The Goldfinch

“Van,” he said, throwing himself back in the car. Slamming the door. Taking a deep breath, bracing his arms out straight against the steering wheel.

“What is he doing?” Glancing side to side, panicked, half expecting some random pedestrian to notice the bloodstains, rush at the car, bang at the windows, throw open the door.

“How should I know? There are too many cars in this fucking city. Look,” said Boris—sweating and pale in the lurid tail lights of the car in front of us; more cars had pulled up behind, we were trapped—“who knows how long we will be here. We are only few blocks from your hotel. Better you should get out and walk.”

“I—” Was it the lights of the car in front of us that made the water drops on the windshield look quite so red?

He made an impatient flicking movement of the hand. “Potter, just go,” he said. “I don’t know what is going on with this van up here. I’m afraid the traffic police will show up. Better for us both if we are not together just now. Herengracht—you ca

“What about your arm?”

“It’s nothing! I’d take off my coat to show you except is too much trouble. Now go. I have to talk to Cherry.” Pulling his cell phone from his pocket. “I may have to leave town for a little while—”

“What?”

“—but if we don’t speak for a bit, don’t worry, I know where you are. Best if you don’t try to call me or get in touch. I’ll be back soon as I can. Everything will be okay. Go—clean up—scarf around the neck, up high—we will speak soon. Don’t look so pale and ill! Do you have anything on you? Do you need something?”

“What?”

Scrabbling in his pocket. “Here, take this.” Glassine envelope with a smeared stamp. “Not too much, it is very very pure. Size of a match head. No more. And when you wake up, it will not be quite so bad. Now, remember—” dialing his phone; I was very conscious of his heavy breathing—“keep your scarf high up at your neck and walk on the dark side of the street as much as you can. Go!” he shouted when still I sat there, so loudly that I saw a man on the pedestrian walk of the bridge turn to look. “Hurry up! Cherry,” he said, slumping back in his seat in visible relief and begi

xiv.

THE SUBSEQUENT HOUR, OR hours, of wandering the canal rings hunting for my hotel were as miserable as any in my life, which is saying something. The temperature had plunged, my hair was wet, my clothes were soaked, my teeth were chattering with cold; the streets were just dark enough that they all looked alike and yet not nearly dark enough to be roaming around in clothes bloodied from a man I’d just killed. Down the black streets I walked, fast, with oddly confident-sounding heel taps, feeling as uneasy and conspicuous as a dreamer wandering naked in a nightmare, staying out of the streetlights and trying hard to reassure myself, with dwindling success, that my inside-out coat looked perfectly normal, nothing unusual about it at all. There were pedestrians on the street, but not many. Afraid of being recognized, I’d removed my glasses since I knew from experience that my glasses were my most distinctive feature—what people noticed first, what people remembered—and though this was unhelpful in terms of finding my way it also gave me an irrational sense of safety and concealment: illegible street signs and fogged streetlamp coronas floating up isolated out of the dark, blurred car lights and holiday tracers, a feeling of being viewed by pursuers with an out-of-focus lens.

What had happened was: I’d overshot my hotel by a couple of blocks. Moreover: I was not used to European hotels where you had to ring to get in after a certain hour, and when at last I splashed up sneezing and bonechilled to find the glass door locked, I stood for some indefinite time rattling the handle like a zombie, back and forth, back and forth, with a rhythmic, locked-in, metronome dumbness, too stupefied with cold to understand why I couldn’t get in. Dismally, through the glass, I gazed through the lobby at the sleek, black desk: empty.

Then—hurrying from the back, startled eyebrows—neat dark-haired man in dark suit. There was an awful flash where his eyes met mine and I realized how I must look, and then he was looking away, fumbling with the key.

“Sorry, sir, we lock the door after eleven,” he said. Still averting his eyes. “It’s for the safety of the customers.”

“I got caught in the rain.”

“Of course, sir.” He was—I realized—staring at the cuff of my shirt, splatted with a browned blood drop the size of a quarter. “We have umbrellas at the desk should you require them.”

“Thanks.” Then, nonsensically: “I spilled chocolate sauce on myself.”

“Sorry to hear that, sir. We’ll be happy to try to get it out in the laundry if you like.”

“That’d be great.” Couldn’t he smell it on me, the blood? In the heated lobby I reeked of it, rust and salt. “My favorite shirt too. Profiteroles.” Shut up, shut up. “Delicious though.”

“Happy to hear it sir. We’ll be happy to book you a table at a restaurant tomorrow night if you like.”

“Thanks.” Blood in my mouth, the smell and taste of it everywhere, I could only hope he couldn’t smell it quite so strongly as me. “That’d be great.”

“Sir?” he said as I was starting off to the elevator.

“Sorry?”

“I believe you need your key?” Moving behind the desk, selecting a key from a pigeonhole. “Twenty-seven, is it?”

“Right,” I said, at once thankful he’d told me my room number and alarmed that he’d known it so readily, off the top of his head.

“Good night sir. Enjoy your stay.”

Two different elevators. Endless hallway, carpeted in red. Coming in, I threw on all the lights—desk lamp, bed lamp, chandelier blazing; shrugged my coat on the floor, and headed straight for the shower, unbuttoning my bloodied shirt as I went, stumbling like Frankenstein’s monster before pitchforks. I wadded the sticky mess of cloth and threw it into the bottom of the bathtub and turned on the water as hard and hot as it would go, rivulets of pink streaming beneath my feet, scrubbing myself with the lily scented bath gel until I smelled like a funeral wreath and my skin was on fire.

The shirt was a loss: brown stains scalloped and splotched at the throat long after the water ran clean. Leaving it to soak in the tub, I turned to the scarf and then the jacket—smeared with blood, though too dark to show it—and then, turning it right side out, as gingerly as I could (why had I worn the camel’s-hair to the party? why not the navy?) the coat. One lapel was not so bad and the other very bad. The wine-dark splash carried a blatting animation that threw me back into the energy of the shot all over again: the kick, the burst, trajectory of droplets. I stuffed it under the tap in the sink and poured shampoo on it and scrubbed and scrubbed with a shoebrush from the closet; and after the shampoo was gone, and the bath gel too, I rubbed bar soap on the spot and scrubbed some more, like some hopeless servant in a fairy tale doomed to complete an impossible task before dawn, or die. At last, hands trembling from fatigue, I turned to my toothbrush and toothpaste straight from the tube—which, oddly enough, worked better than anything I’d tried, but still didn’t do the job.

Finally I gave it up for useless, and hung the coat to drip in the bathtub: sodden ghost of Mr. Pavlikovsky. I’d taken care to keep blood off the towels; with toilet paper, which I compulsively wadded and flushed every few moments, I mopped up, laboriously, the rusty smears and drips on the tile. Taking my toothbrush to the grout. Clinical whiteness. Mirrored walls glittering. Multiple reflecting solitudes. Long after the last tinge of pink was gone, I kept going—rinsing and re-washing the hand towels I’d sullied, which still had a suspicious flush—and then, so tired I was reeling, got in the shower with water so hot I could barely stand it and scrubbed myself down all over again, head to toe, grinding the bar of soap in my hair and weeping at the suds that ran into my eyes.