On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  His hand came down on the table violently; the children went still, shivered. “Just how do you know I’ve had offers, Paola?” he asked dangerously.

  Her face paled, but she defied him. “You leave the letters lying around, I find them everywhere.”

  “And read them. Yet you wonder why I have to get away? My mail is private, do you hear me? Private!”

  Walt threw his fork down, shoved his chair away from the table and stalked from the kitchen. His wife and children stared after him, then Paola wiped Mikey’s slimed face and rose to get the ice cream and Jell-O.

  There was an old mirror on the wall to one side of the fridge; Paola caught a glimpse of herself in it and felt the tears overflow. Eight years had been enough to turn the vivacious and very pretty young woman with the great body into a thin, downright plain woman who looked years older than she was.

  Oh, the joy of meeting Walt, of captivating Walt, of catching Walt! A fully qualified medical doctor who was so brilliant that they would soon be rich. What she hadn’t counted on was that Walt had no intention of leaving academic medicine — plumbers earned more! And the children just kept coming, coming. The only way she could prevent a fifth child was to sin — Paola was taking the Pill.

  The quarrels, she understood, were totally destructive. They upset the children, they upset her, and they were driving Walt to seek his cabin more and more often. His cabin — she’d never even seen it! Nor would she. Walt refused to tell her where it was.

  “Oh, wow, fudge ripple!” cried Stanley.

  “Fudge ripple doesn’t go with grape Jell-O,” said Bella, who was the fussy one.

  According to her own lights Paola was a good mother. “Would you prefer your Jell-O and your ice cream in separate bowls, honey?”

  Dr. Hideki Satsuma, letting himself into his penthouse apartment atop Holloman’s tallest building, and feeling the day’s stresses slide from his shoulders.

  Eido had come home earlier than he, set everything out as his master liked, then gone ten floors down to the far less elegant apartment where he lived with his wife.

  The decor was deceptively simple: walls of beaten copper sheeting; checkered doors of black wood and frail paper; one very old three-leafed screen of expressionless slit-eyed women with pompadour hairstyles and ribby parasols; a plain polished black stone pedestal that held one perfect flower in a twisted Steuben vase; glossy black wooden floors.

  A cold sushi supper was laid out on the black lacquer table sunk into a well, and when he went through to his bedroom he found his kimono spread out, his Jacuzzi giving off lazy tendrils of steam, his futon down.

  Bathed, fed, relaxed, he went then to the glass wall that framed his courtyard and stood absorbing its perfection. To have it built had put him to a great deal of expense, but money wasn’t a commodity Hideki needed to worry about. So beautiful, living as it did inside the apartment where once had been an open area of roof garden. On the courtyard side its walls were mirrored, but from the room that surrounded it the walls were transparent. Its contents were sparse to the point of austerity. A few bonsaied conifers, a tall Hollywood cypress growing in a double helix, an incredibly old bonsaied Japanese maple, perhaps two dozen rocks of assorted sizes and shapes, and varicolored marble pebbles laid down in a complex pattern not meant to be walked upon. Here the forces of his private universe came together in the way most felicitous to his own well-being.

  But tonight, his fingertips still reeking faintly of xylene to his exquisitely sensitive nose, Hideki Satsuma stared at his courtyard in the sure knowledge that his private universe had shifted on its foundations; that he had to rearrange the pots, the rocks, the pebbles, to neutralize this profoundly disturbing development. A development beyond his control, he who was driven to control everything. There…There, where that pink rivulet meandered through the glowing jade pebbles…And there, where the sharp grey rock leaped like a sword blade in front of the tender vulvar roundness of the cloven red rock…And there, where the double helix of the Hollywood cypress tapered up to the sky…They were suddenly wrong, he would have to start again.

  His mind went wistfully to his beach house up on the elbow of Cape Cod, but what had happened there recently required a period of recovery. Besides, the drive was too long, even in his maroon Ferrari through the night marches. No, that house had a different purpose, and while it was connected to the shifting of his universe, the epicenter of the disturbance lay in his Holloman courtyard.

