“. . . Or perhaps Bando really had flown in that instant of grace.”
“Why did Bando jump?” I asked. The numerous faces looking out from the portraits on the walls seemed to want an answer as well.
“I’ve often thought about that myself. You’ll have to ask Poppy.”
“She spoke about you before we came to Zurich,” I said.
“How so?” asked Samas.
“I asked her if the one that found her acted as advocate in her Ascension. She said no, and I sensed there was some animosity on her part.”
“You’re right about that. She’s been hostile to me ever since the village. I’m accustomed to it by now. Besides, I understand where it comes from.”
“Where does it come from?” I asked, wanting him to say it.
“Well, part of it is obvious, because of what I did that last day at Latsei. But there’s something else, something with edges that don’t dull with time. I think she feels responsible for their deaths. If she hadn’t gone in search of them, they wouldn’t have been exposed to the disease that was latent in both our bodies. No matter how you look at it, you cannot dispute the fact that she was responsible.”
“You can’t blame her for that,” I said in her defense.
“No, no, no,” Samas said, shaking his head. “Don’t confuse culpability with responsibility. They’re different. It’s not her fault, but you can’t deny it wouldn’t have happened the way it did had it not been for her. She was responsible. That type of responsibility, no matter how you justify it, is your own in the end. You can’t help but carry it around with you. My only transgression is that I was witness to hers. Is there nothing in your lives for which you have felt responsible in the same way?”
Samas’s simple question cut to the very core of my being. At times it seemed as if everything I did could be reduced down to the lowest common denominator of reacting to the guilt I felt about the fire that killed Bobby’s mother. It didn’t matter that I’d inherited the guilt from unknowing benefactors. The feelings were as real as my own. They were mine now and equated to who I was and what I thought I—what I thought we were. “Are we evil?” I asked, looking at him.
“Which we? We humans, we Reincarnationists, or you and I, specifically?”
“We Reincarnationists. Are we evil for replacing the lives of those before us?”
A look of surprise came over his face. “I’ve never thought of it that way. Why do you ask?”
“Samas, I’ve wrestled with that same kind of responsibility and guilt for a few years. I’ve known for some time now that I could never absolve myself of those sins, and recently with meeting you and Poppy, it has occurred to me that there may not even be a need for absolution.”
“That’s right,” he said emphatically. “That’s the way it works. Personally, I think you’re ahead of Poppy in that respect.”
“What do you mean, ahead of Poppy?”
He leaned back as if exasperated that I didn’t get it. “As Reincarnationists, we are burdened by the knowledge that we, and only we, are responsible for our actions. We know there is no divinity on whose shoulders we can lay the blame for any errors in our lives. Normal humans embrace the divine precisely because they can burden other shoulders with their sins. We know differently. But it’s important for you to realize that we live in their world, not the other way around. So when you speak of absolution, you will eventually find that your desire for the quarter it can provide and your knowledge of the truth are incompatible. The only vehicle within which you can find solace is responsibility.
“Unrighted wrongs can haunt you like a specter. I believe they haunt Poppy to this day, which in some ways explains her actions. You may be haunted as well—only you know for sure. Ultimately, there is only one way to exorcise such a fiend; you must accept him.” Samas leaned forward in his chair and stared at a painted face on the wall. “You must look him square in the eyes without turning away, taking in every unsightly nuance of his repellent face and say: ‘Yea I know thee brother, and love thee as I love myself, for we are one and the same.’ That fiend will have an unspoken, yet unassailable mastery over you until it is assimilated. It is only when you embrace that dark brother that you can know true freedom.”
I absorbed the import of his words in a long silence.
Samas continued. “So when you ask me if we are evil, I have no choice but to answer in the affirmative. I must answer so, for we are evil, even if we only have the capacity for it. The evil is latent within us. It lives and breathes in that twin fiend. Does that answer your question?”
I nodded. “I think so. There is something else I’m curious about.”
“What’s that?”
“Why did you take the pieces off the dead bodies at Latsei?”
“Oh, dear Evan,” he said with a sigh. “The answer is within your own question. They were dead, so what did it harm? Besides, they had no idea of the jewelry’s value.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
He shook his head, disappointed. “Right or wrong is not the issue. I can live with it. That’s my point.” He finished the last of his wine in one long drink. “Let me ask you something. What would you do if a similar opportunity at fortune presented itself?”
He asked the question knowing I couldn’t answer. “I can’t say. I’d have to be in the situation.”
“That’s right, and that’s the decision I made when I was in that situation.”
“Fair enough,” I said, refilling both glasses.
“It was the money from those artifacts that started all this,” he said, looking around at the faces and landscapes on the walls. “It started me, you might say. It allowed me to become what I am now. There’s something else you will come to know in time, and it goes back to what I said earlier. Life is not worth living unless you can fully enjoy it, and unfortunately, for most neophytes like yourself, amassed wealth is part of that. I don’t have to tell you the difference money can make in your life, the way it sweetens it, the way it brings certain refinements into focus.”
