The Facades: A Novel (3 page)

I
DID GET THAT CALL FROM
D
ETECTIVE
M
C
C
READY AT
T
RUDE’S
tenth precinct station, to my surprise. It came three months after Molly’s disappearance, almost to the day. He called me
at work. The law office of my employer, William S. Boggs, was located in a strip mall off I-99 “in the glow of Rip’s Sporting
Goods,” as the commercials put it. It had been a slow afternoon in personal injury. Our only remaining client of the day was
an eye-patched man wearing two sweatshirts despite the summer heat. He squinted through his good eye at one of the gentlemen’s
magazines Boggs subscribed to. I’d seen women glance uncomfortably in their direction and didn’t really consider them good
lobby fare, but that was one of many battles I’d lost long ago.

“Good afternoon,” I answered. “Office of Boggs, tell us where it hurts.”

The detective informed me that there had been a development in my wife’s case. The force had acquired a document whose significance
was not yet clear, but they were pretty sure—
near certain
,
he stressed—that it pertained to Molly’s disappearance. I goaded him for more information, but he insisted that I read it
for myself. Could I come down to the station right away?

I knocked on the door of Boggs’s lair. A crisp file was spread out on his formidable mahogany desk. He stood at the large
industrial paper shredder against the back wall, feeding documents into its maw. As he did this, he gazed out at the row of
parked cars behind the strip mall. He gestured me in with a barely perceptible flick of his pointer finger. My employer, a
minor celebrity in Trude on account of his late-night cable TV ads, was a man of great physical beauty. He was tall, broad-shouldered,
and wore exquisitely tailored pinstripe suits that accentuated his dignified salt-and-pepper hair. His chin was firm, his
hands soft and sinuous. These hands, with their subtle, liquid acquisitiveness, must have played a part in his astonishing
success with women. (A note on Boggs’s hands: I had tracked down several Shaker chairs and Edwardian sideboards to placate
Boggs’s antique-collecting wife, Sheila, after she’d discovered one of his affairs. At one point, Sheila invited me to the
Boggsian home for dinner. As Boggs led me on a “house tour,” he caressed these objects as if reliving the affairs they represented.)

He turned to me, rubbing his hands together softly. I explained the phone call and asked if I could have the rest of the afternoon
off.

“By all means,” he said, sliding into his chair and swiveling up to the desk. “If you think that is a good idea.”

“A good idea?” I asked.

Boggs smiled thinly. I was close enough to the man to know that he never uttered a careless word. In court, he often couched
his most devastating points within seemingly irrelevant
digressions. “Bewilderment is a precious commodity, Norberg,” he said. He caught me in his gaze. His eyes were his most deceptive
gift. The film guys had recognized this, shooting the ads in claustrophobic close-up. Boggs’s eyes, which according to the
cliché ought to have been windows on a shuddering, black void, were instead two orbs of enigmatic hazel. Eyes of a minor deity
who looked upon human events with interest and compassion and longed to intervene.
You deserve justice, justice, justice
, they cried.

“With all due respect,” I said, “I think that is somewhat facile, sir.”

“Of course it is,” he replied. “I just wanted you to stop and think. To consider the perfect ignorance in which you find yourself.
But by all means, go, pursue this. The collation can wait until morning.”

I mentioned the eye-patched man who had been waiting through Boggs’s hour-and-fifteen-minute lunch.

“Tell him to come back tomorrow,” said Boggs. “I’m not in the mood.”

I went. “Mr. Boggs is indisposed,” I told the client. He accepted this with a meek shrug and trailed me out of the office.
I got in my car and whistled westbound on I-99, the windows open to the languorous midsummer air. I had not been downtown
since my nights of painful and fruitless sleuthing. In sunlight, the buildings lost their malice and threat—I could see their
peeling paint, their rusting ironwork and dim palimpsests.
WACKER AND SONS: FOR A REAL SHINE, THE TIME IS RIGHT FOR SQUIBB’S COLA
. The aged high-rises comforted me in their half-wrecked, almost fleshly failings. I parked in a line of vacant meters across
from the tenth precinct station. The neighborhood
was quiet. Two men in bowler hats were making a suspect transaction in an alley, and a woman cried “Sparky, stop that!” at
a creature I could not locate.

Passing through the familiar double doors, I found cops playing chess, cops dozing beside whirring fans, cops reading thick
ex-library books—picked up on the cheap at one of the Central Library’s recent liquidation sales, I supposed. I asked for
McCready at the front desk. The receptionist’s book bag, crumpled next to her chair, was a different-colored version of the
one Molly had carried her sheet music in. She pointed to McCready’s open door before picking up where she’d left off in
Fear and Trembling
. Inside, McCready was at his desk, exhaling a ragged line of pipe smoke. His appearance had changed. He wore a neat brown
beard and horn-rimmed glasses. A tweed coat hung over the back of his chair, complementing the framed portrait of Wittgenstein.
The new look fit him so well that I found it difficult to remember what he’d looked like before.

“Mr. Norberg,” he said. “I apologize for the long delay. This has been a very vexing case for me. I spent a few days in the
hospital with a heart murmur, nothing serious. They tell me it was psychosomatic.”

“I see.” I nodded, coughing. The room was incredibly smoky.

“Have you met my colleague?”

A young man with slicked-back blond hair and racer shades rolled out from behind a file cabinet. He wore an unseasonal argyle
sweater vest and nodded behind a smoldering cigarillo.

