The car was getting cold. Two couples had already wandered past the car, on their way to the main
building, their faces round with the contented prospect of food.
He stirred, as if returning from a long distance. 'Up to you.'
She tried for cheerful: 'I'm easy.'
'Not out here you're not. Supper's six-thirty until nine. We eat now or in the morning. Breakfast's
seven until eight. And small.' 'What — there's nowhere you can get a burger in between? Or this place can't lay on a sandwich a little later?'
Zandt turned his head, and this time his smile looked almost real. 'You're not from around here, are you?'
'No, thank God. Neither are you. Where we come from you can eat when you want. You hand over money and they give you food. It's modern and convenient. Or have you been in the country so long you've forgotten?'
He didn't answer. Abruptly she dropped the file in the foot well and opened the door. 'Wait here,' she said.
Zandt waited, watching out of the windshield as she marched purposefully toward the main building. The hunger he'd felt after the day's walking was long gone. He felt chilled, inside and out. He was unaccustomed to dealing with someone who knew him, and felt awkward, his thoughts and feelings out of sync. He had spent a long time on the move, as background texture: the man at the counter who was due for a refill; the guy who was working out the back for a couple days; someone at a wind-swept gas station, staring at nothing over the top of his car as he filled it up, and who then pulled back out onto the road and was soon gone. For long periods he had thought of almost nothing at all, aided by a complete absence of any hooks into his past existence. Nina's presence changed that. He wished he had moved on a day earlier, that she had arrived to find him gone. But Zandt knew more about her doggedness than most people, and knew she would have kept on going once she'd set her mind to find him.
He looked at the file lying in the foot well. It was thick. He felt no desire to touch it, still less to see what was inside. Most of it he knew too well already. The rest would be more of the same. The feelings it inspired were a rank mixture of numbness and horror, razor blades wrapped in cotton wool.
He heard the sound of a door closing, and looked up to see Nina walking back from the main part of the inn. She was carrying something in one hand. He got out of the car. It was much colder now, the sky leaden. Snow.
'Jesus,' she said, her breath clouding around her face. 'You weren't kidding. Food on a need-to-eat
basis only. I got this though.' She held up a bottle of Irish whiskey. 'Said it was needed in evidence.'
'I don't really drink any more,' he said.
'I do,' she said. 'You can sit and watch.' She opened the door and retrieved the file. Zandt caught her
checking its position on the floor, as if to see whether he'd taken a look in her absence.
'Nina, why are you here?'
'Come to save you,' she said. 'Welcome you back into the world.'
'And if I don't want to come back?'
'You're already back. You just don't know it yet.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'John, it's colder than a nun's pants out here. Let's get inside. I'm sure you can do your new
thousand-yard-stare just as effectively under a roof.'
He was surprised into a grunt of laughter. 'That's kind of rude, isn't it?'
She shrugged. 'You know the rules. You sleep with a woman, she's got the right to be superior to you
for the rest of your life.'
'Even if she started it? And ended it?'
'You fought tooth and nail on neither occasion, as I recall. Which of these rustic barns is your current
abode?'
He nodded toward his building and she marched off. After a moment in which he considered and rejected the notion of getting back in the car and driving away, he followed.
4
He built a fire while she sat in one of the threadbare armchairs, her feet on the coffee table. He was aware of her assaying the surroundings in the lamplight: the tastefully worn rugs, shabby chic furniture, paintings only a hotelier could love. The floorboards were painted creamy white, and a spray of local flowers sat perkily in a vase a few inches from Nina's feet.
'So what time's Martha Stewart dropping by?'
'Just as soon as you've gone,' he said, heading to the bathroom for glasses. 'Me and her, it's like an animal thing.'
Nina smiled, and watched the kindling in the grate. The fire clicked and crackled, pleased to be wakened, ready to consume. It seemed like a long time since she'd seen a real fire. It reminded her of childhood vacations, and made her shiver.
When Zandt returned she screwed the cap off the bottle and poured two measures. He stood a moment longer, as if still unwilling to commit himself to joining her, but then took the other chair. The room slowly began to warm.
She held the tooth glass up to her lips with both hands, and looked at him across it. 'So, John —
how've you been?'
He sat, staring straight ahead, and didn't look at her.
'Just tell me,' he said.
