Marisha Pessl - Night Film

I knew exactly what she was thinking; somehow Cleo’s words had engrained themselves in my head when she’d described the lurid realities of those working with black magic. Old leather-bound journals filled with spells written backward. Attics stockpiled with the really obscure ingredients, like deer fetuses, lizard feces, baby blood. This stuff is not for people with queasy stomachs. But it works.

The doorman had found a taxi, so we raced out from the awning, scrambled into the backseat. I saw I had a missed call from Blumenstein and two from Hopper. He’d also sent a text.

I’m out on bail. A million thanks. Heading to your apt

Good. I couldn’t wait to ask him what he’d seen inside the townhouse — not to mention the question How in the hell had he known how to break in ?

As Nora and I entered my building, she stopped in alarm and grabbed my arm, pointing at the lock on my front door.

It was smashed, the wood splintered.

Slowly I pushed the door. It was dark inside, no noise but the pounding of the rain.

I stepped into the foyer.

“ Don’t, ” whispered Nora. “Someone might still be here—”

I pressed a finger to my lips and crept farther down the hall, my every step creaking on the wooden floors. Suddenly I heard a muffled thud coming from the living room.

I raced to the doorway just in time to see a man climbing out the window, violent rain pummeling his black coat and knit cap as he scrambled over the flower box and jumped out of sight.

I wheeled past Nora and back down the hallway, seeing the intruder streak past the building, heading west down Perry.

I ran outside and took off after him. He was already halfway down the block, charging past a pedestrian — who I realized was Hopper.

“Catch that guy!” I shouted.

Seeing me barreling toward him, Hopper spun around and took off after the man, who’d just disappeared onto West Fourth.

The intruder was too short to be Theo. It had to be someone else.

Hopper disappeared around the corner. When I reached the intersection seconds later, he was already chasing the man around the block onto Charles. I ran after them, dodging cars, chained bicycles, people hauling shopping bags. The intruder made the light at Hudson, Hopper racing after him, shouting, though the resounding cracks of thunder drowned out the words. Within minutes, I’d made it to the West Side Highway, where there was a pileup of cars. Hopper tore across the median, reaching the other side, though I was forced to wait as the light turned green.

The man was hightailing it north down the bike path along Hudson River Park, past a few police barricades. Suddenly, he swerved left, heading toward Pier 46, and then vanished.

The light turned yellow, and with a break in the traffic, I sprinted across, catching up to Hopper on the bike path.

“I lost him,” he said, panting.

I stared down the track, shielding my eyes from the rain. Apart from a couple walking a German shepherd, it was deserted. But the pier, a popular recreational spot, was busy, some thirty or forty people strolling the promenade, armed with slickers and umbrellas.

“He’s on the pier,” I said. “I’ll check this end. You search the other side.” I took off, passing a family of tourists in plastic ponchos; a young man walking a Jack Russell; a pair of teenagers giggling, huddled under a brown coat.

No sign of him.

I moved past a crowd of joggers in raingear stretching on the railing and spotted a lone man at the very end of the pier.

He was seated on a bench, staring at the Hudson River, his back to me. He wore a khaki coat, a bright red umbrella over his head. Yet there was something strange about him, and as I approached I saw what it was: Not only was his thinning gray hair disheveled, as if he’d just yanked a knit cap off, but his shoulders were rising and falling, as if he was out of breath.

Casually, I stepped alongside the bench beside a trashcan, some six feet away, and turned to see his face.

It was just an old man, his hand resting atop the handle of a quad orthopedic cane, his jeans soaked. There was a large blue JanSport backpack beside him, and the remains of a Subway sandwich.

I must have seemed brazen, studying him so intently, but he only glanced at me and smiled, muttering something.

“What was that?” I shouted.

“Think we’ll need Noah’s Ark?”

I smiled blandly and stepped in front of him, walking to the end of the pier. The downpour was so severe now, there was barely a difference between the swelling gray river and the rain.

I turned to check out the old man again, just to be sure.

But he was still hunched there harmlessly, the rain streaming in a gurgling waterfall off the red umbrella around him.

He smiled again, beckoning me to approach, and I realized from his excited expression he’d actually mistaken my stares for some kind of sexual overture.

He was some old gay geezer, out here cruising.

Jesus Christ.

“Would you like to share?” he shouted at me, looking up at his red umbrella, which made his complexion pink. “Actually, I think I have an extra.” Licking his lips, he unzipped the backpack, fumbling inside.

I held up a hand, waving him off, and moved quickly down the walkway just as a resounding crack of lightning struck, followed by another rumble of thunder. As I reached the northern side of the pier, I saw that there was a commotion, a small crowd forming back along the bike path. I sprinted toward it, jostling through the onlookers to find Hopper, as well as another man, helping an elderly African American woman to her feet.

The poor woman was sobbing and completely drenched, wearing only a thin pink housedress, clutching her arm in pain.

“What happened?” I asked a woman next to me.

“She just got mugged. The asshole even stole her cane.”

No sooner had she said the words, I was fighting my way through the crowd, racing as fast as I could back along the pathway.

The old man was already gone.

When I reached the empty bench, I could only stare down at it in anger.

There, abandoned, was the red umbrella, the backpack, the orthopedic cane and trench coat, the Subway sandwich wrappers. The cunning son of a bitch had probably taken them out of the trashcan so he’d appear to be enjoying a leisurely lunch.

Exactly where he’d been sitting was a small white scrap, facedown on the bench.

I picked it up. It was my business card.

I returned the belongings to the woman.

Every item was hers: the blue JanSport backpack, the red umbrella, the cane and coat. No money was missing. Her assailant had come from behind her, brutally wrenching her things away, shoving her down on the sidewalk.

“ No way that was an old man!” Hopper shouted over the downpour as we jogged across Greenwich Street, heading back to Perry.

“I’m telling you. It was. ”

“Then he’s been eating his friggin’ Wheaties, because he had the torque of a Suzuki. What’d he steal?”

“We’re about to find out.”

We picked up our pace. I could hardly calm myself to think, it had happened so quickly. Yet I had a feeling I shouldn’t have been so cavalier about leaving Nora alone. I hadn’t stopped to consider if the intruder had an accomplice.

We raced into my building. She wasn’t in the hallway.

“Nora!”

I shoved open the door, racing through the foyer. Nothing in the living room had been disturbed. I hurried down the hall to my office and stopped dead.