Damnation Street

by Andrew Klavan

  And she had abandoned it, all of it, everything she'd learned, to sink back into medieval superstition and hocus-pocus.

  Look at her! I thought to myself wildly, staring wildly, gaping wildly. I was appalled. I was a modern man, an intellectual, sophisticated man. I was appalled to see such a smart, witty, knowledgeable girl kneeling there with her hands clasped like a child, with those wonderful green eyes lifted like a saint's and that valentine face upraised like the face of some pert, mischievous angel who seemed to give off an almost mesmeric radiance so that I couldn't stop staring at her, standing there at the window and staring and staring through the glass and feeling this tide, this wave, this surge of hunger for a lifetime at her lips and in her arms rising up through me, washing away every other thought and caution and consideration...

  So that it was many long moments—I don't know how many, I don't know how long—before I realized I had been discovered.

  22.

  When I die and go to hell, they will lock me in a screening room and play the movie of that moment for all eternity. They won't need fire. I'll burn from within.

  All this time later, I remember every detail. I can see it as clearly as if I were in hell already. My breath started it. In my curiosity to know what was going on, I had instinctively held my breath. Then, as the full truth hit me, the air poured out of my lungs in a long huff of surprise. It fogged the glass of the window I was peering through—a circle of mist blossomed on the pane. The preacher caught the movement of it in his peripheral vision. Halfway through an "Amen," he turned and saw me standing there.

  Some part of my brain must have registered this, but it didn't fully get through to me somehow. I was too busy staring at Emma. She and the rest of the congregation were rising from their knees, settling back into their seats. And one by one, noticing that the preacher had turned his head, they were following his gaze.

  Still, I didn't completely realize what was happening. I was staring at Emma. I was thinking about Emma.

  Then she turned too. Emma turned too.

  Our eyes met through the window. I came to myself with a jolt. The shock I felt was answered by the shock on Emma's face.

  I remember thinking: Ah. Well. That's that...

  Emma stood crisply. She gestured to the others to go on without her. Calm and stately, she walked out of the room.

  The congregation was still staring at me, every one of them. I offered them a Cheshire grin of infinite apology and withdrew through the whispering pachysandra to stand abashed in the shadow of the lemon tree.

  A moment later they started singing again. Why shouldn't they sing? I thought miserably. They aren't me. I stood and waited. I heard the front door of the house open and shut. I saw Emma walking slowly to the garden gate.

  She opened the gate and came toward me over the brick path at a thoughtful, deliberate pace. She was not wearing the beret, but she'd put the long coat back on. It was unbuttoned, open on the white sweater and jeans underneath, the slim, elegant figure underneath.

  It was a cool, crisp day. The sun was bright. The shadows of lofty clouds sailed swiftly over the grass. Emma's cheeks were already turning pink with the weather, a sensational contrast with her black hair and her green eyes. Those eyes were glistening with—what?—mainly bewilderment, I think, and maybe pain—yes, pain.

  As for me, I was just sorry, so terribly, terribly sorry I had not called the number she had written on the coaster at Carlo's.

  She came to stand before me. She looked at me a long time, studied my face, as if she might find some clue there to what was going on. Her lips parted, but she seemed unable to find the words to speak.

  "Emma...," I said.

  "What are you doing here?"

  I couldn't answer. Driving over the bridge, fretting over the disastrous possibilities, I had envisioned this scenario a dozen different times. I had prepared a dozen different lies to tell her if she caught me out. But now that it had actually happened, I was struck silent. Even I could see that a lie here would be quicksand. I would never get out of it. The truth, though—even if I weren't professionally bound to keep her father's case confidential, I wouldn't have had the courage to tell her the truth.

  "Were you following me?" she asked.

  I nodded.

  "You were spying on me."

  I nodded.

  She shook her head, bewildered. Bewildered, she gazed down at the path beneath her shoes with an expression of wonder. She moved around past me to the lemon tree. There was one of those circular wrought-iron benches surrounding the trunk. She sank onto it. She considered the bricks another moment. Then she raised her eyes to me and shook her head and gave a single laugh—bewildered, all bewildered.

