Always (2 page)

“He likes cars,” I said.

“Lots of men do.”

I skimmed the list of affiliations, memberships, and subscriptions: Mystery Guild Book of the Month Club, local wine society, the American Museum of Natural History, chamber of commerce, the local Gilbert and Sullivan Society. “He likes operetta.”

“That’s not exactly sinister.”

“Well, no.”

“But you’re frowning.”

“I’m trying to imagine my mother beaming fondly at a man dressed as the lord high executioner.”

“Giggling behind a fan.”

I stared at him.

The seat belt light went on. “Look at that,” he said, and busied himself with the tray table and footrest.

WE WALKED
past the tired people in baggage claim and to the man holding a sign saying Torvingen.

“I’m Aud Torvingen,” I said.

He didn’t bat an eye at the Norwegian pronunciation but said, “Jeff,” and led us to the town car.

I fastened my seat belt and opened my window, and we pulled smoothly past the hordes waiting for taxis.

“Maybe you aren’t potty after all,” Dornan said, leaning back on the grey leather. He’d thought I had lost my mind when I’d first suggested FedEx-ing the luggage. Then I’d offered to pay, and suddenly it hadn’t been such a bad idea.

Traffic was light. The cool air, heavy at first with jet fumes, then the scents of late cherry blossom and second-growth conifer, reminded me of Oslo last year. It had been May then, too.

The engine hummed. I’d never driven a Lincoln, but I suspected it would handle like a squashy pillow. The interior wood trim, black bird’s-eye maple, was so heavily varnished it looked like plastic.

If I’d done my research correctly we were on Highway 99, which ran north and west into the city along the waterfront. I could sense the empty horizon stretching to my left, but I couldn’t see or smell it; there was a steady offshore breeze and the moon was hidden behind dense cloud. In Atlanta it would be twenty degrees warmer. In Oslo, twelve degrees closer to the Arctic Circle, the sky would still be light. There would not be so many cars on the road. My mother and new stepfather would be in the United States by now, in New York, or possibly Vancouver.

From a distance the Edgewater Hotel looked like a warehouse building, but as we approached, it became clear that what had seemed to be corrugated iron was in fact massive vertical timbers. Fir, I thought. Very Scandinavian. It was just after ten-thirty when we pulled into the parking lot. “Wait,” I told Jeff. “We’ll be out in ten minutes.”

The lobby was all exposed wood—definitely fir—and polished slate. I handed my Total Enterprises credit card to the woman behind the desk. She handed me two keys.

“They’re not next to each other. I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem,” I said, and gave one to Dornan. “Don’t unpack if it will take you longer than ten minutes.”

In my room were two faxes, and a large FedEx box. I put everything on the bed and opened the window, which was less than eight feet above the water. I listened a moment; all I heard was the slap and slip of Puget Sound against the pilings driven deep into the muck of Elliott Bay. I closed the window. Being so close to the water was less than optimal, in terms of security. I took a dime from my wallet and balanced it against the glass. There were a dozen portable intruder alerts on the market, but low-tech worked well enough.

One of my credit cards wasn’t plastic but specially sharpened ceramic. I extracted it from my wallet and slit the tape on the FedEx box. The clothes were still on their hangers. I hung them in the wardrobe, and my toiletries bag above the mirror in the bathroom. I set up my laptop but didn’t connect to the local network—security precautions took time—and glanced at the faxes, one from Laurence, one from Bette, both of which could wait. After a quick visual check of the room I shut the door, rattled it to make sure it was locked, and headed for the lobby.

Dornan was four minutes late. He had changed his T-shirt and put a sapphire in his right earlobe.

“Belltown,” he said. “That’s the only place we’ll be able to get anything to eat at this time. Belltown,” he said again to Jeff as we got in the car. “Somewhere called the Queen City Grill?”

“On First,” Jeff said, and turned left out of the parking lot.

“First and what?” I tried to visualize the city plan, which was a confused mix of the original diagonal and later north-south grids. If you could believe the maps there was even a spot, north of here, where “First” intersected with “First.”

“First and Blanchard.”

Blanchard. Between Bell and Lenora. A little north and east of downtown, a little south and west of here. “Why are we heading north?” Northwest.

“If I take you south there’s no cross street for a while.”

“Thank you.”

