Her voice was weak, and she was slurring. Her hair had turned gray, dry as straw, her pale skin was tinged yellow, and she had a thin blue robe sashed tightly around her thinning waist. Her mouth seemed off-kilter, as did one of her cheekbones, as if she had suffered a stroke herself.
“I’m glad he’s dead,” she added. “And I’m glad the hotel is gone.”
“What have you always known, Ivy?” I said.
“You know what. What they never knew.”
“Meaning Samax—”
“Yes, and him,” she said, inclining her head toward the second floor. “I knew when your mother died that you were Geza’s son. I told no one. Now it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“You did it because Bel took him away from you. That day on the road near the Hotel Canopus.”
Her washed-out eyes flared. “What do you know about that?”
“I know you were in love with him, too.”
“He was my brother,” she snapped.
“Sure,” I said thickly. “And if you couldn’t have him, you’d make sure Bel didn’t either. That’s why you lied to him when he was in Colorado, telling him the cops were on to him, sending him a bad check.”
If it was possible for her to turn any paler, she did. “Geza is alive? You’ve talked to him?”
“I haven’t talked to him.”
“Then how could you know all this?”
I leaned down to her ear. “I know more about you than you think.” Then I rang the doorbell and a butler materialized from the gloom of the foyer.
“Good-bye,” the parrot squawked.
“Go to hell,” Ivy cried after me, and then started coughing.
The house was white on the inside too, and it looked and smelled like a hospital. A wave of ammonia and alcohol greeted me. A nurse with a tray disappeared through a swinging door. Through a window I saw a private ambulance parked by the rear entrance, on call. Immediately, no questions asked, the butler showed me up to the second floor. There I was met by another nurse, who asked if I would like a cold drink. Then she took me down two long bare corridors to a room where an orderly, a burly man with a blond crew cut, sat on a stool outside the door. He looked up at me without interest as he opened the door.
I entered a spacious bedroom where there were two more nurses. It was difficult to make them out clearly because the room seemed to be full of fog. In fact it was mist, from an enormous humidifier. The mist was nearly as thick as the smoke in Spica’s room, and the little sunlight that penetrated the heavily curtained windows was deeply refracted, the beams crisscrossing sharply. Lining the walls were a mahogany desk, a chest, an armoire, and a long leather couch. In the center of the room was a white hospital bed surrounded by medical equipment—oxygen tanks, monitors, a breathing machine the size of a commercial freezer. There was a clear oxygen tent on the bed and a man beneath it, white-faced with a shaved head, peered at me as I crossed the room. His large white hands were nearly indistinguishable from the sheet drawn up to his chin.
His blue eyes studied me closely through the plastic tent. I could hear him wheezing as he breathed.
“Lift it,” he rasped to the two nurses hovering beside the bed.
They unfastened and lifted a small square of the tent so that he and I could see each other clearly. His nose was long, his ears large, and he had once had a strong chin. I had seen photographs of him in middle age, but the man inside the tent looked nothing like the tall, black-haired, broad-shouldered man in those photographs. Now his face was as bleached-out as his hands. And his lips had more blue to them than his eyes, which never left mine. After about ten seconds, one of the nurses refastened the square.
“You’re a Cassiel, all right,” he said. “Imagine.”
“My name is Enzo Samax.”
“Ah. Have a seat, then, Enzo Samax.” One nurse placed a metal chair behind me, and another appeared with a glass of ice water. Then the three nurses took up positions, forming a triangle around the bed, just out of earshot. The breathing machine whirred, lights flashed on the monitors, the mist continued to pour into the room. Already my shirt was clinging to my back.
“I’ve got half a lung left,” Vitale Cassiel said, his voice slipping into the rough whisper where it would remain. “And that half is no good. So we’ve got ten minutes to talk. It’s all I can do. I don’t see anybody anymore.”
For more than half my life, this man’s name had been synonymous with fear, chaos, vengeance, destruction. Just as certain words can function in themselves as reproaches, his name, uttered without embellishment, was like a threat. I had often thought about what it would be like to meet him. I had concocted many scenarios—usually with me confronting him, sword in hand—but this had not been one of them.
