In the Night Room

20

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Quivering with shock and terror, Willy is on her way across the Upper West Side of Manhattan, vibrating on one of the two back seats in the boxy Sienna piloted by Kalpesh Patel, a native of Hyderabad who refuses to stop or find a policeman because 1) he’s scared and excited by the obvious connections between the FBI dudes and those guys who came running down West Sixty-first Street, shooting at his previous fare, and 2) well, Kalpesh Patel was borderline crazy to begin with, and now he’s in overdrive. The woman weeping and trembling in the back of his cab has not given him a destination. If she did, he wouldn’t go there on a bet—unless, of course, she were to say, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars to take me to a top-secret government installation in the Sierra Nevadas,” or something similar, in which case he would flip on his off-duty lights and rocket straight for the Lincoln Tunnel.

At last, Willy wails, “I don’t know where to go!” She plasters her hand over her face and says, “They killed Tom! He’s dead!”

After that, the funny noises emanating from behind her hands disturb Patel so greatly that he considers personally ejecting this woman from his cab, by force if necessary. She calms down, however, and begins to look about her, which Patel takes to be an excellent sign. And since he, like his distraught passenger, has no idea where he has taken them, he begins to check around for landmarks, too.

“Where are we?” Willy asks.

“Yes, in several senses,” says Patel, trying to catch sight of a street sign. “Riverside Drive, I’d say, and about 103rd. Yes, there is the sign, miss. We are at 103rd Street. The question is, where do we go from here? The government agents will be mobilizing soon, and the police, too, will be massed against you. If you wish me to continue helping you, it is necessary that you explain the entirety of your situation to me.”

“The police, too?” Willy asks.

“I have no doubt of that, miss. From what I saw, the police are in league with the forces against you. Nothing is as it seems, and those who pretend to act in the name of good in fact serve dark and evil masters.”

“The evil master is my fiancé,” Willy says. “His name is Mitchell Faber, and he isn’t what he seems to be, that’s for sure. He murdered my first husband, and my daughter, too.”

“This is your story. It was given to you, and now you must repeat it. I understand. You are supposed to imitate a parrot. But now your story has reminded me of something I read this morning. It was that name—your fiancé’s name. I am sure of it. Let me check on this, miss.”

“Mitchell’s name was in the paper?”

This seems so unlikely, also so foreign to Mitchell’s character, that Willy cannot believe the driver’s words. Besides that, this driver, although very polite, is also a screwball. She’d known people in the Institute who, like him, were convinced that they had the inside dope on governmental or military conspiracies. The problem with such people was that their theories almost always incorporated a good deal of the truth, as you learned every time governmental officials were caught telling whoppers, and this occasional (even fundamental) accuracy served only to buttress their faith in the wilder branches of their conspiracies.

Kalpesh Patel has pulled up in front of an unusually beautiful brownstone on the corner of 103rd Street, and he is bending over, evidently shuffling through a stack of newspapers on the seat beside his.

“Yes, that was the name. Undoubtedly, we are talking about a bit of disinformation planted by government agents.” Willy hears the sound of pages being turned. Then Patel’s arm stops moving, and his mouth stretches out in a smile. “Oh, my, the lies these people are willing to tell their own citizens. It is shameful. Do you know you have been accused of bank robbery, Miz Patrick?”

“Bank robbery?”

“And your name is Willy? You were given a man’s name? Not even a true, dignified name, but a mere nickname? How did your mother explain this decision to you?”

“My parents were killed when I was a child—I never had a chance to ask her. I want to see that newspaper, please.”

“You must read about your alleged crime,” Patel says, and passes a folded-over copy of the Daily News over the seat and through the rectangle cut into the plastic divider between them.

Willy sees it instantly: a smudgy photograph, lifted from film taken out of a surveillance video camera, of herself seated before the desk of Mr. Robert Bender, president of the Continental Trust of New Jersey. She is dressed in the jeans and cotton sweater she had been wearing that day, and in the hand that rests on Mr. Bender’s handsome desk is a pistol that looks a little too large for her grip. The headline reads Imaginative Newcomer Breaks New Jersey Bank.

