The Voice Inside

32

Rudy leaned against one of the flagpoles in the Civic Center plaza. The wind had kicked up, and the flag snapped to attention over his head. Warm sun from a cloudless sky offset the wind. He had his hands in the pocket of his sweatshirt, the black hood covering his head. Around him, a few homeless people slept on the green grass, and children played on the monkey bars.

On the sidewalk on Larkin, he spotted two uniformed police officers walking side by side toward city hall. Cops never missed a thing. They were always watching even when they weren’t watching. Rudy squatted and fumbled with his shoelace with his head down. He waited until the cops had passed him, and when he stood up, he didn’t look back over his shoulder. Looking back was a dead giveaway that you didn’t want to be seen.

He could hear their boots, walking away. They hadn’t spotted him.

He focused his attention on the six-story downtown library building on the other side of the plaza. That was his destination. He strolled along the sidewalk, and behind his sunglasses, his eyes moved from face to face. The sleeping bodies on the grass. The mothers on the benches, watching their children. The parking police, doling out tickets on the cars.

At the intersection, he crossed the street with a cluster of pedestrians. On the opposite side, the library loomed like a prison of gray stone, with rows of small square windows adorned with X’s, as if the architect had been playing a game of tic-tac-toe. People came and went through the doors. He followed them, marching into a circular atrium, which rose toward a vast ceiling skylight that looked like a spiderweb. The building hummed with the quiet echo of voices.

Rudy knew where he was going. He’d been here before. He got on the elevator and punched the button for the fifth floor, where the library kept its computer training center. He kept his hoodie up and his sunglasses over his eyes. He stared straight ahead.

The doors began to close, but then they opened again as a small, skinny black man in his thirties slipped inside. The man wore a jean jacket covered in San Francisco patches and an Alcatraz baseball cap. He had the look and smell of a homeless person taking refuge from the streets, and he swayed in the elevator as if he were listening to the beat of a song that only he could hear.

“Beautiful day outside, ain’t it?” the man said to Rudy. “You been outside? That is one gorgeous day God made for us.”

Rudy nodded but didn’t look at him. “Yeah.”

“You here for the books? Most folks come for the books. Lots and lots of books in this place. Me, I like the magazines. Motorcycle magazines, mostly. Daddy had a motorcycle when I was a kid, and he let me ride on the back. That’s how I got my nickname. People call me Bike.”

Rudy said nothing.

“You ever been on a motorcycle?” the man asked.

“No.”

“Daddy loved it. Nothing like riding on the open road, he said. Wind in your face and bugs in your teeth.” The man broke into a fit of laughter. “Daddy made that joke a lot. Bugs in your teeth.”

Rudy forced a smile, but his mind was elsewhere. The arrival of the fifth floor rescued him from further conversation. He got out of the elevator and immediately turned right toward the computer center. The man in the jean jacket sauntered out behind him and headed toward the magazine room on the other side of the library.

The computers were set up on long white tables near a series of cubicles occupied by library staff. A glass wall separated the training center from the corridor. It was a busy day, and most of the computers were already taken. He spotted one open computer halfway down the aisle, and he walked there quickly, avoiding eye contact with the employees inside the cubicle walls.

Sitting down, he glanced in both directions at the people close to him. On his left side, a teenager with a cross shaved into her orange hair tapped the keyboard at lightning speed. She seemed to be writing fantasy fiction; he could see references to otherworldly monsters coming through time portals. On his right, a man in his sixties in a worn business suit worked on his résumé. Nobody paid any attention to Rudy. He silently slipped plastic gloves on his hands before touching the keyboard, and he slid off his sunglasses so he could see better.

He called up a search engine on the Internet and typed the name Maria Lopes on the keyboard. He got millions of results. He was about to narrow the search when someone thumped loudly on the glass wall in front of him. It was the black man from the elevator. He had a motorcycle magazine in his hand, and he pointed at it and gave Rudy a thumbs-up. Rudy responded with a quick smile and looked down again, hoping the man would leave, but the man stayed on the other side of the wall, repeating, “Hey!”

