He walked through the streets of his zone, crossed another zone and came to Desire. He didn’t think he was going to make the Arboretum in an hour as she’d said, but then he hoped she’d be late too, miscalculating her own time and distance. When the silhouette of the Arboretum appeared he kept his eyes peeled for her blond hair; he knew she wasn’t going to wait for him and he knew he couldn’t afford to wait for her. He was sure the cops were somewhere behind him thinking it odd that he was returning to the Arboretum tonight. He assumed cops had an instinct for these things. There was nothing to stop them from going into the Arboretum if they thought they had a reason, ambiguous as their jurisdiction might be. As he neared the neighborhood there was no sight of her. He paused for a moment outside but knew it was a mistake to stop; it would only make everything appear all the more suspicious. He went inside.
He was halfway down the first corridor when he felt someone in front of him. He felt her fingers run up his face and stop at his glasses. “It’s me,” he confirmed.
She took his hand. “Come on,” he heard her say, and she pulled him down the corridor and around its U-turn, continuing to the interchange chamber where they crossed to the door on the far side and its spiral stairs. Far away below him on the stairs he could hear, as one always heard in the stairwell, the faint sound of waves crashing. Mona went first before him and he followed.
They descended past the three doors to the fourth that led to Fleurs d’X, and then they passed that one. They climbed further and further down, passing another door and then another and then another, the light in each more ominous. Etcher had never gone this far down in the Arboretum. He could see what appeared to be the final door beneath him, the eighth by his count. She stopped before reaching it. “You brought the money?” he heard her ask.
“Yes,” he answered tersely.
“This is your last chance to change your mind,” she said. “It’s dangerous from here on.”
“Let’s get to the door,” he said.
“We’re not going to the door,” she said in the dark. There was a pause. He felt her reach up and touch his leg. “On the other side of you,” she said, “there’s an opening.”
“The other side?” She meant the other side of the stairwell. It was pitch black. “Let’s go a little further down,” he said, “into the light of the door.”
“That’s not where it is,” she explained in the dark, “it’s where you are, on the other side. Where there is no light. That’s why it’s there, because there’s no light.”
He listened and realized that the sound of water crashing in waves was indeed coming not from below him but to his side, in the black of the other wall of the stairwell. He reached out but touched nothing; the wall, and the opening she said was there, was beyond his reach. “I can’t reach it,” he said.
“No,” she said, “you can’t reach it.”
“How do I reach it?”
“You jump.”
“I don’t even know there’s an opening there,” Etcher said, “except that you tell me there is and I think maybe I hear something.”
“Do you hear the sea?”
“Yes.”
“Next to you, where you are now?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s there,” she said. “Jump.”
He looked at the door down below him. “Is that the bottom of the stairs?”
“No,” she said.
“It looks like the last door.”
“It may be the last door or … it may not. I’m not sure. But it’s not the bottom.”
“How far is the bottom?”
“I don’t know.”
He breathed deeply. He kept studying the darkness to the side of him where the sound of the waves was coming, as though he might distinguish some profound pitch of black that constituted an opening. “How big is the opening?”
“I don’t know.”
He was annoyed. He was supposed to jump over a chasm of undetermined depth to an opening of unknown size, which he could neither reach nor see. He kept staring into the side of the stairwell and he knew no matter how long he looked or waited it all came down to jumping. He took off his glasses, folding them and putting them in his pocket. He raised his leg over the rail of the stairs and climbed out onto the outer edge of the steps, suspended over the dark of the stairwell below him. When he started thinking too much about everything, he jumped.
It was at least half a minute before she said, “Did you make it?”
One foot had slipped, and he’d wildly grasped the first thing he could put his arms around. He found himself sitting for that half a minute listening to his heart pound while she in turn had listened for his fading scream downward or a distant telltale splat or whatever sound the plunge to oblivion makes, finally deciding that either he had made it or been very polite about the plummet.
“Can you reach me?” he heard her ask from the stairs. She didn’t sound far away.
“What do you mean, reach you?” he said.
“Can you take my hand and pull me?”
He laughed.
“What’s funny?” she asked in the dark.
“Nothing.”
“I told you,” she said, “I can’t stay here anymore. He’s looking for me.” He was laughing because one thing was for sure and it was that this woman looked out for herself. Maybe she liked him or maybe she didn’t but in either case she hadn’t allowed sentiment to get in the way of his making that jump first, and now that he’d risked his neck once by getting himself across the dark pit of the stairwell, it was his function in the scheme of things to risk it again getting her across. He still couldn’t see anything. On his knees he felt the rock’s edge at his feet. He leaned out into the dark until he felt her hand, and then pulled her. “You’ve got the money?” was the first thing she said to him on the other side.
“You’re welcome,” he answered. Unfazed she led him out through the back of the opening to a tunnel that continued further down into the earth. They went for some way. The sound of the waves grew louder and the air in the tunnel colder. The two of them had gone ten minutes when the path turned to reveal a dark grotto, lit by torches jammed into the rocks. The ocean rushed in and out of the grotto through an opening in the distance that was located at the base of the cliffs far below the city. Inside the grotto was a small dock with several very small boats that wouldn’t hold more than two or three people, and standing around the boats were five men talking and smoking and drinking. A couple of them were playing cards. They looked up to see Mona and Etcher climb down the last stretch of the trail.
No one sailed in, everyone sailed out. This wasn’t a harbor for sailors on leave but a one-way station for fugitives unlikely ever to come back, and once you got this far the men running the operation weren’t about to let you turn around and go upstairs, where you could tell the cops about it. Now they gathered around Etcher and Mona and one of them took his cigarette from his mouth and dropped it on the dock and held out his open hand without saying a word. Etcher gave him the money. The man looked at it and shook his head. He waited.
“That’s all I’ve got,” Etcher said.
“It’s only enough for one,” the man said. Etcher looked at the man and Mona looked at Etcher. Frightened, she struggled with frustration to free her earrings from her lobes, turning them over to the man, who said, “These aren’t worth much.” Mona took from her coat pocket something wrapped in a scarf and handed that over as well. The man unwrapped it and held it up. “It’s a fucking rock,” he said.