Century Rain

SIXTEEN

Auger shut the door behind her, clutching her handbag and the biscuit tin to her chest as if they might be snatched away at any moment. On the landing outside the detective’s premises, a heavily made-up old woman studied her with sly, knowing eyes while enveloping herself in a haze of silver-blue cigarette smoke. She said nothing, but the look on her face conveyed both accusation and bored indifference, as if she had witnessed every possible sin in the world and had long since ceased to be shocked by any of them. Her attention flicked momentarily to the tin Auger was holding so protectively, then her eyes lost focus and whatever gleam of malice had been there a moment before. Auger was about to take the stairs down to the next landing when she noticed that another woman—this one young, with very black hair held back from her face with a spotted red headscarf—was on her hands and knees, waxing and polishing the lower steps.

The woman looked up as Auger was about to descend. “Please,” she said, nodding towards the black iron framework of the elevator shaft that rose up the centre of the stairwell.

Grateful that the elevator car was ready and waiting, Auger stepped inside and slid shut the trellised gate, then pressed the button for the ground floor. With a thud and a whine, the elevator began its inching descent, creeping past the cleaning girl. The elevator descended another floor and then came to an abrupt, rattling halt, exactly between landings. Auger swore and pressed the button again, but the elevator refused to budge. She tried forcing open the sliding gate, but it had locked itself tight.

“Hey,” she called out. “Can someone help me? I’m stuck in this thing.”

She heard the cleaning girl say something, but it sounded more sympathetic than useful. Auger tried the elevator button again, but with no more effect than before. Feeling suddenly dejected, it began to dawn on her that she might be stuck inside it for hours while some overworked engineer made his grumbling way across the city on a Saturday. Assuming anyone had the presence of mind to call for assistance, which might be one assumption too many. She called out again—if the cleaning girl didn’t answer or understand her, then perhaps she might be able to rouse Floyd—but this time she heard nothing at all in reply.

A minute passed with no further sign of movement. All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing and the occasional metallic rattle as her movements caused the elevator car to chafe against its restraints. The building sounded utterly deserted.

She heard a door shut somewhere above her, followed by a rapid succession of descending footsteps. The footsteps quickened in pace and then became thuds, as if someone was skipping two or three steps at a time. Auger peered through the meshwork screen that constituted the elevator car’s roof and saw a dark figure circle the landing immediately above her. Before she could call out, the figure had bounded down the steps surrounding the part of the shaft in which she was stuck in a series of flighty jumps and was on the landing below, continuing towards street level. Auger had only seen the figure in full view for an instant, and that blurred by motion, but she had not been able to make out any facial details. The figure was wearing a high-collared coat, a fedora jammed low on his head with the brim turned down. For an absurd moment she wondered if it might have been Floyd, but even as the idea occurred to her, she dismissed it as stupid.

A moment later, the elevator buzzed back into life and resumed its descent. It came to a halt on the next landing and, not wanting to take any further chances, Auger opened the gate and made the rest of her journey on foot. With the box still in her possession, it was a relief to reach daylight. Somehow she felt safer outdoors, illogical as that may have been.

She looked up and down rue du Dragon, but there was no sign of the running man, or of anything else obviously out of place. The street was as quiet and sleepy as it had been when she had arrived, but there were some pedestrians walking along it, and if anyone was to try anything against her, she knew she could count on one or two witnesses from the equine butcher’s shop on the ground floor of Floyd’s building.

A little further down the street, Auger stepped into the doorway of a boarded-up hosier’s shop, long out of business, and snapped the lid from the tin. Inside, as Floyd had shown her in his office, was a thick rubber-banded bundle of paperwork and documents. She took this bundle and stuffed it into her handbag. Having no further use for the tin, she pushed it into a pile of cardboard boxes and other debris that had built up in one corner of the shop doorway.

She stepped back into the street and walked to the south end of rue du Dragon, crossing rue de Sèvres on to the much wider thoroughfare of rue de Rennes. As she reached the corner, she heard the rumble of a car starting somewhere behind her, and as she walked north on rue de Rennes, she risked a glance over her shoulder and saw the grilled nose of the vehicle emerging on to the same street. The car rolled forward until the cab was in full view, but the sunlight flaring from the windscreen prevented her from making out the driver. Auger quickened her pace, and when she allowed herself another glance back, there was no sign of the car. But there were many similar cars parked along the roadside, and it would not have been difficult for the driver to lose his amongst them.

