In the night room Page 0,29

with rain-resistant hair turned their heads to see how much trouble he was in.

“I’m okay,” he said.

The young men snapped their heads forward and began walking a little faster, leaking disdain.

Strange, how normal the world seemed to him now, after Crosby Street. Those young men, what would they say if they knew he was getting e-mail from dead classmates? No more. Underhill was turning his back on all that nonsense. He resolved to concentrate on his work. From here on out, he would delete, unread, all e-mails without domain names. He wanted order and productivity.

He reached this decision with the sense of having established the ground rules for the next six months of his life. He would create a clearing, and in that clearing, free of uncertainty and disorder, he would write his book. Within imagination’s protective confines, he would set his heroine in motion. She was supposed to be in emotional extremity, not he. He needed to get in balance again.

With this resolve in mind, Tim turned the corner of Wooster and Grand, looked through the drizzle to the entrance of his building, and noticed a tall man in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt emerging through the open door. Oh, no, he thought, without being entirely certain why he should react this way. Then he looked more closely beneath the edge of the hood and saw what part of him had already registered, the face of Jasper Kohle. Kohle was grinning at him.

Tim stopped moving. For a second or two, Kohle’s face seemed to slide over its bones, and the bones themselves to shift. All that remained steady was the grin. Kohle’s face disappeared when his body turned, and he began to move in a deliberate slow jog toward West Broadway, where a wet young woman with green hair and facial piercings slouched past a steady stream of cars.

“Hey!” Tim shouted. “What are you doing?”

Kohle jogged around the corner, and Tim followed. For a moment he saw Kohle’s back moving purposefully away from him; then it slipped around a group of policemen staring at the entrance of a shop, and was gone. Tim thought of calling out to the cops, but he realized that he had no crime to report.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, hell.” One of the cops turned his head and gave him a look that said, Do you really want to mess up my day?

He spun around and raced back to the entrance of 55 Grand, as if haste could alter whatever he was going to find in his loft. The key jittered in the lock, demanding extra body English before it slid home. Though Tim’s mind was empty of nearly everything but anxiety, he managed to wonder how Kohle had gotten inside without a key. Callers could not be buzzed in: loft holders had to go downstairs and open two sets of doors for their visitors. This reality created a possibility for hope. Maybe Kohle’s visit had been no more than the act of a stalker pushing the envelope.

Tim ran past the elevator and charged up the staircase. His heels rang on the metal steps. He was breathing hard by the time he reached his door, and he had a sharp stitch in his side. He placed his left hand over the pain, with his right inserted his second key into the slot, and the door swung open by itself. Instead of unlocking it, he had almost locked it.

“Bloody hell,” he said, trying to remember if he had locked the door on his way out. The memory would not come. In fact, he could not even remember if he had taken the elevator or walked down the stairs, but he could not imagine forgetting to lock his door when he left the building.

Holding his breath, he pushed the door open, stepped inside, and flattened his back against the wall. From this position, at the end of a long, narrow corridor lined on one side with framed photographs and a row of coat hooks on the other, he could see only a small vertical slice of the loft itself. He realized that he was being absurdly cautious. Tim unpeeled himself from the photographs and called out, “Anybody here?” He moved to the end of the narrow corridor and surveyed his loft. No furniture had been overturned, and nothing seemed to have been destroyed.

Then he noticed that ten to fifteen feet of the floor in front of the wall of books at the rear of his loft