by Ira Levin
Andy turned and stared. “That Judy was Alice Rosenbaum?”
Rosemary nodded.
“How?”
Looking at him, she said, “The thirty pieces of silver, and the name.”
“The name?” he said.
She said, “Judith S. Kharyat...”
“Say it fast,” Joe said.
Andy’s lips moved. He stared—at her, at him—and clapped the side of his head. “They even thought of that!” he said. “A name that reinforces everything! I never put it together! She told me her middle name was this long Indian...” He spun a hand, looking at Rosemary. Stopped the hand. “Don’t you see who did it?” he asked. “Don’t you see who’s behind it all?”
She said, looking at him, “No . . .”
He turned to Joe.
Joe shook his head, looking at him.
“The rest of the Brigade!” he said. “The five guys! Or some of them. The Commish got word who she was just as we got there. I realized right away what the story was, what it meant: they had planted her here to spy on us, they were getting even with her for—I guess you’d say switching teams—and at the same time they were messing up the Lighting by making it look as if she was killed for betraying me somehow! Because I look the way I do, and the thirty pieces of silver—which that name only reinforces! That’s why they killed her in such an attention-getting way. Really, who except someone looking for absolute maximum worldwide publicity would—I mean, Tiffany’s, nudity, blood, silver—come on, it had to be a set-up.”
Joe, gasping, said, “Whew, kiddo, I have to admit, your mother and I had a little nervous moment there, at least I did, I shouldn’t speak for you, Rosie. What a relief. Whew!” He wagged a hand, slapped at his chest.
Rosemary said, “It sounds logical. . .”
Andy lifted a finger. “But before I could even say a word,” he said, “the Mayor had put the whole thing together himself! Including the thirty pieces of silver!” He tapped his temple, nodding. “Once he laid it all out, everyone agreed in a flash. She stays unidentified, both identities, till after the Lighting, after vacation, Jan third. The FBI is mounting full surveillance on Fort Whatever-they-call-it in Montana, and their computer already found a connection between one of the Brigade members and a lawyer on the eighteenth floor.”
“What a relief,” Joe said, checking the doughnuts.
Andy turned to Rosemary, took her by the shoulders. He sighed, gazing into her eyes. “At least we know who did it,” he said. “I hope that helps a little.”
Nodding at him, she said, “It does, dear.”
“Ahh, poor baby...” He kissed her nose, hugged her. “You look old enough to be my mother.” She punched, he chuckled.
Joe, eating as he watched them, smiled.
Rosemary, looking up at Andy, said, “It really does help, angel. I’d probably have seen myself that the Brigade was behind it if I’d had more time to think about it. I only realized who she was minutes before you came in. I’m glad the FBI is on it so quickly; I’m sure they’ll find them.” She smiled up at him—radiating candor and sincerity. And honesty and openness.
The Antijudas . . .
It figured she’d have been in there among his twelve antiapostles.
Eleven now.
She split MULTAROSES, shifted the tiles, made ASTROLUMES.
Sitting at the table in the late afternoon, after a nap and a shower. Soft lounging pajamas, soft jazz on the radio, soft snow sifting down past the window.
ULTRAMESSO. Like a teenager’s room. Not so common a word, though, that five- and six-year-olds use it.
Could Judy/Alice have been lying about Roast Mules too—to drive her bats? Was there really no word using those ten letters? Was it a hoax, like her saris and the dot?
No . . . Not even a PA would do that. . .
And they’d been friends. That hadn’t been a hoax.
MORTUALESS . . .
Hutch had been stopped from telling her Roman’s real identity by the spell Roman and his coven cast, the spell that finally killed him.
Judy had been stopped from telling her—what? That Andy had a coven? Were witchcraft and Satanism, not fraud and tax evasion, what Alice Rosenbaum had found—what Andy had derailed her into? And after she had told her, who would the Antijudas have told today? The Times?. The tabloids? They’d sit on that for about two seconds, coming from her. Or a publisher, for a book to be published next April or May? Why else would she have been killed that way? They must have been high on something, like many a knife-wielding murderer in recent history—far fewer nowadays, thanks to Andy.
