that I was even thinking to myself in Weiss's voice. I was thinking, Hey, it's a mystery, that's all. We think we know what the world looks like, but that's just our own bullshit we're looking at. Past the bullshit, take my word, it's a fucking mystery.
Just then I was startled by the ringing of the interoffice phone. I hesitated, then picked it up: 'Uh… Yeah?'
It was Amy. She was still smirking. I could hear it.
'Patrick McNair,' she said.
He was a small man, solidly built, fat in the belly the way drinkers get fat. In fact, as I stepped up to shake his hand, I caught the scent of whiskey on him, though it wasn't yet noon. He was bald with a flyaway fringe of silver hair. He had a round, pug, pinched Irish face. His cheeks were laced with scowl lines that seemed to have been carved into them with a putty knife. He had squinting eyes sunk deep into the flesh-eyes that looked out at me from a remove, withdrawn but watchful, a drunk's eyes.
As I showed him to one of the client's chairs, I noticed that he was dressed in an expensive and formal suit, black with a bright red paisley waistcoat in the English fashion, a bright blue tie. There was a generous sprinkling of dandruff on his shoulders. He somehow managed to come across as austere and unkempt at the same time.
I expected to have to explain to him why Weiss wasn't there, why such a young man was handling his case. I even had a little speech worked out about how I was supported by the full power and experience of the Agency and so on. But none of that was necessary. McNair began speaking even as he sat, even before I'd made my way back around the desk to the swivel chair.
'I suppose I can assume this is all confidential. There are situations in which one hopes never to find oneself, and sitting in the office of a private investigator certainly fits that description.' He spoke like that, in a stilted, old- fashioned way, as if he were a character in a novel. He had a slow, rolling bass voice that added to the effect.
'Of course,' I said, grateful to sink into the chair again, hoping it would steady me.
'The idea that anyone might know I'd been here, talked to you, especially about private family business…' He made a great show of shuddering. He gave a single bitter laugh. 'It's bad enough I know it.'
