‘I thought I saw something unusual up there,’ he said.
‘Get any more water in your mouth, you’ll drown.’ The man shook his head and moved on.
Tim squelched over to the rack of news boxes and saw, between the Village Voice and the New York Press, a yellow plastic bag bearing a cartoonlike caricature of Charles Dickens. The angel’s clothing had, like its owner, traveled elsewhere.
With the half-conscious sense that the bag seemed familiar, he bent down and picked it up. Cold and slippery to the touch, it contained a number of books. Tim’s first impulse was to protect the books, then to see if he might somehow be able to return them to their owner. Carrying the bag, he waited a moment for a break in the traffic, and when one came he moved down off the curb and remembered where he had seen such a bag earlier that morning.
Tim reached the other side of the street and opened the top of the bag as he trotted toward the entrance to his building. When he peered in, a small amount of rain fell through the opening and beaded on the glossy jacket of lost boy lost girl. Two other copies were stacked beneath it.
Tim stepped inside the entry of 55 Grand. Too small to be called a lobby, it held only a row of metal mailboxes, a cracked marble floor, a hanging light fixture that worked half of the time, and, to one side of the stairs, a wooden school chair. This was one of the light fixture’s off days. Tim spun around to prop the door open a couple of inches so that he would be better able to see the condition of the books.
He opened the cover, turned to the front matter, and gasped at what he saw. In spiky, slashing letters three inches high, Kohle had printed FRAUD and LIES all over the page. Tim’s inscription had been crossed out and covered over with UNTRUE AND OUTRAGEOUS. Tim slid the book back into the bag and removed the next. He discovered the same furious graffiti scrawled over the front matter. In the text, individual phrases and paragraphs, sometimes whole pages, had been x-ed out.
A fast-moving thread of water slipped from the bill of his cap onto a violated page, and the R in FRAUD softened and ran into the adjacent letters on both sides. The book seemed to be dissolving in his hands. In horror, Tim slammed it shut, making a soft splatting sound, as if some big insect had been squashed between the pages. The books went back into the shiny bag, and he trotted out into the fierce rain and, with a swooping gesture of his right arm, threw the bag into a garbage bin.
In Hendersonia, the rain predicted by Roman Richard Spilka came and went in under an hour, never amounting to much more than a sprinkle. (There was something suspiciously overdetermined about that storm over SoHo.) The sun shone the entire time it rained. The workmen who wore shirts shed them to enjoy the sensation of mild, warm rain falling on their upper bodies. Willy envied them. She wished she could strip naked to the waist and stroll through the sun-gilded rain.
Suddenly, she felt like talking to Mitchell, not just listening to his voice on the answering machine. Mitchell disliked intrusions of his personal life into his work world, and probably wouldn’t like being called back. He especially wouldn’t like it if he were in bed with some woman who worked for the Baltic Group. The thought of her husband-to-be in the embrace of one of his female colleagues gave Willy an entirely unwelcome pang. Sometimes she wondered why he had chosen her, Willy Bryce, Willy Patrick, with her funny little gamine body and clementine breasts. Gently, in a series of little nibbles, despair attempted to draw her downward through a psychic drain. She really did want to talk to Mitchell, and at first hand, not through an exchange of recorded messages.
The Internet soon found the telephone number of the hotel in Nanterre. She dialed for what seemed a frustratingly long time, but was then rewarded with a series of rings that sounded like the wake-up signal of a portable alarm clock. A male, wonderfully clear French voice said something she had no hope of understanding.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but do you speak English?’
‘Of course, madame. How may I help you?’
‘I’d like to speak to one of your guests, please, a Mr Mitchell Faber.’
‘Moment.’ Soon he was back on the line. ‘I am sorry, madame, Monsieur Fay-bear is no longer a guest of the Mercure Paris La Défense Parc.’
‘I must have just missed him. When did he check out?’
‘Monsieur Fay-bear checked out this morning, madame.’
‘He couldn’t have,’ Willy said. ‘He just left a message on my voice mail, and he was speaking from your hotel.’
‘There is some mistake. Unless he called you from a telephone in the lobby?’
‘He said he was in his room.’ She hesitated. ‘You said he checked out this morning? What time was that?’
‘Shortly before ten, madame.’
‘And what time is it there now?’
‘It is 4:45 P.M., madame.’
Mitchell had left the hotel almost seven hours earlier. Willy hesitated again, then asked, ‘I’m calling from New York with a message for his wife. Was Mrs Faber with him, or did she go ahead to Toledo?’
‘We have no record of a Mrs Faber.’
She thanked him and hung up. Back to the Internet for more information, then back to the telephone to dial another endless series of numbers. When she was connected to the Hotel Domenico in Toledo, she had trouble communicating with the man on the other end of the line, and finally succeeded in replacing him with a hotel employee whose English was less like Spanish.
‘Mr Faber? No, no Mr Faber is registered here. I am sorry.’
‘What time do you expect him?’
‘There is no record of a Mr Faber reserving a room in this hotel, I regret.’
She thanked him, hung up, and pushed the intercom button that connected her to Giles Coverley’s telephone. His bland drawl asked, ‘Can I help you with something, Willy?’ A light on his phone told him where the intercom message had originated. ‘Hold on there, Giles,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right in.’
‘I believe the boss left a message for you. Did you hear it?’
‘Roman Richard told me as soon as I drove in, and yes, I did hear it. You two don’t want me to miss anything, do you?’
‘We want Mitchell to have whatever he pleases, you could put it that way. And you, too, of course. Did he mention a trip into the city?’
‘I’ll be there in a second, Giles.’
That last-minute bit of diplomacy was typical of Coverley. From Willy’s first meeting with her future husband’s assistant, she had understood that Giles Coverley would always be delighted to perform any tasks she might assign him, as long as they coincided with his employer’s desires. Occasionally, as she had begun to settle into the house and arrange a few insignificant things to her liking, a taut, short-lived expression on Giles Coverley’s smooth face had reminded Willy of Mrs Danvers in Rebecca.
Giles’s office, a long narrow alcove Mitchell had partitioned off what he called the ‘morning room,’ was only slightly more familiar to Willy than her husband’s office upstairs, but she had far less curiosity about what it contained. Her presence in his lair tended to make Coverley speak even more slowly than usual and consider his words with greater care. This deliberation struck Willy as both self-protective and pretentious. Giles always dressed in loose, elegant overshirts and collared tops, handsomely draped trousers, and beautiful shoes. As far as Willy knew, he had no sexual interest at all in either gender. Giles seemed perfectly self-sufficient, like a spoiled