Текст книги "The Divide"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)
Because I want to see you I have bought bus tickets to Toronto and will be arriving Saturday Feb 10. Hope you can meet me at the Bus Station as I do not know how to find your Apartment exactly. I would call you but unfortunately the Phone has been take out again by those Bastards at the Phone Co.
Roch sat back and smiled at this, especially the bit about the telephone, which not only solved a potential problem but sounded a lot like Mama. He typed, Your Loving Mother, and duplicated her signature with a blue Bic pen.
Masterpiece.
The only remaining problem was re-sealing the envelope. Amelie had left a jar of mucilage in the kitchen drawer, and Roch discovered that a very thin layer of this would pass for the original glue. He sealed the envelope and set it aside. Good enough for today. He turned on the TV and watched Wheel of Fortune, content with the state of the world.
* * *
On his way back to the Goodtime Grill the next morning, a troubling thought occurred to him:
What if Amelie didn’t take the bait?
There was no love lost between those two, after all. Roch did not hate either of his parents—except his father, sporadically; hating them was a waste of time. But he knew that Amelie harbored deeper feelings, mostly negative. Amelie sometimes talked about Mama sympathetically, but with her fists clenched and her nails digging into her palms. Maybe she wouldn’t show up at the bus depot.
Or maybe—another new thought—she was too far away. Maybe she’d left the city. She might be in fucking Timbuktu, although Roch suspected not; it wasn’t her style. But who knew? Anything was possible.
No, he thought, better not to borrow trouble. If the letter arrangement fell through, he’d try something else. He had the connection through Tracy; that was secure and that was enough for now.
Tracy recognized him when he sat down at the table by the window. He saw her say something to the manager, who looked impatient and sent her scooting over with a glass of water and the order pad. Roch smiled his biggest smile and ordered lunch. When she came back with the food he reached into his jacket pocket, very casually, and brought out a wad of mail including the spiked envelope.
“I remembered to bring these,” he said. “Thought maybe you’d want to pass ’em on.”
Tracy took the envelopes but held them at a distance, as if they might be radioactive. “Oh,” she said. “Well, okay, I’ll see what I can do, okay?”
“If it’s convenient,” Roch said.
“Oh,” Tracy said.
* * *
One more thing, one more small item to take care of, and then he’d be ready. Everything would be in place.
That night he walked down Wellesley to the corner where Tony Morriseau, the drug dealer, was hanging out.
Roch didn’t know Tony too well. Roch didn’t believe in doing drugs; drugs fucked up your mind. He had, admittedly, sometimes scored a little of this or that from Tony, when the inclination took him or he wanted to impress somebody. But he was not a regular customer.
Tony stood on the snowy streetcorner done up in a khaki green parka with a big hood, his breath steaming out in clouds. He regarded Roch from this sheltered space with an expression Roch could not decipher. Tony seemed more paranoid these days, Roch had observed.
Tony rubbed his hands together and said, “It’s fucking cold, so tell me what you want.”
“Something serious,” Roch said.
“Speak English,” Tony said.
Roch mimed the act of holding a hypodermic needle against his arm and pressing the plunger.
Tony looked ill. “Christ,” he said, “don’t do that, all right? You don’t know who’s looking.” He seemed to withdraw into the depths of the parka. “I don’t deal with that.”
“You know where to get it,” Roch said.
“Matter of fact I don’t.”
“If you can’t sell it to me, tell me who can.”
“I don’t like your tone of voice,” Tony said. “I don’t have to do you any favors. Christ!”
Roch stood up straight and looked down at Tony, who was at least a head shorter. “Tone of voice?”
Tony cringed.
Then Tony looked at his watch. “Oh, well … from now on you don’t come to me for this. Go to the source, okay? It’s really not my territory.”
Roch nodded.
They walked down the street to Tony’s car—a battered Buick. “Hey, Tony,” Roch said. “What happened to the famous Corvette?”
Tony scowled and shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
18
It was a cool Southern California winter day, but Susan was comfortable with a sweater wrapped around her. She was able to stand for a long time on the exposed, sunny hillside where her father was buried.
She had been given a week-long leave of absence from the big house north of Toronto and she wasn’t sure whether to resent this or not. Dr. Kyriakides had practically hustled her onto the airplane, claimed that the trip would be good for her, that she had driven herself to the point of nervous exhaustion—that “Benjamin” would probably be around for a while longer and there was nothing helpful she could do. “We’ll need you more later,” he said. During the crisis, he meant. When John’s neurological breakdown reached its apex.