We turned right, heading northeast, and then right again, finally moving south and east.

“After all these years I still can’t believe how early Americans eat their dinner,” Dornan said, as we passed dark storefronts. “Look at that. Can you imagine a U.K. city the size of Seattle shutting down at ten?”

“No.”

“It makes no sense.”

It did to me. The city was full of Norwegians and Swedes who had formed the backbone of the fishing and shipping industry and a large part of the paper and lumber industry, and then settled back to work hard, live quietly, and grow. They would write back to relatives dug into their
fjell
-side
seter
s, or boiling and freezing in sod houses in the Midwest, and tell them about the good life, the teeming salmon and the miles of trees, and how it hardly ever snowed. Inevitably, the children of the brothers and sisters left behind would come for a month in summer to visit. And here I was.

AT THE
Queen City Grill we were shown to one of the dozen or so booths running alongside the bar, a huge expanse of mahogany that looked as though it had been there a hundred years. It was enhanced by a double handful of the young urban gorgeous. One woman with long glossy hair and skin the color of toasted flax smiled and tipped her head back to laugh. Her companions laughed, too. She sipped her martini, and when she leaned forward, the cream silk of her dress pulled tight across her hips. Her lips left a red print on the rim of her glass.

“See anything you fancy?” Dornan said, studying the menu, which was very short and specialized in steaks and seafood with an Asian tang.

“Crab cakes look good.”

The wine list turned out to be heavy on Washington and Oregon vineyards I’d encountered only in travel guides. I put it down. The woman at the bar laughed again, and the server appeared.

“What do you have on draft?”

I settled on something called Hefeweizen, Dornan ordered a kamikaze, and we asked for oysters to start. The Hefeweizen came with a wedge of lemon in it, and looked like cloudy lager. It tasted better than it looked. The oysters were cool and slippery and tasted like the beach at low tide. We focused on the food for a while.

The woman at the bar slid from her stool and stood, gathering purse and wrap.

“It’s good to see your appetite returning,” Dornan said. He was concentrating on squeezing the last drop from his lemon onto the oyster on his plate. I let him tip it into his mouth and swallow, then nodded at the last remaining half-shell.

“How’s your appetite?”

“Let me put it this way, Torvingen. For once, I think I’d be prepared to fight you for it.”

We ordered another dozen.

Two intense twenty-nothings took a seat at the bar and started arguing about whether cyberpunk owed its attitude more to Materialist philosophy or to a misguided interpretation of Descartes’ interpretation of Aristotle.

“So,” he said. “How are you?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. It’s been nearly a year. And then the incident with your self-defense student. And now your mother is coming. Talk to me. Tell me how you feel, what you think.”

I thought Mr. Materialism was about to get lucky: Ms. Cartesian Dualism was leaning forward in the kind of unnatural pose that had been practiced in front of the mirror because someone once told her it made her throat look delicious, and holding her hand palm up while she talked, tilted towards him in a way that could be interpreted only as
Touch me.
And indeed, Mr. Materialism was beginning to stumble over the bigger words as his subconscious figured out what was going on and diverted blood from his brain to more important organs. Although Dornan’s degree from Trinity was in philosophy, I doubted that’s what he meant. I shook my head.

He drank off his kamikaze, sighed with pleasure while he refilled his glass from the cocktail shaker, and nodded over at the debating couple. “Did you ever argue philosophy with a girl in a bar?”

“There are easier ways.”

He nodded. “Buying her a drink always worked for me. So have you tried any interesting approaches lately?”

I looked at him.

“You could at least reassure me that since, ah, well . . .” He hated to mention Julia’s death. “I just don’t think it’s natural to be so—Look, I know how you are, what you’re like. You shouldn’t deprive yourself . . .”

“I haven’t.”

He sat back and looked expectant.

“Her name was Reece.”

His expectant look didn’t waver. Ever since I had let him help with the cabin in North Carolina last year he seemed to believe he deserved a window into my life. I had not yet worked out how to shut him out, or whether I wanted to.

“When I went back to the cabin last month Tammy had a party. She introduced me to Reece. We had a conversation that ended up in bed. She’s a very pleasant woman. It was a very pleasant evening. I doubt I’ll ever see her again.”

