In the Night Room

24

Willy kneeling on the bed, rummaging in smiling concentration through her bag and offering various items of clothing for his contemplation: she had crammed a lot of stuff into that bag. Blouses, shirts, sweaters, underwear, dresses, skirts, and jeans were displayed to him for comment, then placed beside the suitcase on the bed. “I should wear something comfortable,” she said. “Especially since we’re going to spend all day in the car. How about this sweater and a pair of shorts?” She held up for his approval a little cream-colored cotton-and-silk sweater with long sleeves and a boat neck. It probably weighed as much as a packet of stamps.

“I’d love to see you wear that,” he said, and offered her a fragment of the mosaic she would eventually have to assemble. “Where’s it from?”

“Hmmm.” She held out the sweater, glanced puzzled at Tim, then checked the back of the collar for a label. “I don’t remember where I got it. The label says ‘Grand Street,’ but that must be the brand name. I don’t know of any shop called Grand Street.”

She could not remember where she bought the sweater because it had come into existence only at the moment she had opened her closet and pulled it from a shelf.

“I don’t either,” he said, “and I live on Grand Street.”

“In a loft?”

He nodded.

“That’s nice. I always wanted to live in a loft. If Mitchell Faber hadn’t scooped me up, I think I would probably have left the apartment I had on East Seventy-seventh and looked for a nice loft space downtown.” She began putting her clothes back into her case.

“Would you?” In a way that was quickly becoming familiar, she had surprised him. The woman who had appeared in his life exhibited certain subtle differences from her representation on the page. His Willy would never have thought to leave her Upper East Side apartment, but only because he had not understood her well enough. As he had seen in the bookstore, he had underrated his heroine.

“Sure, as long as I felt stable enough to move,” Willy said. “But I was feeling pretty well put together before Mitchell relocated me to Hendersonia. I mean, on the night I met him, I wasn’t all that secure, but in general I was recovering pretty well. Once I got to Hendersonia, though, wow, it was like I was in some weird slow-motion dream. I thought I needed Mitchell to protect me, and look how that turned out.”

“We’re going to have to keep an eye out for Mitchell,” Tim said, remembering again that Cyrax had written of a 2ble peril created by Kalendar’s merging with a 2nd Dark Man, a dark dark villain almost instantly to b in pursuit of yr lovely gamine.

“How much do you know about all that?” Willy asked him. “Mitchell, and Hendersonia, and Roman Richard and Giles, and the Baltic Group.”

“A surprising amount, considering that we’d never met until last night. Tom kept me pretty well filled in.”

“Boy, I never realized what a gossip he was,” Willy said.

“He knew I was getting very fond of you.”

“You were? Just from hearing about me?” She smiled at him, then closed her repacked suitcase and swung her legs down on his side of the bed. “How nice. What do you think, do I come up to your expectations?”

“You surpass my expectations,” he said.

“I do?” She slid off the bed, moved quickly across the gleaming dark floorboards, and slipped into his lap. Her body felt as if she were made of balsa wood and foam. She kissed him. “I don’t know about you, but what happened between us last night was extraordinary. People talk about out-of-body experiences, but I think my body left me. Talk about surpassing expectations! It was like some kind of religious experience.”

“Maybe it was a religious experience.”

“My whole body feels so light—really, I’ve never felt anything like it.”

For a time, he held her with the fierce protectiveness that came from the knowledge that he was going to lose her—as if in her lightness she would float away from him on the spot.

“You must have had thousands of women,” she said.

“Not really.” He smiled, although she could not see it. “Tom Hartland and I have a number of things in common. I haven’t had thousands of anything, but the people I have gone to bed with tended to be men.”

She was already looking up at him with a mixture of disbelief and astonishment. “You? But you—you’re not kidding, are you? You’re actually gay? You can’t be that gay, though. If you weren’t incredibly turned on, I have no idea of what’s going on, anywhere. You were like, I don’t know, like Zeus coming down in a shower of gold.”

She slid around on his lap, straddled him, and moved her head close to his and looked deep into his eyes.

“I thought so, too,” he said. “It was exactly like that. I’m astoundingly attached to you.” He spoke with all the frankness the moment would allow. “There’s a reason for all this, Willy, and you’re going to find out what it is.”

“I certainly hope so.”

She had taken his remark as an attempt at general encouragement. He said, “I’m not speaking loosely, Willy. You do have something to find out, and it’s extremely important.”

She pulled her head back. “Is this whatever Tom kept saying he had to tell me, only the time was never right?”

“No. They’re related, but what Tom was talking about is something else.”

“And you know what that was, that secret, or whatever.”

He nodded.

“So he told you, but he didn’t tell me?”

