In the Night Room (12 page)

And with that verbal flourish, the nervous Mr. Bender withdrew from a file on his desk an agreement that transferred an immediate $200,000 from various of Willy’s shiny new accounts into Mitchell’s savings account, and thereafter moved half that amount from hers to his on the first of each month for the next eight months. This document bore two signatures, Mitchell’s and one that came pretty close to Willy’s hasty scribble.

“I don’t believe it,” Tom said.

“He forged my signature on a document that moved one million dollars from my accounts into his over the next eight months.”

“I mean, I do believe it, but it’s incredible. How did he explain it to the banker?”

“He told him that I was nervous about investing money, and wanted him to do it for me. He said after we were married, we were going to have joint accounts anyhow.”

“Were you?”

“Do you think Mitchell ever discussed finances with me? It was taken for granted that he had tons of money. He certainly acted like a rich man—he bought me a Mercedes! With my money, it looks like. I guess I bought his Mercedes, too.”

“Willy, how much money do you have in that crappy little bank, anyhow?”

“Around three million,” she said. “Most of it was from Jim’s estate. If Baltic paid that kind of money to Jim, I thought Mitchell would earn pretty much the same thing.”

“Mitchell must be a long way down the totem pole. What did the banker do when you told him your signature was forged?”

“I thought he was going to commit hari-kari. You know the funny thing? He always knew there was something fishy about that agreement. He was afraid of Mitchell. Mitchell intimidated him. I bet Mitchell intimidated everyone in Hendersonia. And the arrangement didn’t take any money away from his bank, it just moved it around a little, so he didn’t ask any questions. He apologized for about half an hour and begged me to let him make things right.”

Tom laughed. “He’s been ‘making things right’ all afternoon. I bet his shredder’s seen a lot of use.”

Willy drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. To Tom, in the low light of the bedside lamp, she looked, at first, only a few years older than the mysterious girl he had met in 1985; then he saw the fine lines around her mouth and the faint tracery under her eyes and, although he had never before thought of her in these terms, that she was one of the most distinguished women he knew.

“And of course another way he could make things right was to grease the wheels for your withdrawal. How much money did you walk out with?”

“A hundred thousand.”

“Jesus Christ.” He half-rose from the chair and looked at the floor on the other side of the bed, then at the closet door.

“It’s in the closet. I didn’t know where else to put it. A thousand hundred-dollar bills makes a pretty big stack.”

“I’ve never been in a room with that much money before.”

“Mr. Bender told me I could come back tomorrow and get another hundred thousand, but I don’t think I should do that.”

“No,” Tom said. “What did you do after you left the bank?”

“I almost killed Roman Richard Spilka, that’s what I did. I got out of the bank, and I was walking toward my car, holding one of my bags and rolling the other one along behind me, and in pulls Mitchell’s car, with Giles driving and Roman Richard sitting beside him. All of a sudden, I felt like this horrible, reeking cloud of
villainy
was all around me. . . . I couldn’t
see,
I could barely
breathe
. . . . Aah!”

Willy threw out her arms and waved them violently in front of her, as if she were trying to shake off spiderwebs or frighten away a bat. Her eyes were wild and out of focus. She kept uttering
aah!
in a small, stifled voice that went higher and higher. Scattered tears flew from her eyes.

Tom jumped off the chair, stretched out on the bed beside her, and put his arms around her. At first, it was like holding a trapped animal, but after a few terrible seconds in which Tom felt his own self-control begin to waver under her assault, Willy ceased to thrash in his arms and pound her fists against his back. He stroked her head, saying her name over and over. Eventually, she sagged against him, as limp as if she were boneless. She said, “Oooooohh, just hold me for a while, okay?”

“Try and stop me,” he said.

Sometime later, Willy groaned and separated herself from him. “I said something about a cloud of evil, and all of a sudden it was literal, a literal cloud, all sticky and foul. . . .” She chafed her hands together, wiping off imagined gumminess.

“It was ‘villainy,’ not ‘evil,’ ” Tom said. “A ‘reeking cloud of villainy.’ I thought that was pretty good. You know, you have a certain way with words. Ever think about becoming a writer?”

She groaned again, this time with a touch of self-mimicry. “I never got to the part where I almost killed that fat pig, Roman Richard. So they’re in the car, and I’m close to mine, right?”

“Right.”

