Devil's Food

by Janice Weber

  “Oh yes. Very much so.”

  “What did you do about it?”

  “Waited and hoped for an opportunity.”

  “Did you ever get one?”

  “Several. Each time I failed.”

  “Your nerve failed?”

  “Lord no! My plans failed.” Dagmar put a hand on Ross’s shoulder. “Don’t ever apologize for exacting your own justice, Ross. Another opportunity will present itself.”

  Something inside of him collapsed: Dagmar understood, and had already forgiven him for whatever he had done. Did he dare tell her the truth? He longed to; Ross was desperate to find another Dana. “The opportunity did present itself,” he began. “I’m afraid my aim was a little off. Someone got hurt rather badly.” He looked in her wise eyes. “I don’t know what to do about it.”

  She held his gaze for an electric, ecstatic moment. “I’d say aim a little better next time.”

  Speechless, fluttering between joy and horror, Ross looked away. Dagmar touched his elbow. “Let me look into this. Something will turn up, I’m sure.”

  He thanked her and left.

  Giddy with strange news, Emily called Ross’s office the moment she got her car into the woods beyond Brother Augustine’s monastery. Should she blurt out the story of her mother and Leo now, or should she just tantalize him with a few details until she could get back to the office and tell him in person? Neither, it turned out: Marjorie picked up the phone. “Where’s Ross?” Emily said curtly. Damn, this was a private line!

  “He’s visiting sites all afternoon. He should be back around five-thirty.”

  At least he had left Marjorie back at the office. Emily tried to match the secretary’s starchy tone. “Just tell him I called, please.”

  She drove back to Boston, exiting at the expressway. Traffic was just beginning to pile up along Albany Street, where five lanes had to squeeze into two after an excruciatingly long red light. Cabs and buses, with neither mufflers nor suspensions to lose, usually led the pack racing ahead after the light turned green. Diavolina was just a few dozen potholes away. Emily cut over to Tremont Street, parking up the block. She called the restaurant, praying that Zoltan would pick up the phone. He usually did this time of day, taking reservations while the kitchen staff battled over dinner and Ward began hitting the gin reserves.

  “Diavolina,” he said.

  “This is Emily. I have to speak with you right away. Could you get away for a few minutes? I’m parked about a block up the street.”

  “What is this about?”

  “Leo. Please, it’s very important. I won’t be long.”

  “Just wait there,” Zoltan said, hanging up. Presently he hopped in the passenger seat of Emily’s car. “I told Klepp I’m buying cigarettes.”

  That was good for about five minutes. “You’re supposed to know everything at Diavolina. Have you heard from Leo?“ Emily asked.

  Zoltan’s dark eyebrows wrinkled. “No. Have you?”

  “Of course not! Why the hell should I? You’ve got to tell me what’s going on here.” As the maître d’stared stonily out the window, Emily continued, “I know about him and my mother. But not enough. I know that they were in some kind of trouble together.” She was not getting through to Zoltan, Emily saw; he was protecting old secrets, older friendships. “I talked to Augustine this morning.”

  His eyes finally met hers. “What did he tell you?”

  “That I wasn’t born in a hospital, that my mother died, Leo’s half blind, and no police were involved.” Emily grabbed Zoltan’s withery hand. “Did you know my mother?”

  His Adam’s apple skipped an inch up and down. “You look like her,” he said. “Sometimes you even talk like her. I recognized you the moment you walked into Diavolina.”

  Emily bit her tongue, waiting: Zoltan was choosing words, one by one, from a musty, abandoned cellar. What had O’Keefe told her about the maître d’? That he had murdered his wife and not been caught? Or not murdered her and been caught? It was fairly easy to imagine Zoltan’s hands twisting the life out of a woman’s neck as expertly as he twisted the cork from a bottle of champagne. It was more difficult to imagine the woman who would become Zoltan’s wife.

  “Your mother and I were onstage together several times,” he finally began. “Little parts, but she always stole the show. She had many admirers. Finally she fell in love with one.”

  “Who? Leo?”

