She stumbled over the words, unfamiliar in her mouth, but I sensed that speaking them aloud caused something deep inside her to thaw. It was as though my proximity reminded her of what it had once been like to be human.
‘If you stay here,’ she said, ‘events will play out without you. The world will be different. You will not be there for those whom you might have protected. Others may take your place, but who can say?’
‘And if I go back?’
‘Pain. Loss. Life. Another death.’
‘To what end?’
‘Are you asking me your purpose?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘You know what they seek. The One Who Waits Behind the Glass. The God of Wasps. The Buried God.’
‘Am I supposed to stop them?’
‘I doubt that you can.’
‘So why should I go back?’
‘There is no “should”. If you go back, you do so because you choose it, and you will protect those who might not otherwise be protected.’
She moved closer to me. I felt the warmth of her breath against my face. It bore a trace of incense.
‘You wonder why they come to you, why they’re drawn to you, these fallen ones.’ She whispered the words, as though fearful of being overheard. ‘When you spend time close to a fire, you smell of smoke. These things seek not only their Buried God. They are looking for a fire that they wish to extinguish, but they cannot find it. You have been near it. You have been in its presence. You carry its smoke upon you, and so they come for you.’
She stepped away from me. Her reflection receded, then disappeared. I was alone. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, my daughter was beside me. She put her hand in mine.
‘You’re cold,’ said Jennifer.
‘Yes.’ My voice broke on the word.
‘Would you like to go for a walk, Daddy?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like that very much.’
51
The Battery Park Book Exchange stood in the center of Asheville, North Carolina. It sold rare and used books, to which Louis had no objection, and wine and champagne, to which, if possible, he had even fewer objections.
The woman named Zilla Daund was taking part in a book club in the store. She and four other women were discussing Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra over sparkling wine and the kind of single-mouthful treats that passed for food where thin, attractive women were concerned. Louis sat with a glass of pinot noir by his right hand, and a copy of Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg on his lap. He had picked up the Berg book because Perkins had edited Thomas Wolfe, probably Asheville’s most famous son, and Louis, who couldn’t stand Wolfe’s writings, was trying to understand why Perkins had bothered. As far as he could tell from reading the relevant sections in Berg’s biography, the only reason that Wolfe’s debut Look Homeward, Angel was even marginally tolerable was because Perkins had forced Wolfe to remove over 60,000 words from it. At Louis’s rough estimate, that still left Look Homeward, Angel – which, in the store’s Scribner edition, came to about 500 pages – at least 499 pages too long.
Zilla Daund looked like the kind of woman who took reading books very seriously without actually understanding how the act could be enjoyable as well. Her copy of Cleopatra was marked with narrow Post-it notes of different colors, and Louis felt certain that the interior was marked with words such as ‘Interesting!’, ‘Agree strongly!’ and ‘VIP!’, like a high schooler in freshman year working her way through The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. She was slim and blond, with the build of a long-distance runner. She might even have been considered good-looking had she not prematurely aged herself through a probable combination of excessive exposure to the elements and a steely determination that had left her brow permanently furrowed and her jaw set in a thin rictus, like a serpent about to strike.
Louis had been watching Daund for the past thirty-six hours, but this was as close as he had yet come to her. It was his way: begin at a distance, then slowly move in. So far, from his brief exposure to her routine, she seemed like an ordinary suburban housewife living a moderately comfortable existence. She’d gone to her local gym that morning, training for an hour before returning home to shower and change, then leaving shortly after lunch to come to her book club. The day before she’d eaten a late breakfast with some friends, shopped at the Asheville Mall, browsed the aisles at Mr K’s Used Books at River Ridge and had dinner at home with her husband and their younger son – their older son, a sophomore at George Washington University, being currently absent. The younger son was just sixteen, but he wouldn’t be coming home for dinner anytime soon. At that precise moment, he was in the back of a van being driven deep into the Pisgah National Forest by two men whose faces he had not even glimpsed before he was snatched. He was probably terrified, but the boy’s terror didn’t concern Louis. He wanted something to use against the Daunds if they proved unwilling to talk.
Meanwhile Angel was staying close to William Daund, who was on the faculty of the Department of Literature and Language at the University of North Carolina in Asheville. Louis would have bet a dollar that William Daund had read Look Homeward, Angel so often he could recite passages from it by heart. He probably even liked the book. Louis was looking forward to killing him.
Zilla Daund finished giving her opinion on Cleopatra’s ruthlessness, which apparently extended to slaughtering her own relatives when the situation required it. ‘She lived in an age of murder and betrayal,’ Daund told her friends. ‘I don’t believe that she killed because she liked it. She killed because it was the most effective solution to the problems that she faced.’
