by Chris Knopf
What did Axel call Anika, the artist? Color head.
I pushed off the bottom of my consciousness and swam back to the surface. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at Anika, still sitting on the bed, playing with her hair and bouncing her feet on the edge of the mattress. I willed my recalcitrant limbs to put me back on my feet and walk me into the center of the room where I could get a good look at her painting.
"What happens if the roof blows off?" I asked her.
"It'll be ruined."
"That'd be a pity."
"I took photos," she said, pulling a flash drive strung on a slim cord around her neck out from under her sweatshirt. "The re-creation would take a while, but nothing would be lost."
"Color corrected?" I asked.
"Perfectly," she said. "Why wouldn't I? It's a painting."
"Of course it is."
chapter
23
I got my two hours of sleep, and an hour after that, since Anika failed to wake me when I asked her to. Since I'd not suffered a brain hemorrhage while sleeping, and did actually wake up, it was easy to forgive the lapse.
Waking up was one thing. Getting up was another. There might have been a part of me not tender to the touch, or not stiff as the tin man after a night in the rain, but it would have been lonely. I knew from those years in the ring that if you could move any body part without passing out from pain, it wasn't broken, and if it wasn't broken, then moving was simply a matter of will and existential resolve.
I swore a little on the way to my feet, but I got there. Anika steadied me and rubbed my shoulders. She had strong hands, stronger than Amanda's, though geared more toward function than caress. I thanked her anyway.
By this time it was dark outside and the wind was howling like a medieval chorus on a tour from hell. The frame of the Swan was tensioned under the load and I could hear the vertical members and sheathing creak and groan with lateral stresses, and feel the structural tie-ins straining to fulfill their purpose.
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I told Anika it was time to leave the attic with anything whose survival she hoped to ensure.
"Like your cat," I said. "Too late for the painting. How about the hard drive on your computer?"
She got Eloise into the cat carrier, gathered up a handful of clothes, and after employing a few deft maneuvers with my Swiss Army knife, removed the hard drive from the CPU. Thus burdened, we descended the stairs and opened the attic door, nearly bashing into Jock, who was standing in the hallway talking to Christian Fey and Del Rey. He told us he was ordered to keep us in the attic, but was moved by the argument that the order should be contingent on the roof staying put. He went downstairs to check with Hammon.
Anika told her father we were taking over one of the rooms, then left to drop off her stuff. I asked Fey about his insurance.
"Adequate, but you don't honestly think it will come to that, do you?" he asked.
"Maybe. Probably not. Do you have any plywood? It's a little late to board up windows, but we might need some in case of a breach."
"A breach? I have ply in the shed. Maybe two four-by- eight sheets. And a battery-powered drill and some screws."
"By the way, you two, you're scaring me," said Del Rey, holding a cocktail with a healthy charge of ice, something I took note of.
"Do you have a handheld VHF radio?" I asked him. Mine was in my backpack, safely stowed under the bushes in front of the house. I hoped.
"I do."
He went down to the first floor to retrieve it. I was left alone in the dark hallway with Del Rey, who looked unsettled by the sudden intimacy.
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"What happened with Sanderfreud and the Fey kids?" I asked. "You tried to tell me before, but I wasn't listening. I am now."
"I don't know. They had a falling out. Nobody would talk about it."
"We only have a couple minutes."
"It doesn't matter," she said, her tongue thickened by drink. "I looked after them when they needed me. Not that anybody cares."
"Hammon's headed over a cliff. Don't let him take you with him."
"What do you know about it?" she asked, her chin up and her eyelids at half-mast. "You don't get to pick the people you end up with. Fate picks them for you. I could have done more at the company if they'd let me," she added, in a neckwrenching right turn. "I was one of the original N-Spock developers, I'll have you know. Smartest damn chicky in the building. Only it's hard to join the boy's club when you're not a boy. I was good, though. You'd be amazed."
She fell into me, stopping herself with a thin hand that clutched at my shirtsleeve. I supported her while she re- established equilibrium.
"Sorry," she said. "Tee many martoonies."
Fey arrived with a handheld VHF, a modern, lightweight, waterproof model, fresh out of the catalog. I took it and went into the bathroom and tuned in the clearest NOAA weather channel I could get.
The news wasn't good. The storm, defying all predictions, had made a sudden eastward jog, putting all of the New England coast and parts of Long Island in the path of sixty to eighty knot winds. Up to a hundred, if you counted the gusts. They predicted with confidence both the velocity and wind direction based on the highly organized nature of the storm.
I checked my watch and took note.
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When I got back to the hall, Anika was there with Jock, Fey and Del Rey.