Could the Antijudas have spread the worse news, the Bad News?
No. If she had known who Andy’s father was, she would never have opened up to his mother, not even partially—and would have pried for more information besides. The Indian cultural thing—ha!—would have given her the excuse.
Which meant, probably, that the eleven others didn’t know either. Coven members shared their secret knowledge; that was one of Roman’s lures, whenever he tried to get her to join...
STEALORMUS . . .
Last Christmas Eve—her last, six months ago—she had let Andy go to Minnie and Roman’s alone, for the first time, and stay overnight. He had been five and a half, to the day. There were rituals that had to be performed half a year before his next birthday, Roman said, instructions to be given. They were honoring their part of the bargain; she had to honor hers. His father had rights too. Rites too.
She needed the coven. When you have a toddler with beautiful tiger eyes, and horn buds slightly less beautiful, and other parts even less beautiful—all of which today he presumably controlled (she wasn’t asking) by the same semi-Satanic willpower that gave him hazel eyes—when you have a toddler like that, you can’t drop him off at a preschool and go on to the job. When you really desperately need a sitter for a few hours, you can’t call an agency or the teenager in the apartment down the hall.
The coven paid the bills. The women were doting nanas on whom she relied only when absolutely necessary, under strict rules whose following she checked in secret ways. All of them, men and women—except Laura-Louise, the bitch—treated her with the same helpfulness and respect everybody gave her today.
Roman promised her—he made a vow he said was sacred to him—that Andy wouldn’t be harmed in any way or pressed to do anything he resisted, that he would only be strengthened mentally and physically in ways that would be useful to him all his life. The experience would be inspiring and uplifting, like any other good religious service. Though she couldn’t be there as an onlooker, she was more than welcome, as she surely knew by now, as a celebrant. The coven could certainly use some young blood—his old eyes twinkled—and there were two places empty. That way she could keep an eye on Andy.
Thanks but no thanks.
She had spent half that Christmas Eve sitting on a footstool in a deshelved closet whose back opened, when it wasn’t bolted on the other side as it was then, into a closet next door—the same passage she’d been carried through that night in October of ’65. Sitting there with an ear to the bottom of a glass pressed to white-painted plywood, she heard faintly now and then echoes of the piping flute of that night, the chanting, the beating drum. The tang of tannis root sneaked through cracks, sour but not unpleasant... A whiff of sulfur, though, sickened her. Had he come up, or out, or materialized from outer space or wherever the hell?
She wept for Andy then. She should have taken him and run. She would, and before his birthday—far, to San Francisco or Seattle. She’d get the plane fare somehow, and find an agency or children’s hospital, a church-run hospital, that would help her.
Once the sulfur smell was gone and there was just the scent of tannis again, stronger soon in the closet’s shelter, she felt better. She recalled the tannis taste of the drinks Minnie had made for her during her pregnancy, drinks that had nourished Andy. Minnie and Roman loved him, they’d take good care of him.
Later she poure
d herself a glass of eggnog, added a splash of bourbon, and watched It’s a Wonderful Life— on the way to becoming a TV Christmas tradition. Sweet movie. Second time she’d seen it.
When Andy came through the closets the next morning, he was fine, happy, glad to see-hug-kiss her and run into the living room. Had he had a good time? He nodded, looking up at the tree. “What did you do?” she asked, kneeling beside him, smiling at the lights shining in his eyes, on his cheeks.
“I said I wouldn’t tell,” he said. “Should I?”
Her hand on his flannel-shirted back, she said, “If you really didn’t want to say it, yes. Or if you changed your mind and want to tell me anyway. Kids can do that. If you don’t want to, no. I gave permission, I said you could go.”
He chose not to tell.
Her last Christmas. He’d had twenty-seven since, or this would be the twenty-seventh. The ones when he was growing up and in his teens, at least, must have been like that one, scented with tannis, caroled by whining flutes and chanting. Black Christmases...
