Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone Page B

secrets of the heart. But what about me, Browne wondered. Which was the very question he had sought to elude. For a moment he felt as though he were standing at the edge of a great darkness with an ear cocked to the wind, attending silence. It was a place he dared not stay.
    He remembered walking as a stranger in the ruined terminal. For a moment he became a stranger in his own house, in his own bed, beside his own woman—a stranger but without a stranger’s freedom. On the other side of darkness, he imagined freedom. It was a bright expanse, an effort, a victory. It was a good fight or the right war—something that eased the burden of self and made breath possible. Without it, he felt as though he had been preparing all his life for something he would never live to see.

6
    S TRICKLAND had been asleep only a few hours when the phone woke him. A drab sun addressed Manhattan at a late morning slant. Pamela, his visitor the night previous, was gone.
    He picked up the phone and said, “Hold on.”
    Hurrying to the studio door, he put the police bolt in place. He glanced about him as he went back to the bedroom, wondering if she had been pilfering. He had been too tired to see her out. Pamela had mainly learned to keep her liberated fingers under control around his property but he had once caught her with a six-thousand-dollar zoom lens.
    â€œYes,” Strickland said to the person on the phone. He stood in the long window, pulling on his trousers, squinting in the sunlight. A bright young voice hailed him.
    â€œI have Mrs. Manning of Hylan, Mr. Strickland.”
    â€œThat’s great,” Strickland said. He sat down on the bed and reached for a cigarette and his Rolodex file.
    â€œMr. Strickland,” an older woman’s voice declared, ‘Mrs. Manning of Hylan.”
    The Hylan people, Strickland had observed, tended to offer their surnames as possessed by the corporate suffix. It suggested foggy glens and Celtic heraldry.
    â€œHow are you, Mrs. Manning?”
    â€œJust fine. Will you be coming to see us today?”
    â€œYes I will, ma’am. I have an appointment.”
    â€œMr. Hylan himself can’t make it,” Mrs. Manning of Hylan informed him. “But we’ve arranged a schedule.”
    Strickland decided he did not care for the sound of it. His annoyance occasioned him his first stammer of the day.
    â€œBut ma’am,” he began, and stuck on the next sentence. “I . . . I came back a week early to meet Mr. Hylan. We set this up months ago.”
    â€œIt’ll be all right,” Mrs. Manning said. “We’ll make it up to you.”
    The unusual promise intrigued him. He waited for her to go on.
    â€œWe’ll show you Shadows,” she said flirtatiously. “We’ll give you the tour. You can look at tapes. Hello, Mr. Strickland?”
    â€œYes, ma’am.”
    â€œReally,” she assured him. “You’ll have a good time.”
    Strickland considered that it was early in the day for Mrs. Manning’s wry alertness.
    â€œHey,” he told her, “I’m having one already.”
    Strickland kept his car on the second level of a pier on the Hudson, a priceless midtown spot, convenient and secure. The car was a 1963 Porsche with austere lines and black leather upholstery. The fittings were rusty but the engine reported like a Prussian soldier on the first turn of the key. Strickland gave a little whistle of satisfaction.
    At the Twelfth Avenue barricade, he paid his parking bill to an unkempt youth of Caribbean Spanish origin.
    â€œI’m looking for storage space,” he told the young man. “I don’t need a lot of it. I’d like to talk about renting some.”
    It was desirable, Strickland felt, to rent from the same waterfront outfit who ran the garage. Their property had a way of avoiding violation. The young man gave him a card with a number to call.
    On the drive upriver, he