“You can drop me off at my house,” I said.
“Wow! The mysterious Shake is going to show me where he lives.”
“I understand why you’re upset. I understand that the injustice of this is difficult to ignore. But this is one of those times when you need to step back and pause.”
Karla gripped the steering wheel with both hands and took several long, deep breaths. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You want me to trust you about not reporting a psycho who kidnaps and probably tortures and murders young girls, and in return you’re going to trust me with your address!”
“Have you read Borges?” I asked.
The question clearly confused her. “What?” she asked, shaking her head as if to clear it.
“The writer, Jorge Luis Borges.”
“I’ve heard of him,” she said.
“In one of his fictions, a character searches through the pockets of a dead man and finds a small metal cone that is so heavy, he can barely lift it. The man is mystified by this inexplicable object and, of course, he steals it. Unfortunately for him, the cone has a deleterious effect on anyone in possession of it, and the man comes, as they say, to a bad end.”
“And your point is?” she said, after I’d paused.
“My point is that having my address may not be as light a matter as you think.”
I had her pull up in front of the house. “This is it,” I said. “I live on the second floor. The caretaker lives downstairs. There’s a private entrance in the back.”
We sat quietly for a bit, Karla’s face turned away from me as she studied the house.
“It’s a nice house,” she said, breaking the silence. “I guess I’m a little surprised.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just an ordinary house on an ordinary street. I guess I was expecting something more mysterious.”
I could see she was calming down. We sat a while longer in silence before she spoke again.
“I’ll do what you want, Shake. I’ll stay away from Pollock Pines. And I won’t call the police.” Then, after a minute of silence, asked, “Will you do me a favor?”
“Certainly, if I can.”
“When Mio is back in town, would you tell her I’d like to go dancing again?”
“I’m sure she’ll be pleased,” I said, and got out.
Chapter 22
The garage was separated from the house by a passageway giving access to the back yard. As I passed through the gate, I knew I had company and I knew who it was. When I rounded the corner into the back yard, Calvin was on the upstairs landing, leaning against the banister. He seemed to be preoccupied with his thoughts, remaining motionless as I started up the stairs. Only as I neared the top did he turn and face me. He had changed very little in the hundred years since we had last stood so close. His eyes were still cold, piercing, indifferent; the gaze of a well-fed predator. Or maybe it was just the gaze of someone who had seen most of what there was to see in this world. In Sicily, he had been dressed like one of the local shopkeepers. Now he was wearing khaki slacks with oversized pockets on the thighs, hiking boots, and a wrinkled cotton shirt.
“You let the girl go,” he said, with the hint of a smile. It wasn’t a question so much as a request to confirm what he assumed to be the case.
“Yes,” I said.
Having gotten confirmation, he seemed to be considering his next words, then added, with the low, whispery tranquility I remembered first hearing under the rubble in Sicily, “It will be inconvenient for me, if she leads the police back to my house.”
“I don’t think that will happen. She has no idea where she was, and I put her on a bus to Texas.”
There was an unexpected sparkle in his eyes. “You’re either more heartless than I am, or you’ve never been to Texas.”
His comment was funny, but I wasn’t in the mood. “It seemed like the thing to do under the circumstances.”
“Circumstances?” he asked.
That was when it suddenly became clear to me. I’d done the same thing to Calvin as he had done to me. I had taken him for granted. For a hundred years, I had satisfied myself with an idea of him that was mostly my own invention, one that I’d formed while still under the sway of my human emotions. My first impressions hadn’t been entirely wrong. Calvin was indifferent to my fate, but no more so than I was to his. What I couldn’t see in Sicily was the practicality behind his lack of emotional involvement. I couldn’t understand his detachment from the devastation all around him, because at the time I lacked that detachment myself. But a century had now passed.
Be that as it may, I still wasn’t inclined to explain myself to him. I wasn’t particularly uncomfortable about finding him at my house. I didn’t care that he knew where I lived. I wasn’t afraid of him. But something was changing for me, something I wasn’t very clear about in my own mind, and Calvin, what he represented, was from a past I was trying to move away from, or at least trying to reevaluate. But then it occurred to me that if I wanted to take a fresh look at my past, Calvin might be the best place to start.
“You’re not still upset about Sicily, are you?” he asked. Then, when I didn’t respond, he said, “Look, I know what happened there was hard for you. I admit I might have been more helpful.”
“You think?”
“You say that like it’s obvious I could have made things easier for you. But it isn’t. It’s far from obvious. Being turned can be positively chaotic. I wasn’t in any better position to predict what you would do, how well or poorly you would handle the situation, than you were.”
I had to admit, Calvin had a point. There was no
