“I hope I live that long.”
Her smile broadened, and her voice was soft with the affection of a friend. “You have a certain grace, you know.”
I shrugged and shifted my attention to the flame within the red glass lamp between us.
She said, “Let’s have no misunderstanding. I mean—a grace on which you can rely.”
If she thought that she had distracted me with the flower and that I had forgotten the question that she had dodged, she was wrong. I returned to it:
“If they don’t want to kill you right now but will want to kill you soon, and for the wrong reason—what is the right reason? I’m sorry. Excuse me. I mean, what is the better reason they might have for wanting you dead?”
“You will know when you will know,” she said.
“And when will I know?”
As she replied, I answered my question in sync with her: “All things in their time.”
Crazily, I did not believe that she was withholding information or was speaking in riddles either to deceive me or to entice me. She impressed me as being absolutely truthful.
Furthermore, I had the sense that everything she had said had carried more meaning than I had taken from it, and that eventually, when I looked back on our dinner, I would realize that on this night, in this hour, I should have known her for who she was.
With both hands, Annamaria picked up her mug of tea and sipped from it.
She looked no different in this flattering lamplight from the way that she had looked in the gray light of late afternoon, on the pier. Neither beautiful nor ugly, and yet not merely plain. Petite yet somehow powerful. She had a compelling presence for reasons that I could not define, a presence that was not as magnetic as it was humbling.
Suddenly my promise to keep her safe was a weight on my chest.
I raised one hand to the pendant that I now wore.
Lowering the mug of tea, she looked at the bell captured between my thumb and forefinger.
I said, “‘The bell invites me…it is a knell that summons me to Heaven or to Hell.’”
“Shakespeare,” she said. “But that’s not quite the quote. And a man like you doesn’t need to doubt his ultimate destination.”
Again I lowered my gaze to the oil lamp. Perhaps because my imagination is so rich, I saw the leaping flame fashion itself, for just a moment, into the image of a dragon rampant.
Together, without more talk, we quickly cleared the table, hastily put away the uneaten food, rinsed and stacked the dishes.
Annamaria retrieved a car coat from a closet and pulled it on as I employed a long-handled wick pincher to snuff the flame in the kitchen lamp, and also the one in the lamp by which we had eaten dinner.
She came to me with just a purse, and I said, “You may need more than that.”
“I don’t have much else,” she said, “some clothes, but suddenly I don’t think we have time.”
The same hunch had harried me into quickly cleaning off the dinner table.
“Put out the other lamps,” she said, withdrawing a flashlight from the purse. “Quickly.”
I extinguished the remaining three flames.
As she played the flashlight across the floor, toward the door, out of the silent night came the roar of an approaching vehicle, a truck by the sound of it.
At once, she hooded the beam to prevent it from brightening the windows.
Brakes barked in the night, and the previously racing engine only idled now—in the driveway in front of the garage above which we waited.
A truck door slammed. And then another.
FIFTEEN
“THIS WAY,” SHE SAID, AND WITH THE FLASHLIGHT still hooded, Annamaria led me to a door that I assumed must open on a closet.
Instead, a landing lay beyond, and narrow interior stairs went down to the garage.
Although sturdy, the stairhead door could be locked only from inside the apartment. If the hulk and his friends got into the apartment, we could not foil their pursuit.
Because Annamaria was pregnant and because I was afraid that, in a rush, she might trip and fall, I took the flashlight and urged her to hold fast to the railing and to follow me with caution.
Filtering the beam through fingers, holding the light behind me to illuminate her way more than mine, I descended into the garage less quickly than I would have liked.
I was relieved to see that the roll-up door featured no glass panels. Two windows, one in the north wall and one in the south, were small and set just below the ceiling.
Our light was not likely to be seen through those high dusty panes. Nevertheless, I continued to keep the lens half covered.
Two vehicles were parked in the garage: facing out, a Ford Explorer; facing in, an older Mercedes sedan.
As Annamaria reached the bottom of the stairs, she whispered, “There’s a way out, along the south wall.”
From above came the knock of knuckles on the door to her tiny apartment.
Through the smell of grease and oil and rubber, wary of putting a foot in a slippery spot on the floor, we moved past the SUV, past the sedan, and found the side exit.
Overhead, a second round of knocking sounded more insistent than the first. Definitely not just a pizza delivery.
With the thumb-turn knob, I disengaged the deadbolt. Because the door opened inward, it did not block my view in any direction when I leaned through to have a look outside.
The Victorian house stood to the north side of this building, out of sight. Here, a narrow walkway lay between the south wall of the garage and the high hedge that defined the property line.
If we stepped outside and went east, toward the front of the garage, we would find our visitors’ truck in the driveway. If we went west, toward the back of the structure, we would be at the foot of the stairs that led up to the landing, where someone had just been knocking.
Even in the dense fog, I did not want to place a bet on our chances of getting off the property without encountering trouble. Two doors had slammed, so two men were out there—at least two—and I did not think they would both have gone up the outer stairs, since they had not arrived with a large gift basket, wine, and flowers. One of them would remain behind to snare us if we escaped from the man now knocking upstairs.
Turning from the door, leaving it open, I scanned the shadowy ceiling and saw no fluorescent fixtures, only one bare incandescent bulb. Another light would be built in to the chain-drive mechanism that raised the large roll-up, but it would come on only when that door was up.
When I guided Annamaria toward the Mercedes sedan, she trusted me at once. She neither resisted nor asked what I intended.
The knocking had stopped. From above came a subtle crack of breaking glass, which the visitor could not entirely muffle.
As I took hold of the handle on the rear passenger-side door, I was suddenly afraid that the car would be locked. Our luck held, and the door opened.
Overhead, the footsteps were so heavy that I would not have been surprised if they had been accompanied by a giant’s voice chanting, “Fee, fi, fo, fum,” and promising to grind up our bones to make his bread.
The interior lights of the Mercedes were not bright. We had no choice but to risk them.
As I encouraged Annamaria into the backseat of the sedan, I saw in my mind’s eye the modest apartment above us. The intruder would see the stacked dishes in the sink: two mugs, two sets of flatware. Sooner than later, he would touch the long neck of one of the oil lamps.
The glass would not be merely warm, but hot. With a smile, he would snatch back his stung fingers, certain that we had fled only as he had arrived.
I glanced toward the south-wall door that I had left standing open to the walkway alongside the property-line hedge. Tendrils of fog crept across the threshold and probed around the jamb, like the fingers of a blind ghost, but no one had yet appeared in the doorway.
Annamaria slid across the backseat, and I climbed into the sedan after her. I pulled the door shut fir
mly without slamming it, though with more noise than I would have liked. The interior car lights winked out.
The Mercedes was at least twenty years old, maybe twenty-five, from the era when the Germans still made them big, boxy, and not in the least aerodynamic. We were able to slide down in that roomy space, heads below the windows.