The Distance Beacons (28 page)

The woman didn't seem to think this was such a great idea. Then she had one of her own. "Look," she said, her voice shaking. "I'll let you have sex with me if I can keep the bike."

She knew that this wasn't such a great idea either. If I wanted to rape her and still take her bike, I could do it. But she was desperate. Well, I was desperate too. This is a desperate world. Why couldn't I have run into a thug instead of her? "How about this," I suggested. "If you don't want me to find out where you live, I'll bring the bike to Art's Filthy Bookstore, over on School Street. You can pick it up there tomorrow."

I thought this was pretty reasonable, but the woman started crying instead of carrying on with the negotiations. The rain was coming down harder now, and her face looked as if it was going to dissolve in all the moisture. "Why does everything have to happen to
me
?" she sobbed. "I didn't ask to be born. Why is life so
hard
?"

I had no answers. And I had no time to listen to her life story, which she seemed about ready to tell me. All I had was a gun and a need. I gently disengaged her hand from the bike. She let it go and sat down in the middle of the street, wailing. "Art's Filthy Bookstore," I repeated. "Everything will be all right."

"Why me?" she asked the darkness. "Why always me?"

I got on the bike and pedaled away, and soon the woman's wailing became just part of the distant wind.

I went as fast as I could through the dark streets. On Essex Street I hit a pothole that sent me flying. What were a few more bruises at this point? On Columbus Avenue a couple of soldiers on patrol decided I looked suspicious, and I had to zigzag through a few side streets before they gave up the chase. But finally, wet and weary, I ended up where I wanted to be: on Huntington Avenue, facing one of those massive reminders of the grandeur of the past and the degeneracy of the present.

It was the Museum of Fine Arts. Here, I was certain, I would find Gwen and the president.

* * *

The Frenzy was irrational, to be sure, but not totally mindless. People made decisions about what to deface, what to destroy. And what they chose were generally the most precious things from the old days—not just the weapons and the computers and all the now-useless high-tech apparatus of the old civilization, but its books and paintings and beautiful buildings as well. These objects were as useful (or useless) as they had ever been, but the people in the Frenzy hated them just the same. They were reminders, I suppose, of an era that was now irrevocably over, of wealth and leisure and joy that we in the new era would never know—of a smug, self-satisfied world that could create this wretched new world we had to live in, out of ignorance or arrogance or simple, inexplicable evil.

The Museum of Fine Arts was therefore one of the main targets of the Frenzy. I don't know how much of its contents have been destroyed, but it was enough, I know, to destroy some people too.

I had a friend once named Martha Comstock. She was an old lady—well, perhaps not so old; I find it difficult often to tell what in a person's appearance is due to age and what is due to suffering. At any rate, she had been in high society in the old days, serving on committees and giving teas and generally leading a life that is scarcely comprehensible to us recent arrivals. After the War, her son disappeared and her husband died and she had to struggle like the rest of us. But she did all right. She managed to hold onto her home on Beacon Hill—not far from the residence we had commandeered in Louisburg Square—and she survived by selling her precious possessions to the likes of Bobby Gallagher.

She took an interest in Gwen and Stretch and Linc and me. We were the harbingers of a future that held promise of being somewhat better than the past decade or two. We in turn kept an eye on her, and tried to shield her from the harsher aspects of her new life. She was a tough woman, though, and didn't need much shielding—at least, not of the sort we could offer.

I brought her a bag of apples one September afternoon.

I found her staring out the window with that glazed-eyed look I recognized as that of an old-timer remembering the old times. This wasn't like Martha; she never mentioned her family or her friends or her lost pleasures. So I was worried. "Martha?" I said. "What's the matter?"

She turned away from the window and stared at me. "The past is gone," she said in her patrician accent.

"Uh-huh," I replied. This was not news.

"I went to the Museum of Fine Arts today," she continued.

Her tone was neutral, as if mentioning a trip to the corner store.

"You did what?" People did not go to the museum, for a reason I will soon get to.

She waved her hand, dismissing the unspoken reason. "I kept myself from going all these years," she said. "It just seemed too hard. But today I woke up and I saw the leaves turning brown, and I started wondering how much time I had left, and I decided I had better do it before it's too late." She looked away. "I should not have gone," she whispered.

"Why, Martha?"

She got up from her chair and went into the next room. She returned a moment later with a painting.

A painting of a cathedral, shimmering in blue against a blue sky, and fading to darkness at the bottom.

Done in little dabs of color, so that the cathedral seemed real and yet not real, so that it seemed as if you were seeing cathedrals—seeing the sky—in a whole new way.

"Monet," Martha said. "My parents used to take me to the museum as a child, and this was my favorite painting. I don't know why, exactly. Perhaps because the world just seemed so beautiful when seen through Monet's eyes. I wanted to look at the world that way myself, but I suppose I lacked the imagination, so Monet had to do it for me. I never grew out of my love for this painting. You would think—well, I became a grownup, a mother, too old for such feelings. But they didn't change. They have never changed. Even the War... the War simply made Monet more important than ever, because it made the beauty so much harder for us to see. And now..."

Her voice trailed off as she stared at the masterpiece.

It was a painting of a cathedral, shimmering in blue against a blue sky, and fading to darkness at the bottom.

