Running Blind (The Visitor)

down. So you need to see it for yourself. Hell, I need to see it for myself . But I want you there, for the arrest.”
    “What arrest? Just tell me.”
    He shook his head again. “Where’s your car?”
    “In the lot.”
    “So let’s go.”
    REVEILLE HAD BEEN 0600 the whole of Rita Scimeca’s service career, and she stuck to the habit in her new civilian life. She slept six hours out of twenty-four, midnight until six in the morning, a quarter of her life. Then she got up to face the other three quarters.
    An endless procession of empty days. Late fall, there was nothing to be done in the yard. The winter temperatures were too savage for any young vegetation to make it through. So planting was restricted to the spring, and pruning and cleanup was finished by the end of the summer. Late fall and winter, the doors stayed locked and she stayed inside.
    Today, she was scheduled to work on Bach. She was trying to perfect the three-part inventions. She loved them. She loved the way they moved forward, on and on, inescapably logical, until they ended up back where they started. Like Maurits Escher’s drawings of stair-cases, which went up and up and up all the way back to the bottom. Wonderful. But they were very difficult pieces to play. She played them very slowly. Her idea was to get the notes right, then the articulation, then the meaning, and then last of all to get the speed right. Nothing worse than playing Bach fast and badly.
    She showered in the bathroom and dressed in the bedroom. She did it quickly, because she kept the house cold. Fall in the Northwest was a chilly season. But today there was brightness in the sky. She looked out of her window and saw streaks of dawn spearing east to west like rods of polished steel. It would be cloudy, she guessed, but with a halo of sun visible. It would be like a lot of her days. Not good, not bad. But livable.
    HARPER PAUSED FOR a second in the underground corridor and then led Reacher to the elevator and up into the daylight. Outside into the chill air and across the landscaping to her car. It was a tiny yellow two-seater. He realized he had never seen it before. She unlocked it and he ducked his head and folded himself into the passenger seat. She glanced hard at him once and dumped her bag in his lap and climbed down into the driver’s seat. Shoulder room was tight. It was a stick shift, and her elbow hit his when she put it in gear.
    “So how do we get there?”
    “We’ll have to go commercial,” he said. “Head for National, I guess. You got credit cards?”
    She was shaking her head.
    “They’re all maxed out,” she said. “They’ll get refused. ”
    “All of them?”
    She nodded. “I’m broke right now.”
    He said nothing.
    “What about you?” she asked.
    “I’m always broke,” he said.
    THE FIFTH OF Bach’s three-part inventions was labeled BWV 791 by scholars and was one of the hardest in the canon, but it was Rita Scimeca’s favorite piece in all the world. It depended entirely on tone, which came from the mind, down through the shoulders and the arms and the hands and the fingers. The tone had to be whimsical, but confident. The whole piece was a confection of nonsense, and the tone had to confess to that, but simultaneously it had to sound utterly serious for the effect to develop properly. It had to sound polished, but insane. Secretly, she was sure Bach was crazy.
    Her piano helped. Its sound was big enough to be sonorous, but delicate enough to be nimble. She played the piece all the way through twice, half speed, and she was reasonably pleased with what she heard. She decided to play for three hours, then stop and have some lunch, and then get ahead with the housework. She wasn’t sure about the afternoon. Maybe she would play some more.
    YOU TAKE UP your position early. Early enough to be settled before the eight o’clock changeover. You watch it happen. It’s the same deal as yesterday. The Bureau guy, still awake, but no longer very attentive. The arrival of the cold Crown Vic. The flank-to-flank pleasantries. The Buick starts up, the Crown Vic turns in the road, the Buick rolls away down the hill, the Crown Vic crawls forward and settles into its space. The engine dies, and the guy’s head turns. He sinks low in his seat, and his last shift as a cop begins. After today, they won’t trust him to direct traffic around the Arctic Circle.
    "SO HOW DO we get there?” Harper asked again.
    Reacher paused.
    “Like this,” he