The medical center had its own power plant, at the back of the campus, abutting the slope of Mount Sutro. He could hear it ahead of him, the low whine of its generators and the rush of the fans and the water in the forced draft cooling towers. There were caged light bulbs mounted on the cement walls at the tunnel junctions. When he got to the first junction, he read the numbers on the conduit pipes, looked back along the route he’d followed, and figured out where he needed to go. There was a smaller, unlit passage that went off to his left. This burrowed under Parnassus Street, and it carried power and heat to his own lab. He followed it, crawling in the dark now, pausing every thirty feet to listen to the tunnel behind him.
He was waiting to hear voices, running footsteps. But neither came.
He climbed out of the power supply closet behind the mass spectrometer and stood in the main room of his lab, wearing nothing but the dirt-streaked lab coat. His wallet was where he’d left it, flipped open on the workbench. He took it and walked to the locker room. When Emmeline dropped him off after their single night in bed together, he’d changed clothes and left his old ones in his locker. The only thing missing was a pair of shoes. He sat on the wooden bench and dressed, then tossed the lab coat in the trash on his way to the sink.
Before he left, before he went looking for a place to hide, he knew he needed to see his face. So he stood in front of the mirror and looked. His eyes were swollen and ringed with blood. His lips were puckered and bleeding in a dozen spots, and his face was smeared with charcoal-gray dust from the tunnel. Grains of sand and the wings of dead insects were stuck in the antibiotic ointment. At least the bathroom had paper towels and soap. He didn’t have time to do much, but if he didn’t clean up a little, he might not get far.
When he left the lab, it was four thirty in the morning.
Caleb’s car was in the garage, but he didn’t have his keys. Even if he’d had them, he didn’t think driving it would be a good idea. Kennon would put out a BOLO for it, and every patrol car in the city would be looking. Going home was out of the question too. Kennon’s men would be there, picking through it. Putting evidence in zipper-lock bags, snapping pictures. He came out of the parking garage at the lower level on Carl Street, crossed the Muni tracks, and walked down the hill on Arguello. Heading north, toward the park. He had no jacket and his socks were soaked before he made the first block.
He stayed in the shadows close to the row of houses, and once, when a police car passed, he had to crouch behind a parked minivan. It took him fifteen minutes to find what he was looking for. The motorcycle was at least ten years old, a cheap sport bike that had never been much to start with. It was parked between a Jeep and a beat-up Honda beneath the spreading shadow of a cypress tree on Frederick Street. Leaning on its kickstand, not locked to anything.
He knelt next to the motorcycle and felt the wires running between the headlight assembly and the handlebars, following them down under the plastic fairing cowl. He traced the wires until he found the three-pronged, male-female connector plug. The plastic was so old that the locking clip broke when he disconnected it.
It didn’t matter.
Caleb took a paperclip from his pants pocket. Before leaving the lab, he’d broken it to the right length. Now he bent it into a U. He’d learned something of value in every California institution that had held him between four walls. University High School, Berkeley, Stanford. But this trick was purely thanks to the buildings and grounds superintendent at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, who’d allowed Caleb to shadow him for two months while his mother sat in the dark and wept in between surgeries.
He pushed the wire into the female half of the connector plug and heard the motorcycle’s ignition click once. There was still medical tape on his right arm from the IV catheter. He took a piece of it and taped the paperclip in place so it wouldn’t slip out while he was riding. He stood, mounted the bike, and brought up the kickstand.
It started on the first try.
Six a.m., and the rain still hadn’t let up.
He lay on the mattress and stared at the water-sagged ceiling, listening to a garbage truck emptying dumpsters in the alley behind the hotel. Riding down Eddy Street, in the heart of the Tenderloin, he’d seen ten hotels just like it. But the Coburn Arms had a light in the office, and the clerk behind the bulletproof window took cash without asking questions.