“Forcas told me about the letter you found. I didn’t know,” he said. “And you knew me only as something else. You’ve never met your father?”
“No. I tried to find him, but I didn’t.”
“I never tried to find him. He knows where to find me, but I’ll never see him again. It’s December. Before March I’ll be dead, no matter how many machines they wheel in here.” He stopped to catch his breath. “Your father blamed me for everything.”
“You mean, like the fact he was forced to commit murder?”
“Who forced him? He put himself in that position. He was stupid. I gave up on him a long time ago.”
Sick as he was, his vehemence stopped me for a moment.
“Ivy knew about me all the time,” I said.
“Should that surprise either of us? I’ve learned that everyone’s a chameleon, but Ivy is the only one who never bothers to change her color. I used her when I needed to, but all the time she was using me, just like she was using Junius. That’s what she is.” He paused. “If I had known about you, things might have been different.”
“Between you and Samax?”
“No. Nothing could have changed that. Certainly not another illegitimate child.”
“Of course not.” He seemed to have no recognition of, or concern about, the cruelty in his words; he might as well have said “bastard.” I was seeing firsthand, I thought, why Samax and my father had been so repelled by him.
“Why did you hate my uncle so much?” I asked him.
“You think you know everything there is to know about all this,” he wheezed. “You think you know who all the heroes are, and all the villains. And who did what to whom—and why. But it’s not that simple. It’s not one color, like with Ivy. Remember that. If that’s all you remember from me, remember that.” He paused. “What I did to Junius all those years ago, and then to your other grandfather, Nilus—those things didn’t happen in a vacuum. I lusted after money then, sure. And after women. But what do you think they were—saints? For Stella I would have cheated fifty men—a hundred—I’m not ashamed to say it. For the money to keep her, I would’ve put a thousand men like Junius in jail. That’s the way it was.” He laughed—more a dry cough than a laugh. “But the pendulum swung back. I ended up losing Stella, not in the end to Junius, or to a man with more money than me, or a man more foolish and vain than either Nilus or me. Worse, I lost her to men I would never know anything about. And that drove me crazy. Junius took her away, but she was using him all the time: after she ditched him, how many others were there? I had years and years to ponder that question. So, you see, Junius got his revenge. He made me suffer right back. You know that. And he knew how to get at me, where it would hurt the most. Not in my pocketbook, but in here.” Slowly he raised one ghostly hand and rested it on his chest. “Junius knew how to put a bullet through me without firing a gun.” He drew a long, rattling breath. “You’ve got so much bad blood in you, Enzo. Like a mix of chemicals that ought to have exploded the minute they came together. Yeah, I can see a few people in your face—especially your father.” He nodded toward the desk across the room, where there were two framed photographs angled away from us. “I used to keep them in the drawer, but last month I had them put out. Have
a look.”
On the desk, in a plain black frame, was what looked like a graduation photograph of the same man—aged sixteen or so—I had seen in the Air Force uniform at the gas station outside Albuquerque. Here he was wearing a jacket and tie. Darkly handsome, with a pompadour, he wasn’t smiling. The other photograph, twice as large, with an ornate gold frame, was of a young blond woman in a black dress. Even without the description Samax had once given me, I knew at once who she must be. She was strikingly beautiful, with full lips and clear, lucent skin; her mouth was smiling, but her eyes didn’t go with that smile. I had never quite seen eyes like hers: not wicked, exactly, but knowing—in a way that was unsettling for someone her age. Of myself I saw one notable characteristic in her face: the slight upturn of her lip beside a dimple on the right cheek.
“Ever seen a picture of your grandmother Stella before this?” Vitale Cassiel said, as I returned to his bedside.
I shook my head.
“I didn’t think so. Junius wouldn’t have kept them around.”
“She was very beautiful.”
