Crying Wolf Read online

  Silence; not complete, with that low humming of machine noise, but no human sounds. He opened the door a crack, saw little zones of machine glow in the shadows. All systems go. Freedy stepped into the utilities room in the sub-basement of building 13, silent as, as some animal known for silence-tiger? wolf? — but much, much smarter.

  He shone his light around, spotted a fridge in one corner, a small fridge where the maintenance guys would keep their lunches and snacks. Freedy opened it. Each shelf bore a different name tag; he remembered the way they kept their food to themselves. Workies. Freedy helped himself to a ham sandwich intended for someone named Griff. A thick sandwich, the kind wifey might pack for hubbie, but mustard instead of mayo; what kind of wifey was that, Griff? He took a bite or two and dropped the rest in the trash on his way out.

  Not out right away of course, but after a careful wolf- or tiger-like peek both ways, and into the sub-basement hall under building 13. Widely spaced low-voltage bulbs in the ceiling cast a dim light. No switches. This was new: had to be a security thing. Freedy didn’t worry. No one around, no reason for anybody but maintenance to be down here-and what difference would it make if anyone did see him? They’d take him for a student, or somebody’s date. It was safe, at least going in. Going out, with the goods-that was a little different. But all of it, the in part and the out part: fun. Yes. At that moment, Freedy understood why people got into skydiving or climbing Mt. Everest. On Everest, though, you wouldn’t have to put up with any of the college shit, like this flyer taped by the stairway: Curious? Come to the weekly Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Club Dance. Music! Food! Prizes! He tore the sheet off the wall, crumpled it up-the sound of the crumpling so clear in contrast to the silent way he’d been moving, clear like the sound system he’d once checked out at some Hollywood guy’s place when no one was home-and went upstairs, into building 13. Lanark, or whatever they called it, a residence, and all the residences had a basement lounge. Freedy checked it out.

  TV-but not HDTV; VCR-dying technology, DVD was what the market wanted; microwave-who gave a shit about microwaves? What he had a hankering for, maybe because of the recollection of that killer sound system, was one of those compact stereos, the new kind that hung on a wall, and a laptop or two for dessert. For dessert! That was funny, unlike so-called jokes about bureaucrats. Idea, plan, stick, stick, stick. Freedy left the lounge and went up to the dorm rooms, where the real goodies were.

  Stone stairs, each step worn with a depression marking the tread of feet over a hundred years or more; the kind of thing that should have been repaired but was instead considered a point of pride. College shit-they had no idea what the country was all about. Freedy, maybe because of the Everest thing, maybe because he got a little zoned out planting his feet in those depressions, went all the way to the top floor, the third, and entered the hall. Three rooms on each side, all with closed doors but the two at the end; blue light leaked out of one, yellow light, very faint, from the other. Freedy, tiger, wolf, but much, much smarter-there was a word for that kind of animal, started with p, it would come to him-treaded silently down the hall. He peeked into the yellow-lit room.

  Good choice. Freedy saw something nice, real nice. The room itself, the living room, sitting room, whatever the hell they called it, wasn’t lit at all; the yellow light came through the partly open bedroom door at the back. And through that opening, Freedy saw a woman, a college girl. A fat college girl, maybe, or if not fat, still far from perfect; and she wore glasses. But that wasn’t the point: the point was she wore jeans and nothing else. Even more-she was doing something interesting. The college girl, kind of fat, glasses, was standing sideways, from Freedy’s viewpoint, and facing a mirror. Freedy couldn’t see a mirror from his angle, but he knew it had to be there, possessed as he was of a brain capable of mental leaps. This girl, not too fat, really, had one of her tits cupped in both hands, was shifting it around a little, gazing at the mirror Freedy couldn’t see; a few moments later, she went through the same routine with the other tit, like she was checking to see if they were identical. Did girls do that? Learned something new every day. An up-close-and-personal moment: it was like they knew each other already, no bullshit, no expense. Add to that the fact of her not being perfect, meant she was probably lonely for a man. In her wildest dreams would she ever think she’d have a chance with a man like him, diesel, buff, a man like him a matter of a few feet away? If he cleared his throat right now, for example: wow. One other thing, an image, a memory. Wasn’t the mind funny, the way it worked? This image Freedy recalled from a porn video, maybe seen on that trip to Mexico, or else the time he’d rented one to watch with Estrella, but she’d been grossed out, letting him down bad. This video memory: a girl with glasses Action central. The girl turned abruptly toward the door, toward him. Started to turn would be more accurate, because Freedy, so quick, was out of sight in the hall almost before the movement began.

