So the surviving, definitive image of the house was that photograph, augmented by a series of brief, fractured descriptions scattered throughout Rooms by the Sea.
There were also the images in Carmen’s sketchbook, for this was the same house she had been trying to draw.
8
Claudine began her last chapter recounting, as fact, the Basque legend that they were descended from the inhabitants of the lost continent of Atlantis. That Atlantis was destroyed by a mysterious cataclysm, an earthquake or volcanic eruption, and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. That its last king was Gades, who founded and gave his name to the ancient city of Cádiz, on the southern coast of Spain. Atlantis’s few survivors washed up there. They made their way north and settled high in the Pyrenees, as far from the sea as possible. She added to the story her own twist: that several survivors who had come closest to drowning were transformed into amphibious beings and forced to remain behind. To survive, they needed to remain close to the sea. They became fishermen and built houses on stilts along the coast. They had to spend at least eight hours a day in the sea, either swimming on the beach, or far from shore, off their boats.
Claudine’s husband, like his father and grandfather before him, had inherited the vast fishing fleet—two dozen ships by the time he was running the company—that had been assembled by his great-grandfather, himself descended from generations of sailors on fishing boats whose earliest ancestors were humble fishermen, those same survivors of Atlantis who settled by the sea.
9
Several weeks after she tried to follow him, Fabius served Carmen lunch at the long dining room table. He had prepared a more elaborate meal than usual, all seafood: monkfish soup, seaweed salad, octopus ceviche, and squid stuffed with crab and scallops. While she ate and drank a glass of wine, Carmen was reading Rooms by the Sea. Comparing the two editions, she realized that at least three pages of the last chapter had been cut in the English translation.
She was so immersed, going back and forth between the books and flipping through her dictionary, that she didn’t notice Fabius had brought out a dish of apricots stuffed with goat cheese, another wineglass, and the bottle of wine. He was standing on the other side of the table watching her. She was startled to see him in a double-breasted blue suit with a blue shirt and pale blue tie, rather than his customary whites.
“Thank you,” she said. “This was delicious.”
“May I sit?”
He had surprised her again, not because he wanted to join her for the first time ever, but because he had asked her in English.
“Of course,” she said.
He set down the wineglass and bottle and pulled out a chair. “This is the oldest wine in the house. A Faustino Rioja.” He refilled her glass and then filled his own.
“You speak English,” she said.
“I never said I didn’t. I said I spoke enough languages already. I need to talk with you.” He folded his hands on the table. “I see you’ve nearly finished the book.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve noticed that the number of pages in the two editions is roughly the same—until the last chapter. Would you like to know why?”
“I was trying to work through the original.”
“I’ll save you the time. And add a few things you ought to know. You’ve read what she says about the origin of the Basques.”
“You believe it?”
“Of course. It was shortened by the translator, herself a Basque, for the same reason any of us would: it would reveal long-kept secrets.”
“Then you’re Basque, too.”
“I didn’t know it when I first came here. Looking back on my life, I should have. My father did not speak Euskera. He grew up in Malaga, far from Basque country, but he was a Basque. He didn’t know it because he was an orphan, adopted by a Spanish couple when he was an infant. I discovered that his true parents died in a fire in Donostia, which is what we call San Sebastián.”
“And what is it that the translator had to cut?”
“The fact that certain Basques die twice.”
“What?”
“Those descended from the coastal Basques are amphibious, as Claudine says. After they give up this earthly life, they become marine creatures exclusively, for a year. Then they truly perish. When the time comes for this transition, they know it and prepare themselves. They enjoy another year of life, so long as it is aquatic at all times, not just eight hours a day.”
Carmen stared at him.
“You don’t believe it?” Fabius said.
“I don’t know.”
“Your great-grandmother describes the process in detail. She herself would undergo it.” He paused. “Your mother did as well.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your mother didn’t drown. She wasn’t cremated.”
“You lied to me?”
“It was her request.”
“So she lied.”
“Before you arrived for the funeral, she left here—by water.”
Carmen pushed the books aside and leaned closer to him. “That’s over a year ago.”
“Yes. So now she’s truly gone. I’m sorry to shock you like this. I planned to tell you at a more propitious time.”
“When would that be?”
“One day out on the water, sailing,” he said calmly. “But I have no choice now. It’s time for me to prepare myself. I’m leaving today.”
“Just like that?”
“In rare instances, we have more time. Usually it is like this. I’ve lived a hundred years. I’ll live one more.”
“You’re sixty-eight.”
He smiled. “Trust me, I have been in this life longer than that. Your family has been good to me. Now I’ll go back to the place of our origins.”
“Basque country?”
“No. Before that. Before Cádiz.” He paused. “You understand?”
“I know what you’re saying, but I don’t understand.”
“It’s the truth.”
