Free Werewolf Cop by Andrew Klavan Page B

impeccable English.
    â€œY’all seem to be having some real troubles over here,” he said, by way of making conversation. He leaned his elbow on the counter while she worked her computer.
    â€œAch, it is terrible, the riots,” she said, her eyes never leaving the monitor. “Usually it is one or the other—the immigrants, the unions, the fascists—now it is all together, so I don’t know what will happen.” She handed him the car keys.
    â€œWell,” said Zach. “Good luck to you.”
    So all of this was a bit bewildering, but—again, looking back on these events later on—he sometimes thought it was during the drive to the university that some essential connection, between himself and the world as he had always known it, had been severed. The scenery along the way seemed whimsical and out of time. His sporty red Sebring, modern enough, cruised twisty mountain roads with ancient rocks and ancient walls looming over them. Inside, there was temp control and radio music and an English-speaking computer lady giving him directions from the GPS. Outside, it could have been the world of Peter Stumpf. It could have been the Brothers Grimm. Rolling fields and milling cows and autumn forests on misty hills. Startling veins of pastel lacing the pale green of vaunting firs and junipers and pines against clouds in an afternoon sky he’d seen in old paintings. The villages he passed: all so strange, so foreign and old-fashioned and unreal. Half-timbered buildings and churches with onion domes and ruined structures of maybe Roman stone and curlicued hilltop castles that seemed to have been imported from Disneyland. Really, the whole place seemed like something out of Disneyland.
    Then—in his memories—or maybe even at the time—there came a city nestled in some past century. Red rooftops and chimney pots and church towers in a yellow valley surrounded by October hills. It seemed like the GPS lady was calling to him from the present day as he wound down the slope into the storybook past.
    Finally, there was the university. He parked the car in a lot here. He continued on foot, bowing under the branches of an oak tree gone shockingly orange. He came into a grassy quad surrounded by great brooding temples of brick—what looked to him like courts and palaces, guarded by twisted verdigris statue-gods from some tribal age. Like the airport, the campus was nearly deserted. He saw only one student—a pert, slender girl with short black hair—wandering along an asphalt pathway under yellow lindens. To find the building to which Gretchen Dankl had summoned him, he had to break away from the main area and head down the slope of a small side path until he reached a stalwart stone lodge standing all alone in a grassy cul-de-sac.
    When he pushed the heavy front door open, the snap of the latch seemed to echo through empty halls. His footsteps likewise echoed on what might have been marble as he stepped into more unreal, out-of-the-past eeriness: a towering hallway lined with stony saints. That was all that was there: Zach and two long rows of bowed apostles on their pedestals—oh, and gargoyles hung up high, dragon-faced drains grinning down at him at intervals from the top of the walls.
    An echoing door echoed his, echoing footsteps echoed his, and he looked down the long gallery of statues to see that a woman had entered through the farthest door. She was small, slumped, wearing a misbuttoned gray cardigan and a wool diamond-pattern gray skirt that even Zach knew was out of fashion. She wasn’t short but seemed small, slumped, narrow, frail. Her hair was drabbish silver—what woman let her hair turn such a color nowadays?—and her face was pouty and pinched like the face of an anxious monkey. She was smoking too. That in itself was startling to the American. In a public building, a museum like this? She had a filter cigarette scissored between two overlong