After paying for the room, Caleb had three hundred and fifty dollars left. The ATM on Castro Street had a daily withdrawal limit, so he couldn’t get any more until tomorrow. Assuming Kennon didn’t freeze his account between now and then. He had no idea how big this might be, how wide a net Kennon would cast. There was a TV in his room, but it didn’t work. In fact, its tube was shattered and the room’s prior occupants had been using the hollowed-out box as a wastebasket. It was crammed with empty whiskey bottles and used needles. Little twists of bloody toilet paper.
Caleb was too cold to do anything but get into the filthy bed. He wrapped the stiff blankets around himself and lay shivering. He was tired enough to sleep, but knew what would happen if he did. He’d hear Bridget screaming behind the gag, would see her tied to the chair. He was afraid if he closed his eyes, he’d see her face. He couldn’t bear it if she’d been cut up like his mother, sliced up and left for Kennon to find.
Or he’d see Kennon, sitting in the dark, the single red eye of his recorder glowing.
The police couldn’t have found one of his hairs on the second floor of the Haas-Lilienthal House. That was impossible. But if a bottle of Berthe de Joux could carry itself from his locked lab to his locked house, a piece of hair might get anywhere.
He looked at the window. The streaking rain flashed amber with each pulse of the garbage truck’s rotating warning lamp. He wondered where Bridget was. Wondered how badly she was hurting right now. Sometime soon, she might start talking. For Kennon to have come at him that way, she couldn’t have said anything yet. Maybe she’d been in shock, or delirious with drugs. Screaming gibberish, seizing up and rolling her eyes backwards. Maybe she’d never been conscious at all. But soon, she could tell them about Emmeline. She had to tell them.
Dawn was still hours off. He didn’t sleep.
At ten in the morning, he walked toward the Goodwill on Geary Street. Halfway there, he looked at his wrist and saw he was still wearing a plastic bracelet from the hospital.
He hooked his finger underneath it and popped it off. It fell in the gutter with the rest of the trash.
The bell rang when he walked in, and the man behind the counter glanced up from the magazine he was reading. He looked at Caleb. At his shoeless feet, his bloody shirt. His pincushion face. He set down the magazine and brought a nightstick from under the counter. He pointed it at Caleb’s chest.
“You bringing trouble, you can take it the fuck back out.”
“Bringing cash,” Caleb said. “Not trouble.”
He brought out his wallet and fanned the bills.
The man put down the nightstick and nodded. He sat on his stool again and picked up the magazine.
“Boots are in the back. Jackets, too.”
Ten minutes later, he had boots on his feet and a jacket that kept out the rain. Gloves and a stocking cap. The dark sunglasses were a blessing on his eyes, though the day was cold and the rain was coming back. On his way to Eddy Street, he spotted a pharmacy. It would sell makeup, and if he could stop the bleeding, he could use it when it was too dark to wear the sunglasses.
He spent the day hiding in his room at the Coburn Arms. Staring at the smashed TV set and holding chips of ice against his face. Picturing Bridget in her hospital room, the remnants of Emmeline’s drugs covering her like a heavy blanket. But she was okay—Kennon had said she was okay.
As for Emmeline, he couldn’t even imagine what she did by day.
Maybe she slept in her bed of wrought-iron vines, and with each breath brought the smell of candle smoke into her woodland dreams. When it was dark enough, she could glide into the
city in her Invicta Black Prince to descend to underground bars. To hunt, to collect.
He sat on the bed and thought of these things, and rubbed the ice against his wounds. He sipped Jim Beam from the bottle he’d bought, but it didn’t even touch him. He was still numb from the hospital. He tapped his fingers against his swollen lips, and listened to the sirens prowling the Tenderloin streets like packs of wolves.
Like Emmeline, he waited for dusk.
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor was up in Lands End Park, in the northwest corner of the city. He parked the motorcycle on El Camino del Mar, a five-minute walk from the museum. At four thirty in the afternoon, the park was windswept and cold.