"I think we should keep heading toward the lower levels," I told them. "Just to be on the safe side."
"I don't believe anything's safe," said Del Rey. "But lead on, MacDuff."
The storm did me a favor by picking that moment to slam a gust into the side of the hotel, causing a tremor everyone felt from the feet up. Without comment, Jock herded us down the stairs.
't Hooft was there to greet us. He helped Del Rey negotiate the final steps, then led us all to the restaurant area at the back of the hotel. The French doors that comprised the outside wall facing the docks shuddered in the wind, though precautions had been taken: the doors were latched and tied off at the doorknobs with clothesline and wedged shut with the dining room chairs. There was still plenty of seating for everyone, some of which was occupied by Hammon and his crew. They were drinking and eating cheese and sliced meats off a large tray. Pierre held a lit cigarette between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. As the smoke found my nostrils, envy caught at my heart.
I went behind the service bar and found the fixings for a vodka on the rocks, netting a handful of ice from the slosh at the bottom of the ice chest. Then I sat down, staying a healthy distance from Jock and Pierre, just outside earshot and the swing of an ambitious fist.
Anika joined me, banging a chair up to mine into which she dropped like a sack of sand. A tiny splash of wine from the glass she held dropped on my thigh, creating a cool spot as it rapidly evaporated. She put her lips conspicuously and uncomfortably close to my ear.
"What's your plan with the backpack?" she asked.
"Lean back and act like we're talking about the World Series," I whispered, hoping my irritation showed.
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She did as I asked.
"Okay, Mr. Paranoid, what do you have in mind?"
I made her clink glasses.
"You'll know when something happens," I said.
"When what happens?"
"You'll know."
"You don't trust me," she said.
"Not entirely."
"I don't deserve that."
"Yes you do," I said. "That and more. You're a very bright woman, but not aware of your own behavior. I'm not completely wise to your game, but I know you have a game, which is almost as good."
She gave my knee an affectionate slap, a gesture favored by Jackie Swaitkowski.
"But you like me anyway, don't you?" said Anika.
"I do," I said, in a moment weakened by the unexpected association with Jackie, never more than a friend, but a friend th
at had bred in me an unqualified devotion. Whether she knew it or not.
"You came back for me, even after you were safe and sound," she said.
"I did. Not very successfully as it turns out."
"I'm wearing you down."
"I can't say that I know you," I said, "but I think I know enough."
She writhed in her chair in a fluid, preening way, as if channeling her cat. It was part pleasure with my words, part preamble to what she was about to say.
"I know you," she said. "You're afraid of death. You finally have a life you hope is worth living, but you're unsure, afraid to repeat all the same mistakes. You love your girlfriend, but you don't trust her enough to go in whole hog. So you pretend it's a great relationship even while you fret over what could be fatal shortcomings. You're exhausted by your own
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ambivalence and are secretly longing for an alternative to present itself. That alternative is staring right at you, and you like it."
Her words were punctuated by a slight lift of the floor, timed with the sound of the wind battering the west wall of the hotel, and a little involuntary yelp from Del Rey, who grabbed at a nearby curtain to keep from falling. Both Fey and Hammon looked over at me with questions on their faces, but I ignored them.
"What's under this floor?" I asked Anika.
"Not the basement. A crawl space? This part was added on by the former owners so they could have a restaurant. My father keeps ladders and big planks under there."
"The wind's getting underneath," I said.
"Is that bad?"
"Depends on your definition."
Another gust blew the Persian carpet in front of us a few inches off the floor. I looked over at Hammon who was buried in a conversation with Jock and Pierre. 't Hooft sat with them, but was distracted, apparently more engaged by the furor going on outside. He got Hammon's attention by gripping the other man's arm.
"Somebody should go out there and check on conditions," 't Hooft said to Hammon.
Jock stood up without hesitation and gave Hammon a casual salute. Hammon nodded to him and I watched while he put on a windbreaker and zipped it up. Hammon looked over at me.
"You've been through these storms before?" he asked.
"Some storms like this, yeah," I said.
He looked at Jock.
"Take Acquillo with you," he said. "I want his opinion."
Jock shrugged and grinned at me, which I read not so much as a warning but a wished-for expectation that I'd try something stupid. I gave him the same sort of salute he'd
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given Hammon and stood up. I was still wearing my rain jacket, torn at the elbow from one of the various maneuvers I'd put myself through, but otherwise functional.
We walked to the front of the hotel and opened the door. A giant punched me in the chest and tried to yank the doorknob out of my hand. Jock grabbed the edge of the door and held it while we both fought our way outside. When we were clear, he let go and the door slammed shut.
