The Throat (93 page)

Tom moved
ahead of me as the boy slipped out of the alley by the other end.
Thirty feet along, opposite a high brown half-louvered fence, stood the
long flat windowless back of the Beldame Oriental. Whorls of spray
paint covered the gray cement blocks and surrounded the two wide black
doors. I came up beside Tom. The thick length of chain that should have
joined the two doors hung from the left bracket, and the padlock
dangled from the right. Tom frowned at me, thinking.

"Is he in
there?" I whispered.

"I think I
should have sent Clayton and Wiggins down here right after you did your
Dick Mueller act. I thought he'd wait until the end of his shift."

"To do what?"

"Move the
papers, of course." At what must have been my expression of absolute
dismay, he said, "It's just a guess. He'll come back, anyhow."

He pulled at
the right bracket, and both doors moved forward a quarter of an inch
and then clanked to a stop. "Ah, there's another lock," Tom said. "I
forgot that one." Until Tom spoke, I had not seen the round, slightly
indented shape of the lock beneath the bracket.

From the
inside of his jacket he pulled a long dark length of fabric, held it by
one end, and let its own weight unroll it. Keys of different sizes and
long, variously shaped metal rods fit into slots and pockets all along
the heavy, ribbed fabric. "Lamont's famous kit," he said. He bent
forward to look at the lock and then took a silver key from one of the
pockets in the cloth. He moved up to the door, poised the key, and
nudged it squarely into the slot. He nodded. When he turned the key, we
heard the bolt sliding back into its housing. Tom put the key into his
jacket pocket, rolled up the length of fabric, and slid the fabric into
a pouch on the inside of his jacket. I vaguely saw the shape of the
Glock's handle protruding from a soft, glovelike holster just in front
of his right hip.

"Try the
penlight," he said, and both of us pulled from our pockets the narrow,
tubular flashlights he had produced just before we left the house. I
turned around and pushed up the switch. A six-inch circle of bright
light appeared on the brown wall opposite. I moved the light sideways,
and the circle swept along the buildings across the alley, widening as
it moved toward the other end. "Good, aren't they?" he said. "Lot of
power, for a little thing."

"Why would he
come back, if he already moved his notes?"

"Dick
Mueller. He'll imagine that Mueller will try to outfox him by showing
up early, and so he'll show up even earlier."

"Where would
he put the notes?"

"I'm thinking
about that," Tom said, and grasped the bracket and opened the right
half of the double doors. "Shall we?"

I looked over
his shoulder. In ten minutes the street lamps would switch on. "Okay,"
I said, and moved past him into the pure darkness of the theater.

As Tom closed
the door behind us, I switched on the penlight and ran it over the
dusty cement wall to our right and found the single black door in front
of us that opened into the main body of the theater. To my left, wide
concrete steps led down into the basement. "Over here," Tom said. I
swung the light toward the door he had just closed and zigzagged it
around until I found the interior indentation, painted over with black,
that matched the one on the outside. "Good, hold it there," Tom said,
and relocked the door. I trained the yellow circle of light on him as
he unfolded the cloth, inserted the key, and packed the kit away into
his jacket again.

"You know,
those notes might still be here. Fee might have come over here from
Armory Place right after we called and unlocked the chain to make it
easier to get in tonight."

He switched
on his light and played it over the door. He held the beam on the
doorknob and switched off the penlight as soon as he took the handle. I
also turned off mine, and Tom opened the door.

After the
door closed behind us, Tom placed the tips of his fingers in the small
of my back and urged me forward into a dimensionless void. I remembered
a long stretch of empty floor between the first row of seats and the
back exit; in any case, I knew that all I was stepping toward so
cautiously was the aisle; but it was like being blind, and I put my
hands out in front of me. "What?" I said, whispering for no rational
reason. Tom nudged me forward again, and I took another two cautious
steps and waited. "Turn around," Tom whispered back to me. I heard his
feet moving quietly on the bare cement of the theater's floor and
turned around, less out of obedience than fear that he was going to
disappear. I heard the knob turning in the exit door. If he goes out, I
thought, so do I. The door swung open an inch or two, and I realized
what he was doing—a distinct line of grayish light shone along the edge
of the door. He opened the door another few inches, and a column of
gray light shone in the darkness. A shaft of the rough surface of the
cement floor, painted black and lightly traced with dust, opened like
an eye in front of the shining column. We would be able to see anyone
who came into the theater.

