The School of Night (6 page)

“Then why were you there?”

“Well, see, that's hard to explain.” She twirled her fork through a tangle of salad greens and blue cheese. “I guess I have a personal stake in Alonzo's subject.”

“You do?”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “The thing is, I've
seen
it. In person.”

“Seen what?”

And here the skin around her cheekbones began to pink.

“I've seen the School of Night,” she said.

“Like … in a picture?”

“Like in my head. Like a dream, except I'm not dreaming.”

“Does it happen a lot?”

“You have no idea, Henry.”

Shrugging, she picked up her fork and scooped up a little pile of blue cheese. The very sight of it made my stomach lurch.

“So how long has this been going on?” I asked. “The visions and all.”

“I don't know, almost a year? Maybe more.”

“Every
night
?”

“Once or twice a week. Although sometimes I'll get them three or four nights in a row.” She lowered her head a fraction, gave me a sheepish smile, and said, “I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging or anything, Henry, but the School of Night? It's my very own personal curse.”

Her eyes were dry and alert as she studied me.

“You're skeptical,” she said.

“Um … yeah. Well … yeah.”

“I would be, too.” She nodded to herself. “I would. The point is, whether you believe me or not, something happened to Alonzo. And now, whether we like it or not,
we're
bound up in it, too.”

She set her fork down and laced her hands together.

“Something
larger
is at work. You must have felt that, too, Henry. From the moment Alonzo died.”

But the only thing I was conscious of right now was the swirling within my own body, the epinephrine surge that was kicking my heart into second life and dilating my pupils.

With a long and labored breath, I shoved my plate away. “You know what, Clarissa? I
haven't
felt something larger at work. Apologies and whatever, but the time-travel visions? I think it's very clear—”

“I'm crazy.”

“And know what else? I'm
not
bound up with you, I'm not bound up with anyone. For which I have a—a certain amount of gratitude. Especially now. And okay, Alonzo? Something didn't
happen
to him, he
made
it happen. That's what suicides do. They're not—speaking in the passive voice, okay?”

And now she was pushing her own plate away. “The man I met in St. Augustine would never have killed himself,” she said. “Not in a million years.”

Lines of sweat had sprung up behind my ears. My eyes were rocking inside their sockets.

“You know I'm right, don't you, Henry?”

I stared at my watch—12:50. Lily might even now be waiting for me. “Very sorry,” I murmured, staggering to my feet.

“What's wrong?”

“I've got to go to Alonzo's place.”

And suddenly Clarissa was standing, too. Fronting me.

“I'm coming, too,” she said.

“Oh.” I put up a shaky hand. “You know what? It would be very boring for you.”

But she was already hailing our waiter. And when the check arrived, she plucked it free of its glossy leatherette container and said, in a jaunty voice:

“You don't mind if I treat, right?”

She gave me a sidelong glance as she added:

“You don't look like the sort of guy who'd mind.”

*   *   *

Alonzo's place had once been two apartments, but he had bribed the building management into tearing down the dividing wall and creating a master suite, penthousey in its aspirations. To the west lay the bedroom, with its armoire and canopied four-poster and acanthus-leaf scrolls. To the east was the kitchen, pristine with neglect. (The refrigerator, if memory served, contained only a bottle of champagne and a jar of mustard.)

And to the south? A balcony, almost as wide as the apartment. That's where I went now. Below me, in the early afternoon heat, slumbered a courtyard, with a gamely gurgling fountain and a playground, empty as usual, and a row of sycamores that seemed to stand at attention whenever the National Cathedral bells rang.

“Have you noticed it's freezing here?”

Clarissa was standing in the doorway, rubbing her bare white arms.

“Sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit,” I explained. “And fifty-two percent relative humidity. Optimal environment for book storage.”

“And for driving up electric bills. Power company must have loved ol' Alonzo.”

“Maybe not so much,” I said, remembering the stack of overdue Pepco notices on my apartment floor.

“You know, Henry, it might be helpful if you told me what we're looking for.”

“It's a paper.”

“A paper?”

“A document.”

“Old? New?”

“Old.”

“Well, in that case…”

No need for her to point. It was the elephant in Alonzo's apartment. His book vault. A climate-controlled concrete-and-steel bunker, roughly three hundred cubic feet, so massive it seemed to have crash-landed in Alonzo's living room.

“Do you know the combo?” Clarissa asked.

“Unless he changed it.”

I squared myself against the steel-plated door … but something kept snagging at the edge of my vision. A black faux-alligator handbag, resting on the floor under a marble-top end table. Instantly familiar, as was the BlackBerry Pearl smartphone inside.

Lily's.

The phone she took with her everywhere she went. The phone she'd once likened to a second womb. Taking custody of it now, I stared at the voice-mail icon on the screen. Three messages (one of them mine, presumably). And Lily not here to retrieve any of them.

A curious numbness stole into my fingertips as I tucked her phone into my pocket.

Don't overreact,
I told myself.
She's somewhere.

It wasn't like I needed her to open the vault for us. All I had to do was recall the date of George Chapman's death—a date I'd once known as well as my birthday—and then enter the numbers on the keypad.

But even this simple act was harder than it seemed. December, wasn't it?

Twelve
 …

And the date was … what the hell was the date?

Sixteen
 …

All I needed now was the year. But my hand wasn't able to punch the keys anymore, so I had to lay my other hand on top and press down.

One … six … three … four.

I thought at first I'd misremembered. But then, breaking into the midafternoon gloom, came a green light, followed by a high singing frequency.

“Wow,” said Clarissa.

The vault door gave off a dyspeptic rumble. Clarissa and I each grabbed the handle—a faint crackle as our hands brushed—and together we pulled.

A sound like lips pulling away from skin, a swirl of cool, heavy air, and with a long amorous sigh the door swung open and Lily Pentzler rolled out.