  “No. Someone else. For a while she was very happy. Then she became pregnant. He wouldn’t marry her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Perhaps he was already married. Leo looked after her then. She was not having an easy time, as you might imagine. In those days unmarried women were viewed quite differently than they are today. She lost work, she lost her apartment. She was frequently ill. It made Leo crazy. Late one night your mother called. She told me that Leo had gone to a club downtown and that there might be trouble. I went down immediately and saw him sitting in the shadows watching another man across the room. It was quite apparent that this was the villain who had ruined your mother.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Zoltan shrugged disdainfully. “A typical man. He was with another woman. I sat at the bar for an hour or two, waiting to see what would happen. Finally the man left with the lady. Leo followed. Out in the street, they exchanged a few words, then a few punches. They ended up in an alley. It was a long, bloody fight. They were both quite strong.”

  “You didn’t try to stop it?” Emily cried.

  Zoltan looked haughtily, perhaps murderously, at her. “I wouldn’t think of doing so. Honor was at stake.”

  “What about the other woman?”

  Zoltan opened the window and spat. He rolled it shut and swallowed noisily. “She tried once to interrupt. The man threw her into a brick wall. Perhaps he wanted to fight as much as Leo did. After a very long time, they were both lying unconscious in their own blood. I pulled Leo away from there. He was seriously hurt. The other man looked dead.” Zoltan’s mouth twisted into a harsh smile. “By the time I dragged him home, your mother was in labor, quite beside herself with fright and worry. Leo somehow packed her in a car and drove away. That’s the last I saw of her.”

  Emily watched a man up the block casually drop a candy wrapper into the wind. After a few feet it fluttered to the dirt. So her father hadn’t wanted her either; somehow, she had known that for forty years. “Did the other man die?”

  “There were no newspaper reports of a death.”

  “What happened to Leo?”

  “I didn’t see him for a long time. He lost an eye. He was never quite the same. Quieter.”

  “Did he ever talk about me or my sister?”

  “Never.”

  Why should he? They weren’t his. Neither had their mother been. At the end of the day, all he had gotten for his trouble was a glass eye. “I think he’s looking for me now. Would you know why?”

  “Maybe to settle an old score.”

  Thick air here: Emily opened her window. “What does Slavomir Dubrinsky have to do with all this?”

  Zoltan’s eyes widened, as if he had just sat on a thorn. “He was an artist,” he said carefully.

  “Don’t act dumb. I know he went to prison for statutory rape and Leo met him there. Before Slavomir died, he gave me a key to a post-office box. Inside were a few sketches. At first glance, I thought they were of me.”

  “He recognized you too.” Zoltan smiled wistfully: Emily was so clever, just like her mother. “He was commissioned to make a statue.”

  “By whom?”

  “Your mother’s lover, I would guess. She posed for Slavomir three times a week before her delicate condition became obvious.”

  “Where’s the statue now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What did it look like?”

  Zoltan’s eyes closed. “Her naked. It was quite beautiful. After your mother died, Slavomir made a second statue for Leo.”

  “A c
opy of the first?”

  “Not quite. Slavomir called the first statue Angelina. The second he called Diavolina. Leo got that one.”

  “What for? A souvenir?”

  “A token of gratitude. Leo has always looked after his friends.” Zoltan opened the car door. “If he calls the restaurant, I’ll tell him you’re here.” He walked quickly away.

