Only they’re not words. They’re numbers. In Spanish. She speaks them in a bland, uninterested manner. She keeps a mechanical, absolutely controlled rhythm, the same spacing between breaths, the same tone: “Atención grupo número cuarenta y nueve … 51512 … 12152 … 32085 … 28911 … 11211 … 61208 … Atención grupo número sesenta y dos … 03151 … 08201 … 02611 … 08129 … 22519 …”
Speer closes his eyes for a moment, listens to the numbers, tries to prevent himself from speculating or analyzing. He just wants this Spanish voice to wash over him like a kind of primal music. He wants to put himself into a mood, create an atmosphere.
And when he feels he’s come as close as he’ll get, he uncaps his pen and in a practiced, legible, no-nonsense script he writes:
4 A.M.
Dear Margie,
What is a man to do? I’m no stranger to discipline. I have attempted to be as ordered and precise with my life as is reasonable. I have attempted to be prudent. As you know, my methodology has always been to review all available options and select the most promising. I often said to you, “We can only work with the available facts.” I have steadfastly acknowledged that there will always be certain parcels of information that we aren’t privy to. No matter how much skill or intuition a man possesses, there will be events he can’t alter. I’ve always felt that understanding this was one of the chief signals of maturity. I’ve always felt I had an unalterable grasp of this fact.
Were I acting in a professional manner, applying all I’ve learned to this turn my life has taken, there are questions I would ask. This is how I would begin. I would start with broad, general questions. Later, based on the answers I’d obtained, I’d narrow in. I’d select the most promising avenues. Try to verify evidence. Try to establish patterns and trails. See what led to what. This is sometimes called “tracking” and I like to think of the word in the way an outdoorsman would, in literal terms — following markings to trace the route of your prey.
I think you know, Margie, that if I wanted to, I could track you down. You’re an intelligent woman, and though I was limited in the degree to which I could discuss my work, certainly you’re aware of the tools at my disposal, the networks of information, the breadth of data I can access, the amount of manpower that would be willing to do a favor for a fellow agent. I’m reasonably sure that it would take no more than a week to ten days to locate the city you’re in, who you’re with, where you’re staying, where you’ve been, and on and on. Ad infinitum.
At the moment, for complex reasons of my own, I’ve chosen not to take this route. Ultimately, I’m not sure what the benefit would be to either of us. As adults, we each make choices, take actions, accept the consequences. Thinking about this last week, I realized that my goal in seeking you out, my true goal, would be simply to explain my feelings, to talk to you. Right now, at this moment, I can see where you’d find tremendous irony in this. Perhaps that’s typical in the reality of any marriage. But if what I want to do is enumerate my feelings, convey to you what’s happened to me since your departure, I can do that here, in the safety of this room. Someday these words may get to you. By conventional means or other.
This is a journal of my heart, Margie. Please don’t laugh so bitterly. I’m aware how trite this sounds, how trite it looks to me now, in ink, on the page. But I won’t cross it out. I won’t begin again. Because that would imply an attempt to alter the past, to change history. And we both know what a childish, futile wish that is. We can only chart what is to come (and some would even argue against this).
If you know me, then you know I align myself on the side of free will rather than fate, that we have the definitive say in how our future lives will go.
You should know that I have stopped using amphetamines. Two days after you left, I took all the vials and poured them into the toilet, got on my knees, and pulled the lever. I will admit to you that I experienced a somewhat painful withdrawal for forty-eight hours. But I’ve purified myself with an ongoing regime of weak tea and club soda. (I’ve also been taking extended steam baths at the Y.)
I have also purchased a few paperbacks concerning spousal abuse and its treatment. I recall the incident last spring when I discovered a book of this type in your drawer, but, again, this is the unalterable past. I’ve read over a hundred pages in Dr. H. L. Helms’s Dark Glasses and Rouge.
Possibly these signs of change mean little or nothing to you, Margie. Perhaps you believe there is no hope for me and that everything was entirely my fault. I will concede this.
But, for your part, what you must do, what any notion of justice would insist that you do, is acknowledge, right now, wherever you are, in whatever miserable second-rate motel room or trailer park, that you’ve broken my heart. The triteness of that phrase only makes the pain greater, larger, and more relentless. I am a changed man, Margie. You would see this if you came back. I can control the behavior that terrified you. 1 can eliminate the drug usage. I can participate in an open, rational exchange of ideas.
Alter my future, Margie. I’m waiting.
Send me a message.
13
Ronnie steps inside the apartment, turns off the alarm, and begins to undress in the dark. She has that strange tired but excited sensation, kind of a sweet fatigue, like when she drinks too-potent cappuccino on top of too-cheap mescal, that slow but giddy war within the nervous system that makes her almost stupid the entire next day.
It’s not that she’d take back the airport dance with Flynn. She’s glad it happened and she hopes it happens again. But she has screwed with her normal postshow routine and that always leaves her a little concerned, as if she’s messing with a system that’s taken years to fine-tune and once broken, might never heal.
So, though she’s only got an hour till dawn, she wants to squeeze in at least some of the ritual. She dumps her clothes in the bathroom hamper, takes her short kimono from the hook on the back of the door, and slides it on. She goes to the sink and throws some cold water on her face, dries off, and jogs into the kitchen, where she grabs a pint of ice cream from the freezer and a pint of mescal from the liquor cabinet.
Then it’s out to the balcony, seventeen stories above Main Street. The air is really too cold now for the kimono, but it reminds her of the summer, when every night, from two-thirty till dawn, she took her watch over the city, still hard-core, still the cutting-edge night-owl and still-young Voice of Quinsigamond.
Ronnie’s apartment building is the gray-faced, concrete Heptagon that shoots up twenty-one stories at the west end of Main Street. The first three floors were once owned and occupied by Westblitz Savings and Loan, but about a year ago the Feds walked in one Monday morning, seized the books, sent home the staff, and directed a vanload of bulky young men weighed down with elaborate toolbelts to change all the locks and alarms. A week later the Spy reported that the S&L’s president and two senior V.P.’s were thought to be in either Antigua or southern France, that the institution’s assets were frozen pending a lengthy audit and analysis, and that the trust which owned the Heptagon, which housed Westblitz, had filed for bankruptcy protection.
Outside of Westblitz, the trust had managed to rent only three of the luxury apartments that made up the remaining eighteen floors of the building. In a registered letter, the court had informed Ronnie they’d release her from the lease she’d signed when she’d moved in. Her two neighbors took the opportunity to cut their losses and run. But Ronnie saw no reason for another disruptive move, so now she’s the sole occupant of over 350,000 square feet of downtown Quinsigamond real estate. And as such, she’s taken it upon herself to rename the building. She now insists on calling the Heptagon Solitary, after a sleazy women’s-prison movie she saw on cable late one night.