At the Window

Two weeks after they put Dr. Alan Reyes in the ground — the first days of November, though the dates had stopped meaning much to him — Martin Wells still caught himself reaching for the telephone at odd hours of the evening, his hand drifting toward the receiver the way a tongue drifts toward the socket of a pulled tooth. There was no one to call. Reyes was gone, and Vale had stopped answering, and the questions Wells had carried since January had done what unanswered questions do: they had put down roots and grown thorns.

He told himself he was a lawyer and not a detective, that curiosity was a professional instrument and not a private vice, that a man was entitled to let a mystery sit in its drawer until someone with a badge came to open it. He told himself these things in the mornings, shaving, in the afternoons, over contracts, and by nightfall he had talked himself into a silence that looked, from the outside, like patience.

The Sunday walks with Colin Grange had resumed in the spring, after a fashion. They did not speak of January, of the girl with the dog, of the check signed A. Vale. They walked the Marina and talked about the Giants' pitching, and this arrangement suited them both the way a truce suits two armies that have run out of ammunition.

On a Sunday in the middle of November, the light came down flat and pewter-colored over the bay, and Colin, who had been quiet for the better part of an hour, said, "I never thanked you properly, you know. For taking it seriously. Everyone else wanted it smaller — the girl's mother wanted it settled, the report wanted it anonymous. You lost sleep over it in an alley."

"I did nothing."

"You asked it questions. Nobody asks it questions." Colin walked a few steps, hands in the pockets of his windbreaker. "I've been thinking I'd like to see the place again. In daylight. With you."

Wells stopped. They were at the foot of the Marina green, gulls standing about on the grass like latecomers at a funeral. "That is a bad idea," he said.

"Probably."

"It's the worst idea you've had since you suggested I read the will's contingencies out loud in my office."

"Then we should go now," Colin said, "while we're still sensible enough to be afraid."

Wells should have refused. He examined himself on the walk to the car and found, under the layers of objection, a kind of relief, and the relief shamed him more than the curiosity would have. He had spent ten months circling that block of Folsom Street the way a man circles the last room of his childhood home. He wanted it over. He wanted to see the brick face of the building in ordinary daylight, with trucks rumbling past and a woman walking a terrier, and discover that it was only a building, that the alley was only an alley, that the dark was a property of the hour and not of the place.

They parked two blocks off and came down Folsom on foot. The Vale Biolabs building stood in its Sunday emptiness, the lobby glass throwing back the gray sky, a contractor's van parked at the curb with its hazards blinking. Nothing watched them. Nothing ever watched you; that was the trick of it. Wells had learned that much from the whole affair: evil does not observe you. It simply fails to register you, the way weather fails to register you, and there is more horror in that indifference than in any stare.

"The steel door's down there," Colin said. His voice had changed. The nurse's evenness was back in it, the voice of a man who has learned to keep his hands steady by keeping his voice steadier.

They turned into Harriet Alley. It ran behind the building's spine, a slot of poured concrete and dumpsters and fire escapes, draining a smell of wet brick and machine oil. And there it was, the steel door, flush in the brick like a plate set into a jaw. In daylight it was almost modest, gray-green paint scuffed at the corners, a push bar, a card reader with a small red diode burning in its housing. Someone had left a coffee cup on the sill of the reader. That did more than anything else to unnerve Wells: the ordinary cup, the ring of dried coffee, the human habit of it, all within three feet of a door out of which a man had walked carrying a check for twenty-five thousand dollars and nothing on his conscience a camera could find.

"There are windows above," Wells said. His own voice sounded borrowed. "The lab floor."

They looked up. Three windows ran along the second story, tall for a laboratory, the kind of windows a building puts up when it intends to be seen and then regrets it. The glass was dirty at the edges but clear at the center. Behind the middle window, a light burned.

"We shouldn't," Wells said.

"We're already doing it," Colin said. "We've been doing it since January."

They stood back against the opposite wall, two men loitering in an alley on a Sunday, and looked up into the lighted room.

