Shadow Man: A Novel (11 page)

I walked back to the hotel. Alice was sleeping at the front desk, her head on her arm, her Bible open. I took the stairs and slipped into 503. The scent of pot was gone and the room was sticky, a salt film on the mirror, and sitting in the corner, though I didn’t notice at first, was Vera, holding a silver pistol in her hand with her purse on her lap.

“I knocked but you weren’t here. These locks are easy to pick. He’s here, Jim. I saw him again. Out there, on the beach. I was on the balcony while Kurt was sleeping, and there he was standing under the boardwalk light, looking up at me. We gotta get out of here, Jim. As soon as Kurt wakes up.

“I don’t want you to worry. He doesn’t want you. Only me. That’s why I have this. It’s a thirty-eight caliber. I don’t know much about guns but the man who sold it to me said it was the kind of gun for what I needed.”

“Does Kurt know you have a gun?”

“I’ve kept it hidden. You don’t pull a gun out when you first meet a man. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. But this guy keeps coming, following me like a stink or a shadow and I don’t know why he
just won’t let me be. Why he won’t let that time go, believing he could bring the Maghreb here. Go to the balcony, Jim. See if he’s still there.”

There was no one under the boardwalk light, just a few circling seagulls. I wondered if it was the same guy I had seen hours earlier.

“Vera, I think you should put the gun away. There’s no one out there right now.”

“I’ve been sitting here for two hours, frozen, hunched in this corner. I can’t hold this gun much longer anyway. Here, Jim, take it and put it in my purse.”

I stepped toward her and took the pistol. It was dense and as heavy as a paperweight. I put it in her purse and lay the purse on the bed. Vera stood and hugged me; she hugged me hard, so hard I could feel beneath her skin into the core of her and it reminded me of that Bible passage “I can count all my bones.” Vera pulled back and looked at me and hugged me again. She laughed and cried in my ear.

“Look at us, Jim, in this room above the ocean, hiding; we are hiding from a crazy man speaking another language. It’s like a storybook. But we won’t let him get us. We won’t let him. We’ll get Kurt, get the Impala and go. We’ll shake him, Jim. This time we’ll shake him for good.”

She sat on the bed, still for a few minutes, then slumped over and curled up like a sea horse.

“Jim, I’m going to sleep for an hour or so. Keep watch.”

I sat in the chair. Vera’s breathing slowed. I lifted her purse, a big, rattling macramé sack; the gun slipped to the bottom. I peeked and reached in and felt sand and lipstick and lighters and bobby pins and loose tobacco and papers and three vials for pills, all empty. There was a postcard by Edward Hopper and a map drawn on the back of an envelope. It was our hotel and the boardwalk and the streets and alleys around it and the road to the interstate and a star where the
Impala was parked. There were arrows on the streets, each leading through twists and turns to the interstate. Beneath the map it read: “Escape route. Wait till last minute. Keep clothes ready. Go quickly. Keep Kurt and Jim close, so don’t have to be looked for. Running out of time, energy.”

Vera’s purse was full of escape maps. There was a map of our neighborhood in Philly, and another one from around the tennis court where Kurt played that guy on the Eastern Shore, and a few more from places I didn’t recognize. There was a black-and-white picture of a girl in a snowsuit sitting by a swing set, with sledders in the distance; another picture of the same girl running on a grassy hill in a summer dress. There were no dates, but you could tell they were long-ago photographs, the kind Kurt kept in a shoe box from his boyhood. They didn’t give enough clues, like clothes or cars or obvious things, to place a time. The images were faint, nearly lifeless, like pictures of Civil War generals sitting around tents. The little girl in the pictures had dark hair and fair skin and must have been Vera, but I couldn’t tell.

I dropped the pictures into the purse and pulled out a letter. It was written by Vera and mailed to the same Cleveland address it was sent from. I opened the envelope:

I turned the page and looked at the pencil-and-ink man Vera had drawn: hair tapered close to his head, eyes far apart, a nose, not broad, but not angular, either, his chin hiding in the scarf wrapped around his neck. I didn’t know if I’d recognize him if I passed him on the boardwalk, although there was a scar shaped like a diamond on his cheek. Mounir. No last name. I put the letter and drawing back and closed the purse. I didn’t want to know more.

I looked at Vera, sleeping. I sat on the floor by the bed and studied her. She was big in waking life, a force pulling you into her, like the way in Philly when she slid into the diner booth and started chattering to Kurt and me. You had to listen; the words whirled, came at you with stories of all the things you didn’t know, and the things you wanted to know, the things you knew were out there half sketched, but Vera filled them in, gave them the feel of steel. The souks, Cairo, trinkets in Bedouin hands, desert treks to the sea. But sleeping, Vera was small, thin, her hair mussed and dull, all her energy vanished.

I wished there was a record player in the room. I felt like listening to the Beatles’
White Album
, real soft, especially “Dear Prudence” and “Julia.” I missed my music. Kurt and Vera and I shared what
was on the radio, but to me music was private; it was as personal as secrets, even more part of you than the sins you whispered at confession. I wanted to put the needle on the groove, to hear the crackle and scratch and then John Lennon singing about the mother he had lost. I went to the window. I wanted to see the man from Marrakesh on the boardwalk. I wanted him to wave to me. I wanted to know he was there, that he was more than pencil and ink. You can’t have demons scratching at the edges all the time; they have to climb aboard and show themselves just like the monster in the
Creature from the Black Lagoon
did. Maybe the man from Marrakesh was a killer, was all the things Vera was so spooked about, but I needed to see him. Every time Kurt and I looked he was gone. He could have been clever, real clever, like Vera said, a jinn possessed of special powers from the Maghreb. Not science-fiction weirdo powers, but powers and auras people have from living in deserts and mountains. I looked down. Nothing, except two joggers, a man and a woman, talking and looking at each other as they panted down the boardwalk.