“I wasn’t holding a gun,” Will says. “I don’t even own a gun!”

“Photoshop,” says Patel. “The maker of miracles. I believe this kind of thing happens nearly every day. Look how much money you are alleged to have stolen.”

“I didn’t steal, he stole from me!” Willy yelps, and scans the article running down the page alongside the photograph.

In an act that had puzzled both bank officials and New Jersey law officers, Willy Patrick, thirty-eight, a prizewinning author of novels for young adults and the fiancée of well-known area figure Mitchell Faber, had pointed a 9mm pistol at bank president Robert Bender during a private consultation requested by Ms. Patrick, and ordered Bender to give her $150,000 in cash from her future husband’s accounts. “For the safety of my employees, I did as the lady requested,” Mr. Bender was quoted as saying. A “troubleshooter” for the Baltic Group, Mr. Faber was said to be hurrying back from meetings in European capitals to offer support to his troubled bride-to-be and aid to area law enforcement officers. Aldo Pinochet, a spokesman for the Baltic Group, described Ms. Patrick as an “unstable woman with a history of mental problems and in desperate need of help.”

“Aldo Pinochet,” Patel says. “See how they work? Everything is connected. You need only take a few steps back, and the pattern comes clear.”

“ ‘Troubleshooter,’ ” Willy says. “That’s literally what he is.”

“Will he want to shoot you?”

“Oh, shooting wouldn’t be nearly good enough,” she says. “First he’ll want to break most of my bones, and after that he’ll start cutting off little bits of me.”

“Is there someplace safe I can take you? The meter will stay off, that should go without saying. However, I must soon return to my duties. You have a headquarters in this city, do you not?”

“I don’t have a headquarters, no. Why would I?”

“Then perhaps you wish me to go to a police station and report your friend’s murder. Or perhaps I should go to the offices of the New York Times and tell them what I saw.”

“I don’t know what to do. Maybe they’re looking for this cab.”

And it goes on from there—Willy is right: a police officer driving up the West Side Highway sees the cab, there’s a cop anyhow, and we know he’s calling in their location. Patel shoots around the corner, gets to Broadway, and drops her off. It is no longer safe for her to stay in his taxi; she must fend for herself. For the rest of the book, Willy is on the road, running toward knowledge she has been kept from all her life.

Now I must reluctantly climb out of my sandbox and begin to prepare for tonight’s reading at the Upper West Side B&N, which is on 82nd and Broadway, about a million miles from here. My publicist and the bookstore event managers work out these decisions between them; nobody ever asks me where I’d like to read. How about the Astor Place store, that’s pretty hip? How about Union Square, with that nice big reading space? For that matter, what’s wrong with the one on Broadway in the East Village? But 82nd and Broadway is where they want me to read, so that’s where I’ll go.

For about five minutes I’ll pander shamelessly for laughter, then read bits and pieces of lost boy lost girl for about twenty minutes, the maximum length of time I can bear to listen to someone else read from his own work. After that there’ll be the good old Q&A, which I enjoy, and I’ll sign books for as long as there’s still someone in line.

Right after I saved my document and checked my e-mail—three new messages from mixed-up, unhappy dead people, deleted the way you’d wipe a stain off a wall—who should walk in but Cyrax, frend & gide, appearing as usual in a big blank blue rectangle on my screen. Apparently Cyrax expects unusual things to happen at my reading, and he wants me to brace myself.

Underdone, yr gr8 moment comes 2nite

u must do rite & b strong & brave

tho

it is not e-z 4 a slug like u

(LOLOL!)

rede yr boke, rede the 1 with-in

the 1 u wrote

& hear the brush of gr8 WINGS!

u have no choice, my deer,

yr time is come to make re-pair,

& re-pair u must!!! the lyfe u knew

is no mor b-cuz U MUST CO-RECK THE ERROR!!

What in the world does this gabby busybody expect to happen? Jasper Kohle, probably—I’ll warn the staff to keep an eye out for him.