“We call him ‘the Oracle’ around here,” said McCready. “Because he doesn’t talk much. But when he does, you can bet it will
be profound.”

The Oracle nodded sagely.

“Down to business, then,” said McCready. “I’d like to hear your reading of this document.” He handed me a manila folder with
two typewritten pages inside. The pages were grubby and coffee-stained. Commentary in at least two different illegible hands
lined the margins.

M
C
C
READY RELIT HIS
pipe. “Well?”

“I’m a little unclear on the significance of this,” I said.

McCready glanced at the Oracle, who nodded over his glinting shades.

“The code,” McCready said.

“Pardon?”

“The encoded name in the confession,” said McCready impatiently. He removed his horn rims and scrubbed them with the tail
of his shirt. “‘Many other little leaks, yes.’ ‘Many other long-legged youths.’”

“‘My organ,’” the Oracle quoted, “‘is large—’”

“Yes. Must we spell it out for you, Norberg?”

“Molly,” I said. I reread the underlined portions of the confession with a chill. For a long, superstitious moment, I was
convinced.

“This is clearly the work of a devious mind,” mused McCready. “This banal confession of tenniphilia, if you’ll permit the
coinage, may mask a subtext of true guilt. As we read and reread the confession, I thought, ‘I remember that sad little fellow
who used to come in here every night, looking for his wife.’”

“I have been reading your wife’s file very closely,” the Oracle said, pressing his fingers to his temple. “Her name is very
much on my mind.”

“As we discussed your wife,” McCready continued, dragging a wispy wraith of smoke around the room, almost as if he were dancing
with it, “my colleague recalled that he had seen her in a production of
Don Giovanni
, which Jimenez references in his confession.”

With McCready’s pipe and the Oracle’s cigarillo going full blaze, I decided to light a cigarette myself. Amid the thick smoke,
we were like three neophytes at a séance. I contemplated the text in my hands. “Aren’t we reading too much into this?” I asked.

McCready pulled on his pipe, nonplussed. The Oracle wheeled over.

“After all,” I said, “Jimenez is a man who draws a distinction between ‘females’ and ‘virgins.’ The so-called code could
be accidental—or it might mean something entirely different than you’ve supposed. As for the Mozart reference, that’s a mistake.
He clearly means to say ‘Don Juan’ there.”

The Oracle leaned back. “We find it profitable,” he said, “to treat mistakes as buried intentions.”

“Where is Jimenez?” I asked. “Have you questioned him?”

The two detectives shared a pained look. McCready said, “You may have heard about the new mayor’s passion for budget cutting.
We’ve lost some of our best officers. Regrettably, Jimenez escaped. Do let us know if you run into him.”

“But how would I recognize him?”

There was a pause, the heavy silence of the Oracle in thought. “You would know him,” the Oracle said finally, “by his manner
of speaking.”

McCready stroked his beard. “Norberg may have a point,” he conceded. “Perhaps our methods have become too refined. Perhaps
we have misunderstood this confession of Jimenez.”

I turned to the Oracle. His hands lay like unsent letters in his lap. His preternatural calm unnerved me. “You saw my wife
in
Don Giovanni
?”

He took a patient pull on his cigarillo, savored its gradual burn. He was in no hurry to speak as McCready paced the room
and I tapped my foot nervously.

“Indeed. I was privileged to hear her famous performance in the tenor role of Don Ottavio.”

I was woozy with smoke. Molly had never told me about this feat. Though with her incredible range, I did not doubt her ability
to sing a male part. The words of Jimenez atomized, scattered characters trembling on the page before me.

“When was this?”

“The last performance of last season,” the Oracle said. “You mean, you didn’t know? You didn’t read the reviews? Martin Breeze
called it, I believe, the most impressive vocal feat—”

“No,” I interrupted. “I tried to avoid Molly’s reviews. ‘The sumptuous Molly Norberg.’ ‘The fetching Molly Norberg.’ They
always made me jealous.” I handed McCready the manila folder and rose from my chair. “Well, thanks for thinking of me,” I
said, halfway out of the room already. “Do keep her in mind.”

“Of course,” McCready said. “Though I think we should be thanking you, Norberg. You’ve shown us that we need to take a more
basic approach.”

“Like the fundamentalists,” the Oracle added. An ironic smile twisted his lips. “The word means what it says, and says what
it means.” McCready, flopping in his chair, looked disappointed with this tautology.

The dark beam of the Oracle’s stare remained on me. “I hope your quest ends well,” he said, exhaling a curl of smoke. “I hope
you are more successful than our friend Jimenez.” And he pushed the shades back over the bridge of his nose.

I
WANDERED OUT
into the muggy, landlocked heat of August. The sun was boiling and relentless; flies capsized in a sweet grave of warm soda
at my feet. I did not contemplate what the word “fundamentalist” might mean, coming from the mouth of an Oracle. It was hard
to even think about Molly. I thought of the Don in a tight frock chirping about his 1,002 conquests in Italy or whatever.
I passed the block of the Opera House. It was the architect Bernhard’s first major project in Trude, and he came to consider
it a conservative, gaudy failure. Yet those gargoyles
and chandeliers still drew crowds. Even now the cars were rolling in for the matinee. The people of Trude had a taste for
opera; my wife had done well here. I stopped at the corner where I’d turned so many times to trace her steps, then forced
myself to walk away.