Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Stanley pulps Whitey’s right hand against the cabinet’s edge with the swung blackjack. Then he hits him again on the side of the head, and keeps hitting him until he’s motionless on the concrete. A girl a few machines down screams.

The third Dog isn’t yet finished in the john, so Stanley goes in after him, kicking his stall door open, bringing the blackjack down until it connects with his face. The Dog balls up, sags against the spattered wooden panel. Through a small glory-hole over the roll of paper Stanley sees someone cringing in the next stall. Oh god, a voice says. Oh my god.

On his way back to the boardwalk, Stanley pauses to club Whitey one more time, taking care not to step in the slick of blood that spreads from his body toward the ocean, carried by the downgrade of the concrete floor.

It takes no more than a minute to clean out the squat. Soon Stanley’s on the street again, his dad’s fieldpack on his back, Claudio’s duffel slung over his shoulder, walking through wind-driven rain as the crack-bulbed streetlamp overhead creaks and thrashes on its black cables. He’d planned on using the Speedway, but flashing lights of squadcars and ambulances — he can’t tell how many — have congregated at Westminster, a block from the penny-arcade. He stops under a leaky canvas awning to watch as red pulses from their gumball beacons throw the gigantic shadows of rainslickered cops against the sides of buildings. Stanley thinks of black scorpions attacking Mexico City.

He doubles back to Market and heads inland, into town, taking Cabrillo to Aragon to Abbot Kinney, taking Abbot Kinney west again. As he’s making the left on Main an ambulance rockets through the intersection behind him, siren keening, and this makes Stanley feel a little better: if the guy inside was dead, nobody’d bother with the siren. At least that’s what people used to say back in the neighborhood.

Wave Crest comes up in a few blocks. As he’s crossing Pacific the clouds open up, the wind sweeps the rain into a solid-seeming wall, and he hastens to the doorway of a bakery for shelter, already firehose-drenched. This is probably where Synnøve bought last night’s bread; today it’s closed for Shabbos, its carefully labeled window racks — TEIGLACH ךעלגײט — HALVAH הבלח — HAMANTASH שאט־ןמה—bare and swept of crumbs. Stanley puts his wet nose to the glass and inhales, but it just smells like glass, like nothing.

Welles and Synnøve must have taken Claudio to the hospital by now; nobody seems to be home, which is what Stanley’s counting on. To be certain, he bangs on their front door, leaves the two packs on the stoop, and waits in the yard, crouched between the sundial and the row of dark hibiscus, out of sight from the street. Nobody answers. Stanley stands up, knocks again, hides again. To kill time, he reads the brass letters set along the sundial’s circumference. It takes him a second to figure out where to start. I snatched the sun’s eternal ray , they say, and wrote till earth was but a name . Raindrops drum against Stanley’s back as he bends to read.

He makes a quick circuit of the house to look for lights in windows and finds none. Under the shelter of the deck he crosses the side porch to the kitchen door. A burbling drainpipe pukes dark water onto the pavement; a prefab concrete channel aims the flow into the flowerbed, where it forms a puddle. The knife-edge of the peaked roof appears in the puddle’s rippling surface, black against the moon-green sky.

Stanley pulls an old roll of maskingtape from a jacket pocket; it’s swollen now at its edges from the damp. He tears off strips and tapes over the door’s lower right-hand windowpane, the one closest to the knob, until it’s covered entirely. He overlaps the strips so everything will stick. His hands are cold and stiff and badly puckered from the rain, and it takes him a while to do it. When he’s done, he puts the tape-roll back in his pocket, takes off his jacket, folds it in two, and presses it against the taped-up window with his left hand. Then he punches it with his right fist: a hard, glancing blow. The pane breaks with a flat crunch. A few slivers, smaller than rocksalt, sprinkle the porch and glitter around Stanley’s feet. He shakes out his jacket, drapes it over his shoulder, peels up the layer of tape. Almost all the broken glass comes away with it; he sets this aside. Then he reaches through the window and lets himself in.

The air inside is dry and warm and full of strange smells that Stanley hasn’t noticed before, or that weren’t here. He feels like an archaeologist who’s just unsealed a tomb. He moves quickly through the house to the front door, hangs his dripping jacket over the banister, and hauls the two packs in from the stoop.

In the john just off the staircase he finds a towel, dries his hair and hands. Then he opens his pack and comes out with the thick wad of cash — Alex’s junk money, the take from the boardwalk con — that he’s amassed over recent weeks. He combines this with what little he has in his pockets now, counts the total, and divides it in half, as well as he can with the bills he’s got. It’s even within a few bucks. Stanley puts the smaller half back in his fieldpack, tucks the larger half into Claudio’s duffel.

Then he searches the house. He grants cursory attention to the ground floor — pump shotgun under a dust-ruffle in the tidy master bedroom; weird sculptures in Synnøve’s cluttered studio, adipose blobs, skinless and shapeless, like organs without bodies — but Stanley already knows what he really wants to see.

Upstairs in Welles’s study, he throws the bolt on the big barred door but finds the internal deadbolt still locked. He steps back to look at it. There’s probably something downstairs in Synnøve’s workroom that’ll knock the lock off or pry it open, but that seems inelegant, amateurish, and Stanley isn’t sure he has time for it anyway. Besides, he has a feeling Welles keeps a key stashed close by.

He checks the obvious places first: the undersides of the desk and the swivel chair, the drawers and the backs of the drawers. The desk is still unlocked, the two pistols within easy reach. Welles doesn’t lock up his guns, but he keeps that big black door locked. Cynthia’s room , he called it. Bullshit.

Stanley opens drawers and closes them. Every time he bends down he smells the bandage on his leg; he still hasn’t taken the time to change it. Every time he sits up his vision swims, he gets lightheaded. He feels like he’s running a fever. Outside, the wind gusts; cold rain hisses against the windows and the french door.

After a while Stanley sits in the swivel chair and leans back and thinks. Trying to imagine his way into Welles’s big pipesmoked body, into his swelled head. He’s not having much luck. He runs his fingers along the edge of the desk, lingering in the spots where the wood is worn, the finish faded. The letter he found last night — the one from the hospital in Washington — lies open on the desktop, and it looks as though Welles has started to draft a response:

Naturellement any man possessed of a modicum of reason and intellectual courage is compelled to be anti-Jew, and anti-Christian as well — hardly the greatest but surely neither the least of the Nazi errors manifested itself in superficial Wotanism and a lack of serious understanding of their Germanic forebears’ pagan wisdom .

In the brass wastebasket next to the desk Stanley finds five or six crumpled pages that bear minute variations of the same sentence. He crumples them again, slowly, and places them back in the basket. Then he sags into the chair again, scanning the room.

The key is in a goddamn book ; it’s got to be. Probably a book by one of the goddamn names on the fucking list in his pocket, the list that Welles made, the list that’s smeared now, turned to mush by the rain. He wonders if he can spot the key just by looking — there’ll be a gap in the right book’s pages, or between its pages and its cover — but most of the spined-out volumes have others laid flat atop them; plus the bookcases all go clear to the ceiling, and Stanley isn’t tall enough to see the upper shelves. His eyes crawl along the spines, up and down the walls. Thousands of books. Which one?