“Go out,” the European invited him. “It’s been waiting for you all these years. Go on! Go!”
The floor beneath Whitehead’s feet seemed to have become slick; he felt himself sliding toward the past. His face was washed by the open air as it glided into the hallway to meet him. It smelled of spring, of the Vistula, which roared to the sea ten minutes’ walk from here; it smelled of blossom too. Of course it smelled of blossom. What he’d mistaken for stars were petals, white petals lifted by the breeze and gusted toward him. The sight of the petals was too persuasive to be ignored; he let them lead him back into this glorious night, when for a few shimmering hours the whole world had promised to be his for the taking. Even as he conceded his senses to the night the tree appeared, as phenomenal as he had so often dreamed it, its white head shaking slightly. Somebody lurked in the shade beneath its laden branches; their smallest movement caused a new cascade.
His entranced reason made one final snatch at the reality of the hotel, and he reached to touch the door of the suite, but his hand missed it in the darkness. There was no time to look again. The obscured watcher was emerging from the cover of the branches. Déjà vu suffused Whitehead; except that the first time he’d been here there had only been a glimpse of the man beneath the tree. This time the reluctant sentinel broke cover. Smiling a welcome, Lieutenant Konstantin Vasiliev showed his burned face to the man who’d come visiting from the future. Tonight the lieutenant would not shamble off for a rendezvous with a dead woman; tonight he would embrace the thief, who had grown furrowed and bearded, but whose presence here he’d awaited a lifetime.
“We thought you’d never come,” Vasiliev said. He pushed a branch aside and stepped fully into the dead light of this fantastical night. He was proud to show himself, though his hair was entirely burned off, his face black and red, his body full of holes. His trousers were open; his member erect. Perhaps, later, they would go to his mistress together, he and the thief. Drink vodka like old friends. He grinned at Whitehead. “I told them you’d come eventually. I knew you would. To see us again.”
Whitehead raised the gun he still had in his hand, and fired at the lieutenant. The illusion was not interrupted by this violence, however, merely reinforced. Shouts-in Russian-echoed from beyond the square.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Vasiliev said. “Now the soldiers will come.”
The thief recognized his error. He had never used a gun after a curfew: it was an invitation to arrest. He heard booted feet running, close by.
“We must hurry,” the lieutenant insisted, casually spitting out the bullet, which he had caught between his teeth.
“I’m not going with you,” Whitehead said.
“But we’ve waited so long,” Vasiliev replied, and shook the branch to cue the next act. The tree raised its limbs like a bride, shrugging off its trousseau of blossom. Within moments the air was thick with a blizzard of petals. As they settled, spilling their radiance onto the ground, the thief began to pick out the familiar faces that waited beneath the branches. People who, down the years, had come to this wasteland, to this tree, and gathered under it with Vasiliev, to rot and weep. Evangeline was among them, the wounds that had been so tastefully concealed as she’d lain in her coffin now freely displayed.
She did not smile, but she stretched her arms out to embrace him, her mouth forming his name-“Jojo”-as she stepped forward. Bill Toy was behind her, in evening dress, as if for the Academy. His ears bled. Beside him, her face opened from lip to brow, was a woman in a nightgown. There were others too, some of whom he recognized, many of whom he didn’t. The woman who’d led him to the card-player was there, bare-breasted, as he remembered her. Her smile was as distressing as ever. There were soldiers too, others who’d lost to Mamoulian like Vasiliev. One wore a skirt in addition to his bullet holes. From under its folds a snout appeared. Saul-his carcass ravaged-sniffed his old master, and growled.