The Dark Room(96)

“Okay.”

“It’s not because it was the first time back. It’s because it was like any other time.”

“That’s good,” Cain said.

“You probably know the feeling even better than I do,” she answered. “You’re under the lights all the time. Every eye in the house on you, waiting for you to make a mistake. And if you do, it really matters. So that when you’re done for the day, you’re quiet. It takes you a while to decide that you’re okay. That you didn’t make any mistakes.”

He took a sip of his beer and watched her in the firelight.

“But you’re not going to do that,” she said. “Make mistakes.”

“No,” he answered.



At eleven the next morning, he checked her into the Marriott at Union Square. He went with her up to the eighth floor, watching the lobby shrink away as the glass elevator rose upward. There were people in the third-floor bar, but no one was watching the elevators. No one had followed them back from Mendocino, either. In the room, he slipped off his shoulder holster and locked his gun in the safe.

“Will you be okay?” he asked.

“I still have my book.”

“They’ll probably take my phone at the consulate. If you need me—”

“I’ll be okay,” Lucy said. She wrapped her arms around herself and looked out the arched window. “What do you think he wants to say?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you have a hunch,” she said. “You always do.”

He looked at the gray sky, at the traffic moving down Post Street toward the square.

“He sounded like a man who wanted to confess.”

“Confess what?”

“I don’t know,” Cain said. “But he feels guilty about something. I’m sure about that.”

“And you think it’s safe to meet him?”

“It’s in a consulate. And they must know I told people—”

“Fischer, you mean. You told her.”

“—so they’d be crazy to do anything.”

“All right,” she said.

They both knew there were plenty of crazy people. Neither of them had to say it to the other. But there were a thousand times as many people who were perfectly decent. The odds were with him on this.



The day had been getting darker since dawn, and the next wave of rain was almost here. He stood in a thinning lunch-hour crowd near the corner of Sansome and Sutter. The consulate’s marble columns were stained dark with water. Nearby, a young tourist couple held their cell phones at arm’s length, taking a few last photos of themselves before they fled the weather.

“You look just like your picture,” a man said. “Maybe we should go inside before the rain comes, eh?”

Cain turned around. The man facing him was a few years into his seventies. He wore a dark cashmere overcoat that was unbuttoned enough to show the crimson knot of his tie. His brimmed black hat was pulled low over his brow.

“Too conspicuous to do this on the street?” Cain asked him.

“Obviously,” the man said, and Cain knew his voice. It was the refined baritone he’d heard on the first call. “And the weather. Mostly the weather.”

They looked together up the street. A wall of storm clouds was advancing along Sutter, a cold whiteout. Everything behind it was already gone.

“You didn’t fly here just to give me all the answers,” Cain said. “You have your own agenda. Tell me about that first.”

“I want to know how she died,” the man said. “That’s the first thing. I want to know what happened.”

Now the first rain came with the wind, big and icy drops that speckled the pavement around them. They could play games with each other and get soaked. Or they could get to the point and move on.

“She was buried alive.”

“On top of a corpse—in another man’s casket?”

“You’re not guessing. You know that.”

“It’s what we were afraid of,” the man said. His paused to loosen his tie, as though the knot had been the thing blocking his throat. “After everything that happened in ’eighty-nine, we guessed it. But we didn’t want to believe.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with it, did you?”

“I had everything to do with it—I sent her, and I shouldn’t have.”

“You said the first thing you wanted was to know what happened,” Cain said. “What’s the second?”

“The body. I want to bring her home.”

Cain looked at him. This choked-up old man in his cashmere overcoat, the rain already soaking into it.

“Let’s go, then,” Cain said. “Show me in.”



The heavy rain arrived as they were coming into the consulate’s security lobby. Even when the door closed behind them, they could hear it hitting the bulletproof glass. A guard checked Cain’s passport against a list on his clipboard, then took Cain’s phone and put it in a drawer. Cain went through the metal detector, and the guard met him on the other side with a visitor’s badge.

His host had sidestepped the security station and was waiting next to a steel door. He opened it with a key card and held it for Cain.