The Mirror Thief (56 page)

He straightens, puts the pipe back in his teeth. Now, he says. Did you remember to bring the book?

Yes sir. Downstairs, in my coat.

Well, run and get it. I’ll be writing out that list I promised you.

As he descends, Stanley can hear Synnøve somewhere nearby, singing wordlessly to herself, but he doesn’t look around. He opens the hall closet, pulls
The Mirror Thief
from his pocket, mounts the stairs again.

Welles has turned on the desklamp; it glows under its opaque green shade. As Stanley approaches, Welles lifts with a flourish the page he’s written and hands it over. This will keep you busy for a while, I’ll wager, he says. May I?

Stanley gives him the book, takes the page. He looks it over in the dim light: a long column of strange names, uniform and equidistant, as if plotted with a ruler. The handwriting is neat, but cramped and peculiar, and he knows he’s going to have a hell of a time making sense of it.

When Stanley looks up again Welles has the book open on his desk, a fountain-pen in his hand. He’s motionless, wearing a confused expression. Oh yeah, Stanley says. I guess I forgot to tell you. Somebody already wrote in my copy. Like I said, I got it second-hand. I never been able to read the message.

Welles begins to laugh. It’s a funny laugh: a little hysterical, then joyless and forced. Ah, he says. This is beginning to make sense. Where did you say you found this, again?

The Lower East Side. It belonged to a thief who got sent off to Rikers.

What was his name? Do you know?

Stanley shrugs. Everybody called him Hunky, he says. I never met him.

Hmm, Welles says. Then I suppose you got it—let’s see—third-hand, at the very least. Here, I’ll read it to you.
Dear Alan
—ah, good, I see I misspelled that—
I salute your naked courage. Yours respectfully, Adrian Welles
.

Oh, Stanley says.

I gave it to a poet who came through town two summers ago. A young self-styled visionary. Blake, by way of Whitman. Larry Lipton, I think, had invited him to come down from San Francisco. During the reading he had an altercation with someone from the crowd, and to demonstrate—
something
, his sincerity, his commitment, I don’t know what—he disrobed completely. It struck me at the time as a rather impressive gesture.

Welles closes the book, sits to open a drawer. You know, he says, this copy is rather the worse for wear. I’ve got one here in my desk that’s essentially untouched. Let me replace—

Stanley puts a quick protective hand on the book. If it’s all the same to you, he says, I’d just as soon keep the one I got.

Welles’s eyes track up Stanley’s arm to his face. Something in them seems slightly wounded. Then he smiles.

When he rises, he’s holding a metal ruler. He sets it down, fishes a razorblade from the top drawer. Opening the book again, he slips the ruler inside and cuts out the inscribed page with a single swift motion. Stanley tenses for an instant, about to spring, to seize Welles’s arm. Then he realizes that he doesn’t care. He’d rather be rid of it.

Welles flips to the preceding page, uncaps his pen again. As the nib scrapes the paper, Stanley’s eyes drift across the room: the mountains of books, the arsenal desk, the great barred door. After a moment Welles blows across the ink to dry it and puts the open book in Stanley’s hand. I tried to be more forgiving with my penmanship this time, he says. Can you read it?

Sure, Stanley says. Most of it.

It’s a quotation from Roger Bacon, the Thirteenth-Century English magus.

Okay. What’s it mean?

Welles caps the pen, turns off the lamp. It means I’m glad I met you, he says. Very glad indeed.

Welles picks up his pipe and steps toward the french door again, but Stanley doesn’t follow him. He stands next to the desk, holding the book, staring into space. Thanks for everything, Mister Welles, he says. Really. But it’s time for me to go.

Back downstairs, as he’s pulling on his jacket, Synnøve does her best to get him to stay—there’s a murphy bed in my studio, she says; I promise it’s quite comfortable—but he exits as quickly as he can, accepting a peck on the cheek, giving her an awkward hug. Wait! she says. Did you want to take your fish-buckets?

Oh, Stanley says, those aren’t actually mine.

Welles walks him down the path to the gate. What shall I tell your friend when he and Cynthia return? he says.

He’ll know where I am. You don’t need to worry yourself.

Welles offers his hand. Stanley takes it, and Welles pulls him into an embrace. Stanley is suspended for a moment, his ear against the man’s chest, breathing in his spicy smoke, hearing the roar and rumble of his chambered interior. Then Welles releases him.

