“What do you think? Who. What. Where. When. Why. How.”
Crossing the room to the window, she looked out at the lightly falling snow. After a bit, she turned and, leaning her back against the windowsill, said, “Okay, that’s what we’ll do—but I’m going in first.”
McBride shook his head. “Unh-unh.”
“They don’t know me,” she insisted. “If you go in, and they recognize you, that’s it. What if Opdahl’s not there? They’ll alert him. And then you’ll never get close to him. But, me? I’m just a student passing through. At least I can find out if he’s there or not.”
“‘A student,’“ he repeated.
“Right. I’ll say I was in the neighborhood. Skiing. And one of the fellows—who I met in the States—said I should stop in. Get an application.”
“They don’t have applications,” McBride told her. “You have to be recommended.”
“Right! That’s what I mean. He said while I was over here, I should stop in and say hello. Let Opdahl know who I am. Because, ‘I don’t want to promise anything, but:’ I think there might be a recommendation in my future.”
“And which fellow was this?” McBride asked. “I hope it wasn’t Jeff Duran, because—”
“No! Of course not! I never heard of Jeff Duran. Who’s Jeff Duran? This was someone else. This was… who was it?”
“Eric Branch.”
“Right!” she exclaimed.
“He was studying sub-Saharan migration. I read a couple of his reports. Good stuff.”
“Great! So, I’ll ask to see Opdahl. And if he isn’t there, I’ll find out where he is.”
“And if they say, ‘I’m afraid you can’t just “drop in” on Dr. Opdahl,’“ McBride said in a snotty German accent. “‘You must have an appointment.’”
Adrienne’s voice turned waiflike and pitiable: “‘But I’m only in Zurich for a couple of days.’”
“Don’t wheedle,” he told her. “It’s their loss.”
Again, her voice changed, plunging to throaty and lascivious depths: “‘But I’m only in Zurich for a couple of days.’”
The tone was silly and irresistible, all at once. Lunging across the bed, he pushed her down, rolling with her in the cloudlike folds of the comforter, giddy and making out, with Adrienne trying one variation after another of “I’m only in Zurich for a couple of days… “ Then the kissing became more serious, until Adrienne finally pulled away, flushed, her dirty blond hair in disarray, one strand plastered to her cheek. She was one of those women, McBride thought, who looked better disheveled. You could see the wildness in her then, which at most times she kept so well hidden.
“We can’t,” she said. Breathless. “It will get too late.”
Reluctantly, he agreed. Stood up, plucked a tiny feather from his pants leg. “Which fellow?”
“Eric Branch.” Adrienne found a brush on the bedside table, and began to brush her hair. “One thing: what if—what if—they say, ‘Fine—Mr. Opdahl will see you right away’? What then?”
“Get out.”
“But—”
“Just don’t go upstairs with him,” he told her.
“Why not? Maybe—”
He shook his head. “Promise…”
The tram took them most of the way to the Institute, with McBride clutching the box of “curtain rods.” Adrienne sat stiffly, holding the cylindrical metal post. At nearly every stop the tram’s accordion doors wheezed open to admit a blast of arctic air and some rosy-faced commuters. At this time of day, these were an odd mixture of senior citizens, working men who smelled of nicotine and well-dressed women with plastic mesh shopping bags. At one stop, a high-spirited influx of uniformed school children clambered aboard.
The animation of the children seemed to exist in counterpoint to McBride’s own mood, which was bleak and getting bleaker. The closer they got to their destination, the more he worried that he was on a fool’s errand—that they’d get to the address, and it wouldn’t be there. Instead of a townhouse with mullioned windows and gargoyles, and a massive front door—there would be an empty lot or a train station. That’s what had happened in Bethany Beach, and the effect of that now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t memory was to make him doubt the reality of his own past.
“What’s the matter?” Adrienne asked, but he just shook his head and looked away.
He’d thought all this was behind him, these worries about his memory, about what was real and what was not. He’d thought they’d gotten down to bedrock. He was Lew McBride, and that was that. Only it wasn’t. That would never be that. That was something Opdahl had taken from him.
The conductor announced their stop, and the tram began to slow. He could see the station ahead, the widening of the platform, the Plexiglas shelter with its benches, a few waiting passengers. Children were shouting farewells to each other, getting up, queuing in the aisle toward the front of the car. Looking out the window at the row of solid houses—there was something familiar about it, although he couldn’t have said what. “This is it,” he told her, standing up to press the rubber button that opened the tram’s rear door. Then they were outside and he began to wonder if the whole trip wasn’t a terrible mistake.
The houses on either side of the street were stolid and old, the mansions and near mansions of Swiss industrialists, bankers, lawyers, and tax exiles. In front of each, two or three plane trees stood their ground in the cold, awaiting the spring.
Adrienne and McBride lowered their heads against the wind, which was blowing off the lake, even as a light snow zipped through the air, snowflakes flying like sparks.
They’d traveled three blocks before they came to a dogleg in the street. With each step, McBride’s chest seemed to tighten. He told himself to breathe, just breathe, but how could he? Like a weight lifter finishing his third set of reps, he wasn’t breathing at all, just straining to get it over. Either the Institute would be there, or it wouldn’t. His sanity seemed to hang in the balance.
And then, there it was—just as he’d remembered: a three-story granite structure with mullioned windows and window boxes, filled now with junipers and evergreens. The heavy door with its lion’s head knocker. The leaded glass transom. The small brass plaque with the Institute’s name on it, and the closed-circuit camera overhead. Instinctively, he hung back, across the street and out of range of the camera.
The sense of foreboding that he felt was overwhelming. Suddenly, the idea of sending Adrienne inside seemed insane. “Maybe this isn’t such a good plan,” he said. “Maybe we should rethink it.”
She shook her head, and straightened her back. Put her Scout face on. Prepared. Determined. The lawyer. Then she glanced around. “I think I got the long straw,” she told him. At least I get to go inside.”
“We could have called him on the phone. We still can.”
“It’s too easy to blow someone off on the phone. This way, I’m in their face.”
“If you’re not back in fifteen minutes,” he promised, “I’m coming in. And it won’t be just a box in my hand.”
She nodded. “Eric Branch, Eric Branch, Eric Branch,” she said and, turning, marched toward the door.
McBride checked his watch. It was 2:36.
He forced himself to look at the building. Watched Adrienne ring the bell, saw the door open, glimpsed a woman in the doorway, watched Adrienne walk inside.
He was cold. It was freezing. And time didn’t just slow down, it turned as glacial as the weather. He was standing across the street from the Institute, a quarter of the way up the block, leaning against a sycamore tree. And he felt very conspicuous. There was no reason for him to be there, holding this unwieldy box. But there he was, eyes glued to the massive front door, muttering, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…”
Because, all of a sudden, he didn’t want Opdahl to be there. There was something about the Institute, something about the building he was watching, that affected him in a primal way—like waking in the middle of the night to see a snake writhing across the bedroom floor. The fear he felt came from the deepest and most instinctive part of himself, a region of the brain that had nothing to do with rational thinking, and everything to do with survival.