  But why? Shouldn’t he have stayed where he was, let her see him? He could have delivered some line, like: They both look pretty good to me. How cool was that? Then: Come in, big boy. The college girl saying that, not the video girl. His reflexes had gotten the better of him. He was about to make up for it, to step back into the room and hit her with that line, when the door closed. Then the lock clicked. And some kind of fucking bolt slid into place. Not hard, not frantic, she hadn’t spotted him, simply noticed the open door. Shut out, just like that, by seconds, or tenths of a second. Bad luck, nothing more.

  But Freedy was getting tired of bad luck. Now he was in a bad mood. Idea, plan, stick, stick, stick. They made it seem so easy.

  Freedy took a deep breath, a trick he’d learned from Estrella, or maybe from the other waitress, the one who worked days, and got a grip. Stick, stick, stick. Meant doing it again and again. Meant sucking it up, being a man. He knew how to do all that, had learned in high-school football. A fucking leg breaker, a Thanksgiving crackerjack. Freedy dug down deep, stuck his head into the blue-lit room.

  No one there. He walked right in, on a mission now, in search of stuff and plenty of it.

  The blue light came from a computer, a laptop, sitting on a desk. Dessert, but he was in a bad mood, and the joke had lost its appeal. The laptop’s light illuminated another laptop-a second helping, to put it in dessert terms, but he didn’t see the humor in that either-this one closed, on the adjoining desk; a sound system, but not the kind that hung on a wall; a cell phone and a regular phone; and something else, reflecting blue light in the corner. He went closer, saw that this something else was a fish tank. In the fish tank hovered a single fish, bigger than a goldfish and not gold. Some other colors-Freedy didn’t really notice. What he noticed were its eyes, blue from the reflection, focused on him like it was watching. Freedy wished he had something sharp to stick right through them, but not because he was unkind to animals-he’d owned a dog, a pit bull, for a few months after his arrival in LA, and fed it practically every day. He was in a bad mood, period. Could happen to anyone.

  Cheer up, he told himself. The laptops, the cell phone: a decent night’s work. Freedy walked over to the open laptop, read what was on the screen:

  To: Phil. 322

  From: Prof. L. Uzig

  Re: Due to the late arrival of the Kaufman edition of Zarathustra, the assignment due

  And other college bullshit that he would have stopped reading even if he hadn’t heard a sound. A voice; distant, female. He ripped the plug out of the machine, snapped it shut, glanced out into the hall. Saw nothing, but heard footsteps, faint then less faint, on the stone stairs at the far end. He banged through the exit at his endEmergency Only, Alarm Will Sound, but it didn’t, the college kids disabling everything they could-and zoomed down, two, three, even four stairs at a time.

  Easy for him. His body handled it; his mind was elsewhere, working on something important. If he had a problem with women, and that was debatable, it had always been getting past the first step or two in meeting a certain type. Only get past that hurdle
, begin from a position already inside their lives, as he had been on the point of doing with the college girl in the yellow-lit room, then they’d see him for what he really was, a stud on the road to big success. After that, well who wouldn’t jump at the chance to hook up with the CEO of a major pool corporation in Florida, maybe the entire Southeast one day? Freedy reminded himself to keep financial control out of greedy little hands, to draw up one of those agreements-prenups, there’d been an infomercial on that too-if he ever got married. Damn: he thought of everything.

  Freedy’s bad mood lifted just like that. Out into the night, laptop under his arm. He felt good again.