Carmen drank some wine. “So this will happen to me as well. That’s what you’re telling me.”
He nodded. “But only after you’ve lived a long life.”
10
That was Fabius’s goodbye. Carmen never saw him again.
A few hours later, she discovered that his ocean kayak was gone. He had left his keys on the kitchen counter. The house keys and a large brass key, embossed with a trident. The kitchen was tidy. His aprons were hanging on their hooks, but his sisters’ photograph was gone.
His keys in hand, Carmen left the kitchen by the door Fabius always used, walked down the two short corridors she’d seen before, but instead of getting lost, she entered a much longer, well-lit corridor. It was unremarkable. The walls white, with blue sconces, the ceiling blue. She passed rooms with more of those white doors from the shipwrecked Sabina. At the end of this corridor there was a blue door with a brass lock. It couldn’t have been easier to reach.
She knocked twice, but she knew Fabius was gone. She unlocked the door and entered a large, circular blue room that smelled of the sea. Its circular windows were more like portholes, but larger. All of them looked onto the sea. The bed had been stripped and the room cleared of all possessions. The desk was bare, the closets and cabinets empty. The bathroom was also huge, tiled in blue and white, with brass fixtures. The sink, toilet, and shower stall were white. But it was the circular bathtub that drew Carmen into the room. It had recently been drained. Its deep blue tiles were still damp. Seven feet deep, with a diameter of fifteen feet, it was more like a pool than a tub. A man could submerge himself easily or float for many hours. Hours, she thought, when he could not remain in the sea if the weather was harsh or his work didn’t allow it.
Carmen had already moved most of her things to her apartment in the city. That evening she gathered up what remained, her canvases and paints, her books. Passing by the room that opened onto the sea, she saw that the door was closed. She turned off the lights
and locked up the house and walked down the stone path.
When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw, not the house she had just left, but the large house in the photograph and in her sketches, its windows lit up and the sea behind it a luminous blue. She gazed at it for a long moment before entering the forest. She didn’t look back again, and she never returned to that place.
MICHAEL CONNELLY is the author of 28 novels, many of which feature Detective Harry Bosch of the Los Angeles Police Department. He lives in Florida and California. He first saw Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks at the Art Institute of Chicago while writing his first Bosch novel and was inspired to include the painting at the ending of the book.
Nighthawks, 1942
33 × 60 in. (84.1 × 152.4 cm). Friends of American Art Collection,
1942.51, The Art Institute of Chicago
NIGHTHAWKS
BY MICHAEL CONNELLY
Bosch didn’t know how people in this place could stand it. It felt like the wind off the lake was freezing his eyeballs in their sockets. He had come totally unprepared for the surveillance. He had layers on but his top layer was an L.A. trench coat with a thin zip-in liner that wouldn’t keep a Siberian husky warm in the Chicago winter. Bosch wasn’t a man who gave much credit to clichés but he found himself thinking: I’m too old for this.
The subject of his surveillance had come down Wabash and turned east toward Michigan and the park. Bosch knew where she was going because she had headed this way on her lunch break at the bookstore the day before as well. When she got to the museum she showed her member pass and was quickly admitted entrance. Bosch had to wait in line to buy a day pass. But he wasn’t worried about losing her. He knew where she would be. He didn’t bother to check his coat because he was cold to the bone, and he didn’t expect to be in the museum more than an hour—the girl would have to get back to the bookstore.
He moved through the galleries quickly on a direct route to the permanent Hopper exhibition. There he found her sitting on the one long bench. She had her notebook and pencil out and was already working. He had been surprised the day before to find she was not sketching in her notebook as she repeatedly glanced up and studied the painting. She was writing.
Bosch surmised that the Hopper painting was the biggest draw in the museum. Many people came for it and often carelessly stood in front her, blocking her view. She never cleared her throat to alert them. She never said anything. She sometimes leaned to her left or right to see around one of the blockers and Bosch thought he would see a slight smile on her lips, as though she were pleased with what the new angle of observation had brought her.
The lone bench was crowded with four Japanese tourists sitting in a row next to her. They looked like high school students come to study the master’s most well-known work. Bosch took a position on the other side of the gallery, behind the surveillance subject’s back so she wouldn’t notice him. He rubbed his hands together and tried to get some warmth into them. His joints were aching from the cold and the nine-block walk to the museum. He had found no interior space with an angle on the front doors of bookstore. He had waited outside, hovering around the entrance to a garage, for her to emerge at lunchtime.
Bosch saw a spot on the opposite end of the bench come open when one of the students got up. He moved toward it, sitting down and using the three students between him and the surveillance subject as a blind. Without leaning forward and exposing himself, he tried to look down the bench and possibly see what she was writing in her notebook. But she was writing with her left hand and that blocked his view.
