The clouds united, condensed, turned to fog. It wrapped around the upper floors of the world headquarters of Fischer-Morrow, pressed itself like nebulous gray lint against the window-walls. Said obfuscation, thought Fischer, was an apt physical metaphor for conditions on the executive floor: the programming staff had to stage a roving series of outages in the mainframe while they tried to isolate the problem that had led to the loss of data on Security's server; consequently, the entire staff watched their productivity stagger about in fits and starts while their frustration rose, and Browning had yet to recover his lost file on Susan Gaumont. Her physical file, that now-mysterious black plastic folder, was, of course, nowhere to be found. Browning, quietly fuming, stayed away or terse and attended meetings with an almighty impassive scowl, which left the remainder of the attendees from accounting and strategic planning practically tongue-tied: they were so accustomed to having him commandeer their gatherings that, left with Browning leaned back as grim as basalt in his back-corner-left-at-the-table chair, from which he could, like a Mafia bodyguard, watch both the proceedings and the door, they found themselves with nearly nothing to say. Across the executive floor, the lighting adjusted automatically to counter the gloom outside, but by the end of the day it seemed the building had inverted and that Fischer was now a hundred meters under, rather than above, the ground, a dweller in a muffled netherworld. Briefcase in hand at six o' clock, he nearly caught himself pressing the "UP" button to summon the lift.
He took the long way home from the office. A drive out where he could could glimpse the setting sun as it dropped lower than the unbroken gray stratum of cloud, where he could watch the path of molten light spreading briefly across the dark water of the harbor. Back at his flat, he left his briefcase on the desk in his open office space, continued through to his bedroom. He hung his suit, dropped his dress shirt into the laundry hamper; he put on an ash-gray sweatshirt and softly worn jeans and proceeded back out to the kitchen, where he chopped carrots and apples and celery and fed the chunks into the juicer. Too much stillness around him after all the day's muffling at the office: he summoned Alicia de Laroccha from the stereo, let the filigree of the Granados Goyescas weave through the flat; he seated himself on the sueded-leather alcove sofa, sipped his juice, put his head back, closed his eyes. Then, wanting one last look at the terms of a regional demand forecast before going down to the pool for a swim, he got up, crossed to his office space to fetch his data pad from his briefcase. The flat was becoming stuffy as the heating and air conditioning negotiated the transition from gloomy day to chilly overcast night; he took the briefcase out onto the balcony, laid it on the glass top of the patio table, opened it.
It might have been an Eastern Brown Snake for the shock he felt.
The black plastic folder was there in his briefcase.
As thunder rumbled from the southwest, Fischer reached with shaking fingers to open it. A second shock, like a miniature lighting-strike, passed through him.
Susan Gaumont's file was no longer under the opaque black cover. He found, instead, a newsprint clipping from that day's Morning Herald: another article about that missing Koran. Below it he saw, in the window-filtered light from the flat's living area, newsprint practically rust-yellow. The paper flaked at the edges as he picked it up. It was an old trade ad, dateless, sourceless, for a warehousing firm on the harbor. A grainy photograph of a five-story brick building looming, solid and reliable-looking, beyond the docks, at the water's edge. The copy below read in hand-set type: Secure Storage. You Will Be Safe with Us.
Fischer frowned. Will you keep me safe?
A drop of water fell on the newsprint. It was starting to rain. Fischer tried to brush the water away. Then another drop struck the paper, another after that. Fischer watched as a drop replaced the a in Safe with a smear like a bullet hole. The copy was beginning to blur. Another low growl of thunder, followed by a definite, continuous pattering. Fischer closed the folder, his briefcase. Then, as the rain began to fall in earnest, he sensed someone standing behind him, to his right.
He turned, the back of his neck prickling, to see his reflection in his bedroom window. Or was it his reflection? The shape in the dark glass was human, roughly his size. Night and the rain were obscuring the details. Still holding the old trade ad, he approached the window, reached out with his free hand, touched the glass. The reflection reached out, too. Maybe a second too slowly. Fischer eased closer—
A silent burst of light. Lightning. Fischer found himself staring into eyes like, but not, his. A woman's face. He jumped back, startled, propelled by a concussion of thunder, even as he felt raindrops now drumming the paper in his hand. He looked down, away from the window, and saw that the old newsprint wasn't just blurring now; the page was actually being washed clean. He wiped desperately at the water with the edge of his free hand.
