“I don’t like New York women,” I said. “They’re too . . . busy. Noisy.”
“Eh. New York. Women are women. They’re all noisy. But the good ones, you treat ’em nice, they’ll do anything for you.”
“I’ll have to try that sometime. Here’s my exit.”
I left the highway. A couple of turns, a couple of miles of driving and I dipped down onto a narrow lane through the woods. It was dark here, really dark. No houses in sight. No lights. No moon visible through the heavy cloud cover. The forest on either side of me seemed dense and impenetrable. A drizzle started and as I turned on the wipers, a mist trailed up off the black pavement in front of me. I couldn’t tell anymore whether the mist was real or in my mind.
“Your guys ready?” I said.
“You should see this army,” said Monahan. “After we arrest this guy, I think we’re gonna invade New Jersey. Right now, you’re the safest guy in America. Press your thing.”
I felt my pocket. I had a key chain in there with a flashlight about the size of a quarter. If I pressed the flashlight button, it lit up like a regular flashlight—but it also sent a radio beacon to the task force. I pressed the button through the cloth.
“There you are,” said Monahan. “Every fifteen minutes, right?”
I was going into Emory’s place without a wire or a gun. Emory was careful, suspicious. I knew he’d search me. The flashlight-beacon was the only way I had to call the cavalry. One signal meant I was okay, two meant it was time to launch the invasion. If they didn’t hear from me after fifteen minutes, they’d come in without any signal at all. That was just in case Emory took the flashlight away.
“Every fifteen minutes,” I said.
The drizzle grew heavier. So did the mist. I leaned forward, squinting, trying to see. The headlights picked out the end of the pavement. The next second, the Lexus was juddering over a dirt road. I felt the forest pressing in on me. I saw it moving at the edge of my vision—I thought I saw it; I thought I saw it creeping up to the windows of the car. When I turned to look, the trees were still, but the spaces between the trees were so black that the darkness seemed almost a solid wall.
Once, deep in that darkness, I saw a figure—the figure of a little boy—standing amidst the trees, watching me go by.
When I looked ahead, the mist was everywhere, clinging to the pavement, to the windshield, to the air. The rain on the windshield made streaks on the glass.
Then I saw an old stone root cellar to my right—that was the landmark Emory had told me to look for. To my left, hidden in the bushes, a driveway wound down away from the road.
I turned the wheel. The Lexus came bouncing off the rutted dirt onto the smooth pavement of the driveway. Now the trees really did close in around me as the car descended into a narrow forested valley.
“I’m signing off,” I said.
“Go with God,” said Monahan.
I disconnected. I felt the solitude flutter down on me like a shroud.
I came around a long curve and the forest fell away. The driveway continued to descend over a great sweep of sloping lawn. The house was at the bottom of the hill. It was a vast place, a mansion. Three stories of red stone. Roofs, gables, chimneys—I counted four chimneys—and graceful balconies. White pillars holding up the porch roof. More pillars supporting a round conservatory or something off to the side. The newspapers next day said the place had been built in 1900 in the Colonial Revival style, whatever that means. To me, it just looked pompous and grand—and grandly secluded too, sitting down there at the bottom of the hill with the lights from the windows dying into the blackness of the woods on every side.
As I traveled the last few yards of the drive, I saw something that I would remember later. A light went out somewhere. A yellow glow went out on the lawn, right where the lawn met the base of the house. I hadn’t even noticed the light until it snapped off, and then I couldn’t see where it had come from. There was no window there. There was nothing. I would remember that.
I felt my throat go dry as I rolled up to the four-car garage on the right. My head seemed to expand painfully, then snap back into place painfully. I was nauseous and woozy and I cursed the drug.
The rain grew heavier. It pattered on the roof of the Lexus. The fog was encroaching on my vision again. I blinked it away but it kept returning. I switched off the engine and sat taking deep breaths. Finally, I popped the glove compartment and checked one last time that my Glock was there. Then I pushed open the door.
I had to concentrate hard to walk steadily over the wide slate path across the lawn to the front steps. The rain dampened my hair, rolled down my face. The rain felt thick to me; gelatinous.
I climbed heavily into the darkness of the porch—and as I did, the lights just behind the front door came on. The mist seemed to swirl away for a moment so that I knew it was only in my mind. I checked my watch. Nine exactly, right on time. I reached into my pocket. Pressed the button of the flashlight. Fifteen minutes.
Now the huge front door swung open. Emory stood there. He was dressed almost formally for him, wearing slacks and a turtleneck and a navy blazer. His bland face creased with a bland smile. He stepped back to let me enter.
“You seem surprised to see me,” he said. He closed the door.
“The house was so grand, I was expecting . . . you know . . .” He pretended not to understand. Stood with his head cocked in a question. “A butler, a maid or something,” I said.
He gave a strangely feminine little giggle. “On these special nights, I prefer to be alone.”
These special nights
. He said the words in that way he had, wrinkling his nose, gleeful and wicked.
Are we being naughty now?
I wanted to clutch him by the throat. I felt a thickness in my brain like fever. The room swam in mist all around me.
We were standing in a vast foyer. A massive chandelier with prisms sent rainbows over the walls. There was a sweeping turn of stairs in the shadows beyond the chandelier’s reach. Dark wood banisters twisted out of sight into the upper stories. Mist.
“I’m afraid I have to search you,” Emory said.
I rolled my eyes. That’s what I thought an innocent man would do. “You’re kidding me.”
“I know, I know,” he said, “but the world is full of philistines and we really have to be careful. Would you mind removing your overcoat?”
I gave an elaborate sigh and stripped the coat off and handed it to him. He went through the pockets, examined it back and front, felt the linings. He was thorough and expert. He had done it before. When he was finished, he hung the coat neatly on a hanger in the foyer closet.