  Could it wait until the weekend? No, it could not. Hideki Satsuma pressed the buzzer that would summon Eido upstairs.

  Desdemona, erupting into her apartment on the third floor of a three-family house on Sycamore Street just beyond the Hollow. Her first stop was the bathroom, where she ran a warm bath and removed the lingering traces of her two-mile walk home. Then it was into the kitchen to open a can of Irish stew and another of creamed rice pudding; Desdemona was no cook. The eyes that Carmine had been surprised to find beautiful took no notice of the pitted linoleum or the wallpaper lifting around the edges; Desdemona did not live for creature comforts.

  Finally, clad in a checkered flannel man’s dressing gown, she went to the living room, where her cherished work lay in a big wicker basket atop a tall cane stand beside her favorite chair, whose herniating springs she didn’t notice. Frowning, she dug in the basket to find the long piece of silk on which she was embroidering a sideboard panel for Charles Ponsonby — surely it had been right on top? Yes, it had, she was positive of the fact! No chaos for Desdemona Dupre; everything had its place, and lived in it. But the embroidery wasn’t there. Instead, she found a small clump of tightly curling, short black hairs, picked them out and studied them. At which moment she saw the panel, its rich blood reds muddled on the floor behind the chair.

  Down went the hairs; she scooped up the embroidery and spread it out to see if it had sustained an injury, but, though a little creased, it was fine. How odd!

  Then, the answer occurring to her, her lips tightened. That Nosey Parker of a landlord of hers who lived in the apartment below had been snooping. Only what could one do about it? His wife was so nice; so too was he in his way. And where else would she get a fully furnished apartment for seventy a month in a safe neighborhood? The hairs went into her trash bin in the kitchen, and she settled, feet under her, in the big old chair to continue with what she privately considered the best piece of embroidery she’d ever done. A complicated, curving pattern of several reds from pinkish to blackish on a background of pale pink silk.

  But bugger her landlord! He deserved a booby trap.

  Tamara, tired of the painting, her imagination incapable for once of envisioning a face ugly enough, terrifying enough. It would come, but not tonight. Not so soon after today’s disaster. That insolent cop Delmonico, his bullish walk, the shoulders so broad that he looked much shorter than he was, the neck so huge that on anyone else the head would have been dwarfed — but not his head. Massive. Yet try though she would, eyes shut, teeth clenched, she couldn’t make his face assume a piggish cast. And after he made her miss her appointment, she wanted badly to paint him as the ugliest pig in creation.

  She couldn’t sleep, and what else was there to do? Read one of her whodunits for the millionth time? She flopped into a big magenta leather chair and reached for the phone.

  “Darling?” she asked when a drowsy voice answered.

  “I’ve told you, never call me here!”

  Click. The line went back to its dial tone.

  Cecil, lying in bed with his cheek on Albertia’s beautiful breast, trying to forget Jimmy’s terror.

  Otis, listening to the rhythmic beep-beep-beep of his own heart, the tears rolling down his seamed face. No more lead bricks to move, no more cylinders of gas to wriggle onto a dolly, no more cages to shove into the elevator. How much would his pension be?

  Wesley, too happy and excited to sleep. How Mohammed had straightened up at his news! Suddenly the hick postulant from Louisiana loomed important; he, Wesley
le Clerc, had been given the job of keeping Mohammed el Nesr informed about the murder of a black woman at the Hug. He was on his way.

  Nur Chandra, exiled to his cottage in the grounds where only he and his whipping boy, Misrarthur, ever came. He sat, legs crossed and braided, hands on his knees with palms upraised, each finger precisely positioned. Not asleep, but not awake either. A different place, a different plane. There were monsters to be banished, terrible monsters.

  Maurice and Catherine Finch, sitting in the kitchen poring over the accounts.

  “Mushrooms, schmushrooms!” said Catherine. “They’ll cost you more than you can make, Maurie, and my chickens won’t eat them.”

  “But it’s something different to do, sweetheart! You said yourself that digging out the tunnel was good exercise, and now it’s dug, what have I got to lose by trying? Exotic varieties for a few exclusive shops in New York City.”

