The Word Exchange (36 page)

I wouldn’t say I was abducted. But I didn’t go to Dr. Thwaite’s by choice.

The night of the Diachronic Society meeting—the night Johnny was killed—I stood cowed over a half-packed suitcase, listening to Laird announce from the screen “authorities are still investigating the mysterious death” and trying to reach Bart. It was only when I’d finally given up, after nine or ten dials, that
my
phone started to ring. An old New York number, 212. No photo or geographic data. I broke my rule and answered.

“Bart? Are you there?” I said, breathless. A collar of dread had closed around my throat, and I was having trouble speaking. “It’s Alice.”

“Alice?” said a male voice I couldn’t quite place.

And in that terrible moment which spiraled out of time, when I was sure the call was to tell me that Bart was dead or dying, I grew quiet and very calm, as if I were being robbed at knifepoint. I braced myself to lose everything. And realized right then—too late—that that’s what I’d lose if I lost Bart.

Sounding repentant and on edge, the man said, “I must have the wrong number.”

It was Vernon.

“Vern. It’s me,” I said, heart frogging in my chest. More sure than ever that the news was bad.

“Who is this?” Vernon asked, voice warping in suspicion. I could hear
the exhalation of cigarette smoke. “Anana? But you said … Wait. That’s right. They—”

“Is he really dead?” I blurted. All warmth seemed to leave the room.

And after a stifling silence, Vernon said softly, “So you heard.”

I tried to fight back tears. It was no good: the attack of sadness hit like a coughing fit. I let it take me over. And the story I’d imagined didn’t start to melt away until Vernon murmured, “I can’t believe it either. Poor Johnny.” That’s when I stopped midsob, tears ablated by confusion. “Wait—Johnny? John Lee? Not …?” I didn’t finish the thought.

It was only then that I learned what had really happened. The neighbor who’d found Johnny—how he’d gone through Johnny’s phone,
¹
and when he’d gotten Bart, he’d asked for help making calls while he dealt with paramedics and police. The reason I hadn’t been able to reach Bart was that Bart was trying to reach Johnny’s friends and family. And it was a blessing, Vernon assured me. Repeated that I
should not
talk to Bart. “We’re going to try to help him,” Vernon claimed. “But he sounds really bad. I talked to him just now for less than three minutes. And I was still a little worried I might infect you.” I squeezed my eyes shut.

But shaken as I was, what Vernon said next sent shockwaves through me. He said I should “run, not walk,” to Dr. Thwaite’s. Stunned, I snapped my eyes open again. “I’m not kidding, Anana,” he added when I didn’t reply.
“Run.”

When I asked why, he said he had reason to believe that the people who’d killed Johnny might also want a word with me. “That place you described earlier, in the meeting? The basement room, where you saw them burning books?”

“The Creatorium,” I said, eyes and throat stinging, as if I were still inhaling blazing paper and glue. Decades of my father’s research.

“Apparently Johnny was there right before he was murdered.”

“But that’s impossible,” I said, cold spreading over me. I glimpsed the ghostly moon of my face in the window that opened onto the fire escape. “A few days after I found the Creatorium, I went back with the police, and it was gone. They shut it down.”

Vernon paused. “No,” he said carefully. “You’re right, he wasn’t there,
exactly. They moved operations around the corner, below a dry cleaner’s.” Then, in the odd, gauzy silence that followed, he added, “At least that’s what I heard.”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked. But I was a little distracted; my nerves were making me hallucinate. I thought I heard a clang outside. I held my breath for a moment. Placed a hand over the mouthpiece. Considered cutting the lights so I could see out, but the thought made my heart seize. Imagined I heard another noise. A scrape. And I was suddenly flush with the rich elixir of fear. I jammed my feet into an ancient pair of Max’s sneakers.

“You still there?” Vernon asked, voice taut as wire. He explained that he was outside, calling from the pay phone at the end of my block. “Come down,” he said with a palsying urgency. “I’ll take you to Phineas’s myself.”

My head buzzed with white bees of anxiety. “I don’t understand,” I babbled. “Why was Johnny there? How does it have anything to do with me?” But I was only talking because it sort of soothed me, feigning tranquillity as I hunted for an old wallet and some form of ID. Even two weeks after I’d given up my Meme, I had yet to replace either of these.