  In a daze, Emily drove home. She called the office again; Ross was still out. She poured herself a stiff scotch and lay on the couch in the atrium, watching clouds and tiny airplanes drift across the sky. It was always helpful to look upward, at limitless clear expanses, when her past threatened to pull her into bottomless muck. It didn’t happen very much anymore, but when it did, she felt as impotent and ignorant as she ever did: a mother again? For years, Emily had thought about her mother every day, felt her presence, sent her daily messages; having never seen her mother dead or alive, nor having experienced the downside of maternal rule and discipline, the child in Emily believed that her mother was exactly like that beauty in the photographs on Uncle Jasper’s piano, forever mysterious and feminine, immaculate. That theory had suffered heavily when Philippa had started posing for publicity photos, and Emily saw the discrepancy between actress and actual woman. She had stopped idealizing her mother and, for a number of years, became fairly angry that her mother had not had the brains to get herself married before getting herself pregnant. That anger finally ran its course as Emily realized that every adult on the face of the earth was annoyed with his or her parents for something and that in many cases, parents who had remained alive had done much more damage than those who had had the grace to exeunt during the prologue. Over the last decade, thoughts of her mother had receded to a benign, diffuse fog as Ross and then Guy had overtaken her imagination. She would have been content to leave it that way.

  Until today, when Augustine had exhumed all the sleeping demons, seducing her with tales of love and gore and, most astonishingly, extant human participants. Part of her wanted to know everything. But was it wise to replace fog with a willful mother, an unwilling father, and a third wheel named Leo? So she had been born on a couch in a monastery: so what? Wasn’t that her stupid mother’s fault? She could have gone to a hospital and had a safe delivery. She could have married Leo, whoever the hell that was, and gotten on with her life. Why should Emily get all roiled up about a father now, why presume that after forty years a stranger’s silence would suddenly blossom into love just because an illegitimate daughter showed up? Uncle Jasper had been parent enough; maybe she should be thankful for that blessing and let the other ghosts rest in peace. Pursuit of this tawdry little history treaded a fine line between curiosity and masochism, and to what end? She wasn’t about to write it down in a family Bible for future generations to read. Did she hope that getting to the bottom of this story would fill in some of those psychic craters? Dream on: Life was one huge crater, dug in secret, ended at random, no matter who one’s parents were.

  Emily was staring at the long, plush contrail of a silver airplane, thinking of Guy, when the phone rang. Perhaps it was Ross; she needed him here, now. “Hello?”

  Santa Monica police: Philippa had been shot twice at close range by an unknown assailant. She was in the operating room now, playing dead. The man told Emily that his office had booked her on a flight leaving Boston in forty-five minutes. If she missed it, there was another at six o’clock, but he didn’t recommend that one. Emily slammed down the phone. Flinging clothes into a suitcase, praying for time to stand still, she gunned her car down Joy Street. The hell with the dead; they had waited for forty years. They could wait a little more.

  Late in the afternoon, when Ross returned to the office from his site visits, several messages awaited him. The only ones of interest came from the shop on Newbury Street and his wife. Ross returned her call first: no answer. Couldn’t have been terribly important. Maybe she was just checking in to see if he had been free for lunch. Ross decided to go home early tonight. They could spend another pleasant evening with atlases and escapist fantasies, the wilder the better; this could be the year he finally talked Emily into the Paris-Dakar road race. Ross shut his office door before calling the shop on Newbury Street. “Were you able to find anything for me?” he asked the salesman investigating the purple bikinis.

  “Yes, sir. Fortunately, our recordkeeping is meticulous.” Of course it was; how else could the man earn thousands of dollars on the side looking up suspect lingerie purchases? “As I told you, many customers bought that particular bikini. It was very popular with power dressers of the early eighties. Red and purple were the big sellers. Had it not been for the monogram of the pitchfork, my search might not have been successful. But I was able to contact Heddi, the woman who does all our custom embroidery. She remembered the job. The purchase was made by Rita Ward.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Does that name ring a bell?”

  “Vaguely,” Ross replied.

  “She paid fifteen dollars for the monogram.”

  “Any particular reason for the pitchfork?”

  “I asked Heddi that exact question. All she could remember was that it had to do with devils rather than farmers. By the way,” the man said just as Ross was about to hang up and stagger to the liquor cabinet, “Heddi said that you’re the second person who’s asked about that monogram. She remembers a woman coming into the store with the bikinis a week after the purchase. Quite angry.”

  Ross sighed, guessing the scenario. “What happened?”

  “I told her nothing,” the man said.

  That’s because Ardith had slipped Heddi, not him, the hundred bucks. “Did the woman find out about Rita?”

