Innocence

  “I know you didn’t, Simon. Half an hour. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She terminated the call. “Telford and his kind pass for human but they’re animals.”

  “They’re not animals,” I said. “Animals kill only what they need to feed themselves. Animals suffer but they cast no blame for their suffering, and they never envy. Who is Simon?”

  “A man who almost lost his soul but found it again. Come on.”

  47

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW REAL DOGS, NOT JUST PICTURES of them, I was eight years old and recently banished by my mother from our house.

  Between the church where I was almost beaten and the truck stop where I stowed away aboard a flatbed, I passed through woods alive with whip-poor-wills and tree frogs, crossed wild meadows where flocks of yellow butterflies swarmed up like fallen petals of the sun to which they sought return, before I came upon kept land encircled by a half-collapsed split-rail fence, a pasture where no livestock grazed.

  Towering masses of clouds hung low and irregularly across the sky, the electric-blue of late afternoon visible between them. The westering sun flamed across the upper slopes of the cloud mountains, which were kettle-gray underneath, but golden at their summits. The waning day lay between storm and serenity, in an hour of indecision when any scenario might play out.

  I vaulted the rail fence and began to hike the field. I had covered perhaps a quarter of it when two dogs came bounding through the grass from my left. One was a German shepherd, the other a mix of shepherd and perhaps a hound of some kind.

  Because dogs were the most domesticated species on the planet, I assumed that they wouldn’t be as peaceable as the wild animals of the woods in which I had grown up. Bonded as dogs were to people, surely they shared the prejudices of them. I expected to be attacked and left to bleed to death as they circled and snarled their hatred.

  I raced through the grass, though not at a pace that defeated dogs. When they caught up with me, they didn’t lunge, but instead paralleled me, one on each side, grinning foolishly, tails wagging.

  I stopped running, concerned that my fear might be conveyed to them, but I kept moving at a walk. They loped ahead of me, gamboling together, play-biting, tumbling, springing to their feet once more. I feared them still, but it was a delight to watch them frolic.

  When I was halfway across the field, they returned, panting, and sniffing. They smelled the church-picnic ham in my backpack. I had eaten two slices for breakfast, but one remained in a side compartment of the pack, wrapped in aluminum foil.

  I thought perhaps dogs might after all be as amenable as the animals of the woods. Those creatures had been more of a family than my troubled mother. Without taking off the backpack, I reached the zipper of the side compartment in which I’d stowed the ham. I unwrapped it, tore it into pieces, and fed it to the dogs.

  They had perfect manners, each waiting patiently as I gave the other a chunk of ham, back and forth, until the meat was gone. They didn’t snap the morsels from my fingers, but took them with soft mouths. When I said, “No more,” they didn’t insist on further treats.

  Just then a voice called out, “They won’t bite. They’re good old boys.”

  Fifty or sixty yards away, a man wearing a shooter’s jacket with satchel pockets ambled toward me, carrying a shotgun across the crook of his left arm. In spite of the weapon, he seemed unthreatening, but that would change when he drew closer and saw my face under the hood.

  I pulled my scarf up to my eyes and sprinted, expecting a warning shot or a command to the dogs that would set them upon me. Neither came. I leaped the collapsed fence and fled into more woods.

  The dogs accompanied me in a spirit of adventure. I shooed them away, but they would not go. They weren’t seeking more food, and by their demeanor I thought I understood. I dropped to one knee and with my gloved hands rubbed behind their ears and scratched beneath their chins. I told them that they must go at once, before their master thought I might steal them. Just then, he called out, much closer than before. Upon my further insistence, the dogs turned away and retreated to the pasture, though they went with their tails between their legs, looking back repeatedly, as if chastened by my dismissal.

  Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first—and lost—home. By the example of their joy and humility, by wanting nothing more than food and play and love, by the deep satisfaction that they take from those humble things, they belie all creeds of power and fame. Although they have the teeth to tear, it is by swish of tail and yearning eyes that they most easily get what they want.

  And as it happened, in a critical hour, dogs did prove to be all that I imagined and more.

  48

  THE CITY STEADILY SUCCUMBED TO THE BLIZZARD, but Gwyneth did not. The chain-wrapped winter tires churned through soft powder and spat it out in compacted wads. Snow fell at nearly two inches an hour, and already more than half a foot mantled the ground, but she still thought this was a perfect night for speed, pressing the Land Rover faster, faster, making it slalom around a few stalled vehicles that busy tow trucks had not yet snared, taking corners as if the danger of tipping and rolling were obviated by some ruling she had won in court against the laws of physics.

  Even as young as I was, I remembered a time when the plows were quick into the streets and the cleanup began even as the storm was still rising toward its peak. These days, judging by the delay in response, you might have thought the city relied, as in an earlier century, on brigades of shovelers who needed time to bundle against the cold and fortify themselves with spirits before reporting, and on wagon sleds and dray horses to haul away the accumulation.

