toward Manhattan, or what he assumed was the direction of Manhattan, he walked along the ice and
gravel shoulder, wind biting into his skin. Traffic grew heavier as he walked. Semitrucks with
advertisements painted across their trailers, flatbed trucks piled high with industrial cargo, minivans,
and compacts sped past. Exhaust mixed with the frigid air, a thick, toxic soup that made it painful for
him to breathe. The seemingly endless stretch of highway ahead, the bitter wind, the mind-numbing
ugliness of the scene—it was as if he had fallen into a piece of nightmarish postindustrial art.
Walking faster, he scanned the passing traffic, hoping to flag a police car, a bus, anything that would
get him out of the cold. But the traffic moved by in a relentless, aloof caravan. Finally Verlaine stuck
out his thumb.
With a whoosh of hot, gaseous air, a semi slowed and stopped a hundred yards or so ahead, the
brakes creaking as the tires ground to a halt. The passenger door was flung open, and Verlaine broke
into a run toward the brightly lit cab. The driver was a fat man with a great tangled beard and a
baseball cap who eyed Verlaine sympathetically. “Where you headed?”
“New York City,” Verlaine said, already basking in the warmth of the cab’s heater.
“I’m not going that far, but I can drop you in the next town, if you’d like.”
Verlaine tucked his hand deep into his coat, obscuring it from view. “Where’s that?” he asked.
“About fifteen miles south in Milton,” the driver said, looking him over. “Looks like you’ve had a
hell of a day. Hop in.”
They drove for fifteen minutes before the truck driver pulled over, letting him off on a quaint,
snowy main street with a stretch of small shops. The street was utterly deserted, as if the entire town
had shut down due to the snowstorm. The shop windows were dark and the parking lot before the post
office empty. A small tavern on a corner, a beer sign illuminated in the window, gave the only sign of
life.
Verlaine checked his pockets, feeling for his wallet and keys. He’d buttoned the envelope of cash
into an interior pocket of his sport jacket. Removing the envelope, he checked to be sure he hadn’t
lost the money. To his relief, it was all there. His anger grew, however, at the thought of Grigori.
What had he been doing, working for a guy who would track him down, bust up his car, and scare the
hell out of him? Verlaine was beginning to wonder if he’d been crazy for getting involved with
Percival Grigori at all.
The Grigori penthouse, Upper East Side, New York City
The Grigori family had acquired the penthouse in the late 1940s from the debt-ridden daughter of an
American tycoon. It was large and magnificent, much too big for a bachelor with an aversion to large
parties, and so it had come as something of a relief when Percival’s mother and Otterley began to
occupy the upper floors. When he had lived there alone, he had spent hours alone playing billiards,
the doors closed to the movement of servants brushing through the corridors. He would draw the
heavy green velvet drapes, turn the lamps low, and drink scotch as he aligned shot after shot, aiming
the cue and slamming the polished balls into netted pockets.
As time passed, he remodeled various rooms of the apartment but left the billiard room exactly as
it had been in the 1940s—slightly tattered leather furniture, the transmitter-tube radio with Bakelite
buttons, an eighteenth-century Persian rug, an abundance of musty old books filling the cherrywood
shelves, hardly any of which he had attempted to read. The volumes were purely decorative, admired
for their age and value. There were calf-bound volumes pertaining to the origins and exploits of his
many relations—histories, memoirs, epic novels of battle, romances. Some of these books had been
shipped from Europe after the war; others were acquired from a venerable book dealer in the
neighborhood, an old friend of the family transplanted from London. The man had a sharp sense for
what the Grigori family most desired—tales of European conquest, colonial glory, and the civilizing
power of Western culture.
Even the distinctive smell of the billiard room remained the same—soap and leather polish, a faint
hint of cigar. Percival still relished whiling away the hours there, calling every so often for the maid
to bring him a fresh drink. She was a young Anakim female who was wonderfully silent. She would
place a glass of scotch next to him and sweep the empty glass away, making him comfortable with
practiced efficiency. With a flick of his wrist, he would dismiss the servant, and she would disappear
in an instant. It pleased him that she always left quietly, closing the wide wooden doors behind her