77 Shadow Street

22

Apartment 2-F

Dr. Kirby Ignis spent the latter part of that afternoon in an armchair, sipping hot green tea, listening to Italian operas sung in Chinese, and watching tropical fish swimming lazily in the large lighted aquarium that stood against one of his living-room walls.

Kirby owned one of the more modest apartments in the Pendleton, although he could have bought a mansion on a sprawling estate. He had earned serious money from his numerous patents; and the royalties flowed to him in greater streams every year.

He could afford the highest caliber interior design, but he chose to live simply. He bought his nondescript furniture on sale from various discount warehouses, with no consideration other than function and comfort.

While he appreciated fine art, he didn’t feel compelled to own any. Not one painting hung in his rooms. He had a few thousand books, perhaps a hundred of which were oversize volumes about painters whose work appealed to him. Photographs of great art were as satisfying to him as would have been the originals hanging on his walls.

Simplify, simplify. That was the secret to a happy life.

At the Ignis Institute, he had a wealth of space and equipment, as well as a support team of brilliant men and women. But these days, he did more work at home than at the office, saving travel time and sparing himself the worries of everyday operation and bureaucracy, which others could handle for him.

Kirby Ignis’s life was largely a life of the mind. He had little interest in material things, but an all-consuming interest in ideas and their consequences. Even now, watching the fish and listening to opera, his mind was occupied with a difficult research problem, a mare’s nest of seemingly contradictory facts that for weeks he had been patiently untangling. Day by day, he unknotted the bits of data and raveled them into order, and he anticipated that within another week, he would have the whole problem smoothed out and rolled as neat as a spool of new ribbon.

Although he lived alone, he wasn’t lonely. There had been a Mrs. Ignis—lovely Nofia—but she had needed a different life from the one that he wanted. With mutual regret, they divorced when they were twenty-six, twenty-four years previously. Since then he hadn’t met a woman who had Nofia’s effect on him. But he enjoyed a complex network of friends to which he added continuously. More than once, he’d been told that he had a character actor’s face such that he could play the amusing next-door neighbor, the favorite uncle, the charming eccentric—and soon the beloved grandfather. His face won him friends, as did his contagious laugh, as did the fact that he was a good listener. You never knew what people might say, and from time to time he heard a story or a fact or an opinion that, though it would seem to have no connection whatsoever to his work, nevertheless led him onto new pathways of thought that proved fruitful.

Indeed, the music that currently encouraged his problem solving was the result of a conversation at a cocktail party. When Kirby said that he thought more deeply and more clearly when listening to music but that he could abide only instrumentals because singers distracted him with lyrics, the somewhat ditzy but always amusing girlfriend of a colleague suggested that he listen to songs sung in languages that he didn’t know, for then the voice would be just another instrument. He liked Italian operas, but because he spoke Italian, he now enjoyed them as performed by opera companies singing, of all things, Chinese translations. The ditzy redhead with pendant earrings like cascades of Christmas tinsel—and with a small tattoo of a leaping gazelle on the back of her right hand—had solved this little problem for Kirby, which would never have happened if he hadn’t enjoyed listening to even the most unlikely people.

His apartment didn’t offer a million-dollar view of the city. The living-room windows faced the courtyard, which was good enough for Kirby, who spent more time looking inward than outward. Because he liked storms, the draperies were drawn all the way open. The thunder, the rattling of the rain on the windows, and the whistling of the wind comprised a symphony that didn’t compete with the opera on the music system. The room was illuminated only by the pleasantly eerie glow of the aquarium, and something about the quality of the light reminded him of scenes in certain sumptuously designed black-and-white movies such as Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane. The flares of lightning were to him no more threatening than the twinkles cast off by a rotating mirrored chandelier in a ballroom, and they added to the ambiance that was so conducive to profound consideration of his current work.

Each throb of lightning, which sometimes came in bursts of three or four or five, shuddered the patterns of the tall French windows across the furniture and walls, grids of narrow shadows and bright squares. Not lost in thought, for thought always led him somewhere, Kirby noticed when a particularly brilliant trio of flashes projected the pane-and-muntin window patterns with a curious difference: a dark curve drooping across the top of one window, as if it had a swagged valance.

When he turned in his chair to determine what could have caused that convex arc of darkness, he saw what appeared to be a curve of pale, wet bunting on the outside of the window, as though someone must have hung a flag or holiday decorations—Christmas was less than four weeks away—from a third-floor window ledge, which was against the homeowners’-association rules.

Kirby put down his teacup and got up from the armchair. By the lambent easy light of the aquarium, he crossed the sparsely furnished living room.

By the time he reached the window, the swag of cloth or whatever it was had either lifted out of sight or been blown away. He pressed the right side of his face against the glass, peering up toward the third floor. He could see an object that wasn’t an architectural detail, something shapeless and pale draped over part of the pediment above the window, but the rising glow of the landscape lights in the courtyard was not bright enough to allow him to identify the thing. It seemed to billow slightly but did not flap vigorously as a flag or decorative bunting ought to have done in the wind, perhaps because it was heavy with rainwater.

The storm flared once, twice, and Kirby got a better but brief view of the thing, which now seemed to be three small, pale sacks, each half the size of a five-pound bag of flour, worked together by a length of rope or a rubber cord. The bags were smooth and bellied, apparently full of something, clustered together and overhung by a flap of loose cloth or perhaps vinyl, which was the part that had blown down over the window but that now billowed higher. He couldn’t tell what the item was or from what it had been suspended, but it certainly didn’t belong up there. When lightning flashed once again, he thought he saw something twitching, two segmented lengths of a stiffer material than the other parts of the assemblage, but instead of clarifying the nature of the object, the frantic stutter of light only made it more mysterious.

Kirby considered cranking open the casement window and sticking his head out in the rain to have a closer look. Before he did that, however, he needed to fetch a flashlight from a utility drawer in the laundry room.

When he stepped out of the living room into the brighter dining area, he glanced at his watch and realized that the day had gotten away from him. He had an appointment for drinks and dinner with one of the institute’s most brilliant scientists, Von Norquist, whose mind flung off new ideas in as bright profusion as a grinding wheel spat sparks from the blade of a knife. If he didn’t hurry, he would be late. Whatever had blown onto the pediment or fallen onto it from the third floor was not raising a clatter, and he saw no risk that it was hard enough or heavy enough to swing down and smash a window. Further exploration could wait for morning light.

In the master-bedroom closet, he added a tie to his shirt and slipped into a sport coat.

In the living room once more, he switched off the Chinese opera but left on the aquarium light.

Lightning imprinted the unobstructed pattern of panes and muntins on the room, with no curious swag of shadow across the top.