Bibi suspected that when there were guests in the house, this door would be locked, for it and the stairs that led to it felt like a fateful passage to a forbidden realm. The lock was not now engaged.
As she gripped the doorknob, she knew what she would surely find beyond, not the precise details but the essence: rooms that were in stark contrast to everything on the first two floors.
When she stepped across the threshold and, with a wall switch, turned on several artfully positioned stained-glass and blown-glass lamps, she passed from stark modernism to high Victorian. The door opened onto a parlor with hand-printed wallpaper in a colorful floral pattern. Delicate lace curtains overlaid with maroon-velvet tasseled-and-fringed draperies. Two étagères full of porcelain collectibles. Chesterfield sofa. Studded-leather armchair. A large circular side table, covered with fabric that itself was covered with a crocheted overlay, accommodated portrait busts and enameled ornaments and small framed drawings.
Bibi felt akin to the children who discovered Narnia, as though she’d passed into another world, but also as if she had returned to a place she’d visited before. The contrasting sumptuous fabrics and the extreme clutter were, even for the period, evidence less of a passion for Victoriana than of a troubling obsession.
Beyond the parlor, a master-bedroom suite offered more of the same. The centerpiece was a bed with an elaborate layered canopy, its four posts carved with twining vines and gilded flowers.
Bibi stood just inside the bedroom, both enchanted and filled with misgiving, wondering if anything of interest might be found in the nightstands. Before she could explore further, the black-lacquered door at the head of the stairs slammed shut.
As Bibi turned toward the door between the bedroom and the parlor, the time seemed to have come for her to draw the Sig Sauer from her shoulder rig.
Pax had given her a few days of instruction at a shooting range, and in his company she had fired hundreds of rounds at paper targets in the form of human silhouettes. She had been concerned that in a crisis she would make a wrong decision, shoot when she should hold her fire, accidentally take down someone other than her target. Her defense had always been words, and if she shot off the wrong ones, an explanation and an apology had remedied her mistake. But apologies didn’t heal a mortal chest wound.
When no one appeared in the portion of the parlor that Bibi could see through the doorway, when the silence became so attenuated that she began to feel she was being tested, perhaps mocked, she overcame her lingering inhibition and drew the pistol. She held it in her right hand, with the muzzle aimed at the ceiling.
She glanced at a window, wondering if beyond it lay one of the teak decks to which she could flee if necessary. Her journey through the house had disoriented her. She didn’t know in what direction this window faced, and the fog that cloistered the coast prevented her from getting her bearings by the intensity and angle of sunlight.
Silence could be an effective strategy. It frayed the nerves and encouraged the imagination to invent one anxious-making scenario after another, until you mistook every smallest and most innocent sound for the start of the expected assault, and were at a fateful moment distracted from the true threat. With every step that Bibi had taken in this house, her apprehension had been whetted, until now it was razor-sharp.
In movies, the silence-tortured character asked, Is someone there? Who’s there? Hello? What do you want? The answer to that last question would always be a variation of Terezin’s response when Bibi, on the phone, had inquired of him what he wanted from her: Only to kill you. Therefore, silence should be met with silence—and with well-considered action.
She brought the pistol down into a two-hand grip, arms extended, as Pax had taught her. She cleared the open doorway fast, bedroom to parlor, staying low, sweeping the gun left to right, right to left.
No one crouched behind the Chesterfield or the armchair. No one sheltered behind the voluminous draperies.
Bibi stood alone, wondering if the door had been slammed by a draft. But the tight construction of the house disfavored drafts no less than it fostered silence. She did not believe in dramatically timed currents of air any more than she believed in coincidences.