  Simon, to whose rescue we were riding, turned out to be the homeless man who, in search of redeemable soda cans to cash in for whiskey money, found the badly beaten, naked little girl in the Dumpster. Decades before that discovery, he had been a young artist whose career was taking off. But something about success scared him so much that, with alcohol as his copilot and a tendency to burn business relationships as if they were slips of a magician’s flash paper, he managed to stall out and crash so spectacularly that in one year he went from sleeping in a penthouse to passing his nights in a bedroll under bridges.

  After his breakdown in the doughnut shop, where he brought the battered child, and after he was released from the hospital, he gave up alcohol overnight, without the help of drugs or counseling, or a twelve-step program. Lifting a glass or a bottle of the old poison to his lips, he recoiled from the stench of it, and when he tried to sip it, invariably he vomited. The smell and taste were as foul to him as the malodor in the Dumpster. Each time that he tried to drink, he was forced to confront the realization, which he’d made in the hospital, that it was not merely weak but also evil to throw away your life when so many had their lives or the promise of their future taken from them by cruel people or by the brutal forces of nature.

  He lived, sober and industrious, in an eccentric neighborhood, an enclave of picturesque 1920s-era bungalows on a loop of two-lane called John Ogilvie Way, in the southeast borough, near the river.

  During the first half of the nineteenth century, the city rang with more harmonies than discords, and everywhere there were things to please the eye. But during decades when the government turned to expert planners, much of the past was considered déclassé, if not abhorrent. Architecture that raised in the mind an appreciation of history was deemed embarrassing because much of that history was considered unfortunate, if not shameful. No place could be made for what was quaint or charming or noble. Anything that might be seen as the work of sentimental primitives was torn down and replaced by massive buildings seemingly inspired by Soviet apartment blocks and by forests of steel-and-glass office towers that blazed in daylight as if they were more glorious than the sun that shed it.

  The bungalows of John Ogilvie Way became popular with pa
inters, sculptors, and ceramics artists who lived in them and used them also as their personal galleries. The neighborhood survived long enough to become a tourist attraction, a cultural asset about which the city boasted. Because contemporary art is said to be about the future and progress, about abstraction and the impossibility of knowing truth, it is embraced not just by genuine aficionados but also by those who despise the past. So Ogilvie Way remained, encircled by structures that, in their bold expressions of brute power and command, looked as if they were from a parallel world in which Hitler triumphed.

  In appreciation of Simon having saved the nameless girl, Gwyneth had bought a house in this enclave so that he could live there rentfree and seek again to explore his talent. It was a spacious dwelling in spite of being a bungalow, with a deep front porch and elements of Craftsman style. Lights were on in all its windows. She drove a block past Simon’s house and parked on the farther side of the street.

  We got out of the Rover.

  “We can’t go directly to the front door,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Have to scout the place in case they found him. If something’s happened to Simon, I’ll never forgive myself. I said I’d be here in half an hour, and I wasn’t.”

  Consulting my Rolex, I said, “Thirty-five minutes is pretty close. Five minutes can’t have made a difference.”

  “Something tells me that it did.”

  Even past eleven o’clock at night, lights shone in the windows of nearly all the bungalows. I supposed that artists, who didn’t have to live by the hours of a standard business day, might be most creative when the rest of the world began to grow quiet, that with their talent might come circadian rhythms different from those of us who lacked their particular gifts.

  The street reminded me of one of those winter paintings by Thomas Kinkade, charming houses and cobbled walkways and evergreens draped with snow as glamorous as bejeweled ermine, the whole infused with warm light expressed in unexpected but convincing ways. The scene was steeped in magic, but magic has two forms—light and dark.

  From a pocket of her coat, Gwyneth withdrew a small can of Mace and handed it to me. From another pocket, she took her close-contact Taser.

  We crossed the street and passed through the narrow side yard of the dark bungalow next door to Simon’s, into that backyard. A stately monastic evergreen of some kind rose to sixty feet, providing us with a shadowed and sheltered observation point under the hood and habit of its snow-laden boughs.

  Simon’s house lay quiet in the white downpour, plucked by this weaker and fitful wind but unmoved, so snug that it seemed to welcome drifts that might bury it and insulate it further from the world. No shadows moved beyond the lighted windows.

  The only strangeness was a pale fan of light that repeatedly arced wide and then contracted across the back porch, irregular in its timing, not accompanied by any sound. When we moved out from the tree, toward the low garden wall that separated the properties, we saw that the light came from the house and that it was measured out by an open door, which again and again eased almost shut only to be blown open each time by the changeable wind.

  “Not good,” Gwyneth said.

  We crossed the garden wall, the yard, and ascended the steps with a wary urgency. On the porch, we heard a voice inside, but it was that of an announcer backed by music and must have come from a television.

  With her usual daring, Gwyneth crossed the threshold. Although the only two residences I had ever entered in the city were both hers, and although this bungalow felt like a trap, I followed her without hesitation.

  “Close the door,” she whispered.

  I wondered if that would prove wise, but I closed it quietly.