There were only a few cars parked near the trailheads. It wasn’t a day for walking. He could hear the waves eating at the base of the cliffs down beneath where he’d parked the bike. Steady crashes, the breath of wet air sucking through holes in the rocks. He pulled the paperclip from the ignition wires so the short wouldn’t drain the battery, and then leaned against the bike’s seat, looking northeast, toward the bridge.
While there was still enough light, he took the tube of concealer foundation from his pocket, squeezed some onto his finger, and leaned close to the motorcycle’s mirror so he could paint over the bruises and the needle marks around his eyes and above his eyebrow. The foundation wasn’t perfect, but after he blended it back toward his temples and down his cheeks, brushing it lightly, as if giving depth and shading to a charcoal sketch, it was acceptable. He could get in and out of the gallery, at least.
He waited until sundown, then started toward the museum. It would be open for another half an hour. He cut through the parking lot and then went up the entry ramp, passing beneath the stone arch into the courtyard, where a bronze Rodin hunkered naked in the blowing rain. At the main entrance, a security guard opened the door for him.
“Closing soon,” he said.
“I’ll have time. Just wanna see one thing.”
He paid the admission price at the ticket desk and accepted the brochure the woman handed him.
“Looking for something in particular?”
“A John Singer Sargent painting. I don’t know what it’s called.”
“We have two, and they’re both in gallery seventeen.”
He started to unfold the brochure, looking for a map. But the woman caught his hand and pointed across the entry hall.
“You go that way, turn right. It’s midway down the east wing.”
“Thanks.”
He passed two more security guards on his way to the gallery. His Goodwill boots squeaked on the parquet floors. He looked back and saw that he was leaving wet tracks. The second security guard was watching him, his thumbs hooked in his belt.
Gallery seventeen, when he got to it, was empty. There was a large bench in the center of the square room. Five paintings on each wall. He saw the one he was looking for right away, in the far corner.
If there had been a clock in the room, he was sure it would run backwards. Unwinding time. Because this couldn’t be real. Every other gallery he’d passed through had been lit brightly, but this one was missing two of its halogen bulbs. The light in here was heavy and honeyed, like candlelight. He walked slowly to the painting, the floor growing beneath him as he went. It was like walking against the flow of a moving sidewalk. He didn’t want to see this, didn’t want to get any closer to it.
He crossed the room until he stood directly in front of it.
Bridget had been right: he’d drawn it, almost exactly. But that had to be because of what he’d seen in the Haas-Lilienthal House, the way Emmeline had propped herself on the cushions to watch him leave. He couldn’t remember seeing this painting before. The room was reeling now, the walls spinning up and back as if he’d just finished off a bottle of absinthe. Only the painting held steady.
It was Emmeline, reclined on the thin mattress of a cot. Her lips were slightly parted and a look of serene sadness lay in the angle of her eyebrows and the tilt of her eyes. The woman in the painting was lying in a prison cell instead of a mansion. The floor was made of flagstones; straw poked through the tears in the old mattress. But otherwise, his drawing was an exact copy of the painting. And Emmeline was an exact copy of a woman John Singer Sargent had painted in 1917. Caleb’s stomach was a frozen fist.
There was a glass plaque fixed to the wall alongside the painting.
John Singer Sargent
American, 1856–1925
Miss Emmeline Ponurý, on the evening before she was hanged at San Quentin, ca. 1917
Oil on canvas
Signed lower right corner: John S. Sargent
Gift of The Haas-Lilienthal Trust.
He stumbled backwards until he got to the bench at the center of the room, then sat down, still facing the painting.
He had to hold on to the edge of the bench so that he didn’t pitch forward into the floor.
“They’re shutting down now.”
He looked to his side, startled.
It was the woman who’d sold him the ticket. He hadn’t heard her come into the gallery. She’d put on a red raincoat and was carrying her purse over her elbow. A set of keys dangled from a pink lanyard in her hand. She crossed the room and sat on the bench, leaving four feet between them.