Three days previously, a girl called Sarah Becker had been sitting on a bench on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California. She was listening to a minidisc, on a player she'd received for her fourteenth birthday. She had printed out a neat little label on the computer at home, and her name and address were stuck to the back of the player, fixed with invisible tape to prevent the ink from wearing off. While she'd hated to compromise the machine's sleek brushed chrome, she disliked the idea of losing it even more. When the player was found, it emerged that the album she'd been listening to was Generation Terrorists, by a British band called the Manic Street Preachers. Except, as Sarah knew, you called them The Manics. The band wasn't big at her school, which was one of the reasons she listened to them. Everybody else mooned over feisty pop princesses and insipid boy bands, or else bobbed their heads while some hip-hop yahoo bellowed last year's slang over someone else's tune from the safety of a walled compound in Malibu. Sarah preferred music that sounded as if, somewhere down the line, someone had meant something by it. She supposed it was her age. At fourteen, you weren't a kid any more. Not these days, and not by a long shot. Not in LA. Not here in 2002. It was taking a while for her parents to come up to speed, but even they knew it was so. In their own ways they were getting used to the idea, like Neanderthals warily watching the first Cro-Magnons coming whistling over the rise.
At the end where she was sitting, by the fountain opposite the Barnes and Noble, the Promenade was pretty empty by this time in the evening. A few people came and went from the bookstore, and you could see others through the two-storey plate-glass window: leafing intently through magazines and books, geeking out over computer specs or scouring for magic spells in screen-writing manuals. Her family had gone on a two-week vacation to London, England, the year before, and she'd been baffled at the indigenous bookstores. They were utterly weird. They just had, like, books. No cafe, no magazines, no washrooms even. Just rows and rows of books. People picked them up, bought them, then went away again. Her mom had seemed to believe this was cool in some way, but Sarah thought it was one of the few things she'd seen about England that really sucked. Eventually they'd found a big new Borders, and she'd fallen upon it, discovering The Manics at one of the listening posts. British bands were cool. The Manics were especially cool. London was cool in general. That was that.
She sat, head nodding in approval as the singer loudly proclaimed himself a 'damned dog', and watched down the Promenade. Down the other end of the three-block pedestrianized zone was mainly restaurants. Her father had dropped her off twenty minutes before, and would be coming to pick her up at nine sharp — a once-monthly occurrence. She was supposed to be meeting her friend Sian at the Broadway Deli. They were ladies who dined. The supper club had been the brainchild of Sian's mom, who was adapting to her daughter's adolescence by throwing open all the doors she could find, for fear that leaving the wrong one closed might ruin their special relationship. Sarah's mother had gone along with it pretty easily: partly because everyone tended to go along with Monica Williams, but also because Zok Becker was sufficiently in contact with her younger self to realize how much she'd have liked to have done the same at her age. Sarah's father had occasional right of veto, however, and for a long, bad moment she thought he was going to exercise it. A few months prior there had been a spate of gang-related killings, part of the seasonal undertow of corporate restructuring in the crack industry. But eventually, after proposing and reaching agreement on a battery of precautionary measures — including dropping and picking her up at closely defined times and places, demonstration of a fully-charged cellular battery, and a recitation of the key common-sense means of avoiding the chaotic intrusion of the fates — he'd agreed. It was now part of the social calendar.
Problem was, when they'd pulled up this evening, Sian hadn't been standing on the corner. Michael Becker craned his neck, peering up and down the street.
'So where is the legendary Ms Williams?' he muttered, fingers drumming on the wheel. Something was bitched with the series he was developing on the Warner lot, and he was big-time stressed: heavy calm spiked with jumpiness. Sarah wasn't sure exactly what the problem was, but knew her father's credo that there were an infinite number of ways for things to go wrong in The Business, and only one way of them going right. She had seen proposals and drafts for the show's pilot episode, and he'd even picked her brains over a few things, gauging her reaction as part of the potential target audience. Actually, and to her slight surprise, Sarah had thought the series sounded pretty cool. Better than Buffy or Angel, in fact. She privately thought Buffy herself was kind of a pain, and that the older English guy didn't sound half as much like Hugh Grant as he seemed to think. Or look enough like him, either. The heroine in Dark Shift was more self-contained, less showy, and less prone to whining. She was also, though Sarah didn't realize this, loosely based on Michael Becker's daughter.
'There she is,' Sarah had said, pointing up the way.
Her father frowned. 'I don't see her.'
'Yeah, look — up under that streetlight, outside Hennessy and Ingels.'