Ripped almost in half, and across it was scrawled in black ink: "Fuck Art." The ink dribbled down from the words and over the cathedral, like poison dropping from the sky.

I had never seen Martha cry. But she was crying now. "And we did it to ourselves," she sobbed. "We did it to ourselves."

I tried to think of something comforting. "You know," I said, "working for Bobby, I've noticed that a lot of art has been saved. He's always coming across people with impressive paintings and sculptures and what-not for sale."

Martha shrugged as she tried to compose herself. "But what's gone is gone forever," she pointed out. "The books that you read—there may always be another copy somewhere, if yours is destroyed. Not my Monet."

I didn't have much of an argument to counter that. I just had the one all-purpose cliché everyone used to lift each other's spirits. "At least you're still alive," I offered. "Life is worth something, isn't it?"

Martha shrugged again.

She died that winter.

So. Another cheery story from my vast repertoire. The obvious point is that the Museum of Fine Arts no longer contained much in the way of fine art—at least so far as anyone knew. And this brings up the less obvious point—and the one that was especially relevant to my case. Martha is the only person I know who has been in the museum since the Frenzy.

The reason is not very reasonable, but these are not particularly reasonable times. Among the treasures of the museum had been a few mummies. In a world that has been filled with corpses, it is somehow strange to think that these particular corpses were once considered to be worth displaying (like the future
oculis privatus
) for public edification; such were the inscrutable ways of people in the old days. At any rate, the mummies had also been destroyed during the Frenzy. And that, you see, had caused the Mummy's Curse to fall on the museum.

I have never heard a precise explanation of just what the Mummy's Curse entails. But certainly people believe that the ghosts of the destroyed mummies haunt the museum (looking, presumably, for those who disturbed their peace), and that anyone who dares enter the museum had better not expect to come out. Even people who don't believe this (or profess not to believe it) stay away from the museum as well, out of cultural solidarity, perhaps, or simple prudence. Oh, I suppose some Northeastern students from across Huntington Avenue sneak in as a rite of passage—but maybe not. I imagine they could find easier ways to prove their courage than risking the wrath of these dead Egyptians. I certainly had never ventured into the place. And that's why I had been so surprised at Martha's trip there.

And that's why the museum was the perfect place to hold a kidnapped president and a nosy reporter.

* * *

The museum was completely dark. But the place was huge, and there was no telling from the outside what was going on in its bowels. I pedaled up the circular drive and dismounted by the large statue out front. The statue was of an Indian on horseback, looking up at the sky with his hands outstretched. He seemed to be saying, "Why me? Why always me?" like the poor girl whose bike I had stolen. I left the bike there and walked toward the building. Was I scared? Oh, maybe a little. Did I think about the curse? Oh, maybe once or twice. Actually, I was looking forward to meeting a bunch of cold-blooded thugs inside, because if they had survived a couple of days in the museum then there would be less of a chance I would run into any of those dead Egyptians.

Who would those thugs be? Bolton's people? Members of the Church of the New Beginning? Henry Fisher and some angry friends? More likely, it was someone I had never heard of, and all my efforts to figure out the case had brought me nowhere near its solution.

I walked slowly up the long steps to the carved wooden doors. I tried the handle. It wouldn't budge. I groped along the front of the building, looking for a window. A flashlight sure would have been nice. Finally I found a window with its bars bent back and the glass broken, and I squeezed my way inside.

I brought my right foot slowly down onto the floor, and then my left. My left foot landed on something round—a vase?—which promptly rolled away. I lost my balance and fell on my wounded arm. The noise echoed through the building. I stifled a groan and waited. I didn't hear anything else. I was sweating. The room had the familiar abandoned-building smell of dampness and rot. The darkness was deeper here than it had been outside.

I closed my eyes and rested for a moment as the pain in my arm subsided. It seemed as if I had been spending a lot of time in the dark lately. I thought of the darkness on the way to the Church of the New Beginning, rural and frightening, like my childhood; and the darkness outside Bolton's mansion—the lonely darkness of the cruel city; and finally the subterranean darkness of my journey underground—the darkness that always lurked beneath the surface of our lives, no matter how sunny the world appeared to us dwellers in the light.
Your gonna die too.

So what kind had I come upon now?

This is real life,
Gwen had told me. And Gwen, as always, was right. What I had here was simply one more obstacle to be overcome, something that stood between me and Gwen—and Gwen was all that mattered. I opened my eyes and got to my feet. Time to press on.

But where? It took me several minutes just to grope my way out of the room I was in. And then what? I picked a direction at random and set out. Every step was an adventure, every movement was dangerous. I began to feel the way I had in the subway. If I didn't find some thugs or some mummies, I was going to be stuck wandering in the dark here forever. Or at least until dawn. And dawn, I realized, would be too late.

I wondered if the mummies felt this way.

My arm throbbed. My stomach started to growl.

And then I saw a light. At first I thought it was a match appearing out of the darkness right in front of me, and I tensed for battle. Then I realized that I had lost all my perspective, and the light was really some distance away down a long corridor.

Thank God.
I moved my hands carefully along the wall till I found a room off the corridor, and I slipped into it. I waited there as the light approached.

Now, I thought, it will begin.

Chapter 19