But no one could say for sure when that crisis would come, or what the final resolution might be. Therefore, Susan thought, it was a terrible risk to be away from him. But Dr. Kyriakides had been persuasive … and it was true that she owed her mother a visit. Susan had promised at the funeral that she would be home every Christmas. A promise she’d broken this year.
So she had spent five days in this quiet suburb, driving to the malls with her sixty-five-year-old mother and-dodging questions about her work. She said she was doing “an exchange project” with the University of Toronto, to explain her Canadian address. Fluid transfer in mitochondria. Too complex to explain. Her mother nodded dubiously.
And today—the last day of Susan’s visit—they had come here to this grave, where Susan had stood frowning for the last forty-five minutes, poised on the brink of a mystery.
She was distressed to discover that she could not summon up a concrete image of her father. She tried and failed. She could remember only the things she associated with him—his clothes, the mirror polish on his shoes, the brown sample cases he had carried to work. The rest was either hopelessly vague or, worse, deathbed images, his emaciated body and hollow eyes. She remembered the sound of his voice, the soothing rumble of it, but that was a childhood memory. His laryngeal cancer had ended all that, of course; but it seemed to Susan that he had fallen mute years before the operation, a functional silence in which anything meaningful must never be pronounced. His way of protecting her from the divorce, from his own fears, from adulthood. She was trying hard not to hate him for it.
How awful that sounded. But it was true: she had never forgiven him for his silence, for his cancer, for his callous descent into the grave. It was a monumentally selfish thought. A childish thought … but maybe that was the heart of the matter: she could never come to this place except as a child, suspended in time by his withdrawal and his death. She would never be his “grown-up daughter.” She couldn’t say any of the things she needed to say, because he couldn’t listen.
She was startled by the touch of her mother’s hand on her shoulder.
“Come on, Susan. We’ve been here long enough.”
Have we? Susan climbed into the car dutifully, a child, thinking: Maybe not Maybe if she stayed long enough, the right words would come to her. Talking to herself, she would talk to Daddy. And Daddy would answer. His buried words would rise up from the ground and hover in the cool, sunlit air.
But she couldn’t stay forever. And so the car carried her down the hillside in the long light of the afternoon, away from the stubbornly silent ground.
* * *
Her flight out of Los Angeles left an hour and forty minutes late, which meant she missed her connection at O’Hare. The next available seat to Toronto was on a red-eye flight; she had an afternoon and evening to kill in Chicago.
She phoned Toronto with this news and then—on an impulse—rented a car for the day. She did not want to stray too far from the airport; Susan distrusted official scheduling and usually preferred to lurk near the departure gates. But she knew her way around this city and she recalled that John’s old neighborhood, the neighborhood where he had grown up with the Woodwards, was only a short drive from the airport.
Winter hadn’t affected the city too severely. There was a glaze of snow along the highway embankments, but the air was clear, with faint trails of wintery cirrus clouds running down to a powder blue horizon. But it was cold, the kind of cold that made the tires crackle against the blacktop.
She had written down John’s old address in her notebook. The neighborhood was a Levittown, a postwar bungalow suburb, treeless and bleak in the winter light. She located the street—a cul-de-sac—and then the house, a pastel pink box indistinguishable from any of these others. THE WOODWARDS was printed on the mailbox. A sign posted on the front lawn said FOR SALE and a smaller one beside it announced a CONTENTS SALE—SATURDAY FEBRUARY 16.
Today.
Susan allowed the car to drift to a stop.
She didn’t think she would have the courage, but she did: she got out of the car and walked up the driveway and knocked on the door, shivering. She was about to turn away when the door opened a crack and a grey-haired, chunky man peered out.
“Mr. Woodward?”
“Yes?”
She took a breath. “I, uh—I saw the sign—”
“Sale ended at four o’clock,” he said, swinging the door wider, “but you might as well come in. Hardly anybody else showed up.”
Susan stepped inside.