Adrian Vale was there. There was no mistaking him even at that angle and distance, the fine tall carriage of him, the silver at the temples, the tweed jacket Wells had seen across a dozen dinner tables. He was standing at a long bench near the window, and he was not alone. Two other figures were in the room with him, seated, only their shoulders and the backs of their heads visible past the equipment, and Vale stood addressing them in the full spate of whatever he was saying. His hands moved as he talked. Even through the glass, even without sound, Wells recognized the performance, the generosity of it, the way Vale gave his attention to people like a man handing round a decanter. One of the seated figures nodded. The other leaned forward. It looked, from the alley, like any presentation in any laboratory in the city, a man in love with his own subject making it lovable to others.

Then Vale's face changed.

Wells would spend years reaching for the right word for what happened in that window, and the honest word was the plainest one. It changed. The color went out of it in a single beat, the way a page goes when a hand passes over the lamp, and then a dark flush surged up from the collar as if something under the skin had burst its banks. Vale's hand came down on the bench. His shoulders drew up. And his body, his fine tall body that Wells had known for thirty years, seemed to go wrong the way a reflection goes wrong when the mirror is touched at the edge, the line of him bending where bones do not bend, the jacket suddenly hanging from a frame that was not the frame it had been fitted to.

The two seated figures recoiled. One of them stood up so fast his chair went over. Wells saw the chair fall, saw it in perfect clarity, because the whole scene had the terrible brightness of things seen once and kept forever.

Vale's mouth was moving. He was still talking, or trying to, some sentence that had begun as a sentence about science, addressed to colleagues, in a voice they knew, and Wells watched the sentence die in the man's mouth, watched the lips work around the ruin of it. Then Vale went down, or back, out of the frame of the window, and the lighted room stood empty of him, only the overturned chair and the one man still standing and the other one half-risen behind the bench, their postures the postures of men in a room where something has just happened that will never be explainable at a dinner table again.

The woman with the terrier came around the corner with her dog and passed them, and the click of the dog's nails on the concrete went on and on in the silence.

"Martin," Colin said. His hand was on Wells's arm. Wells had not felt it arrive. "Martin, did you see."

"Yes."

"What was that."

"I don't know."

"You saw. The same as I saw. His face, and then—" Colin stopped. Down the alley the steel door stood in its modest gray-green paint, and nothing came through it, and nothing rang behind it, and the red diode burned on. "He was talking to those men and then he wasn't Dr. Vale anymore. That's what that was. Tell me I'm wrong."

"You're wrong," Wells said. "He fainted. A seizure. Some seizure. He's forty-eight and he works eighteen hours a day, and men fall down."

Colin looked at him with the flat professional pity that nurses keep for patients who lie about their symptoms, and Wells looked back at the window, at the empty bright rectangle of it, and knew that he was lying, and knew that Colin knew it, and knew that neither of them could afford the truth, which was that in thirty years of knowing Adrian Vale he had never once seen the man's body fail to be exactly, impeccably, carelessly his own.

They walked out of the alley. Wells did not look at the steel door as they passed it, and the not-looking cost him more than looking would have.

At the corner he made himself stop and look back once, deliberately, the way a man looks back at the scene of an accident to fix it in his memory against the later erosion of doubt. The windows of the lab floor were dark now, all three of them, though only minutes had passed. Somewhere up there, he told himself, Adrian Vale was sitting up with his collar loosened, drinking a glass of water, apologizing to embarrassed colleagues, being Dr. Vale again with the practiced ease of a man putting on a coat. And behind that comfortable picture stood the other one, the one the alley had been built around, the one who walked without sound, and Wells could not make the two pictures share a building.

Neither of them spoke until the car. Then Colin, buckling his seat belt with hands that were not entirely steady, said, "What are you going to do?"

"Nothing," Wells said.

"Nothing."

"Call the office on Monday and ask if Dr. Vale is receiving. If they say yes, I'll have been worried about nothing. If they say no—" Wells looked out at the flat gray street. "If they say no, I still can't tell them what I saw from an alley window on a Sunday, Colin. A man's color changed. A man moved wrongly. There's no disease in the textbooks with that for a symptom, and there's no police procedure for it either. There's nothing a sane man can do with what we saw except decide, quietly, that he didn't see it."