"No—"
He started awake. Rain was pelting his face. He'd dozed off with the alcove window open.
He could see his briefcase from where he sat. It was there on the edge of his desk, right where he'd left it when he arrived home from work. He boosted himself up off the sofa and went to it. His heart still dream-pounding, he opened it.
The black plastic folder was inside.
He felt as though Browning were there in the flat, watching him with his basilisk scowl.
"Impossible," Fischer said, to the empty room, to Browning's accusing shade. He opened the cover of the folder. Susan Gaumont once again looked back at him in digital color. He feathered through the pages below. Details of her service career, her potential affiliations and doings since then. A possible address in Sydney. No old warehouse ads.
Wait.
The ad. You Will Be Safe with Us. He looked away from Susan's file, focused instead, inwardly, on what he'd seen in the dream.
"Will you keep me safe?" he whispered, seeing in his mind not only the warehouse pictured in browned and crumbling newsprint but the same warehouse, or one nearly like it, as it existed in fact. He'd seen it in real life. He'd passed it, at a distance, on his way to the office.
Had Robert Fischer been a decade, even five years, older, he might have called Browning or the police. An older Robert Fischer, a more experienced, jaded Robert Fischer, might even have put an end to the whole mysterious, irritating mess by feeding the folder and its contents wholesale into the heavy-duty paper shredder that stood beside his desk.
This Robert Fischer, young, clear-eyed, confounded, closed the folder and his briefcase. He took the keys to his Jaguar and left the flat.
#####
Through another's concern, he had a torch in the car. Fischer, half-American as he was, tended to think of it as a flashlight; Phil, his faithful driver, who knew his employer's predilection for solo night-time trips to the middle of nowhere, had packed for the XF a breakdown kit, which included, along with basic medical supplies, a blanket, an old-style pry-bar, and, among other things, a black-barreled Maglite nearly the length of Fischer's forearm. His destination now, the building supposedly from his dream, was a warehouse on the north side of the harbor, on the waterfront, that had so far been passed over for conversion into high-end condos most likely either because of a zoning stalemate or questions regarding toxic-substances remediation. He left the highway; he navigated and finally passed beyond sidestreets to wasteland; he drove slowly across muddy rough ground, trying to be mindful of rocks, glass, jagged chunks of of brick and scrap. The building that might have been the warehouse in his yellowed imagined ad, five stories high by the line-count of broken black windows in its dirty brick side, seemed, from Fischer's angle of approach, like a monstrous ancient animal glancing over its shoulder at an interloper who was seconds away from becoming its dinner. Thirty yards from the warehouse, he came to a chain-link fence topped with a triple stranding of barbed wire. He put the car in park. He took the Maglite from the emergency kit in the boot. After a moment's hesitation, he took the pry bar, too. He killed the engine and the headlamps, locked the Jaguar's doors. He moved cautiously along the fence, passing signs warning of condemnation and danger, telling him, likely wisely, to KEEP OUT, the flashlight on but its beam angled only as high as was necessary for him to see—
—there—
—a break, a gap, really, worn by runoff and rutting, between the ground and the bottom of the chain-link. He reached it and hesitated. The rain beat a chilling tattoo on his hair and shoulders, dribbled at his collar, pocked the mud at his feet. Across the harbor, the city lights sparkled unreal through a million falling drops. The whole situation was unreal. He told himself, as he wriggled, flinching, through the muck and snags of the gap at the bottom of the fence, that this was the most foolish thing he had ever done.
He repeated to himself, silently, as he approached the warehouse's near wall, the mantra of his stupidity: What the hell am I doing here?
Set in the rain-slimed grimy brick fifteen feet from the corner of the wall, he found a rust-marked steel door. The handle turned; the original lock had been cored out.
But a bright new padlock on a shiny new hasp held the door firmly shut.
Fischer at first felt profound relief: he was locked out; his foolishness had been thwarted; he could claim to have made a good-faith effort that had been honorably— and legally— stymied. He could go home to a hot shower, clean, dry clothes, and dinner.
But he found himself looking at the lock, comparing its newness to the age of the door and the brick exterior of the warehouse. The metal signs on the fence surrounding the building were faded, corroded at their white edges. The ostensible owners of the property hadn't been near the place for some time.
He braced the pry bar between the padlock and the hasp and pushed. With a metallic creak and a localized shattering of masonry, the lock gave way.
Fischer opened the door, took a deep breath, and stepped inside.