  “It’ll cost a lot of money,” she said stubbornly.

  “Cathy, we’re not short of a dime! No kids of our own — for why do we need to worry about money? What are your nieces and my nephews going to do about this place, huh? Sell it, Cathy, sell it! So let’s get all the fun we can out of it first.”

  “Okay, okay, grow your mushrooms! Only don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

  He smiled, reached over to squeeze her roughened hand. “I promise I won’t gripe if it fails, but I just don’t think it is going to fail.”

  Chapter 2

  Thursday, October 7th, 1965

  Carmine’s day began in Commissioner John Silvestri’s office, where he sat in the middle of a semicircle around the desk. On his left were Captain Danny Marciano and Sergeant Abe Goldberg, on his right Dr. Patrick O’Donnell and Sergeant Corey Marshall.

  Not for the first time by any means, Carmine thanked his lucky stars for the two men senior to himself in the hierarchy.

  Dark and handsome, John Silvestri was a desk cop, had always been a desk cop, and confidently expected that when he retired in five years’ time, he would be able to say that he had never drawn his side arm in a fracas, let alone fired a rifle or a shotgun. Which was odd, since he had joined the U.S. Army in 1941 as a lieutenant and emerged in 1945 bedaubed with decorations, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. His most irritating habit concerned cigars, which he sucked rather than smoked, leaving slimy butts in his wake to impart an odor to the air Carmine fancied might resemble the odor given off by a spittoon in an 1890s Dodge City saloon.

  Fully aware that Danny Marciano hated the cigar butts most, Silvestri loved to push his ashtray under Marciano’s snub nose; north Italian blood had given Marciano a fair and freckled complexion and blue eyes, and sitting at a desk had given him a few extra pounds. A good second man who lacked the cunning patience to wind up the Commissioner.

  They left Carmine and his two fellow lieutenants to get on with the real police work, ignored political pressures from Town, Gown and Hartford, and could be relied upon to go to bat for their men. That Carmine was their favorite everybody knew; hardly any resentment stemmed from that fact because what it really meant was that Carmine inherited the ticklish cases requiring diplomacy or liaison with other law enforcement agencies. He was also the department’s top murder man.

  He had just finished his freshman year at Chubb when Pearl Harbor was attacked, so he postponed his education and enlisted. By sheer chance he was seconded to the military police, and once he got past guard duty and arresting drunken soldiers he found that he loved the work; there were as many violent or crafty crimes in the teeming wartime army as on the streets of any city. When the war and an occupation stint in Japan were over, he was a major, eligible to complete his degree at Chubb under an accelerated program. Then, a sheepskin in his hand that would have let him teach English literature or mathematics, he decided that he liked police work best. In 1949 he joined the Holloman Police. Silvestri, a deskbound lieutenant at the time, soon spotted his potential and put him in Detectives, where he was now the senior lieutenant. Holloman was not big enough to have a homicide squad or any of the subdivisions larger city police forces had, so Carmine might find himself working all kinds of crime. However, murder was his speciality and he had a formidable solve rate: just about a hundred percent — not all convicted, of course.

  He sat looking eager yet relaxed; this would be juicy.

  “You go first, Patsy,” said Silvestri, who disliked the Hug case already because it was certain to become high profile. Only a small paragraph in the Holloman Post this morning, but as soon as the details leaked, it would be front-page news.

  “I can tell you,” said Patrick, “that whoever dumped the torso in the Hug’s dead animal refrigerator left no fingerprints, fibers or any other trace of himself. The victim is in her middle teens, and has some colored blood. She’s small in size, and she looks well cared for.” He leaned forward in his chair, eyes glistening. “On her right buttock she has a heart-shaped scab. A nevus, removed around ten days ago. However, it wasn’t a pigmented birthmark, it was a hemangioma — a tumor made up of blood vessels. The killer used a pair of diathermy forceps to nip off every feeder to the growth, coagulate it. Must have taken him hours. Then he packed it with gelfoam to assist clotting, and after that he let the wound crust over, get nice and dry. I found traces of what I thought was an oil-based ointment, but it wasn’t.” He drew a deep breath. “It was greasepaint exactly the same color as her skin.”