“We can talk about it later,” Vern said. “Will you please just come down? Now?”

I managed to gather everything into a bag, including the Aleph, which clairvoyance or paranoia made me grab, too. But still I hesitated. The danger in Vernon’s voice sounded oddly false. Why was there such a hurry? Where was he really planning to take me? For a moment I even doubted Johnny’s death. A strange, leaden calm came over me.

“I don’t know,” I said, glancing again at my reflection in the window. “I think I might stay. I feel safer here, with the police car outside—”

“There is no car,” Vernon said soberly.

Icy pins pricked my neck. “No,” I said, shaking my head. I took a thin breath. “The car’s unmarked. You wouldn’t—”

“I’m telling you, Anana. There is
no car
,” Vernon interrupted, voice raw. And with a pang, I realized what sounded so strange, so false, in his tone: it was exactly its grave sincerity. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he continued, “but the city’s heading toward crisis. Not just an increase in crime but a virus, which I’m sure has also started spreading to police. I imagine they’re starting to be pretty strained. And I hate to say this,
but you’re probably not their first priority. So I’m only going to ask you one last time, because it’s not safe for you, or me, to stay here anymore. Will you please come down?”

I was motionless for one more moment. Suspended between doubts. Who had been in the car I’d been nodding to each day? I hugged the bag to my chest. “Yes,” I said. Nodded.

That was when I heard another clang. Thought I saw a dark form move on the fire escape.

My body tensed with vital attention. Listening. “Wait,” I whispered. Squinted. Tried to see past the reflection of my face in the windowpane.

“Anana? What’s happening?” asked Vernon. “Are you there?”

Just then there was a flash of motion outside, and another face, a man’s, loomed through mine. The face of Dmitri Sokolov.

The bang on the pane was as hard and loud as a shot, and within seconds I’d flown from the apartment, the violent music of shattering glass following me into the hall as I took the stairs two, three, four at a time. I lost my balance on the second flight, and even though I fell as well as I could, I got badly battered: opened a knee, broke a lip, chipped a tooth, got bruised all over. But I didn’t drop the bag, and I clawed myself back up, bleeding, the sound of boots thudding down behind me. Then I dove out into the black, bitter night. Sprinted the block in Max’s huge, sliding shoes, arms pumping, lungs on fire, heart pounding hard.

Vernon was standing at the same booth I’d used to place my first call to Dr. Thwaite, holding the receiver away from his face. Looking east on Forty-ninth, head weaving, watching for me. His glasses two white squares of glare. As I came running nearer, he yelled my name. Dropped the phone so that it swung back and forth on its glinting cord like a pendulum.

But I didn’t stop. I ran past him, into the street, blood flowing from my mouth and the hole in my jeans. Waved my arms for a car as Vernon hobbled after me. Three taxis sailed past, two off-duty, one driverless. A fourth slowed, nearly sped away again. But I managed to get the door open and wedge myself in. Vernon tumbled after me, striking my arm with the silver ball of his cane as he yanked it inside and slammed the door. Yelled to the driver, “We’re late. I’ll pay you fifty bucks if you can get us to Times Square in five minutes.”

We lurched into traffic, tires shrieking, and I peered through the rear window. Saw Dmitri pounding close. As we braked to cut east on Forty-eighth,
he reached into his jacket, and I wrenched Vernon down with me onto the backseat. Warily, the driver eyed us in the mirror, nearly colliding with the car in front when it stopped short, and Vernon put his cold, clove-flavored lips on mine, ignoring the blood. Confused and alarmed—especially when he placed a sweaty hand on my breast, over my drumming heart—I didn’t realize for a moment that he was offering our driver a quick story for why we’d gone supine. An incredibly brave and selfless thing to do—he knew I’d been infected. We stayed that way for the time it took—less than five minutes—to reach Times Square.