As he steps from the curb, Stanley turns. Oh, Mister Welles? he calls.

Yes?

When we first met on the beach, a couple nights ago, you said something to me. What was it?

Welles walks away slowly until he reaches the stoop. Then he turns and leans against a wooden column. I don’t think I recall, he says.

It was in another language, Stanley says. You said it twice.

Welles is a featureless silhouette against the open door. His wife stands behind him, looking sleepy and sad. Two points of light appear in his spectacles. Stanley can’t tell where that light is coming from.

I’m sorry, Welles says. I must have enunciated so poorly that whatever I said sounded foreign. I’m sure I spoke only English. And that badly, it seems. My apologies.

Stanley nods. Okay, he says. Goodnight, Mister Welles.

Goodnight, Stanley.

On the way to the boardwalk, maybe two lots down, Stanley passes an overgrown yard with a cat in it. The cat has something in its mouth: a sandy fishhead, trailing scraps of viscera. It watches him with glassy green eyes.

Stanley clenches his jaw, aims a kick at the cat’s skull, then pulls it at the last second. The cat hunches, flattens its ears, and tears off through the grass, darting under the porch. Stanley’s vision is blurring again; a tremor gathers in his throat, and his breath comes heavily.

He looks over his shoulder at Welles’s deck, just visible through a spearpoint row of juniper trees. There’s a dark shape on the rail that must be Welles, though Stanley can’t tell if he’s watching or not.

You’re a lying sack of shit, Stanley hisses through his teeth.

When Stanley wakes the next morning in the squat on Horizon Court, Claudio isn’t there. Stanley sits up, wipes his eyes, looks around. Wondering if maybe the kid knocked at some point and he didn’t hear it. Then he remembers last night—Cynthia and her frog flick, Synnøve and her murphy bed—and he knows exactly where the kid is.

He flops down again, pulls up the blanket. Trying to get mad, not
quite managing it. The kid is soft; of course he’d take the bed. Can’t blame him for that. Stanley’s not even sure why he was in such a hurry to leave Welles’s place himself. Partly because he was embarrassed by his waterworks performance, sure. And partly because the talk had quit paying off. But there was something else: an uneasiness he can’t name, a sense of something compromised or put at risk. Trying to pin it down just makes Stanley sad, and being sad always makes him tired.

It’s late morning before he wakes again; he’s not sure how late. Still no Claudio. He’s starting to feel like he’s made a bad bet: bankroll too small, number taking too long to come up. He shoves away the blanket, brushes his teeth, drinks from his father’s canteen. The list of names Welles gave him is still in the breast pocket of his new shirt; he finds it and flattens it on the counter in the front room, then looks at it from time to time while he gets dressed. It may as well be in Chinese. Sometimes it’s hard for Stanley to say just what he crossed the country to find, but it goddamn sure wasn’t this. Welles has ducked him again, shifting shape like some wiggly undersea thing, leaving Stanley in the usual cloud of ink.

He thinks of the long walk he took with Welles the night they met, and all the gobbledygook the guy spouted along the way. What if it was all intended to put Stanley off the scent? What if the secret wasn’t in Welles speech, but in his steps, in the path he took over the filled-in canals? Stanley thinks of a word he saw on a streetsign that night, a word he keeps seeing:
RIALTO
. What does it mean? In
The Mirror Thief
it’s a place, a neighborhood in the book’s haunted city—not the same as this city, but not completely different, either. The word points toward something. What?

It could be something from history, but Stanley doesn’t think so. History is just more books; the secret he’s after has nothing to do with books. It’s either in the world—hidden there somewhere—or it’s not worth knowing. The closest Stanley’s come to it was on that walk: the way the old man, caught off-guard, pointed to the city to explain himself. Welles wrote the book, sure, but he didn’t build the city. The city is the key. Stanley needs to get outside, to take another look around.

He laces up his Pedwins, slides quietly to the street. Part of what’s put
him in a sorry mood is the air pressure: he can feel more rain coming in, though the sky’s clear. As he turns onto the boardwalk he catches a sour sickly smell—bad familiar, rhyming somehow with the odors from the oilfield—and he remembers that he forgot to change the dressing on his leg. Thinking about it brings back the ache; he feels woozy, slows down. The last time he cleaned the wound was yesterday afternoon, at the showers in Santa Monica. It looked all right then; now he’s not so sure. He thinks about going back to the squat, but then figures it’ll keep for a couple hours.