“Giles puts on his brakes, but I keep going. When I’m tossing my bags into the back seat, Giles and Roman Richard are both getting out of the car. Giles says, ‘You left home pretty early this morning, Willy.’ I say, ‘Isn’t that allowed these days?’ They’re both walking toward me, but slow, like this is just an ordinary conversation on an ordinary day. I didn’t know if Giles had gone in and seen the pictures, and if he did, he doesn’t know if
I
did. ‘No need to worry about me,’ I said, and I got in behind the wheel. Now they’re walking a little faster. Giles says, ‘Hold on, Willy,’ and we look at each other, and bang, he sees that I know, and I see that he sees, and now we’re not playing games anymore. Giles yells, ‘Stop her!’ to Roman Richard, and they both come running. I got my car started just in time, and I turned the wheel and jammed the pedal, and the car just
shot
forward. Then Roman Richard was right in front of me, and there was a kind of a soft thump, and off he flew to the side. I hit him, all right.”

“How do you know you didn’t kill him?”

“I don’t even think I hurt him all that much. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him getting up. He sure was mad, though.”

She pushed herself a bit farther away on the bed, picked up his right hand with both of hers, raised it to her mouth, and kissed it. She flattened the palm of his hand against her cheek. “You were wonderful to come here and tend to me. I hope you won’t mind if I tell you I love you.”

“I was just thinking the same,” Tom said.

Willy placed his hand on the bedspread and patted it. “Now I have to go into the bathroom and wash my face.”

He patted her hip as she swiveled sideways to get off the bed. For a second, sexual interest raised its head, and Tom was astonished for the second it took him to imagine that, at one level below consciousness, she had just reminded him of his first lover, slight, brilliant Hiro, who had relieved him of his virginity in his sophomore year. Then he thought,
No, it’s Willy, I can’t believe it, she’s turning me on. What’s happening to me?

Sounds of running water came from the bathroom. “Really, Tom, I’m so grateful you’re here,” she called out.

“Me, too. Willy, didn’t they follow you?”

“I got away too fast. The bank is only half a block from the expressway, and by the time they got themselves organized, I could have gone in either direction. They probably guessed that I came to New York, but I don’t see how they could know where I am.” She appeared in the bathroom doorway, wiping her face with a small white towel. “I just hope I’m not getting you into any trouble.”

“Don’t worry about me. I don’t suppose there’s any way he can find out you’re in this hotel, is there?”

“Molly once told me that the Baltic people can find anything out, but after all, we’re talking about Mitchell, not the whole company. And he’s still in France.”

“How did you check in here? Did you use a credit card?”

“As far as the hotel is concerned, I’m W. Bryce. That’s the name on my AmEx card. Jim Patrick told me to do that when I applied for the card. Actually, Jim made out the application, and he told me that was the name he wanted me to use. We hardly ever took the AmEx cards out of our wallets, though. When we paid with plastic, we usually used MasterCard.”

Willy was drawing the towel over first one hand, then the other, staring at the moving towel, as if she expected something to slip out from beneath it. She glanced at Tom.

“I figured it was about some accounting rigamarole, because we got the American Express cards through a service division of his company. It was like we got reduced rates, or something like that.”

“Did the bills come through the company, or directly to you?”

“They came straight to us. I used to write the checks. But like I said, we almost never used those cards.” She stopped moving the towel across her hands. “That wasn’t an idle question, was it?”

Tom shook his head.

“You think he was trying to protect me.”

“I think he was probably covering his ass.”

“My ass, you mean.” Willy flipped the towel into the bathroom. “He knew something was wrong.
Damn
him. What kind of company are they, anyhow? Oh, as if that hasn’t become transparently clear. But Jim was such a nice man, and such a smart man, too—he was kind, you know? Do you suppose he had Holly with him to keep her safe? To protect her from being kidnapped?”

Tom was looking straight at her, giving nothing away.

“All this
stuff
is going through my head! Did I tell you that I almost broke into a produce warehouse because I was sure Holly was imprisoned inside it? I could hear her calling for me! I knew my daughter was dead, but I couldn’t stop myself—I got out of the car, fully intending to break a window and climb in. I swear to you, Tom, sometimes it feels as though I am being
made
to do things. Like I’m a marionette, and someone else is pulling the strings.”

Wild-eyed again, she held her arms straight up and wiggled them as though they were controlled by puppet strings. Tom stood up, hesitated, then saw from the tragic expression on her face that she was close to losing herself again. He moved across the room and pulled her to his chest.

“I think you should have a little vodka,” he said. “While you’re at it, I’ll have one, too.”

He opened the minibar, removed two miniature bottles of Absolut, took two lowball glasses from the top of the cabinet, set them down on the table, and told Willy he would be back in a minute with some ice. “You’re like Superman,” she said. “No, I think you are Superman.”

He returned almost as quickly as he had promised, and in another minute they were seated across from each other, Willy on the side of the bed and Tom back in the nubbly chair, raising glasses filled with ice cubes and a clear liquid.

