“She’s busy all day Friday.”
Carella put his face very close to hers.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Watch my lips.” Slowly and distinctly, he said, “How about breakfast Saturday morning?”
She watched his lips.
He said it again.
“Breakfast. Saturday morning. Okay?”
He smiled.
She shook her head.
Carella turned to the interpreter.
“Did she say no ?” he asked.
“That’s what she said, pal.”
Carella looked at her.
“No?” he said incredulously.
She shook her head again.
And then spelled the word out with her right hand, letter by letter, so there’d be no mistake.
N…
O…
No.
He caught the burglar three days later. A kid who delivered lunch to the office from the local deli, got grandiose ideas about how much money the firm had to be making, concocted his brilliant caper, stole the key, and sneaked in one night to score a big two hundred and twelve dollars that would net him at least three years on a Burg Two. Eighteen years old, he’d be out of jail when he was twenty-one. Maybe.
He came to the office again on that Friday, the eleventh day of February—she remembered all these dates accurately and precisely because they all led to the beginning. Coming out of Mr. Endicott’s office where he’d just reported the results of his investigation, he stopped at Teddy’s desk to repeat the story. She listened without an interpreter this time. Studied his mouth as he spoke, his lips.
“Why won’t you go out with me?” he asked abruptly.
She shrugged.
“Tell me.”
She shook her head.
“Please,” he said.
She touched her lips.
She touched her ears.
She shook her head again.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” he asked.
She sighed heavily, spread her arms helplessly. Her face said It has everything to do with everything .
He read this on her face and in her eyes, and he said, “No, Teddy, it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
She nodded.
Yes, her face said. Her eyes said Yes, it does.
He kept looking at her.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Haven’t you ever dated men who…well, who can hear ?”
She nodded.
“And speak?”
She nodded again.
“You have ?”
She nodded again. Yes, I have.
Once, she thought.
“Well, good,” he said, “I was beginning to think…”
She pointed at him.
Shook her head.
Wagged her finger No.
“Why not?” he said.
She shrugged.
“I mean…why not ?”
She turned away.
“Well…” he said.
She did not turn to face him again. She was no longer listening. “See you around,” he said, which she didn’t hear or see. And left the office.
She had not told him she was afraid of what might happen if she started seeing this handsome detective with the slanted brown Chinese eyes and the easy smile and the long rangy look of an athlete. Never again, she thought. I will never again fall in love with a hearing man, I will never again even allow myself the opportunity …never grant myself even the possibility of it happening ever again.
But on Valentine’s Day that year…
A Monday.
It was snowing that Monday. She took the bus home from work, and walked up the street to her building, the air swirling with snowflakes, the ground underfoot white and clean, the air sharp, a spot of red up ahead in the overwhelming white, she squinted through the flying flakes and saw someone sitting on the front stoop of her building, and recognized him as Detective Stephen Louis Carella.
Steve.
His face was windblown and his hair blowing in the wind was covered with snow, and the spot of color in his gloveless hand was a single red rose.
“Change your mind,” he said, and extended the rose to her.
She hesitated.
The rose still in his hand, its petals moving in the wind.
Extended to her.
He raised the other hand.
Slowly his fingers formed the single letter O .
And then the letter K .
OK?
“Change your mind,” he said again.
And raised his eyebrows plaintively, and she found herself nodding, perhaps because he had taken the trouble to learn how to sign those two letters,O and K , OK, Okay, change your mind, okay? Or perhaps because she saw in those Chinese eyes an honesty she had never seen on the face of any man she’d ever known. She knew in that instant that this man would never hurt her. This man could be trusted with her very life.
Still nodding, she accepted the rose.
He sat across the room now, in the big easy chair before the imitation Tiffany floor lamp they’d bought when they were first furnishing the house. He was reading, his brow furrowed in concentration. He must have felt her steady gaze upon him. He lifted his eyes. From across the room, she smiled and signed I love you. He returned the smile. Returned the words. Mouthed them and signed them.I love you . And went back to the book.
She had not yet told him what she planned to do tomorrow morning.
THE FIRST CHAPTER of the book was thirty-five pages long. He had read it through once after dinner, and was now reading it for the second time, and he still didn’t understand why the Deaf Man had asked him to look at it. Well, The Rites of Spring, sure. He was planning a spring surprise of some sort. Planning to spring a surprise, so to speak. But that was too obvious, since spring was already here. And obviousness simply wasn’t the Deaf Man’s way. Direction by indirection was more his style. Tell them exactly what he planned to do but in a way that made it all seem unfathomable.
The book had originally been published in South America. Carella had no way of knowing whether the English translation was any worse than the Spanish original had been. To him, the book seemed atrocious, but then again he wasn’t used to reading science fiction, if that’s what this was. The novel’s opening chapter began with the premise that the creatures on a planet named Obadon feared nothing more than the approach of the planting season. Rivera then went on to explain how this fear of the magic of growth led the entire population of the planet to gather on a wide open plain every year, to participate in what for time immemorial had been called The Festivities.
“Here on this dusty red plain ringed by the mountains of Kahnara, here beneath the four glistening moons of the season, the Obadons gathered to shout and to chant and to stamp their feet against the swollen soil…”
God, this is awful, Carella thought.
“…so that their timeless fear of the magic of growth could once more be exorcized by a magic of their own, a magic born of ecstatic fury, presaging the moment when the plains would run red with water turned muddy and nascent.”
Carella read the paragraph again.
What the hell was the Deaf Man trying to tell him?
THERE WEREN’T ANY real writers anymore in this city, not what you could call genuine artists, there were only guys writing gang shit or dope shit, it was disgusting the way things had disintegrated the past twenty years. Nowadays, you did a whole subway car, the fuckin transit police had it acid-cleaned the very next day, it hardly paid getting the name out anymore.