The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [56]
Canada Gold’s father—one of the mathematici but also a man of faith—had been a bridge between factions, a man who believed in building discreetly on the ancient knowledge in order to better know God. Since his death, relations between mathematici and acusmatici had gone from cordial to bad to very bad. The casualties were mounting, and the Sheik feared Solomon’s innocent daughter might be part of the next mathematici scheme.
Rhodes was no bridge. He didn’t believe in anything anymore. For him, there was only stumbling, stumbling, trying to find his way. Trying to do the least worst thing.
Now they wanted him to find a little box hidden inside Canada Gold.
“How am I supposed to do that?” he’d asked the Sheik. “I’m not a fucking brain surgeon.”
The Sheik had finally taken a sip of his cognac. He assumed a smile that clenched Rhodes’s stomach like a fist.
“What we want done,” the Sheik said, “is nothing as elegant as that.”
TRIAD
But take heart for men are descended from the gods, and nature generously reveals to them everything holy.
—The Golden Verses of Pythagoras
18
FRIDAY, JULY 23
WAYNE HAD HOPED to enter this apartment under different circumstances: late at night, maybe a little bit drunk, his hand running down her back to the low, round swell of her behind and then up her left side as she fumbled with the keys and swatted him away playfully. Once inside with the door closed behind them, she would turn and kiss him and let his hands drift where they wanted and rip his shirttail from under his belt and, without ever breaking their embrace, back him slowly toward the bedroom.
Ideally, it wouldn’t have been like this, with a bleeding cut on his hand and shattered glass from the little window next to the door embedding itself in the carpet around his feet.
At least it was late at night. And he was drunk.
From the outside, the complex had the charm of a community college. Eight identical buildings of cinder block connected by narrow concrete pathways and a landscaped quilt of grass and pea gravel. There was a small overchlorinated swimming pool, an adjoining hot tub, and covered but not enclosed parking where the tenants’ cars baked like Toll House cookies in the daytime.
The apartment itself was a box made up of three smaller boxes—living room, bedroom, and kitchen/dining room—each of roughly equal size. The bathroom was large, and one of the closets was the walk-in kind. The living room included a fireplace that was mostly for show but usable on those December and January nights when the temperature dipped into the thirties. There was a balcony just big enough for a romantic breakfast, Wayne mused, early in the morning, before the sun was desert hot.
It was nearly empty, absent any trace of Nada at all. Not even a tack hole in the wall. Not a single size-five shoe print in the vacuumed carpet. Wayne was a lifelong resident of the desert, and by his expert estimate the air-conditioning had been off for at least a day, probably more. He forced a breath of hot, stale air into his lungs and checked his watch. Four a.m., breaking and entering. Not that there was anything for a burglar to take. He was just so worried. Worried that he hadn’t seen or heard from her. Worried that he’d find her body, five days decomposed, after she’d slipped from a wobbly stool while changing a lightbulb and cracked her head on the kitchen counter. He couldn’t admit it to himself, but he was almost as worried that he would find exactly this—an empty apartment and every indication she’d simply split town without saying good-bye.
Wayne scanned the living room—beige carpet, beige sofa, beige chair—hoping that whatever he had come for would announce itself through the Heineken haze. It didn’t. The entire contents of the apartment could be cataloged in a handful of seconds.
The last time