#####
The air smelled of dust, of old oil and diesel, over a saltwater tang. No sound but the rain, striking the glass of what had to have been grime-obscured skylights high overhead. No light, save that from the Maglite. No derelicts, no junkies, no graffiti, no guttering campfires. Someone, not just the fresh lock, had kept the place free of intruders. Someone, or something. Fischer thought the latter word and wished he hadn't. He stood for a moment in the black stillness while a shudder ran between his chilled shoulderblades. He told himself that he needed to move quickly but carefully; he needed to keep a clear head. Where would a safe be in such a place? In the back, most likely, in the offices.
He set off across the warehouse floor, his shoes striking in the dark at bits of debris, a muffling of dust. About midway, he began to feel a give underfoot, a sponginess, heard a soft splash practically below his feet. He shone the Maglite straight down, saw cracks between thick wooden boards. The light through the gaps struck off something black, glistening, shifting: he was standing above water. Likely he was traversing a boat slip, since covered over, that had allowed small craft direct access into the warehouse. He moved as lightly as he could across the rotting wood, his gut anticipating a splinter-and-crack with every step; he sighed with shaking relief when he again felt dusty concrete beneath his soles.
Beyond the boat slip lay an iron topiary of abandoned machinery, dismantled pieces of crane, derrick, gantry, most man-high or taller. Fischer made his way through, cautious of juttings and metal edges rusted but still sharp, and found himself at the far end of the warehouse. A brick wall rose before him; a run of metal steps was bolted to it; thirty feet above Fischer's head, the steps terminated at a railed catwalk, also wall-bolted, that fronted a row of four empty doorframes. The offices. Fischer ascended slowly, testing the corroded mesh of the steps as he went; he reached the top without incident. He shone the Maglite in at the doors nearest the top of the steps, right and then left, saw nothing but dust, floorboards, and brick. The third office, the one farthest to the left, was empty, too.
In the fourth office, at the far cornering of the brick walls, stood a black safe.
Fischer crossed the floorboards of the office as cautiously as he'd crossed the boat slip, imagining dry rot above as much as wet rot below. No tracks in the dust on the floor, no scrapings, either, as the safe might have made had it recently been wheeled or dragged into place. Fischer dropped to his haunches before it. The coating of dust on the safe's top was powder-smooth and even; the safe itself looked very old. A single circular numbered combination dial on its front, a steel handle, its horizontal length curved into a gentle ornamental S. Fischer reached out, grasped the handle, pushed.
It swung downward with a soft click. Fischer, surprised, tugged the handle outward. The door opened; with his heartbeat shaking his sternum, he shone the Maglite inside.
Nothing. Nothing but dust motes swimming in the glare of the torch. The safe was empty. Of course it was.
Then he noticed the crack. The Maglite's intense beam of light was striking a shadow, no more than an eighth of an inch high, between the ceiling of the safe's interior and the top of its back panel. Fischer looked more closely, saw an actual gap between the two.
The back panel of the safe was false.
Fischer set the Maglite, still pointed toward the safe, on the floor. The crack was too narrow for his fingertips to find purchase: he hooked the pry bar into the gap and pulled. The panel gave way, fell forward. Something fell from the back of the safe on top of it. Something rectangular, wrapped in fine opaque plastic. Something about the size of a standard hardcover bestseller.
Fischer traded the pry bar for the Maglite. He peeled packing tape from one corner of the rectangular something, carefully pulled back the plastic, and froze.
Gilt-edged pages. Golden leather binding. A sparkling of emeralds, rubies, sapphires. The lost Koran seemed to give off its own glow.
Fischer found himself holding his breath as he re-wrapped the exposed corner. Then, as he began to remove the book from the safe, he found himself drawing back. Hesitating.
If he returned the Koran to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the action would be suspicious at best, scandal-worthy at worst. If he turned the book in at a police station, he— and, by extension, his father and Fischer-Morrow— faced the potential for even more scandal. Furthermore, he would practically be admitting complicity in the book's disappearance: old man Maurice's spoiled drunk of a son having a lark. (He could imagine his custodial interview as conducted by Detective Sergeant Monroe, a mild frown on the man's broad face, skepticism in his shale-like eyes: "And how, exactly, did you know where the missing item was to be found, Mr. Fischer...?") Even leaving the book unannounced posed a risk— hell, given the omnipresence of CCTV cameras, anonymity within fifty yards of a police station was a myth.
