“That’s right,” Nolan said.
There was a beautiful silence, the silence of a decision nearly made. Jeffrey seemed to find no joy in breaking it.
“Actually,” he said, “if we’re going to do this right, then there is one catch. And it’s a big one, and nobody’s going to like it.”
PART TWO
15
I awoke because of the pain in my shoulder. I rolled onto my back, but that also ached. In fact, I seemed to hurt just about everywhere. The hard floor underneath me reminded me of yet another reason why, in my experience, camping was better imagined than experienced. And this floor lacked even the earth’s slight give; nor was there a soft sleeping bag anywhere in sight.
It was dark—I had dimmed the overhead hours earlier—and very quiet. I lifted my head (there was one comfort, at least—an old sweatshirt I’d been using for a pillow) and saw the lack of activity around me. Earlier, we had carried the sofa from the control room into the main recording room. The sofa was only a loveseat, but Marie was small and seemed comfortable on it, curled on her side underneath the blanket that, if everything went according to plan, would soon return to its designated place inside the bass drum. Closer to me on the floor, Jeffrey was lying on his back, eyes closed, using his jacket for a pillow. His breathing was deep and even and, it appeared, peaceful.
I tilted my watch to catch the room’s dim light: 4:10 AM. I’d been asleep for nearly an hour. I’d thought I would only rest my eyes for a while, as I’d done the nights before Cynthia and I fled New York, when I used to sit by the window and worry one hour into the next.
And yet when I’d lain down tonight, I’d felt as tired as I’d ever been in my life. In a recording studio it is difficult to tell day from night, but apparently not impossible—eventually the body takes over. Evidently my exhausted body knew that night had come. Then again, for millennia human beings have fallen asleep in more perilous circumstances than ours—with tigers on the prowl, in frigid temperatures. Right now, how many people were sleeping exposed to the elements in Bayonne or New York or Detroit? And how many others, across the globe, were right now in dreams while around them war threatened to gut them or blow them to pieces? We call ourselves human, think we’re rational beings, but we’re animals first with animal needs. We can’t help risking the big sleep for the little one. It seemed absurd, lying there in the studio, that I’d ever stayed awake all night long for something as monumentally trivial as a term paper.
Nolan was awake. He lay propped up on an elbow, looking at the television, which flickered silently and gave the room a slight strobe effect.
Earlier, I had wanted to run out briefly for essentials. Now that everyone’s stay here was more or less voluntary, I began to feel a little like their host. I thought we ought to have toothbrushes, for instance, and contact lens solution. There was a twenty-four-hour supermarket a couple miles down the road, and I didn’t believe that it would be a risk for me to go there. But I was persuaded otherwise. Better to stay here. Stay unnoticed. For one night we could do without the comforts of home.
The plan—the catch—was to give Marie’s story twelve hours. First she tells us that her grandmother will practically notify the White House if she isn’t home promptly at eight o’clock, then she tells us that her grandmother actually lives in a nursing home. First our arrest seems imminent, then she tells us that not a single person knows she’s missing. We believed the second story because it filled the holes in the first one. It explained why we were not yet in custody. But there could be other reasons, other explanations that we simply hadn’t thought of.
So before going through with my plan, a plan that would irrevocably tie us all together, Jeffrey had proposed—insisted, really—that we wait. That we stay right here in the studio, where we’d be insulated from the outside world, and continue to watch TV and see if the kidnapping story broke. If after twelve hours—by ten thirty tomorrow morning—there was no word of any robbery/kidnapping at the Milk-n-Bread or anybody reporting Marie missing, then we could assume that she was telling us the truth: that there was no surveillance tape at the store, and nobody to report her missing at home. In that case, the deal was on. In the meantime, the door leading from the recording room to the hallway remained unlocked and unobstructed. If at any time she wanted to abort our agreement, she was free to walk out the door. Of course, if she was telling the truth, then there’d be no need to.