He picks out a spot by the water to sit and watch the boardwalk and think. After a while, when the streets and buildings haven’t disclosed anything, he turns around and looks out to sea instead. The sun is just overhead; the waves are dark translucent blue. Sometimes at the limits of his vision he can see the flash of a garibaldi among the rocks on the bottom, like a ripe Riverside tangerine lost in the waves.

Stanley pulls Welles’s list from the pocket of his jeans and goes through it again, one name at a time, puzzling over each slip of a letter in turn. One name he knows from the book—Hermes Trismegistus, of course—but the rest are gibberish. He stares at them, half hoping they’ll wriggle to life on the page like millipedes and spell out something other than what they say. Before long Stanley has a fierce headache, and they’re no different than they were.

He folds the page, pockets it, and walks north, shoeless along the sand where the ocean breaks. The tide is out. The beach is long and flat and smooth, specked at odd intervals by flotsam that leaves straight comet-trail paths to the water: scattered moon-jellies and by-the-wind sailors, the shells of periwinkles and jackknife clams, the creepy fudge-brown egg-cases of skates, lengths of yellow kelp bowed seaward by the tug of waves. As Stanley looks inland toward the arcades—a couple of shiftless drunks by the Fortune Bridgo, a well-dressed old Jew with a violin case, a woman pushing a baby-carriage and towing a kid with a white balloon—his foot finds something hard buried in the sand, and he stops to uncover it.

It’s the skull of some crazy bird: a light-brown beak, forearm-long, and huge hollow orbits where eyes once were. Beach-grains have pitted
and polished the beak, and a single barnacle adorns its blade near the midpoint. Stanley studies it, then looks down at the cavity it left in the sand. Bulbous at one end, tapering to a point, it looks like a letter from some archaic alphabet. The wave-graded sand around it is blank and uniform, seemingly empty, though there’s no telling what else it might hide.

Stanley stoops to the smooth beach-surface and makes a deep slash with the beak’s downturned tip. Then he makes another one—longer, curving—next to it. The three marks look like they might spell something in some language, though Stanley doesn’t know what language, or what it might mean. In
The Mirror Thief
Crivano writes on the beach to summon the moon, which rises and talks to him. The book never says what marks he makes. Welles probably doesn’t even know. But the book knows.

Stanley bends again, slicing long furrows through the sand. He thinks of the old apartment on Division: the white wall across from his pallet, the first thing his eyes met every morning. How he hated that fucking wall. He begged his mother to ask his grandfather for permission to hang something there—a hamsa, a painting, anything—but she never would. The wall always seemed to be watching, although it would never acknowledge him. Eventually he had enough. He considered wrecking its pure surface with the letters of his name, but even then he was trying to detach himself from it, to leave it behind. Instead he wrote SHIT, the most powerful word he knew. To blind the wall. To keep it from judging. Thinking of it now, he remembers the handprints and footprints in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese, and the memory makes him smile. He straightens, stretches, sidearms the bird-skull back to the sea.

For a long time he walks the wet sand, eyeing the boardwalk, eyeing the water. His shadow precedes him as he goes. To the east almost everything he sees was made or placed by human hands; to the west almost nothing was. The pale void of the beach stretches between. A gull flies by with a dead grunion curved in its beak. Stanley thinks of the fish swarming in the waves, and wonders what switch the moon flips to summon them to the land—whether they’re aware of it in themselves, whether any among them ever opt out, want no part of it, choose to remain below, lurking and lonesome and proud.

As he nears the quiet amusement pier at Ocean Park he spots Charlie ambling along the beach. Charlie’s wearing tatty business attire—white shirt, silk tie, jacket and slacks, fedora—but he has no shoes or socks, and his pants are rolled to his knees. He holds a tube of paper in one hand, a bottle in the other, and he cuts a crooked path across the sand. Hey! he shouts. Hey, Stanley! Bwana Lawrence was just asking about you!

Hey, Stanley says, raising an open palm. Who?

Bwana Lawrence. Lawrence Lipton. Lipton teabags. Hip, fun glad-rags. You know who I mean, man. He said he met you the other night, at the jazz canto.