“This certainly is refined,” I said, looking around at the walls.
“I told you this collection is my passion, what I didn’t tell you was why.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“All the pieces in this room have one thing in common, me. I commissioned all these works and modeled in several of them. I’ve had at least one portrait done in each of my last six lives. That’s the kind of refinement I could not live without,” he said with the resolve of a confirmed addict.
“What was there?” I asked, pointing to the blank rectangle on the wall behind me.
“A portrait of me. Done by Jan Vermeer in 1670.”
“What happened to it?”
“It was taken from me, stolen from my home in Amsterdam by the Nazis in 1940. These two pieces were in the house as well,” he said, pointing them out on the wall, “but the SS captain in charge took only the Vermeer. I searched for that one piece for five years, until the end of the war. Ramsay helped me and set an appointment with a Luftwaffe Colonel in Berlin to pick it up in the closing days of the fighting. The Nazis, as it turned out, hid a large portion of their plundered art in the tall antiaircraft towers around Berlin.
“The deal was ten thousand British pounds and a boat ride from Rostock to neutral Sweden for the colonel in exchange for the Vermeer.” Samas sighed and continued. “I readied two hundred thousand pounds, hoping that maybe the colonel was sitting on more stolen works. I even had a truck at the ready to cart off everything I expected to find, but the Red Army beat me to him. I arrived in time to see them loading an eastbound truck with narrow crates. I sat huddled in a dense thicket nearby and watched them work, hoping to catch a glimpse of my portrait.”
“Did you see it? Was it in any of the crates?” I asked him.
Samas continued, “Time after time, t
he soldiers would reemerge from the open portal at the base of the ominous concrete tower carrying yet another narrow crate with a black eagle stenciled on the side. The colonel’s body lay in his bloody uniform at the base of the vacant spire. After an hour’s labor, they removed the last crate, closed the truck, and retreated to the east.”
I was already completely absorbed in Samas’s story. I nodded for him to continue.
“It must have been another full hour before I ventured forth from my secluded vantage to inspect the scene. They had taken everything. I searched every corner in hopes of finding some lead to follow. Hours later, I found a manifest in handwritten German among the scattered papers littering the floor. It detailed everything that had been moved into the tower over the past three years, everything that I had seen being carted away in a mere hour. I wept as I read through the list. Evan, the contents of those crates made the collection in this room look like a show of freshman projects at a third-rate art college. My portrait was on the list.
“It took me twenty years to find it within the Soviet Union. It was in storage in the Hermitage along with all the other items on the German manifest.”
“Where is it now?” I asked.
“In 1985 it was given by General Secretary Gorbachev to the government of Italy, along with several other pieces as a political offering. The Italians keep them leased out to various galleries around the world, though the dolts have it listed as ‘doubtfully’ attributed to Vermeer.”
“Won’t they sell it to you?”
“No. I’ve made a generous offer each year for the past three years. They’ve refused every time. I even left the last offer open, letting them put in whatever figure they wished, and still they were not interested. I never thought men could be so unreasonable,” he said angrily.
I could see that the idea of his money not being able to buy something was poignantly irritating to him. “Is that not contradictory to what you said about wealth sweetening life? After all, you said this is your passion, what keeps you going,” I said, baiting him.
“That’s where you’re mistaken, my friend. It is precisely my wealth that will bring the portrait back into my possession.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m going to contract someone to steal it. My life will be sweetened, and the vehicle is still money, there are no two ways about it. Never underestimate the potential of kinetic money,” he said, laughing.
“How much would it cost to have it stolen?”
“I would go as high as two million American dollars.”
“That’s a lot of money,” I said, trying to match his cool demeanor.
“That depends on your frame of reference,” he said, fixing his eyes on me. “It’s a reasonable price for a part of your own identity. You’d do the same thing in my place. The point is that you must seize an opportunity when it comes, because it can last you several lifetimes. My situation with Bando at Latsei is a good example.”
Poppy’s episode with Joubert was a good example too. “I heard your story. I heard Poppy’s story about the mirror concession, but the world is a different place today. Those opportunities are harder to come by.”
Samas shook his head slowly from side to side. “Opportunity is everywhere, Evan. It could be in this room with us right now. It could even be on the wall behind you,” he said, staring at me.
I turned to look at the blank spot. “Are you suggesting that I steal it for you?”
He held up a hand in objection. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not suggesting anything. My situation is this: I’ve tried to be reasonable with the Italians about a purchase and now I am at the point that I must contract someone for a handsome sum to procure it, a sum that will ensure I have plenty of interest. That in itself is an opportunity, and since I am merely contracting services, it is of no importance whom I contract, provided I have confidence in that person’s abilities,” Samas said, letting the words linger between them.
“I have confidence in your abilities based on who and what you are, so I’m offering it to you first, as a gift. You don’t have to answer now, just think about it. Think about what two million dollars could do for you now and in the future.”