The house had obviously been stripped down for moving. There were blank spaces where there should have been furniture, and curtain rods empty over the windows. It seemed to Susan that James Woodward had been similarly stripped down. He was not as big as she had pictured him; not nearly as imposing. He was a small, barrel-chested man with a fringe of grey hair and big, callused hands. He was friendly but distant, and Susan was careful to pretend an interest in this item or that as he conducted her in and out of these small rooms. What she really wanted was to find some ghost of John or even Benjamin lingering here; but there was nothing like that … only these mute, empty spaces. Coming down the stairs she said, “Is your wife home?” He shook his head. “She died. That’s why I’m moving. I tried looking after this place for a while, but it’s too big for one person.” He opened the basement door. “There’s a few things still stored down here—if you think it’s worth the look.”
“Please,” Susan said.
This was where his workshop had been, though most of the tools had been carried away. Not much left—a battered workbench with curls of pine and cedar still nesting under it; an ancient P.A. amplifier with its tubes pulled. In one shadowy corner, an acoustic guitar.
Susan went to it immediately.
“Oh, that,” Woodward said. “You don’t want that.”
“Maybe I do,” Susan said.
“You know, I sold some guitars earlier. I used to make ’em by hand. Like a hobby I guess you could say. But that one—see, the truss rod’s off true. You know guitars? Well, it means it’ll go off tune and be hard to fix. The action’s a little too high off the frets, too. It’s a bad instrument.”
“How much do you want for it?”
“Say, fifty bucks for the materials? If you’re serious. You play?”
“No,” Susan said. “But I have a friend who does.” She took the money out of her purse.
James Woodward accepted the payment; Susan picked up the guitar. It was heavier than she expected. The strings rang faintly under her fingers.
“I almost hate to sell the damn thing,” Woodward said. He looked past Susan, past these walls. “It’s funny,” he said. “It’s the broken things that stay on your mind. Broken, bent, half-made or bad-made. You take them to the grave with you.”
* * *
She climbed off the plane in Toronto weary and dazed, collected her suitcase and the guitar from the baggage carousel. Dr. Kyriakides was waiting in the crowded space beyond the customs checkpoint.
She understood by his hollow smile that something was wrong. She followed him up to the carpark and loaded her baggage into the trunk of the Honda, daunted by his silence.
“John is back,” he said finally.
“That’s good,” Susan responded.
Dr. Kyriakides opened the car door for her. Ever the European gentleman.
“But Amelie is missing,” he said.
19
It was a long drive back to the house. A snowstorm had settled in from the west and wasn’t leaving; the car radio warned people to stay off the roads. Susan was grateful that Dr. Kyriakides had been able to maneuver the Honda all the way to the airport; she was even more grateful that she was able to drive it back. Visibility had closed in and the road was blanked out north of the city; the headlights probed into a swirling wilderness. For the time, she was too preoccupied with driving to press for details about Amelie.
The weather grew steadily worse, but the tires were good and there wasn’t much traffic and they were back at the house before long. Kyriakides brushed the snow from the car while Susan headed for the kitchen and a hot cup of coffee.
John was there, waiting for her.
It was John—no doubt about it.
He looked up as she came through the door. His expression was somber and utterly focused.
“I need to do two things,” he said. “First, I need to talk to you. There are a lot of things I want to say while I still can.”
Susan nodded solemnly. She was too tired to be shocked by this sudden volley; she simply accepted it. “Second?”
He said, “I mean to find Amelie.”
* * *
Susan slept for five dreamless hours between three and eight o’clock in the morning.
She woke to find the window of her room laced with frost. She stood for a moment, touching the icy surface of the glass with one finger and wondering at the intensity of the cold. Outside, the world was a blurred grey-white wilderness. The snow had obscured the driveway. The highway was empty save for a plough inching southward under its strange blue safety light. The sky was dark and the snow was falling steadily. She dressed in the darkness of her room.
She carried her portable Sony tape recorder down the hall to John’s door, raised her hand to knock—and then paused.
John was playing the guitar. She had given him the instrument last night, had explained about the layover in Chicago and the sale at the Woodward house. He had taken the instrument wordlessly, his expression unreadable.
The music came softly through the closed door. He was good, Susan thought. She didn’t recognize the piece—something baroque. Not passionate music but subtle, a sad melody elaborated into a cathedral of notes. She waited until the last arpeggio had faded away.
He put down the guitar when she came through the door, looked questioningly at the tape recorder.
“It’s for me,” she said. “I don’t trust myself to remember.”