Auger continued along rue de Rennes, stopping every now and then to try to flag down a taxi. But either it was the wrong time of day, or there was some Parisian knack she hadn’t yet grasped, for the taxis sped on in an indifferent blur of black metal and chrome, leaving her muttering under her breath. Auger glanced back once more and thought she saw the same car again, inching along at walking pace, but no sooner had her suspicions begun to build than the car swerved away down a side street.

Auger told herself sternly that she was being just as paranoid as Susan White’s fictitious persona. The trick was to see things from Floyd’s point of view, not hers. The detective could have no possible idea of the significance of the paperwork in the box. Her story was entirely reasonable, and Floyd should have no grounds to doubt her word. Susan White had even mentioned that her sister would be coming for her belongings.

Still nervous, but forcing herself to act a little more calmly, Auger realised that she had arrived at the entrance to the Métro station at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She would have preferred the speed and safety of a taxi ride, but the train was the next best thing. She fished money from her purse, still not completely familiar with the coinage, and bought a one-way ticket. A train was grinding into the underground station as she cleared the turnstile.

Auger got aboard, moving along the compartment as the doors closed themselves and the train lurched away. She found a seat next to two young women who had their faces buried in fashion magazines. The train burrowed its way south, slowing into Saint-Sulpice, the station’s walls plastered with faded sepia-tinted advertisements for perfume, stockings and tobacco. As people moved on and off the train, Auger checked them out in her peripheral vision, searching for anyone who looked like Floyd or the figure she had seen descending the stairs. But she recognised no one, and as the train pulled away into the darkness of the next tunnel, she allowed herself to relax a notch. After a minute or so, the train slowed into the next station on the line, Saint-Placide, and Auger once again kept an eye on the passengers coming and going. This time, however, it was with less apprehension and more a guarded interest in the private lives of these unwitting prisoners. It was then that Auger noticed a woman stepping out of the train two carriages ahead of the one she was in. The woman had a pretty face framed by very black hair, and it took Auger a moment to place her as the girl who had been cleaning the stairs in rue du Dragon. She had removed her headscarf and apron, but her features were unmistakable. Rather than heading for the exit, the woman walked alongside the train until she reached carriage next to Auger’s, reboarding just as the doors hissed shut and the train hurtled back into darkness.

Auger clutched the handbag tightly against her stomach, resisting the urge to open it to make sure that the paperwork was still safe and sound. Presently, the train began to slow into Montparnasse. Auger made sure she was standing right next to the door as the train pulled to a stop, and was relieved when a surge of people followed her from the train, enveloping and jostling her towards the tiled corridors and stairs that led to the number six line. She pushed ahead of them, all the while clutching her handbag against her like a living thing that needed protection. Climbing stairs, she glanced back and saw the black-haired woman behind her, but almost lost amongst the faces and hats of the other passengers. The number six line ran on an elevated section of track, and when Auger reached daylight she was relieved to see that a train was already in the station, on the point of departure. She ran for it, nearly tripping in her painfully tight shoes, and just managed to get aboard as the doors slid shut. As the train pulled away and Auger caught her breath, she saw the black-haired woman still waiting on the platform.

Auger checked her watch. It was just before ten. Barely an hour had passed since she had walked into the detective’s office.

Floyd picked up the telephone on the first ring. “Greta?”

“It’s me,” she confirmed, sounding a little out of breath.

“I lost her,” Floyd said. He was sitting in the sad, shuttered spare room in Montparnasse. Sophie was upstairs with Marguerite, and the house had a peculiar kind of Sunday-morning calm about it, even though it was only Saturday. “I expected her to get into a taxi as soon as she left the office. But she was on foot, and there was no way I could keep up with her in the car without her getting suspicious. I don’t think she recognised me, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. Better to lose her this time and hope we can pick her up again near Blanchard’s apartment.”

“You think she’ll go back there?”

“She might have unfinished business, especially when she gets a look at what’s inside the box.”

“Maybe she will. In any case, we haven’t lost her yet. I know where she’s staying.”

Floyd brightened. Now and then a piece of unexpected good fortune dropped into his hands like an early Christmas present. “You managed to keep up with her?”