  14

  “Clever people are not credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!” Give one example, citing the U.S. president of your choice.

  — Homework assignment, Philosophy 322

  “You caught it?” Nat said.

  “Not cleanly,” said Izzie.

  Not cleanly, but she’d caught the matchbook in the dark, with the last match inside, and now a candle burned, down in the hole. Not a hole, Nat could now see, but a room, a bedroom, and as far as he could tell in the dimness, a bedroom of the kind he’d encountered only in stories set in English country houses. Grace and Izzie were sitting on a bed, a red-canopied bed like Scrooge’s except that the canopy had been torn off by Izzie’s fall. Nat could make out something of the intricately carved bedposts, and beyond that, darkpaneled walls and the glint of gilt-framed paintings hanging on them.

  “What is this place?” he said.

  “Like in that expression,” said Grace.

  “Sanctum sanctorum,” said Izzie.

  “Yeah,” said Grace. “Sanctum sanctorum. You joining us, Nat?”

  Nat paused. There was still the problem of getting back up, of course, candle or not, a problem no one else seemed to recognize. And other problems: he had the feeling there were other problems, but couldn’t think what they were.

  “Just jump,” Grace said.

  “It’s safe,” said Izzie.

  They got off the bed, Grace holding the candle, their faces tilted up at him. He hesitated. The jump itself was no big deal, not with a bed to land on. Then what was stopping him?

  “What’s it going to be?” Grace said, and Izzie started smiling as though she knew what was coming. “Man or Superman?”

  He jumped.

  A long fall, surprisingly long, maybe a bigger deal than he’d thought; a long fall, with those faces tilted up at him and the candlelight catching the gold flecks in their eyes; long enough for an odd image to pop up in his mind: Lorenzo falling out of his aquarium.

  A surprisingly long fall, feet first until the thought of Lorenzo broke his concentration, and he dipped out of the perpendicular, landing on the bed, but on his back and hard. He bounced right off, out of control, and caromed into Grace, pinning her to the floor.

  “Well, well,” she said.

  Izzie picked up the candle, dropped by Grace, peered down at them. “Everyone all right?”

  Nat got off quickly. “I’m fine.”

  Grace rose more slowly. “He’s heavier than he looks.”

  Izzie nodded, an expression that could have meant anything on her face. Grace took the candle, held it up, gazed at what remained of the chandelier: thousands of cut-glass crystal teardrops still shimmering from the impact, and twenty or thirty fat candles like the one Grace held, set in glass holders.

  “No electricity?” she said. She turned to the lamp on the bedside table, an oil lamp, Nat saw, with a chimney and a wick. He examined it, found the reservoir dry. Underneath lay a book, coated with dust; everything in the room was thick with it. Grace picked up the book, blew off the dust; she and Izzie blew it off simultaneously. A leather-bound book. With Nat and Izzie looking over her shoulder, Grace leafed through. A French book, probably a novel because of all the dialogue, but he could pick out only a few words- fesses, jolie, and one he didn’t know, couilles- before a picture flashed by.

  “Whoa,” said Grace, paging back to it.

  The picture: a black-and-white drawing, pornographic, of a woman wearing nothing but one black stocking, in the lap of a mustached man sitting on a piano stool and wearing nothing at all, both of them gazing out at the reader in a matter-of-fact way. A second woman, fully dressed, leaned against the keyboard, gazing down at them.

  Silence.

  Then Grace said: “This is better.”

  “To say nothing of the dress,” said Izzie.

  “Better than what?” said Nat.

  “ Playboy, ” said Izzie. And to Grace: “What’s the pub date?”

  Grace turned to the front of the book: Mon Jardin, published by Editions Bleues in 1919. She leafed through again, finding a few more illustrations, all featuring the mustached man with different women. “Remind you of anyone?” she said.

  “Not funny,” said Izzie.

  And Nat knew they were talking about Paolo. He also wondered whether on their little journey under Inverness they would keep unearthing porn. He was about to ask if anyone knew the year the college had gone coed when Izzie said, “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “Shh.”

  They listened, heard nothing.

