Chapter 1
The rain in Washington possesses a quality altogether unlike the rain in Milan. It lacks ceremony. In Milan even foul weather had the decency to comport itself in the operatic mode — fat warm drops that pooled obligingly in the cobblestones and returned the city to the saints for the duration of an afternoon. The rain in Washington, by contrast, merely complains. Cold, thin, and managerial — much, I had come to think, like the men I sat beside in the chamber I had just abandoned to it.
I had walked out of the legislative session bored to the bone. Two centuries and ninety-four years upon this Earth, and the one consistent property of its lawmakers is the unfailing preference for the sound of their own voices over the relief of a hungry child. I find this an amusement, on most afternoons. On this particular afternoon — a wet, charmless Tuesday with a thin sky and the gray-bellied clouds of a city that has never learned to dress for itself — I found it unbearable.
The restaurant into which I eventually wandered was small and warm and undistinguished by any quality but the bell above its door, which was the same brass article that had hung above such doors in the eighteen-hundreds and would, I supposed, continue to hang above them long after the rest of us had given the city up. I took a seat at the bar. I ordered a Disaronno, neat, in the same Italian I had once used to order it in Milan in the company of men who had been a great deal more dangerous than this bartender. He did not card me. I would have liked to see him try.
Then the bell rang a second time.
I am a being of considerable patience. I have been required to be. Patience, in the end, is what time affords you when it is unable to afford you anything else — and time, in its three hundred years of acquaintance with me, has been markedly unable to afford me anything else. I should have liked to inform myself that I would finish my drink, observe the new arrival with the detached interest of a being who had observed several million such arrivals before her, and depart into the rain unburdened by her ordinariness.
She removed her hat. She let down her hair.
And there was Sophia, wearing a woman named Stephanie like a borrowed coat.
I did not move. I could not have moved if the dark one himself had appeared at my shoulder and commanded the motion of my body in syllables a demon does not refuse. The Universe is precise in its cruelties — this I have learned, at length, in the slow education of an existence that has refused to end — and what was occurring in the small wet restaurant did not feel like a cruelty. It felt like a slip. A small careless slip from a Universe that does not, under any circumstances I had previously observed, slip.
She sat at the second table from the door. Her companion — a young woman with a brittle laugh and the manner of one who is friendly without being kind — was already settled there, fussing over her with the inadequate offices of a napkin.
Stephanie. Stephanie. The name landed in my mouth like a wine I had never had the privilege of tasting and yet recognized, somehow, with the entirety of a palate that had spent three hundred years in training.
“Is there a draft in here?” she asked her friend.
Her friend laughed. “Stephanie, you’re cold from the rain. Let’s eat.”
I had not exhaled. I made my body exhale — and the displaced air moved past her shoulder, and she shivered a second time, and her hand rose to her throat, where a small silver necklace I did not recognize hung against the place where I had once, in another century, pressed my mouth.
I left a fifty-dollar note upon the bar and stepped into the rain without finishing my drink. I did not look back. I had not given myself the permission to look back. I walked one block and then a second and then a third in the disagreeable direction the rain had elected for itself, in search of an alley dark enough to suit the purpose I was now compelled to. When I found such an alley — narrow, unobserved, possessed of the particular silence one finds in the unattended corridors of any city which insists upon importance — I raised my hand and opened a portal into the only place in any realm where I might be assured of the courtesy of grieving in private.
The dark realm received me as it has always received me.
I did not make it ten paces from the door of my own chambers before the air hardened.
“Lahash.”