“Not exactly,” Greta said. “I followed her on foot until she reached the station at Saint-Germain. I skulked in the shadows while she bought a ticket, then bought one for myself while she headed for the train. I got on the same train as she did, but made sure I wasn’t in the same carriage. I moved up the train in Saint-Placide, then followed her as she changed on to the number six line at Montparnasse. Luckily, I know that station pretty well: I spent most of my childhood changing trains there. I saw the direction she was taking, but she managed to get on to a train before I reached the platform.”

“Then you lost her.”

“Only for a couple of minutes. I caught the next train out of Montparnasse. We were on the elevated line, moving west, and you have a good view of the street from those elevated stations, so I kept my eyes peeled. It paid off. I saw her walking away from the station at Dupleix, just as we were slowing down. I got off the train, hared down the steps and followed her all the way home, always hanging a block behind her.”

“I’m impressed,” Floyd said. “Did she look as though she thought she was being followed?”

“I’m not a mind-reader, Floyd, but she seemed a lot less twitchy than before. My guess is she thought the change of trains had thrown anyone following her off her scent.”

“I’ll make a detective out of you one of these days, just you watch.” Floyd reached for his notebook and pen. “Tell me where she’s staying.”

Greta gave him the address of a hotel on avenue Emile Zola, a short walk from Dupleix Métro station. She was calling from a brasserie frequented by change-of-shift car workers from the nearby Citroën factory. “I can’t tell you her room number, or how she likes her toast done. And I can’t stay here all day, either.”

“You don’t have to. I can be there within the hour.”

“There’s no way you can get here sooner?”

“I’ll have someone on my tail as well, remember,” Floyd said.

“Another of those horrible children?” she asked, nervousness creeping into her voice.

“No, just Belliard’s goons. They followed me to Montparnasse. I think I can lose them if I cross the river twice, but that will take time. I don’t want them thinking I’m taking an interest in Verity Auger. If they do, awkward questions might be asked.”

“What do you mean, ‘awkward questions?’ ”

“The kind that will involve a heavy dental bill.”

“Be here as soon as you can. This is as far into this as I want to go, Floyd. I never had aspirations to play the girl detective, and I’m not on your payroll.”

“You did a good job,” Floyd said as she hung up. He set his receiver down and began to plot his route across Paris, incorporating as many sudden turns and reversals as he dared.

Auger turned the key, locking the door from inside, and crashed on to the bed, suddenly overwhelmed by relief and exhaustion.

She closed her eyes for a few minutes, then hauled herself to the pea-green washbasin and splashed some cold water on to her face. “Stay sharp,” she said aloud. “The hard part might be over, but you still need to make it back to the portal. Don’t get too complacent, Auger. And don’t talk to yourself, either. It’s the first sign of madness.”

She removed her horrid, tight Parisian shoes and dialled down to the front desk for a pot of coffee. Then she called down to the lobby again and asked to be connected to an external number.

“Just a moment, madame.”

Someone picked up on the third ring, answering in poorly enunciated French. “To whom am I speaking?”

“This is Auger,” she said.

“Good,” Aveling answered, slipping immediately back into English. “Do you have—”

“Yes, I have the items. Can you get a message through to Caliskan?”

“Not possible, I’m afraid.” He was speaking from the safe house, a rented room a minute’s walk from Cardinal Lemoine. No direct telephone connection existed between the surface of Paris and the concealed chambers underground. “We’re having some technical difficulties with the link.”

“Tell me it isn’t serious.”

“It’s being worked on. It’s not the first time the link has become unstable, and it’ll most likely sort itself out within a few hours. It’s probably not related.”

“Not related to what?”

“Anything you need worry about.”

“Tell me, you patronising…” She tried to insult him, dredging her repertoire for something suitably nasty, but it was as if a mental roadblock had been installed between her brain and her mouth.

“There’s political trouble back home,” Aveling interjected before she could continue. “That Slasher offensive everyone was expecting? It’s begun. But don’t you fret. Just bring the box and let us worry about the bigger picture. We’re all very happy with the way you’ve handled things so far. It would be a shame to spoil things now, wouldn’t it?”

“I could just burn the papers,” Auger said. “Or throw them away somewhere where no one will ever find them. What’s the problem with that?”

“We’d rather you returned them to us. That way we can make sure nothing has gone astray.”

“I can make it to the portal,” she said, “but I’m not certain that’s such a great idea at the moment. I’m pretty sure someone followed me here, from the detective’s office.”

“What kind of someone?”