  "What are you doing here, Emma?" I blurted out.

  "Well," she answered quietly. "I'm not really sure that's the question."

  "No, I know, but I mean: you looked like you were praying?"

  "Did I?"

  "I mean, you and I, we—talked ... About poetry and philosophy and ... I mean, is it a play? Are you rehearsing a play or something?"

  Another wondering laugh burst out of her. The sun through the lemon tree's branches laid a filigree of shadows over her cheeks. It had the weird effect of making her seem part of the scenery, at one with the surrounding garden.

  "You're a Christian," I said, appalled.

  She nodded. "I am; it's true."

  "But that ... you can't ... you can't be. You ... I mean, your father..."

  I stopped myself before I said too much. Or maybe I already had. Emma arched an eyebrow at me. "What about my father?"

  " Well, I mean, he's ... I read his book; he's ... I mean, he's an intellectual. You're an intellectual. We don't believe in God anymore. I mean, sure, if you want to pretend there's some amorphous, mysterious Oriental crap underlying actual real reality, fine, but this—this is organized religion."

  "It is a little organized," she conceded, "but I try to inject my own personal chaos into it whenever possible."

  "No, really," I insisted. "Christianity, Emma. It's for those guys on TV who go around telling people not to get laid and then get caught handcuffed to a hooker in a Motel 6 somewhere."

  "I guess I haven't quite reached that stage of spiritual development."

  "Nobody believes in this stuff anymore, none of the real people."

  She continued to look up at me, wondering, even amazed. "You mean, real people like my father."

  "Well..."

  Emma gave a slow nod. She looked away, off into the distance, where you could see, through the neighboring houses, glimpses of the tree-lined road. The people, the congregation, had stopped singing inside, and the low voice of the preacher had taken up again. The whisper of traffic reached us, too, and the songs of birds carried on the vital autumn air.

  "Well, my father is a very brilliant man, that's for sure," she said finally. "And he's always been a man of deep convictions too. When he was younger, he was convinced that Freudian analysis would set us all free. Then he was convinced that communism would save the world, then he amended that to socialism—though I've never completely understood the difference. What else was there? Feminism was very big with him about ten years ago. And he's still into multiculturalism—you know, noble savages and all that. Then there's the postmodern stuff; I guess that's the latest—everything's relative, there's no truth, words don't mean anything. And of course atheism—that was always there, that was a given. You couldn't really have the rest of it without that."

  She spoke all this into that distance between the trees. My eyes went over her profile as she did. I was struck again by the rightness of her, by my certainty that we were meant to be together. I had never known anything as surely as I knew that my best life depended on her. I loved her.

  Now she turned to look up at me again, the filigree of shadows shifting on her heart-shaped face, holding her within the texture of the garden. "One thing I couldn't help noticing after a while, though? Brilliant as he was,
every thing my father believed in turned out to be untrue. I mean, people don't really have Oedipal complexes, not usually anyway, and labor doesn't actually produce capital. Women are born different from men, some cultures are better than others, and on and on. And then, on top of being wrong all the time, he's also miserable. Drinks morning to night, hates his marriage, treats my mother like garbage. I sometimes think miserable people shouldn't be allowed to have philosophies at all, you know. I sometimes think they should have to find happiness first, then at least they can tell us what worked for them." She waved the thought away with her hand. "Anyway, the point is, after a while it made me wonder. The fact that all these deep convictions of his turned out to be, you know, just false, made me wonder about the other thing, the God thing. Well, it's a long story."

  I drew my hand along the side of my jaw. I had to admit, it didn't seem as silly as it did when she was praying. "What about this?" I said, gesturing toward the house. "All this hush-hush stuff. Is this the catacombs or something? You have to come here to do this in secret?"

  Emma seemed about to object. I wouldn't have blamed her. It was none of my business, for one thing. Plus we both knew I owed her more answers than she did me. Still, she seemed to want to explain, to get it out of the way, maybe, before we got down to discussing the real topic of the day, which was why the hell a creepy scummy slimebag like me was following her around and spying on her.