  Carmine’s own skin began to creep; he shivered. “She still didn’t look perfect after he removed the birthmark, so he covered it with greasepaint to make her perfect. Oh, Patsy, this is one weird dude!”

  “Yeah,” said Patrick.

  “So he’s a surgeon?” asked Marciano, pushing Silvestri’s ashtray and its contents away from his nose.

  “Not necessarily” from Carmine. “Yesterday I talked to a lady who does microsurgery on the Hug’s animals. She doesn’t have a medical degree. There are probably dozens of technicians in any big center for research like the Chubb Medical School who can operate as well as any surgeon. For that matter, until Patsy just told us how the guy coagulated the bleeding nevus, I was considering butchers and slaughtermen. Now I think I can safely rule them out.”

  “But you do think that the Hug’s involved,” said Silvestri, picking up the disgusting cigar and sucking on it.

  “I do.”

  “What’s next?”

  Carmine got up, nodding to Corey and Abe. “Missing Persons. Probably statewide. Holloman doesn’t have one on the files unless the killer held her for much longer than it took him to do what he did. Because we don’t know what she looked like, we’ll concentrate on the birthmark.”

  Patrick walked out with him. “You won’t break this one in a hurry,” he said. “The bastard’s left you nothing to go on.”

  “Don’t I know it. If that monkey hadn’t woken up in an icehouse, we wouldn’t even know a crime had been committed.”

  Holloman’s Missing Persons having yielded nothing, Carmine began to phone around the other police departments in the state. The State cops had found the body of a ten-year-old girl in the woods just off the Appalachian Trail — a big, part-colored child reported missing by camping parents. But she had died of a cardiac arrest, and there were no suspicious circumstances.

  The Norwalk police came up with a missing sixteen-year-old girl of Dominican extraction named Mercedes Alvarez, who had disappeared ten days ago.

  “Five feet tall, curly but not kinky dark hair, dark brown eyes — a real pretty face — mature figure,” said someone who had announced himself as Lieutenant Joe Brown. “Oh, and a large heart-shaped birthmark on her right buttock.”

  “Don’t go away, Joe, I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  He put the flashing light on the Ford’s roof and gunned the car down I-95, siren screaming; the forty miles took him slightly more than twenty minutes.

  Lieutenant Joe Brown was around his own age, early forties, and more excited than Carmine had expected hi
m to be. Brown was on edge, so were the other cops in the vicinity. Carmine studied the color photo in the file, looked for the reference to the birthmark, which some untutored hand had attempted to sketch.

  “She’s our girl, all right,” he said. “Man, she’s pretty! Fill me in, Joe.”

  “She’s a sophomore at St. Martha’s High School — good grades, no trouble, no boyfriends. It’s a Dominican family been here in Norwalk for twenty years — the father’s a toll collector on the Turn-pike, the mother’s a housewife. Six kids — two boys, four girls. Mercedes is — was — the eldest. Youngest is three, a boy. They live in a quiet old neighborhood, mind their own business.”

  “Did anyone see Mercedes abducted?” Carmine asked.

  “No one. We busted our asses to find her because” — he paused, looked worried — “she was the second girl of that type to go missing within two months. Both sophomores at St. Martha’s, in the same class, friends but not bosom buddies, if you get me. Mercedes had piano practice after school finished, was due home at four-thirty. When she didn’t turn up by six and the nuns said she had definitely left when she was supposed to, Mr. Alvarez called us. They were already upset over Verina.”

  “Verina was the first girl?”

  “Yeah. Verina Gascon. A Creole family from Guadeloupe, been here a long time too. She disappeared on her way to school. Both families live within walking distance of St. Martha’s, just a block away in either direction. We ransacked Norwalk looking for Verina, but she’d gone without a trace. And now this one, the same.”

  “Any possibility either girl took off with a secret boyfriend?”

  “Nope,” Brown said emphatically. “Maybe you should see both families, then you’d understand better. They’re old-fashioned Latin Catholics, bring their kids up strict but with lots of love.”