He looked up at the painting when there was a moment the crowd cleared and it could be seen clearly. His eyes were drawn toward the man sitting alone at the counter, his face turned toward the shadows of the painting. There was a couple sitting across the counter from him. They looked bored. The man sitting alone was ignoring them.
“Iku jikan.”
Bosch turned his eyes from the painting. An older Japanese woman was signaling the sitting students impatiently. It was time to go. The two girls and a boy stood up and scurried out of the gallery to join the rest of their classmates. Their five minutes with the masterpiece were up.
That left Bosch alone on the bench with the subject of his surveillance. Four feet of space on the bench separated them. Bosch realized that sitting down had been a strategic mistake. She could get a good look at him if she looked away from the painting and her notebook. She might remember him if this lasted another day.
He didn’t move at first because that might draw her eye. He decided to wait two minutes and then get up. He would turn quickly away so she wouldn’t see his face. In the meantime, she did not seem to notice his presence and he went back to looking at the painting. He wondered about the painter’s choice to show the interior of the diner from the outside. To paint it from the shadows of night.
But then she spoke.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Excuse me?” Bosch asked.
“The painting. It’s pretty magnificent.”
“That’s what they say, yes.”
“Who are you?”
Bosch froze.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Which one of them do you identify with?” she said. “You’ve got the man by himself, the couple who don’t look all that happy to be there, and the man working behind the counter. Which one are you?”
Bosch turned from her to look at the painting.
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “How about you?”
“Definitely the loner,” she said. “The woman looks bored. She’s checking her nails. I’m never bored. It’s the one all alone.”
Bosch stared at the painting.
“Yeah, me too, I guess,” he said.
“What do you think the story is?” she asked.
“What, with them? What makes you think there’s a story?”
“There’s always a story. Painting is story telling. Do you know why it’s called ‘Nighthawks’?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, the night part is obvious. But check out the beak on the guy with the woman.”
Bosch did. He saw it for the first time. The man’s nose was sharp and bent like a bird’s. Nighthawks.
“I see it,” he said.
He smiled and nodded. He had learned something.
“But just look at the light,” she said. “All light in the painting comes from within the coffee shop. It is the beacon that draws them there. Light and dark, yin and yang, clearly on display.”
“I would guess you are a painter but you are writing in your notebook, not drawing.”
“Not a painter. But I am a storyteller. A writer, I hope. One day.”
He knew she was only 23 years old. It seemed too young to have accomplished anything yet as a writer.
“So you are a writer but you come to look at a painting,” he said.
“I come for inspiration,” she said. “I think I could write a million words about it. When I am having trouble I come here. It gets me through.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Writing is about what happens next. Sometimes that doesn’t come so easily. So I come here and look at something like this.”
She gestured toward the painting with her free hand, then nodded. Problem solved.
Bosch nodded too. He thought he understood inspiration and how it could travel from one discipline to another, how it could be harnessed for an endeavor seeming completely different. He had always thought that studying and understanding the sound of a saxophone had made him a better detective. He wasn’t sure why or if he could ever explain it to himself or anybody else. But he knew that hearing Frank Morgan play “Lullaby” somehow made him better at what he did.
Bosch nodded at the notebook in her lap.
“Are you writing about the painting?” he asked.
“Actually, no,” she said. “I am writing my novel. I just come here a lot in hope that somethi
ng about the painting rubs off on me.”
She laughed.
“I know, sounds crazy,” she said.
“Not really,” Bosch said. “I think I understand. Is your novel about someone alone?”
“Yes, very much so.”
“Based on you?”
“Sometimes.”
Bosch nodded. He liked talking to her even though it broke the rules.
“So that’s my story,” she said. “Why are you here?”
It took him by surprise.
“Why am I here?” he asked, buying time to think. “The painting. I wanted to see it in person.”
“Enough to come back two days in a row?” she asked.
Bosch was caught. She smiled and pointed to her eye.
“They say a good writer is an observer,” she said. “I saw you here yesterday.”
Bosch nodded sheepishly.
“Couldn’t help notice how cold you were,” she said. “That jacket . . . you aren’t from around here, are you?”
“No, not really,” Bosch said. “I’m from L.A.”
He watched her as he said it. His words were as freezing as the wind outside the museum.
“All right, who are you?” she asked. “What is this?”
Bosch waited in the foyer twenty minutes before Griffin’s security man took him back to the office. Griffin was seated behind a large mahogany-topped desk. The same place he was sitting the day Bosch had met him.
Through the open curtain of the window to his right Bosch could see the still surface of a pool. Griffin was wearing a long-sleeved workout ensemble with a zip-up turtleneck. His face was flush from whatever activity accounted for a workout for him.
“Sorry to hold you up, Bosch,” he said. “I was rowing.”
In Sunlight or In Shadow Page 8