He nodded. She felt his sense of urgency: it was like something physical, a third presence in the room. Because of his impending neurological crisis, Susan thought, his “change”—or because of Amelie. Or both.
He’s changed. He’s different.
But she put the thought aside for now.
“Sit down,” John said.
She plugged a cassette into the recorder and switched it on.
* * *
All that morning he talked about his childhood.
They skipped breakfast. Twice, Susan paused to change tapes. She was afraid she would miss something. It was a fear John didn’t share, obviously. The words poured out of him like water from a broken jug. A cataract of words.
She understood what he was doing. He had explained it to her last night. These were things he had never said, small but vital fragments of his life, and he was afraid they would slip away uncommunicated. She was not expected to learn these things verbatim or play them back to him—the tape recorder was superfluous. It was the telling that mattered. “Nothing is permanent,” John said. “Everything is volatile. You, me, the world—everything. But it’s like throwing a stone into a pool of water. The stone disappears. But the ripples linger awhile.”
She was that pool. He was the stone.
* * *
He talked about his mother.
Her name was Marga Novak and she was working through her apprenticeship at a hairdressing salon in downtown Chicago when she answered a classified ad in the back pages of the Tribune: “Pregnant, single women wanted for privately funded medical study.”
She had recently become pregnant by a thirty-five-year-old shingle and siding salesman who had promised to many her but who left town, or was relocated, a couple of weeks after she announced the results of the pregnancy test. For Marga, answering the Trib ad was a last resort. But the salon was sure to fire her when she started to show, and she needed some kind of income.
She passed two screening interviews and was introduced to Dr. Kyriakides, who explained that the treatment—to prevent low birthweight and “give the child a healthy start”—might involve some discomfort in connection with the intrauterine injections but would be perfectly safe for both mother and child. Moreover, the follow-up study would include a fully paid private educational program for the baby and ongoing medical care for both of them. In the meantime all expenses would be taken care of and housing would be arranged.
She agreed, of course. Was there a choice? The injections were uncomfortable but the delivery was easy, even allowing for the infant’s exaggerated cranial size. Mother and child were installed in a two-bedroom town house near the university district, and John’s schooling began almost immediately.
* * *
“How do you know all this?” Susan asked.
“I broke into Max’s office one night. Came in from the Woodwards’ house in the suburbs. I was twelve years old. He kept his files and his notes in a little vault behind his desk. I’d seen it there a few years before. I’d seen him open it.”
“After all that time? You remembered the combination?”
John nodded and continued.
* * *
Marga’s parents were Czechs who had come to America before the war. She hadn’t spoken to her mother or father for fifteen years; she didn’t know whether they were still alive. This baby was in effect her only family.
Marga understood soon enough that John was a special child. Even the name “John”—she hadn’t chosen it herself. It had been Dr. Kyriakides’ suggestion. The doctor was polite but firm and Marga acquiesced because she was afraid of offending him. He paid all the bills, after all. In a very real sense, he owned her.
She hardly saw the baby. She tried to be a responsible mother, at least at first. But there were research people always coming to take the child away. He slept in a crib in Marga’s room most nights; they had that time together. But the doctors must have been doing something to him, she thought—something she didn’t understand.
He was a strange child.
He began talking too soon—at only a few months! But more than that. She sensed it every time she picked him up … every time she put him to her breast. There was a discomfort she once described to Dr. Kyriakides as something like the sound of a piano string gone off tune. (“Dissonance,” Kyriakides supplied.) And the baby’s eyes were too observant.
It wasn’t like touching a baby, she said. It was like touching … a dwarf.
After that confession, she saw even less of John. Marga pretended that this made her unhappy, but really it didn’t. … It was nice, having some time to herself for a change.
* * *
“I remember Max more clearly than I remember Marga. Marga is just a face. Small eyes. Big body, big shapeless dresses. She wore a perfume that smelled like linden flowers. Overpowering!
“Max was different then. He had more hair. A heavy Joe Stalin moustache and rimless glasses. It was frightening. I trusted him, of course. He was the central force, the operating engine. It was obvious that everything revolved around him, everybody followed his orders.
“He taught me more than anyone else. I had plenty of professional tutors. But it was Max who would really talk to me. If I asked a question, he took it seriously. Child questions, you know: how high is the sky and what comes after it? But he understood that I didn’t want trivial answers. I wanted the true answers.
