down a couple of times.”
Frank made the right turn, then stopped and looked at the street sign: Mercer Place. When he turned back to Stan, the boy’s face was pale.
“I know this is it,” he said, slowly. “She took me up and down it a couple of times. Then we went to the alley. “ He shivered slightly. “It gives me the creeps.”
Frank made a slow turn onto Mercer Place and then headed down it.
“Did she seem interested in any particular house?” he asked.
Stan shook his head. “No. She just looked straight ahead. But she did get a look in her eye, like she was forcing herself not to look one way or the other.”
“Did she say anything?”
“No.”
Frank glanced left and right as he continued to cruise slowly down the street. Small, dilapidated houses lined it. Some leaned in one direction, some in another. But all of them looked as if they were trying to let some unbearable burden slide from their shoulders at last.
It was almost midnight by the time Frank returned to his apartment. He’d gone back to the Bottom Rail for a while, just to see if it still had any appeal to him. He found that it didn’t, but he didn’t know of anything to replace it with, except a solitary drink on a soiled sofa, with his eyes locked helplessly on a square of painted flowers.
His green notebook still rested where he had left it earlier in the evening, curled up next to the bottle on the little table by the sofa. He reached for it immediately and went through it once again. Facts and suppositions swarmed in and out of his mind. He saw people and places that were real enough: Cummings and Morrison and Jameson and Theodore; offices and great halls and small, spattered studios. Karen’s portrait of Angelica came back to him, and then dissolved will-lessly into her vase of flowers. Ghosts. A city of ghosts. He thought of Linton, then of Miriam Castle, then of the little paved street that wound down from the edges of the park. He could see the storm fence, the muddy ground, the small door and mound of speckled drop cloths.
Something caught like a hook in his flesh. He sat up slowly, and all the great, teeming chaos suddenly came together in a dead and frozen order.
25
By nine o’clock the next morning, Frank was at the Cyclorama. He pulled the badge from his coat and dropped it on the desk. It gleamed like pure gold beneath the lamp.
“I’d like to see David Curtis,” he said.
“Mr. Curtis is busy at the moment,” the man said. He was wearing a blue uniform with a badge emblazoned on the front, a large tin one that carried the name of the security firm he worked for in bold letters.
“Where is he?” Frank asked.
“The rotunda.”
“Go get him,” Frank said.
“Mr. Curtis don’t like to be disturbed when he’s working,” the man said.
Frank snapped his hand up to the badge and ripped it off the coat.
“Hey, man!” the guard cried.
Frank tossed the badge onto the floor. “Don’t get the idea that little piece of tin means anything. You can buy them at a toy store.”
The guard fingered the rip in his coat. “They’re going to shit when they see this, man.”
Frank grabbed one of the large buttons on the guard’s coat and tugged down on it. “How do I get to the rotunda?” he asked.
The man glared at him helplessly. “Just go through the room behind me, and then through them double doors.”
Frank let go of the button, then stepped around the desk and walked through the double doors of the rotunda.
It was very large and very dark. He could see the terrible fury of the battle of Atlanta as it spread out in miniature before him, a vision of desperate struggle in the smoking ruin of the South’s premier city. He could almost feel the heat of the flames, hear the roar of the cannon. An air of pain and terror hung over the display, loss and grief like a black shroud in the tiny trees.
“May I help you, sir?”
The voice came from a tall, slightly stooped man who stood next to one of the models, a Union soldier almost half his size.
“I’m looking for David Curtis,” Frank said.
“I am David Curtis,” the man replied.
“On the sign outside, it says that you’re in charge of the Cyclorama restoration.”
“Yes, I am,” Curtis said. “But if you’re looking for work, I’m afraid that all of our positions are filled.”
“I’m not looking for work,” Frank told him. He pulled out his badge.
Curtis leaned forward slightly. “What’s that you’re holding?” he said. “In this light, and with my eyes …”
Frank stepped over to him. “Frank Clemons. Police.”
The man squinted at the badge. “Oh, yes.” He walked a few feet away and hit a switch. A steely gray light suddenly flooded the rotunda. “That’s better, don’t you think?”
Frank nodded.
Curtis walked back over to him. “Now, what is all this about the police?”
“I’m investigating a murder,” Frank said. As he glanced around, he realized that he was standing almost in the dead center of the battle. It seemed to rage ferociously below him, a world of smoking air and exploded buildings, horrifying even in miniature.
“Odd, isn’t it?” Curtis said quietly.
“What?”
“This place.”
“Yes, a little.”
“Sometimes I feel like ducking quickly, to avoid a musket ball that’s hurtling toward me.”
It was a landscape of hellish misery, and as Frank’s eyes lingered on it, the misery itself seemed to gather around him in a cloud. It was as if every streak of pain and cry of grief had been collected in this room, all the folly of a million years suddenly rolled into one heartbreaking ball.
“My God,” he whispered.
Curtis looked at him curiously. “You’ve never been here, have you?”
“No.”
“Most people see it from up in the stands,” Curtis said. “It’s quite different when you’re down here.” He tugged Frank gently by the arm. “Come, we’ll go to my office now.”
Frank followed him slowly into a small room at the rear of the rotunda. It was cluttered with tiny figures of soldiers and military equipment, tiny flags fluttering in an invisible wind, patches of smoldering earth, stands of burning trees.
Curtis sat down behind his desk. “Now, you said something about a murder?”
“Yes,” Frank said. “A young woman.” He handed Curtis the picture of Angelica. “Her.”
Curtis brought the photograph very close to his eyes. “I broke my glasses yesterday,” he explained. “I’ll have a new pair by this afternoon. But for now, I’m a bit handicapped.”
“Do you recognize her?” Frank asked.
Curtis shook his head. “No. Who is she?”
“Angelica Devereaux.”
“Oh, yes, it was in the paper a few days ago.”
“That’s right,” Frank said. “Her body was found not too far from here.”
“Really? I thought the paper said that it was found off Glenwood.”
“You have a very good memory,” Frank said.
“Yes, I do.” Curtis handed the picture back to Frank. “Was the paper wrong?”
