As the leviathan and his charge ducked beneath the 110, Topsy felt the whole of downtown rise off him like a corroded weight — but they were in danger, because there were no more buildings to hide in and the infamous Rampart station was yet to come.
He slowed so as not to seem in flight past lumpy fields and grassy hillocks on both sides of the wide macadamized road. He could hear the furtive, alien rustle of encampments as they rushed by (Fitz and Half Dead in there somewhere, for all anyone knew). “It’s fine, child, it’ll be right fine,” he said, like a lullaby, turning his whiskery head so she’d hear. “There, there.” When taxis or trucks passed and they were alone again, he let slip the coat from his shoulders so her head struck fresh air. A naked man crouched in the middle of the street defecating, like a figure in an outlandish prehistoric diorama; Topsy thought it a neat diversion for his and the girl’s potential pursuants.
Now, who else roamed this strange place? It was not Epping Forest! How must the entirety of it have looked to a man like William Morris? Tonight, the Victorian age was but a vapor between him and the vast metropolis. The girl had seen to that — the sweet turtleshell stuck on his back had crimped his delusions, the pure unselfishness of his concern for her leeching air from the bubble within which he normally moved. He nearly heard the hiss. He accelerated past the blurred, sleepy storefronts — Salon del Reino de Los Testigos de Jehova — SIGNS-BANNERS — Botanica — Psíquica — Carniceria — Panadería — to a street called, most curiously, East Edgeware. Topsy broke a cool sweat as they swept past the abandoned hotel with the faded advertisement painted on its side — ALL ROOMS WITH BATH & SHOWER $2.50 UP. FIREPROOF — around the stucco face, its crumbly chicken wire disabused by a hundred careless fenders. Another alley: and then he let Amaryllis down behind the shop. They walked a few paces and huddled in the shadow of a dumpster.
Dawn came with usual rosy-fingered treachery. A white Volvo station wagon turned, nosing into its space behind the bakery. With a smile Topsy noticed that his sometime employer, may he be blessed, wore a white mushroomed chef’s hat even as he drove.
“All right, listen,” he whispered urgently. “That man there will help. He’s an ample soul, and his wife is a worker for the public good.”
“But you won’t come?”
A heartbreaking puff of cold came from her tiny mouth.
“It’s no good with me there. He’ll take care of you, girl — him and his wife — but you mustn’t say I brought you here, understand? I know ’im, understand? He’s good and he’ll get me word of what’s happened to you and I’ll come.” Tears again between them, and he dried her eyes with his sleeve. “Go ahead now, there! I’m watching you, child! You’ll do right well with ’im. This man’s my friend. Understand? But you mustn’t tell him it was me. Now, right along, right along!”
She nodded and stared at the ground, her lower lip jerking about. He kissed her cheek, turned her around and sent her off like a toy soldier. She took a few steps, then gazed at him in a way that broke his heart again; but he did not break, and urged her on.
The car’s engine shut off, and Gilles walked to the trunk and rooted around inside. She was fifteen feet from the Volvo, and again turned back — again, he urged her on.
The baker saw her.
“Hullo?”
He stood up straight in his loose bleached clothes and came near. “Hel-lo … here now, what’s wrong? What are we doing all alone?” He looked around but saw no one. “Do you live around here? Where’s Mommy and Daddy? Do you know where Mommy and Daddy are?”
She shook her head, fighting the urge to run to her friend.
“Are you hungry? Do you like cake and pastry? Would you like to come inside, where it’s warm, and have some pastry? Sure you would! Come. Come inside.”
She looked back one last time — the shadow of Topsy was gone.
Amaryllis went to the baker, head bowed like a votary. He knelt and spoke to her with great kindness. The vagrant tucked thoroughly away, strained to hear, but the voice was low and indecipherable. Gilles led her inside.
The morning lifted like a curtain as he retraced his path. The cityscape stirred, stretching itself under a still-cool sun; his step quickened as he entered the tunnel. There would be coffee waiting at Misery House.
CHAPTER 11. Last Looks
Katrina sat on a bench in the middle of the maze in a purple Viktor & Rolf midi, a $27,000 brain coral — clasped torsade wrapped about an ankle. Her foot, shod in Jimmy Choo, tapped nervously — wearily — on the stone base.