  “There is a remote chance that she did,” the man lied.

  “Does Heddi remember what she looked like?” Ross asked, just in case he was on the wrong planet.

  “She says the lady wore a hat and a wedding ring with three marquise diamonds. She was rather unpleasant.”

  Ardith, all right; even ten years ago, she knew her marriage was a travesty. “Thank you,” Ross said. “It’s all becoming clear to me now.” He hung up.

  After a moment’s paralysis, he bounded out of his chair and went across the hall to Dana’s office. “Marjorie! Could you come here a second, please?”

  She found him struggling with the bronze bust. “Finally chucking that thing out the window?”

  “Don’t make stupid jokes,” he snapped, tipping it on its side. “Read me the initials on the bottom again, would you?”

  “‘R.W. 1983.’”

  “Goddamn it! Nobody tells me anything around here!”

  Marjorie closed the door. “What’s going on, Ross?”

  “Don’t think Tin nuts,” he said, pacing agitatedly in circles, “but I’m fairly sure that the girl who jumped off the Darnell Building was the same one who made this statue of Dana. Rita Ward was her name. She was the one who gave him that purple underwear. They probably met while he was doing that renovation at Diavolina. The affair really went down the tubes.”

  Marjorie watched him pace for a quarter mile. “So what?” she asked finally. “They’re both dead.”

  What was he supposed to say to that? So is Guy Witten? “It’s been on my mind,” he rasped, walking around a few more circles. “Dana never told me about it.”

  “You couldn’t have prevented anything.”

  “But that girl killed herself! For nothing!”

  “Says who?”

  “I don’t understand! Why didn’t Dana tell me? Didn’t he feel bad about it?”

  “Either no, he didn’t, or yes, he felt so bad that he couldn’t ever speak to you about it. Why should Dana confess, anyway?”

  “Catharsis. Forgiveness. If he had just said something to the family,” Ross said, almost talking to himself. “Apologized or something. Not left them in the dark with no idea whom the girl had killed herself over.”

  “Are you joking? Can you imagine Dana going to the grieving parents and saying something like ‘Hi, you d
on’t know me, but I was screwing your daughter and she couldn’t handle my wife and two kids’? That’s almost beyond fiction.”

  “If he wanted to forget about it, why save the underwear? That bust?”

  “Souvenirs of the good days, I’d say.”

  Dana had always been very clever about props; that bronze bust had probably provided the perfect excuse for artist and model to get together three afternoons a week for months. When Dana first installed the sculpture in his office, he had explained that it was a trade for services. Ross hadn’t even asked what the services had been. Now he sat on Dana’s soft couch, wondering if Rita had sat there once, whispering as she stroked Dana’s hair. “Do you think it was a crime?” he said softly. “Is that why he kept his mouth shut?”

  “I’m not familiar with the Massachusetts laws on fornication and adultery,” Marjorie said archly. “But if unrequited love were illegal, half the world would be in prison.” Rising, she put a hand on Ross’s shoulder. “Let sleeping dogs lie. In Dana’s case, the less we know, the better.”

  He watched her lovely legs waft her toward the door. After several moments alone with the cold, mute bust of Dana, Ross called Diavolina. “Ward, please,” he said, then waited a long time. “I have to see you.”

  “Again? You’re not about to start blackmailing me now, are you?”

  “Don’t be asinine! Where and when? Preferably in the next half hour.”

  “This must be an emergency. How about the waiting room at Back Bay Station?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  Ross methodically cleared his desk, as he did every day before going home. Then he took the subway to Back Bay and waited in the crowded Amtrak lounge, where lots of actor types with gorgeous hairdos and cheap luggage awaited the next train to New York. Ward finally swept in with the same voluminous cape she had worn to Guy’s funeral. Heads turned as she cut a grand swath through the crowd. Ward had gotten her hair trimmed and curled. It looked rather cute. She had stenciled her eyes with heavy liner that imitated the flow of her cape. Smiling like a debutante, she sailed past Ross out to the sidewalk.