But what had happened to him? Kit thought. What had he done, where had he gone?
The library was open. At the steps Saul and Max ushered them all inside, medieval outlaws claiming sanctuary; a few though stayed outside to deal with the crowd—Saul, whose chest was heaving maybe from the unaccustomed exercise, and Max, unperturbed, hands clasped behind his back and even smiling when Kit went by him into the dark silent inside. For a moment she felt it had grown suddenly not dark but black, and her feet lost touch with the floor, as though it melted to liquid; then she felt someone take her arm, and steady her.
“Okay?”
“Yes. Yes. Okay.”
How long did they hide there? The librarian came to speak to them more than once, hushing them and telling them, which they knew, that the library was a place of study and work, not conversation and mingling. Someone was crying. Time passed. Above their heads, all around the base of the rotunda, were words printed in gold: A Good Book Is the Precious Life Blood of a Master Spirit. The doors kept opening to show the day and admitting more of the demonstrators, and also those who had bones to pick with them, their voices dropping to hissing whispers, until the librarian chased them away too.
Kit sat huddled on the bench by the great doors where you could sit to pull off your galoshes or overshoes, which were not allowed in the halls and stacks.
“Kit,” Fran said, studying her. “Are you sick?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long since you ate?”
“I forget.”
Fran nodded. “I do that,” she said. “I fainted once in Saks.” She sat beside her. “Listen,” she said. “What happened. With Falin.”
“I saw him,” Kit said. “Now, just now, out there. I have to find him. I have to.” She bent over, feeling she might fall asleep here, again, on this bench. “My throat hurts so much.”
“We’ll go eat,” Fran said. “Hell with those people.”
In the Castle the arguments were continuing; Max came in with an entourage of questioners, not all of them angry, and he sat to talk with them. Saul and Rodger came in too, warily.
“Sit,” Fran said. “What do you want?”
“Just a sec,” Kit said.
Taking hold of the backs of booths she made her way to the phone in the back, in its little wooden house that had long ago lost its door. She called his office at the liberal arts tower but there was no answer there, the office closed on a Saturday. She called the operator and asked for the number at his house, not expecting to be told it. “Falin,” she said, and spelled it, and the operator told her what it was, Orchard 9-5066, not secret at all. She dialed, almost unable to turn the worn dial plate with her finger, why so weak. She listened to the Princess ring. Ben had told her that actually the ring you hear isn’t the one that’s heard or not heard in the room you calclass="underline" just an illusion.
After a long time she hung up.
Fran stood by the booth where Saul and Rodger sat. “All those people,” she was saying. “It’s like they want it to go off. Like they’re tired of standing on the edge, and they want to jump. But that can’t be. It just can’t.”
“1914,” Saul said. “War fever. The workers all joined the armies of their countries. Even though it was in none of their interests. Even though they knew it. They just did it. As though they were sleepwalking, or possessed. They weren’t even drafted. They volunteered. They were called, they went.”
“1914 is a date in history,” Rodger said. “This isn’t gonna be, if it doesn’t stop.”
“Saul,” Kit said. “What happened to Jackie, where is he.”
Saul looked up at her and thought a moment. “He’s gone,” he said. “That’s the short answer. He said he had some emergency business. He threw some clothes and things in his car and left early this morning.”
For a time she only stared at them, at Saul and Rodger and Fran, thinking she could no longer understand what was said to her. The voices of others came to her loud and resonant like noises made underwater but not seeming to be speech. Where had Jackie gone? Why would he go? “Do you have a car, Saul? I need a ride somewhere.”
“Jeez, Kit. I don’t. I came in with Rodger.”
“Rodger,” Kit said. “It isn’t far. Just out West North Street. I just can’t walk, I can’t.”
“Kit what are you doing, what are you doing,” Fran said, clutching her brow.
“I just want to go out and see,” Kit said. “I have to see.”
“I think you should go to the infirmary,” Fran said. “I really think.”
“No.”
“I’ll go there with you.”
“Rodger,” Kit said.
Rodger regarded her, touching the tips of his long fingers together. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I am not ready to go riding a scooter through the west end of town with a white girl on my jumpseat. Arms around my waist. This ain’t Greenwich Village, girl.”
“What if we waited till after dark,” she said.
“Oh,” Rodger said. “Oh sure. After dark is good.”
She looked at them. She wanted to say that if she could get there, she would just wait alone, wait until she learned something, until she knew something. She saw though that they had ceased to look at her or at one another, that their eyes were drawn to something behind and above her, first Rodger’s and then the others’, and the sound on the television above the counter was just then turned up, and the hubbub faded. Kit turned to see what they all saw.
A police car, lights revolving, attended on a truck poised on the bank of a river, its big tires planted like feet. From the truck a cable ran, thrumming with effort as it was winched in; and what it drew up from the river, what it had caught with a heavy hook, was a car: a big new convertible. It was pulled by inches up and out of the river, and water poured from it as it rose, from the insides over the doorsills and out from under the crumpled hood.
11.
It must have been near dawn. The little town where that iron bridge arched the river was a couple of hours to the north, on the way, though not the main way, to the capital. Up there the sudden storm had poured a great slew of rain across a narrow band of prairie, flooding streams and washing out dirt roads. The car in the river had only become visible after floodgates downstream were opened at morning and the river’s level fell. It might have encountered another vehicle on the bridge; police said tire marks and a scattering of broken glass were visible there where the guardrail was depressed, but nothing was certain. There were plans for a full search of the river, but the authorities said that the rapid flow resulting from the downstream gates being opened could have carried a body very far. Police recovered items from the river that they said might have been discarded by a man trying to swim ashore: an overcoat, an empty briefcase, shoes.
That was all that was said in the Sunday-morning papers that Fran brought to Kit in the student infirmary. There was the picture of the convertible being drawn up out of the river, and the picture of Falin when he arrived in West Berlin the year before. One year, almost two.
There was another picture on the front page of the same paper, and on the front page of a Chicago paper that Fran had also brought. The little group of demonstrators, looking not only few but small, surrounded like damned souls in a Brueghel hell by the contorted crowded faces of their tormentors, yelling or laughing or cursing at them. Most of their signs already gone, except for one that read Hands Off and didn’t seem to be about Cuba at all. Pro-Cuba March Meets Massive Opposition. Kit in the front, in her leather jacket: her eyes looking away, as though just then catching sight of something, something not part of this conflict at all.