Odd Hours

shadowy ceiling and saw no fluorescent fixtures, only one bare incandescent bulb. Another light would be built in to the chain-drive mechanism that raised the large roll-up, but it would come on only when that door was up.
    When I guided Annamaria toward the Mercedes sedan, she trusted me at once. She neither resisted nor asked what I intended.
    The knocking had stopped. From above came a subtle crack of breaking glass, which the visitor could not entirely muffle.
    As I took hold of the handle on the rear passenger-side door, I was suddenly afraid that the car would be locked. Our luck held, and the door opened.
    Overhead, the footsteps were so heavy that I would not have been surprised if they had been accompanied by a giant’s voice chanting, “Fee, fi, fo, fum,” and promising to grind up our bones to make his bread.
    The interior lights of the Mercedes were not bright. We had no choice but to risk them.
    As I encouraged Annamaria into the backseat of the sedan, I saw in my mind’s eye the modest apartment above us. The intruder would see the stacked dishes in the sink: two mugs, two sets of flatware. Sooner than later, he would touch the long neck of one of the oil lamps.
    The glass would not be merely warm, but hot. With a smile, he would snatch back his stung fingers, certain that we had fled only as he had arrived.
    I glanced toward the south-wall door that I had left standing open to the walkway alongside the property-line hedge. Tendrils of fog crept across the threshold and probed around the jamb, like the fingers of a blind ghost, but no one had yet appeared in the doorway.
    Annamaria slid across the backseat, and I climbed into the sedan after her. I pulled the door shut firmly without slamming it, though with more noise than I would have liked. The interior car lights winked out.
    The Mercedes was at least twenty years old, maybe twenty-five, from the era when the Germans still made them big, boxy, and not in the least aerodynamic. We were able to slide down in that roomy space, heads below the windows.
    This was not quite Poe’s purloined-letter trick, but something similar. Our pursuers would expect us to flee, and the open south-side door would suggest that we had done just that.
    In the heat of the moment, believing they were close on our heels, they were not likely to suspect that we would risk hiding in what was virtually plain sight.
    Of course, they might find the open door and the in-creeping fog to be a tad too obvious. They might decide to search the garage, and if they did, we were doomed.
    They were not fools, after all. They were serious men. I had it on good authority that they were planning many deaths and much destruction; and men don’t get much more serious than that.

 
    SIXTEEN
    HUDDLING IN THE BACK OF THE MERCEDES, WE had arrived at one of those moments of extreme stress that I mentioned earlier, one of those awkward situations in which my imagination can be as ornate as a carousel of grotesque beasts, standing on end like a Ferris wheel, vigorously spinning off visions of ludicrous fates and droll deaths.
    If we were found, these men could shoot us through the windows. They could open the doors and shoot us point-blank. They could bar the doors, set the car on fire, and roast us alive.
    Whatever they chose to do to us, we would not die as easily as any of those scenarios allowed. They would first need to find out who we were and what we knew about their plans.
    Torture. They would torture us. Pliers, sharp blades, needles, red-hot pokers, nail guns, garlic presses applied to the tongue. Blinding bleach, caustic acids, unpleasant-tasting elixirs, secondhand smoke. They would be enthusiastic torturers. They would be relentless. They would enjoy it so much that they would take videos of our suffering to play later for their adoring mothers.
    I had told Annamaria that I was prepared to die for her, and I had told the truth, but my vow had come with the implicit promise that I would also not lead her to her death before I died for her. At least not in the same hour that I had solemnly sworn to be her protector.
    Someone switched on the single bare bulb in the garage ceiling. The car was parked nose-in, which meant we were at the front of the garage, farther from the stairs than anywhere else we could have hidden. The light proved too weak to penetrate to our dark little haven.
    Mercedes’ engineers could be proud of their skill at providing sound attenuation. If someone was