His eyes narrow and she wonders if he’s got a pad of paper tucked away somewhere to communicate.
“Could you tell him I’m here?” she says.
He shakes his head no.
They stare at each other. She hadn’t counted on this.
“Okay,” she says, “I don’t want you to take this wrong, you know, I want to be clear here. You can’t tell him, meaning you’re physically incapable, which I’m aware of? Or you just won’t tell him, as in you don’t want to or you’ve got instructions not to or something like this?”
He waits until she’s finished and simply shakes his head no again.
“Mr. Cortez would want to see me,” she says, lowering her voice. “It would be in his best interest to see me.”
Now he just folds his arms across his chest.
“I don’t want to tell you your job, but I think the thing to do here would be simply to check in upstairs. I’ll wait right here. I won’t budge.”
It’s a standoff. He makes no movement at all. They just continue to look at each other.
“You’re limiting my options,” she says. “You understand that?”
He nods.
“So I’m only left with one avenue here.”
He raises his eyebrows slightly.
“I’m going to have to shoot you in the fucking head.”
He gives a big smile, but she sees his shoulders shift under his jacket and she knows it would be close as to who got to who first.
Then a voice from nowhere: “That’s enough, Jimmy. Show her the elevator.”
It’s Cortez. And he’s been watching and listening to the whole scene. She should have realized that. Cameras and microphones. Probably in every wall.
Wyatt pivots backward and extends a hand forward like the perfect bellman. She waves him off and says, “I can find my way up, thanks.”
She moves past him up the three small stairs to the main lobby and turns left to find a wall of three old-time elevators with the traditional arrow pointers mounted above each door to indicate which level the car is at. The door is already opened on the middle elevator and she steps into the gilded cage and looks to press for the top floor, but there are no buttons. Then it dawns on her that this is the express car, the private car for use by Cortez only. Straight to the top, no stops.
The car bucks slightly, then starts to rise and Cortez’s voice fills the air.
“What a delightful surprise.”
She feels uncomfortable not being able to project her words in a particular direction, but she doesn’t want to make Cortez aware of this.
“In the neighborhood. You know how it is.”
“Actually, no. I don’t get out too often.”
“Is that by choice?”
“Actually, that would be hard to say.”
“You’ve done wonders with this old building.”
“It was a crime. The way I found it. Left to decay.”
“Some things need constant attention. Continual upkeep, you know?”
There’s no response. The elevator comes to a stop with a jerk and the doors slide open. She steps out into a small foyer. The doors immediately close behind her, but she doesn’t hear the car move. She stands still for a minute and takes in the surroundings. It feels about ten or twenty degrees warmer than in the lobby, and yet it’s not uncomfortable. The ceiling hangs a good twelve or more feet high. It’s antique — scrolled tin plating covered with a glossy enamel. The walls are natural mahogany, divided every three or four feet into carved panels. The floor is a burnt-rust-colored tile covered by a large, oval, oriental rug. She stares down at the rug, it draws her attention. It’s filled with an intricate pattern, a confusing weave that works like an Escher print — it shows a pattern of books that, when viewed from a different perspective, become fat-bodied geese in flight.
“Come, please.” Cortez’s voice sounds from nowhere. “Join me in the library.”
The foyer opens into a large hall. Midway down, there are two sets of double doors facing each other. She faces one set, reaches out, and tries to turn the gold lever-handles. They’re locked. She turns around to face the second set and they open for her, revealing an enormous room.
“This way,” he says, and this time she can tell the sound of his voice is coming directly from his mouth, not a hidden speaker system. She enters the library. It’s an enormous room, probably consists of more square footage than the entire green duplex, her place and Ike’s combined. All four walls are made of built-in bookshelves, floor to ceiling. All of the shelves are empty and covered with dust.
The rest of the room is almost empty. The floor is covered by two gigantic braided rugs. There are no windows. There is one break in the shelving to allow for a small fireplace and mantel. The remains of a fire are smoldering on the andirons. There’s a single, low-to-the-ground, overstuffed rocking chair, covered in a faded, soft-grey material. The chair sits facing and to the left of the fireplace. It looks a bit out of place in the room, like it came from a garage sale or had been passed down through several generations.
The only other piece of furniture is something big and bulky that’s been covered by a plain white bed sheet. It’s pushed up against a wall to the left of the rocker. Hung on the wall above the mantel is a large, iron-looking crucifix, a grotesque-style Christ figure, bent and broken, iron droplets and running lines of blood covering the body. Below the crucifix, resting on the mantel itself, are small wooden boxes standing upright to reveal their contents — a mishmash of pebbles, shells, watch faces, string, eggs, shards of a broken mirror, a doorknob. Lenore has an urge to walk over to them and study them more closely.
“My own feeble attempts,” Cortez says. “An old hobby of mine.”
He’s standing at the top of a wrought-iron platform that rises from a tiny spiral staircase mounted in the very center of the room. Lenore approaches the miniature stairway and looks up. There’s an open skylight cut into the ceiling of the building. Cortez is peering into a telescope that juts out of the skylight. He’s being pathetically careless, Lenore thinks. Could he actually trust me?
“Come up, please,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
She looks around the room, then climbs the seven stairs and joins him on the circular platform. He brings his head up from the telescope and stares, then, slowly, smiles at her. “Which one of us can resist saying it?” he asks.
“Excuse me,” she says.
He tilts his head back slightly, puts a theatrical and self-mocking hand on his chest, and says, “We meet at last.”
“Had to happen sooner or later,” she says.
Up close, he’s a little more breathtaking than Lenore was prepared for. He’s tall, probably about six five or so, with large eyes that contain blue and grey and green and dominate the face. He has the most ingratiating grin she’s ever witnessed, with a small gap between his two front teeth that enhances rather than detracts from his attractiveness. He has a thick, woodsman beard that covers the whole second half of his face, black with random strands of grey starting to break through here and there. His hair is jet-black and a bit too long, she thinks, and he parts it to the left in a big sweeping arc. He speaks in a rich, almost echoing baritone, like a well-trained actor with a natural sense of timing. There’s a strong hint of a Spanish accent, but also something beyond that, something clearly more foreign, distant, impossible to place.
“Just like in the movies,” he says.
“What happens when it rains?” she asks, pointing upward with her thumb.
“There is a cover,” he says, not raising his head from the eyepiece. “What the architect called a bubble. I’ve always liked that. ‘A bubble’.”