“To you,” Willy said. “My anchorage, my port in the storm.”

“To us,” Tom said. “We’ll go crazy together.”

Willy took a sip of the vodka, winced, and shook her head. “My port in the storm has a terrible effect on my character. I hardly ever drink, except for when I’m with you. Then there’s the swearing. What’s next, we take up smoking?”

He took a swallow. “What’s next is, we figure out a way to go to the police. What would Teddy Barton do? We need proof that you’re being followed, assuming that you are. Good old Teddy would round up a little band of boys, and some of them would create a diversion while another one takes a picture of the bad guys. We can’t organize the little band, but there’s a cheap little camera in the minibar. If someone’s following you, I could take a photograph of them and we could take it to the police. And just to be safe, you ought to leave this hotel in the morning and check in somewhere else. Somewhere a little obscure, like the Mayflower.”

“The Mayflower?”

“It’s a nice little hotel near the foot of Central Park West. What time did you get here, anyhow?”

“About nine-thirty.”

“And when did you leave Hendersonia?”

“Something like ten in the morning. You know, I haven’t had a thing to eat all day. This vodka is going to do me in.” She placed her glass on the bedside table.

“And the time in between ten in the morning and nine at night?”

“Gone, mainly. I can remember driving across the G.W. bridge, but that’s it. It was daytime, and then it was night. I was on the bridge, I was parked in front of this hotel. It’s not that I forgot the time in between, it’s that it never happened. Those hours happened in your life, but they didn’t in mine.”

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“Then don’t say anything. I want to order some room service. Are you hungry? Could you eat anything?”

“No, but please order something, Willy. You have to eat.”

She called room service and ordered a hamburger without French fries and a Diet Coke. “I guess I can start to relax now, sort of. It’s strange, I don’t have the faintest beginning of a plan of what to do next, but for some reason I’m not really worried about it. I think the next thing will happen, and then the thing after that, and I’ll find out where I’m going when I get there.”

She collapsed back on the bed and gave him a look of flat inquiry. “Didn’t you have something you were going to say to me?”

“I did, yes,” Tom said. “But I’m going to hold off. This isn’t the time to bring it up.”

“ ‘Bring it
up
’? Uh-oh. This is pretty serious, isn’t it, pretty grim.”

“Well, it’s serious. Tomorrow, maybe. If you want to see me tomorrow, that is.”

“Want to see you tomorrow? I don’t want you to leave, Tom. I want you to spend the night here. With me. Please.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“No, you won’t,” Willy said. “You’re going to sleep in this bed, right alongside me. That way, if time gets taken away again, it’ll happen to you, too.”

17

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Before I deal with my unhappiness with what I’ve been doing in my new book, I really have to write about what has been going on around here. In the midst of all this stuff I’m about to describe, I somehow feel a kind of gathering clarity—the sense is not that I’m beginning to understand it all, because I’m not, rather that one day I am
going to
understand it, and that feels like enough. Enough, certainly, to keep me from another visit to the Austen Riggs therapeutic community in Stockbridge, Mass., and kindly Dr. B., although after 9/11/01, I was entirely grateful to spend sixty days in their care.

Ever since “Cyrax” filled the mysterious blue box on my screen with page after page of instruction, advice, and what he thought of as explanations, events have been conspiring to make me imagine, very much against my will, that some of what he told me might be true. And if I can feel part of a larger pattern, a
huge
pattern, incorporating a multiplicity of worlds filled with entities like sasha, zamani, and towering angels with names like WCHWHLLDN, the individual events themselves become less inexplicable. Hardly less threatening, though, because I am about 90% sure that yesterday afternoon, while I was taking a long, slow walk back from Ground Zero after my first visit there, Jasper Kohle tried to murder me.

I eventually noticed that I had wandered over to West Broadway. As always, it was crowded with people young, middle-aged, and old hastening up and down the sidewalks, crossing the street in the middle of the block, lingering in the doorways of shops, and haranguing someone just out of sight. Great vivid balloons of color sparked and floated by, advertisements, the sides of buses, neon flashing, an unforgettable face seen through a taxi window, all the usual riot south of Canal Street. As ever, Manhattan seemed to have produced an inexplicable number of men whose jobs involved surging along the pavement and yelling into mobile phones. I was glowering at one of these Masters of the Universe when I caught a quick, furtive movement reflected in the window of the little Thai restaurant behind him. Whatever it was, it seemed
wrong
—a sudden, sneaky dodge into concealment, a movement that had no real beginning and no real end, only an abrupt lateral shift from one obscurity into another. Then the asshole shouting into his hand moved on, and the restaurant window reflected only the kids from NYU and a homeless guy and the bright taxis rushing down West Broadway. When I stepped forward, so did the homeless guy, and with a flash of shock I realized that I was looking at myself. Evidently, I hadn’t paid much attention to what I was wearing when I left home. My old gray sweatshirt looked all wrong under the blazer I had wrestled myself into on my way out the door. The blazer itself appeared to have come from some charitable agency. The blue jeans, the sweatshirt, and the soft, almost shapeless loafers on my feet were the most comfortable clothes I owned, and on days when I wanted to get through a lot of work, they sort of slipped onto my body by mutual agreement, as if they, too, had a job to do. When the shock of recognition faded, I looked again for what was
wrong,
but it had concealed itself within the scene around me.

