“Hello?”
The voice, when it came, was gritty. “Hello, Clay.” It might have been a man’s or an older woman’s. I did not recognize it.
“Lucian?”
Silence. I was impatient and anxious, ready to grab my coat now and meet him anywhere. “Is that you? Did you get my e-mail?”
Another pause. And then: “Were you expecting Lucian?”
A chill crawled from my shoulders to my nape.
“Is that you?” I whispered, my heart so loud in my ears I wondered if I’d be able to hear the reply. It came, with a soft rasp.
“No.” And then, “No, Clay.”
I clapped the phone shut, my heart drumming against my ribs.
I sat very still. My door was locked. My computer had gone into energy-save mode, and both living room lamps were on. I stared out past the window, at the black, predawn night.
I made myself stand and walk first to one lamp and then the other, turning each of them off with a quiet click. In the darkness I felt vulnerable, blind. I closed my eyes and slowly opened them, made out the shapes of my desk, my sofa, the television on its stand, the casement of the window. I made myself walk to the sill. I grasped it with one hand. The window looked out at the space between my apartment building and the house next door. I leaned against the frame and craned my neck, looking out toward the street.
At first I didn’t see it—not until I swept my gaze away from the curb. There. A lone figure, leaning against the porch post of a house across the street, black against the darkness, looking up at me.
I knew, instinctively, that it was not Lucian. I jerked back from the window.
I hurried into my bedroom, shut and locked the door behind me, climbed beneath the covers on my bed, and listened to the percussion of my own heart.
WITH ONE GLANCE AT my clock, I shoved out of bed in a panic. It was Tuesday; I was missing my weekly editorial meeting. I stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the shower.
For a moment I stood dumb in the middle of my bathroom, remembering the phone call, the rasping voice.
The figure across the street.
It was daylight now. Emboldened, I walked straight to the window—not in my living room but in the spare room that faced the street. I pulled the shade.
There was the house, the apartment building next to it, and farther down, Saint Mary’s, the liturgies of which I often heard drifting from the open windows of the church in summer. A mother and her young son passed along the sidewalk, bundled up in coats and scarves, toward Massachusetts Avenue. There was no one else.
I hurried to shower, shave, dress. I hesitated a moment before pocketing my cell phone and another moment upon stepping outside my door. Music was coming from Mrs. Russo’s apartment, a soaring female voice that reminded me of Barbara Streisand. I couldn’t make out the words, but the sound of it, like the daylight, heartened me.
On the single short ride from Central to Kendall Station, one of the train car’s few passengers was holding onto the rail to my left and studying me. He looked at least fifty-five and wore a faded Carhartt jacket. His hair was orangish, in the way of men who colored their hair long after it was gray. His large, thick glasses took up the upper third of his face. An “I didn’t vote for him” bumper sticker with a picture of the president was wrapped around his sleeve like an armband. As far as I could tell, he wore no watch.
“Can I ask you something?” He swayed with the car. Was he a tourist? No, generally they held maps folded open to red and green diagrams of the T, as though they were the complex capillaries of an organism and not five simple lines named after colors.
“Sure.” I prepared to tell him he could switch to the Green Line two stops after Kendall.
“Has someone been talking to you? Contacting you?”
I froze. And then I studied the man more acutely: the faint age spots on his face and the edge of his upper lip, the flannel shirt under his jacket, the too-straight line of his hair across his forehead that indicated a comb-over.
“Don’t be afraid.” He regarded me through sagging eyelids magnified by those glasses. “Has someone been talking to you? Someone not like you?”
The chill and ensuing sweat of the night before returned to me—along with the same need to flee, to shut myself behind a door. The train slowed with a squeal of brakes, and I jumped up, grabbing for the rail near the door as it stopped completely. I squeezed past the doors as soon as they opened, hurried out into the station and up the stairs. Only on the street did I look behind me to confirm that he had not followed me.
I needed to talk to Lucian.
I went into the meeting late, flustered, unprepared. I contributed little, unable to think of anything but the man on the train, the voice on the phone. Were other members of the legion aware of what Lucian was up to, his ambition to have his story—and theirs—outed? Could they interfere?
Helen pulled me aside in the hallway after the meeting. “Clay, I know you’re working on a brilliant piece of writing. And it is brilliant. But I can’t have you doing it at the expense of your responsibilities. It’s all right if it takes longer to finish. You and Anu are still working out the contract particulars, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” I’d forgotten the contract.
“Then give yourself the time you need to do your job in the meantime. Please.”
I nodded, embarrassed and a little resentful at being openly chastised outside the conference room. I went into my office, shoved the door shut with more force than I meant to, dropped the stack of packets from the meeting onto my desk.
I went to the window and looked out at the people walking by, headed somewhere with a purpose I had once envied.
Returning to my desk, I unpacked my bag, pretending it was any usual day—not that I had had a usual day since early October—putting the packets on the corner of my desk, docking my laptop.
I signed in to the company server, opened my calendar, and faltered.
There. Five o’clock tonight: L. But that was not what caused me to hesitate. Below that, a line across the time block read:
Don’t EVER try to contact me again.
I sagged into my office chair and rubbed at my face with trembling hands.
27
In the Marriott Starbucks across the street from my office, I waited. For Lucian. For answers. For the end of the story.
Five o’clock arrived and passed. I sipped my coffee, strained to see guests walking through the hotel lobby, studied every patron that came into the coffee shop, most of whom left again. Except for a businessman camped at a table with his laptop, I was the only one there.
I checked my watch. 5:07.
Was this his idea of getting back at me? For what—trying to contact him?
5:11.
I thought through our last conversation that day in the airport before the nuns came along. They had thanked Lucian, not in the way older women coo at the kindness of strangers but in the regal way of those accustomed to respect. I had eavesdropped on their conversation, which consisted wholly of the details of their trip, and had found myself disappointed not to hear them debating Scripture or the devil.
5:19.
I thought about the man on the T and the figure in the darkness across the street from my apartment. They weren’t the same person; the man on the T was short, slightly stooped. The figure across the street was taller, seemingly at ease in the darkness, apparently doing nothing but standing there.
Waiting to be seen. Watching me.
A man in cargo pants with zippered pockets and a “Carpe Brewem: Seize the Beer” sweatshirt strode into the coffee shop. He was tall, with straight features and a prominent nose. He wore thick socks inside his Birkenstocks, and I could see the gleam of a silver chain disappearing into the neck of his sweatshirt. He might have been a grad student at MIT.