Innocence: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

open the door.
    The likelihood of the bolt finding that—apparently single—void in the otherwise smooth stone seemed small. I suspected that she had wedged it there to make sure the door remained open wide to admit a draft that would be noticed.
    As the frustrated man in the street began to turn back toward the library, I retreated before I might be seen. I raced across the foyer with the intention of returning to the labyrinth of books.
    At the sight of the girl in black, I faltered. She hurried through the half-light in the reading area that lay past the stacks, heading toward an interior door at the distant northeast corner of the immense room.
    She had faked her escape, which meant she must know a secret haven in the building where she felt safe. And it meant more than that, though I couldn’t quite imagine what.
    I heard the man cursing loudly even before he reached the top of the exterior steps. I didn’t have enough time to reach the stacks across what seemed to be an acre of marble. The moment he arrived at the open door, he’d see me. I darted to the left and vaulted the wraparound counter at the main desk, which was not simply a desk but instead a spacious librarian station appointed with exquisite mahogany moldings, at which patrons could be served from four sides. I crouched below the counter, hopeful that I had not been spotted.
    I listened as the bronze door boomed shut, as the primary deadbolts were engaged, and as the drop bolt rang softly as it was seated in the bronze-rimmed hole in the floor. His footsteps seemed to approach my hiding place directly, but then he walked past, so close that I could smell his spicy cologne. In passing, he snarled “bitch” and worse, alternating vicious epithets, as if in fact he hatedher enough to kill her. He faded into silence. A door closed in the distance.
    After a while, the lights went off.
    I got to my feet but didn’t leave the shelter of the main desk.
    The thirty-foot-tall windows in the south wall began above ten feet of bookshelves and arched to a keystone within ten feet of the deeply coffered ceiling. One of the charms of the city is its night glow, which is never less than romantic, sometimes magical. On this occasion in December, the metropolis shone into the library not with an eerie milkiness, as earlier, but with a convincing imitation of snow light, like a Christmas moon reflecting from a landscape cloaked by a recent blizzard. The EXIT signs above the doors were as red as clusters of holly berries, though I marveled at myself for thinking such a thing and wondered what had possessed me that I should be so light of spirit only minutes after cowering in fear.
    Of course, it was the girl. Her gracefulness, her fleetness, her balletic sprint, and the sheer mystery of her presence in the library inspired in me the pleasant expectation that I might be witness to—if not a party to—an exciting adventure.
    Although my life was by any standard unconventional, it wasn’t full of sparkling encounters and dazzling exploits. I hid by day, reading, listening to music through the earphones of my CD player, thinking, wondering, and from time to time sleeping. By night I skulked through the city, seeking the essentials for survival, as well as a few moments of beauty in places like this, where great culture and fine art came together in sublime architecture. But considering the all-consuming hatred and fury that I inspired on sight, if I sought to participate in an adventure, I would be as unwise as a hemophiliac juggling hatchets.
    Books had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wantedtheir lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal. Even I, in my terrible difference, wanted nothing less than purpose and meaning.
    Intuition told me that this girl might be different from other people in her attitude toward me, that she might be at least as tolerant as my mother had been, that she might be a touchstone by which I could test my value