"Shit," he said, "it's really blowing."
We were peppered by light debris spun up from the ground, and while the air was mostly dry, it felt pregnant with the promise of rain. The wind was blowing in from the west, so I led us around the east side of the hotel, down the brick path past the outdoor shower and out to the docks. Everything that could be cleared off the dock before the last storm was gone, so the only motion was an erratic sway of tall aluminum poles that supported the dock lights. I pushed myself to the end of the center walkway to where we'd docked the Carpe Mañana, put my arm around a pier and shot my little flashlight into the Inner Harbor.
It was as if the wind and water had decided to merge into one. I felt the saltwater on my tongue, pelting my cheeks and burning my eyes. The only definition you could see in the waves was in their frenzied, frothy rush across the harbor. On the other side of the channel clumps of tall grass and wild rose were flattened out and slathered with sea foam, which skittered across the surface of the water and sprayed up into the air. A small motor boat, once a foolish straggler out in the mooring field, was half-buried in the foliage, upside down, its white and blue hull bared to the sky like the belly of a big fish.
I wet a finger and stuck it in the air. Then I took the handheld compass out of my jacket pocket, and took a reading.
I had what I needed, so I signaled to Jock that I was going back, and the two of us lurched and staggered our
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way to the hotel, retracing our steps down the brick path and around the side.
"Look at the drowned rats," said Del Rey, when she saw us coming into the restaurant, stripping off our jackets and wiping off our faces with table linen. "So I guess it's finally raining."
"That's not rain," I said. "It's the Inner Harbor."
They were still trying to figure out what I meant when Fey asked, "So what's the prognosis?"
I shrugged in a broad theatrical way, playing to the dispersed nature of my audience.
"No big deal. It's just a little wind. I say we drink the Swan dry and pretend we get along."
Del Rey liked that.
"Hip-hip, hooray," she yelled, holding her glass above her head.
Hammon jumped up from his chair, stalked over to her and grabbed her wrist, gradually lowering her hand to avoid spilling some sort of clear concoction out of the glass. He whispered something in her ear that made her freeze, everything but her eyes, which shifted from side to side, expressing more of what she felt than what she saw.
"You're no fun," she said to the room, an all-in-one statement of defiance, contrition and disappointment. She shook her hand free and walked an irregular line over to the bar, head high and back straight. Hammon shook his head as he watched her, and then catching himself, slumped back in his chair. 't Hooft whispered something that caused Hammon to nod brusquely and flick his hand in the air, as if swatting away a noxious thought.
The weather noise outside suddenly died down, so abruptly that all conversation in the room stopped and all eyes flashed toward the walls and ceiling. Having been in a hurricane before, I knew what was coming next.
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The roar started low, but built up fast, from the bottom up. You felt it in your feet, then up through your body, and eventually, when it reached your ears, you were already distracted by the concussive force of the blow.
The Swan took it broadside, a mighty gust that sent convulsions down the walls and into the foundation, which my engineer's instincts said was straining to hold the building in place, stressed but defiant against the kinetic forces arrayed against it.
Del Rey screamed and 't Hooft dashed across the room and took hold of her. Anika just stared at me, as if I was in collusion with the storm. Jock looked amused, but Pierre was impressed.
"So that was a pretty big piece of wind, eh?" he said.
"Not at all," I said. "It's just warming up."
Nobody seemed to like that.
"I thought you said the wind was no big deal," said 't Hooft.
"For a place like this?" I said. "Not that I've actually examined the structure," I added, looking up at the ceiling as if I could see straight through to the rafters.
"You say you're a carpenter?" Hammon asked me.
"I am."
"And an engineer?"
"More on the mechanical side, but I know what holds buildings together," I said.
The wind swept from west to east across the back end of the restaurant, as if a ghostly calvary had just rushed by. Hammon's self-control, never fully in place, loosened another notch or two.
"Maybe you should take a look around," he said, pointing at Jock to go along with me. "Assuming you know what the hell you're looking at."
"That'll have to be your call," I said.
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Hammon wearily gave his final assent, so my new buddy and I headed out for another exploration. I told him we should start in the basement.
W
e swam down into the cool, wet and moldy air, guided by my intrepid little flashlight. Fey had given me the basic lay of the land, but we still had to move cautiously to avoid colliding with old furniture, crates filled with drinking glasses, rotting canopies, lawn games, folding tables and all the other detritus accumulated by a resort hotel over the decades. My objective was the sill, where the foundation of the building was joined to the frame, a juncture important enough for modern building codes to require substantial reinforcement. For a reason.