  We were in an open space, with a small kitchen to the left and to the right a larger area that might have been intended as a family room. Simon evidently lived largely in this back section of the bungalow, for it was furnished with a bed, two armchairs with small tables, an old chifforobe, and a wall-mounted TV currently tuned to a news program. These quarters were nearly as modest as my three rooms, but I supposed that to a man who had lived on the streets and who had slept under bridges for thirty years, the accommodations seemed palatial.

  On the TV, an enormous cruise ship lay at anchor near the mouth of a harbor, and the newsreader said something about the authorities denying the captain the right to dock.

  Far beneath the city, under countless tons of concrete and steel, radio waves or microwaves could not be received. During my adventures aboveground, every time I had a glimpse of television, it intrigued me. I always reminded myself, however, that Father said we were better off without TV, that it was an instrument of change that could make us into people we would not like to be.

  My mother had no television in her remote house, and yet she had become less than she wanted to be. Perhaps she watched a lot of TV as a child in her parents’ home and everywhere else that she lived before she had gone to the mountain house. There was so much that I didn’t know, that I might never know, and many things that I didn’t understand about the psychology of those people who lived their lives openly aboveground.

  Anyway, Simon’s quarters were essentially a studio apartment, which he kept spotless. No grime. No dust. As a consequence, the broken vase and the smear of blood on the blond-wood floor were the visual equivalent of a shout.

  49

  SHE WAS A GIRL WHO OPENED DOORS, NOT BECAUSE she wanted to open them, but because she knew that she needed to open them.

  The chocolate-brown paneled door between Simon’s living quarters and the other rooms of the bungalow seemed like a monolith to me, a formidable slab beyond which lay something to be feared, either past or future violence. If the choice had been mine, I might have left right then; but the decision was Gwyneth’s.

  The door opened to a short hallway. To the left were a bath and a room used for storage, both doors open and lights softly aglow. To the right lay the studio in which Simon created his works. No one, dead or alive, waited for us in those spaces.

  At the end of the hall, we entered a gallery that had once been two rooms. Fixed to the rafters of the open-beam ceiling, pin spots brightened walls that were enriched by oil paintings that astonished and amazed, appealing equally to emotion and intellect. He excelled at figurative painting, both portraits of single individuals shown from head to foot and groups of people engaged in communal activities in a variety of exquisitely detailed and rendered locations.

  Gwyneth said, “They’ve taken him.”

  “Where?”

  “Not to Telford’s apartment, not anywhere they would be seen with him. They think they can carve out of him the address of my ninth apartment.”

  “You said he doesn’t know where it is.”

  “He doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t even know it exists.”

  “What can he tell them?”

  “Nothing. And even if he knew, he wouldn’t tell them. Clearly, he didn’t tell them I was coming here to take him someplace safe, or they would just have waited for us.”

  “What will happen to him?” I asked.

  For a moment forgetting the terms of our relationship, she looked at me, and an instant before our eyes met, I bowed my head, not willing to trust that my ski mask would be sufficient to ensure against her sudden and vehement rejection.

  She switched off the pin spots, leaving the gallery faintly illuminated by the inspill of hallway light, and she went to a window to stare out at the snowy night.

  Although I didn’t know Simon except through Gwyneth and through his stunning paintings on the surrounding walls, I felt we must do something. I repeated my question: “What will happen to him?”

  “They’ll torture him, Addison. And when he gives them nothing, they’ll have to kill him.”

  “All just to get to you?”

  “I told you, Telford has stolen millions. And there are many millions more to steal from the warehoused collections of the museum and the library, items that won
’t be missed for years, especially considering that Telford controls the inventory logs. And he alone decides what paintings, sculptures, rare books, and illuminated manuscripts will be taken out of storage to be featured in special shows. So he won’t be caught easily, as he might be if someone else had that power.”

  I didn’t know what to say or do. I was a creature from the deep dark, an outsider who had known but one friend, Father, in the past eighteen years, and no friend at all since he died. I had thought that, with Gwyneth, in spite of her social phobia, I was learning how people were with one another, how they acted and reacted and interacted, what they said and how they said it, what they wanted, what they hoped for—more than I could learn from books alone. I thought that I might eventually discover, through her, how people arrived, if they ever did, at an understanding of the why of their lives, because the why of mine weighed heavily on me and seemed unanswerable. But if I had learned anything in the past twenty-four hours, it wasn’t knowledge that I yet understood how to use. I didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t know. I just didn’t.

  I couldn’t hear her crying. She stood there as quiet as the snow falling in the light of the streetlamps, yet I was certain that she wept. Tears had no scent, as far as I knew, but my five senses were not the instruments by which I became aware of her grief, nor was it merely intuition, but instead a perception more profound, one that I couldn’t name.

  If I had been allowed to touch this sweet girl, I would have put my arms around her. In her current mood, however, with her emotions raw, she might not just recoil from a touch, but might instead fling herself away from it as if she’d taken an electric shock. And then my violation of the rules surely would have opened a gulf between us that could not be bridged.

  She turned from the windows, crossed the gallery. “Come on.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”