People in the library began to look their way.

“Hey!”

Rudy looked up again, an impatient question in his eyes.

“Bugs in your teeth, huh?” the man called, laughing. “Right?”

Rudy tried to laugh at the joke, and when he did, the man finally took his magazine and walked away. Rudy was alone again. He felt stares directed his way; he needed to work quickly. He tapped in a new search term:

He still got an unmanageable number of results.

However, he noticed a row of thumbnail photographs included with the search. He clicked on the “Images” tab and found a larger array of hundreds of pictures of different women. Apparently, they were all named Maria Lopes, and they all lived in San Francisco. Some were old; some were young. Some wore cowboy hats; some wore bikinis. They were brunettes and blondes. Interspersed among the photos were religious icons, dolls of Spanish dancers, and pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge.

He scrolled down.

And there she was.

Rudy recognized her immediately. He’d seen that face day after day for weeks; he’d sat two rows away from her on a double-decker tour bus; he’d spied on her bedroom window through binoculars across from her old apartment. Maria Lopes — his Maria Lopes — was thirty-two years old. Her birthday was February 19. She had long, straight brunette hair, but he could see that she’d added blond highlights in the last four years. Her eyebrows had a wicked arch. Freckles dotted her forehead. She smiled with only her lips, in a perky, sexy way.

In the online photograph, Maria wore a business outfit, gray skirt and scoop-neck black blouse, with a slim gold chain around her neck. The picture didn’t say who she was or where she was, but it was an unusual photograph: Maria stood next to a tall woman dressed in a silk kimono with a styled black wig and a gold butterfly on top of her head like a tiara. The two women posed in front of a backdrop of garish multicolored streamers.

Rudy was puzzled.

Then he thought, Opera.

He was about to click on the picture for more information when he realized that someone was standing over him beside the computer.

“Buddy,” a male voice said, low and unpleasant.

Rudy looked up. A teenager with a bald head and loose-fitting jeans crowded the chair.

“Buddy, that’s my computer. I was sitting here.”

“Sorry, it was empty,” Rudy murmured, trying not to attract attention. “Nobody was here.”

“I was taking a leak, man. I’ve been here for almost an hour. I reserved it, so take a hike.” The young man raised his voice and gestured at the nearest employee working in one of the cubicles. “What’s the deal here? Somebody can just take my computer when I go to the damn bathroom?”

Rudy slid his sunglasses back on his face and yanked up his hood. He pasted a smile on his face. “No problem, it was just a misunderstanding. I didn’t realize the computer was reserved. Go ahead, take it, I’m done here.”

He slid the mouse to the top of the screen and clicked out of the browser. He stripped off his gloves and shoved them in his pocket.

One of the librarians called to him. “If you want to reserve one of the other machines, sir—”

“No, that’s okay,” Rudy replied quickly. “Thanks.”

“Out of the chair, man!” the teenager insisted.

Rudy stood up. “All yours.”

He bumped hard against the teenager with his shoulder, nearly knocking the kid over, and tucked his head down into his chest as he walked away. He could feel everyone in the computer lab watching him go. He listened for a voice saying his name. A whisper. A warning. They’d all looked right at him.

That’s Rudy Cutter.

But no one recognized him. He was safe.

He made his way back to the library elevators, where he waited impatiently, pretending to stare at the paintings on the wall. With a musical ding, one of the elevators arrived, and he studied his feet and wiped a hand over his face to hide himself as the people inside got out. When the car was empty, he stepped inside, but as he did, he threw a last glance at the open interior of the library’s fifth floor.

Not far away, the black man with the patch-covered jean jacket and the Alcatraz cap sat in an overstuffed armchair, staring right at Rudy over the top of a motorcycle magazine.