  “I thought I heard something.”

  But there was nothing to hear except the candle flame sizzling in a pool of wax. “I didn’t hear anything,” Grace said. “And I’ve got better hearing.”

  “Is that even possible?” Nat said.

  “She does,” said Izzie.

  “How do you know?”

  “We know,” Grace said, closing Mon Jardin and putting it on the table. She moved toward the nearest wall, ran her hand over the paneling. The light shone on an ornate picture frame. They examined the painting, a nude bathing in a stream. Even in the poor light, Nat could see it wasn’t very good; compared to the Renoir, not worth looking at. There were other paintings, much the same.

  They came to a leather-padded door studded with brass. Grace opened it. On the other side, a much bigger room, full of shadows.

  “It’s like that club,” Izzie said.

  “Except more lively,” said Grace. Izzie laughed.

  “What club?” said Nat.

  “Some old-farts club in New York we had to go to once. Just like this, the furniture, the rugs, the paintings, everything. Except for dust.”

  “And the spiderwebs.”

  Nat walked into one at that moment; it clung to his eyelashes. He wiped it away, and as he did noticed Greek writing high on one wall-he knew some of the letters from math-painted in gold.

  “Were there fraternities here?”

  “Something like that,” said Grace. “Didn’t Leo mention it?”

  “They kicked them out,” Izzie said. She was opening a glass cabinet full of bottles. “During Prohibition.”

  Grace held the candle near the bottles, dust-free in the cabinet: scotch, bourbon, gin, rum, cognac, Armagnac, many still sealed. “This looks good,” she said, taking out a heavy, square bottle: Bas Armagnac, Domaine Boingneres, 1913. She chipped off the wax seal, found a tarnished silver corkscrew on the top shelf, drew the cork. The scent reached Nat a moment later and grew and grew: a heady smell, fiery, sweet, strange; as though France, which he’d never seen, and a long-ago time, when he’d never lived, could be kept in a bottle.

  Grace tilted it to her lips, drank. “Ah,” she said, and passed it to Izzie. Then to Nat. He took a sip and decided not to romanticize too much. It was just booze, after all, the very best quality, but just booze. Then the aftertaste hit him and he changed his mind again: yes, France and a long-ago time, in a bottle. He took another drink.

  “He likes it,” Izzie said. Nat saw she was watching him closely.

  “What else does he like?” said Grace.

  The girls looked at each other in silence, their expressions beyond his power of interpretation. But an awkward moment, certainly. Was this the time to bring everything into the open? But wha
t was everything? He and Izzie hadn’t been together alone for more than a few minutes since that one time on the beach at Aubrey’s Cay. More guests had arrived the next day, and Nat had had to share his room with a banker from Singapore. And Grace had always been around. But the biggest impediment was this need for secrecy. It was almost as though that in pretending nothing was happening between them, they were making it reality. Maybe nothing was happening: there was lots of hooking up at Inverness, or at least some, that neither party intended to repeat, if not before it happened, then after. Were he and Izzie like that? And what about Patti? Nat realized he had to do some clear thinking, but down here in this strange place, that wasn’t easy. He found himself taking another drink.

  “Hey,” said Grace, “my turn.”

  The bottle went round again.

  “What’s this?” Izzie said.

  “A record player,” Nat said. He’d seen one of these before, probably at a lawn sale. Opening the top, he found a record on the turntable. Victor, read the label: Caro Nome (Rigoletto-G. Verdi), sung by Amelita Galli-Curci.

  “Turn it on,” Grace said.

  Nat wound a crank at the back, moved a switch beside the turntable. The record began to spin. He lowered the needle onto it.

  A little musical intro, almost lost in the fuzziness and scratchiness of the recording, and then came a voice, high, light, penetrating, strange, that made Nat forget about the recording quality. If anything, it made it better. The room, the drink, the music: all from a long-ago time. He’d heard of Verdi, was pretty sure that Rigoletto was an opera, but otherwise knew nothing, had no idea what the song was about, couldn’t understand a word. Still, he stood motionless until it was over.