Unfurled
, like a Persian rug, she lay there, entirely still. Powder-blue throat and periwinkle lips. And the face—that staring face, with its swollen eyelids—the face had a shade all its own.

Alice
blue, I thought, with a strange jolt of triumph.

Desperately, I crammed down the laugh that was starting to bubble inside me. It was Clarissa who had the presence of mind to step
over
the dead woman's body—as though it really were a rug—and peer into the vault's interior and deliver the news.

“The books,” she said. “Alonzo's books are gone.”

7

I
HAD NEVER
met anyone named August until my first week at college, when I met
two
. I didn't meet any others until twenty-seven years later, that day in Alonzo's apartment. His name was August Acree—
Detective
August Acree—of the Violent Crimes Branch. A point guard's build, just melting into fat, and a dandyish mustache, whose promise of fun was undermined by ball-bearing eyes, severe, unpersuadable. Once or twice I caught him smiling. I'm not sure I saw him blink.

By now a forensic photographer was circling Lily's body, technicians from the Mobile Crime Lab were crawling in and out of Alonzo's vault, and two uniformed cops were standing outside the apartment door, looking vague and bored.

Outside, a phalanx of cop cars, a pair of local news crews, and a knot of worried widows: Alonzo's fellow tenants, wondering how bad things could happen in Northwest D.C., where residents were practically guaranteed a natural death.

Detective Acree knew different. No deference, no silver tongue. He treated the crime scene as if it were on the other side of the Anacostia. He stared down that vault as if it were a meth lab.

“It's got vents,” he said. “Blowers.”

“True,” I said.

“In working order?”

“As far as I know.”

He gave his tie a delicate twist. “Then there's no reason for that woman to suffocate. She should be alive right now.”

“Detective?” said Clarissa, taking a step forward. “If I may?”

A crease lined August Acree's brow as he squared himself toward her.

“Your name, ma'am?”

“Clarissa Dale. I think I could be of help here.”

“Ah.”

You can say
ah
in many different ways, but you can't make it sound much less encouraging than that.

“Best I can tell,” she said, “Mr. Wax's vault is built along the same lines as a bank vault. Which means it needs some way of suppressing fires. Your classic sprinkler system, that's not going to work because it's going to soak the books. Might as well just let them burn, right?”

The crease in the detective's forehead got deeper.

“Now most banks,” Clarissa said, “use a gas called halon. Pretty safe, not too toxic. But if you're not a regulated entity, you can get away with using carbon dioxide.”

“Carbon dioxide.”

“Now don't worry, Detective, I won't touch a thing. I'll just direct your attention to the vault's roof. Assume for a second that a fire's broken out. In that event, what happens is the carbon dioxide gets released from the ceiling, see? It floods the vault, it
squeezes
out the oxygen so the fire won't have anything to react with. Imagine a
hand
, okay? Pressing all the oxygen to the floor.”

“So…” Acree took a step toward the vault. “If someone's actually inside when this is happening…”

“They'd have a few minutes is all. And if they know how the system works, they're gonna keep
low
, because that's where all the oxygen is. If there's any left. Now when we found Miss Pentzler, she was all the way down to the ground.” Clarissa knelt in an attitude of prayer. “Her face was pressed against the door crack. My guess? She was fighting for air.”

The detective gave his tie another twist.

“So how'd the smoke alarm get triggered?”

The question was answered by one of his own techs, emerging from the vault with a plastic bag raised like a war trophy. Inside was a soggy cigarette butt, no more than an inch long. Far too small, you'd have thought, to merit all the scrutiny it now received.

“Was Miss Pentzler a smoker?” asked Detective Acree.

“Not that I ever saw,” I said. “She might have been.”

“Geez, you're not a smoker, but you bring a lit cigarette into a vault, then get yourself locked inside. I don't know. In my world, that's…” He made a whistling sound.

“Maybe it was someone else's cigarette,” I said.

“Then where's the someone else? If that cigarette was still burning, whoever it was couldn't have been far off. And forget the cigarette for a second. If Miss Pentzler knew what a fix she was in, why didn't she call someone? Building management, nine-one-one?”

With some regret, I drew Lily's BlackBerry from my pocket.

“We found it by the sofa,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level.

Detective Acree watched as the phone was sealed in a bag. Then he turned his eyes back to the vault.

“No air,” he said, half to himself. “No phone. No one to hear her scream.”

“No
books
,” added Clarissa.

Acree arched his eyebrows. “Sorry?”

“Detective, I don't mean to minimize Miss Pentzler's death, but there's another pretty serious crime that's taken place here. Mr. Wax's whole collection has gone missing.”

“That so?”

In unison, Clarissa and Acree swiveled toward me. Awaiting confirmation.

“I'm afraid she's right, Detective. Alonzo had one of the most esteemed collections of Elizabethiana in the world. Shakespearean quartos and folios. First editions of Tudor poets. One of Queen Elizabeth's Bibles. We're talking a value of—I'd say three or four or five million dollars, and that's conservative.”

“He wouldn't have sold it off?” asked Acree.

“Maybe a title or two, he's done that before. But not the whole inventory, he just wouldn't have.”

“Why not?”

“The collection was his life.”

Except Alonzo took his life, didn't he? After first taking the precaution of wiping out his computer's hard drive. With great care and deliberateness, he'd gone about erasing himself from this earth, and he'd done an uncommonly thorough job.

*   *   *

By five o'clock, the last forensic obeisances had been paid, and Lily Pentzler was ready for her plastic shroud. And when they lifted that plump, short-waisted figure onto the gurney, I felt something inside me go slack. Grief, I suddenly realized. Lily Pentzler had consecrated her life to one man, and this was how she'd been rewarded.