I left Vera sleeping and went to Room 501. I checked the door. It was open and through the white curtain I saw Kurt sitting on the balcony, his shirt off, his hair slicked back from a shower, the scents of talcum and Right Guard in the room. He had his eyes closed and face toward the sun.

“Vera’s next door,” I said.

“I know.”

“She’s got a gun.”

“I know. I took the bullets out back in Maryland.”

The morning breeze was cool, but you could feel threads of heat in it like when you jumped into the ocean and a warm current snaked past you.

“What should we do?”

“I don’t know, Jim. It was like an adventure back in Philly. This woman comes out of the night and changes things for us, telling
us about places, bringing us colors and sounds and smells, hitting tennis balls in the alley. It was different and that’s what I wanted for a while. No gray paint in the shipyard. No wife and mother buried in the earth. I miss her, Jim. I had to get away from all the things, the tiniest damn things that brought her back into that house making me think she was in the kitchen or running a bath upstairs. You know what I mean? Did you feel it, too? She was there but we couldn’t have her.”

“I thought sometimes I heard her in the backroom listening to the radio and painting her watercolors. Remember what she said after taking that painting class at the Y?”

“Seep and bleed.”

“Yeah, let the colors ‘seep and bleed across the canvas.’”

“I think she only finished one.”

“The rowers on the river.”

Kurt kept his eyes on the waves and the empty beach. He was done talking about Mom. I saw it in the way his jaw tightened. He was tan and built hard, his muscles sturdy and long like dock rope, but they fit his lean frame. He didn’t seem a father. He was a man on a balcony, sun and breeze on his face, all his logic and the things he knew, all those traits a son sees in his father from a distance, were loosened, and up close Kurt was a man wanting to be rearranged back to what he was before. I thought it must be hard for a father to be caught between the two sides of himself. I felt split, too. But it was different; my history was brief, too young to be a record, grooved and set with rhythms.

“Is there a guy from Marrakesh? I did see a man under the boardwalk light last night, but he didn’t look like someone to be scared of.”

“I’m not certain about any of this, Jim. Should we go to the cops? And say what? I don’t know if I believe Vera or not, but I wouldn’t feel right abandoning her. I can’t get into that Impala and leave. I
guess in this short time she’s become part of us. Not like Mom, but somebody who has filled in some of the blank spaces. It’s only right to protect her from whatever scares her. But what if this man is really out there? Am I putting us in too much danger?”

I didn’t know, either, so I sat with Kurt on the balcony, saying nothing, listening to the morning waves.

The lady sleeps. I am in a white robe. It feels more like a warm towel than a robe. I sit in a high-back chair and look through the curtain and over the gray morning beach. How long have I been here? I feel something is supposed to happen, but what? Maybe I’m in the wrong place. Perhaps something changed or was switched during the night. I’ll sit here and watch the waves. The lady sleeps; her bare shoulder, a pale fin, rises from a sea of covers. Who is she? I will not wake her. I hear seagulls; I step to the window, watch them circle, the tips of their wings cutting the aluminum sky. A knock. I will not answer. A knock I will not answer. A knock. I go to the door and peek through the hole. A short man in a green suit with gold buttons stands there blurry, wide, out of proportion. I open the door.

“Good morning, sir. Here’s your paper.”

He smiles, pivots like a military officer, and retreats over the thick carpet and down the hall. I close the door and go to the chair. The headlines: The “surge” in Iraq is working; Palestinians from Gaza are flooding Egypt; Al-Qaeda has moved to Pakistan; the US housing market is in trouble; a black man named Obama is running for president; whales are more intelligent than we originally thought.

“James?”

The lady in the bed wakes.

“James?”

I turn. I don’t know her. I don’t know why I’m here. I am confused. She stretches over the pillow like a cat.

“Your name is James,” she says through a yawn. “I am your wife, Eva. You don’t know who I am or where you are. Your mind is
going. Your memory is fading on you. But I am Eva and I love you. Don’t be frightened. We are on the Jersey Shore; you’ve been coming here for years. You’re safe here.”

She slips out of bed, walks across the room, naked, and kisses me on the forehead, then turns and goes into the bathroom. The door is open a crack and there is shadow and light and I hear water running, the slide of the shower curtain, and then mist coils through the door crack and vanishes in the cold room; the room where I am sitting, holding a newspaper and looking at the waves. The lady is singing in a language I do not understand. Am I in a different country? The newspaper is in English. The water goes off; the shower curtain slides again. The lady comes out wrapped in a towel.

“Oooh, it’s freezing in here.”

She turns a dial on the wall.

“What’s in the news, James?”

She points to the paper.

“You used to write for one of those. But they’re not doing so well these days, newspapers. You wrote stories, James. Thousands of stories from all over the world.”

She dries her hair with another towel.

“Let’s go get breakfast. Here’re your clothes. Get dressed. I’ll get ready in the bathroom.”

She flings the curtains open. “A new day, James.”

“What day is it?”

“Saturday. Saturday on the Jersey Shore.”

“Did you know Kurt and Vera?”

“Get dressed James, so we can eat.”

“I want coffee.”

“I know. Hurry up.”

The boardwalk is quiet and cold. A man juggles lemons on a bench; a child watches and tries to grab one but the man keeps them
spinning in a jagged yellow circle just out of reach. The man reminds me of something, but I can’t think what. I feel like I’m rapping at a door that won’t open; the lady beside me has her arm around me and her head on my shoulder and we’re walking as if this is how it should be, but I don’t know how it should be.

“Here we are, James. The diner, remember? Best pancakes in the world, you say. I don’t like them.”