The Memorist

Chapter 65

Wednesday, April 30^th-2:08 p.m.

Swinging 200 feet above the ground in the enclosed space of the Ferris wheel’s red cabin, Meer looked out over the city sprawl. “This is crazy.”

“It was our best chance. The way the two trains were sitting there, even if someone had followed us from the tram stop, there wouldn’t be any way they could have seen us get off the first train and onto the second one.”

“And now?”

“And now we’re waiting. Catching our breath. Letting the sun set.”

“And then?”

“A hotel.”

“You mean a different hotel?”

“Yes, not the Sacher where you’re registered. We’ll find someplace else.”

“When can we call Malachai? And my father? We have to let my dad know what’s going on.”

“Once we get to the hotel.”

The cabin swung in the wind and Meer felt her center of gravity shift.

“I remember this scene from The Third Man,” she said. “We studied that movie for its zither score in a film scoring class I took at Juilliard.”

“That’s what everyone remembers, the zither and this scene.”

“It was a frightening movie, but Vienna really is a frightening city, isn’t it?”

“Yes, behind the facades of these elegant buildings are ugly secrets and dirty shadows. Like a beautiful woman holding a gun behind her back.”

His voice crawled on her skin and she glanced away from him and down at the miniature city below them.

“What was that famous line from the movie about this view?” she asked.

“It’s one of my favorite movies. By the time they’re here, Holly Martins knows all about the diluted penicillin and that Harry Lime has destroyed people for his own gain. The corrupt man as metaphor for the corrupt state. Sitting in one of these cabins-looking out at this same view, Lime tells Martins to look down and asks him if he’d feel pity if any of those dots stopped moving forever? ‘If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep the money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?’”

“That’s not the line I remember.”

The wind picked up outside and the cabin swayed back and forth. Sebastian smiled and she saw something of Orson Welles’s character’s devilishness in his eyes as he recited the line: “‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’”

“That’s it. We used to play a game at Juilliard. What would you give up to create something brilliant and timeless?”

“We’ve all played a version of that game.”

Or what would you give up to save someone you loved? she thought but didn’t say as the car started on its downward cycle with a hard jerk. They were returning to earth, the people on the ground getting larger, and then there was a clap of thunder as the clouds broke open and fat, heavy drops streaked the windows. Minutes later, the car came to a stop.

“All safe now,” Sebastian said.