“Someone working for him, I think. He seemed very willing to hand over the box. With hindsight, it looks as though he always intended to have someone tail me.”

“And he’s just a local detective?”

“Yes, the one I told you about after I spoke to Blanchard.”

“He’s probably just curious. Do your best to shake him off your tail, but don’t worry about him.”

“There’s more going on here than you’ve told me,” she said.

“Listen carefully,” Aveling said. “It’s exactly ten-forty now. Check your watch and synchronise.”

“Done.”

“At exactly noon we will arrange for a two-minute power interruption on the Métro line running through Cardinal Lemoine. I’ll be waiting for you inside the tunnel, at the door, and for obvious reasons, it would not be good to be late. No excuses, Auger—we’re all counting on you. I’ll see you in eighty minutes, with the paperwork.”

She said nothing.

“Will you be there?” Aveling asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course I’ll be there.”

Room service arrived with a knock on the door. She hung up on Aveling and opened the door as far as the security chain allowed before letting the boy enter and place her coffee service on the bedside table. She tipped him generously and then locked and chained the door from the inside. The coffee was on the lukewarm side of hot, but it was considerably better than nothing. She spooned cream and sugar into it and had drunk half a cup before she began to feel calm again.

She was definitely not being told everything. Auger supposed that this suspicion had always been lurking at the back of her mind, but now she was certain of it. And there was something else, something even more troubling that had been nagging at her quietly since she had first learned of Susan White’s involvement in this whole business.

Why had White made such a point of involving Auger when they were little more than professional acquaintances? Auger could understand White being concerned about her own safety and wanting to make sure that the papers didn’t fall into the wrong hands. She could understand the requirement for someone from the other side of the portal to come and retrieve them. But why Auger, specifically? Sure, she had the necessary background on Paris, the deep knowledge of the city, but there had to be more to it than that. At first glance, it looked as if White was playing a posthumous trick on Auger, setting her up for a hazardous job out of professional spite. But they’d been cool rivals rather than enemies, with no mutual animosity that Auger was aware of. In truth, they were rather alike.

So it had to have been something else. White was clever and calculating—she’d have done nothing without an excellent reason. And the only explanation Auger could come up with—the only one that seemed plausible to her, given what she knew of the woman—was that it was a matter of trust.

Auger was an outsider. She had ties to Caliskan—that was unavoidable for anyone with an Antiquities background—but they weren’t exactly thick as thieves. More important was the fact that she was not part of Aveling’s operation. A little more than a week ago, she’d had no knowledge of E2 whatsoever. Which meant, presumably, that Susan White had decided that she couldn’t trust Aveling or his people.

All of them? Auger wondered. Or did she just suspect that somewhere in the organisation there was someone who couldn’t be trusted?

Auger preferred the second hypothesis. It made more sense to her than the idea that the entire organisation, from Phobos to E2, was compromised. If that was the case, then they would surely have found a way to avoid bringing in an outsider, no matter how much it inconvenienced their plans.

Auger thought about what she had already learned for herself. Everyone agreed that there was something important about those papers. Susan White had gone to the trouble of passing them on for safekeeping and making arrangements for their return to the other side of the portal. Caliskan, Aveling and all the others involved in the Phobos operation seemed to agree on the significance of the documents, or else Auger would never have been co-opted to retrieve them. And there was someone else who considered them to be significant: whoever had killed White and now Blanchard. Whoever that was, they seemed less than keen to see those papers return to Phobos. Which implied—unless Auger’s imagination was running away with itself—that the person or persons who had committed those two murders were in some way linked to the contents of the papers.

Which brought her to the papers themselves. What did they have to say on the subject?

Auger took the bundle of documents from her handbag and began to arrange them on the maroon bedspread, eventually covering it completely. She laid each item out neatly, but imposed no sorting methodology on the papers other than the order in which they emerged from the bundle.

She stepped back from the bed and looked at the dead woman’s legacy.

“Talk to me, Susan,” she said. “Give me a hint as to what all this is about.”

Auger poured herself another cup of coffee, added cream and sugar and set about rearranging the material on the bed, hunting for some meaningful combination. But no permutation of the papers looked any more or less significant than the last. Unless she was missing something subtle, the message must be in the content of the documents rather than any pattern they formed. None of these papers would have had any particular significance to a local. They might have struck someone as rather an eccentric collection of documents, especially if they had been traced to a young American tourist, but there was no smoking gun, no one document that shrieked of an otherworldly origin. There was, in fact, nothing in the collection that could not have been acquired by an ordinary person with access to the usual libraries and bookshops. There were no top-secret blueprints or duplicated documents from E1; nothing even remotely hinting that Susan White was an explorer who had arrived in Paris through a quasi-wormhole link from some unguessably distant part of the Milky Way.

