When some of her strength returned, a woman from “intake” came bedside to announce she could make two phone calls, adding that both would be “monitored.”
“Who would you like to talk to?” she asked cheerfully.
All this time, Will’m lay low in Angelino Heights, the grateful guest of Fitz and his maimed pet. The peculiar trio put up in the garage of a Queen Anne Victorian on Carroll Avenue. The owner (one of Fitz’s former supervisors at the DCFS) had hit a financial bump in mid-restoration; chain link surrounded the property. Fitz was on-site to ward off vandals.
The architecture was to Will’m’s liking. It reminded him of Red House at Bexleyheath in Kent, the dwelling built for Janey on occasion of their marriage — with its humble demi-courtyard garden, rose-entwined wattle and decorative well house with conical roof, he felt he was truly home again. There were two stories, plain and spacious, and polished, set-back porches. By light of day, he explored the Gothic-arched drawing room of this earthly paradise and made secret plans to paint a mural on a hall cupboard, the one he had begun so long ago but never finished: Morte d’Arthur. This time he would include Fitz and Amaryllis among the likenesses of Lancelot and Tristram, and even work in Half Dead.
At night, while Fitz smoked his chemical pipe in the garage and ranted about the Department of Children and Family Services, Will’m paced the hortus conclusus, square plots of lilies and macerated, streetwise sunflowers, reciting verse from News from Nowhere (which he need soon retrieve from its Olympic Boulevard storage bin)—
I know a little garden-close
Set thick with lily and red rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy morn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.
To be frank, he hadn’t slept well since giving up the girl. The small face, with its rough cherub’s mop, tugged, calling him to seek her out; he made resolution to reconnoiter the bakery and look in on her progress. But skid row tom-toms soon brought news of her capture by police — and Someone-Help-Me’s perfidious involvement in the dragnet. Will’m was undone. Discreet by nature, he decided to gather Fitz into his confidence, bringing him up to speed on all that had transpired between him and Amaryllis, culminating with the freedom flight from Higgins to East Edgeware alley.
Fitz focused his rage upon the malignant beggar, for whom no love had been lost. “Why, that cocksucker snitch; he ought to be murdered!” At this moment, the once honorable George Fitzsimmons looked more than ever like one of those sociopathic eggheads from thirties heist films who plan bank jobs but don’t dirty their hands. “He brought that cop to the Higgins, Will’m, don’t you see?”—Fitz had heard it all from Misery House cronies—“so the weasel could’ve seen you that very first night you were with the girl. Now, I know you didn’t do anything with her; nothing but love and protect her. But they’ll accuse you of molestation, and God knows what else. That’s their game!”
Will’m was in a daze. “But how did she leave Frenchie’s? How would they let her wander away?”
“Never mind that—there was a murder, Will’m, a murder in the motel. The St. George! The girl’s mother they think was killed — that’s what the boys on the street tell me. And they’ve got her now, they’ve got the girl. They don’t like unsolved murders on the books, Will’m. If they can jail us for walking outside a crosswalk, then they’ll jail you for this, believe me! By the time they finish, she’ll turn on you herself!”
Will’m grabbed him by the shirt while Half Dead lamely launched himself at the aggressor’s calf. “Don’t you say it, Mr. Fitz! Don’t you say it, ever!”
“Oh, I don’t mean anything, Will’m”—he reached for the giant’s implacable wrists to loosen the grip—“Hell, she’s a kid—I know what happens to frightened kids when the goons get hold of ’em. Before you know it, it’s the mob after Frankenstein. You’d never be able to defend yourself.”
“I need to speak with Mr. Mott,” said Will’m, entering a trance again. “To find out what happened … how could it have come to this? What was she doing back at Higgins, in the dead of night?” He began to pace and sweat, kneading his hands like a heart-shaped motor. “And that mangy bum! That child-stealer! I’ll tear his head off!”
“Don’t go out there half-cocked! They’ll be gunning for you, can’t you see? You’ll walk right into their web! Lay low and let me make a few calls — I’ll find out where they stashed her.”
But alas he found out not a thing, due to more pressing concerns with the pipe. And what if he had? What good would it have been? If Will’m stormed the palisades and spirited her out, what would he do with her? He’d played hero before and look what happened.
After almost a week of pondering, he could take no more. Early one morning, when Fitz had already quit the Queen Anne for coffee at Misery House, he lit out to Frenchie’s. As he walked, the air was cold — having been sequestered for his own good (still hearing Fitz’s admonitions), he felt like some exposed and hunted thing. He would at least find out what had happened. Could Mr. Mott have argued with the girl? And might she have been so headstrong to escape, on rebellious, childish impulse? She was a headstrong child … or could it be that Mr. Mott didn’t love her, that he never took to her? No! I’m a better judge of character than that, he thought. Then perhaps something had happened to the bakery itself, catastrophic; perhaps Will’m would discover a charred, smoky lot with only cast-iron ovens remaining.
He looked left and right like a paranoiac and, jamming fists into pockets, tucked into the wind. Never had he bowed his head before, but now the old soul was injured or at least made vulnerable by his love for the girl. He had become the Chairman of the Disembodied.
Gray day with gray sun — looking over his shoulder for black-and-whites that might haul him to gaol. Their uniformed thugs and siren-shrieks were “abominations that oe’r the Rampart cared not twopence for hill or valley, poplar or lime, thistle or vetch, convolvulus or clematis — not twopence either for tower, spire, apse or dome.”
Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.
When he was close to Frenchie’s, his pace slowed and memories colluded. He saw himself fencing with Edward Burne-Jones at Oxford off Hell Quad, on Broad Street — arm in arm they strolled, in purple trousers, chanting Gregorians outside St. Thomas’s church. (Such was his love for Arthurian legend that as a student, he had literally worn chain mail.) He was a sight then in leggings and metal, with starfish spray of hair, charging along with Rossetti and Ruskin; then one day he met her and his life was changed forever. Jane Burden was his obsession, an adulterous woman who could never have had more apt a name …
“Will’m!” cried Gilles, standing in dusty apron at the bakery’s street-side door. In his reverie he’d walked straight past his destination. The wanderer turned with a baffled look. “I was beginning to worry!”