the morning,' Tom said. The attendant said that was fine, he'd be there all night, and took the keys, barely able to look away from the car. He went into his booth and returned with a ticket.
Tom and I walked out of the garage into the beginning of twilight. Grains of darkness bloomed in the midst of the fading light. Tom turned away from Livermore, crossed the street, and led me into the alley at the end of the block. Ten feet wide, the alley was already half in night. A tall boy leaning against a dumpster up at the far end straightened up when we moved in out of the light. 'Wiggins?' Tom asked. 'Nope,' said Wiggins, his voice soft but carrying, 'but check that chain.' He gave Tom a mock salute and sauntered off.
Tom moved ahead of me as the boy slipped out of the alley by the other end. Thirty feet along, opposite a high brown half-louvered fence, stood the long flat windowless back of the Beldame Oriental. Whorls of spray paint covered the gray cement blocks and surrounded the two wide black doors. I came up beside Tom. The thick length of chain that should have joined the two doors hung from the left bracket, and the padlock dangled from the right. Tom frowned at me, thinking.
'Is he in there?' I whispered.
'I think I should have sent Clayton and Wiggins down here right after you did your Dick Mueller act. I thought he'd wait until the end of his shift.'
'To do what?'
'Move the papers, of course.' At what must have been my expression of absolute dismay, he said, 'It's just a guess. He'll come back, anyhow.'
He pulled at the right bracket, and both doors moved forward a quarter of an inch and then clanked to a stop. 'Ah, there's another lock,' Tom said. 'I forgot that one.' Until Tom spoke, I had not seen the round, slightly indented shape of the lock beneath the bracket.
From the inside of his jacket he pulled a long dark length of fabric, held it by one end, and let its own weight unroll it. Keys of different sizes and long, variously shaped metal rods fit into slots and pockets all along the heavy, ribbed fabric. 'Lamont's famous kit,' he said. He bent forward to look at the lock and then took a silver key from one of the pockets in the cloth. He moved up to the door, poised the key, and nudged it squarely into the slot. He nodded. When he turned the key, we heard the bolt sliding back into its housing. Tom put the key into his jacket pocket, rolled up the length of fabric, and slid the fabric into a pouch on the inside of his jacket. I vaguely saw the shape of the Glock's handle protruding from a soft, glovelike holster just in front of his right hip.
'Try the penlight,' he said, and both of us pulled from our pockets the narrow, tubular flashlights he had produced just before we left the house. I turned around and pushed up the switch. A six-inch circle of bright light appeared on the brown wall opposite. I moved the light sideways, and the circle swept along the buildings across the alley, widening as it moved toward the other end. 'Good, aren't they?' he said. 'Lot of power, for a little thing.'
'Why would he come back, if he already moved his notes?'
'Dick Mueller. He'll imagine that Mueller will try to outfox him by showing up early, and so he'll show up even earlier.'
'Where would he put the notes?'
'I'm thinking about that,' Tom said, and grasped the bracket and opened the right half of the double doors. 'Shall we?'
I looked over his shoulder. In ten minutes the street lamps would switch on. 'Okay,' I said, and moved past him into the pure darkness of the theater.
As Tom closed the door behind us, I switched on the penlight and ran it over the dusty cement wall to our right and found the single black door in front of us that opened into the main body of the theater. To my left, wide concrete steps led down into the basement. 'Over here,' Tom said. I swung the light toward the door he had just closed and zigzagged it around until I found the interior indentation, painted over with black, that matched the one on the outside. 'Good, hold it there,' Tom said, and relocked the door. I trained the yellow circle of light on him as he unfolded the cloth, inserted the key, and packed the kit away into his jacket again.
'You know, those notes might still be here. Fee might have come over here from Armory Place right after we called and unlocked the chain to make it easier to get in tonight.'
He switched on his light and played it over the door. He held the beam on the doorknob and switched off the penlight as soon as he took the handle. I also turned off mine, and Tom opened the door.
After the door closed behind us, Tom placed the tips of his fingers in the small of my back and urged me forward into a dimensionless void. I remembered a long stretch of empty floor between the first row of seats and the back exit; in any case, I knew that all I was stepping toward so cautiously was the aisle; but it was like being blind, and I put my hands out in front of me. 'What?' I said, whispering for no rational reason. Tom nudged me forward again, and I took another two cautious steps and waited. 'Turn around,' Tom whispered back to me. I heard his feet moving quietly on the bare cement of the theater's floor and turned around, less out of obedience than fear that he was going to disappear. I heard the knob turning in the exit door. If he goes out, I thought, so do I. The door swung open an inch or two, and I realized what he was doing—a distinct line of grayish light shone along the edge of the door. He opened the door another few inches, and a column of gray light shone in the darkness. A shaft of the rough surface of the cement floor, painted black and lightly traced with dust, opened like an eye in front of the shining column. We would be able to see anyone who came into the theater.
He gently shut the door. Absolute blackness closed in on us again. Two soft footsteps came toward me, and his hand whispered against cloth as it slid into his pocket. There was a sharp click! and a round beam of yellow light, startlingly well defined and so physical it seemed solid, cut through the darkness and picked out the last two seats in the first row. 'Tom,' I began, but before I got any further, he had snapped off the penlight, leaving me with the shadow image of the raised seats. The floor moved under my feet like the deck of a boat. Over the shadow- flash image of the chairs, the hot beam of light hung in my eyes like the ghost of a flashbulb, increasing the darkness.
'I know,' Tom said. 'I just wanted to get a general idea.'
'Let's just stand here for a couple of minutes,' I said, and pressed the burning circle in my back against the wall. The floor immediately stopped swaying. Through the jacket, the cool roughness of the wall seeped toward my skin. I remembered the walls of the Beldame Oriental. Red, printed with a raised pattern of random, irregular swirls, they were stony, as abrasive as coral, sometimes sweaty with a chill layer of condensation. I bent my knees to concentrate the pressure on the hooks and ratchets, flattened my palms against the rough stipple of the cement, and waited for details to swim up out of the blank dark wall in front of me. Tom's soft, slow breathing at my side seemed indistinguishable from my own.
A sense of space and dimension began to shape the darkness. I began to be aware that I stood near one corner of a large tilted box that grew smaller as it rose toward the far end. After a time, I could make out before me the raised edge of the stage as a slight shimmer, like rays of heat coming up off a highway. This disappeared as Tom Pasmore moved in front of me and then returned when he moved quietly away up the side of the theater. I heard his footsteps dampen but not disappear as he left the cement apron extending from the first row of seats to the stage and stepped onto the carpeting. The shimmer solidified into the long swelling shape of the stage, and the seats gradually became visible as a dark, solid triangle fanning up and out from a point a few feet from where I stood. Tom's face was a faint, pale blotch up the aisle.
At the far end of the theater was another aisle, I remembered, and the wide space of a central passage, probably mandated by the fire department, divided the rows of seats in half.
I could now just about make out the curved backs of the nearest individual seats, and I had a dim sense of the width of the aisle. Beneath the pale smudge of his face, Tom was a black shape melting in and out of the darkness surrounding him. I followed him up the aisle toward the front of the theater. When we reached the last row, Tom stopped moving and turned around. A metallic glint like a slipperiness in the air marked the panel in the lobby door. Looking down, we could see a great soft darkness over the stage that must have been the curtains.
The gleam of the metal plate disappeared as he put his hand over it, and the door yielded before him in
