I took a breath. I was very tired, but now I thought hard and fast — what was May doing? For a second, my old suspicions flickered, but after what had happened on Hamilton's barge, I couldn't believe them. But what were the alternatives? Had Brightman made a terrible blunder and allowed some record of the safe-deposit box to stay in his will? It seemed incredible. Wills are too public… but then if she hadn't learned about it from the will, how else could she have?
In confusion, I made my way back to my car, and by the time I reached it, I was beginning to feel fairly anxious as well. I'd shaken off Subotin in Russia, but there was no reason to think he'd disappeared for good. And did May even know he existed? Had she any idea of the danger she was now in? I had to find her. Which meant another airplane and a trip to Toronto — hardly a thrilling prospect after the past forty-eight hours. But then I thought again. She'd been here yesterday. Conceivably, she'd gone back right away; on the other hand— if she was driving — she might only have left this morning, or might actually still be here now. It wasn't impossible. She was never one to hurry, and it wasn't eleven yet — checkout time, but still worth a try. What I needed was a phone, so I walked along Market to Second Avenue — past the Senator, with skin flicks beginning at ten forty-five; past the hotels with rooms by the day, week, or month — and went into a greasy spoon called the Olympia.
Therein, I wasted five quarters.
She wasn't in the Sheraton, Marriott, Holiday Inn, or any of the other big places, but then it occurred to me that she never stayed in places like that. Tourist homes… guest houses". funny little residential hotels that no one else knew about — they're what she liked. A number of candidates came to mind, but they were the kind of places you do better to visit in person, so I went back to my car, drove past Brightman's bank again, and then straight through to the old railway station, where passengers now catch the Trailways bus. I parked, then walked back to Blackberry Street. On the corner of Fourth stood the Alva.
I couldn't think when I'd last been there; years ago. It was a big old place, three stories high and half the block wide, and the ground floor was taken up with one of those old family restaurants the fast-food chains are killing: American food, plenty of "regulars," the cops stopping by for their "coffee and…" The hotel, over the restaurant, had its "permanents" — mainly pensioners — and was used by people up at the Capitol when they couldn't get home during the session. Stepping inside brought back a flood of memories, for it had changed very little since my childhood: the same booths (but no jukeboxes); the same photograph of the prize steer they'd bought at the State Farm Show; the same middle-aged waitresses, spiced up with a few pretty college kids.
I asked after May — and it seemed that my logic had been right but my timing wrong.
"This is a lady with long hair, sort of red?"
"That's right."
"I know the one you mean, then. She was here for a couple of days. Just left this morning, around ten. She had one of those old Volkswagens, the kind you don't see so much anymore."
So that was that.
As consolation, I decided to get something to eat and slid into a booth. Given that I was in a place like the Alva, I ordered coffee and the speciality de la maison, peanut-butter cream pie. Waiting to see what this could possibly be, I lit a cigarette and looked around the room. There were booths along the outside walls, tables elsewhere. Coming right into the center of the room was a staircase from the second floor, the hotel. Washrooms said a sign, and pointed up. After a time, my pie arrived. It was astonishing, but also delicious. As I ate it, I listened to the pretty Chinese waitress flirting with a man in a Caterpillar Tractor cap a few tables over. "Oh, you!" she exclaimed, dissolving in giggles. "You just behave!" Another girl, behind the counter, was having trouble fitting a filter of coffee into the machine. Then a man came down the stairs from the second floor. He was zipping up his windbreaker and stopped halfway when the zipper got stuck. He worked it free and came down the last steps, into the room. I could see him well now. It was Subotin. Short, red-haired, that hard, narrow face — it was definitely him. With his hands thrust deeply into the windbreaker's pockets, he shouldered open the front door of the restaurant and passed into the street… while I, hand trembling slightly, set a forkful of peanut-butter cream pie back on my plate.
Chance, as someone once said, is merely a nickname for Providence: in which case this particular encounter was providential in many respects — such as the million-to-one shot that I'd been sitting there, and the billion-to-one shot that he hadn't seen me. It was enough to take your breath away — but not so completely that I didn't have the presence of mind to get up and dash out the door.
I was in time to see him crossing the road, heading for a large concrete parking garage on Fourth.
Relying on luck for another ninety seconds, I ran back to the station and fetched my car. Then I waited, breath held — because there might be a second exit from the garage which I couldn't see. But the gods were still on my side, and after a couple of minutes, Subotin emerged and pointed a Chevrolet down toward the river. There he slowed; in front of us stretched the Susquehanna, broad and placid, the reflections of its bridges mingling on the surface like a pioneers' Avignon. Front Street was quiet; a few joggers puffed along the bank, but almost no one lives in the fine old houses now, for they're all taken up with lawyers, PR men, and lobbyists specializing in "issues management." At the corner — a bit clumsily — Subotin turned left; but then he had to, for Front is one-way. And evidently he wanted to head in the other direction, because he immediately switchbacked onto Second. Now, straightened around, he became more confident and picked up speed, heading north toward Interstate 81.1 stayed right behind him, and my brain started working. What was Subotin doing here? What had led him to the Alva?… Had he simply been using the washroom? Looking for May? Had he missed her, just as I had — or was he with her? It seemed a preposterous notion, but then I realized something: I had absolutely no proof that he'd been to Russia at all. Maybe he'd come here straight from France.
As my logic ran into these complications, we also hit the interchange and I concentrated on my driving. Following the Marysville signs, Subotin got onto 81 South… a highway I know as well as any in the world, for, if you stay on it, you'll end up in Washington. But Subotin didn't stay on it. Beyond Marysville, he swung north, onto a side road — and, if anything, this was a road I knew even better. It carried you through the Blue Mountains, across the Mahanoy Ridge, into the higher, rougher Tuscaroras beyond.
In tandem, we wound our way across the peaceful, dun-colored slopes. At first, the settlements were almost suburban — expensive bungalows built along the ridges of the hills so they could enjoy the views of the valleys below — but soon we left the city behind. The woods thickened. The leaves had turned, and many trees were already bare, so that on the exposed faces of the higher hills, veins of silver-gray wiggled through the rust and the gold. After a time, we slid into a valley. Here there were farms, the swaths cut by the combines neatly marking the contours of the fields, and marshaled around the crossroads were all-American villages, with their steeples, picket fences, and shiny coats of white paint. I knew all these places; one by one, their names came back to me. And every time I lifted my eyes, patches of landscape jumped out of the past: the way the road, darkly overhung by tall oaks, doubled back through this curve; a valley, opening up to display every shade of Thanksgiving brown and gold; a scar of rock on a hill. I did not need to summon memories, they were simply there, and as we entered the Tuscaroras themselves, I could hear my father, explaining — explaining that the Tuscaroras were Indians, that they'd been driven from their own confederacy in North Carolina to join with the Iroquois as the last of the famous Six Nations, that they were among the most advanced of the woodland tribes. Did they take scalps? I'd wondered. Maybe, he replied: but if they did, it was only because the white man — specifically the French — taught them how, just the way your mother took mine. At which we all laughed, and indeed it became a family joke: that my mother, born in Lyons, was a Tuscarora princess at heart.