Auger scrutinised the papers once more to make sure she was not missing something, but barring the use of invisible inks, microdots or some other such subterfuge, there was nothing intrinsically destabilising about any of the items Susan White had acquired. There was, in short, nothing that would have caused any obvious difficulties had it fallen into local hands. In all likelihood, the documents would have been thrown out and the biscuit tin kept instead.

But Caliskan and his organisation had staged a high-risk operation to recover these documents. And the emphasis had indeed been on “recovering” them: there had been no talk of simply discarding or destroying them. No: Caliskan wanted them back, and that meant that the documents were themselves suspected of being important.

They knew that Susan White had been on to something. They just hadn’t wanted to tell Auger, knowing that it might have scared her off. She had been foolish not to ask more questions about the significance of the lost property before she agreed to recover it. But Caliskan and his people had counted on her clutching at any straw to avoid the disciplinary tribunal, and they must have known that she would not think too deeply beyond the immediate objective. The fact that they had been right, that she had played so willingly into their scheme, only made her feel more foolish.

“Verity,” she chided herself. “You silly, silly girl.”

Shaking her head, Auger returned her attention to the papers.

“You knew what this was about,” she said, addressing Susan White’s imagined presence, which she pictured brooding like herself over the tableau of harmless documents. “You knew what this was about and you knew that it was worth someone murdering you for.”

Auger reached out and examined the largest of the maps. It was the first time she had paid proper attention to it. Why had it ended up in the woman’s collection of papers, when others like it could be bought cheaply at almost any stationery shop? A similar map was almost certainly amongst the items White had already passed through the portal.

Auger opened the map fully, laying it gently over the other documents without disturbing them. Covering half the bedspread was a political and geographical map of Europe, with lines marked on it in a dark-blue ink. Auger scratched gently at the lines with her fingernail, as Floyd had done, satisfying herself that they were not part of the original design. They formed a tilted “L” shape, with one arm reaching from Paris to Berlin and the other from Paris to Milan. Inked circles surrounded the three cities, and neat digits above the lines indicated—Auger was certain—the distances between them in kilometres. But beyond this observation, the meaning of the markings eluded her. What was so critical about the distances between these cities that this map had to be smuggled out of E2 at all costs, when that information was readily available in the archives back home?

Auger folded the map, taking pains not to damage the thin paper upon which it was printed. As she returned it to its place amongst the other documents, her attention was drawn to a railway ticket. It was for an overnight sleeper train to Berlin, purchased not long before Susan White died, but dated for travel just after her death.

Auger scanned the other documents looking for a German or Italian connection. It did not take her long to find an official-looking letter from a heavy-engineering concern located in a suburb of Berlin. The letter was printed on very good paper, with an impressive letterhead in scarlet ink. Her newly installed German crunched through the text with machinelike efficiency.

The letter was in response to an earlier query—evidently part of some longer chain of correspondence—concerning the manufacture of a number of specialised items. From what Auger could gather, this contract involved the forging and machining of three large metal spheres at the Berlin works of Kaspar Metals. The letter also referred to the transportation and installation of these aluminium spheres in Berlin, Paris and Milan, together with a number of associated parts. The fact that the spheres were large and heavy was obvious from the attention that the letter placed on their delivery. They would require specialised arrangements and were much too heavy to be flown, even given the distances involved. The letter went on to stress the difficulty of delivering the objects without damage, according to the instructions of the “artist,” and that this would incur additional costs.

Metal spheres. What, she wondered, was that all about?

Auger searched through the other documents and pieces of paper, looking now for anything related to the German contract. Almost immediately she found a carefully executed sketch of a sphere hanging from a heavy-duty gantry or support cradle, attached to it by many delicate springs or wires. The sphere was marked as being more than three metres in diameter.

Auger wished that she had access to the historical archives back in E1. Although they were not exhaustive, they would have given her some guidance as to whether the spherical objects were also part of the E1 historical timeline. Perhaps some ambitious artist had indeed commissioned the forging of such aluminium spheres, and Susan White had simply got the wrong end of an innocent stick. Auger couldn’t count on it, but a detail like that might just have survived the Forgetting.

