* * *
Manhattan was in the grip of a cold snap the day I arrived, the iciest first of May on record, and the Boathouse and Nutter’s Battery lay fixed under a scrim of frozen rain. I sat on the stone wall of the park for a while, watching the trees flash and rustle, putting off my next move as long as I could. There was no sign of anything suspicious across the way: just a steady stream of grim, time-mired locals. I was shivering and my legs were going numb. It was time to cross the street and ring the buzzer.
Before I could do that, however — before I’d even crossed Fifth Avenue — I was treated to a piece of vaudeville. A silhouette caught my eye through the General Lee’s doors, then a flurry of movement; a few seconds later, just as I reached the curb, a hobo shuffled out onto the pavement. I use the term hobo, Mrs. Haven, because no other word suits the case. His toes jutted out from the tips of his boots and his pants were held up by duct-tape suspenders and his five o’clock shadow had the sheen of burnt cork. He turned toward me in a kind of dust-bowl soft-shoe, the steely glint of hardship in his eye. I expected him to cuss at me, or dance a jig, or possibly to hit me up for change. Instead he asked if I could hold the door.
There were two more drifters in the lobby, it turned out, standing on either side of what looked to be a refrigerator wrapped in a tarp. They were more presentable than their friend, but only barely. The three of them hoisted the thing without the least sign of effort and steered it neatly out onto the curb. The man in the suspenders thanked me and slipped me a dollar. I left them on the ice-encrusted stoop, apparently waiting for their ride, which I could only assume was a Model T Ford.
Hobos and refrigerator boxes aside, something was different about the General Lee — I sensed it as a tightness in the hollow of my chest. Had I been an older man, I might have put this down to hypertension; if I’d been a paranoiac, to airborne pathogens or smog or cosmic rays. As it was, I chose to blame it on anxiety, and urged my body up the darkened stairwell. But something was different.
My nerve failed me again when I reached my aunts’ door. Orson and I had stood on that same water-stained landing nearly a decade earlier, I remembered, on the night that had ended my childhood. We’d hesitated then, too, and with good reason. I remembered Orson’s obvious discomfort, and his clumsy attempts to conceal it — I’d seen him embarrassed so rarely. He’d been afraid on that visit, I realized now: that had been the source of his embarrassment. That I might look at him and recognize his fear.
The door swung loudly open before I could touch it. What I saw next stopped all speculation cold: dozens of bustling strangers, coming and going through those once-majestic rooms, burrowing like moles or dwarves or termites through my aunts’ beloved Archive. Enzie and Genny — who’d let virtually no one cross their threshold since the Nixon administration, who’d set booby traps and cut all ties to keep the world at bay — suddenly had a house full of guests.
It was Genny, smiling tightly, who received me at the door.
“You certainly took your time,” she snapped, before I could say a word.
“What do you—”
“Enzie!” she called over her shoulder, standing squarely in the doorway, as if I’d come to repossess the sofa. “Enzie! That person is here.”
I couldn’t see much over Genny’s white, Andy Warhol — ish bob, but what I managed to glimpse struck me speechless. Shabby young men and women with clipboards and archivists’ gloves were jostling and whispering to one another in the hallway behind her, scribbling notes with thick, expensive-looking pens. The theatrical decreptitude of their outfits clashed wildly with the businesslike air of the proceedings, not to mention their Mormon-ish hairstyles, and instantly put me in mind of the hobo downstairs. It was obvious that he’d been coming from my aunts’ apartment — but what could he have wanted with poor Genny’s fridge? And why was everyone dressed like extras in some dust-bowl reenactment?
“There you are,” said Enzie, squeezing out into the hall. Her tone was peculiar, self-conscious and stilted, as though put on for the benefit of someone on the far side of the door.
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself mumble. “I didn’t know—”
“We called at eight this morning, and again at half past ten. Anyone would think you didn’t care for our business.” She held a package in her arms, I now saw: a padded manila envelope, like those I’d seen at the Villa Ouspensky, on which UPS had been written in block letters with a Sharpie. She thrust it hurriedly into my hands. The look on her face, severe at the best of times, was nothing short of marrow-chilling now.
“I do want it,” I got out at last. “Your business, I mean. As a matter of fact—”
“Run along, then,” hissed Enzie. “And be careful. It’s a family heirloom.”
“I will, ma’am — of course.”
“Good. Now you’ll have to excuse us.” She scuttled back inside and shut the door.
I stood motionless on the landing, barely breathing, until I was sure she wasn’t coming out again; then I leaned against the wall and tried to think. Enzie and Genny were too otherworldly, somehow, for me to fear much for their safety, but the thought that we’d never spent a single moment together under anything approaching normal circumstances — that we’d never sat around a dinner table, or watched a movie, or compared notes about Orson and the Kraut — suddenly filled me with remorse. Why it hit me then and there, I couldn’t say; it wasn’t the ideal time or place, to put it mildly. Perhaps I sensed my chance had come and gone.
It was only after I’d snapped out of it and made my getaway, slinking off into the icebound afternoon, that it occured to me that the fridge-like object in the tarp had been the size and shape of the exclusion bin.
* * *
It might be overstating the case, Mrs. Haven, to say that my aunts’ envelope contained the whole of this account in capsule form; but it wouldn’t be overstating it by much. I took it straight to the Forty-Second Street Library — the beautiful main branch, the one with the lions — where I tore it open with the key to my Ogilvy dorm room. I’d barely made myself comfortable at one of the Rose Reading Room’s gargantuan tables before I saw that I’d been slipped a century.
Kaspar’s journals — eleven pocket notebooks crammed with dense, schoolboyish cursive — were first out of the envelope; then a copy of the Gottfriedens Protocols; then Enzian’s crude account of her grandfather’s work, written when she and Genny were still in their teens. Some juvenilia of my father’s — along with his second-to-last novel, Salivation Is Yours! — distracted me so completely that I overlooked the scrap of rag paper at the bottom of the pile until a few minutes before the building closed. By the time I came up for air it was a quarter past six, all the tables were empty, and a security guard with a sad yellow mustache was tugging at the collar of my coat.
The scrap of paper in question was a copy of Ottokar’s seminal riddle: the half page of alliterative, semiliterate gibberish that had started it all, written out in pencil in the Timekeeper’s precise, archaic hand.
The next thing I knew I was out on the street, blinking through thin, stinging rain at a power plant on the far side of the river, alive with a sense of consequence I’d never felt before. I was Waldemar Gottfriedens Tolliver, after all. I’d been given those names for a reason — Enzian and Orson (and even the Kraut herself) had told me so. It was my burden and birthright to close the great circle, to restore the Toula/Tollivers to what we’d been before Ottokar’s breakthrough: a family of inconsequential picklers. And I would do it, Mrs. Haven, if it killed me.