by Mark Helprin
He was now on the level of the parlor floor, having seen from the ground that the rectangular silver bands often traced in Egyptian fashion around the edges of grandiose parlor windows, were absent—though it was never much of a chore to foil them, as long as one insisted upon remaining delicate. The window in front of him was locked and alarmed, but all he had to do was cut a nice big hole in the glass and step through gingerly onto the piano.
The moon saved him, for it cleared the eaves and shone down upon the glass, illuminating ten thousand hair-thin channels etched on the inner surface like orderly rime. He took out his loupe and examined them. By some sophisticated technique that even he did not know, the fine lines had been filled with hardly visible strips of metal. Obviously, every opening in the place was rigged. Peter Lake did not know that Isaac Penn was obsessed by burglars, and had taken heroic steps to bar their entry.
“That’s all right,” said Peter Lake. “They can jam up the windows and doors. That’s fine. But they can’t wire every square foot of the walls and roof. And since there’s no one here, I’ll cut myself a hatch.”
At the very instant that Beverly opened the door to the iron stairs and the flash appeared in the sky, Peter Lake’s steel grappling hook was thrown in a perfect arc, and traveled smoothly up to the roof. It took hold with a sound like that of an ax lodging in a piece of timber. But Beverly didn’t hear it, for the hook landed and the door slammed at the same time. With his tool-laden knapsack on his back, Peter Lake climbed hand over hand up the knotted rope, like an alpinist, talking to the hook all the while, begging it not to pull out. Beverly made circles around the pole of the spiral staircase, as if she were dancing down the steps of a palace filled with music. Four o’clock in the morning.
Still, the city did not stir. A few thin willows of smoke rose straight and undisturbed, and on the river some pilot lights could be seen on vessels moored fast to buoys or stranded in the ice. Light-headed and obsessed, both Beverly and Peter Lake were furiously engaged. She whirled about the second floor, tossing off her clothes as she went, waiting for enough water to fill the bathing pool so that she could take shelter in it away from the cold air that would be playing in invisible eddies above it. She was not used to such exertion, and probably should have refrained, but she danced the way people often do when they are unobserved—as unfettered and unselfconscious as a child, skipping like a lamb. Peter Lake was hard at work on the roof, panting like a bicyclist, turning a heavy auger.
“This goddamned roof’s three feet thick,” he said to himself as the drill went deeper and deeper and did not break through. He thought that he had hit a sleeper, so he started a new hole. After a few minutes, the brace came to rest against the top of the roof, and the bit still had not broken through. “What’s going on here?” asked Peter Lake, with tremendous irritation. Usually, he would already have been knocking at the fence’s door. He did not know that Isaac Penn (being an eccentric and heinously wealthy old whaler) had had the house built by New England’s finest shipwrights, specifying that the roof be crafted like the hull of a polar whaler built to survive pack ice. For some reason, Isaac Penn was afraid of meteorites, and because of that the attic of his house was, more or less, a solid block of wood. The timbers were so thick and tight that Peter Lake could not have sawed open an entrance for himself had he had until June to accomplish the task. He grew more and more apprehensive as he realized that he might have to go down a chimney. It was bad enough doing that in summer, but in winter it usually entailed difficult complications.
As Peter Lake climbed along the roof, Beverly prepared to enter the bath. Isaac Penn’s bathing pool was a tank of black slate and beige marble ten feet long, eight feet wide, and five feet deep. Water flowed into it over a smooth stone ledge along its entire length, came upwelling in an explosion of bubbles from jets at the bottom, and played over the surface after spewing from the yawning mouths of golden whales. All the Penn children, most lately Willa, had learned to swim there. And despite his deserved reputation for being a pillar of virtue, Isaac Penn did not object to men and women bathing together in the nude, as long as it was not done coyly. He had learned the custom in Japan, and maintained that it was highly civilized. Had the public known, he would have been pilloried.
The pool was half full, a churning sea of warm white bubbles. Peter Lake found the roof door and the lighted spiral staircase. He thought it might have been a trap, but he also thought that it might have been good luck. It was a heavy steel door: someone had mistakenly left it unlocked after leaving the solarium. Deciding to try it, he took out his pistol. Beverly raised her arms. No fever, it seemed. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She was beautiful; and how wonderful to be beautiful and not wasting away. Peter Lake peered in through the roof door, allowing his eyes to adjust to the light. Then he took a step, and Beverly tossed herself, feet first, with a whoop, into the whirlpool. He turned dizzily down the steps. She spread her arms and revolved easily in the current. Just as he reached the main floor, pistol in hand, eyes darting to and fro, she took hold of a golden whale and stretched out her feet to kick in place, singing to herself. She had plaited her hair in a loose braid, and it lay suspended in the clear shallows that washed across her back. Her limbs, smoother and more perfect than ivory, beautiful in themselves as examples of form, beautiful in their motion balanced one against the other, were stretched out and lean, and her arms made a lute shape as she clutched the golden whale in front of her. If the fever were to come back, it would do so after the bath, and make her once again redder than a field of hot roses. But she didn’t think about it, and she kicked and sang as the water flooded over the fall.
