In the weak yellow lamplight, Welles’s offer becomes ridiculous: Stanley could search this room for hours and find nothing to interest him. Books on economics and nuclear energy and the history of Italy, books about metallurgy and glassmaking and electronics, books in other languages. A lot of them remind Stanley of The Mirror Thief, but not of anything that he likes about it. After a few minutes of browsing he loses interest, shifts his focus to the room itself.
The study takes up nearly half the floor. On the west wall a french door between two curtained windows opens onto the moonlit deck. In the middle of the opposite wall there’s a heavy black portal with a regular deadbolt plus a massive external sliding bolt, like something out of a medieval fortress. Curious, Stanley throws the big bolt — the loud hi-fi downstairs swallows the noise — and tugs on the knob, but the door is locked. He puts the slider back the way he found it, transfers his attention to Welles’s desk.
It’s immense: polished teak, ornately carved. Several peculiar paperweights — a bronze pelican, a clear glass hemisphere with colors swirled inside it, a jagged hunk of metal that looks like part of an exploded shell — are clustered at the lower right corner, probably to catch rollaway pens and pencils, since that’s the way the floor slopes. A few sheets of rose-white paper sit on the blotter, crowded with handwriting, steeply slanted and illegible. Next to them is a letter, still in its ripped-open envelope, from someone in a hospital in Washington, D.C. Stanley pays these little mind. With one ear cocked toward the stairs he begins to open the drawers, to scan their contents.
They all have fancy brass locks, but none is locked. The first one he opens — the long shallow one in the middle — contains a pistoclass="underline" a.45 automatic, 1911 model. Stanley guesses it’s got a round already chambered, but opts not touch it to learn for sure. Seated in the swivel chair behind the desk, Welles could get to it in a hurry. Two drawers down on the right Stanley finds a second pistol, a Wehrmacht P38. If Welles keeps this stuff stashed in his study, what’s hidden in his sock-drawer? A greasegun, maybe. Or a bazooka. The guy probably drives to work in a tank.
On the wall behind the desk hangs a framed map. Stanley figures it for a map, anyway: it shows a club-shaped island city the way it might look from a plane flying by, though not directly overhead. The perspective strikes Stanley as strange, because the style of the map makes him think it was made a long time before there were any such things as airplanes — like whoever drew it had to close his eyes and project himself into space, and then to hold the picture of the city in his head while he nailed down the streets and canals and houses on paper. Remembering all he could. Imagining the rest.
Welles is on the stairs, singing in a deep buttery voice as he climbs. O Fortuna, he chants, velut luna statu variabilis. Semper crescis aut decrescis, vita detestabilis—
Stanley keeps his eyes on the framed map, hunting out details: domes and belltowers, plazas and sailing ships. A couple of smaller outlying islands are labeled; their names are almost familiar. IVDECA, one says. MVRAN, reads another.
Welles’s voice. Recognize it? he says.
Sure. It’s the city in your book.
That’s right. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been there?
Stanley squints, leans closer. His nose nearly touches the paper. I don’t think so, he says. Where is it?
It’s in Italy. On the Adriatic Sea. If you had been there, I suspect you would remember.
Italy, Stanley says. That’s in Europe. Right?
Yes. Europe. Correct.
No, Stanley says. I never been to Europe.
Welles steps forward, puts a cold bottle in Stanley’s hand: a Goebel. You should go when you can, Welles says. You would find it intriguing. If nothing else, my modest lecture on local history of two nights ago would accrue broader resonance. The city — the original, I mean — is built on the water. Directly on it. There is no earth to speak of, not really. It sits in the midst of a lagoon. Do you know what a lagoon is?
Sure. My dad was at Eniwetok.
Then of course you do. Our word lagoon comes from the Latin root lacuna, which refers to a gap, an absence, an interruption. Which may explain why this city throughout the years has become a locus of such diverse and vigorous species of desire. It has deliberately situated itself in a void.
Stanley steps back from the wall. A beer is about the last thing he wants right now, but he sips the Goebel anyway. It’s a nice place you got here, he says.
Thank you. At this point, I suppose, Synnøve and I can afford to move up in the world, as they say. But this feels like home. Along the waterfront, we are left to our own peculiar devices. And frankly I can’t abide the thought of moving all these books.
Stanley nods toward the bolted door. What’s in there? he asks.
That, Welles says. He takes a long sip of beer. That is Cynthia’s room, he says.
Stanley looks at Welles with upraised eyebrows. Then he takes a long stagy glance at the sliding bolt, and looks at Welles again. You scared maybe she’ll get loose while you’re sleeping? he says.
Welles forces a laugh. Ah ha ha! he says. It looks a bit eccentric, I know. Often I have wondered why the previous occupants saw fit to install such a door. The realtor claimed total ignorance. I used to imagine all sorts of things. A bootlegger’s storeroom. A white-slave dungeon. The asylum of some grown idiot son. All plausible in this neighborhood. Nowadays I hardly think of it at all. Shall we have a seat on the lanai?
The what?
The lanai, Welles says, opening the french door to the deck. I was afraid that we’d have rain again tonight, but for now it looks to be lovely. We’ll come back in if we get chilled, of course.
Outside there’s a stumpy wooden table ringed by folding canvas chairs, the kind of chairs that Claudio’s screen magazines always show movie-stars and famous directors sitting in. The deck doesn’t afford a view of much except the side of the neighboring house, but Stanley still has a sense of the ocean’s closeness. An armada of small dense clouds sweeps across the dusk-blue sky, and the moon hangs among them like a bruised apple, its perfect circle on the wane.
Welles gives Stanley the chair with the best west-facing vista. Stanley doesn’t want it — it’ll put Welles in silhouette; he’d rather to be able to read his face — but he takes it anyway, because it seems rude to decline. So, Welles says, getting comfortable in the creaking chair. You have some questions for me.
Yeah, Stanley says.
They sit in silence for a while. The hi-fi downstairs must have played through the LP’s side. Overhead, the buzz of an airplane grows and fades.
Well, Welles says, there’s no rush. Take whatever time you—
I want to know about magic, Stanley says.
All right. What can I tell you?
You can tell me how to do it. How to get it to work.
Welles is quiet. Then he chuckles. The sound is smug, patronizing — and fake, too. You’re asking the wrong fellow, I’m afraid, he says.
Whaddya mean?
I don’t know anything about magic, Stanley. I learned a few card tricks in the Army, but I’ve forgotten even those. I’m sorry.
Stanley shifts his beer from hand to hand. Crivano knows about magic, he says. You wrote about him. So you must know something.