“She was still in love with me then. Christmas, 1940. We were in Havana. Maybe you can see now why I would’ve sold what soul I had left for her. How Nilus who couldn’t find his own shoes in the morning discovered her in the first place, in the dung heap of this world, I’ll never know. But he never lived to regret it as much as I did. He stumbled on to something else. Another girl, it was all the same to him. But not to me. Not to Junius, either, no matter what he told you. I know he filled that place of his with things, but he would’ve traded every one of them, in a heartbeat, to have her back. And he never did. That’s my solace, I’m sorry to say. But enough. The ten minutes is up, and you came here for something more than conversation. I can see that.”
“I’d like that amulet Uncle Junius was looking for.”
“Ah, I should have known. And you want me to give it to you.”
I hesitated, remembering Forcas’s advice. “I do.”
“Maybe I can give you more than that.”
“That’s all I want.”
“And here I thought maybe you were going to visit here for a while. Spend a little time.”
He’s testing me, I thought. “I don’t believe you really thought that.”
The shadow of a smile crossed those blue lips. “You’re more Cassiel than you’ll ever know. But that’s all right.” He wheezed slowly, and ten, fifteen, twenty seconds ticked away. “What Junius always wanted, it’s in there,” he said finally, nodding toward a small chest directly across the room from the desk. “Take the two silver keys from the bottom drawer in the bedside table here. Open the top drawer of that chest and you’ll find another drawer inside it. It has two keyholes. Insert the keys and turn them simultaneously, the right one clockwise, the left counterclockwise. Then come back here.”
I did exactly as he said. The keys turned easily, and when the tumblers were fully engaged, they produced a single musical note together. What I found inside the inner drawer was a small box that looked like a music box. It was covered in black velvet with an onyx circle inlaid on its lid, and it too had a silver lock.
“When he left here for the last time, twenty-five years ago, in a rage, your father took the key to this box with him. I made it so Junius couldn’t have what was inside the box, but Geza made it so I couldn’t have it, either.” His voice was so low now, I had to strain to pick it up. “See, only that one key can open the box. There’s no duplicate. If you try to use another key, or to force the lock, the contents of the box are destroyed at once. It’s an old Japanese design. I had it made for me in Tokyo. And it’s all yours. Take it with you.” Again, the laugh that was a dry cough. “Of course you’ll have to find your father to open it—providing he didn’t throw the key away. Or lose it. But I’ll never see the inside of that box again. There’s another box waiting for me.”
I didn’t say good-bye, for he had already closed his eyes and the nurses were moving toward the bed as one, like clockwork. A moment later I was escorted downstairs and out the door. The straight-back chair on the verandah was empty and the parrot was gone.
On the way out of Reno, lost in thought, I stopped by the Fleischmann Planetarium, ostensibly to check out the design for the planetarium in Phoenix, but really to see the place where Samax had begun his seduction of my grandmother Stella. In my head, however, I kept scanning the photograph of her, and the one of my father. The planetarium itself left me cold: it was difficult to conjure up ghosts there after being in the presence of a pair of living ghosts like Ivy and Vitale Cassiel. Though I hated to admit it, Vitale Cassiel had been right about one thing: there was plenty of blood—mostly bad—to go around, and it had ended up on just about everybody’s hands, including Samax’s. Ivy just had more of it than anyone else. All those years, none of them had ever escaped either one another or themselves.
Back at my apartment in Santa Fe, accompanied by Sirius, I found two packages in the pile of mail that awaited me. One contained an audiocassette of The Echo Quintet’s second album sent by Auro, the other a signed copy of Dalia’s translation of Friar Varcas’s book on vampires, just published by the Revenant Pess. Enclosed in a plain brown jacket, inscribed To Enzo in a shaky hand, it looked like any other book, but I noticed the next day, while flipping through it during my flight to Honolulu, that it had one amazing peculiarity which sent a shiver through me: when you tilted its pages out of the light, their ink appeared to be red, not black.
