A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  The building was tucked into a forgotten corner of an industrial zone near the Harlem River. Mountains of rubble filled the vacant lots around it. A rooftop spotlight directed down the building’s side flickered badly, casting a flashing ellipse. With darkness descending, the moon appeared through the clouds and I heard a pack of dogs baying nearby. The streetlights blinked on, their powdery silver rays pooling on the pavement.

  Now even the smells of that long-ago December day—the dry stinging snow, Ivy’s paralyzing perfume with the scent of Easter lilies, the smoke of Nestor’s cigarette—had come back to me, and I started crying silently. My driver peered over his shoulder without curiosity, awaiting instructions. My emotions did not engage him; though I could not see his eyes, shaded beneath his cap, it was clear he was nervous and just wanted to get out of there. He hadn’t expected the address I gave him when he picked me up near City Hall, and now that we had arrived at it, he wasn’t pleased. I told him I wanted him to wait, and he thrust his upturned hand through the sliding panel in the security wall atop the front seat, wiggling his index finger. To have him wait in that neighborhood was going to cost me.

  He had a point. We seemed to be at the epicenter of a wasteland. In the last decade, this entire neighborhood had deteriorated. While I remembered the buildings in the surrounding streets as rundown, they were now decimated—windowless, roofless, with heaps of rubbish pouring from their doors. Even taking the passage of time into consideration, I couldn’t believe Samax had thought this would be a good location for a museum of rare collectibles. And the real estate outfit to which he had sold the building appeared to have done nothing with it. The building looked abandoned again, and even more neglected. The caged windows were still sealed and dirty, the doors at the loading zone were padlocked, and the sign over the entrance was now so corroded that even those few letters that had formerly been legible—CHINE—were reduced to a single faded E. Getting out my handkerchief, I tried to pull myself together there on the sidewalk. It had never been easy for me to cry, and here I had let myself go twice within a few days’ time, first with Auro in his dressing room, and now in this place. Sitting alone for half the afternoon in that airless room at police headquarters, reading those reports, had sent me spinning far inside myself, until I felt all twisted up, vividly remembering the fear that gripped me when Ivy dragged me into that building.

  The fare meter read twenty-nine dollars and was still running when I stepped from the taxi. I took out my wallet and offered the driver a crisp fifty-dollar bill. “And another of those when I get back,” I said. “That should cover the ride downtown, too. I’ll also need to borrow a flashlight, if you’ve got one, and a screwdriver.”

  The driver pondered this offer, his eyes still shaded beneath the brim of his cap. “You ain’t going to do anything illegal, are you?”

  I shook my head. “And I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  He looked me up and down suspiciously, assessing the value of my leather jacket, two-tone cowboy boots, and the onyx ring glinting on my finger. “For the tools, the other fifty now,” he said finally.

  My heart was thumping when I approached the metal door. Its lock was so old and rusted that I was able to jimmy it easily. As the door swung open, I was greeted by a rush of stale air. The interior, swirling with cold dust, was as dark as I remembered it, and I could hear the wind howling in a distant shaftway. The scuttling of rats, too, that preceded the tunnel of light my flashlight cut through the blackness. I picked my way down the only corridor unblocked by boxes and rubbish, and at the end of it found myself before another door. Pushing it open, I stepped onto a narrow balcony and felt a vast darkness yawning before me, its icy vapors flowing upward. I leaned into that darkness for a few seconds, holding my breath, closing my eyes, trying to gauge its depth before I directed the flashlight into it.

  At first, in that open space, the beam exploded out so brightly that I couldn’t see anything. Then the light contracted into a white circle, and when my eyes adjusted I saw just how enormous the space before me was, wide and deep with a high ceiling. The balcony overlooked a kind of amphitheater lined with steep tiers of seats. Knowing the balcony was at street level, I calculated that the floor of the amphitheater itself must be about four stories underground. Whatever work had been undertaken there long ago by Samax’s successors was broken off abruptly. Tiny as toys below me, there was a cement mixer, a crane, a stack of lumber, and a pyramid of cinder blocks, all of them thick with dust and cobwebs. Ropes and wires dangled from the rafters. The floor was deeply recessed, with furrows full of dangling wires and large craters crisscrossed by rusty pipes. Thinking I had seen those craters before, I realized I was looking down at the very room, enormous as a football field, in which I had first been brought to Samax.