“And there was the way he looked at me.
“You have to understand how the others treated me. The other research staff, even Marga. I would sit at a little table and they would run a Stanford-Binet or a Thematic Aperception and after a while they would start to register their disbelief—or their fear, or their resentment. I was strange, anomalous, different. I was scary. I learned to recognize it—I thought of it as ‘The Look.’ After I was a year old, Marga would never touch me, never wanted to pick me up. And when she did: The Look.
“But Max was different. Max knew what I was. Took pride in me. That meant a lot.
“I decided he was my real father. That Marga was only some kind of hired nurse. Eventually, of course, they took me away from Marga altogether; and then Max was my father, or the nearest thing.
“I trusted him.
“That was a mistake.”
* * *
Susan said, “Why did they take you away from Marga?”
“She came home from the Safeway one morning and found me taking apart the radio. I was doing a pretty good job of it. I had it sorted by component size—quarter-watt resistors on the left, power supply on the right. Desoldered the parts with a needle from her sewing kit—I heated it over a candle. Burned myself a couple of times, but I was beginning to make sense of it.”
“Marga was angry?”
“Marga was frightened, I think, and angry, and she was wearing The Look—which is really a kind of horror. Changeling in the crib, worm in the cornmeal …”
“She punished you,” Susan guessed.
“She turned on the left-front burner on the Hotpoint and held my hand over it. Second-degree burns. I healed up pretty fast. But they took me away from her—or vice versa.”
* * *
It wasn’t all bad (John explained). There was more luxury than torture. He was pampered, really. And in some ways, it was an ordinary childhood. He had toys to play with. He remembered the extraordinary vividness of colors and sensations … the radiant blue luster of a crib toy, the pale intricate pastels of a sun-faded beachball; he remembered the letters etched on glass storefronts like black cuneiform (“chicken-tracks,” Max called them), pleasing but mysterious.
He remembered the day he learned to read—acquiring the phonetics and the approximations of written English, puzzling out a newspaper headline to himself. He remembered riding into town on some errand with Dr. Kyriakides, and his amazement that the angular marks on signs and windows had resolved suddenly into words—A P, USED BOOKS, WOOLWORTHS—this pleasure mixed with frustration because, having recognized the words, he could no longer see the lovely strange chicken-tracks. The marks had turned into words and words they stubbornly remained. The abstraction had displaced the concrete. Story of his life.
One by one, category by category, the objects of his perception faded into language. A tree became “tree”; “tree” became “a noun.” Categorical hierarchies exploded around him, somehow more organic than the organic things they named. For instance, the oak in front of Marga’s town house: even when he tried to focus exclusively on the texture of its bark or the color of its leaves, he triggered a network of associative ideas—gymnosperm and angiosperm, xylem and cambium, seed and fruit—that displaced the thing itself. He became afraid that his vision—that the world itself—might dissolve into a manic crystal-growth of pattern and symbol.
“It’s an inevitable process,” Max told him. “It’s good. Nothing is lost.”
John wondered whether this was true.
He began to understand the way in which he was different, though no one would really explain it and even Dr. Kyriakides dodged the subject. He learned how to slip into the research unit’s snail medical library when his keepers weren’t looking, usually during lunch hours or bathroom breaks. The neurological tomes that resided there were too advanced for him, but he could divine a little of their subject. The brain. The mind. Intelligence.
On his fifth birthday he asked Dr. Kyriakides, “Did you make me the way I am?”
After a hesitation and a frown, Max admitted it. “Yes.”
“Then you’re my father.”
“I suppose … in a way. But Marga wouldn’t understand, if you told her.”
“I won’t tell her, then,” John said.
It didn’t matter. He understood.
* * *
Outside this small room in Toronto, the snow continued to fall. Susan wondered whether Amelie could see the snow. Whether Amelie was cold—wherever she was.
The tape recorder popped up a cassette. Susan inserted a new one.
* * *
“I trusted Max until he farmed me out to the Woodwards,” John said. “Even then—at first—I gave him the benefit of the doubt.”
The explanation was plain enough. Max had explained meticulously. The research was funded by the government and now the funding had been revoked. The legality of it was questionable and people were afraid of the truth getting out. John would have to be careful about what he told the Woodwards. “Also, we won’t be able to see each other for a while. I hope you understand.”
