Marisha Pessl - Night Film

Had I misread her? Had she silently been pleading for help, begging me not to leave? I was glad I’d told Sharon Falcone about that boy at 83 Henry Street. With a little more research, I wouldn’t hesitate making the same call for the Devold children. The thought was so unsettling, I found myself sending Cynthia a text, apologizing for the change in plan, telling her I was looking forward to having Sam for the weekend while she was in Santa Barbara.

“That’s the third time that guy’s walked by looking in at us,” Hopper said, staring out the window behind me.

I turned, following his gaze. It was the same man I’d noticed before — tall, dark hair, black leather jacket. He was across the street again, a few yards from where I’d first spotted him.

“He was watching me before, when I was outside,” I said.

Hopper suddenly leapt out of his chair, jostling a waitress, who nearly dropped her tray of food as he ran past her and outside. Seeing him coming, the man darted around the corner. I stood up and took off after them.

Hopper was halfway down the block, running in the middle of the street. I caught up with him at the corner of Lafayette.

“He just took off,” he yelled, pointing at a cab accelerating toward Houston. Hopper stepped into the traffic, trying to flag down another, and I headed after the taxi.

Far ahead at the intersection, the light turned yellow, and the cab, swerving into the center lane, was flooring it. He was going to fly right through — and that would be that. But then suddenly the taxi slammed on its brakes, coming to an abrupt halt at the red light.

I had seconds. I weaved between the cars, darting along the right-hand side. I could see the man — a dark silhouette in the backseat, looking over his shoulder — probably to see if Hopper was behind him. I tried the door.

He whipped around, startled. His shock quickly gave way to cold calm as he realized the doors were locked. He looked distantly familiar.

“Who are you?” I shouted. “What do you want?”

He shook his head, shrugging as if he had no idea who I was. Did I have the wrong taxi? The cab crept forward, the man’s face slipping into the shadows. Then the light turned green and the taxi shot across Houston, cars honking as they swerved around me.

Just as the cab pulled away, his left hand had slipped into the light.

The man was missing three fingers.

Back at Gitane, I explained to Hopper and Nora what had happened, that I was certain it was Theo Cordova who’d been watching us.

“It changes everything,” I said. “The family is on to us now, so we’ll have to assume our every move is being watched.”

They responded with somber acceptance, Hopper almost immediately throwing a few crumpled bills on the table and taking off in answer to a text, Nora and I heading home. She went to bed, though I poured myself a Macallan scotch and looked up Theo Cordova.

There were at least a thousand returns in Google images, every one a Cordova film still. He’d played small roles in At Night All Birds Are Black and A Crack in the Window, though most of the photos were from the opening scene in Wait for Me Here, when he runs half naked into the road.

The more I scrutinized the photos, the more certain I was that it was the same man, the same long, thin nose, same pale brown eyes. I checked my notes for his birth date: born in St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany on March 12, 1977, which made him thirty-four.

There was little more about Theo on the Blackboards. In the world of Cordova, it appeared the man’s son was basically an afterthought. According to one source, for the past eleven years he’d been living a life of total obscurity in rural Indiana, working as a landscaper, and had changed his name to Johnson.

After scrolling through a few more pages, I had an idea. I set up a simple post in the TALK TO STRANGERS section, asking for assistance identifying and privately accessing a mysterious club on Long Island with a French name, “held in a former jail or forgotten prison.”

Then I put the computer to sleep and headed to bed.

I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep. I had the gnawing feeling that he was still out there somewhere, watching me.

Theo Cordova. The feeling was so acute I climbed out of bed, yanked up the shade, and looked out the window. But Perry Street remained silent and solemn, packed with shadows, no movement except the trees trembling in a faint freeze. Now I was turning into some paranoid nutcase straight out of Dostoyevsky.

I went back to bed, pulling the sheet up over my face, furiously willing sleep, shoving my pillow over to the cool side. Within seconds it was hot and clammy. The sheets were scalding, too, untucking from the mattress so they bunched around my waist like carnivorous plants trying to strangle me. Whenever I closed my eyes, Theo’s face was there, half-drowned in the dark of the taxi, his dull eyes and deformed hand pressing against the window as if trying to tell me something, plead with me, warn me, as disturbing and elusive a presence as Ashley that night at the Reservoir.

Somehow, around three in the morning, I must have fallen asleep because I was awakened by soft knocking on my door.

I cracked open an eye. The clock read 3:46 A.M.

“Can I come in?” whispered Nora.

Without waiting for an answer — thank Christ I had on pajama bottoms — she crept inside. I couldn’t see much of her in the dark, but she appeared to be wearing a white long-sleeved nightgown, which made her look like a ghost that had just wafted into my room, now hovering at the end of my bed, sizing me up, trying to decide if I was worth haunting.

“I was just thinking …” she began, but didn’t continue.

“Why are you thinking at four in the morning?” I asked, bunching the pillows underneath me and leaning back against the headboard. “This better be good.”

“It’s Hopper. Before I couldn’t put my finger on it, but …” She propped her feet on the railing of the bed, slipping the nightgown over her knees. “How did he know to go to that piano store? Out of the whole city he found the one place she went to? It’s too incredible.”

I agreed with her. It’d been such a stroke of luck, Hopper chancing upon an eyewitness for Ashley at Klavierhaus. When something appeared to be a wild coincidence, nine times out of ten it wasn’t.

“And when I suggested that Ashley put that stuff under her bed, he got so mad.”

“I noticed.”

She bit her thumbnail. “You think he’s responsible in some way for what happened to her?”

“Not sure yet. But he’s definitely hiding something.”

“I don’t think he likes us, either.”

“A terrible flaw. There’s also the chain-smoking, the morose scowling, the bad-boy hair. It’s like he thinks he’s the rebel in a John Hughes movie.”

She giggled.

“We’ll pull a choice move from the McGrath playbook. The Corleone. We keep him close. Eventually he’ll reveal himself. Works every time.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears, making the bed shake, but said nothing.

“May I ask you something?” I asked.

She turned to me, her face a milky blur in the dark.

“Terra Hermosa. How were you allowed to live there? Surely there was some kind of age requirement.”

“ Oh. It was illegal. But I couldn’t leave Eli. She raised me. The worst day of my life up till then was when she fell in the parking lot of Bonnie Lee’s Fried Chicken and the doctors said she had to go into a home.”