  The moment this realization hit me, I felt as if I could see that long-ago scene come alive before me in the amphitheater, as if the flashlight were a magic lantern reanimating those ghosts from my past. Ivy in her black coat. Samax in his black suit. Calzas with his shiny cropped hair unfurling a blueprint for Samax. And a boy in a pea coat sitting at a small table writing on a piece of paper.

  Standing there on the balcony all those years later, I recalled the words I had written to Alma at the base of Samax’s letter:

  Dear Alma,

  This is so hard, but it’s better for both of us, and I want you to know I’m okay and I’m going because I want to.

  Love, Loren

  Words lost in time, that no one ever saw.

  Feeling very cold suddenly, I just wanted to get away from that place. Backing away from the edge of the balcony, I stepped through the door and sprinted down the corridor, the beam of the flashlight dancing crazily on the peeling walls, all the way to the street.

  I leapt into the back of my taxi and the driver floored the accelerator and sped around the corner. The flashlight was still burning, and, as I switched it off, I saw how hard my hand was shaking.

  The driver didn’t ask me if I had found what I was looking for. I passed him the flashlight and the screwdriver, with another fifty-dollar bill, and he slid the plastic panel shut and negotiated the narrow streets toward the Harlem River Drive. I sat back, dizzy, disoriented, staring at the oncoming headlights on the highway, and within no time it seemed, we were back in midtown Manhattan, in front of my hotel.

  When I arrived in Las Vegas the next afternoon, I found my uncle had just returned from Japan. As invigorated as he was from his trip, I was exhausted from mine. Samax knew right away that something was terribly wrong, and it didn’t take him long to get me to tell him what Ivy had spat out at me in the parking lot of The Aladdin. On learning the fate of his letter to Alma, he first turned deathly white, then grew as angry as I had ever seen him. He stormed out of the library, banging the floor with the cane he was now forced to carry, and went directly to Ivy’s rooms on the eighth floor.

  White-haired for as long as I had known him, after his stroke Samax truly looked his age for the first time. He had the thinning hair of an old man now, as well as the concave chest, sunken cheeks, and braided throat muscles. Liver spots were surfacing on his hands and he had to wear glasses all the time because of retinal damage to his left eye. But taking all that into consideration, and the fact that he now almost exclusively wore his Chinese silk pajamas and velvet slippers around the hotel, the inner resources he had garnered over his long life and his still iron will nevertheless made him a formidable figure, capable of intimidating close acquaintances and strangers alike.

  Within a minute of entering Ivy’s suite and confirming what I had told him, he banished her from the Hotel Canopus forever, effectively banishing her from his life. Forbidden by Samax from saying another word to anyone, no good-byes, nothing, even to Dolores and Desirée, Ivy put three white suitcases in the trunk of her Coupe de Ville and, at the age of forty, after living at the hotel for over thirty years, drove away. To Reno, as it turned out, where, enraged at Samax and at me, she would quickly cement h
er unholy alliance with her mother Stella’s former lover, Vitale Cassiel.

  Meanwhile, Samax had me join him in the greenhouse for a serious discussion. He was determined to right a wrong, as he put it. No matter that twelve years had elapsed, and that Alma, now thirty-three years old, could be anywhere at all, he wanted to find her.

  “But you’ve got nothing to go on,” I said gently.

  “What do you mean—there’s always something. I found you years ago, didn’t I?”

  Relatively easily, I thought, by bribing and intimidating people once he discovered the adoption agency where Bel had taken me.