John didn’t answer.
Max had checked the family out and they were decent enough people, an older couple, childless, referred through a contact in an adoption agency. “Obviously, they don’t know what you are. You may have to conceal your nature. Do you understand? You’ll have to become at least passably ‘normal’—for everyone’s sake.”
John listened politely, watching Max across the barrier of his polished oak desk in this indifferent room, his book-lined office. “You have to do what the government tells you,” he said to Max. John was five years old.
“Yes, I do. In this case.”
“But you’re a Communist,” John said.
Max rose slightly in his chair. “What do you mean? Who told you that?”
“Nobody told me. I watch you when people talk about politics. I watched you when Kennedy came on TV and talked about Castro. Your face. Your eyes.”
Max laughed. John was pleased: even at this terrible moment, the hour of his exile, he was able to make Max happy. “I should never mistake you for a child,” Max said. “But I always do. No, I’m not a Communist. I was at one time. During the war. I gave it up when I came to this country. My uncle died fighting for Veloukhiotis, and it was pointless—completely futile. Now we have the Generals. Is there any sense in that? I don’t believe in revolution any more.”
“But you believe in the rest of it,” John pressed. “Marxism. Leninism.”
He had read the entry under “Communism” in the Columbia Encyclopedia and these questions had been on his mind.
“Not even that,” Max said, more soberly. “I gave it all up.”
“You stopped believing in Marxism?”
“Do you really want to know?”
John nodded.
“I stopped believing in ‘the people.’ I’m an apostate from that central faith. Marx believed that mankind was perfectible through economics. But it’s a childish idea. People talk about Stalinism, but Stalinism is only fascism with a different accent, and fascism is simply the politics of the monkey cage. The failure is here”—he thumped his chest—“in the mechanism of the cells. In our ontogeny. If you want to perfect mankind, that’s where you begin.”
“But you still believe in the perfectibility of mankind.”
“Wouldn’t you rather talk about the Woodwards? Your future?”
“I want to know,” John said.
“Whether I believe in the perfectibility of mankind? I will tell you this: human beings are cowards and thieves and torturers. That I believe. And yes, I believe the species can be improved. Why not? The only alternative is despair.”
But there’s a contradiction here, John wanted to say. How could you want to improve a thing when you despised it so entirely to begin with? What could you build out of that contempt?—especially if the contempt encompasses your own being?
But he didn’t ask. Max was going on about the Woodwards, about school—“Don’t trust anyone,” he said. “Anyone might be your enemy.”
It was a sweeping statement. Including you? John wondered. Should I mistrust you, too? Is that what this is all about?
But it was not a question he could bring himself to ask. He was not a child, Max was right; but neither was he old enough to endure the possibility that he might be fundamentally alone in the world.
* * *
Life with the Woodwards, then, began as a deception, a concealment, not always successful. But at least he understood the rules of the game. For years John chose to believe that Max would eventually come and get him.
Even if they couldn’t be together, Max was still his truest father; Max cared about him.
He banked this belief in the most private recesses of his mind; he never allowed the flame to flicker. But Max did not come. And on his twelfth birthday, after a perfunctory celebration with the Woodwards, John began to admit to himself that Max might never come.
So he broke a promise. He went looking for Max.
It was spring, and he rode a bus into the city through thawing snow-patches and muddy lots. He had packed a bag lunch, solemnly. He ate it sitting on a transit bench outside Marga’s old house, a couple of blocks from the university. Did he want to see Marga? He wasn’t sure. But no one entered or left the house. The shutters were closed and the siding had been painted eggshell blue. Maybe Marga had moved away.
He stood and walked through the raw spring air to the research complex, to Max’s office there.
He opened the door and walked in. Max looked up, maybe expecting to see an undergraduate, frowning when he recognized John. Max was older than John remembered him, fashionably shaggier; he had grown his sideburns long.
His eyes widened and then narrowed. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
“Don’t be flippant. I could lose my tenure. People in this building have long memories.” He frowned at his watch. “Meet me in the parking lot. I have a car there—a black Ford.”
John left the building and waited twenty minutes in the pallid sunlight, shivering on the curb beside the automobile. Then Max came striding out and opened the passenger door for him. John climbed aboard. “I wanted to see you,” John said. “I wanted to talk.”