He gently
shut the door. Absolute blackness closed in on us again. Two soft
footsteps came toward me, and his hand whispered against cloth as it
slid into his pocket. There was a sharp click! and a round beam of
yellow light, startlingly well defined and so physical it seemed solid,
cut through the darkness and picked out the last two seats in the first
row. "Tom," I began, but before I got any further, he had snapped off
the penlight, leaving me with the shadow image of the raised seats. The
floor moved under my feet like the deck of a boat. Over the
shadow-flash image of the chairs, the hot beam of light hung in my eyes
like the ghost of a flashbulb, increasing the darkness.

"I know," Tom
said. "I just wanted to get a general idea."

"Let's just
stand here for a couple of minutes," I said, and pressed the burning
circle in my back against the wall. The floor immediately stopped
swaying. Through the jacket, the cool roughness of the wall seeped
toward my skin. I remembered the walls of the Beldame Oriental. Red,
printed with a raised pattern of random, irregular swirls, they were
stony, as abrasive as coral, sometimes sweaty with a chill layer of
condensation. I bent my knees to concentrate the pressure on the hooks
and ratchets, flattened my palms against the rough stipple of the
cement, and waited for details to swim up out of the blank dark wall in
front of me. Tom's soft, slow breathing at my side seemed
indistinguishable from my own.

A sense of
space and dimension began to shape the darkness. I began to be aware
that I stood near one corner of a large tilted box that grew smaller as
it rose toward the far end. After a time, I could make out before me
the raised edge of the stage as a slight shimmer, like rays of heat
coming up off a highway. This disappeared as Tom Pasmore moved in front
of me and then returned when he moved quietly away up the side of the
theater. I heard his footsteps dampen but not disappear as he left the
cement apron extending from the first row of seats to the stage and
stepped onto the carpeting. The shimmer solidified into the long
swelling shape of the stage, and the seats gradually became visible as
a dark, solid triangle fanning up and out from a point a few feet from
where I stood. Tom's face was a faint, pale blotch up the aisle.

At the far
end of the theater was another aisle, I remembered, and the wide space
of a central passage, probably mandated by the fire department, divided
the rows of seats in half.

I could now
just about make out the curved backs of the nearest individual seats,
and I had a dim sense of the width of the aisle. Beneath the pale
smudge of his face, Tom was a black shape melting in and out of the
darkness surrounding him. I followed him up the aisle toward the front
of the theater. When we reached the last row, Tom stopped moving and
turned around. A metallic glint like a slipperiness in the air marked
the panel in the lobby door. Looking down, we could see a great soft
darkness over the stage that must have been the curtains.

The gleam of
the metal plate disappeared as he put his hand over it, and the door
yielded before him in another widening column of shining gray light.

The lobby was
filled with hazy illumination from the oval windows set into thick
doors opposite leading out to the old ticket booth and the glass doors
on Livermore Avenue.

Two
chest-high pieces of wooden furniture stood in the place of the old
candy counter. Even in the partial light, the lobby seemed smaller than
I had remembered and cleaner than I had expected. At its far end,
another set of doors with metal hand plates led into the aisle at the
other side of the theater. I went up to the furniture where the candy
counter had been, bent down to look at a round carving in what I
thought was the back of a shelf unit, and saw ornate letters in the
midst of the filigree. I took out my penlight and shone it on the
letters, inri. I pointed the light at what looked like a lectern and
saw the same pattern. I was standing in front of a portable altar and
pulpit.

Tom said,
"Some congregation must use this place as a church on Sundays."

