“Stop.”
It sounds like her voice. It feels like her voice, too; her lips feel the plosive pop. But how can such an insubordinate sound come from a woman blinded by Spray ’N Steam vapor, weighed down by a beehive hairdo, deafened by the repetitive thwack of a headboard against a wall? Still the voice continues, over the belligerent telephone and the harrumphs of the waiting room’s latest arrivals, so that she, just this once, might prioritize a man who is no one else’s priority.
“They don’t want it,” she says.
“They…” Giles adjusts his glasses. “I’m sorry?”
“They won’t tell you. But they don’t want it. They’ll never want it.”
“But it’s… they asked for green and—”
“If you leave it with me, you’ll get a kill fee. But that’s all.”
“—and it’s as green as can be, it can’t get any greener!”
“But I don’t think you should.”
“Miss Strickland?” Giles is blinking hard. “Mrs. Strickland, I mean—”
“You deserve better than this. You deserve people who value you. You deserve to go somewhere where you can be proud of who you are.”
The voice, Lainie realizes, feels sovereign from her because it’s not only speaking to Giles Gunderson—it’s speaking to Elaine Strickland. She deserves better; she deserves to be valued; she deserves to live in a place where pride is not an exotic gift. Once more, the young wife and doddery gent are one and the same, stamped as deficient by people who haven’t the higher ground to make the accusation. Klein & Saunders is a start but only that: a start.
He’s fussing with his bow tie, searching the corner of the room for clues, but she keeps nodding, harder and harder, urging him to do the right thing, to walk out of the room. He exhales with a weak shiver and stares down at his portfolio case. Then he inhales sharply and looks right at her, his eyes sharp with tears and his mustache quivering with a brave smile. He holds out the case. Not the painting—the whole case.
“For you, my dear.”
She can’t accept it. Of course she can’t. But Giles’s arm shakes the very same way her voice had shaken; he’s matching her impulsive heroism with that of his own, begging her to take the burdensome baggage of his life off his hands. Lainie takes the case, her fingers settling into grooves shaped by his fingers over the years into soft red leather. She sees the shifting of Giles’s shadow as he moves away, but she doesn’t look up. It would only make it harder for him, she senses, and besides, she’s looking for a place to set down the case so that it, heavy with significance, doesn’t crash through three floors of the building.
21
HOFFSTETLER IS CHECKING, for the final time, the barometers reporting temperature, volume, and pH from the F-1 pool, his assistants wheeling hand trucks of equipment from the lab for good, when he’s struck by a staggering fact. He might never again be this close to the Devonian, at least while it still breaths. On Monday, a sickening three days off, he himself will dissolve it from the inside via Mihalkov’s hypodermic solution.
Had it been the body armor of lab coats and battle shields of briefcases that had made him impervious for so long to others’ pain? Well, today he wears no coat; he threw it to his office floor, disgusted by its invisible soaking of blood. And his briefcase? In mere days it has come to represent the collapse of his meticulously maintained life; it is filled with crumpled notes, cracker bags, cookie crumbs. For once, no modicum of professionalism separates death and deliverer in F-1.
Hoffstetler’s victim—he won’t permit himself to think of the Devonian by any gentler term—floats at the pool’s center, the chains affixed to its harness as still as rods. Its sole show of life is the light spilling from its eyes like smelted gold across the water. Hoffstetler thinks of Elisa Esposito’s dancing and the Devonian’s delighted illuminations, and he’s gripped by a fierce jealousy. It isn’t fair that she got to love it, and it her, while he—he’s saddled with a murder no god will forgive. He replaces the barometers, tries to shake off all feelings of tenderness. Those won’t make it any easier to jam the killing needle through bony plates.
He has no reason to believe the Devonian feels anything toward him but hatred. None at all. And yet, as he hears the lab doors close behind his assistants, he finds himself raising his eyes imploringly. If Elisa did it, he could have done it as welclass="underline" make contact, real contact, with the Devonian. He’s managed to live with himself despite repeated trespasses of the humane. Can he forgive himself for this final trespass as well?
The lab is empty and still. Hoffstetler sets down his notebook, not caring if it gets wet, if all his carefully notated facts go blurry, for what good have facts done him at Occam? He crosses the red warning line and lowers himself to the pool’s ledge, dampness soaking through his seat. His hands are used to being empty; they fumble for each other while his spine slumps. It is a melancholic pose, like hunching at the graveside of a loved one. Another fantasy of humanity. He has no loved ones. Not in this land. Even the Devonian, a being of another world, has him beat in that regard.
“Prosti menya, pozhaluysta,” he whispers. “I am so sorry.”
The gold-hued water undulates as softly as a field of wheat.
“You cannot understand me. I know this. I am used to it. My real voice, my beautiful Russian—no one here can understand it. In that way are we similar? Perhaps if I speak with enough feeling you will understand?” Hoffstetler taps his own chest. “I am the one who failed you. Who could not save you. Despite the diplomas I have packed away in boxes. Despite the honorifics they attach to my name. All of this to parade me about as intelligent. But what is intelligence? Is intelligence calculations and computations? Or must true intelligence contain a moral component? Each passing minute, I believe more that this is the case. And therefore believe that I am stupid, stupid, stupid. These chains, this tank—this is your repayment for saving my life. Do you know that you did? Can you smell it in my blood? I had the razor blades all picked out. And then they found you, as if from the pages of the Afanasyev fairy tales I read as a boy. Stories of magical beasts, strange monsters. It is you, my dear Devonian, who I have waited to meet my whole life. Our relationship—it should have been wondrous. I know my world is dry and cold. Yet there is so much in it that I could have shown you, that might have brought you joy. Instead, you and I have no relationship at all, do we? You do not even know my name.”
Hoffstetler smiles into the vague shape of his dark reflection.
“My name is Dmitri. And I am so very, very pleased to meet you.”
Sobs break out of him. Hot tears blast down his cheeks, a dozen at once, like he’s the one injected with Mihalkov’s serum, he’s the one whose guts are melting. He braces himself against the ledge and watches the tears patter into the pool, a diminutive rainstorm, the first Baltimore has seen in months.
The water is cut in half. It is the Devonian’s hand, slicing upward like a shark, its claws like five pearlescent fins. Hoffstetler recoils, totters from the ledge. But there is nothing to fear. The Devonian is three feet away, having swum close without a sound, and is already retracting its arm. Hoffstetler watches with held breath as the creature passes its fingers through its mouth, over its tongue. There is no question what is happening.
The Devonian is tasting his tears.
Hoffstetler knows that he is fortunate that none of his team enters F-1 at that moment. His mouth is open in a silent bawl, his face is slick and flushed, his whole body is shuddering. The Devonian’s double jaws gnash over his salty tears, and its eyes soften from metallic gold to sky blue. The Devonian lifts himself upright in the pool, seeming to defy gravity, and bows to Hoffstetler. There is no other word for it. Then it quietly dives under, its webbed feet giving a final wiggle that, to Hoffstetler reads like a thank-you as well as a good-bye.