“Not exactly.”

She cocked her head. “What does that mean? Either he told you, or he didn’t. Which one was it?”

“He didn’t, Willy. It’s just something I know.”

“So this is like general knowledge? If I put in the right terms, I could look it up on Google?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“But now there are two big secrets. I don’t like this. It’s skeevy.”

Skeevy? Tim thought. Like agency, it was a word he would never use.

“What makes Timothy Underhill willing to risk injury, death, and imprisonment on behalf of a woman he just met? Why would he even consider driving her halfway across the country?”

“Timothy doesn’t feel he has much choice.”

He put his arms around her, and the moment of tension passed. They clung to each other as if they were stranded on a rock. Tim kissed her forehead, and she sighed and tightened her grip.

“Do you want anything to eat?” he asked.

“I guess.” She nestled into him, pressed the side of her head to his chest, drew in her legs. She weighed nothing, and her bones seemed made of water. “Will we get to Millhaven today?”

“I think so, yes. We’ll get to Indiana, then drive north. I want to get there in time to do a couple of things before the reading.” Also, Tim could feel Cyrax as though he were present in the room, and he was saying, Get to Millhaven, buttsecks, and do yr job! You caused this mess, now you SOLVE it! It was time for another fragment of the mosaic: Willy had to understand everything before they got to Millhaven.

“What was the name of your second-grade teacher?”

“Who cares?” She unhooked the bra she was wearing and tossed it toward her suitcase. “I don’t even think I remember.”

“Mine was named Mrs. Gross. I remember that, and I’m a lot older than you are. You should be able to remember her name, Willy.”

Willy closed her eyes and put her hands on the sides of her head. Her face tightened into a grimace. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I think my second-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Gross, too. Maybe we had the same one. Did you go to . . .” Again, she squinched up her face and pressed her hands to the sides of her head. “Ahhh . . . Freeman? Lawrence Freeman Elementary School?”

“Yes, I did,” he said.

“Well, there’s your answer! We went to the same school, we probably had a lot of the same teachers.”

“Kind of funny, though, isn’t it, that the school is right behind the St. Alwyn Hotel, in Pigtown, and the Children’s Home is way over on the north side of town.”

“I’m going into the shower, sorry. Come on, you’re getting hard again, let’s get this guy in the shower and see what he does when he’s wet.”

Tim found both amusement and a kind of wonder in having so underestimated his heroine’s sexual frankness and appetite. They forgot their worries until their hunger brought them back to the world. For Tim Underhill, every time he made love to Willy, his darling and his invention, he became more attached and involved, deepening the process that had started when he had placed her, like a figure on a chessboard, in front of the Michigan Produce warehouse.

At the end of their breakfast in the Swan Room, Mr. Davy told them that he had been visited by the police. Willy had displayed an amazing appetite, eating all four of her pancakes and all of her bacon, and following that with the two pancakes Tim still had left on his plate.

“They were wondering, do you see, if I might have checked in a woman who robbed a bank in New Jersey. They showed me a picture, but I don’t think it really looked like Mrs. Halleden, and I certainly don’t think that Mrs. Halleden ever robbed a bank in New Jersey!”

“I don’t think she did, either,” Willy said. “Will they be coming back?”

“Not until lunchtime. Our police officers have a distinct taste for our sauerbraten and Wiener schniztel.”

“We’ll be checking out in a couple of minutes,” Tim said. “And thank you, Mr. Davy.”

Willy excused herself and stood up. While Tim calculated a tip, the total to be added to his hotel bill, he noticed that his host was closely watching “Mrs. Halleden” on her way to the restroom. In his admiration, he had forgotten that Tim was present. While Tim watched Mr. Davy watching Willy, the little man registered some sort of quick, fleeting shock: his body clenched, and he thrust his head forward. Tim glanced past him at Willy, who was disappearing around the door to the ladies’ room.

Suddenly realizing that he had been observed, Mr. Davy twitched around to face Tim. A faint blush, a faint smile enlivened his cherubic face.

“What?” Tim asked.

“Mrs. Halleden is a striking presence. If I may, sir.”

Tim gestured for him to go on.

“If I might say this without being impertinent, sir, the lady is somehow more beautiful than one takes in at first glance. And I believe she looks younger than when the two of you arrived last night.”

“There’s more. There’s something you’re not saying. What startled you?”

Mr. Davy looked at him sharply. “Startled me, Mr. Halleden?”

“Something made you do a double take. I’m curious about what it was.”

“It was just a mistake, a trick of the eye,” Mr. Davy said. “I’ll be at the desk, sir, should you wish your bags taken down.” He whirled around and was gone.