TREMULOSSA . . .
He had told her he was through with Satanism—after looking her in the eye and saying he would never lie to her again. If he had lied . . . Friday night could be just the time to find out.
He had said on the plane that he and Judy had plans for Christmas Eve, that they would exchange presents with her and Joe on Christmas Day in the morning. And Judy had started saying something the first time they played Scrabble about goings-on on the ninth floor . . .
Not a bad space—the amphitheater and its dressing rooms and green room, the conference rooms, all carpeted, soundproofed by floors of empty offices above and below—not a bad space at all for a Black Mass. Better than Minnie and Roman’s living room, for sure.
Five people to get it spick-and-span? Didn’t the cleaning crew hit nine? Ultramesso?
SOULMASTER . . .
Snow strummed the window, falling faster now, windswept swaths of white, whipping down out of darkening sky. Score one for the forecasters; four inches by midnight, they had said, two to four more by morning. Wind gusts up to forty miles an hour.
Snow was probably coming down at the radio station too; Bing Crosby had begun dreaming of a white Christmas.
Just like the ones he used to know.
THREE
14
THE BLIZZARD of ’99, lasting two and a half days and dumping two to five feet of the white stuff all the way up the Eastern seaboard from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod, was far and away the peak, the pinnacle, the Everest of the century’s blizzards, and the paramount headache of them all.
New York City was lucky, only 23.8 inches. God got thanks for that—Boston, it was said, would never dig out—and “Mother Nature” (God in drag?) took the rap for the rest of it: the buried commuter trains, the collapsed roofs of supermarkets, the empty theaters and stores, the stranded travelers, the homebound everyone else except children with sleds and cross-country skiers.
The last flakes fell and the sun came out early Friday morning, as if in direct obedience to the feisty, irreverent order of only one of the tabloids: STUFF IT, BING. Mid-town Manhattan was a grid of lumped tundras where people tramped, kicked, skied, threw snowballs, frisked with dogs, pulled children on plastic shells—while store managers watched, smiling, from open doorways.
Tiffany’s alone was jammed with card-waving customers, not only the Fifth Avenue store and its satellite boutiques but the branches in White Plains and Short Hills as well—proof yet again that as long as they spell the name right, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
“Hi. Let’s go look at the tree.”
They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since Tuesday morning, when her obviously wretched state of exhaustion had given her a legitimate excuse to send him and Joe on their way, each with a kiss on the cheek, Joe with the rest of the doughnuts and both the rags, thank you. Andy had said he was going to the retreat but would be back in time for Christmas-morning brunch.
She had been glad of his going—the radiating hadn’t been exactly a lark—but she had wondered whether it was grief or guilt or a mixture of both that he was retreating from, and in whose company, if anyone’s. She imagined him or them in an adobe-and-steer-horn Playboy pad surrounded by desert. Another subject left unmentioned; a retreat is a retreat.
“You there?”
“Yes,” she said, moving with the phone to the bedroom window. “Where are you?”
“Forty-five floors overhead. Just got in.”
“How?” she asked, looking down at the billowed white quilt laid over the park.
“Plane, chopper, and subway. Feel like some exercise? The snow’s more or less packed in the middle of the streets and the plows are getting plowed out. It’s real Christmasy.”
She sighed, and said, “We had a tree of our own the last Christmas I remember. You were five and a half, we trimmed it together. Do you remember that?”
“Completely forgot it. That’s why I’m still in Arizona. Do you have boots? The boutiques must be sold out.”
“I’ve got,” she said.
Everybody had— boots brown, black, red, yellow. Gloves, mittens, scarves, hats, earlaps, red cheeks (those usually pinkish), I ANDY buttons, I ROSEMARY buttons, big smiles, shiny shades or eyes smiling right back at you.
“The city’s never better than after a big snow,” Rosemary said, pluming out breath, tramping along arm in arm with Andy down the center of Central Park South amid dozens of other proud Reclaimers of the Land from Vehicles. “It really brings out the best in people.”