He would make an anonymous phone call. Not from his cell, which he knew would be traceable and which, he only just realized, was still in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, hanging in the closet back at his flat. He'd leave this dark and dangerous place; he'd find a pay phone—
Behind him, a sound. A soft scuttling.
Rats, likely. If only slightly, Fischer relaxed. Though what rats might find to eat in a place like this was a question he was loath to consider. He tipped the Koran carefully back on edge, re-concealed it behind the false back wall of the safe. He stood.
From outside the office, from the graveyard of machinery below the steel steps, came a short, sharp ping of metal on concrete. Something had fallen.
Or something had been knocked loose.
Someone was down there.
He knew the light from the torch gave away his location; he didn't dare turn it off. He gripped the pry bar like a club; he left the office; made his way quickly down the steps. At the bottom, he stopped dead: to his right, at an angle from the steps, stood the dark shape of a man.
"Keep back," Fischer barked, his voice sounding choked and yet far too loud in the cavernous stillness. "I'm armed."
As he spoke, he swung the beam of the Maglite in the man's direction.
And no one was there. A headache ball on a length of cable, hanging at a right angle to the beams of a segment of gantry. Nothing more.
But fear had taken root in his mind. He had to fight to keep himself from running for the door through which he'd entered this rotting dark nightmare. When he was back safely across the punked boards of the boat slip, when the outer door still proved to be open and passable, he bolted into the rainy night. He ran at rabbit-speed for the fence, squeezed back under it, reached the Jaguar without turning an ankle or slipping in the mud.
He unlocked the driver's-side door, opened it.
"Wait," he panted. In semi-panic and thorough paranoia, he suddenly shone the Maglite into the back seat. No one was there. No one was in the passenger seat, either.
But in the second before he got in, he heard, artificially muffled to distance by the rain, a creaking followed by a solid, final clang. Fischer knew, without looking, without testing the limits of the Maglite's powerful beam, what that sound signified: though there was hardly any wind, the door into the warehouse was once again closed.
He belted himself into the driver's seat, started the Jaguar, and drove away across the muddy debris-strewn wasteground as quickly as he dared.
#####
His heart was still overstepping its beat when he pulled into a Coles Express to implement the next stage of his plan. The station, a low white-block convenience store fronted by four petrol pumps sheltered against the rain under a red peaked awning, had a pay phone affixed to its side. Fischer parked the Jaguar in one of the spots adjacent to the store, at the edge of the oasis of sterile light cast by the rows of bulbs on the awning's underside, and got out. He had the receiver of the phone uncradled in his hand when he realized two things: the entire area, as noted by a sign above the nearest petrol pump, was under video surveillance. And he had no change. In fact, he couldn't remember the last time he'd handled a coin— or, for that matter, whether he had, in fact, ever touched a coin in his entire life.
Right.
He hooked the receiver back in the cradle. Forty-five cents the phone wanted: fine. Fischer entered the convenience store, walked to the cooler cases at the back, and selected a plastic bottle of Coke. On his way to the check-out counter, he picked, at random, also, a packet of crisps from a crowded metal rack. He set crisps and bottle on the counter before the clerk, a skinny young ginger indifferently paging through an issue of Wired; beside his would-be purchases Fischer placed, like an offering, a fresh twenty-dollar bill from the wallet he'd— thank God— remembered to bring.
The clerk didn't quite look up from an article on corporate security innovations in the age of artificial intelligence. "Will that be all?"
He had to be asking Fischer. There were no cars at the petrol pumps. They were alone in the store. "Yes," Fischer replied. His voice came out as a hoarse whisper. He cleared his throat, repeated, he hoped, casually: "Yes. That's all."
The clerk glanced at the money and the goods, took a look longer and oblique but somehow far more direct at Fischer himself. Who was, Fischer only then realized, standing before him covered in dust and mud under the all-seeing glare of the overheads. Who no doubt looked at least half as nervous as he felt.
The clerk scanned Fischer's purchases, muttered a total that dropped without impact into Fischer's ears, took the twenty, and offered him in return worn polymer notes and an assortment of coins. Fischer pocketed the notes, kept the coins like talismans in his hand, turned for the glass door of the exit.
"Forgetting something, sir—?" said the clerk.
'This is a robbery,' perhaps—? Fischer appended for him, silently, as he returned to the counter, sheepishly, for his Coke and crisps.