Tim examined Willy for signs of youthfulness as, evidently considering something she found troubling, she wove her way back to the table. She had always seemed essentially young to him, but he wondered if she did in fact seem a bit younger than she had the day before.

Abruptly, she said, “I have that ‘light’ feeling again. I don’t mean hunger. That’s emptiness. This is lightness. It’s like a buzz or a hum going through my whole body. It’s like a thousand hummingbird wings, all beating at once.”

Upstairs, Tim called the Pforzheimer in Millhaven and was assured that he could secure a junior suite for as long as he liked through the end of September. He was a valued customer, and they would treat him right. Then he called Maggie Lah and asked her to FedEx some of his shirts, pants, jackets, and socks to the hotel.

When he put down the phone, Willy said, “Let me pay for our hotels, okay? I won’t feel like such a parasite.”

When he protested, Willy said, “You shouldn’t have to pay for me, I should be paying for you! We could probably live off this money for a couple of years. Let me show it to you.”

As Willy dragged the long, white gym bag toward the bed, the telephone rang. Tim picked up the receiver and heard Mr. Davy say, “Mr. Halleden, please take a look out of your window. It appears that someone is extremely interested in your car.”

“Willy, take a look at the parking lot, will you?” He thanked Mr. Davy and watched her go to the window.

“De nada,” Mr. Davy said. “Tell me if you or Mrs. Halleden recognize the gentleman. He’s too elegant to be a police officer.”

“Shit,” Willy said. “It’s Coverley. How did he ever find us here?”

Tim moved to the window and looked over Willy’s shoulder. A tall, slender man in a sweater the blue of a gas flame and pale gray trousers was walking back and forth beside Tim’s black Town Car. He had long, well-combed blond hair and the face of a bored priest, and he was stroking his chin as he peered through the windows. The man straightened up and looked around the lot, then checked his watch.

“He’s waiting for Roman Richard,” Willy said. “That soulless murdering prick.”

“Mrs. Halleden does not harbor friendly feelings toward the gentleman,” said Mr. Davy.

“No,” Tim said.

“Would he have any connection to the gray Mercedes sedan parked in front of the hotel?”

“What are you doing?” Willy asked.

“Yes, that’s his partner,” Tim said. “Willy, Mr. Davy and I are working something out.”

“Mr. Davy?”

“Listen to me, now,” said Mr. Davy. “For Mrs. Halleden’s sake, I am going to act against type. That lady not only never robbed a bank, she never did a wrong thing in her life. And that man in the parking lot is a scoundrel. When you hear a loud noise, or you see that blond-haired creature start to run out of the lot, leave your room. Three doors to your right, you’ll find a maid’s staircase that will take you down to the back of the hotel. Get in your car as quickly as possible and take off. Pay no attention to the fracas when you drive by.”

“The fracas?”

“Don’t worry about me.” He hung up before Tim could reply.

“Now what?” Willy asked.

Coverley was pacing beside Tim’s car, growing more impatient with every second. He pulled a yellow pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lit one with a match, and exhaled a plume of smoke.

“Giles smokes?” Willy sounded almost shocked. Every bit as startled as his beloved by this display of character treachery, Tim once again felt that loosening of the ground beneath his feet that occurred whenever Willy acted independently of the template he had made for her. An elegant character like Giles Coverley wouldn’t smoke, but here he was, puffing away anyhow, acting like a human being instead of a character in a novel.

Below, Coverley spotted something hidden from the occupants of Room 119 by the trees on the near side of the lot. He threw away his cigarette, gesticulated, pointed at the hotel, raised his arms in an angry query.

“Uh-oh.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked him.

“Our friend Mr. Davy was counting on Roman Richard staying in the Mercedes. He was going to create a diversion, and I think this one-armed creep was supposed to play some kind of role in it.”

On cue, Roman Richard Spilka strolled into view, suit jacket slung over his left shoulder, right arm encased in a plaster cast supported by a broad white sling. He was making conciliatory gestures to Coverley, half-turning to nod at the hotel. Again, there was a slight disconnect between the way Tim’s characters actually looked and the way he had imagined them when depicting them on the page. Where Giles Coverley was slimmer, taller, and more decadent-looking than the man bearing his name in In the Night Room, Roman Richard was heavier, more solid, more obviously a thug. From the back, his close-cropped head resembled a bowling ball.

“You know he had a broken arm? Tom told you?”

“I guess,” said Tim, wishing he hadn’t mentioned it.

“That’s incredibly interesting.” Willy turned her head to look over her shoulder. A hint of suspicion darkened her eyes. “Tom knew that I knocked him down with my car, but he didn’t know about the cast until a minute or two before he was killed.”