“I guess it does,” Andy said, as they paused at Seventh Avenue to watch some men, women, and children helping a crew of sanitation workers dig out a drifted-over salt spreader. Another group farther down the avenue was doing similar work on something else large and orange.
They tramped on down Central Park South among the other pioneers, steadying each other now and then; the 23.8 inches wasn’t packed down hard yet.
Rosemary was well Garboed: new bigger shades, a scarf around her head, the floppy-brimmed hat, and a coat out of Ninotchka—worn maybe by a Russian colonel. She had been on the verge of giving it to a bellman.
Andy’s simple street disguise had never failed him: shades and a jumbo I ANDY button—transforming him instantly into one of the city’s, the planet’s legions of Andy wannabes.
One of the better ones. A cop in shades coming toward them gave him a gloved thumb up. “Yo, Andy!” he grinned. “Great! Numero uno!”
They smiled back at him. Andy said, “Thanks, love ya,” as they passed.
“The voice too!” the cop cried, pointing, walking backward. “Say something else!”
“Up yours!”
The cop laughed, waved.
Rosemary elbowed. “Andy,” she said.
“It’s part of the disguise!” he said. “Would Andy say that? Never!”
“Ohh . . .”
“Say shit, it’ll help.”
They laughed—“Shit!”—following a right-turning packed-down trail into Sixth Avenue. There the Land had been Reclaimed as far as the eye could see—white tundra dotted with people, bordered with car-shaped igloos.
“When did they give up on ‘Avenue of the Americas’?” Rosemary asked, looking up at a street sign.
“Officially, just a few months ago,” Andy said.
Smiling, she said, “Hutch used to say someday they’d count the syllables.”
The name cast a pall.
She had told him about Hutch, the friend he had been to her, that Roman’s coven had killed him.
They tramped down the Sixth Avenue tundra, holding gloved hands, scanning their shades about, smiling.
Pausing in mid-avenue, they watched a few people scooping snowdrifts from a skewed limo with partly uncovered windows.
Andy pitched in. Rosemary too. When an unlocked door was found and opened, no one was inside.
They waved and tramped on, brushing snow from their fronts.
On the West Fifty-first Street tundra they tramped past the red-neoned rear marquee of Radio City Music Hall. Rosemary said, “When are you going to do your next live show? I can’t wait to see one.”
Andy drew breath; plumed it from his nostrils. He said, “I don’t think I’m going to be doing any more, not for a while anyway.”
“Why not?” she asked. “They’re terrifically effective. The woman at the nursing home who told me about you, she saw you here and talked about it as if—she’d had a religious experience.”
Turning his shades from her, he said, “I don’t know, I just sort of feel that after the Lighting I ought to take a little time off and—reevaluate what I want to do next.”
She said, “I’ve been doing some work on a presentation for a talk show. I don’t want to just come in and say, ‘I’m here, I’m Andy’s Mom, take me.’ I’ve got a great name for it, you gave it to me. ‘Fresh Eyes.’ Isn’t that a good name for a program dealing with the differences between now and then?”
“Yeah, it is,” he said.
She said, “I want to deal with big things, like the mistake of talking the terrorists’ language, and little things, like rollerblades—with people connected somehow with whatever the area is.”
“Don’t forget we’re going away for a while,” he said.
She blew out a long plume. “No,” she said. “No, I really don’t think that’s a good idea. Not right now.”
He drew breath, clamped his lips.
They tramped along in their shades, gloved hands joined.
Turned right into Rockefeller Plaza and froze, cowering. “Wow!” Andy said, raising his free hand. Rosemary whistled. People moved around and past them in both directions.
They made their way closer to the towering cone of multicolored lights. Rosemary said, “I’ll tell you one thing fresh eyes see right off the bat: too much! It used to be you could see there was a tree holding everything up; that’s just a gigantic cone of lights and baubles. It could have styrofoam inside it.”