  Emma looked toward the house, gave a fond half smile. "It's not secret. It's just private, that's all. The people who come here are mostly in the same boat as I am. You know, it's a university town. We all have parents or boyfriends or girlfriends or bosses or whatever who are academics or intellectuals or radicals or journalists—you know, people who have very, very strong convictions that just happen to be untrue. And like most people who have convictions like that, they get very angry at anyone who disagrees with them. Some of us are afraid of losing our jobs or our lovers. Some of us don't want to stop getting invited to the hip parties. Some of us—like me—I just don't want to break the heart of someone I love. It's not being secretive exactly. Most of us aren't the sort of people who would fit in at the mainstream churches anyway. So we organized this and it's private and it gets the job done."

  She finished. She went on looking fondly at the house as the preacher's voice drifted to us and the voices of the people answered. I stood over her, expecting her to say more, expecting her to turn to me, ask me straight out: Why hadn't I called her after that first night in Carlo's? Why was I spying on her now? She didn't. She didn't say anything. She just went on looking at the house.

  "Well, it all sounds almost reasonable when you explain it like that," I said.

  She gave a laugh, a sad little laugh.

  "Ah, Emma." I plunked down next to her on the wrought-iron bench. "I'm not some kind of creep, I swear it."

  She nodded, still without looking at me. "I know that. I know what you are. I think I know what you can be anyway."

  "Emma, from the second I saw you..." I stopped. I couldn't. I didn't have the right.

  "I know that too," she said. She did turn now, brought her face half-around, glanced at me sidelong. It was an awfully nice face. Pug nose, arching brows. Thin lips, but soft, very soft-looking. I couldn't believe I had stayed away from her so long just to avoid this moment, just to avoid telling her the truth.

  "That night we met at Carlo's," I said. "I went back to the city after and stopped to pick something up at the house of a woman I work with." Emma shut her eyes, waiting for it. "I was gonna call you the next day, but ... we, this woman and I, we ... started up together." Emma's soft-looking lips scrunched into a trembling frown. I sighed. "I keep thinking I'll get out of it. I want to get out of it. But I haven't been able to and ... I didn't want to call you until I had."

  A tear hung crystal on her eyelashes and fell. She opened her eyes. For the first time, there was a flash of anger in them, an angry tension in her voice. "Then why are you here?" she said. "Why are you spying on me?"

  Painfully, I forced the words out. "I can't tell you. I'm sorry. I'll find a way to make it right. So help me God, I will. But right now—I just can't tell you."

  Emma opened her mouth. She made a noise. A whispered sob, I guess. Another tear fell from her eyes and then another ran down her cheek. She pressed her lips together. She shook her head. "That," she said, "is not fair."

  "I know, I know."

  "You're taking advantage."

  "I know."

  "You're taking advantage of the fact that we were meant for each other."

  I seized her hand convulsively in both of mine. I brought it up and pressed it against my forehead. "Emma!"

  She gently drew the hand away. As tightly as I held on, I couldn't keep it. She stood up. I couldn't look at her. I bent forward with my elbows on my thighs, my hands still pressed against my brow.

  They began singing in the house again. Knuckleheads. What the hell were they constantly singing about?

  "I'm not the new kind of girl," Emma said. The way she said it, the way she had to work to keep her voice steady—well, it would've broken my heart if my heart had not already broken. "I'm an old-fashioned girl. I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don't come back until you are one."

  The air came out of me as if she'd punched me. I wished she'd only punched me. It was several long moments before I could lift my head.

  When I did, she was at the gate again, slipping through the gate, closing the gate behind her. She walked away, up the path, out of sight, back to the house, where they all continued singing.

  23.

  The canyon highway curled through the barren hills, came out again into barren flatland, wilderness to the horizon. Swaths of gray cloud covered the sky, as if it were a ceiling painted slapdash. Daylight broke through in places as the sun began to rise, but the clouds also gathered and the light slowly died behind an iron monotony. The color of the distance died with the light. There was nothing ahead but the brown of dust and tumbleweed, a faint hazy blue of mountains far away.