  “I don’t care what it costs,” Samax shouted toward the upper canopy his fruit trees formed beneath the greenhouse roof. “We’ll get Pinkerton’s. And the Hopkins brothers in Miami—they can find anyone when no one else can. And, just in case, there are private investigators my friends at the casinos hire—sometimes to track down wise guys fifteen, twenty years after they think they got away with something. I have other people downtown I can ask, too. And I’ll have Alif and Aym scout around, with their paramilitary friends. We can crack this thing, I know.”

  He knew nothing of the kind, but he was so furious that he had to convince himself he could find Alma, even if he needed to conjure up a small army to do so. The fact is, he felt horribly guilty and ashamed, not just on Alma’s account, but, most especially, on mine.

  How could you have trusted Ivy, of all people, with that letter, I had been thinking for days, but Samax was already so agitated, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him this question. Indirectly, he answered it moments later.

  “The very first promise I made you, Enzo,” he declared, “was that your aunt would get that letter. For Chrissakes, everything was predicated on it, from the day you came out here with me. I was careless—inexcusably so—and Ivy broke my promise. At what cost to your aunt I shudder to think. Sabotage is too clean a word for what Ivy did. Now we just have to find your aunt.”

  “And what will we do then?”

  He didn’t answer this question, and it turned out he would never have to, for the combined genius, muscle, and resources of Pinkerton’s, the mob private eyes, the cops with connections, Alif, Aym, and their soldier of fortune pals, and the Hopkins brothers who succeeded when all others failed, turned up absolutely nothing about Alma Verell: last known address, 222 Cabot Place, Brooklyn; last known occupation, student, Boston University. It wasn’t just the NYPD Missing Persons squad that never saw or heard of her again, it was everyone. Right away, Samax feared that she was dead, he was responsible, and there was no way now that he could ever make his amends. It didn’t look good, I had to agree, and I was more heartsick about it than anyone, but still I couldn’t believe Alma was dead. That just didn’t ring true in my bones. Samax kept paying people to look, and spent countless hours on the phone himself, exploiting his many connections, but nothing came of it. Like that ancient amulet depicting the dark side of the moon, Alma seemed to be one lost thing Samax was going to have a great deal of difficulty finding.

  Around this time, the hotel population felt skeletal compared to the days of my childhood. There were few short-term visitors anymore, and the three new long-term ones were anything but collegial: fat Professor Zianor, dry as his cough, who holed up in the library for days at a time unearthing paintings of Adam with a navel and drinking licorice tea; Harahel, an elderly archivist from Alexandria, Egypt, hired by Samax to put in order his personal papers as well as the hotel’s voluminous files; and the polite but unsmiling So Li, who was assiduously studying her bells—for a long time the myriad harmonies of ceremonial bells—in Auro’s former practice room. As with Zianor and Harahel, however great her devotion to her work, on the outside she appeared passionlesss to the point of indifference.

  After a while, this cold-fish attitude seemed to infect the old-time residents: Labusi, who either shot billiards alone or sat with Dolores in the garden, an umbrella affixed to his wheelchair to shield him from the sun; Hadar, never sociable to begin with, who practically camped out in his subbasement laboratory when he returned from expeditions; and even the irrepressible Deneb, who when he wasn’t delivering his stump speech about Atlantis at Basque social clubs, generally made himself scarce around the hotel. Meanwhile, to my great disappointment, Zaren Eboli had become an infrequent weekend visitor after moving to west Texas to complete his catalogue of spiders of the Southwest.

  Mrs. Resh, the replacement for Delia and Denise from the world of four-star hotels, turned out to be a soulless woman who literally never spoke except when spoken to. She ran the hotel with great efficiency, following the model laid out by Dolores years before. As for the latter, at the age of 103 she finally began walking with a cane, and rarely spoke to anyone outside of Mrs. Resh and Labusi. Desirée avoided her, as did Samax, to whom she had taken to writing sharply worded requests, which he ignored; first, she demanded to see his will, then inveighed against him for refusing to verify that he had bequeathed the hotel to Desirée—who still didn’t want it.

