The telephone rang.
He answered. It was the doctor, as he should have guessed. “Understand you’ve a burned hand, sir.”
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t think it’s too bad, but there’s a sort of scab on it.” He decided not to mention the burns he had discovered on his face when he had shaved. The doctor would see them, and would treat them or would not.
“Had a bit of an accident myself. Come on down, sir.” The doctor’s voice sounded vaguely familiar. “I’ll give you some salve and a bandage to protect the skin until it heals. I’m in the basement—the lower level’s what they call it.”
The elevator was a long while coming. He rang three times before he recalled that it required a human operator, who would certainly be annoyed. Today the operator was a morose teenager with pimples.
“Lower level,” he said.
The passing floors that had appeared so forsaken the night before seemed equally deserted now. He felt that he himself was only a ghost, riding a ghostly elevator in a phantom hotel, that this building had fallen to the wrecking ball long ago, that it had been replaced by beach-front condos, silent and sourly white structures haunted by the worm, condos wrapped in white winding sheets of salt, themselves slated for demolition if only someone could be found who wanted the land, who would pay hard cold cash on the barrelhead for their destruction.
The lobby flashed by, empty except for a thin, bespectacled youth at the desk. They landed, helicopter-like, in a windowless cavern of boutiques, all of them shut and dark, each of them (to judge by appearances) more than ready to swear that it was never really open, had never been open at all.
“Which way is the doctor’s office?” he asked.
The teenager pointed.
“And could you tell me how late they serve breakfast in the coffee shop?”
“Until they close,” the teenager said, and slammed shut the wrought-iron door.
He reached the end of the row of shops and turned a corner. The cavernous space was even larger here, enlivened by shelving balconies. Dusty flags like stalactites hung from the ceiling; there were only two or three he recognized. Whose was that two-headed eagle? That griffin clawing the air?
“Up here, sir!”
A fat man in shirtsleeves, leaning on a crutch, was bending over a slender balcony rail to wave to him. He waved in return and mounted a short flight of iron steps that creaked and boomed dully beneath his feet, wondering whether there was an elevator someplace and whether the doctor (who it seemed should not have climbed stairs) had been forced to climb these.
The doctor’s door was the only one that showed a light, an old-fashioned pebbled glass door with an oak frame. Plain black lettering on the glass: C.L. APPLEWOOD, M.D.
Inside there was no receptionist, no nurse. The doctor sat at a desk at the back of a long, narrow room, large of feature, heavy of jaw, and smooth of face, with the high Shakespearean forehead that white hair and encroaching baldness give all men, and an extra chin upon which to display a slick professionalism in shaving and the touch of fine white powder that bespoke the actor.
“Good, good!” The syllables were resonant and constricted. “Good to see you made it, sir! Wonderful! We all made it then, save for poor Daniel. Dead, sir! Yes, dead as a stone, and I could not have saved him, sir, nor could any physician since Hippocrates. They got him, sir! Settled poor Dan once and for all. They got me too, as you’ve seen. A bullet, a thirty-eight I suppose, through the fleshy portion of the thigh. Had they but nicked the femoral artery, sir, you should not see me here! I would be a citizen of a better sphere, with poor Daniel at my side. As it was, I was able to hobble away before the fire—as you, sir, were not I see—our bold Carlos having shot the rascal set to guard the stage door.”
The doctor chuckled; the sound was deep and throaty, like the contented noise, half clucking and half crowing, made by a great rooster.
“And now, sir, if you’ll excuse me for not rising, I’ll excuse you from shaking hands. Let’s see it.”
The Sea in Winter
The coffee shop was empty. A black-and-white sign on a wooden stand read: PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF.
He did so, choosing a small table beside a high glass wall, like the wall of a greenhouse or conservatory. Beyond it stood a low cliff or bluff, or perhaps only one wall of the cavernous, flag-hung arcade he had left; beyond that lay a broad expanse of beach upon which the ocean had erected a duplicate of the quarry he had seen a few years before on a National Geographic special. Expressionless images leaned or lounged here and there among the shattered wrecks of others, some finished, some incomplete, some scarcely begun—all this executed in slabs of greenish sea-ice.
One watched him, a statue some distance down the beach and midway between land and ocean, staring insolently but silently as he took a napkin from a water glass and turned up an inverted coffee cup.
It was impossible that the police should have chosen such a strange means of spying on him, yet he felt they had. In some way they would be watching him, so why not this? Or if it was not really true, it felt true. Klamm and his men would try to account for everybody they had seen on the stage—for him, for North, for the two in business suits, for Dr. Applewood, and for the man in the army uniform. (But he was easy enough to account for—even Dr. Applewood had said so.)
And he, too, was readily accounted for. The cop had looked in his wallet, had seen his hotel key, had told the driver where to take him. They knew where he was, and they would surely send somebody to watch him.
“Would you like coffee, sir?”
The waitress was about twenty, very petite, with black hair cut short, hair that curved around her face like the wings of a soft, black bird, a bird determined to hatch that oval face—or if it was hatched already, to shield it from the harsh winds of this world.
“Yes,” he said. “And some orange juice, if you have any.”
She said, “I’ll have to squeeze you some, sir,” and winked.
He was too astonished to wink back; but he watched her as she trotted away. She wore polished black shoes with very high heels (because she’s so short, he decided), a little white cap, and a black silk dress with a tiny white apron, like the maid in some old movie starring Cary Grant.
The steamy fragrance of freshly brewed coffee told him she had filled his cup, though he had not noticed. The coffee was as black as her dress, as black as her shoes, and he knew that he would never be able to see anything black anyplace again—coffee or the night—without thinking about her shoes and her dress. He added cream (which he seldom did), looked through the glass wall, and remembered nights with Lara.
A big white boat was passing the hotel, half a mile or less from where he sat; passing slowly, as though fighting a headwind with its engines almost idling. A teacher had read it to him in schooclass="underline" “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”
He felt sure Lara was on that boat, that white-painted boat that would have looked so much more at home down in Florida or a place like that, on the Gulf or the Pacific or the Mediterranean. He felt sure that it was Lara watching him through binoculars as he sipped his coffee, sipped the icewater that the girl in the black shoes must have brought him too, brought him icewater even though he had not noticed, brought him water even though he sat in front of water and ice that went on forever.
She brought the orange juice, placing it before him with a delicate hand tipped with long, crimson nails, a hand naked of rings. “What else would you like, sir?”