A beige Datsun sports coupe is parked in her numbered slot behind the building. She finds another space.
The Santa Anas are starting to blow. Dust whips along the alleyway. Straight overhead she can see stars quite clearly: the Santa Ana is an ill wind that brings dry heat and pollen off the desert, stirs up dust and spores, carries misery to allergics and fans brushfires in the canyons-but it clears off the smog.
Alongside the oleander hedge she unlocks the mailbox. The skirt flaps around her knees. A gust nearly rips the mail from her grasp. She goes around the corner in the lee of the building and sorts through the sheaf.
Amid the mail order catalogs she discovers an envelope containing her new bank credit card.
Jennifer C. Hartman. She rubs the embossed letters with the pad of her thumb; gets out a pen and signs the back of the card and slips it into the transparent window of her wallet opposite the California driver’s license.
They look so preposterously real. It’s an eerie thrill-this feeling that Jennifer Corfu Hartman is actually beginning to exist.
She glances up the outside stair and along the railed balcony. A light glows through the lowered blind of the furnished room. The lamp is on a timer; it will switch off at eleven-thirty.
It has been more than a week since she’s had a look inside; may as well dump the junk mail in a wastebasket, make a bit of noise for the neighbors’ benefit and move a few things around-just in case the superintendent or some repairman has had occasion to let himself in. No point encouraging them to believe the premises have been deserted. How ironic it would be if the well-intentioned concern of neighbor or janitor led the police to issue a missing-persons report on Ms. Hartman.
The wooden stair clings tentatively to the building; it gives when she puts her weight on it.
When she goes along the upstairs balcony the footing is uneven and she walks slowly in the bad light.
The television in the next-door apartment casts blue illumination against the slitted Venetian blinds and she can hear the laugh track of a situation comedy as she fits the key into the door and enters and catches a man in the act of pawing through the clothes that hang in her closet.
31 He’s heard the door; he’s looking over his shoulder. His expression is a comic exaggeration, like that of an animated cartoon character taken by surprise.
She recognizes him immediately and realizes now that the Datsun 280Z out back is a car she’s seen before, parked near the bookshop.
The reporter.
Graeme Goldsmith.