The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [244]
There was a sink in the lab, where I washed the blood from my hands as best I could. I put on my hat and coat. I unsnapped the locks of my suitcase and took out some clothes, and dressed Céleste in them. She was a little smaller than me, the clothes were baggy on her. I gave her some pants, and dressed her in the same droopy-sleeved green hooded sweatshirt that I used to wear when I was very young, in which Lydia used to dress me when we went out in public, to hide me, to avoid suspicion. I shut the suitcase and picked it up. We were almost out the door when another thought came to me, and, following the thought, I went back to the body of the dead scientist, and searched through his pockets until I found his wallet. My shoes stepped in the blood. I slipped the wallet into the pocket of my coat. Then together Céleste and I struggled through the door that led into and out of 308: BEHAVIORAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY and into the hallway, which had gone dark again, and which our presence lit up again. We walked—she leaning on me, and me doing most of the walking—down the hall, and we rode the elevator to the first floor, and I guided her out and down another hallway toward the door.
Behind us, far down the hallway and out of sight, as we were nearing the door, I heard the peep and squeal of the wheels of a cart—and, very slowly, I heard a softly muted form of a familiar series of sounds: first the quarter-beat of the heel of a boot making contact with the floor, followed immediately by the clomp of the rest of the foot coming down, and then the deft squeak of the toe launching the foot on its journey toward the next step, then a loop of chain whapping against a denim-clad thigh, and the tinkling of a hoop of many keys: kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK—kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK—kLOMPa-whap-SHLINK…
I saw that I had left a trail of footprints in blood behind me in the hallway.
I grabbed the handle of the door that led out and pushed on it, and we left. The door whispered shut, clunked, and locked behind us. I wiped the bottoms of my shoes off in the grass.
How love must suffer in this stern world. How love must suffer.
XLIX
With most of the money I had left from New York I paid for another taxi to take us northward out of Hyde Park. I told the driver to let us out when we were passing between the stony feet of the skyscrapers of the Loop, and I asked for a room at the Palmer House Hilton on Monroe and State. We had ducked inside the hotel almost at random. It was raining again, and deep night. I was still woozy-brained with drink, and Céleste was drugged and stumbling. Two small figures, their clothes soaked flat to their suspiciously proportioned little bodies, waddled past a doorman in a cap and gloves and a brilliant bottle-green coat with shiny gold buttons, pushed through the hotel’s revolving glass doors, wandered through the elegant underbelly below the hotel’s main lobby, found an escalator, and rode it up a floor to a high-ceilinged and spacious and crapulously decorated lobby, all gilded neoclassical ornaments and Corinthian columns and so forth, glass and brass, golden-veined expanses of marble, painted plaster and potted ferns. I yanked the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt low over Céleste’s face, to hide her apeness. At the golden-veined marble slab of the hotel’s front desk I booked a nonsmoking room with one king-size bed on the nineteenth floor. I put it on Dr. Norman Plumlee’s credit card. I kept my hat tipped low over my features. The mirror-paneled elevator whooshed us up to the nineteenth floor in seconds—so fast it was slightly nauseating—and we scurried down the hallway and found the door to our room. I slid the keycard inside, watched a light flash green, and pushed the door open. I flicked on a light, took the sign reading DO NOT DISTURB from the other side of the door and affixed it onto the outer door