#####
Mindful of the cameras, even more mindful that much of the CCTV system around the city had recently been upgraded with nightvision tech, Fischer kept his head down while he phoned the police. He checked the list of local services numbers posted next to the phone and dialed straight through to the nearest station; to a desk sergeant who sounded like the clone of the desk sergeant three nights ago in Surry Hills, he gave the location of the missing Koran, described in precise detail its location within that dark and rotting warehouse. And when the man asked, with open suspicion, how Fischer had come to possess such information, Fischer replied, with clear and sudden daring, "My name is Chris. I'm the bastard who stole it from the Museum of Contemporary Art.", and hung up.
#####
His confidence dimmed on the drive home, as he drew, dry-mouthed now, on the bottle of Coke; adrenaline faded into exhaustion. By the time he reached his flat, he wanted nothing more than a shower and his dinner.
Both of which would have to wait. He heard a bell-like chiming as he opened the door. The sound was coming from his office, more specifically from his Mac: someone from Fischer-Morrow had sent him an executive-priority message.
Fischer moused his monitor awake, clicked over to his in-box. He read the sender's identity and felt himself go absolutely still.
The message was from him, from his work computer.
The chiming stopped as he opened the e-mail. Fischer read silently, only the sound of his breathing in the stillness of his flat: Meet us here. You've lost us the book. Bring the file. Don't tell anyone. We have her.
#####
He took the time to change into a different sweatshirt. That was all. He was at Fischer-Morrow, the black folder in his briefcase, the briefcase beside him on the passenger seat of the Jaguar, in under twenty minutes.
The guard at the security desk in the main lobby, a mahogany high-walled dais centered in an expanse of dove-gray marble and clean-lined stainless-steel appointments, looked up as Fischer approached. John Burns, Fischer thought, automatically, without needing to see the man's name tag. Fortyish Burns offered a smile from beneath his trim brown mustache. "Telecommuting not all it's cracked up to be, Mr. Fischer?" he asked, with cheerful nightshift informality. Fischer kept his expression coolly neutral as he wrote his signature in the light-box of the after-hours sign-in sheet.
"I forgot something," he said.
"Could've called for a runner, saved yourself a trip."
Fischer left the desk before Burns could see the nervous tic in his smile. "Was more than halfway here before I remembered I could do that, John," he called over his shoulder, en route to the platinum doors of the elevator bank.
#####
"Well," said Chris, "it's about fucking time."
He had a knife to Susan's throat. Something hooked, serrated, truly nasty looking. He and she were standing near the sofa in Fischer's office. They were both in jeans and practical lace-up boots; he wore a black sweatshirt, she a sensible crewneck sweater in deep-sea blue.
And he'd already cut her. Blood was trickling from a nick near her right jugular. A single drop, garnet-red, glistened jewel-like against the pale expanse of the carpeting at her feet.
"Did you tell the guard downstairs why you were here?" Chris asked, as Fischer moved farther into the office, as he realized, too, for the first time, that his tormentor spoke with an American accent. Not Southern, not from the coasts. A less-harsh Midwestern. Michigan, perhaps, or Ohio.
"No."
"Are you certain?"
Fischer was still looking at that drop of blood. Another joined it as he watched. When he raised his eyes to look at Chris and Susan, she shook her head slightly, nothing more than a twitch, really, as if she could see past his uncertainty to the fury building in him.
"Yes," Fischer replied, flatly.
"You've lost us that Koran, Mr. Fischer," Chris continued. "Now Miss Gaumont needs to become invisible again. Untraceable. The data on your company's server will not be recovered." He nodded toward Fischer's briefcase. "You have the only evidence of her existence right there in your hand."
"Robert, I'm sorry—" Susan said.
She was scowling back tears. Fischer met her eyes and said, calmly, words he knew were quite apt to be a lie: "Don't worry. It's going to be alright." He set the briefcase on the edge of his desk, glanced queryingly at Chris. "May I?"
"Open it."
Fischer opened his briefcase, removed the black plastic folder. He bent back the cover and held the folder so that Chris could see the contents without having to come closer. Then he re-closed his briefcase and placed the folder on top. "There. Now let her go."
"No copies, Mr. Fischer?"
"No."
"You're sure of that?
Fischer no longer bothered to hide his irritation. "Do I look like someone who frequents the Xerox room?"
Chris smiled at him with a barracuda's admiration. "You've got balls, you little bastard. I'll give you that."
