Innocence

Assuring myself that what had really spooked me was the police sedan, I turned from the window and spoke into the darkness where the girl sat. “We better get out of here. If you’ve stolen something—”

“I’ve stolen nothing. Just copied evidence.”

“Of what?”

“Of the case I’m building against the murdering thief.”

“You’ve been in here before, at his computer.”

“Several times, though he doesn’t know it.”

“But he was chasing you.”

“I came into the library an hour before closing time and hid in the nook behind that painting. Fell asleep and woke after midnight. I was climbing the south stairs with my flash when the door opened above me, the light came on, and there he was, as shocked to see me as I was to see him. First time he’d seen me in five years. He never works so late. Besides, he was supposed to be in Japan another two days on business. I guess he came back early.”

“Five years. Since you were thirteen.”

“The night he tried to rape me. The worst night of my life, and not only for that reason.”

I waited for her to explain that curious comment, but when she didn’t, I said, “He’s above you on the stairs, you run, and you fake him out so he thinks you left the library.”

“Not that easy. He chases me down the stairs. He’s fast. In the hallway, he catches me by the arm, swings me around, throws me to the floor. He drops to one knee, arm pulled back, going to punch me in the face.”

“But here you are.”

“Here I am because I have a Taser.”

“You Tasered him.”

“A Taser doesn’t drop a guy as hard if he’s really furious, if he’s hot with rage and flooded with adrenaline, totally wild. I should have given him another jolt or two after he went down and I got up, but all I wanted was to get away from him, so I ran.”

“If he recovered that quick, he must really hate you.”

“He’s had five years for the hate to distill. It’s pure now. Pure and potent.”

She got up from the chair, a dark shape in a darker room.

Stepping away from the window, I said, “Why does he hate you?”

“It’s a long story. We better hide until they open in the morning. He’s not as smart as you might think a big-time curator would be. But if it dawns on him that maybe I’ve been here before at night and that maybe I didn’t leave the way it looked like I did, he’ll be back soon.”

In the first soft flare of her flashlight, the girl’s painted face appeared both beautiful and eerie, as if she were a character in an edgy graphic novel in the manga style.

I followed her into the reception lounge, marveling at the ease of our regard for each other, wondering if it might strengthen into friendship. However, if my own mother eventually became unable to endure the sight of me, an amicable relationship between Gwyneth and me was unlikely to last any longer than the moment when, by an accident of light, she glimpsed my face. But I would have liked a friend. I would have loved one.

I said, “We don’t have to hide here in the library through the night.”

“He set the alarm, and if we trigger it, he’ll know I was still here when he left. I don’t want him to know that yet.”

“But I have a way out that isn’t wired into the system.”

Phantoms of the library, we descended to the basement, and as we went, I succinctly explained how I traveled through the city unseen and unsuspected.

In that lowest level of the building, at the hinged cap to the storm drain, which remained open as I had left it, Gwyneth said, “You never go by streets and alleys?”

“Sometimes but not often. Only as far as necessary. Don’t worry about storm drains. The idea is a lot scarier than the reality.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said.

“I didn’t think you were.”

She went down the ladder first. I followed, pulling shut the lid and securing it with the gate key.

The confining dimensions of the tributary drain did not seem to concern her, but nevertheless I explained that it would shortly take us to a much larger tunnel. Shoulders hunched and head lowered, I led her along the gradual downward slope, my mood especially felicitous because I was able to help her. It felt good to be needed, no matter how humble the service I provided.

The smaller pipe entered the main one at the level of the maintenance walkway, three feet above the floor of the bigger drain. With the flashlight, I showed her the drop-off, the sweep of floor below, the high curve of the ceiling.

For a moment we stood there, two dark shapes, finger-filtered flashlight aimed well away from us, so featureless that we might have been mere shadows separated from the people who cast us.

Gwyneth took a deep breath and then said, “It doesn’t smell like I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Bad odors. All kinds.”

“Sometimes there are but not often. A big rain washes all the soot and filth down here, and for a while there seems to be as much stink as there is water. Even toward the end of the storm, when the city’s been rained clean, you wouldn’t want to bathe in the runoff, but it doesn’t smell much anymore. When it’s dry like now, there’s usually just the vague scent of lime or, in the older passages, the faint trace of the silicates in the clay used to make the bricks. If they don’t clean out the catch basins frequently enough or if something dead is rotting in one, that can be foul, but it’s not a major problem.” In my eagerness to share my subterranean world, I was close to babbling. I reined in my urge to be a docent of the drains, and said, “What now?”

“I need to go home.”

“Where is home?”

“Tonight I think maybe it should be on the upper east side, where there’s a view of the river. It’s beautiful how sometimes the morning sun scatters gold coins on the river.”

“‘Think maybe’?” I asked.

“I have choices. More places to go than one.”

She gave me an address, and after a moment of thought, I said, “I’ll show you the way.”

We dropped off the service walk to the main floor of the tunnel, so that we could proceed side by side, each with a flashlight. The blackness was not merely darkness but a reduction of darkness, so thick that it seemed to congeal around the twin beams and press those narrow cones of light into even narrower cones.

As we ascended the barely perceptible slope, I glanced at Gwyneth now and then, but she kept her promise and did not look toward me.

“Where do you live, Addison?”

I pointed behind us. “Back there. Farther. Deeper. Rooms that everyone has forgotten, where no one can find me. Rather like a troll, I guess.”

“You’re no troll, and never say you are. Never. But you live by night?”