I had needed the animal warmth of the sex, had welcomed the familiar building heat of skin on skin, the harsh breath, the shudder that starts in your bones. The terrible urge afterwards to weep until I howled had been new.

“That Tammy. Isn’t she something?” It had been three months since she’d returned his ring, but his voice still throbbed with pride.

“She is.” She was a piece of work. He was better off without her.

SOMEONE HAD
turned on the fire in the corner of my room. The dime was undisturbed. I turned off the fire, put the dime in my pocket, and opened the window.

I read the faxes. Details from Laurence about how my Seattle real estate revenues had fallen against local benchmarks, the addresses of my local real estate manager and my cross-shipping warehouse, and a list of leaseholders of that property in the last eighteen months—far too many. Bette’s fax was a detailed, itemized list of OSHA and EPA complaints leveled by person or persons unknown against either me, as the property owner, or various lessees, along with pages of definitions of various regulations, and the names of relevant people at both regulatory offices to deal with the complaints.

I turned to my laptop. The fan hummed and the hard drive chuckled as it ran its anonymizer software and automatically cleaned itself of anything but the most basic programs: no documents, no cookies, no automatic updates downloaded from the Web, no e-mails, no address book, nothing. Just an operating system unencumbered by experience or past history, lean and sure, memory constantly scoured and reset for instant, optimum efficiency. Stupid, to be jealous of a computer.

I set every firewall I could, then hunted for and matched the hotel network. I logged in to my e-mail account. Nothing.

I logged out, wiped all the cookies again, just in case, and checked my antivirus software. All my personal data was safe on the flash drive on my key ring.

It was late, according to my body clock. Nearly four in the morning.

I tapped the faxes into a neat pile and put them next to the phone on the cherry-veneered desk by the window. I’d study them carefully in the morning. On top of the pile I put my maps and two books about Seattle. Tomorrow I’d start learning this city the way I liked best, by moving through it.

I undressed and carefully laid my clothes over the back of the desk chair, easily to hand in case of emergency.

I stood naked by the open window. The water was black. Kuroshio, the Black Current, the vast ocean stream that poured past Japan and arced north, keeping the inlets of the Pacific Northwest from freezing. I could lower myself into the lightless water and slide beneath the surface, leave it all behind. Give it all away and never look back. I wish my father had left all his holdings to my mother instead. I wouldn’t have to be in Seattle to deal with a real estate manager stealing me blind. I wouldn’t have to meet my mother and brand-new stepfather. I wouldn’t have been at leisure to teach a self-defense class.

The room felt as warm and moist as the womb. I got dressed.

ON FOOT,
I could head south. I walked through the night, swinging my arms, glad that there was nothing to my right but Elliott Bay. I could feel the open water, taste salt on the breeze. I walked up and down artificially graded hillocks of grass, avoided a tree. When I ran out of park I turned left, under the Alaskan Way viaduct; I saw traces of the homeless—a burnt-out trash can, a slashed sleeping bag—but the streets and train tracks were silent.

In Atlanta at one o’clock on Thursday morning I would have had downtown to myself, but Seattle’s center flickered with flashes of restless, contradictory life. As I walked down First, south of Queen City, I could have been looking at two different boulevards. On my left, the fifty-foot-tall sculpture of
The Hammering Man
banged away silently in cultural ecstasy outside the Seattle Art Museum. On my right, a man and a woman stepped into the street from the Lusty Lady, whose pink neon sign flashed cheerily, its letter board declaring VENI, VIDI, VENI. Peep shows for the classically educated.

Pioneer Square wasn’t really a square but a triangle, partially cobbled, with a totem pole and a drinking fountain. The buildings were old brick and wrought ironwork, painted to match the blue-and-rust paintwork on the Tlingit totem. There had been more trees in the guidebook photos, plane trees. I couldn’t think of any diseases specific to plane trees, and wondered why they had been taken down. It was still a picture-perfect vision of the heart of an established city whose industrious citizens slept well—or would have been without the thump of club music, and the homeless who lay on benches or leaned against the wall in knots of two or three, not unlike the hipsters at the bar earlier. Some of them were young and some smoked, but none wore white and none of them laughed; most had more tattoos than teeth. They stopped talking as I neared. I nodded. They smelled of tobacco and old wine, like old people in hot countries, which is not how the homeless in Atlanta smell.