Free The God Particle by Richard Cox Page B

decide to spend a relaxing day watching television.
    But Steve has other ideas. He calls a cab and heads to the Niederdorf. He can think of a dozen things that can go wrong with another visit to the Cabaret, sure, but he’d also like to know what the hell happened to him there. And thank Anna for returning the ring.
    Steve makes his way through the crowds, his feet falling again on cobblestone. His mind whirls, electric, igniting flashes of memory he’d rather not relive. Anna’s red dress and stilted English. The sweet smell of champagne. Shards of broken glass. A cold, silent fall through raindrops.
    Murmurs of German and French and English float around him, and he wonders if they are about the limping man, the crude American. Bald now, with a white bandage on his head, back to have another run at Anna before he returns to the States.
    Will he be waiting, the muscular fellow who jerked Steve off the bed? According to Dobbelfeld there were no charges filed, no clear idea even of who tossed him out the third-story window. But someone here knows. Someone must have seen, and that someone must have told someone else, and now they observe his approach as the street narrows and buildings close in around him. His neck pivots, and he looks toward the third-floor windows above him, imagining his fall in reverse, tumbling silently through the emptiness that isn’t really empty at all. Had he understood the nature of the field sooner, he might have saved himself the head injury and ensuing coma. And now here it is, the Cabaret in front of him.
    Only it isn’t the Cabaret any longer.
    No more sexy pictures in the windows. And above the blue door, letters have been pried away, leaving dark patterns of paint unmarred by oxidation. These patterns spell the word
Cabaret.
    He reaches for the door. It doesn’t open. His eyes search for a sign, some sort of explanation.
    Nothing.
    Across the narrow pedestrian street is a newsstand. Steve walks over and addresses the merchant.
    “Excuse me,” he asks in German. “What happened to Cabaret?”
    “Closed,” the man says.
    “Yes, but do you know why?”
    “I don’t know. What happened to your head?”
    “I fell,” Steve says. “Do you have any idea what happened? Did the girls go work somewhere else?”
    Now the merchant smiles. “You want a good time, eh? Those were not the only women in town.”
    “Yes, but there is one I would like to speak with. Anna.”
    “Why do you want to talk to her?”
    “She helped me,” Steve says. “I would like to thank her.”
    “You cannot thank her.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because she is dead.”
    “What? How do you know that?”
    “Because my boss saw the police with her body. He works in the morning, when she was found.”
    Steve stands there, looking not at the merchant but through him.
    “Do you know how she died?”
    “Yes,” the merchant says, tilting his head upward. “She fell.”
    Static in Steve’s brain now, a fuzzy, soundless noise. He involuntarily steps backward and bumps into an elderly woman. She glares at him and continues walking.
    “What did you say happened to your head?” the merchant asks him.
    But Steve is still backing away, faster now, and then turns. The merchant calls to him, yelling something, but the sound disappears, absorbed by the white, nebulous static of Steve’s consciousness.

1
    It’s been almost nine months, and still Kelly has trouble imagining another man in her life.
    She’s sitting in her kitchen, scooping peach-flavor yogurt into her mouth. It’s 11:35 PM . Home from another long day at the station, decompressing, wondering where her life went off its tracks.
    The problem here, the situation she cannot quite resolve, is that the promises she made were for life. She loved James more than anyone or anything on earth, more than herself, and promised she would never betray him, that he could trust her for the rest of his life. And maybe there is more to a relationship than trust, maybe she