I studied the wine in my glass and absorbed Samas’s statement before speaking. “What is it about me that makes you think I am qualified to steal a painting?” I thought about my testimony in the grotto only days before, remembering the multiple criminal acts I had admitted to being involved in.“Do you think I am qualified because I’ve committed other crimes?”
“As have we all, Evan,” Samas countered. “I just confessed to you that I have stolen from the dead. I think you are qualified because the job is an easy one based on vulnerabilities in their security system, and I know it would be easier for you than for others, based on reasons you likely haven’t even considered yet. Listen,” he said, leaning forward, “I’m going to have this done regardless of your involvement, so don’t worry about my end. You just think about whether or not you want to participate. Any choice offered is always yours to accept or to reject, I just think back to when I joined the Cognomina and the adventures I chased in order to be able to keep up with the others. As I think back, I often wished I had been given a head start on the life I have now,”Samas said, swirling his wine.
“It’s getting late, and I want to go to bed,” he said, walking to the keypad next to the door. “Are you ready?” he asked.
I nodded.
He punched in the code and we both stepped through in one motion. “I’ll see you in the morning, Evan. Don’t forget to use the mosquito netting, I’ll have the windows open tonight,” he said, walking away.
i entered my room and walked straight for the sliding door. The air outside was cool, and the stars shone brilliantly in a black night sky. Samas’s offer struck me as generous after the initial shock had worn off, very generous. Two million could certainly sweeten anyone’s life, but there was something else it could do as well, something Poppy and Samas had both alluded to, perhaps without even knowing it. It could make me their equal.
I was a guest in his house now, but in time the disparity in our positions could no longer be ignored. I would be looked upon as an inept younger brother, incapable of living up to my older siblings’ achievements. That’s the challenge about entering into a new group, you automatically find yourself in a new peerage, and if I were to be confirmed back in Zurich, I knew I’d find myself at the very bottom of it, looking up at everyone else.
I walked back to the bed, parted the sheer netting, placed my roll of bills in a pile on the bed, and counted it. I had three thousand eight hundred and seventeen dollars out of the original five thousand. Stacked up, it was about an inch high. Funny, it would have seemed a large amount of money only two weeks ago. I began to see what Samas meant by having a frame of reference.
I assumed, upon confirmation, that I would have room and board at the St. Germain as long as I liked, but that was only a temporary solution. Eventually, after this small stack of money ran out, I’d have to either find some kind of income in Zurich or go back to my old world in LA, which seemed more perilous than Samas’s proposition in many ways. In all honesty, criminality was not a major concern. He was probably aware of that as well. Perhaps that’s why he made the offer in the first place. I knew the life I’d known before would welcome me back, waiting with open, atrophied arms.
I folded the stack of bills and put them back in my pocket. The faint, lazy notes of a cello crept into my room as I turned off the lights, drew the netting closed, and tried to quiet my racing mind until sleep came.
the morning air in the house was thick with simmering spices. I awoke from dreams of Samas’s offer. The colors of the guest room seemed duller than those of my dream world.
I found the source of the smell in the kitchen. Zohra stood on tiptoes peering into a large pot on the stove. “What are you cooking?” I asked.
“I prepare couscous three times a week and offer it to the poor at the mosque in Rabat. I made some pastries early this morning. They’re on the table if you’re hungry. Samas was awake a few minutes ago, he should be down shortly.”
I took a pastry and walked around the living room, looking at the charcoal sketches on the walls. I stopped in front of a small sketch in a plain black frame. Its yellowing, cracked edges betrayed its age. In it, a young, semiclothed black man lay asleep next to a white horse. I studied it at length, looking for some seed of the person I knew, but try as I might, I couldn’t put the two together.
“Hard to believe it’s the same person,” Samas said behind me.
“Yes, you’re right.”
“I liked her much better back then.” He walked into the kitchen. “How long will you be gone?” he asked Zohra.
“Until late afternoon, but I left a rack of lamb in the oven for your lunch. Will you boys be okay this afternoon?”
“I think we’ll manage,” he said, peeking into the oven. “We have a few things to discuss.”
“Good. I’m leaving. I’ll see you later.”
Samas came over to where I sat in the living room. “How did you sleep last night?”
“So-so,” I answered.
“Did you have trouble with flies?”
“No. I was up most of the night thinking about your offer.”
“And?” he prompted.
“I think it’s very generous and very tempting. How long do I have to decide?”
“A while, until after the Ascension is finished, obviously. Just give it some thought. I’ll let you know before I offer it to anyone else.”
“That’s fair enough. Why is this one piece so important to you?”
He nodded. “I remember I first saw Vermeer’s work in a bakery in the village of Delft in Holland. I was an Englishwoman living in Amsterdam at the time and was on my way to Zurich for the Sumerfest.”
“Sumerfest? What’s that?”
“It’s a yearly get-together we have on the summer solstice. Gluttony and decadence are the rule of the day. In the old days, when the Cognomina first started, the original members would meet every summer solstice in the same location in order to stay in contact with one another. In time, the Sumerfest became a tradition.”
The Reincarnationist Papers Page 27
