Innocence: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

and quick that they might have been those of a child ghost desperately fleeing from the recognition of his early death.
    In the opening before me, crossing an intersection of aisles, a slender teenage girl appeared from the left, which was the north, gazelle-fast, running with balletic grace and landing on her toes. Her shoes were silver, like the winged feet of Mercury, and otherwise she wore black. Her long hair appeared black, too, lustrous in the lamplight, as a pool of moonlit water lies glossy in the night. One moment there, the next moment gone, she seemed to be running for her life.
    I heard no pursuer, though her evident alarm suggested that one must be close on her trail. If she was the prey, I didn’t know—and couldn’t imagine—any predator stealthier than she.
    Warily, I entered the stacks. The big chandeliers, hung from the fifty-foot-high ceiling, were not alight. The aisle that the girl had run through lay deserted for its considerable length, illuminated by brushed-steel sconces trimmed with polished brass, like small lamps, fixed high on the six-inch-wide stiles that separated sections of shelving.
    These shelves had backs, so that I couldn’t look over the tops of the books into the next aisle. Stepping softly, I continued east, into the next north-south passage that paralleled the first, but the girl wasn’t there.
    The stacks were arranged in a large grid, not as mazelike as the board for that old video game Ms. Pac-Man. Yet it seemed far more baffling than a grid as I cautiously made my way through it, spying around corners, turning this way and that as intuition guided me.
    I was heading south, approaching a corner, intending to turn left, when I must have heard something, perhaps the faintest squeak of a rubber-soled shoe. I froze between the last two sconces, not in shadow but not brightly lighted.
    A tall, sinewy man hurried through the intersection in front of me, from right to left, apparently so sure of his quarry’s location that he didn’t glance in either direction as he crossed my aisle and disappeared. I thought that he must have registered my presence peripherally and that he would startle back for a more direct look, but he kept moving.
    He’d been dressed in a suit and tie, minus the coat, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, which suggested that he belonged here, worked here in a position of authority. But something about him—perhapshis intensity, his grimly set mouth, his hands clenched in big bony fists—convinced me that his intentions were suspect if not even dishonorable.
    I dared to follow him, but by the time I turned the corner, he had vanished. Even as familiar as I had become with the library, this might be his labyrinth more than mine. If his role was the Minotaur of legend and if my role was Theseus, who destroyed such beasts, this might end badly for the good guys, considering that I’d never killed anything, monsters or otherwise.
    The girl cried out and the man shouted,
“Bitch, you little bitch, I’ll kill you,”
and the girl cried out again. The clump-and-thud of avalanching books suggested that someone must be using the weapon of knowledge in an unconventional fashion.
    The acoustics of the enormous room were deceiving. The ornate and gilded ceiling coffers, the limestone walls, the marble floor, the endless partitions of muffling books alternately absorbed and ricocheted sounds until it seemed that the brief battle was being waged in every aisle of the stacks, to all sides of me. Then sudden silence.
    I stood in an intersection, head cocked, turning in a circle, my heart racing, fearful that something had happened to her. I recalled that the Minotaur, in the caverns under Crete, ate human flesh.

8
    HOOD UP, HEAD DOWN AS BEST I COULD KEEP IT AND still find my way, I turned left, right, left, this way, that way, around and back again, through History with all its wars, through NaturalSciences with all its discoveries and mysteries. Several times I