The Window on Ninth

By the middle of April, Adrian Voss had not been seen outdoors for twenty-six days. He had stopped answering the door at Clintonville. He had stopped answering his phone, and then he had stopped answering email, and then, on a Tuesday, he had answered an email in a manner that made the institute's chief of staff drive to Amos Whitlock's office and sit down without being asked and ask him whether he thought they should call somebody.

The email was nine words long. It said: The freezer inventory is wrong. Do not send anyone.

They went on a Thursday evening, Amos and Teo, because Teo had a car and Amos had a key he had never used, which the institute had given him in 2011 as the executor of a living man and which he had kept in a drawer beside two watches that had belonged to clients of his who were dead, neither of which he had ever wound. The building ran the whole block between Fourth and Ninth, with the loading bays facing one street and the lab entrance facing the other. It was dark on three floors and lit on one, and the one was the basement, and the basement had a window at ground level, the kind with wire in the glass.

They stood outside it and looked in, and for a while there was nothing to see but benches and a sink and a rack of glassware and a fume hood with a light on under it, and then a man came into the frame of the window and stood there, on the other side of the wire, eight inches away, and looked out at them.

It was Adrian Voss. It was his coat, and his watch, and his posture — the weight on the left leg, the hands folded, the particular tilt of the head that photographers liked. And it was not Adrian Voss at all, and the impossibility of it was not a matter of opinion. It was the shoulders under the coat, the forearm on the sill, the weight come down on the left leg: the twenty inches of a man that Amos had looked at across a table for twenty-two years, and every one of them was wrong by a margin no photograph would have shown.

He had his face. He had his face the way a car has a paint job that has been chosen to look like the factory's.

Teo, behind Amos, said, very quietly, "Mr. Whitlock," and did not say anything else, because there was nothing else to say, and because he had gone and stood by the car with his back to the building, which is what a young man does.

Amos put his palm flat on the glass. Voss — or the thing wearing him — put his palm on the other side of it, in the same place, exactly, the way a man does when he thinks the joke has gone on long enough. And then he did something worse than anything in any of the files: he tried to smile, and the smile came out in pieces, arriving late, sitting crooked, as though the muscles under the skin were taking instructions from two different rooms, and he took the hand off the glass and put it over his own mouth and stood there for the space of four breaths with his eyes on Amos, and the eyes were the eyes.

Then he turned off the light in the hood, and the window went dark, and they walked back to the car, and neither of them said a word until they were past the light at Ninth and High, when Teo said, "Do we call the police?"

"No," Amos said.

"Why not?"

"Because they'll take him to a hospital," Amos said, "and the hospital will find out how much of him is still there. And then they'll find out how much money he gave it." He looked out of the window. At the corner of Ninth and High a man in a reflective vest was folding a newspaper under his arm and getting onto the first bus of the morning, and the bus pulled away with nobody else on it. "And then it will be in every paper in America, and the scholarship will be over, and nobody will ever know what he actually did, and the thing he was most afraid of will have happened."

"So what do we do?"

Amos, who had been a lawyer for thirty-one years and had a false answer ready for almost every question a client could ask, said, "We wait for him to finish."