28

Artie Wexler woke afraid and confused. The red digital numbers of the bedside clock shimmered like the scales of tropical fish in shallow water. He had a sense of his throat closing, but he knew no physical agent was responsible for it, it belonged in the dream he’d just aroused himself from – dream? no, more a nightmare of a cold lime-green room and ornate iron grating overhead and the shadow of a man walking back and forth above him. The click of steel-tipped shoes on metal.

He was dry as a dead fire, needed water, reached for the glass he usually left beside the clock, couldn’t find it. He sat up. He remembered he’d taken one of Ruthie’s sleepers, maybe that was what had dehydrated him –

The dream had been about money. Right.

Tell me Artie, you remember taking that money?

Perlman’s voice in the dream, and yet not; the way of dreams was to buff the edge of the known and replace anything familiar with a skewed facsimile.

He sat up on the edge of the bed. Ruthie was dead to the world. The digital clock read 4:25. The window of the bedroom was black. The sleet and rain had quit, no wind blew. Thirst scorched him. He’d have to go downstairs for water. He walked out to the landing, flicked a switch that turned on lights downstairs.

Halfway down he paused. He thought of Joe Lindsay dead. He thought of Nexus and the way Perlman had asked about it, and all that seemed such a long time ago. He reached the foot of the stairs, headed towards the kitchen. He pressed the button that turned on the spotlights. He wondered if Perlman really knew anything, or if he was firing from the hip – why had he mentioned money?

And then he remembered, as if the recollection were a small incendiary device from the past, the day he’d stolen Colin’s hidden stash, and young Lou had taken the blame for it. I’d forgotten that, he thought. Maybe that’s what Lou Perlman had been referring to: Colin’s coins. That’s all. Nothing more serious than that.

The little theft made him feel ashamed now.

He thought of places in the past where events had come together. You want to go back and change things round. Shift the furniture of your history. Revise the way you’d lived, the stuff you’d done. I am falling to bits, he thought.

Somebody killed Joe. Had that been in the dream too? He couldn’t remember. He heard the wind chimes shiver, a soft timpani in the night.

Wind chimes. But no wind.

He felt a wave of vulnerability. He imagined his skull in a sniper’s scope. He walked slowly to the sliding glass doors in the living room. The sensor lights shone in the yard. He pushed his face to the glass and, holding his breath, squinted out, looking for a sign of Reuben. The dog’s movements often triggered the lights. But that didn’t explain the chimes in the motionless dark.

The dog wasn’t around. Probably curled up somewhere and sleeping. Poor Reuben, growing old and infirm, diminished vision and hearing. Artie Wexler felt a huge affinity with the dog. Going downhill, man and dog together.

He was about to open the door to call for Reuben when something at his back cast a shadowy reflection in the panes. He thought: ah, Ruthie, Ruthie’s come down to look for me, and from outside came the bong of the wind chimes again, a sweet rippling effect as one chime collided with the next, and the next. He said, ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ and he turned, expecting to see his wife, but it wasn’t her, and before he could register this fact he heard glass shatter violently behind him, a scattering of pieces as jagged as stalactites of ice, and he felt himself pitched back into pain, into the fury of wreckage, and back further, and as he fell through shards he reached for the hanging chimes and caught them, and brought all the hollowed bamboo sticks suspended by thin wires down around him, and he kept on falling like an axed tree, teetering back until he stood on the lip of the swimming pool, where he dropped with a splash, and sank through icy water.

In the depths of the freezing black pool his eyes registered nothing.