18

Tap.

Crosetti stirred in his sleep and tried to return to a rather nice dream in which he was sitting around a movie set with Jodie Foster and Clark Gable, just having a comfortable conversation about the movies, and he was giving Jodie the eye because they were in on the secret about Gable not really being dead and waiting for him to explain about how he’d fooled the world but there was this rattling sound behind them and he said he’d go find out what it was…

Tap tap tap taptaptaptap

He was up, in the unfamiliar room of the Linton Lodge Hotel, on the outskirts of Oxford, a very nice room that Professor March had kindly arranged for him. It had a triple bay window giving on the garden, these windows being black with the night and also the source of the noise that had separated him from dreamland. Another rattle of pebbles hit the glass. He checked his watch: two-thirty in the morning.

Rising, he pulled on his jeans, went to the window, opened it, and got a faceful of gravel. He cursed and leaned out the window and spied a dark figure on the lawn below, stooping to retrieve another handful of pebbles from the path.

“Who the hell is that?” he demanded in the sort of loud whisper one uses when not wanting to wake a sleeping house.

The person below stood and announced in the same style, “It’s Carolyn.”

“Carolyn Rolly?”

“No, Crosetti, some other Carolyn. Get down here and let me in!”

He stared below at the white, raised, familiar face for a long moment and then shut the window, pulled on a shirt and sneakers, left the room, ran back and got his key just before the door swung shut, dashed through the short hallway, flew down the stairs and through the lounge to the garden door. He opened it, and there she was, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and jeans, soaked through, her dark hair plastered in strings on either side of her face.

She pushed past him into the lounge.

“Christ, I’m freezing,” she said, and she seemed to be: in the dim red light of the emergency exit lamp her lips looked dark blue. She glanced at the bar. “Can you get me a drink?”

“This is closed and locked up. But I have a bottle in my room.”

He did too, a fifth of Balvenie purchased in the duty-free for his mother. When they were in the room, he turned on the hot water in the bath, handed her his old plaid bathrobe, and told her to take her wet clothes off. He poured a couple of generous shots into the hotel water glasses while she changed in the bathroom, and when she emerged, in the robe with a towel around her hair, handed her one of them.

She gulped it down, coughed, and sighed, while he stared at her face. She met his eye. “What?” she said.

“What? Carolyn, it’s the second of December, no, the third now, and you’ve been missing since, I don’t know, the end of August. Bulstrode is dead, did you know that? Someone killed him. And his lawyer shot two guys in my mom’s living room and gangsters tried to kidnap me and…oh, Christ, I can’t begin to…Carolyn, where the hell have you been and what the hell have you been up to?”

“Don’t yell at me!” she said in a strained voice. “Please, can I just sit down and be quiet for a minute?”

He gestured to an armchair by the window and she sat on this and he sat on the bed facing her. She looked ridiculously small and young now, although there were smudges under her eyes and their blue seemed dulled, like tarnished metal.

She finished her whiskey in silence and held out her glass for a refill.

“No,” said Crosetti. “The story first.”

“From what point? My birth?”

“No, you can start with your marriage to H. Olerud of 161 Tower Road, Braddock, Pee-Ay.”

A sharp intake of breath and he saw those familiar bars of rose bloom on her cheekbones. Rolly had less control of the blush than he would have supposed necessary for such an accomplished liar.

“You know about that?” she asked.

“Yeah. I actually went out there, to the house. I had a nice conversation with Emmett.”

At this her eyes widened and she clutched her mouth. “Oh, God, you saw him? How is he?”

“Reasonably healthy, a little skinny maybe. He seems like a bright kid. I saw the girl too, also healthy, the bit I saw of her. Their father seems like a pretty violent guy.”

“You could say that. Harlan is fairly free with his hands.”

“I saw. How did you come to hook up with him? He seems a lot older than you.”

“He was my brother-in-law. My mom died when I was thirteen, and my sister Emily took me in. She was four years older than me and he was six years older than her.”

“What about your father?”

She uttered a short derisive laugh. “Whoever he was. Mom was a small-town waitress and barmaid and she supplemented her income by cultivating guys. Pay the rent this month and you get all the ass you can handle. She was what they call a trucker’s friend. One of them shot her and the guy she was with at the time. I guess he thought it was true romance. I came home from middle school one day and the cops were there and I called Emily and she picked me up. This was in Mechanicsburg, and I started to live with them. Do you need to hear this?”

“Yes. So there was no Uncle Lloyd.”

“No, I lied about that. There was Harlan, though. He started messing with me when I turned fourteen and Emily didn’t do anything to stop it, he had her beat down so bad. I got pregnant with Emmett when I was sixteen and with Molly four years later and what can I say about it but that was the way I thought things were. Harlan had a job at the battery plant, there was food on the table, and that’s how we lived. I had Emily and she had me and we both had the kids. You’d be surprised how many people there are in places like Braddock who live like that. Then Harlan lost his job and had to take a shit job in a Wal-Mart warehouse and Emily died and-”

“How did Emily die?”

“She got electrocuted by the washing machine. It was always kind of sparky, and Harlan was always promising to fix it but he never did, and we had to be careful around it. I sort of think she accidentally on purpose killed herself. He was beating her pretty regular by then.”

“Uh-huh. And how does the bookbinding come into this?”

Suddenly her face turned rigid. “You want to know my whole life story? Why do you? Because we had a fuck? That entitles you to the whole fucking five-CD collection of the life of Carolyn Rolly?”

“No, Carolyn,” said Crosetti. “I’m not entitled to anything. But you came to me, in the middle of the night. Why? A warm bath? A drink of scotch? A chat about old times in the bookstore?”

“No, but…look I need your help. I ran away from them. I didn’t know where else to go. And we don’t have the time to get into every detail. When they wake up and find I’m gone they’ll come here.”

“Who’s ‘they,’ Carolyn?”

“Shvanov’s people. There are four of them, in a hotel about two miles from here. They know where you are. That’s how I knew to come here.”

“And now…what? We’re on the same side again? Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Oh, God! I told you before, I don’t know how to behave with…real people like you. I lie, I get into desperate panics and I run and…Christ, can’t you give me another drink? Please?”

He did. She drank. “Okay, look we don’t have time for the long version. Bookbinding-I took the kids to a doctor one day, for shots for school, and while I was waiting in the office…I saw this book. It was part of the decorations, you know? How some people have fancy bookcases with old hardcover books in them? Well, this doctor had one of those and Emmett and Molly were playing with them, taking the books down and using them like blocks and the receptionist told them they had to stop and I replaced them on the shelf and there was one of them that was called The Bookbinder’s Art and I swiped it. It was bound in half-calf with gold tooling. I don’t know why I took it. Maybe it was, it felt so rich, the feel of the leather and the paper, it was so not Braddock, like a piece of a different world that fell there by accident, right there in my hand, like a jewel. And when I got home I hid it and read it at night, every night, for months, and the idea that people could just make books by hand and they would be beautiful things…I don’t know why but it just got under my skin. And then Emily died and he started beating on me and I knew if I didn’t get out I’d be as dead as Emily, either he’d do it or I would, or I’d kill him. So I left. The first time, he caught me and locked me in the cellar and beat me so bad I could hardly walk. The next time I waited for his payday and I took five hundred in cash while he was sleeping and walked away and hitched a ride and ended up in New York and stayed in a shelter. I got a job cleaning buildings at night. I found my loft through that job. It was illegal and toxic, like I told you, but it was dirt cheap because the owner wanted someone on the property so scavenger gangs wouldn’t rip out the copper. That was the first time I heard Shvanov’s name.”