He let Susan go. As he did, a man's voice said, over Fischer's left shoulder: "Pleasant dreams, Mr. Fischer."
Fischer realized he'd never clarified the components of the "we" in Chris's message. Before he could lash to the rear with an elbow, a man's hand placed something cloth-soft and moist over his nose and mouth. Fischer caught a single whiff of something sharp and sweet and felt his knees buckle.
#####
His body told him not to regain consciousness, at least not so soon; unwisely, he disregarded its advice. He was lying on his his side, his bruised cheek pressed into the sand-colored carpeting of his office. His skull throbbed in a way that suggested he'd abandoned the drinking of cheap vodka in favor of hitting himself in the head with the bottle; his unfed stomach was nauseous; the floor seesawed beneath him when he pulled himself up his desk to his feet.
He was alone. The folder was gone. He picked up the handset to his desk phone, heard nothing but silence; a second later, he saw the cut wire. His cell was still back in the pocket of his suit jacket, hanging in his bloody bedroom closet.
He took the lift back down to the main lobby. No one was at the security desk. The phone there was dead, too.
Fischer stepped back, frustrated, and shouted into the cool marble silence: "Hello—? Burns, are you there?"
His voice echoed in the lobby. There was no reply.
Fischer left the security desk, took the lift back down to the executive car park. He got in the Jaguar and drove toward an address in Surry Hills. An address he'd seen only in passing earlier that night in a file in a black plastic folder.
#####
Ironically, perhaps, her flat wasn't that far from Gilliam's. A three-story brick building on a tree-lined suburban street. Fischer found himself sitting with the Jaguar's engine and headlamps off across from the building's front entrance, watching, thinking, gathering his courage to do— what, exactly? The trip over from Fischer-Morrow had condensed in his mind until it became, for practical purposes, nonexistent; he frowned, knowing he owed his being here not only to sheer foolhardiness but to luck, the kindness— or road-skills— of strangers, and, possibly, advanced automotive engineering: he must have been the very model of a distracted driver.
He got out of the Jaguar, closed the door as soundlessly as possible, crossed the street. No buzz-in lock on the front glass door of the building; he entered, passed a wall, like a miniature mausoleum, of brass-doored post boxes. No name above the inlaid paper strip on which was typed the number 304, the number he saw in a file in his mind. There was a brown metal fire door beyond the row of post boxes; that door, too, was unlocked. Fischer passed through, found himself in a tight lobby of pale green walls and black-specked linoleum flooring. Stairs ahead. He took them at a run, three steps at a time.
#####
The walls of the third floor were parchment-white, not green; the linoleum of the lobby and stairway gave over to worn camel-colored carpeting. There were tall wood-frame windows, uncurtained, at either end of the floor. Fischer stood outside the door marked 304, not winded from his climb but breathless nonetheless. A voice in his head told him to turn around and walk back out the way he'd come, to forget her, Chris, the Koran, the whole insane business.
He raised his right hand and knocked.
An interminable three seconds, maybe five, maybe eight, while a task was abandoned, a room was crossed, the peephole was checked. Fischer heard the rattle of a door-chain, the slither of a deadbolt. The door opened, and he and Susan Gaumont stood face to face.
He wanted to be angry with her. He had every right to be. He wanted to feel hurt, used, betrayed. Then he saw the blood still seeping from the cut on her neck; he saw, too, a fresh bruise on her jaw, and he as much as blurted: "Now will you let me protect you?"
She looked beyond him to the corridor, fear in her eyes; she fixed her eyes on him, then, almost helplessly, and ushered him into the flat. "Come in."
She closed the door behind herself and him. She turned and pressed herself shaking against him, and Fischer drew her into his arms and held her close.
"You can't be here," she whispered. "He's coming back. He's coming back for me."
Fischer squeezed her gently, let his cheek come to rest against the dark softness of her hair. He glanced around the flat as he did. Sparse furnishings. A couch upholstered in brown cloth, a metal telescoping reading lamp on an end table, a small analog television on top of a shelved wooden cabinet. An old mirror in a chipped silver metal frame hanging on the wall to the right of the door. No pictures, no knick-knacks. Whoever lived here hadn't been planning on staying long.
Had, in fact, been in the process of leaving when Fischer knocked. Through an open doorway on the far side of a narrow dark hallway, Fischer saw a suitcase lying open on the maroon-quilted foot of a bed. He eased out of the embrace, took Susan's hand; he tipped his forehead to hers and said, quietly: "Please. I have the resources. I can keep you safe."
