“The police are outside,” she said.
I suppose I opened my mouth. Certainly, I felt cool air on my tongue.
“They are?” I asked stupidly.
“You must have walked right past them.”
I dismissed it. “Eleanor,” I said, “I need you.”
She looked past me, at the picture window, and said nothing.
“There’s no one I can talk to,” I said.
“You can talk to me,” Eleanor said, her face down.
“With him around?” I asked. “Homo imitatiens?”
“He won’t be around tomorrow,” she said in a muffled voice.
“I need you tonight.”
“Well,” she said, lifting her face to me, “I’m sorry. It’s a little bit late, isn’t it? There’s a life going on here even when you’re not around, Simeon,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea that you wouldn’t be around. Lord, Simeon, how long did you think-”
“Okay,” I said, not knowing whether I wanted to cry or kill someone. “Fine. Skip it.”
“Please,” she said, “don’t-”
“I’ve recorked the wine,” Burt said from the door that led to the kitchen.
“Then we can go,” Eleanor said with her back to him, passing a hand over her face.
“Well,” I said. “Then let’s go.”
“Simeon,” Eleanor said. “Will you call me?”
“Sure. See you,” I said, heading for the front door and feeling no more substantial than my own raincoat, filled with newspapers.
Outside, the hot wind blew, and the moon shone brightly enough to evaporate water, brightly enough for me to see the unmarked police car waiting across the street. I navigated across the smooth black asphalt and looked down at Hammond.
“Al,” I said, “you could have spared me that.”
Hammond took a puff off the cigar I’d smelled before and leaned forward to twitch the ignition on. He used the power to hit the window button on the driver’s side, and the glass slid up. He still hadn’t looked at me.
“You forget,” he said just before the window sealed him off, “we ain’t buddies anymore.”
The window closed, and I lifted my arms high above my head and slammed the roof of Hammond’s car with both fists, putting a substantial dent in it, before I drove away from my ex-friend and my ex-ex-girlfriend and did what I’d been threatening to do: headed for a Holiday Inn.
After I checked in, I hauled the stack of notebooks out of Alice’s trunk and toted them upstairs. It took two trips, just as it had going down the driveway. Then, knowing I wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway, I went out to a convenience store around the corner and bought a jar of instant coffee. It could be mixed with hot water from the tap. Or, what the hell, I could eat it with a spoon.
The notebooks opened up like rooms from the past, furnished with odds and ends-many of them very odd and most of them dead ends-that had once seemed important. Names, dates, places, impossibly broad concepts, niggling details, the occasional carpet of plausible language to sweep stubborn facts under. I had spent fifteen years of my life doing this, and I had gotten very good at it.
The instant coffee kept my eyes open and my heart pounding, pounding erratically but pounding, and the frequent trips to the bathroom gave me a little exercise. All in all, I was in pretty good shape at eleven the next morning when I opened the ninth book at random, somewhere toward the middle, and found myself looking down at a preliminary outline for a paper, one of literally hundreds prepared for literally dozens of classes in comparative religion.
The paper was entitled “Faces of God,” and beneath the title, signaled by an important-looking Roman numeral, was a list of the visual traditions I’d intended to ransack with the least possible effort and at the last possible moment. And under Roman numeral III was the heading “Illuminated Manuscripts,” and below that, in parentheses, was the Incinerator’s name.
14
“Wilton Hoxley,” EdnaVercini said promptly. She snapped her gum and took a bite of sugared doughnut that did not, against all the laws of physics, seem to dissolve her gum, then followed the doughnut with a long and apparently satisfying hit off an unfiItered Camel. “‘Tiltin’ Wilton,’ we all called him.” She chose the nearest from among a bewildering assortment of styrofoam coffee cups and slurped, making a face. “Not me, of course,” she said.
“Of course not,” I said, wondering as I had for years whether the desk also held a set of hypodermic works. Either they were hidden in a drawer, or else heroin was the only life-threatening habit to which Edna did not subscribe. Nonetheless, she was as slender as she’d been when I’d first met her, and her forty-five-year-old complexion was flawless.
“Good old Elvis,” Edna said, consulting another of her vices, the latest edition of the National Expose, which lay open on her desk. “Now there was a man who knew how to eat. He would have swallowed a tennis racquet if someone could have figured out how to deep-fry it.” She advanced into the depths of her doughnut.
“Tiltin’ Wilton,” I suggested.
“Nice enough boy.” She shifted the doughnut to one side so she could work on the gum. “I mean, a specimen to be preserved on the end of a pin if there ever was one, but that wasn’t his fault.” Edna was second assistant to UCLA’s chief librarian.
“Then whose fault was it?” I asked.
“That foot,” she said. “Poor kid had a clubfoot, didn’t he?”
“Edna,” I said, sipping from the coffee cup nearest me. It was sweet enough to gag a primrose, but the caffeine felt good as it did its dubious magic to the ganglia of my nervous centers. It was noon, and I hadn’t slept a minute. “Did he have a clubfoot?”
“Well, sure,” she said. She searched among the flotsam and jetsam atop her desk to find something sufficiently horrible. Finally, she chose the oldest and emptiest of the coffee cups, one rimmed with lipstick above half an inch of black fluid with powdered nondairy creamer bobbing on top of it like a ghost’s dandruff. “That’s why Tiltin’ Wilton.” Edna quaffed half of the ghastly liquid in the cup before she said, “And that’s why he changed his name.”
“To what?” I asked.
“I just said that,” Edna said.
“To what?” I asked.
“Festus,” she said. She found the doughnut, picked it up in the hand with the cigarette, and made a detour to drop the butt into the film can that served her as an ashtray. The can held a little Matterhorn of cigarette butts.
“Why Festus?” I asked.
“Are you going to buy me lunch?” Edna said, squinting suspiciously.
“I promised that I would.”
“Well, I asked him why,” she said, placated. “Who wouldn’t? It was after Hephaestus,” she said. “The blacksmith of the gods, remember? Another gimp. Lame, same like him, and his mother-that was Zeus’ wife, Hera- tossed him out of Olympus because he was deformed. Poor baby,” she said, “bet he had mother trouble, too. We never would have fired him, he was terrific at his job, except that manuscripts kept disappearing.”
“Illuminated manuscripts,” I said.
Edna took a bite off what remained of her doughnut. “Sure,” she said, “well, bits and pieces anyway. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”
“At the moment,” I said, “we’re talking about Hephaestus. Just yesterday, or maybe it was two days ago,
