Fritz shut one eye to target me with fire from the other, contempt under glass.
“You will take direction from an Academy Award–winning director?”
“What?”
“Drop quick. When you hit, don’t stop. Whatever’s down there can’t grab you if you run! If you see her, tell her to try to catch up. ’Stood?”
“ ’Stood!”
“Now die like a dog. Or …” he added, scowling, “live like a stoop who got the hell through.”
“Meet you at the ocean?”
“I won’t be there!”
“Oh yes you will!”
He lurched toward the basement door, and Henry.
“You want to follow that idiot?” he roared.
“No.”
“You afraid of the dark?”
“I am the dark!” said Henry.
They were gone.
Cursing Germanic curses, I climbed down into mists, fogs, and rains of night.
Chapter Forty
Quite Suddenly I was in Mexico, 1945. Rome, 1950.
Catacombs.
The thing about darkness is you can imagine, in one direction, wall-to-wall mummies torn from their graves because they couldn’t pay the funeral rent.
Or kindling by the thousand-bone-piles, polo heads of skulls to be hammered downfield.
Darkness.
And me caught between ways that led to eternal twilights in Mexico, eternity beneath the Vatican.
Darkness.
I stared at the ladder leading up to safety—Blind Henry and angry Fritz. But they were long gone toward the light and the crazies out front of Grauman’s.
I heard the surf pounding like a great heart, ten miles downstream in Venice. There, hell, was safety. But twenty thousand yards of dim concrete floor stood between me and the salty night wind.
I gasped air because …
A pale man shambled out of the dark.
I don’t mean he walked crazy-legs, but there was something about his whole frame, his knees and elbows, the way his head toppled or his hands flopped like shot birds. His stare froze me.
“I know you,” he cried.