“Then I knew about it some other way.”

“There is no way at all you could know about it,” Willy said. She turned her head back to the window.

Tim and Willy watched Roman Richard moving across the lot toward Coverley. Both of the men indulged in a good deal of pointing and arm waving. Whatever camaraderie they might once have enjoyed had shredded under their multiplying frustrations, and now they were just two guys trying to make the best of a bad deal.

Then two things happened at once: a good-sized explosion at the front of the hotel rattled their window and shook the pictures in their frames, and Roman Richard and Coverley looked at each other and sprinted off across the parking lot with the reflexes of former soldiers. Roman Richard had worked out a more efficient way to wear his pistol, which was in his hand before he disappeared beneath the trees.

Tim took Willy by the elbow, spun her around, picked up the bags, and pushed her into the hallway. Three doors down to the right, he opened a door marked FOR STAFF ONLY and clattered down the dark, narrow set of stairs with Willy close behind. A door opened by pressing on a metal bar swung out onto a little paved area with uncapped garbage cans lined up on both sides of a dumpster.

“What’d he do?” Willy shouted behind him.

The sunlight drenching the parking lot shimmered on the tops of the cars. Underhill pounded toward the Lincoln. He was only ten feet away when the button on his key ring unlocked the door, honked the horn, and made the lights flash.

“Get in and duck down,” he called, and heard her footsteps coming along behind him instead of separating off to the other side of the car, as he had expected. He grasped the door handle and asked, “What the hell are you doing?” But he was asking the air, and already understood that she was going to get into the back seat. She opened her door a fraction of a second after he opened his, and as he threw the bags inside and slid behind the wheel, he heard her climb onto the back seat and close the door behind her. The ovenlike heat made him pant; his skin instantly felt sandblasted. Blurry features and a flash of blond hair swam across his rearview mirror as Willy Patrick sank out of sight.

He turned the key and hit the accelerator. After a moment’s rumination, the big car shot across the lot and into the narrow, tree-lined drive that led to the front of the hotel. On the left-hand side, the drive widened into the entry court; on its right, it continued on to the street. Tim clicked his seat belt into place, and felt Willy pulling herself up on the back of his headrest.

They came around the side of the hotel into expanding chaos. On the lawn between the edge of the forecourt and the sidewalk, a ruined silver-gray car sent up six-foot flames from its shredded rear end. Uniformed hotel staff milled around the burning Mercedes. Most of them looked like college students. Tim glimpsed a familiar-looking boy in a tight-fitting black T-shirt and black hair staring at him in inexplicable annoyance. People from the neighborhood walked or trotted toward the front of the hotel. In the middle of the street, two boys on bicycles stared at the car in shared fascination.

Roulon Davy stood alone on the sidewalk, watching a pair of police cars race toward the hotel. Roman Richard and Giles Coverley had posted themselves on the lawn between Mr. Davy and their boss’s former vehicle, keeping an eye on the hotel while they watched the conflagration. Roman Richard’s back looked stony with fury, and Coverley’s slouch expressed an elegant despair.

“Is your head down?” Tim asked.

“Just drive,” Willy said, meaning that it was not, entirely.

At the moment the Town Car zipped past the short lawn and was a second or two from shooting into the street, Coverley’s blond head snapped sideways, and his spoiled face hardened in concentration. He followed the car’s progress as it sailed over the sidewalk and raced away down the block. In his rearview mirror, Tim saw Coverley step out in front of the police cars and watch them go. Behind him, the boy in the black T-shirt walked away from the scene: he had taken two long steps before Tim realized who he was, and why Roulon Davy’s “diversion” had been so successful. His forearms prickled; his scalp tingled.

“He’s talking to the cops, all right,” Willy said, kneeling on the back seat. “He isn’t even letting them go up to the car. I wonder what good old Roulon actually did?”

Thinking of WCHWLLDN throwing off his clothes, unfurling his great wings, and leaping into the vastness of the sky, Tim turned toward the middle of Restitution. Beyond its white houses and thick green hedges lay the long, long unspooling of the highway. Quick tears filled his eyes, and he wiped them away before Willy could turn around.

“Pull over so I can get into the front seat.”

He drew up at the side of the street, and she got out of the rear door and advanced toward the side mirror and the passenger door. Just before her right hand moved out of the mirror’s range, Tim realized that from midpalm to the tips of her fingers, it was a gauzy haze outlined by the grass and sky behind it. Then the hand slipped from view, and the passenger door opened.

Willy threw herself into the seat. As she closed the door, he tilted his head to look at her right hand, which was small, intact, and solid.

“What are you looking at?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, and took a breath, remembering Mr. Davy’s double take.