It seemed probable that Jasper Dan Kohle was still intent on punishing me for failing to write “I yam what I yam” in his book, or for the flaws in my writing, or whatever was bugging him. I kept glancing over my shoulder and looking at the reflections in plate-glass windows as I proceeded up the street. To draw him out of cover, I turned corners and crossed streets in the middle of the block.

I turned off Sixth Avenue at Thompson Street, still with the feeling that someone was following me. I quickened my pace. At my back, it seemed, an unclean spirit capered along, dancing, jigging, bopping in its glee at having me so close at hand. Not looking over my shoulder was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. When I could, I shot brief glances into the ghostly mirrors provided by windows, and saw only the ordinary street traffic of the Village. Mothers pushed strollers that looked like either phaetons or Jetsons vehicles, fiftyish New York frizz-heads waved their hands in conversation as they ambled along, a few underfed kids lip-synched to their iPods. The feeling of being shadowed clung to me as I hastened toward home.

At Grand Street I turned right and moved toward West Broadway. More people filled the sidewalks, and all of them looked as though they had been born to appear on Grand Street at precisely that moment. I mean, they looked
at home
in a way I knew I did not. I realized that I no longer had the feeling of being followed, but neither did I feel at ease.

Before I reached the corner, a slash of the blue of a Wedgwood plate—a mild English blue, an Adams blue, an Alice blue!—caught my eye, and my heart surged into my throat even before I realized that I was looking across the street at my sister, gorgeous unbeautiful April. Fists on her hips, she stood glaring at me within a small circular space of her own making. The people who approached her made an unconscious adjustment at about four feet away and swerved to pass behind her. She was a little blue fire, a blaze of blue and yellow. If you got too close, she’d singe your eyebrows off. I stopped moving so abruptly that a woman with a nose ring, a sleeveless black leather jacket that showed a lot of tattoos, and Paki-basher boots bumped against my back. She called me an ignorant turd and tried to dust me off the pavement with her fingertips. Without taking my eyes from April, I said, “Sorry.” Acting on an impulse I neither understood nor questioned, I placed my hand just above her hip and pushed her away. She flailed back, swearing at me.

April was on the verge of spitting out lightning bolts. She took her right hand from her hip, held it out fingers extended, and swept it two decisive feet to her left, telling me to move backward. After I had taken two steps back, then another, April returned her hand to her hip and lifted her chin. She appeared to be gazing at the sky above my side of the street.

I looked up and saw a speck tumbling through the air. The speck got bigger as it fell. Far overhead, a dark little head peered down from the top of the nearest building. I staggered backward another couple of steps and yelled, “Look out!” Six feet away, the woman with the nose ring whirled around and opened her mouth to screech something at me. An object moving too fast to be identified cut through the air between us and smacked into the pavement with a hard, flat, ringing sound over a dull undertone faintly like cannon fire. Stony chips flew upward in a gritty haze.

“Fucking hell!” the woman yelled. “Are you
kidding
me?”

I looked across the street at the place where April had been, then up at the edge of the roof, where the dark little head was pulling back out of sight. On the sidewalk, a broken concrete block rested in the pothole it had made on impact. Cracks and fractures crazed the entire section of pavement where the block had fallen.

“Did you actually
hear
that?” the woman shouted at me.

I said nothing.

“Did you? Is that why you pushed me away?” For the first time I realized that she had an English accent.

“Something like that,” I said. People had started to crowd in, pointing at the sidewalk, pointing at the sky.

She pulled a cell phone from a zippered pocket. “I’m calling 911. We’d be dead now, if you didn’t have ears like a fucking bat.”

An hour later, a bored police lieutenant named McMenamin was telling me Jasper Dan Kohle had never served in the armed forces, never voted, never taken out a library card, never bought property or contracted to use the services of a telephone company. He had no passport or driver’s license. He didn’t have an address or any credit cards. He didn’t own a car. He’d never been arrested, or even fingerprinted. It also appeared that he had never been born. With that, Lieutenant McMenamin ordered me out of his station.