the dark.
Then I went to put out the candles and found myself drawn to her little shrine. There was a family portrait in a drugstore frame, a stiffly posed snapshot of a father, a mother, and a daughter that must have been Ilona at age six or seven. Her hair was lighter and her features undefined, but it seemed to me that her eyes already held their characteristic expression of ironic self-amusement.
You’re falling in love, I thought, with a little ironic self-amusement all my own.
I picked up the crystal, felt its weight in my palm, put it back. I looked at the icons and decided they were authentic old ones, although probably not of great value. I fingered a military or ecclesiastical decoration, a bronze medallion with a portrait of a mitered bishop and an inscription in Cyrillic lettering, hanging from a ribbon of gold and scarlet. There was a Maria Theresa thaler, and a white-metal medallion with the bust of some king I couldn’t recognize, reposing in the bottom half of its original velvet-lined presentation box.
Family treasures, no doubt. And there was a tiny menagerie, including a cast-iron dog and cat (hand-painted, the paint gone in spots), another dog of hand-painted china, a trio of china penguins (one missing the tip of one wing), and a very well-carved if stolid wooden camel. Childhood souvenirs, as no doubt were the miniature cup and saucer, the probable sole survivors of a dollhouse tea set.
Another photo caught my eye as I set about snuffing the candles. It stood in an easel-backed frame and showed a man and woman about my age. She had really big hair; it was piled high on her head, and reminded me of the fur hat on the Ludomir vodka label. She was wearing a tailored jacket, and around her shoulders she’d draped a silver fox stole. He wore a belted Norfolk jacket and a flowing silk scarf, and he had one arm around the woman’s waist and was raising the other hand in greeting, and aiming a blinding smile at the camera.
He reminded me of somebody I knew, but I couldn’t think who.
I was still working on it when I pinched out the third and final candle, at which time I could no longer see his smiling face. So I found other things to think about, like where the door could have been the last time I’d seen it. Very little light came in through Ilona’s window; it was almost as dark as the apartment at the Boccaccio had been, and this time I didn’t have my flashlight along. There was a narrow band of light from the hallway showing at the bottom of the door, and I managed to walk to it without bumping into anything along the way.
I stepped out into the hallway and drew the door shut, then tried it to make sure the snaplock had engaged. I hated to leave her with only a snaplock between her and the big bad world, but I hadn’t brought my tools with me. If I had I could have locked up properly, but maybe it was just as well. It would have been hard to explain.
It had threatened to rain late that afternoon, but the evening turned out clear and mild and it was nice out now. I was a fifteen-minute walk from the bookstore, but if I went there now I’d be nine hours early for work.
The lovemaking that had saddened Ilona had left me edgy, which made the two of us a hell of an advertisement for great sex. I felt as though I could walk clear to St. Louis and punch somebody in the mouth when I got there. I walked eight or ten blocks and flagged a cab. As I scrunched up my legs to get them into the backseat, the first thought that came to me was to take a run up to the Wexford Castle and see if Ludomir was as bad as I remembered. The second thought was to recognize the first thought for the idiocy it was, and I told the driver to take me home.
CHAPTER
Eight
Around ten-thirty the next morning I was reading Hop To It, a slender volume on how to train your pet rabbit. I’d rescued it from my own bargain table, and was taking a break from Will Durant before reshelving it under Pets & Natural History. The photos of the bunnies were endearing, but the text made it clear they were much given to