“About what?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You’re teasing me.” Leo Neumann laughed.
“Of course. You and Hanley. I can tell him tomorrow. It was so simple, but really, I was amazed. It was beautiful. I don’t understand all of it and why it was done, but it was a beautiful job.”
She had called the taxi company and they had promised a driver to meet her on the Fourteenth Street side of the Agriculture building at the right hour.
She passed through security and then the main desk security and was let out of the locked door into the darkened street. Official Washington: glum, low buildings hidden in stately ranks along tree-lined streets. All doors were locked against the anarchy of the night city streets. In the distance was the sound of an ambulance or the wail of a fire truck. Washington burned and died and killed and raped and stole at night in the shadows of the great government buildings; Washington was angry, tense, hateful at night, a jungle of a million beasts, each turned against the other beneath the orange glow of the anticrime lights along the streets. It had still been a sleepy Southern sort of city when she had first come here. She remembered feeling thrilled by the cherry blossoms at night along the Potomac in spring and by the sweet, magnolia smell that seemed to float over the concrete hub of the city, even when there were no magnolia trees to be seen. That sense of the city had changed for her and for her husband, who had lived in it for a long time, and they had long since fled to one of the outer suburbs. By day, the city was an ersatz Paris, devoid of street life and the bizarre juxtapositions of shabby businesses alongside great monuments in that French city, but still with some elements of nervous grace in the little shops and restaurants and tiny parks alongside sweeping thoroughfares. But at night, it was a merciless place, full of silences and screams and terrors kept outside locked doors.
The taxi was waiting at the curb, and she crossed the walk to it.
“Is this for me?”
“Mrs. Neumann?”
“Yes.”
She climbed inside awkwardly. She was awkward in many things because her gestures were too large for her frame and for the compact nature of the society she moved in now.
“Where do you want? That address in Alexandria?”
“Yes, please.”
The meter had been running, she noted, but nothing would sour her tonight. This was a triumph, albeit a quiet one; she could tell no one but Hanley. Not even Marge. Not yet.
The car fled quietly down Fourteenth Street toward the bridge over the Potomac. It was the sort of cab sealed against violence from passengers: The driver rode in a cocoon of bulletproof glass and plastic that cut off conversation between the front seat and the back. The doors could not be opened without a release from the driver. Everything had been done to protect him against crimes of violence from the public at large.
Mrs. Neumann felt pleasantly tired. The air conditioning in the cab brushed against her face. She smiled. Once, when she had been a young woman, she had smelled the magnolias blowing in from the parks along the river.
She reached for the lever to open the window. Perhaps she would smell the magnolias again. She felt young tonight, as though she had begun all over again.
The lever was stuck; the window remained closed. She forced it with her strong hand, but it would not budge. She pulled, and the lever came off in her hand.
“Damn,” she said, and pushed it back into the socket. She leaned over to the other window and forced the lever there.
It did not work.
The cab crossed the Fourteenth Street bridge. Below, in the placid waters of the Potomac, an airliner had gone down the previous year. The cab continued into Virginia, past the gentle embankments on that side of the river. Home in a little while, she thought peacefully. She rapped at the bulletproof glass to get the driver’s attention.
He did not turn in his seat.
The car continued down the desolate streets, heading south.
She struck the glass again. He didn’t understand, she thought with impatience. She struck it again, much harder.
The car glided past the street where it should have turned.
She looked for the license number; she would report him to his superiors. Mrs. Neumann was not a woman to suffer nonsense or fools.
There was no license card and no number in the cab.
For the first time, her anger was replaced by a sense of dread. What was happening here?
She hit the glass very hard, as though she intended to break it. She kicked very hard at the back of the front seat.
The driver turned and looked at her for a moment and then turned back to the windshield.
They were rapidly passing through darkened hills of darkened homes.
She looked around her but there were no cars. There were no people on the streets.
Jungle, she thought.
She swung with her might at the side window. It shivered with the force of the blow of her doubled fist but it did not break.
And she knew what was happening. She felt the giddiness rise in her, the sense of losing control that she had once felt on a Ferris wheel that had malfunctioned and sent her whirling too quickly around and around until the hand safety brake had been set. She had been quite dizzy and afraid.
Leo, she thought.
Her arms; she couldn’t feel her arms. They were floating away from her body.
She tried to swing her fist again against the window, but the fist would not respond.
Her knees. Her knees were on the floor of the cab.
My God, she thought, I have to fight this, I should never…
She slumped forward and pushed her feet against the door. She pushed and could not feel her legs. And then she felt the pleasant giddiness pass and felt another wave of emotion come to her. She was sleeping again and she must wake up; she was dreaming that she was awake and it seemed very real but she also knew she was only dreaming. If she could just awaken, then it would be all right.
She tried to rise.
Yes, she thought with wonder. She was rising. She was floating upward. Her head pumped briefly against the roof of the cab and then she was through it, rising above the cab and above the street, rising above the city.
The Washington Monument. She was at the same level as the red warning lights set into the top of the obelisk like the red eyes of a monumental Klansman. She stared at the red eyes.
And slowly, they winked at her.
22
The funicular advanced slowly up the steep ascent of tracks and pulleys toward the square at the top of the hill. On the square was the strange white bulk of the church of Sacré-Coeur with its minaret towers gleaming in the soft morning light. Below the church, stretching out on a broad plain on either side of the meandering Seine, was Paris, wrapped in a light haze of ozone.
Herbert Quizon watched the city fall away below him as the car ascended. It never failed to startle him by its beauty, perceived from the heights of Montmartre.
Quizon brushed an imaginary speck from the lapel of his lightweight sports coat and repositioned the flower in the buttonhole of his lapel.
He was an old-fashioned bachelor with old-fashioned mannerisms that seemed parodies of a dandy’s gestures in a turn-of-the-century melodrama. His hands were elegant and his fingers were long and carefully trimmed at the nails; he always carried a walking stick that would not have supported his weight if he had been required to use it as a cane. He seemed suited to Paris, but a Paris of another time.
With a grinding lurch, the funicular cars reached the top end of the short run and locked. The doors slid open and Quizon stepped off through the turnstile and ascended the few steps to the square that surrounded the white church.