The Motion of Puppets(28)
“Living out of a suitcase,” Irina said. “Better than living in one, eh?”
Nix laughed. “You saw they packed away the Original, too. I am sure we will not come back to this place. Our happy home.”
“But what about my people?” Kay asked. “How will they know where to find us?”
“We are your people,” Olya said. “You are one of us, and you go where we go.”
Kay stared at the partition above her head, wondering how long she was doomed to be in this cubicle. How long till she could be free, to see the outside world again, to hold her husband in her arms. She searched her memories for his image, his name, but found it had slipped her mind. She did not know how she would bear such a prison.
Early in the morning before the moon had set, a knock came at the back door. As if in answer, the shop bells rang once from the front door. The giants had come for them. A wave of August filled the Back Room. Footsteps, the sound of an engine in the alley behind the toy shop, and then the box was being lifted in the air, let loose from gravity’s bounds. They were leaving, they were in motion. Kay wondered if he would stop looking now that she was truly gone. She whispered her good-byes.
*
In the end, Theo packed Kay’s things to take home with him to New York. Her suitcases sat next to his in the foyer. All that was left to do was box up his books and papers, the unfinished Muybridge. Fortunately, his publisher had granted him an extension, under the circumstances, and he promised it by December. The sublet on the apartment expired as well, and Theo’s few acquaintances had come to say au revoir. Thompson leafed through Animals in Motion while Foucault was engrossed in a newspaper account of the photographer’s trial and acquittal. Sipping a beer in an easy chair, Egon appeared more relaxed now that the cirque’s run was over and summer near its end.
“Just so you know, Mr. Harper,” said Thompson. “Theo. We questioned Reance a number of times, questioned all the women who went out with him that night as well. I know you have your doubts, but believe me, if he was involved, we would know.”
“The criminal mind always has a hiccup,” Foucault said. “A giveaway. Working a suspect is like playing poker. Do you play, Monsieur Harper? Any fool can win with your winners. The trick is to lay down your obvious losers but bluff when the time is right. Too often and they con on to your game. Too rarely and you’re depending on luck again. Most players make a psychological mistake. There’s a tell, a subconscious move or gesture that gives away whether they have the nuts, are limping in, or completely bullshitting. Play with a fella long enough and you discover the tell. If you pay attention. If you are good at that sort of thing. We must have had that guy in a half-dozen times. Not our man. No tell.”
Theo wondered if they had been playing him all this time, too, trying to guess what his tell might be, what his gestures might be saying. He knew that they thought, at first, that he was responsible for his wife’s disappearance. Hell, they even had Kay’s mother believing he was guilty. But over time, Thompson at least had come to regard him above reproach, though perhaps for Foucault it was all a ploy, an elaborate double bluff.
“Do I have a giveaway?” Theo asked.
Rising from his easy chair, Egon lit up a cheroot and went to the window to blow smoke out to the street.
Thompson closed the book with a bang. “Theo, you surprise me. Once and for all, you are free and clear. We’ll keep working on the case. We have all your contact information—”
“I can be here in two hours, if I fly.”
“Good.” Thompson patted him on the knee and motioned for his partner to get up. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that this happened here in Québec. And that we have so little from where we first began. We’ll keep looking. Tiens bon.”
They departed via the stairway in the hall. From his perch, Egon watched, and seeing them pass on the street below, he flicked the butt of his cigar through the open window. “Useless,” he muttered.
“Not a clue,” Theo said. “Almost three months and not one damn lead. Not even a theory as to how she vanished.”
Into the box, he piled the Muybridge texts and then laid a neat stack of manuscript pages atop the books. Awaiting trial, Muybridge wondered in his misery if he would ever take another photograph. After he was acquitted that was all he ever did. Freed from the burdens of his marriage and the trial that changed his life, Muybridge pursued his art with a fanatic’s obsession. Seeing his work all together made Theo uneasy, for so much remained to be done, but he could not imagine how he could ever find the will. School would start in a few weeks, and he had no idea how to prepare for the semester or simply face the students in the classroom. Not with Kay missing a world away.
“I’m running out of money,” he confessed. “If I could stay in Québec, I would. And I feel like I’m abandoning her somehow, to be leaving like this.”
The apartment looked so impersonal with all their things removed. He should leave a note behind, in case she returned to find him gone. Or if she was dead, so her ghost would not wander the rooms searching for him. Egon sat by without a word of comfort.
“Where will you go?” Theo asked.
“Maybe I’ll try to latch on with another show. There’s a group of puppeteers doing some interesting things in Calgary, and I’ve always wanted to spend some time in the wild West. Or I know a showman down in Burlington.”