No longer fearful of entrapment, Peter Lake reached Isaac Penn’s study. It was sumptuous indeed, something a burglar might pray for—ten thousand leather-bound books (some in glass cases); a glimmering collection of ancient navigational instruments, chronometers, and brass-sheathed telescopes; and half a dozen oil paintings. Peter Lake looked at a book in one of the glass cases. A printed card next to it read “Gutenberg Bible.” Worthless, thought Peter Lake, since it could not have been very old, having come from Guttenberg, a town in New Jersey just south of North Bergen and north of West New York. Someone there was printing up tremendous unreadable Bibles.
Right over a dark mahogany desk as spacious as a room in servants’ quarters was a painting of a racehorse standing in a meadow. Behind such a painting, Peter Lake knew, one could always find a vault. He swung the painting out from the wall. “It’s as big as a vault in a bank,” he said out loud. And it was, but it was in Isaac Penn’s study, and that meant something.
Isaac Penn was in many ways a genius. But he was also peculiar and eccentric. Enamored of the sciences, he had wanted to name his last child Oxygen, but everyone had prevailed in getting him to choose a more conventional appellation, which was lucky for little Willa. Years before, however, he had managed to saddle Harry with the rather uncommon middle name of Brazil. And he had prevailed entirely in the design of his house. One of its more unusual features was the vault that Peter Lake was so happy to find. Though the house itself was a fortress, still, Isaac Penn had thought to make sure that anyone who did manage to break in would be kept busy. Thus the vault was not a vault but rather a solid plug of molybdenum steel which extended into the wall for five feet. Peter Lake began to drill.
Half an hour later, the brace for the two-inch bit began to grind steel. He pulled away the drill and inserted a probe. He hadn’t broken through. Must have been machined imprecisely, he thought, or maybe my bit’s worn down. He took a set of calipers from his bag and measured the tool—exactly two inches. One of those foil deals, he said to himself, and placed an awl in the boring. He struck it hard with the steel mallet, and the mallet went shooting back over his shoulder and bounced off the wall. A three-inch door? Impossible: it couldn’t be opened. Let me check this. After careful measuring and calculation, he determined that the radius of the opening and the design of the hinge did
not permit of a three-inch-thick door. He would try three inches anyway. He put in a longer bit, and resumed drilling.
Upstairs, Beverly did not know if the fever had returned or if the heat she felt was only because of the bath. She sweated as if she had 105, and feared that, though the fever might have gone away, her flirtation with steam and hot water had invited it back. Perhaps she should have been totally silent and held her breath, hoping that the fever would run blindly throughout the house unable to find her and then crash out a window to dissipate in the snow. But she was not sure that her indiscretion would not, in the end, serve her well, for she remembered what her father had said about those who bide too much of their time and keep too much counsel. He had told her, “God is not fooled by silence.” He had told her always to have courage, and sometimes to step into the breach—though he need not have told her, for it seemed to have been her temperament from the very start. So she cleared the steam from the mirror with a bold sweep of her hand and revealed a gorgeous sweating girl with a gleam of water covering her reddened face and chest. Fight the fever. Fight it, and, if necessary, go down fighting. The courage would not go unrewarded, would it? That is to be seen, she thought. But, meanwhile, there was no question—she would fight. She wrapped herself in a blanket-sized towel and fastened it near her shoulder with a silver clasp. With the fever, even standing upright was taxing. When she went into the hall on her way downstairs to play the piano, the cool air was like a breeze in the mountains.
Peter Lake, too, was sweating. When the brace ground to a halt, he pulled out the drill and blew away the tailings. In went the probe. Solid. In went the awl. He struck it a stupendous blow, and was nearly killed by the ricocheting hammer, which, this time, lodged in the wall behind him. His wrist and fingers stinging, Peter Lake forgot what he had broken in to do, and changed to a ten-inch bit. “I’m going to break through this bastard,” he said, angrily and with a trace of insanity, “even if it kills me.” Then he rolled up his shirt sleeves, and began to drill yet again. Sweat poured down his face, stinging his eyes, dripping onto the crimson carpet.
Beverly glided past the door of the study. Peter Lake saw a diffuse white reflection in the wet steel of the auger, and turned, half expecting to see a ghost. But she was already in the kitchen. He went back to his task, gripping the slippery beet-colored handle of the brace with all his strength as he worked it.
While she stared into the hell of the toaster, Beverly heard the squeaking and mincing of the drill. Muffled within the walls, it sounded like a very large rat. Her eyes shot about suspiciously. Since when were there rats in the Penn house? She imagined him and shuddered, visualizing rats in the honeycombed tunnels that passed through the dead in their graves, among the horrible tangle of roots that embraced the ground as pale and blind as maggots. But the rat would undoubtedly be satisfied with whatever was deep in the walls. Besides, gnawing sounds from inside a house always went away, and then seemed as if they had never been there. Up popped two scones, and she deftly caught them in midair.
Peter Lake hit ten inches. His muscles ached. He was thirsty. Just before Beverly passed by the study door on her way to the conservatory (and this time, looking to her left, she would have seen him), he threw himself on a leather couch and closed his eyes in exhaustion.