We were there, in that wonder garden of pulsing lights, glyphs, widowed marquees, a magic carpet of bodies, just long enough for Vernon to buy us both
I
NY
caps at the tourist stand where we got out. Helped me cram my hair up under the band as we hailed another car. Still riding prostrate, we switched taxis two more times, going as far north as Mount Sinai’s ER, as far south as Katz’s Deli, until we finally arrived, more than half an hour later, on Beekman Place.

As we hustled into the lobby, the doorman, Clive, nodded solemnly. Vernon asked a question without saying a word, and Clive shook his head. Pointed from the door to his security monitors, then to his eyes. Vernon nodded grimly back and took my arm. We staggered down a long, gloomy hall to the freight elevator on the building’s other side.

During our zigzagging suite of rides, Vernon had whispered a hasty explanation of why we were going to Dr. Thwaite’s. I couldn’t stay with Vera, he said; “Laird” was his one-word exegesis. Bart’s was also out of the question. “He needs to be hospitalized,” Vernon said. Panicked and upset, I tried suggesting other friends. “And put them at risk?” he asked. He also alluded to “other reasons” he was taking me to Dr. Thwaite’s. He wouldn’t elaborate. “If we make it, you’ll find out why,” was all he’d say. And then, just as we turned onto Beekman, he added, “Besides, it’s temporary. Only until you leave the country.” My skin crawled. How had he known I’d been packing for Oxford when he’d called me?

He slid the grate of the freight elevator open on six and hurried me down a hall to a cul-de-sac of rickety pea-green shelves. They looked as if they’d been deserted there, in violation of fire code, sometime in the 1970s. But instead of doubling back, Vernon approached them. And he did something odd: he took a pale blue book—
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground
—from the top shelf. Fumbled in the lacuna. After a moment a tinny woman’s voice said, “Password?” and Vernon responded, “Nadya.”
The shelf swung in, and Vernon ferried me into a void. But instead of following, he gave a curt nod and closed the door. It locked with a dry, sickening click, and I found myself plunged into darkness, alone.

Air suddenly felt scarce. All at once it seemed possible that I’d just assisted in my own kidnapping—that the whole circuitous route had been a ruse to lose not Dmitri but the police, who probably
had
still been stationed outside my building. Why else would Dmitri not have fired a shot? Or managed to catch us during what must have been, for him, an easy game of cat and mouse? Why had Vernon been acting so cagey? Was what he’d said about Vera, Bart, my friends, true? What did I really know about Vernon? Remembering his thin body on top of me, his mouth on mine, I shivered. Took my phone from my pocket: no signal.

The phone’s blue glow didn’t reach far in the dark. But what I did see made me go cold: a drain in the floor. A straight-backed chair. Nothing else. And for several unbearable minutes, gently testing my swollen lip, tonguing the small, sharp chip in my front tooth, I waited for Dmitri to open the door. To take me to the Queen.

Off with her head
, she screamed.

But when the door did open—not the door that went out to the hall but another door, which opened into an apartment—I saw no one on the other side. I held my breath. Then felt something low and heavy hit my legs, and I was nearly knocked over. I called out in alarm, and the thing scrambled up and scratched my chest. It was Canon, Dr. Thwaite’s dog, and Dr. Thwaite was right behind him, standing in a sea of coats and brandishing a remote control. He wore his blue velour robe and a look of bleak concern.

“Alice,” he said, stepping gingerly from the walk-in closet to the tiny room where I’d been waiting. I recoiled in the dark.

The secret cell—a bare area about ten feet square, smaller than its cover closet—was one of the main reasons, it turned out, that I’d been taken to Dr. Thwaite’s.

Even now, more than six weeks later—and knowing that it might have saved my life—the existence of this hidden room is still a little hard for me to believe. (Though no more unlikely, maybe, than a few of the apartment’s other features.) And I find something so touching, honestly, about Dr. Thwaite’s devotion to literary tropes: a bookshelf door, a portal through a wardrobe, Alice. The affinities of the very rich
are sometimes so childlike. (In staying at his place, I learned more about his money. I’d known he was well off—his home bespoke an echelon of ease, as did his eccentricity—but I soon discovered that the wealth on his mother’s side alone made the Dorans seem plunged in penury; it was on a scale that qualified as thaumaturgic: putting the impossible within reach.)