Unsteadily, I got up and went to the window. Bells, bells. The streets were white and deserted. Frost glittered on tiled rooftops; outside, on the Herengracht, snow danced and flew. A flock of black birds was cawing and swooping over the canal, the sky was hectic with them, great sideways sweeps and undulations as a single, intelligent body, eddying to and fro, and their movement seemed to pass into me on almost a cellular level, white sky and whirling snow and the fierce gusting wind of poets.
First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.
I took a shower, shaved and dressed. Then, quietly, I cleared up and packed my things. Somehow I would have to get Gyuri’s ring and watch back to him, assuming he was still alive, which I was increasingly doubtful he was: the watch alone was a fortune—a BMW 7 series, a down payment on a condo. I would FedEx them to Hobie for safekeeping and leave his name for Gyuri at the front desk, just in case.
Frosted panes, snow ghosting the cobblestones, deep and speechless, no traffic on the streets, centuries superimposed, 1940s by way of 1640s.
It was important not to think too deeply. The important thing was to ride the energy of the dream that had followed me into waking. Since I didn’t speak Dutch, I would go to the American consulate and have the consulate phone the Dutch police. Spoiling some consulate member’s Christmas, the festive family meal. But I didn’t trust myself to wait. Possibly a good idea to go down and look at the State Department’s website and apprise myself of my rights as an American citizen—certainly there were many worse places in the world to be in jail than the Netherlands and maybe if I was up front about everything I knew (Horst and Sascha, Martin and Frits, Frankfurt and Amsterdam) they could run the painting down.
But who knew how it would play. I was certain of nothing except that evasive action was over. Whatever happened, I would not be like my father, dodging and scheming up until the very moment of flipping the car and crashing in flames; I would stand forward and take what was coming to me; and, to that point, I went straight to the bathroom and flushed the glassine stamp down the toilet.
And that was that: fast as Martin, and just as irrevocable. What was it my dad liked to say? Face the music. Not something he’d ever done.
I had been to every corner of the room, done all there was to do except for the letters. Even the handwriting made me wince. But—the consciousness made me start back—I did have to write Hobie: not the self-pitying wobbles of drunkenness but a few businesslike lines, whereabouts of checkbook, ledger, deposit-box key. Probably just as well if I admitted, in writing, the furniture fraud, and made it crystal-clear he’d had no knowledge of it. Maybe I could have it witnessed and notarized at the American consulate; maybe Holly (or whoever) would take pity and call someone in to do it before they phoned the police. Grisha could back me up on a lot of it without incriminating himself: we’d never discussed it, he’d never questioned me but he’d known it wasn’t kosher, all those hush-hush trips out to the storage unit.
That left Pippa and Mrs. Barbour. God, the letters I’d written Pippa and never sent! My best effort, my most creative, after the disastrous visit with Everett, had begun, and ended, with what I felt was the light, affecting line: Leaving for a while. As a would-be suicide note it had seemed at the time, in terms of concision anyway, a minor masterpiece. Unfortunately I’d miscalculated the dose and awakened twelve hours later with vomit all over the bedspread and had to stagger downstairs still sick as a dog for a ten a.m. meeting with the IRS.
That said: a going-to-jail note was different, and best left unwritten. Pippa wasn’t fooled by who I was. I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from. Jail would only confirm what she knew. The best thing I could do was break off contact. If my father had really loved my mother—really loved her the way he said he had, once upon a time—wouldn’t he have done the same?
And then—Mrs. Barbour. It was sinking-ship knowledge, the sort of extremely surprising thing you don’t realize about yourself until the absolute last ditch, until the lifeboats are lowered and the ship is in flames—but, in the end, when I thought of killing myself she was the one I really couldn’t bear to do it to.
Leaving the room—going down to inquire about FedEx and to look at the State Department’s website before I called the consulate—I stopped. Tiny ribbon-wrapped bag of candies over the doorknob, a handwritten note: Merry Christmas! Somewhere people were laughing and a delicious smell of strong coffee and burnt sugar and freshly baked bread from room service was floating up and down the hall. Every morning I’d been ordering up the hotel breakfasts, grimly plowing through them—wasn’t Holland meant to be famous for its coffee? Yet I’d been drinking it every day and not even tasting it.