  Weiss drove wearily. He'd slept badly. He'd had bad dreams. All night in the motel, in a boxlike room bare yards from the highway. Tangled in sweat-gray sheets, mere inches beneath the surface of sleep. Trucks had thundered past, headlights had flashed over the ceiling—and in his dreams, the dark was split by lightning and there stood the Shadow-man. It was the man from Hannock, the man in the suede windbreaker whom Weiss had spoken to at the base of the driveway. But in these dreams, the killer leaped suddenly at him out of the split darkness—and he had no face. That was the worst part of it. That was the thing that haunted Weiss even after he was awake. The killer had no face. Even here, now, no matter how hard he tried, Weiss couldn't remember what the man had looked like. He had slipped away, had slipped even out of his memory.

  "Boof," he said aloud. Just thinking about it gave him indigestion. He rubbed his gut with one hand as he steered toward Reno with the other.

  At eight he saw the city catch the sun. Wind with a hint of rain in it had thinned the clouds by then. The light came down in beams. The oasis of hotel towers and casinos was held in a pink glow, set apart from the backdrop of white-blue mountains. It looked like a fine place from here.

  But with every mile Weiss drove, a little of the luster of the city seeped away. Soon the dreary outskirts surrounded him. A great barrel-chested rainstorm came rolling westward, darkening the sky. The dreariness spread and overtook him and went on before.

  By the time he cruised into downtown, the streets seemed duller to him than the wilderness. This was in spite of the lights, in spite of the morning crowds. The Taurus passed beneath the arching sign: "RENO," in large red letters and underneath in yellow: "THE BIGGEST LITTLE CITY IN THE WORLD." Beyond that, on either side, were the hotels and casinos outlined in neon now. Thick traffic clogged the way ahead, pickups and hulking SUVs shouldering against each other from intersection to intersection. Late gamblers from the night before and early tourists
moved in small groups along the sidewalks under the shadows of domed roofs and the lancing angles of high-rise hotels.

  Weiss found himself checking faces as he drove. The sinewy cowboy in the truck alongside him. The obese salesman coming out of the casino with a whore. The bored, irritated honeymooner with his unhappy bride in tow. Weiss examined them without thinking, compulsively trying to prove to himself that the nightmares were wrong, that he would, in fact, recognize the killer if he saw him again. But it was no good. He didn't know what to look for. The killer's face was gone.

  He drove on to the address the kid at the Super 8 had given him. Adrienne Chalk's address. Another of his Weiss hunches, another slender thread of a lead. The woman had stayed in the motel room paid for by Andy Bremer, and Weiss had a feeling that had something to do with Julie. That's all he had. That Weiss feeling. But he'd been right about Bremer, it turned out. And if Bremer was Julie's father, maybe Chalk was her mother or something. Or maybe not. Maybe it was nothing, a dead end.

  He found the place easily enough. It was just a couple of blocks from the center of town. The Taurus turned the corner onto a long broad boulevard that led out to the low suburbs and the mountains. There were strip joints lining one side of the street. Their shabby signs jutted over the sidewalk, nightclub names in blinking neon: Fantasy, Femme Fa-tale, Gangster Pete's. Weiss parked the car under twinkling lights that spelled out The Black Hand.

  On the far side of the boulevard, there were four- and five-story buildings with glass-fronted shops and taverns at the ground level, brown brick apartments up top. Weiss got out of the car, lifting his eyes to some of the windows above a liquor store. A figure pulled away behind curtains on the third story. Weiss figured: So what? But he felt edgy. He sensed something was coming. Maybe it was just the bad dreams.

  He crossed the street, dodging a red pickup with country music booming from its radio. When he reached the sidewalk, he moved to the entrance alcove next to the liquor store. There was a bright red door. There was a line of names on a brass panel next to it, a line of buttons next to the names. The Chalk woman's name was there. Weiss pressed the button next to it. Almost immediately, the door buzzed, unlocked. Fast, as if she was expecting him. Weiss pushed in. He didn't feel good about this. He was sorry he'd left his gun in the car.