My flight to Honolulu out of Albuquerque was at two o’clock, and I had to make one stop before going to the airport. Actually, it was an extended detour to Acoma, for which I had to start out early in the morning. I put on the same clothes I would be wearing when I arrived in Honolulu that evening—a plaid shirt and jeans, black lizard boots, and a dark blue jacket—and with Sirius curled up beside me in the front seat, I lowered the top on the old Ford Galaxie. The sky was already a hot, clear blue. We passed the gas station where I had seen Geza Cassiel and the Zuni cemetery where there was a grave marker but no grave for Calzas’s father; but Sirius, who had always enjoyed looking at the sights when we drove, didn’t once raise his head.
He had been agitated for weeks, as Desirée had told me, slipping away into the desert for the night, uncharacteristically hiding around the hotel, and not eating for days at a time. Losing weight, he had begun to look haggard, concave around the rib cage. Fourteen years old now, for the first time since Calzas had given him to me he seemed every bit his age. Samax’s murder and the cataclysmic loss of the hotel—the only home Sirius had ever known—were major shocks, which only aggravated his restlessness. Mrs. Resh had attributed his behavior before the fire to my extended absences from the hotel, but Sirius and I knew better.
Those last days in Las Vegas and Reno, and the very last night, in Santa Fe, he stuck close to me, and even slept at my feet on the bed, which he hadn’t done in years. I knew, well before we had left Nevada, that before I did anything else he wanted me to take him to Acoma. That morning when I awoke, I found Sirius staring out the window, westward toward the desert sky.
With just a last few miles to go on the winding two-lane blacktop into the valley, Sirius sat up as soon as the mesa of Acoma, and the Enchanted Mesa beyond it, came into view. The last time I had been there with him was nine years earlier, when he had run off and Calzas and I couldn’t find him. Now his ears were extended, his tail began ticking, and his eyes focused suddenly. Gazing through the windshield, he remained riveted on Acoma until I parked the car and switched off the engine. Only then did he turn to me, and laying his paws on my left shoulder, rested his head against my own. His breath felt warm against the nape of my neck. His body was trembling. I put my arm around him for a long moment and drew in his scent and whispered his name just once. Then with a yelp, and an energy I hadn’t seen in him for some time, he bounded from the car and ran directly to the rocky trail that spiraled up the mesa.
I didn’t call out to him. I got out of
the car and walked to the trail myself. I could no longer see him after he rounded the second bend in the trail, still running hard, but I knew where he was heading: that pyramid of black rocks on the plateau where Calzas had found him.
When I reached the plateau, I followed his tracks from the trail, through the grass and brambles, directly to the pyramid of rocks surrounded by lavender grass, where they ended abruptly. There was no sign of Sirius atop the pyramid or anywhere else. I knew there wouldn’t be.
Wiping my brow, I sat down on a flat boulder and gazed out across the brown valley, its bright dust rising into the sunlight, at the Enchanted Mesa. I saw the blue ribbon of the Río Puerco. And the Gallo Mountains far off in the haze. Above me the sky-city of Acoma shone gold in the midday sun. I knew that when night fell and Canis Major rose in the eastern sky, the Dog Star would be back in its place, at the constellation’s center. It was Calzas who told me that your life is a road along which you leave many markers—points in time and places on the map. The ones in time you can only revisit in your mind, and they never change. The places can be revisited firsthand, but they’re constantly changing. To keep a place the same, he said, you can no longer return to it—and then it becomes a point in time. For me, Acoma would be such a place now. And for the first time since Samax’s death, and the destruction of the Hotel Canopus, and all the farewells of the previous days, I buried my face in my hands and started to cry. I cried for so long that when I lowered my hands, the Enchanted Mesa looked as if it were underwater, and the valley itself filled with tears.
Throughout the long flight from Albuquerque to Honolulu, I listened to Auro’s tape, which was entitled Star-Crossed; its cover illustration was a silver X composed of small stars, with a red star at its center. If his first album had been eclectic and joyous, this one was elegiac, long dark understated riffs in minor keys around Frankie Fooo’s heavy bass and the alto sax and the lower octaves of the piano. And behind it all Auro’s drumming, his soft touch with the bass pedal and his delicacy with the brushes on muted cymbals. The music played into my own mood so exactly it was unsettling at first. Auro, too, it seemed, had come to the end of something.
A Trip to the Stars Page 59
