In the night room Page 0,60

Byzantium/

So Does Willy

PART FOUR

21

On the second floor of the big Barnes & Noble bookstore on Broadway and Eighty-second Street, Katherine Hyndman from the community-relations department glanced up from the podium before her and said, “And after all that, I’m sure you are as eager as I am to hear tonight’s guest, so here he is . . . Timothy Underhill.”

She looked to her side and smiled at him through her outsized black-framed glasses, and Underhill walked out from cover and into full view of the thirty or forty people occupying the rows of chairs in front of him. Katherine Hyndman stepped back and motioned him toward the podium with a comically exaggerated sweeping gesture that got a few laughs.

It was a few minutes past 8:00 P.M. The enormous windows on the street side of the readings area showed a thorough darkness washed by light upon light. Cars swept up and down the length of Broadway. The few people standing on that side of the room could look down to see pedestrians wearing sweaters and jackets. Autumn—or at least this presage of the autumn and winter to come—seemed to have arrived overnight.

“Wasn’t it just summer?” Underhill asked. He was rewarded by a little more laughter than had greeted his presenter’s parodic courtliness—which had masked a real courtliness, he knew, designed to soothe the touch of anxiety Ms. Hyndman had mistakenly perceived as stage fright. Underhill had been doing readings, panels, symposia, and public talks for so long he had forgotten what stage fright felt like.

“I mean, like yesterday?” he said, to renewed laughter. “All of a sudden, the world turned harsh on us. I think we should try an experiment. Stick with me on this. I know, I know, you came here for a reading, and I am here to read, but first we are going to make a concerted group effort to influence the weather around here. It’s going to sound like Alice in Wonderland, but deep in my heart I believe it’s worth a try.”

Tim was improvising. He’d had no idea he was going to say these things, but he figured he might as well keep rolling. Most of the people looking up seemed amused, expectant, interested in what he would ask them to do.

As he let the words come out of his mouth, Underhill scanned the audience, row by row, for Jasper Kohle. He would be peering out from beneath his ratty hood, or leaning forward in his chair; standing hunched against the window; peering out goblinlike from behind a rank of bookshelves. He might be gripping a heavy-looking brown bag, and the weight in that bag could be anything at all: a book, a Chinese take-out dinner, a gun.

“Let’s clap our heels together and see if we can get another month of nice weather. It rained all of June, so we were cheated out of the best month of the year in New York. August was the usual fish fry. This month, it really poured a couple of times. We’re coping with a fundamental structural maladjustment, and you and I have an opportunity to step in and make a difference. Not so much for our own sakes, of course, but think of the street musicians. Think of the people who live on the sidewalks. They’re in no hurry to see winter come.”

For some reason, two people in the middle rows had raised their arms and seemed to be trying to attract his attention. Underhill went on scanning his audience, moving from face to face.

“I’m warning you, if you don’t go along with me on this, you risk putting us in a kind of Evil Punxsutawney Phil situation, with arctic gales around Halloween. So all together now, let’s click our heels together three times and say—”

“It’s the Wizard of Oz,” said a middle-aged man in the second row.

Behind him, one of the women with her arm in the air flapped her hand at him, smiled, and said, “That’s what I was going to say. You’re talking about The Wizard of Oz.”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Tim asked. “The Wizard of Oz. Clicking your heels together, what else can it be? Apart from ‘Springtime for Hitler.’ ”

“No,” the woman said, “you said—”

But Timothy Underhill did not need these people to remind him of what he had said. In the form of his sister, April, little Alice Blue-Gown was watching him from the seat on the far left end of the last row. In the gap between two nouveau