She placed the little china plate that held the scones, and a bone-white cup of hot tea, on the piano. When she was a girl her father had scolded her for doing that. The piano did have some heat rings on it, but it had always sounded the same. She opened the keyboard cover and out flashed a smiling monster of soft ivory. What would she play? Perhaps “Les Adieux.” It was one of her favorite pieces, and with it she might say goodbye to the fever. But no, the beauty of “Les Adieux” was also an invitation to return, strong enough to call back a galloping horse and its rider. Remembering what her father had said about those who were unduly silent, she decided upon a piece of music that was pure courage, the allegro of the Brahms “Violin Concerto,” which she had in a piano transcription. She got it out and spread it open. The steam from the tea rose past the notes; their pattern was like what an eagle might see as he wheeled over a range of steep mountains. The opening was so bold and true that she feared to start, for its drawn-out melody was no less than a cry from a human heart. She shuddered, and then she began. The beauty of the music exploded through the house as its first phrases were sustained, echoed, and elevated by those that followed.
Peter Lake had been lying back on the couch, slack. His tools were strewn about the room. Neither crouching nor alert, nor packed-up and ready, as his profession dictated, he was, to the contrary, uncharacteristically vulnerable. And when the music erupted furiously, it caught him completely off guard. He flew into the air, his heart stopped, and then he sank down with the expression of a dog kicked from sleep by a screen door. However, he recovered very quickly—another part of his profession—and by the time he was on his feet he was no longer a burglar attacked by a violin concerto, but a man. He left his tools and jacket where they had been, and walked toward the sound.
This was not the ringing piano of the music hall, sweet and sad, but something far higher. It moved him not as a succession of abstract sounds, but as if it were, rather, as simple and evident as the great strings of greenish-white pearls that glistened along the bridge catenaries at night. When early evening came, they were there, shining out, the symbol of something that he loved very much but did not really know. What would he have done if the lights of the bridges did not light in early evening? They were his center calm, his reassurance, and much more than that. This music sounded to Peter Lake like the sparkling signal that the lights tapped out in the mist.
He arrived at the door of the conservatory, defenseless, as the echo and timbre of Beverly’s grand piano rang through him in a resonance as solid and direct as one of the physical laws. Running that fierce black engine was a girl in a towel. She was sweating, working hard, lost in powering the wide end of the speeding piano. Her hair was half wet, still plaited, delirious. She sang and spoke to the piano, cajoling it, tempting it, encouraging it. She spoke under her breath, and her lips moved to emphasize and verify. “Yes,” she said. “Now!” She hummed notes, or sang them, she closed her eyes, and sometimes she struck down very hard, or withdrew with a smile. But she was working all the time; her hands were moving; the tendons and muscles in her neck and shoulders shifted and flowed like those of an athlete. Peter Lake could not see that she was almost crying. He didn’t know what was happening to him, and was resentful of the deep emotions that he tried to control and could not, so that, though he wanted to, he was unable to back away. He stood there, rooted, until Beverly, breathing hard, finished the piece and slammed down the keyboard cover. Her breathing was most peculiar. It was the breathing of someone deep in the lucid darkness of a fever.
She put her hands on the piano and leaned against it so she wouldn’t fall. Peter Lake neither moved nor took his eyes off her. He was deeply ashamed, mortified. He had come to steal, he had broken in, he was streaked with sweat and dirt from his work at the drill, and he was staring at Beverly without her knowledge.
He had unspeakable admiration for the way she had risen from obvious weakness to court with such passion the elusive and demanding notes that he had heard. She had done what Mootfowl had always argued. She had risen above herself, right before his eyes. She had risen, and then fallen back, weakened, vulnerable, alone. He wanted to follow her in this. And, then, she was beautiful, half naked, glowing as if she had just stepped from a bath. Her fatigue seemed almost like drunkenness or abandon. Her bare shoulders alone might have absorbed his attention for many weeks. He was overwhelmed.
But how in the world would he, could he, approach her? It seemed to him as if the new dawn took an hour to fill the room, and all the while they were frozen in position. He finally concluded that she was, simply, unapproachable, and that he dared not try. As the dawn wind gently shook the windows, he took a step backward, hoping to leave unobs
erved while she was immobile at the piano.
When he did, the floor gave a wonderful, tortured, wooden squeak which told unmistakably of live weight. He froze, hoping that it would go unnoticed. She lifted and turned her head. And then she saw him. Half in delirium, she fixed her open gaze upon his face. Though her reaction built steadily within her, she gave no clue to what it was. He, on the other hand, felt shame flooding his cheeks like a hot geyser.
He could say nothing. He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was not good at small talk, she was half naked, it was dawn, and he loved her.
He moved his foot up and down on the loose plank that had given him away. It sounded like a child’s toy being pressed. He kept on moving his foot up and down, and he looked as if he were about to burst into tears. “It squeaks,” he said, with such emotion that he thought the whole world had gone mad. “It squeaks.”
Beverly looked at the piano, and then back at Peter Lake. “What?” she asked, her voice rising gently. “What did you say?”