Tom went
toward a door in the wall next to the pulpit. He tried the knob, which
jittered but would not otherwise move, unrolled the burglar kit, peered
at the keyhole, and worked another key into the slot. When the lock
clicked and the door opened, Tom packed away the kit and peered inside.
He took out his light, switched it on, and with me behind him went into
a stuffy, windowless room about half the size of Tom's kitchen.

"Manager's
office," he said. The penlights picked out a bare desk, a small number
of green plastic chairs, and a wheeled rack crowded with shiny blue
choir robes. Four cardboard boxes stood lined up in front of the desk.
"Do you suppose?" Tom asked, running his light along the boxes.

I went
through the chairs and knelt in front of the two boxes at the center of
the desk. The open flaps had been simply laid shut, and I opened those
of the first box to see two stacks of thick blue books. "Hymnals," I
said.

I played my
own light along the other boxes while Tom started moving things around
behind me. None of the boxes showed anything but ordinary wear, no rips
or holes made by busy rats. All four would hold hymnals. I checked them
anyhow and found—hymnals. I stood up again and turned around. The rack
stuffed with choir robes angled out into the room. Tom's head protruded
above the rack, and the circle of light before him shone on a plywood
door almost exactly the color of his hair. "Fee always liked basements,
didn't he?" Tom said. "Let's take a look."

I walked
around the rack as Tom opened the door, and trained my penlight just
ahead of his. A flight of wooden stairs with a handrail began at the
door and led down to a cement floor. I followed Tom down the stairs,
playing my light over the big space to our right. Two startled mice
scrambled toward the far wall. We descended another three or four
steps, and the mice darted into an almost invisible crevice between two
cement blocks in the wall on the other side of the basement. Tom's
light flashed over an old iron furnace, a yard-square column of bricks,
heating pipes, electrical conduits, rusting water pipes, and drooping
spiderwebs. "Cheerful place," he said.

We reached
the bottom of the steps. Tom went straight ahead toward the furnace and
the front of the theater, and I walked off to the side, looking for
something I had glimpsed while I watched the mice scramble toward the
wall. Tom's light wandered toward the center of the basement; mine
skimmed over yards of dusty cement. I moved forward in a straight line.
Then my beam landed squarely on a wooden carton.

I walked up
to it, set down the thermos, and pushed at the edge of the flat top. It
moved easily to the side and exposed a section of something square and
white. I slid the top all the way off the carton and held the light on
what I thought would be reams of paper arranged into neat stacks. A
lunatic message gleamed back into the light. Black letters on a white
ground spelled out
BUYTERVIO
. Above that, in another
row of letters, was
MNUFGJKA
. Two other nonsense words
filled the top two rows of the carton. "Buytervio?" I said to myself,
and finally realized that the carton contained the letters once used to
spell out the movie titles on the marquee.

"Come over
here."

Tom's voice
came from a penumbra of light behind the furnace. I picked up the
thermos and followed the beam of my own light across the dirty floor to
the side of the furnace and then shone it on Tom. "He was here," he
said. "Take a look."

I misheard
him to say
He's here
, and,
thinking that Fee's corpse lay on the ground
beside the gun with which he had killed himself, experienced an
involuntary surge of rage, sorrow, grief, and pain, all mingled with
something that felt like regret or disappointment. My light swept over
a pair of cardboard boxes. Did I want him to live, in spite of
everything he had done? Or did I simply want to be in at the end, like
Tom Pasmore? Raging at both Fee and myself, I aimed my light at Tom's
chest and said, "I can't find him."

"I said, he
was here." Tom took my hand and aimed the beam of light on the boxes I
had overlooked in my search for the corpse.

Their flaps
lay open, and one box was tipped onto its side, exposing an empty
interior. Ragged holes of various sizes had been chewed into two sides
of the box still upright. Tom had tried to prepare me, but as much as a
body, the empty boxes were the end of our quest. I said, "We lost him."

"Not yet,"
Tom said.