"And that's what you'll do?"

"That's what I've been doing since January," Wells said.

He drove Colin home. He drove home himself by the long way, over the hill, past streets he had no business on, and told himself it was to avoid traffic.

He did not call Vale's office on Monday.

He composed the call instead, the way he composed difficult letters, standing at his study window in the evening with the receiver in his hand and the dial tone humming against his ear like a held breath. Ask for Dr. Vale. If they put him through, say something easy, something about the estate accounts, and listen to the voice, and determine whether the voice is still the voice. If they do not put him through, ask when he is expected. Ask it lightly. A lawyer asking after a client is the most natural thing in the city.

He set the receiver down without dialing, on Monday, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday of that week, and by the second Sunday he had to admit the shape of what he was doing, which was not prudence but fear of the voice — Reyes's had gone to gravel before the end, and Vale's had spoken his name like a stranger trying it on, and he did not want the last of his certainties about his friend to go the way of the others.

Because the window had shown him something worse than illness, and his mind kept returning to it in the margins of the day, while he executed a trust or witnessed a signature. It was not that Vale had collapsed. Men collapse. It was that in the moment before he went down, the body in the tweed jacket had seemed for one long second to be making an argument, struggling against a verdict, contending with something inside the clothes that had a shape and a will of its own, and the clothes had lost. And the two men in the room had recoiled not as one recoils from a sick man but as one recoils from a stranger who has just put his hand on your shoulder calling you by name.

Wells thought of the dinner table, ten months ago, the candles and the good claret, Vale's hand on his forearm and the smile that had been half affection and half farewell: I can be rid of Mr. Crow the moment I choose. He had taken it for confidence then. Standing at his window in the dark, he heard it again and understood that it had been a plea for belief, the way a drowning man's statement that he can swim is a plea for belief.

For two weeks he did not ask. He made one call, and only one: Merrick, on a procedural pretext, and then, when it was nearly ended, the question that had been standing in the room with him since the alley — what had become of the two men who had been at the bench with Vale. Interviewed, she said. Co-operative to the point of blankness. A colleague fainted; they wanted no part of anything further; one had taken a post out of state within the month. Ordinary men, ordinary answers. Wells thanked her and sat a while in the quiet after the dial tone, telling himself that ordinary was a mercy, and knowing he was using it as a wall to paper over the window.

The one witness he could still reach was the younger of the two men at the bench — a bench technician named Paul Osei, who had not, as it happened, taken a post out of state; the information was a month stale. Wells found him restocking IV tubing in a walk-in clinic south of the bus yard, and Osei saw the questions coming before Wells had his coat off.

"I'll tell it once," Osei said. "I tell it to the police the same way, so pick whichever version you like better."

He told it with his hands. He had been sitting at the window end of the bench, and when Dr. Vale's color went he was the one whose chair went over — Wells understood, with a small cold click, that this was the chair he had watched fall through two panes of glass. Osei's account matched the alley's, beat for beat, until it reached the fall. Then it changed.

"A faint," Osei said. "He's forty-eight, he works like a deckhand, men go down. The doctors said."

"The doctors said," Wells repeated.

"Listen." Osei's hands stopped. "I stood next to the man when they sat him up. I've fainted at a blood draw; I know the weight a body has when it goes. What I picked up off that floor weighed nothing. Like furniture. Like something that had already left." He wrapped the rest of the tubing without looking at it. "You want me to say I saw a man turn into another man, Mr. Wells. I won't say it. I'll say I've never been in a room where a faint had a temperature."

Wells drove home in the dark and sat in the car a while, holding the two halves of it: what Osei had said, and the shape of what he would not.

Then, on a Thursday night at the end of November, his doorbell rang, and when he opened it, Denise Marsh was on his step, twenty-six years the housekeeper of the house on Broadway, with no coat over her dress and her face the color of paper.

"Mr. Wells," she said. "Forgive me. I didn't know where else in the world to go."