The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [112]
“Did you know Dr. Falcone?” he asked.
She said she had. She was much younger than Marlena, small and shy. Her name was Laura and she said Marlena had been a colleague of her father, but she had known her since she was a child and in recent years, since Laura had moved out on her own to an apartment in the city, they had become close. Alberto could tell that the murder had affected her profoundly. He wondered briefly and gratuitously if they had been lovers but then decided no. She was just a woman living alone, wondering when the wheel of random city violence would stop and find her as it had found her friend.
“I was her professor, once, years ago,” Alberto explained. “I couldn’t make the wake. I thought maybe this would be a substitute.”
Laura shook her head. “The wake was private. I wasn’t even allowed to go.”
“What do you mean?”
Laura hesitated. “Marlena lived her life in boxes. Boxes inside boxes. The funeral was only for the … the people in the innermost box.”
Riddles, Alberto thought. Who talks in riddles except Batman villains and people who think they know something they shouldn’t say?
“May I?”
He sat and they spoke in whispers within the cavernous space. Laura explained that Marlena’s family had disowned her years ago when she came out as a lesbian. She told him that after the wake her brothers had claimed the body coldly and without a ceremony of their own and were now auctioning off all Marlena’s possessions, scattering her life like ashes to the highest bidders.
“Her family, her brothers, they weren’t at the wake, either?”
Laura shook her head.
“They weren’t in that box.”
“No,” she said.
Alberto sensed the meaningful silence and he leapt into it, regretting that he had almost as soon as he did. “How did she get in? The smallest box, I mean.”
Laura examined his face, as if wondering where these questions were leading her. “They adopted her. She had something they could use, so they adopted her. And then—” She leaned away. “Who are you?”
“I told you who I am.”
“What do you think you know?”
Alberto swallowed the next words and analyzed the situation, coming to a conclusion with Euclidean certainty. Laura had already volunteered that she was not in the “innermost box.” Laura was not a member of the Thousand, but she was close to Marlena, close to the box. She knew something.
“The Thousand.” He whispered as low as he could while still being heard. “She was mathematici, yeah? That’s the box. The mathematici. The Thousand.”
She picked up her bag. “I need to go. This was stupid.”
“Please don’t.”
Laura sidled down the row of chairs and stepped quickly toward the rear opening in the curtain. A bald man in a dark suit appeared twenty feet ahead of her and Laura stopped abruptly. Alberto watched as she covered her face with the canvas bag, waited for the man to take his own seat, and then ducked out behind him, unnoticed.
Alberto slumped a bit in his own chair before remembering that the bald man, whoever he was, must not have any idea of his identity. Alberto Cepeda was no threat. He was a nonperson. For once in his life, it felt like an advantage.
He followed Laura’s steps through the curtain, but she was already out of sight, the clicks of her sprinting high heels just barely reverberating from somewhere behind pallets and stacks of unmarked boxes.
Damn.
Behind the stage, the lots were still open for inspection, and Alberto peered at each one: furniture, dresses, photo albums, books, shoe boxes of pictures and miscellaneous papers, a large wooden harp with the label Lyon & Healy, Chicago. Alberto didn’t find what he was looking for. Of course, he hadn’t really expected to.
In