I can’t forget, because I’ll never comprehend:
One night he would find pure beauty there.
And commit his greatest mistake.
* * *
—
But let’s get back to that morning; the first day beyond the Murderer, and Clay lay curled, then straightened. The sun didn’t so much rise as carry him up, and there was something light and lean, in the left-hand pocket of his jeans, beneath the broken peg. He chose for now to ignore it.
He lay across the mattress.
He thought he felt he heard her—
But it’s morning, he thought, and Thursday.
At times like this, thinking of her ached:
The hair against his neck.
Her mouth.
Her bones, her breast, and finally, her breath.
“Clay.” A bit louder now. “It’s me.”
But he would have to wait for Saturday.
In the past, she’s there again, utterly unknowing—for Waldek Lesciuszko didn’t so much as breathe in a way that might suggest what he was planning.
The man was meticulous.
Absolutely dormant.
A concert in Vienna?
No.
Often, I wonder what it must have been like for him—to buy the mandatory return ticket, knowing she was only going one-way. I wonder how it was to lie and make her reapply for her passport, as had to be done, every time you left, even if briefly. So Penelope did it, like always.
As mentioned earlier, she’d been in concerts before.
She’d gone to Kraków. Gdansk. East Germany.
There was also the time she’d traveled to a small city by the name of Nebenstadt, west of the Curtain, but even that was spitting distance from the East. The concerts were always high but not-too-high affairs, because she was a beautiful pianist, and a brilliant one, but not a brilliant one. She usually made the trips alone, and never failed to return at the allotted hour.
Until now.
* * *
—
This time her father encouraged her to take a bigger suitcase, and another jacket. In the night he added some extra underwear and socks. He also fed an envelope inside the pages of a book—a black hardcover, which was one of a pair. The envelope held words and money:
A letter and American dollars.
The books were then wrapped in brown paper.