Night Film(75)

“I want to come,” said Nora.

“We went over this,” I said.

“But Ashley went. I can easily pass for a boy. I brought pants to change into and a baseball cap.”

“This isn’t Boys Don’t Cry. And after your performance at Briarwood, we’ve established you’re no Hilary Swank.”

Within minutes, we were driving through Montauk, so dark, and still it looked like an evacuated fairground, the brightly lit sidewalks strewn with sand and empty plastic bottles, deserted. Shingled beach cottages, so cheerful in the summer, now hunched sullenly on the hill, dark and dour, bracing themselves for the winter. Even the locals were nowhere to be found.

I made a right onto South Emery Street and a left onto Emerson, accelerating past darkened shops and inns, Ocean Resort, Born Free Motel, signs reading SEE U NEXT YEAR, and then: the Sea Haven Diner, its blue twenty-four-hour neon sign bright in the window, a few cars parked in the lot out front. I sped past it and turned onto Whaler’s Way, edging past a cluster of beach condos and pulling up behind a dented pickup.

When I cut the engine, I could hear the roar of the ocean, somewhere in the dark in front of us.

“Okay, troops,” I said. “Let’s move.”

We climbed out, Hopper yawning and stretching. I locked the car and handed the keys to Nora as we headed back to Emerson Street.

“You want Hopper to go in with you?” I asked her.

“I can handle it,” she said, incensed. Slinging her gray purse onto her shoulder, she spun on her heel and shuffled away.

We watched her go, her footsteps crunching down the sidewalk, the hem of her dress flashing green as she passed under the streetlight. She was dressed like Lily Munster meets Cinderella by way of punk in a pea-green velvet dress, black crocheted tights, Moe’s motorcycle boots, and black fingerless gloves.

“Maybe you should catch up with her,” I said. “Make sure she’s okay waiting in there.”

Hopper shrugged. “She’ll be fine.”

“Glad to know chivalry’s not dead.”

He only squinted after her. Nora pulled open the door to the diner, disappearing inside. When she didn’t emerge, I zipped up my jacket.

“Let’s get going,” I said.





48


We walked down Whaler’s Way, along the wood fence to the beach, beyond the reach of the streetlamps. I took out my pocket flashlight. We trudged through the sand and up the sloping hill, a freezing headland wind hitting us hard, slicing right through my clothes. Not knowing Oubliette’s dress code, I was wearing all black—leather jacket, slacks, button-down—hoping the Russian vor look (vor being Russian slang for crime lord) would be enough for people to sense I should be left alone.

The wind grew stronger, the rumbles of the Atlantic deafening as we crested the knoll. The beach looked deserted. The ocean was rough, choppy with whitecaps, the waves crashing along the shore violently, their white explosions the only interruption in the dome of darkness surrounding us.

Staring eastward, far ahead of us down the coast, were condos and houses—all of them looked dark, boarded-up for the winter—and beyond the streetlights of town, Montauk’s steep cliffs rising along the shore.

Duchamp’s staircase.

It was an ambiguous clue, to say the least. I knew the modernist Cubist painting of 1912 it seemed to refer to: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. Nora and I had Googled the work before leaving Perry Street, though how I was going to associate that with something on this beach, I had no idea.

I turned to Hopper, but he’d wandered down to the water, standing there, immobile, his coat whiplashing behind him, seawater frothing inches from his feet. He looked so dark and melancholy, contemplating the thundering waves, I wondered if he was considering walking right into them—letting them swallow him.

“It’s this way!” I shouted, my voice scarcely audible above the wind.

He must have heard me, because he turned and started after me.

The walk was slow going.

The sand was littered with debris after a recent storm—tangled ropes of seaweed, smashed shells, bottles and rocks, long bony arms of driftwood reaching out of the sand. The wind picked up as we trudged on, trying to shove us back, the salty air abrasive and biting. We hiked past blocks of boxy condos with empty porches and parking lots, motels with dark welcome signs. I scrutinized every battered flight of stairs leading down to the beach, looking for some sign of life—but there was nothing.

We were alone out here.

After twenty minutes, we’d walked beyond the town of Montauk and had reached Ditch Plains, the surfing beach. It was empty, nothing but a surfboard’s lost ankle strap half buried in the sand. As I scaled some rocks, I didn’t move out of the way in time as a wave crashed to shore and I got soaked up to my shins in icy water. I could forget about a Russian vor; I was going to look like Tom Hanks in goddamn Cast Away by the time I arrived.

If I arrived.

Here, the beach narrowed considerably, the massive cliffs like muscular knotted shoulders bulging down the coast. Ahead, there were only multimillion-dollar beachfront estates, and it certainly wasn’t a stretch to imagine that a secret party took place at one. But looking far ahead, my eyes watering in the fierce wind, I could see black silhouettes of beach houses perched high on the bluffs, but not a single light.