Her father proudly called her a landscape architect, but Trinnie always told people she was “just a gardener.” He thought that well enough true — his daughter had made topiary designs of startling scientific whimsy for the duke of Roxburghe and the marquess of Bath, and been engaged by whole cities to memorialize spirit of place in elegant, leafy riddle. She grew puzzles of verdure beside abbeys and ancient almshouses; one of her labyrinths for a private Swedish estate consumed twelve thousand emerald boxwoods and 150 tons of peach-colored Raisby gravel alone (Mr. Trotter pretended to be piqued that she hadn’t used a family quarry). As signature, Trinnie always hid sacred spaces in the branchy creatures of myth sculpted within — her “secret meditation zones.”
But not here: not at Saint-Cloud. This one, shaped like a Fabergé egg, was without artifice, a final, transcendent maze for the ages (you’ll excuse the author when he says it didn’t hedge). Mr. Trotter had been after her to grow one forever, but understood his daughter’s reticence — it was too close to home or, rather, too close to where home might have been: the virid mother of all maze and meadow, La Colonne Détruite. How could she ever top what had pulled the world from under her?
At the unveiling of the Saint-Cloud labyrinth (for the forty-odd months it took to sufficiently mature, Trinnie kept the magical grid sequestered by a Christo-like muslin curtain), the old man couldn’t help but think the end was near — that father and daughter had completed their tomb — and began to regret the commission.
For years, she had barely managed to stay on deck; her body clock stormily ticked maritime. She knew the marriage to drugs and hospitals (she cheated on one with the other) was bottom-line tawdry: just another circle-of-hell party girl. What was she really in the grip of? a man? a phantom? a middle-class fantasia? — was that what murdered her? But how? Yes, she adored her husband. She was certain — convinced — that her love—their love — matched, gale force, the greatest loves in the history of the love-long world. Then came that silly, horrifying, Dickensian thing—that deformed moment — absurd old literary saw come to life replete with falling-down Havishamian villa — except in Trinnie’s case, there was a marriage … so which was worse? Perhaps all of it, all the heartbreak and weirdness, was merely her excuse for a fabulous thirteen-year debauch. Before him — even before Marcus — hadn’t her body longed to be fucked and held, honey’d, moneyed and opiated? Wasn’t she always this way? From nowhere came this dream of domestic life — such as it was — the old Carcassone dream … a cockeyed, hillside family life. He was crazier than her, and smarter too, and that was new and it calmed her. Trinnie could see herself settling down — and then, when he vanished … — yet how could she have done that to her precious son? She with her Year of the Pig heart, vast as the sea? It was one thing to torment her dad; Louis was a digger, a scarab, a burrower who could book his own passage. And Bluey — well, Bluey never suffered, at least not conventionally. Trinnie envied her for that. But Tull! — small, living thing, with scrunchy bones and soft smelly feet, who loved her, a wizardly child she made, then abandoned. That kind of cruelty was a dissolution sidebar; she felt like a pervert. When he needed her, when he cried and hated and wet his bed for her, she lay in the arms of jackals with pleasure palaces, jet-flown to inconceivable houses in every place on earth — Moroccan hunting lodges and Vietnamese retreats, lava-island belvederes and ranches in Tulum, festive cottages in Mustique, Compass Point flats and Christchurch aeries, sprawling pavilions in Biarritz and Jaipur, Chamonix and Amazonia, Negril, Margaret River, Lake Como, Faux-Cap, Madagascar — until, stoned and panicky, she moved on — to spa and hotel, monasteries and rainy sacred ground — and on — posh sanatoria (at one three-week stint, she found herself at the castellated Priory arranging flowers beside General Pinochet) — and when her son was dying for her, or when he was laughing with friends and not even thinking of her, she sat in the wide dayrooms of Hazelden or The Meadows listening to tales of woe from athletes and drunks, cabbageheads and kings. And for what? A sailor now fallen from grace, she walked slowly to dock and stood over, looking down on gelatinous waters. The perorations of those rooms would soon be — must be — drowned by the waiting sea.