  “What do you expect?” Desirée said to me one night as we sat by the pool drinking wine and I complained of the general torpor at the hotel. We had both just returned from trips: I to Santa Fe, where I had visited Calzas and his wife upon the birth of their second child; Desirée to Bali, on what she described as a “pleasure trip,” making me wonder if she had added a new photo to her gallery.

  “It’s not because of Zianor or So Li or Harahel,” she went on, “that things have come to this. It’s Samax. He’s the one who invited them, and he handpicked Resh out of a slew of terrific applicants the agency sent over. The same with Harahel: there was a young guy from the University of Hawaii who had ten times the spunk and would have given some shape and vitality to the material Samax shoveled at him, rather than just compiling the stuff. Samax has got Harahel in there sifting through the history of his life as if he’s already dead. It makes me crazy—like he has a mortician on call. Samax wants these people around him now because he was so knocked out by the stroke and Denise’s death. Labusi’s accident and Calzas’s marriage didn’t help either. Why should he want fascinating dinner companions, like the old days, when he never comes to dinner himself? He no longer craves distractions, or the kind of overstimulation he used to thrive on. Again, why should he when he’s always up there in his library with the Angel of Death? To my mind, all that motivates him now is finding that amulet and producing his hybrid tree. And of course making sure you’re okay after he’s gone.”

  This last observation was not made with bitterness, but it was also not the first time she had said something to this effect over the previous few years. She may not have wanted the hotel, but that didn’t mean Desirée was indifferent to Samax’s making some provisions for her future. And because he had showed less and less interest in her activities—not the surest barometer, I thought, considering his state of mind—she was certain that he hadn’t.

  Soon afterward, Samax did fulfill his longtime pomological quest for the hybrid he had sought to create between the star apple and the starfruit. In fact, he succeeded. It was just before sunrise one morning when I received a summons from him on the house phone.

  “Can you join me for breakfast in the greenhouse?” he asked.

  Though of late such requests had often come in response to crises, this time I detected a lilt in my uncle’s voice. Still, the hybrid was far from my mind just then, so, as I threw my clothes on, and made my way down to that tunnel where I had first encountered Auro, I didn’t know what to expect.

  Alif and Aym, in blue sweatsuits and running shoes, were playing backgammon under a plant light at the entrance to the greenhouse. They nodded when I passed, with Sirius trailing me. The first person I saw in the greenhouse was Harahel. Desirée was right, I thought: he looked like a mortician. Gaunt, with pale hands and sallow cheeks, Harahel was wearing a tan fez and a khaki jacket with an ink-stained handkerchief stuck in the front pocket. As usual, he was cross-referencing two bundl
es of folders that documented some aspect of Samax’s earliest collecting days. So far, after a year of unremitting labor, he had covered only the years 1935 through 1940. At that rate, it would take him six more years to finish the job.

  In a terry-cloth robe, Desirée was sitting near the zinc sink, fingers flying on her silent portable typewriter, filling up one of her yellow sheets of paper. She and Harahel were so absorbed in their own activities that I was utterly unprepared for what Samax was about to reveal to me.

  He did it quite simply, walking out from behind a pair of palmettos in his red smoking jacket, the customary yellow and red flower stuck in the lapel. His threadbare lab coat was hanging by the door, but he was wearing his scuffed rubber shoes. In his outstretched palm he cradled a piece of fruit, which I took from him. Samax’s hand was trembling—from emotion, not the aftereffects of the stroke—and I too felt a welling up in my chest and behind my eyes as the coolness of the strangely oblong, dark blue piece of fruit permeated my palm. What Samax had predicted to me years before was exactly what his hybrid had turned out to be: a star-shaped fruit with a hard, waxy skin. It smelled acrid, the juice my thumbnail drew from the skin part citrus, part ammonia. And when Samax cut it in half with a pocketknife, I saw that the flesh was also indigo, speckled with golden seeds. Like a night sky, as he had promised.

  “The rootstock and scion were in perfect harmony with this tree,” he murmured approvingly. “But only after it had produced the first full-fledged and edible pieces of fruit could I be sure. Taste it, Enzo.”