But even if that was the case, Auger reminded herself, this was E2, where the timeline had already swerved twenty years away from E1 chronology. The chances of an artist pursuing the same project in two very different histories were small indeed. The same thinking applied even if the spheres were part of some clandestine military or scientific project being conducted by the E2 locals. Even if it had a traceable analogue in E1, it was very unlikely that a similar initiative would have been undertaken in the altered Europe of E2. But not, she had to admit, unthinkable: if there was a good enough strategic reason for something, then it might crop up in both the E1 and E2 chronologies, despite the altered political landscape. What seemed less likely was that something would be developed in E2 and not E1, especially if that something depended on a scientific underpinning. The scientific worldview of E2 had barely advanced since 1939.

There was, Auger realised, a more troubling possibility: the project Susan White had uncovered might not have anything to do with the locals at all.

In which case, who was running it? And what were they planning to do? She didn’t have an answer yet, or even the beginnings of one, but she did have the sense that she was on the right track. She could almost feel Susan White’s ghost nodding in frustrated encouragement, desperately willing her to make the next—and incredibly obvious—deductive leap.

But Auger couldn’t do that; not yet.

She looked at her watch. It was nearly eleven, which gave her just over an hour to make it to the Métro tunnel before the juice was cut.

Hastily, but with care, she gathered the documents, wrapped them in a sheet of writing paper from the desk and returned them to her handbag. She would have liked the time to look at all the other things in detail, but she didn’t have that luxury. And with Aveling’s warnings about the unreliability of the link, Auger was more than anxious to make a safe return to the other side. As much as this living memory of Paris entranced her, as much as she longed for all the time in the world to explore it, she did not want to become its prisoner.

Auger pulled aside the filmy net curtains covering the window. Since she had returned to the hotel, it had started raining: a soft October rain that muffled the city’s sounds to a muted hiss of late-morning traffic. She stood there for a moment and watched the pedestrians below, scurrying along under dark umbrellas and glossy raincoats. It was impossible not to see them as living beings, with their own interior lives. Yet their very existence was still a kind of sham.

Skellsgard had spoken of this world being like a photographic exposure, a snapshot of a moment in time that had, for reasons unclear, continued to evolve forward in time from that instant, while preserved in the armoured shell of the ALS. There was no guessing the means by which that snapshot had been taken, or whether anyone alive on the real Earth had felt the slightest hint that it was happening… the smallest interruption in their thoughts, the merest instant of collective déjà vu. Perhaps the event had gone completely unnoticed.

But thereafter the two histories had diverged. The real counterparts of the people moving around in E2 had gone on to live out genuine flesh-and-blood lives in the historical timeline of the real E1. The snapshot could not have been taken later than May 1940, nor could it have been taken very much earlier than that, for events in E2 leading up to the Ardennes advance seemed more or less to follow the E1 timeline. The real world, E1, had shortly thereafter been plunged into a catastrophic war. Many of those who had been alive at the instant the snapshot was taken would certainly have died during that war, or during the miserable conflict-filled decades that followed. Even if they had somehow slipped through the historical cracks and avoided death by war, or famine, or political oppression, then many of them would have lived lives blighted and lessened by the brutal circumstances of those years.

And yet, as grim as those lives might have been, as squalid and miserable and tragic, they had been played out according to the right script. It was the lives of their counterparts on E2 that had followed a deviant path. And almost everyone born on E2 since the timelines diverged would either not have existed at all on E1, or would have been very different people. In every sense they were living on borrowed time. And not just “on” it, but “in” it.

For a moment, a repugnant idea flashed through Auger’s mind. How much simpler would it be, how much neater, if these lives had never happened? If the snapshot had preserved only Paris and the rest of the world, but not the people in it. If it had been like one of those nineteenth-century photographs of the city, the exposure necessarily so long that the people blurred themselves out of existence, leaving only spectral traces.

The thought made her shiver, but she could not quite erase it from her mind.

Glancing at her watch, she gathered her coat and left the hotel room. As she teetered out through the lobby, still not quite steady on her heels, the concierge raised an eyebrow. But the telephone on his desk chose that moment to ring, and by the time he answered it he had forgotten all about the awkward American woman, and the hurry she seemed to be in.