“Empty your pockets please,” he said over his shoulder.
I gave him my wallet, my phone, and my keys. He turned the phone off and set it on top of a short bureau by the closet door. He set the wallet there too. Then he looked at the key chain, pressed the flashlight button. He was satisfied when the light went on. He put the keys on the bureau beside the wallet.
Finally he patted me down. Again, he was thorough and expert. I’ve snuck guns past the searches of some pretty hard-boiled street characters, but Emory and his soft white hands would’ve been hard to get around.
He smiled then. “Sorry about that.”
I shrugged. “Whatever. Can I have my stuff back?”
“Just leave it there for now. You won’t be needing it anytime soon.”
I didn’t want to leave the flashlight-beacon behind but I couldn’t think of an answer that wouldn’t arouse his suspicions.
Emory gestured toward the archway behind him. “Shall we sit and have a drink together?”
I hesitated. The clock was ticking. Emory had pressed the flashlight-beacon again so the fifteen-minute count had restarted, but it might not be enough. I didn’t want the tac team to come bursting in before I’d had a chance to get some solid evidence against him.
I tried to move things along, pretending to be a nervous first-timer. “You know, I think I’d rather just . . . get on with it, if you don’t mind.”
Emory laughed. “No, no, no. Don’t be that way. Everything’s fine. Now that it’s all out on the table between us, you and I are going to be good friends. Let’s get to know one another. Please.”
There was no getting out of it. I glanced at my watch as I followed him through the archway. It was just after 9:05. Around 9:20, tac would come through that door like the Allies crossing the Rhine.
The living room was expansive. There was one wall of high windows. They were dark except where the interior light winked off the raindrops running down the panes. The other walls had elaborate wallpaper and paintings—one green and hazy landscape after another with ruined temples on their hills.
“Single malt, if I recall,” said Emory.
I sat on the flowery sofa. The thickness in my head came and went and came again. The mist drifted in and out of the room’s corners. Finally, it gathered all around me, blurring the borders between my body and the room. Made me feel as if I were going to melt somehow into the fabric of the place. I shook the feeling off.
Emory handed me a drink and took one of his own to a chair on the other side of a low coffee table.
“To the good life,” he said, and drank. Then he laughed. “Oh, relax, really. This is part of the pleasure of it: being accepted for who you are. Not having to make excuses anymore. Not having to live a lie.”
I barely sipped the scotch—barely sipped the sting off the surface of it—and yet it hit me instantly, hit me hard. I felt my stomach roll. I saw the world go dreamy. Thick white fog pressed hard against the windows across from me, threatening to permeate the walls, the room, my mind.
“Let’s face it, we live among troglodytes most of the time,” Emory went on. “People are so incredibly backward, so incredibly insensitive to differences in points of view. I mean, God, this is the postmodern world already! There are cultures on the globe where we’d be perfectly accepted, cultures where we’d be priests and kings. What are they going to say now? ‘Only our way is right?’ By what argument? ‘Oh, I
feel
it. You’re evil. I feel it in my bones.’ It’s absurd. Socrates himself was . . . What’s the matter?”
I had been staring past him at the fog gathered at the windows. It seemed to roil and push against the glass like a living animal, seeking access. Then all a once . . . a shadow on the fog . . . a small dark figure moving through it, toward me . . . reaching out for me plaintively with his desperate little hands . . .
The ghost boy. Alexander.
Emory looked over his shoulder to see what I was gaping at. But the dead boy sank back into the fog, and the fog sank away into the darkness.
I glanced at my watch. Almost ten minutes had gone by since he’d pressed that flashlight button. Another five or so and the tacs would invade and we might well be left empty-handed. Emory would slip the net.
I plunked my drink down on the coffee table. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I really am tense. I’d feel a lot better if we could . . . you know, convene and have a drink afterward maybe.”
Emory sat and gazed at me a long moment, a bland, meditative gaze. With his legs crossed at the knee, he swung his foot back and forth as he considered. In my feverish brain I thought I could practically hear him calculating whether or not to trust me. For a moment, in a waking dream, a waking nightmare, I saw him reach under his blue blazer and draw out a .38, ready to shoot me dead. I caught my breath—but the moment passed, the hallucination passed. He was just sitting there, just gazing at me.
Then he smiled. He leaned forward in his chair. Set his drink down next to mine.
“Afterward, you won’t want to, you know. That’s the problem. You’ll scuttle away—you’ll see. But . . .” He slapped his knees resolutely and stood. “I understand your . . . anticipation.” He gestured toward the archway. “Shall we?”
I followed him back out into the foyer, then up the stairs. It was a hard climb for me. My body felt distant, as if I were running it by remote control from somewhere far away within myself. When we reached the landing, there were several halls going in different directions. So it seemed to me anyway. The place seemed to me a maze, a mad maze that was a living reflection of the mad maze in the haze of my mind. Down we went now along a corridor of doors and dark wood paneling. Around a corner . . . down another corridor. Lights like candles flickered in sconces on the wall. The mist curled around the lamps. Their light faded and the shadows threatened to swarm and overcome me. The tendrils of mist threatened to wrap themselves around me like skeletal fingers.
I didn’t want to look at my watch, but all the while I felt the time tick-tick-ticking away. Around another corner . . . down another hall . . . Any minute, I thought, any second, Monahan and the staties were going to break down that door and come pouring in here.
Not yet,
I thought.
Not yet
.
We came at last to the end of a corridor. There was a small triangular table set in the corner there with a vase of flowers on top of it. Emory bent to move the table aside, lifting its legs carefully over the runner so as not to jar the thing and tip the vase over.
“You’ll like this part,” he said to me with a sly smile. “Very gothic.”