“That’s the one you came in to see?” she asked, nodding toward the painting.
“That’s it.”
“It gets me, too,” she said. “It’s so different from all his others. Except maybe the one of the beggar girl, in Paris. You know that one?”
Caleb nodded. Bridget’s copy was hanging in his bedroom. It was the only thing she’d left behind.
“It’s like that,” the woman said. “It has that same look.”
“Haunted.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That haunted look.”
“Who was she?” Caleb asked.
He was whispering, looking at the painting. He couldn’t take his eyes away from it. Beside him, the woman shrugged. Her raincoat made a crinkly sound in the quiet gallery. From farther away, there were hollow booms as the security guards closed metal doors in the lower galleries.
“There was an art student who used to come in here, six or seven years back. She told me the story. She’d studied it. But I don’t remember everything she knew.”
“Whatever you remember,” Caleb said.
“Something about a poisoning—she poisoned a guest, I think, at the Palace Hotel, in that bar they have there. The one with the painting. And then at her trial, the girl said she’d been kidnapped. By a showman of some kind. A man with a traveling act, who took her state to state. She’d never had a choice, she said, because of the things he’d done to her—horrible things. But no one believed her,” the woman said. “And she hung for it.”
She spoke softly, without looking at Caleb. He waited for her to go on, and eventually she did.
“John Sargent was friends with her attorney. He did the sketch when they visited her in San Quentin, on the night before. He did the painting the next day.”
“Without a model to sit for it.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “By the time he painted it, she was gone.”
They sat in silence for a moment with Emmeline Ponurý, who was waiting to be hanged.
“What happened to it?” Caleb asked. “What are those scratches?”
It looked as if someone had put his fingernails into the paint next to Emmeline’s arms. A few of the scratches went as deep as the weave of canvas.
“Vandalized,” the woman said. “Twenty-five years ago, maybe. Before it came to the museum.”
“Why?” Caleb asked.
But he could guess. It looked like someone had been trying to dig Emmeline off the canvas. Like someone had been clawing near Emmeline’s wrists, trying to break through the barrier of paint, to help her through the frame and into the world.
On the bench beside him, the woman shook her head.
“I don’t think anyone knows
what happened,” she said. “That girl, the art student, even she didn’t know. It looked worse before the restoration.”
“She was a pretty girl, the student?” Caleb whispered. “Blond hair to her shoulders, blue-gray eyes?”
“You know her?”
“I used to.”
The woman stood.
“They’ve locked the front doors now. I can walk you out.”
But Caleb didn’t get up right away. The painting was such a perfect rendering of Emmeline, he could almost smell her perfume. If she came to him now, if she kissed him, her lips would be cool on his wounds.
As cold as absinthe, and as soothing as morphine.
It’d be easy, wouldn’t it? she might whisper. Here, on this bench. You could have me any way—
“Sir?”
“I’m sorry. I’m coming.”
Jesus, he thought. Please let this stop.
There was only one person who might know what was going on. To see him would be dangerous, but Caleb knew there was no other choice.
Twenty-Five
CALEB STOOD IN the shadows on Bay Street in the Marina District, pacing to keep warm, watching the lights in the house across the street. He hadn’t come to commit theft, but he’d already stolen something. And now that he’d thought about it, he’d probably do it again before he left. There was at least one other thing he wanted, and he could get it here.
He was two blocks from the Vespa scooter now. That had just been luck, coming across it, forcing its seat compartment open, and finding the motorcycle helmet inside. The helmet would be necessary later tonight when he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. There were usually police around the toll plazas. Riding past them without a helmet would be too dangerous.
He watched the house.
Like the rest on this street, its ground floor was a garage, and next to the garage door, a set of steps led upward to a little porch and the main entrance. The living room’s bay windows were on the second level, directly above the garage. A woman came into view. She pulled the curtains back, cupped her hand to see past the inside reflection, and looked up the street. After a moment, she disappeared toward the back of the house.
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