"I can't—"
"Yes, you can." He met her eyes patiently, reassuringly. "My car is outside. You come away with me now, right now, and everything will be okay. I promise."
"You don't have to promise me everything."
"But that's what I want."
She looked at him for a long moment in wonderment and incredulity. Then she smiled, if still a little uncertainly, caressed his cheek, kissed him on the lips. There was nothing uncertain about the kiss. "Let me get my bags."
She stepped away from him, moved toward the bedroom. Fischer moved to follow. "Here, let me give you a hand—"
A sharp knock. A man's voice called from beyond the front door of the flat: "Susan, it's me. Open up."
It was Chris.
Surprise and fear jolted through Fischer in equal measure; like him, Susan for a moment stood very still. "Just a minute, Chris," she called. "I'll be right there." She took Fischer by the arm, began to steer him toward what had to be the kitchen; she looked at him desperately and mouthed her next words: "Come on—"
Something struck the far side of the door with blunt and tremendous force. The door splintered at its hinges, caved inward. And, like that, Chris, the bogeyman in a black sweatshirt, was with them inside the flat.
He took a moment to rub his battering-ram of a shoulder, to grimace as he did. Immobilized by almost a dream-state terror, Fischer could do nothing but watch. "Those are the magic words, aren't they, Sue?" Chris panted. "'Just a minute.' They say so much when you've got someone to hide." He turned to Fischer and added, his tone good-natured but his face unsmiling: "You know, man, I love— I fucking love— your Jag."
Then he punched Fischer in the stomach. Only it wasn't just a punch. The pain was sudden, apocalyptic, awful; the air grunted from Fischer's lungs.
A blade, attached to the handle of a knife different from the one Chris had held to Susan's neck at Fischer-Morrow, was buried in his midriff. Fischer stared in shocked incomprehension at the blood now spreading across the front of his sweatshirt, and Chris, as if by way of clarification, yanked the blade free and stabbed him again. Again, and again after that. Susan screamed.
"Susie," said Chris, "I'm sorry, but I think I've had just about enough of your shit."
The odd thing was, Fischer was still standing when Chris turned his attention, and the straight, bloody blade of his second knife, Susan's way. It was as if he knew that the pattern and depth of the wounds to Fischer's torso effectively neutralized him as a threat; Fischer, staggering, trying to gasp breath into a punctured lung, was in fact beginning to lose the feeling in his legs. As he did, however, he became aware of something else: a weight in the back waistband of his jeans. He reached behind himself, pawed under his sweatshirt at the small of his back, felt the handle of a gun.
A gun.
He pulled it free with numbing fingers. It was an old-style snub-barrel .38, its cylinder loaded with bullets. Vaguely he remembered— he thought he remembered— Browning suggesting that he take a firearms course after he was mugged. None of that mattered now. He disengaged the safety, leveled the pistol at the back of Chris's head.
"No, Chris," he said, clearly. "I think we've had enough of yours."
With Susan twisting her wrist free of his grip, Chris turned to face him.
And Fischer shot him through the left eye.
Chris's eye socket became a crater; brain matter and blood burst from the back of his head. A fragment of slug or a chunk of skull struck and shattered the mirror behind him. He crumpled to the floor. Fischer fell a moment later. Sat down, really: he could no longer feel his legs. Susan took the gun from his hand even as sitting proved too difficult and he tipped onto his right side. Knowing that the beating of his heart was no longer the certainty it had always been, Fischer felt calm but afraid. A spreading numbness was driving the pain from his wounded torso.
"I have to get help." Susan whispered the words around a sob. She was kneeling beside him. Her eyes were brimming with tears.
Fischer looked up at her. A realization, the last of a lifetime: I'm dying.
"Stay with me," he said.
She looked into his eyes. "It'll only take a minute."
"Don't go." He caught her right hand with numb fingers, held on. "Please—"
"You'll be fine. I promise. I promise you that." A tear splashed onto Fischer's cheek as she leaned close to him. She smoothed his hair away from his temples, kissed his forehead, his cheek, his lips. Then she took her hand from his, straightened away, and was gone.
In her absence, stillness began to settle in the flat. Almost as if he and his fading heartbeat had been alone there the entire time. Pieces of the shattered mirror, blood-spattered, lay all around him. In the shards, obliquely, Robert Fischer watched himself die, and die, and die.
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