The other women laughed – that was their Zilla, always following the shortest route between two points, no matter who or what happened to be in the way – and Louis watched as Daund laughed along with them. The group broke up. Louis returned his attention to Maxwell Perkins. In a letter dated November 17, 1936, Perkins was trying to come to terms with the fact that Wolfe was severing ties with him. ‘I know you would not ever do an insincere thing,’ wrote Perkins to Wolfe, ‘or anything you did not think was right.’
Louis had to admire Perkins’s faith, even if he adjudged it to have ultimately been misplaced.
‘He ruined Thomas Wolfe, you know.’
Louis looked up. Zilla Daund was standing before him, her copy of Cleopatra cradled beneath her left arm, her right hidden in a pocket of her coat.
‘He did good by Hemingway and Fitzgerald,’ said Louis. ‘Can’t win ‘em all.’
He didn’t allow his eyes to drift to her right hand. He held her gaze.
‘No,’ she said, ‘maybe you can’t. Enjoy your wine – and your book.’
She walked away, and Louis thought: she’s made me, or thinks she has. It didn’t matter. If she and her husband were as smart as Cambion and the Collector seemed to think, they must have learned quickly that the private detective they’d tried to kill was different, and the perpetrators of the attack on him were being hunted not only by the police, but by men who were not unlike themselves. Perhaps they had simply not expected to be found so quickly, if they were found at all. Louis wondered if Cambion had already warned them.
He called Angel as he watched her walk across the street to the parking garage.
‘Where is he?’
‘In his office,’ said Angel. ‘He’s been in tutorials since this morning, and he’s about to give a class until four.’
‘If he cancels, call me.’
‘Why?’
‘I think the woman is spooked. If I’m right, she’ll contact him. You know where he’s parked?’
‘Yes.’
‘Watch the car.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll take the house. Stay with the husband. And, hey?’
‘What?’
‘You ever read Look Homeward, Angel?’
‘Fuck, no. It must be a thousand pages long. Why would I want to do that?’
‘I knew there was a reason why I liked you,’ said Louis.
‘Yeah?’ said Angel. ‘Well, if I think of one in return, I’ll let you know.’
Louis was ahead of the woman all the way. He had parked at a meter, just outside the store, so as soon as she was out of sight he left cash for his wine and returned to his car. Angel had already taken care of the house alarm earlier in the day, once he was certain that William Daund was committed to his tutorials. It meant that when Zilla Daund entered the house, Louis was waiting for her. She said only one word as she set her bag down, Louis’s suppressed .22 inches from her head.
‘Fuck.’
‘I prefer “fucked”,’ said Louis. ‘And just for the record, you’re wrong about Maxwell Perkins.’
He closed the front door with his foot, and took a step back from her.
‘You know what this is about?’ he asked.
‘The hit in Maine.’
‘Someone told you to expect trouble?’
‘We knew from the aftershock, but we got a call.’
‘Cambion?’
She didn’t respond.
‘Not that it’s any consolation, but he told us about you as well,’ said Louis. ‘Not everything, but a start.’
‘Like you say, we got fucked.’
‘Yes, you did. Drop the bag.’
A big purse hung from her left shoulder. He’d watched her as she drank her wine earlier, so he knew that she was righthanded, even before she’d spoken to him with that hand concealed, probably holding a weapon aimed at him. He figured she had at least one gun on her person, and maybe another in the purse.
‘If you’re armed, you better tell me now.’
‘In my purse.’
‘But not your right coat pocket?’
‘Oops.’
Louis stepped back and told her to let the coat fall from body. It landed with a heavy thud on the wood floor.
‘You got anything else?’
‘You’re welcome to frisk me.’
‘We’re below the Mason–Dixon line. Us colored folks got to be careful with the white women down here. I’d prefer it if you just told me.’
‘Left side, on the belt.’
‘You expecting war to break out?’
‘We live in a dangerous world.’
She was wearing a loose-fitting cardigan under a light jacket, the kind that would easily cover a gun.
‘Use your left hand,’ Louis said. ‘Thumb and index finger only. Slowly.’
Zilla Daund lowered her left hand, pushed aside her jacket with her forearm, and used the palm of her hand to raise the cardigan, exposing the gun. It looked like a little hammerless S&W 642 in a .38 Special.
‘This is awkward,’ she said. ‘The holster’s tight.’
He saw her tense, and was a second ahead of her. She was fast, twisting her body at the same time as she raised her right hand to lash out at him, but by then Louis was already bringing the butt of his gun down on her right temple. He followed her to the floor, wrenching the .38 from its holster and tossing it aside. She was stunned, but conscious. He kept the gun at the base of her neck while he pulled her jacket and cardigan to her elbows, trapping her arms, then patted her down. Her jeans were skintight, but he still checked them for a blade. He released her when he was done, and watched as she rearranged her clothing. He found her phone and handed it to her.
‘Call your husband,’ he said.
‘Why?’